I wonder how well it would work to use a fluid that boils closer to 100 degrees F, and use the temperature differential between the roof/interior and the underside of a car. Combine it with flexible thin-film solar panels on the roof (which are usually black and tend to get very hot), and you might be able to generate quite a bit of power when the car is sitting in the sun.;-)
For a house, it shouldn't be that difficult to create a temperature differential. Have a black surface soaking up the sun (i.e. on the roof) and a white surface perpetually in shade (i.e. under the house). The black surface could even be a solar panel, boosting the energy output even more. Under the house, ventilation could be set up to blow most of the transferred heat outside during the summer, and inside during the winter.
Re:Too Much Serious Violence
on
Prey Review
·
· Score: 1
If it weren't, shows like the Three Stooges, Tom & Jerry, and Looney Tunes would never have become so popular.
After a year, their capacity is usually half what it started as. And they're way too expensive given how short their useful life-span is. They also take too long to charge. One technological advance we need to make "battery-based" cars viable is the super-capacitor.
Oh, I almost forgot. I think that Java would be very close to perfect if they added a way to create "unmanaged" classes, structures, and arrays. An unmanaged class/structure/array would essentially be a C++ class/structure/array. It would be compiled to machine code, and you could choose for that to happen at compile time, at install time, or at run time. It would be manually allocated/deallocated (outside Java's managed heap), and it would remove most of Java's seat belts (probably not the exception handling). Sun could probably make it even better than C/C++ by adding constructs that allow vectoring to be taken advantage of (I'm still a bit surprised that a new C/C++ standard isn't in the works to provide a way to do that). High and low-level classes would be able to call each other, and of course a debugger should be able to step between them seamlessly. That's what I'd love to have, seamless integration between high-level and low-level code, where I can get close to the hardware when I need to and still keep my high-level perks when I don't. I can create a project that uses two languages, but it's not seamless. I'd love to be able to do it with one language, one IDE, and one debugger.
I know that it "can", but I've written a good bit of both Java and C/C++ code, and all those times it can don't seem to add up to offset all those times it can't. I think Java is great for writing scalable back-end (and possibly distributed) server processes, but I wouldn't use it to write a game client that needs to push the CPU and GPU to their limits.
One of the best things about high-level languages is that it's generally more difficult for inexperienced (or in some cases just plain terrible) developers to screw things up. Programmers usually work on teams, and unless you're very lucky, your team will almost always have a few developers who aren't very sharp. In situations like this, I'd much rather use Java that C/C++ (though it would still depend on what you're trying to write). I'm not sure I'd go with a full scripting language in a situation like that, because I've seen people do some really stupid things with scripting languages. Some people need at least a little bit of structure forced onto them.;-)
From what I've read (and I may have been reading in the wrong places), most climate/weather scientists don't buy into the butterfly theory. If everyone in the world decided to face in the same direction (i.e. east) and fart at the same time, I doubt it would have even the slightest impact on weather. I believe that the forces that move large air masses and cause storms are powerful enough to drown out the random noise caused by tiny living things.
I occasionally wonder what would happen if it was large-scale and not random. Here in Atlanta, we have an interstate loop surrounding it (I-285). I always wondered whether it would create a localized low pressure zone if all the cars and trucks drove around it counter-clockwise at high speeds for a few weeks (like when kids get the water to swirl around in a circular pool by all walking around it in the same direction). Would it give a measurable difference in air pressure, or would a fairly slight breeze coming from a larger air movement be enough to blow it all away?
