I think your right there. I did a degree in physics and there were a lot of pretty popular people in my class. Just because you take a "nerdy" degree doesn't mean you are a nerd:)
That said, just because you are good at something doesn't mean you want to do it for a career. Maybe she would be better off taking something she has an interest in, as a backup maybe take a minor in computer science or something. For example, still use math but not quite as abstract, accounting, or actuarial science. Or even just business.
The world needs more people that get business and technology. Often you find one or the other. Brilliant programmer makes company and then just wings it on the business part. She could bring both if that was her interest.
I think the lack of a variety of stickers was to avoid confusion. Now admittedly, the fact that they were in such a situation in the first place seems to me that they should have rethought the marketing/product line.
I'd think if anything MS's Vista Capable program helped low end computer lines/manufactures not MS, even then it might be debatable. After all if your low end box didn't say Vista Capable but your high end did, costumers might go for your higher end model. I still don't get how having a Vista Capable sticker "makes" you want Vista. You can slap a "Photoshop capable" sticker on my computer it won't make me want Photoshop, but if I'm a person that is considering getting Photoshop I might go for your hardware because I know it is supposed to work.
Anyways, I think that at worst MS confused people into buying underpowered systems. Is it a crime to miss direct someone around another companies product line? Since the logo IMHO wouldn't have enticed people that didn't want Vista already, I don't see how MS benefited. They turned a whole bunch of potential Vista Premium customers into Vista Home Basic customers. Not my idea of a sound marketing strategy.
Sounds like what you'd get if they were using a search warrant IMHO. You don't get an opportunity to defend yourself until they bring suit/charges against you. They are "just looking" so the right to counsel etc isn't really defended as much as once they actually accuse you of something.
It's unclear if the revelations will advance the plaintiffs' central claim in the class-action lawsuit -- that Microsoft artificially increased demand by allowing PCs that could run only the most basic versions of the Windows Vista operating system to be called Vista Capable.
That is where it will all fall apart for them IMHO. I can't see how you can argue that it increased demand. People that were looking for the Vista Capable logo were at least considering getting Vista if not planning on getting it. If you weren't planning on getting Vista than the Vista Logo wasn't a deciding factor in your purchase decision, so again MS can't be blamed.
At best people could argue that they thought that they bought a premium version of Vista and didn't find out until they were trying to install it that they wouldn't get the Aero Interface, and other candy. But they still are able to run a version of Vista so it is still Vista Capable IMHO. Also, I'm not sure if it was the same everywhere, but at least were I'm from there was always a footnote saying that it would run Vista Home Basic on any advertisements that used the Vista Capable logo.
Good luck. It is a hard thing I think. Partially because there are a lot of natural disaster prone areas in the world. I can just imagine a large storm hitting say Cuba and everyone trying to leave for Miami as "refugees". I don't think it would go over too well.
I think the problem is defining what is an environmental refugee and when do you send them back. Clearly if your country is underwater now isn't the time to send you back. But what if your island gets hit with a category 4 hurricane 3 times a year? When does it become "safe enough". Tuff questions but I agree the international community needs to be thinking about the problem.
Well such things as requiring porn magazines to be stored on the highest shelf at stores is a common law in a lot of countries. Does it prevent kids from getting access to them? No but it makes it more difficult and will make it so most people won't either be able to, or care enough to get the material. Pro-censureship people will make the same arguement I'd suspect, essentially anyone that gets prevented from viewing the material would be deemed a win.
My personal view is that what isn't legal in other media forms shouldn't be legal on the internet either. The main challenge with the internet is that it is sort of possible to prevent the transaction, where as with a guy passing out tapes it is hard to determine what he's doing without viewing each tape. Because the internet revolves around searching/cataloging information it makes it much easier for the authorities to find people that are breaking the law and if they can't shut them down, than at least block the transaction.
I'll find every flaw that everyone in the industry is predicting, and complain at every step.
So what you are saying is you'll conduct an unbiased test?
IMHO we need to be careful not to swing farther away from people we disagree with just because they say or do something that we don't like. I'm guilty of it at times. If you disagree with censorship you should fight that issue. Those that like censorship might not care that your internet is 30% slower or that you can't get on Facebook anymore.
Anyways, I just think if you are for censorship you should be helping people make a "better mousetrap" so what is deemed valid material isn't getting blocked. If you are against censorship fight that issue not technical problems in its implementation. The argument shouldn't be "censorship makes my internet slower therefore it is wrong".
