Keep in mind that the court generally won't restrict the police if the technology is generally available. So if a technology with surveillance capabilities is commonly used by the general populace, then you can't usually prevent the state from employing it. Besides, think about it: the idea that someone driving the highway can link cars, by tag, to individuals and their home address is kind of creepy. Automated stalking.
First- you need a market strategy. Who are you selling to (retailers, clubs, direct to the public). Pick you staff appropriately.
Second - don't offer partnership at the outset, offer shares and partnership on a conditional basis. Make the offer fair to the people you want to bring on and CLEARLY structured in terms of performance metrics.
Third- you will need to offer a draw against a commission. Make a percentage of sales deal with sweeteners (such as aforesaid partnership) for milestones. Put it in writing. Stick to it.
Fourth- If you can find a marketer with experience with the retail segment and the specific retailers they will probably give you the best results quickly, but they may not be the best partners.
Only you can gauge what the sales volumes need to be, and therefore only you can set the targets. The marketer can tell you if they feel the targets are way off. Also remember, in any game all the players rate the percentage due to them too highly.
Technically the US Government would adopt rules that require switch manufacturers to include features that would allow the government to assume control in an 'emergency'. Phone companies are required to keep call logs and allow wiretaps, it would extend the same model. In normal day to day operation there would be no filtering. Or maybe only the filtering that the MPAA requested. If the authorities ever felt threatened in a way that was construed as 'national security' they would kick in their control. They would not do a complete shutdown like Egypt, in all likelihood. They might route all DNS requests to servers they controlled and you would get 404 messages to sites you visit that are being taken off-line. Stuff like that.
Right now, no - they don't have that control, but if they require it in the infrastructure it will go in without a whiff of protest from the manufacturers. They would see increased sales and price rises. And the Iranians would be happy because they could upgrade, too, and take advantage of easier friendlier control of information.
The real point for me is something I heard Steven Breyer say once on a roundtable discussion. "The first thing I ask when someone wants to hide information is 'Why?'" Basically, if the government - ours or Egypt's or any other - feels it needs to take control of information to keep control of its citizenry it is almost by definition admitting its own illegitimacy.
Why not remove it from control of any nation by chartering it as an independent entity funded by levies to governments, but controlled by representatives elected by users divided into regions. This way no government could control the election of representatives, which would minimize outright threats to censorship. The rest could be handled by the charter itself. This is just an idea - maybe we could all stop the recriminations for a while and work it out. No... on second thought recriminations are too much fun.
Ways that meaning are encapsulated in different human languages can be a useful way to demonstrate the structural underpinnings of programming languages. Linguistics is more interesting than reading Boole and gives you a way to think about larger structures without tying you to a particular paradigm. All computer languages have strengths, all are inadequate. But so are human languages. There is a Korean word that expresses this exactly, but it doeasn't translate directly into English.:-)
Until you actually look at the facts. The tax cuts were not the same percentage cut for everyone. They were weighted to give the most percentage reduction to the top earners. They contained cuts like dividend and capital gains adjustments that specifically target wealthy rather than middle class taxpayers. They contain other provisions that can ONLY be used by business or high income earners (special depreciation rules for businesses, etc). Your argument is the facile one, not the original poster. Why- and this is not directed at you personally, but at all of us collectively- do we rag someone out for a reasoned argument before we acquaint ourselves with the actual facts? Aren't we supposed to be tech savvy types, don't we respect facts?
This government (and not just this administration) has gotten very good at gaming the news cycle to mislead the citizenry into supporting some pretty vile stuff. The frustrating thing is that none of the things we have been led to do (warrantless wiretapping, waterboarding and Guantanamo) have been the least bit effective at actually solving crimes, preventing terrorist attacks or bringing the a guilty to justice. Every expert knows this, anybody who reads the experts knows this and a large segment of the population, the majority of the GOP presidential candidates, as well as Congressmen of both parties and 10% of the Slashdot community, won't believe the truth. The most effective solutions to the problem were already in place before 9-11. The failures were HUMAN failures, we already knew all the parts, we didn't connect the dots. Keeping a man in sensory deprivation for a month will break a man - it won't connect the dots. Filtering the internet traffic for keywords makes more dots, but it doesn't connect any. Over the last 6 years we haven't made ourselves any safer - only more depraved.
