People often conflate proprietary software with commercial software, believing software can only be sold if it's proprietary, because a proprietary license is the only thing that prevents people from using software without paying.

In fact that is not the case at all. On the one hand, proprietary software is used all the time in violation of its license, as the industry's own figures demonstrate.

So clearly proprietary licensing is no guarantee of payment, therefore the license itself is irrelevant to selling software for profit.

On the other hand, Free Software is sold all the time, such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Indeed the GPL permits this, and the author of the GPL, Richard Stallman, actively encourages it.

The Ultimate Abomination

First of all, let me make it clear that this is only meant to be a joke.

No really, it's a joke.

Please, for the love of God, do not pervert GNU/Linux into Windows, by giving it the worst configuration storage system of all time.

Having said that, it does actually work (FSVO: "work").

The following takes the contents of "/etc" and "$HOME/{userid}/{dotfiles}", and creates a Windows-style "Registry" from them, comprising two Sqlite3 databases: SYSTEM.DAT.db and USER.DAT.db respectively.

Kill that damned "urlclassifier3.sqlite" problem once and for all

Turn off (uncheck) "Block reported attack sites" and "Block reported web forgeries" in Firefox/IceCat security preferences. Unless you're an idiot, or running Windows, then you probably don't need this.

Then quit Firefox/IceCat, and:

cd "$HOME"
find . -name urlclassifier3.sqlite -exec rm -f {} ';' -exec touch {} ';'
su -c "find . -name urlclassifier3.sqlite -exec chattr +i {} ';'"

"chattr +i" means "change the file attributes to immutable", meaning "can't change or delete".

This will now ensure urlclassifier3.sqlite remains a zero byte file forever.

Apparently, that melodramatic proclaimer of outrageously twisted opinion, Linus Torvalds, thinks anyone who criticises Microsoft for their unethical (and even criminal) behaviour, is suffering some kind of "disease" (although he fails to specify). I, however, will specify the disease that fuels Torvalds' hatred of Microsoft critics ... it's called "pragmatism".

A couple of days ago I started getting these errors whenever I ran anything that scanned for logical volumes (Linux LVM2):

Buffer I/O error on device dm-6, logical block 0
Buffer I/O error on device dm-7, logical block 0
Buffer I/O error on device dm-8, logical block 0
Buffer I/O error on device dm-9, logical block 0

My first reaction was panic, as I initially believed my HDD was failing, but after some investigation I realised that the above devices simply didn't exist.