Those features and more are available in vim, if you care to learn how to use it and maybe install a plugin or two. I assume emacs can provide them as well. Linux also lets me have 10 code windows and a larger compiling window simultaneously visible on a dual 1920x1080 monitor setup.

Look into computerized stock trading, where software is making all the decisions. They spend all day long making billions of trades of hundreds or thousands of shares of stock at a time on their own markets, and prices are negotiated to 1/1000 of a cent for less than a rounding error of profit per trade.

What do you think the real reason is for Google Fiber? They don't want to pay, and this mess has come up before. Google seems to be making an excelent run at undermining telecom monopoly practices with minimal government regulation. I think if Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Wikipedia and Microsoft would just tell Verizon, "No! We will firewall Verizon before paying," then Verizon would have to back down or they will be thrown out of business.

It's MY bandwidth!!! I bought it from them with my money! It is mine to waste how I want, as long as I comply with the laws and TOS. Bandwidth is not returned like a leased car, so you cannot say I'm merely leasing it. The lines, hardware and other equipment may be leased, but once the month is over, the bandwidth allocated for my use is gone whether I used it or not. Any purposful attempt to take away my bandwidth to the full Internet will be considered theft by me.

It's normal for 2008 patents to be enforced on 80's touchscreen technology? Just because you were the first to mass-market an idea doesn't mean you deserve a patent. Apple's touch screen patent covers any type of screen technology or touch technology yet to be invented and "other devices, such as personal computers and laptop computers." Basically they have a patent on moving things with their fingers. Is that normal? (I'll be fair and admit it's a patent on using a touchscreen to move digital things and concede some of the included tech might be as recent as 1990)

I don't know as much about the headphone jack detection, but my 2001 phone could tell when I plugged in my headset. Is adding stereo (featured in my 2005 phone) really such a revolution that they need a patent in 2007? It doesn't appear to detail any new method of detection, other than maybe individual channels, but I think my Pocket PC's did that.

I find it infuriating that the US government is just handing rights, an unfair market position, and a lot of business over to Apple with the touch patent, and so many people are defending Apple. Meanwhile, the government is setting a precedent that with enough lawyers, patents, political connections, and stupid jurors you can claim ownership of what you didn't invent and kick competition to the curb. As a small, inventive company, it makes work look like a game of waiting to get squashed.

What kind of ill intentioned group is both smart enough to pull off an attack, and stupid enough to think the government isn't spying on everything? My Venn diagram the two circles in different zip codes.

Personally, I think we would be better off if we weren't antagonizing everyone. Instead, we're spending a fortune to make enemies, and we publicly mock politicians for having a foreign policy as "unamerican" as George Washington's.

There are about 1 billion phone calls per day in the US and they average around 2 minutes each. The population is about 314 million people. It works out to only a little more than 6 minutes of phone calls per person, per day.

It may sound low, but those hour-long conference calls w/ 15 people are only 4 minutes per person to record and normal calls are split between 2 people. This also averages in infants, young children, and others who never use the telephone.

Bing image search gave me nude pictures of children when trying to find a picture of young Anakin Skywalker. I wouldn't recommend the service to anyone.

You can cash a check at a branch from the account holder's bank. Until fairly recently there weren't any fees to cash it, but now a some banks (notably Bank of America) are charging. These fees are a small part of everything dishonest the banks have done. The United States has given illegal amounts of power to the banks.

I still occasionally see software on cvs.

Off the top of my head: Hadoop, HBase, PHP, jQuery, JAVA, the Linux Kernel (e.g. make menuconfig), and MySQL all have better documentation than Oracle. I have trouble thinking of something that slashdot readers would know about with worse documentation.

No one but Oracle writes documentation in numbered pages anymore. It's a horrible format for getting around data in this newfangled age of hypertext links, which Oracle uses painfully sparingly. Their docs are extremely wordy, not extremely detailed. The details are disorganized and horribly lacking (e.g. set some variable to some value, with no explanation of how or what it's affecting). If you're so sure of the level of detail, then show me the guide on deciphering ORA-0600 errors without going through paid support (who always asked for tons of info, then started by telling me to recover from a backup and see if that fails). While installing from the Oracle guides does work, installing a single-node HBase server in 2010 was easier (and ran not just circles, but knitted-doilies around Oracle in terms of performance).

Thanks, I already have a multi-terabyte MySQL install with better uptime than Oracle than the last Oracle cluster I dealt with.

Facebook scales each node to multi-terabyte, and runs so many database servers that it would probably be cheaper to buy the company that licensing (~2 million cpu licenses aren't cheap). A year ago, Facebook was dealing with 2.5 billion content items shared, 2.7 billion likes, and 500+ TB new data ingested every day on their primary database (estimate about 15% higher now). Something else to add: Facebook's workload is 90% read and quite interlinked.

You're probably thinking of the rules against murder, which doesn't include all killing. For example, the Old Testament Law gave parents explicit permission to kill their perpetually disobedient children, and God often told them to kill all the women and children when they conquered a city. Jesus took the stance against murder even further by denouncing all hatred for others, and requiring his followers to love everyone.

Are you insinuating that someone antagonizing me (and the general public) and flagrantly attacking the government rule (US Constitution) isn't my enemy?

$2 trillion? What about handing a private banking cartel the ability to create new money without oversight, then standing idly by as they hand out $16 trillion in new loans to banks worldwide at near-zero rates.