Um, I think it doesnt quite stack up like that:). It's not the man-years that they are putting you in jail for when you murder. It's the "Golden Rule" that plays a huge part here - 'do unto others as you would have them do unto you'. If you don't care if you're killed, then you probably won't care if you offed someone. On the other hand, if you fear for your life, and you agree with most people that there should be protection of human life, then you care for the Golden Rule - thus you dont want to die.
The more appropriate punishment for a case like this would be not to kill or punish him severely by putting him in jail for 15 years, but to make him pay for what he's done - confiscate _EVERYTHING_ he owns to the maximum amount recoverable for the monetary damage he incurred. Since he doesn't have money, then probably appropriate punishment would be to garnish his wages, much like alimony/child support for the rest of his natural life or until he's paid off his debt. A little jail time wouldn't hurt him either, to keep his memory fresh, but for effect, I wouldn't put him in some country club, whitecollar crime type of prison.. Let him out with some rougher criminals, to hold him under their wing:)... Briefly, but it'll be MEMORABLE:)...
My 2 cents:).. But 15 years? Come on - what's he going to come out as? A reborn copyright/license lover in the end? Yeah right...
wasn't it AMD's CPUs that you could literally fry an egg on? How did this come about? Sorry if it's redundant, but that was my impression for the longest time - AMD runs hotter...
Please don't listen to this person. No one, and I mean no one (aside of maybe your parents and/or wife) is going to knock on your door, trying to give you money based on your academic credentials. The only way a VC, and I mean a true VC, not some angel investors, is ever going to consider you for funding is after you have been established as a company, with paying customers and a somewhat solid reputation. A finished product is assumed in all this. Then the VC's come in and help you ramp up on marketing and other stuff for which a buttload of money is required.
Ph.D. or MBA can definitely play a limited part in whether you get VC capital, but not from the perspective the parent poster is trying to describe to you... It's more of a finishing touch, or polish to the other deal I just told you about, which has very little to do with whether you have a PhD or an MBA.
It is sad that some people on Slashdot basically just talk through their ass without understanding how money is really made.... Hopefully, as a general principle most people who read this bulleting board take all posts with a grain of salt, otherwise we'd all be swimming up shit's creek...
instead of the biased ranting? Linux probably does 95% of what Solaris does just as good, but without some objective, feature by feature (or possibly, benchmark by benchmark - hopefully this wont invite flaming:) comparison and how exactly one falters when compared to the other, would be most helpful... Back to Linus' point - we need an expert on Solaris and an expert on Linux architecture to give us major strong points of either..
I'll bet you (short of the driver support in solaris), there's probably minimal differences in how both work:).
Preferrably the manufacturer as they would be the most apt for doing so. Sometimes the specs for writing an efficient device driver aren't available or are expensive. And most times, people who work in the company that makes the hardware are the ones best equipped w/the prior knowledge of writing device drivers for their devices...
This is why (IMHO) device driver writing should be left up to the vendor, rather than some external developer entity.. But then again, what do I know...
No man are created equal - especially from the waist down;) (catch my drift here?:)) Jokes aside, I think taking what the US Constitution says literally will get you nowhere... Laws are made in equitable ways - nowhere does it say that we all are truly equal... It's like saying, all lions are equal.. or all rhinos are equal - of course they aren't... One's an alpha, the others follow. If you believe evolution, we are also 'pack' animals of sorts.. Except we decide to follow the more abstract features of man/woman, like intelligence (something that's hard to measure), monetary success (easily measured:), athletic ability, etc. I don't see anything inherently wrong in that and in fact that is what makes us inherently different... I can't play basketball because I'm 5'8", no athletic ability, but then again I know Michael Jordan can't cut Java/C++ enterprise integration code...:).
Don't read into the constitution so much.. It's more of a pragmatic description than a logical one.
