What sort of APIs are your talking about? Much of what existed pre Android was software built primarily for desktop use, disregarding things like battery and memory usage and implementing a feature set far greater then what is needed on a phone - like the X window system. Nokia tried porting a true GNU system to a phone with Maemo, but it looks like it wasn't much of a success.

This is Bagdad 2007, that would be four or five years after Bush declared the war was over and that he'd won it.

No. This is not a urban legend - and it IS based in law. The 1868 St. Petersburg declaration forbids the use of explosive munitions against human targets. If I recall correctly its the same piece of legislation that bans "dum dum" bullets.

Back when I was given my training (std. mil. subscription, Norway) we where clearly told not to use our .50 M2 gun at human targets - it would be in violation with the Geneva convention. The M2 was always loaded with MP round - but I'm fairly sure you not suppose to use large calibers like that on human targets. The chances of collateral are way to big.

Yeah, like that ever stopped them. Bastards.

Why on earth would you choose the only filesystem with a broken fsync() for your database partition?

MySQL handles typical web load better than both Oracle and PostgreSQL. 99% reads and not to complicated queries and a lax attitude towards MVCC (with the query cache enabled) makes MySQL run really fast.

To be a 100% sure you see everything on an old SCSI bus you reset the bus and wait 15 seconds to let the devices settle before scanning the bus. Most devices settle within a couple of seconds but some odd tape drives (or robots, I can't remember) took ages to settle after a reset.

I guess modern hardware is not that different although the 15 seconds timeout are gone.

From Debian, if you stick with the official repositories (which is possible since they are very thorough and extensive), you are pretty much guaranteed that all your packages have passed through a standardized system where they are checked for problems, inter-dependencies, and are all compiled with the same methodology.

Where is this process described?

The reason I ask is because I've never seen one single release of Debian where the clvm package actually works. (I don't know what the current state is - I haven't used Debian for Ubuntu a couple of years).