I think that you are right in that the idea is to encourage developers to release new versions in time for new distro releases, but I am not sure this is a good idea. I see the benefit of there being a distro with a predictable release schedule, but, generally, I believe more in "releasing when it's good enough". For example, I think Debian stable is as good as it is because they determine the release time by looking at the quality rather than by looking at the calendar. I am happy there is a distro that does that, too. And, as for software that gets packaged in distros, I hope they will let their releases be guided by the quality of the code, rather than rush things out of the door to be in time for the next release of the major distros.
I guess we're all supposed to be outraged about this, but, honestly, I'm not surprised. The idea that there must be liberty is, as far as I know, only generally accepted in the USA, and even there, concerns about the children or the terrorists usually quickly overrides any ideals of liberty.
Total liberty simply isn't very important to most people.
Happiness is, and comfort, but you can have those without liberty.
In fact, comfort and happiness might be increased if the government, or another organization, steps in to ensure that you and your children won't bump into nastiness on the Internet quite as often.
Where I live, in the Netherlands, there's been a survey (I think it was before the latest elections) that showed that the number one thing people wanted the government to do was place more cameras. Not even less crime on the streets or anything that one might consider good, just more cameras. They wanted the government to spy on people more.
Knowing some people from China, it wouldn't surprise me at all if the result of the survey were close to accurate. By and large, the things that American's abhor about China are considered Good Things by people there. And they aren't alone: many people ouside China also want the government to protect them against themselves.
I don't understand what you're getting at. How do you mean a single person has to do all the merging in a distributed version control system? As far as I know, with Git at least, you can give multiple people push permission to your repository, just as you can give multiple people commit access to your repository in Subversion.
The main architectural difference I see between Git and Subversion is that, with Git, every repository is first-class, instead of only one. That means you can, but don't have to, pull changesets from and push changesets to more than one repository. It also means you can make commits to your local repository (or repositories), and only push things to someone else's repository later. To me, these seem additional and useful features compared to Subversion. If you want, though, you can work with Git just like you would with Subversion, and have one central repository that everyone pushes to and pulls from.
``The bottom line is, if it didn't work, the authorities wouldn't keep spending money on it.''
I think the rest of your post provides very valuable input for the debate, but that last line just isn't right. It sounds catchy, and you might want it to be true, but I think governments spending their resources efficiently is nothing more than wishful thinking. Not even necessarily because they don't try to be efficient, but simply because they don't have the right feedback to make them efficient.
In the case of cameras to fight crime, in particular, I think it is too early for anyone to know whether the recent expansions of the surveillance are efficient or not. Can you present well-founded figures as to the total costs and benefits of the system to society? I know I can't, and I honestly think nobody can. How, then, is anyone to know if it's efficient?
``What this is, basically, is emulating the Java in Javascript, an interpreted language. I can't help but feel that anything written in this is going to be very slow, and I can't, personally, see why anybody would bother. Of course, I'd be very happy to be proven wrong!''
Probably, it will be slow.
But, in general, just because something is interpreted doesn't mean it has to be slow. There are various ways to implement an interpreter, and interpreters can have either very fast start-up time or very fast execution time, as well as various places in between.
``If you take Windows Vista, Windows Server, Office, SharePoint, Exchange, SQL Server, IIS, everything on offer; you're guaranteed absolutely they will work together (assuming you're not thick as shit and screw it up) you can be assured that some of the most thorough testing on the planet has gone into making sure they work together and that's a real advantage Microsoft has over OSS - information systems are never one component, they are many.''
On the other hand, this is the sort of thing that standards are for. Particularly, standards that anyone is free to implement at no cost. Because, with standard-compliant software, you get the same "everything works together" goodness, but you are free to choose the pieces that suit you best. Competition, the right tool for the job, etc.
With Microsoft, you get, pretty much, one option for every piece of the puzzle. It's a single software stack, you just get the individual components separately. It's very nicely integrated - but only with itself. Try adding pieces from a different vendor, and you will find that they don't fit very well, due to not supporting Microsoft's proprietary interfaces.
To be fair, there is usually a little more flexibility in the Microsoft world than I have sketched above. You can typically choose a few different versions of Microsoft software to fill a certain role (e.g. you don't need to upgrade everything at once), and some parts actually work together well with the rest of the world (e.g. Windows and Exchange are pretty good at communicating with competing products). Still, many Microsoft products only work in combination with other Microsoft products (e.g. almost everything requires Windows, even though competing software is usually cross-platform), and support for standards is often lacking. Generally, it's difficult to use Microsoft products together with non-Microsoft products that perform the same task.
