I think a better question is whether Apple would have included DRM if the music labels didn't demand it. The answer is yes.
That's not a complete question. If the music labels didn't demand DRM, then another outlet can and probably will compete with iTunes by selling unencumbered music. How long can Apple continue on that course, once somebody else starts selling identical 128-bit AAC songs with no DRM?
If it's so great, whay are you reselling it? Huh? gotcha fan boY! hahaha... heh;)
People sell things for any number of reasons. You might be leaving town, or now need a much faster CPU, or need the cash, or need the desk space, or need to run PC-only software, or your new spouse already has a Mac.
If there are two systems, and they both do what you want, the more expensive one does have less value.
Absolutely, but you must remember that the price tag is not the total cost. The total cost includes things like downtime, wasted time, irritation, and resale value. It's dishonest to count a $1,500 Mac as less value than a $1,000 PC if the resale value of the Mac is $500 and the PC's is $0.
There are lots of ways of [buying Microsoft-free PCs].
If you want to buy a Mac today, you have five models of laptops, two all-in-one's (not counting what will probably be three iMac models when they return), and three desktop models. How many different models of Microsoft-free PCs can you name?
Also, MS gets money for every Mac sold.
I wasn't arguing that buying a Mac doesn't pay Microsoft. I was arguing that buying most PCs will not avoid paying for proprietary software, which is what the person I was responding to wanted. I personally have no problem paying for commercial software.
1) Extremely annoying Mac zealots chanting "It has teh UNIX!" when they have no clue what that means.
There are extremely annoying Windows and Linux users as well. There are even extremely annoying people who don't use computers. So what?
2) "Total Cost of 0wnership" study showing how laughably weak MacOS is, even though "it has teh UNIX!"
Sorry, what are you referring to?
3) The OS is proprietary, as is the hardware. Expensive and hard to come by.
Yes, the OS and hardware are proprietary. That's not going to change.
Expensive is relative. For some people, dealing with Linux (for example) is an expensive proposition as well, which can involve spending considerable time and money learning it. There's also the question of resale value, where Macs do considerably better than PCs of similar age. (Whether you consider it lunacy or not, a 400 MHz PowerMac circa 2000 fetches about the same price as a brand new 2.4GHz Dell desktop.)
Hard to come by? Apple sells computers right on its website, if you don't have a retailer near you. Recent Macs use standard hard drives, RAM, as well as various Firewire and USB peripherals.
4) The elitist stigma that would come with owning one. (I don't think they'll sell you one unless you have an aloof attitude, a goatee and a pair of those fashionably thick-framed rectangular eyeglasses.)
Wow, you really do let image get in the way of your computer purchase decisions. You are even more like those you criticize - yeah, those who buy Macs because of their pretty cases - than many actual Mac owners.
Apple is just as susceptible to flaws like this as anyone else. I prefer the more ubiquitous and affordable hardware.
That's certainly your right, but you don't have a right to dress up that personal preference in pseudo-technical babble.
You want a low up-front cost. Great, but that doesn't mean a computer with a higher up-front cost has a low value.
You want the most common hardware. Great, but that doesn't mean another computer is "hard to come by".
You want non-proprietary software. Great, but that doesn't mean you can't run Linux or a Mac, or that you're not paying Microsoft when you buy that Dell. Want a PC without paying Microsoft? You may find the selection to be as limited as Macs.
Finally, you don't like the image of Mac owners and zealots. Great, but your insecurities are your own.
To be even more accurate, very few countries - if any at all - ever recognized two Chinas. During the Cold War, the ROC regime in Taiwan was generally considered the rightful one, holding the UN Security Council seat. The PRC regime was considered to be simply rebels, with recognition basically only within the communist bloc.
As the Cold War moved to a stage where China became useful against the USSR, the PRC gained the Security Council seat (which is still formally labeled "Republic of China" to this day), and most countries including the US switched recognition.
Today, nobody has a Two China policy. The PRC severs diplomatic relationships immediately with anybody who recognizes the ROC.
Heat doesn't stick around as long as most pollution.