If a doctor can't hear you out 100% on what the symptoms are, perhaps you should find another doctor. I have never had that experience with any of the doctors I've dealt with. If I actually even remotely thought he's diagnosing based on 1/10th of the info I give him, I'd slap him around, not just leave him... He's screwing w/my life in that case. Another time when I had surgery, and had to go into general anesthesia, I told both, the anesthesiologist and the doctor doing the surgery that if I don't wake up and somehow it's determined it was your error, it won't be the courts that will be settling the payment for your services;). Fortunately I woke up, so I guess they didn't err...:)
They won't go down hard. Matter of fact, I don't think they'll go down at all. Not because they can't provide any good service/price (I once waited 3 hours before I could get to talk to a rep in a Best Buy in San Diego), but because it isn't you (or your kin) that shops there... it's idiots that don't know there's better deals on the net or those who want to 'feel' the merch before they buy it... as if 'feeling' a printer or a digicam will guarantee you anything.
About the only time I purchase stuff from them is when I am in _dire_ need, ASAP... and that usually doesn't amount to a whole lot of money. Most of my gizmos or software I buy off the net..
sad doesn't begin to describe the politically apathetic mood that permeates the country...
name ONE, just ONE thing that Bush said in his campaign ads that has any truth to it... This entire country is run on perception, not truth.
That is what bothers me about it. But I suppose if the Roman Empire could do the same for centuries, why can't we... Since when does truth matter..right?
1) Reject all voters who have voted for one party eversince they began voting! Obviously, these do not think through any issues or let alone care about anything but the party affiliation.
2) Put strict limits on who can vote - reject people without at least a college degree because we don't want an ignoramus who barely made it through high school and doesn't know which ocean is on the western side of the United States voting for anyone....
Leave voting to the educated 24 or so percent of the population. This way you preclude idiots and unwashed masses who choose a candidate based on looks or some such peripheral bullshit trait... This way you also eliminate bible-thumping, inbred, toothless dickweeds, oh and by the way, most of the states that voted for Bush....
You cannot have it for regular salaried workers. That would defy the whole point of this system, and would lead it to a shutdown. From the getgo, this was conceived as an 'extra' earning potential, I can almost assure you. If someone wants to undercut the market based salaries of workers just because some lightly-toasted Mexican immigrant is willing to do the work for 1/2 the price, then you will see two things happen: 1) unions going ballistic, and if that fails (which it won't, at least in the nursing case), 2) people changing professions to something else.
If I was a nurse, and I was forced to work for half the wages I regularly make, then I'll go do something else, far more grateful (and possibly easier) than being a nurse.... It's obvious that you cannot drive down wages so far to the point where people won't work for those wages anymore. That would be a lose-lose proposition, both for the employee as well as the employer. Think about it. It doesn't make sense. If you don't think through it, then you wind up with knee-jerk reactions like this other socialist dumbfuck in the other replies to me...
Maybe you didn't read what I said close enough, so you just parrot yourself all over again. If nurses are overworked, they do not have to bid for extra hours. Whether someone is overworked or not, is largely a subjective issue and depends on a variety of factors. Some people can take 10-12 hour a day shifts 5 days a week, and not even gasp once, because these are disciplined folk who know how to manage time, do their work, get rest, do whatever else needs to be done, and that's it...
The others who cannot do so, will complain of burning out. Aww.. let's pity the poor nurses, right? I'm here also spending 10-12 hr days more often than not, coding C++/Java what have you for an employer - do you see me bitching? No. If I don't like it, I can leave and work something else for half the fucking salary.... That, or start a business, which in and of itself is no easy feat to accomplish unless you already have money saved up.
So spare me this 'save the nurse' bullshit... Obviously they know what they signed up for. Yes, it's an unthankful job, but someone's gotta do it...
The point of the bidding, and I'll restate it again, is to give nurses _extra_ earning potential, should they choose to accept it - not to UNDERCUT their already existing salaries.
What you are bitching (so annoyingly I might add too) about is that eventually this reverse bidding process will start to creep into the regular salary system, meaning, let nurses bid on regular hours.
And should you have an ounce of fucking brain instead of 'foe'-ing me, you will know that cannot succeed because 1) there would be little incentive to work for a wage below the already accepted market-based wage for a nurse, 2) nurses would quit their profession and go wait tables or something, if they were forced to bid under their market-based wages in which case, there will be no one to switch the colostomy bags for your grandma, in which case we have a serious breakdown in healthcare, in which case there will be some serious shit falling out of it before you can say 'dumbass'....
