While I definitely agree that all kinds of evidence has been withheld from public knowledge, there are a couple points....
First, this is nothing new. Bin Laden has always denied involvement. The only time he acknowledged being responsible, was in some supposed sham video that was "found" in Afghanistan, and claimed by the CIA as some sort of smoking gun proving he did it.
Second, while I certainly have never seen a solid piece of evidence proving that he was involved... Him saying he wasn't involved isn't exactly proof of innocence either. He is after all a crazy bastard who thinks it's perfectly ok to murder people because of the country they were born in.
Are you seriously saying that you have a problem with this guy because he edited a WIKIPEDIA article and made his girlfriend look better? And that its some sort of major corruption thing? Jesus dude. Its not like he is covering up genocide or something. He is glossing over some embarrassing details about his girlfriend. I applaud him for doing that.
People who think this qualifies as corruption or abuse of power obviously aren't familiar with how the world works, and I would bet they don't have girlfriends.
It doesn't have to be about breeding certain people to each other to produce the best positive traits. Eugenics could also be used to eliminate 'negative' genetic strains. For instance, there are likely hundreds of genetic diseases that could be eliminated within 2 generations through forced sterilizations. Or, what would happen if everybody with an IQ under say 80, was sterilized? I don't think its a good idea morally speaking, but it certainly makes you wonder how civilization as a whole would change in the course of a few generations. What about sterilizing anyone who commits a violent crime? Would society change, or would we always have the same percentage of people prone to violence?
I think people who are worried about "eliminating" genetic diversity as somehow being a threat to the human race aren't taking into account the solid evidence we have that points to all humans rising from an extremely small genetic pool long long ago. Is wiping out genetic disease going to make us more prone to... genetic disease... because of a "weaker" genepool? Thats like saying a penicillin resistant bacteria is weaker because its "diversity" was killed by penicillin.
First, there are so many obscure laws, sometimes it all boils down to a simple case of willpower. If some government official has a hard-on against you or your company, they will find SOMETHING they can charge you with. There are various laws per state (especially California), that a company could easily overlook without a massive legal department looking into all possiblities. And frankly that is beyond the scope and financial ability of most companies. At my own company, we spend a substantial amount towards legal fees to try to keep up with various state laws as they apply to our business, and stay compliant, but it simply isn't possible to be 100% legal, 100% of the time.
Second, the notion that "only wrongdoers have something to hide" is on the slippery slope of fascism. Privacy has value to both private citizens, and companies. While I don't think companies should have the same legal and privacy rights as people, I do feel that some level of privacy and expectation of privacy fosters business growth and is a useful thing.
IT is part of a business. Making IT's job harder in that business costs money. The article is making the point that there are some pretty serious cons about using laptops, and these need to be considered as part of their cost.
Hunter and gatherers has much more free time than most people today -- and time is also a form of wealth.
Are you sure? Whats the average lifespan in a hunter-gatherer society? Certainly aren't many doctors in such a society.
How many people per square mile can live in a hunter-gatherer setting versus agrarian? Wouldn't 1,000 people living in an agrarian society with a 65 year life span, working 40 hours a week, equate to more "lifetimes" than 50 people living in that same square mile working 10 hours a week by hunting, with their 35 year life span? (I think I'm being extremely generous with respect to judging hours worked, and the quality of life that medicine can provide)
Most people using Linux in the workplace already have their preferred Linux hardware vendor.
I run linux at work on several machines, and have a preferred hardware vendor, Dell. I have installed linux on dell laptops, desktops, and rackmount servers. I just get them shipped with no OS. No big deal. I have never had a single hardware problem. If it came with linux pre-installed, sure why not, but it won't sway my actions one way or the other.
imagine if a shocking percentage of the population drove their cars without any thought to changing their oil, airing their tires, or even filling their tank with gas.
