Not everything, just the things that prevent the 1% from making money.

English is a living language, and that's its strength. The debate among French speakers for French language purity is still going on becuase Frnech is an old, arcane one. They have great difficulty coming up with new words to describe new technology terms becuase they try very hard to stay within the rules of French. Coming with with new words for new ideas using old roots is destined for failure.

I think Debian's, or any distro's strength, comes from the maintainer's willingness to try new things. Sure, the swtich to systemd may have been a little heavy handed, maybe they should have forked rather than forced. But lets face it, many of the popular distros have code older than God. Ubuntu knew this when they started the Wayland effort. They blew it but they are right about X. An occasional house cleaning is sometimes in order.

Tons. I don't really need to trot out some project names for you, do I? But what I can point to: do google search on variations of "google code", "google projects", "google api", search for various apis on github, and you may be startled by the number of those projects that are written, some times in part but often whoally, in C++.

I smell a Haskell programmer in the room. Quick, get a net!

Agreed, a high-level language for embedded systems would be great.

I gotta correct ya champ, that's not exactly true, at least in every case. Its true that the kernel maintainers (Torvalds & gang) maintain some drivers with the kernel, but not all. And what do you mean "tightly tied to the kernel"? Are you saying that if Microsoft made a radical change to their "kernel" (three big DLL's is a kernel, who knew?) architecture those drivers would still work? I doubt it. "Tightly" as a loaded word; either you have an architecture that has many parts yet all works together, or you you don't. That they all work in harmony to deliver a satisfactory user experience- is that "tightly" coupled? Oh, and don't get me started on GNU Hurd...

And yet they do (IBM), becuase there's more than one business model in the world.

Implying the Windows driver model is flawless.

It may be, but it was incredibly bad. McMillan (Lynch?) over killed him with the degenerate angle, and his baron was a sharp as a hammer. Ian McNeice was a far sharper and cunning baron in my opinion, which is much closer to the books. Lynch's baron with the preoccupation with all his little festering wounds and and disgusting nonsense was just odd to me.

You've got to be kidding. Even my girlfriend laughed when she saw that one, and she doesn't know anything about the novels. Lynch WAS NOT right for that story, not at all. The Sci Fi version was "magnificent".

What a Hitlerian thing to say.

DAMN! I've been waiting years to use that!

I do. Its been a fairly accurate prediction, yet a prediction none the less. The "law" part is just an anecdotal, off-the-cuff addendum. You want to support your theory that its in fact an actual law, here's room for your proof right here:

Sure. Where people still measure weight in "stone" the ENGLISH system must seem very archaic.

Umm, don't you mean Motorola chips? I mean, I'm no Appel expert but I could have sworn appel was big on Motorola procs for the longest time. I always liked the flat model addressing in those...