Without the ability to go anonymous successfully you will be held accountable for everything you say that the government or some bureaucratic group or another does not like. As the concept, not to mention the practice, of individual rights has been seriously eroded of late (even where it used to exist), there is nothing protecting you from the state and other powerful buyers/creators of legal instruments of coercion.
What is a crime in the eyes of the State may be a duty to all reasonable people.
What, having a parent company means you can no longer work for the "good of humanity"? Since when? Can you only work "for the good of humanity" with no visible means of support at all? If so this "good" will be seriously limited and in short supply I'm afraid.
The ideology of Open Source is to have the source open and useable by others. Period. There is no dogma about not having reasonable sponsorship or means of support.
Actually, some of us think it is much better than Java for many tasks beyond "scripting and administration". It is a higher level language than Java. And yes, it is useful for making up for Java's flaws.
I am 46. I make more as a fulltime employee (well into six figures) than most of the twenty somethings make as consultants. I have no dearth of offers to change employment when the time is right.
Frankly I think the age discrimination thing is a huge myth. Really good software design and engineering talent doesn't magically appear right out of school (at least very seldom). In case no one remembers there is a very serious shortage of good software talent in the industry. Any place worth working for knows that. If they simply want a code monkey gulping jolt colt and throwing shit together then they will get precisely what they asked for (and usually do).
I hope you are being extremely sarcastic or otherwise kidding. Visual Basic is and has been a disgrace since the beginning. Having a single thread of control for the debugger, ide and your code is the most glaringly stupid piece of mis-design I've ever seen millions of people pay good money to have inflicted on them. Visual J++ is a little better on threading stuff but is largely a rehash of Visual Basic in basic abilities and layout. This is not imho at all the best way to do a Java IDE. It also forces a pretty strange project structure on the developer. It is fairly painful to simply use J++ on a Java source tree that you want to make a project of. And of course M$ changed a few things here and there "for your own good" so that some of your classes will not be compatible with any other JVM.
Do we really need to help these buffoons screw up two more languages? I will not touch any Python IDE that does not give me full source access.
Not so simple. Python (and I assume Perl but could be wrong) has had sandboxes designed for use in client-side scripting for a while now. It does not take Java to do this. Nor is Java sandboxing the end and be-all of what can and needs to be done to satisfy security issues.
We should use whatever tools in the opinions of the programmers involved best do the job. Waving security around to attempt to force people to your choice is pointless. Security as such is not a language dependent issue. At any particular time some language in some environment may be more or less secure.
I don't get it. Mozilla is imho tremendously bloated for its originally intended purposes. Now this bloat is proposed to be introduced into other more humble applications spaces? This is something to celebrate? In particular why would I want a majorly bloated mother of all geeky gewgaws detracting from a sweet clean little language like Python?
I like UIs and IDEs when they actually help the work and aren't total pigs. I am not a command line bigot of any kind. But this seems like too much to me.
IIS doesn't even have a decent servlet story. To run a Java servlet on IIS requires a per web server licensed add-on like JRUN. With Apache on the other hand, you have JServ which is open source and free also. So, unless WAP is all bottled up by M$ I see no reason you need to use IIS for this project at all. Even if WAP was bottled up (I presume at server side) then you could use a CORBA-COM bridge to call the M$ WAP stuff. Presumably your clients are not M$ restricted.
Considering the apparent dearth of much human intelligence I will personally happily welcome intelligence of the "artificial" or "synthetic" variety. If human engineers and our increasingly sophisticated tools that will eventually become more autonomous cannot manage to design systems that are at least as good as what evolved naturally, then I would conclude that intelligence is overrated. The question is not whether there will be artificial intelligences that are autonomous. The quesiton is how soon and what are the implications?
I hope that human consciousness can be eventually migrated onto more capable substrates. These meat heads (literally) are at the end of their intellectual range. And that range is increasingly obviously utterly inadequate for the world we inhabit, much less the world that is coming.
You utterly miss the point. It was questionable in the extreme for Microsoft to take an open source standard like Kerberos and make proprietary changes that it then kept secret. When called on this Microsoft published the changes but tried to put license restrictions on anyone using the information! This is not a normal case of fair property or property rights even assuming for just a sec that such "intellectual property" should be property. So it strains credulity mighthily to say that Microsoft has been mistreated when folks bypass their misbegotten licensing gimmick to look at the information more directly and instruct others how to do the same.
