... I think 70% NO is breathable,... NO is the safest of the anesthetics, and is sometimes called "laughing gas".
You meant N20, nitrous oxide. OTOH, as a previous replier has also pointed out, life almost certainly could have evolved to use either NO or N2O as the primary oxidizing agent if it, instead of oxygen, had been what was available (considering the wide range of what various weird bacteria manage to use).
You are correct. However, the article talks about nitrogen oxides, not molecular nitrogen. The nitrogen in nitrogen oxides is already "fixed" and can be absorbed by many different kinds of plants.
Why do you think you put nitrogen fertilizers to plants, if the atmosphere is > 70% nitrogen?
As you probably know, we'd all be dead if the atmosphere were ~70% nitrogen oxides.
> You've just become accustomed to "newspaper" meaning "establishment drivel."
You're probably right, but I can call in my defense the Slashdot FAQ which says that "Slashdot is US-centric". In the US, "newspaper" more or less does mean "establishment drivel".
If you also read the blog (assuming he isn't just making it all up), you would see that rather than the council resigning because of being humiliated, the blog seems to have managed to mobilize a large enough segment of the residents to make the usual workings of the council rather difficult since there are many, many more people trying to make sure that the Council is actually protecting their interests. It seems that before this, the Council just would do mostly whatever it wanted, with little external review.
The blog talks about two recent Council meetings where 100+ residents showed up.
Just reading a few of the last entries of the blog:
Town Council would have approved the building of a recycling center, itself a business opportunity for one of the council members, except that 100+ residents actually showed up at the Town Council meeting to protest.
A post ridiculing a plan to build a new cheap aluminum doorway in a historic building.
Critique of the Town Council buying land for some kind of project, the project being canceled, and various interests connected with the Town Council profiting from the sale of the rezoned land, whereas there didn't seem to be much problem with actually managing to get this project finished rather than canceled (and that would have been more transparent and equally beneficial to the community).
The blogger's car was torched and his house vandalized.
So no, I don't think it's exactly a newspaper. It's more focused and more dangerous, like being an opposition leader in an only semi-democratic country.
> I found and could have posted plenty of > relevant links for you to ignore > but your disingenuous post only > deserved mockery. So that all you get.
Wow, you really showed me! That smarts! What a lesson you have taught me!
BTW, I agree that if I had replied to an argument about
>... taking one's hand off of the wheel, > let along performing a long sequence of > blind maneuvers requiring > a high degree of manual dexterity
with my original argument, it would have been a straw man. Unfortunately, your original post said nothing at all similar to that. You really should try to be more clear to help us who are less telepathic!
OTOH, there would be little use for the plans for a multi-million-dollar modern missile to, for example, Hamas in the Gaza Strip, since it would be beyond their manufacturing capabilities (OK, they could probably sell the plans to someone, but we're not talking about that). They manage to accomplish much of their goals (e.g., giving the population the impression that something is being done against Israel, and having a real effect on Israel's civilian population which lives within range) using very primitive rockets.
In addition, it is clear that as time goes on, Hamas only gets better and better at making these rockets.
> until they are wiped out by some of our niftier stuff
This is not always a viable possibility, politically, it seems.
No, I had the distinct impression that you actually thought the colloquialism had something to do with actual brain function, since you used it in the same paragraph where you claimed that a particular action was connected with use of the visual cortex.
As for the rest of your reply:
Actually providing an external reference is not an argument from authority, except in special cases (again, from WP):
On the other hand, arguments from authority are an important part of informal logic. Since we cannot have expert knowledge of many subjects, we often rely on the judgments of those who do. There is no fallacy involved in simply arguing that the assertion made by an authority is true. The fallacy only arises when it is claimed or implied that the authority is infallible in principle and can hence be exempted from criticism.
Straw man:
Topic A is under discussion.
Topic B is introduced under guise of being relevant to topic A (when topic B is actually not relevant to topic A).