Where did I say that it does? The point isn't that heating a lake is akin to polluting it in terms of its damage. The point is that heating a lake likely produces a local effect that can be much worse than the average heating, just like polluting an ocean can result in a local effect much worse than the average.
Therefore, it's wrong to compute the average heating (or pollution) and then dismiss the problem there. The local effect might still be acceptable or even negligible, but that needs to be studied further than dividing the heat output by the volume of water in the lake.
You're assuming that the lake is being heated evenly. More likely, the warmer water re-enters the lake at specific points and depths, resulting in a more local (but also more pronounced) effect than you calculated.
Put another way, you might as well say that we can just dump waste into the oceans because it's so big it'll dilute whatever poison we toss in. It doesn't work that way.
No, it's a warning that the point I was making was a very subtle one.
I don't disagree one bit with the advantages of GPL that you mention. What I had a problem with is the indictment that BSD is useless. I know for a fact that many commercial developers work on projects that include BSD code, and those projects would've been more expensive (perhaps prohibitively expensive) if not for the free ride. This in turn allows the paid developers to contribute back into open source software, which they may not have been able to do if they have to flip burgers all day.
The point is that BSD code feed companies, companies feed developers, and developers feed open source software. The cycle is nowhere near as obvious or direct as the GPL, but it's not zero either.
Note also that a lot of the prominent supporters of open source are not entirely in the software business. IBM and Apple want to sell you computers, not just software. Apple (which uses BSD code!) is also very careful to keep its crown jewels closed. What would MacOS X look like if not for BSD code? It's likely they'll have to spend a lot more money, but it's not completely likely that they'll take Linux and deal with GPL instead.
Try to read what I write very carefully before you respond again.
If GPL did not exist, then many companies will probably keep all additions secret (to avoid aiding their competitors). This does not aid the particular project they took code from, as you pointed out. However, if this "unrepaying" use of open source code enables the developers it hires to contribute to some other open source code in their spare time, then the open source community gets something (else) back.
I didn't mean to imply the hypothetical company was benevolent. I'm saying that greedy companies can hire developers who later contribute something they may not have been able to do if they were hungry. Therefore, the interaction between the open source community and commercial entities is not as simple as the original post made it to be.
Numerically, I expect the gross majority of open source developers to have day jobs at greedy companies that far prefer BSD licensed code to GPL code. The growth of either does not imply the downfall of the other, because the two entities feed off each other. To say that BSD code does nothing for the open source community is probably as wrong as saying free software kills commercial software vendors.
It's not really that simple. Take a large piece of software that would cost millions to build commercially, such as Linux, for example. Assume that BSD (the OS, not the license) did not exist as an alternative. A company that could not use Linux without keeping its additions secret may simply not pursue the entire product, because it's too expensive to build otherwise. A company that chose to use BSD OS might go ahead with the product and hire 20 developers, who might then contribute to other open source projects in their spare time.
I'm not saying there aren't plenty of greedy businesses that want to freeload off of other people. I'm just saying that "BSD (license) makes no sense" is probably too hasty a judgement.
The open source community is not communist. It's a folly to even mix the terms that way. Communism is an economic system, just like capitalism. Open source development is not an economic system in itself, because it doesn't really have a unique way of distributing or allocating resources.
By and large, open source work is done as a branch of capitalism (give away the code, make money off services), or as a beneficiary or capitalism (don't need the money, give away the code). Open source developers do not submit code into the public domain, and have some benevolent central authority assign to them the resources they need to survive daily. Instead, the open source developers who get the resources are those who fill a market need. Just like free market capitalism.
There's also nothing fundamentally incompatible between capitalism and open source code. In the ideal case, where the software is both free to acquire and free to operate (author makes zero money), all it means is that you can't make money doing a particular thing. But even under capitalism there are many things that don't make any money at all, such as charity work. However, we don't complain that charities take jobs from prison guards!
What does intersect is the communist ideal, which is basically like everybody else's ideal: that we're all rich and happy. Having Free/free software to use makes us a little richer and a little happier. The similarities end about there.
The question is whether you expect to see news coverage or cheerleading. If the former, then how closely the coverage reflects the truth is a valid criterion for judgement.
