The one positive thing about Qt is that there's at least a remote chance of it becoming genuinely free software... someday... If this merger means more code falling under this condition - good.
It's licensed under a copyLEFT, restrictive software license that places many limits on who can use it, where, and how. Only copyFREE and "public domain" software can logically be considered "free as in freedom"!
(1) Open all borders. End all taxation. Auction off all government property and put all politicians / government bureaucrats in work prisons, with the profits going to their victims in the form of tax rebates. Ostracize anyone who ever thought government was a good idea, for any purpose whatsoever.
Net Neutrality is one of the most Orwellian-named draconian Big Brother government power-grabs of our time! Only individual choice, competition, and the free market can protect freedom of speech. The government is its #1 enemy!
This oil spill is a great example of GOVERNMENT failure, not of lack of regulation!
(1) The government created this oil-based economy in the first place by subsidizing it, including all the trillion-dollar wars in the middle east, while a freer society would have probably switched to (post)nuclear, geothermal, and/or perhaps even space-solar by now.
(2) The government forced the tax-victims to pay for its crummy quality assurance monopoly, which failed miserably. Why worry about safety yourself when everyone knows Mommy Government needs to do all your thinking for you! The government inspectors rated the rig as exemplary, when they showed up at all.
(3) The government created a "tragedy of the commons", whereas all sea and ocean territory would be privately owned in a free society, not in any way differently from land, and even undersea X-depth access rights would be a commodity to be traded. When you get oil in other people's property, you'd typically pay out the wazoo!
(4) The government created corporate liability protections, whereas in a free society people starting or investing in an oil company would know they can lose the shirt off their back, and would thus only do so if they had sufficient industrial insurance, which in turn would have led to draconian safety standards all across the production process.
(5) Oil has been seeping into the oceans of millions of years, and the overwhelming majority of the oil seeping into the ocean today has nothing to do with acts of man. Nature, for the most part, simply cleans itself. This isn't to minimize BP's liabilities for its actions, but to point out that perhaps the greatest damage of this accident is psychological rather than environmental. There are eco-religious nuts out there who literally think the world is coming to an end! Most of them will not blow up any SUV dealerships, but a lot of them will live a different life than they otherwise would have, avoiding industry, avoiding having children, avoiding the very processes that propel the human civilization forward! There will always be stupid people who will find stupid reasons to sit on the couch all day and complain, but the current environmentalist hysteria was to a great part encouraged by government-controlled education, government influence over the media, and countless other examples of government force!
Only private ownership of resources and free market capitalism can properly balance utilization and protection of the environment, on this little planet and soon far beyond!
All forms of government regulation are tyranny, but private businesses like ISP's do have a Right to whatever user contract they see fit. If enough people switch to a more libertarian ISP, then this stupid policy will be self-defeating for Eircom. The marketplace will adapt accordingly, and the Internet will be a stronger and freer place as the result.
Parents tend to have a far greater interest in their children, for emotional as well as economic reasons, then unaccountable government bureaucrats that operate through the barrel of a gun and institutionally only care about retaining and expanding their power!
Furthermore, libertarians are very big on child emancipation as a counter-balance to our strong support of parents' rights. Individuals should get to run their own lives as soon as they are able and willing to do so.
Or is it? A more effective government brainwashing mechanism (aka "public school") will help no one! The reform of education must begin with putting parents in complete control!
Firefox is quickly becoming the slowest Web browser, as well as one of the buggiest. It's particularly bad on Linux, where it's slower than the Windows version (even through Wine) and it has a bunch of issues that almost all distro maintainers simply refuse to fix - graphics look as pixelated as an MS-DOS game from 1989! One exception is Ubuntu, where you have to add the "firefox-smooth-scaling" PPA and have a long fight with APT about keeping the version number locked, but on all other distros I've used (including all *BSD's) it's next to impossible to figure out, even when compiling from source.
