Just go back to nature, eschew all this horrible modern sanitation and antibiotics, they are all poisoning you.
I'm going to bet that the majority of people will live their entire life without requiring antibiotics. Modern life expectancy probably has a lot more to do with cheap travel leading to properly balanced diets, and just the understanding of germ theory (eg., don't eat off the floor, clean wounds before they get infected, etc.), not to mention improved product safety, continually improving building standards (fewer drafty houses) relatively cheap home heating/cooling, etc.
The truth is that the median income in the US is actually much lower than people seem to realize.
That's because a great many people live in areas with extremely high cost of living, and can't fathom that other areas are very different...
We have become a service industry country, and have given all of the "high paying" jobs to foreign nationals because otherwise our corporate masters would have to pay for real benefits and a meaningful pension plan.
The US remains the #1 manufacturer in the world, and the #1 economy, by a big margin.
The skill-free jobs that got off-shored were generally not the high paying ones... that cheap pair of socks at WalMart isn't to blame for the rising disparity in rich and middle class. That would have happened even without globalization, as automation, and increasing worker efficiency, results in far fewer people being required than were a decade ago.
Every industry that has been allowed to function without regulatory oversight has found a way to bubble.
I must have missed the nannies/housekeepers bubble... Or perhaps the retail store bubble...? In fact, MOST industries aren't regulated, and I doubt you can come up with hundreds of "bubbles".
I don't disagree that much more regulation is needed in the US. Sound economics has been underminded since Regan, and seems to still continue to spiral downhill. But that doesn't make your facts any less inaccurate...
Nothing you've said anywhere here gives me any reason to believe you know any more about the subject than any other random 12 year-old idiot posting on/. from his mother's basement.
Assuming JUST one single SysAdmin making $200k/year (no over-time, including all taxes and fees the company has to pay for each employee), and that admin singlehandedly taking care of 100 servers, that amounts to ~$.23/hour per-server for the SysAdmin on its own.
If I take a task that was previously done by a secretary making $12/hr, write an inefficient script in some high-level language and put it on a dedicated server that costs $0.20/hr to maintain, I've made 6000% profit.
This is the same kind of crap I hear at work all the time. The numbers NEVER add up that way.
Server-class computers cost a big chunk of money. Besides power and cooling, you have to throw in a RAID array, tape backup system, computer operations personnel, systems administrator's salaries for round-the-clock response to that server behaving strangely, crashing, etc. UPS capacity, networking infrastructure, upgraded air cond., etc.
I know exactly what you're going to say, as it's been said many times before, so I'll reply preemptively with the stock answer: "No single drop of rain believes it is responsible for the flood."
DRM depends on proprietary software. You are encrypting a file, then giving the user the key to decode it, while telling the program in question to decode the file, but only allow it to be used in one of a few ways (eg. display PDF, but don't print).
Such a system is untenable with proprietary software (just need to find the right memory address), and absolutely impossible with open source software, as you can simply remove the line in the program that tells it what actions not to allow. (See xpdf). With proprietary DRM systems, the companies just hope it's difficult enough to decipher the compiled code of the proprietary programs, that it takes a while before someone finds the right spots in memory to probe/change, and publishes the details... Then, they make trivial changes to the DRM system, and call it a new, "fixed" version that everyone should start using quickly (before someone figures it out).
The only thing DRM can do effectively, is to prevent the first opening of the file. After you send that first key (eg. via server), no matter what the DRM involved, the user can (trivially) strip the DRM off, and do whatever they want with the unencrypted file.
If that is what you want... I would suggest using public-key encryption to protect the file instead of a commercial "DRM" system. Either PGP or SSL (keys in combination with a password) can make absolutely sure only the intended recipient can make use of the file, even if others obtain copies of it. If you are expecting any more control over what others do with the file, you are simply denying reality.
The very existence of netbooks and nettops are an admission by the entire industry that the majority of tasks performed by computers these days are served well enough by a "Pentium III", perhaps with the addition of a better GPU than existed back then.
No matter how far back you go, portable computers ALWAYS had CPUs slower than their desktop counterparts for the sake of lower heat, and longer battery life.