Topic B is usually a distorted version of A.
I fail to understand how citing other common actions which can take one's attention off the road, in the name of defending the action which you condemned for doing the same thing, is a straw man. In what way did I distort your position?
Reductio ad absurdum is a valid argumentation technique, not a fallacy. In this case, as the article you linked to points out, my argument was more reductio ad incommodum.
Your ignoring my request for actual sources supporting your original argument and instead giving an unrelated exposition about logical fallacies and valid argumentation techniques makes me wonder if your original argument was argumentum ad ignorantiam? Oh noes! You've got me doing it now!
Your use of this phrase indicates to me that you would have a hard time producing hard psychophysical evidence confirming your theory. In fact, the sense he uses to locate the bottle is called "proprioception" or "kinesthesia", and has little to do with the visual cortex.
> but it also undeniably takes your attention away from the road
As do countless other legal actions like listening to the weather/traffic congestion report on the radio, talking, or even thinking about that project you have to finish at work or what you will say to the person you are about to meet when you arrive. Or would you make it only legal for certified Zen monks to drive?
You keep bringing this same thing in to every discussion, but are you saying that people should be allowed to download those songs *because* only 1 album sale is lost? So that's your rationalizing for piracy?
I agree that it makes a very bad reason for arguing that this behavior is moral, but there's a flip side: it makes a good reason that the people who should be looking out for the maximum benefit to society shouldn't be passing laws which cause collateral damage to society (as in, causing extreme economic distress to, or stripping basic human rights from, people who are guilty of doing this action) in the name of saving that one album sale.
... in some other legit way approved by the maker, why do you think you should be obligated to get them? Even more so if you want to get them for free. If you dont approve with the price, you just dont get it then. Live with it and dont go stealing it and try to rationalize it.
I find it interesting to compare your point with the fact that the ideal goal of advertising, in some sense, is to raise having the product in question to the level of being a necessity, in the eyes of the consumer. When I think about it, it seems to me that advertising is a lot like copyright violation, in that some advertising is certainly moral, yet other, more abusive forms of advertising are probably not.
> Let's not pretend that GPL software is any different.
It is. There are absolutely no conditions imposed in order to use GPL licensed software, as long as you don't distribute it in any way. However, as you correctly point out, the average proprietary software's EULA has gobs of conditions which you have to fulfill to be allowed to even use the software as it was meant to be used. Probably one of the reasons why no one is actually sure if EULAs are enforceable.
If I lived near that grocery, I'd make it a point to visit there and buy (assuming, of course, the prices aren't outrageous and it's clean enough). No matter how bad that woman sings.
Well, since the Kindle and ebook readers are still new, this "we are better because we let you lend" idea has a little bit of logic still, but the minute that the market phases over to ebooks being the preferred format for enough of the customers, we're going to see a revolution in the book publishing field, just like what has happened in the music field, where DRM is fading from memory.
Most people are just not going to stand for the stupid restrictions which DRM places on them, and they will obtain, somehow, non-DRMed copies of their books in order to be able to still do what they think they should be able to do with them. And when going to get the copies of the books they bought legally, they will discover how available and easy it is to obtain books which they didn't buy. In addition, there will be tons of public domain and freely licensed content which will be easily found via the wonders of the net, search engines, and the inevitable rise of sites which try to survive based on replacing the edit/review/recommend function of current publishers for this wealth of free content.
To sum up, the current business model of book publishers isn't going to survive. My guess is that its new form will include a lot of mutations of the Street Performer Protocol.
I know that the **AA may disagree, but your music tracks may someday be used by your heirs, no? And being that there is a good chance that you will have kicked off because of being old, it's likely that their ears could be a lot younger and more sensitive. (Not to mention the portion of the population, probably a large portion, who believe that if they buy a music track it is OK to let all of their children use/listen to it, also.) I frankly agree with the previous posters who said that in this day of cheaper and cheaper storage, it pays to rip to/buy at higher quality or even lossless, and reencode if you need a lower quality for a small capacity music player.