I'm ignoramus? Maybe you should read better into what is being worked into the system, before you start bitching and complaining like the little thin skinned pussy that you are.. Thank God some other people see it for what it's worth and instead of overreacting, the ones that can actually manage their time better and have more energy than your average Joe, can make some little extra cash on the side by using this system, and yet save the hospitals some money too.
altrustic? which planet or country do you live on? the driving concern and motive for capitalism is -looking out for #1. even those who appeared to have nobler ("altrustic") motives, eventually become NON-altruistic people (I wont call them capitalist/greedy pigs, because Linus, even though he works for a US based corp, he still genuinely cares about the OS's future), wake up and smell the coffee...
Do you get hungry every day? Yes, I'm sure.. well then you need to go out and BUY food (not hunt it I hope, which would be far more altruistic and genuine if you had to do that:). To buy shit, you need money. To get money you need to provide value to someone or something. If you cannot provide value, then you re-educate or you wither away and are decimated... that, or hopefully your children will take care of you when you're older and can't work.
Are you a software engineer? If so, I have a few interview questions for you. Send me an email at balkanboy@hotmail.com. If we can arrange an online meeting to see what your 25 years of experience can bring to the table, I will tell you where you can get a job quite soon. You may have to relocate to WAshington though.
Aren't you a dumbfuck... Jumping to conclusions without due research. Most of such software allows nurses who have ALREADY WORKED their fulltime hours to bid on _extra_ hours, if they want more money, thereby earning extra cash and saving the company/hospital extra money they would pay out to temp staffing agencies in the case of a nurse shortage.
Nurses are mostly unionized and the union would go ballistic if such software is actually used to undercut their salaries. So you really should read into how they run such software before you go out blurting stupid shit like this.
Uhm.. I know CS is difficult, but to put it on the intelectual scale above rocket science, is a bit too much , won't you agree? After all, any ol' programmer can use a $1500 dollar PC to create software at any rate he wishes... but to create rockets, or their components, it require a bit more than 1500 dollars and a knowledge of computer architecture and a programming language.
Checking every piece of code against a potential patent-violation is absurd. Software, unlike hardware, is notoriously difficult to patent. This is because the barrier of entry into creating something patentable in terms of software is quite low compared to creating the latest VLSI circuit with the same algorithm as you would on the software. E.g. you could write a Palm emulator for their best model, conceivably at 1/10th the cost of what it'd cost you to build a Palm device....
Thus, software is far more dynamic and far more difficult to patent.
This is a distinction that needs to be acknowledged when considering patents, patent violations, etc. So, recently it was said Linux could violate 283 patents.....
Right..it could... but what people don't understand, and what goes against the grain of capitalism I suppose and the sentiment of business in the united states or wider, is that Linux transcended the classical model of capitalism... forgive me for a lack of a better description.. but it has taken on a regime and a life of its own, and has hinged people on it because it is of a different nature than anything else out there. Primarily this stems from the fact that it is free, and moreover, because it is open and modifiable by anyone who understands it..
So you give this to enough people, you make it good enough..and you hook major companies on it... and it becomes the feeding trough now, and not some obscure student's pet project...and the effects are that IBM will fight tooth and nail assholes like SCO, or others losers, to prevent them from biting into their flesh....
You can only HOPE that others will do the same, whoever those 283 potential patent litigators are... You can hope that their conscienctiousness and hope for a better future will transcend their greed for a brief millisecond and help them decide against litigating Linux....
What people need is an _attitude_ change. Not getting lost in endless litigation over patents, as if whatever was invented since Einstein brought us the theory of GR could even remotely be called an 'invention'... Think about what REALLY was an invention over the last couple of centuries? Really, you could probably name them if you tried hard... The rest, I call evolving, not really a intelectual LEAP...
So, yes, it is important not to abandon capitalistic postulates, but at the same time, to think that this modus operandi is the ultimate one, and that there can never be something better... is downright retarded.
Sorry..this went off topic, but your thinking is representative of a much larger issue, that Linux has managed to untap.