Nothing says you are a professional more, than showing up to a presentation and hoping your client has some way for you to present your information. In the business world, showing up with a usb stick wont cut it. What if you get last minute changes? Going to borrow a clients computer to do your work on?
Presentations are meant to impress somebody. People dont hop onto a jet and fly around the world to impress their underlings. If you cant spend $1k on a laptop, and $1k on a projector, my company wont be providing what you cant afford, and wont be doing business with you.
I think you are excluding some important facts in your interpretation of history. The vast majority of Jews did not die until the last couple years of war. This was after years and years of war and violence, after food shortages became a grave problem for the people of Germany.
Hitler was a racist, and hated Jews. There is no denying that. First, he merely treated them as second class citizens. He disrespected them and restricted their rights. After some years of war, he decided that Jews were hoarding wealth he needed, so he stole their money, and made them work as slaves. After more years of war, when food was running short, he started exterminating them.
Now you could say that Hitler was hellbent on killing them from the start, but the fact is that the war itself caused much of the mass starvation.
What pacifist options are there to stop Hitler? Well, lets look at why the war started: Hitler's ability to lead the German people to believe the terms of the Treaty of Versaille were bogus because it drained their wealth. Not surprisingly, the overwhelming majority of all wars are disputes over money, and one side having an interest in redistributing wealth. However, this is rarely the claimed cause. People make claims about patriotism, and saving people, and protecting the innocent, and defending their nation, but lookng back through history, its clear that almost all wars are over money. What is suprising is for people of every age to think that they somehow are different. That their war is for pure reasons.
All war is about killing people for money, on a mass scale. To believe otherwise is to ignore ALL of recorded history. To believe that pacifism alone will solve that problem is foolish too of course.
The counter-argument is that many companies are basically seeking people who will port their code for free, and then profit from their efforts. Companies can either pay actual salaries to programmares and get it coded closed-source, or donate their intellectual property and get it ported for free, eventually. Either way, they have to pay.
The downside to that is when you try to find answers for a non-noob question, you find 20 redundant threads covering the same simple topic. This is a recurring theme on every single helpful question-answer forum I've ever seen on the internet strangely enough. I've always wondered why people would choose to ask a question and wait, rather than do a simple search.
Completely agree about the forums for your distro, and especially the gentoo forums as a fallback option.
As a longtime Gentoo user (4+ years), I have recently decided to test out Ubuntu. The polish is impressive, but the forums definitely have a higher signal-to-noise ratio than the Gentoo forums. This is not a slam on Ubuntu or its users by any means, I think its quite impressive. But in general, I think the Gentoo crowd simply attracts the more hard-core nerd element due to the type of distro it is. Their solutions won't always fit, but they should be informative, and help you diagnose whats going on.
The difference is, me and my next door neighbor can both download the same file, and each have our own copy.
If we both want a student loan, it is feasible that I can get the loan, but now there isnt enough money to give him a loan too.
This person has a full-ride scholarship, and rather than taking small loans to cover his costs, has taken big loans, far more than he needs to cover his costs. Various government programs and organizations have set limits on how much money they loan out. This means that somebody else who wanted to pay for college, does not have that money, and is not going to college now.
I would consider stealing a poor person's education quite different from stealing a song from the MPAA.
As a counterpoint, I've had great success with software firewalls. The only hardware firewall I've dealt with extensively is Sonicwall, and to me its a nightmare trying to set it up properly and have everything locked down.
Maybe I'm an idiot, but IPCop is much much easier to deal with. To me, its a lot more secure to have something very simple and obvious, than complex and confusing.
Last year my small company was faced with a need to upgrade firewalls to accomodate more VPN tunnels to link home offices. We could have paid $3500 for a hardware appliance, or used one of the spare computers we have and set up a software firewall. We "cut corners" as you put it and I couldnt be happier. After a year of easy management, I'm ready to dump the Sonicwalls I have to manage and replace them with low power mini pc's and IPcop.
