> Bill Gates has donated in excess of $10 billion to charity. In both relative and absolute terms, that's extremely generous.
I know I should let this ride, but I just can't resist...
Let's see. He's worth $72G now, and if you add back the $10G that he has reportedly given away, you get $82G, of which that $10G is... 12%. Your family doctor probably gives away a bigger share. Lots of middle class families give away a tithe just on general principles. If you compare on the basis of disposable fortune rather than gross, the attempts to portray Gates as a philanthropist look absolutely ridiculous.
This is not an impressive sum for the world's richest man.
And then you look at the $10G. How much is still sitting in the coffers of his self-aggrandizing Gates Foundation? How much was given away with strings attached? How much was given away as software, and reckoned at the sticker price rather than the almost-nothing that it actually costs him personally?
How much was given away before he started having legal and PR problems? How much did he give away without a press release to tell the world about it? How often do his disciples invoke his donations as proof that he's a nice guy, never mind whatever he did to get the money in the first place?
> You are a jealous hypocrite.
Jealous? No. (See below.)
Hypocite? You're making a lot of assumptions about what I'm worth and where it goes.
> Be honest and admit you hate Bill Gates because he's more successful than you.
Actually, I don't consider him successful at all, because I'm one of those freaks who doesn't believe that you "win" by dying with the most toys. Sure, he's got piles of cash and herds of brown-nosers, but I don't happen to want either one. I've got enough to eat and live under a roof and drive a car that doesn't break down too often, and enough left over for a few toys. Whenever I discover that I've got much more than that, I figure I've been spending too much time making a living and not enough time living a life, so I switch gears for a while. What makes you suppose everyone wants to be like him?
Is he handsome? Has he got a winning personality? Lots of friends? Do girls fawn on him? Has he got musical talent? Does he speak lots of languages? Does he write novels or poetry? Paint? Hack on a project for fun? Does he do lots of cool stuff that other people don't?
Sorry, but I'll save my jealousy for more deserving guys.
> Short of donating his entire fortune to charity, there's nothing he could possibly do to make you like him.
I probably wouldn't like him even then, though I would probably respect him for that particular act. Maybe even be jealous, if I found that I couldn't do the same thing.
> Here's my response: learn basic economics. The economy is not a zero-sum game.
Was that supposed to be relevant to some point you were trying to make?
> Heck, even Bill Gates has recently donated 100 million dollars to aids research. The obvious arguement is that we should not criticise them for the good they do.
For more details on the magnitude of Bill Gates' magnanimity, see my other post on the topic.
And yes, I detect the sarcasm. Please see the other post anyway.
> And say what you will about Bill Gates, but at least he isn't hoarding all his wealth.
Hmmm. He's worth $72,273,900,000 right now, and his $100,000,000 is spread out over the next five years, so his yearly donation of $20,000,000 is worth a whopping 0.02767% of his net worth.
An ordinary millionaire would have to give a budget-busting $276.73 per year to keep pace. Someone worth $100,000 would have to hurt themselves to the tune of $27.67 per year -- that's a decent steak dinner, I'm telling you. A working highschooler could keep up by throwing a quarter in the hat once a year.
"Capitalism overcoming the shortcomings of capitalism", indeed!
All hail to Saint Bill of Borg! He steals from the rich -- or at least limits himself to the working class and above -- and throws pocket change to the poor -- at least when the media are watching.
Sorry, Bill, but this is only going to buy the love of people without a pocket calculator.
> I think even the most strident freemarket supporter would say that to withhold medical care is wrong.
Half the voices here seem to be saying otherwise.
In the modern political dialog, "free market" is just a politically correct code phrase for "look out for #1, fuck everybody else". If you die because you lost the economic game, well, that's what you get for losing. Don't ask me for help; I'll never make it to the top of the heap if I stop to help you up instead of stepping on you.
I mean, seriously... are we going to sit back and let millions of people die miserable deaths just so we can get that 43 profit on our stocks this quarter?
No wonder you have riots every time the WTO holds a conference.
> By selling imaginary items one acquires in the game, it makes it possible for someone with a lot of disposable income (and not much of a life) to gain an unfair advantage over other, possibly more skilled players.
> He says "Yes, but I'm gonna replace it, I have the new machine all set up on the network, but when I put in it's IP address, it doesn't work because it says another machine is using that address."
