Surely the police have some discretion in how they apply their resources. Have all other crimes been prevented or solved? If not, then the resources spent on shutting down this party could've been put to better use, and at least part of the criticism should be leveled at whoever decided to enforce this law in this field instead of enforcing some other law somewhere else.
Just make school non-compulsory. The kids who are "bad" won't go. Those who just don't fit in can go and find something else to do. No need for "bad" kids to be locked up in what amounts to detention centres in the name of school. Most people wouldn't tolerate a compulsory system equivalent to school for the adult population, it's time we woke up to the fact that just because we're doing to children doesn't make it ok.
Hear, hear.
Compulsory schooling is little better than imprisonment for the kids who don't want to be there -- you can't force them to learn, you can only waste their time -- and their unwilling presence causes constant trouble for teachers, administrators, and the kids who do want to be there.
Don't you wish you were spanked a few times rather than being drugged for years? What a fucked up situation, when spanking is deemed worse than drugging.
Why on earth would you think physical punishment would've led to a better outcome? What about his story made you think he needed to be hit?
The short answer seems to be: monetary base is not money supply. This spike is related to the Fed's decision to pay interest on excess reserves, and it has not translated into a similar rise in the supply of currency.
I don't think I'd call 15% growth in 9 months "stable and low."
June 2007 to May 2009 is 23 months, not 9 months. In the same period, the gold supply grew around 5%. Typical growth in M2 since the mid-90s has been around 5% per year, or twice the rate of gold.
Barring monopolistic practices, the mining companies would no more be in charge of our economy than the banks are now.
You're missing the point. A central bank controls the money supply deliberately with an eye toward the effect of that money supply on the overall economy. Mining companies produce gold, and industrial users consume gold, for their own purposes, with no regard for the effect of the gold supply on the economy.
Exactly, the duration may have gotten shorter, but the effect when reality finally hits is worse.
Any evidence for this claim?
This is why we had the Great Depression, and why we are heading into another major downturn now.
Good luck finding anyone who isn't a crank who believes that the Great Depression was caused by insufficient goldbuggery. If anything, gold standardcontributed tothe Depression.
So you're saying the people who didn't see the current crisis coming, assured us it was contained, and then told us we barely avoided catastrophe know what they're doing and are the perfect stewards for our monetary system?
Not perfect stewards, no. But they're still better stewards than mining companies and gold-consuming industries. The alternative is for the value of our currency be affected by what sort of rocks were uncovered recently or how many edge connectors and necklaces are being manufactured; do you really think that would be an improvement?
The Federal Reserve was founded in 1913. The Great Depression started 16 years later.
Surely you aren't trying to imply causality there, are you? Because recessions have gotten shorter and less frequent since 1900.
The intrinsic value of gold is that it is rare enough to hold large quantities of wealth and cannot be manufactured arbitrarily. The second reason is why every fiat currency has historically failed
Furthermore, it had the potential to create problems between RIAA and Apple, because Apple was controlling what they were allowing people to put music on, and there was this little hole in their wall. Now, they have control over what devices you're putting the music on with their software again, just like they told the music people they'd be doing.
You seem to be confused. iTunes music is DRM-free now, right? So Apple had no control over what you can put music on anyway before they started blocking the Pre, and they still have none after. And they're blocking all music, whether it was obtained from the iTunes store or not! This change makes it less convenient to get your music onto anything except an iPod, but far from impossible.
What are the chances that gold production will double next year? Very low. That the gold supply will double? Astronomically low. US dollar supply? We've seen what happened in 2009:)
Yes, and...? The supply of dollars didn't double. Production of dollars is "stable and low in relation to the total supply", and the chance that the dollar supply will double next year is astronomically low.
The dollar is US taxpayers' potato. Seriously. Just like the inherent value of gold comes from its use in electronics and jewelry, the inherent value of the dollar comes from the fact that Americans must pay taxes in dollars.
Beyond that, gold and dollars only have value because people expect that others will take them in exchange for goods and services. And despite goldbug claims, we're better off with a currency whose supply is deliberately controlled according to monetary policy than with one whose supply fluctuates randomly according to natural deposits, industrial use, and the whims of mining companies.
