Linus deserves recognition for the amount of work he has done; but as an operating system, Linux in my mind has always demonstrated the difference between popularity and quality. I wholeheartedly felt that Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson deserved the awards they received; but where Linus is concerned, I'm more ambivalent.

For me, Linux is popular , while *BSD is actually good. I can't motivate myself to install a Linux distribution, these days, and for two reasons.

a} In technical terms, I know of no distro in existence, which has close to the same level of overall quality as the BSDs. Comparitive Linux distributions are invariably a bloated, disorganised, opaque mess.

b} Linux developers are socially toxic, hubristic, juvenile adolescents; who are persistently unrepentant about the degree to which their code sucks. I would laugh about said developers' near-mindless obsession with modernity and false "innovation" purely for its' own sake, if said attitude did not make me so angry. Massive changes are made to the system, just because . Changes are not made with any real consideration for whether or not said changes are actually a good idea, but rather because any change is apparently seen as somehow being better than none at all. It is a completely irrational attitude.

I probably should not let my level of disgust with the current state of Linux as a whole, cloud my enthusiasm about Linus being recognised for his genuine tenacity and brilliance as a programmer. I've said before that the .01 release of the kernel was absolute poetry; but then, tragically, over the years both the Windows refugees and the cultic, authoritarian Leftist FSF vermin moved in, and the rest became history.

Linus should strongly consider riding off into the proverbial sunset before too long, I feel. Let him go out on a high note, and let history remember him favourably, before the malevolence of the likes of Lennart Poettering contaminates his legacy.

When will Dr. Evil be told to clean out his desk? You might not have figured out who the company's main liability is, yet; but the rest of us have known for years, now.

By the way, Windows 8 sucks; and although I intended XP to be my last Microshaft operating system, (after which I would have migrated to FreeBSD) thanks to the UEFI standard that you and the rest of the consortium of corporate supervillains implemented, that is no longer possible for me. If I want to use FreeBSD at all on new hardware these days, and I want full hardware support, I'm stuck doing so in vmWare under Windows.

Insincerely yours,
Petrus

a} Clueless psychopathic suits in management, who make impossible schedule demands, and have no programming background themselves.

b} The use of popular, but garbage programming languages. C++, PHP and Perl are probably the main three culprits here. Dishonourable mention also goes to XML, JavaScript, and the XHTML Document Object Model. I have never encountered a "Web application," yet, which wasn't a disorganised, bloated, CPU hogging abomination.

For the last two months I've been economically forced to use a dual core 1.5 ghz laptop with 2 gb of RAM, and it can only barely keep up with the inefficient, JavaScript-infested obscenity that the Web has become. Virtually none of said JavaScript ever provides truly valuable functionality, either; most of it is just trackers of various kinds.

It's also purely due to Capitalism; all of it. Why have Red Hat had Lennart try and force systemd, GNOME, and the rest of their corporate crapware on Linux users? Their desire for a corporate monopoly, that's why.

What caused the UNIX wars? Corporations wanting to add their own non-standard extensions, to ensure their coveted Unique Selling Positions.

We must get rid of the suits.

Am I saying the Drake Equation is almost certainly full of shit? Why yes I am.

Oh, the Drake equation is just fine. It's anyone who thinks they know any of the values to plug into it that's probably full of it.

Many folks have proposed the "government doesn't use the term marriage" thing. It has a few problems.

First of all, it's a bit like Lucy and the football that's she's holding for Charlie Brown to kick. You're effectively saying "sorry gay people - we really don't want you to have marriage, so we're going to take it away from everyone".

But the biggie: it's a tremendous amount of work to solve a non-problem. There are literally thousands thousands of laws, in literally thousands of jurisdictions, that reference marriage. We'd have to change all of these, and somehow convince people to start using a different terminology, to eliminate a confusion that doesn't exist. We already distinguish between the legal status filed at the county courthouse, and the ceremony that may or not be performed at a church.