All that will happen is someone will come out with a better technology and you won't be able to notice the difference (other than the lack of access to censured material of course). Eventually those that care about censorship will end up having to fight that issue, and not the technical difficulties of implementation.
Well if they cache the current session locally and it is just the connection to the back end that you lose temporarily I think it would be alright. Losing data sucks. That said who uses desktop suites without a crash? "Hopefully" (not sure if that is the right word to use when referring to an outage), they manage to have the downtime clumped together and planned in non-peak hours for the region (say upgrades done first Saturday of the month at midnight or something).
My big concern with this type of offering is it increases a companies dependence on their internet line. If your network is down not only can't retrieve files, email or browse, you now can't work on productivity software either. Essentially if your doing a job that requires a computer in this environment you can't work whenever the internet or network has a hickup. I like having something else to do in the rare instances where the network isn't working right.
Add to that the fact that wireless/laptops are becoming of larger importance in companies (and wireless is flaky at the best of times IMHO) you're really courting disaster not just in terms of outages but in terms of accidental data loss. Say your not so gifted technologically colleague decides to walk over to your desk with their laptop to show you the spreadsheet they've been working on. They get out of range of the router that they were using and presto session time out and the chance of data loss.
So we decided not to create a replacement before the shuttles are decommissioned. So we are going to have an astronaut through a big piece of crap and hope it doesn't hit anything important. And if it does?
To make the irresponsibility even worse this is from what is supposed to be the most high tech group in the world. Could they not have come up with a more accurate way of getting rid of this junk, and at least predict the drop zone? Even if it was only a 100km radius you'd most likely be able to call the country or ocean. Would be nice to know and I'm sure their has to be a masters student looking for a thesis topic:)
I'm sure there has to be a way. Clustering suites, say Sun's Grid Engine, or ROCKS http://www.rocksclusters.org/wordpress/ have utilities for pushing applications off to their nodes, you might be able to use that functionality in your environment. Also, not sure it is possible, but could you use kickstart (PXE) but rather than having commands to format the harddrive and install you just have to post install bit which you'd want to rcp the app over, run the installer and clean up for example. It would require a reboot but I think it should work.
True it will happen eventually, unless those countries screw themselves up (hey its happened in the past). But it will be a while. For example wikipedia has the 2008 estimate for China's per capita GDP at 7217, US is currently at 46541. Lets assume that the US has no real growth (unlikely), but China continues as is (9.0% GDP growth but 4.6% inflation = 4.4% real growth). Well quick and dirty calculation gives 43 years as the estimate. That is assuming no US growth which I think is highly unlikely.
I don't think so. There seems to be a fairly universal consensus that it was shoddy lending practices that is the culprit. Banks have people deposit X, they want to lend out 10X, they do so but that isn't enough profit for them. So they lend out to people that can't really afford it because they get a higher interest rate, then they combine the junk into a CDO to make it hard to determine how high the risk is and resell it. After all buying one mortgage you'd check the credit worthiness of the borrower, but a collection of 1000 mortgages, well they can't all go bad right?
If it was war spending that was the cause of the problem it wouldn't be an international problem, the credit worthiness of the US would have come into question not the credit worthiness of the banks. If anything the war should have helped the US economy in the short term because of increased spending, taxation wasn't being increased and the cost of money (fed lending rate) was very low. The US has been running like someone piling up credit card debit, but not paying it back. If anything more spending would be happening and you'd appear richer than you are until the creditors came knocking. But for the most part it is the banks that they are coming after not the government. So I don't think the average person thinks it is the wars fault.
P.S. Why does the angle brackets p formatting code sometimes introduce a space between the two paragraphs and sometimes don't? It is really annoying I'll write something and half the paragraphs will get the space and the other half won't. As evidenced above. I realize we are techies but most forums have had automagical WYSIWYG formatting for about a decade, time to borrow some code me thinks.
Cool. Good job with the math. Electric vehicles tend to cost a bit more upfront for similarly equipped models but your calculations seem to show that at least for operating costs it makes sense.
Supplying power back to the grid: it is a good idea and has been around for a while. It is being done in some areas but is definitely technically complicated and expensive. It requires large capacitors or some other way of storing the energy so adds cost to the system. Things like solar are a pain in that sense because they tend to produce their power in non-peak times, as you said charge while you are at work... That means that you are likely to need the most extra capacity storage of any eco friendly system.
