Now evil overlords will have to switch from keeping fluffy cats to keeping scary spiders. "Come into my lair, little one! Feeling a little sticky? Hearing a soft patter of giant fuzzy legs? Bwah ha ha ha ha ha!"
I need more than a dozen monitors to be more productive. Yes, I use that many windows and often twice that at the same time
Speaking as a UI designer, I really have a hard time understanding why you do that. If I were designing a window manager, I certainly would not expect a normal person to have 24 windows on the screen at once. Could you please enlighten us ignorant souls on what you have in them and why they all have to be visible simultaneously? This is a serious question, not just an attempt to bash your preferences. How about giving us a list containing each open window and what you have in each one? Then please explain why each one needs to be persistent. Why not just launch apps as you need them? Why do all these windows have to be overlapping and partially visible instead of fullscreen and switchable by Banner+#? If you do need to see more than one window at once, why don't you tile them instead of wasting your time manually positioning them "just right"? Do you primarily use the mouse to switch tasks, and if so, why, when using the keyboard is more efficient? Are you also a user with multiple virtual desktops? Could you please describe what you have on each one and why they can't be merged?
Where you do save a crapload of time is things like the integrated revision system, so when you edit a system file you can simply check it out and check it back in when you're finished.
If you want version control on system [config] files, it is equally easy to put/etc in a git repository. Same benefits, but without relying on an obsucre file system. Oh, and I can push the same config files and their full mod history to every computer on the network. Can your fancy ZFS do that? I thought not.
Or compiling everything with appropriate use of processor extensions.
Ever heard of Gentoo? It's quite a bit easier to use than your BSD ports system.
Not to mention the much easier process of eliminating unneeded modules from the kernel.
I don't know what you're talking about. Linux always supported module unloading, and will usually do it automatically with no user intervention required.
It's time to stop the insanity and stop treating 64 bit stuff as if it's some temporary add-on that will go away. Get over it people, nearly every desktop CPU in the world is 64 bit. There is no reason to rddun a 32 bit Linux any more. I can see it sticking around on Windows, since there's all this legacy software that people can't run any other way, but on Linux everything is natively compiled to 64 bit already. If you want dual-arch, fine, but put the obsolete 32 bit stuff in a specially named dir, like/lib32, instead of treating it like it's going to stay around forever.
And enough with those bogus arguments of "programs not needing 64 bit address space". That's irrelevant. It is much more useful to have a single target platform to develop for, and it should be 64 bit. Additionally, there's only two architectures left: x86_64 and ARM. ARM is used on handheld stuff and sometimes on servers. x86_64 is used on everything else. Since desktop and mobile applications usually use a different codebase anyway, this gives developers just one target to develop for, which is a very big deal indeed. Less work for developers - shorter time to release and cheaper software. It really is a good thing.
How about having the government use eminent domain to seize the patents covering industry standard practices? If this is not a good use for eminent domain, nothing else is.
Since all the games I want to play crash wine and only run on Windows, I have to reboot whenever I want some entertainment. I don't expect companies to start developing Linux games anytime soon, seeing how the driver situation is, so I expect to continue rebooting frequently for a long time yet.
So what do you suggest for a solution? Copyright it and hope that respect for the law will persuade enough people to pay for a license? Sorry, I don't think that will work.
Of course it will work. It has been working just fine for pretty much every company making software since there was software. It has made Bill Gates a very rich man and allows countless one-man shareware shops to eke out a decent living. Closed source is the only way to go if you want to sell. Don't look for a solution where there is no problem.
But you don't think support and service works either, and Red Hat has made it work.
RedHat is a large corporation and has the resource to provide service and support to other large corporations. You don't. If you are a programmer, you also likely lack the skills for that job and would suck at it even more than an Indian call center while having to charge twice as much to stay above the poverty line. Large corporations are the only ones who will buy support contracts. Regular users never do because they know tech support is worthless. Companies only buy it to have somebody to blame. Since you have no net worth to steal in a lawsuit, you are largely worthless even as a scapegoat. So no, selling service and support will not work for you unless you are a large corporation like RedHat.