Historically paper money only had value because it was backed by gold, or some other known commodity. Now it's backed by faith. How's that working out for everybody?
Better, actually, except in isolated cases like Zimbabwe where the central bank has totally failed.
Gold only has trading value because people expect that others will take gold in exchange for goods and services -- just like the dollar only has trading value because people expect that others will take dollars in exchange. In other words, gold as a currency is also "backed by faith".
The difference is that the supply of gold fluctuates unpredictably based on natural deposits, industrial use, and the activity of mining companies, while the supply of dollars fluctuates deliberately according to the monetary policy imposed by the central bank. Generally we're better off when the supply is controlled by people who know what they're doing rather than random fluctuations -- if you think business cycles are bad now, take a look at how they worked before the Federal Reserve -- although the outcome can be catastrophic when it's controlled by people who have no clue (i.e. Zimbabwe).
So when hackers used to take advantage of RPC vulnerabilities in Windows XP, and then Microsoft patched it so they couldn't, the hackers had a right to be mad that this functionality was removed?
You're comparing a person's ability to use his own copy of iTunes to sync his own music library with his own Palm Pre to a hacker's ability to remotely exploit other people's Windows boxes without their consent? Sorry, try again.
Your comment implies that syncing a Palm Pre with iTunes was a function fully intended and provided by Apple, and it wasn't.
No, it doesn't. It only implies that syncing a Palm Pre with iTunes was useful and valuable, and Apple has destroyed that value by disabling it.
But allowing you to overdraft your account is a valuable service. If my balance is $20 short to cover my rent check, I'd sure as hell rather the bank pay it anyway and charge me an overdraft fee, rather then bounce the check and get nailed with a late fee + bounced check fee + hassle from my landlord.
If you want to opt in to this service, and pay a reasonable price for a short-term loan, that's one thing. But banks assume that every customer wants their checking account to provide short-term loans, and then they charge a fee that far exceeds the market price for such a loan ($39 overdraft fee in a month where your balance hits -$20 comes out to 2340% APR).
Regardless, banks could not function if everyone routinely over-drafted their accounts.
Sure they could: banks don't need to allow overdrafts at all. If there's $80 in my account and I write a check for $100, the bank doesn't need to take $20 out of their own funds to pay the check -- they can return it unpaid and let me deal with the consequences. But they'd rather loan me the $20 so they can charge hefty overdraft fees on top.
When did Robert Byrd change parties? How about Bill clinton's mentor (William J Fulbright)?
Please, keep on ignoring the vast sea of racist Republicans, and more importantly, the Republican attitudes and policies that have all but destroyed minority support for the GOP.
And keep on equating Robert Byrd's membership in the KKK over half a century ago with the racism that exists in the Republican Party today.
Democrats assert that Republicans are racist, but it was Senate Democrats who wrote memos saying that Miguel Estrada must at all costs be kept off of the DC Circuit Court because he was Hispanic. It is Democrats who believe that minorities can only succeed if the government favors them.
Gosh, you're right, it's the Democrats who really hate minorities. That must be why the Democratic Party has been reduced to a tiny regional party, reliant on the votes of evangelical whites whipped up by bigoted talk show hosts, and the Republican Party has been carried into the House, Senate, and the White House by a base that crosses racial and religious lines.
A sense of disproportion between the amount of the fee and the expense that could reasonably be caused by the event that caused the fee.
For instance, I consider it outrageous to charge $39 when a $10 payment is received one day late. Or to charge $4 for each day that an overdrawn account has a negative balance of $1. Fees like those are essentially short-term loans, but at rates that far exceed the sensible or legal price for an outright loan.
Would not the smarter part of the plan be to avoid ALL fees.
Sure, just like a smart plan to save money on health care is to avoid getting sick or injured.
Eh, maybe it is just me... The more solvent I can keep my account the better I feel. Same for Credit Cards. Pay the balance off, avoid the interest and late fees, etc.
