I have been a devotee of Linux for nearly 15 years. I have faithfully followed first redhat, and now the fedora releases. All my PCs at least dual-boot, if not run native Linux all the time. I even TAUGHT Linux for a major computer company for a while. In my informally gathered experience, there are three things holding Linux back-
1) The cult of UNIX mentality - this is a belief, deeply held by many OSS fans, that it is morally wrong to make software easy to use. If it was hard to code, it should require effort from the user to make use of it, otherwise how will they appreciate your hard work? Microsoft on the other hand got it a loooong time ago. Ease of use isn't just nice to have, it is the one overiding factor that outweighs all others in software design. Flexibility just confuses most users. security is a sick sad joke that only security wonks care about. Until the Linux community embraces the overwhelming truth that ease of use is ALL that matters, they will be doomed to be a hobby OS for out-of-touch tech weenies.
2) Endlessly re-inventing the wheel. I think Redhat/ Fedora is now on their third version of the X-windows package, and there is talk of scrapping the whole thing for a new windowing paradigm. Every six months I do a version upgrade, and my desktop breaks, my icons disappear, my scripts stop working because the directories have changed. For the love of sanity PLEASE knock it off. If it ain't broke, DON"T FIX IT!!! If you want people to really use Linux, focus on a consistent user experience, keep the magic behind the curtain, and stop screwing up the user interface.
3) Fear of licenses. Every time I upgrade fedora, I have to spend hours getting my Xine video player, web browser, and games to work again. Give up the insanity guys. The world is not going to change to suit your whiny childish prejudices. There's all kinds of industry standard free software out there that EVERYONE uses. You are just marginalizing Linux by not supporting it in your distros.
'Nuff said.
Imagine this scenario. Since our sun is a 2nd generation star ( we know this from the presence of heavy metals - only created in supernovae), that means that most solar systems in towards the galactic center probably could have been at our stage of technical development 4-5 Billion years ago. At the VERY least, we can reasonably assume that they have learned to send communications via technologies as advanced and subtle as quantum-entangled pairs. And here we are broadcasting primitive RADIO waves at them. Why would they want to waste their time coming to visit a backwater, dirty, disease-ridden, slum like Earth ? Think of a nuclear submarine cruising by an island populated by primitive primates. The local baboons see the wake of the sub and decide to try to attract its attention. They rush to the beach and begin frantically beating their chests, screaming, and flinging their poop into the ocean (think escaped TV broadcast signals). Yet the sub makes no attempt to return their communication, nor does it stop to share its technology with them. Why should we be so conceited as to think we have anything interesting to say to an advanced alien race?
Mr. Gates has a long history of making warped predictions about the future. Remember this is a guy who has computer monitors hanging on the walls of his house that change the artwork to suit each visitor, because clearly a digitized picture of a masterpiece is just as good as the real thing, right? In the same way, a digitized copy of an education is just as good as a real education, right? But where will chemists perform labwork online? Where will biology students do dissections? Other than being a pale washed-out copy of a real education, there's the problem of quality control. On-line materials are going to include lectures on the "Jewish Communist Bankers" conspiracy written by Josef Goebels, and treatises on how the "government" is hiding reverse-engineered UFO's at "Area 51". What Mr. Gates is doing is hawking yet another revenue generating app for the Windows PC. Look at what the cesspool of the internet has done to corrupt the quality of everyday life, and you can easily see, Mr. Gates concern is for increasing his already vast fortune,. The public welfare can go to hell, as long as Mr. Gates and Microsoft get to charge a toll at the entrance.
A modern liberal arts degree is a mostly worthless piece of paper. The degree is chock full of courses in dead literature and useless philosophy. All of which are a holdover form the days of royalty and privilege. The upper classes didn't have to work, so they spent their leisure time filling their heads with literature and philosophical trivia. This made them appear more intelligent than the working-class slobs whose days were filled by 16-hour shifts in the coal mines. And this in turn was used to rationalize a mythical genetic basis for the wealth and leisure of the upper class. It's time to bring colleges and universities into the 21st century. Instead of trying to recreate the old European culture of wealth and privilege, let's trash the whole university system, and create a whole new, publicly funded set of technical degree generating institutions that don't bother with dead and arcane subjects like English or Art. It would be well worth the investment of public funds to have a populace that can compete on a global scale in technical fields. Of course the useless f-tards from wealthy families can still waste their lives on "private sector" liberal arts degrees, the difference being that their lack of technical focus will label them as useless idle slugs instead of the erudite and effete members of the upper crust.
