""I was not aware the right to life was an inherent right, if the government was not here to grant it to you, anyone can come along and stab you all they want." See what I did there?"
Yes: a false comparation.
Even in the absence of goverment there still would be one there to stop others from stabbing you: you.
In the other hand, if those guys just were overthere talking about you, spying from the distance or spreading what they learnt by listening to you, that would be a different problem.
"a new and unproven well doesn't produce it doesn't cause harm to the expected daily supply."
Of course it harms it. They, of course, take into account production expectations into their futures, and it's futures the stronger variable with regards of oil price evolution.
I there's tomorrow a credible announcement about a new gigantic easily explotaible oil field you can bet oil prices would drop immediately without waiting the oil really going out the wells.
"I am responsible for directing technology decisions for a large hospital system and Oracle will get no business recommendations from me for any of their technologies."
Don't worry. They'll find the way to fire you and hire one more "sensible to the general interest".
"Not that I am a particular fan of marketspeak like "cloud computing". But the idea at least is that you can access computer resources without really knowing where they are, and scale your needs many orders of magnitude without worrying about floor space, air conditioners and lightbulbs."
If that were the case then there couldn't be "cloud providers" or "providers in the cloud" since they, obviously, need to be quite aware of their hardware, growing ability and its limitation (or do you think Amazon's boxes just come from aether as soon as someone provisions the N-th virtual server?).
It's a given that if you go the "private cloud" route you become both the provider and the consumer of the service so you need to stay concious about your hardware.
"a "private cloud" in a box is kind of an oxymoron."
Given my previous paragraphs, no, it is not.
I didn't read TFA (that's Slashdot, after all) but *IF* this is in the form of a "brick" that offers the "standard" cloud services (on-demand provisioning of virtual instances and storage; charge-back; delegated responsibility, etc.) in a fashion that you just need to add more "bricks" as your hardware needs rise, then the concept "cloud-in-a-box" would make perfect sense.
Does it create for me the OS templates and bootstrapping processes? Does it provide configuration management and orchestration? Does it provide an operational control panel? Does it provide auth and policy definition and enforcement? Does it provide a system for multi-tenancy and back-charging? Does it provide for proper hardware matching, deployment and management? Does it provide monitoring and load evolution?
A private cloud requieres a bit more than just dowloading eucalyptus from its home site.
"I dunno about anyone else, but knowing there is something non-transparent and solid around me is about the only thing that makes flying semi-sane for me.;)"
Not. It is *not* knowing there's just a hugh amount of thin air between you and earth what makes it semi-sane for you. Transparent fuselages would take you out of such oblivion.
"How do you compare an OO database with a Relational Database? For that matter, how do you compare a Star Database with a Relational Database? [...] To an extent, that is a good thing - it means you can pick a database that's good for the problem"
Easy: you throw a typical problem from each class and then test all the engines against all of the problems. The fact that a relationally-oriented engine will do worse at an OO problem than an OO-oriented one doesn't preclude the test from being made anyways.
"I am a software engineer with a strong science background. To be told that I have to accept folklore as a source of database knowledge - that is just so very very wrong."
That's my point: this is the case not because is too dificult to produce proper benchmarks but because database vendors decided long time ago that they don't want you, the technician, to choose the database but the PHBs, which are much more open to marketing tactics than you (current license price tags for best renowned database engines are the success hallmark of their strategy).
"You're absolutely correct that such a comparison would be a real asset to users. However, it would also be a Herculean task."
I don't think so. I think that it even would be quite easy and cheap because, for the most part, it's already done!
I think that it's not done exactly because what you stated: it would be a real asset to users. RDBM vendors don't want that because RDBM choice is greatly based on gut feelings, which are much better handled by marketing than hard data.
Think of it: don't you think that, specially the big vendors like Microsoft, IBM or Oracle, don't already have their own internal benchmarking teams? So, from a naive point of view all that would rest is for them to public their results.
Given that the hard part is already done (knowing what to measure and having the tools for in fact measure it) releasing it to the public should be quite easy from the technical standpoint: you just open a competition and allow for each team to bring up their own technicians (so they can't say, "yeah, but it was not properly tunned") to test under loads defined from a trusted authority upon comitee from the vendors themselves.
That's how, say, all motorsports competitions work and it does work.
"I don't know Ron Paul's view but the libertarian idea is that oligopolies exist because of government regulation."
Which seems not to be supported by reality. Oligopolies are an unavoidable outcome of competition on any stable environment (in other words: in the end, the winner takes all).
