But the internet is a series of tubes.

Unlike being an investment banker.

I heard if you hold a person under water long enough the evil spirits will leave them. I don't know where they go, maybe into a fish?

Null pointers are great, assuming you actually write tests for code coverage. Otherwise you potentially have many of the typical C bugs lurking, not just null pointer dereference.

I remember using sentinel structures for a linked list in Pascal, just like it was recommend in my old computer science texts. And I had a bug where I would sometimes return the sentinel and the rest of my program would happily write to it. So instead of a crash, It would silently write data and lose track of it. I don't remember how many days it too me to track that bug down.

I'm a C Programmer. It's the only language where I'm paid to program.

"do some horrible things to an individual and then walk away scott-free"

No, murder is still illegal and whether you use a pressure cooker full of fireworks or a one-shot plastic pistol, the authorities are going to chase you down for as long as it takes.

You need to go to the source of the problem and ban women.

Banning children is as pointless as banning ammunition. Because an industrious person can always make more at home.

That's a classic article. Do you have anything more recent?

Once you create a black market, though poorly crafted bans on an easily transported good, you empower criminals and plant the seeds for organized crime. We saw this with Prohibition. We see it with the War on Drugs. And some countries have seen it with bans on guns.

I challenge the assumption that the US is most like the UK and Australia. What if the US is culturally more like Latin America, or Ukaraine.
What if we're like Greece? They have 3000 legally registered private gun owners in the entire nation, but an esimated 2.5 million guns. And this discrepency is from a country that has a relatively low rate of private firearm ownership (about 25 in 100) compared to the US.

Firearms in the US is a much bigger problem than firearms in Australia. And I mean bigger in terms of scale. I'm not ready to accept a solution to a problem that worked on a small scale on the hunch that it will work on a large scale or that the US is even culturally or politically similar to countries that have successfully implemented bans on guns.

I never heard of the Boston TV API programming contest until it was won by a young woman... so maybe it's just me, but I don't think so.

It certainly wouldn't have been newsworthy if they selected a male 20s-something developer.

You don't like Pandas?

So are you saying that Ubuntu should or should not follow in Puppy's footsteps?

Arch's pacman is has some significant improvements over apt/dpkg, especially when it comes to creating new packages. And gentoo portage/emerge has lots of useful features that don't exist in dpkg/apt either.

Debian is solid and has an excellent package system. But it isn't the pinnacle of achievement. We can take package management further still, I am certain.

it seems like they suffer from Not Invented Here but at the same time, I seem to recall that Puppy Linux already installs self-contained package bundles into individual directories. Not unlike OSX/NeXT app bundles.