NASA has been collecting earth-observing data for five decades now, and in spite of the current wave of interest in climate related matters, little or no effort is put into examining this historical record. A small group of scientists within the US Geological Survey have heroically attempted to preserve this enormous treasure of historical climate data at a small data center in South Dakota. But hundreds of terabytes of irreplaceable data are at risk of being lost forever because no one seems to care. There are lobbyists galore for NEW satellite systems, but in many cases you might as well pour the data into a bit bucket, we spend billions of dollars collecting data, and pennies storing and analyzing it. Instead of relying on flawed computer models and bogus prognostications, the Global Warming debate could be based on real hard data, if anyone wanted to take the time to go look at it. http://eros.usgs.gov/#/About_Us
It appears that we have seen the last of an American icon, namely the "big block" V8 engine.
There could not be a more poignant, even stirring example of the slow steady wimpification of US culture than the passing of this pillar of young male manhood.
My brother Jim and I had a phrase for the thrum-thrum noise made by the revving of a big-block V8, we called it the "Happy Engine Song". Singing it required a displacement of no less than 350 cubic inches (about 6000cc's in today's parlance). But that song will now pass into obscurity, the victim of oil prices and economic decline.
Global warming may give us a lot more beachfront property, but we'll be driving to those beaches in little tin 15HP hybrid-mobiles.
No one will ever sing a song titled "She's real fine my 60mpg 2cylinder-electric hybrid".....meh!
Once again, we see that the core of the environmental movement in reality cares nothing about the environment. Artificially created enviro-panics like the hole in the ozone layer (which hasn't shrunk after 15 years of CFC bans), and the comical global warming hoax (now revealed to be the result of research chicanery and fraud) are in reality all just excuses. They are ruses used in an attempt to panic and frighten the world into dismantling our technological infrastructure and returning to a hunter-gatherer civilization. All in a lunatic attempt to atone for the sin of being human to the demon-goddess gaia. When enviro-kooks develop a head of steam behind a good scare-story, the LAST thing they want is for the problem to be SOLVED through technology. The point is to make us all give up using earth-hostile amenities like cars and electricity, kill off 9/10ths of the human population through starvation and disease, and then go back to living in tee-pees and using our own dung as fertilizer for our maize. Then MAYBE gaia will forgive us for living on her surface and leave us alone. WAKE UP people! Environmentalism isn't science, it's a religion. One of the most barbaric and scary religions on the face of the earth. If they ever get control of public policy their death-toll will make the Taliban look like a kindergarten class.
High student loan interest rates are the result of Bush administration tinkering to increase the profit of lenders. If you believe religiously that corporate profits are the highest moral good possible, there's no end to the suffering you're willing to inflict on regular citizens in order to raise those profits. Bush promoted and signed bills raising student loans from ~2.5% to over 8% in some cases. It's that good-old "loot and pillage" economic theory. If you're a Republican over 50 years old, you don't give a d@mn about the future, as long as you wallet is swelling today....
Built to last - snork! That must be why you see often see used mainframes on Ebay for $25.
The only thing a bout a mainframe that is built to last is the massive debt you have to take on to own one.
The CPU cores are the same as the power PC - buy them for a desktop , its 10 cents/MIP. Buy it wrapped in a mainframe skin, its $1000/MIP for the same CPU.
I can't believe people still fall for this "Mainframes are superior technology" malarkey.
Yes, but where's the monolith? It has the opening to the wormhole that leads to the solar system where we achieve enlightenment. It must be true, I saw it on TV.
The Commodore 64 was a landmark in personal computing, I had one tricked out with hard drive, printer, modem (for BBS - there was no internet), Z-80 co-processor to run CPM. C-compiler, Pascal Compiler, and a big stack of game cartridges... When the IBM PC came out I didn't see how it could compete with the vastly superior C64 - groan-
WE programmed the executable memory with JUMPERS, because it was read-only
And if we would get rid of this amazingly insecure invention called RAM, and record the OS and application executables in PROM at the factory the way God intended, there wouldn't be any computer viruses EVER AGAIN!
"So how is it that adopted children are loved?" - you're a real sick f*ck. You can't see the difference between choosing to adopt a child and having your wife lie to you about being pregnant by an illicit lover? What are you , 9 years old?
"Furthermore, do you think that, possibly, your preference for robotic women may have to do with your lack of uhh.. success, in that arena?" OMG - did you go to school on the short bus? YES that's the whole point of the joke!
