We really don't, actually. I mean, yes regarding employment -- if you're worth it, people will put up with you, but you'd be MORE valuable and probably PAID more if you were less "high maintenance" -- but not with the law. Look at Justin Bieber, for instance. Having money can unfortunately help with legal issues, so it may look like we go easy on celebrities, but, if anything, politically motivated prosecutors probably like the publicity they get for being "tough" on people who think they're "above the law".

Yes, GCC has bugs. So do ALL optimizing compilers.

GCC, relative to other compilers, has a pretty good track record of stability, actually. Try using the Intel compiler sometime. I used it for 20 minutes and it segfaulted on me. That's better than generating incorrect code, I'll grant you, but damn.

I'm not saying GCC didn't do something very wrong in this instance ... spilling immediates is insane by itself ... but compilers are hard, and GCC is a solid one overall.

Linus Torvalds is paid by the Linux Foundation to work on Linux kernel development full-time.

Here's a list of who funds the Linux Foundation: http://www.linuxfoundation.org...

Do you think all those companies are irrational?

Whether such such trifling "transgressions" are bad or not really depends on the intent and the circumstances. If someone goes up to a female coworker every day and makes jokes about how women are stupid, then, yeah, that's pretty bad, and it needs to stop. The guy is being a jerk. It's not as bad as rape. It is bullying.

To me, it's not especially heinous because it's "sexual". It's on the level of going over to the system administrator's desk every day and making jokes about nerds playing sports poorly. It's harassment. It's bullying. There's something wrong with you if you're doing that to people, but no one is getting raped.

If it's people making jokes with each other because they're teasing each other because they're friends, then that's totally different and it's completely okay. But if someone doesn't like being teased, and makes that known, it will stop on its own in that case without outside intervention. But if it's really that horrible for you to be teased a little by someone with no ill intent toward you, you're extremely thin-skinned and there's something wrong with you (though not nearly as much as with the bullies in the previous paragraph).

So, basically, it all boils down to intent, and, for this stuff, in the case where something bad is going on, the "harassment" part is much more important than the "sexual" part. The only reason anyone cares about the sexual part at all is because lawyers and thin-skinned feminazis who want to be offended about something.

Now, for the more serious stuff: if people are getting raped in the workplace, then that's absurdly horrible, I can't imagine /HOW/ that's even happening because aren't there other people around?, and people need to go to jail. But I can't imagine people actually raping each other in the workplace often because in most workplaces I'm familiar with it would be pretty hard to have /consensual/ sex without getting caught and fired. But, I've never been on an archeological dig, so maybe I'm missing something.

Here's one way to get by without student loans: be a dental hygienist and save your money, then when you have enough, go to college. You'll need two years of community college and you'll need to take a licensing exam. You'll also need to put your hands in people's mouths eight hours a day, but you'll have gloves. There are other ways to bootstrap yourself; you just have to look.

http://www.ada.org/en/home-ada...

I stand by my statement that taking out student loans is an incredibly risky thing to do. Yeah, you can do it and have everything work out. It can also fuck up your financial future more than if you took out a mortgage, bought a house, set it on fire (accidentally) without having insurance, maxed out all your credit cards, and then wrecked your Tesla which you took out a car note to buy (and didn't have collision coverage for). Is "never" too strong? I don't think so.

"Completely and totally financially secure" was meant in a relative sense. Even the 1% aren't completely and totally financially secure, as the French Revolution demonstrated. What I meant to say was done with your education, settled into your career, in a marriage you expect to last, that type of thing.

Finally, in modern times, unless you're a subsistence farmer, children are, objectively, a burden. For some people, the burden is worth it because they enjoy having children. Pets are also a burden. Maintaining a boat is a burden. Owning and maintaining a house is a burden. Most things in life are optional, and the optional bits often come with costs of time and money. Those costs we can refer to as burdens. Just because something is a burden doesn't mean you shouldn't do it. It just means you should do a cost/benefit analysis beforehand.

Oh, and, yeah, cars suck. You're right on that.

I strongly disagree with this. Credit cards aren't scams. The problem is that people use them irresponsibly. The best way to treat credit cards is as charge cards: you pay the entire balance at the end of the month and only rarely and only for very good reason ever use the high-interest line of credit the cards give you. It's much better to use credit cards than debit cards as the credit cards offer stronger protection against liability for identity theft, and it's better to use credit cards than cash because cards are simply more convenient. As long as you pay off the balance every month, you don't get shafted. Now, if you don't have the self-control to do that, then, sure, don't get them, just like if you don't have the self-control not to get yourself shit-faced drunk every time you see a container of alcohol you shouldn't keep alcohol in your house. But, in both these cases, the first attempt at solving the problem should be gaining self-control rather than avoiding the underlying issue by treating the symptom.

