Suppose there was a large apartment building, and child pornography was found in one apartment. Should the government have the right to indefinitely hold the belongings of the residents of all of the other apartments in the building?

In the very unlikely event that a kind-hearted, mentally disabled person could become dictator, that person would not be dictator for very long. The first concern of an individual who is in power is to stay in power, because he or she is continually in competition with others who want power.

If a leader stays in power for a while without doing ruthless things, it just means that that leader had the good fortune of not being presented with situations where ruthlessness was required. I doubt that this happens very often.

How does the size of the user base of Dancer compare to that of Catalyst? How do the growth curves compare? Are these things known?

Having a larger support community is one factor I need to consider, partly because it's easier to get help when I need it, and partly because a more widely-used framework is likely to continue to be supported over time. The inherent technical superiority is, of course, another factor to consider.

What do you guys think of Catalyst these days? Does Catalyst still have enough support behind it to make it worth my while to sit down and really learn Catalyst?

This is assuming that I already know Perl well, and that I'm also not interested in switching to another language at the present time.

I've still got the old Apple ][ wire-bound manuals. Yeah, I know, it's extremely unlikely that I'll ever again go poking into the assembly code of Apple DOS, but I've just never been able to consign those manuals to the trash bin.

I've also still got the manuals for the TRS-80 Color Computer. I can still flip them open and immediately remember writing programs using those exact BASIC commands.

You missed the joke. CinthIA = CIA. The woman whose voice is used for one of the numbers stations is known as Cynthia because of the station's supposed connection to the CIA.

This is precisely my point: the free software community should have thrown away one of the two APIs ten years ago.

Choice is not always a good thing. Would you be better off if you had a "choice" of different voltages and socket types for your various household appliances? Is it important to be able to choose a hair dryer which runs on 60vDC and a toaster which runs on 150vAC? Oh, sure, you could have all kinds of voltage adapters for "interoperability", but there's no need for any adapters if everything runs on the same current.

The functional differences between Gnome and KDE are trivial; they are minor variations on the same window/widget paradigm found on MacOS and Windows. If there are individual differences in taste, they would be better handled as user preference settings within a single environment.

I think the free software community has really shot itself in the foot by continuing this division between Gnome and KDE.

Around ten years ago, I was interested in building some GUI apps for Linux, but there was no clear path as to which of the two GUI APIs I should learn. I found the lack of a clear path to be enough of a discouragement that I ended up losing interest. I doubt that I'm the only one who has felt that way about it.

Paying your taxes is one of your basic duties as a citizen. Other than jury duty, taxes are the only compulsory duty expected of U.S. citizens (we don't even have compulsory military service, much less any form of conscripted labor). In case you need to have this spelled out, taxes are what make it possible for us to have roads, public schools, a police department, an army and a navy, and so on.

Of course, there's plenty of room for debate about how much we should be taxed, and how the money can most wisely be spent. Liberals have a particular view on this question.

Don't confuse this question with the question of "freedom". You may not agree with the liberal view on taxation and government spending, but you're just plain mistaken if you think that liberals oppose freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of association, and so on. Liberals strongly support those freedoms. There is nothing in the liberal view on taxation and government budgeting which contradicts those freedoms.

To answer your question about age grading, you have to look at a population at more than one point in time. In cases where this has been done (e.g. speakers of central American Spanish), what we find is that young adults have the highest percentage of the incoming feature (higher than both children and older adults). As those same young adults get older, their use of the incoming feature does decline some, but not down to the levels of the previous generation. The 40-year-olds today have a higher percentage of the incoming variant than the 40-year-olds twenty years ago.

Variants in speech can serve as social markers which you use to identify yourself as a member of a group. As a guess, I imagine that the slight decline in use of the incoming variant as you get older has less to do with "learning standard English better", and more to do with it not being quite as important to sound cool as you get older. As a 40-year-old, you probably still wear clothes which identify you as a member of a certain group, but you probably don't dress in quite as trendy a way as you did when you were 20.

Actually, it appears that AAVE is a product of the Great Northern Migration of African-Americans in the early 20th century. Prior to that time, there was little to no distinction between the dialects of southern whites and southern blacks.

The pieces of evidence for this claim include:

• Phonograph recordings made in the 1930's of former slaves
• Diaries and letters written by semi-literate slaves and former slaves in the 19th century. Since the writers were semi-literate, the spelling is a better indication of the pronunciation than standard spelling would be.

• Something which linguists call "age grading". If you take speakers of AAVE today and compare younger speakers with older speakers, the younger speakers actually have a higher percentage occurrence of the distinctive features of AAVE. This suggests that AAVE is becoming increasingly distinct from standard American English over time.

There are other pieces of evidence as well, but those are some of the important ones.

Your statement is uninformed. ADHD is real.

I agree that ADHD is overdiagnosed, but ADHD is a real pathological condition with a biological substrate. It is a matter of ongoing research by neurologists. Those who have ADHD are not just "kids being kids".

I had a severe case of ADHD as a child, back in the 1970's when the name for the condition was "Hyperactivity". I knew perfectly well that I would keep getting in trouble and be rejected by my peers if I engaged in behaviors such as singing songs in class at inappropriate times, but I could not help it. No amount of punishment from my teachers or parents made the slightest difference. I would continually resolve to stop misbehaving and to start paying attention in class, and I certainly punished myself enough for being a bad kid, but I see now that no amount of willpower could change the basic biological problem.

When I finally got a correct diagnosis and started meds (which, in those days, was Dexedrine), the problematic behaviors stopped as abruptly as if a switch had been flipped. My grades immediately went from all F's to all A's. My teachers, who did not know that I had started meds, were astonished at the sudden change.

Fortunately, I largely outgrew the condition in early adulthood. That is not uncommon in cases of childhood ADHD.

ADD is a bullshit diagnosis of people's varying ability to concentrate.

No. ADD is a specific neurological disorder.

The term ADD has come to be popularly misused to mean any difficulty with concentration. This is incorrect. It is listed in the DSM and is a legitimate diagnosis recognized by the psychiatric community. It has biological substrates which are a matter of scholarly study by neurologists.

I had ADHD (the hyperactive variety) as a child, back in the 1970's, long before the condition was widely known. I knew that my flunking grades and disruptive behaviors would result in punishment from teachers/parents and in rejection by my peers. I continually resolved to concentrate and behave, but I could not help it.

I finally got a correct diagnosis. My teachers, who did not know I had started meds, reported an abrupt, dramatic change for the better; they told my parents it was like I was a different person. I became a near straight-A student and finally started making friends.

Your statement is uninformed. The condition is real.

At my day job in the software industry, I often feel like a musician who has to make a living writing advertising jingles. At least I get do use my talent, but it's not what I'd create if I had complete freedom.

I often dream about having the freedom and unlimited time to code whatever I want, on my own schedule, to my own standards, without any concern about whether the product could make money or not. One lifetime would not be long enough to code all of the cool ideas which I'm constantly thinking up.

Having a psychiatric illness doesn't make you any less a "real programmer".

I'm sure there's a fair number of us here who have been treated for psychiatric conditions at one point or another and are still perfectly competent programmers.

Suppose your colleague's disability were physical rather than psychiatric. If he used a wheelchair, would that mean that he is not a "real programmer"?

Psychiatric illnesses are classified as disabilities under the Americans with Disabilities Act. If the condition can be reasonably accommodated by the employer, then it is against the law to discriminate on the basis of that disability. If your employer got to the point where they could afford "real programmers" and ended your colleague's employment because of his psychiatric illness (assuming it's a case where reasonable accommodation is possible), then your colleague could take the employer to court under the ADA.