Even in "the real real world" (Nature, I mean), the best example for an unregulated market, on stable ecosystems what you get is an oligopoly or even monopoly for each and every niche. Yes, you have high biodiversity by means of specialization, but you won't see almost never three different species taking advantage of the same resource.
"Now, if a robot drives a car, he has two options: Follow the law, cause a traffic jam behind himself"
Provided all other cars were robotical, how could this happen? A traffic jam creates when vehicles reaching a point are faster than vehicles at that point. Provided our car is respecting security distance from a car that was at top legal speed, it would go at top legal speed as well as those after it. No traffic jam is possible. And with regards to speed change and wave effect since robots would have faster and finer-grained reactions, those would be minimized too.
"(or even provoke somebody to cut into the seemingly extremely long clearance)"
It can only seem to be to long if you think you can do it better. On one hand, other robotic cars neither would nor could find it "too long" but just "as it must be"; on the other hand, provided robots have better reaction times than humans (and that's a perfectly defensible position) clearance distances could be reduced basically to the dynamic envelope of running vehicles, no need to take human reactions into account.
"You sell me a chip that is intentionally handicapped, and then tell me that for $50 more, you will unlock it; as a consumer, it's fully reasonable for me to think you're taking advantage of me."
Yes, but History shows that while reasonable, market doesn't tend to react that way.
I don't know if it's the case anymore, but both Windows NT 3.5 and 4.0 server's versions were just intentionally handicapped NT workstation versions to be unlocked by paying more, and it was plently known back in the day -why do you limit workstation edition to just 10 concurrent network connections? (I myself did the "trick" for testing purposes: some registry changes and a bit of hex editing was enough for a workstation version to be booted up as a server one, graphics work included). And still they were a great success.
"Everyone else I found searching Google just repeats the tale as told on Slashdot, as if it were the gospel truth - "
That's interesting too. How is it that even before starting the migration there was a strong campagins against it on general media and now, after its failing there seems to be just one side talking when one would suspect those that campaigned against it would trumpet it an give their overall point of view too?
Is it that only the open source advocates are airing their POV disregarding the critics or is it that once the job's done the powers that pushed the critics prefer to remain silent knowing that their critics wouldn't stand critical-eye scrutiny?
I'd expect some more info coming in the next days if only from the "why you shouldn't touch open source with a 10 foot pole" Microsoft marketing engine.
"All well and good, but don't forget that Joe/six Pack's clever uncle / brother in law invariably uses Windows"
That's exactly one of my points: that they *DON'T* use "Windows". Specially for the untrained eye, almost the only thing in common between "Windows 3.11", "Windows 95", "Windows XP" and "Windows 7" is the "Windows" tag -and even for systems operators the changes are anything but trivial. About the same can be said of productivity software like Ms Office.
Despite of this, on their minds, XP->7 seems to be no migration with no training involved while XP->Gnome (and I say "Gnome", not Linux, since the end user in a coporate environment all that "see" is the desktop environment, not the underlying OS) is an almost ubeareable burden. Any IT guy can tell that from the point of view of the people "merely" using the desktop both changes are about the same.
I think we should point that as a magnificent success of Microsoft marketing.
"Yeah, this story is pretty self-explaining... good work FOSS!"
Yes, this story is pretty self-explaining... but I question what does indeed explains.
It's almost a meme around here that "joe sixpack" simply doesn't pay attention to computers but here it seems there has been a strong campaign in press against the migration from the very begining as if it were a sensible issue for general public.
And then, this project has been cancelled when internal polls show that only around 10% of users -and it seems "end users" are implyied, not sysadmins, were dissatisfied and 80% were satisfied with the new environment (I'd bet that's and expectable turnaround for *any* environment change).
One should ask himself if there might be some kind of pressure from "other vendors with deep pockets".
It's obvious too that has been some managerial mistakes that, as such, could be an expected source of problems no matter what the migration path were as, per instance, towards Windows 7 instead of Linux. There has been problems that tough counted on the negative side of the migration seem indeed to be more on the side of the lackings from the preceding environment (like a closed database that ends up being difficult to transition -heck, that's why you are migrating: to avoid things like that to happen... from then on).
All in all it's an enlighting example... mainly about how carefully the "soft side" of a migration towards open source should be managed. As in "be prepared to withstand attacks from the older stablishment trying to regain its lost power -and licenses" or "people will take the problems with a Windows to Windows upgrade as a non issue -it might be because the name doesn't change, even if most of the environment so does, while in a Windows to Linux migration everything and the kitchen sink will be Linux' fault no matter what so you'd better choose very carefully your stakeholders and make sure they feel involved as a driving force".