The post you reply to doesn't deny that. The only thing which would change if copyright lapsed on out-of-print and other orphan works would be (cut to dramatic drum-roll) who profits from the reprinting, and how much.
> peer to peer telephony. If it got big enough we could put the cell companies out of business.
Well, it would only work reliably in places where the density of telephones was fairly significant and constant, like urban areas. So we'd be trading an expensive option which sometimes gives coverage of less populated areas with a cheap option which would give practically no coverage of less populated areas.
I have commented on statutory damages. I'm not strictly against them. If you adjust for the risk of getting caught, they start to look reasonable (e.g., if the risk of getting caught sharing one file is assumed to be 1 in 10,000, then the risk-adjusted expected damages for willfully sharing the file is only $0.075 to $15).
Yes, perhaps something like this was in the lawmakers' mind when the idea of statutory damages was thought up. Unfortunately, the statute doesn't have any mechanism which would maintain a "reasonable" damage amount in the case that the probability of being caught varies (and in the real world, it does vary wildly).
> This wasn't exactly a random person. This was the defendant's daughter
My example was hypothetical, it wasn't intended as commentary on the case in question. And I see that you have avoided replying to my more general point, which is that your average filesharer does very little economic damage to the record labels, putting them in the very uncomfortable position of trying to fight an enormous fog of tiny droplets with a laser cannon.
Since you seem rather reasonable, I have a question: you talk about both sides' rights. Are you in favor of legislation in the "three strikes" style which tries (in my eyes badly) to "balance" economic rights like copyright versus human rights like freedom of speech and the right to due process?
In a previous post you lauded the decision as balanced (surprising considering your chosen Slashdot ID), and stated that neither side should be prevented from exercising their rights.
> Then they kept the suit open while trying to find out who might have used her > account. It looks like it just took several years before they could identify > the right defendant.
Ah. So if a random person infringes copyright using my net connection, possibly even without my knowledge, it is reasonable for me to have to defend myself in court for several years? I like the added touch of your "just" --- "just took several years". Do you have any idea what that costs?
The right of RIAA to defend its copyrights does not balance against an individual's right not to be sued frivolously. All of the cases, even those where juries awarded enormous statutory damages, are frivolous in my eyes, because the individuals in question (based on the evidence produced) couldn't possibly have caused economic damage to the record labels at the same level as the economic damage caused them by being sued.
It is a big problem. If you believe them, the labels are "drowning", because each of 1,000,000+ individuals spits on them. Unfortunately, they can't charge any one individual with their "murder" by spitting. What would fit this situation is the inverse of a class action suit; unfortunately (for RIAA, anyway; probably the opposite for society), such a beast doesn't exist.
Good, so if I would illegally copy music, I only am infringing on the rights of the songwriter, and so only need to pay ASCAP/BMI. Interesting philosophical take on copyright in music, but not connected with the legal reality of our times.
> We're just no longer in the practice of making our own mediocre performances > at home based off of works that are sufficiently dumbed down.
And for the same reason, I should tell my children not to bother to attempt to do any sports, since their performances will be mediocre compared with professional athletes. And I shouldn't bother to submit my patches for Random_OSS_Project, because they are for sure not as good as they would be if SuperDuperInvolvedProgrammer did them.
Somehow I feel your reaction is a reaction to some bad life experiences. Did some family member try to learn to play bagpipes while you were growing up?
Sorry about the formatting of my reply, I wrote it in a hurry and I forgot to close and reopen all of the quotes from your post, so my comments are hard to separate out. (and it didn't help that "preview" has been relatively broken for me here on Slashdot for a while, don't know why)...
I switched to Linux on my laptop when I had issues with Vista at launch that, frankly, pissed me off. I used that for about a year - year and a half and recently switched back to Vista about six months ago.