``The chance of running into all kinds of memory problems is gradually outweighing the performance penalty you have to pay for garbage collection.''
Moreover, automatic memory management makes for more elegant and workable APIs, and some things (I think closures are among those) need automatic memory management.
Also, automatic memory management is not necessarily slower than manual memory management. In fact, garbage collection can be faster than malloc/free, and has been demonstrated to be so in some cases. (One obvious case where a collector outperforms manual memory management is when the collector never has to run.)
``IMHO this makes a lot of sense. You can do whatever the hell you want with the CD you purchased - the only thing you cannot do is make a copy of it, with limited exceptions for fair dealing. That's traditionally how copyright law worked and it's how it still applies to books.''
IANAL and all that, and I don't know what the law says in the USA, but here in the Netherlands, the law distinguishes between copyrighted works that come on media (music is the copyrighted work, the CD is the medium) and works that don't (the book is the copyrighted work).
With works that come on media (except software), you are allowed to make copies of the copyrighted work for personal use. You are also allowed to do this if you don't own the medium, but, say, borrowed a CD from a friend. And you are allowed to ask your friend to make a copy for you, and they are allowed to do so. (To compensate copyright holders for this, there is a levy on blank media.)
With works that aren't separate from their media (e.g. books), you aren't allowed to do all that.
Moreover, when there are "technical measures" that in place to prevent you from doing certain things, you are not allowed to circumvent these technical measures (even to excercise rights that you otherwise have, such as playing the music that you paid for).
It is my understanding that this would make a service like MP3Tunes offers perfectly legal to use in the Netherlands. Also, to address other posters who have stated that MP3Tunes would be illegal in "most countries": as far as I know, the way copyright law works in the Netherlands is very similar if not identical to the way it works in many other EU countries.
I reckon the job of the spies has been a whole lot easier because they could rely on the US gov't buying Cisco-branded equipment. More diversity in the network equipment landscape would have made things more difficult.
How do you mean? I create lots of validating HTML. And many browsers render it correctly. Or, at least, I think they do. Even if they don't support all the CSS features I use, the page still degrades gracefully, which is a feature of HTML.
"While universities like MIT, Berkeley and CMU don't tend to shout as loudly about their latest tech innovations as do Google, Cisco and other big vendors, their results are no less impressive in what they could mean for faster, more secure and more useful networks, computers, etc."
I feel that hits the nail on the head. A lot of impressive innovations come out of universities, but it's the corporate world that makes most of the hype. Sometimes, they promote inventions that originally came from universities. Sometimes, they promote inferior technology to what already exists. But it's usually the hyped technology that wins. I think we should be paying more attention to university research.
``KGI was a damn good system - somewhat overshaddowed by GGI and other similar efforts, though, as the argument of the time was that the kernel shouldn't do what userspace can do.''
There is a point to that. On the other hand, it is questionable whether, in Linux, userspace _should_ be able to do all the things needed to drive the graphics card. Userspace directly accessing hardware and reading and writing arbitrary memory locations?
On the gripping hand, the reason this is unsafe is only that the languages we use are unsafe. They don't gurantee that processes don't access things that aren't theirs. Essentially, we solve this by imposing a sort of dynamic type checking: we run these unsafe processes in a restricted mode, where the hardware limits their access to memory and I/O ports. Of course, sometimes, you _do_ need more than this restricted access, and that's what the kernel does. We trust the kernel to do it right. But now we've used indirection into the process: to access the hardware, a process needs to go through the kernel, which (hopefully) restricts the process to only doing benign things to the hardware. This is, of course, slower than it could be. Especially on x86, where switching from user mode to kernel mode is quite an expensive operation. This is the real reason why microkernels are slow.
An alternative would be to have the compiler perform or insert the checks that, in current systems, are performed by the kernel and the hardware at run-time. This way, processes don't have to run in restricted mode and go through the kernel anymore, because they aren't going to do any of the things the kernel would prevent them from doing anyway. Of course, this requires a rather safer type system than C's, and it shifts trust from the kernel to the compiler - which raises issues about how you can know that the code you want to run was indeed compiled by a trustworthy compiler. However, these issues can be solved, and you end up with a system that can be more modular _and_ more efficient.
``One has to wonder if this hacking attempt was government sponsored or not.''
There's probably no need. The thing that many people don't seem to realize that the information chinese people in China get and the information people outside China get are very different, and what the implications of this are. I've met a number of people from China, and, simply put, there is a world of difference between what is common knowledge here and what is common knowledge there.