"It's a specific example, not "in principle" and the "game rules" are fixed."
Yeah, sure, but what are the rules? Is this a one shot game or a multiple turn one?
"You can have $0.00. or you can have $0.01. In which case are you better off?"
Where are the other $60,000,000,000,000 you mentioned in your previous post? Are there $60,000,000,000,000 or there aren't? They are important. The proper strategy depends on the details.
"In fact the argument whole argument is ridiculous because there's a third person involved, so the two options are: 1. You get $0.01, other guy gets $99.99, game runner gets $0.00. 2. You get $0.00, other guy gets $0.00, game runner gets $100.00."
Enough. In my previous post I said I was not so sure you knew the meaning of such concepts as "in principle" and "game rules". Now I know: you don't.
"I am stunned that what I was implying, both in my words and in the quote, failed to reach you."
It might be because YOU DIDN'T IMPLY A DAMN. Maybe you meant to imply something, but you didn't and I carefully made that clear.
"It's very clear that short-term sacrifice often pays off long-term."
No: it's never "very clear". I'll tell you what *is* very clear: that a dollar in my pocket is a dollar I can count on. Everything else is rationale and as such, subject to interpretations and -again, as such, you'd better have a solid case to support your "you should sacrifice the money you have at hand now in order to get much more tomorrow" or else it won't work.
"I suspect that you would like to think that the status quo in public corporate law is a law of the universe."
I don't. But there's one thing clear; it is a matter of fact: things are the way they are.
"it is not, it is just an artifact of our system."
Whatever. They still are the way they are.
"It is not hard to imagine a regime where officers are not punished for doing the right thing, whether it is a matter of long-term economics or even "mere" ethics."
Of course it's not hard. What is hard is to come with a metric that will allow us to know what the (your) right thing *is*. Because without a metric is a matter of opinion and as long as it's a matter of opinion, those with the power to make their opinions prevail are the ones that will tell what "right" in fact is. As it is now the case, and they clearly vote with their money and that currently means favour short terms profit, damn with anything else (which, as I already stated, lacking strong evidences and/or better reasons to counter is not such a bad policy).
"It is also not hard to imagine a regime where officers are not accountable for the speculative price of shares."
Like... which one? It's not hard to imagine that there is *a* regime where officers are not accountable for the speculative price of shares. It's quite more difficult to tell exactly *which* regime is that. But, hey, you are free to offer your opinion. If it's not that hard, you surely will convince me with ease.
"Just because something is technically legal doesn't mean you should be compelled to do it."
You make it sound it as an argument but, who did say anything different?
"This is not just game theory"
This *is* game theory.
"you can't measure everything in dollars"
Who said game theory was exclusively, or mainly, or even liminary related to dollars?
"and we abandon human decency at our civilization's peril."
False again. There's an old motto: first step to recover from an illness is being able to recognize you are ill. You seem to defend that current state of affairs is somehow due to a few of bastardly, almost out of the human species individuals instead of a matter of each and every one of us being the way that we are. Good luck making any change about current situation starting from false asumptions.
"Yeah, and there are five people who legitimately want to back up their blu-rays. So what? You know and I know, this is primarily a tool for piracy."
Maybe he knows and you know. But I don't know. What I do know is that there are whole countries where ripping a DVD for private use is perfectly legitimate. That surely makes for more than five people.
"I'm not expressing an opinion, just a simple fact."
"Simple facts" can become quite complex upon deeper inspection.
"It needs to be put in context. What he meant was: when a company cannot compete (inferior product), they scream at the top of their lungs BUT IT'S OPEN! in order to masquerade their incompetence. He may have a point."
Yes: like even underperforming products and management get better by using an open source license.
Probably not the kind of argument Microsoft expects from one of its drones (so this one is dumb in a double fashion).
Slashdot Mirror
"But do they have sharks on which to mount them?"
We must avoid them teaming to Biologists at all costs!
"And the people who come to slashdot and think they have the right to any non-physical copyrightted work, even without paying for it."
Not any. Only what the author already decided to make *public*.
""I was not aware the right to life was an inherent right, if the government was not here to grant it to you, anyone can come along and stab you all they want."
See what I did there?"
Yes: a false comparation.
Even in the absence of goverment there still would be one there to stop others from stabbing you: you.
