It is harder to debug than to code. Logically, if you write something as creatively as possible, you are not smart enough to debug it. If you are a smart programmer, your 'clever' code can be so impossible to debug by others that it must be entirely replaced to be corrected. Write legibly and clearly. Your compiler can optimize just fine, as long as you follow the general rules of legibility and reuse of code.

In a world where 2GB of ram on a desktop is standard, it's nothing more than intellectual masturbation to compete on how small a program can be made. You're not designing embedded codes or programming a TRS-80 anymore.

You haven't really PvPed until you launch 0.8c rocks at your enemy's home planet from a neighboring star.

If you trust a single byte on the possibly-infected disk, you're not scanning for viruses: You're asking pretty please for the virus to show itself. Most are polite enough, but why take the chance? Use a known-clean read-only media to boot from, and scan the entire drive.

When legalizing an act will result in fewer deaths, it should be a strong incentive to legalize it. (cf. marijuana and alcohol prohibition) Legalizing theft and murder would logically only increase the number of deaths, as businesses would begin hiring violent guards to protect their profits. The same women still have abortions as when it was illegal, but with safe treatments those women now don't die in an alley. Count up the positives, weigh against the negatives, and make allowances for what people will do regardless of the legality.
Robberies and other violent criminal acts also differ from abortion in a very specific way: They affect a separate and whole actualized person. One can argue that an unborn fetus is a whole person, but to do so requires upsetting the whole of legal and societal history for what is essentially a navel-gazing philosophical point.

Well, please do invent the absolute worst kinds of inhumane treatment to prove that women must have no control over their own bodies. A shockingly vast majority of abortions are performed in the first trimester, and if you can make out an expression on a fetus that's less than 12 weeks old, you've got an imagination too vivid to be anonymously yelling on the internet. Of the vanishingly small percentage of abortions that are performed when the baby has passed the normal age of viability, the vast majority of those are performed to save the life of the mother, or to prevent the infant from having a short, brutish, and pointless life. The misogynistic organizations are attacking a strawman that was never relevant in the slightest.

The abuses you've imagined are not because a mother suddenly decided, two weeks before her due date, that she didn't want a baby. Late term abortions are performed to save lives and limit suffering. We find it sane to put down a dog that's been grievously injured, but for some reason ending the suffering of a child born without a brain is some gross unjust cruelty, and you somehow believe that a child cursed to die before their first birthday should be forced to live through a year of brutish suffering, rather than being given the only kindness we have.

Finally, statistics demonstrate that women will still get abortions, regardless of how stringent the theocracy is that you place them under. Legalized abortions mean fewer women die. Which do you want, brassy moral superiority and thousands of women dead, or an unpleasant feeling and those women still alive? That's the only 'choice' offered.

Comfortable and inviting coffee shops don't need to market to college students bearing macbooks. Merely by existing they become a mecca for someone who wants to study and has plenty of disposable income.

Libertarians also hold the completely rational belief that people incapable or unwilling to work hard enough--and here only the Libertarian is allowed to define how hard--should die when they meet hardship.

A regulation can easily be made revenue-neutral by imposing fines on those who violate the regulation. Those who hold the black-and-white view that all regulations result in higher taxes, and are for that reason a priori 'bad', are too simple-minded to consider debating.

There are people I would kill if I knew I wouldn't face punishment for it. Most of them are public figures whose crimes will never be legally punished.

I genuinely think this mindset is fairly common, and looking at the looting that breaks out every time cops go on strike is only one example of why.

"Oh, well, uhh...I lurked. Yeah, that's it. I lurked for years. Man, I was reading when Taco posted with his uid 1 account. I'm original geek, man!"

The fact that you can listen to any popular (by which I mean RIAA-backed) song for free on the radio did nothing to push the apparent value down, now did it? Why pay for it if it's already streamed into my bedroom for free 24/7?

Acai berry is provably a less potent antioxidant than cheaper and more prevalent foods. Not to mention that antioxidants have no proven benefits. None. Your anecdote notwithstanding, antioxidants are bogus. On the other hand, vitamin D is really fucking important, so taking 0.25mg a day is probably a good idea. There's not much of a link between it and the immune system, but you'll be safe from rickets.
How about the following to protect from illness: Wash your hands. Don't touch your face. Get enough rest. Drink lots of fluids. Eat healthy. Exercise a little. Most sick people haven't been doing those, and I can trace every illness I've ever gotten to skipping more than one.
Expensive supplements are a waste of money. Stupid Americans want a miracle pill that doesn't exist...take care of yourself, you pussies!

It wasn't a stupid mistake. It was a blatantly malicious hijacking of an uninvolved piece of software, and it should have resulted in his being blacklisted across the entire Mozilla site. Instead, he apologized for infecting thousands of computers, and he's re-welcomed with open arms and zero punishment. What prevents him from doing it again, but being even more sneaky about it? Nothing at all.

Even if his contrition is genuine, which I don't doubt, his actions required severe punishment. I'll live with having to manually turn on and off javascript when necessary.

Citation: http://hackademix.net/2009/05/04/dear-adblock-plus-and-noscript-users-dear-mozilla-community/

And there was as much bitch-slapping as ever occurs when any OSS developer does something blindingly stupid. The Internet's huddled masses screamed incoherently at them for a few days, and they realized that they weren't going to get away with it. Many, myself included, vowed to never again let Giorgio Maone's code run on any machine under our control.

The first entry is not entirely true. Non-root processes are restricted from using low port numbers(1024, iirc). Also, if there's a correctly configured firewall on the machine, a non-root process is incapable of going around it.
Not that it would actually prevent any malware I know of from wreaking havoc, high port numbers are perfectly fine for sending email and talking to bot herders.