Well... I work in graphic design, and I interact with dozens of newspapers, printing presses, and other graphic design departments, which are almost exclusively Mac dominated. I assure you, the average Mac user is just as stupid as the average Win user, if not dumber.
As it happens, I can't always get by in my job using only free non-commercial software. Now, I have to assume that several other people here are in the same boat, and commercial software can provide value to them. Given those circumstances, I'd prefer seeing a debate about the relative merits of particular software packages, and discuss it, rather than dismissing a product because it costs money. And if slashdot happens to make a side profit, more power to them.
XPS is the designer's dream. Even if he'll have to go through hell to get his work to print in massive quantities, he has flexible tools and rapid prototyping just using XPS and an XPS printer.
Speaking as someone who has done several mass quantity print jobs, I would much prefer a stable format which is uniform across platforms, than a couple extra design tweaks. I don't want to go through hell to get my work printed. I just want to take a cd to the printshop, and get 50,000 copies. I really like the idea of an open XML format to replace PDF, but it has to be a big improvement to gain traction, and I dont expect MS to be able to handle an open format without crippling it somehow, or suing the people who make a linux version, etc.
Flexible Tools: Huh? Where? What tools?
Rapid prototyping with an XPS printer: I'll believe that only afer I see it. Even major printshops have problems making exactly precise prototypes of the final product. Your PDF or XPS document doesn't change, the hardware does. Far as I can tell, different printing hardware means different results, every single time. I don't see how a different format could possibly offer any change over prototyping a PDF.
First, bridges are quite a bit less complicated than software. Second, there are numerous examples of bridges that have had structural flaws. Just because they don't turn blue with obvious error codes stamped on them does not mean they are perfect. Bridges must undergo repair periodically, or they will fall apart.
Bridges solve one problem: Supporting X weight across Y distance, taking into account building materials and terrain.
Software is usually far more complex in what it tries to accomplish. Its not merely a matter of being "more expensive" to make bug free software. Its so incredibly difficult, and so labor intensive, thats its actually "cost prohibitive". Meaning that for nearly all programs made, the cost involved in making it bug-free is far more than a company could hope to redeem.
Would you like Microsoft to make a bug-free OS but then sell it for $10,000 per computer, to make up for all the production costs?
The difference is that banks have a large amount of money riding on the fact that the ATMs must be secure. The requirements are stiff, and the inspections are thorough. Thus, Diebold makes secure ATMs.
Election boards who request the machines have a vague list of requirements, and being mostly staffed by partisan volunteers, have less inclination to protect something they want to steal from you anyways. Now, add in the mix of being able to pay for it with unlimited taxpayer money, and you have a nice definition of low-hanging fruit for Diebold.
What I find ironic is that all this negative publicity against their voting machines is obviously dropping faith in the companies main ATM business, and ruining the Diebold brand. (E.g. the parent post)
By now it should be obvious that we can't expect the government to play by the rule of law. The best option is to get companies to stop cooperating, and I feel the best way to do that is to cancel your service with At&T, and show them in dollars how much it will hurt them to spy on their customers.
A few weeks ago I cancelled my at&t phone and dsl service. I'd previously been a happy & loyal customer for 7 years. I explained to the cancellation dept why I was ending my service. I spent twenty minutes arguing with the woman on the other line who refused to believe her company would do such things. So I gave her about 5 url's explaining what At&t had done, how several ex-employees had come forward, etc etc. An hour later she called me back after contacting her superiors and the companies legal dept to get their side of the story. They told her (I'm not kidding here), that AT&T was being sued by anti-privacy advocates because the company was refusing to divulge customer information.
Yes, thats right, the companies legal dept is telling the employees that they are being sued for being "too protective" of customer info.
Cancel your service. Tell them why. Make them know the cost is high when they conduct business in this manner.