Who died and made you the overlord of all file formats?! You don't get to dictate what the standards are! They evolve naturally in the marketplace based on consumer demand, and the vast majority don't want your stupid standards, they like the products that Microsoft is selling.
Microsoft is a business, not your personal standards-obeying butt-boy here for our amusement! Don't like Microsoft products? Use something else, and live with the consequences of sloppy document conversion if your product fails to open Microsoft's popular formats correctly.
In a free society it would be within the right of the content authors to try to use whatever "technological cleverness" they come up with to track at least some of the "pirates" who copy their works, for the purposes of identification for legitimate contract enforcement or ostracism. For example Microsoft might gain the identity of the individuals / businesses pirating their software (or at least the individuals / businesses like ISP's that refuse to cooperate in their investigation) and blacklist them with certain business groups where Microsoft may be influential. Vast business alliances can form naturally in the free market to protect common interests like anti-piracy, and a university may be contractually obligated to punish their students for "piracy" lest the university's garbage pickup company boycotts them - you get the idea. Market pressure can be a powerful force, but, unlike government force (i.e. copyright / patent laws), it is always based on legitimate individual rights and not mindless violence for the sake of the state!
It is a person's individual responsibility to decide which social interactions are permissible in his/her life or not, and in the case of a child that responsibility falls onto parents / guardians. Actual acts of aggressionobviously need to be punished, but "cyber-bullying" falls within the margins of normal human interaction (i.e. free speech) that the "victim" could have walked away from at any time. So the sociological question to ask is - why didn't she?
The vast majority of the social problems children face today come from government-enforced non-consensual over-socialization with randomly chosen "peers" in dumbed-down part-time political brainwashing prisons called "schools", which gives infinite power to the state and dis-empowers the parents from having any actual influence on their children's lives. The motivations and incentives that power-hungry government bureaucrats have toward children are very different from those of the family / voluntarily chosen peer group that the human psyche has evolved to deal with, with depression and violence being the obvious result. The government treats children as cattle to be herded around at the pace of the lowest degenerate, and it matters not what goes on inside their heads as long as they can be milked (taxed) for the government's benefit! You'd have to be a psychopath not to be driven close to suicide by a system like that!
From the long-term evolutionary point of view, this one suicide is a perfect example of this horrible socialist system leading to extinction: outright suicides are still rare, but billions of children world-wide are simply not being born as fertility rates in socialist countries drop toward zero. What kind of parents would want to spend that much time, emotion, and money raising little snitcher drones to be brainwashed and controlled by the state?! Billions of children don't kill themselves biologically but experience a similar psychological suicide: the death of hope, of spirit, of their individual sense of life... Your whole socialist society is doomed to gradual suicide over the coming centuries, and the sooner the better! A freer society (the logical ideal being Anarcho-Capitalism) would empower the parents by recognizing their Natural Rights, thus resulting in greater cultural freedom, greater intellectual diversity, incentives for more results-driven career-oriented education, better mental health within the family, healthier children, higher fertility rates, and far better economic and thus scientific growth.
In the free software world, that would mean the impossibility of violence-backed "licenses" like GPL - if you choose to make your code public then you can no longer control it. Without the "viral" effect of Copyleft, open source code would be [i]a lot[/i] more business-friendly, resulting in more small businesses being able to compete with entrenched giants like Microsoft. Just look at how much good Microsoft's competitor's were able to do with the small fraction of FLOSS that is permissively licensed: MacOS X, Safari, Google Chrome, EnterpriseDB (about to eat Oracle's lunch), the long list of games that embed SQLite or Python / Lua, etc, etc, etc.
In the proprietary software world, with EULA's no longer being any more enforcable than an "if you see me you owe me money" post-in note stuck on someone's forehead, we would see rapid growth of hosted applications, software as a service (SaaS), support subscriptions, certification subscriptions, business contracts, hardware bundling, etc, etc, etc. Companies like Microsoft and Oracle would still be able to make money, but based on value-adding merit and not a race through the inherently-corrupt patent bureaucracy!