No, it's not just you. Everyone feels better when they're more solvent, and no one wants to pay interest or fees.
What may set you apart from some others is your ability to stay solvent and avoid paying interest and fees.
The DMCA does restrict fair use. For instance, you might have a fair use right to use clips from a DVD, but you can't do so legally if you have to break the encryption to get at the clips. Fair use is a defense against copyright infringement but not against circumvention.
I mean, I remember an area bank, Washington Mutual, used to run these fun ads talking about how they didn't charge lots of fees, unlike the other banks. Of course, they were among the first to fail and they ended up getting bought up by Chase.
WaMu's failure, like other bank failures, was not caused by setting their fees too low. It was caused by making a lot of terrible investments. Wells Fargo may have made up for their investment losses by charging outrageous fees (or maybe they just didn't make as many bad investments), but that doesn't mean charging outrageous fees is necessary for banks to stay in business.
It's true, Democrats used to be the racist party. Lincoln was a Republican.
What you're overlooking, however, is the fact that that all changed in the mid-20th century. Look up the "Southern Strategy". Racist Democrats migrated en masse to the GOP.
No, he means they stop allowing Mono to use their patent-encumbered implementations of Winforms, ASP.NET and ADO.NET. That is the glue code that allows a Mono app to become a Windows app on Windows, and that has always been what the controversy over Mono is about.
Well, not always. The more paranoid commenters here have tried to raise a controversy over the use of C# itself, but hopefully the legally binding "community promise" will put an end to that. WinForms, ASP.NET, and ADO.NET are what the controversy should be about.
That said: I don't believe there's any evidence that WinForms, ASP.NET, or ADO.NET are actually covered by patents at all, let alone evidence that the APIs couldn't be implemented in a way that worked around any such patents. There's only speculation: there's no explicit guarantee that a WinForms implementation is non-infringing, but the patent danger is still hypothetical and imaginary at this point.
Of course, using Mono/GTK# isn't a problem, as I think you pointed out, but judging from Mono's overall popularity in the Linux world, at least outside of Gnome, few people are really interested (for now) in doing that
Key words: "for now". I think people would become interested very quickly if Microsoft actually made a move toward stopping Mono from implementing Windows Forms.
No, for one thing I mean start threatening anyone who uses Mono for patent infringement.
In light of the recent legally binding "community promise", this is a non-starter. There is no patent danger from using C# or the CLI. Combine that with open source replacements for Microsoft's proprietary libraries (GTK# instead of Windows Forms, etc.) and patents are useless against Mono developers.
Staying compatible only until Microsoft decides it doesn't want Mono to be compatible.
What, you think they're going to stop people from running.NET 2.0 applications on Windows? Considering how many such apps exist, that would be suicidal, but even if it weren't a hilariously stupid idea,.NET 2.0 is already out there (and redistributable). Even Microsoft can't change the past.
Because you say one will, it's only logical to conclude the other will or may not be compatible. So whoever uses it may be locked into proprietary software then left out in the cold when support for it is dropped.
The other one isn't compatible with Mono and isn't meant to be, because it interfaces with hardware that doesn't have Linux drivers. I just mentioned it as evidence that even on Windows, no one is being forced to upgrade to newer.NET versions.
If a person wanted to they could still write software for Windows 3.x and those who have the OS can run it. But Someone running Vista will not.
Actually, it's only 64-bit Vista that can't run Win16 apps. 32-bit Vista still can. And running even 32-bit programs on 64-bit Linux is no picnic either, so I'm not sure how this point is supposed to relate to Microsoft.
With Mono, sure something may run on the current version of Mono today, but that does not mean Mono will be current in 5 or 10 years.
Mono isn't even "current" with.NET today, but again, no one cares about that. Everyone who targets Mono is aware of where it sits in relation to the latest.NET. If they just wanted to be "current", they wouldn't be using Mono in the first place.
Anytime MS wants to they can stop supporting Mono and make.net incompatible.