Huh? XML is meant to be used to store information in a non-proprietary format with tags and such to facilitate use of the information by more programs than just a single one. That is a large part of its power.
It bothers me greatly that MS and other companies take my personal data in WP documents, addresses and so on and encode it in a way that I can't get at with anything but their tools. That is theft. I don't agree to be locked into a particular vendor just because I may have used their tool[s].
Even MS is giving lip service to replacing their proprietary formats with XML.
Re:Not that I am particularly happy about this, bu
on
MP3.com Loses In Court
·
· Score: 1
No more questionable than the same user making a mp3 copy to play on their Rio. The fact that it is downloadable by owning users from the Internet does not change this at all. It simply makes owned works more available everywhere to their owners/licensees. In priniciple this is a simple extension of the right to make a copy for your own use. The court would only have a case if non-owners can get at the material. This ruling shows a clear lack of understanding of the internet and computer technology in general and what it makes possible.
As someone who has been intimate with the guts of databases and database middleware, object and relational, for nearly 20 years I don't share the general opinion that a good Open Source dbms cannot be built. DBMS systems do indeed have some black art in them but the people who build and extend these things are hackers. There is no reason that a start like Postgres or Interbase cannot be evolved into something truly viable. Even starting from scratch is not impossible. Just a very long-term project. The hardest parts are not in the relational engine core or even the query language implementationa and optimization or the logging/recovery mechanisms. The really difficult part is the tuning of all elements together.
The comments on the SAT above have a lot of BS in them. "A measure of scioeconomic status"? Come again? I was born a poor, white child and things didn't get a lot better until long after I went to work. Review courses? Never heard of them when I took the SAT and would be bored silly anyway. Yet I still walked in cold and scored high enough to meet this requirement (although barely as I flubbed a couple of things that were a big DOH! as I walked away afterward).
All of that said, the SAT seemed to me to measure general academic competency and some smattering of basic math and verbal skills only. At least it did way back when when I first took it. The last time I took it or the ACT about 10 years ago I was amazed that a bunch of politicized science and other questions (especially around environmental issues) had found there way into the ACT especially. I just answered what was the standard opinion (often wrong) of the day on those and tried not to get too bent out of shape. Still scored in the top 2%. As I hadn't done school stuff in over a decade at that point (never did get a piece of paper the first time around) and didn't take any prep courses the test must measure some factor X not accounted for in the opinion I am responding to. The questiion is whether that X is a good predictor of success in school or life. Don't ask me about school success. I tend to get side-tracked and run off into some interesting application or implications when taking courses that may or may not lead to a decent grade. Tend to be pretty independent and off after something that interests me whether it leads to more money or not in work also.
My biggest problem with the 1 year course is that I would go quite nuts not actually having time to use the things I was learning in ways that interest me. There is only time for cramming in information and using it in the ways necessary to master the course. That is precisely what I don't like about undergraduate education generally.
Amen. This "observer magically changes the observed" nonsense has been clinging to quantum mechanics for decades. Wave states do not collapse just by thinking. There is no mysterious thought energy that reacts somehow with the quantum state of observed objects. Anything that claims otherwise is mysticism, not science.
In many of your rights you speak eloquently about the rights of the public to software that may be freely distributed, examined and modified. And I agree strongly that software must be open/free if it is to be maximally effective.
Whoever, I have on problem. Before software can be freely distributed and used it must first be produced. While all digitally based information is freely and infinitely distributable, there is not an infinite pool of talent creating the content. Far from it. Yet in many of your writings you seem to ignore this problem to the point of saying that programmers should make their living at something else rather than writing programs! Why? This is a highly scarce and quite needed talent. Why is it wrong to be paid for being able to do it and do it well? As anyone like yourself who has created major software knows, the effort and dedication involved is quite intense. Yet you seem to say that the person putting in that effort has little or no rights to the fruits of the effort or to expect any rewards at all for having put out that kind of energy. This seems very lopsided to me.
"Let's concentrate on making people smarter and then worry about the machines."
Well now, a truly fine idea. But how do you propose to do this exactly? Throwing more dollars at education is very much not working. Perhaps you could shift cultural values (as this seems to have more real effect) but cultural control knobs are notoriously difficult to find and manipulate. And what about those folks who believe they are as happy as can be in their abysmal ignorance? You can't exactly force them to learn.