Come on....the Chinese military is capable of hacking Robert Gates' office, yet is completely incapable of obscuring their tracks? You really believe that? This is another set up situation - an insider trying to scuttle a deal, or to embarrass someone, or to effect policy in some minor way, or just to get you going. I have no doubt the office was hacked - why admit something that makes you look so incompetent, but are we really to believe that they tracked down the ACTUAL culprits? Let's ask to see the evidence, for once - they never seem to have any of that these days.
No, you are correct. The story I had read said 'Antigua and Barbuda', several days had passed and I misremembered. Not an excuse for failing to double check. Thank you both for your correction.
Barbados recently won the second (appeal) round of its WTO case against the US for laws prohibiting on-line gambling. This gives Barbados the LEGAL right to take retaliatory measures. Maybe Internet Radio and Pirate Bay can both find a new home?
The original question was not about disasters Global Warming causes, but predicted environmental catastrophe - mass species death ( loss of biodiversity) is a predicted environmental catastrophe, and one we are in the midst of. Will it be "doomsday"? Maybe, maybe not, but to suggest that because we have not been made extinct ourselves....yet....there is nothing to see here is a bit cavalier. We don't know how bad it is, but that doesn't mean it's good. or even not bad. Technology may or may not help resolve these issues, but probably not. My experience has been ( and you are free to find issues that don't fit the pattern) we are promised that a particular technology will 'fix' or 'enable' something wonderful, but we see that technology become dominated be large interests who leave the original problems in place and exploit the technology for solely their benefit.
1. Smallpox eradication under WHO (a UN body)
2. UN Mandated ceasefire and democratic restoration of Cambodia (since 1991, with severe challenges in 1997)
3. The defence of South Korea from invasion by the North. This was done under UN madate. An oldie but a goodie.
I would actually try to find more, there are many, but they don't always grab headlines, or get remembered. Meanwhile most of you disasters and failures Rwanda? Darfur?? are failures of US government policy as much as they are of the UN. Rwanda was a Clinton disaster, Darfur is a Bush disaster.
That's the thing about predictions, they happen in the future. Since
most of the predictions of the 'environmentalists' were not being made
before the 1960's, and since the timeframes are usually 50 - 100 years
out, it is not surprising that they have yet to be proven true or
false. If you discount falling
sperm counts in some men in industrial agriculture areas, rising
rates of autism in American children and rising rates of leukemia,
by ignoring the possible- but by no means proven- environmental
component behind them. To claim any of these is proof of prior claims
is inaccurate, to dismiss them as possible proof of prior claims is
disingenuous. We are in the middle of things, and can't definitively say what they mean, or if they mean anything at all. As if to dismiss everything, you say there is no 'doomsday prediction' that's come
true-but you don't admit any of the evidence unless it is positively
uncontrovertable (which is not the way of law or science-which argue
the meaning of evidence all the time), so what good is the
conversation? Extremist wackos like the ones you quote are not
representative of most environmentalists, anymore than a parade of
right wing cranks who say equally demented stuff are representative of
your views. (Unless I miss my guess and you are a devotee of Pat
Robertson). So, you are left with rising
rates of species extinction as the only proven, predicted
environmental disaster that we know of. Still, it's pretty compelling
if you think about it at all. Oh, yeah, and there's that ozone hole thing.
First, yes you can use GIMP and Photoshop to improve your images. Second, the problem you are noticing can't easily be fixed in either program. The pixellation you see is most likely a result of jpeg compression. Even jpeg fine can cause this. JPEG is lossy compression and it tries to optimize an image for shrinking. Many of the subtle shades in the sky were simply tossed out by the compressor. Use TIFF or RAW, as these do not use lossy compression. The files are much larger, but they don't use lossy routines (LZW is lossless compression, and RAW doesn't compress at all.). To try to fix the problem in Photoshop (GIMP will have similar abilities, but I don't use it so I can't instruct you) you need a good mask of the sky. Zoom in to 100% on an area of the sky ( so you have 1 pixel for each screen pixel). Use Filter | Blur | Gaussian blur and interactively blur the sky to get a smooth effect. Don't worry that it looks fake at this stage. Second use Filter | Noise | Add Noise. Take gaussian from the radio buttons at the bottom of the interactive tab that comes up. Move to a boundary of the mask so you can see the sky and the unblurred areas of the photo. Adjust the noise rate to approximate the noise in the original areas. This time it will look a little sharp, try for size approximation. Now choose Filter | Blur | Gaussian Blur again and this time select a very low number.3 or.4 pixels... adjust it to match back to the look of the original image. You will have to play around with this several times to get it right for your image - and believe me every image is different. AND NEVER USE JPEG. Save as Tiff, which is a general standard. Jpeg is for web use, it really ruins images.