I'm not a FreeBSD proponent, but if I may remark here in addition to what you said - where the *BSD folk got it right is in sticking to one distro and one distro only, so that there's no "Red Hat" or Suse or whatever the fu*k... If Linux, or Linus Torvalds I should say, was also as smart about a distro as he was about building out the kernel, he'd have (10 years ago) opted to have an 'official' distro across all platforms, an if not all platforms, at least x86... (which is most popular anyway).
What we've got here now, today, is gazillion distros all a rip off one another, and processes/standards like LSB trying to make sense of all of them and prevent the redhats of the world from charging 3000/certification, as if what Redhat is certifying you against is something holier than any other distribution out there...
If Linux fucked it up on any front (excluding the desktop front, because that's dominated by M$ and Apple Mac OS X - with a true GUI killer on top of it), it would probably be the distro front and the inability to have a single distribution for everyone. At least in this regard, you gotta hand it to the BSD folk when they say that they were doing kernel development when Linus was in kindergarden... I ain't saying Linux is any worse than BSD, so dont jump on my throat just yet, I think it's the best OS out there currently but boy did they fuck it up with the distributions or what....
As someone who used to hang on IRC (EFNet as well as Undernet), I can tell you it's an extremely addictive thing... I've met numerous people from IRC and made numerous friends from it, so it can be a good thing too. If you only leave it at chatting but don't do much else, it's kind of stupid and you're wasting your time.. I used it as a forum to get together with my countrymen whom were also here in the United States.
Overall, objectively speaking, if you have some other way of using your time in a constructive manner, you're better off doing that than wasting time on IRC. While this may be hard to do, it's usually the wisest thing to do.. Go write some open source software or what not... Much better use of your time.
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Um, I think it doesnt quite stack up like that :). It's not the man-years that they are putting you in jail for when you murder. It's the "Golden Rule" that plays a huge part here - 'do unto others as you would have them do unto you'. If you don't care if you're killed, then you probably won't care if you offed someone. On the other hand, if you fear for your life, and you agree with most people that there should be protection of human life, then you care for the Golden Rule - thus you dont want to die.
:)... Briefly, but it'll be MEMORABLE :)...
:).. But 15 years? Come on - what's he going to come out as? A reborn copyright/license lover in the end? Yeah right...
The more appropriate punishment for a case like this would be not to kill or punish him severely by putting him in jail for 15 years, but to make him pay for what he's done - confiscate _EVERYTHING_ he owns to the maximum amount recoverable for the monetary damage he incurred. Since he doesn't have money, then probably appropriate punishment would be to garnish his wages, much like alimony/child support for the rest of his natural life or until he's paid off his debt. A little jail time wouldn't hurt him either, to keep his memory fresh, but for effect, I wouldn't put him in some country club, whitecollar crime type of prison.. Let him out with some rougher criminals, to hold him under their wing
My 2 cents
wasn't it AMD's CPUs that you could literally fry an egg on? How did this come about? Sorry if it's redundant, but that was my impression for the longest time - AMD runs hotter...
Please don't listen to this person. No one, and I mean no one (aside of maybe your parents and/or wife) is going to knock on your door, trying to give you money based on your academic credentials. The only way a VC, and I mean a true VC, not some angel investors, is ever going to consider you for funding is after you have been established as a company, with paying customers and a somewhat solid reputation. A finished product is assumed in all this. Then the VC's come in and help you ramp up on marketing and other stuff for which a buttload of money is required.
Ph.D. or MBA can definitely play a limited part in whether you get VC capital, but not from the perspective the parent poster is trying to describe to you... It's more of a finishing touch, or polish to the other deal I just told you about, which has very little to do with whether you have a PhD or an MBA.
It is sad that some people on Slashdot basically just talk through their ass without understanding how money is really made.... Hopefully, as a general principle most people who read this bulleting board take all posts with a grain of salt, otherwise we'd all be swimming up shit's creek...
Thanks for listening.
instead of the biased ranting? Linux probably does 95% of what Solaris does just as good, but without some objective, feature by feature (or possibly, benchmark by benchmark - hopefully this wont invite flaming :) comparison and how exactly one falters when compared to the other, would be most helpful... Back to Linus' point - we need an expert on Solaris and an expert on Linux architecture to give us major strong points of either..