You didn't mention ad revenue, and that's fine. Ad revenue cannot start projects, it can only help projects that have already achieved some popularity.
If your project is GPLed, nothing stops people from rewriting the URLs in your code to point to their ads or their malware. If that spreads and users get infected, you'll be buried in lawsuits.
Even if you wrote some successful software and managed to sell access to it, it only takes a few people to duplicate its functionality
Ha ha ha ha. You obviously have never tried to do that. Any substantial program will require a serious amount of work on the implementation. It's not enough to just come up with the idea; I have great ideas every day. It's the great implementation that turns a great idea into great software. Writing good code takes time. If it takes you a year to write your program, it is going to take at least that long to make a knockoff. Sure, being free would tend to steer my customers to the copycat, but he is the one taking a loss here, with all that development time. And I can always come up with some way to improve something, while he'll be stuck playing a catch-up game with no pay. How much self-sacrifice for the public good do you think he's capable of?
We need some other system. I think I know what it must be: some form of patronage.
So you want to replace a system rewarding good programmers with a system rewarding well-connected bootlickers? A system where you would have to beg for a job and beg and mooch to keep it? That's what they do in the academia, you know, with the government being the patron dispensing grants. Or maybe you're talking about the venture capitalists who will be happy to patronize your project as long as they get to keep all the profits and all the control. Or maybe you'll come to your senses and realize that having your own business and selling closed source software really is the right way to go.
Naturally, all this only applies if you want to make money from your project, which was the beginning of this thread. The GPL is the license you choose if you don't want to make any money and don't want anybody else (except possibly large corporations like RedHat) to make any money from it either. On the other hand, if you just want to release code for whatever other reason, choose the MIT license.
The price you charge for the software is only limited by what your customers are willing to pay and you can't charge anything more for the source code.
You are forgetting one crucial difference: the GPL does not allow any restrictions to be placed on redistribution of the software other than the ones explicitly mentioned in the license (such as the source code availability requirement). When you purchase a proprietary program you are not allowed to give it out for free to anybody. You are not allowed to upload it to a torrent site and let the whole world have it. When people do that, they commit copyright infringement, which is a crime, even though it is seldom prosecuted. When you pay for a GPL program, you are not bound by any agreement to not redistribute it, so it becomes perfectly legal to give it away for free to everybody. The consumer thereafter has a choice: download it for free or pay you for it. With proprietary software the former choice is illegal, which serves as a deterrent to some people. With GPL software both options are equally legal and create the same result, so which choice do you think the user will take? I'm betting you won't make a dime after the free torrents and mirrors pop up.
Of course, GNU does not really think you should be making any money that way anyhow. If you were to actually read the links you provided, you'd see that GNU does not want you selling the actual software in the first place. The fee they suggest charging is the copying and distribution fee and other service fees related to the software, rather than the software itself. Copying fee is not justifiable any more, since physical distribution media is more or less obsolete. Other services like offering support or modifications are likewise impractical, and generally beside the point because you'd be making money from the wrong kind of labor - customer service instead of software development.
Some of us want to be software developers rather than helpdesk jockeys and get paid for it. It's what we're good at, and we want to be paid for it. For writing code, not for holding customer hands, or for getting yelled at, or for pleading to big corporations to "please please buy my custom splash screen". We also recognize that there are people like you and Richard Stallman who dislike that attitude and want us all unemployed and dead. All I have to say about that is: you can keep your GPL and your philosophy and get out of our hair.
The problem with GPL is that nobody can take the code private and make money selling it. Many people like me think this is unfair and tend not to provide unpaid work. I sometimes send bug reports to a GPL project, but would never even consider contributing any code. GPL people feel the same way about my MIT licensed projects. So before you change the license, be sure you are on the side you want to be on. I have no numbers, but you should not just assume one side is larger than the other.
