"16.13. Why should I care what color the bikeshed is? The really, really short answer is that you should not. The somewhat longer answer is that just because you are capable of building a bikeshed does not mean you should stop others from building one just because you do not like the color they plan to paint it. This is a metaphor indicating that you need not argue about every little feature just because you know enough to do so. Some people have commented that the amount of noise generated by a change is inversely proportional to the complexity of the change.
The longer and more complete answer is that after a very long argument about whether sleep(1) should take fractional second arguments, Poul-Henning Kamp posted a long message entitled "A bike shed (any color will do) on greener grass...". The appropriate portions of that message are quoted below.
"What is it about this bike shed?" Some of you have asked me.
It is a long story, or rather it is an old story, but it is quite short actually. C. Northcote Parkinson wrote a book in the early 1960s, called "Parkinson's Law”, which contains a lot of insight into the dynamics of management.
[snip a bit of commentary on the book]
In the specific example involving the bike shed, the other vital component is an atomic power-plant, I guess that illustrates the age of the book.
Parkinson shows how you can go into the board of directors and get approval for building a multi-million or even billion dollar atomic power plant, but if you want to build a bike shed you will be tangled up in endless discussions.

Parkinson explains that this is because an atomic plant is so vast, so expensive and so complicated that people cannot grasp it, and rather than try, they fall back on the assumption that somebody else checked all the details before it got this far. Richard P. Feynmann gives a couple of interesting, and very much to the point, examples relating to Los Alamos in his books.

A bike shed on the other hand. Anyone can build one of those over a weekend, and still have time to watch the game on TV. So no matter how well prepared, no matter how reasonable you are with your proposal, somebody will seize the chance to show that he is doing his job, that he is paying attention, that he is here.

In Denmark we call it “setting your fingerprint”. It is about personal pride and prestige, it is about being able to point somewhere and say “There! I did that.” It is a strong trait in politicians, but present in most people given the chance. Just think about footsteps in wet cement.

--Poul-Henning Kamp on freebsd-hackers, October 2, 1999

Amazing... after three years of inactivity, there are two new posts at Descent3.com. The last one stating that work on the 1.5 patch has resumed!

WORK ON THE DESCENT 3 1.5 PATCH RESUMES After being on hiatus for several years, work on the Descent 3 1.5 patch has resumed. The 1.5 patch aims to fix many of the lingering bugs in Descent 3 including operating system cross-compatibility issues that have cropped up in multiplayer. It should also resolve some problems with installing and running Descent 3 on modern operating systems running modern hardware. Click here for a video preview of the 1.5 patch that features Descent 3 multiplayer running on Mac OSX, Ubuntu Linux and Windows. More to come!

Cool! This is amazing news for Descent 3 fans!

By placing electrode grids inside patients' skulls, researchers at the Mayo Clinic have created a way for people to type words using only their brainwaves. It's a major breakthrough for brain-computer interface research.