The dock was there, but the shelf wasn't added until 4.1. 4.1 and 4.2 contained quite a number of UI changes.

Sites that are distributing malware are not exactly legitimate porn sites though - if it were technically feasible to shut them down then we already have sufficient legal justification for doing so from the Computer Misuse Act.

Except those of us who use a terminal, who find control-C and control-Z (and, on FreeBSD, control-T) indispensable.

The problem with shell scripts for this kind of thing is that they're a Turing-complete language. This makes it very hard to present to the user what they actually do. .BAT files on DOS / Windows provided that functionality too, but unless you aggressively restrict yourself to a subset of the shell language it's very hard to check a .sh / .bat file and see exactly what command is going to be invoked.

This requires the program to be explicitly written that way. Gcc and clang also do this, to detect whether they're invoked as C or C++ compilers, and clang will detect a target triple if it's the compiler invocation name prefix. This just goes in argv[0] though - you can't modify the other arguments from a shortcut. It would be really useful to be able to add things like --sysroot=/some/path and -msoft-float to a symlink so that you had a single cc that you could invoke as a cross compiler, but currently the only way to do this is with a tiny shell script that execs the compiler with the correct flags.

You would think a pair of gloves would render all the police fingerprinting useless, yet haphazard criminals are caught by it all the time. Like everyone else with limited resources, they either catch you because you're important or because you make it easy. Heck, I bet many criminals using computers don't even know what crypto is.

The car insurance industry is making a lot of money on the fact that your driving profile is individual and will trick you into keep paying a high premium despite having moved into a lower risk segment. All autonomous cars of the same model will drive the same way, which makes it a lot harder to price gouge. It doesn't matter if you're 18 or 80, male or female, single driver or whatever. It's one Google car, 10000 miles/year, parked in garage - what are you charging? In fact, Google might easily just offer insurance themselves since they're the driver and got deep enough pockets they don't need an insurance company.

And this made a lot of lesser crashes that wouldn't have injured the passengers anyway far more expensive because even small damage is distributed on a large area. I was in an accident not so long ago and despite being a fairly low speed collision where the air bag did not deploy, the damage to my car alone amounted to about 1/5th of the sticker price for a new one and in total I think it wiped out everything I've paid in insurance premiums over the last ten years. So I got no reason to complain, really...

Has anyone ever clicked on a random link and been taken to a commercial porn site? To shock sites and stuff hosted in random places, sure, but these are not the ones being threatened with shutdown.

Nonsense. It is true, however, that Windows and Linux use different (overlapping) subsets of the SATA (and SCSI) command sets and, in particular, use very different sequences of commands in common use. If you test heavily with Windows and not with Linux, then you may find that there are code paths in your firmware that Linux uses a lot but which are mostly untested.

The 'tray' that Raymond describes in his second article looks very much like the Shelf from OPENSTEP 4.1, which was released just after Windows 95. I wonder if some of the NeXT people were playing with early betas of Windows 95 and, as their company CEO later quipped, started their photocopiers...

Win32s was released for Windows 3.1, but it just added some win32 APIs, not the UI. The UI was first introduced in the Chicago betas, which were eventually released as Windows 95. NT4 was released shortly afterwards and wasn't a bad OS, but hampered by the lack of plug-and-play support and perpetually having old versions of DirectX.

And, of course, I meant 'to shortcuts' there.

There are a few differences. First, symlinks are a property of the filesystem. This means that the normal filesystem APIs just work with them and you need special APIs for things that care about whether it's a link or not. In contrast, shortcuts are just another kind of file and everything that wants to follow them needs to know what the target is. Second, shortcuts contain a lot more information than just a path: they include the path to the destination file, an icon, the set of command-line arguments to pass, and some other flags. For example, I used to have a load of different shortcuts to the WinQuake (and, later, GLQuake) executable that all had different -game flags, for launching different mods. Many of them also had different icons, if the mod came with its own icon. You can't do that with symlinks.

The closest thing to symlinks on *NIX systems is .desktop files.

There are already animal cruelty laws that could be amended to grant better protection from human-on-animal neglect and abuse. The problem with giving them rights is that they'd apply to animal-on-animal action or environmental harm. You wouldn't let a child assault another child, would you? But it would be crazy if we were equally compelled to intervene if a gorilla assaults another gorilla. And we wouldn't let kids hunger or thirst or freeze to death, yet that happens to animals in nature all the time. Not doing them harm is way different from being responsible for their well-being.