Some phones don't care how much free space you have, they still limit the number of phonebook entries. Mine for example has several megs of free space, but limits the phone book to 200 entries. Why the OP is concerned about bytes is beyond me, but I can understand wasting phone book entries when you have a limited hard-coded amount.
A java app would work better for me if I had that problem, because I have loads of free space for apps, but not for the addressbook.
Nonsense. Recompiling the same code provides a 0% performance improvement
It is highly unlikely that the various other switches provided by GCC will provide anything significant.
The problem with your argument is that processors have improved since the 386. Not just more MHZ and GHZ, but actual design improvements, and better ways to execute code. If you compile for a 386 (which most distros do), you dont get to take advantage of those new subroutines inside the processor that an athlon uses. Sure the Athlon can use 386 code, but time has in fact improved some of the ways processors work, and it needs differently compiled code to do that.
A system administrator's job will be on the line if a system crashes due to instability caused by compiling code with different compiler flags than those provided by default by the author or vendor;
Heres the crux of the argumnet: stability vs configurability. You are making the assumption that stability is more important, when this is not true for all sysadmins, or servers.
If I were an employer looking for a sysadmin I'd root out the Gentoo fans
Why do you think that if code is compiled locally its inherently unstable? Debian package builders don't have a magical gcc which makes code crash less than my gcc.
my favorite TV shows would be on 33% longer, the internet would be safer to surf (well, assuming haven't already migrated away from IE), etc, etc.
And you forgot to mention... you would have to pay for every tv show you watched, you would have to pay for most websites you visit, you would have to pay more for newspapers and magazines, etc etc.
And conversely, you might pay less for some products which spend a great deal of advertising money. For instance, beer & insurance might go down in price some. But, many businesses would not go down in prices if you removed advertising. Businesses use advertising because it works, which is important to keep in mind. Advertising done properly generates revenue which is why you see it everywhere.
Slashdot Mirror
While I definitely agree that all kinds of evidence has been withheld from public knowledge, there are a couple points....
First, this is nothing new. Bin Laden has always denied involvement. The only time he acknowledged being responsible, was in some supposed sham video that was "found" in Afghanistan, and claimed by the CIA as some sort of smoking gun proving he did it.
Second, while I certainly have never seen a solid piece of evidence proving that he was involved... Him saying he wasn't involved isn't exactly proof of innocence either. He is after all a crazy bastard who thinks it's perfectly ok to murder people because of the country they were born in.
Are you seriously saying that you have a problem with this guy because he edited a WIKIPEDIA article and made his girlfriend look better? And that its some sort of major corruption thing? Jesus dude. Its not like he is covering up genocide or something. He is glossing over some embarrassing details about his girlfriend. I applaud him for doing that. People who think this qualifies as corruption or abuse of power obviously aren't familiar with how the world works, and I would bet they don't have girlfriends.
It doesn't have to be about breeding certain people to each other to produce the best positive traits. Eugenics could also be used to eliminate 'negative' genetic strains. For instance, there are likely hundreds of genetic diseases that could be eliminated within 2 generations through forced sterilizations. Or, what would happen if everybody with an IQ under say 80, was sterilized? I don't think its a good idea morally speaking, but it certainly makes you wonder how civilization as a whole would change in the course of a few generations. What about sterilizing anyone who commits a violent crime? Would society change, or would we always have the same percentage of people prone to violence?
I think people who are worried about "eliminating" genetic diversity as somehow being a threat to the human race aren't taking into account the solid evidence we have that points to all humans rising from an extremely small genetic pool long long ago. Is wiping out genetic disease going to make us more prone to... genetic disease... because of a "weaker" genepool? Thats like saying a penicillin resistant bacteria is weaker because its "diversity" was killed by penicillin.
Two points...
