I need to preface that by saying I think Linus is 100% correct on the technical matter. As a "boss" he's appalling. He's absolutely right in his assessment as well. You don't pass the buck.

That being said, when something is this big, you do it privately. .

The spirit of the law is to protect users. The people creating sites don't care, and are, in fact, hostile to any such consideration.

In all reality, cookies enable some pretty good behavior on web sites, but more often than not, are designed to track user behavior against their own interests.

Your behaviors are those of a spammer. 420,000 addresses? You are surprised that you were blocked? There does not need to be any conspiracy, it only means that there is similarity in their algorithms.

Anyone that wishes to deliver 420K k-emails in a batch SHOULD be shut off. That volume of email can not contain any valuable information. Its nothing but the crap we have to endlessly delete. You are the type of email abuser that makes spam filters nessesary.

This ship has sailed, the government already knows your net-worth. That is a different argument, of course, and I probably agree with you.

It sounds like a daunting task, but it isn't really. Most people make this accounting for insurance and tax purposes already. If you owe more than you own, then you pay no tax.

I'm pretty sure that a study would find that some number, say $30,000 single and $50,000 married, covers most people in the united states when it comes to non-accounted assets. Everything else generally is on a ledger somewhere that is already reported to the IRS. You have NO IDEA how much privacy people have lost since Nixon's "Drug War."

The real problem is *what* is taxed. Income is bogus. I don't see why, when I go to work, the money I earn is taxed at a higher rate than the income derived by a rich person's trust fund. No, "income" is a bad tax. What we need is a "net worth" tax. 2 or 3 percent should do it for everyone, including companies, because, companies are people too. They have 1st amendment rights according to SCOTUS, let them pay up as well.

Everyone calculate their net worth and pay 2-3% no exemptions.

I'll ignore the obvious implied ad-hominem (accusing anyone of pedophilia is an attack) and talk about the quote. It is important to be able to discuss sensitive and emotional matters in an unemotional and controversial way. The sub-quote about pedophilia was part of a much larger abstract treatment of social morals and laws around sex and, in fact, did not make any direct claims one way or another. It merely cited a lack of evidence that un-coerced acts caused harm and that it is likely that the coercion, itself, does. Which, given research and a common feeling of "violation" amongst victims isn't all that unreasonable. Also, given the context of the quote, I believe that it was aimed toward maturing adolescents and obviously not about little children, which you seem to want to imply.

Controversial people say controversial things. Things are controversial because they challenge perception. Stupid people react to controversy with hysterics and hatred, intellectual people respond to controversy with reason.

RMS Lives in this world and has an almost perfect record of seeing the problems before everybody else.

Seriously, do you work for a company getting crushed by Linux? Insulting a man, not on his character but by your subjective view of his appearence is almost a text book example of insecurity and ignorance.

To the intellects that will listen, he is quite impressive. You, well, lets leave it at that.

I read a lot of negative comments about RMS and it makes me sick. He is fanatical, sure, but he has a track record of *always* being right before anyone notices.

People should be reminded that the "free" in "free software" applies to freedom and not a monetary consideration. Privacy is an important part of freedom.
Cardinal Richelieu:
"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."

The idea is the privacy and private information must remain private because no matter how innocuous, it can be used to restrict your freedom.

RMS is right and we should support him in our own self interest.

Wrong, absolutely wrong. "Ownership" is not ambiguous. I have a true story. About 30 years ago I worked at a bank. One teller would put a stack of $20bills in his pocket every day. ($2000). Every night, he would take it out of his pocket and put it in his cash draw and settle. I asked him why he did this, he said, "in case I am robbed, I get to keep it."

Back to the phone. If the employee buys the phone and pays the bills, the company has no "rights" to that device. In fact "sarbanes oxley" says that companies should only allow communications over corporate systems. This is why larger companies are starting to provide digital phones for their employees so that they can have access to this information.

At work I always have two laptops. (1) My work laptop. (2) My personal laptop. Never does personal and business cross. Its cleaner that way.

