The same joke was also made on the Firehose submission. So I guess it was kind-of obvious...

For what it's worth, the laptop I'm currently using (a Toshiba Satellite) had information about the terms and conditions (that I couldn't get a refund for uninstalling Windows) on the outside of the box, visible before I bought it. I was pretty impressed by that; if they're going to let people make an informed decision rather than try to force a contract by the back door, more power to them.

The purpose of goto is to stand in for whatever control structures your language needs but doesn't have. Goto for error cleanup in C is one of those examples: it's the best way to do it in C, but if the language had better support for doing that, a goto wouldn't be necessary.

I thought it used to be a common fraud in some areas to put some substance on one of the voting buttons, so that it was possible to inspect people coming out of the voting booths to see if they'd voted the "wrong" way.

In the UK, this is handled by making all the ballot papers different colors. The voter writes their cross on each ballot, then folds the ballot in half (so that the election officials can't see the vote) and puts it in the relevant box. The election officials check, by looking at the color of the paper, that the voter's putting the paper in the right box, and corrects them if they aren't. If a paper goes in the wrong box anyway, it can probably be moved to the right one during the count, because the papers are counted by hand. (Whoever was counting the paper would notice it was the wrong color and put it in a separate pile for incorrect ballots, which are checked by the candidates.)

It's worth noting that the Italian Wikipedia actually did shut down for a few days, in response to a proposed law in Italy that they thought would have made it basically illegal for them to operate (apparently, it would have allowed anyone to force a website to publish a retraction of anything said about them with minimal judicial oversight). Here's the Slashdot story on the issue. They hid all content on the site while they were opposing the proposal. So not only has this happened, on Wikipedia, but at least one major website's actually gone through with a threat like that in the past. I guess it makes it more likely that they'll go through with it again, if necessary.

I remember an anecdote where one of the beta testers of Java, who was using it even before it was released to the public, got turned down for a job due to not having enough Java experience. I forget exactly who it was, though.

Indeed. (I think the trick of running words together like that comes from BASIC, though; or at least, that's the first place I saw it.) The same line in BASIC would be rather simpler.

Indeed, you just had to write your ASM inside square brackets as if it were a BASIC program, and it was assembled into memory. (But the [ and ] rendered as arrows in the default text-only graphics mode.)

Given that you're talking about driver support, which is entirely a hardware issue and has nothing to do with the parts of the userland that GNU provide, "Linux" is correct here even if you're the sort of person who likes to list all the relevant parts of a system in its name. (That said, I suspect "GNU/Linux" is nowadays possibly not the description for systems generally used graphically; Gnome/Linux or KDE/Linux would be more accurate, as the desktop environment is a larger part of such systems than the command-line userland; although the GNU tools are still important and relevant, they would easily be replaceable with, say, the BSD equivalents.)