When the majority of DESKTOP PCs use such slow CPUs, THEN you might have a point. Right now, you're just trying to force the facts to fit your worldview.
Yeah and I'll only have to hire 15 guys to scrounge around for old PCs all day in classified ads and pick them up in trucks.
Spoken like a true idiot. Off-lease and surplus PCs are purchased by the forklift-pallet load, from companies who specialize in this.
Not to mention transport, clean, test and maintain them.
You do not clean, test, or maintain them. They are throwaways. You plug them in where they need to go, and when the ~5% don't work, you throw them away and swap with another.
How often do I have users sitting around twiddling their thumbs because their $30 dumpster PC caught fire in the middle of the day?
Out of hundreds, we've never had one catch fire. And users don't just sit around if their terminal dies, they stand up, take two steps to another one, sit down and start working again.
Sounds like a brilliant way to run a business.
This is how real businesses work. The fact that you're convinced it can't work just proves that you know practically nothing about the subject.
Want a thin client? To hell with hardware variation! A default Linux kernel, out of the box, can boot damn near anything, and access every network card I've come across in years, and X11's VESA driver can handle just about every display out there. Keyboards and mice and a no-brainer.
Setup a working PXE net boot environment with all your thin-client apps, and go. Drop in any old surplus PC, found in any dumpster, anywhere. 98% chance it'll work. If it doesn't, write it off as trash and spend $30 on the next forklift pallet of 'em, or in my case, point the supervisors to the pile...
Old PCs are hazardous waste. Even if they work, companies actually have to pay people to take them away. Every company that's been around more than a decade has them, and they're just warehoused somewhere. Drop them in and go. If you're a new or expanding fast enough that this won't work, you literally can find off-lease equipment in bulk for under $50/each.
Buying a thin client is akin to buying bottled water...
We've been using this instruction set for years and years now. There's gotta be something better around by now. Is it ARM? Cell?
Actually, it's just the opposite. There WERE plenty of better architectures in the early days of x86. Today, x86 is just simply THE chip. The one that's left, competing for the high-end, pushing economies of scale, being all things to all people, and most importantly, with a healthy ecosystem of competitors continually trying to one-up each other.
Everything but the kitchen sink gets thrown into x86, to try to increase performance on various tasks. If there was a better chip out there, it would get integrated into x86 in no time. FPUs come to mind. x86-64 and SIMD instructions come to mind. GPUs seem to be the next big deal, with AMD looking to have an x86-64 CPU in one socket and a GPU in the other...
In short, if anything better comes along, it will quickly get integrated to Intel/AMD/VIA CPUs, and then there once again won't be anything "better"...
I remember twenty years ago that an in-state call to a town 200 miles away cost thirty cents a minute.
And? How much did a 56kbps modem cost? Oh right, it hadn't even been conceived of yet.
Regulation has next to nothing to do with falling long-distance costs. Technology is improving all the time, and it's vastly less expensive to operate a data line today than it was 30 years ago.
Even if we'd maintained the bell system as a regulated monopoly, the falling operating costs would have similarly resulted in falling phone bills.
So netbooks are essentially moving into the low end notebook space and pushing out the cheap notebooks
Not at all. There's no such thing as a small, cheap notebook.
The cheap notebooks are (were) the huge 10lb monsters with 1.5 hours of battery life. Not necessarily a large screen, but THICK and heavy as hell.
Small notebooks are (were) horrendously expensive... A minimum of $1,000 for a low-end mediocre unit, but at least your arm won't fall off after carrying it all day. And there, notebooks kept getting bigger.
The best thing about it... People were clamoring for smaller, lighter laptops for years. And for years they heard the same thing from every corner "People must not want it, Sony/HP/Toshiba just discontinued their smallest unit due to lack of sales."
while leaving the small netbook space empty...
I'm not so sure. Everyone I know is turning around with a new 8" netbook just about every day, most of which I haven't even heard of before. They're out there, and they're numerous, they just aren't getting a lot of press for each EEE PC also-ran.