I'm sure it's possible to build a laptop that can withstand years in any environment, but at what cost? As NetBooks get cheaper, maybe it's time to start thinking of them as a disposable commodity - a new $300 every 6 months beats a $4000 ToughBook every 5 years, especially considering the time-value of money (i.e. credit interest or inflation), increasing performance value, lighter weight, not having to worry about accumulative maintenance costs, etc. And you can donate your worn out NetBooks to a local school or something where kids can learn what electronics look like on the inside.
Seriously, China will not own the 21st century, and they'll be even weaker in the 22nd. Demographics is everything. Sure, they're a big country (presuming they don't collapse like the Soviet Union did), but their per-capita GDP will be lagging, and China will grow old before it grows rich. And all Chinese people who are worth talking to are learning English. What matters is the ideas you can express, not how many languages you can express them in, and English will remain the most prestigious cultural, technological, and scientific language for the foreseeable future. And, phonetic insanity aside, English does deserve to be the global language by being the language of the culture responsible for modern science, the industrial revolution, and relative economic and personal freedom. The only reason China is doing so well economically is because they've abandoned Chinese ideas and made use of the ideas that were imported through places like Hong Kong (still the freest economy in the world, but thanks exclusively to its English influence). Of the top 5 Russian writers of the 20th century (and, yes, I'm counting Ayn Rand) 3 wrote in English, 1 fled to (eventually) Vermont! By the end of this century 70% of the world's 800 million remaining Chinese and 90% of the world's 4,500 million South Asians will speak decent English!
The only language that can supersede English is something like Lojban, and studying that would actually be good for children's mental development. The Chinese language is like an explosion at the irrationality factory that's been burning for 5000 years!
In a rational society, border guards would be convicted of an assault on him!
The "border" between Vermont and Québec is no different than the border between your property and your neighbor's, except that your ownership of your land is based on the Natural Right to property that stems from the fact that specific human action brought that land into the human economy, and you either are the person who took that action (the original homesteader) or you've acquired that land through a chain of (hopefully) voluntary exchanges. The government's claim over land is not based on empirical economic facts (evolutionary pragmatism being the only axiom of free market capitalism), the government's claims come from nothing more than the barrel of a gun!
And shame on that jury for being 12 nitpicked butt-kissers who've never heard of the right (and their obligation) to Jury Nullification. They're not there as legal scholars or cheerleaders for the judge, they're there as the final check and balance on the legal system that supersedes the authority of law itself! I hope each of those jurors gets pulled over and arrested for untermenschen ohne papieren due to a bizarre case of bureaucratic/*FAIL*/. No man has the right to detain another outside the detainer's property and without evidence that the detainee might have initiated aggression. And this government doesn't have any more a right to stop people on the "borders" (which it doesn't actually own) than the Nazi thugs had the right to do the same on the streets of Berlin!
Gee wiz, how will Commiedot cover IE9, the most revolutionary Web browser since Microsoft won the browser wars and invented the technologies behind AJAX in the late 1990s? Will they mention Microsoft's embrace and leadership with HTML5 and progress toward 100% Acid3 compatibility? Will they mention awesome developer tools / profiling / Visual Studio 2010 integration that makes Firebug look like a retard on a tricycle trying to race the space-shuttle? Will they solemnly admit that an early pre-alpha version already blows Firefox 3.6 out of the water in terms of performance? (And the Windows version of Firefox runs faster than the Linux version, even through Wine, and Windows graphics card support is much better than Linux / Solaris / *BSD, so the difference with an all-FLOSS desktop would be even greater, especially on new hardware.)
Nah, not a chance, they have their socialist anti-Microsoft agenda to promote! First they'll dig up a story about Google Chrome trying to do some 3D acceleration (which would be pretty hard without the level of hardware vendor support that Microsoft has earned over the years), and then they'll whine that it won't run on a 10-year-old operating system... I'd like to see how well the 2011 versions of the top FLOSS browser binaries work on Red Hat 6!
