Microsoft can control who speaks for Microsoft and give official support on their behalf, Apple can control who speaks for Apple and give official support on their behalf, but nobody can claim to speak for the whole Linux (or better yet, OSS) community nor is 99,99% of the support you get in any official capacity. Sure you can try to create walled off areas like Ubuntu's Absolute Beginners Section where moderators can use the ban hammer on douchebags but in general there's no telling what you'll run into. To use your analogy, it's more like a potluck dinner than a restaurant and in a large group there'll always be asshats. It doesn't help that just like you have community members that piss in the well you sure have users that piss in the well too, if you ever have to deal with any obnoxious, persistent, over-entitled twats you're likely to swear off offering support forever.

The other fundamental issue is that many of these people are essential to the software development, they just don't give a damn about your problems. Say what you will but if it comes down to a more-or-less savvy user or a key code contributor, most will side with the "not our problem, read the manual or code a patch yourself" attitude. A lot of projects have very poor separation between development and support and developers that don't want to be bothered by support, bad combination. And in the end you're not their boss so if you bring it up they might just take their ball and go home, start a competing fork or just make a giant mess of everything. Even so, some people still need to be evicted from projects - abuse of users is usually not grave enough though.

Well the "jumped him from the shadows and started bashing his head into the pavement" is just from Zimmerman's testimony, let's instead assume Trevon doubled back and confronted him verbally to find out why this "creepy ass cracker" was stalking him. In a very unkind way, with panic as Zimmerman got a lot more than he bargained for and Trevon was now very much in his face and between him and his car. Maybe Zimmerman started getting physical in order to get back to his car and safety - maybe more shoving then punching that escalated and Trevon started hitting back hard. Still, even if I assume the worst there doesn't seem to be any justification for the beating Zimmerman was taking, that level of violence was way beyond self-defense. And even if he'd gotten himself into that whole mess, Zimmerman had at that point reason to be in genuine fear of his life. I don't much like it that you can provoke a situation like this, but I don't see the evidence for a murder conviction either.

What has remained are the parts that you really can't replace without ceasing to be X11, he goes to great lengths to explain how toolkits, compositors and extensions all try to work around it. It's the reason they want to replace X11 with Weston, not the other way around.

Or as others would call it, getting new features. Do I smell a case of WORKS4ME? Didn't need it, don't want it so nobody else should either, X11 is just fine the way it is.

It was a presentation not a demo, don't pretend you can't find demos on YouTube... There are even LiveCDs so you can try it yourself.

Which would be relevant if anybody was using X as a drawing library, but nobody does that anymore. There is OpenGL pass-through with GLX, but the final image acts like a pixmap to the X server and I assume there will be something similar with Wayland, in fact as I understand it that's the only way Wayland will work as it has no drawing routines of its own.

All of our "business rules" are in the database and the reason is speed. Without going into too much detail we receive many and huge chunks of data from external parties and our job is to process these for quality, everything from whether the dates are dates to complex relationships between many values/existence checks in many tables. And I'm not talking about simple IT rules, there are teams of subject matter experts dedicated to finding new forms of invalid and improbable combinations and it is not feasible to push these quality controls out to the external parties. Could it be done in an application layer? In the "it's Turing-complete" sense but I'd love to see you try, we have trouble enough keeping up the performance on a beefy SQL server that runs everything without any network round-trips or in-app joins.

And several moderators from the USA! USA! USA! crowd have swallowed it hook, line and sinker already. If any country is doing anything better than the US, they must be lying or the situation is not comparable. Here's how it really works, most of our doctors are public employees working for a public doctor's office or hospital which means they don't have any direct incentive to pad the bills. Private institutions mostly do things by public requisition like this patient needs a back surgery, here's $X to do it and there are no kickbacks to the referring doctor. Our patients wants the best treatment money can buy (without paying the money) just like yours and we too have limited funds. The difference is that we mainly leave it to the doctors to decide what is a medical necessity rather than the insurance companies what is a legal necessity.

Just because our coverage is universal, it doesn't mean that we're handing out treatments and medications and aids left and right. You have to go through a whole system with your general practitioner, specialists and an application process who employ their own reviewers to be issued an aid, yes you might eventually get a free hearing air or wheel chair but chances are very good that you have a real medical need for one and you don't want to "lose" it to start the paperwork all over again. Not that there's much of a domestic market anyway since those who need it eventually get it for free so you'd have to smuggle it out of the country. Besides it's not like you're getting pampered there, unless I have a real reason for being there I don't want to be stuck in the doctor's office - or rather the waiting area.

Speaking of waiting, we have queues for many kinds of surgery - even if you've passed the medical requirements and everyone has signed off that yes you should have it you're still going to wait for capacity and they have priorities there as well, it's not the person with the right insurance policy who pays the most it's the person with the most dire medical need. I'm not going to pretend that it's all flowers and sunshine and that every patient is actually treated perfectly equally, but we're at least working towards that goal. To that end we also have guest patients, if your local hospital doesn't have capacity you can have the surgery at any other public hospital in the country that does. It's not like in the US where you're stuck with the hospitals your insurance company has a deal with. But hey, social pressure sure. Let's pretend.