As for the Olympic ideals, let me just point out that Taiwan - which formally calls itself as the Republic of China - is forced to participate in the Games as "Chinese Taipei" and cannot use its own flag. So don't be stupid. The Olympics are every bit as political as everything else international.
What they don't know is that the selection blows, hard, outside of standard bullshit.
I know one hundred million reasons why the selection is okay. You may not like the music, but that doesn't mean the store shouldn't sell the kind of product that sells.
Zeppelin and Radiohead aren't exactly fringe bands that don't deserve even a single album!
Did Apple make the decision not to sell their songs, or did they choose not to sell their songs on Apple?
Re:Embed Linux? It's not an ideal choice.
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A DVD player on sufficiently low-powered hardware would need real time scheduling. It has to read the audio and video streams from disc, decode, and playback according to a strict schedule (~30 fps on NTSC, etc).
Any "need" for real time scheduling can be mitigated by using much faster hardware. However, we should not confuse the analysis of the hard real time requirements with overkill solutions.
A firewall or router, on the other hand, is generally required to have a certain average performance. That is, even if a particular packet is delayed a little more than usual, nobody is likely to notice and be upset. Therefore, they generally don't have hard real time requirements, and even unmodified Linux boxes do well at these tasks.
Yes, it may be a clever little word play, but let's not confuse the loss of a personal domain (if it comes to that) with rape. In all likelihood, it would not even cost Katie Jones that much money.
Yes, it's the principle of the thing, and I think Jones should get to keep the domain and Penguin should reimburse her for related damages. Yes, Katie Tarbox is responsible to the extent she is actually involved in this. But it's nowhere near the trauma of the rape of a 13 year old. Let's keep some perspective.
Sorry, but if major basic features are broken then it isn't ready for alpha test, and you're going to irritate me, your Friendly Test Engineer.
IME, what typically happens is that software engineers declare code completion, and testers begin their involvement. At this point, every feature "basically works" to the satisfaction of the software engineers. As testers do their work, they discover major (relative to beta test) bugs that require major (again, relative) code fixes. What usually doesn't happen before the fixes are delivered to the testers is a recertification that all features "basically work". The regression tests are usually tasked to the testers at this stage if not automated.
This is why I say that while major bug fixes are still being done, major basic features are likely to be broken from time to time.
Yes, it irritates the testers. However, many (most?) organizations seek to maximize bugfixing bandwidth at this stage, and don't want to use software engineer time for regression tests.
Call it a beta test if you like because end-users were involved
That's exactly what I did, before you objected.:)
he specifically said "Human Interface related issues, i.e. GUI Mess-Ups, Invisible Buttons, etc." That sounds like Alpha test to me, not Beta.
Right, which is why I warned "if you go into beta testing too early, then major basic features will be broken from time to time, and you'll only irritate your testers and make them stop helping you." He may be releasing alpha quality code to beta testers.
If this guy has end users do alpha test, more power to him; personally, while I enjoy creating test cases and test scripts, I hate running the actual tests and I'd love to have the users do it for me:-)
The problem is that end users are ill suited to do alpha tests. They won't explore the entire menu tree for you, just the ones they actually need to use. Beta testing (and its emphasis on end users) is meant to catch a different class of bugs than the two previous stages, and you just can't skip these steps without compromising quality.
No, what he's referring to is called "alpha testing," where a feature-complete product is released to the in-house test team.
Exactly where does "the best test was a small deployment of the Application to users who are apt to help you conduct the test, over a few weeks" mean or imply an in-house team of testers?
POSIX is all about the system calls and C library functions. C89 is about compiler support. They are seperate and don't go hand-in-hand.
C89 refers to the version of C standardized in 1989, which devotes hundreds of pages to the Standard Library (C99 devotes over 280 of about 600 total pages to the library). While "freestanding" implementations are not required to contain any or all of the Standard Library, it's really just provided as a way out for very limited processors. Practically all C implementations better than the desktop class of computers are "hosted", and must provide the entire Standard Library.
POSIX makes additional guarantees on the language (C is written for the lowest common denominator in many ways), and requires additional library functions.
The answer is elegance. If you can't appreciate that answer, that's a strong sign you're not qualified to have an opinion.