Yet again we see capitalist software achieve its market share on the basis of merit. Yet again we see socialist software playing second-hander catch-up with the aid of government force (ex. the forced EU browser ballot screen, etc). But, just like the former claims that the Soviet Union will surpass the American economy, the socialist software model continues to fall flat - consumers are willing to pay more for quality, convenience, and innovation (which often leads to a lower total cost of ownership), and companies like Microsoft are able to invest that money to hire the top developer brains this world has to offer, thus perpetuating the positive feedback cycle of wealth creation. Government-subsidized European college hippies(which is where most socialist software originates) steal tax money from companies like Microsoft, which is the only reason their development model didn't end up on the ash heap of history just quite yet!
The ideal means of verifying identity and reputation would be built on the "web of trust" concept, not blunt government force!
The latter provides a single point of failure, and gives near-absolute power to a monopoly (government) that is inherently tyrannical, deceitful, and corrupt!
Proprietary software makers use copyright & patents to initiate government aggression, the copyleft commies use GPL to initiate government aggression, etc, etc, etc - the cycle of government-backed violence continues... 8~(
The libertarian / Anarcho-Capitalist solution would be for proprietary companies to come up with a business model that doesn't depend on so-called "intellectual property" enforcement (instead making money through hardware bundles, B2B partnership, training and certification contracts, support, etc), and for people who want to contribute to truly free software to stop hiding behind restrictive licenses and just release their work as public domain.
Slashdot Mirror
The one positive thing about Qt is that there's at least a remote chance of it becoming genuinely free software... someday... If this merger means more code falling under this condition - good.
It's licensed under a copyLEFT, restrictive software license that places many limits on who can use it, where, and how. Only copy FREE and "public domain" software can logically be considered "free as in freedom"!
(1) Open all borders. End all taxation. Auction off all government property and put all politicians / government bureaucrats in work prisons, with the profits going to their victims in the form of tax rebates. Ostracize anyone who ever thought government was a good idea, for any purpose whatsoever.
(2) Install FreeBSD.
Net Neutrality is one of the most Orwellian-named draconian Big Brother government power-grabs of our time! Only individual choice, competition, and the free market can protect freedom of speech. The government is its #1 enemy!
The world's #1 most popular free software operating system!
At least to people not drinking Stalinman's communist kool-aid... All 8 of us...
Seriously, why so few comments on this story?
I'm very glad to see this example of free market solutions to Internet freedom issues that don't put blind faith in government force.
This oil spill is a great example of GOVERNMENT failure, not of lack of regulation!
(1) The government created this oil-based economy in the first place by subsidizing it, including all the trillion-dollar wars in the middle east, while a freer society would have probably switched to (post)nuclear, geothermal, and/or perhaps even space-solar by now.
(2) The government forced the tax-victims to pay for its crummy quality assurance monopoly, which failed miserably. Why worry about safety yourself when everyone knows Mommy Government needs to do all your thinking for you! The government inspectors rated the rig as exemplary, when they showed up at all.
(3) The government created a "tragedy of the commons", whereas all sea and ocean territory would be privately owned in a free society, not in any way differently from land, and even undersea X-depth access rights would be a commodity to be traded. When you get oil in other people's property, you'd typically pay out the wazoo!
(4) The government created corporate liability protections, whereas in a free society people starting or investing in an oil company would know they can lose the shirt off their back, and would thus only do so if they had sufficient industrial insurance, which in turn would have led to draconian safety standards all across the production process.
(5) Oil has been seeping into the oceans of millions of years, and the overwhelming majority of the oil seeping into the ocean today has nothing to do with acts of man. Nature, for the most part, simply cleans itself. This isn't to minimize BP's liabilities for its actions, but to point out that perhaps the greatest damage of this accident is psychological rather than environmental. There are eco-religious nuts out there who literally think the world is coming to an end! Most of them will not blow up any SUV dealerships, but a lot of them will live a different life than they otherwise would have, avoiding industry, avoiding having children, avoiding the very processes that propel the human civilization forward! There will always be stupid people who will find stupid reasons to sit on the couch all day and complain, but the current environmentalist hysteria was to a great part encouraged by government-controlled education, government influence over the media, and countless other examples of government force!
