I worked for a University for 7 years. 1 year as a research assistant, 1 year as a research programmer, and 5 years as a UNIX system administrator. As UNIX admin I had from 2 to 6 student employees working for me. Sometimes my help was amazingly good and other times it wasn't so hot. Some years we were swimming in money and I could buy anything I needed but other years research grants were lean and I had to make due. One boss was a techie himself and gave me reviews that made it sound like I walked on water, my next boss didn't trust techies and gave me scathing reviews.
First the good: there is lots of stuff to learn. Instead of having only one or two different platforms like most companies my department had a few of almost every UNIX box known to man. It was a support nightmare but it was fun to have so many different kinds of toys. Much of the work I did was very cutting edge/early adopter; we were doing stuff years before most businesses were. After my years working in a university I was so strong technically that future "real" jobs were a piece of cake. I did have to scale a learning curve on business and proceedure stuff though.
Now the bad stuff: pay, expect to make less than half what you would elsewhere. Speaking of politics, there is an old saying, politics in acadamea are so viscious because the stakes are so low. At universities there is a lot of dead wood. Some managers measure their worth by how many people are under them so they create useless positions to fill. Little wars erupt between rival departments, rival colleges, departments and colleges, deans and their departments, etc. When I started out my attitude was that I was there to help everyone else so I never took sides in any of these little wars. This strategy worked well for the first few years but later when my position was in jeoparty I had no allies to call upon.
In my case my job description included a lot of non-technical stuff. I ended up spending half of my time doing procurement, inventory and clerical stuff which was a drag. Before you accept a job be sure you know exactly what your responsibilities will be.
One of the things that amazes me about Cuba is how much they do with so little. While Cubans live in poverty and the Cuban government is cash straped they do have lower infant mortality and a higher literacy rate than the US which is the wealthiest nation in the world. Some parts of their system do seem to work better than ours.
Many argue that the average Cuban is better off today than they were before the revolution. Under Batista the vast majority of Cubans lived in poverty as well.
While I'm still on my soapbox I'd point out that American opposition to Cuba has nothing to do with Democracy or freedom; we have supported far worse despots than Castro. Our problem with Castro is economic ideology or Capitalism vs. Socialism not Democracy vs. Despotism.
While the first pilgrims who came to North America did come for religious reasons a lot happened between the time of the first pilgrims and the founding of the USA. By then coloists were here for many reasons including new opportunities or escaping legal or financial problems in their homeland.
Many forget that Revolutionary America was at the tail end of the Enlightenemnt. Rationalism and Freethought was popular. Some of our founding fathers were Deists or Pantheists rather than Christians. Of the Christians many belonged to liberal or unorthodox religions like those you mention like Quakers, Unitarians and Universalists (Unitarian and Universalist were seperate religions back then).
Many of our founding fathers who were Christians were very anti-clerical while others were ambiguous or even countradictory about their religious views. A common sport here is for religionits to take founding father's quotes out of context to make them appear more Christian than they were while secularists take their quotes out of context to make them appear less Christian than they were. Often the same person is claimed by both sides.
While American founding father's religions were diverse and sometimes unorthodox within several decades of the revolution there were a number of protestant revivals solidifying the position of main-line Protestant Christianity, deism and pantheism died out, and non-orthodox religions faded in popularity.
My first programming experience was on a TI programmable calculater in the 70's. I never touched a computer until I was in college.
There are still interpreted languages. For the purpose of teaching programming I'd recommend Scheme. Nice little language available in lots of forms. If you want to teach something that will be a decent learning language yet still useful commercially I'd go with java.
I've been noticing a lot of VW's with 'TDI' badges on them lately. At least in my area (D-FW area of Texas) turbo diesels do seem to be pretty good sellers.
Now if bio-diesel was available here that would really be something. I'd gladly pay $4-$5/gal for biodiesel knowing my money is going to our farmers and our economy than pay $2/gal for gas knowing the money is going to multi-national corporations and terrorists.