Wind has the same problem, a lot of wind farms stow there generators during strong winds because they'll overload the grid otherwise, essentially they don't have anywhere to put their energy if it isn't needed immediately in a lot of places.
A proposal I saw was pretty interesting, it called for utilities to have large differences between their peak times and off peak times price. The idea is it would make things like home batteries (which could also be used for your solar panels) economical. You charge when the utility is cheap and use it during peak time. It would help level the demand out and encourage investment in the infrastructure that would make green energy reasonably affordable.
Isn't it sad that American's are more interested in their ability to afford their house and an SUV than the people that are either (depending on you're view of the war):
1) Dying to protect them and their right to do so. or
2) Wasting a whole lot of money to oppress a country that they had no point in invading in the first place, and causing needless deaths.
I'm not taking a side on the issue, but shouldn't either one be more important than having to move back into an apartment? I mean my swimming pool isn't a life or death issue. As well, recessions happen, they are needed for the proper functioning of an economy. Still every time one happens the cable news channels go off like it is the end of the world. It is extremely unlikely that it will be the end of america as a power.
Never On Windows feature. That seems more appropriate for the/. crowd.
More seriously though it would be good if they partition things nicely so you don't have instant on then have to choose to boot into a full Windows. Instead if you could use the work that has already be done (by presumably just loading a small kernal with minimal services), and then just load the remaining pieces that would be better. My understanding, please correct me if I'm wrong but the Instant On linux is actually a firmware linux on the Asus and Dell products so when you click to go to full OS it has to load everything as if the feature didn't exist. Having an OS kernel in firmware that was used when live would be really cool.
Not 300 mpg, it is 300 mpg + 8hr recharge. How much is the electricity costing you and polluting? Passing the buck to the power plant doesn't solve the problem. Some econazis get all in your face saying "I'm carbon neutral look at my electric car" etc etc, fail to realize they just pushed the carbon over to the power plant. Centralizing production makes it easier to control, but doesn't necessary mean that it is being controlled, aka China's electricity.
I'm always astonished with say open source software that has been around for 10 years and is still at version 0.62 or something. I like the premise of version numbers = major changes, subversion numbers = minor changes + those features that were planned for the version but didn't make the release date and sub sub version numbers for patches. I hate when things are released and the version number is essentially just the build number without any hint of how major the changes were.
Yeah and again that is the problem with Apple thinking. Buy Apple, buy apple pheripherals and we'll make up for the shortcomings of your system. There are better keyboards and mice out there and my work is kind enough to let me buy what I like the best. The only thing that the apple hardware offers me is more USB ports. I agree though the keyboard is a pretty good place to put your mouse if you have one it is a shame that more keyboards, especially in the highend, don't come with this feature.
Exactly, I have a Ergonomic Microsoft keyboard (leather palm rest goodness) and a Logitech MX revolution mouse. I'm a big guy 6'3"(191cm) 230 (106kg) it seems that most things made for laptops, and Apple hardware in general is just a bit too small for my hands. Hence all the pimped out peripherals I get at work.
Not the case for me. I hate touch pads. My work supplied me with a high end keyboard and mouse both of which are USB. I also have an encrypted external drive. This is all work related stuff it is my office hardware that I also bring home. Fortunately at work I have a 20" Apple monitor that supplies a couple more ports so I plug the keyboard and external drive into that then connect the one cable to my laptop.
In general I live with not having a full sized keyboard at home and just bring the mouse and occasionally the external drive. But at work it is really tight because if anyone gives me something else that needs USB I'm out of luck. Yeah a hub would work, but Macs suck for connectivity, when they aren't using a custom connector, they have two few ports. I'm sorry but I can't really see how the existence of another peripheral really excuses Apple from at least having the connectivity of their competition.
Why less ports? My MacBook Pro has less ports than a mid line ThinkPad I had at my last job. I had 3 USB ports I seem to recall, my MacBook Pro only has two. I have one used for an external harddrive/keyboard (they are multiplexed through my monitor) and the other one for my cordless mouse. Great so when I need to use a thumb drive or something I got to choose between my full sized keyboard or my mouse:-)
The sad thing is presumably these extra components have gotten cheaper as USB is old tech as is Firewire. While connectivity realestate is at a premium for a laptop I'd think you'd want to have at least comparable to your competitions mid range offering.
Probably not too smart though if you ask me. What are the odds of making it to the NFL, maybe one in a hundred highschool players, and that is probably being generous. I'd think that the proportion of people that go on to study math and end up getting a good job because of it is much higher.