Sorry, I mis-spoke. I didn't mean that the original FORTRAN compiler. I meant to say that "a" FORTRAN compiler could be written in C, and still produce code that was faster than C for the numerical computations. I didn't get much sleep last night, which is pretty much my normal state.;-)
And even if a LISP compiler is written in LISP, it had to be compiled by a LISP compiler that wasn't written in LISP. If it was, then its parent wasn't written in LISP, or its parent. My point was that the original LISP compiler wasn't written in LISP. It would be a very neat trick indeed if it was.;-)
I never said that LISP was slow, or that LISP was always interpreted. I only used it as an example, and the only reason I mentioned LISP at all was because it was in TFA. Most people either love or hate LISP, and I hate it. Some higher-level languages I'm more familiar with are Java, Ruby, Perl (shudder), Python, PHP, Lua, etc. There are a plethora of high-level languages that I can download the source code for. Most of them are written in C, and the extensions for those languages are also written in C. And as a hobbyist graphics/game developer, I can't get any of them to come close to the performance I get with C/C++. Sorry, I never tried LISP because I can't stand it. I never tried FORTRAN either, also because I can't stand it. I know every language has places where it shines. A language like Java would probably make a great MMO server, but there are a number of things it really sucks at, and a game client is one of them.
The TFA mentions vectoring as a "simple" example, but from where I sit, it looks like the only example with any real merit (on x86). Dealing with branch prediction, instruction pipelining, and things like that are just as much of a pain to get right in high-level languages as they are in C. And there's a lot of code out there that wouldn't benefit at all from SIMD. Game clients can benefit from it, but there's always inline (or even out-of-line) assembler for that. Game clients can also benefit from slower high-level languages, as long as you fall back to C/C++ in critical areas.
Did you finish reading my post? I mentioned that some languages which are often interpreted can also be compiled. And if you write a LISP compiler in LISP, what do you compile the compiler with? Since the new compiler hasn't been built yet, you would have to compile it with a different LISP compiler, and I doubt that one was written in LISP. All compilers can be traced back to machine language, and most take advantage of assembler before that, and most of those take advantage of another language, like C, before that.
I would be very surprised if there's anything LISP can do that can't be done just as fast (or faster) in C. A poster before you mentioned that many LISP compilers convert the LISP code to C to compile it, and C can't go faster than C (though some C code is definitely better than others). Even if LISP is compiled directly to machine language, it's more a question of which compiler optimizes the code better, and not about which language is better. FORTRAN is a special case because it can take advantage of specialized machine language instructions, like MMX and SSE.
I didn't see anything mentioning that many high-level languages are written in C. And I don't consider languages like FORTRAN to be high-level. FORTRAN is a language that was designed specifically for numeric computation and scientific computing. For that purpose, it is easy for the compiler to optimize the machine code better than a C compiler could ever manage. The FORTRAN compiler was probably written in C, but FORTRAN has language constructs that are more well-suited to numeric computation.
Most truly high-level languages, like LISP (which was mentioned directly in TFA), are interpreted, and the interpreters are almost always written in C. It is impossible for an interpreted language written in C (or even a compiled one that is converted to C) to go faster than C. It is always possible for a C programmer to write inefficient code, but that same programmer is likely to write inefficient code in a high-level language as well.
I'm not saying high-level languages aren't great. They are great for many things, but the argument that C is harder to optimize because the processors have gotten more complex is ludicrous. It's the machine code that's harder to optimize (if you've tried to write assembly code since MMX came out, you know what I mean), and that affects ALL languages.
The Skype protocol has been cracked for a while, and by at least three organizations I know of, each using different techniques. Some of those techniques have been published, and it's only a matter of time before hackers start exploiting Skype. The only news here is that one of the companies who cracked it is releasing their own Skype library.
I have a post below that references a PDF from Black Hat Europe 2006 called "Silver Needle in the Skype". The authors hacked Skype (the PDF explains how they did it) and exploited a buffer overrun to make it execute their own code. They gave a demonstration where they had a Python script craft a packet that caused a Skype client to launch the MS calculator. Obviously this was a trivial exercise, but it was done to prove a point.