For the last dozen years I've been arguing that either Sun should buy Apple or vice versa. I'm a little dubious that the SPARC franchise is going to be able to keep up with the IBM and Intel juggernauts. Every new version of SPARC is late so I don't expect to see a 8 core Niagra chip any time soon. As insurance it would be wise for Sun to support Solaris on SPARC/Intel-AMD/PowerPC so whichever architecture wins the market they will have a presence on.
Not in my experience. I have Solaris IA running on Intel servers all the way down to Pentium 200's. We have a name server on a Solaris/P200 that has been up for years and has never missed a beat. The time when I called Solaris Slowlaris was back in the '486 days when Solaris really was a dog on Intel.
We have been having a heck of a time getting breeder reactors to work right.
The few breeder reactors that have been built have produced electricity so expensive that their operation had to be subsidised and they are very inefficent at producing more fuel.
Running a breeder reactor makes more waste disposal problems instead of fewer. Breader reactors produce more high level waste than conventional light water reactors.
President Carter was knowledgable about nuclear energy having studied at the Navy nuclear school. There is the problem of pruducing plutonium but the main problem with breeder reactors are that they are too expensive and don't work well at the current state of the art. Currently there is plenty of uranium so breeder reactors remain an interesting technology for the future if uranium prices increase.
I quit trying to have intelligent conversations with "audiophiles" after one tried to tell me that they could hear a difference between an original CD and copies, then they boasted they could hear a difference between coppies burned at 2x and 4x; the 2x burn being more faithful to the original.
I haven't had time to read all the posts here so 2^10 pardons of someone already said this.
In the 1950's scientists promised electricity so cheap we wouldn't need to meter it from nuclear power plants but the reality is exactly the opposite; nuclear energy is the most expensive way to generate electricity there is. The reason why we don't use more nuclear energy isn't because of its dangers or because the left opposes it; it is because it is too expensive. Many nuclear power plants operate at a loss because it costs more to generate the electricity than anyone would pay.
The economics can change if fossil fules get expensive and new reactor designs make nuclear power cheaper.
It is essential to reduce our dependance on foreign oil but the best solution is a multi-pronged approach: conservation, geothermal, hydroelectric, wind, biofuels, coal, oil shale (?) and nuclear.
Sun's license terms came about quite a while ago when Sun and AT&T had a stock swap. The idea of a Sun/AT&T merger sent shivers through the UNIX industry leading to OSF which brought us OSF/1 (which only DEC used) and Motif which everyone used and almost everyone hated.
As far as I know Sun is the only vendor with such a license where they can distribute UNIX without paying royalties to anyone.
To me this brings up a thought. Assume that SCO wins their lawsuit saying that there is UNIX technology in Linux. Under Sun's license it might turn out that Sun and Sun alone would be the only company who could still legally give away Linux.
Don't be so sure. Remember that Knuth took 10 years off his schedule to write TeX and friends.
I have no doubt that if Knuth decided to work in the field of GUI's that whatever he came up would blow everything else out of the water. I doubt he would work with anything as cumbersome as X; he would start from the beginning and create something better in every way.
There is no balance -- you pick one and do it seriously.
There is always balance. Even if it is only work and video games.
Or you do your 40-50 hours a week at work and take a single class. Yeah, it takes forever, I went to school with a guy who spent about 10 yrs getting his BS doing just that.
This requires balance also. Even if your one class only takes up 5 hours/week you have to take 5 hours away from something else.
I have your guy beat, I took 12 years to get my bachelor's degree; I changed major a few times though. After almost 10 years off I'm thinking about going for my masters. I'm also thinking about changing carreers from IS to pharmacology. A pharmacology degree would probably take me another 12 years since I haven't taken any real chemistry classes yet.
A course in logic and fallacies is essential if you want to be able to think for yourself. I got my logic training from a course called discrete mathamatics which was required for my CS major.