I protested that this could create a conflict wherein a church could be sued for refusing to allow a gay couple to use the church for a wedding.
Not going to happen. In the US, the Westboro Baptist Church still has tax-exempt status. We still have freedom for religious groups as vile as that one, so churches that only refuse gay weddings won't be an issue.
   
I didn't rub it in the faces of my gay friends
Is that really the phrasing you wanted to use?

and the "folder" work around is a kludge doesn't cut it for me.

Labels. It's not a work-around, it's a deliberate design decision, and a good one. You can emulate folders with labels - simply don't attach more than one label to a given email.

As others have noted: citation needed. I can only find other comments making the same claim, no articles.

Also, the ship that shot down 655 was a guided missile cruiser, not a carrier. While there's no requirement that a movie be historically accurate, a cruiser mock-up would be much, much cheaper.

They shouldn't be in traffic in the first place, for starters.

True, but then again, automobiles shouldn't be driving into crosswalks when I've got the light, but that happened to me today - in fact, during the time since I wrote that last comment.

Today's incident wasn't a big deal, because I was watching the driver, and I could see she was looking only at oncoming traffic from her left, while I was on her right, trying to cross in front of her turn. So I waited, and resisted the temptation to slap the side of her car.

But that's also a scenario where the Elio would have been a bit more of a danger. If I'm watching the driver, that protruding wheel is only in my peripheral vision. That's different from a regular car, where the edge of the car is between us and easier to identify.

So it's a risk - the hard part is quantifying how big of a risk it presents.

Well, it's narrower - that'll help in many urban areas, and will make finding parking a bit easier. A two-wheel car is also a little less likely to take out pedestrians with one of those protruding front wheels.
But those advantages might be outweighed by other disadvantages - as you've noted, cost and complexity are concerns, and the actual performance of the balancing algorithms and such is still an unknown.

256-bit block ciphers are merely difficult to attack.

That is incorrect. It is impossible to brute-force a cipher like that, and it is extremely unlikely that someone has found a cryptanalytic break for modern ciphers like AES.

Unlike a block cipher, you can prove that a one-time pad is unbreakable, but that proof depends on the assumption that the random bits of the pad are completely unpredictable. Turns out that's a non-trivial problem to solve, and an especially difficult one to test.

Automobile insurance issuers are chartered and regulated at the state level. There have been a number of discussions of a federal-level charter, but I'm not aware of any changes on that front in years.

Copyright was a very minor factor in Microsoft's exclusion of effective competition and suppression of any real innovation in software design.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that comparisons to the Holocaust and world wars are in fact quite appropriate when discussing the magnitude of what Microsoft did to the history of computing, and by extension to human history overall.

The reason for this is simple. The effect of the Microsoft monopoly lasted so long and was so stultifying that it meant we will never know what a different word processor might be like. We will never know if spreadsheets or email might be more usable or efficient. We will never know (at least not in our lifetime) what an operating system or software might be like that doesn't use the conventions laid down by a company that had no incentive to make anything better, no need to design anything more than barely adequate, or to listen to its customers. Yet all these things are of fundamental importance to our lives - far, far too important to have suffered under a brutal, money-grubbing monopoly.

Despite (very) small innovations, Apple was not and is not a counter-balance because they were forced to ape the conventions that the Microsoft juggernaut had laid down with it's 95% market share. Jobs knew as well as anyone that it would be suicide to create anything that the market place was not already at least partially familiar with.

In the final analysis, the Microsoft era was a massive failure of free market capitalism that left us all driving Trabants while thinking they were the best that we could have. The blame lies of course with politicians and industry regulators who had no clue what an immense influence personal computing would have on society until it was too late. But it is too late. The die has been cast for personal computing for generations to come, and that is an utter and maddening tragedy for all of us.

The issue is of course far bigger than just one man, but holy mother of god do I hate what Bill Gates did to all of us.

... in the vast majority of cases ... the homeowner does not contact the authorities ...

Bullshit. State laws on the subject vary massively; there's no way to make a blanket statement like that unless you're in confirmation-bias mode.

Nice to see my mum's allotment garden on /. :-)