We see and Winboi's can be just as bad - or worse.
Complete and utter BS. No one actually likes Microsoft,
least of all their largest customers. People use their software because
no perfect alternative exists, and many people view Apple as more expensive
(don't get into the holy war, whether true or not most people believe
if) and Linux as too much hassle or only for geeks (don't go there either,
jus' sayin').
But when Microsoft breaks something, their users call for Bill's blood. When
Apple does something like this, its users offer Steve their own blood
defending against all those mean people who would dare call an Apple product
defective (whether by design or not).
How can you make the assessment that IBM is in the wrong by
introducing the 15% reduction without knowing the salary range
in question?
More importantly, without knowing the weekly hours range as
well. Personally, I would jump at the opportunity of taking
a 15% paycut if I could get OT pay, because my take-home would go up
considerably.
For everyone calling IBM evil bastards over this, consider - Working
hourly rather than salaried, a 15% pay cut translates to a mere 4.7 hours
of overtime. After that, you make more than you did before.
So, if this involves only an extra hour or two here and there, IBM sucks.
If more like 10 hours, these people will make quite a chunk of extra change
each week.
Gravitational waves (the phenomenon) are a very clear and very well understood prediction of the theory of General Relativity.
Yeah yeah, I understand that. So why haven't we ever seen one of these flying pink unicorns?
If, ultimately, gravitational waves are not detected by LIGO and its successors that would prove GR was incorrect.
Quantum phsics already "proves" GR as wrong. We just can't articulate how.
In any case, I disagree. The wrongness of GR doesn't necessarily follow from a lack of gravity waves - We simply don't
know how gravity works. It could have an underlying mechanism totally outside the scope of GR, thereby not disproving
GR but requiring a small modification to it, just as GR didn't "destroy" Newtonian physics. We still use the classic kinetics
laws juuuuust fine in day-to-day calculations. Instead, it extended the older work into a realm that Newton had virtually
no knowledge of. I don't see why the same idea can't apply here.
The non-detection was actually a valuable contribution, as it helped to distinguish between competing models for what powers GRBs.
Alternately, since no one can really say where gravity itself comes from, the concept behind LIGO could simply fail to
account for how gravity really works.
Who can say that the same shortening of one side compared to the other doesn't affect the speed of light proportionately
to the change in length? In that case, we could just as well have a black hole buzz our solar system and LIGO would
hapilly report nothing of interest.
I 100% support science research, especially into some of the "real" unsolved problems such as the
nature of gravity itself; but I would call this simply "bad" science - You can't use one poorly-understood
phenomenon to explore another.
Considering many electronics assembly shops have people on staff that used to (like,
last week) work for a competitor the possibility of moles in real. So, prevent documents
from being opened by non-authorized personnel.
That doesn't require DRM, however - Nothing more than sane file permissions
on the server.
Also, if you build anything sensitive enough that someone would pay to steal the
plans, why do you have one untrusted person working on a large enough chunk to get
something juicy? "Attach Widget A to Wocket B using 47 reverse-threaded Thorplenuts".
End of job description - Paperwork? Why?
I've had to deal with all of that in a manufacturing environment.
So have I, inlcuding one industry most people would call somewhat "sensitive".
And you simply don't worry about the line workers. New engineers, yes. Manufacturing
staff, not unless you have far more fundamental security problems than mere trust
issues.
after midnight all desktops that are not in the excluded list hibernate automatically. I used python + MFC . Was very easy and simple.
As opposed to, say, making a scheduled task to run "rundll32.exe powrprof.dll,setsuspendstate hibernate" at midnight?
That approach also has the perk of letting you specify that the task should not run unless the system remains idle for a
given amount of time, so you won't knock anyone off who stayed late.
Do security concerns and power consumption issues matter enough to do this?
Yes and no.
When I first got comfortable in my current job, I made a big push toward "greening" our IT
resources. As one obvious (erroneously, as I'll explain in a sec) step in this, I convinced
most of my users to shut down at night. If we need to push out updates, WOL works just fine
for turning machines on a couple hours before the start of the day, and it doesn't impact
anyone during working hours.