Well the source is still available so I think it is still open source. It all depends on how much freedom you want, some poeple don't like GPL and prefer BSD because it gives even more freedom, but most will consider both to be forms of open source. This is an even more restrictive form of open source but it still is open. Keep in mind too that a lot of open source projects are Linux or at least *NIX only. Not by license but by low level system dependancies and the developers biases, or possibly lack of access to Mac or Windows machines. Usually the licenses leave you free to port it if you want which I suppose is okay.
Any sort of public availablity is good, this is just less good than the ideal. I think this is a good balance though for a company, as they have an agenda: increase the power and appeal of the product they sell. They have an ethical obligation to their shareholders to try to make money for them. Some companies have gone too far to open source IMHO. For example Sun, almost every product you could have bought from them is now available in an open source version. Great for the customer; my work uses a lot of Sun infrastructure, but I'm not convinced it is great for the company, as can be demonstrated by their stock performance (which is at its low and has been roughly flat since the.com bubble).
It was a joke. I have problems with RMS saying you "must" or you are a bad person. I'm all for anarchy in that sense. People should be free to chose how they associate with others including choosing not to associate.
Anyways, use OSS all the time, think it is great but it has to be the right tool for the job. To be honest I don't have time to spend learning someone else's code, so having access to the source isn't much use to me. It is nice that the developer can decide to stop making it but the product continues, other than that my access to the source isn't much use.
RMS speaks like I'm being wronged if someone sells me a program without the source code which I think is ludicrous. It is extremely rare in business where buying one thing entitles you to something else, heck even when buying a house you have to include terms such as "having clear title blah blah" to make sure when you buy the house you also have the right to use your driveway etc.
Slashdot Mirror
That said, just because you are good at something doesn't mean you want to do it for a career. Maybe she would be better off taking something she has an interest in, as a backup maybe take a minor in computer science or something. For example, still use math but not quite as abstract, accounting, or actuarial science. Or even just business.
The world needs more people that get business and technology. Often you find one or the other. Brilliant programmer makes company and then just wings it on the business part. She could bring both if that was her interest.
I'd think if anything MS's Vista Capable program helped low end computer lines/manufactures not MS, even then it might be debatable. After all if your low end box didn't say Vista Capable but your high end did, costumers might go for your higher end model. I still don't get how having a Vista Capable sticker "makes" you want Vista. You can slap a "Photoshop capable" sticker on my computer it won't make me want Photoshop, but if I'm a person that is considering getting Photoshop I might go for your hardware because I know it is supposed to work.
Anyways, I think that at worst MS confused people into buying underpowered systems. Is it a crime to miss direct someone around another companies product line? Since the logo IMHO wouldn't have enticed people that didn't want Vista already, I don't see how MS benefited. They turned a whole bunch of potential Vista Premium customers into Vista Home Basic customers. Not my idea of a sound marketing strategy.
prior notice and an opportunity to be heard
Sounds like what you'd get if they were using a search warrant IMHO. You don't get an opportunity to defend yourself until they bring suit/charges against you. They are "just looking" so the right to counsel etc isn't really defended as much as once they actually accuse you of something.
It's unclear if the revelations will advance the plaintiffs' central claim in the class-action lawsuit -- that Microsoft artificially increased demand by allowing PCs that could run only the most basic versions of the Windows Vista operating system to be called Vista Capable.
That is where it will all fall apart for them IMHO. I can't see how you can argue that it increased demand. People that were looking for the Vista Capable logo were at least considering getting Vista if not planning on getting it. If you weren't planning on getting Vista than the Vista Logo wasn't a deciding factor in your purchase decision, so again MS can't be blamed.
At best people could argue that they thought that they bought a premium version of Vista and didn't find out until they were trying to install it that they wouldn't get the Aero Interface, and other candy. But they still are able to run a version of Vista so it is still Vista Capable IMHO. Also, I'm not sure if it was the same everywhere, but at least were I'm from there was always a footnote saying that it would run Vista Home Basic on any advertisements that used the Vista Capable logo.
I think the problem is defining what is an environmental refugee and when do you send them back. Clearly if your country is underwater now isn't the time to send you back. But what if your island gets hit with a category 4 hurricane 3 times a year? When does it become "safe enough". Tuff questions but I agree the international community needs to be thinking about the problem.