You just don't like it when the tin foil hat brigade is right, first you ridicule them for years then give them a kick in the nuts for saying "I told you so?" Besides, the only thing Americans are crying about is that they're spying on their own not the 6.7 billion other people on the planet so I'll continue to assume that the NSA wants to read my mail. In fact, I should probably assume that every other country in the world would like to read my email even if ours doesn't - which is by no means certain. That should be the real wake-up call around the world, not that Americans are spying on their own that's more of a "local" problem, but how they want and are spying on ordinary people everywhere else.

In terms of hardware I'm pretty sure it's down, there used to be a lot more to tinkering with your PC. Today you grab a motherboard, slap in a quad core, single high end gaming card, 16GB RAM and a SSD and call it pretty much done for a moderate enthusiast build. For every component in my PC there's s reasonably priced upgrade if I'd care enough to want it and I couldn't really be arsed to overclock it because if there's any instability it'll be the nagging doubt that it's because of my overclock. It is diminishing returns, you can't get back any of the "oh WOW" moments I had where crappy blocky graphics suddenly looked almost real. It's like trying to recreate the sense of awe and wonder people had when they saw "horseless carriages", to me cars have always existed so they're perfectly natural.

When I look at smart phones today, and think about explaining to a kid that in my day we didn't have smart phones they were just phones... connected by a wire... in a big bulky box at home... granted it was buttons to dial and not the old rotor phones, but seriously I feel like I'm from the stone age. We didn't have any Internet or even a modem, that alone should send their heads spinning. But they don't know what it was like, any more than I can sort of but not really imagine how people lived before electricity, refrigerators, freezers, washing machines and TV. They'll no more care about my idea of technological "wonders" than I do about the "wonders" of the past. I don't think I would have become an enthusiast if I grew up today even though the PCs are a million times better.

There's an 80/20 ratio here, if you fix the 80% that fail the same every time then you wouldn't solve everything but you'd solve a lot. And sometimes the exact set of conditions is obvious after a few tries (Example: A chess program I use, if you have hit "analyze" but is still reviewing the options and haven't started it, get challenged to a match (usually a rematch) and hit cancel in the analysis dialog, the client crashes. First time I thought random crash, second time waaaait didn't it crash before on something just like this, third time it was "I think it'll crash if I hit Cancel now" and I was right). Other things are just random like "the game crashes at random intervals", you can't catch them all that way but some or most is better than none.

Given the topic, FTFY.

Fucking A! (or is that illegal these days)

But there's plenty "good code, crap idea" that won't make you rich either, most that have gone viral haven't been massively complicated, complex state of the art games. They've been simple, fun and easy to get into while being rather run-of-the-mill technically. Sure, you can't be hopeless but a lot are sufficiently skilled while the l33t coding skillz won't do any good on their own.

Unfortunately at my job the boss tells me what to do, I don't tell him what to do. All I can do is give him options, like saying there's no time for everything so what would he like to put on the back burner. If he tries the usual BS on how surely you can squeeze it in there I usually point out that if there was room in the original plan we'd have added more tasks until it was full, we don't have any time set off for goofing around. I'd also point out how inefficient it is and how these rushed solutions ruin the overall quality, but if they don't listen hey... I only work there, I don't run the place. If the same retarded rules and system applies to the other employees too, I'll probably still come out ahead on reviews even if you're driving with the handbrake on. It also keeps you sane when the WTFs are of a kind or on a level you can't do anything about.

You don't see what's happening on the back-end and they don't want you do know. Most consulting companies are now a shim layer of local people who outsource the actual coding, that's at least how Accenture, Deloitte, PWC, Ernst & Young, KPMG, Capgemini, McKinsey etc. operate. Other big companies just go directly to Indian consulting companies like Tata or get their own local staff in India. Locally, they still have the same brands, the same "local" image but in reality they're getting Indians to take over piece by piece. In-house development is slowly being phased out, in reality what's left is a sales front like a sophisticated version of Walmart. I was at an interview for a position like that, I'd be the only local resource and leader keeping up appearances while eight people in India would be doing all the actual work. Didn't get the job and in retrospect glad I didn't.

Well my connection is finally fast enough to stream one BluRay quality stream, but with 4K around the corner that'll quadruple (maybe only double with H.265) again soon. It's not that hard to tell your computer the night before that hey, tomorrow I'd like to see movie X so you've got 24 hours to download - at least my torrent client understands that just fine. It also has the best offline mode I ever saw. I'm a paying HBO Nordic customer, but they must wonder... I still prefer getting Game of Thrones from my one-stop shop for everything, the subscription is just to have paid some. Usually my guilt trip has been BluRay boxes, I've many that I've never even played. The biggest change is still going from the TV model where I get fixed channel packages with fixed air times to the on-demand model where I get what I want when I want it without fiddling with a DVR.

And when your Java application goes to shit you're going to call Oracle? Reality is that for enterprise code it's more about longetivity than anything else (no "ancient VB6 app nobody knows how to touch anymore") and by the looks of it Javascript is here to stay. Sure sounds a lot better than many of the other fads out there.