Then I learned how electric billing actually works for commercial users - Put simply, your
company doesn't care if machines stay on all night, because they pay based on their
peak load, which will always occur during normal business hours. I had applied
ideas that make perfect sense at home, to an environment where they don't apply.
Now, that doesn't mean we should just leave machines on 24/7 - Using electricity has an
an environmental aspect in addition to the monetary cost. But if it inconveniences users
by more than a few seconds every day, any conservation efforts will actually cost the
company money in the long run.
So, I still encourage my users to shut down, and 95% comply. But if they consider it too much
of a hassle, I can't financially justify forcing them to spend the first minute of the work
day waiting for their machine to boot (not that anyone really works for the first five
to ten minutes of the day, between coffee, hitting the bathroom, and just getting the obligatory
morning socializing out of the way).
As for the security aspect of this, the servers must run 24/7, and any attacker would
target them rather than some random user's desktop. I don't worry about an attacker
using a compromised desktop as an intermediate step to the servers, because the desktops have
no more privileges on them than anything else inside the firewall (and even then, not much more
than a totally untrusted source, except for nonconfidential shared resources that we could
restore in a matter of minutes if necessary).
An ounce of documentation is worth a pound of analysis.
I (and I think most geeks) will agree with you 100%. But...
In the real world, I find that most documentation often hurts rather
than helps, because it goes out of date so quickly. "Okay, so
I can drop a line to the router at this intersection... Where the hell did
this wall come from?"
The big problem with DVD recorders for me (as an American) is that
getting a show off my DVR and into a recorder is a pain in the ass.
Doesn't that kinda misses the point of both devices?
I have a DVR as well as a DVD recorder...
I use the former for day-to-day crap that I can't catch live (or even if I can, I'll
usually record it and watch the next day, just so I can skip the commercials).
I use the latter to catch programs that I'll either want to watch more than
once (or one-time broadcasts that will never make it to a DVD set yet have some
"archival" value to my interests), or that I want to share with someone who may
not have cable (more common, at least in my area, than you may believe).
I can record on both of them at the same time, however, when necessary (even
the same show, if I really wanted to).
Because 14-day-old embryos have such well-developed nervous
systems that they can appreciate (nevermind even "experience") pain?
Do you know how many embryos are going to be destroyed
No. Do you?
More importantly - So what? At that stage of life, you have organic scum
in a tube. What it could someday turn into has no relevance to its
status at that developmental level.
There are better ways to get stem cells people.
Yes - Yes, we do indeed have better ways. But the goddamned fundies
don't seem inclined to let us use the numerous extra embryos from human
fertility therapies (nevermind abortions), so we need to find new, even
more absurd, ways to get them.
The embryos would then be destroyed within 14 days.
So, anyone else consider that the single most dissapointing part of this?
They'd almost certainly not live long enough to ever call them infants, but
even in the steps they do last through, we could learn so much by
watching how they develop differently from either human or other-half
embryos.
And if they actually lived to term, well, I would consider their
cognitive develpment nothing short of fascinating to observe.
That statement translates to "give me what you agreed to sell me, which I dutifully
paid for". I'd hardly call that stupid, except in the sense that we shouldn't
need to say it in the first place.
Most people don't care about the plight of the poor, starving "merely" 30%
market share ISP. They care that they can play their online games, get their
email, surf the web, and download streaming HD porn. The end user's obligation
to "care" ends when they send in their monthly check.
The ISP, on the other hand, has an obligation to actually provide a
reasonable approximation to what they've sold. Does that mean they'd need to
charge far, far more per customer? Too bad! If they can't provide it, they
can't sell it. If they sell it, they damned well better provide it.
Alternatively, you could exercise some courtesy and just not leave
BitTorrent downloading 24/7.
Why? I want to sell you this orange, the whole, unlimited, complete orange - But
wait! I sold the same orange to nine other people, so could you "considerately"
only eat 10% of it and leave the rest for others?
Since we made the whole damned ball of wax for our
own amusement, and Joe Public decided to tag along
for the free porn, I'd have to say that yes, only
the geek interpretation matters. Joe can thank us (as can
the Hunters of Commerce who hungrily stalk Joe and his kind),
but his "interpretations" of the scenario simply do not matter.