I'm a professional software engineer. I'm not at all averse to refactoring or rewriting code.
However, because I'm paid for my time, I only do things that are worthwhile to my employer. If the code is unlikely to get new requirements or features, then it's best to leave it alone just because it seems to still work. What I produce for work is a balance of business sense and elegance, never one completely overcoming the other.
Anti-hacker? You stopped being a hacker when you took the paycheck. Be a hacker who cares only about "elegance" on your own time. That paycheck requires you to also consider other priorities.
What you're referring to is called "beta testing", where a feature-complete product is released to a selected group of real users. This is a highly effective technique, because it's simply impossible to think of everything.
However, if you go into beta testing too early, then major basic features will be broken from time to time, and you'll only irritate your testers and make them stop helping you. This is where automated tests shine, because they help you ensure that major changes to the code have not broken anything.
Put another way, automated test can verify compliance to a specification or design. User testing can verify compliance to actual needs. Neither can replace the other.
A good filesystem should be capable of handling all potential applications
File systems have design goals, and many goals are entirely contradictory. For example, maximum throughput often means (relatively) poor random access speeds. The lowest read latency might mean high power consumption. Maximizing the storage for user data probably increases RAM footprint. Sure, it can "handle" it, but it won't be best suited for a particular application.
Worse, different media require vastly different file systems. A floppy disk file system will not necessarily work well on a hard drive, and neither will work well on Flash devices.
These differences are not a simple matter of adjusting a build flag or changing a constant, but fundamental to the way data is stored on the device. Your point of avoiding overspecialization is well taken, but overgeneralization is a similarly foolish path.
What really needs to happen is to have a minimum IQ for serving on juries.
Then how would you get a jury of peers to judge those who are not "intelligent" enough to serve on a jury? I understand your frustration, but like voting in better political leaders, some goals have no shortcuts. In both cases, the answer is to improve the citizenry as a whole, not exclude those we deem unworthy.
Given that the majority of Americans are pro-choice I fail to see how this statement supports your argument.
Whether we like it or not, Bush got enough votes to be president (note that I'm not going into whether he actually "won" the election, etc.) The political system is an approximation, in the sense that we don't decide individual policies, but pick a person who's most likely to decide the way we like. Thus, America indirectly decided to stop funding abortion counseling abroad, partly because many Americans don't think their tax money should be used that way.
The main "argument", if you want to call it that, is that by "don't use my tax money" I don't mean to dictate that opinion over all others. There cannot be effective government if each of us get a veto instead of a vote.
We don't have machines right here on earth that can mine in easy conditions without a lot of human intervention. Do you think they'd work better in space?
Good question. What I do know is that humans perform horribly in space (and that's not our fault, having evolved with gravity), and it's probably harder to modify humans to work well in space. Human physical ability is a foreseeable obstacle; computer hardware and software designed for space are not.
You're also not considering the fact that it's precisely the "easy conditions" that make a human-based mining system affordable. Harsh conditions, such as off-shore oil rigs, increase costs that end consumers must bear.
I agree with this, so long as *you* don't use *my* tax money for things *I* don't approve of.
In a democracy, if you can get enough people to agree, that's exactly what happens. Bush, for example, prohibited the use of US aid on abortion counseling in other countries.
Did you somehow suppose that I thought my opinions on how tax money should be spent is more important than anybody else's?
Last I checked, Asimo can't mine asteroids.
True, but we can't send humans to the asteroid belt, either. The question is whether it's a better use of resources to build smarter robots or manned spacecraft. Therefore, as I said, "that doesn't imply manned missions at all," because of a rather big question yet unanswered.
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That's not a complete question. If the music labels didn't demand DRM, then another outlet can and probably will compete with iTunes by selling unencumbered music. How long can Apple continue on that course, once somebody else starts selling identical 128-bit AAC songs with no DRM?
People sell things for any number of reasons. You might be leaving town, or now need a much faster CPU, or need the cash, or need the desk space, or need to run PC-only software, or your new spouse already has a Mac.
If there are two systems, and they both do what you want, the more expensive one does have less value.