Only private ownership of resources and free market capitalism can properly balance utilization and protection of the environment, on this little planet and soon far beyond!
All forms of government regulation are tyranny, but private businesses like ISP's do have a Right to whatever user contract they see fit. If enough people switch to a more libertarian ISP, then this stupid policy will be self-defeating for Eircom. The marketplace will adapt accordingly, and the Internet will be a stronger and freer place as the result.
Parents tend to have a far greater interest in their children, for emotional as well as economic reasons, then unaccountable government bureaucrats that operate through the barrel of a gun and institutionally only care about retaining and expanding their power!
Furthermore, libertarians are very big on child emancipation as a counter-balance to our strong support of parents' rights. Individuals should get to run their own lives as soon as they are able and willing to do so.
Or is it? A more effective government brainwashing mechanism (aka "public school") will help no one! The reform of education must begin with putting parents in complete control!
Firefox is quickly becoming the slowest Web browser, as well as one of the buggiest. It's particularly bad on Linux, where it's slower than the Windows version (even through Wine) and it has a bunch of issues that almost all distro maintainers simply refuse to fix - graphics look as pixelated as an MS-DOS game from 1989! One exception is Ubuntu, where you have to add the "firefox-smooth-scaling" PPA and have a long fight with APT about keeping the version number locked, but on all other distros I've used (including all *BSD's) it's next to impossible to figure out, even when compiling from source.
Who died and made you the overlord of all file formats?! You don't get to dictate what the standards are! They evolve naturally in the marketplace based on consumer demand, and the vast majority don't want your stupid standards, they like the products that Microsoft is selling.
Microsoft is a business, not your personal standards-obeying butt-boy here for our amusement! Don't like Microsoft products? Use something else, and live with the consequences of sloppy document conversion if your product fails to open Microsoft's popular formats correctly.
In a free society it would be within the right of the content authors to try to use whatever "technological cleverness" they come up with to track at least some of the "pirates" who copy their works, for the purposes of identification for legitimate contract enforcement or ostracism. For example Microsoft might gain the identity of the individuals / businesses pirating their software (or at least the individuals / businesses like ISP's that refuse to cooperate in their investigation) and blacklist them with certain business groups where Microsoft may be influential. Vast business alliances can form naturally in the free market to protect common interests like anti-piracy, and a university may be contractually obligated to punish their students for "piracy" lest the university's garbage pickup company boycotts them - you get the idea. Market pressure can be a powerful force, but, unlike government force (i.e. copyright / patent laws), it is always based on legitimate individual rights and not mindless violence for the sake of the state!
It is a person's individual responsibility to decide which social interactions are permissible in his/her life or not, and in the case of a child that responsibility falls onto parents / guardians. Actual acts of aggression obviously need to be punished, but "cyber-bullying" falls within the margins of normal human interaction (i.e. free speech) that the "victim" could have walked away from at any time. So the sociological question to ask is - why didn't she?
The vast majority of the social problems children face today come from government-enforced non-consensual over-socialization with randomly chosen "peers" in dumbed-down part-time political brainwashing prisons called "schools", which gives infinite power to the state and dis-empowers the parents from having any actual influence on their children's lives. The motivations and incentives that power-hungry government bureaucrats have toward children are very different from those of the family / voluntarily chosen peer group that the human psyche has evolved to deal with, with depression and violence being the obvious result. The government treats children as cattle to be herded around at the pace of the lowest degenerate, and it matters not what goes on inside their heads as long as they can be milked (taxed) for the government's benefit! You'd have to be a psychopath not to be driven close to suicide by a system like that!