In the other hand, if those guys just were overthere talking about you, spying from the distance or spreading what they learnt by listening to you, that would be a different problem.
"a new and unproven well doesn't produce it doesn't cause harm to the expected daily supply."
Of course it harms it. They, of course, take into account production expectations into their futures, and it's futures the stronger variable with regards of oil price evolution.
I there's tomorrow a credible announcement about a new gigantic easily explotaible oil field you can bet oil prices would drop immediately without waiting the oil really going out the wells.
"I am responsible for directing technology decisions for a large hospital system and Oracle will get no business recommendations from me for any of their technologies."
Don't worry. They'll find the way to fire you and hire one more "sensible to the general interest".
"I wonder if their kernel is patched against CVE-2010-3081 already?"
Of course not! Why they should? They already told you it's UNBREAKEABLE, weren't you listening? So no need for any patch.
"Not that I am a particular fan of marketspeak like "cloud computing". But the idea at least is that you can access computer resources without really knowing where they are, and scale your needs many orders of magnitude without worrying about floor space, air conditioners and lightbulbs."
If that were the case then there couldn't be "cloud providers" or "providers in the cloud" since they, obviously, need to be quite aware of their hardware, growing ability and its limitation (or do you think Amazon's boxes just come from aether as soon as someone provisions the N-th virtual server?).
It's a given that if you go the "private cloud" route you become both the provider and the consumer of the service so you need to stay concious about your hardware.
"a "private cloud" in a box is kind of an oxymoron."
Given my previous paragraphs, no, it is not.
I didn't read TFA (that's Slashdot, after all) but *IF* this is in the form of a "brick" that offers the "standard" cloud services (on-demand provisioning of virtual instances and storage; charge-back; delegated responsibility, etc.) in a fashion that you just need to add more "bricks" as your hardware needs rise, then the concept "cloud-in-a-box" would make perfect sense.
"THIS. Want a private "cloud"? http://forum.eucalyptus.com/"
Does it create for me the OS templates and bootstrapping processes?
Does it provide configuration management and orchestration?
Does it provide an operational control panel?
Does it provide auth and policy definition and enforcement?
Does it provide a system for multi-tenancy and back-charging?
Does it provide for proper hardware matching, deployment and management?
Does it provide monitoring and load evolution?
A private cloud requieres a bit more than just dowloading eucalyptus from its home site.
"I dunno about anyone else, but knowing there is something non-transparent and solid around me is about the only thing that makes flying semi-sane for me. ;)"
Not. It is *not* knowing there's just a hugh amount of thin air between you and earth what makes it semi-sane for you. Transparent fuselages would take you out of such oblivion.
"How do you compare an OO database with a Relational Database? For that matter, how do you compare a Star Database with a Relational Database? [...] To an extent, that is a good thing - it means you can pick a database that's good for the problem"
Easy: you throw a typical problem from each class and then test all the engines against all of the problems. The fact that a relationally-oriented engine will do worse at an OO problem than an OO-oriented one doesn't preclude the test from being made anyways.
"I am a software engineer with a strong science background. To be told that I have to accept folklore as a source of database knowledge - that is just so very very wrong."
That's my point: this is the case not because is too dificult to produce proper benchmarks but because database vendors decided long time ago that they don't want you, the technician, to choose the database but the PHBs, which are much more open to marketing tactics than you (current license price tags for best renowned database engines are the success hallmark of their strategy).
"You're absolutely correct that such a comparison would be a real asset to users. However, it would also be a Herculean task."
I don't think so. I think that it even would be quite easy and cheap because, for the most part, it's already done!
I think that it's not done exactly because what you stated: it would be a real asset to users. RDBM vendors don't want that because RDBM choice is greatly based on gut feelings, which are much better handled by marketing than hard data.
Think of it: don't you think that, specially the big vendors like Microsoft, IBM or Oracle, don't already have their own internal benchmarking teams? So, from a naive point of view all that would rest is for them to public their results.
Given that the hard part is already done (knowing what to measure and having the tools for in fact measure it) releasing it to the public should be quite easy from the technical standpoint: you just open a competition and allow for each team to bring up their own technicians (so they can't say, "yeah, but it was not properly tunned") to test under loads defined from a trusted authority upon comitee from the vendors themselves.
That's how, say, all motorsports competitions work and it does work.
"I don't know Ron Paul's view but the libertarian idea is that oligopolies exist because of government regulation."
Which seems not to be supported by reality. Oligopolies are an unavoidable outcome of competition on any stable environment (in other words: in the end, the winner takes all).
