Since you think anyone who disagrees with you in the slightest must be a slobbering neocon you are not even worth responding to.

When you grow up and learn that not everyone who disagrees with you is the boogeyman, I'll be happy to continue this discussion more rationally.

You do know what a "judgement" is, right?

HINT: It's a government action, not a business one.

You do know where credit reporting comes from, right?

HINT: Legislation enacted by congress (particularly the Consumer Credit Protection Act and the Fair Credit Reporting Act).

You do know where corporations come from, right?

HINT: Acts of government.

Government created business, not the other way around. They are two heads of the same hydra.

Ah. I see. I havn't had points on the Dot since 2011.

OK Phablet in protective case in shirt pocket, fairly snug fit, never so much as a hint of coming loose.

It would not surprise me to learn that in some form, software developed in the 1960s is still in use today.
This is coming from someone who had to hack Fortran code as recently as 2009.
Wouldn't surprise me one bit.

A draft is possible, and I believe would be somewhat automatic if war were declared. Certain types of rationing would be.

The thing that stops the draft is the reality of the fact that military organizations have no means of dealing with large numbers of people who *really* don't want to be there. In the '60s, the military system had a distinct benefit with the fact that the primary opposition to the draft was a counterculture which was relatively unified in a commitment to non-violent protest.

The age bracket in question is, today, decidedly not non-violent. Opposition to a draft today might not take the form of "flower power" and "sit ins." More likely, it would provoke the militia movement into actual violence.

It's much easier to imagine a draft than it is to imagine some of the other things that would happen in a declared war.

For example, rationing of commodities. Compulsory conversion of industrial production from civilian to war efforts. Seizure of raw materials.
Requirements for businesses to take compensation in the form of interest-bearing bonds which are not redeemable during the conflict.

All things that my parents were subjected to...

I can't imagine the post "greed is good" generation or the "corporate personhood" set to accept any of this, or even to believe that it happened within living memory.

Are you a consumer of audio, or are you producing it?

The requirements and objectives of these two groups are wildly different. These discussions generally divide consumers into groups, instead of dividing consumers ("audiophiles" and "casual listeners") from producers ("recording" and "synthesizing").

I don't know if the people from the "consumers" group can understand just how important my "sound cards" are (a good old Delta 1010 and a Focusrite Scarlett 18i20), and my system would probably be a royal pain for someone whose objective is A/V theatre, gaming, or music listening.

It's good that some of the consumer gear has been converging on pro gear, because it means that for playback at least, we now have inexpensive systems with audio fidelity beyond the threshold of human perception. Awesome as that is, other things are important to people who are producing audio, and not all of us have "audio production budgets."

Predicting that x86 would go away was more wishful thinking than anything else. At the time, Intel had just switched from pushing the i960 to pushing the i860 and would later push Itanium as x86 replacements (their first attempt at producing a CPU that it was impossible to efficiently compile code for, the iAPX432, had already died). Given that Intel was on its second attempt to kill x86 (the 432 largely predated anyone caring seriously about x86), it wasn't hard to imagine that it would go away soon...

I found Modern Operating Systems better than the Minix book. The Minix book tells you exactly how a toy OS works in detail. Kirk McKusick's Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD OS (new version due out in a month or two) tells you how a real modern OS works in detail. Modern Operating Systems gives you a high-level overview of how modern operating systems work and how they should work. If you want to learn about operating systems, I'd recommend reading the FreeBSD D&I book and Tanenbaum's Modern Operating Systems and skipping the Minix book (which was also a bit too heavy on code listings for my tastes).

Minix has been BSD licensed for well over a decade. I'm not sure exactly how long, but it was when I was an undergrad and that was a depressingly long time ago now. As the kids today say: Old troll is old.

While this is true, it's worth noting that a lot of the compartmentalisation and sandboxing ideas that most of the userland programs on OS X employ (either directly or via standard APIs) have roots in microkernel research. OS X is in the somewhat odd situation of having userspace processes that are a lot more like multiserver microkernels than its kernel...

This is confusing in Brussels, because there is Université libre de Bruxelles (Free University of Brussels), but there is also Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Free University of Brussels), a different university.

Props?

Agreed.

There are hundreds of billions of dollars of tribute payment from vassal states in the pretend buy of those aircraft. No matter how bad they are they need to be made and sold in order to collect those tribute payments. In fact the worse they are the more money the US will be able to collect of those vassal states as they pay through the nose in repairs, bug fixes and upgrades.