Is this another case of "misguided politician hears about Watch Dogs"?

Is this what they taught you in school or did you figure it out yourself? Either way, you may want to update yourself on the constitutions of the ~50 countries you're talking about. For starters, there is no "the Governent of Europe". Each country in Europe, even those within the European Union, have their own elected government. By the way, over here the governments are elected by actual majority and not by proxies. Further, if you do some research on the US constitution, you may even find that most of it can be traced back to France. Sorry.

Working for the local government means we can't rely on internet services or utility power to stay operational. Even if a major disaster hits, we need to be able to keep services running. That's why we have fault tolerant systems set up in multiple server rooms that we control. Our servers, our storage, our backup.

I call BS. For most non-enterprise purposes, MySQL is more than good enough as long as you make regular backups and use any modern operating system with a journaling file system.

IMHO MS Access is a poor alternative to a database. Poor jokes aside, MySQL or PG are obvious candidates for the backend but the real problem here is agreeing on a front end that lets the user accomplish more than he/she can already do in MS Access. The obvious question that needs to be answered is therefore "what are you trying to accomplish from switching to a different tool?" First decide what to build, THEN look in the toolbox.

There's probably an app for this anyway, the badge is unnecessary. Chances are, you're already carrying a computer with an accelerometer, GPS and microphone in your pocket. And you probably even paid for it yourself. You just have to trust whoever built the damned thing that it's not recording everything you say and do. Go ahead, tell me it can't be done.

The worst is that damned communicator that just won't ever stop beeping whenever some idiot wants to ask a stupid question or tell you some irrelevant story about a sign he saw or a funny cat video. Wait, we actually have those now. Nevermind.

Get Watson over here will you?

1. Find a way to crash Kinect, a Microsoft product. 2. Invade North Korea undetected. ...This is obviously an attempt to have the south koreans and americans laugh themselves to death.

If you want to paint a barn, you hire a painter. If you want to decorate the ceiling of a cathedral, you hire an artist who is passionate about her work. The painter will usually have more predictable working hours and make enough to support a family. The artist is the one who will be remembered :-)

This must be some kind of record :-)

+1 Indeed, all helmets are meant to be discarded after an accident, including $2000 MC helmets. Even if they do not visibly crack.

Don't hold your breath, Microsoft is busy optimizing all their software for handheld devices.

RH used to give away their Linux for free before RHEL so this isn't a dramatic change. Also, they can't legally stop CentOS so it makes sense to keep them close. Those of us who already use CentOS may consider it a free RHEL without benefits, but to marketing and executive droids every CentOS installation just means one more server that isn't running RHEL. This may simply be a move by RH to make CentOS "officially count" as RHEL market share so RH looks better on those pie charts.

Same here but they chose to ignore us because of "practical verifiability concerns". And they call themselves researchers...