Surely exile to Ceti Alpha V is more fitting?

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Sorry about that.

Whilst I agree with you (having sweated blood over fixing corrupted MySQL tables more times than I'd care to mention), and wish there was more support for more robust databases, it seems most of the world hasn't caught up with this idea yet.

Not only do most webhosts only support/provide MySQL (IIRC due to Postgres and others not having quota support), but there's a vast swathe of projects out there that don't have support for anything other than MySQL. Heck, I was looking into upgrading my home install of Gallery only to find out that support for Postgres (or even SQLite) was dropped completely:
http://codex.galleryproject.org/Gallery3:Requirements

A similarly disheartening thread from Piwigo can be read here:
http://piwigo.org/forum/viewtopic.php?id=18008

Sadly, for a bewildering array of software it's MySQL or nothing. It's partly this monoculture that has, IMHO, contributed to much of the animosity against MySQL, since users are unable to even contemplate trying out something else.

£0.02

Not a problem! When hydrogen sulphide reaches about 100ppm, you can't smell it any more, and if the concentration gets any higher you soon stop caring about it :)

And here's me wishing I hadn't been given my mod points over the April 1st weekend so I could have used them on a worthwhile post like this. I'll be raising a glass of that single malt this evening, and probably starting to re-read Use of Weapons again just to re-iterate your points about his worldview.

I'm not a huge reader by any means, but I've still read a boatload of sci-fi, and whilst there are dozens of books that have cooked up convincing, ,evocative, even enviable, realities, Banks' are the only ones where I've genuinely felt like the author is already living in it.

Sorry, you're wrong. We removed the Model M's from our vending machines because when the keyboard dropped into the out-tray, it broke the vending machine in half and then dented the floor. :)

Just as a counterpoint, the same subject matter was covered recently in the darkly satirical technocentric series "Black Mirror" in the UK, most especially in "The Entire History of You". Definitely worth a watch if you enjoyed Strange Days.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Series/BlackMirror

Personally, I think ritual recording of memories is a terrible idea; most of us can already remember the good stuff pretty well, and not forgetting the bad stuff would be... well, pretty bloody traumatic.

Wrestling is broadcast from a parallel universe where it's actually considered worthwhile entertainment?

Hell, look at all the wrestlers with goatees.

What is this, the 1980's? A modern CSI Enhance Button can zoom into the perps DNA helix merely from a reflection in a hub cap and extract a portrait of their entire family.

Not directly related, but the XKCD "What If" scenario on just changing the rotation of the earth enough to avoid having leap-seconds would require 50,000 4m diameter rocky asteroids hitting the earth every second.

http://what-if.xkcd.com/26/

Back-of-a-fag-packet calculations that every nuclear and non-nuclear explosion in the history of civilisation wouldn't give enough oomph to move us more than a few km away from the sun (although that didn't stop anyone making films about it). http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0054790/

....that seems to exist solely to either attempt to coin a phrase, or just blindly continue the meme of prepending "bro" to everything.

Coding has, sadly, always been "testosterone fuelled" simply by having so many more men in the profession than women for the majority of its history, despite the fact that the vast majority of nerds, geeks and just plain computery types are far and away from what I'd see as a "bro" (although as a recalcitrant Brit I might not fully grok the term, is a "bro")
I've not yet met any programmer (or indeed any slightly competent professional) that hasn't overindulged in various psychoactive substances at some point in time

The article seems to base it's findings on having watched The Social Network, and seems to think that because a college undergraduate and his mates became hojillionaires after a few beers (yup, it was totally that simple) that this is why software quality is going down the pan. Stupid privacy issues aside, I was under the impression that facebook had a fairly good track record on actual server security because it already had put a large emphasis on engineering standards; even if they don't, they wouldn't be the first company that started out as some frenzied and possibly coding session and later put on a professional hat and cleaned up its act. I wonder if Larry and Sergey had a beer fridge at Stanford?

The real reason "quality software" is apparently seen to be disappearing is because a) software engineering as a "methodical, engineering-heavy discipline" is both difficult and expensive, not to mention seen as boring by many, so many companies and individuals will skimp and b) because barriers to entry are so low and there's so much *more* software out there now (including just as much good, if not great stuff), it could conceivably give the impression that "good software" is drowning in a sea of mediocrity.

My 2p.

Every phone I've used in at least the last 10 years has the capability to combine SMS messages together seamlessly for both sending and receiving; most messages I send are typically made up of 3-4 text messages glommed together.

AH, but if you break the license, are you still a "a lawful user"?

Yes. The whole point of statute, and the ensuing statutory rights, is that the rights they confer upon you can't be negated by a license, EULA, or even a contract signed in blood. The UK has a fairly good history of customer-friendly policies in this regard, frequently to the annoyance of foreign companies.

http://whatconsumer.co.uk/what-are-my-statutory-rights/

It gets a bit more nebulous as you describe the "rented device and service" scenario, but I don't believe that's been tested in the UK courts yet. There's certainly a lot of people who've hardhacked things like their Sky+ boxes to do things like add extra storage and migrating recordings off the box are common, and so far there's been no legal repercussions TTBOMK.

Glad someone brought this up! I was in Germany one NYE and, being a Brit, I was hussled in front of the TV to watch this, and everyone in the room was utterly shocked I'd never even hard of it; as far as I'm aware this custom is almost completely unheard of in the UK. As far as I can make out from Wikipedia, this sketch was broadcast in Germany in 1963 and became a cult hit almost instantly, whilst it's been forgotten about over here - no broadcasts in the UK in 30yrs apparently.

Classic little sketch, and a fantastic excuse for multiple chin-chins :)

This. In my, admittedly limited, hardware building experience intel boards are not only very open source friendly, but come with the best documentation and least-flaky BIOSes. And of course their SATA controllers and NICs are class leaders.

I've built a few NAS/NAS + HTPC mITX units using two of Intel's newer boards, running either debian stable or testing, and found both of these to be excellently supported OotB:
http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/motherboards/desktop-motherboards/desktop-board-dh77df.html.html
http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/motherboards/server-motherboards/server-board-s1200kp.html

And that's even with my beloved M1015 HBA's, which I've had problems with on some older AMD boards (almost certainly down to poor testing on LSI's side).

I've not done any testing of features like suspend/hibernate since these are targeting "low power always on", and the onboard graphics don't quite match up to 23.97fps at times*. My only regret about choosing the "server" S1200KP board for my NAS is that it doesn't come with mSATA or eSATA ports.

In the mITX arena, almost everyone else seems to use the ubiquitous (and ubiquitously crap) Realtek chips, so it's worth buying Intel for that reason alone. Recently Asus have made a point of using Intel NICs in their higher-end mATX and ATX boards but for small linux builds intel is the only game in town. My two pence.

* If you're really set on a good HTPC experience with e.g. linux+XBMC I would still recommend an ASRock Vision 3D with an nVidia card in it. They're ludicrously overpriced but tiny and silent and the SB models at least work perfectly with linux.