By crafting some simple UDP packets, they were also able to get Skype clients to do a number of unsavory things, such as scout for information from behind a firewall (i.e. IP and port scans on the Skype client's internal network). However, there is more to it than that. Skype can also relay TCP connections to help a client that is blocked get connected to the Skype network. But the relayed TCP connection isn't restricted to carrying Skype traffic, and this makes that feature very dangerous. Imagine what a hacker could do if he could scan your internal network and open any TCP connection he wanted to from inside your firewall. And the only trail you'd have to trace the attack back to its source is virtually undetectable, obfuscated, and encrypted. It should even be pretty easy for the hacker to bounce his connection through several Skype clients in several different countries before it hits the target, making it virtually impossible for anyone to trace it back to the true source (although Skype did such a good job hiding that it's not even really necessary).
Skype is very right to want to protect themselves from the telcos, but the IT managers are also very right in wanting to be able to identify and/or block it. It really is a security risk for them. And as I mentioned above (in case you didn't see it), NetSpective WebFilter can identify and/or block it without a proxy. Just plug it in where it can sniff your traffic going to the Internet, set it up to monitor or block, and very much like Skype, it just works.;-)
That's not even close to being true. This presentation from Black Hat Europe 2006 gives a decent description of how to recognize and block it (and even a high level description of how to hack it if you were so inclined):
http://www.secdev.org/conf/skype_BHEU06.handout.pd f
Actually, there is a product that blocks it without being a man in the middle. I know for sure because I'm one of the developers who worked on it. It's called NetSpective WebFilter. It runs in promiscuous sniffing mode only (no proxy), and it blocks Skype perfectly (along with several other protocols). I've also studied Skype well enough to know how big a security risk it really is.
(I didn't answer this call. A friend of mine working at the same company did.) It took a long time to figure out why every set of disks the company sent her were blank when she tried to install our software. The reason? She was using a magnet to attach them to the side of her computer case so she wouldn't "misplace" any of them while working her way through the install.
Why do we need anti-trust laws? If you think about it, every for-profit company wants to become a monopoly (i.e. to crush their competiton). And the larger the market is, the more likely it is to attract very clever and unscrupulous people. Just look at Bill Gates. Here's a great quote from El Reg (link to full article):
[quote] And, as Bill said to me at that breakfast chat: "It's important for a corporate leader to know the difference between what is actually illegal, and what people assume should be illegal." Gates got his big break, of course, in exactly such a way. [end quote]
To me, this seems to indicate that Microsoft got where it is today by doing things that are unethical but not technically illegal. As detestful as that is, Gates gets a few brownie points for being honest about it, and a few more for not blatantly breaking the law (as so many other big companies seem willing to do when they see an advantage).
The servers will probably get hacked (possibly even from the inside). If this gets implemented, most pedo's will consider an IT job at one of these ISP's to be their dream job.
If she was 14 and she let him drive her anywhere, which implies that he's at least 16 or that he's already breaking the law, she should be fined heavily and her lawyers barred from practicing law for frivolously wasting the taxpayers' (and MySpace's) time and money. Of course, most judges in America won't have the guts to do that, especially in such a sensitive and high-profile case.
Unfortunately, ridiculously frivolous lawsuits seem to be one of the hallmarks of American society. Otherwise, companies like Dremel would never need to add a warning label to their drill indicating that it should never be used as a dental drill.
It needs a bit more than stability to gain popular use. It has to be cheap enough to manufature, and the current manufacturing process doesn't sound cheap. Why can't you buy a cooler or a thermos that's insulated with aerogel? Because it would be ridiculously expensive.;-)
From what I've read, no one knows for certain, but the general consensus seems to be that this would be bad. Most existing climate/weather models, which are far from perfect, predict that weather would become more extreme. Highs and lows would get higher and lower, causing more frequent and more severe storms. Rising sea levels will cause problems in most coastal areas. I've read that the average height above sea level for the entire state of Florida is 5 feet. Imagine the whole state disappearing or turning into a bunch of little islands. Certain mosquito-borne viruses like malaria will spread to a much larger percentage of the world (I've read that it's already spreading some), yada-yada-yada, and so on, and so forth.
I'm an American, and I have to say it's for two reasons:
1) On average, Americans have a lot of money.
2) On average, Americans are fools when it comes to money.