If your decode hardware is fixed (it's generic HDTV hardware), then there is much less room for improvement, and half the bitrate is an enormous drop.
You're assuming they started with a halfway decent encoder to begin with. The difference between a good encoder and a crappy one is vastly more than 50%.
Added complexity need not be involved (though it certainly can help). A better Quantization table, for instance, wouldn't be any slower, and the reduced bitrate would speed-up encoding/decoding.
More relevant, though, is the comparison function. I find libavcodec's SAD (Sum Absolute Differences) far better than the traditional DCT as it doesn't discolor blocks, while the former will speed-up video encoding almost an order of magnitude versus the later.
This was true of the preview release of 2.0. It was horrible. However, the final version of the UI is fairly decent.
Bullshit!
Downloaded and installed TODAY, on a nice fresh RHEL5.4 system. Spent half the day trying to get the web interface minimally working, and explaining to my boss why it doesn't work worth a crap.
Open a browser to the HTTPS URL... empty page. Type the URL of the insecure webpage, get redirected to the secure page, but this time far enough for a login. Type username/pass, get about half the web interface loaded before the connection craps out. Hit reload 20=30 times before it decides to actually work. Click on CREATE VIRTUAL MACHINE... Click through a few dialogs, then error out because the path to the image datastore hasn't been passed from the config app correctly. Finally get through that idiocy, and start up the virtual machine, only to find there's no input or display... "Console" section of the menu has NOTHING under it... Curse a lot. Switch to a different machine (running the same version of Firefox), about the same level of senselessness getting the UI to load. Start virtual machine, but note in amazement that this time, you actually have a Console tab... Install a nasty huge plugin, note the terrible performance, but at least you get a screen.
Of course this convoluted manual process requires 10,000 steps, and offers NOTHING over the VMWare Server 1.0.x interface (except nightmares).
Even with VMWare-Server1 up and working, there's loads of compatibility hacks needed to get a real system migrated over, or even a just slightly non-standard damn CD to boot. Meanwhile, QEMU is open source, and just works out of the box, and does exactly what you tell it to, and no more...
VMWare was only ever good when it was the only game in town. Once there was a freer knock-off, reality demonstrated all the VMWare issues weren't inherent, just poor programming and design. These days it survives on having a just slightly more mature high-end product, and most of all, name recognition by the clueless.
If you can't do it with Slackware, it doesn't need doing.
Actually, I'd say: If you can't do it with a given Linux distro, try it on Slackware before deciding Linux can't do it.
A store list of things I hate about EVERY LINUX DISTRO OTHER THAN SLACKWARE:
Devel packages. Why the hell aren't the 2KBs of headers included in the main RPM, and instead included in a 20MB package? Yes, sooner or later, I, and everyone else on the planet, is going to want to compile at least one program from source, and having the configure script squawk about missing 50 packages the user has installed, and then requiring a huge search and install-fest of dev packages, is a huge nightmare, and so utterly unnecessary, it's beyond ridiculous.
Customized pakcages. Quit changing the layout of every application out there. Dropping your bookmarks into Firefox is one thing, but why do you need to move all the damn panel buttons around, change color schemes, etc.? It's as if each Linux distro believes they are a world unto themselves, don't trust upstream know what they are doing, or bother to send their recomended changes to upstream in the first place.
Buggy crap programs... If you can't be bothered to test them, don't release them. Leave it alone.
Weird reconfiguration. Quit screwing with defaults, and changing configurable options to something insane. I don't want rm to prompt me FOR EVERY DAMN FILE UNDER THE TREE, and NO, it's NOT okay to require me to abuse the --force option, which has a necessary job as it is. I don't want whois to print a massive banner, and then return only the expiration date on the domain. Nobody else's whois tool is so fucked up, fix the damn thing.
Dependencies. I understand the desire to track dependencies, but you damn well better prompt the user before you install 2GBs worth of crap to support a single app, and make it easy to use yum/apt for a single package WITHOUT dependencies. Once again, somewhere along the lines, users will find a need to compile a package from source, and I don't mean SRPM.