If you don't understand the rules of poker and try to play,
you'll go home shirtless. The same idea applies here. If they
want into our game, they'd damned well better learn the rules
before playing for anything more than token plastic chips.
The only "crime" here results from a judge who doesn't understand
that DNS servers exist to serve, unless told otherwise (a not
difficult task). Yes, you could say the defendant "harassed" the
company - Which the company could have stopped with one line in a
config file.
The public who understands it, opposes it. The rest of the public
has no clue what they even asked (though would oppose it if
they did). And the FCC will still
side with the three comments from guys like Rupert Murdoch.
Before you know it the code has been running for decades.
...And I've retired, problem solved.
Mmmm, sweet sweet post-retirement contracting income! And just about on the right schedule
for me, too! Time to start making my code as dependant on 32-bit timestamps as possible (Stupid
Windows with its 64-bit "100 nanoseconds since 1/1/1601", trying to rob me, the bastards!).;-)
and the same Usual Suspects were all up in arms over it, and, of course, it is now so accepted
and commonplace no one even remembers there was an outrage.
And the cancer rate, and the autism rate, and the diabetes rate, and the asthma rate all
keep going up and up and up, despite once counting as rare diseases (with the possible
exception of cancer as simply underdiagnosed). We have a whole slew of "new" diseases that humanity
has never seen before (MS, CFS, fybromyalgia), which we can't even attribute to underdiagnosis because
they leave people unable to function.
Do we blame that on cloned meat? Hormone-treated meat? Antibiotic-treated meat? GM plants? Pesticide use?
No. No one offense to nature can take all the credit. Regardless, we keep slapping the bitch harder
and harder, and it shows in how she treats us in response.
Resign
And let someone who knows what they're doing operate.
Close to my idea, so I'll respond to you rather than start a new thread...
Step 1: Pick one of the non-whackjob libertarians as my VP, and pack my
cabinet with moderates from every political party I can think of except
the Asses and Elephants.
Step 2: Order NASA to build a new space-shuttle - Not the current crappy STS models,
one of the cool ones we've seen prototypes and concept drawings of for years but
never seem to get around to building.
Step 3: At the launch party, steal said new shuttle and distract attention from
my VP and cabinet so they can actually get things done.
To protect the value of its trademarks, Ford is obligated to
object to and pursue unauthorized uses of its trademarks
...And in other news, the newly formed "Black Corvette Club" recently
released this year's calendar, inexplicably titled "Get the hint?",
showing all 150k members arranged in a giant "F" mooning the camera.
The rear cover features their classic Chevrolet vehicles parked in
the shape of a giant gun pointed at a giant foot.
if I were out of a job, I suspect I'd be spending my time making
what money I could and looking for steady income rather than fluffing
my resume.
True enough - But you can't really actively "look" for a job more than
10 hours per week, and if you have steady enough contracting work to take
up the rest of your time, I wouldn't really call that "unemployed".:)
There are a lot of businesses that rely on people working for
them for free because they get a pay check somewhere else, and I
think that a recession would make people question working without
getting any dollars in return.'
On the flip side of that, if you have a lot of unemployed coders
who want to keep their skill-set up-to-date (as well as avoid a large
gap in their work history), open source provides a way to do both.
Now figure out how you're going to get all of that into space.
Load by load via a maglev-like tube going up a mountain, accellerating each
payload to (slightly) exceed escape velocity before flinging it off into
space (preferably in the general direction we want it - It may work better to
initially send it to a high Earth orbit and manually move it out from there).
Now figure out how you're going to shield it from radiation, feed the
hundreds of employees.
With the hydroponic gargens in the outer layer of the factory/station.
Even when you've got it, now figure out how you're going to get it
back down to the ground.
Move it back to HEO and let gravity take care of the rest.
You point out some of the major problems, but most of them already
have a solution. Only the cost involved has kept us from doing exactly
that already - For a few trillion dollars, Biosphere III could just as
well occupy L4 as any site on Earth. And while that may sound like a lot
of money, it may look cheap compared to the price of any of a number
of increasingly scarce resources (copper, tantalum, beryllium - Pretty much
any metal other than iron, really) 50 years from now.