Even in "the real real world" (Nature, I mean), the best example for an unregulated market, on stable ecosystems what you get is an oligopoly or even monopoly for each and every niche. Yes, you have high biodiversity by means of specialization, but you won't see almost never three different species taking advantage of the same resource.
"bicyclists and pedestrians are an actual concern"
How many have you seen lately in a high way?
"Now, if a robot drives a car, he has two options: Follow the law, cause a traffic jam behind himself"
Provided all other cars were robotical, how could this happen? A traffic jam creates when vehicles reaching a point are faster than vehicles at that point. Provided our car is respecting security distance from a car that was at top legal speed, it would go at top legal speed as well as those after it. No traffic jam is possible. And with regards to speed change and wave effect since robots would have faster and finer-grained reactions, those would be minimized too.
"(or even provoke somebody to cut into the seemingly extremely long clearance)"
It can only seem to be to long if you think you can do it better. On one hand, other robotic cars neither would nor could find it "too long" but just "as it must be"; on the other hand, provided robots have better reaction times than humans (and that's a perfectly defensible position) clearance distances could be reduced basically to the dynamic envelope of running vehicles, no need to take human reactions into account.
"Here's some news about Munich."
That's from last March. I meant something a bit more up-to-date.
"You sell me a chip that is intentionally handicapped, and then tell me that for $50 more, you will unlock it; as a consumer, it's fully reasonable for me to think you're taking advantage of me."
Yes, but History shows that while reasonable, market doesn't tend to react that way.
I don't know if it's the case anymore, but both Windows NT 3.5 and 4.0 server's versions were just intentionally handicapped NT workstation versions to be unlocked by paying more, and it was plently known back in the day -why do you limit workstation edition to just 10 concurrent network connections? (I myself did the "trick" for testing purposes: some registry changes and a bit of hex editing was enough for a workstation version to be booted up as a server one, graphics work included). And still they were a great success.
"Everyone else I found searching Google just repeats the tale as told on Slashdot, as if it were the gospel truth - "
That's interesting too. How is it that even before starting the migration there was a strong campagins against it on general media and now, after its failing there seems to be just one side talking when one would suspect those that campaigned against it would trumpet it an give their overall point of view too?
Is it that only the open source advocates are airing their POV disregarding the critics or is it that once the job's done the powers that pushed the critics prefer to remain silent knowing that their critics wouldn't stand critical-eye scrutiny?
I'd expect some more info coming in the next days if only from the "why you shouldn't touch open source with a 10 foot pole" Microsoft marketing engine.
"All well and good, but don't forget that Joe /six Pack's clever uncle / brother in law invariably uses Windows"
That's exactly one of my points: that they *DON'T* use "Windows". Specially for the untrained eye, almost the only thing in common between "Windows 3.11", "Windows 95", "Windows XP" and "Windows 7" is the "Windows" tag -and even for systems operators the changes are anything but trivial. About the same can be said of productivity software like Ms Office.
Despite of this, on their minds, XP->7 seems to be no migration with no training involved while XP->Gnome (and I say "Gnome", not Linux, since the end user in a coporate environment all that "see" is the desktop environment, not the underlying OS) is an almost ubeareable burden. Any IT guy can tell that from the point of view of the people "merely" using the desktop both changes are about the same.
I think we should point that as a magnificent success of Microsoft marketing.
"Yeah, this story is pretty self-explaining... good work FOSS!"
Yes, this story is pretty self-explaining... but I question what does indeed explains.
It's almost a meme around here that "joe sixpack" simply doesn't pay attention to computers but here it seems there has been a strong campaign in press against the migration from the very begining as if it were a sensible issue for general public.
And then, this project has been cancelled when internal polls show that only around 10% of users -and it seems "end users" are implyied, not sysadmins, were dissatisfied and 80% were satisfied with the new environment (I'd bet that's and expectable turnaround for *any* environment change).
One should ask himself if there might be some kind of pressure from "other vendors with deep pockets".
It's obvious too that has been some managerial mistakes that, as such, could be an expected source of problems no matter what the migration path were as, per instance, towards Windows 7 instead of Linux. There has been problems that tough counted on the negative side of the migration seem indeed to be more on the side of the lackings from the preceding environment (like a closed database that ends up being difficult to transition -heck, that's why you are migrating: to avoid things like that to happen... from then on).
