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Has SVN missed the boat? Basic features that were desirable 10 years ago lead people to use BitKeeper, arch/arX/tla/Bazaar, and eventually Hg, monotone and Git. (I guess some folks were using Darcs too). Now that people have tackled the learning curve and the lack of tools. These days many of these alternatives to CVS and SVN have support in numerous IDEs and desktop environments

It is probably great news for people still using SVN. But why should we keep going in that direction? I also wonder why Perforce is still around too, I still don't find it easy to deal with at work.

Definitely applicable to children's medical records. So pediatricians will still want to track gender. The other medical data based on gender is currently suspect, including dosage for anesthetic. But it seems harmless to keep track of a person's chromosomal gender in a private medical database, perhaps including all the complicated rare chromosomal anomalies. You know, information your Doctor would probably like to know, but which your tax auditor, local police officer and boss have no right to know.

Tax breaks for gender? Are you actually suggesting that this is something we need to keep around?

How about maternity and paternity claims being treated equally and with common sense? Also, a man can certainly file a maternity claim, as everyone is free to file most kinds of civil court claims in most jurisdictions. He just won't win it when it becomes obvious he is not the biological mother (duh). On the other hand if he took on a male identity after giving birth, there definitely can be a situation where such filter up front is not only unnecessary but violates basic rights.

Business systems are no longer written in COBOL, using the present tense form of the verb "written". While certainly there exists old software, it's hasn't been actively developed in several years now and is in pure maintenance mode these days. Let's try to look forward instead of backwards. And I'm definitely for making old system obsolete so they can be replaced by new systems, spurring economic growth. (oh I'm sure you can find someone who does COBOL out there. but there are a lot of crazy and unreasonable people out there. for example, I program 8-bit NES games for a hobby)

I'm arguing that the information on gender is generally irrelevant and that as individuals we should consider our gender a very personal piece of information that the vast majority of the businesses and government do not need or deserve. I think we should draw a clear line between the medical condition of a person's gender, and the cultural identity for gender. For 99.9% of people out there, it's the same. No problem, they can have the added bonus of not having to even check an M/F box except on a medical form.

But salutations are the appropriate data, M/F is inappropriate data. If you want to argue against them due to complexity, then don't record either I guess.

I guess businesses and governments can greet someone as "Pat Smith" instead of "Ms Smith". But it seem horribly sterile and somewhat impolite to me.

Names are also a mine field, they can be of indeterminate length, contain characters outside of our simplistic basic latin alphabet, and are often difficult for people unfamiliar with a person's cultural background to pronounce correctly.

Wouldn't it be better if we were all just a number? "Hello number two-five-four-nine-six ...."

I can understand the database keeping track of a salutation like Mr/Ms/Miss/Mrs/Dr/Rev/etc. And a salutation can of course change, a Miss can easily become a Dr or Mrs.

The status of M/F doesn't usually seem necessary for customer service or governments, as using personal pronouns can be ambiguous or unnecessary. But the salutation can be a convenient, comfortable and respectful way to address a person on the phone.

Competing based on IPv6 saturation? I guess the US is doing pretty well for not even trying.

I suspect IPv6 adoption isn't nearly as critical for the US as it is for other countries. As the US controls an obscene portion of the IPv4 address space.

Then why get a CS degree at all? You don't need a CS degree to be an app developer. You can pick up what you need from a trade school. The science part of Computer Science implies that you do research. Most of us are glorified technicians with trumped up titles (myself included).

I am a professional computer programmer without a CS degree or Mathematics related degree, but I still strongly believe that CS degrees ought to be very math centric.

A better user interface is a system that never shutdowns down. It might hibernate, but when you plug it back in, everything is right where you left it.

A few research OSes have tried this sort of thing before. such as all RAM being disk-backed with support for checkpointing. Tricky things like leaving TCP sessions in a state that can be resumed, or forcing them into a state where the disconnection will be immediately picked up on resume had to be done of course. But it did hide a lot of this nasty business of waiting for the OS to finish forcing programs to terminate.

You can sit in jail indefinitely for refusing to comply with a court order. You stay until you change your mind or the judge's order is no longer relevant, for example if you refuse to testify in a case, but the trial is over then they let you out. If it's a complicated trial that takes 6 months, then I guess you're cooling your heels without much recourse until then. That is what it means to be compelled by a judge to testify. (criminal contempt)
If you're already being held by police for a crime and you don't want to testify against yourself on a technicality like handing over decryption codes, then there is probably not a lot to lose. IANAL, but I suspect the criminal contempt could only add 4-6 months onto a sentence, and given the controversial nature the contempt charges could be reversed later and potentially could result in a mistrial.

But we (the general public) don't want it that way. We want it one way, where there are boarders and jurisdictions between countries.

Right. that's my experience at well. I just don't trust these statistics being thrown around because I can't use same basic assumptions to make sense of them. It stinks of sensationalism to me.

Those people are sick and probably aren't the majority of people. Their behavior is so unusual that you took note of it.

Every 2 minutes? please

I'm not buying any of this.

That's really ony one check. If I pick up my phone and check facebook, email, and texts then play a game, then go on wikipedia. That's 1 check, or maybe 4 or 5. But are we counting every second I'm holding my phone as checking my phone? Do we also count checking the time on my phone when I don't wear a watch? Should we compare checking a phone with checking a wrist watch, it might be interesting but I don't know what that would tell us about people.

No, this call from work is top priority and vitally important. It's life or death!
Except I'm not an MD, I'm not doing heart transplants. I'm just a software engineer writing drivers for smartphones and tablets.