Yes, I admit that when I called you out, I was comparing Linux to Windows (XP) on desktop systems. I admit that Linux on (randomly chosen) laptops is probably more of a pain than Windows, especially since the installed Windows is customized to the hardware, which itself is designed to work with Windows and only possibly with Linux.
I'm talking about when things go wrong they tend to require much tweaking and editing and messing with some such program but not before you do X in this other program, etc. It's a pain in the ass. In Windows, most problems can be fixed with a reboot (yeah, it's annoying, but it's easy). Application problems you just run the repair. And if you really broke things bad (almost all Windows problems these days are user caused) you just roll the whole system back to before you installed that piece of crapware or whatever.
I've had quite a few problems that "X doesn't work" in Linux, but I sometimes just live with it, as opposed to breaking my head trying to fix things which sometimes just fix themselves upon the next major update of the distro.
It doesn't really require much technical knowledge until things are really bad. Linux, on the other hand, if things are not quite the way you want them, half the time you'll need to manually edit a config file instead of having an option to adjust it in the program itself. It sucks.
When "things are not quite the way I want them" in Windows, it is usually a significant investment of effort to discover how to "fix" them, in my experience. Like when I decided that double-clicking on "My Computer" should cause Windows to "explore" rather than "open". That experience, while teaching me a lot about Windows internals and the registry, also showed me that there are two sides to most coins.
> First off, that your total cost of ownership is lower. That is certainly true if your time is worth nothing to you....
His post mentions that he is a software developer. The cost of buying gobs of proprietary development (and other) software is large compared to even a few hours of his time (unless he's really highly paid, of course).
And I think it's ingenuous for you to assume that Windows requires a lot less maintenance and customization than a major Linux distro. This hasn't been my experience. Or are you factoring in the "I will get this to work no matter how long it takes" geek stubbornness which sometimes hits me when I don't succeed in doing something easily, like printing from Linux to a printer shared from Windows? I will concede to you that Linux is much more of a "trap" than Windows in this way, because I would never even consider wasting time trying to fix Windows.
Slashdot Mirror
... I think 70% NO is breathable, ... NO is the safest of the anesthetics, and is sometimes called "laughing gas".
You meant N20, nitrous oxide. OTOH, as a previous replier has also pointed out, life almost certainly could have evolved to use either NO or N2O as the primary oxidizing agent if it, instead of oxygen, had been what was available (considering the wide range of what various weird bacteria manage to use).
Plants cannot metabolize nitrogen directly.
You are correct. However, the article talks about nitrogen oxides, not molecular nitrogen. The nitrogen in nitrogen oxides is already "fixed" and can be absorbed by many different kinds of plants.
Why do you think you put nitrogen fertilizers to plants, if the atmosphere is > 70% nitrogen?
As you probably know, we'd all be dead if the atmosphere were ~70% nitrogen oxides.
> You've just become accustomed to "newspaper" meaning "establishment drivel."
You're probably right, but I can call in my defense the Slashdot FAQ which says that "Slashdot is US-centric". In the US, "newspaper" more or less does mean "establishment drivel".
If you also read the blog (assuming he isn't just making it all up), you would see that rather than the council resigning because of being humiliated, the blog seems to have managed to mobilize a large enough segment of the residents to make the usual workings of the council rather difficult since there are many, many more people trying to make sure that the Council is actually protecting their interests. It seems that before this, the Council just would do mostly whatever it wanted, with little external review.
The blog talks about two recent Council meetings where 100+ residents showed up.
Just reading a few of the last entries of the blog:
So no, I don't think it's exactly a newspaper. It's more focused and more dangerous, like being an opposition leader in an only semi-democratic country.
> I found and could have posted plenty of
> relevant links for you to ignore
> but your disingenuous post only
> deserved mockery. So that all you get.
Wow, you really showed me! That smarts! What a lesson you have taught me!
