Well, the tables have turned. Rather than those of us in the UK having to buy from the lowlands, now you probably have to buy from us. Or, as you say, just download it. I have to say, the whole thing has certainly left a sour taste in my mouth. I'm not sure whether I'll be buying 4.5 or not...

I've been following this on the OpenBSD mailing list. Looks like a nasty situation all round. No matter who is in the right and who is in the wrong, the OpenBSD project loses. I've never had any problems with Wim (other than slow turnaround times on orders), and he's been nice enough when I've met him in person. Has he been diverting funds that should have gone to the project to himself? Unlikely I think. Has there been a misunderstanding between Wim and Theo about which funds should go where? Probably. Should this have been settled behind closed doors rather than in public? Absolutely...

I've never used it, so I can't comment on it directly. However, it was written by my housemates at university. Their third year project was working on vdiff[1], a visual diff tool (IIRC originally for X11, but I think they were working on an OS/2 version at the time). After graduation, they decided to write a more polished, commercial version, which became Araxis Merge. Two decades later they're still selling it, so a) I guess the business plan was viable, and b) they probably know what they're doing by now when it comes to diff tools.

[1] vdiff was originally available from Kent Software Tools, a company set up to commercialize computer science research at the university. I don't think it exists any more.

Why does a job in law enforcement have any relevance here? Surely your position should be murder is bad, regardless of the victim's occupation?

FWIW, I'd never heard of Mumia before 2 minutes ago, and all I know is what I've just read on Wikipedia. What happened on 3rd April to change people's minds?

It may look imrpessive, but it's not actually a very good window manager IMHO. What I don't understand is why they felt the need to write a new window manager. Had they written libcomposite instead, then the whizzy effects could have been made available to any wm that used that library. But no, this is the free software world. There's a wheel that needs reinventing...

Uhhh... how is this news? I've been doing that with Firefox for ages using bookmark keywords. So I have w foo to look up foo on Wikipedia and p foo to look for python documentation about foo for example. That could easily be expanded to do imdb searches, etc if I wanted to. It's reasonable to claim the interface for setting up these searches could be improved, but the functionality is already 99% there.

Linux, using python. OS level threads would be fine. I have plenty of tools to let me look at what's going on there. But trying to get at the innards of the python runtime to find out why a given thread isn't running when it should be? That's not proving easy...

Heh. I'm the exact opposite. I need a US keyboard layout (double quotes being a shifted-2 is a deal breaker for me when it comes to using a UK keyboard), but of course, being in the civilized world, I need sensible paper sizes...

1. Astronaut. The rest pale into insignificance compared to this.
2. Professional drag racer. I'm strictly amateur at the moment.
3. Musician. It's not much of a way to make a living, but I'd love to be able to play guitar. However, I've tried, and I can't!
4. Snowboarding bum
5. Pyrotechnician

Well, you did say they didn't have to be practical...

Really? Wow. You and I are just miles apart, then. IMHO people get an emotional response to eugenics that defies rational explanation. So long as it's not compulsory, and so long as there is sufficient genetic diversity, I hope and believe that eugenics will have a place in our future society.

As for why I believe it's not yet a baby, that's hard to explain. Why would you believe it is? At what point do you believe life begins? For me, it utterly defies both logic and common sense to believe that it starts at conception. At some point later, the baby emerges from the womb, and it's equally unrealistic to claim that it's not alive at that point. Somewhere during those 9 or so months, there must have been a point[1] where it changed from not alive to alive. Not a baby to baby. Where is that? I can't give you a definitive answer, and it will vary on a case by case basis.

[1] Actually, I don't believe there's a single point. I see it more as a gradual transition over a period of time. Which is in part why the question is so hard to answer.

Do I want to keep it legal? Yep, sure do. I'm not sure how the video was meant to convince me otherwise, but if that was the intent, it failed. Am I a liar for believing that it's not yet a baby? No. I just happen to draw the line in a different place to you...

The same as you would for any other candidate applying for the same position. His previous managerial experience might give you a few pointers to his ability to manage, but other than that, it's largely irrelevant. If he's applying for a tech position, then interview him as such. Don't be afraid to ask what he might see as demeaning tech questions. I've interviewed several candidates who have been billed as senior developers/project leads, but who have fallen down on the basics. If he breezes through the easy questions, it will rapidly become apparent that he knows what he's talking about, and you can move on to something meatier.

Ultimately, the interview is an opportunity for you to see how fit he is for the role in question, and the only way to do that for a tech job is to ask him about the technology you'll expect him to be using. Don't be intimidated by his extra experience. The differences between .NET and Java are sufficiently small that you should be able to ask general programming[1] and data structure type questions and still get a feel for how good he is. Just think of it as a normal tech interview and you'll be fine.

[1] I've found FizzBuzz type problems to be very revealing here. They're far from perfect, but they can tell you an awful lot about how someone approaches a given problem.

Out of interest, why? I've been meaning to write a JE about this for a while, and may yet get around to it. I agree it's unproven. But there is a reasonable amount of supporting evidence. What I don't understand is why the global warming skeptics seem to completely dismiss the possibility that it might be true, and that we might want to start doing something about it. Surely if you're uncertain, then you look at the worst case outcome, and plan for that.