There is a difference. Microsoft embodies the worst of capitalism: Untruthful, and using those lies to undermine the market, destroy rivals through deception, unfair competition and other nasty FUDDY ways. Think Word Perfect - undermined by low-ball pricing, then when the product began to fade jacking up the price for Office. Think Netscape, undermined by a free product to eliminate the market altogether. Then lies about IE as an 'integral' part of the OS that can't be eliminated- somehow Unix, Linux, and MacOS didn't have that problem. Think of all the great ideas that other people had that microsoft undermined by announcing that the next version of Windows would include that feature. Only it never appeared in a later release - it was a strategic announcement designed to scare away the money men. Think about the efforts that Steve Ballmer is making to cast doubt on the legal status of Linux - everything he says about patents applies equally to Windows - it probably violates the same number of patents. Basically, the company is dishonest to a degree that undermines the market. I am contemptuous of them for this.
Then the product itself. Very weak in the OS department, they were OK at the NT 4 stage, not up to Unix, but ahead of Mac and Linux. That was the high point - they have stagnated and Linux and Mac OS have literally blown past them, yet they maintain an inertial lock on the desktop. This is changing, but it won't be really evident for 2 years.
Office is a good product, but they charge a premium for yesterday - and Office is so yesterday. I am contemptuous of them for that.
Security was a non-thought with them. They had a hobbyist view of the world of computing and adapted it to an internet world on the fly - remember they were reacting to events that they were powerless to define. They were late to the game and they had a toy OS (windows 95) in the pipe and they just put it out and prayed. Their prayers were not answered. Windows is unsecurable. I have contempt for them for that.
But I don't hate them, they are pathetic - very rich, but still not worthy of envy or hate. They are just guys ( and women) in over their heads.
OK, Zimbabwe I understand, Mugabe has completely lost his nut and driving the society toward suspicion and fragmenting, but South Africa? I had heard good things about it, though I haven't been myself. What isn't making the headlines here? (besides the obvious). Thanks
Every body needs a little different support to account for height, weight distribution and posture. Those trendy chairs can indeed help significantly if you get the right one ( the Aeron comes in three sizes, and if you get the wrong size it will be worse than nothing ), I know people who hate the Aeron, I know people who love it - the key is to get a good chair that you have tried and know you can work comfortably in. Someone I work with had excruciating back pain after a week in a chair, that went away after two days in a new chair ( not an Aeron BTW, I am not plugging their product)
I don't believe in Windows backdoors any more that I believe that the Lenovo people are able to pull this off without anyone detecting it. Remember, Lenovo assembles these in this country and in Mexico, and the company has moved its headquarters here, and hired American executives, etc. If they got caught doing this HEADS WOULD ROLL. These people would all be guilty of spying or treason, so it wouldn't be quietly hidden away, they would face arrest, possible execution. These aren't products from a company where the Chinese government has direct control of operations, and design, specification and manufacture is worldwide.
While Levono insists that their computers pose no security risk, we need to remember that they do run the Windows OS which is a significant hole:-) On a more serious note, this is obviously a purely political step - but why? No one with any technical savvy is going to believe that these systems pose a greater security risk, unless someone independently confirms this and demonstrates how a backdoor exists. Is a mere accusation enough to get a company dumped from secure contracts, if so I have dirt on Halliburton, KBR, CACI and a host of companies who are defrauding government agencies. Isolationism doesn't score political points the way it used to, and these are the same people that will happily defend moving jobs off shore. Who are they trying to appeal to here? There can't be that many blindly stupis people in the country ( 29%, or so, it seems)...
The idea that a Microsoft of Linux means the end of the 'movement' and that Linux, or the OSS movement is immune to monopoly domination and its attendant arbitrary actions and pricing are NOT the same. Linux could become ( in some mythical future world after Linus Torvalds passes the torch, or with corrupted governments injecting laws to halt open software, or whatever) an OS dominated by one monopoly player. And that would mean the end of whatever 'movement' existed. So it can happen, but it probably won't ( absent that corrupted government thingy, which is obviously possible, since they seem so clearly to want to ), because openness itself is a hedge against it. As long as source is available domination is difficult for one group.
Slashdot Mirror
Keep in mind that the court generally won't restrict the police if the technology is generally available. So if a technology with surveillance capabilities is commonly used by the general populace, then you can't usually prevent the state from employing it. Besides, think about it: the idea that someone driving the highway can link cars, by tag, to individuals and their home address is kind of creepy. Automated stalking.