BTW, I agree that if I had replied to an argument about
> ... taking one's hand off of the wheel,
> let along performing a long sequence of
> blind maneuvers requiring
> a high degree of manual dexterity
with my original argument, it would have been a straw man. Unfortunately, your original post said nothing at all similar to that. You really should try to be more clear to help us who are less telepathic!
OTOH, there would be little use for the plans for a multi-million-dollar modern missile to, for example, Hamas in the Gaza Strip, since it would be beyond their manufacturing capabilities (OK, they could probably sell the plans to someone, but we're not talking about that). They manage to accomplish much of their goals (e.g., giving the population the impression that something is being done against Israel, and having a real effect on Israel's civilian population which lives within range) using very primitive rockets.
In addition, it is clear that as time goes on, Hamas only gets better and better at making these rockets.
> until they are wiped out by some of our niftier stuff
This is not always a viable possibility, politically, it seems.
No, I had the distinct impression that you actually thought the colloquialism had something to do with actual brain function, since you used it in the same paragraph where you claimed that a particular action was connected with use of the visual cortex.
As for the rest of your reply:
On the other hand, arguments from authority are an important part of informal logic. Since we cannot have expert knowledge of many subjects, we often rely on the judgments of those who do. There is no fallacy involved in simply arguing that the assertion made by an authority is true. The fallacy only arises when it is claimed or implied that the authority is infallible in principle and can hence be exempted from criticism.
I fail to understand how citing other common actions which can take one's attention off the road, in the name of defending the action which you condemned for doing the same thing, is a straw man. In what way did I distort your position?
Your ignoring my request for actual sources supporting your original argument and instead giving an unrelated exposition about logical fallacies and valid argumentation techniques makes me wonder if your original argument was argumentum ad ignorantiam? Oh noes! You've got me doing it now!
> ... the mind's eye ...
Your use of this phrase indicates to me that you would have a hard time producing hard psychophysical evidence confirming your theory. In fact, the sense he uses to locate the bottle is called "proprioception" or "kinesthesia", and has little to do with the visual cortex.
> but it also undeniably takes your attention away from the road
As do countless other legal actions like listening to the weather/traffic congestion report on the radio, talking, or even thinking about that project you have to finish at work or what you will say to the person you are about to meet when you arrive. Or would you make it only legal for certified Zen monks to drive?
> And great influence in other fields such as finance.
Er, you should have stopped while you were ahead?
> I believe there are breeds of humans just like there are breeds of dogs.
You really should have stopped while you were ahead!
You keep bringing this same thing in to every discussion, but are you saying that people should be allowed to download those songs *because* only 1 album sale is lost? So that's your rationalizing for piracy?
I agree that it makes a very bad reason for arguing that this
behavior is moral, but there's a flip side: it makes a good reason that the people who should be looking out for the maximum benefit to society shouldn't be passing laws which cause collateral damage to society (as in, causing extreme economic distress to, or stripping basic human rights from, people who are guilty of doing this action) in the name of saving that one album sale.
... in some other legit way approved by the maker, why do you think you should be obligated to get them? Even more so if you want to get them for free. If you dont approve with the price, you just dont get it then. Live with it and dont go stealing it and try to rationalize it.
I find it interesting to compare your point with the fact that the ideal goal of advertising, in some sense, is to raise having the product in question to the level of being a necessity, in the eyes of the consumer. When I think about it, it seems to me that advertising is a lot like copyright violation, in that some advertising is certainly moral, yet other, more abusive forms of advertising are probably not.
> If you want software freedom, then there is only one license -- no license at all.
Nope. You could license under the WTFPL, which is a recognized Open Source license, fully compatible with the GPL.
> Let's not pretend that GPL software is any different.
It is. There are absolutely no conditions imposed in order to use GPL licensed software, as long as you don't distribute it in any way. However, as you correctly point out, the average proprietary software's EULA has gobs of conditions which you have to fulfill to be allowed to even use the software as it was meant to be used. Probably one of the reasons why no one is actually sure if EULAs are enforceable.