At the other end of the scale - I don't know about you but I am very aware of apparent limits in my ability to learn and to reason clearly and well. I don't think these are just my own personal short-comings as I actually measure pretty highly relative to humanity at large. I think this model of humanity has some real mental processing limits (without even getting into psychological limits for now) that are more than a little problematic as the world gets more and more complex. Frankly I see very little reason to believe that any human or set of humans is adequately equipped to deal with some of the issues confronting us well. And this is after watching various proposals and essays and systems being built for quite some time.
So, imho, we had better hope we can build true AIs and/or seriously augment our own intellectual abilities. It may well be our only chance.
If Java is an idiot language then the poster of all people should immediately use it! OO is a much better way generally of writing code. The encapsulation and thinking in terms of entities closer to the real world that have sets of behaviors is a great improvement of the old days where you hand some raw function some data structure that the function then knows how to chew on and all the rest of the old C hackery. Sure OO is not good for every single problem. But it is an improvement of many.
Now I will agree that OO as it is commonly practiced with inheritance of implementation as well as interface and with protocols based almost exclusively on type/class is unnecessarily dim-witted. Adding stong typing just makes the problem of productively using the language worse for many OO languages. Java gets out of some of this, but not quite enough imho, with interfaces. I also want a language with a real full strength interpreter which Java could of been but somehow isn't. Oh, and true first class methods would be real useful. For that matter I would rather do something similar to Lisp where I could roll my own language/environment for the problem at hand.
I won't argue that Java keeps you from writing really tight data structure type components.
But OO is not going to be laughed out of the office or anywhere else any time soon.
Good information. But you can take your geeker than thou "what a lamer" attitude and stuff it where the sun don't shine.
Even the most geeky of us have our spots where we aren't so well-informed. If we can't ask each other without being spoken to or about as if we are total idiots then something is freakin wrong.
Why not just answer the technical question without trying to second guess the questioner's knowledge, skills and general psychology?
Excuse me but we understand the things we create with genetic engineering one hell of a lot better than the things we have been creating with selective breeding for centuries. There is way too much FUD over GE.
The way we make most everything is pretty scattershot until we have real working nanotech.
Again GE is more predictable than what went before.
On nanotech itself you are literally designing building at the atom at a time level. You can't get more controlled or predictable than that. Once you get replicating nano-assemblers life gets more interesting as you include biological effects. But there is far less chance of wild mutation than there is today among bacteria and viruses. So if the replication is designed to be controlled by certain signals/conditions and works including reasonable levels of safeguards, I would have far more confidence of it not going wrong than with a natural or tailored bacteria or virus.
In robotics it is not exactly likely that super intelligent AIs in mechanical bodies would consume all resources in simply producing more of themselves. Highly illogical. Even humans, given half a chance, are not that stupid.
There is of course a possibility of a arms race using these capabilities as weapons, but what else is new?
If you actually bother to know any history and to compare current situation to the past you would know just how huge a difference science and technology has made. I am not going to sit around on this rock listening to morons like you tell us why we shouldn't do anything much but wring our hands indefinitely.
Pollute space with ourselves? Excuse me, what do you thing is out there? Heavenly angelic beings? As far as we know all of it within reach is a barren wasteland without life at all. Exactly what would you be polluting?
Take your human hating vitriol and your cynicism and crawl deeper in your hole if you wish. The rest of us can find something better to do.
I agree. Can't go to Mars and bring back a few rocks in an entire decade? That is abysmal. It is time to privatize. Let those of us who are interested and believe in this stuff invest in it and reap any profits (or losses). Just get government out of the way.
It is not Joyce or nonsense. It is a code. Remember those? Really good point.
Conversations that are meant to be [semi-]private can be private with the proper encryption. Not everything needs to be discussed with everyone. That would lead to design-by-committee with a vengeance. And to a lot of time and energy spend with various trolls, agents provacateur and just plain cluelessness.
Also it would help to do more Internet Phone with maybe a web cam going. Especially when discussing stuff that is more critical or delicate.
What is out there in open source conferencing software?
For the last freakin time whether you are for Open Source or not doesn't necessarily have a damn thing to do with whether or not you are a capitalist or a socialist or a libertarian or whatever.
Just because you don't understand markets and can type words like monopoly and make empty accusations, don't assume that your assertions actually make any sense much less that they are accurate. There is a difference between striving to be the best and striving to control. But perhaps this is too deep for you.