And we begin to get a glimpse of what's been going on in Redmond this week... --
> They don't know what they're doing.. and i hear they have one guy working on the linux sites now...
Last time I heard mention of 2cows they were in the dog house among Linuxers for publishing some sort of cluelessness. IMO they should go the Corel route and get out of it altogether if they don't care enough to get a clue.
> There was no deregulation. The proof is simple. All PG&E has to do is raise their rates and their problems are over. But they can't do that. All they can do is beg, threaten and whine to the regulators for permission to charge a little bit more.
Yeah, that almost leaves a guy wondering why they pushed so hard for the legislation, and then drummed up $30,000,000 to beat Proposition 9 (which would have effectively vetoed part of that legislation).
> What happened instead was that certain sectors of the energy market were opened up to competition, which is not deregulation. It's the tons of regulations still in place that's causing this problem to spiral out of control. PG&E and SCE have government granted monopolies. I have absolutely ZERO choice about whom I buy my electricity from. And I would gladly pay a market price for my electricity in order to forestall blackouts, but again, the government won't let me excercise that choice.
Actually, it's not the Big Evile Gummit that's preventing it. The legislation was supposed to open things up, but the utilities didn't want to cater to low-profit residential neighborhoods.
See my earlier post, which cites a survey of what the utilities were ready to offer the lucky citizens of CA just before the law went into effect (2 years after being passed). The survey showed that consumers were not going to get a damn thing in return for their $28,500,000,000 bailout of the utilities.
People need to get over the notion that "regulation is inherently evile", because it tends to blind them to what is actually going on in CA.
> You can't blame your power company for selling outside the state. They are being forced to sell power at a fraction of the cost, so naturally they want to minimize losses and sell as little as possible in CA. Don't forget that their stock holders could sue them for doing anything else.
Just a reminder that the CA legislation that set this situation up was pushed by the utilites, not evile government bureaucrats, and it was rammed through the legislature almost without the public knowing what was going on. The day after the vote all the CA newspapers said was that residential consumers were going to get a 10% rate cut out of the deal... They forgot to mention that the utilities got a $28.5 billion bailout as part of the deal.
I don't know whether the utilities deliberately set up a scam, as geekoid suggests, or whether they merely miscalculated the probable outcome of the screwing they gave the citizens of CA; either way, I'm having a bit of difficulty working up any sympathy for them.
And what solution do the utilities want now? Another bailout, of course. Even people who think regulation is evile should realize that deregulation designed by the utilities is never going to yeild a satisfactory solution.
--
Re:Good Fnarg! that article is so full of shit.
on
2.2 vs 2.4
·
· Score: 1
> > Also, at the speed processors are progressing at (we're already at 1.5 GHz), the 2 GHz mark is coming soon -- something Linux 2.4 adds support for.
> Ok, will someone tell me how the hell you add support for speed ? Ok so 8 years ago we had a problem with Turbo Pascal's timing loop overflowing, and they all learned to never write such stupid timing code ever again.
I think they were afraid the bogomips calculations would cause a numeric overflow.
> Windows 2000 is quite stable--as many others have pointed out in past postings. My Win2K system runs continuously for weeks at a time, without glitch or problem, despite my use of games and unusual hardware.
Weeks at at time!
There has been a raging argument about this in comp.os.linux.advocacy for the past few weeks, and some guy finally went and looked up all the Hot 100 sites using Netcraft's uptime counters, and the results looked pretty dismal for W2K.
I suppose someday I'll be bothered to learn how to href a usenet article, but meanwhile I'll just direct you to c.o.l.a. and tell you to look for a recent thread with "Hot 100" in the subject line.
To avoid undue suspense, I'll tip you off that the average uptime for sites based on W2K was about 19 days, or about half what the Linux sites were getting and 1/3 of what the Solaris sites had.
So. I'm sure W2K is nice for people who are in to that kind of thing, but I were trying to sell people on it I wouldn't push it on the basis of its uptimes.
> The goal that the media industries have isn't eliminating ALL piracy, it's eliminating mainstream piracy.
But the funny thing is, they end up eliminating casual piracy and barring exercise of Home Recording Act rights, and meanwhile the professional pirates keep selling piles of counterfeit DVDs.
I don't know what the media industries think they're trying to do, but they damn sure aren't eliminating "mainstream" piracy.