It is tough for a lot of people to see their sacred cows die in politics, religion, economics, etc. That is why most people choose not to think for themselves.
My intro to philosophy class was interesting but not useful. My instructor only covered epistemology. No mention of logic, classical philosophers, exestentialism, and only brief mentions of theology, apologetics and cosmology. I expect intro courses to be a survey of all major topics in a discipline.
Early reports were that M$ lost money on every X-Box it sold. The old razor and blade game; sell the razor at a loss and mark up the blades a bunch and make your money there.
If it is true that M$ looses money on every box it sells than buying them up to run Linux would hurt them.
While it may be true that M$ lost money initially I don't believe that they would let this situation go on for long.
I followed the Irish tradition of buying her a Claddagh. Claddagh rings have a heart to symbolize love, hands to symbolize frendship, and a crown (optional) that symbolize loyalty.
Claddagh rings are worn different ways. Worn on the right hand with the heart pointing out means you are available; worn on the right hand with the heart pointing inward means you have prospects (e.g. engaged). Worn on the left hand with the heart pointed inward means you are married.
Not only am I so cheap not to buy the diamond engagement ring I'm so cheap that I'm making her use the same ring as an engagement and wedding band. I'm such a cad! Actually we both like the looks and symbolism of Claddagh rings. After I bought her one she bought one for me. We got ours at James Avery Jewlers; mine was custom since the ring we liked didn't come in men's sizes.
My favorite activity is bicycling. The problem with this is that it takes a while to get ready (putting on clothes, shoes, helment, pumping up tires, etc.) so I don't get out very often.
The best solution I found is weight circuit training. I do 10 minutes of calesthenics and stretching, then 1-4 circuits of 5 weight exercises with no rest between exercises, then 10 minutes of abdominal and oblique exericse. My current circuit is military press, upright row, bicept curls, bent row, stiff legged dead lifts. By not taking any breaks between exercises I keep my heart in the high target range and I can get a pretty good workout in about the time I usually spend just getting ready to ride.
Mac OS X is BSD. BSD was UNIX long before X/open owned the trademark. Were their any justice in the world BSD would be grandfathered in as UNIX. After Ford purchased Mazda my Miata didn't become a Ford.
I suppose Apple is big enough of a company to care about trademarks so they could conceivably spend the money to make Darwin UNIX 95 standard compliant and certify it. Then they could legally call it UNIX instead of *NIX or UNIX-like.
No, for signed 32 bit integers time_t fills up in 2038. If we are still using time_t by then I'll bet we will be using more than 31 bits to hold it.
I'm not aware of any future events that have been accurately predited by interpreters of Bible prophecies. In general after the fact world events are interpreted as fulfilling prophecies but even these corrolations require a certain amount of imagination to tie together.
FreeBSD is dead for people who need a bandwagon to jump onto. FreeBSD is dead for people who want a political or trendy OS. For people who simply want the best server OS available for PC hardware FreeBSD lives.
Sun knows they can not compete in the price/performance arena at the bottom end. The $1,000 Sun Blade isn't a bad attempt though. I'm not sure what makes you say an Ultra 10 is a slug though. It can saturate a couple T1's with web content or email. I agree that it isn't that great any more but it still does the job. I agree with the first poster; the reason why Sun is choosing Linux for its low end Intel based machines is hype. Every mindless dweeb who has read a few compouter mag articles knows that Linux is cool and that they are supposed to like it. Every pointy haried boss is afraid of missing out on the Linux bandwagon. You have to
be buzzword complient these days and Linux is a good buzzword checkoff.
I used to call Solaris x86 on '486 machines Slowlaris because it really ran slower than Solaris ran even on ancient IPC's and SPARC I's. Ever since the Pentium I felt that Solaris was reasonable on Intel hardware.
As far as ugly and hard to work with I'd have to give that crown to HPUX. Their default dekstop is even uglier than Solaris's and their X11 libraries are a disaster. You have to build your own X11R6 tree in order to have much success building your own X11 software. I'm still a fan of good old SunOS 4.x but have had to go the way of Solaris 2.