> I have no doubt she is an aweful singer.
If I lived near that grocery, I'd make it a point to visit there and buy (assuming, of course, the prices aren't outrageous and it's clean enough). No matter how bad that woman sings.
The Streisand effect in action....
Well, since the Kindle and ebook readers are still new, this "we are better because we let you lend" idea has a little bit of logic still, but the minute that the market phases over to ebooks being the preferred format for enough of the customers, we're going to see a revolution in the book publishing field, just like what has happened in the music field, where DRM is fading from memory.
Most people are just not going to stand for the stupid restrictions which DRM places on them, and they will obtain, somehow, non-DRMed copies of their books in order to be able to still do what they think they should be able to do with them. And when going to get the copies of the books they bought legally, they will discover how available and easy it is to obtain books which they didn't buy. In addition, there will be tons of public domain and freely licensed content which will be easily found via the wonders of the net, search engines, and the inevitable rise of sites which try to survive based on replacing the edit/review/recommend function of current publishers for this wealth of free content.
To sum up, the current business model of book publishers isn't going to survive. My guess is that its new form will include a lot of mutations of the Street Performer Protocol.
I know that the **AA may disagree, but your music tracks may someday be used by your heirs, no? And being that there is a good chance that you will have kicked off because of being old, it's likely that their ears could be a lot younger and more sensitive. (Not to mention the portion of the population, probably a large portion, who believe that if they buy a music track it is OK to let all of their children use/listen to it, also.) I frankly agree with the previous posters who said that in this day of cheaper and cheaper storage, it pays to rip to/buy at higher quality or even lossless, and reencode if you need a lower quality for a small capacity music player.
> Sometimes reprinting is very good business.
The post you reply to doesn't deny that. The only thing which would change if copyright lapsed on out-of-print and other orphan works would be (cut to dramatic drum-roll) who profits from the reprinting, and how much.
For some real data on how interesting (or not) it is to maintain a copyright for more than 28 years, see Bill Patry's post at The Volokh Conspiracy.
> peer to peer telephony. If it got big enough we could put the cell companies out of business.
Well, it would only work reliably in places where the density of telephones was fairly significant and constant, like urban areas. So we'd be trading an expensive option which sometimes gives coverage of less populated areas with a cheap option which would give practically no coverage of less populated areas.
I have commented on statutory damages. I'm not strictly against them. If you adjust for the risk of getting caught, they start to look reasonable (e.g., if the risk of getting caught sharing one file is assumed to be 1 in 10,000, then the risk-adjusted expected damages for willfully sharing the file is only $0.075 to $15).
Yes, perhaps something like this was in the lawmakers' mind when the idea of statutory damages was thought up. Unfortunately, the statute doesn't have any mechanism which would maintain a "reasonable" damage amount in the case that the probability of being caught varies (and in the real world, it does vary wildly).
> This wasn't exactly a random person. This was the defendant's daughter
My example was hypothetical, it wasn't intended as commentary on the case in question. And I see that you have avoided replying to my more general point, which is that your average filesharer does very little economic damage to the record labels, putting them in the very uncomfortable position of trying to fight an enormous fog of tiny droplets with a laser cannon.
Since you seem rather reasonable, I have a question: you talk about both sides' rights. Are you in favor of legislation in the "three strikes" style which tries (in my eyes badly) to "balance" economic rights like copyright versus human rights like freedom of speech and the right to due process?
In a previous post you lauded the decision as balanced (surprising considering your chosen Slashdot ID), and stated that neither side should be prevented from exercising their rights.
> Then they kept the suit open while trying to find out who might have used her
> account. It looks like it just took several years before they could identify
> the right defendant.
Ah. So if a random person infringes copyright using my net connection, possibly even without my knowledge, it is reasonable for me to have to defend myself in court for several years? I like the added touch of your "just" --- "just took several years". Do you have any idea what that costs?