:).
I'll bet you (short of the driver support in solaris), there's probably minimal differences in how both work
Preferrably the manufacturer as they would be the most apt for doing so. Sometimes the specs for writing an efficient device driver aren't available or are expensive. And most times, people who work in the company that makes the hardware are the ones best equipped w/the prior knowledge of writing device drivers for their devices...
This is why (IMHO) device driver writing should be left up to the vendor, rather than some external developer entity.. But then again, what do I know...
No man are created equal - especially from the waist down ;) (catch my drift here? :)) Jokes aside, I think taking what the US Constitution says literally will get you nowhere... Laws are made in equitable ways - nowhere does it say that we all are truly equal ... It's like saying, all lions are equal.. or all rhinos are equal - of course they aren't... One's an alpha, the others follow. If you believe evolution, we are also 'pack' animals of sorts.. Except we decide to follow the more abstract features of man/woman, like intelligence (something that's hard to measure), monetary success (easily measured :), athletic ability, etc. I don't see anything inherently wrong in that and in fact that is what makes us inherently different... I can't play basketball because I'm 5'8", no athletic ability, but then again I know Michael Jordan can't cut Java/C++ enterprise integration code ... :).
.. It's more of a pragmatic description than a logical one.
Don't read into the constitution so much
If a doctor can't hear you out 100% on what the symptoms are, perhaps you should find another doctor. I have never had that experience with any of the doctors I've dealt with. If I actually even remotely thought he's diagnosing based on 1/10th of the info I give him, I'd slap him around, not just leave him... He's screwing w/my life in that case. Another time when I had surgery, and had to go into general anesthesia, I told both, the anesthesiologist and the doctor doing the surgery that if I don't wake up and somehow it's determined it was your error, it won't be the courts that will be settling the payment for your services ;). Fortunately I woke up, so I guess they didn't err ... :)
Just like Windows NT killed UNIX.
no such thing as 'artificially inflated price'. there's only what you can/can not afford or what you are too stupid to buy for a given price.
if prices were 'fair' and uninflated, then this country wouldnt exist as is
They won't go down hard. Matter of fact, I don't think they'll go down at all. Not because they can't provide any good service/price (I once waited 3 hours before I could get to talk to a rep in a Best Buy in San Diego), but because it isn't you (or your kin) that shops there... it's idiots that don't know there's better deals on the net or those who want to 'feel' the merch before they buy it... as if 'feeling' a printer or a digicam will guarantee you anything.
About the only time I purchase stuff from them is when I am in _dire_ need, ASAP... and that usually doesn't amount to a whole lot of money. Most of my gizmos or software I buy off the net..
sad doesn't begin to describe the politically apathetic mood that permeates the country...
name ONE, just ONE thing that Bush said in his campaign ads that has any truth to it... This entire country is run on perception, not truth.
That is what bothers me about it. But I suppose if the Roman Empire could do the same for centuries, why can't we... Since when does truth matter..right?
1) Reject all voters who have voted for one party eversince they began voting! Obviously, these do not think through any issues or let alone care about anything but the party affiliation.
2) Put strict limits on who can vote - reject people without at least a college degree because we don't want an ignoramus who barely made it through high school and doesn't know which ocean is on the western side of the United States voting for anyone....
Leave voting to the educated 24 or so percent of the population. This way you preclude idiots and unwashed masses who choose a candidate based on looks or some such peripheral bullshit trait... This way you also eliminate bible-thumping, inbred, toothless dickweeds, oh and by the way, most of the states that voted for Bush....
I still cannot believe Bush won...
thats cause they probably tied it to native api, like SWT. this is just a guess, but a likely correct one.
That's actually quite stupid of you to say. Resting on your laurels is the quickest way to your demise.