Is Matt Ridley an expert?
First- you need a market strategy. Who are you selling to (retailers, clubs, direct to the public). Pick you staff appropriately. Second - don't offer partnership at the outset, offer shares and partnership on a conditional basis. Make the offer fair to the people you want to bring on and CLEARLY structured in terms of performance metrics. Third- you will need to offer a draw against a commission. Make a percentage of sales deal with sweeteners (such as aforesaid partnership) for milestones. Put it in writing. Stick to it. Fourth- If you can find a marketer with experience with the retail segment and the specific retailers they will probably give you the best results quickly, but they may not be the best partners. Only you can gauge what the sales volumes need to be, and therefore only you can set the targets. The marketer can tell you if they feel the targets are way off. Also remember, in any game all the players rate the percentage due to them too highly.
Technically the US Government would adopt rules that require switch manufacturers to include features that would allow the government to assume control in an 'emergency'. Phone companies are required to keep call logs and allow wiretaps, it would extend the same model. In normal day to day operation there would be no filtering. Or maybe only the filtering that the MPAA requested. If the authorities ever felt threatened in a way that was construed as 'national security' they would kick in their control. They would not do a complete shutdown like Egypt, in all likelihood. They might route all DNS requests to servers they controlled and you would get 404 messages to sites you visit that are being taken off-line. Stuff like that. Right now, no - they don't have that control, but if they require it in the infrastructure it will go in without a whiff of protest from the manufacturers. They would see increased sales and price rises. And the Iranians would be happy because they could upgrade, too, and take advantage of easier friendlier control of information. The real point for me is something I heard Steven Breyer say once on a roundtable discussion. "The first thing I ask when someone wants to hide information is 'Why?'" Basically, if the government - ours or Egypt's or any other - feels it needs to take control of information to keep control of its citizenry it is almost by definition admitting its own illegitimacy.
I believe I was pretty clear in stating that I wanted to remove it from the control of any government, as in ANY Government.
Why not remove it from control of any nation by chartering it as an independent entity funded by levies to governments, but controlled by representatives elected by users divided into regions. This way no government could control the election of representatives, which would minimize outright threats to censorship. The rest could be handled by the charter itself. This is just an idea - maybe we could all stop the recriminations for a while and work it out. No... on second thought recriminations are too much fun.
Ways that meaning are encapsulated in different human languages can be a useful way to demonstrate the structural underpinnings of programming languages. Linguistics is more interesting than reading Boole and gives you a way to think about larger structures without tying you to a particular paradigm. All computer languages have strengths, all are inadequate. But so are human languages. There is a Korean word that expresses this exactly, but it doeasn't translate directly into English. :-)
Until you actually look at the facts. The tax cuts were not the same percentage cut for everyone. They were weighted to give the most percentage reduction to the top earners. They contained cuts like dividend and capital gains adjustments that specifically target wealthy rather than middle class taxpayers. They contain other provisions that can ONLY be used by business or high income earners (special depreciation rules for businesses, etc). Your argument is the facile one, not the original poster. Why- and this is not directed at you personally, but at all of us collectively- do we rag someone out for a reasoned argument before we acquaint ourselves with the actual facts? Aren't we supposed to be tech savvy types, don't we respect facts?
This government (and not just this administration) has gotten very good at gaming the news cycle to mislead the citizenry into supporting some pretty vile stuff. The frustrating thing is that none of the things we have been led to do (warrantless wiretapping, waterboarding and Guantanamo) have been the least bit effective at actually solving crimes, preventing terrorist attacks or bringing the a guilty to justice. Every expert knows this, anybody who reads the experts knows this and a large segment of the population, the majority of the GOP presidential candidates, as well as Congressmen of both parties and 10% of the Slashdot community, won't believe the truth. The most effective solutions to the problem were already in place before 9-11. The failures were HUMAN failures, we already knew all the parts, we didn't connect the dots. Keeping a man in sensory deprivation for a month will break a man - it won't connect the dots. Filtering the internet traffic for keywords makes more dots, but it doesn't connect any. Over the last 6 years we haven't made ourselves any safer - only more depraved.