Where many Americans see the chinese government as a repressive tyranny that needs to be overthrown to allow the chinese people to be free, the chinese see huge economic development and modernization. Where I've heard Europeans call the One Child Policy a crime against humanity, I've heard chinese people call it an unfortunate necessity, put in place for the good of the people. The Dalai Lama? How dare he criticize the chinese who have done so many good things for him! And you may not realize it, but the chinese government is actually doing a lot of good things for the environment.
Of course, the chinese government isn't perfect, and I think everybody will agree. But, knowing what a chinese person in China does, some of the things that foreign press agencies have been saying about China are completely outrageous. And when they are also critical of your country, some people will get angry. In a large country like China, that means a lot of angry people.
Remember the flame wars that were all over the net and the media when foreigners criticized the Bush government, its warlike policies, and their attempts to deceive the American people and the world? The same thing is now happening in China. The good thing about it all is that it raises awareness, in China, about issues that are important to the rest of the world. The bad thing about it is that it seems that the criticism is being turned into evidence of a worldwide conspiracy against China.
Of course, this is the wrong way to deal with criticism. The right response would be to find the cause of the criticism and only then decide on an appropriate action. Perhaps the critics have a point and the situation should be improved. Perhaps the critics are misguided and they should be corrected. Or perhaps their criticism is unfounded - in which case the appropriate response may be to ignore them or to criticize them in turn. Silencing critics is not, I think, an appropriate response.
One really interesting question is, though, how well informed are the critics? How sure are _you_ about the real situation over in China?
``Can you code 24 hours non-stop?... to enhance Free Software projects''
I don't know about the rest of you, but, although I am sure I _could_ code non-stop for 24 hours, I am sure I won't be producing the best quality code if I do so. I think _enhancing_ any project is best done with clear thinking and sufficient breaks.
``And if programmers would check that the allocation succeeded, we would also have no problem.
In your hypothetical "safe" language (C#, for example), I can't count how many times I've seen system calls wrapped in a try/catch to hide the exception, then carry on pretending the call worked just fine. Guess what? SAME DAMNED PROBLEM!''
Not quite. First of all, there is a marked difference between having to write extra code to handle an error, and having to write extra code to ignore an error. The easier the language makes it to do the right thing, the more often the right thing will be done.
Secondly, there is an important point to be made about (type-) safe languages. In a type-safe language, the abstractions provided by the language canont be broken. Your program will only ever do what the source code says it does. Contrast this with C, where various ways exist to make the program do something utterly different from what the source code says. C's lack of type safety is at the root of entire classes of exploits, all of which simply aren't possible in type-safe languages.
I didn't actually know there were robot warriors, until today. Now I am thinking about whether I think robot warriors are good or really bad.
On the one hand, I it is a Good Thing that robots can be used to fight instead of people, because, if a robot warrior gets destroyed, I won't feel nearly as bad as when a human soldier gets killed.
On the other hand, incurring human casualties and bad feelings when going to war is a Good Thing. The idea that one can go to war by sending the robots and not incur any negativity on the home fronts is really scary. Going to war _should_ be painful.
Let's not develop the false impression that everything is great in the EU. We (I live in the EU), too, have bad laws, and a patent office that has granted software patents. Here, too, there are fear of the terrorists, discrimination against muslims and foreigners (even from other EU countries), security theater, governments that block investigations of possible mishaps, unreliable voting machines, religious fanaticism, the works.
Not that life is downright terrible in the EU, but we need to keep our eyes open, promote what is good, and correct what is wrong. Sure, I guess it's fun to laugh at Americans who can't spell their own language right, think Holland is the capital of Amsterdam, and are being spied on by their own government, but then, I know there are plenty of people in my country who can't spell their own language right, have absolutely no idea where Minnesota is, and are spied on by their government even more.
And that's not even counting the fact that your free *nix of choice is far more customizable than OS X, and better geared towards low-end hardware, to boot.
Yes, of course I have considered that "better" is subjective, and that the best choice for one person may not be the best choice for another person.
This is exactly why standards and interoperability are important. Leave everybody free to choose the software (interface, etc.) that suits them best, but still allow everybody to communicate with everybody else because the different choices interoperate.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that you are right in that the idea is to encourage developers to release new versions in time for new distro releases, but I am not sure this is a good idea. I see the benefit of there being a distro with a predictable release schedule, but, generally, I believe more in "releasing when it's good enough". For example, I think Debian stable is as good as it is because they determine the release time by looking at the quality rather than by looking at the calendar. I am happy there is a distro that does that, too. And, as for software that gets packaged in distros, I hope they will let their releases be guided by the quality of the code, rather than rush things out of the door to be in time for the next release of the major distros.