> The difference is that building a bridge or an engine takes huge amounts of capital
An even bigger difference is that people don't expect a bridge to fall down every third or fourth time they use it, whereas with software they think that's normal.
> When I looked at the curriculae at a few colleges offering degrees in CS, I had to laugh. They teach almost nothing
I think you meant to say, nothing that you hold valuable.
> Ive met PhD's I wouldnt wipe my shoes on. It seems like programming skill is inversely proportional to academic accreditation.
I think that's an unfair generalization. Sure, there are people with PhDs in theoretical computer science who don't need to be 1337 44x0r5 to do their work, and maybe you and me can program circles around them. But can we compete in their field? CS is about a lot more than just hacking out code. (Arguably, hacking out code is for us bottom feeders, with the 1337 doing the design work and the 1337er doing the theoretical work that the designs are based on.)
And then there's the PhDs who do their dissertations in other fields of CS. I know CS grad students doing their PhD research who write code by the metric ton, sometimes for extremely complex algorithms. And have to know how to use big piles of other utilites to do their work, too. And maintain their own systems and networks. And publish their research code for all the world to see and criticize. I suspect that some of them could compete with the 1337357 of hackers in terms of doing a hard job well.
Don't get me wrong; I have immense regard for people who are self-taught professionals, in CS or any other profession (or hobby). But that's no ground for bashing formal education.
And frankly, I think the cure for reliable software is going to come from the adoption of formals methods and other mathematical stuff that I'll never be very good at.
> A couple of famous people in the industry you may have heard about: Bill Gates... Do you really think you have a better handle on software engineering than Microsoft's Chief Software Architect
Frankly, I think my handle on SE surpasses his by about the same amount that his bank account surpasses mine.
> Can anyone comment on what to expect from either that or why I shouldn't worry that we'll get everything supported 'in house' despite proprietary device vendors?
I can't really answer your question, but I wanted to make the suggestion that if vendors of proprietary devices only support Windows, the solution is not to switch to Windows, but rather to use something else and forego their devices just to spite them.
If we give up and just go with the flow, we are essentially rewarding the behavior that we want to change. That isn't the recipe for success.
I recognize that not all vendors will ever provide open source drivers, but we could at least expect drivers for OS OSes.
In principle I don't object to closed-source drivers, but with the proliferation of spyware and other badbehaviorware, I'm getting to the point that I don't really want to run anything closed on my systems. However, it might be better to postpone that battle for now, and concentrate on getting drivers, open or closed, for alternative OSes.
On the bright side, I notice that Linux 2.4 supports I2O, which if I understand correctly is a protocol for OS-independent drivers. If we could get vendors to ship I2O drivers with all their nifty toys, Linuxers (and others) would be in as good a shape as Windowsers as far as device support is concerned. And it should be in vendors' best interest to ship I2O drivers, because that would let them maintain one driver and sell everywhere, rather than limiting themselves to a single market or having to maintain multiple drivers for multiple OSes.
Of course, with Windows running on 90% of the world's desktops, some vendors may not think that their slice of the remaining 10% is worth bothering with. There's an unfortunate focus on the mainstream in commerce these days.
And of course, MS may be subsidizing some of them a la OEM agreements, with an explicit or tacit agreement that they will only support Windows. If that turns out to be the case, that's all the more reason to shop elsewhere.
> And the analysis of being a "libertarian leaning, anti-establishment, technically savvy introvert with no social skills" was spot on for my early life, but I've got social skills now:-)
Did you send them a.diff file with the corrections>
> If the Carbon Dioxide is synthesized in an internal combustion engine, or in a coal burning powerplant, it is not "naturally" occurring.
I'm still trying to decide whether the much discussed "bovine flatulence" is natural or artificial.
Sure, flatulation is natural for the cows, but there wouldn't be so many out there flatulatin' away if we didn't breed them by the million.
At any rate, I'm not too worried about bovine flatulence over the long haul, because I'm sure there's some biotech startup out there that will be patenting fartless cows sometime in the next decade or two. Then we can enjoy a diet of beef and milk without feeling guilty about what it's doing to the atmosphere.
> Ummm... that's what the US Nuclear Waste Policy Act was for. By law, electric utilities do not "own" the uranium they use in power plants, it is only leased from the Department of Energy. So in this circumstance, and again by law, final disposition of spent fuel must be performed by the federal government.
