Did you ever stop to ask yourself why 21st century American working conditions are better than those from the 19th? A lot of it comes down to health and safety regulation, including child-labor laws. The existence of sweatshops and ill-run factories all over the third world shows that companies are willing (and always will be willing) to sacrifice the lives of their workers as long as it is profitable for them to do so. Repealing that legislation would be a sure way to go right back to the sort of working conditions we had in American in the 1800s and the sort of working conditions we find in China today.

The problem isn't searching in the ordinary case. The problem is searching in the failure case. I can grep a truncated, mangled text file. If I truncate and mangle your BerkeleyDB can you still search it?

Well, DBAN is open source. If you have suspicions, you're welcome to review the source compile your own version with a trusted compiler. If that isn't to your liking, there are commercial tools that do the same thing.

As for, "What if a drive is mishandled and doesn't get wiped," well, isn't that a concern with physical destruction too?

In that vein, a registry of some kind that told you what hardware was compatible with your Linux distro would be a godsend. I mean, I've seen various half-hearted attempts to start something like this, but they've always petered out. Then when you find them on Google, you get your hopes up, only to have them dashed by lists upon lists of laptops, video cards, sound cards, etc. that were EOL'd years ago.

That's a bad idea. Administrators may be in a position of power on Wikipedia, but that doesn't mean that they have a commensurate level of power in the real world. Forcing real name use just opens up administrators to possible personal harassment and physical attack.

CCP is already getting paid with its players' monthly subscriptions. This is rent-seeking, plain and simple.

No, this is NIMBY-ism, plain and simple. The argument of the Osage people is exactly the same, and just as invalid, as that of the Massachusetts landowners who complained that an offshore windfarm would ruin the view from their beachfront homes.

At the university I went to they run a scan to see if you're running the 'approved' anti-virus software, and won't let you onto the network if you're not running it. That said, the IT folks I spoke with were fairly clued-in and put in exceptions for your MAC address if you were running Linux, OSX or some other OS.

As another commenter pointed out, some degree programs (Computer Engineering, being a prime example) really only work if they're stretched out over a 5-year period. I just wish universities would be honest with their students and say, "Yeah, this degree can be finished in 4 years, but realistically, it'll take 5." I think that would go a long way towards helping those of us who take a little longer to understand a given concept.

In any case, I ended up getting my degree in 5 years. I tried to do the grind for three years (like you), then I burned out, spent two semesters off working, and then returned to school to finish my degree.