My personal view is that what isn't legal in other media forms shouldn't be legal on the internet either. The main challenge with the internet is that it is sort of possible to prevent the transaction, where as with a guy passing out tapes it is hard to determine what he's doing without viewing each tape. Because the internet revolves around searching/cataloging information it makes it much easier for the authorities to find people that are breaking the law and if they can't shut them down, than at least block the transaction.
I'll find every flaw that everyone in the industry is predicting, and complain at every step.
So what you are saying is you'll conduct an unbiased test?
IMHO we need to be careful not to swing farther away from people we disagree with just because they say or do something that we don't like. I'm guilty of it at times. If you disagree with censorship you should fight that issue. Those that like censorship might not care that your internet is 30% slower or that you can't get on Facebook anymore.
Anyways, I just think if you are for censorship you should be helping people make a "better mousetrap" so what is deemed valid material isn't getting blocked. If you are against censorship fight that issue not technical problems in its implementation. The argument shouldn't be "censorship makes my internet slower therefore it is wrong".
All that will happen is someone will come out with a better technology and you won't be able to notice the difference (other than the lack of access to censured material of course). Eventually those that care about censorship will end up having to fight that issue, and not the technical difficulties of implementation.
All sys-admins must be addicted. I mean I'm online 6+ hours a day and under "mental distress".
My big concern with this type of offering is it increases a companies dependence on their internet line. If your network is down not only can't retrieve files, email or browse, you now can't work on productivity software either. Essentially if your doing a job that requires a computer in this environment you can't work whenever the internet or network has a hickup. I like having something else to do in the rare instances where the network isn't working right.
Add to that the fact that wireless/laptops are becoming of larger importance in companies (and wireless is flaky at the best of times IMHO) you're really courting disaster not just in terms of outages but in terms of accidental data loss. Say your not so gifted technologically colleague decides to walk over to your desk with their laptop to show you the spreadsheet they've been working on. They get out of range of the router that they were using and presto session time out and the chance of data loss.
To make the irresponsibility even worse this is from what is supposed to be the most high tech group in the world. Could they not have come up with a more accurate way of getting rid of this junk, and at least predict the drop zone? Even if it was only a 100km radius you'd most likely be able to call the country or ocean. Would be nice to know and I'm sure their has to be a masters student looking for a thesis topic :)
I'm sure there has to be a way. Clustering suites, say Sun's Grid Engine, or ROCKS http://www.rocksclusters.org/wordpress/ have utilities for pushing applications off to their nodes, you might be able to use that functionality in your environment. Also, not sure it is possible, but could you use kickstart (PXE) but rather than having commands to format the harddrive and install you just have to post install bit which you'd want to rcp the app over, run the installer and clean up for example. It would require a reboot but I think it should work.
True it will happen eventually, unless those countries screw themselves up (hey its happened in the past). But it will be a while. For example wikipedia has the 2008 estimate for China's per capita GDP at 7217, US is currently at 46541. Lets assume that the US has no real growth (unlikely), but China continues as is (9.0% GDP growth but 4.6% inflation = 4.4% real growth). Well quick and dirty calculation gives 43 years as the estimate. That is assuming no US growth which I think is highly unlikely.
If it was war spending that was the cause of the problem it wouldn't be an international problem, the credit worthiness of the US would have come into question not the credit worthiness of the banks. If anything the war should have helped the US economy in the short term because of increased spending, taxation wasn't being increased and the cost of money (fed lending rate) was very low. The US has been running like someone piling up credit card debit, but not paying it back. If anything more spending would be happening and you'd appear richer than you are until the creditors came knocking. But for the most part it is the banks that they are coming after not the government. So I don't think the average person thinks it is the wars fault.
P.S. Why does the angle brackets p formatting code sometimes introduce a space between the two paragraphs and sometimes don't? It is really annoying I'll write something and half the paragraphs will get the space and the other half won't. As evidenced above. I realize we are techies but most forums have had automagical WYSIWYG formatting for about a decade, time to borrow some code me thinks.
Supplying power back to the grid: it is a good idea and has been around for a while. It is being done in some areas but is definitely technically complicated and expensive. It requires large capacitors or some other way of storing the energy so adds cost to the system. Things like solar are a pain in that sense because they tend to produce their power in non-peak times, as you said charge while you are at work ... That means that you are likely to need the most extra capacity storage of any eco friendly system.
Wind has the same problem, a lot of wind farms stow there generators during strong winds because they'll overload the grid otherwise, essentially they don't have anywhere to put their energy if it isn't needed immediately in a lot of places.