> Yes, there's all the NIMBY opposition to a good permanent storage facility. Somebody should just get it over with and force Nevada to let them build the proposed storage facility.
> I totally agree with you that nuclear is the way to go.
I could go the nuke route, but I'd like to see a requirement that power plants make prior arrangements for their waste disposal and plant decomissioning before a license is granted, and pre-pay for them before construction starts.
The main failure of nuclear power in the USA isn't Three Mile Island, but rather the "what do we do with the mess" situation that it has left us.
> But the global warming has seem to become the favored theory of environmentalists, regardless of evidence.
As indicated by the "environmentalist" bashing your reply, GW-denial is a political movement.
Yes, GW is a hypothesis. But yes, we have evidence that we're changing the atmosphere, and we have science that tells what various mixtures of gases do to incoming and outgoing radiation. A hypothesis, but the best one you can build on theory+evidence right now.
Denying GW might be good for your stock portfolio, but it probably isn't good for your planet.
In a newsgroup full of Libertarians, it's no surprise to see a lot of GW-denial. (See, I can put a political spin on it too!)
> As a political tool, hey, whatever you can get away with to force other people to release THEIR code, no matter that it has nothing to do with YOUR contribution.
Nice spin. Completely bogus. I can't "force" you to do anything. However, I can withhold my permission for you to use my code.
It's not like using GPL'd code is your only choice when you start a new project. You could write it yourself, like I did. Or you could hire someone else to write it. Or you could obtain it through a license which may or may not cost money, depending on what you want and who is licensing it to you.
The problem with critics of the GPL is that they assume they have some kind of intrinsic right to use GPL'd code, and thus bitch about the restrictions on it. The fact is, however, no one has any intrinsic rights to it at all. You can use it under a license, just like you could with code from Sun or Microsoft. If you don't like the cost or terms of the license, you have to shop elsewhere, whether you're dealing with Sun, Microsoft, or me.
Slashdot Mirror
> Bill Gates has donated in excess of $10 billion to charity. In both relative and absolute terms, that's extremely generous.
I know I should let this ride, but I just can't resist...
Let's see. He's worth $72G now, and if you add back the $10G that he has reportedly given away, you get $82G, of which that $10G is... 12%. Your family doctor probably gives away a bigger share. Lots of middle class families give away a tithe just on general principles. If you compare on the basis of disposable fortune rather than gross, the attempts to portray Gates as a philanthropist look absolutely ridiculous.
This is not an impressive sum for the world's richest man.
And then you look at the $10G. How much is still sitting in the coffers of his self-aggrandizing Gates Foundation? How much was given away with strings attached? How much was given away as software, and reckoned at the sticker price rather than the almost-nothing that it actually costs him personally?
How much was given away before he started having legal and PR problems? How much did he give away without a press release to tell the world about it? How often do his disciples invoke his donations as proof that he's a nice guy, never mind whatever he did to get the money in the first place?
> You are a jealous hypocrite.
Jealous? No. (See below.)
Hypocite? You're making a lot of assumptions about what I'm worth and where it goes.
> Be honest and admit you hate Bill Gates because he's more successful than you.
Actually, I don't consider him successful at all, because I'm one of those freaks who doesn't believe that you "win" by dying with the most toys. Sure, he's got piles of cash and herds of brown-nosers, but I don't happen to want either one. I've got enough to eat and live under a roof and drive a car that doesn't break down too often, and enough left over for a few toys. Whenever I discover that I've got much more than that, I figure I've been spending too much time making a living and not enough time living a life, so I switch gears for a while. What makes you suppose everyone wants to be like him?
Is he handsome? Has he got a winning personality? Lots of friends? Do girls fawn on him? Has he got musical talent? Does he speak lots of languages? Does he write novels or poetry? Paint? Hack on a project for fun? Does he do lots of cool stuff that other people don't?
Sorry, but I'll save my jealousy for more deserving guys.
> Short of donating his entire fortune to charity, there's nothing he could possibly do to make you like him.
I probably wouldn't like him even then, though I would probably respect him for that particular act. Maybe even be jealous, if I found that I couldn't do the same thing.
> Here's my response: learn basic economics. The economy is not a zero-sum game.
Was that supposed to be relevant to some point you were trying to make?
--
> Heck, even Bill Gates has recently donated 100 million dollars to aids research. The obvious arguement is that we should not criticise them for the good they do.
