I see your point, and don't mean to troll; but I think this is one reason Linux doesn't get as much use as it would. There is no real helpful Linux community. Linux nerds are a bunch of DIY guys, who expect everyone else to be so too. But the novice doesn't have the wherewithall (or knowledge) to hit up man pages, and start digging through arcane forums littered with snippets of code.
I don't think we're disagreeing very much. The people who make Linux what it is don't need it to become popular, and, in particular, aren't terribly worried about making the system friendly to non-geek users. We are geeks, and we're also elitists. If Linux gets to be a 'user oriented' operating system, then it won't suit us, and we'll probably all decamp - to the Hurd, or something new.
If you want a user friendly operating system, and you don't have the skills to do it yourself, Steve Jobs or Bill Gates will be perfectly happy to take your money and sell you one. And that's perfectly OK, if that's what you want.
Why is it that Macs came from the ashes and haves close to 10% marketshare, while Linux install base (is between 0.5% - 3%) and you need to pay for Macs, and for OS upgrades, get stuck on priority OS and Hardware. The Linux comunity really step on its foot durring the Late 90's and early 2000's It really could have been a huge player on the desktop area, but the comunity is so Anti-Corproate and so resistant to change that it left them off as a distant 3rd place.
Why should we care whether you use Linux or not? Hint: Steve Jobs makes a lot of money if MacOS becomes popular. He's in it for the money and he's making lots of it. Good for him! Linus Torvalds makes a reasonable salary if Linux becomes popular, but he's a talented guy and he'd make a reasonable salary anyway. He's not in it for the money, he's in it for the fun.
When you buy a Mac, Steve Jobs gets more money. When you use Linux, Linus doesn't have more fun (if anything, with all your moaning and whinging, he'll have less).
Understand now? There ain't no such thing as a free lunch, and Linus isn't obligated to make you one.
so if I had windows, I'd complain about not having the support of microsoft. but since I'm trying linux, I get told to buy new hardware.
That sounds like a nice double standard from the linux crowd.
You paid for Windows. You have a contractual relationship with the people who wrote it.
If a shopper wants to choose between 3 wifi cards, do the Linux developers bother to tell the shopper quickly and concisely which of those will work??
No. Why should they? Do the shoppers pay them? Do the makers of the wifi cards pay them? Answers: no, and no. The developers are doing it for fun - their fun, not your fun. If no-one else wrote a driver for the card you bought, write it yourself and contribute it back.
If Linus had one hairsbreadth of concern for a users' ability to discern compatibility while contemplating hardware purchases, then his group would have setup an HCL years ago. But instead he leaves that horrid little task of dealing with the unwashed to the distros, who produce pathetic nearly-empty HCL databases with some of the most unpleasant web-search design imaginable.
Why should Linus do anything for you? When did you last do anything for him? You have a really weird idea about how the world works.
Lots of alternatives to choose from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windowing_system
And thank you for posting your snarky comment before doing 30 seconds worth of research. Pretty much all the alternatives listed are dead or dying, so pot kettle black on the amount of research done.
That's precisely the point. In a competitive environment, X Windows has won out. Why? Because it's extremely hard to write anything as good, and even harder to write anything sufficiently better to persuade any significant number of users to switch.
You have just articulated the major perceptual obstacle to Linux developers' ability to grasp the desktop. They refuse to draw a neat line between "system" and "applications" and then promote and support that set of interfaces, so there is no consistent platform that facilitates independent distribution of applications to end-users.
You have just articulated the major perceptual obstacle between you and the kernel developers. The kernel developers aren't doing it to scratch your itches - you don't pay them. They're doing it to scratch their own itches, or else to scratch their employers' itches. If you want an operating system with 'a neat line between "system" and "applications"', go away and write one (or pay someone else to write one). Come back and tell us about it when you're done.
If there was a big community that wanted to coalesce around a desktop OS, it would have coalesced around Haiku or AmigaOS. It never has. Why? Because the people who want a desktop OS mostly don't want to do the work.
Benchmarks may not help as well. Gut feel is sometimes the best we get. I have found linux to be sparatic. with Xwindows. Tiny Delay Blast Tiny Delay Blast. On Average it may be on par but there is something off on its performance that doesn't vibe with me, that other systems such as OS X and Windows doesn't give me.