First, there are so many obscure laws, sometimes it all boils down to a simple case of willpower. If some government official has a hard-on against you or your company, they will find SOMETHING they can charge you with. There are various laws per state (especially California), that a company could easily overlook without a massive legal department looking into all possiblities. And frankly that is beyond the scope and financial ability of most companies. At my own company, we spend a substantial amount towards legal fees to try to keep up with various state laws as they apply to our business, and stay compliant, but it simply isn't possible to be 100% legal, 100% of the time.
Second, the notion that "only wrongdoers have something to hide" is on the slippery slope of fascism. Privacy has value to both private citizens, and companies. While I don't think companies should have the same legal and privacy rights as people, I do feel that some level of privacy and expectation of privacy fosters business growth and is a useful thing.
IT is part of a business. Making IT's job harder in that business costs money. The article is making the point that there are some pretty serious cons about using laptops, and these need to be considered as part of their cost.
Hunter and gatherers has much more free time than most people today -- and time is also a form of wealth.
Are you sure? Whats the average lifespan in a hunter-gatherer society? Certainly aren't many doctors in such a society. How many people per square mile can live in a hunter-gatherer setting versus agrarian? Wouldn't 1,000 people living in an agrarian society with a 65 year life span, working 40 hours a week, equate to more "lifetimes" than 50 people living in that same square mile working 10 hours a week by hunting, with their 35 year life span? (I think I'm being extremely generous with respect to judging hours worked, and the quality of life that medicine can provide)
Most people using Linux in the workplace already have their preferred Linux hardware vendor.
I run linux at work on several machines, and have a preferred hardware vendor, Dell. I have installed linux on dell laptops, desktops, and rackmount servers. I just get them shipped with no OS. No big deal. I have never had a single hardware problem. If it came with linux pre-installed, sure why not, but it won't sway my actions one way or the other.
imagine if a shocking percentage of the population drove their cars without any thought to changing their oil, airing their tires, or even filling their tank with gas.
You mean my wife?
Nothing says you are a professional more, than showing up to a presentation and hoping your client has some way for you to present your information. In the business world, showing up with a usb stick wont cut it. What if you get last minute changes? Going to borrow a clients computer to do your work on?
Presentations are meant to impress somebody. People dont hop onto a jet and fly around the world to impress their underlings. If you cant spend $1k on a laptop, and $1k on a projector, my company wont be providing what you cant afford, and wont be doing business with you.
I think you are excluding some important facts in your interpretation of history. The vast majority of Jews did not die until the last couple years of war. This was after years and years of war and violence, after food shortages became a grave problem for the people of Germany.
Hitler was a racist, and hated Jews. There is no denying that. First, he merely treated them as second class citizens. He disrespected them and restricted their rights. After some years of war, he decided that Jews were hoarding wealth he needed, so he stole their money, and made them work as slaves. After more years of war, when food was running short, he started exterminating them.
Now you could say that Hitler was hellbent on killing them from the start, but the fact is that the war itself caused much of the mass starvation.
What pacifist options are there to stop Hitler? Well, lets look at why the war started: Hitler's ability to lead the German people to believe the terms of the Treaty of Versaille were bogus because it drained their wealth. Not surprisingly, the overwhelming majority of all wars are disputes over money, and one side having an interest in redistributing wealth. However, this is rarely the claimed cause. People make claims about patriotism, and saving people, and protecting the innocent, and defending their nation, but lookng back through history, its clear that almost all wars are over money. What is suprising is for people of every age to think that they somehow are different. That their war is for pure reasons.
All war is about killing people for money, on a mass scale. To believe otherwise is to ignore ALL of recorded history. To believe that pacifism alone will solve that problem is foolish too of course.
The counter-argument is that many companies are basically seeking people who will port their code for free, and then profit from their efforts. Companies can either pay actual salaries to programmares and get it coded closed-source, or donate their intellectual property and get it ported for free, eventually. Either way, they have to pay.
The downside to that is when you try to find answers for a non-noob question, you find 20 redundant threads covering the same simple topic. This is a recurring theme on every single helpful question-answer forum I've ever seen on the internet strangely enough. I've always wondered why people would choose to ask a question and wait, rather than do a simple search.