Sometimes I wonder if human beings are actually intelligent at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Without the ability to go anonymous successfully you will be held accountable for everything you say that the government or some bureaucratic group or another does not like. As the concept, not to mention the practice, of individual rights has been seriously eroded of late (even where it used to exist), there is nothing protecting you from the state and other powerful buyers/creators of legal instruments of coercion.
What is a crime in the eyes of the State may be a duty to all reasonable people.
What, having a parent company means you can no longer work for the "good of humanity"? Since when? Can you only work "for the good of humanity" with no visible means of support at all? If so this "good" will be seriously limited and in short supply I'm afraid.
The ideology of Open Source is to have the source open and useable by others. Period. There is no dogma about not having reasonable sponsorship or means of support.
Actually, some of us think it is much better than Java for many tasks beyond "scripting and administration". It is a higher level language than Java. And yes, it is useful for making up for Java's flaws.
#include
I am 46. I make more as a fulltime employee (well into six figures) than most of the twenty somethings make as consultants. I have no dearth of offers to change employment when the time is right.
Frankly I think the age discrimination thing is a huge myth. Really good software design and engineering talent doesn't magically appear right out of school (at least very seldom). In case no one remembers there is a very serious shortage of good software talent in the industry. Any place worth working for knows that. If they simply want a code monkey gulping jolt colt and throwing shit together then they will get precisely what they asked for (and usually do).
I hope you are being extremely sarcastic or otherwise kidding. Visual Basic is and has been a disgrace since the beginning. Having a single thread of control for the debugger, ide and your code is the most glaringly stupid piece of mis-design I've ever seen millions of people pay good money to have inflicted on them. Visual J++ is a little better on threading stuff but is largely a rehash of Visual Basic in basic abilities and layout. This is not imho at all the best way to do a Java IDE. It also forces a pretty strange project structure on the developer. It is fairly painful to simply use J++ on a Java source tree that you want to make a project of. And of course M$ changed a few things here and there "for your own good" so that some of your classes will not be compatible with any other JVM.
Do we really need to help these buffoons screw up two more languages? I will not touch any Python IDE that does not give me full source access.
Not so simple. Python (and I assume Perl but could be wrong) has had sandboxes designed for use in client-side scripting for a while now. It does not take Java to do this. Nor is Java sandboxing the end and be-all of what can and needs to be done to satisfy security issues.
We should use whatever tools in the opinions of the programmers involved best do the job. Waving security around to attempt to force people to your choice is pointless. Security as such is not a language dependent issue. At any particular time some language in some environment may be more or less secure.
I don't get it. Mozilla is imho tremendously bloated for its originally intended purposes. Now this bloat is proposed to be introduced into other more humble applications spaces? This is something to celebrate? In particular why would I want a majorly bloated mother of all geeky gewgaws detracting from a sweet clean little language like Python?
I like UIs and IDEs when they actually help the work and aren't total pigs. I am not a command line bigot of any kind. But this seems like too much to me.
IIS doesn't even have a decent servlet story. To run a Java servlet on IIS requires a per web server licensed add-on like JRUN. With Apache on the other hand, you have JServ which is open source and free also. So, unless WAP is all bottled up by M$ I see no reason you need to use IIS for this project at all. Even if WAP was bottled up (I presume at server side) then you could use a CORBA-COM bridge to call the M$ WAP stuff. Presumably your clients are not M$ restricted.
Considering the apparent dearth of much human intelligence I will personally happily welcome intelligence of the "artificial" or "synthetic" variety. If human engineers and our increasingly sophisticated tools that will eventually become more autonomous cannot manage to design systems that are at least as good as what evolved naturally, then I would conclude that intelligence is overrated. The question is not whether there will be artificial intelligences that are autonomous. The quesiton is how soon and what are the implications?
I hope that human consciousness can be eventually migrated onto more capable substrates. These meat heads (literally) are at the end of their intellectual range. And that range is increasingly obviously utterly inadequate for the world we inhabit, much less the world that is coming.
You utterly miss the point. It was questionable in the extreme for Microsoft to take an open source standard like Kerberos and make proprietary changes that it then kept secret. When called on this Microsoft published the changes but tried to put license restrictions on anyone using the information! This is not a normal case of fair property or property rights even assuming for just a sec that such "intellectual property" should be property. So it strains credulity mighthily to say that Microsoft has been mistreated when folks bypass their misbegotten licensing gimmick to look at the information more directly and instruct others how to do the same.