Getting back to the original question I'll bet Sun is producing their own Linux distro so they will be able to support it better. Sun is a company that sells solutions rather than hardware, software, and/or support. Sun will sell you the whole bundle. It would be easier for Sun to support their own distro than to be at the mercy of other companies for updates and bug fixes.
Re:"For the benefit of humanity"
on
China Plans Moonbase
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
> Jeez, I guess they must have run out of room > for their extensive chain of gulags and > slave labor camps down here on Earth.
Actually, the good 'ol US incarcerates a higher percentage of its population than red china.
With our current trend of zero-tolerance and long mandatory sentences for non-violent drug offences we keep building more and more prisons and keep filling them up. LA's Twin Towers Correctional Facility is the world's largest prision. Lets not forget Guantanamo Bay where we refuse to honor the Geneva convention because the prisioners of our "War on Terrorism" are not prisioners of war according to the US.
As others said OpenBSD was an offshoot of NetBSD. NetBSD itself started life as a system that combined the Jolitz's 386BSD with collected patches so you could say that NetBSD "ripped off" 386BSD. Since all the software is free nobody is ripping anyone else off though. Since OpenBSD is based in Canada they can ship their system with strong encryption since they are not subject to the USA's fascist crypto laws.
There is a certain amount of skill inflation going on in the DP/IS/IT industry. Are CNE's and MCSE's really engineers? I think not! People who churn out lines of code implementing other people's design and algorithms don't deserve the title of programmer since they are just coders. A lot of the folks passing themselves off as sofware engineers have never studied this discipline and have a fuzzy at best understanding of what it is. Having worked in the CS department of a university I found that a far smaller percentage of graduates could do system work than programming. Most areas of programming and engineering allow workers to become specialists while systems people have to be generalists. Where I work we have systems so complex that nobody understands them top to bottom. The DBA's, data modelers, statiticians, and developers each understand their layer but the systems administrators are the generalists who know a little about every layer and often have to be called in to fix things that break and perplex the specialists. IT does not equate engineering and programming; it requires far more intellectual curiosity and problem solving.
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I worked for a University for 7 years. 1 year as a research assistant, 1 year as a research programmer, and 5 years as a UNIX system administrator. As UNIX admin I had from 2 to 6 student employees working for me. Sometimes my help was amazingly good and other times it wasn't so hot. Some years we were swimming in money and I could buy anything I needed but other years research grants were lean and I had to make due. One boss was a techie himself and gave me reviews that made it sound like I walked on water, my next boss didn't trust techies and gave me scathing reviews. First the good: there is lots of stuff to learn. Instead of having only one or two different platforms like most companies my department had a few of almost every UNIX box known to man. It was a support nightmare but it was fun to have so many different kinds of toys. Much of the work I did was very cutting edge/early adopter; we were doing stuff years before most businesses were. After my years working in a university I was so strong technically that future "real" jobs were a piece of cake. I did have to scale a learning curve on business and proceedure stuff though. Now the bad stuff: pay, expect to make less than half what you would elsewhere. Speaking of politics, there is an old saying, politics in acadamea are so viscious because the stakes are so low. At universities there is a lot of dead wood. Some managers measure their worth by how many people are under them so they create useless positions to fill. Little wars erupt between rival departments, rival colleges, departments and colleges, deans and their departments, etc. When I started out my attitude was that I was there to help everyone else so I never took sides in any of these little wars. This strategy worked well for the first few years but later when my position was in jeoparty I had no allies to call upon. In my case my job description included a lot of non-technical stuff. I ended up spending half of my time doing procurement, inventory and clerical stuff which was a drag. Before you accept a job be sure you know exactly what your responsibilities will be.
