I'm sure that President Obama will be glad to know that the idea of waste, fraud and abuse in government-paid healthcare systems is a straw man.

I'm sure that the Catholic Church will be glad to know that mandatory insurance for all kinds of things, including obvious consequences of life choices, is a slippery slope that nobody will really go down.

When they equate seeking privacy with terrorism, only terrorists will have privacy.

They told me that if I voted for John McCain, the Federal government and huge corporations would conspire to take away our privacy rights... and they were right!

The programming challenge with these architectures is not how to write applications for them. It's how to write efficient, correct applications reasonably quickly. In practice, the processors quickly become special-purpose rather than general-purpose as a result of their programming frameworks focusing on particular problems that the architecture is good at. (Not to mention Amdahl's law kicks in pretty quickly.)

If you order protest methodologies from most convincing to least convincing, denial-of-service is pretty far down the list. It doesn't even have the virtue of standing on its own as a statement.

The memos that talk about the data centers make the criteria clear. A "data center is defined as: *Any room that is greater than 500 square feet and devoted to data processing; and, * Meets one of the tier (I, II, III & IV) classifications defined by the Uptime Institute."

If you are surprised that the US Federal government has more than 3,000 of those -- welcome to the (not-so-)new bureaucracy, trying hard to pretend it is a technocracy.

The Fifth Amendment allows a criminal defendant not to testify in his trial. It does not allow him to avoid cross-examination if he chooses to testify; choosing to testify waives the right to avoid self-incrimination, at least with regard to the case being tried.

The defendant's lawyer can raise that possibility, but would have to introduce some evidence to trigger reasonable doubt of guilt.

[citation needed]

Seriously, do you have any good basis for your claim? In particular, which studies use the correct baseline of "distracted by everything except cell phone", rather than "not distracted", when comparing the impact of driving "distracted by a cell phone"? The US death rate due to traffic accidents dropped quite a lot over the last two decades -- and that is true whether you measure deaths per vehicle-mile, per capita, or per registered vehicle. (For example, fatalities per 100 million vehicle-miles traveled dropped from 1.73 in 1994 to 1.14 in 2009, even as phones-in-cars went from near zero to near ubiquitous.) Sure, we have a lot of other new safety systems in newer cars that help bring death rates down, but the marginal distraction due to mobile phone use is obviously hard to quantify.

Perhaps you should tell the Linux and Android developers how wrong they are to use a strict version of the model I described.

I'm halfway convinced you are engaging in some kind of elaborate troll or performance art. You are the one who is attaching automated testing (and tagging based on the results) to a revision control system; I am not. I have professionally developed software in a (useful) business setting, and I have managed a ten-person software development group. I saw the increase in code quality -- and more predictable release schedules -- when I migrated that group from Subversion to Git+Gerrit (which imposes mandatory code review and a tested-by sign-off before a change is applied to the line of development).

Revision control systems are for recording a series of configuration snapshots that you care about. The qualifier at the end is critical.

If what you care about is breaking the configuration for fellow developers, and that works for you, that's fine: keep committing untested changes. Just don't tell me that I am wrong for rejecting that model. When I am working with one or two other people, I do not care so much: They are not likely to break anything so badly that I cannot reverse it or work around it easily, but I still like to be able to bisect to find regressions. (Some of my less capable coworkers care more even at small scales.) When I am working with a lot of other people, I do care whether people test before merging their changes: Without some discipline, the chance that someone will break something important goes up with at least the square of the code churn rate.

Your second paragraph is pretty gutsy for a guy who claimed that someone *else* wasn't doing real (team) development.

The point is not that people only commit fully functional code -- just that they only commit reasonably functional code; that means code that others could reliably use as a basis for further development. During a development phase, that usually means missing features or known bugs. But see also how the Linux kernel, gcc, and other large free software code bases are maintained: They all have phases or steps where they only accept changes to the baseline if those changes are believed to be defect-free.

I provided additional reasoning for shared development servers in a separate reply.