Huh? XML is meant to be used to store information in a non-proprietary format with tags and such to facilitate use of the information by more programs than just a single one. That is a large part of its power.
It bothers me greatly that MS and other companies take my personal data in WP documents, addresses and so on and encode it in a way that I can't get at with anything but their tools. That is theft. I don't agree to be locked into a particular vendor just because I may have used their tool[s].
Even MS is giving lip service to replacing their proprietary formats with XML.
No more questionable than the same user making a mp3 copy to play on their Rio. The fact that it is downloadable by owning users from the Internet does not change this at all. It simply makes owned works more available everywhere to their owners/licensees. In priniciple this is a simple extension of the right to make a copy for your own use. The court would only have a case if non-owners can get at the material. This ruling shows a clear lack of understanding of the internet and computer technology in general and what it makes possible.
As someone who has been intimate with the guts of databases and database middleware, object and relational, for nearly 20 years I don't share the general opinion that a good Open Source dbms cannot be built. DBMS systems do indeed have some black art in them but the people who build and extend these things are hackers. There is no reason that a start like Postgres or Interbase cannot be evolved into something truly viable. Even starting from scratch is not impossible. Just a very long-term project. The hardest parts are not in the relational engine core or even the query language implementationa and optimization or the logging/recovery mechanisms. The really difficult part is the tuning of all elements together.
imnsho of course.
The comments on the SAT above have a lot of BS in them. "A measure of scioeconomic status"? Come again? I was born a poor, white child and things didn't get a lot better until long after I went to work. Review courses? Never heard of them when I took the SAT and would be bored silly anyway. Yet I still walked in cold and scored high enough to meet this requirement (although barely as I flubbed a couple of things that were a big DOH! as I walked away afterward).
All of that said, the SAT seemed to me to measure general academic competency and some smattering of basic math and verbal skills only. At least it did way back when when I first took it. The last time I took it or the ACT about 10 years ago I was amazed that a bunch of politicized science and other questions (especially around environmental issues) had found there way into the ACT especially. I just answered what was the standard opinion (often wrong) of the day on those and tried not to get too bent out of shape. Still scored in the top 2%. As I hadn't done school stuff in over a decade at that point (never did get a piece of paper the first time around) and didn't take any prep courses the test must measure some factor X not accounted for in the opinion I am responding to. The questiion is whether that X is a good predictor of success in school or life. Don't ask me about school success. I tend to get side-tracked and run off into some interesting application or implications when taking courses that may or may not lead to a decent grade. Tend to be pretty independent and off after something that interests me whether it leads to more money or not in work also.
My biggest problem with the 1 year course is that I would go quite nuts not actually having time to use the things I was learning in ways that interest me. There is only time for cramming in information and using it in the ways necessary to master the course. That is precisely what I don't like about undergraduate education generally.
OK. Enough rambling.
Amen. This "observer magically changes the observed" nonsense has been clinging to quantum mechanics for decades. Wave states do not collapse just by thinking. There is no mysterious thought energy that reacts somehow with the quantum state of observed objects. Anything that claims otherwise is mysticism, not science.
In many of your rights you speak eloquently about the rights of the public to software that may be freely distributed, examined and modified. And I agree strongly that software must be open/free if it is to be maximally effective.
Whoever, I have on problem. Before software can be freely distributed and used it must first be produced. While all digitally based information is freely and infinitely distributable, there is not an infinite pool of talent creating the content. Far from it. Yet in many of your writings you seem to ignore this problem to the point of saying that programmers should make their living at something else rather than writing programs! Why? This is a highly scarce and quite needed talent. Why is it wrong to be paid for being able to do it and do it well? As anyone like yourself who has created major software knows, the effort and dedication involved is quite intense. Yet you seem to say that the person putting in that effort has little or no rights to the fruits of the effort or to expect any rewards at all for having put out that kind of energy. This seems very lopsided to me.
"Let's concentrate on making people smarter and then worry about the machines."
Well now, a truly fine idea. But how do you propose to do this exactly? Throwing more dollars at education is very much not working. Perhaps you could shift cultural values (as this seems to have more real effect) but cultural control knobs are notoriously difficult to find and manipulate. And what about those folks who believe they are as happy as can be in their abysmal ignorance? You can't exactly force them to learn.
