Blimey, in about 1998 this old guy from the Jo-Hos knocked on my door and presented me with some literature including something about how "all scientists" believe in god, especially the Great Fred Hoyle, so God must be there.

It also said that "scientists are telling us" about this vast, untapped wealth of hydrocarbon deposits on the deep sea beds in the form of these methane thingy-ma-bobs, so God had provided us with all the energy we'll ever need. He's a great guy that God dude! He didn't mention atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations and global warning, though.

So, the Jo-Hos are right. God is really there! And we will never run out of energy!

Slackware does things The Right Way(TM). I've been using it since 1995 as my main distro with a brief detour into SLAMD64 in 2007 when I bought a 64-bit AMD and Slackware was still x86-32.

I've had the misfortune to have to suffer Debian. RedHat/CentOS, Ubuntu and Arago for work over the years, but Slackware is the best. Everything I've learned from Slackware has empowered me to be productive with all of those other distributions.

why?

Learning a language that comes from a completely different school of thought (i.e. "paradigm") will give you a far larger perspective than only having learned one language or family of languages. For example, if all you ever saw was C++, Java and C# your world view would be extremely limited. Someone who has learned a little FORTH, LISP and Smalltalk, not to mention various assembly languages, would be an order of magnitude more productive than you, produce fewer bugs and be able to think of more good solutions to difficult problems.

If all you ever do is write GUIs for the corporate Oracle or MS database, then stay in your C# paradise.

But they don't have to make new hardware that "runs all past stuff" because the other 999,999 people out of a a million will simply buy the new one.

Whose to blame here?

One day Slashdot is fellating Amazon and Google for their Cloudiness, the next they're accused of corporate evil for being Walmart-A or Walmart-B.

The only thing I see is a consistent bias towards and demand for free crap. Are there any adults on Slashdot anymore?

It's a product of its times - with many more "computer science" people in the field, math says you're much more likely to run across crappy ones than you were before. (Not a bell curve issue, the bad ones are more memorable) Add in the H1B headwobble factor, and you have a lot of shitty java code, doing things because it can not because it should. Add in a corporate culture where time to market trumps reliability or maintainability, and you have a management philosophy that rewards the above behaviors.
Java is shitty because the world has turned.

She's not smart, she's a dipshit AW. And also, not gorgeous. 6/10 maybe, but not gorgeous.

Try leaving your mom's basement some time.

Other than a desire to run the x86 version of Doom on your BeagleBoard, why would you need this when software is just a recompile away?

Bring back Scotti. Also, Tori sucked. Grant and Scotti are all you need. Tori is a tool, good for comic relief when you need a doofus to eat a chili pepper, and Kari was just T&A.

And my problem with that is they they must know that they're underskilled hacks. And they sit there, smirk and headwobble, and then claim you didn't provide Requirements or Do The Needful, and YOUR ass gets chewed out when they fail.

Errr... the UK still has an reasonable approximation of a well-functioning court system. That the police say something is illegal isn't enough to get you thrown in jail.

It is under Tony Blair's Anti-Terror Laws. You only need to be suspected of something that could be vaguely related to terrorism to be locked up. No jury trial involved, just the police, some politicians and a few judges.

Very wise words.

I'd add to that: write unit tests for your code (preferably before you write the code). You'll understand how it works and where it's broken quicker and better and free up your brain cycles more for the creative design part.

You will learn and improve much more quickly with much less stress.

Back in the day (80's 8-bit micros) I started on BASIC and Z80 machine code followed by a little FORTH.

The one thing I really wish I'd known about - or understood - was what LISP really is. It was often described in the popular computing press as a language "for processing lists."

How very wrong. The reality is so much better.

I didn't seriously look at the lisp family of languages until about 6 or 7 years ago. I really wish I'd looked 25 years sooner.

At which point I go elsewhere. Just because there's content out there doesn't mean its valuable. Most of the Internet is crap.

China has a growing middle class, and a growing class of perpetually single men. They need to stop the middle class from becoming so affluent so quickly (where do you park 400 million cars?), and they need to find jobs for the millions of sad horny guys who could easily become revolutionaries. If the cost of food rises a few percent here and there it bleeds excess capital out of the system, inconveniences a few on the long tail, but as a whole (remember, China thinks long-term, and like a single organism) the economy will be better off.