Absolutely, but you must remember that the price tag is not the total cost. The total cost includes things like downtime, wasted time, irritation, and resale value. It's dishonest to count a $1,500 Mac as less value than a $1,000 PC if the resale value of the Mac is $500 and the PC's is $0.
There are lots of ways of [buying Microsoft-free PCs].
If you want to buy a Mac today, you have five models of laptops, two all-in-one's (not counting what will probably be three iMac models when they return), and three desktop models. How many different models of Microsoft-free PCs can you name?
Also, MS gets money for every Mac sold.
I wasn't arguing that buying a Mac doesn't pay Microsoft. I was arguing that buying most PCs will not avoid paying for proprietary software, which is what the person I was responding to wanted. I personally have no problem paying for commercial software.
There are extremely annoying Windows and Linux users as well. There are even extremely annoying people who don't use computers. So what?
2) "Total Cost of 0wnership" study showing how laughably weak MacOS is, even though "it has teh UNIX!"
Sorry, what are you referring to?
3) The OS is proprietary, as is the hardware. Expensive and hard to come by.
Yes, the OS and hardware are proprietary. That's not going to change.
Expensive is relative. For some people, dealing with Linux (for example) is an expensive proposition as well, which can involve spending considerable time and money learning it. There's also the question of resale value, where Macs do considerably better than PCs of similar age. (Whether you consider it lunacy or not, a 400 MHz PowerMac circa 2000 fetches about the same price as a brand new 2.4GHz Dell desktop.)
Hard to come by? Apple sells computers right on its website, if you don't have a retailer near you. Recent Macs use standard hard drives, RAM, as well as various Firewire and USB peripherals.
4) The elitist stigma that would come with owning one. (I don't think they'll sell you one unless you have an aloof attitude, a goatee and a pair of those fashionably thick-framed rectangular eyeglasses.)
Wow, you really do let image get in the way of your computer purchase decisions. You are even more like those you criticize - yeah, those who buy Macs because of their pretty cases - than many actual Mac owners.
Apple is just as susceptible to flaws like this as anyone else. I prefer the more ubiquitous and affordable hardware.
That's certainly your right, but you don't have a right to dress up that personal preference in pseudo-technical babble.
You want a low up-front cost. Great, but that doesn't mean a computer with a higher up-front cost has a low value.
You want the most common hardware. Great, but that doesn't mean another computer is "hard to come by".
You want non-proprietary software. Great, but that doesn't mean you can't run Linux or a Mac, or that you're not paying Microsoft when you buy that Dell. Want a PC without paying Microsoft? You may find the selection to be as limited as Macs.
Finally, you don't like the image of Mac owners and zealots. Great, but your insecurities are your own.
As the Cold War moved to a stage where China became useful against the USSR, the PRC gained the Security Council seat (which is still formally labeled "Republic of China" to this day), and most countries including the US switched recognition.
Today, nobody has a Two China policy. The PRC severs diplomatic relationships immediately with anybody who recognizes the ROC.
Where did I say that it does? The point isn't that heating a lake is akin to polluting it in terms of its damage. The point is that heating a lake likely produces a local effect that can be much worse than the average heating, just like polluting an ocean can result in a local effect much worse than the average.
Therefore, it's wrong to compute the average heating (or pollution) and then dismiss the problem there. The local effect might still be acceptable or even negligible, but that needs to be studied further than dividing the heat output by the volume of water in the lake.
Put another way, you might as well say that we can just dump waste into the oceans because it's so big it'll dilute whatever poison we toss in. It doesn't work that way.
No, it's a warning that the point I was making was a very subtle one.
I don't disagree one bit with the advantages of GPL that you mention. What I had a problem with is the indictment that BSD is useless. I know for a fact that many commercial developers work on projects that include BSD code, and those projects would've been more expensive (perhaps prohibitively expensive) if not for the free ride. This in turn allows the paid developers to contribute back into open source software, which they may not have been able to do if they have to flip burgers all day.
The point is that BSD code feed companies, companies feed developers, and developers feed open source software. The cycle is nowhere near as obvious or direct as the GPL, but it's not zero either.