At the other end of the scale - I don't know about you but I am very aware of apparent limits in my ability to learn and to reason clearly and well. I don't think these are just my own personal short-comings as I actually measure pretty highly relative to humanity at large. I think this model of humanity has some real mental processing limits (without even getting into psychological limits for now) that are more than a little problematic as the world gets more and more complex. Frankly I see very little reason to believe that any human or set of humans is adequately equipped to deal with some of the issues confronting us well. And this is after watching various proposals and essays and systems being built for quite some time.
So, imho, we had better hope we can build true AIs and/or seriously augment our own intellectual abilities. It may well be our only chance.
If Java is an idiot language then the poster of all people should immediately use it! OO is a much better way generally of writing code. The encapsulation and thinking in terms of entities closer to the real world that have sets of behaviors is a great improvement of the old days where you hand some raw function some data structure that the function then knows how to chew on and all the rest of the old C hackery. Sure OO is not good for every single problem. But it is an improvement of many.
Now I will agree that OO as it is commonly practiced with inheritance of implementation as well as interface and with protocols based almost exclusively on type/class is unnecessarily dim-witted. Adding stong typing just makes the problem of productively using the language worse for many OO languages. Java gets out of some of this, but not quite enough imho, with interfaces. I also want a language with a real full strength interpreter which Java could of been but somehow isn't. Oh, and true first class methods would be real useful. For that matter I would rather do something similar to Lisp where I could roll my own language/environment for the problem at hand.
I won't argue that Java keeps you from writing really tight data structure type components.
But OO is not going to be laughed out of the office or anywhere else any time soon.
Good information. But you can take your geeker than thou "what a lamer" attitude and stuff it where the sun don't shine.
Even the most geeky of us have our spots where we aren't so well-informed. If we can't ask each other without being spoken to or about as if we are total idiots then something is freakin wrong.
Why not just answer the technical question without trying to second guess the questioner's knowledge, skills and general psychology?
The article is from 2/7/2000. I saw this news a long time ago. Are things so slow /. needs to dredge up stuff nearly 2 months old as filler?
Excuse me but we understand the things we create with genetic engineering one hell of a lot better than the things we have been creating with selective breeding for centuries. There is way too much FUD over GE.
The way we make most everything is pretty scattershot until we have real working nanotech.
Again GE is more predictable than what went before.
On nanotech itself you are literally designing building at the atom at a time level. You can't get more controlled or predictable than that. Once you get replicating nano-assemblers life gets more interesting as you include biological effects. But there is far less chance of wild mutation than there is today among bacteria and viruses. So if the replication is designed to be controlled by certain signals/conditions and works including reasonable levels of safeguards, I would have far more confidence of it not going wrong than with a natural or tailored bacteria or virus.
In robotics it is not exactly likely that super intelligent AIs in mechanical bodies would consume all resources in simply producing more of themselves. Highly illogical. Even humans, given half a chance, are not that stupid.
There is of course a possibility of a arms race using these capabilities as weapons, but what else is new?
If you actually bother to know any history and to compare current situation to the past you would know just how huge a difference science and technology has made. I am not going to sit around on this rock listening to morons like you tell us why we shouldn't do anything much but wring our hands indefinitely.
Pollute space with ourselves? Excuse me, what do you thing is out there? Heavenly angelic beings? As far as we know all of it within reach is a barren wasteland without life at all. Exactly what would you be polluting?
Take your human hating vitriol and your cynicism and crawl deeper in your hole if you wish. The rest of us can find something better to do.
I agree. Can't go to Mars and bring back a few rocks in an entire decade? That is abysmal. It is time to privatize. Let those of us who are interested and believe in this stuff invest in it and reap any profits (or losses). Just get government out of the way.
It is not Joyce or nonsense. It is a code. Remember those? Really good point.
Conversations that are meant to be [semi-]private can be private with the proper encryption. Not everything needs to be discussed with everyone. That would lead to design-by-committee with a vengeance. And to a lot of time and energy spend with various trolls, agents provacateur and just plain cluelessness.
Also it would help to do more Internet Phone with maybe a web cam going. Especially when discussing stuff that is more critical or delicate.
What is out there in open source conferencing software?
For the last freakin time whether you are for Open Source or not doesn't necessarily have a damn thing to do with whether or not you are a capitalist or a socialist or a libertarian or whatever.
Just because you don't understand markets and can type words like monopoly and make empty accusations, don't assume that your assertions actually make any sense much less that they are accurate. There is a difference between striving to be the best and striving to control. But perhaps this is too deep for you.
Sometimes I wonder if human beings are actually intelligent at all.