A proposal I saw was pretty interesting, it called for utilities to have large differences between their peak times and off peak times price. The idea is it would make things like home batteries (which could also be used for your solar panels) economical. You charge when the utility is cheap and use it during peak time. It would help level the demand out and encourage investment in the infrastructure that would make green energy reasonably affordable.
1) Dying to protect them and their right to do so. or
2) Wasting a whole lot of money to oppress a country that they had no point in invading in the first place, and causing needless deaths.
I'm not taking a side on the issue, but shouldn't either one be more important than having to move back into an apartment? I mean my swimming pool isn't a life or death issue. As well, recessions happen, they are needed for the proper functioning of an economy. Still every time one happens the cable news channels go off like it is the end of the world. It is extremely unlikely that it will be the end of america as a power.
More seriously though it would be good if they partition things nicely so you don't have instant on then have to choose to boot into a full Windows. Instead if you could use the work that has already be done (by presumably just loading a small kernal with minimal services), and then just load the remaining pieces that would be better. My understanding, please correct me if I'm wrong but the Instant On linux is actually a firmware linux on the Asus and Dell products so when you click to go to full OS it has to load everything as if the feature didn't exist. Having an OS kernel in firmware that was used when live would be really cool.
Not 300 mpg, it is 300 mpg + 8hr recharge. How much is the electricity costing you and polluting? Passing the buck to the power plant doesn't solve the problem. Some econazis get all in your face saying "I'm carbon neutral look at my electric car" etc etc, fail to realize they just pushed the carbon over to the power plant. Centralizing production makes it easier to control, but doesn't necessary mean that it is being controlled, aka China's electricity.
I'm always astonished with say open source software that has been around for 10 years and is still at version 0.62 or something. I like the premise of version numbers = major changes, subversion numbers = minor changes + those features that were planned for the version but didn't make the release date and sub sub version numbers for patches. I hate when things are released and the version number is essentially just the build number without any hint of how major the changes were.
Yeah and again that is the problem with Apple thinking. Buy Apple, buy apple pheripherals and we'll make up for the shortcomings of your system. There are better keyboards and mice out there and my work is kind enough to let me buy what I like the best. The only thing that the apple hardware offers me is more USB ports. I agree though the keyboard is a pretty good place to put your mouse if you have one it is a shame that more keyboards, especially in the highend, don't come with this feature.
Exactly, I have a Ergonomic Microsoft keyboard (leather palm rest goodness) and a Logitech MX revolution mouse. I'm a big guy 6'3"(191cm) 230 (106kg) it seems that most things made for laptops, and Apple hardware in general is just a bit too small for my hands. Hence all the pimped out peripherals I get at work.
In general I live with not having a full sized keyboard at home and just bring the mouse and occasionally the external drive. But at work it is really tight because if anyone gives me something else that needs USB I'm out of luck. Yeah a hub would work, but Macs suck for connectivity, when they aren't using a custom connector, they have two few ports. I'm sorry but I can't really see how the existence of another peripheral really excuses Apple from at least having the connectivity of their competition.
The sad thing is presumably these extra components have gotten cheaper as USB is old tech as is Firewire. While connectivity realestate is at a premium for a laptop I'd think you'd want to have at least comparable to your competitions mid range offering.
Probably not too smart though if you ask me. What are the odds of making it to the NFL, maybe one in a hundred highschool players, and that is probably being generous. I'd think that the proportion of people that go on to study math and end up getting a good job because of it is much higher.
Any sort of public availablity is good, this is just less good than the ideal. I think this is a good balance though for a company, as they have an agenda: increase the power and appeal of the product they sell. They have an ethical obligation to their shareholders to try to make money for them. Some companies have gone too far to open source IMHO. For example Sun, almost every product you could have bought from them is now available in an open source version. Great for the customer; my work uses a lot of Sun infrastructure, but I'm not convinced it is great for the company, as can be demonstrated by their stock performance (which is at its low and has been roughly flat since the .com bubble).
Anyways, use OSS all the time, think it is great but it has to be the right tool for the job. To be honest I don't have time to spend learning someone else's code, so having access to the source isn't much use to me. It is nice that the developer can decide to stop making it but the product continues, other than that my access to the source isn't much use.
RMS speaks like I'm being wronged if someone sells me a program without the source code which I think is ludicrous. It is extremely rare in business where buying one thing entitles you to something else, heck even when buying a house you have to include terms such as "having clear title blah blah" to make sure when you buy the house you also have the right to use your driveway etc.