You cannot have it for regular salaried workers. That would defy the whole point of this system, and would lead it to a shutdown. From the getgo, this was conceived as an 'extra' earning potential, I can almost assure you. If someone wants to undercut the market based salaries of workers just because some lightly-toasted Mexican immigrant is willing to do the work for 1/2 the price, then you will see two things happen: 1) unions going ballistic, and if that fails (which it won't, at least in the nursing case), 2) people changing professions to something else.
If I was a nurse, and I was forced to work for half the wages I regularly make, then I'll go do something else, far more grateful (and possibly easier) than being a nurse.... It's obvious that you cannot drive down wages so far to the point where people won't work for those wages anymore. That would be a lose-lose proposition, both for the employee as well as the employer. Think about it. It doesn't make sense. If you don't think through it, then you wind up with knee-jerk reactions like this other socialist dumbfuck in the other replies to me...
Maybe you didn't read what I said close enough, so you just parrot yourself all over again. If nurses are overworked, they do not have to bid for extra hours. Whether someone is overworked or not, is largely a subjective issue and depends on a variety of factors. Some people can take 10-12 hour a day shifts 5 days a week, and not even gasp once, because these are disciplined folk who know how to manage time, do their work, get rest, do whatever else needs to be done, and that's it...
The others who cannot do so, will complain of burning out. Aww.. let's pity the poor nurses, right? I'm here also spending 10-12 hr days more often than not, coding C++/Java what have you for an employer - do you see me bitching? No. If I don't like it, I can leave and work something else for half the fucking salary.... That, or start a business, which in and of itself is no easy feat to accomplish unless you already have money saved up.
So spare me this 'save the nurse' bullshit... Obviously they know what they signed up for. Yes, it's an unthankful job, but someone's gotta do it...
The point of the bidding, and I'll restate it again, is to give nurses _extra_ earning potential, should they choose to accept it - not to UNDERCUT their already existing salaries.
What you are bitching (so annoyingly I might add too) about is that eventually this reverse bidding process will start to creep into the regular salary system, meaning, let nurses bid on regular hours.
And should you have an ounce of fucking brain instead of 'foe'-ing me, you will know that cannot succeed because 1) there would be little incentive to work for a wage below the already accepted market-based wage for a nurse, 2) nurses would quit their profession and go wait tables or something, if they were forced to bid under their market-based wages in which case, there will be no one to switch the colostomy bags for your grandma, in which case we have a serious breakdown in healthcare, in which case there will be some serious shit falling out of it before you can say 'dumbass'....
I'm ignoramus? Maybe you should read better into what is being worked into the system, before you start bitching and complaining like the little thin skinned pussy that you are.. Thank God some other people see it for what it's worth and instead of overreacting, the ones that can actually manage their time better and have more energy than your average Joe, can make some little extra cash on the side by using this system, and yet save the hospitals some money too.
altrustic? which planet or country do you live on? the driving concern and motive for capitalism is -looking out for #1. even those who appeared to have nobler ("altrustic") motives, eventually become NON-altruistic people (I wont call them capitalist/greedy pigs, because Linus, even though he works for a US based corp, he still genuinely cares about the OS's future), wake up and smell the coffee...
:). To buy shit, you need money. To get money you need to provide value to someone or something. If you cannot provide value, then you re-educate or you wither away and are decimated... that, or hopefully your children will take care of you when you're older and can't work.
Do you get hungry every day? Yes, I'm sure.. well then you need to go out and BUY food (not hunt it I hope, which would be far more altruistic and genuine if you had to do that
altruistic? Dream on.
Are you a software engineer? If so, I have a few interview questions for you. Send me an email at balkanboy@hotmail.com. If we can arrange an online meeting to see what your 25 years of experience can bring to the table, I will tell you where you can get a job quite soon. You may have to relocate to WAshington though.
Aren't you a dumbfuck... Jumping to conclusions without due research. Most of such software allows nurses who have ALREADY WORKED their fulltime hours to bid on _extra_ hours, if they want more money, thereby earning extra cash and saving the company/hospital extra money they would pay out to temp staffing agencies in the case of a nurse shortage.
Nurses are mostly unionized and the union would go ballistic if such software is actually used to undercut their salaries. So you really should read into how they run such software before you go out blurting stupid shit like this.
And go with Mac OS X... they will have at least one cash cow, MS Office X ported as is.