Completely agree about the forums for your distro, and especially the gentoo forums as a fallback option.
As a longtime Gentoo user (4+ years), I have recently decided to test out Ubuntu. The polish is impressive, but the forums definitely have a higher signal-to-noise ratio than the Gentoo forums. This is not a slam on Ubuntu or its users by any means, I think its quite impressive. But in general, I think the Gentoo crowd simply attracts the more hard-core nerd element due to the type of distro it is. Their solutions won't always fit, but they should be informative, and help you diagnose whats going on.
The difference is, me and my next door neighbor can both download the same file, and each have our own copy.
If we both want a student loan, it is feasible that I can get the loan, but now there isnt enough money to give him a loan too.
This person has a full-ride scholarship, and rather than taking small loans to cover his costs, has taken big loans, far more than he needs to cover his costs. Various government programs and organizations have set limits on how much money they loan out. This means that somebody else who wanted to pay for college, does not have that money, and is not going to college now.
I would consider stealing a poor person's education quite different from stealing a song from the MPAA.
As a counterpoint, I've had great success with software firewalls. The only hardware firewall I've dealt with extensively is Sonicwall, and to me its a nightmare trying to set it up properly and have everything locked down.
Maybe I'm an idiot, but IPCop is much much easier to deal with. To me, its a lot more secure to have something very simple and obvious, than complex and confusing.
Last year my small company was faced with a need to upgrade firewalls to accomodate more VPN tunnels to link home offices. We could have paid $3500 for a hardware appliance, or used one of the spare computers we have and set up a software firewall. We "cut corners" as you put it and I couldnt be happier. After a year of easy management, I'm ready to dump the Sonicwalls I have to manage and replace them with low power mini pc's and IPcop.
Well... I work in graphic design, and I interact with dozens of newspapers, printing presses, and other graphic design departments, which are almost exclusively Mac dominated. I assure you, the average Mac user is just as stupid as the average Win user, if not dumber.
As it happens, I can't always get by in my job using only free non-commercial software. Now, I have to assume that several other people here are in the same boat, and commercial software can provide value to them. Given those circumstances, I'd prefer seeing a debate about the relative merits of particular software packages, and discuss it, rather than dismissing a product because it costs money. And if slashdot happens to make a side profit, more power to them.
XPS is the designer's dream. Even if he'll have to go through hell to get his work to print in massive quantities, he has flexible tools and rapid prototyping just using XPS and an XPS printer.
Speaking as someone who has done several mass quantity print jobs, I would much prefer a stable format which is uniform across platforms, than a couple extra design tweaks. I don't want to go through hell to get my work printed. I just want to take a cd to the printshop, and get 50,000 copies. I really like the idea of an open XML format to replace PDF, but it has to be a big improvement to gain traction, and I dont expect MS to be able to handle an open format without crippling it somehow, or suing the people who make a linux version, etc.
Flexible Tools: Huh? Where? What tools?
Rapid prototyping with an XPS printer: I'll believe that only afer I see it. Even major printshops have problems making exactly precise prototypes of the final product. Your PDF or XPS document doesn't change, the hardware does. Far as I can tell, different printing hardware means different results, every single time. I don't see how a different format could possibly offer any change over prototyping a PDF.
First, bridges are quite a bit less complicated than software. Second, there are numerous examples of bridges that have had structural flaws. Just because they don't turn blue with obvious error codes stamped on them does not mean they are perfect. Bridges must undergo repair periodically, or they will fall apart.
Bridges solve one problem: Supporting X weight across Y distance, taking into account building materials and terrain.
Software is usually far more complex in what it tries to accomplish. Its not merely a matter of being "more expensive" to make bug free software. Its so incredibly difficult, and so labor intensive, thats its actually "cost prohibitive". Meaning that for nearly all programs made, the cost involved in making it bug-free is far more than a company could hope to redeem.