I guess we're all supposed to be outraged about this, but, honestly, I'm not surprised. The idea that there must be liberty is, as far as I know, only generally accepted in the USA, and even there, concerns about the children or the terrorists usually quickly overrides any ideals of liberty.
Total liberty simply isn't very important to most people.
Happiness is, and comfort, but you can have those without liberty.
In fact, comfort and happiness might be increased if the government, or another organization, steps in to ensure that you and your children won't bump into nastiness on the Internet quite as often.
Where I live, in the Netherlands, there's been a survey (I think it was before the latest elections) that showed that the number one thing people wanted the government to do was place more cameras. Not even less crime on the streets or anything that one might consider good, just more cameras. They wanted the government to spy on people more.
Knowing some people from China, it wouldn't surprise me at all if the result of the survey were close to accurate. By and large, the things that American's abhor about China are considered Good Things by people there. And they aren't alone: many people ouside China also want the government to protect them against themselves.
I don't understand what you're getting at. How do you mean a single person has to do all the merging in a distributed version control system? As far as I know, with Git at least, you can give multiple people push permission to your repository, just as you can give multiple people commit access to your repository in Subversion.
The main architectural difference I see between Git and Subversion is that, with Git, every repository is first-class, instead of only one. That means you can, but don't have to, pull changesets from and push changesets to more than one repository. It also means you can make commits to your local repository (or repositories), and only push things to someone else's repository later. To me, these seem additional and useful features compared to Subversion. If you want, though, you can work with Git just like you would with Subversion, and have one central repository that everyone pushes to and pulls from.
``The bottom line is, if it didn't work, the authorities wouldn't keep spending money on it.''
I think the rest of your post provides very valuable input for the debate, but that last line just isn't right. It sounds catchy, and you might want it to be true, but I think governments spending their resources efficiently is nothing more than wishful thinking. Not even necessarily because they don't try to be efficient, but simply because they don't have the right feedback to make them efficient.
In the case of cameras to fight crime, in particular, I think it is too early for anyone to know whether the recent expansions of the surveillance are efficient or not. Can you present well-founded figures as to the total costs and benefits of the system to society? I know I can't, and I honestly think nobody can. How, then, is anyone to know if it's efficient?
But...but...Google!! Google!!
Hey, I'm not fat!
``What this is, basically, is emulating the Java in Javascript, an interpreted language. I can't help but feel that anything written in this is going to be very slow, and I can't, personally, see why anybody would bother. Of course, I'd be very happy to be proven wrong!''
Probably, it will be slow.
But, in general, just because something is interpreted doesn't mean it has to be slow. There are various ways to implement an interpreter, and interpreters can have either very fast start-up time or very fast execution time, as well as various places in between.
``If you take Windows Vista, Windows Server, Office, SharePoint, Exchange, SQL Server, IIS, everything on offer; you're guaranteed absolutely they will work together (assuming you're not thick as shit and screw it up) you can be assured that some of the most thorough testing on the planet has gone into making sure they work together and that's a real advantage Microsoft has over OSS - information systems are never one component, they are many.''
On the other hand, this is the sort of thing that standards are for. Particularly, standards that anyone is free to implement at no cost. Because, with standard-compliant software, you get the same "everything works together" goodness, but you are free to choose the pieces that suit you best. Competition, the right tool for the job, etc.
With Microsoft, you get, pretty much, one option for every piece of the puzzle. It's a single software stack, you just get the individual components separately. It's very nicely integrated - but only with itself. Try adding pieces from a different vendor, and you will find that they don't fit very well, due to not supporting Microsoft's proprietary interfaces.
To be fair, there is usually a little more flexibility in the Microsoft world than I have sketched above. You can typically choose a few different versions of Microsoft software to fill a certain role (e.g. you don't need to upgrade everything at once), and some parts actually work together well with the rest of the world (e.g. Windows and Exchange are pretty good at communicating with competing products). Still, many Microsoft products only work in combination with other Microsoft products (e.g. almost everything requires Windows, even though competing software is usually cross-platform), and support for standards is often lacking. Generally, it's difficult to use Microsoft products together with non-Microsoft products that perform the same task.
``The chance of running into all kinds of memory problems is gradually outweighing the performance penalty you have to pay for garbage collection.''