Come on....the Chinese military is capable of hacking Robert Gates' office, yet is completely incapable of obscuring their tracks? You really believe that? This is another set up situation - an insider trying to scuttle a deal, or to embarrass someone, or to effect policy in some minor way, or just to get you going. I have no doubt the office was hacked - why admit something that makes you look so incompetent, but are we really to believe that they tracked down the ACTUAL culprits? Let's ask to see the evidence, for once - they never seem to have any of that these days.
But it could correctly indicate you were 60% likely to be a dissident, which is good enough in most jurisdictions.
No, you are correct. The story I had read said 'Antigua and Barbuda', several days had passed and I misremembered. Not an excuse for failing to double check. Thank you both for your correction.
Barbados recently won the second (appeal) round of its WTO case against the US for laws prohibiting on-line gambling. This gives Barbados the LEGAL right to take retaliatory measures. Maybe Internet Radio and Pirate Bay can both find a new home?
The original question was not about disasters Global Warming causes, but predicted environmental catastrophe - mass species death ( loss of biodiversity) is a predicted environmental catastrophe, and one we are in the midst of. Will it be "doomsday"? Maybe, maybe not, but to suggest that because we have not been made extinct ourselves....yet....there is nothing to see here is a bit cavalier. We don't know how bad it is, but that doesn't mean it's good. or even not bad. Technology may or may not help resolve these issues, but probably not. My experience has been ( and you are free to find issues that don't fit the pattern) we are promised that a particular technology will 'fix' or 'enable' something wonderful, but we see that technology become dominated be large interests who leave the original problems in place and exploit the technology for solely their benefit.
1. Smallpox eradication under WHO (a UN body) 2. UN Mandated ceasefire and democratic restoration of Cambodia (since 1991, with severe challenges in 1997) 3. The defence of South Korea from invasion by the North. This was done under UN madate. An oldie but a goodie. I would actually try to find more, there are many, but they don't always grab headlines, or get remembered. Meanwhile most of you disasters and failures Rwanda? Darfur?? are failures of US government policy as much as they are of the UN. Rwanda was a Clinton disaster, Darfur is a Bush disaster.
That's the thing about predictions, they happen in the future. Since most of the predictions of the 'environmentalists' were not being made before the 1960's, and since the timeframes are usually 50 - 100 years out, it is not surprising that they have yet to be proven true or false. If you discount falling sperm counts in some men in industrial agriculture areas, rising rates of autism in American children and rising rates of leukemia, by ignoring the possible- but by no means proven- environmental component behind them. To claim any of these is proof of prior claims is inaccurate, to dismiss them as possible proof of prior claims is disingenuous. We are in the middle of things, and can't definitively say what they mean, or if they mean anything at all. As if to dismiss everything, you say there is no 'doomsday prediction' that's come true-but you don't admit any of the evidence unless it is positively uncontrovertable (which is not the way of law or science-which argue the meaning of evidence all the time), so what good is the conversation? Extremist wackos like the ones you quote are not representative of most environmentalists, anymore than a parade of right wing cranks who say equally demented stuff are representative of your views. (Unless I miss my guess and you are a devotee of Pat Robertson). So, you are left with rising rates of species extinction as the only proven, predicted environmental disaster that we know of. Still, it's pretty compelling if you think about it at all. Oh, yeah, and there's that ozone hole thing.
First, yes you can use GIMP and Photoshop to improve your images. Second, the problem you are noticing can't easily be fixed in either program. The pixellation you see is most likely a result of jpeg compression. Even jpeg fine can cause this. JPEG is lossy compression and it tries to optimize an image for shrinking. Many of the subtle shades in the sky were simply tossed out by the compressor. Use TIFF or RAW, as these do not use lossy compression. The files are much larger, but they don't use lossy routines (LZW is lossless compression, and RAW doesn't compress at all.). To try to fix the problem in Photoshop (GIMP will have similar abilities, but I don't use it so I can't instruct you) you need a good mask of the sky. Zoom in to 100% on an area of the sky ( so you have 1 pixel for each screen pixel). Use Filter | Blur | Gaussian blur and interactively blur the sky to get a smooth effect. Don't worry that it looks fake at this stage. Second use Filter | Noise | Add Noise. Take gaussian from the radio buttons at the bottom of the interactive tab that comes up. Move to a boundary of the mask so you can see the sky and the unblurred areas of the photo. Adjust the noise rate to approximate the noise in the original areas. This time it will look a little sharp, try for size approximation. Now choose Filter | Blur | Gaussian Blur again and this time select a very low number .3 or .4 pixels... adjust it to match back to the look of the original image. You will have to play around with this several times to get it right for your image - and believe me every image is different. AND NEVER USE JPEG. Save as Tiff, which is a general standard. Jpeg is for web use, it really ruins images.