By "stop supporting Mono" you mean "stop supporting.NET 2.0", which they technically could do, but (1) it would be crazy, since there's so much.NET 2.0 software out there, and (2) they couldn't stop anyone from installing an old copy of.NET 2.0 (which is freely redistributable)... or, you know, installing Mono for Windows.
They do if they want to stay current, and I think anyone worth salt would want to stay current.
If they're using Mono to write software that runs on Linux, then no, they won't care about staying "current" with Microsoft's releases. They'll care about staying compatible, which means either using the latest version of Mono and all it provides (if they only care about Linux), or using the common subset of features supported by both Mono and.NET (if they're writing cross-platform apps).
Hell, even Windows developers don't necessarily care about staying current. I'm a developer on two commercial apps written in C#, and they both target.NET 2.0. In the case of one of them, that's specifically so that it will be compatible with Mono.
And when.net reaches 5.1 or 10.1?
By then, presumably Mono will have caught up with.NET 4.1 or 8.5.
By your reasoning people should still be using Windows 3.x. I doubt 1% do today.
I don't see how this is relevant. The Windows 3.x API was not submitted to an industry standards group and promoted as a cross-platform standard. No one has piles of Windows 3.x code that they expect to remain compatible with other platforms. No one is writing new code targeted to an open-source implementation of Windows 3.x.
The situation with Mono is different. If you write a bunch of C# code for Mono, using the features of.NET 2.0, because you want your software to run on Linux, you aren't going to give up on Linux compatibility and throw away all that investment just because Microsoft releases a shiny new version.
The only thing needed between "Microsoft releases a new version of.NET for Windows containing features Mono doesn't support" and "Linux developers are forced to switch to Microsoft software or stop using Mono" is the need to remain current.
You really think Linux developers are willing to give up on Linux just to "remain current" with Microsoft's releases? Seriously?
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Surely the police have some discretion in how they apply their resources. Have all other crimes been prevented or solved? If not, then the resources spent on shutting down this party could've been put to better use, and at least part of the criticism should be leveled at whoever decided to enforce this law in this field instead of enforcing some other law somewhere else.
Just make school non-compulsory. The kids who are "bad" won't go. Those who just don't fit in can go and find something else to do. No need for "bad" kids to be locked up in what amounts to detention centres in the name of school. Most people wouldn't tolerate a compulsory system equivalent to school for the adult population, it's time we woke up to the fact that just because we're doing to children doesn't make it ok.
Hear, hear.
Compulsory schooling is little better than imprisonment for the kids who don't want to be there -- you can't force them to learn, you can only waste their time -- and their unwilling presence causes constant trouble for teachers, administrators, and the kids who do want to be there.
Don't you wish you were spanked a few times rather than being drugged for years? What a fucked up situation, when spanking is deemed worse than drugging.
Why on earth would you think physical punishment would've led to a better outcome? What about his story made you think he needed to be hit?
I'll let others explain it.
The short answer seems to be: monetary base is not money supply. This spike is related to the Fed's decision to pay interest on excess reserves, and it has not translated into a similar rise in the supply of currency.
I don't think I'd call 15% growth in 9 months "stable and low."
June 2007 to May 2009 is 23 months, not 9 months. In the same period, the gold supply grew around 5%. Typical growth in M2 since the mid-90s has been around 5% per year, or twice the rate of gold.
Barring monopolistic practices, the mining companies would no more be in charge of our economy than the banks are now.
You're missing the point. A central bank controls the money supply deliberately with an eye toward the effect of that money supply on the overall economy. Mining companies produce gold, and industrial users consume gold, for their own purposes, with no regard for the effect of the gold supply on the economy.
Exactly, the duration may have gotten shorter, but the effect when reality finally hits is worse.
Any evidence for this claim?
This is why we had the Great Depression, and why we are heading into another major downturn now.
Good luck finding anyone who isn't a crank who believes that the Great Depression was caused by insufficient goldbuggery. If anything, gold standard contributed to the Depression.
So you're saying the people who didn't see the current crisis coming, assured us it was contained, and then told us we barely avoided catastrophe know what they're doing and are the perfect stewards for our monetary system?
