> Why would one in his sane mind convert from CVS to SVN?

Because Subversion really is "CVS done right". It scales much, much better, it's much easier to administer and manage, and it has much better support for large centralized repositories with limited access to specific parts of it for specific developers. My transformations from CVS to Subversion have been quite straightforward, except where developers manually edited old CVS files in the repository itself and broke things years previously.

If you need the local flexibility and to have source control access when disconnected from your central repository, the 'git2svn' interface has also been invaluable.

Deleting the Google links is a quite serious hindrance to scholarship and informed research today. One may as well put it here (with due credit to Douglas Adams for writing this.

        "But look, you found the notice didn't you?"

        "Yes," said Arthur, "yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'."

>but when you apply for them you get a response that the job doesn't exist

Oh, dear. This is a quite old trick. It's even more fascinating when they say "we already have candidates", but when your colleague with a different age, gender, or citizenship applies with similar credentials at the same time their application is accepted for review. The classic example of this is tuning HR requirements to only hire H1B candidates, as shown at:

                            https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

> They were suffering from price competition

Not just price competition: they were also suffering profoundly from fraudulent Cisco hardware.

          http://www.crn.com/news/networ...

Not only does it cost Cisco profits to lose the legitimate sale, but it costs them profoundly in customer support for the purchasers of fraudulent Cisco hardware. And Cisco support is a very large business cost to Cisco.

Goodness, are you hiring? I'm doing a lot of partnership consulting with environments that have good people that have been trying to fix things for years. We respect them profoundly for their input and do our best to make sure they get full credit. But there is sometimes political infighting to get the work done and they wind up as sacrificial lambs. I'd love to send some your way: I wish _I_ could hire them, but my team is pretty well staffed and we often have non-poaching agreements.

> Let me try to bring some perspective into the discussion. Lest somebody misunderstand, the very essence of an enterprise (any enterprise) is that it is a bundle of labour and capital whose essential structure and identity is independent of and more persistent than the labour it employs. The identity behind its labour component is no more important than the identity of its capital component.

I'm afraid, sir or madam, that your very opening statements show exactly why engineers will disagree with the entire rest of your statement. You've redefined a common word with a well understood social and legal meaning. Your definition reflects a business school philosophy that does not match either the common or the legal meaning. And it breaks down very, very quickly in the real world.

> It is for this reason that any contemporary HR policy is aimed at (and this is important) divorcing the work from specific individuals.

Nonsense. This guarantees failure in the long run for a tech business. It can work for Wal-Mart or even McDonald's or even non-technologically innovative business, such as spam advertising and domain squatting. There are profound evolutionary economic pressures against it for the more interesting or leading edge technologies. Networking tools and hardware, lab instruments, software virtualization, and systems security are examples that require insight and mastery to improve designs and remain effective and profitable..

> So it's up for debate really, and this isn't a new debate. It's a debate about a basic balance in our society that needs to be realigned from time to time.

And it's vital to know what the debate is really about. Please do not try to redefine basic terms in ways that obscure the actual debates. It's framing the question in a way that is misleading and helps prevent understanding of the underlying problem.

The existing TSA has not presented a single successful prosecution, nor any "terrorists" successfully blocked by the terrorism watch list. The effective change in security has been the change in behavior of on board passengers and crew who no longer wait for the plane to land in control of the hijackers, and simple steps like better cockpit doors. There's little if any evidence that the enhanced check-ins are anything but security theater.

I've flown through dozens of airports since 9/11. Much like those attackers, I could easily pick the one with the worst security to stage a demonstration of just how simple it is to get weapns past their security.

> the real cost is showing up to be photographed and present whatever records are required.

This is often not a small cost for someone on limited income, trying to take care of children or hold down a job with medical issues, long commutes, or poor transporation. Voter ID laws and poll taxes have a terrible history, and have been part of blocking poorer Amercians, especially black Americans, from being able to vote since the end of the US Civil War.

> The FBI is barring you from employment for _getting caught lying to them_.

"Fixed That For You".

If you commit illegal acts, need to lie about them, _and cannot beat a simple polygraph_,, I'm afraid you have no role in modern federal agencies.

The supplies of deuterium and tritum for powering all existing fusion reactor designs are far, far more difficult to harvest and supply in bulk than fossil fuels or solar. As best I can tell, the available supplies of those fusion fuels is limited by the production from ordinary fission reactors. Since the last large scale refiner of deuterium from other sources went out business in 1997, it's not an economically viable resource. Essentially, if we first scale up our fission power to many times its current volume, we could use the byproducts to fuel fusion reactors. Their maximum output would be only a few percent of that of the fusion reactors required to fuel them in bulk,

Unless someone works a way to fuse plain hydrogen in bulk, efficiently, there is no economic point to fusion energy research. The only source of bulk fuel for it is the solar wind. If you've got large scale fusion fuel collectors in orbit, simply collect the solar energy directly and cut out the very expensive, quite radioactive middleman of fusion fuel.

I do believe you've forgotten SELinux and requiring passwords for your particular tool.

This has actually been tried.

                              http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...

I must say that it is _completely_ ethical to discuss adoption with fertility patients. Depending on the medical issues, they can be dangerous for the mother and the fetus, draining for both parents, and hideously expensive whether or not covered by insurance. It is the doctor's role to explain the _options_ and their consequences.

There are many equivalents. A lifestyle change can often be more effective treatment than the most extensive medication or surgery, whether it be moving to a better climate to ease asthma, moving to a less sunny climate for people with a history of skin cancer, giving up smoking, getting exercise and improving diet for someone with early diabetes, getting enough sleep, etc. Discussion of lifestyle and the medical consequences of it is part of a doctor's responsibility.

> I Doubt any kind of genital surgery was common in the 19th century

I'd certainly agree that the transplantation or reconstruction of working sexual organs was unavailable. But what, precisely, would you call castration, circumcision, clitorectomy, C-section, or genital piercings? Even abortions and surgical assistance with cysts, tumors, and physical trauma all existed, through they would have been emergency treatments rather than scheduled treatment.

You've a point about state law. I was admittedly referring to federal law.