What would have happened if MS had open sourced WinFS?
"Hey guys, I have this great idea - Let's take a passably fast storage medium, the hard drive... And
instead of using a one-layer mapping of filenames to physical locations, we can store everything in
an SQL database the size of the whole drive! That way, we can take advantage of all the speed,
reliability, and economy of resource use of MSSQL, and apply that to every file operation,
no matter how trivial! Sure, we might get timeouts under heavy loads (such as booting), but really,
those lazy programmers should check for failure of (previously) atomic file ops in the first place!"
I just don't see the practicality of a system that only works at 3cm, it seems to me more like an upgrade to IrDA, not USB
Pish - IrDA will at least work across most conference tables, it just requires line-of-sight and having the transmitter
and receiver roughly pointed at one another.
This sounds more like Vista - Fixing something that doesn't need fixing (W-USB) by adding features almost no one wants (a mere 8%
speed boost), at the expense of core functionality (not needing physical contact).
There are many aspects of the application that I don't have time to refine ... However, I don't know how I earn money from something once I've made it open source.
Short answer: You don't.
Longer answer - You've written a pair of contradictory statements there. Making money from FOSS
requires you to stop thinking of the program (whether executable or source) as a final product to
sell.
You need to view the program as a hook. People use it and either want support or more
features, and they pay you for exactly that. However, you've already stated that you don't
have the time to further refine the program, which also implies you don't have time to do support
for the program. Thus, you will not make money selling your program if you release it
as FOSS (and unless you have something really quite impressive, you won't make money on it
in a closed version, either.
Sad but true. If you do FOSS, do it for the love of doing it, because it almost certainly won't
bring you any profit.
Slashdot Mirror
We see and Winboi's can be just as bad - or worse.
;-)
Complete and utter BS. No one actually likes Microsoft, least of all their largest customers. People use their software because no perfect alternative exists, and many people view Apple as more expensive (don't get into the holy war, whether true or not most people believe if) and Linux as too much hassle or only for geeks (don't go there either, jus' sayin').
But when Microsoft breaks something, their users call for Bill's blood. When Apple does something like this, its users offer Steve their own blood defending against all those mean people who would dare call an Apple product defective (whether by design or not).
based on absolutely no evidence
Well, when Apple keeps deleting it...
How can you make the assessment that IBM is in the wrong by introducing the 15% reduction without knowing the salary range in question?
More importantly, without knowing the weekly hours range as well. Personally, I would jump at the opportunity of taking a 15% paycut if I could get OT pay, because my take-home would go up considerably.
For everyone calling IBM evil bastards over this, consider - Working hourly rather than salaried, a 15% pay cut translates to a mere 4.7 hours of overtime. After that, you make more than you did before.
So, if this involves only an extra hour or two here and there, IBM sucks. If more like 10 hours, these people will make quite a chunk of extra change each week.
Gravitational waves (the phenomenon) are a very clear and very well understood prediction of the theory of General Relativity.
Yeah yeah, I understand that. So why haven't we ever seen one of these flying pink unicorns?
If, ultimately, gravitational waves are not detected by LIGO and its successors that would prove GR was incorrect.
Quantum phsics already "proves" GR as wrong. We just can't articulate how.
In any case, I disagree. The wrongness of GR doesn't necessarily follow from a lack of gravity waves - We simply don't know how gravity works. It could have an underlying mechanism totally outside the scope of GR, thereby not disproving GR but requiring a small modification to it, just as GR didn't "destroy" Newtonian physics. We still use the classic kinetics laws juuuuust fine in day-to-day calculations. Instead, it extended the older work into a realm that Newton had virtually no knowledge of. I don't see why the same idea can't apply here.
The non-detection was actually a valuable contribution, as it helped to distinguish between competing models for what powers GRBs.
Alternately, since no one can really say where gravity itself comes from, the concept behind LIGO could simply fail to account for how gravity really works.