And on the same note, dependency creep needs to be headed off... Stop taking the defaults of configure, just letting it link to every other app on the planet for each trivial feature. If an image viewer wants to install all of GNOME/KDE to provide slightly prettier window borders, that shit should just be shut the hell off by any package maker not completely comatose. Wake up! I don't give a rats ass that GNOME/KDE is your default desktop, and if EVERY PACKAGE is linked against them, you're just forcing those with slightly different preferences to not use your distro AT ALL. There's no damn reason for it.
It isn't going to be climate change that kills us. We won't have any clean water to drink.
A miniscule percentage of our water supplies are consumed by humans. While desalination and advanced filtering aren't cheap, it would still be much cheaper than the current batches of bottled water.
In short, we aren't going to die. Your lawn might, though.
No one needs television, and its one practical use -- news -- is much better satisfied by literally every other medium by which news is available.
Yes, because every event in the world can be adequately described by a grainy B&W still photo, and a few lines of text. The destruction of the World Trade Center, for one. No doubt you got the gist of it on the radio...
I think the newest generations of free software developers take free software for granted.
BS on two very significant accounts...
1) The conflict between pragmatism and idealism has been there since the beginning in the open source and FSF world. In fact, it was much more significant back then because YOU COULDN'T DO ANYTHING without some less-free software at the time. There wasn't the whole ecosystem that there is now, so nobody batted an eyelash at having to use a piece of crap like XAnim to play what few supported video formats there were, while today open source LGPL'd audio/video codecs exist for EVERYTHING in popular use.
2) The rise of open source is NOT the story of the GPL/FSF/"Free Software" jumping in to save the world. People were developing open source software before the GPL gained popularity, and continue to do so. In fact, it's really only an inconveniently-timed lawsuit that allowed Linux to rise to prominence, rather than BSD. The vast majority of the core technologies you use every day are not under FSF licenses, and their developers don't subscribed to Stallman's extremists world view. Even those who like the GPL and believe in the goals, think Stallman is a fool, and denounce his behavior as often as not.
Silver lining though: Americans may have forgotten that their Congress has the power to tell the Executive branch "NO!".
You clearly didn't RTFA. They need it to pass the senate, THEN they need Obama's signature.
Yes, the Congress has the power to overrule the Executive, as well as the Supreme court, but they need a super-majority to do it, and that in an extremely rare event.
However, there's a darker side to that coin. If you can accelerate a ship to near-c with little difficulty, there's not much stopping you from extorting the Earth by threatening to drop the ship (or for that matter, a bunch of tungsten telephone poles traveling at.99c) on them.
If you can get out of Earth orbit, it's pretty damn inexpensive RIGHT NOW to give a meteor a nudge in the right direction, too... Or dig up a chunk of the moon and give it a push towards the Earth.
In short, there are cheaper and easier options, which don't even require this propulsion method.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, if we're doing bullshit numbers like entire continents, then I suspect NAFTA would beat-out the EU.
And I should point out that the EU is just barely larger than the US economically, despite a population 170% as large.
I'm going to bet that the majority of people will live their entire life without requiring antibiotics. Modern life expectancy probably has a lot more to do with cheap travel leading to properly balanced diets, and just the understanding of germ theory (eg., don't eat off the floor, clean wounds before they get infected, etc.), not to mention improved product safety, continually improving building standards (fewer drafty houses) relatively cheap home heating/cooling, etc.
That's because a great many people live in areas with extremely high cost of living, and can't fathom that other areas are very different...
The US remains the #1 manufacturer in the world, and the #1 economy, by a big margin.
The skill-free jobs that got off-shored were generally not the high paying ones... that cheap pair of socks at WalMart isn't to blame for the rising disparity in rich and middle class. That would have happened even without globalization, as automation, and increasing worker efficiency, results in far fewer people being required than were a decade ago.
I must have missed the nannies/housekeepers bubble... Or perhaps the retail store bubble...? In fact, MOST industries aren't regulated, and I doubt you can come up with hundreds of "bubbles".