From the long-term evolutionary point of view, this one suicide is a perfect example of this horrible socialist system leading to extinction: outright suicides are still rare, but billions of children world-wide are simply not being born as fertility rates in socialist countries drop toward zero. What kind of parents would want to spend that much time, emotion, and money raising little snitcher drones to be brainwashed and controlled by the state?! Billions of children don't kill themselves biologically but experience a similar psychological suicide: the death of hope, of spirit, of their individual sense of life... Your whole socialist society is doomed to gradual suicide over the coming centuries, and the sooner the better! A freer society (the logical ideal being Anarcho-Capitalism) would empower the parents by recognizing their Natural Rights, thus resulting in greater cultural freedom, greater intellectual diversity, incentives for more results-driven career-oriented education, better mental health within the family, healthier children, higher fertility rates, and far better economic and thus scientific growth.
In the free software world, that would mean the impossibility of violence-backed "licenses" like GPL - if you choose to make your code public then you can no longer control it. Without the "viral" effect of Copyleft, open source code would be [i]a lot[/i] more business-friendly, resulting in more small businesses being able to compete with entrenched giants like Microsoft. Just look at how much good Microsoft's competitor's were able to do with the small fraction of FLOSS that is permissively licensed: MacOS X, Safari, Google Chrome, EnterpriseDB (about to eat Oracle's lunch), the long list of games that embed SQLite or Python / Lua, etc, etc, etc.
In the proprietary software world, with EULA's no longer being any more enforcable than an "if you see me you owe me money" post-in note stuck on someone's forehead, we would see rapid growth of hosted applications, software as a service (SaaS), support subscriptions, certification subscriptions, business contracts, hardware bundling, etc, etc, etc. Companies like Microsoft and Oracle would still be able to make money, but based on value-adding merit and not a race through the inherently-corrupt patent bureaucracy!
I'm sure it's possible to build a laptop that can withstand years in any environment, but at what cost? As NetBooks get cheaper, maybe it's time to start thinking of them as a disposable commodity - a new $300 every 6 months beats a $4000 ToughBook every 5 years, especially considering the time-value of money (i.e. credit interest or inflation), increasing performance value, lighter weight, not having to worry about accumulative maintenance costs, etc. And you can donate your worn out NetBooks to a local school or something where kids can learn what electronics look like on the inside.
Join the Microsoft Developer NetWork today!
Seriously.
Or not.
Just a possibility. I know I'd be.
All "rational economic actors" in this universe (say [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentience_Quotient]SQ>11[/url]) own themselves.
while (MemorizedCharacterCount TOTAL_COLLAPSE && OfficialChineseWritingSystem != PINYIN) { cram(); cram(); cram(); /* ThinkAboutReturnOnInvestint(); */ cram(); }
forget (EVERYTHING);
Seriously, China will not own the 21st century, and they'll be even weaker in the 22nd. Demographics is everything. Sure, they're a big country (presuming they don't collapse like the Soviet Union did), but their per-capita GDP will be lagging, and China will grow old before it grows rich. And all Chinese people who are worth talking to are learning English. What matters is the ideas you can express, not how many languages you can express them in, and English will remain the most prestigious cultural, technological, and scientific language for the foreseeable future. And, phonetic insanity aside, English does deserve to be the global language by being the language of the culture responsible for modern science, the industrial revolution, and relative economic and personal freedom. The only reason China is doing so well economically is because they've abandoned Chinese ideas and made use of the ideas that were imported through places like Hong Kong (still the freest economy in the world, but thanks exclusively to its English influence). Of the top 5 Russian writers of the 20th century (and, yes, I'm counting Ayn Rand) 3 wrote in English, 1 fled to (eventually) Vermont! By the end of this century 70% of the world's 800 million remaining Chinese and 90% of the world's 4,500 million South Asians will speak decent English!