Who can say that the same shortening of one side compared to the other doesn't affect the speed of light proportionately to the change in length? In that case, we could just as well have a black hole buzz our solar system and LIGO would hapilly report nothing of interest.
I 100% support science research, especially into some of the "real" unsolved problems such as the nature of gravity itself; but I would call this simply "bad" science - You can't use one poorly-understood phenomenon to explore another.
Considering many electronics assembly shops have people on staff that used to (like, last week) work for a competitor the possibility of moles in real. So, prevent documents from being opened by non-authorized personnel.
That doesn't require DRM, however - Nothing more than sane file permissions on the server.
Also, if you build anything sensitive enough that someone would pay to steal the plans, why do you have one untrusted person working on a large enough chunk to get something juicy? "Attach Widget A to Wocket B using 47 reverse-threaded Thorplenuts". End of job description - Paperwork? Why?
I've had to deal with all of that in a manufacturing environment.
So have I, inlcuding one industry most people would call somewhat "sensitive". And you simply don't worry about the line workers. New engineers, yes. Manufacturing staff, not unless you have far more fundamental security problems than mere trust issues.
after midnight all desktops that are not in the excluded list hibernate automatically. I used python + MFC . Was very easy and simple.
As opposed to, say, making a scheduled task to run "rundll32.exe powrprof.dll,setsuspendstate hibernate" at midnight?
That approach also has the perk of letting you specify that the task should not run unless the system remains idle for a given amount of time, so you won't knock anyone off who stayed late.
Do security concerns and power consumption issues matter enough to do this?
Yes and no.
When I first got comfortable in my current job, I made a big push toward "greening" our IT resources. As one obvious (erroneously, as I'll explain in a sec) step in this, I convinced most of my users to shut down at night. If we need to push out updates, WOL works just fine for turning machines on a couple hours before the start of the day, and it doesn't impact anyone during working hours.
Then I learned how electric billing actually works for commercial users - Put simply, your company doesn't care if machines stay on all night, because they pay based on their peak load, which will always occur during normal business hours. I had applied ideas that make perfect sense at home, to an environment where they don't apply.
Now, that doesn't mean we should just leave machines on 24/7 - Using electricity has an an environmental aspect in addition to the monetary cost. But if it inconveniences users by more than a few seconds every day, any conservation efforts will actually cost the company money in the long run.
So, I still encourage my users to shut down, and 95% comply. But if they consider it too much of a hassle, I can't financially justify forcing them to spend the first minute of the work day waiting for their machine to boot (not that anyone really works for the first five to ten minutes of the day, between coffee, hitting the bathroom, and just getting the obligatory morning socializing out of the way).
As for the security aspect of this, the servers must run 24/7, and any attacker would target them rather than some random user's desktop. I don't worry about an attacker using a compromised desktop as an intermediate step to the servers, because the desktops have no more privileges on them than anything else inside the firewall (and even then, not much more than a totally untrusted source, except for nonconfidential shared resources that we could restore in a matter of minutes if necessary).
An ounce of documentation is worth a pound of analysis.
I (and I think most geeks) will agree with you 100%. But...
In the real world, I find that most documentation often hurts rather than helps, because it goes out of date so quickly. "Okay, so I can drop a line to the router at this intersection... Where the hell did this wall come from?"
The big problem with DVD recorders for me (as an American) is that getting a show off my DVR and into a recorder is a pain in the ass.
Doesn't that kinda misses the point of both devices?
I have a DVR as well as a DVD recorder...
I use the former for day-to-day crap that I can't catch live (or even if I can, I'll usually record it and watch the next day, just so I can skip the commercials).
I use the latter to catch programs that I'll either want to watch more than once (or one-time broadcasts that will never make it to a DVD set yet have some "archival" value to my interests), or that I want to share with someone who may not have cable (more common, at least in my area, than you may believe).
I can record on both of them at the same time, however, when necessary (even the same show, if I really wanted to).
This is animal cruelty, plain and simple.
Because 14-day-old embryos have such well-developed nervous systems that they can appreciate (nevermind even "experience") pain?
Do you know how many embryos are going to be destroyed
No. Do you?
