I'm disappointed that people think Linus' behaviour is justified. His outbursts are a nasty habit that only serve to escalate his anger. Whilst politeness might only be a social veneer, it's better than the alternative.

I'm so tired of these April Fool articles on slashdot that I generally just delete the emails either side of April 1.

Four days later, and I find that this nonsense is still arriving in my inbox.

I'm not a happy bunny.

All of the problems could be solved by simply switching to a metric time.

Remember this time people, 80 past 2 on April 47th, it's the dawn of a new enlightenment.

How much is that in "employees per mile"?

Old maths puzzle that I heard ages ago ...

THEOREM: All numbers are interesting

PROOF BY CONTRADICTION: Let S be the set of all numbers that aren't interesting. It must have a minimum value, call it n. That being the case, n is quite an interesting number!

QED

The thing about the CLI is that it gives you automatability, which is the whole sine qua non of computers. GUIs take away automatability.

GUIs are like gilded cages or walled gardens. They're pretty to look at from the inside, but there's no way to step outside their strictly limited capability. Since most users are non-technical, especially on Windows, there is an inherent push towards GUIs rather than CLIs.

In my experience, it's a bit of a balance. Some random advice:
* learn to throw out stuff. YAGNI works in life as well as in programming. Perform regular purges of historic data.
* use Flickr/photobucket/whatever to store your pics
* keepass is your friend
* separate data between secret and non-secret. For non-secret stuff, create a git repo on github. Use it as a brain dump and store your projects and information in some heirarchical form. Don't get over-fancy with heirarchical depth.
* Create a "website" for storing technical information . You don't have to host it if you don't want to, just store it in your repo and link to the index.htm file on Firefox.

If we are trying to reduce inifficiencies and energy waste, then I suggest a good place to start would be to eliminate the self-perpetuating bureaucracy that deem it necessary to micro-legislate every aspect of our lives like this one. Tell me, exactly what business does the EU have in passing laws that regulate what kind of light bulb I can use? Utter madness.

Arrgh! When I lived in London, there was a Mongolian restaurant advertising "All you Khan eat", and "Khan and get it", and many other daft slogans, which I now forget.

I'm a Brit, and I've never understood the concept of "extra credit". Surely you either understand the material, or you don't. Call me simplistic for not "getting" it, but in my head a written test is the final arbiter of this. Bonus assignments just seem like a way of gaming the system and currying favour to me, and doesn't address the central question: do you know the material? If you know the material, then why would you need extra credit? If you don't know the material, then surely extra credit is just a fudge? Take a written test, and let's find out. Why complicate something that doesn't need complicating?

Here's an idea - stop building on flood plains! Some time ago I heard how one English council approved planning persmission on a flood plain. The councilor explained that "we had to balance risks", or somesuch nonsense, in defence of the decision. The logic totally baffles me. If you look on an Ordnance Survey and it says "flood plain" then guess what - the area is liable to flooding. Really, is it that difficult to work out?

I'm not saying that all flooding problems have such simple-minded solutions - just that, you know, why do something that you know is going to be a problem?

> People are staying late because of the Manager, or people staying late because of crappy code.

And maybe they're writing crappy code because they're staying late.

What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare?

Leisure -- W. H. Davies

To quote from the Simpsons: Grammar is not a time of waste.

Recently, the government had the idea of taxing employers for each parking place they provided to employees. No doubt they need this money so that they can waste on utter nonsense like CCTV in people's homes.

The UK taxpayer is handing over tax money for rubbish that we can ill afford.