You are saying "I am a vegan" as if it is a disease and not your own choice. Nobody is forcing you to be a vegan. If there aren't enough vegan products, the solution is simple: don't be one.

I am in a much more difficult situation myself: I only eat foods which contain meat. I have to tell you, no food producers and no restaurants are sensitive to my needs! Those bastards. I have been asking for meatball bread at my local Safeway for years, but they simply ignore me and laugh at me. Insensitive clods!

Really, moron? I happen to be from the Mediterranean...

Oh, please, spare us the pretentiousness. Of course the main reason people drink is to get intoxicated. That is why wine exists. You may like to pretend that you enjoy it purely for the taste, but that is horseshit. As a society we have cultivated a "taste" for wine/single-malt scotch/whatever simply to justify our alcoholism and to make it more varied and fun.

I don't dispute that it is useful, but it is less so than it might appear at first sight. IntelliJ IDEA already could automatically collapse anonymous inner classes into lambdas in the IDE, even with Java 6.

The huge disappointment is that they *could* have supported real closures, just like C#. I am not aware of a technical reason not to. But they didn't, and the whole hoopla is about a very mild syntactic improvement, just as generics were.

Sadly you are wrong. Java8 lambdas offer nothing over anonymous classes because, unlike C#, they only capture read-only variables, exactly as do anonymous classes. It is a sad joke.

You only see buzzwords because you don't understand the technical differences, not because the technical differences are not there. Debian guarantees a fully reproducible build environment. I can rebuild anything in Debian, even the whole distribution, without any special effort and be confident that I will get exactly the same binaries (modulo timestamps and signatures).

That may or may not be important to you personally, but it is a big deal technically and there is an extraordinary amount of technical details and additional work that goes into achieving it.

The whole point is that the distro build is supposed to be 100% reproducible, with the exception of things like timestamps and signatures. And it is with Debian, as he found out. But not the other distros he tried. And that is a real problem.

Why? naive people might ask. Because that is the only way to verify that a binary is what is claims to be. And is the only way to reliably support and diagnose something. It is shocking how few people on Slashdot realize that.

You don't really realize what a premium experience means... I don't want to restart the OS when I install a browser, for example. Don't get me wrong, the Linux desktop has way too many kinks, but the problem with the Windows mono-culture is that people don't even see the huge problems because they are so used to them.

Science doesn't mean what you think it means. It is funny because you are obviously wrong and blatantly biased, yet you persist. You may not like it, or you may have not experienced it if you are a female (for which I am sorry), but for anyone who is not spending time in their parents basement it is very obvious. The number of independent experiments confirm it.

Yeah, right, you wrote, debugged and tested 500 lines per hour for 800 hours... We believe you. Now take your pills, your straitjacket, go back to your room and let the adults talk.

I come from Eastern Europe and I think that it is socially driven. Corruption is so prevalent in absolutely every aspect of life - from traffic tickets to simply buying something in the store. So "white collar" crime like this is socially acceptable.

It is most definitely not economically driven - in Eastern Europe there is a huge hunger for competent developers, so unless Russia is an exception (I doubt it), it is easy to find a legal well paying programming job.

Full disclosure: I left Eastern Europe a long time ago and I am not Russian, but I am extrapolating from my own country.

The "porno scanners"? Give me a break. You are so scared that somebody is going to see your naked body? Big whoop. What are you ashamed of? This is getting ridiculous.

While I personally do think that the TSA is ridiculously ineffective and this is security theater, I don't get why most Americans are so ashamed of their bodies. It is ... unnatural for lack of a better words. It reminds me of the idiocy surrounding Janet Jackson's nipple. The whole world was laughing. Duh, she is a woman - she has nipples. My mother has them too.

I remember in Europe little girls and boys as old as 5-6 years old used to run completely naked on the beach. Of course in the USA that would be considered "perversion", I guess. The perversion is in fact the exact opposite.

It isn't that, I think. The phone is ringing, but the screen remains black so there is no way to answer. Often I have another problem - it can't hang up; just locks up there and only removing the battery fixes it.

In a strange way it is by far the best phone I have ever had, and by far the most unreliable one :-)

I love my Nexus One, but I have to say the statistics are probably true. I have to reboot it a couple of times per week - the touch screen stops working, or the screen just turns black when I am receiving or making a call. Sometimes I have to resort to removing the battery. A co-worker with a Nexus One is having similar problems, so it is not that my specific device is defective.

As much as I hate Apple, my wife's IPhone 3GS hasn't had any problems whatsoever and she's had it for longer.

No, no, you don't understand. Microsoft does this because they care! Ask any Windows developer :-)

Seriously though, objectively speaking, no matter how ridiculous this technology churn seems to us looking from outside of the Microsoft universe, it does keep people perpetually employed. It feeds not only Microsoft but a huge ecosystem of businesses, consultants, IT experts, MCEs, support stuff, technical book authors, administrators, etc. It is great!

It may look inefficient, but if it was really inefficient, would it continue to exist and be successful in a market-driven economy? Well, of course market rules wouldn't apply if there was a monopolist in the room :-)

Just to show how objective I can be, the constant API churn of the Linux kernel acts in much the same way. And it sucks.