Would you like Microsoft to make a bug-free OS but then sell it for $10,000 per computer, to make up for all the production costs?
The difference is that banks have a large amount of money riding on the fact that the ATMs must be secure. The requirements are stiff, and the inspections are thorough. Thus, Diebold makes secure ATMs.
Election boards who request the machines have a vague list of requirements, and being mostly staffed by partisan volunteers, have less inclination to protect something they want to steal from you anyways. Now, add in the mix of being able to pay for it with unlimited taxpayer money, and you have a nice definition of low-hanging fruit for Diebold.
What I find ironic is that all this negative publicity against their voting machines is obviously dropping faith in the companies main ATM business, and ruining the Diebold brand. (E.g. the parent post)
By now it should be obvious that we can't expect the government to play by the rule of law. The best option is to get companies to stop cooperating, and I feel the best way to do that is to cancel your service with At&T, and show them in dollars how much it will hurt them to spy on their customers.
A few weeks ago I cancelled my at&t phone and dsl service. I'd previously been a happy & loyal customer for 7 years. I explained to the cancellation dept why I was ending my service. I spent twenty minutes arguing with the woman on the other line who refused to believe her company would do such things. So I gave her about 5 url's explaining what At&t had done, how several ex-employees had come forward, etc etc. An hour later she called me back after contacting her superiors and the companies legal dept to get their side of the story. They told her (I'm not kidding here), that AT&T was being sued by anti-privacy advocates because the company was refusing to divulge customer information.
Yes, thats right, the companies legal dept is telling the employees that they are being sued for being "too protective" of customer info.
Cancel your service. Tell them why. Make them know the cost is high when they conduct business in this manner.
Some phones don't care how much free space you have, they still limit the number of phonebook entries. Mine for example has several megs of free space, but limits the phone book to 200 entries. Why the OP is concerned about bytes is beyond me, but I can understand wasting phone book entries when you have a limited hard-coded amount.
A java app would work better for me if I had that problem, because I have loads of free space for apps, but not for the addressbook.
Nonsense. Recompiling the same code provides a 0% performance improvement
It is highly unlikely that the various other switches provided by GCC will provide anything significant.
The problem with your argument is that processors have improved since the 386. Not just more MHZ and GHZ, but actual design improvements, and better ways to execute code. If you compile for a 386 (which most distros do), you dont get to take advantage of those new subroutines inside the processor that an athlon uses. Sure the Athlon can use 386 code, but time has in fact improved some of the ways processors work, and it needs differently compiled code to do that.
A system administrator's job will be on the line if a system crashes due to instability caused by compiling code with different compiler flags than those provided by default by the author or vendor;
Heres the crux of the argumnet: stability vs configurability. You are making the assumption that stability is more important, when this is not true for all sysadmins, or servers.
If I were an employer looking for a sysadmin I'd root out the Gentoo fans
Why do you think that if code is compiled locally its inherently unstable? Debian package builders don't have a magical gcc which makes code crash less than my gcc.
my favorite TV shows would be on 33% longer, the internet would be safer to surf (well, assuming haven't already migrated away from IE), etc, etc.
And you forgot to mention... you would have to pay for every tv show you watched, you would have to pay for most websites you visit, you would have to pay more for newspapers and magazines, etc etc.
And conversely, you might pay less for some products which spend a great deal of advertising money. For instance, beer & insurance might go down in price some. But, many businesses would not go down in prices if you removed advertising. Businesses use advertising because it works, which is important to keep in mind. Advertising done properly generates revenue which is why you see it everywhere.
(I hate most advertising too)
SVG, Scalable Vector Graphics
Vectors graphics turned into a small XML file, coming soon to a browser near you, unless you use Firefox 1.5 in which case, you've got it already.
Just needs a little more time to mature and stabalize and it will be very commonplace.