Windows needs a redesign.
Uhm.. I know CS is difficult, but to put it on the intelectual scale above rocket science, is a bit too much , won't you agree? After all, any ol' programmer can use a $1500 dollar PC to create software at any rate he wishes... but to create rockets, or their components, it require a bit more than 1500 dollars and a knowledge of computer architecture and a programming language.
Checking every piece of code against a potential patent-violation is absurd. Software, unlike hardware, is notoriously difficult to patent. This is because the barrier of entry into creating something patentable in terms of software is quite low compared to creating the latest VLSI circuit with the same algorithm as you would on the software. E.g. you could write a Palm emulator for their best model, conceivably at 1/10th the cost of what it'd cost you to build a Palm device....
... is downright retarded.
Thus, software is far more dynamic and far more difficult to patent.
This is a distinction that needs to be acknowledged when considering patents, patent violations, etc. So, recently it was said Linux could violate 283 patents.....
Right..it could... but what people don't understand, and what goes against the grain of capitalism I suppose and the sentiment of business in the united states or wider, is that Linux transcended the classical model of capitalism... forgive me for a lack of a better description.. but it has taken on a regime and a life of its own, and has hinged people on it because it is of a different nature than anything else out there. Primarily this stems from the fact that it is free, and moreover, because it is open and modifiable by anyone who understands it..
So you give this to enough people, you make it good enough..and you hook major companies on it... and it becomes the feeding trough now, and not some obscure student's pet project...and the effects are that IBM will fight tooth and nail assholes like SCO, or others losers, to prevent them from biting into their flesh....
You can only HOPE that others will do the same, whoever those 283 potential patent litigators are... You can hope that their conscienctiousness and hope for a better future will transcend their greed for a brief millisecond and help them decide against litigating Linux....
What people need is an _attitude_ change. Not getting lost in endless litigation over patents, as if whatever was invented since Einstein brought us the theory of GR could even remotely be called an 'invention'... Think about what REALLY was an invention over the last couple of centuries? Really, you could probably name them if you tried hard... The rest, I call evolving, not really a intelectual LEAP...
So, yes, it is important not to abandon capitalistic postulates, but at the same time, to think that this modus operandi is the ultimate one, and that there can never be something better
Sorry..this went off topic, but your thinking is representative of a much larger issue, that Linux has managed to untap.
I'm not a FreeBSD proponent, but if I may remark here in addition to what you said - where the *BSD folk got it right is in sticking to one distro and one distro only, so that there's no "Red Hat" or Suse or whatever the fu*k ... If Linux, or Linus Torvalds I should say, was also as smart about a distro as he was about building out the kernel, he'd have (10 years ago) opted to have an 'official' distro across all platforms, an if not all platforms, at least x86... (which is most popular anyway).
What we've got here now, today, is gazillion distros all a rip off one another, and processes/standards like LSB trying to make sense of all of them and prevent the redhats of the world from charging 3000/certification, as if what Redhat is certifying you against is something holier than any other distribution out there...
If Linux fucked it up on any front (excluding the desktop front, because that's dominated by M$ and Apple Mac OS X - with a true GUI killer on top of it), it would probably be the distro front and the inability to have a single distribution for everyone. At least in this regard, you gotta hand it to the BSD folk when they say that they were doing kernel development when Linus was in kindergarden... I ain't saying Linux is any worse than BSD, so dont jump on my throat just yet, I think it's the best OS out there currently but boy did they fuck it up with the distributions or what....
As someone who used to hang on IRC (EFNet as well as Undernet), I can tell you it's an extremely addictive thing... I've met numerous people from IRC and made numerous friends from it, so it can be a good thing too. If you only leave it at chatting but don't do much else, it's kind of stupid and you're wasting your time.. I used it as a forum to get together with my countrymen whom were also here in the United States.
Overall, objectively speaking, if you have some other way of using your time in a constructive manner, you're better off doing that than wasting time on IRC. While this may be hard to do, it's usually the wisest thing to do.. Go write some open source software or what not... Much better use of your time.
Perhaps. But definitely not if IBM will have a part in all this.