Do you even know what the full quote is, or what the paper Donald Knuth wrote that in is about?

Here is the full quote:

"We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%. A good programmer will not be lulled into complacency by such reasoning, he will be wise to look carefully at the critical code; but only after that code has been identified." - Donald Knuth

So the quote you've used to back yourself up is completely and utterly against your argument. It actually makes a point for the skills that you say don't matter. I really can't even believe people modded this as insightful.....

Billboards would be impossible, but nobody in the United States nor most western nations would stop anyone from sitting in the streets protesting. The DDoS attacks were (in some cases) actively disrupting the companies ability to do business, and thus were illegal. Mubarak's regime had no concept of freedom of speech, but most of the western nations do, including the ones they were targeting, so they would have no problems here.

Nothing is stopping any of the anon people from holding a legal protest rally at multiple locations all over the world, the fact is that they didn't and they chose instead to attack these businesses. The sit-in metaphor doesn't work because a sit-in is legal as long as it doesn't cause a complete disruption of business. That is, you picket outside the front of the building, but people (if they want to try depending on the size of the crowd) can still get into the business. What Anon did is closer to sitting inside the lobby of a building making sure nobody could get past them.

The truth of the matter is that they're just children having tantrums. I'm guessing the lot of them have a distorted view of how the world works.

I love Mac OS X, I think my Android phone is fantastic, and I've been a Linux advocate for years, but I'm not thrilled at this news at all. It doesn't matter where you work, the common workstation has Microsoft products on it and STB is the last business unit of Microsoft that has been putting out good stuff consistently. If Microsoft goes belly up it will have a negative effect on the technology industry by costing businesses tons of money to readjust, and anything that threatens the tech industry threatens my chance of having fun toys like Apple computers, Android phones, or home servers I can run Linux on, by threatening my source of income.

Seriously people, Microsoft products generally stink, but a sudden or quick change of the status quo can mean negative things for the entire industry. The very slow, gradual failure that Microsoft has been going through these past few years (thanks to successes the of STB) are a good way for it to disappear.

Not if it goes nuclear. If it goes nuclear, NATO will retaliate nuclear as well. There is a strong chance that a second major conflict in Korea would result in a total nuclear war.

Exactly. I would say the thread on Penny-Arcade alone has probably driven more traffic to his website (and influenced people to purchase the game) than anything else. In March Gamasutra ran an interview with Notch discussing the game's development. Just because you didn't know about the game doesn't mean that it isn't popular. I can't believe ANYONE modded this guy insightful.

The cassette tape killed off the 8-track. By 1988 8-tracks were no longer being made.

This is completely true. Those who have the money ultimately can drive the decision making in their favor. Unfortunately its also one of the reasons our government is the unhealthiest its been since the time of the Rail Barons. Same reason its unhealthy too, money has once again, become too important in the decision making process.

Also, I've never met a German who didn't know what Nazism was about... Its something that sadly still causes some severe pain and embarrassment in their culture.

You make an excellent point about social anthropology, however there are most likely much more reliable sources for doing research on Neo-Nazism (especially since websites aren't considered by most academics to be first-hand accounts).

As for trolling them, I would hope anti-racism and anti-fascism groups would have better things to do rather than try to debate politics with a bunch of skinheads.

If you need to go to Neo-Nazi sites you need to really get help....... The Nazi ideology is one that you can't really defend unless you're seriously messed up in your head.

Uh... I think not. $20 that Vista SP2 still won't achieve EAL6+ by the NSA. Apparently he's never heard of INTEGRITY.

I was referring to Morton's (and company's) attempt at banning binary blobs from being loaded into the Kernel. That is totally forcing an ideal on someone else. I didn't mean to accuse you of this (heinous) act; I just couldn't get off my soap box and I had to recap my argument. :p

How? They have absolutely no copyright over any of the code that nVidia provides, unless of course it has some stolen code within it, which I would love to see them try to prove. That's how the GPL was written; the author keeps the copyright over his portion of the code unless he specifically assigns the copyright to the FSF. So, nVidia holds the copyright to their code for their card driver, the FSF has not and will never hold the copyright for this code until nVidia assigns it to them, and it doesn't violate the Linux copyright since nVidia wrote their own original code for the drivers.

Security can be argued, but the chances of a security loophole (either accidental or on purpose) being put into some proprietary drivers are improbable, and the chance that a security researcher would miss it is fairly improbable too. If you don't want to use a binary blob, then don't. Nobody is forcing you to, so why do you want to force people to not use a binary blob?

The true issue here is that while Linux wants to grow and become more popular, half of the community wants to alienate people by pushing their ideals on others, which is what Linux, especially at the beginning of this decade, was never about. The FSF and GNU have become just as bad as Microsoft and Apple. Until the Linux community can work past that, it will continue to grow too slowly for it to surpass Microsoft or Apple.

Totally, and I think Ubuntu's approach is a wiser one both to educate people and keep freedom within Linux. I've been using Linux for 11 years now, and it seems each and every year the FSF wants to take more and more freedom from the user, specifically their freedom of choice. A great example was when in 2006 Morton and some other GNU/FSF pundits made a very big push to ban proprietary kernel modules by making the kernel refuse to load binary kernel modules. Thankfully Torvalds squashed the idea and essentially said "over my dead body". There is nothing wrong or newbish about using proprietary kernel drivers. I don't get why so many people make it like they're about to die because nVidia and AMD/ATi don't release their driver code... which is probably full of trade secrets. They have to keep proprietary to keep competitive.