Tell me, when you walk down the sidewalk and pass a stop sign, do you come to a halt and sit there for hours pnndering the dilemna?
After two divorces from two unfaithful wives, and 20 years of raising two children who might or might not be my genetic progeny, I say - lets just clone ourselves and convert to Stepford wives.
Unless you live in a state like the People's Republic of Maryland, where the attorney general has publicly voiced that opinion that children are the property of the state and parents are allowed to raise the children only at the pleasure of the state.
Most parents have no idea how far the "child protection" laws have eroded their rights as parents.
We live in a police state where we have traded freedom of speech for rap music, freedom of association for cheap abundant beer, and freedom of the press for internet pr0n. The founding fathers would break down in tears at the mockery we have made of the liberties they fought and died for.
The best way to survive the next 100 years is to stop running from the imaginary boogeymen of the LAST 100 years. We have this suicidal fascination with birth control and population reduction. In reality, birth rates are plumetting all over the world. An if it wasn't for immigration, the population of most propserous nations would be in rapid decline. In the U.S. the average couple has only 1.4 children. Without immigration from third world countries, the U.S. would be depopulating at a rate of 30% every 25 years. Exacerbating this is the profile of who is reproducing. In our welfare state, we pay the least functional and arguably least intelligent segments of our population (this is not racist - 75% of welfare recipients are not african americans) to sit around and breed. The only part of the population demographic that is growing is the poor and dependent. The crisis of the next 100 years will not be global warming or toxic waste or nuclear fallout. It will be vast armies of stupid belligerent parasites with their hands out demanding to be fed and clothed by a shrinking pool of intelligent functional human beings. The next world crisis is the crisis of de-evolution! To survive, we must institute emergency programs of tax relief and education to encourage intelligent people to BREED, for the sake of humanity.
For the sake of the post, all that was necessary was to demonstrate a plausible correlation between reality and the Biblical passage. From a spiritual point of view, the dealy thing about the mark isn't the number, it is the acceptance of a "substitute" God in the person of the beast. From a practical point of view, I won't let anyone put a chip under my skin even if it isn't that "mark of the beast".
From the Bible, Revelations chapter 13:16-18>------ 16He also forced everyone, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on his right hand or on his forehead, 17so that no one could buy or sell unless he had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of his name. 18This calls for wisdom. If anyone has insight, let him calculate the number of the beast, for it is man's number. His number is 666.
-----------
OK, I have a computer chip in me. It has files on it. Since it will be used for all my file transactions, it must be able to be read and written by anyone - so we have read and write permission for owner, group, and world. If this file system is UNIX/POSIX compatible, that's a permission code of 666 !!!
QED
Corollary I - the so-called "Christian" right are a bunch of moronic stooges, acting as a hand puppet for the devil.
Corollary II - The republicans are the party of satan, busily building the infrastructure for the antiChrist to use to rule the world.
Corollary III - If you vote for them in the next election, you have only yourself to blame when the secret police kick in your door.
If this was structured like most liability laws, what would happen is that vendors would be forced to raise their prices in order to pool the money in a big liability insurance fund. This fund would then be harvested by unscupulous lawyers using sympathetic clients whose claims pulled on the heartrings of juries, like: I spent so much time trying to keep my browser from crashing that I forgot to feed my cat and she starved to death; or I got so mad at my filesystem for losing my files that I smacked my kid and gave him brain damage.
Legitimate users who organized and filed class action suits over business costs caused by real bugs would be tied up in court forever by defendants legal teams because the magnitude of their claims would make a vigorous defense an economic necessity.
Free and Open Source software authors would have to form non-profit corporations to front for them, and rely on contributions from sympathetic sources to buy their insurance. They would be routinely attacked by lawsuits drummed up by front companies funded by a certain software giant in a fashion that might remind some people of the SCO lawsuit.
Testify in these bogus suits would tie up all the time of FOSS developers, effectively slowing open-source development down by a factor of 10.
In the end, only the lawyers would benefit - exactly the way it works in most industries.