Oh, for pity's sake. Throw all your engineering discipline out of the window (ha!) and fall back on gut feel. and superstition. The fact is that Linux (with X Windows) performs much better on the same hardware than either Windows or MacOS. Why is this? Until you've shown that X Windows is a significant cost, then you really don't have any argument beyond hand-waving.
I have this to add: I personally have been using the X Window system for eighteen years. I've used it on hardware which had an 8MHz - MHz, not GHz - processor. I've used it on hardware that had 8Mb - Mb, not Gb - of RAM. The X Window system performs perfectly well on that hardware spec. It's always outperformed every other windowing system on the same hardware, and it still does now.
Basic engineering tenet, known to all old engineers (but obviously not taught to young ones): if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
My history with Linux has the problem not being with the Linux Kernel but with the X Windows System (Xwindows is big and clunky to support features that we don't fully utilize and are fully utilizeing them less and less). I think Linux needs to seporate from its Unix haritage and start moving away from X11 and to something a bit more direct with the frame buffer and video card (Much like how OS X has). Granted X11 has improved in the areas of 3d acceleration and such. But compared to OS X it is lacking
And that has precisely what to do with the kernel? X is in user space. If you want to replace X with any other windowing system you like, just port it or write it. And when you've written something as powerful and stable as the X Window System, come back and tell us about it.
A base load power plant (or base load power station) is one that is best suited to serving this load because it takes a long time to start up and is relatively inefficient at less than full output. These plants run at all times through the year except in the case of repairs or scheduled maintenance.
Which is one very good reason not to use nuclear power for base load: it goes off-line unpredictably and for long periods. Currently, both of Scotland's nuclear power stations have been off-line for more than two months, one for planned maintenance, the other for leaks. In the past three years both have been working at the same time for less than six months total.
Fortunately, we don't need them - we have so much hydro-electric and wind generation that even with the nuclear stations off-line we're still net exporters of electricity.
Your idea of using some power dump is nice, but electrical vehicles are not the place. How are you ever going to switch on and off their charging for a start? When the wind falls, these chargers should be switched off. That requires some sophisticated communications, and is quite error prone.
Errr... it's being done already and has been being done for twenty years at least, in the UK. I know this because my firm has recently been involved in rewriting the software which drives it.
Essentially a signal is added to television broadcasts - in amongst the teletext data - which indicates to certain industrial plant when to switch on and off for cheaper electricity. A different signal can be broadcast by each regional transmitter, so you can switch on and off these 'energy dumps' on a regional basis. Systems which use the cheaper excess electricity are connected to a switch which picks up the television transmission and parses out the 'power available' signal.
On top of that power dumps are nice but also have limited capacity, both in absorption and release of energy on demand. They can cover fluctuations measured in time spans of minutes to hours maybe - not the longer term fluctuations such as a windless week.
Not always true. There are two types of 'buy back'- One (netmetering) uses one meter that can go in both directions. If you are using more than you are producing, the meter goes forward. If you are producing more, it winds Backward. If it ends up at at a higher number at the end of the period (month/quarter/year), you pay for the net amount you used. If it ends up at at a lower number, you do NOT get paid for the extra you gave them.
The other way is to have 2 meters- one for what you use, and one for what you sell to them. Even though they only pay wholesale rates, it would be possible to sell them more than you use, and actually make money.
Whereas in Germany, and in some other European countries, they have to pay (quite a bit) you more for every KW/h you sell them than for the ones they sell you.
Actually if you have running water on your land a pelton wheel will typically give you more reliable and cheaper power than a wind turbine.
/of course 1000 watts is a little low for most people...
Indeed. But you don't need to cut yourself off from the gird; and, indeed, in Europe at least, when you have an excess (which you sometimes will) you can sell electricity back to the grid at a preferential price.
In Britain, good quality health care is free. In the US, you can't afford it. The same applies to a lot of other things - what happens if your employer goes bankrupt, or your boss sacks you because he doesn't like your haircut? You need to add a lot - maybe 30-50% - to a US salary to get equivalent UK salary.
Yes, but don't they take the difference out in taxes?
Yes, but you also (on average) pay more tax in the US.
In Britain, good quality health care is free. In the US, you can't afford it. The same applies to a lot of other things - what happens if your employer goes bankrupt, or your boss sacks you because he doesn't like your haircut? You need to add a lot - maybe 30-50% - to a US salary to get equivalent UK salary.