For many Americans, it's not just easy to part them from the money they have now, it's easy to part them from the money they'll be earning for the next 15-30 years (through high interest credit cards). I don't think this will last much longer, though. Another poster mentioned that the exploitation of workers is going up (which I agree with). Pretty soon #1 won't be true anymore, and a lot of businesses in America will dry up.
If you didn't attend Georgia Tech, you should have. The professors there had an annual content for the worst one-liner technical joke, and you would've nailed it with that one.;-) Wait a minute, this isn't professor Greenlee is it? (He won that contest every year.)
Yes, I know that. But it detracts from the whole "free" argument to try to get people to try Linux. If someone like my wife had decided to try Linux because someone had told her it was "free", she'd be pretty upset about it.;-)
You're missing the point. Let's use my wife as an example computer user. She freaks out and complains to me almost every time a message box pops up on the screen that she's never seen before. She can usually browse the Internet ok, but when she uses an app like Word or Excel, I often shudder at the things she does, like switching to a really small font size and holding down the space bar to align text. (I tried to show her how to set and use tab stops once, but very quickly regretted it.) Unfortunately for us developers, she is what I'd call a typical end user.
Let's say I replaced her Windows installation with Linux. As long as I made sure it booted straight into X Windows and had desktop icons for Firefox and OpenOffice applications (which I'm sure a number of distros will set up for you during the install), she probably wouldn't notice much or care. However, if she had a problem with an application, and if she managed to find the right place to ask about it (actually she'd bug me, but let's pretend I died and left Linux on her computer), then telling her that that the fix is in CVS is basically telling her to "piss off". Or better yet, to go crying back to Windows or Mac.
I will freely admit as a paid commercial developer that I avoid talking directly to the end users as much as possible. We have paid support/service reps, and that's what they're for. One real problem I see with "OSS for everyone" is that even the lowest level of end users need support, and I can't imagine anyone volunteering for that job for free. I get more than enough of that from my wife at home.;-)
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I wonder how well it would work to use a fluid that boils closer to 100 degrees F, and use the temperature differential between the roof/interior and the underside of a car. Combine it with flexible thin-film solar panels on the roof (which are usually black and tend to get very hot), and you might be able to generate quite a bit of power when the car is sitting in the sun. ;-)
For a house, it shouldn't be that difficult to create a temperature differential. Have a black surface soaking up the sun (i.e. on the roof) and a white surface perpetually in shade (i.e. under the house). The black surface could even be a solar panel, boosting the energy output even more. Under the house, ventilation could be set up to blow most of the transferred heat outside during the summer, and inside during the winter.
If it weren't, shows like the Three Stooges, Tom & Jerry, and Looney Tunes would never have become so popular.
After a year, their capacity is usually half what it started as. And they're way too expensive given how short their useful life-span is. They also take too long to charge. One technological advance we need to make "battery-based" cars viable is the super-capacitor.
Oh, I almost forgot. I think that Java would be very close to perfect if they added a way to create "unmanaged" classes, structures, and arrays. An unmanaged class/structure/array would essentially be a C++ class/structure/array. It would be compiled to machine code, and you could choose for that to happen at compile time, at install time, or at run time. It would be manually allocated/deallocated (outside Java's managed heap), and it would remove most of Java's seat belts (probably not the exception handling). Sun could probably make it even better than C/C++ by adding constructs that allow vectoring to be taken advantage of (I'm still a bit surprised that a new C/C++ standard isn't in the works to provide a way to do that). High and low-level classes would be able to call each other, and of course a debugger should be able to step between them seamlessly. That's what I'd love to have, seamless integration between high-level and low-level code, where I can get close to the hardware when I need to and still keep my high-level perks when I don't. I can create a project that uses two languages, but it's not seamless. I'd love to be able to do it with one language, one IDE, and one debugger.