Not perfect stewards, no. But they're still better stewards than mining companies and gold-consuming industries. The alternative is for the value of our currency be affected by what sort of rocks were uncovered recently or how many edge connectors and necklaces are being manufactured; do you really think that would be an improvement?
The Federal Reserve was founded in 1913. The Great Depression started 16 years later.
Surely you aren't trying to imply causality there, are you? Because recessions have gotten shorter and less frequent since 1900.
The intrinsic value of gold is that it is rare enough to hold large quantities of wealth and cannot be manufactured arbitrarily. The second reason is why every fiat currency has historically failed
Except the ones that haven't, you mean?
Furthermore, it had the potential to create problems between RIAA and Apple, because Apple was controlling what they were allowing people to put music on, and there was this little hole in their wall. Now, they have control over what devices you're putting the music on with their software again, just like they told the music people they'd be doing.
You seem to be confused. iTunes music is DRM-free now, right? So Apple had no control over what you can put music on anyway before they started blocking the Pre, and they still have none after. And they're blocking all music, whether it was obtained from the iTunes store or not! This change makes it less convenient to get your music onto anything except an iPod, but far from impossible.
What are the chances that gold production will double next year? Very low. That the gold supply will double? Astronomically low. US dollar supply? We've seen what happened in 2009 :)
Yes, and...? The supply of dollars didn't double. Production of dollars is "stable and low in relation to the total supply", and the chance that the dollar supply will double next year is astronomically low.
The dollar is US taxpayers' potato. Seriously. Just like the inherent value of gold comes from its use in electronics and jewelry, the inherent value of the dollar comes from the fact that Americans must pay taxes in dollars.
Beyond that, gold and dollars only have value because people expect that others will take them in exchange for goods and services. And despite goldbug claims, we're better off with a currency whose supply is deliberately controlled according to monetary policy than with one whose supply fluctuates randomly according to natural deposits, industrial use, and the whims of mining companies.
Historically paper money only had value because it was backed by gold, or some other known commodity. Now it's backed by faith. How's that working out for everybody?
Better, actually, except in isolated cases like Zimbabwe where the central bank has totally failed.
Gold only has trading value because people expect that others will take gold in exchange for goods and services -- just like the dollar only has trading value because people expect that others will take dollars in exchange. In other words, gold as a currency is also "backed by faith".
The difference is that the supply of gold fluctuates unpredictably based on natural deposits, industrial use, and the activity of mining companies, while the supply of dollars fluctuates deliberately according to the monetary policy imposed by the central bank. Generally we're better off when the supply is controlled by people who know what they're doing rather than random fluctuations -- if you think business cycles are bad now, take a look at how they worked before the Federal Reserve -- although the outcome can be catastrophic when it's controlled by people who have no clue (i.e. Zimbabwe).
So when hackers used to take advantage of RPC vulnerabilities in Windows XP, and then Microsoft patched it so they couldn't, the hackers had a right to be mad that this functionality was removed?
You're comparing a person's ability to use his own copy of iTunes to sync his own music library with his own Palm Pre to a hacker's ability to remotely exploit other people's Windows boxes without their consent? Sorry, try again.
Your comment implies that syncing a Palm Pre with iTunes was a function fully intended and provided by Apple, and it wasn't.
No, it doesn't. It only implies that syncing a Palm Pre with iTunes was useful and valuable, and Apple has destroyed that value by disabling it.
But allowing you to overdraft your account is a valuable service. If my balance is $20 short to cover my rent check, I'd sure as hell rather the bank pay it anyway and charge me an overdraft fee, rather then bounce the check and get nailed with a late fee + bounced check fee + hassle from my landlord.
If you want to opt in to this service, and pay a reasonable price for a short-term loan, that's one thing. But banks assume that every customer wants their checking account to provide short-term loans, and then they charge a fee that far exceeds the market price for such a loan ($39 overdraft fee in a month where your balance hits -$20 comes out to 2340% APR).
Regardless, banks could not function if everyone routinely over-drafted their accounts.
