Appreciate the reply and I do agree that Memorial Day honors (and should honor) the veterans who have served but died for non-combat reasons or after their service for other reasons. But we have a holiday for veterans and other military service members and it's Veteran's Day. Memorial Day, as the name implies, ought to honor those who have died, in my opinion. Thanks to those who have come before me, anyone in the U.S. is free to disagree, however. :)

As a military veteran with friends and family who also served in the military (some who have been in combat), I'd like to offer you the most sincere heartfelt sentiment I can think of: Fuck You.

You don't even understand the thing that you're bashing. Memorial Day is about honoring those who died in battle, not everyone in the military. It doesn't much matter whether you agree with war, or the government, or the military, or whatever your favorite institutional boogeyman is, today is for those who volunteered to serve their country and paid the ultimate sacrifice. If anything, this should be the peacenik's favorite holiday because it highlights and emphasises the real cost of war.

And then there's the irony of posting as an Anonymous Coward...

There, I said it.

As a matter of fact, I am.

Psychologists don't have patients.

Languages which are expressive are a little harder to learn, but any individual line in the expressive language does a lot more. Since you are writing fewer lines, and since the fewer lines do more, you end up making programs more easily and in less time.

I'm not disagreeing with this in any way, but an expressive language which does a lot in a single line of code by definition means that it's harder for humans to read. And readbility is (in my opinion) directly proportional to maintainability. This is, perhaps, why Perl is sometimes derided as write-once, read never.

I don't know if heard this maxim somewhere else, but I think it's pretty accurate: You'll never understand a line of code as clearly as the moment you write it.

The market shifted. First, many Perl programmers shifted to PHP once the net decided security and economy of processing power were not goals on the table. Second, a lot of newer programmers are reliant on frameworks and other pre-built systems and learned the languages that go with those.

Do you maintain the website linked as your home page? If so, what's it running under the hood?

"Internal traffic" counts only towards Comcast's own content services like Xfinity. All other traffic (including to your neighbor) will whittle away at the cap.

Remember, data caps are not about network or quality management. They're about keeping the provider from becoming a "dump pipe" for premium content elsewhere. (In Comcast's case, high-def streaming TV.)

As a motorcylist, I very desparately want to see the day where most of the cars on the road are driverless.

When there's no traffic, cruising along on two wheels is the best thing in the whole world. When the road gets filled up with cagers, however, you start to fear for your life. Motorcycles are effectively invisible to car drivers. No matter how observant, courteous, cautious you think you are, studies have shown that you only *really* pay attention to objects on the road that are a threat to you. Or in other words, vehicles that are as big or bigger than you.

When we have driverless cars, I know I'll feel a lot better around them than their human-handled counterparts. They won't not notice me because they were too busy putting on lipstick via the rear-view mirror. They won't suddenly accelerate or change lanes for no reason at all, or pass me in my own lane. Most importantly, they won't "mess with that biker guy" via brake-checking, tail-gating or otherwise try to get me to crash by coming too close or throwing things at me. (Yes, this actually happens and if you don't believe me I can forward you a few dozen YouTube videos to prove it.)

That's a nice broad brush you have there. Be a shame if anything were to happen to it...

When American population just sits at home watching TV or playing video games, Europeans and especially Dutch tend to spend time together. Sit at cafes getting high, eat at a restaurant and have some fine wine, and socialize with people.

Where exactly did you get the impression that there are no bars, coffee shops, restaurants, user groups, meetups, or hackerspaces in America?

One great geeky example about Americans making artificial social walls around them is how quick companies were to replace LAN gaming with online gaming so that you could sit alone and not interact with people.

A truly dizzying line of reasoning... Just because online games happen to exist does not mean nobody organizes LAN parties anymore. And honestly, how is a LAN party a social event? A bunch of gaming nerds cram themselves into a room to stare at their monitors with headphones on? Please.

Also, your notion that American culture is dominated by introverts is so wrong as to be hilarious. Introverts are routinely shamed simply for being intellectual, creative, shy, or socially awkward. The most popular prime-time sitcom right now in the U.S. is literally nothing but a solid half hour of poking fun at ridiculously stereotyped geek caricatures.

Look how well circular fluorescent bulbs went over: like a lead balloon.

Actually, circular fluorescent bulbs were very popular in the 50's and 60's, particularly in kitchens, in basements, over workbenches, and so on. Places in the home were people spent a lot of time and wanted an abundance of light. They fell out of favor later on because style and taste moved toward softer and warmer lighting, even in the more well-lit areas of the home.

Ah, nostalgia aint what it used to be.

But back in reality, the maker movement is growing by leaps and bounds thanks to the information access and communication capabilities of the Internet. It's not like you have to go very far to find this stuff. There are at least a couple stories a week on Slashdot about Raspberry Pi, Arduino, or other random homebrew projects often made by or for the younger generation. There are http://hackaday.com/">blogs that specialize in DIY electronics projects which showcase youngsters regularly. Engineering courses regularly inspire kids to design and build impressive robots and original inventions. And finally, just in the last few years we've seen hackerspaces pop up in nearly every decent-size city in the U.S., Canada, Europe, and other countries. Hate to break it to you, but these places are rarely, if ever, full of puttering old geezers.

If you choose to live in a rural area with low population density, you have to accept that perhaps your internet connexion will not be as fast as if you lived in bustling city.

I'm going to answer this from my own personal experience.

I grew up in a rural area of the midwest United States. It was an hour's drive to any decent-size city. I went to the same school from Kindergarten through 12th grade. The average class size was about 30 students. Most of the area was above the poverty line, but let's just say that anyone who came into money (or aspired do to so) got out as soon as they could. Beyond magazines and broadcast network TV, there wasn't much contact with the "outside world."

I was lucky, however. My father thought that computers were an insanely expensive fad and a huge waste of time, but my mother saw the value in having a computer in the house and (somehow) overruled him. We got the town's first dial-up Internet account at a time when almost all urban Internet users were switching to Cable or DSL. Even with the slow speeds and occupying the only phone line for the house/business for hours on end, I tried to learn everything I could about the Internet and the stuff that runs it. I joined listservs, "surfed" the web, played with shareware, chatted on IRC, etc. I learned to program (poorly, at first), learned about Linux, and eventually figured out how to make the family computer to dual-boot into either Windows or Slackware. Most importantly, I had this window to the outside world that showed me that there was so much more out there than what I was told when growing up. More interesting and inspiring people, more technology, more culture.

Now I'm in my mid-30s and a software engineer making a comfortable living in a nice city with a happy family. Would my quality of life be as the same if I had stayed in rural BFE and lived out my life like everyone else there? I doubt it very much. This is why I lobby for subsidized rural broadband. Maybe it won't greatly affect those who have the ability to choose where they live. But it can drastically improve the future lives of their children.

Poster 7) Thanks to multi-core CPUs and vast improvements in modern graphics processors, KDE 4.96 is finally usable on many modern systems

You're definitely not reading the right dictionary... Only in the most general possible sense does "employee" == "consultant". In the same way that the segway is a motorcycle because it has two wheels and a motor.

In the U.S. at least, the term "employee" is legally (and casually) reserved for someone on an organization's payroll at the non-executive level. Being on a payroll means that the organization pays you regularly and deducts taxes from your paycheck. Consultants (or their employers) must manage their own taxes. One may be both a consultant and an employee, but not generally of the same company.

Florian Mueller is not an employee of Oracle, he is a consultant. He is self-employed and is on the payroll of his own company.