Slashdot Mirror
I have been a devotee of Linux for nearly 15 years. I have faithfully followed first redhat, and now the fedora releases. All my PCs at least dual-boot, if not run native Linux all the time. I even TAUGHT Linux for a major computer company for a while. In my informally gathered experience, there are three things holding Linux back- 1) The cult of UNIX mentality - this is a belief, deeply held by many OSS fans, that it is morally wrong to make software easy to use. If it was hard to code, it should require effort from the user to make use of it, otherwise how will they appreciate your hard work? Microsoft on the other hand got it a loooong time ago. Ease of use isn't just nice to have, it is the one overiding factor that outweighs all others in software design. Flexibility just confuses most users. security is a sick sad joke that only security wonks care about. Until the Linux community embraces the overwhelming truth that ease of use is ALL that matters, they will be doomed to be a hobby OS for out-of-touch tech weenies. 2) Endlessly re-inventing the wheel. I think Redhat/ Fedora is now on their third version of the X-windows package, and there is talk of scrapping the whole thing for a new windowing paradigm. Every six months I do a version upgrade, and my desktop breaks, my icons disappear, my scripts stop working because the directories have changed. For the love of sanity PLEASE knock it off. If it ain't broke, DON"T FIX IT!!! If you want people to really use Linux, focus on a consistent user experience, keep the magic behind the curtain, and stop screwing up the user interface. 3) Fear of licenses. Every time I upgrade fedora, I have to spend hours getting my Xine video player, web browser, and games to work again. Give up the insanity guys. The world is not going to change to suit your whiny childish prejudices. There's all kinds of industry standard free software out there that EVERYONE uses. You are just marginalizing Linux by not supporting it in your distros. 'Nuff said.
Imagine this scenario. Since our sun is a 2nd generation star ( we know this from the presence of heavy metals - only created in supernovae), that means that most solar systems in towards the galactic center probably could have been at our stage of technical development 4-5 Billion years ago. At the VERY least, we can reasonably assume that they have learned to send communications via technologies as advanced and subtle as quantum-entangled pairs. And here we are broadcasting primitive RADIO waves at them. Why would they want to waste their time coming to visit a backwater, dirty, disease-ridden, slum like Earth ? Think of a nuclear submarine cruising by an island populated by primitive primates. The local baboons see the wake of the sub and decide to try to attract its attention. They rush to the beach and begin frantically beating their chests, screaming, and flinging their poop into the ocean (think escaped TV broadcast signals). Yet the sub makes no attempt to return their communication, nor does it stop to share its technology with them. Why should we be so conceited as to think we have anything interesting to say to an advanced alien race?
Mr. Gates has a long history of making warped predictions about the future. Remember this is a guy who has computer monitors hanging on the walls of his house that change the artwork to suit each visitor, because clearly a digitized picture of a masterpiece is just as good as the real thing, right? In the same way, a digitized copy of an education is just as good as a real education, right? But where will chemists perform labwork online? Where will biology students do dissections? Other than being a pale washed-out copy of a real education, there's the problem of quality control. On-line materials are going to include lectures on the "Jewish Communist Bankers" conspiracy written by Josef Goebels, and treatises on how the "government" is hiding reverse-engineered UFO's at "Area 51". What Mr. Gates is doing is hawking yet another revenue generating app for the Windows PC. Look at what the cesspool of the internet has done to corrupt the quality of everyday life, and you can easily see, Mr. Gates concern is for increasing his already vast fortune,. The public welfare can go to hell, as long as Mr. Gates and Microsoft get to charge a toll at the entrance.
A modern liberal arts degree is a mostly worthless piece of paper. The degree is chock full of courses in dead literature and useless philosophy. All of which are a holdover form the days of royalty and privilege. The upper classes didn't have to work, so they spent their leisure time filling their heads with literature and philosophical trivia. This made them appear more intelligent than the working-class slobs whose days were filled by 16-hour shifts in the coal mines. And this in turn was used to rationalize a mythical genetic basis for the wealth and leisure of the upper class. It's time to bring colleges and universities into the 21st century. Instead of trying to recreate the old European culture of wealth and privilege, let's trash the whole university system, and create a whole new, publicly funded set of technical degree generating institutions that don't bother with dead and arcane subjects like English or Art. It would be well worth the investment of public funds to have a populace that can compete on a global scale in technical fields. Of course the useless f-tards from wealthy families can still waste their lives on "private sector" liberal arts degrees, the difference being that their lack of technical focus will label them as useless idle slugs instead of the erudite and effete members of the upper crust.