So tell me, if EA can deduct all developer salaries as R&D expenses, why can't an indie developer likewise deduct his entire paycheck and pay no income tax?
r u - would you be so kind to let me know if you are brb - I am terribly sorry for the interruption, but I must leave you for a moment to attend to the important business of flossing my cat bf - gentleman caller gf - imaginary friend thx - thank you so much! I would be forever in your debt, but that would not be politically correct rofl - your anachronistic babbling amuses me rl - that rustic, charming place where you live rtfm - I suggest you improve your intelligence before continuing this conversation fyi - but I am sure you do not care for it ftw - is a much better alternative that you would have thought of if you were younger afaik - by saying this I do not wish to appear to actually know anything, as that would result in ostracism by my peers
Correlation does not imply causation. Just because people with higher incomes have fewer children doesn't mean raising incomes will lower birthrates. If you think about it for a second, it becomes obvious that causation here goes the other way. Incomes will not rise until birth rates go down and families can start accumulating capital in form of houses, personal possessions, and money to spend on increasing income through education, entrepreneural financing, and just plain survival until the next paycheck without going into debt. A family with two children can do all these things easily. A family with six can not do them at all, since capital needs triple with each generation, and the existing capital dwindles at the same rate.
It always amuses me to hear all these ravings about "getting off this rock", as if doing so would somehow be of a direct benefit to you. Colonization of other planets may indeed eventually happen, in order to make our species less vulnerable to extinction due to damage or even destruction of the Earth. Likewise, we may want to send colonies to other stars to avoid going extinct if something were to happen to ours. What is definitely not going to happen is outward population migration to those other planets to alleviate population pressure, to breach new frontiers, or to find trade opportunities.
The part you're missing is just how outrageously expensive it is to move anything in space. That is always going to be true not because "I say so", but because of the basic laws of physics that dictate that any movement of matter through our solar system or between stars is going to cost a lot of energy. Energy is a limited resource and always will be. Even if we manage to discover fusion (which has been "20 years in the future" for as long as I've been alive), fuel will still cost money to mine and purify. The fixed energy cost of transport between large energy wells such as Mars and Earth will always greatly exceed the cost of just making whatever it is at the destination.
Earth has all the elements you can find on Mars or other planets, or the asteroids. They are all present here in greater or equal abundance and purity than you will find out there. Even if you had to sieve the ocean for them, it would still be cheaper than getting it off Mars and all the way over here. Physics and economics pretty much ensure that there will be no trade between planets. As for trading or recreational travel between stars, that is absolutely not going to happen. The amount of energy involved there is truly astronomical, and after we send the initial colony there will be no justification whatsoever to send anything else. Even the initial colony will almost certainly not carry people. It is much more cost effective to send a robotic ship with frozen embryos.
Once the colonies exist on other planets or other stars, they will have no tangible effect on Earth. You will never move to Mars, because it costs so much to travel, and because it is so much easier to breed people who are already there. Sure, there might be a brief initial surge of colonists, but very soon after that, in a few generations at most, immigration will be restricted by the Martians who'll want to keep Mars to themselves and their descendants. Breeding there will always be more cost effective than importing Earth overflows, and before too long they'll have their own population pressures without importing them.
So no trade, no immigration, and very expensive travel that only the very rich can afford. That's all the colonies will mean to regular people like us. We'll still have the very same problems on Earth that will in no way be solved or even alleviated by those colonies. The colonies' benefit is to the species, not to individuals.
I'm the user - the one who actually uses them, and as such is the only person qualified to make the judgement. You don't have to be a whale to write "Moby Dick", and you most certainly do not have to be a contributor or even a developer to notice that your drivers are slow and buggy.
