Did you ever stop to ask yourself why 21st century American working conditions are better than those from the 19th? A lot of it comes down to health and safety regulation, including child-labor laws. The existence of sweatshops and ill-run factories all over the third world shows that companies are willing (and always will be willing) to sacrifice the lives of their workers as long as it is profitable for them to do so. Repealing that legislation would be a sure way to go right back to the sort of working conditions we had in American in the 1800s and the sort of working conditions we find in China today.

The problem isn't searching in the ordinary case. The problem is searching in the failure case. I can grep a truncated, mangled text file. If I truncate and mangle your BerkeleyDB can you still search it?

Well, DBAN is open source. If you have suspicions, you're welcome to review the source compile your own version with a trusted compiler. If that isn't to your liking, there are commercial tools that do the same thing.

As for, "What if a drive is mishandled and doesn't get wiped," well, isn't that a concern with physical destruction too?

There is software out there (like D-BAN) which will repeatedly overwrite the data on a hard drive, rendering it unrecoverable. Why not use that, rather than relying on encryption?

Last I checked no window manager on Linux requires Firefox to be installed. However, in Windows 8, Internet Explorer will be required for the "Metro" window manager.

In that vein, a registry of some kind that told you what hardware was compatible with your Linux distro would be a godsend. I mean, I've seen various half-hearted attempts to start something like this, but they've always petered out. Then when you find them on Google, you get your hopes up, only to have them dashed by lists upon lists of laptops, video cards, sound cards, etc. that were EOL'd years ago.

That's why you check those handy little citation tags that they have. If you don't believe the article, check its sources.

That's a bad idea. Administrators may be in a position of power on Wikipedia, but that doesn't mean that they have a commensurate level of power in the real world. Forcing real name use just opens up administrators to possible personal harassment and physical attack.

CCP is already getting paid with its players' monthly subscriptions. This is rent-seeking, plain and simple.

No, this is NIMBY-ism, plain and simple. The argument of the Osage people is exactly the same, and just as invalid, as that of the Massachusetts landowners who complained that an offshore windfarm would ruin the view from their beachfront homes.

At the university I went to they run a scan to see if you're running the 'approved' anti-virus software, and won't let you onto the network if you're not running it. That said, the IT folks I spoke with were fairly clued-in and put in exceptions for your MAC address if you were running Linux, OSX or some other OS.

As another commenter pointed out, some degree programs (Computer Engineering, being a prime example) really only work if they're stretched out over a 5-year period. I just wish universities would be honest with their students and say, "Yeah, this degree can be finished in 4 years, but realistically, it'll take 5." I think that would go a long way towards helping those of us who take a little longer to understand a given concept.

In any case, I ended up getting my degree in 5 years. I tried to do the grind for three years (like you), then I burned out, spent two semesters off working, and then returned to school to finish my degree.

This is why you purchase a display that's capable of rotation. There's nothing like seeing a massive document fit on one 19" screen rotated to be portrait instead of landscape.

There's no reason that any of those things require low level hooks. Every single one of those functions is managed by a command-line program that can be called from anywhere (GUI control panel, CLI, shell script, etc.). All GNOME has to do is call the same command line utilities that shell scripts do.

Indeed it does, and this very discussion is about one of those daemons. The Linux-only crowd is saying that GNOME should require systemd as a dependency. Unfortunately, systemd only runs on Linux. I think that GNOME should not depend on systemd until it has been ported to other operating systems (e.g. BSD, Solaris). Once systemd is available on all the platforms that GNOME supports, GNOME can rely on it being available.