NASA has been collecting earth-observing data for five decades now, and in spite of the current wave of interest in climate related matters, little or no effort is put into examining this historical record. A small group of scientists within the US Geological Survey have heroically attempted to preserve this enormous treasure of historical climate data at a small data center in South Dakota. But hundreds of terabytes of irreplaceable data are at risk of being lost forever because no one seems to care. There are lobbyists galore for NEW satellite systems, but in many cases you might as well pour the data into a bit bucket, we spend billions of dollars collecting data, and pennies storing and analyzing it. Instead of relying on flawed computer models and bogus prognostications, the Global Warming debate could be based on real hard data, if anyone wanted to take the time to go look at it. http://eros.usgs.gov/#/About_Us
It appears that we have seen the last of an American icon, namely the "big block" V8 engine. There could not be a more poignant, even stirring example of the slow steady wimpification of US culture than the passing of this pillar of young male manhood. My brother Jim and I had a phrase for the thrum-thrum noise made by the revving of a big-block V8, we called it the "Happy Engine Song". Singing it required a displacement of no less than 350 cubic inches (about 6000cc's in today's parlance). But that song will now pass into obscurity, the victim of oil prices and economic decline. Global warming may give us a lot more beachfront property, but we'll be driving to those beaches in little tin 15HP hybrid-mobiles. No one will ever sing a song titled "She's real fine my 60mpg 2cylinder-electric hybrid".....meh!
Once again, we see that the core of the environmental movement in reality cares nothing about the environment. Artificially created enviro-panics like the hole in the ozone layer (which hasn't shrunk after 15 years of CFC bans), and the comical global warming hoax (now revealed to be the result of research chicanery and fraud) are in reality all just excuses. They are ruses used in an attempt to panic and frighten the world into dismantling our technological infrastructure and returning to a hunter-gatherer civilization. All in a lunatic attempt to atone for the sin of being human to the demon-goddess gaia. When enviro-kooks develop a head of steam behind a good scare-story, the LAST thing they want is for the problem to be SOLVED through technology. The point is to make us all give up using earth-hostile amenities like cars and electricity, kill off 9/10ths of the human population through starvation and disease, and then go back to living in tee-pees and using our own dung as fertilizer for our maize. Then MAYBE gaia will forgive us for living on her surface and leave us alone. WAKE UP people! Environmentalism isn't science, it's a religion. One of the most barbaric and scary religions on the face of the earth. If they ever get control of public policy their death-toll will make the Taliban look like a kindergarten class.
High student loan interest rates are the result of Bush administration tinkering to increase the profit of lenders. If you believe religiously that corporate profits are the highest moral good possible, there's no end to the suffering you're willing to inflict on regular citizens in order to raise those profits. Bush promoted and signed bills raising student loans from ~2.5% to over 8% in some cases. It's that good-old "loot and pillage" economic theory. If you're a Republican over 50 years old, you don't give a d@mn about the future, as long as you wallet is swelling today....
Built to last - snork! That must be why you see often see used mainframes on Ebay for $25. The only thing a bout a mainframe that is built to last is the massive debt you have to take on to own one. The CPU cores are the same as the power PC - buy them for a desktop , its 10 cents/MIP. Buy it wrapped in a mainframe skin, its $1000/MIP for the same CPU. I can't believe people still fall for this "Mainframes are superior technology" malarkey.
IBM was pushing Windows NT 3.51 on the mainframe back in the 1990's. This is decades old ! http://news.cnet.com/Windows-NT-on-mainframes/2100-1001_3-207931.html People just lost interest because it was so profoundly expensive that even mainframe shops couldn't afford it.
Clearly X.org is being held up because it is the new game engine for "Duke Nukem Forever"....
This is the same principal that made dinosaur bones appear in the ground when we doubted the bible and started looking for evidence of evolution.
God is taunting us.
Yes, but where's the monolith? It has the opening to the wormhole that leads to the solar system where we achieve enlightenment. It must be true, I saw it on TV.
The Commodore 64 was a landmark in personal computing, I had one tricked out with hard drive, printer, modem (for BBS - there was no internet), Z-80 co-processor to run CPM. C-compiler, Pascal Compiler, and a big stack of game cartridges... When the IBM PC came out I didn't see how it could compete with the vastly superior C64 - groan-
Who cares about plastics - these guys have invented the first PHASER!
But beware the darkside. Soon we may have beams that will turn PEOPLE into natural gas!
Of course, if someone aimed it at Congress, no one might notice....
Don't you mean Darth Cheney, lord of the Sith?
SWITCHES, you had SWITCHES???
WE programmed the executable memory with JUMPERS, because it was read-only
And if we would get rid of this amazingly insecure invention called RAM, and record the OS and application executables in PROM at the factory the way God intended, there wouldn't be any computer viruses EVER AGAIN!
"So how is it that adopted children are loved?"
- you're a real sick f*ck.
You can't see the difference between choosing to adopt a child and having your wife lie to you about being pregnant by an illicit lover? What are you , 9 years old?