Moreover, automatic memory management makes for more elegant and workable APIs, and some things (I think closures are among those) need automatic memory management.
Also, automatic memory management is not necessarily slower than manual memory management. In fact, garbage collection can be faster than malloc/free, and has been demonstrated to be so in some cases. (One obvious case where a collector outperforms manual memory management is when the collector never has to run.)
``IMHO this makes a lot of sense. You can do whatever the hell you want with the CD you purchased - the only thing you cannot do is make a copy of it, with limited exceptions for fair dealing. That's traditionally how copyright law worked and it's how it still applies to books.''
IANAL and all that, and I don't know what the law says in the USA, but here in the Netherlands, the law distinguishes between copyrighted works that come on media (music is the copyrighted work, the CD is the medium) and works that don't (the book is the copyrighted work).
With works that come on media (except software), you are allowed to make copies of the copyrighted work for personal use. You are also allowed to do this if you don't own the medium, but, say, borrowed a CD from a friend. And you are allowed to ask your friend to make a copy for you, and they are allowed to do so. (To compensate copyright holders for this, there is a levy on blank media.)
With works that aren't separate from their media (e.g. books), you aren't allowed to do all that.
Moreover, when there are "technical measures" that in place to prevent you from doing certain things, you are not allowed to circumvent these technical measures (even to excercise rights that you otherwise have, such as playing the music that you paid for).
It is my understanding that this would make a service like MP3Tunes offers perfectly legal to use in the Netherlands. Also, to address other posters who have stated that MP3Tunes would be illegal in "most countries": as far as I know, the way copyright law works in the Netherlands is very similar if not identical to the way it works in many other EU countries.
I reckon the job of the spies has been a whole lot easier because they could rely on the US gov't buying Cisco-branded equipment. More diversity in the network equipment landscape would have made things more difficult.
Honestly, I'm gravitating towards the conclusion that this is Microsoft giving the finger to the world.
How do you mean? I create lots of validating HTML. And many browsers render it correctly. Or, at least, I think they do. Even if they don't support all the CSS features I use, the page still degrades gracefully, which is a feature of HTML.
OOXML? It wishes it were that good!
"While universities like MIT, Berkeley and CMU don't tend to shout as loudly about their latest tech innovations as do Google, Cisco and other big vendors, their results are no less impressive in what they could mean for faster, more secure and more useful networks, computers, etc."
I feel that hits the nail on the head. A lot of impressive innovations come out of universities, but it's the corporate world that makes most of the hype. Sometimes, they promote inventions that originally came from universities. Sometimes, they promote inferior technology to what already exists. But it's usually the hyped technology that wins. I think we should be paying more attention to university research.
``KGI was a damn good system - somewhat overshaddowed by GGI and other similar efforts, though, as the argument of the time was that the kernel shouldn't do what userspace can do.''
There is a point to that. On the other hand, it is questionable whether, in Linux, userspace _should_ be able to do all the things needed to drive the graphics card. Userspace directly accessing hardware and reading and writing arbitrary memory locations?
On the gripping hand, the reason this is unsafe is only that the languages we use are unsafe. They don't gurantee that processes don't access things that aren't theirs. Essentially, we solve this by imposing a sort of dynamic type checking: we run these unsafe processes in a restricted mode, where the hardware limits their access to memory and I/O ports. Of course, sometimes, you _do_ need more than this restricted access, and that's what the kernel does. We trust the kernel to do it right. But now we've used indirection into the process: to access the hardware, a process needs to go through the kernel, which (hopefully) restricts the process to only doing benign things to the hardware. This is, of course, slower than it could be. Especially on x86, where switching from user mode to kernel mode is quite an expensive operation. This is the real reason why microkernels are slow.
An alternative would be to have the compiler perform or insert the checks that, in current systems, are performed by the kernel and the hardware at run-time. This way, processes don't have to run in restricted mode and go through the kernel anymore, because they aren't going to do any of the things the kernel would prevent them from doing anyway. Of course, this requires a rather safer type system than C's, and it shifts trust from the kernel to the compiler - which raises issues about how you can know that the code you want to run was indeed compiled by a trustworthy compiler. However, these issues can be solved, and you end up with a system that can be more modular _and_ more efficient.
``(It's not like I am still expecting it to work in Netscape 3!)''
On the other hand, why shouldn't it?
Fortunately, soyuz is unbreakable!
``One has to wonder if this hacking attempt was government sponsored or not.''