I don't disagree that much more regulation is needed in the US. Sound economics has been underminded since Regan, and seems to still continue to spiral downhill. But that doesn't make your facts any less inaccurate...
Nothing you've said anywhere here gives me any reason to believe you know any more about the subject than any other random 12 year-old idiot posting on /. from his mother's basement.
Assuming JUST one single SysAdmin making $200k/year (no over-time, including all taxes and fees the company has to pay for each employee), and that admin singlehandedly taking care of 100 servers, that amounts to ~$.23/hour per-server for the SysAdmin on its own.
This is the same kind of crap I hear at work all the time. The numbers NEVER add up that way.
Server-class computers cost a big chunk of money. Besides power and cooling, you have to throw in a RAID array, tape backup system, computer operations personnel, systems administrator's salaries for round-the-clock response to that server behaving strangely, crashing, etc. UPS capacity, networking infrastructure, upgraded air cond., etc.
I know exactly what you're going to say, as it's been said many times before, so I'll reply preemptively with the stock answer: "No single drop of rain believes it is responsible for the flood."
DRM depends on proprietary software. You are encrypting a file, then giving the user the key to decode it, while telling the program in question to decode the file, but only allow it to be used in one of a few ways (eg. display PDF, but don't print).
Such a system is untenable with proprietary software (just need to find the right memory address), and absolutely impossible with open source software, as you can simply remove the line in the program that tells it what actions not to allow. (See xpdf). With proprietary DRM systems, the companies just hope it's difficult enough to decipher the compiled code of the proprietary programs, that it takes a while before someone finds the right spots in memory to probe/change, and publishes the details... Then, they make trivial changes to the DRM system, and call it a new, "fixed" version that everyone should start using quickly (before someone figures it out).
The only thing DRM can do effectively, is to prevent the first opening of the file. After you send that first key (eg. via server), no matter what the DRM involved, the user can (trivially) strip the DRM off, and do whatever they want with the unencrypted file.
If that is what you want... I would suggest using public-key encryption to protect the file instead of a commercial "DRM" system. Either PGP or SSL (keys in combination with a password) can make absolutely sure only the intended recipient can make use of the file, even if others obtain copies of it. If you are expecting any more control over what others do with the file, you are simply denying reality.
touché
No matter how far back you go, portable computers ALWAYS had CPUs slower than their desktop counterparts for the sake of lower heat, and longer battery life.
When the majority of DESKTOP PCs use such slow CPUs, THEN you might have a point. Right now, you're just trying to force the facts to fit your worldview.
Spoken like a true idiot. Off-lease and surplus PCs are purchased by the forklift-pallet load, from companies who specialize in this.
You do not clean, test, or maintain them. They are throwaways. You plug them in where they need to go, and when the ~5% don't work, you throw them away and swap with another.
Out of hundreds, we've never had one catch fire. And users don't just sit around if their terminal dies, they stand up, take two steps to another one, sit down and start working again.
This is how real businesses work. The fact that you're convinced it can't work just proves that you know practically nothing about the subject.
Want a thin client? To hell with hardware variation! A default Linux kernel, out of the box, can boot damn near anything, and access every network card I've come across in years, and X11's VESA driver can handle just about every display out there. Keyboards and mice and a no-brainer.
Setup a working PXE net boot environment with all your thin-client apps, and go. Drop in any old surplus PC, found in any dumpster, anywhere. 98% chance it'll work. If it doesn't, write it off as trash and spend $30 on the next forklift pallet of 'em, or in my case, point the supervisors to the pile...
Old PCs are hazardous waste. Even if they work, companies actually have to pay people to take them away. Every company that's been around more than a decade has them, and they're just warehoused somewhere. Drop them in and go. If you're a new or expanding fast enough that this won't work, you literally can find off-lease equipment in bulk for under $50/each.
Buying a thin client is akin to buying bottled water...
Actually, it's just the opposite. There WERE plenty of better architectures in the early days of x86. Today, x86 is just simply THE chip. The one that's left, competing for the high-end, pushing economies of scale, being all things to all people, and most importantly, with a healthy ecosystem of competitors continually trying to one-up each other.