When I was a Junior High School Student participating in an experimental class in the mid 1970s called "Computer Science," it was explained as the science of solving real-world problems on computers. There was REAL thinking involved. There was REAL math involved. It wasn't about hash tables, trees, and so forth. These main-stay algorithms were not the focus of the class, but the tools one develops and uses to solve the real-world problem.

It may be an esoteric point here, but "CS" as is presented at the university level isn't the science of applying computers, it is a review of the science and math created thus far. To teach it they use artificial computers (java VMs and interpreters) because real computers have too much "real computer" in the way.

Self-taught is the only way to get real-computer science knowledge. The schools won't teach it. The schools CAN'T teach it. In the immortal works of Will Hunting, "You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for $1.50 in late fees at the public library."

Here is where we must agree to disagree. "Scalability" is a complex topic and almost any axiom one can dig up is only valid within a very narrow context. There is no valid way to win any such debate because at one end we have the likes of Google and Facebook and at the other end we have Android with embedded SQLite.

Suffice to say, as a general rule, process the data as close to the source as possible. If doing a join in a database makes the query slightly slower, but eliminates having to pipe tons of raw data out to the app and have it do the equivalent of a join, is in most cases a better strategy because it reduces the number of I/O operations to disk and saves network bandwidth. Is this always true? of course not, but most of the time, yes.

99.99% of the web sites can make do with a redundant/failover database strategy. If you know you have needs beyond this, that is a different story. Short of the various wet dreams of scaling like Facebook, you don't need too and as a financial consideration for your enterprise, you don't want too. The solutions that seek to replace a good SQL backend with "NoSQL" drive up the cost of development. If you need that kind of scalability, and few sites really do, then yes go for it because that is an important aspect of your solution. Otherwise, try to be cost conscious and choose a database that does the heavy lifting for you.

You are just not looking in the right place. PostgreSQL, just like MySQL has pre-build binaries for popular system. What are you getting on about?

Technically speaking, you used more characters than me :)

I never said that MySQL was particularly hard to get running, just that postgresql wasn't harder.

However, given these two basic "default" installations, my bet is that PostgreSQL will conform better to SQL standard, handle concurrency and transactions better, and be faster under a real load.

But it helps if you understand the levels of support and can make an educated decision about whether or not it makes a difference. PostgreSQL, by all meaningful measure, is technically a better database. Choosing MySQL over PostgreSQL, IMHO, is a bad decision for a few reasons: (1) Technically, PostgreSQL is universally regarded as a better technology platform in terms of quality, scalability, performance, flexibility, stability, adherence to SQL standards, etc.. (2) Since Oracle purchased MySQL the TCO has been increasing. (3) Also since MySQL was purchased by Oracle, the GPL-ness of the over-all package is becoming in question. Oracle has the right to stop releasing the product as GPL because of they OWN the copyrights and trademarks. It is not community owned like PostgreSQL.

So, PostgreSQL is the better technical choice, therefore you should try to use it. If you decide to use MySQL when PostgreSQL would have had more or less equivalent support, you may be painting yourself in a corner needlessly. If you do nothing to avoid the problem and generally accept and cultivate your own ignorance, then you are a bad engineer.

That is not true at all. In fact wildly wrong. A good database is the tool you use to manage your data. If your system is properly designed, it is part of your application. A good database will manage concurrency, data integrity, and more. The idea that you move this out into the application geometrically increases complexity, or more likely, is ignored at your peril.

Just a simple query:
select * from songs where name like 'love%';
Assuming you have a non-trivial amount of songs, i.e. a song web site, this query can show a poorly implemented index. Once you start getting into sub-selects and joins, a good database can do quite well, a bad database, i.e. MySQL will fall down.

People who view the database as nothing but dumb storage usually end up implementing similar features in their code. They won't be as efficient, won't be standard, will cause the data to be processed more than it needs to be, and can't be tested as well as the database's system.

A good architect will know where and when it makes sense to do something in a database verses the application. Ignoring the capabilities of a database for some idealogical purity is ridiculous.