This is completely untrue. Few good programmers are self taught, and few self taught programmers are any good at all. The nature of software is that you have to go on learning - fast - all your career, but without basic engineering discipline and an understanding of such things as algorithms and complexity you're nowhere.
In response to the original poster, the people who read your CVs - people like me - will pay a lot of attention to what institution you went to, and what class of degree you were awarded. It doesn't have to be computer science, though. On the whole I'd score a first in physics, maths or philosophy above a 2.1 in computer science.
I'll pay for name-brand when that actually correlates with
quality. When it comes to matters of "fashion", where people
pay only for the name - I'd actually prefer to buy the
knockoff at the same price, just to punish the idiots
that really believe a name has value.
Ish. I'm sitting at my desk dressed head to toe in designer clothes. It's expensive. But the brand sponsor a team in a sport I support, and not being a mainstream sport, it needs all the sponsors it can get.
The reasons for buying a particular brand are not necessarily simply to do with what you get for your money.
And as you mentioned, it's just complete and utter bunk. The idea that OSX was just copied over to the iPhone is absurd. "OSX" on the iPhone is to OSX on the desktop as Windows CE is on PDAs and embedded devices (which Microsoft has been doing for at least 8 years or so) to the desktop -- yeah, there's some cross branding, shared libraries (from a source-code perspective -- C is cross-platform, even in the Windows world), API similarities, but underneath it all it isn't the same, and both are best-purposed for their respective targets, which is a much better decision than any run anywhere, lowest-common-denominator approach.
I don't know whether OSX on the desktop and OSX on an iPhone are the same, because I don't like Apple and have never written anything for either. However, I've written lots of software for BSD, including on embedded devices, and lots of software for Linux, including on phones; and I can verify that BSD on embedded devices is just the same as BSD on the desktop, and that Linux on phones is the same - the codebase with the same libraries and many of the same applications - on phones as it is on the desktop. So there's nothing 'absurd' about the idea that MacOS on an iPhone could be just the same as MacOS on a desktop.
And, again, having written software for it: Windows CE is not - not even remotely - the same as either Windows95/98/Me or Windows NT/XP/Vista. It's completely different.
Of course I knew Gartner's opinion was nonsense when they went down the ridiculous-yet-truthy-through-repeated-assertion "monolithic" line of argument (which they likely picked up on Slashdot, it should be mentioned). Vista is a failure not because of any sort of code maintenance problem, but rather that Microsoft aimed far too high with Vista, taking far too many risks for a big, big change.
Vista's failure is down to poor engineering and poor management. Vista could have been brought out on time with all its features as promised by half a dozen of the companies out there - but not by Microsoft.
Wait, the iPhone OS X can run on a several devices, with as little as a 133 MHz processor with 16MB of RAM?
I'm no Apple fanboy, but I don't really think that your points are valid anyway. Apple has no embedded device with a 133 MHz processor and 16 MB of RAM, so why should they even try to make the iPhone OS X run on such a device? In fact, since there has been no attempt to run it on such a device, how can you even sound so sure that it cannot be done?
OS X is essentially BSD. Twenty years ago I was running BSD on machines (Acorn R260) with 8Mb of RAM and an ARM3 processor clocked at 8MHz (yes, that's 8, not 80 or 800, just eight). It ran fine, with good X Windows performance. Now, obviously MacOS X uses a different graphics layer, but there's no special reason to believe it's that much worse in performance. And BSD hasn't changed that much in the past twenty years - certainly not in the direction of bloatware.
It's usually green on black. I use yellow on black for special shells (like when I'm using a lot of shells with cssh). Putty defaults to white on black, so when I'm stuck in Windows land, that's it.
Any shells that default to black on white, I switch immediately. It's not so bad in a web browser, but there's something about a shell and typing in it that hurts my eyes. It could be that I'm concentrating that much more on the text on the screen, since it's usually fast data. Like, tail logs on a busy server, or run top with a refresh of 1 or 0. I catch details that other people don't even notice on their machines.
For years I had my screen set up so that everything was green on black (and my personal website still is). Like you, I find this restful on the eyes; probably like you, I started in this industry in the days of green screen monitors. However, I've also studied a bit of the HCI and physiology research on this, and the actual answer, surprisingly enough, is amber or red on black - which is why many military display systems use those colours. Black on white - what most people use - is actually one of the most tiring.
Just do a search in Google news for IBM and you'll find the story. Looks legit to me, although the Register clearly has an April Fools story that Robert Scobe is an IBM construction with 1TB of memory.
