argv_minus_one

People being contractually obligated to undergo medically unnecessary surgery is still an intolerable atrocity.

How was he supposed to know, if no one ever told him? They didn't teach about child porn when I was in school, and Stallman is older than me.

By “user” I mean the person who is using the application.

Using exceptions for handling unexceptional errors (like invalid user input) is a footgun. You don't know when one might be raised, nor what type it will have, so you can easily forget to catch it and handle it properly, and then your app crashes.

We kinda do need him, though. Very few people are as intensely principled as he is on the subject of computing freedom, and without him anchoring the Overton window, there's nothing stopping the Bill Gateses of this world from moving it.

I think the problem there is that, for many years, nobody bothered to explain to him exactly why child porn is bad.

Most people observe that everyone else thinks it's bad and don't question it any further. That's not good enough for Stallman, though, and for good reason: expecting him to unquestioningly bow to peer pressure is an insult to his intelligence.

Someone did eventually explain the problem to Stallman. I don't know what exactly was explained, but my guess is that Stallman was told that child porn is non-consensual and therefore violates the child's privacy, similar to how revenge porn violates the subject's privacy. At any rate, after that discussion took place, Stallman did an about-face on the subject, and is now opposed to child porn like anyone else.

Moral of the story: taboos and peer pressure bad; logic and education good.

Hoping to see news that the US government has finally decided to stop the economy from melting down.

I keep being disappointed…

Defeated by Nazis. A sad and embarrassing choice by the people of Finland.

That will keep children out for about 12 seconds.

A string being parsed as a date-time is presumably user input, which is potentially invalid.

Printers these days tend to be driverless, so that's pretty much a solved problem.

And back at that time if you installed any flavor of Linux you were lucky if the OS install didn’t fuck itself over

I was using Linux religiously back then, and this is false. As long as there's a driver for all of your hardware, it generally worked fine.

But that “as long as” is doing some heavy lifting. The usual suspects were pretty much the same as now: Broadcom, NeoMagic, and NVIDIA.

The wireless kind, presumably. Those always need their own firmware and therefore their own driver.