Most embryonic stem cell research is done on mouse embryos, not human ones. Human embryonic stem cells are finicky about their environment and are generally a royal PITA to work with. There is very little benefit to working with human cells when you're researching basic mechanisms of pluripotency, since they are the same in the mouse cells. Frankly, the main reasons for pushing the switch to human cells are political, and even if you don't need them or want them, the boss may push it on you anyway because the results would look "better" when you try to submit them to Nature.
Innovation does not always lead to future profit. Sometimes you sink billions into a project only to find out that it can't possibly work. Taking chances like that requires disposable income, which is not available when times are bad. In a boom a company can easily afford to invest in long-term projects that provide no immediate benefits, but now when companies struggle to stay afloat amid all that debt they took on while betting on infinite growth, it would be totally insane to spend money on flakey things like research.
90% of the population are not paid by the hour, so they don't really care how long it will take. Learning something takes conscious effort, and therefore is hard. Only the boss cares, and that's why he sends them to training seminars.
When on this subject, I always recall that great movie "You've Got Mail", where a small "Shop Around The Corner" is out-foxed by a big chain. "Can we save the Shop Around The Corner?" Asks Kathleen Kelley and the crowd goes wild. Of course, while offering verbal encouragement, the crowd continues to not offer its business. Is that evil? Uncharitable? Unwise? "I've heard Joe Fox compare books to olive oil", says Kathleen Kelley. Kathleen Kelley is a walking encyclopedia on the subject of children's books and can offer you advice on what to read with your kids. Kathleen Kelley hosts a reading hour to get kids interested in reading. Kathleen Kelley knows who you are and always offers service with a smile. Is it worth it?
The Shop Around The Corner employs four people: the owner, Kathleen Kelley, and two college students. Let's peg decent wages for them at, say, $100000, $60000, and 2x$20000. In New York, you can barely live on this. Let's add rent on the place at $20000/year, and other miscellaneous expenses of $20000/year on business license, electricity, insurance, whatever. That comes to $240000/year, $960/day. "Is that why it costs so much?" "That's why it's worth so much." The store is open, say, 12 hours a day, 8am-8pm. That's $80/hour, or $1.33/minute. How fast can you check out? Friendly service with a smile takes time.
Small shops can get away with higher markup. The books, after all, are already there, so there's an expectation of immediate satisfaction which can tolerate a higher price. Let's say $10 markup for hardcovers and $2 on paparbacks, which is just barely on the line between making a profit and losing your customers. If an average customer buys a hardcover and two paperbacks, each checkout nets you $14. You need to get a customer like that every 10 minutes to get the aforementioned income level. Now, if you've ever been to a small bookstore, you'd know that they are usually empty. I don't know if people hate books, or what, but I've never seen more than ten people in a store at once, and that's a crowd. That was twenty years ago. I imagine now things are even worse. I can not imagine how anyone can run a small bookstore profitably.
What exactly do you get at "Shop Around The Corner" that you do not get on Amazon? Customer service. If you are the kind who likes to chat, to ask advice, and to receive books from a real human being, that must be invaluable to you. Only, can't you get better social interaction by spending time with your friends? Ok, there's also advice about what to read. After all, Kathleen Kelley knows everything. Well, that's why we have friends who tell us what we might like, book clubs, review sites, and amazon lists and recommendations. Ok, but isn't it nice to pick up a real book, feel the binding, smell the pages, and flip through it to see if what's inside? A nice thing to have indeed, but is it really worth a $10 markup?
The bottom line is: you go to the bookstore to buy a book. You don't need to go there to socialize or to ask advice. You just need the book. Amazon gets you the book with minimum overhead, so you can spend that money you saved on something you like instead of on keeping Kathleen Kelley in business. Oh, by the way, the author of the book is surely more important to you than she is, and the authors get 40% royalties when they publish on Amazon, and maybe 10% elsewhere (if they haggle real hard). Isn't it better to reward the creators rather than useless, but nice, middlemen?