Just think what you could do with a beowulf cluster of those...
ok i'm just curious here, why is it that so many people profess hate towards twitter? or is it just one person who is pissed at him.
As someone who has been reading Slashdot daily for about ten years, I wasn't aware he even existed until this discussion. The moderation system is there for a reason, guys! It's a dynamic communal filter on what is worth reading. The community obviously thinks this twitter person isn't worth reading, and that's fine by me. Set your filters appropriately, and we can get back to discussing the politics of the OOXML process, not the twitterings of some troll.
Given that the world is already grossly overpopulated and rapidly becoming more so,
Wrong. Global population is widely-understood to be slowing in growth, and, as less-developed nations become more-developed (and, assuming similar trends to those in developed nations hold true of fewer children being born over time as the nation develops) is expected to stagnate by the middle of this century. Already, nations like Japan have negative population growth, i.e. a decline in the population count, i.e. they have a replacement rate below about 2.1...
Malthusianism is not a widely-respected position among serious social scientists anymore. Journalists, clueless as ever and seeking scare stories to boost story sales, still push it though...
I said the thick would inherit the Earth, didn't I? Scotland, where I live, has been below replacement rate for generations. So has Italy. So what? 'Growing less fast' does not mean 'not growing', it means 'still growing disastrously fast but not as fast as last year'.
The poster's argument requires the premise that it is in the best interest of intelligent people to have more offspring or to limit the offspring of the less intelligent.
Given that the world is already grossly overpopulated and rapidly becoming more so, for 'intelligent people to have more offspring' is clearly grossly irresponsible. For less intelligent people to have more offspring is equally clearly grossly irresponsible, but less intelligent people tend to be grossly irresponsible, and (as others have pointed out) one of the things you really can't do in a 'free society' is limit people's ability to procreate.
Face it, geeks: we're a dying race. The lusers will outbreed us, and the thick will inherit (what's left of) the Earth.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think we're disagreeing very much. The people who make Linux what it is don't need it to become popular, and, in particular, aren't terribly worried about making the system friendly to non-geek users. We are geeks, and we're also elitists. If Linux gets to be a 'user oriented' operating system, then it won't suit us, and we'll probably all decamp - to the Hurd, or something new.
If you want a user friendly operating system, and you don't have the skills to do it yourself, Steve Jobs or Bill Gates will be perfectly happy to take your money and sell you one. And that's perfectly OK, if that's what you want.
Uhh, we already have. Actually something a lot more powerful and stable. That's precisely what this thread's about.
Why should we care whether you use Linux or not? Hint: Steve Jobs makes a lot of money if MacOS becomes popular. He's in it for the money and he's making lots of it. Good for him! Linus Torvalds makes a reasonable salary if Linux becomes popular, but he's a talented guy and he'd make a reasonable salary anyway. He's not in it for the money, he's in it for the fun.
When you buy a Mac, Steve Jobs gets more money. When you use Linux, Linus doesn't have more fun (if anything, with all your moaning and whinging, he'll have less).
Understand now? There ain't no such thing as a free lunch, and Linus isn't obligated to make you one.
You paid for Windows. You have a contractual relationship with the people who wrote it.
No. Why should they? Do the shoppers pay them? Do the makers of the wifi cards pay them? Answers: no, and no. The developers are doing it for fun - their fun, not your fun. If no-one else wrote a driver for the card you bought, write it yourself and contribute it back.
If Linus had one hairsbreadth of concern for a users' ability to discern compatibility while contemplating hardware purchases, then his group would have setup an HCL years ago. But instead he leaves that horrid little task of dealing with the unwashed to the distros, who produce pathetic nearly-empty HCL databases with some of the most unpleasant web-search design imaginable.Why should Linus do anything for you? When did you last do anything for him? You have a really weird idea about how the world works.
That's precisely the point. In a competitive environment, X Windows has won out. Why? Because it's extremely hard to write anything as good, and even harder to write anything sufficiently better to persuade any significant number of users to switch.
You have just articulated the major perceptual obstacle between you and the kernel developers. The kernel developers aren't doing it to scratch your itches - you don't pay them. They're doing it to scratch their own itches, or else to scratch their employers' itches. If you want an operating system with 'a neat line between "system" and "applications"', go away and write one (or pay someone else to write one). Come back and tell us about it when you're done.