There's probably no need. The thing that many people don't seem to realize that the information chinese people in China get and the information people outside China get are very different, and what the implications of this are. I've met a number of people from China, and, simply put, there is a world of difference between what is common knowledge here and what is common knowledge there.
Where many Americans see the chinese government as a repressive tyranny that needs to be overthrown to allow the chinese people to be free, the chinese see huge economic development and modernization. Where I've heard Europeans call the One Child Policy a crime against humanity, I've heard chinese people call it an unfortunate necessity, put in place for the good of the people. The Dalai Lama? How dare he criticize the chinese who have done so many good things for him! And you may not realize it, but the chinese government is actually doing a lot of good things for the environment.
Of course, the chinese government isn't perfect, and I think everybody will agree. But, knowing what a chinese person in China does, some of the things that foreign press agencies have been saying about China are completely outrageous. And when they are also critical of your country, some people will get angry. In a large country like China, that means a lot of angry people.
Remember the flame wars that were all over the net and the media when foreigners criticized the Bush government, its warlike policies, and their attempts to deceive the American people and the world? The same thing is now happening in China. The good thing about it all is that it raises awareness, in China, about issues that are important to the rest of the world. The bad thing about it is that it seems that the criticism is being turned into evidence of a worldwide conspiracy against China.
Of course, this is the wrong way to deal with criticism. The right response would be to find the cause of the criticism and only then decide on an appropriate action. Perhaps the critics have a point and the situation should be improved. Perhaps the critics are misguided and they should be corrected. Or perhaps their criticism is unfounded - in which case the appropriate response may be to ignore them or to criticize them in turn. Silencing critics is not, I think, an appropriate response.
One really interesting question is, though, how well informed are the critics? How sure are _you_ about the real situation over in China?
``Can you code 24 hours non-stop? ... to enhance Free Software projects''
I don't know about the rest of you, but, although I am sure I _could_ code non-stop for 24 hours, I am sure I won't be producing the best quality code if I do so. I think _enhancing_ any project is best done with clear thinking and sufficient breaks.
``And if programmers would check that the allocation succeeded, we would also have no problem.
In your hypothetical "safe" language (C#, for example), I can't count how many times I've seen system calls wrapped in a try/catch to hide the exception, then carry on pretending the call worked just fine. Guess what? SAME DAMNED PROBLEM!''
Not quite. First of all, there is a marked difference between having to write extra code to handle an error, and having to write extra code to ignore an error. The easier the language makes it to do the right thing, the more often the right thing will be done.
Secondly, there is an important point to be made about (type-) safe languages. In a type-safe language, the abstractions provided by the language canont be broken. Your program will only ever do what the source code says it does. Contrast this with C, where various ways exist to make the program do something utterly different from what the source code says. C's lack of type safety is at the root of entire classes of exploits, all of which simply aren't possible in type-safe languages.
It also helps that proper *nix programs don't go around popping up windows and making the rest of the computer unusable.
Security doesn't have to be annoying.
I didn't actually know there were robot warriors, until today. Now I am thinking about whether I think robot warriors are good or really bad.
On the one hand, I it is a Good Thing that robots can be used to fight instead of people, because, if a robot warrior gets destroyed, I won't feel nearly as bad as when a human soldier gets killed.
On the other hand, incurring human casualties and bad feelings when going to war is a Good Thing. The idea that one can go to war by sending the robots and not incur any negativity on the home fronts is really scary. Going to war _should_ be painful.
Let's not develop the false impression that everything is great in the EU. We (I live in the EU), too, have bad laws, and a patent office that has granted software patents. Here, too, there are fear of the terrorists, discrimination against muslims and foreigners (even from other EU countries), security theater, governments that block investigations of possible mishaps, unreliable voting machines, religious fanaticism, the works.
Not that life is downright terrible in the EU, but we need to keep our eyes open, promote what is good, and correct what is wrong. Sure, I guess it's fun to laugh at Americans who can't spell their own language right, think Holland is the capital of Amsterdam, and are being spied on by their own government, but then, I know there are plenty of people in my country who can't spell their own language right, have absolutely no idea where Minnesota is, and are spied on by their government even more.
And that's not even counting the fact that your free *nix of choice is far more customizable than OS X, and better geared towards low-end hardware, to boot.
Yes, of course I have considered that "better" is subjective, and
that the best choice for one person may not be the best choice
for another person.
This is exactly why standards and interoperability are important.
Leave everybody free to choose the software (interface, etc.) that
suits them best, but still allow everybody to communicate with
everybody else because the different choices interoperate.