Note also that a lot of the prominent supporters of open source are not entirely in the software business. IBM and Apple want to sell you computers, not just software. Apple (which uses BSD code!) is also very careful to keep its crown jewels closed. What would MacOS X look like if not for BSD code? It's likely they'll have to spend a lot more money, but it's not completely likely that they'll take Linux and deal with GPL instead.
If GPL did not exist, then many companies will probably keep all additions secret (to avoid aiding their competitors). This does not aid the particular project they took code from, as you pointed out. However, if this "unrepaying" use of open source code enables the developers it hires to contribute to some other open source code in their spare time, then the open source community gets something (else) back.
I didn't mean to imply the hypothetical company was benevolent. I'm saying that greedy companies can hire developers who later contribute something they may not have been able to do if they were hungry. Therefore, the interaction between the open source community and commercial entities is not as simple as the original post made it to be.
Numerically, I expect the gross majority of open source developers to have day jobs at greedy companies that far prefer BSD licensed code to GPL code. The growth of either does not imply the downfall of the other, because the two entities feed off each other. To say that BSD code does nothing for the open source community is probably as wrong as saying free software kills commercial software vendors.
I'm not saying there aren't plenty of greedy businesses that want to freeload off of other people. I'm just saying that "BSD (license) makes no sense" is probably too hasty a judgement.
By and large, open source work is done as a branch of capitalism (give away the code, make money off services), or as a beneficiary or capitalism (don't need the money, give away the code). Open source developers do not submit code into the public domain, and have some benevolent central authority assign to them the resources they need to survive daily. Instead, the open source developers who get the resources are those who fill a market need. Just like free market capitalism.
There's also nothing fundamentally incompatible between capitalism and open source code. In the ideal case, where the software is both free to acquire and free to operate (author makes zero money), all it means is that you can't make money doing a particular thing. But even under capitalism there are many things that don't make any money at all, such as charity work. However, we don't complain that charities take jobs from prison guards!
What does intersect is the communist ideal, which is basically like everybody else's ideal: that we're all rich and happy. Having Free/free software to use makes us a little richer and a little happier. The similarities end about there.
As for the Olympic ideals, let me just point out that Taiwan - which formally calls itself as the Republic of China - is forced to participate in the Games as "Chinese Taipei" and cannot use its own flag. So don't be stupid. The Olympics are every bit as political as everything else international.
I know one hundred million reasons why the selection is okay. You may not like the music, but that doesn't mean the store shouldn't sell the kind of product that sells.
Zeppelin and Radiohead aren't exactly fringe bands that don't deserve even a single album!
Did Apple make the decision not to sell their songs, or did they choose not to sell their songs on Apple?
Any "need" for real time scheduling can be mitigated by using much faster hardware. However, we should not confuse the analysis of the hard real time requirements with overkill solutions.
A firewall or router, on the other hand, is generally required to have a certain average performance. That is, even if a particular packet is delayed a little more than usual, nobody is likely to notice and be upset. Therefore, they generally don't have hard real time requirements, and even unmodified Linux boxes do well at these tasks.
Yes, it's the principle of the thing, and I think Jones should get to keep the domain and Penguin should reimburse her for related damages. Yes, Katie Tarbox is responsible to the extent she is actually involved in this. But it's nowhere near the trauma of the rape of a 13 year old. Let's keep some perspective.
IME, what typically happens is that software engineers declare code completion, and testers begin their involvement. At this point, every feature "basically works" to the satisfaction of the software engineers. As testers do their work, they discover major (relative to beta test) bugs that require major (again, relative) code fixes. What usually doesn't happen before the fixes are delivered to the testers is a recertification that all features "basically work". The regression tests are usually tasked to the testers at this stage if not automated.
This is why I say that while major bug fixes are still being done, major basic features are likely to be broken from time to time.
Yes, it irritates the testers. However, many (most?) organizations seek to maximize bugfixing bandwidth at this stage, and don't want to use software engineer time for regression tests.
That's exactly what I did, before you objected. :)
he specifically said "Human Interface related issues, i.e. GUI Mess-Ups, Invisible Buttons, etc." That sounds like Alpha test to me, not Beta.
Right, which is why I warned "if you go into beta testing too early, then major basic features will be broken from time to time, and you'll only irritate your testers and make them stop helping you." He may be releasing alpha quality code to beta testers.