There is a difference. Microsoft embodies the worst of capitalism: Untruthful, and using those lies to undermine the market, destroy rivals through deception, unfair competition and other nasty FUDDY ways. Think Word Perfect - undermined by low-ball pricing, then when the product began to fade jacking up the price for Office. Think Netscape, undermined by a free product to eliminate the market altogether. Then lies about IE as an 'integral' part of the OS that can't be eliminated- somehow Unix, Linux, and MacOS didn't have that problem. Think of all the great ideas that other people had that microsoft undermined by announcing that the next version of Windows would include that feature. Only it never appeared in a later release - it was a strategic announcement designed to scare away the money men. Think about the efforts that Steve Ballmer is making to cast doubt on the legal status of Linux - everything he says about patents applies equally to Windows - it probably violates the same number of patents. Basically, the company is dishonest to a degree that undermines the market. I am contemptuous of them for this. Then the product itself. Very weak in the OS department, they were OK at the NT 4 stage, not up to Unix, but ahead of Mac and Linux. That was the high point - they have stagnated and Linux and Mac OS have literally blown past them, yet they maintain an inertial lock on the desktop. This is changing, but it won't be really evident for 2 years. Office is a good product, but they charge a premium for yesterday - and Office is so yesterday. I am contemptuous of them for that. Security was a non-thought with them. They had a hobbyist view of the world of computing and adapted it to an internet world on the fly - remember they were reacting to events that they were powerless to define. They were late to the game and they had a toy OS (windows 95) in the pipe and they just put it out and prayed. Their prayers were not answered. Windows is unsecurable. I have contempt for them for that. But I don't hate them, they are pathetic - very rich, but still not worthy of envy or hate. They are just guys ( and women) in over their heads.
OK, Zimbabwe I understand, Mugabe has completely lost his nut and driving the society toward suspicion and fragmenting, but South Africa? I had heard good things about it, though I haven't been myself. What isn't making the headlines here? (besides the obvious). Thanks
Statistically speaking you have probably at least once experimented with a controlled substance. Should you be jailed?
Every body needs a little different support to account for height, weight distribution and posture. Those trendy chairs can indeed help significantly if you get the right one ( the Aeron comes in three sizes, and if you get the wrong size it will be worse than nothing ), I know people who hate the Aeron, I know people who love it - the key is to get a good chair that you have tried and know you can work comfortably in. Someone I work with had excruciating back pain after a week in a chair, that went away after two days in a new chair ( not an Aeron BTW, I am not plugging their product)
I don't believe in Windows backdoors any more that I believe that the Lenovo people are able to pull this off without anyone detecting it. Remember, Lenovo assembles these in this country and in Mexico, and the company has moved its headquarters here, and hired American executives, etc. If they got caught doing this HEADS WOULD ROLL. These people would all be guilty of spying or treason, so it wouldn't be quietly hidden away, they would face arrest, possible execution. These aren't products from a company where the Chinese government has direct control of operations, and design, specification and manufacture is worldwide.
While Levono insists that their computers pose no security risk, we need to remember that they do run the Windows OS which is a significant hole:-) On a more serious note, this is obviously a purely political step - but why? No one with any technical savvy is going to believe that these systems pose a greater security risk, unless someone independently confirms this and demonstrates how a backdoor exists. Is a mere accusation enough to get a company dumped from secure contracts, if so I have dirt on Halliburton, KBR, CACI and a host of companies who are defrauding government agencies. Isolationism doesn't score political points the way it used to, and these are the same people that will happily defend moving jobs off shore. Who are they trying to appeal to here? There can't be that many blindly stupis people in the country ( 29%, or so, it seems)...
Compete with DESKTOP Linux? Shouldn't they aim a little higher, compete with OS/2???
The idea that a Microsoft of Linux means the end of the 'movement' and that Linux, or the OSS movement is immune to monopoly domination and its attendant arbitrary actions and pricing are NOT the same. Linux could become ( in some mythical future world after Linus Torvalds passes the torch, or with corrupted governments injecting laws to halt open software, or whatever) an OS dominated by one monopoly player. And that would mean the end of whatever 'movement' existed. So it can happen, but it probably won't ( absent that corrupted government thingy, which is obviously possible, since they seem so clearly to want to ), because openness itself is a hedge against it. As long as source is available domination is difficult for one group.