All in all it's an enlighting example... mainly about how carefully the "soft side" of a migration towards open source should be managed. As in "be prepared to withstand attacks from the older stablishment trying to regain its lost power -and licenses" or "people will take the problems with a Windows to Windows upgrade as a non issue -it might be because the name doesn't change, even if most of the environment so does, while in a Windows to Linux migration everything and the kitchen sink will be Linux' fault no matter what so you'd better choose very carefully your stakeholders and make sure they feel involved as a driving force".
By the way, any new news about Munich?
"Are you questioning the manhood of Captain Piccard?"
No, but he's a bit too fond of Vulcans, if you want my opinion.
"It's a specific example, not "in principle" and the "game rules" are fixed."
Yeah, sure, but what are the rules?
Is this a one shot game or a multiple turn one?
"You can have $0.00.
or you can have $0.01.
In which case are you better off?"
Where are the other $60,000,000,000,000 you mentioned in your previous post? Are there $60,000,000,000,000 or there aren't? They are important. The proper strategy depends on the details.
"In fact the argument whole argument is ridiculous because there's a third person involved, so the two options are:
1. You get $0.01, other guy gets $99.99, game runner gets $0.00.
2. You get $0.00, other guy gets $0.00, game runner gets $100.00."
Enough. In my previous post I said I was not so sure you knew the meaning of such concepts as "in principle" and "game rules". Now I know: you don't.
"I am stunned that what I was implying, both in my words and in the quote, failed to reach you."
It might be because YOU DIDN'T IMPLY A DAMN. Maybe you meant to imply something, but you didn't and I carefully made that clear.
"It's very clear that short-term sacrifice often pays off long-term."
No: it's never "very clear". I'll tell you what *is* very clear: that a dollar in my pocket is a dollar I can count on. Everything else is rationale and as such, subject to interpretations and -again, as such, you'd better have a solid case to support your "you should sacrifice the money you have at hand now in order to get much more tomorrow" or else it won't work.
"I suspect that you would like to think that the status quo in public corporate law is a law of the universe."
I don't. But there's one thing clear; it is a matter of fact: things are the way they are.
"it is not, it is just an artifact of our system."
Whatever. They still are the way they are.
"It is not hard to imagine a regime where officers are not punished for doing the right thing, whether it is a matter of long-term economics or even "mere" ethics."
Of course it's not hard. What is hard is to come with a metric that will allow us to know what the (your) right thing *is*. Because without a metric is a matter of opinion and as long as it's a matter of opinion, those with the power to make their opinions prevail are the ones that will tell what "right" in fact is. As it is now the case, and they clearly vote with their money and that currently means favour short terms profit, damn with anything else (which, as I already stated, lacking strong evidences and/or better reasons to counter is not such a bad policy).
"It is also not hard to imagine a regime where officers are not accountable for the speculative price of shares."
Like... which one? It's not hard to imagine that there is *a* regime where officers are not accountable for the speculative price of shares. It's quite more difficult to tell exactly *which* regime is that. But, hey, you are free to offer your opinion. If it's not that hard, you surely will convince me with ease.
"Just because something is technically legal doesn't mean you should be compelled to do it."
You make it sound it as an argument but, who did say anything different?
"This is not just game theory"
This *is* game theory.
"you can't measure everything in dollars"
Who said game theory was exclusively, or mainly, or even liminary related to dollars?
"and we abandon human decency at our civilization's peril."
False again. There's an old motto: first step to recover from an illness is being able to recognize you are ill. You seem to defend that current state of affairs is somehow due to a few of bastardly, almost out of the human species individuals instead of a matter of each and every one of us being the way that we are. Good luck making any change about current situation starting from false asumptions.
"I'm pretty sure one person having an extra $99.98 when there are $60,000,000,000,000 in the hands of other people isn't going to make a difference"
I'm not so pretty sure you know the meaning of such concepts as "in principle" and "game rules".
"Yeah, and there are five people who legitimately want to back up their blu-rays. So what? You know and I know, this is primarily a tool for piracy."
Maybe he knows and you know. But I don't know. What I do know is that there are whole countries where ripping a DVD for private use is perfectly legitimate. That surely makes for more than five people.
"I'm not expressing an opinion, just a simple fact."
"Simple facts" can become quite complex upon deeper inspection.
"It needs to be put in context. What he meant was: when a company cannot compete (inferior product), they scream at the top of their lungs BUT IT'S OPEN! in order to masquerade their incompetence. He may have a point."
Yes: like even underperforming products and management get better by using an open source license.
Probably not the kind of argument Microsoft expects from one of its drones (so this one is dumb in a double fashion).