One of the things that amazes me about Cuba is how much they do with so little. While Cubans live in poverty and the Cuban government is cash straped they do have lower infant mortality and a higher literacy rate than the US which is the wealthiest nation in the world. Some parts of their system do seem to work better than ours. Many argue that the average Cuban is better off today than they were before the revolution. Under Batista the vast majority of Cubans lived in poverty as well. While I'm still on my soapbox I'd point out that American opposition to Cuba has nothing to do with Democracy or freedom; we have supported far worse despots than Castro. Our problem with Castro is economic ideology or Capitalism vs. Socialism not Democracy vs. Despotism.
While the first pilgrims who came to North America did come for religious reasons a lot happened between the time of the first pilgrims and the founding of the USA. By then coloists were here for many reasons including new opportunities or escaping legal or financial problems in their homeland. Many forget that Revolutionary America was at the tail end of the Enlightenemnt. Rationalism and Freethought was popular. Some of our founding fathers were Deists or Pantheists rather than Christians. Of the Christians many belonged to liberal or unorthodox religions like those you mention like Quakers, Unitarians and Universalists (Unitarian and Universalist were seperate religions back then). Many of our founding fathers who were Christians were very anti-clerical while others were ambiguous or even countradictory about their religious views. A common sport here is for religionits to take founding father's quotes out of context to make them appear more Christian than they were while secularists take their quotes out of context to make them appear less Christian than they were. Often the same person is claimed by both sides. While American founding father's religions were diverse and sometimes unorthodox within several decades of the revolution there were a number of protestant revivals solidifying the position of main-line Protestant Christianity, deism and pantheism died out, and non-orthodox religions faded in popularity.
My first programming experience was on a TI programmable calculater in the 70's. I never touched a computer until I was in college.
There are still interpreted languages. For the purpose of teaching programming I'd recommend Scheme. Nice little language available in lots of forms. If you want to teach something that will be a decent learning language yet still useful commercially I'd go with java.
I've been noticing a lot of VW's with 'TDI' badges on them lately. At least in my area (D-FW area of Texas) turbo diesels do seem to be pretty good sellers. Now if bio-diesel was available here that would really be something. I'd gladly pay $4-$5/gal for biodiesel knowing my money is going to our farmers and our economy than pay $2/gal for gas knowing the money is going to multi-national corporations and terrorists.
For the last dozen years I've been arguing that either Sun should buy Apple or vice versa. I'm a little dubious that the SPARC franchise is going to be able to keep up with the IBM and Intel juggernauts. Every new version of SPARC is late so I don't expect to see a 8 core Niagra chip any time soon. As insurance it would be wise for Sun to support Solaris on SPARC/Intel-AMD/PowerPC so whichever architecture wins the market they will have a presence on.
Not in my experience. I have Solaris IA running on Intel servers all the way down to Pentium 200's. We have a name server on a Solaris/P200 that has been up for years and has never missed a beat. The time when I called Solaris Slowlaris was back in the '486 days when Solaris really was a dog on Intel.
We have been having a heck of a time getting breeder reactors to work right. The few breeder reactors that have been built have produced electricity so expensive that their operation had to be subsidised and they are very inefficent at producing more fuel. Running a breeder reactor makes more waste disposal problems instead of fewer. Breader reactors produce more high level waste than conventional light water reactors. President Carter was knowledgable about nuclear energy having studied at the Navy nuclear school. There is the problem of pruducing plutonium but the main problem with breeder reactors are that they are too expensive and don't work well at the current state of the art. Currently there is plenty of uranium so breeder reactors remain an interesting technology for the future if uranium prices increase.
I quit trying to have intelligent conversations with "audiophiles" after one tried to tell me that they could hear a difference between an original CD and copies, then they boasted they could hear a difference between coppies burned at 2x and 4x; the 2x burn being more faithful to the original.
