Sure it seems cheap, but have you seen the prices on the refill cartridges? Outrageous!

The weighted companion cube is the best cube, because the weighted companion cube will never threaten to stab you, and in fact, cannot speak. In the event the weighted companion cube does speak, the enrichment center urges you to disregard its advice.

I'm not saying Linus doesn't have talent, or that he's not "nearly always correct", but I am saying that he goes beyond stripping away sugar-coating, and resorts to name calling (I believe the phrase I once read was "unevolved chimpanzee"), and public (not private) belittling of people who makes mistakes. That's not simply "correcting you", that's not straddling the line in any way. That's fully crossing the line to being an asshole, and it's completely unnecessary. And here he is, talking about it again. Being an asshole has embroiled him in side debates about the correctness of it, and all of this effort and stupid side chatter is now nothing but a waste of his time.

There's a very-not-gray area of being blunt: "This code is too abstract and isn't efficient, it wastes cycles with all this dereferencing, and is not acceptable in the kernel." It's not nice, but it's not mean. It's actually easy to stay in that area. It takes no more or less effort than calling someone an insulting name, and it provides a not-hostile work environment that might bring extra talent to the table.

Sorry to poke at the god-like bubble people try to wrap Linus in, but I never see talent as an excuse for a prima donna getting away with unwarranted hostility.

There is not a reason that talent and asshole must always be coupled in the same person. And very few people who aren't assholes like to work in an abusive environment. Therefore, this kind of environment excludes people who have talent but who are not assholes. Of course, a "nice" environment excludes assholes for very similar reasons.

So what we need is what we've got: two distinct environments. One is where assholes with talent build one set of components, and nice people build other components. Occasionally they spit at each other from across the divide, but overall, it works. Yes, people will complain if they find they ended up working for the wrong team, and they may be appalled at the working environment of the other side, but those seem to be individual preferences.

Is one side better or more talented than the other? Probably, but they would unquestionably be better than they are today if they could draw from the full talent pool, instead of restricting themselves to just like-minded assholes or nice guys.

Yeah, I wasn't worried about her safety, only that all the hospital's systems are vulnerable because they have these malware infection hosting devices rolling around on carts.

Japan really is kind of insanely safe. Assault in a city is often national news. To say it is safer than the U.S. is probably close to universally true, but not because the U.S. Is unsafe.

My wife recently went in for an ultrasound, and the machine clearly booted up Windows XP. I'm sure they can't install updates it without it being a certified upgrade, so they do nothing.

Meanwhile, whatever hackers are finding their ways into the hospital's network probably aren't quite so fussy about the certification of their malware.

I think he may be trying to eradicate his own homelessness with those prices. Although with the prices for printing vanity books, he might not be making enough to pay the rent for two months.

This is no different. Back in the 1970s, our high school physics teacher had the computer terminal in his area, and so he taught the computer class. He wouldn't allow me to take it because, as he said, "you already know more than I do about this."

The important thing is it wasn't an admission of failure on his part. He knew the class was beneath me, and simply didn't want me to waste my time.

Put on your best Hugo Weaving voice and imagine Elrond saying "Hobbits ... are a disease; and we are the cure."

That reminds me of one of those classic lists of airline mechanic log entries:
"Evidence of oil leak on landing gear. Signed, Joe Pilot"
"Evidence removed. Signed, Bob Mechanic"

I highlighted the space between the lines. HTH

If your problem is 20 year old solaris machines, perhaps a fire drill is just what you need to demonstrate to the executive level that they need to budget for new equipment. "According to the consultant, our machines failed the disaster recovery exercise so if we had a real problem we'd be out of business."

Or maybe they already know that, and their business plan includes a suspicious lightning strike next fiscal quarter?

Some companies have already been caught ignoring the opt-out flag. It's also subject to change, or mistakes made through whatever errors, and virtually impossible to prove. Google's said their opt out is only to remove an identifying tag from your info, but they still include the info that you triggered in things like hit counts via googleanalytics.js; they also don't say that your data isn't correlated, just that it's not identified as being yours.

I dislike third party tracking because the data that correlates well-traversed links also provides correlation to marketers and those SEOs who would game the system for their own benefit. It's in our best selfish interests to not reveal the surfing habits that lead us to making a buying decision, so the SEOs don't know which blogs they should pay astroturfers to pollute: epinions, disqus, wordpress, slashdot, or wherever.

But if you run NoScript, all of that third party tracking goes away.

I'm still running V28 of Firefox, and it's working fine. I won't upgrade because they changed sync, and I no longer trust its security.

Chrome sucks. It feeds Google everything that happens, and doesn't let you disable it, it encourages you to continue to send the data with an opt-out flag. WTF should I trust a flag, when none of that info is ever any business of theirs?