If this guy has end users do alpha test, more power to him; personally, while I enjoy creating test cases and test scripts, I hate running the actual tests and I'd love to have the users do it for me :-)
The problem is that end users are ill suited to do alpha tests. They won't explore the entire menu tree for you, just the ones they actually need to use. Beta testing (and its emphasis on end users) is meant to catch a different class of bugs than the two previous stages, and you just can't skip these steps without compromising quality.
Exactly where does "the best test was a small deployment of the Application to users who are apt to help you conduct the test, over a few weeks" mean or imply an in-house team of testers?
C89 refers to the version of C standardized in 1989, which devotes hundreds of pages to the Standard Library (C99 devotes over 280 of about 600 total pages to the library). While "freestanding" implementations are not required to contain any or all of the Standard Library, it's really just provided as a way out for very limited processors. Practically all C implementations better than the desktop class of computers are "hosted", and must provide the entire Standard Library.
POSIX makes additional guarantees on the language (C is written for the lowest common denominator in many ways), and requires additional library functions.
I'm a professional software engineer. I'm not at all averse to refactoring or rewriting code.
However, because I'm paid for my time, I only do things that are worthwhile to my employer. If the code is unlikely to get new requirements or features, then it's best to leave it alone just because it seems to still work. What I produce for work is a balance of business sense and elegance, never one completely overcoming the other.
Anti-hacker? You stopped being a hacker when you took the paycheck. Be a hacker who cares only about "elegance" on your own time. That paycheck requires you to also consider other priorities.
However, if you go into beta testing too early, then major basic features will be broken from time to time, and you'll only irritate your testers and make them stop helping you. This is where automated tests shine, because they help you ensure that major changes to the code have not broken anything.
Put another way, automated test can verify compliance to a specification or design. User testing can verify compliance to actual needs. Neither can replace the other.
File systems have design goals, and many goals are entirely contradictory. For example, maximum throughput often means (relatively) poor random access speeds. The lowest read latency might mean high power consumption. Maximizing the storage for user data probably increases RAM footprint. Sure, it can "handle" it, but it won't be best suited for a particular application.
Worse, different media require vastly different file systems. A floppy disk file system will not necessarily work well on a hard drive, and neither will work well on Flash devices.
These differences are not a simple matter of adjusting a build flag or changing a constant, but fundamental to the way data is stored on the device. Your point of avoiding overspecialization is well taken, but overgeneralization is a similarly foolish path.
Then how would you get a jury of peers to judge those who are not "intelligent" enough to serve on a jury? I understand your frustration, but like voting in better political leaders, some goals have no shortcuts. In both cases, the answer is to improve the citizenry as a whole, not exclude those we deem unworthy.
Whether we like it or not, Bush got enough votes to be president (note that I'm not going into whether he actually "won" the election, etc.) The political system is an approximation, in the sense that we don't decide individual policies, but pick a person who's most likely to decide the way we like. Thus, America indirectly decided to stop funding abortion counseling abroad, partly because many Americans don't think their tax money should be used that way.
The main "argument", if you want to call it that, is that by "don't use my tax money" I don't mean to dictate that opinion over all others. There cannot be effective government if each of us get a veto instead of a vote.
Good question. What I do know is that humans perform horribly in space (and that's not our fault, having evolved with gravity), and it's probably harder to modify humans to work well in space. Human physical ability is a foreseeable obstacle; computer hardware and software designed for space are not.
You're also not considering the fact that it's precisely the "easy conditions" that make a human-based mining system affordable. Harsh conditions, such as off-shore oil rigs, increase costs that end consumers must bear.
In a democracy, if you can get enough people to agree, that's exactly what happens. Bush, for example, prohibited the use of US aid on abortion counseling in other countries.
Did you somehow suppose that I thought my opinions on how tax money should be spent is more important than anybody else's?
Last I checked, Asimo can't mine asteroids.
True, but we can't send humans to the asteroid belt, either. The question is whether it's a better use of resources to build smarter robots or manned spacecraft. Therefore, as I said, "that doesn't imply manned missions at all," because of a rather big question yet unanswered.