"Furthermore, do you think that, possibly, your preference for robotic women may have to do with your lack of uhh.. success, in that arena?" OMG - did you go to school on the short bus? YES that's the whole point of the joke!
Tell me, when you walk down the sidewalk and pass a stop sign, do you come to a halt and sit there for hours pnndering the dilemna?
Wonderful, so now lesbian couples can have male-free baby...mice.
1 7203910160.htm
So the race is on, will women replaced men with test-tubes, or will men replace women with robots?
http://times.hankooki.com/lpage/200605/kt20060504
After two divorces from two unfaithful wives, and 20 years of raising two children who might or might not be my genetic progeny, I say - lets just clone ourselves and convert to Stepford wives.
Unless you live in a state like the People's Republic of Maryland, where the attorney general has publicly voiced that opinion that children are the property of the state and parents are allowed to raise the children only at the pleasure of the state.
Most parents have no idea how far the "child protection" laws have eroded their rights as parents.
We live in a police state where we have traded freedom of speech for rap music, freedom of association for cheap abundant beer, and freedom of the press for internet pr0n.
The founding fathers would break down in tears at the mockery we have made of the liberties they fought and died for.
OK, in your case we'll make an exception. PLEASE don't pass on your genes.
The best way to survive the next 100 years is to stop running from the imaginary boogeymen of the LAST 100 years. We have this suicidal fascination with birth control and population reduction. In reality, birth rates are plumetting all over the world. An if it wasn't for immigration, the population of most propserous nations would be in rapid decline. In the U.S. the average couple has only 1.4 children. Without immigration from third world countries, the U.S. would be depopulating at a rate of 30% every 25 years.
Exacerbating this is the profile of who is reproducing. In our welfare state, we pay the least functional and arguably least intelligent segments of our population (this is not racist - 75% of welfare recipients are not african americans) to sit around and breed. The only part of the population demographic that is growing is the poor and dependent.
The crisis of the next 100 years will not be global warming or toxic waste or nuclear fallout. It will be vast armies of stupid belligerent parasites with their hands out demanding to be fed and clothed by a shrinking pool of intelligent functional human beings.
The next world crisis is the crisis of de-evolution!
To survive, we must institute emergency programs of tax relief and education to encourage intelligent people to BREED, for the sake of humanity.
For the sake of the post, all that was necessary was to demonstrate a plausible correlation between reality and the Biblical passage. From a spiritual point of view, the dealy thing about the mark isn't the number, it is the acceptance of a "substitute" God in the person of the beast. From a practical point of view, I won't let anyone put a chip under my skin even if it isn't that "mark of the beast".
From the Bible, Revelations chapter 13:16-18>------ 16He also forced everyone, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on his right hand or on his forehead, 17so that no one could buy or sell unless he had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of his name. 18This calls for wisdom. If anyone has insight, let him calculate the number of the beast, for it is man's number. His number is 666. ----------- OK, I have a computer chip in me. It has files on it. Since it will be used for all my file transactions, it must be able to be read and written by anyone - so we have read and write permission for owner, group, and world. If this file system is UNIX/POSIX compatible, that's a permission code of 666 !!! QED Corollary I - the so-called "Christian" right are a bunch of moronic stooges, acting as a hand puppet for the devil. Corollary II - The republicans are the party of satan, busily building the infrastructure for the antiChrist to use to rule the world. Corollary III - If you vote for them in the next election, you have only yourself to blame when the secret police kick in your door.
If this was structured like most liability laws, what would happen is that vendors would be forced to raise their prices in order to pool the money in a big liability insurance fund. This fund would then be harvested by unscupulous lawyers using sympathetic clients whose claims pulled on the heartrings of juries, like: I spent so much time trying to keep my browser from crashing that I forgot to feed my cat and she starved to death; or I got so mad at my filesystem for losing my files that I smacked my kid and gave him brain damage. Legitimate users who organized and filed class action suits over business costs caused by real bugs would be tied up in court forever by defendants legal teams because the magnitude of their claims would make a vigorous defense an economic necessity. Free and Open Source software authors would have to form non-profit corporations to front for them, and rely on contributions from sympathetic sources to buy their insurance. They would be routinely attacked by lawsuits drummed up by front companies funded by a certain software giant in a fashion that might remind some people of the SCO lawsuit. Testify in these bogus suits would tie up all the time of FOSS developers, effectively slowing open-source development down by a factor of 10. In the end, only the lawyers would benefit - exactly the way it works in most industries.