Sure they could: banks don't need to allow overdrafts at all. If there's $80 in my account and I write a check for $100, the bank doesn't need to take $20 out of their own funds to pay the check -- they can return it unpaid and let me deal with the consequences. But they'd rather loan me the $20 so they can charge hefty overdraft fees on top.
When did Robert Byrd change parties? How about Bill clinton's mentor (William J Fulbright)?
Please, keep on ignoring the vast sea of racist Republicans, and more importantly, the Republican attitudes and policies that have all but destroyed minority support for the GOP.
And keep on equating Robert Byrd's membership in the KKK over half a century ago with the racism that exists in the Republican Party today.
Democrats assert that Republicans are racist, but it was Senate Democrats who wrote memos saying that Miguel Estrada must at all costs be kept off of the DC Circuit Court because he was Hispanic. It is Democrats who believe that minorities can only succeed if the government favors them.
Gosh, you're right, it's the Democrats who really hate minorities. That must be why the Democratic Party has been reduced to a tiny regional party, reliant on the votes of evangelical whites whipped up by bigoted talk show hosts, and the Republican Party has been carried into the House, Senate, and the White House by a base that crosses racial and religious lines.
What makes a fee outrageous?
A sense of disproportion between the amount of the fee and the expense that could reasonably be caused by the event that caused the fee.
For instance, I consider it outrageous to charge $39 when a $10 payment is received one day late. Or to charge $4 for each day that an overdrawn account has a negative balance of $1. Fees like those are essentially short-term loans, but at rates that far exceed the sensible or legal price for an outright loan.
Would not the smarter part of the plan be to avoid ALL fees.
Sure, just like a smart plan to save money on health care is to avoid getting sick or injured.
Eh, maybe it is just me... The more solvent I can keep my account the better I feel. Same for Credit Cards. Pay the balance off, avoid the interest and late fees, etc.
No, it's not just you. Everyone feels better when they're more solvent, and no one wants to pay interest or fees.
What may set you apart from some others is your ability to stay solvent and avoid paying interest and fees.
The DMCA does restrict fair use. For instance, you might have a fair use right to use clips from a DVD, but you can't do so legally if you have to break the encryption to get at the clips. Fair use is a defense against copyright infringement but not against circumvention.
I mean, I remember an area bank, Washington Mutual, used to run these fun ads talking about how they didn't charge lots of fees, unlike the other banks. Of course, they were among the first to fail and they ended up getting bought up by Chase.
WaMu's failure, like other bank failures, was not caused by setting their fees too low. It was caused by making a lot of terrible investments. Wells Fargo may have made up for their investment losses by charging outrageous fees (or maybe they just didn't make as many bad investments), but that doesn't mean charging outrageous fees is necessary for banks to stay in business.
It's true, Democrats used to be the racist party. Lincoln was a Republican.
What you're overlooking, however, is the fact that that all changed in the mid-20th century. Look up the "Southern Strategy". Racist Democrats migrated en masse to the GOP.
No, he means they stop allowing Mono to use their patent-encumbered implementations of Winforms, ASP.NET and ADO.NET. That is the glue code that allows a Mono app to become a Windows app on Windows, and that has always been what the controversy over Mono is about.
Well, not always. The more paranoid commenters here have tried to raise a controversy over the use of C# itself, but hopefully the legally binding "community promise" will put an end to that. WinForms, ASP.NET, and ADO.NET are what the controversy should be about.
That said: I don't believe there's any evidence that WinForms, ASP.NET, or ADO.NET are actually covered by patents at all, let alone evidence that the APIs couldn't be implemented in a way that worked around any such patents. There's only speculation: there's no explicit guarantee that a WinForms implementation is non-infringing, but the patent danger is still hypothetical and imaginary at this point.
Of course, using Mono/GTK# isn't a problem, as I think you pointed out, but judging from Mono's overall popularity in the Linux world, at least outside of Gnome, few people are really interested (for now) in doing that
Key words: "for now". I think people would become interested very quickly if Microsoft actually made a move toward stopping Mono from implementing Windows Forms.