More importantly - So what? At that stage of life, you have organic scum in a tube. What it could someday turn into has no relevance to its status at that developmental level.
There are better ways to get stem cells people.
Yes - Yes, we do indeed have better ways. But the goddamned fundies don't seem inclined to let us use the numerous extra embryos from human fertility therapies (nevermind abortions), so we need to find new, even more absurd, ways to get them.
The embryos would then be destroyed within 14 days.
So, anyone else consider that the single most dissapointing part of this?
They'd almost certainly not live long enough to ever call them infants, but even in the steps they do last through, we could learn so much by watching how they develop differently from either human or other-half embryos.
And if they actually lived to term, well, I would consider their cognitive develpment nothing short of fascinating to observe.
This statement is utterly stupid.
That statement translates to "give me what you agreed to sell me, which I dutifully paid for". I'd hardly call that stupid, except in the sense that we shouldn't need to say it in the first place.
Most people don't care about the plight of the poor, starving "merely" 30% market share ISP. They care that they can play their online games, get their email, surf the web, and download streaming HD porn. The end user's obligation to "care" ends when they send in their monthly check.
The ISP, on the other hand, has an obligation to actually provide a reasonable approximation to what they've sold. Does that mean they'd need to charge far, far more per customer? Too bad! If they can't provide it, they can't sell it. If they sell it, they damned well better provide it.
Alternatively, you could exercise some courtesy and just not leave BitTorrent downloading 24/7.
Why? I want to sell you this orange, the whole, unlimited, complete orange - But wait! I sold the same orange to nine other people, so could you "considerately" only eat 10% of it and leave the rest for others?
Don't sell what you don't have. End of story.
I'm not 100% sure we're 100% right
Since we made the whole damned ball of wax for our own amusement, and Joe Public decided to tag along for the free porn, I'd have to say that yes, only the geek interpretation matters. Joe can thank us (as can the Hunters of Commerce who hungrily stalk Joe and his kind), but his "interpretations" of the scenario simply do not matter.
If you don't understand the rules of poker and try to play, you'll go home shirtless. The same idea applies here. If they want into our game, they'd damned well better learn the rules before playing for anything more than token plastic chips.
The only "crime" here results from a judge who doesn't understand that DNS servers exist to serve, unless told otherwise (a not difficult task). Yes, you could say the defendant "harassed" the company - Which the company could have stopped with one line in a config file.
FCC Seeks Comment In Comcast P2P Investigation
Why, so they can ignore it again?
The public who understands it, opposes it. The rest of the public has no clue what they even asked (though would oppose it if they did). And the FCC will still side with the three comments from guys like Rupert Murdoch.
Before you know it the code has been running for decades.
...And I've retired, problem solved.
;-)
Mmmm, sweet sweet post-retirement contracting income! And just about on the right schedule for me, too! Time to start making my code as dependant on 32-bit timestamps as possible (Stupid Windows with its 64-bit "100 nanoseconds since 1/1/1601", trying to rob me, the bastards!).
and the same Usual Suspects were all up in arms over it, and, of course, it is now so accepted and commonplace no one even remembers there was an outrage.
And the cancer rate, and the autism rate, and the diabetes rate, and the asthma rate all keep going up and up and up, despite once counting as rare diseases (with the possible exception of cancer as simply underdiagnosed). We have a whole slew of "new" diseases that humanity has never seen before (MS, CFS, fybromyalgia), which we can't even attribute to underdiagnosis because they leave people unable to function.
Do we blame that on cloned meat? Hormone-treated meat? Antibiotic-treated meat? GM plants? Pesticide use?
No. No one offense to nature can take all the credit. Regardless, we keep slapping the bitch harder and harder, and it shows in how she treats us in response.
That depends on what you mean by a "game"... any game, a video game, a PC game?
The first game (of any sort) I remember playing - War (the card game).
The first video game, A Qix variant played on an Emerson Arcadia (or Odyssey 2? Not 100% sure about which, what with it 25+ years ago).
My first PC game, A cheesy text-based poker game. My first real PC game, Might & Magic (the original one).