Everything but the kitchen sink gets thrown into x86, to try to increase performance on various tasks. If there was a better chip out there, it would get integrated into x86 in no time. FPUs come to mind. x86-64 and SIMD instructions come to mind. GPUs seem to be the next big deal, with AMD looking to have an x86-64 CPU in one socket and a GPU in the other...
In short, if anything better comes along, it will quickly get integrated to Intel/AMD/VIA CPUs, and then there once again won't be anything "better"...
And? How much did a 56kbps modem cost? Oh right, it hadn't even been conceived of yet.
Regulation has next to nothing to do with falling long-distance costs. Technology is improving all the time, and it's vastly less expensive to operate a data line today than it was 30 years ago.
Even if we'd maintained the bell system as a regulated monopoly, the falling operating costs would have similarly resulted in falling phone bills.
Not at all. There's no such thing as a small, cheap notebook.
The cheap notebooks are (were) the huge 10lb monsters with 1.5 hours of battery life. Not necessarily a large screen, but THICK and heavy as hell.
Small notebooks are (were) horrendously expensive... A minimum of $1,000 for a low-end mediocre unit, but at least your arm won't fall off after carrying it all day. And there, notebooks kept getting bigger.
The best thing about it... People were clamoring for smaller, lighter laptops for years. And for years they heard the same thing from every corner "People must not want it, Sony/HP/Toshiba just discontinued their smallest unit due to lack of sales."
I'm not so sure. Everyone I know is turning around with a new 8" netbook just about every day, most of which I haven't even heard of before. They're out there, and they're numerous, they just aren't getting a lot of press for each EEE PC also-ran.
You're assuming they started with a halfway decent encoder to begin with. The difference between a good encoder and a crappy one is vastly more than 50%.
Added complexity need not be involved (though it certainly can help). A better Quantization table, for instance, wouldn't be any slower, and the reduced bitrate would speed-up encoding/decoding.
More relevant, though, is the comparison function. I find libavcodec's SAD (Sum Absolute Differences) far better than the traditional DCT as it doesn't discolor blocks, while the former will speed-up video encoding almost an order of magnitude versus the later.
XenServer, at least, has their own variations on all the features you've listed.
Bullshit!
Downloaded and installed TODAY, on a nice fresh RHEL5.4 system. Spent half the day trying to get the web interface minimally working, and explaining to my boss why it doesn't work worth a crap.
Open a browser to the HTTPS URL... empty page.
Type the URL of the insecure webpage, get redirected to the secure page, but this time far enough for a login.
Type username/pass, get about half the web interface loaded before the connection craps out.
Hit reload 20=30 times before it decides to actually work.
Click on CREATE VIRTUAL MACHINE... Click through a few dialogs, then error out because the path to the image datastore hasn't been passed from the config app correctly.
Finally get through that idiocy, and start up the virtual machine, only to find there's no input or display... "Console" section of the menu has NOTHING under it... Curse a lot.
Switch to a different machine (running the same version of Firefox), about the same level of senselessness getting the UI to load.
Start virtual machine, but note in amazement that this time, you actually have a Console tab... Install a nasty huge plugin, note the terrible performance, but at least you get a screen.
Of course this convoluted manual process requires 10,000 steps, and offers NOTHING over the VMWare Server 1.0.x interface (except nightmares).
Even with VMWare-Server1 up and working, there's loads of compatibility hacks needed to get a real system migrated over, or even a just slightly non-standard damn CD to boot. Meanwhile, QEMU is open source, and just works out of the box, and does exactly what you tell it to, and no more...
VMWare was only ever good when it was the only game in town. Once there was a freer knock-off, reality demonstrated all the VMWare issues weren't inherent, just poor programming and design. These days it survives on having a just slightly more mature high-end product, and most of all, name recognition by the clueless.
Actually, I'd say: If you can't do it with a given Linux distro, try it on Slackware before deciding Linux can't do it.
