...and "Christians" slaughtered untold millions during the Crusades, not to mention inquisitions, witch burning, and so on. If we're to follow your logic, then at least 54% of the humans on Earth are homicidal maniacs, and that's only counting two religions that I have some reasonable knowledge of.

Oh, and yes, Sikhs and Muslims are different, but give the guy a break, he was just looking for something that rhymed. Perhaps he meant "Sheikhs."

I'm a computer programmer, and yet I have to buy my furniture from a store. But wait, how is it possible that I could have the technological capacity to produce software when I have to rely on others for something as rudimentary as furniture? It's almost as if some skills and technical abilities were completely independent of others, and you could be very good at one while remaining completely ignorant of others...

There's not necessarily any correlation between the amount of work you're putting in to remove brown M&Ms from a bowl and the amount of work you're putting into safety...or if there is, it may very well be an inverse relationship if you're now short a tech guy because he drew the short straw and had to pick all the brown M&Ms out of the bag. The point of the M&Ms clause was just to make sure that someone had actually read the riders, and you could just as easily accomplish that with any other unique request, there's no need for it to be labor intensive.

To be fair, it was still kind of a dick move. They could just as easily have asked for, say, a hand-written note with some nonsensical but memorable phrase written on it to be stuck to the mirror. There's no reason they had to stick some poor sap at the venue with the job of rooting through a bag of M&Ms and picking out all the brown ones...

Oh, come on...I have to do something to reclaim the Google search results from Justin.

I think it's pretty much certain that if you've developed any useful technology since the dawn of software patents, you've accidentally stepped on at least a couple actionable patents, and you just have to hope that the patent holder either doesn't find out about it or doesn't extort you for too much of your revenues. Is there a name for this principle yet? I'd love to slap mine on it if there isn't...

Because we all know that everything in life is a checklist you have to complete in descending order of importance.

Give me a break. There are unsolved murders in my city, but you know what? I still expect the cops to respond if I find my house has been broken into, even though they haven't solved all the problems of greater scale and importance. In real life, we can do more than one thing at a time, and "There are more important things to do" is not an excuse to put off every task in life that doesn't make it to the very top of the list.

I'll carry a backpack if I need to, but I see no compelling reason to carry a bag with me everywhere just to accommodate a computing device that I really don't need just on the offchance that it may at some point be useful as an alternative to a sheet of paper.

Now I have to carry a smartphone which basically takes up an entire pocket and a separate bag for my tablet with me everywhere? Even when my pockets end up stuffed with relatively absurd amounts of paper, it's still less cumbersome than that.

PDF is actually a pretty bad format for mobile devices, because it's page-based. If your PDF document was generated such that it's ideal to be printed on 8.5x11 paper, it's not going to render well on a device with a smaller screen. This is a huge problem with e-readers: I've spent entirely too much time trying to effectively strip PDFs of their page-based formatting to get them displaying well on my Kindle. The only really ideal use for PDF, imo, is preparing a document for printing.

Of course, there are better solutions (heck, I'm a fan of plain text unless you really need advanced formatting), but the problem is getting people to use them. Unfortunately, we still live in a world where university professors distribute one-page assignments as Microsoft Word documents.

Surely you jest. Even if tablets become absolutely, positively dirt cheap, they still won't be a proper replacement for paper documents.

• Size. I can't fold up a tablet, put it in my pocket, and take it back out again when I need to look up a subway route. A tablet small enough to be pocketable is also going to be small enough that it will be a royal pain to read anything significant off of it. There's no way I can ever conceive of lugging a tablet around with me just going about everyday tasks, not so long as it has a readable surface large enough to be worthwhile.
• Durability. If I drop a sheet of paper in water, or even let it go through a wash cycle it will still be readable afterwards. No such luck with electronics.
• Archiving. Yes, digital archives are superior in almost every way, but for really important documents I want a paper backup that I can still access in case of a power outage.
• Display. A lot of the things people print are meant to be displayed. This primarily applies to images, but it also goes for things like certificates. Why would I want to replace all the picture frames that just passively sit on my wall with tablets that would need to be powered, not to mention costing more?

Easy distribution. I can very easily hand a person a paper copy of a document. With an electronic copy, we need some kind of digital device to accommodate the transfer, and we have to make sure the document is in some format that both of our devices understand. If you're face to face with another person and all you have are your (possibly different brand) tablets, sharing documents becomes a trickier problem.

That's a completely silly comparison to make. My entire point is that when Linux was released, HURD had been under active development for a year. After Linux was released and widely adopted there was obviously no need to continue serious work on the HURD, so it more or less fizzled out. You're making the completely unfounded assumption that HURD would still be in its current state even if the release of Linux hadn't effectively killed off the major motivations driving its development.

I'm not sure where you're pulling this idea of "decades" from...development of HURD began in 1990, and Linux was released in 1991. That's a difference of one year. HURD wasn't heavily developed after the release of Linux because there was no need for it. If Linux hadn't stepped into that role, there would have been a need for it, and all the effort that's currently going into Linux would just have gone into HURD or some other free software kernel. There's also no reason the BSD kernels couldn't have been bundled with the GNU userland to create a standard free software operating system. In fact, such systems exist today.

I think you're drooling over Linus there just a little too much there. Linux is a nice kernel, but when it came along the GNU project already had a usable user-land, and it was just a matter of time until it got a kernel. If Linus hadn't GPL'd Linux, serious development of HURD would have continued. If that still hadn't turned out, there would be other free software kernels. Linus' contribution was significant, but it's profoundly ignorant to claim that had he not made it, no one else in the entire world would have.

As far as his opinions on things like desktop environments, I've learned to tune him out. He's a great kernel hacker and all, but he has a tendency to be very brusque and very sure of himself in areas where he really doesn't know what he's talking about, and I don't see any particular reason we should care what he says about those areas.

Just to be certain, this was a joke, right?

Considering that we've got hundreds of years of copyright extensions on the books pushed through by the media industries, no, a "meet half way" compromise is not acceptable. The original term of copyright in the US was less than 30 years, during which time an artist should be able to make enough off of their government-granted monopoly to make it worthwhile to invest their time and effort in the creation of their work. This was in the 1700s. In 2011, you can potentially turn a profit on your work in less time than it would have taken to get a printing press typeset back then.

By any reasonable application of the same logic which originally inspired copyright, copyright terms should have been shortened drastically in the following centuries. Unfortunately, the entertainment industry figured out how to lobby, and there's pretty much no one in Washington lobbying for the right of the public to have our creative culture enter the public domain...well...how about sometime before our grandchildren are dead?

The status quo established by the entertainment industry in America (and exported abroad through diplomatic bullying) is absolutely not a reasonable place to meet half-way from. That is, unless the position we're starting at is copyright which expires 50 years before the author's birth...I suppose then a right-down-the-middle compromise might be reasonable.

The difference is that if there's a backdoor in a proprietary system then you'll never, ever know about it. Seriously though, if you assume that those in power are just outright manipulating the results, then there's no reason they'd need influential developers to sneak a back door into the system and risk someone catching it on a code audit. They could just as easily pay some lackey to break in wherever the machines are being stored and install a new firmware, pay off poll workers to manually edit results on the machines, or just engage in good old fashioned voter intimidation before anyone got to the polls. Any voting system can be gained, but at least in the case of an open voting system we'd have the opportunity to check and see for ourselves if we were being cheated.