I know that it "can", but I've written a good bit of both Java and C/C++ code, and all those times it can don't seem to add up to offset all those times it can't. I think Java is great for writing scalable back-end (and possibly distributed) server processes, but I wouldn't use it to write a game client that needs to push the CPU and GPU to their limits.
One of the best things about high-level languages is that it's generally more difficult for inexperienced (or in some cases just plain terrible) developers to screw things up. Programmers usually work on teams, and unless you're very lucky, your team will almost always have a few developers who aren't very sharp. In situations like this, I'd much rather use Java that C/C++ (though it would still depend on what you're trying to write). I'm not sure I'd go with a full scripting language in a situation like that, because I've seen people do some really stupid things with scripting languages. Some people need at least a little bit of structure forced onto them. ;-)
From what I've read (and I may have been reading in the wrong places), most climate/weather scientists don't buy into the butterfly theory. If everyone in the world decided to face in the same direction (i.e. east) and fart at the same time, I doubt it would have even the slightest impact on weather. I believe that the forces that move large air masses and cause storms are powerful enough to drown out the random noise caused by tiny living things.
I occasionally wonder what would happen if it was large-scale and not random. Here in Atlanta, we have an interstate loop surrounding it (I-285). I always wondered whether it would create a localized low pressure zone if all the cars and trucks drove around it counter-clockwise at high speeds for a few weeks (like when kids get the water to swirl around in a circular pool by all walking around it in the same direction). Would it give a measurable difference in air pressure, or would a fairly slight breeze coming from a larger air movement be enough to blow it all away?
Sorry, I mis-spoke. I didn't mean that the original FORTRAN compiler. I meant to say that "a" FORTRAN compiler could be written in C, and still produce code that was faster than C for the numerical computations. I didn't get much sleep last night, which is pretty much my normal state. ;-)
And even if a LISP compiler is written in LISP, it had to be compiled by a LISP compiler that wasn't written in LISP. If it was, then its parent wasn't written in LISP, or its parent. My point was that the original LISP compiler wasn't written in LISP. It would be a very neat trick indeed if it was. ;-)
I never said that LISP was slow, or that LISP was always interpreted. I only used it as an example, and the only reason I mentioned LISP at all was because it was in TFA. Most people either love or hate LISP, and I hate it. Some higher-level languages I'm more familiar with are Java, Ruby, Perl (shudder), Python, PHP, Lua, etc. There are a plethora of high-level languages that I can download the source code for. Most of them are written in C, and the extensions for those languages are also written in C. And as a hobbyist graphics/game developer, I can't get any of them to come close to the performance I get with C/C++. Sorry, I never tried LISP because I can't stand it. I never tried FORTRAN either, also because I can't stand it. I know every language has places where it shines. A language like Java would probably make a great MMO server, but there are a number of things it really sucks at, and a game client is one of them.
The TFA mentions vectoring as a "simple" example, but from where I sit, it looks like the only example with any real merit (on x86). Dealing with branch prediction, instruction pipelining, and things like that are just as much of a pain to get right in high-level languages as they are in C. And there's a lot of code out there that wouldn't benefit at all from SIMD. Game clients can benefit from it, but there's always inline (or even out-of-line) assembler for that. Game clients can also benefit from slower high-level languages, as long as you fall back to C/C++ in critical areas.
Did you finish reading my post? I mentioned that some languages which are often interpreted can also be compiled. And if you write a LISP compiler in LISP, what do you compile the compiler with? Since the new compiler hasn't been built yet, you would have to compile it with a different LISP compiler, and I doubt that one was written in LISP. All compilers can be traced back to machine language, and most take advantage of assembler before that, and most of those take advantage of another language, like C, before that.
I would be very surprised if there's anything LISP can do that can't be done just as fast (or faster) in C. A poster before you mentioned that many LISP compilers convert the LISP code to C to compile it, and C can't go faster than C (though some C code is definitely better than others). Even if LISP is compiled directly to machine language, it's more a question of which compiler optimizes the code better, and not about which language is better. FORTRAN is a special case because it can take advantage of specialized machine language instructions, like MMX and SSE.