I haven't had time to read all the posts here so 2^10 pardons of someone already said this. In the 1950's scientists promised electricity so cheap we wouldn't need to meter it from nuclear power plants but the reality is exactly the opposite; nuclear energy is the most expensive way to generate electricity there is. The reason why we don't use more nuclear energy isn't because of its dangers or because the left opposes it; it is because it is too expensive. Many nuclear power plants operate at a loss because it costs more to generate the electricity than anyone would pay. The economics can change if fossil fules get expensive and new reactor designs make nuclear power cheaper. It is essential to reduce our dependance on foreign oil but the best solution is a multi-pronged approach: conservation, geothermal, hydroelectric, wind, biofuels, coal, oil shale (?) and nuclear.
Sun's license terms came about quite a while ago when Sun and AT&T had a stock swap. The idea of a Sun/AT&T merger sent shivers through the UNIX industry leading to OSF which brought us OSF/1 (which only DEC used) and Motif which everyone used and almost everyone hated.
As far as I know Sun is the only vendor with such a license where they can distribute UNIX without paying royalties to anyone.
To me this brings up a thought. Assume that SCO wins their lawsuit saying that there is UNIX technology in Linux. Under Sun's license it might turn out that Sun and Sun alone would be the only company who could still legally give away Linux.
Don't be so sure. Remember that Knuth took 10 years off his schedule to write TeX and friends. I have no doubt that if Knuth decided to work in the field of GUI's that whatever he came up would blow everything else out of the water. I doubt he would work with anything as cumbersome as X; he would start from the beginning and create something better in every way.
I have your guy beat, I took 12 years to get my bachelor's degree; I changed major a few times though. After almost 10 years off I'm thinking about going for my masters. I'm also thinking about changing carreers from IS to pharmacology. A pharmacology degree would probably take me another 12 years since I haven't taken any real chemistry classes yet.
A course in logic and fallacies is essential if you want to be able to think for yourself. I got my logic training from a course called discrete mathamatics which was required for my CS major.
It is tough for a lot of people to see their sacred cows die in politics, religion, economics, etc. That is why most people choose not to think for themselves.
My intro to philosophy class was interesting but not useful. My instructor only covered epistemology. No mention of logic, classical philosophers, exestentialism, and only brief mentions of theology, apologetics and cosmology. I expect intro courses to be a survey of all major topics in a discipline.
Early reports were that M$ lost money on every X-Box it sold. The old razor and blade game; sell the razor at a loss and mark up the blades a bunch and make your money there. If it is true that M$ looses money on every box it sells than buying them up to run Linux would hurt them. While it may be true that M$ lost money initially I don't believe that they would let this situation go on for long.
I didn't buy my fiance a diamond ring.
I followed the Irish tradition of buying her a Claddagh. Claddagh rings have a heart to symbolize love, hands to symbolize frendship, and a crown (optional) that symbolize loyalty.
Claddagh rings are worn different ways. Worn on the right hand with the heart pointing out means you are available; worn on the right hand with the heart pointing inward means you have prospects (e.g. engaged). Worn on the left hand with the heart pointed inward means you are married.
Not only am I so cheap not to buy the diamond engagement ring I'm so cheap that I'm making her use the same ring as an engagement and wedding band. I'm such a cad! Actually we both like the looks and symbolism of Claddagh rings. After I bought her one she bought one for me. We got ours at James Avery Jewlers; mine was custom since the ring we liked didn't come in men's sizes.
My favorite activity is bicycling. The problem with this is that it takes a while to get ready (putting on clothes, shoes, helment, pumping up tires, etc.) so I don't get out very often. The best solution I found is weight circuit training. I do 10 minutes of calesthenics and stretching, then 1-4 circuits of 5 weight exercises with no rest between exercises, then 10 minutes of abdominal and oblique exericse. My current circuit is military press, upright row, bicept curls, bent row, stiff legged dead lifts. By not taking any breaks between exercises I keep my heart in the high target range and I can get a pretty good workout in about the time I usually spend just getting ready to ride.
