Having a separate /home partition is a good idea, simply because you can reinstall the whole system, switch to a different distro or whatever, without wiping your personal stuff and having to reinstall from backup. I usually move my old home directory to /home/old first, to avoid conflicting dot files. No space wasted, and lots of time saved.

If I were to cook at work, lunch would take an extra 30 minutes.

Yeah, and if you programmers were half as smart as you think you are, you'd notice that if all employees were to stop and model every little repeatable task on their computers, you'd have lots of employees stopping and modelling all the time. You'd have dozens of different models and no standard for how things should be done. One employee calls in sick, and there's no one to replace her because everyone does the job slightly differently and the whole place is in total chaos. How about leaving the programming to one person who's really good at it, or a small team, and just have the rest of the workforce report their problems to them.

I swear, if you programmers were a little less infatuated with your skill set, and a bit more attentive to how your products actually work, software wouldn't suck nearly as much.

Due to the magic of capitalism, most people don't work for themselves (hence the term 'employment' at the root of this discussion), and therefore have a limited set of tasks in their jobs. For instance, a programmer doesn't need cooking skills, despite cooking being of enormous daily importance compared to churning out code. Likewise, most cafeteria personnel does not need to be able to code, as any coding job is done by someone else, preferably someone more skilled at the task. Everyone doing everything is inefficient, as is everyone doing one thing, whether that thing is cooking or coding or laundry or being a doctor or whatever.

Everyone coding in every job is simply not economically sensible. The idea is pure idiocy.

Yeah, if I had said coding is never useful in many or most occupations, you'd have a point. I didn't, so you don't. With your reasoning skills, you're certainly an utterly shit coder, imagination or not.

There are thousands of occupations with no need for programming skills. Ah, how about nursing, for instance. This is just an ad salesman trying to give off the impression of being relevant in this day and age. He's an ad salesman. An idiot.

Unless your security is fundamentally broken, you'd still have to authorise throwaway_user to access the X server. Not quite that easy, and not quite that secure. I'd rather just boot a virtual machine.

Slashdot: where obvious jokes are lost.

One of the most significant patents (owned by Apple) expired just a few years ago. I remember there was some code in XFree86 or Freetype or wherever that actually infringed on it, but the default build script commented it out. I also remember seeing a patch in one of the major Free Software GNU/Linux distros that happily circumvented it, resulting in quite decent font rendering. Of course, no one would suspect Debian of doing anything that would be good for desktops...

Expensive wine takes ages to age, and it's rare. It's not necessarily fantastic compared to more reasonably priced wine. Same with whisky. Beer? Yeah, I suppose you could hand-select your grains and hops, and use your private limited supply well water ... but, as you say, water chemistry for brewing is pretty straight forward science (and common knowledge even among homebrewers, so I suppose there's nerd spooge in your average craft beer as well), so it's not like you can't get identical but more consistent results with reverse osmosis and a handful of mineral salts.

The reason why beer snobs dislike your Bud is because it doesn't taste much like all. It's designed primarily to be inoffensive. You might as well ask why music snobs prefer Arnold Schönberg to Justin Timberlake, when the latter has had contributions from market research and advanced statistics to make music that's perfectly acceptable to a much larger share of the market.

Of course, you're also full of shit when talking about craft brewers. Hardly any of them know anything about the soil their hops come from (they source them from the same farms that grow for the macros), and if you hear much hippie bullshit, you're most likely talking to their PR guy. Brewing is geeky stuff, the big guys just have bigger toys.

Anyone who cares about simplicity, reliability and stability.

No, you're a full-time Apple apologist.

Weird. Nowhere in the thread above was netbooks mentioned, nor in the summary, yet two of the replies to my comment mention netbooks, no, not only mention them, but pretend the argument ever was about netbooks. It wasn't. Learn to read, or use a better device for reading. Perhaps one that won't make your hands get in the way all the time.