A store list of things I hate about EVERY LINUX DISTRO OTHER THAN SLACKWARE:
Devel packages. Why the hell aren't the 2KBs of headers included in the main RPM, and instead included in a 20MB package? Yes, sooner or later, I, and everyone else on the planet, is going to want to compile at least one program from source, and having the configure script squawk about missing 50 packages the user has installed, and then requiring a huge search and install-fest of dev packages, is a huge nightmare, and so utterly unnecessary, it's beyond ridiculous.
Customized pakcages. Quit changing the layout of every application out there. Dropping your bookmarks into Firefox is one thing, but why do you need to move all the damn panel buttons around, change color schemes, etc.? It's as if each Linux distro believes they are a world unto themselves, don't trust upstream know what they are doing, or bother to send their recomended changes to upstream in the first place.
Buggy crap programs... If you can't be bothered to test them, don't release them. Leave it alone.
Weird reconfiguration. Quit screwing with defaults, and changing configurable options to something insane. I don't want rm to prompt me FOR EVERY DAMN FILE UNDER THE TREE, and NO, it's NOT okay to require me to abuse the --force option, which has a necessary job as it is. I don't want whois to print a massive banner, and then return only the expiration date on the domain. Nobody else's whois tool is so fucked up, fix the damn thing.
Dependencies. I understand the desire to track dependencies, but you damn well better prompt the user before you install 2GBs worth of crap to support a single app, and make it easy to use yum/apt for a single package WITHOUT dependencies. Once again, somewhere along the lines, users will find a need to compile a package from source, and I don't mean SRPM.
And on the same note, dependency creep needs to be headed off... Stop taking the defaults of configure, just letting it link to every other app on the planet for each trivial feature. If an image viewer wants to install all of GNOME/KDE to provide slightly prettier window borders, that shit should just be shut the hell off by any package maker not completely comatose. Wake up! I don't give a rats ass that GNOME/KDE is your default desktop, and if EVERY PACKAGE is linked against them, you're just forcing those with slightly different preferences to not use your distro AT ALL. There's no damn reason for it.
that's enough for today. Time for my meds.
A miniscule percentage of our water supplies are consumed by humans. While desalination and advanced filtering aren't cheap, it would still be much cheaper than the current batches of bottled water.
In short, we aren't going to die. Your lawn might, though.
And more importantly, the BSD versions are already substantially smaller than their GNU/GPL counterparts.
Yes, because every event in the world can be adequately described by a grainy B&W still photo, and a few lines of text. The destruction of the World Trade Center, for one. No doubt you got the gist of it on the radio...
A sub-100USD ARM-based portable computer with extremely long battery life, and the ability to browse the web? Okay: here you go.
The 1990's calling all /.ers...
BS on two very significant accounts...
1) The conflict between pragmatism and idealism has been there since the beginning in the open source and FSF world. In fact, it was much more significant back then because YOU COULDN'T DO ANYTHING without some less-free software at the time. There wasn't the whole ecosystem that there is now, so nobody batted an eyelash at having to use a piece of crap like XAnim to play what few supported video formats there were, while today open source LGPL'd audio/video codecs exist for EVERYTHING in popular use.
2) The rise of open source is NOT the story of the GPL/FSF/"Free Software" jumping in to save the world. People were developing open source software before the GPL gained popularity, and continue to do so. In fact, it's really only an inconveniently-timed lawsuit that allowed Linux to rise to prominence, rather than BSD. The vast majority of the core technologies you use every day are not under FSF licenses, and their developers don't subscribed to Stallman's extremists world view. Even those who like the GPL and believe in the goals, think Stallman is a fool, and denounce his behavior as often as not.
You clearly didn't RTFA. They need it to pass the senate, THEN they need Obama's signature.
Yes, the Congress has the power to overrule the Executive, as well as the Supreme court, but they need a super-majority to do it, and that in an extremely rare event.
Your statement was completely idiotic, as I illustrated. I don't care in the slightest what you want me to do.
If you can get out of Earth orbit, it's pretty damn inexpensive RIGHT NOW to give a meteor a nudge in the right direction, too... Or dig up a chunk of the moon and give it a push towards the Earth.
In short, there are cheaper and easier options, which don't even require this propulsion method.