No, for one thing I mean start threatening anyone who uses Mono for patent infringement.
In light of the recent legally binding "community promise", this is a non-starter. There is no patent danger from using C# or the CLI. Combine that with open source replacements for Microsoft's proprietary libraries (GTK# instead of Windows Forms, etc.) and patents are useless against Mono developers.
Staying compatible only until Microsoft decides it doesn't want Mono to be compatible.
What, you think they're going to stop people from running .NET 2.0 applications on Windows? Considering how many such apps exist, that would be suicidal, but even if it weren't a hilariously stupid idea, .NET 2.0 is already out there (and redistributable). Even Microsoft can't change the past.
Because you say one will, it's only logical to conclude the other will or may not be compatible. So whoever uses it may be locked into proprietary software then left out in the cold when support for it is dropped.
The other one isn't compatible with Mono and isn't meant to be, because it interfaces with hardware that doesn't have Linux drivers. I just mentioned it as evidence that even on Windows, no one is being forced to upgrade to newer .NET versions.
If a person wanted to they could still write software for Windows 3.x and those who have the OS can run it. But Someone running Vista will not.
Actually, it's only 64-bit Vista that can't run Win16 apps. 32-bit Vista still can. And running even 32-bit programs on 64-bit Linux is no picnic either, so I'm not sure how this point is supposed to relate to Microsoft.
With Mono, sure something may run on the current version of Mono today, but that does not mean Mono will be current in 5 or 10 years.
Mono isn't even "current" with .NET today, but again, no one cares about that. Everyone who targets Mono is aware of where it sits in relation to the latest .NET. If they just wanted to be "current", they wouldn't be using Mono in the first place.
Anytime MS wants to they can stop supporting Mono and make .net incompatible.
By "stop supporting Mono" you mean "stop supporting .NET 2.0", which they technically could do, but (1) it would be crazy, since there's so much .NET 2.0 software out there, and (2) they couldn't stop anyone from installing an old copy of .NET 2.0 (which is freely redistributable)... or, you know, installing Mono for Windows.
They do if they want to stay current, and I think anyone worth salt would want to stay current.
If they're using Mono to write software that runs on Linux, then no, they won't care about staying "current" with Microsoft's releases. They'll care about staying compatible, which means either using the latest version of Mono and all it provides (if they only care about Linux), or using the common subset of features supported by both Mono and .NET (if they're writing cross-platform apps).
Hell, even Windows developers don't necessarily care about staying current. I'm a developer on two commercial apps written in C#, and they both target .NET 2.0. In the case of one of them, that's specifically so that it will be compatible with Mono.
And when .net reaches 5.1 or 10.1?
By then, presumably Mono will have caught up with .NET 4.1 or 8.5.
By your reasoning people should still be using Windows 3.x. I doubt 1% do today.
I don't see how this is relevant. The Windows 3.x API was not submitted to an industry standards group and promoted as a cross-platform standard. No one has piles of Windows 3.x code that they expect to remain compatible with other platforms. No one is writing new code targeted to an open-source implementation of Windows 3.x.
The situation with Mono is different. If you write a bunch of C# code for Mono, using the features of .NET 2.0, because you want your software to run on Linux, you aren't going to give up on Linux compatibility and throw away all that investment just because Microsoft releases a shiny new version.
The only thing needed between "Microsoft releases a new version of .NET for Windows containing features Mono doesn't support" and "Linux developers are forced to switch to Microsoft software or stop using Mono" is the need to remain current.
You really think Linux developers are willing to give up on Linux just to "remain current" with Microsoft's releases? Seriously?
I'm enjoying my Logitech MX Revolution, has 3 buttons, a thumbwheel and a scrollwheel with swivel(so, 5 buttons total).
Sounds like you're missing some parts. My MX Revolution has:
left button
tilt wheel (up, down, left, right, click)
right button
search button
forward button
back button
thumbwheel (left, right, click)
Which is 7 to 13 buttons depending on whether you count the wheel movements.
You would say that, wouldn't you, greenhorn? ;)