I didn't see anything mentioning that many high-level languages are written in C. And I don't consider languages like FORTRAN to be high-level. FORTRAN is a language that was designed specifically for numeric computation and scientific computing. For that purpose, it is easy for the compiler to optimize the machine code better than a C compiler could ever manage. The FORTRAN compiler was probably written in C, but FORTRAN has language constructs that are more well-suited to numeric computation.
Most truly high-level languages, like LISP (which was mentioned directly in TFA), are interpreted, and the interpreters are almost always written in C. It is impossible for an interpreted language written in C (or even a compiled one that is converted to C) to go faster than C. It is always possible for a C programmer to write inefficient code, but that same programmer is likely to write inefficient code in a high-level language as well.
I'm not saying high-level languages aren't great. They are great for many things, but the argument that C is harder to optimize because the processors have gotten more complex is ludicrous. It's the machine code that's harder to optimize (if you've tried to write assembly code since MMX came out, you know what I mean), and that affects ALL languages.
The Skype protocol has been cracked for a while, and by at least three organizations I know of, each using different techniques. Some of those techniques have been published, and it's only a matter of time before hackers start exploiting Skype. The only news here is that one of the companies who cracked it is releasing their own Skype library.
No, none of them did. Read the PDF.
I have a post below that references a PDF from Black Hat Europe 2006 called "Silver Needle in the Skype". The authors hacked Skype (the PDF explains how they did it) and exploited a buffer overrun to make it execute their own code. They gave a demonstration where they had a Python script craft a packet that caused a Skype client to launch the MS calculator. Obviously this was a trivial exercise, but it was done to prove a point.
By crafting some simple UDP packets, they were also able to get Skype clients to do a number of unsavory things, such as scout for information from behind a firewall (i.e. IP and port scans on the Skype client's internal network). However, there is more to it than that. Skype can also relay TCP connections to help a client that is blocked get connected to the Skype network. But the relayed TCP connection isn't restricted to carrying Skype traffic, and this makes that feature very dangerous. Imagine what a hacker could do if he could scan your internal network and open any TCP connection he wanted to from inside your firewall. And the only trail you'd have to trace the attack back to its source is virtually undetectable, obfuscated, and encrypted. It should even be pretty easy for the hacker to bounce his connection through several Skype clients in several different countries before it hits the target, making it virtually impossible for anyone to trace it back to the true source (although Skype did such a good job hiding that it's not even really necessary).
Skype is very right to want to protect themselves from the telcos, but the IT managers are also very right in wanting to be able to identify and/or block it. It really is a security risk for them. And as I mentioned above (in case you didn't see it), NetSpective WebFilter can identify and/or block it without a proxy. Just plug it in where it can sniff your traffic going to the Internet, set it up to monitor or block, and very much like Skype, it just works. ;-)
That's not even close to being true. This presentation from Black Hat Europe 2006 gives a decent description of how to recognize and block it (and even a high level description of how to hack it if you were so inclined): http://www.secdev.org/conf/skype_BHEU06.handout.pd f
Actually, there is a product that blocks it without being a man in the middle. I know for sure because I'm one of the developers who worked on it. It's called NetSpective WebFilter. It runs in promiscuous sniffing mode only (no proxy), and it blocks Skype perfectly (along with several other protocols). I've also studied Skype well enough to know how big a security risk it really is.
(I didn't answer this call. A friend of mine working at the same company did.) It took a long time to figure out why every set of disks the company sent her were blank when she tried to install our software. The reason? She was using a magnet to attach them to the side of her computer case so she wouldn't "misplace" any of them while working her way through the install.
Why do we need anti-trust laws? If you think about it, every for-profit company wants to become a monopoly (i.e. to crush their competiton). And the larger the market is, the more likely it is to attract very clever and unscrupulous people. Just look at Bill Gates. Here's a great quote from El Reg (link to full article):
[quote]
And, as Bill said to me at that breakfast chat: "It's important for a corporate leader to know the difference between what is actually illegal, and what people assume should be illegal." Gates got his big break, of course, in exactly such a way.
