Shorewall meets requirements 1-3 for sure, with 4 being open to interpretatin.

Since I doubt that this sub-question will get through the editor, I'll give you my answer now. My objection was to the use of bitkeeper due to its license. This is not the same as being in favor of violating the license. What Tridge did (invoking the "HELP" command on a TCP stream connection to the bitkeeper server) was not a license violation.

It's up to the editor when they run the replies. But I promise to answer mine.

Yes, I will answer the interview questions as soon as the editor gets them together.

If you have a specific question, you can always reach me via email to bruce at perens dot com or phone 510-4PERENS. Email usually works better.

Do you give this same speech to all the BMW owners who buy custom performance mod chips?

I'm not going back to GW-BASIC, thanks,

Now, could they get rid of the flat, huge, ugly UI elements (window borders, buttons, etc.) and go back to the reasonable look of Vista or 7? Sheesh, honestly the hideous ugliness of it was the most irritating thing about 8 for me, as the tile interface and start menu problems could be fixed with a few add-ons.

Yes, but those are proven to decrease ticket revenue. Why do you think red light cameras are so much more popular?

Personally, I'd love to see this system running in my town. Traffic control here involves trying to impede drivers and preventing them from reaching the speed limit by forcing all lights to be red by the time you get to them as much as possible. Your choice on a clear road is either to speed, or drive 10 under. It's so pervasive in this city that nobody outside of town or in the surrounding cities likes to drive in this town.

Either that, or it demonstrates that all those scary "death penalty for drugs" signs at train stations in Southeast Asia are bullshit, and that there's no such thing for anybody with enough cash. That seriously hadn't occurred to you?

C/C++ don't claim to follow relational data rules like MySQL does. Not only is SQL supposed to error if it can't do *exactly* as the user describes, it's supposed to change nothing if any of the affected rows error. It's not supposed to be allowed to guess if the user tells it to do something ambiguous or nonsensical. It's supposed to be required to throw an error in that case. Indeed, many RDBMSs error on some tasks simply because the result would be non-deterministic.

An RDBMS is not just a fancy key-value store. It's not a series of JSON or XML strings. It's a data entity rule set. Used correctly, it will not allow you to store obviously invalid data, even if the underlying datatypes allow the data as valid types.

Determinism is the real issue here. Imagine a compiler that produced different programs from the same source code. That's not particularly useful, is it? Well, a lot of the behavior that MySQL has let slide indicates that they don't particularly care about being deterministic. It's sloppy, and the one thing DBAs hate is sloppy, unpredictable results.

MySQL is the IE 6 of the database world. It encourages poor developer practice. It allows and even encourages lazy or downright risky developer behavior, when the RDBMS should be the element requiring the developer to think about how he stores his data and consider the ramifications of getting useful data from his system that go beyond his own needs. It has more oddball syntax than any other RDBMS, and is less likely to complain about data integrity and more likely to perform silent truncation or silent modification than even SQLite.

Should diluting a helpful ingredient be considered harmful then?

"Helpful" is not necessarily true. It's possible to have a life-threatening allergy to penicillin.

Additionally, all antibiotics intended for human medical use are legally available only with a prescription in the US.

Quite a powerful capability; but one of those powerful capabilities best handled carefully, kept away from direct sunlight, protected from shocks, and otherwise treated as though it is just waiting to ruin your day.

That sounds like an apt description of a computer in general. Or dynamite. Or banks. Or the government. Or beer.

Next you are going to tell me that the Republicans want to push grandma off the cliff, take food from starving children, and ruin the environment.

Yes... What's your point?

Personally, I like to point out that the government as tried -- repeatedly -- to count the number of federal laws that exist. It has never succeeded.

One begins to question why ignorance of the law isn't a legitimate defense when the laws cannot even be enumerated.

I'm not a golfer

Yes, obviously. There are no rocks on greens, but there are likely no titanium heads, either. That's where you use the putter. Putters need to have some weight to them since you don't swing them very hard.

You might swing hard with a titanium head club on the tee or on the fairway, but you're unlikely to encounter rocks there, either. You're also unlikely to encounter dry grass.

The problem is when golfers hit into deep rough, which can be far off from the fairway that you're intended to play from. Rough can be largely unmaintained. There can be fallen trees, tall grass, and rocks. It isn't irrigated, so it's likely to be as dry as wild grass. And, no, you may not see sparks on a bright summer day. Daylight in an open field on a clear is quite glaring. Even if you did see the sparks, you may not see any flame. The fire could smolder for hours as a tiny ember before finally flaring to life. That's why you're always told to cover a fire pit with sand before you leave it to ensure it's extinguished, remember?