If there was a big community that wanted to coalesce around a desktop OS, it would have coalesced around Haiku or AmigaOS. It never has. Why? Because the people who want a desktop OS mostly don't want to do the work.
Oh, for pity's sake. Throw all your engineering discipline out of the window (ha!) and fall back on gut feel. and superstition. The fact is that Linux (with X Windows) performs much better on the same hardware than either Windows or MacOS. Why is this? Until you've shown that X Windows is a significant cost, then you really don't have any argument beyond hand-waving.
I have this to add: I personally have been using the X Window system for eighteen years. I've used it on hardware which had an 8MHz - MHz, not GHz - processor. I've used it on hardware that had 8Mb - Mb, not Gb - of RAM. The X Window system performs perfectly well on that hardware spec. It's always outperformed every other windowing system on the same hardware, and it still does now.
Basic engineering tenet, known to all old engineers (but obviously not taught to young ones): if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
And that has precisely what to do with the kernel? X is in user space. If you want to replace X with any other windowing system you like, just port it or write it. And when you've written something as powerful and stable as the X Window System, come back and tell us about it.
Which is one very good reason not to use nuclear power for base load: it goes off-line unpredictably and for long periods. Currently, both of Scotland's nuclear power stations have been off-line for more than two months, one for planned maintenance, the other for leaks. In the past three years both have been working at the same time for less than six months total.
Fortunately, we don't need them - we have so much hydro-electric and wind generation that even with the nuclear stations off-line we're still net exporters of electricity.
Your idea of using some power dump is nice, but electrical vehicles are not the place. How are you ever going to switch on and off their charging for a start? When the wind falls, these chargers should be switched off. That requires some sophisticated communications, and is quite error prone.
Errr... it's being done already and has been being done for twenty years at least, in the UK. I know this because my firm has recently been involved in rewriting the software which drives it.
Essentially a signal is added to television broadcasts - in amongst the teletext data - which indicates to certain industrial plant when to switch on and off for cheaper electricity. A different signal can be broadcast by each regional transmitter, so you can switch on and off these 'energy dumps' on a regional basis. Systems which use the cheaper excess electricity are connected to a switch which picks up the television transmission and parses out the 'power available' signal.
On top of that power dumps are nice but also have limited capacity, both in absorption and release of energy on demand. They can cover fluctuations measured in time spans of minutes to hours maybe - not the longer term fluctuations such as a windless week.One answer: Dinowig
Whereas in Germany, and in some other European countries, they have to pay (quite a bit) you more for every KW/h you sell them than for the ones they sell you.
Actually if you have running water on your land a pelton wheel will typically give you more reliable and cheaper power than a wind turbine.
Indeed. But you don't need to cut yourself off from the gird; and, indeed, in Europe at least, when you have an excess (which you sometimes will) you can sell electricity back to the grid at a preferential price.
In Britain, good quality health care is free. In the US, you can't afford it. The same applies to a lot of other things - what happens if your employer goes bankrupt, or your boss sacks you because he doesn't like your haircut? You need to add a lot - maybe 30-50% - to a US salary to get equivalent UK salary.
Yes, but don't they take the difference out in taxes?Yes, but you also (on average) pay more tax in the US.
In Britain, good quality health care is free. In the US, you can't afford it. The same applies to a lot of other things - what happens if your employer goes bankrupt, or your boss sacks you because he doesn't like your haircut? You need to add a lot - maybe 30-50% - to a US salary to get equivalent UK salary.
This is completely untrue. Few good programmers are self taught, and few self taught programmers are any good at all. The nature of software is that you have to go on learning - fast - all your career, but without basic engineering discipline and an understanding of such things as algorithms and complexity you're nowhere.
In response to the original poster, the people who read your CVs - people like me - will pay a lot of attention to what institution you went to, and what class of degree you were awarded. It doesn't have to be computer science, though. On the whole I'd score a first in physics, maths or philosophy above a 2.1 in computer science.
Ish. I'm sitting at my desk dressed head to toe in designer clothes. It's expensive. But the brand sponsor a team in a sport I support, and not being a mainstream sport, it needs all the sponsors it can get.
The reasons for buying a particular brand are not necessarily simply to do with what you get for your money.
Remember the golden rule: he who has the gold, makes the rules.
In a Chinese world, these are the new rules, and all of us in the West had better get used to it.