The only language that can supersede English is something like Lojban, and studying that would actually be good for children's mental development. The Chinese language is like an explosion at the irrationality factory that's been burning for 5000 years!
In a rational society, border guards would be convicted of an assault on him!
The "border" between Vermont and Québec is no different than the border between your property and your neighbor's, except that your ownership of your land is based on the Natural Right to property that stems from the fact that specific human action brought that land into the human economy, and you either are the person who took that action (the original homesteader) or you've acquired that land through a chain of (hopefully) voluntary exchanges. The government's claim over land is not based on empirical economic facts (evolutionary pragmatism being the only axiom of free market capitalism), the government's claims come from nothing more than the barrel of a gun!
And shame on that jury for being 12 nitpicked butt-kissers who've never heard of the right (and their obligation) to Jury Nullification. They're not there as legal scholars or cheerleaders for the judge, they're there as the final check and balance on the legal system that supersedes the authority of law itself! I hope each of those jurors gets pulled over and arrested for untermenschen ohne papieren due to a bizarre case of bureaucratic /*FAIL*/. No man has the right to detain another outside the detainer's property and without evidence that the detainee might have initiated aggression. And this government doesn't have any more a right to stop people on the "borders" (which it doesn't actually own) than the Nazi thugs had the right to do the same on the streets of Berlin!
The test version was called 20th century liberalism.
The result on fertility rates was equally catastrophic, except of course full extinction will require a lot more than just 2-3 generations.
Gee wiz, how will Commiedot cover IE9, the most revolutionary Web browser since Microsoft won the browser wars and invented the technologies behind AJAX in the late 1990s? Will they mention Microsoft's embrace and leadership with HTML5 and progress toward 100% Acid3 compatibility? Will they mention awesome developer tools / profiling / Visual Studio 2010 integration that makes Firebug look like a retard on a tricycle trying to race the space-shuttle? Will they solemnly admit that an early pre-alpha version already blows Firefox 3.6 out of the water in terms of performance? (And the Windows version of Firefox runs faster than the Linux version, even through Wine, and Windows graphics card support is much better than Linux / Solaris / *BSD, so the difference with an all-FLOSS desktop would be even greater, especially on new hardware.)
Nah, not a chance, they have their socialist anti-Microsoft agenda to promote! First they'll dig up a story about Google Chrome trying to do some 3D acceleration (which would be pretty hard without the level of hardware vendor support that Microsoft has earned over the years), and then they'll whine that it won't run on a 10-year-old operating system... I'd like to see how well the 2011 versions of the top FLOSS browser binaries work on Red Hat 6!
Yet again we see capitalist software achieve its market share on the basis of merit. Yet again we see socialist software playing second-hander catch-up with the aid of government force (ex. the forced EU browser ballot screen, etc). But, just like the former claims that the Soviet Union will surpass the American economy, the socialist software model continues to fall flat - consumers are willing to pay more for quality, convenience, and innovation (which often leads to a lower total cost of ownership), and companies like Microsoft are able to invest that money to hire the top developer brains this world has to offer, thus perpetuating the positive feedback cycle of wealth creation. Government-subsidized European college hippies(which is where most socialist software originates) steal tax money from companies like Microsoft, which is the only reason their development model didn't end up on the ash heap of history just quite yet!
The ideal means of verifying identity and reputation would be built on the "web of trust" concept, not blunt government force!
The latter provides a single point of failure, and gives near-absolute power to a monopoly (government) that is inherently tyrannical, deceitful, and corrupt!
Proprietary software makers use copyright & patents to initiate government aggression, the copyleft commies use GPL to initiate government aggression, etc, etc, etc - the cycle of government-backed violence continues... 8~(
The libertarian / Anarcho-Capitalist solution would be for proprietary companies to come up with a business model that doesn't depend on so-called "intellectual property" enforcement (instead making money through hardware bundles, B2B partnership, training and certification contracts, support, etc), and for people who want to contribute to truly free software to stop hiding behind restrictive licenses and just release their work as public domain.