And its meta-newsgroup, alt.adjective.noun.verb.verb.verb

This also indirectly enforces slightly more sensible metrics. In one place I worked, any change, even whitespace, counted as a source code change, so wrapping 1000 lines of code in an if...then counted as 1002 changed lines (which, of course, was coupled with a maximum 250 SLOC/hour inspection rate). The only way around this was to leave the original indentation in place, which made the code as messy as it sounds.

Compiler-enforced indentation would have solved this (but then again, so would development managers growing spines).

Why do republicans hate them and why don't Democrats, the party of the people, think the same?

That's what a regulatory state does. Pass new regulations. The people in charge are the smartest and know what's best. This is why European tech is a joke and they will never, ever have a Apple or a Google or a Dell. Michael Dell started his company in his dorm room. In Europe he would have been expelled for illegal capitalism.

Should I even ask how much time and grief that took?

My several-year-old HP all-in-one has been working fine, even though it whines about the third-party ink I've been using (at a quarter the cost of HP-branded ink). The other day, it prompted me for a firmware update. Right there on the printer's little touch screen, it told me flat out that the main reason for the update was to prevent more third-party cartridges from working.

The original Unix philosophy was that each program should "do one thing and do it well," and that has carried over into GNU. The reason Emacs doesn't follow this dictum is that it was not originally written on or for Unix. Its first release was in 1976 on an internally-developed OS at MIT. Steele and Stallman's Emacs wouldn't even be ported to Unix until 1984, and even then, it was enough of a resource hog that using it earned you an angry call from the sysadmins. Gosling's Emacs, which was much more lightweight, came out in 1981 (see also: MINCE and JOVE).

By the time of the Unix port (and Stallman's inauguration of the GNU project), it would not have been useful to try to reshape Emacs to fit Unix's long-pipes-of-simple-things model.

Even legitimate clones of products have to be bug-compatible, because in any sufficiently large installed base, there's going to be some use that (usually inadvertently) depends on a bug being there.

Related: When I worked at HP, every now and then a customer would get tripped up by upgrading to a new CPU that had a bugfix that broke their code. All we could do was tell them to pay more attention to the release notes. The same thing happened with software upgrades, but it was much easier for customers to find code that depended on a software bug than, say, a microcode bug.

They're not paying the cost of delivery of their packages. Instead, they're passing the cost onto taxpayers. How does that make you feel? Especially considering how these rural uneducated people vote?

Haven't seen a true slashdotting in years! Also a good refutation of all the people here who think this is stupid and nobody would want it.

Nope! That is fake news. The last time I heard this urban legend, it was George W. Bush Senior. If only Slashdot had X's Community Notes feature. That is rapidly turning into our best weapon against lying journalists.

I'm glad someone showed up to put Americans in their place! Goodness knows we almost had an outbreak of American pride there until you put a stop to it.

That's what's called a parasocial relationship, and it's not healthy. Para means half, and the relationship is one way only. People imagine that they are having relationships, but they aren't. That's why the higher tiers of Patreon are so popular among certain people. They get a response back! $500 a month for a friend! Shut up and take my money!

the "place to have the authentic conversations weâ(TM)ve always wanted to have."

Just curious: what is their policy on censorship? Something tells me they are not in favor of having any kind of authentic conversations unless they politically approve of the content.

Whoever came up with this stunt deserves a raise. It worked wonderfully well. It even made Slashdot! Despite having nothing to do with technology. The summary mentions three of their products by name!