...with its obsession for spying every personal detail of every individual of the world with every possible means and gathering the collected data into their archives forever. The only difference between Google glass and all the other products of Google is that glass makes the espionage physically evident.

The EU is losing the support of the masses even in the most euro-enthusiastic countries. As an institution in its whole, people feel that the EU is inexorable when it's time to demand new taxes, dismantle the welfare state, or regulate the length of cucumbers, but then is completely unhelpful, and sometimes harmful, when it's time to solve the problems of the citizens (migration, transportation, environment, defense, foreign policy...) instead of the problems of the banks. Each member state pursues exclusively its own interest with no vision watsoever of the long-term good of the whole continent.

As an EU supporter, I'm afraid that at the next european elections we'll see a triumph of every kind of populism / demagogy / nationalism, left-wing and right-wing, and the people who get elected will work exclusively to suppress the EU from the inside. And I have few arguments against them left. The EU can't carry on by having only the support of the "elite" who can understand the advantages of the common market. They need to conquer back the trust of regular people, or they will disappear.

In ladder, even basic logic structures such as a finite-state machine are hard to express, and harder to read. I still have to understand the reason for the success of ladder. It's hard to write, it's hard to read, it's hard to maintain, even the program "text" is impractical to handle (think about cut and paste).

Has Google Docs been open sourced now? Can it be hosted on a private server, so that the UK government needn't share every single document of them - and therefore their citizen's most private data - with the NSA?

even Microsoft changes its file formats and breaks compatibility occasionally.

To make an example, once Microsoft broke a Word (2000 IIRC) VBA application of mine because a service pack, not even a version upgrade, changed the indexing of tables' elements from being zero-based to being one-based. I was shocked to see that they care so little about compatibility.

Clang error output includes full static analysis,

The compiler is one thing, the static analyzer is another. The error messages of the two compilers are comparable. I've already admitted that GCC is not as suitable for tooling as LLVM is.

"Hip" seems to be your biased way to say modern.

Of course every judgement of value I make is biased, it reflects my opinion. I do my best to avoid objectively false statements, and I like to be corrected when that happens.

And no, small differences in executable speed is not the primary concern of most compiler users.

See that everybody's biased? You say "small difference", others could use different terms when the objective data is "up to 39%". As for the fact that compiler users don't care about speed, you should ask the end users of the binaries about that, rather than the users of the compiler itself. Personally, if ease of development was my primary concern, I'd code everything in Java. GCC even supports it ;-) .

Not so much. This very story is about ESR questioning why GPL GCC deliberately prevents non-GPL software from linking with it. Thus handicapping GCC for developers of IDEs and other tools. And the answer from RMS, that he refuses to compromise, and thus GCCs restrictions remain.

This very story is about ESR not being aware that GCC does have a plugin system and a license exception allowing it to link with GPL-compatible software (such as BSD) for that purpose. The reasons why this interface does not find much use is technical, not political: GCC internals are (1) not modular and (2) do not expose stable programming interfaces. These facts would not change even if GCC was relicensed overnight to the BSD license or the WTF license.

Error messages are only slightly better in clang, because GCC has improved since version 4.2, and now even clang developers themselves explain that clang is better in caret positioning and colouring, which I wouldn't call being a generation ahead. See what the GCC wiki says about that.

Clang is slightly faster than GCC, when compiling at the same optimization level.

Clang is written in C++ and modular, and as result of this, it is more embeddable in third party projects and it can target multiple platforms with a single executable. Work is being done in GCC to address this but I'm talking about released code here.

But when we consider less "hip" features, GCC makes faster code (which is usually the foremost interest of a compiler's user). And GCC supports more target platforms. And GCC supports more language features (FORTRAN, OpenMP, VLAIS).

A GCC developer's benchmark about GCC's vs clang's speed of compilation and of the resulting code.

Currently, GCC is superior than LLVM, not the other way around. Also, it was ESR who appeared into GCC's technical mailing list making political lectures, not RMS.

...is stating that God should make an ill child live or die depending on whether he has done some blessed ritual with some kind of special water in a particular place. It's believing that God would cede a portion of his powers to some particular monk or priestess and have him or her administer them in his stead. It's believing that one can buy salvation in bottles or pullman tickets.

The truth is that not even the various Churches believe in many of those supernatural gurus or miraculous places. But they can't deny them, because people like to believe in them and they can't afford losing more faithful; because locals earn a lot from religious tourism and the Churches get their share of that money; and possibly because advocating for rationality in religion-based matters for them would be like throwing stones in the proverbial glass house.

Non-mediterranean countries mustn't be faring too well if a racist comment with no connection whatsoever to reality gets modded up to +5.

Try tweeting about bombs in the UK, promoting nazism in Germany, communism in Poland, "making homosexual propaganda" in Russia, and see the freedom of expression you enjoy in the mythical North.

Which is not to say that censorship is acceptable or that people who'd like to be ruled by "golden dawn" are sane, it's just that being "mediterranean" is not one of their problems.

A university that teaches you things that you can't learn.

Reality can be more funny than Soviet Russia jokes.

Have they fixed the incredible Windows Update bug that kills the usability of Windows XP machines when connected to the Internet, because svchost.exe starts eating 100% of the CPU for hours, even on powerful machines? That rendered any Windows XP machine that I've seen almost unusable, even though Microsoft is supposedly still supporting them.

I think that it's not fair if you don't say that SpaceX did what they did by using NASA's research (which has huge costs that get written under NASA's budget but not SpaceX's) and with NASA's money (that is, it's the government and only the government that enabled them to reach their achievements).

Those fonts are read by fontconfig and freetype, while the bug is in the server-side font support, the one where you must run mkfontdir and possibly edit Xorg.conf to install new fonts. I don't think any distribution allows non-root users to do that.

Flock to GNU, I don't know. They would certainly consider it, since the licenses of Intel, Microsoft et al cost them money, a fact that companies are very sensitive to. And after they pay that money, they get a proprietary license that is certainly far more restrictive than the GPL.

The GNU folks "got what they wanted" when Tiemann added C++ to gcc because of the GPL license. Same thing happened with Jobs and Objective C. The GPL is proven to work, and it especially used to work back in the days when spreading FUD about the GPL wasn't fashionable.

About not buying stuff that I don't get source code for: that can only be a philosophical proposition in today's world. The GPL is a bastion to keep our devices hackable, and as you say BSD-licensed code will make the situation worse.