My first online game, a pre-Circle-3 variant, of which I no longer remember the site name.
Resign
And let someone who knows what they're doing operate.
Close to my idea, so I'll respond to you rather than start a new thread...
Step 1: Pick one of the non-whackjob libertarians as my VP, and pack my cabinet with moderates from every political party I can think of except the Asses and Elephants.
Step 2: Order NASA to build a new space-shuttle - Not the current crappy STS models, one of the cool ones we've seen prototypes and concept drawings of for years but never seem to get around to building.
Step 3: At the launch party, steal said new shuttle and distract attention from my VP and cabinet so they can actually get things done.
To protect the value of its trademarks, Ford is obligated to object to and pursue unauthorized uses of its trademarks
...And in other news, the newly formed "Black Corvette Club" recently
released this year's calendar, inexplicably titled "Get the hint?",
showing all 150k members arranged in a giant "F" mooning the camera.
The rear cover features their classic Chevrolet vehicles parked in
the shape of a giant gun pointed at a giant foot.
if I were out of a job, I suspect I'd be spending my time making what money I could and looking for steady income rather than fluffing my resume.
:)
True enough - But you can't really actively "look" for a job more than 10 hours per week, and if you have steady enough contracting work to take up the rest of your time, I wouldn't really call that "unemployed".
There are a lot of businesses that rely on people working for them for free because they get a pay check somewhere else, and I think that a recession would make people question working without getting any dollars in return.'
On the flip side of that, if you have a lot of unemployed coders who want to keep their skill-set up-to-date (as well as avoid a large gap in their work history), open source provides a way to do both.
Now figure out how you're going to get all of that into space.
Load by load via a maglev-like tube going up a mountain, accellerating each payload to (slightly) exceed escape velocity before flinging it off into space (preferably in the general direction we want it - It may work better to initially send it to a high Earth orbit and manually move it out from there).
Now figure out how you're going to shield it from radiation, feed the hundreds of employees.
With the hydroponic gargens in the outer layer of the factory/station.
Even when you've got it, now figure out how you're going to get it back down to the ground.
Move it back to HEO and let gravity take care of the rest.
You point out some of the major problems, but most of them already have a solution. Only the cost involved has kept us from doing exactly that already - For a few trillion dollars, Biosphere III could just as well occupy L4 as any site on Earth. And while that may sound like a lot of money, it may look cheap compared to the price of any of a number of increasingly scarce resources (copper, tantalum, beryllium - Pretty much any metal other than iron, really) 50 years from now.
What would have happened if MS had open sourced WinFS?
"Hey guys, I have this great idea - Let's take a passably fast storage medium, the hard drive... And instead of using a one-layer mapping of filenames to physical locations, we can store everything in an SQL database the size of the whole drive! That way, we can take advantage of all the speed, reliability, and economy of resource use of MSSQL, and apply that to every file operation, no matter how trivial! Sure, we might get timeouts under heavy loads (such as booting), but really, those lazy programmers should check for failure of (previously) atomic file ops in the first place!"
I just don't see the practicality of a system that only works at 3cm, it seems to me more like an upgrade to IrDA, not USB
Pish - IrDA will at least work across most conference tables, it just requires line-of-sight and having the transmitter and receiver roughly pointed at one another.
This sounds more like Vista - Fixing something that doesn't need fixing (W-USB) by adding features almost no one wants (a mere 8% speed boost), at the expense of core functionality (not needing physical contact).
There are many aspects of the application that I don't have time to refine
...
However, I don't know how I earn money from something once I've made it open source.
Short answer: You don't.
Longer answer - You've written a pair of contradictory statements there. Making money from FOSS requires you to stop thinking of the program (whether executable or source) as a final product to sell.
You need to view the program as a hook. People use it and either want support or more features, and they pay you for exactly that. However, you've already stated that you don't have the time to further refine the program, which also implies you don't have time to do support for the program. Thus, you will not make money selling your program if you release it as FOSS (and unless you have something really quite impressive, you won't make money on it in a closed version, either.
Sad but true. If you do FOSS, do it for the love of doing it, because it almost certainly won't bring you any profit.