People who complain that you can't build large scale systems without a compiler likely over-rely on the latter and are slaves to IDEs. If you write good unit tests and enforce Test Driven Development, the compiler becomes un-necessary and gets in the way.

No, dummy, the compiler is a large set of unit tests for you, ready to run, so you don't have to write them yourself. Why wouldn't you use a compiler so you can avoid runtime exceptions/errors? Why would you choose deliberately to postpone that to be checked at runtime or worse: that you have to write checks for all those cases yourself (and you'll miss a lot of them)

The compiler isn't something used by 'slaves of an IDE', but by developers who know a compiler will save them from writing tests for situations already checked by the compiler. Oh, and it generates fast code ahead of time too, so your users don't have to wait for an interpreter to come up with fast code.

What it does is obtain footage of people and store it indefinitely (Amazon confirmed this), while feeding it to AI and potentially sell it to 3rd parties. Feature Creep is a real thing in privacy related matters: data is collected for X, but soon after someone sees that the data is also usable for Y and it's used for Y, without asking the original person giving data for X whether it can be used for Y, as they don't have to (it's in every EULA).

Your post shows you're really naive when it comes to these things: don't trust anyone with your data and personal information: it _will_ be used for things you haven't given permission for.

I agree with everything you said, I use VMs too. There's another benefit of using VMs: you have a frozen environment per version. I work on software that releases a couple of versions a year and every 2 years or so a big version jump. With these big version jumps we e.g. upgrade UI controls and introduce necessary breaking changes. When I start on these major version jump versions I move to another VM, cloned from the original. This leaves the previous version's VM in tact so I can fix bugs in that version's VM and alter whatever I need to (controls, libraries, IDE instances even) in the new VM for the new version. I don't have to worry I change something for the new version that breaks the older ones (e.g. uninstalling libraries no longer needed for the new one).

This alone is the key benefit for me for using VMs: no worries changes made to newer versions affect older versions. I can go back to an older version's VM and use the tools used for that, build using the build tools for that version and *know* everything needed for that version to build is there.

FTP is such an old protocol, after a while you have implemented it properly, and nothing will really change. One would think FileZilla is then pretty stable and won't see new builds often. But they apparently find time to spend on new features almost weekly. Instead of spending the time on bugs in the core point of the tool, namely doing file transfer which actually transfers the file, they spend time on random features in the UI and tacked on crap not needed for transferring files.

as a marketing strategy. Think about it: it leaks weeks before the announcement. Every day articles pop up, people talk about it for hours on forums, social media, IRL... No-one talks about the XBox One S anymore. Then the announcement comes, and as it looks like the eurogamer article is based on a stolen item, it can very well be the Slim is available immediately: which is the right time because the hype built-up has been going on for weeks.

Task manager hides certain processes so if it doesn't show up there it doesn't mean it's not running.

News papers, magazines etc... They're subscription based, you pay for them, but you still are confronted with a tremendous amount of ads.

If you are so concerned regarding being spied upon, you should actually look at your own government and what it's doing through its GCHQ agency. This EU proposal is peanuts compared to that.

He has a Ph.D in economics. Which means he spent vast more time on the subject than any of us here combined.

> That explanation would only work if the sole problem was a lack of visitors to our star system. But as I discussed in my comment, we don't see any radio waves nor do we see any signs of megastructures or other large-scale use of the large amount of available energy. The universe looks completely natural. Incidentally, it is also worth noting that the distance explanation doesn't seem to work very well either.

If another planet is looking at earth from further away than, say, 1000 lightyears, they too will not receive radio waves, won't see megastructures etc. If they're looking at earth from, say a million light years away, they'll conclude there's nothing here.

'trash talk'? You don't provide any evidence for that, to be honest. They do know when and how long you use your system, that was proven last month. The telemetry data is analyzed and is far more intrusive than what you state. Bitlocker keys being uploaded to MS' cloud is another example.

I'm sure there are genuine reasons for all of that, the sad thing is that the data can also be easily abused for other purposes and we all know if it can be used for other purposes, it will be used for other purposes eventually. Data once given is never going to be deleted/removable ever again.

> Entity Framework just makes anything in the Java space look outdated

Well, that statement right there illustrates you don't really know the actual details, do you? :) I write .NET ORMs for a living and have been doing that for a long long time, and EF would wish it was near the functionality and flexibility of a random JPA/JDO compatible java ORM.

> Linus rightly called out the idea as moronic and stupid.

How professional of him (and you). Here's the thing: people put _their_ time into a project _he_ runs, effectively do work for him he otherwise has to do himself. He doesn't have to kiss the contributors' feet, but acting like a 3 year old stating "That's stupid!" is on the other side of that spectrum.

I know what you mean, I'm on the internet since '89 and used my real name on e.g. usenet too but you have to realize that today is different than back in the days on usenet and forums and IRC channels where flamewars were kept inside and seldom bled out to other areas, left alone real-life. There are certain areas where I don't use my real name (e.g. in areas that are gaming related) and that's simply because they can be hostile like we know from usenet, but at the same time they DO bleed to outside areas and can affect other aspects of your life, i.e. bleed into your professional life. Back in the days that was uncommon (if you were in a flame war with some people on some IRC channel, chances are if they contacted your work your boss would likely answer "IR what?"), but today it's not. The tools are there, and more than before the concept of 'identity' is different: it's no longer only your passport and the information in it, it's also your combined profile online of all the sites you frequently visit and leave your opinion. So it's best to be careful, e.g. not to use a real name in places which have nothing to do with where you're using your real name.

* Still no stability sensor.