For more details on the magnitude of Bill Gates' magnanimity, see my other post on the topic.
And yes, I detect the sarcasm. Please see the other post anyway.
--
> And say what you will about Bill Gates, but at least he isn't hoarding all his wealth.
Hmmm. He's worth $72,273,900,000 right now, and his $100,000,000 is spread out over the next five years, so his yearly donation of $20,000,000 is worth a whopping 0.02767% of his net worth.
An ordinary millionaire would have to give a budget-busting $276.73 per year to keep pace. Someone worth $100,000 would have to hurt themselves to the tune of $27.67 per year -- that's a decent steak dinner, I'm telling you. A working highschooler could keep up by throwing a quarter in the hat once a year.
"Capitalism overcoming the shortcomings of capitalism", indeed!
All hail to Saint Bill of Borg! He steals from the rich -- or at least limits himself to the working class and above -- and throws pocket change to the poor -- at least when the media are watching.
Sorry, Bill, but this is only going to buy the love of people without a pocket calculator.
--
> I think even the most strident freemarket supporter would say that to withhold medical care is wrong.
Half the voices here seem to be saying otherwise.
In the modern political dialog, "free market" is just a politically correct code phrase for "look out for #1, fuck everybody else". If you die because you lost the economic game, well, that's what you get for losing. Don't ask me for help; I'll never make it to the top of the heap if I stop to help you up instead of stepping on you.
I mean, seriously... are we going to sit back and let millions of people die miserable deaths just so we can get that 43 profit on our stocks this quarter?
No wonder you have riots every time the WTO holds a conference.
--
> Anything that is deemed as having value and does not damage an individual or the corporation should be salable.
Possibly explaining why we never see Slashdot karma on the block at ebay.
--
> By selling imaginary items one acquires in the game, it makes it possible for someone with a lot of disposable income (and not much of a life) to gain an unfair advantage over other, possibly more skilled players.
Kind of like real life, eh?
--
> He says "Yes, but I'm gonna replace it, I have the new machine all set up on the network, but when I put in it's IP address, it doesn't work because it says another machine is using that address."
And we begin to get a glimpse of what's been going on in Redmond this week...
--
> A very nice move.
Forgive my clubieness on this topic, but are any other distros organized as NPOs? Is this an innovation?
Regardless of the answer, I agree with your sentiments -- NPO based distros might be a very good thing for OSS over the long haul.
--
> They don't know what they're doing.. and i hear they have one guy working on the linux sites now...
Last time I heard mention of 2cows they were in the dog house among Linuxers for publishing some sort of cluelessness. IMO they should go the Corel route and get out of it altogether if they don't care enough to get a clue.
--
> > And the internet connection, and, oh, beer. An essential part of Linux development.
> You mean the beer's not free?
LMAO.
Things like this demand a Slashdot Hall of Fame.
--
> There was no deregulation. The proof is simple. All PG&E has to do is raise their rates and their problems are over. But they can't do that. All they can do is beg, threaten and whine to the regulators for permission to charge a little bit more.
Yeah, that almost leaves a guy wondering why they pushed so hard for the legislation, and then drummed up $30,000,000 to beat Proposition 9 (which would have effectively vetoed part of that legislation).
> What happened instead was that certain sectors of the energy market were opened up to competition, which is not deregulation. It's the tons of regulations still in place that's causing this problem to spiral out of control. PG&E and SCE have government granted monopolies. I have absolutely ZERO choice about whom I buy my electricity from. And I would gladly pay a market price for my electricity in order to forestall blackouts, but again, the government won't let me excercise that choice.
Actually, it's not the Big Evile Gummit that's preventing it. The legislation was supposed to open things up, but the utilities didn't want to cater to low-profit residential neighborhoods.
See my earlier post, which cites a survey of what the utilities were ready to offer the lucky citizens of CA just before the law went into effect (2 years after being passed). The survey showed that consumers were not going to get a damn thing in return for their $28,500,000,000 bailout of the utilities.
People need to get over the notion that "regulation is inherently evile", because it tends to blind them to what is actually going on in CA.
--
> You can't blame your power company for selling outside the state. They are being forced to sell power at a fraction of the cost, so naturally they want to minimize losses and sell as little as possible in CA. Don't forget that their stock holders could sue them for doing anything else.