So it's a tablet with an operating system that nobody develops for (WebOS), that puts all my stuff "in the cloud", that looks as locked down as the iPad without any of the benefits of the iPad. I mean, seriously, what in the world am I going to do with this thing?
Slashdot Mirror
Now evil overlords will have to switch from keeping fluffy cats to keeping scary spiders. "Come into my lair, little one! Feeling a little sticky? Hearing a soft patter of giant fuzzy legs? Bwah ha ha ha ha ha!"
Once again, people versed in one discipline apply their skills to another with results that sound fancy and expensive, while really are just nonsense.
Speaking as a UI designer, I really have a hard time understanding why you do that. If I were designing a window manager, I certainly would not expect a normal person to have 24 windows on the screen at once. Could you please enlighten us ignorant souls on what you have in them and why they all have to be visible simultaneously? This is a serious question, not just an attempt to bash your preferences. How about giving us a list containing each open window and what you have in each one? Then please explain why each one needs to be persistent. Why not just launch apps as you need them? Why do all these windows have to be overlapping and partially visible instead of fullscreen and switchable by Banner+#? If you do need to see more than one window at once, why don't you tile them instead of wasting your time manually positioning them "just right"? Do you primarily use the mouse to switch tasks, and if so, why, when using the keyboard is more efficient? Are you also a user with multiple virtual desktops? Could you please describe what you have on each one and why they can't be merged?
These benchmarks say that Linux is usually faster than any BSD flavor.
As for stability, I can't find any definite stats on this. Personally, haven't seen a Linux crash since 1997, and that's a pretty damn long time.
If you want version control on system [config] files, it is equally easy to put /etc in a git repository. Same benefits, but without relying on an obsucre file system. Oh, and I can push the same config files and their full mod history to every computer on the network. Can your fancy ZFS do that? I thought not.
Ever heard of Gentoo? It's quite a bit easier to use than your BSD ports system.
I don't know what you're talking about. Linux always supported module unloading, and will usually do it automatically with no user intervention required.
It's time to stop the insanity and stop treating 64 bit stuff as if it's some temporary add-on that will go away. Get over it people, nearly every desktop CPU in the world is 64 bit. There is no reason to rddun a 32 bit Linux any more. I can see it sticking around on Windows, since there's all this legacy software that people can't run any other way, but on Linux everything is natively compiled to 64 bit already. If you want dual-arch, fine, but put the obsolete 32 bit stuff in a specially named dir, like /lib32, instead of treating it like it's going to stay around forever.
And enough with those bogus arguments of "programs not needing 64 bit address space". That's irrelevant. It is much more useful to have a single target platform to develop for, and it should be 64 bit. Additionally, there's only two architectures left: x86_64 and ARM. ARM is used on handheld stuff and sometimes on servers. x86_64 is used on everything else. Since desktop and mobile applications usually use a different codebase anyway, this gives developers just one target to develop for, which is a very big deal indeed. Less work for developers - shorter time to release and cheaper software. It really is a good thing.
How about having the government use eminent domain to seize the patents covering industry standard practices? If this is not a good use for eminent domain, nothing else is.
The stone with rounded corners was found to infringe on Apple patents, so they had to use a square one. Square stones don't roll.
Since all the games I want to play crash wine and only run on Windows, I have to reboot whenever I want some entertainment. I don't expect companies to start developing Linux games anytime soon, seeing how the driver situation is, so I expect to continue rebooting frequently for a long time yet.
Where's the sandwich? I watched the whole demo and I didn't see it. Or is it like the cake again?
Of course it will work. It has been working just fine for pretty much every company making software since there was software. It has made Bill Gates a very rich man and allows countless one-man shareware shops to eke out a decent living. Closed source is the only way to go if you want to sell. Don't look for a solution where there is no problem.