Well, you missed Roth 401(k)s and traditional IRAs. Give those some love, too. It's usually only better to use Roth vehicles when you're young or, for whatever reason, not making much money, and, in that case, you should double down and use Roth everything. Regarding paying off your house, yes, sometimes it's best to hold onto a mortgage, but it's also sometimes not, so you need to learn how to do the calculations. Remember, any money paid past the minimum payment on a mortgage goes straight to the principal, and you'll never pay interest on that portion of the principal again. That's a pretty good reason to make extra payments, and the mortgage deduction is sometimes a red herring because you lose your entire standard deduction by taking "advantage" of it.

The last thing I'd like to mention is a really, really important thing I think you left out: never take out student loans. Again:

NEVER. TAKE. OUT. STUDENT. LOANS.

Taking out student loans is 50 times more risky than taking out a credit card. If you fuck yourself up with a credit card, you get to declare bankruptcy and erase the debt. If you fuck yourself up with a student loan, you're an indentured servant until you pay it back. It's that bad. I don't care how low the interest is. I don't care how much money you THINK you'll be making when you graduate. It's never worth the risk, and you should never do it, whoever you are and whatever your situation is. If you can't afford college, go to a community college, get an Associate's degree, and work in data entry or something until you can afford college. Taking Pell grants, or other grants, or scholarships is great, and you should try to do well in high school both to get some merit-based scholarships and to get AP credits that I know from personal experience can let you do a 4-year degree in 3 years. But never student loans. THOSE are scams.

Oh, and one last thing: don't fuck yourself up by having a kid until you are completely and totally financially secure. Just don't.

---linuxrocks123

It's not just health: auto insurance is the same way, probably to reduce people driving uninsured. Look up "assigned risk pools".

An argument like that, assuming it's not true, would be perjury and fraud. If mistaken licensing did occur, you can be fairly certain the company would publicize exactly what happened far and wide immediately after they found out the "rogue licensor" had acted. Saying nothing and then suing you and only telling you in court that the licensing was a mistake would not be looked on kindly.

You could represent yourself in a clear-cut case like this, where the files are obviously properly licensed. If you give them notice of the licensing in your counter-notice, and they still sue, they could get in trouble for filing a frivolous lawsuit, and you could recover damages.

You're wrong. Lawsuits cost money for anyone and companies don't "automatically" file them. There's such a thing as a frivolous lawsuit, and lawyers can get in trouble for filing them as well as the organizations paying the lawyers.

In such a clear-cut case as obviously GPL-licensed files, you could represent yourself and not pay a cent. You wouldn't lose: you'd get discovery from the Linux Foundation or whoever indicating the code was GPL-licensed. And you could probably retaliate and sue them for filing a frivolous lawsuit.

Evolutionary psychology is approximately the definition of soft science. And no I'm not going to make the argument here; look in my comment history if you care enough.

About 10% of the population has a reproductive strategy that will never succeed because they're doing it with the same gender. That alone should tell you that normal variation is going to outweigh differences in statistical averages. If that's not enough, consider that multiple times throughout history women have been able to join the military pretending to be men and not get found out for months or years.

Awww, MAN... You haven't LIVED!

For anyone reading this, I can confirm parent is full of shit. The Wikipedia article contains no references whatsoever to Roman court records verifying the existence of Jesus.

The TLDR was for you (or another reader), not for me. I DR.

Your comment is the first I've heard of Roman court records existing. That's neither in the Wikipedia article nor in anything I've come across. Where is your source for these records existing? If they exist and are genuine, the citation I gave would be intellectually dishonest for not dealing with them, and I'll have to revisit my conclusions.

Your argument that I should believe no one ever existed is a strawman; the evidence for Jesus's existence (assuming we don't have court records -- somebody should add that to the Wikipedia article; between us, you should do the honors) is about on par with other legendary figures. I'm skeptical that Jesus, King Arthur, Odysseus, or Aeneus ever existed. Pilate, on the other hand, we have direct archeological evidence for, so there was some guy named Pilate who administered Judaea. There was also a guy named Julius Caesar who became dictator of Rome and was then assassinated by some senators. There's lots of people in history we can be 99.9% sure existed. Jesus of Nazareth isn't one of them.