I don't know whether OSX on the desktop and OSX on an iPhone are the same, because I don't like Apple and have never written anything for either. However, I've written lots of software for BSD, including on embedded devices, and lots of software for Linux, including on phones; and I can verify that BSD on embedded devices is just the same as BSD on the desktop, and that Linux on phones is the same - the codebase with the same libraries and many of the same applications - on phones as it is on the desktop. So there's nothing 'absurd' about the idea that MacOS on an iPhone could be just the same as MacOS on a desktop.
And, again, having written software for it: Windows CE is not - not even remotely - the same as either Windows95/98/Me or Windows NT/XP/Vista. It's completely different.
Of course I knew Gartner's opinion was nonsense when they went down the ridiculous-yet-truthy-through-repeated-assertion "monolithic" line of argument (which they likely picked up on Slashdot, it should be mentioned). Vista is a failure not because of any sort of code maintenance problem, but rather that Microsoft aimed far too high with Vista, taking far too many risks for a big, big change.Vista's failure is down to poor engineering and poor management. Vista could have been brought out on time with all its features as promised by half a dozen of the companies out there - but not by Microsoft.
I'm no Apple fanboy, but I don't really think that your points are valid anyway. Apple has no embedded device with a 133 MHz processor and 16 MB of RAM, so why should they even try to make the iPhone OS X run on such a device? In fact, since there has been no attempt to run it on such a device, how can you even sound so sure that it cannot be done?
OS X is essentially BSD. Twenty years ago I was running BSD on machines (Acorn R260) with 8Mb of RAM and an ARM3 processor clocked at 8MHz (yes, that's 8, not 80 or 800, just eight). It ran fine, with good X Windows performance. Now, obviously MacOS X uses a different graphics layer, but there's no special reason to believe it's that much worse in performance. And BSD hasn't changed that much in the past twenty years - certainly not in the direction of bloatware.
Ok, that post was for fun.
For my shells, that I stare at for hours, I use:
green on black
yellow on black
white on black
It's usually green on black. I use yellow on black for special shells (like when I'm using a lot of shells with cssh). Putty defaults to white on black, so when I'm stuck in Windows land, that's it.
Any shells that default to black on white, I switch immediately. It's not so bad in a web browser, but there's something about a shell and typing in it that hurts my eyes. It could be that I'm concentrating that much more on the text on the screen, since it's usually fast data. Like, tail logs on a busy server, or run top with a refresh of 1 or 0. I catch details that other people don't even notice on their machines.
For years I had my screen set up so that everything was green on black (and my personal website still is). Like you, I find this restful on the eyes; probably like you, I started in this industry in the days of green screen monitors. However, I've also studied a bit of the HCI and physiology research on this, and the actual answer, surprisingly enough, is amber or red on black - which is why many military display systems use those colours. Black on white - what most people use - is actually one of the most tiring.
Just think what you could do with a beowulf cluster of those...
As someone who has been reading Slashdot daily for about ten years, I wasn't aware he even existed until this discussion. The moderation system is there for a reason, guys! It's a dynamic communal filter on what is worth reading. The community obviously thinks this twitter person isn't worth reading, and that's fine by me. Set your filters appropriately, and we can get back to discussing the politics of the OOXML process, not the twitterings of some troll.
Wrong. Global population is widely-understood to be slowing in growth, and, as less-developed nations become more-developed (and, assuming similar trends to those in developed nations hold true of fewer children being born over time as the nation develops) is expected to stagnate by the middle of this century. Already, nations like Japan have negative population growth, i.e. a decline in the population count, i.e. they have a replacement rate below about 2.1...
Malthusianism is not a widely-respected position among serious social scientists anymore. Journalists, clueless as ever and seeking scare stories to boost story sales, still push it though...
I said the thick would inherit the Earth, didn't I? Scotland, where I live, has been below replacement rate for generations. So has Italy. So what? 'Growing less fast' does not mean 'not growing', it means 'still growing disastrously fast but not as fast as last year'.
Given that the world is already grossly overpopulated and rapidly becoming more so, for 'intelligent people to have more offspring' is clearly grossly irresponsible. For less intelligent people to have more offspring is equally clearly grossly irresponsible, but less intelligent people tend to be grossly irresponsible, and (as others have pointed out) one of the things you really can't do in a 'free society' is limit people's ability to procreate.
Face it, geeks: we're a dying race. The lusers will outbreed us, and the thick will inherit (what's left of) the Earth.