[end quote]
To me, this seems to indicate that Microsoft got where it is today by doing things that are unethical but not technically illegal. As detestful as that is, Gates gets a few brownie points for being honest about it, and a few more for not blatantly breaking the law (as so many other big companies seem willing to do when they see an advantage).
The servers will probably get hacked (possibly even from the inside). If this gets implemented, most pedo's will consider an IT job at one of these ISP's to be their dream job.
If she was 14 and she let him drive her anywhere, which implies that he's at least 16 or that he's already breaking the law, she should be fined heavily and her lawyers barred from practicing law for frivolously wasting the taxpayers' (and MySpace's) time and money. Of course, most judges in America won't have the guts to do that, especially in such a sensitive and high-profile case.
Unfortunately, ridiculously frivolous lawsuits seem to be one of the hallmarks of American society. Otherwise, companies like Dremel would never need to add a warning label to their drill indicating that it should never be used as a dental drill.
It needs a bit more than stability to gain popular use. It has to be cheap enough to manufature, and the current manufacturing process doesn't sound cheap. Why can't you buy a cooler or a thermos that's insulated with aerogel? Because it would be ridiculously expensive. ;-)
(1) If the world heats up, is it bad?
From what I've read, no one knows for certain, but the general consensus seems to be that this would be bad. Most existing climate/weather models, which are far from perfect, predict that weather would become more extreme. Highs and lows would get higher and lower, causing more frequent and more severe storms. Rising sea levels will cause problems in most coastal areas. I've read that the average height above sea level for the entire state of Florida is 5 feet. Imagine the whole state disappearing or turning into a bunch of little islands. Certain mosquito-borne viruses like malaria will spread to a much larger percentage of the world (I've read that it's already spreading some), yada-yada-yada, and so on, and so forth.
I'm an American, and I have to say it's for two reasons:
1) On average, Americans have a lot of money.
2) On average, Americans are fools when it comes to money.
For many Americans, it's not just easy to part them from the money they have now, it's easy to part them from the money they'll be earning for the next 15-30 years (through high interest credit cards). I don't think this will last much longer, though. Another poster mentioned that the exploitation of workers is going up (which I agree with). Pretty soon #1 won't be true anymore, and a lot of businesses in America will dry up.
If you didn't attend Georgia Tech, you should have. The professors there had an annual content for the worst one-liner technical joke, and you would've nailed it with that one. ;-) Wait a minute, this isn't professor Greenlee is it? (He won that contest every year.)
Yes, I know that. But it detracts from the whole "free" argument to try to get people to try Linux. If someone like my wife had decided to try Linux because someone had told her it was "free", she'd be pretty upset about it. ;-)
You're missing the point. Let's use my wife as an example computer user. She freaks out and complains to me almost every time a message box pops up on the screen that she's never seen before. She can usually browse the Internet ok, but when she uses an app like Word or Excel, I often shudder at the things she does, like switching to a really small font size and holding down the space bar to align text. (I tried to show her how to set and use tab stops once, but very quickly regretted it.) Unfortunately for us developers, she is what I'd call a typical end user.
Let's say I replaced her Windows installation with Linux. As long as I made sure it booted straight into X Windows and had desktop icons for Firefox and OpenOffice applications (which I'm sure a number of distros will set up for you during the install), she probably wouldn't notice much or care. However, if she had a problem with an application, and if she managed to find the right place to ask about it (actually she'd bug me, but let's pretend I died and left Linux on her computer), then telling her that that the fix is in CVS is basically telling her to "piss off". Or better yet, to go crying back to Windows or Mac.
I will freely admit as a paid commercial developer that I avoid talking directly to the end users as much as possible. We have paid support/service reps, and that's what they're for. One real problem I see with "OSS for everyone" is that even the lowest level of end users need support, and I can't imagine anyone volunteering for that job for free. I get more than enough of that from my wife at home. ;-)