Just a reminder that the CA legislation that set this situation up was pushed by the utilites, not evile government bureaucrats, and it was rammed through the legislature almost without the public knowing what was going on. The day after the vote all the CA newspapers said was that residential consumers were going to get a 10% rate cut out of the deal... They forgot to mention that the utilities got a $28.5 billion bailout as part of the deal.
I don't know whether the utilities deliberately set up a scam, as geekoid suggests, or whether they merely miscalculated the probable outcome of the screwing they gave the citizens of CA; either way, I'm having a bit of difficulty working up any sympathy for them.
And what solution do the utilities want now? Another bailout, of course. Even people who think regulation is evile should realize that deregulation designed by the utilities is never going to yeild a satisfactory solution.
--
> > Also, at the speed processors are progressing at (we're already at 1.5 GHz), the 2 GHz mark is coming soon -- something Linux 2.4 adds support for.
> Ok, will someone tell me how the hell you add support for speed ? Ok so 8 years ago we had a problem with Turbo Pascal's timing loop overflowing, and they all learned to never write such stupid timing code ever again.
I think they were afraid the bogomips calculations would cause a numeric overflow.
--
> Windows 2000 is quite stable--as many others have pointed out in past postings. My Win2K system runs continuously for weeks at a time, without glitch or problem, despite my use of games and unusual hardware.
Weeks at at time!
There has been a raging argument about this in comp.os.linux.advocacy for the past few weeks, and some guy finally went and looked up all the Hot 100 sites using Netcraft's uptime counters, and the results looked pretty dismal for W2K.
I suppose someday I'll be bothered to learn how to href a usenet article, but meanwhile I'll just direct you to c.o.l.a. and tell you to look for a recent thread with "Hot 100" in the subject line.
To avoid undue suspense, I'll tip you off that the average uptime for sites based on W2K was about 19 days, or about half what the Linux sites were getting and 1/3 of what the Solaris sites had.
So. I'm sure W2K is nice for people who are in to that kind of thing, but I were trying to sell people on it I wouldn't push it on the basis of its uptimes.
--
> The goal that the media industries have isn't eliminating ALL piracy, it's eliminating mainstream piracy.
But the funny thing is, they end up eliminating casual piracy and barring exercise of Home Recording Act rights, and meanwhile the professional pirates keep selling piles of counterfeit DVDs.
I don't know what the media industries think they're trying to do, but they damn sure aren't eliminating "mainstream" piracy.
--
> The difference is that building a bridge or an engine takes huge amounts of capital
An even bigger difference is that people don't expect a bridge to fall down every third or fourth time they use it, whereas with software they think that's normal.
> When I looked at the curriculae at a few colleges offering degrees in CS, I had to laugh. They teach almost nothing
I think you meant to say, nothing that you hold valuable.
> Ive met PhD's I wouldnt wipe my shoes on. It seems like programming skill is inversely proportional to academic accreditation.
I think that's an unfair generalization. Sure, there are people with PhDs in theoretical computer science who don't need to be 1337 44x0r5 to do their work, and maybe you and me can program circles around them. But can we compete in their field? CS is about a lot more than just hacking out code. (Arguably, hacking out code is for us bottom feeders, with the 1337 doing the design work and the 1337er doing the theoretical work that the designs are based on.)
And then there's the PhDs who do their dissertations in other fields of CS. I know CS grad students doing their PhD research who write code by the metric ton, sometimes for extremely complex algorithms. And have to know how to use big piles of other utilites to do their work, too. And maintain their own systems and networks. And publish their research code for all the world to see and criticize. I suspect that some of them could compete with the 1337357 of hackers in terms of doing a hard job well.
Don't get me wrong; I have immense regard for people who are self-taught professionals, in CS or any other profession (or hobby). But that's no ground for bashing formal education.
And frankly, I think the cure for reliable software is going to come from the adoption of formals methods and other mathematical stuff that I'll never be very good at.
--
> A couple of famous people in the industry you may have heard about: Bill Gates ... Do you really think you have a better handle on software engineering than Microsoft's Chief Software Architect
Frankly, I think my handle on SE surpasses his by about the same amount that his bank account surpasses mine.
--
> Can anyone comment on what to expect from either that or why I shouldn't worry that we'll get everything supported 'in house' despite proprietary device vendors?
I can't really answer your question, but I wanted to make the suggestion that if vendors of proprietary devices only support Windows, the solution is not to switch to Windows, but rather to use something else and forego their devices just to spite them.
