In the US anyway.

I started in on Linux a year later after buying my first 386-40(?) system and wondering what I'd install on it. Wound up with Linux after trying OS/2 and kinda avoiding the *BSDs because that just looked like a cluster----. Got a small stack of floppies and my career from there was set.

I've done a lot in that time - three books, two computer-based training CDs, lots of work on the LDP, was at Red Hat going for my RHCE the day they had their IPO, worked for VA Linux, designed and ran rather large HPC environments for two Major East Coast Universities(tm).

I haven't studied systemd in too much detail (consider me old school as I just started year 22 of using Linux). dbus? Really? Jeezus.

There's plenty of embedded systems that reboot frequently and need to boot quickly (think Raspberry Pi)

Documentation? A large portion of the packages out there aren't documented and it's still being distributed. Debian and Ubuntu are prime offenders of this when they not only distribute packages without documentation but when they do distribute something with documentation it's for the software as released, not after it got heavily modified to work as a package and following their usage standards.

As a non-programmer, Java stinks.

The idea of it being sandboxed and thus 'more secure' is blown out of the water every time there's an update, of which there are many. Each update from Oracle wants to install the Ask toolbar.

In its earlier days applications had to be distributed with specific versions of the JRE. Even more recently there were plugins that only worked with Java 6 and the vendor had no intention of getting them to work Java 7. The idea of 'write once run everywhere' is mostly dead.

On the server side (Tomcat) it's okay. On the embedded side (Android) it really seems to have finally found its stride..

That's my guess. I still watch it (the TiVo just grabs episodes). One thing that was really telling was just before Christmas 2013 the Mythbusters were on tour and I was expecting to see all 5, but only Adam and Jamie were there. Another item was they had a preview of the coming season along with a discussion of Adam's busted hand. That season in the spring and the one that just concluded now seem to be filmed in the same 'season' as there were parts of the preview we saw that weren't until the past few weeks, and an episode that had Adam's broken hand.

My daughter loves watching the explosions. I kinda missed the more in-depth design and builds that Adam and Jamie did in the earlier seasons and each episode got really busy hopping between myths. It's probably a combination of going back to roots and the 'other three' asking for more and getting turned down. From what I can see it wasn't a bad break, so maybe Kari/Grant/Tori are going another show?

I wouldn't have a problem with going the speed limit.

See, here's the thing. A lot of the traffic jams are because people are hopping lane to lane or cutting people off or really just not doing enough planning about where they want to go. Autonomous vehicles would know what lane to go in and what cars are around it so it would be able to plan appropriately. No more traffic jams (or at least greatly reduced)

When I drive from MA to NY, I may break the speed limit at times, but the average speed is still 50-55MPH because of traffic. In an autonomous vehicle that goes at the speed limit, it would shave close to 30 minutes off what is normally a 3 hour trip. And at no point do I have to speed. A trip into Boston no longer takes an hour in the morning - vehicles know where they're going and you get into town in a fraction of the time.

Longer term, it means that police departments no longer have a benefit of setting up speed traps - nobody is breaking the law, no tickets to write, no additional funding. Cities get no funding from red light cameras.

So here's the real question: Is this a tradeoff that we as society are willing to make? Do we give up the ability to break the law in order to get the benefit that we wanted out of that in the first place (i.e. get to your location quicker)?

T-mobile also pulled the backwards anti-net neutrality thing by happily announcing 'Free Streaming' from select music providers... which is, in effect, making non-select usage fee-based.

You could look at it that way, I guess. I look at it as I get unlimited data access with the first 3GB per month at LTE speed, but any data from those selected services don't count against it. Kinda wish Amazon or Google music were on those lists, but the original deal I signed with T-Mobile a few months ago was 2.5GB at LTE and no 'free' services. I'd consider the deal now to be a good improvement over what I originally got. Does it prefer some music services over others? Yes. Does it cut my services or increase the amount I pay per month? No. Is my access to Amazon Music or Google Music affected? No.

Unlike Verizon and their sorta-but-not-really-anymore unlimited data service.

No. I've only ridden Amtrak a few times in the NE corridor from Boston to NY/DC and I've never had to display any form of identification to enter the station or board.

*adjusts onion on belt*

When I wrote code for the Dept. of Veterans Affairs, the code almost literally wrote itself. I had to document every single function with what it was supposed to do and list inputs, outputs, and every variable that was created/read/modified. By the time I sat down to write the code I knew exactly how each function would work and it was just a matter of implementing it off the spec I had written. Then the code review, then the testing. In the meantime, I got questions from the documentation staff and they had access to the same spec I was using.

But I've gotten the sense that software development isn't done like that anymore, certainly not in the OSS space.

No, GP is right about how the characters are treated. I've only watched a few episodes, but it looks like the main character (Sheldon) has some serious issues that need to be addressed with medication or counseling. To use it as a form of entertainment for others is just insulting to those who have those kinds of problems, and those that are supposed to have those kinds of problems and don't.

Security is somewhat at the developer level, but usually only in a few cases where the software really is security related and gets properly audited before release. Those kinds of software projects are far and few between and even then the documentation is still lacking. Even then that's easier because the people doing the auditing are themselves coders. Documentation requires a whole different skill set (see Word Crimes by Weird Al) that is not always held by coders.

For most other apps, security rests at the system level and is thus outside the scope of what the developers are working on. In some cases the compiler will alert them to common problems.

The best kind of documentation you're going to get for now is really what we have now - some combination of end users writing on their blog, posts to stackexchange, or threads in mailing lists. And some of those may or may not apply to the code that's currently in use.

Longer term, there's things like what synfig does by crowdfunding development efforts including documentation and training. This has a lot of potential, but can quickly get expensive for end users.

I'm a rather odd duck. I did a lot of coding in college and my first job (writing software for hospitals) but have since moved to system administration/design and have a degree in technical documentation. I've written books on Linux and have documentation up on the LDP, some of which is still in use. So I've seen all the sides.

Coders are too busy writing code and making changes to what they write to give time for accurate documentation to be written. The days of "read the code for documentation" are long gone when you have multiple layers of libraries and applications to go through to find what you're looking for. This kinda worked in the days when you could fit an entire Linux install on three floppies but now that you need a few GB there's no way a single human can keep track of it all. Documentation takes time to write and get right. In the age of using github as a distribution and code changes between today and tomorrow, the documentation is suddenly invalid before it's written. Even then, it requires a lot of stupid questions asked by the documentation staff to coders who think they have better things to do.

As for TLDP there was a bunch of problems. Using DocBook was brilliant, but the toolsets were terrible to work with and difficult for people who never used SGML or XML. Linuxdoc was easier to use but really wasn't the way to go long term, especially since the tools were Linux-only and meant the tools were of limited use. Once Wikis took over online there wasn't enough enthusiasm in TLDP to convert and lead the charge.

http://whatthefuckhasobamadone...

I'll grant you that very well may be the case. Removing copays for regular checkups and vaccinations should help a bit, and it should be incumbent on the doctor's office to collect the copay at the time service is provided (in most cases, ER is different). The doctors for my family do that and there's never been a problem.

If the concern is the amount of money that is in collection rather than the number of outstanding collections, then having an insured population will help (or at least cut the amount from tens or hundreds of thousands down to whatever the deductible is).