Mac OS X is BSD. BSD was UNIX long before X/open owned the trademark. Were their any justice in the world BSD would be grandfathered in as UNIX. After Ford purchased Mazda my Miata didn't become a Ford. I suppose Apple is big enough of a company to care about trademarks so they could conceivably spend the money to make Darwin UNIX 95 standard compliant and certify it. Then they could legally call it UNIX instead of *NIX or UNIX-like.
No, for signed 32 bit integers time_t fills up in 2038. If we are still using time_t by then I'll bet we will be using more than 31 bits to hold it. I'm not aware of any future events that have been accurately predited by interpreters of Bible prophecies. In general after the fact world events are interpreted as fulfilling prophecies but even these corrolations require a certain amount of imagination to tie together.
FreeBSD is dead for people who need a bandwagon to jump onto. FreeBSD is dead for people who want a political or trendy OS. For people who simply want the best server OS available for PC hardware FreeBSD lives.
Sun knows they can not compete in the price/performance arena at the bottom end. The $1,000 Sun Blade isn't a bad attempt though. I'm not sure what makes you say an Ultra 10 is a slug though. It can saturate a couple T1's with web content or email. I agree that it isn't that great any more but it still does the job. I agree with the first poster; the reason why Sun is choosing Linux for its low end Intel based machines is hype. Every mindless dweeb who has read a few compouter mag articles knows that Linux is cool and that they are supposed to like it. Every pointy haried boss is afraid of missing out on the Linux bandwagon. You have to be buzzword complient these days and Linux is a good buzzword checkoff.
I used to call Solaris x86 on '486 machines Slowlaris because it really ran slower than Solaris ran even on ancient IPC's and SPARC I's. Ever since the Pentium I felt that Solaris was reasonable on Intel hardware.
As far as ugly and hard to work with I'd have to give that crown to HPUX. Their default dekstop is even uglier than Solaris's and their X11 libraries are a disaster. You have to build your own X11R6 tree in order to have much success building your own X11 software. I'm still a fan of good old SunOS 4.x but have had to go the way of Solaris 2.
Getting back to the original question I'll bet Sun is producing their own Linux distro so they will be able to support it better. Sun is a company that sells solutions rather than hardware, software, and/or support. Sun will sell you the whole bundle. It would be easier for Sun to support their own distro than to be at the mercy of other companies for updates and bug fixes.
> Jeez, I guess they must have run out of room
> for their extensive chain of gulags and
> slave labor camps down here on Earth.
Actually, the good 'ol US incarcerates a higher percentage of its population than red china.
With our current trend of zero-tolerance and long mandatory sentences for non-violent drug offences we keep building more and more prisons and keep filling them up. LA's Twin Towers Correctional Facility is the world's largest prision. Lets not forget Guantanamo Bay where we refuse to honor the Geneva convention because the prisioners of our "War on Terrorism" are not prisioners of war according to the US.
As others said OpenBSD was an offshoot of NetBSD. NetBSD itself started life as a system that combined the Jolitz's 386BSD with collected patches so you could say that NetBSD "ripped off" 386BSD. Since all the software is free nobody is ripping anyone else off though. Since OpenBSD is based in Canada they can ship their system with strong encryption since they are not subject to the USA's fascist crypto laws.
There is a certain amount of skill inflation going on in the DP/IS/IT industry. Are CNE's and MCSE's really engineers? I think not! People who churn out lines of code implementing other people's design and algorithms don't deserve the title of programmer since they are just coders. A lot of the folks passing themselves off as sofware engineers have never studied this discipline and have a fuzzy at best understanding of what it is. Having worked in the CS department of a university I found that a far smaller percentage of graduates could do system work than programming. Most areas of programming and engineering allow workers to become specialists while systems people have to be generalists. Where I work we have systems so complex that nobody understands them top to bottom. The DBA's, data modelers, statiticians, and developers each understand their layer but the systems administrators are the generalists who know a little about every layer and often have to be called in to fix things that break and perplex the specialists. IT does not equate engineering and programming; it requires far more intellectual curiosity and problem solving.