I use Perl nearly every (damn) day, on a very old codebase project. There are things about Perl I like, but there are also things that I really despise. Not through fault of Perl, really -- it's simply old, slow (yes, slow) and outdated compared to other modern languages.

There is no way I would start a new project in Perl, and the only people who would are people who are willfully ignorant of the rest of the industry. Perl is beyond its life. There is nothing it does better than other languages, and there are a whole hell of a lot of things it does much, much worse.

I don't believe you can make the case that Linux wouldn't be Linux without the GPL, had it used some other license. Linux is Linux through force of Torvald's personality. It would be identical if it had used, say, the BSD license. Granted, the tools developed by the FSF gave Linux a good start. But that's software, not a license.

You know what, I imagine it probably does take "bulldozing" to overcome the entrenched existing entities in order to do Really Big Effective Things.

If it takes hurting some feelings to ELIMINATE Polio and Malaria forever (!!), and who knows what other diseases in the coming decades, then that seems fine to me. Polio has been eliminated in India. I'm pretty sure all the millions of children saved aren't too concerned about the fact that Bill Gates is in a bit of hurry to get things done.

Oops, you are correct, sir. Finger fart!

How do you think the concept of Separation of Church and State would fare under President Romney?

Far better than under a 'mainstream' Christian. Who understands better about religious persecution than Mormons? The last thing they'll do is legislate so that one religion is able to dominate more than others, because that dominant religion won't be theirs.

How about your rights to be left alone even after death?

You know what? I'm dead. If it makes my family happy to baptize me in whatever they want so that it eases their mind that they'll eventually meet me in the afterlife, that's fine with me. I'm, you know, dead, so it doesn't matter anymore. If they want to stuff me and put me in the living room, hey, that's great. Whatever makes them happy. Funerals are for the living, not for the dead.

Of course, many Catholics claim that Protestants are "not really Christianity", either (and vice-versa).

I will say one thing about Mormons... of all the people I've met of different religions, Mormons were by far the nicest and most genuine people. They actually try and live the tenants of their religion. I'm an atheist, but if I had to pick a religion to follow because I wanted the culture, I'd pick being a Mormon. I hate alcohol anyway. :)

They're not perfect of course (their support of California's Prop 8 is particularly troubling), but overall having Romney be a Mormon is a positive in my book, compared to, say, Santorum who is a full-blown religious wack job.

Speech recognition is not what we're talking about. Natural language processing is what we're talking about.

Are you a non-native English speaker? Then I could believe you might have trouble with it. But for what it's worth, I find it remarkably accurate, and even more remarkable, I find it useful. I don't have to memorize any voice commands, I just speak in normal English and it figures out what I mean much of the time. It is true that it needs a constant Internet connection, but I think that's why it actually works -- Apple can bring to bear a large amount of processing power. So I'm okay with a useful AI system that needs the Internet to make it work, versus previous attempts that totally suck, but can suck even without an Internet connection.

I don't use plugins. I don't know why you don't get the problem. But there are a hell of a lot of people who do, and I got the problem on every computer I ever used Firefox on.

I haven't ever had memory leak issues with Firefox, at least not in the last 5 years...

Sheesh. If you say you don't experience the problem, why are you commenting on the issue at all? I don't use extensions. And I don't give a crap what the devs think, all they have to do is look through their own bug tracking for literally hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of bug reports on this issue. And ultimately, there is only one bug report that matters to me: my own. IT SUCKS FOR ME. No extension, and the memory grows and grows. And obviously others experience the problem as well.

Why doesn't it happen to you and some other people? Who the hell knows? But that doesn't mean it's not a huge problem for a lot of other people.