The right of RIAA to defend its copyrights does not balance against an individual's right not to be sued frivolously. All of the cases, even those where juries awarded enormous statutory damages, are frivolous in my eyes, because the individuals in question (based on the evidence produced) couldn't possibly have caused economic damage to the record labels at the same level as the economic damage caused them by being sued.
It is a big problem. If you believe them, the labels are "drowning", because each of 1,000,000+ individuals spits on them. Unfortunately, they can't charge any one individual with their "murder" by spitting. What would fit this situation is the inverse of a class action suit; unfortunately (for RIAA, anyway; probably the opposite for society), such a beast doesn't exist.
> Performing is not "creating music".
Good, so if I would illegally copy music, I only am infringing on the rights of the songwriter, and so only need to pay ASCAP/BMI. Interesting philosophical take on copyright in music, but not connected with the legal reality of our times.
> We're just no longer in the practice of making our own mediocre performances
> at home based off of works that are sufficiently dumbed down.
And for the same reason, I should tell my children not to bother to attempt to do any sports, since their performances will be mediocre compared with professional athletes. And I shouldn't bother to submit my patches for Random_OSS_Project, because they are for sure not as good as they would be if SuperDuperInvolvedProgrammer did them.
Somehow I feel your reaction is a reaction to some bad life experiences. Did some family member try to learn to play bagpipes while you were growing up?
Sorry about the formatting of my reply, I wrote it in a hurry and I forgot to close and reopen all of the quotes from your post, so my comments are hard to separate out. (and it didn't help that "preview" has been relatively broken for me here on Slashdot for a while, don't know why)...
I switched to Linux on my laptop when I had issues with Vista at launch that, frankly, pissed me off. I used that for about a year - year and a half and recently switched back to Vista about six months ago.
Yes, I admit that when I called you out, I was comparing Linux to Windows (XP) on desktop systems. I admit that Linux on (randomly chosen) laptops is probably more of a pain than Windows, especially since the installed Windows is customized to the hardware, which itself is designed to work with Windows and only possibly with Linux.
I'm talking about when things go wrong they tend to require much tweaking and editing and messing with some such program but not before you do X in this other program, etc. It's a pain in the ass. In Windows, most problems can be fixed with a reboot (yeah, it's annoying, but it's easy). Application problems you just run the repair. And if you really broke things bad (almost all Windows problems these days are user caused) you just roll the whole system back to before you installed that piece of crapware or whatever.
I've had quite a few problems that "X doesn't work" in Linux, but I sometimes just live with it, as opposed to breaking my head trying to fix things which sometimes just fix themselves upon the next major update of the distro.
It doesn't really require much technical knowledge until things are really bad. Linux, on the other hand, if things are not quite the way you want them, half the time you'll need to manually edit a config file instead of having an option to adjust it in the program itself. It sucks.
When "things are not quite the way I want them" in Windows, it is usually a significant investment of effort to discover how to "fix" them, in my experience. Like when I decided that double-clicking on "My Computer" should cause Windows to "explore" rather than "open". That experience, while teaching me a lot about Windows internals and the registry, also showed me that there are two sides to most coins.
> First off, that your total cost of ownership is lower. That is certainly true if your time is worth nothing to you. ...
His post mentions that he is a software developer. The cost of buying gobs of proprietary development (and other) software is large compared to even a few hours of his time (unless he's really highly paid, of course).
And I think it's ingenuous for you to assume that Windows requires a lot less maintenance and customization than a major Linux distro. This hasn't been my experience. Or are you factoring in the "I will get this to work no matter how long it takes" geek stubbornness which sometimes hits me when I don't succeed in doing something easily, like printing from Linux to a printer shared from Windows? I will concede to you that Linux is much more of a "trap" than Windows in this way, because I would never even consider wasting time trying to fix Windows.
Look, this guy has already proved that he isn't very good. So lose him.