If we give up and just go with the flow, we are essentially rewarding the behavior that we want to change. That isn't the recipe for success.
I recognize that not all vendors will ever provide open source drivers, but we could at least expect drivers for OS OSes.
In principle I don't object to closed-source drivers, but with the proliferation of spyware and other badbehaviorware, I'm getting to the point that I don't really want to run anything closed on my systems. However, it might be better to postpone that battle for now, and concentrate on getting drivers, open or closed, for alternative OSes.
On the bright side, I notice that Linux 2.4 supports I2O, which if I understand correctly is a protocol for OS-independent drivers. If we could get vendors to ship I2O drivers with all their nifty toys, Linuxers (and others) would be in as good a shape as Windowsers as far as device support is concerned. And it should be in vendors' best interest to ship I2O drivers, because that would let them maintain one driver and sell everywhere, rather than limiting themselves to a single market or having to maintain multiple drivers for multiple OSes.
Of course, with Windows running on 90% of the world's desktops, some vendors may not think that their slice of the remaining 10% is worth bothering with. There's an unfortunate focus on the mainstream in commerce these days.
And of course, MS may be subsidizing some of them a la OEM agreements, with an explicit or tacit agreement that they will only support Windows. If that turns out to be the case, that's all the more reason to shop elsewhere.
--
> And the analysis of being a "libertarian leaning, anti-establishment, technically savvy introvert with no social skills" was spot on for my early life, but I've got social skills now :-)
.diff file with the corrections>
Did you send them a
--
> If the Carbon Dioxide is synthesized in an internal combustion engine, or in a coal burning powerplant, it is not "naturally" occurring.
I'm still trying to decide whether the much discussed "bovine flatulence" is natural or artificial.
Sure, flatulation is natural for the cows, but there wouldn't be so many out there flatulatin' away if we didn't breed them by the million.
At any rate, I'm not too worried about bovine flatulence over the long haul, because I'm sure there's some biotech startup out there that will be patenting fartless cows sometime in the next decade or two. Then we can enjoy a diet of beef and milk without feeling guilty about what it's doing to the atmosphere.
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> Ummm... that's what the US Nuclear Waste Policy Act was for. By law, electric utilities do not "own" the uranium they use in power plants, it is only leased from the Department of Energy. So in this circumstance, and again by law, final disposition of spent fuel must be performed by the federal government.
Thanks for the info.
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> Yes, there's all the NIMBY opposition to a good permanent storage facility. Somebody should just get it over with and force Nevada to let them build the proposed storage facility.
I hear that Texas has a robust National Guard.
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> I totally agree with you that nuclear is the way to go.
I could go the nuke route, but I'd like to see a requirement that power plants make prior arrangements for their waste disposal and plant decomissioning before a license is granted, and pre-pay for them before construction starts.
The main failure of nuclear power in the USA isn't Three Mile Island, but rather the "what do we do with the mess" situation that it has left us.
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> But the global warming has seem to become the favored theory of environmentalists, regardless of evidence.
As indicated by the "environmentalist" bashing your reply, GW-denial is a political movement.
Yes, GW is a hypothesis. But yes, we have evidence that we're changing the atmosphere, and we have science that tells what various mixtures of gases do to incoming and outgoing radiation. A hypothesis, but the best one you can build on theory+evidence right now.
Denying GW might be good for your stock portfolio, but it probably isn't good for your planet.
In a newsgroup full of Libertarians, it's no surprise to see a lot of GW-denial. (See, I can put a political spin on it too!)
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> As a political tool, hey, whatever you can get away with to force other people to release THEIR code, no matter that it has nothing to do with YOUR contribution.
Nice spin. Completely bogus. I can't "force" you to do anything. However, I can withhold my permission for you to use my code.
It's not like using GPL'd code is your only choice when you start a new project. You could write it yourself, like I did. Or you could hire someone else to write it. Or you could obtain it through a license which may or may not cost money, depending on what you want and who is licensing it to you.
The problem with critics of the GPL is that they assume they have some kind of intrinsic right to use GPL'd code, and thus bitch about the restrictions on it. The fact is, however, no one has any intrinsic rights to it at all. You can use it under a license, just like you could with code from Sun or Microsoft. If you don't like the cost or terms of the license, you have to shop elsewhere, whether you're dealing with Sun, Microsoft, or me.
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