RedHat is a large corporation and has the resource to provide service and support to other large corporations. You don't. If you are a programmer, you also likely lack the skills for that job and would suck at it even more than an Indian call center while having to charge twice as much to stay above the poverty line. Large corporations are the only ones who will buy support contracts. Regular users never do because they know tech support is worthless. Companies only buy it to have somebody to blame. Since you have no net worth to steal in a lawsuit, you are largely worthless even as a scapegoat. So no, selling service and support will not work for you unless you are a large corporation like RedHat.
If your project is GPLed, nothing stops people from rewriting the URLs in your code to point to their ads or their malware. If that spreads and users get infected, you'll be buried in lawsuits.
Ha ha ha ha. You obviously have never tried to do that. Any substantial program will require a serious amount of work on the implementation. It's not enough to just come up with the idea; I have great ideas every day. It's the great implementation that turns a great idea into great software. Writing good code takes time. If it takes you a year to write your program, it is going to take at least that long to make a knockoff. Sure, being free would tend to steer my customers to the copycat, but he is the one taking a loss here, with all that development time. And I can always come up with some way to improve something, while he'll be stuck playing a catch-up game with no pay. How much self-sacrifice for the public good do you think he's capable of?
So you want to replace a system rewarding good programmers with a system rewarding well-connected bootlickers? A system where you would have to beg for a job and beg and mooch to keep it? That's what they do in the academia, you know, with the government being the patron dispensing grants. Or maybe you're talking about the venture capitalists who will be happy to patronize your project as long as they get to keep all the profits and all the control. Or maybe you'll come to your senses and realize that having your own business and selling closed source software really is the right way to go.
Naturally, all this only applies if you want to make money from your project, which was the beginning of this thread. The GPL is the license you choose if you don't want to make any money and don't want anybody else (except possibly large corporations like RedHat) to make any money from it either. On the other hand, if you just want to release code for whatever other reason, choose the MIT license.
You are forgetting one crucial difference: the GPL does not allow any restrictions to be placed on redistribution of the software other than the ones explicitly mentioned in the license (such as the source code availability requirement). When you purchase a proprietary program you are not allowed to give it out for free to anybody. You are not allowed to upload it to a torrent site and let the whole world have it. When people do that, they commit copyright infringement, which is a crime, even though it is seldom prosecuted. When you pay for a GPL program, you are not bound by any agreement to not redistribute it, so it becomes perfectly legal to give it away for free to everybody. The consumer thereafter has a choice: download it for free or pay you for it. With proprietary software the former choice is illegal, which serves as a deterrent to some people. With GPL software both options are equally legal and create the same result, so which choice do you think the user will take? I'm betting you won't make a dime after the free torrents and mirrors pop up.
Of course, GNU does not really think you should be making any money that way anyhow. If you were to actually read the links you provided, you'd see that GNU does not want you selling the actual software in the first place. The fee they suggest charging is the copying and distribution fee and other service fees related to the software, rather than the software itself. Copying fee is not justifiable any more, since physical distribution media is more or less obsolete. Other services like offering support or modifications are likewise impractical, and generally beside the point because you'd be making money from the wrong kind of labor - customer service instead of software development.
Some of us want to be software developers rather than helpdesk jockeys and get paid for it. It's what we're good at, and we want to be paid for it. For writing code, not for holding customer hands, or for getting yelled at, or for pleading to big corporations to "please please buy my custom splash screen". We also recognize that there are people like you and Richard Stallman who dislike that attitude and want us all unemployed and dead. All I have to say about that is: you can keep your GPL and your philosophy and get out of our hair.
The problem with GPL is that nobody can take the code private and make money selling it. Many people like me think this is unfair and tend not to provide unpaid work. I sometimes send bug reports to a GPL project, but would never even consider contributing any code. GPL people feel the same way about my MIT licensed projects. So before you change the license, be sure you are on the side you want to be on. I have no numbers, but you should not just assume one side is larger than the other.
So tell me, if EA can deduct all developer salaries as R&D expenses, why can't an indie developer likewise deduct his entire paycheck and pay no income tax?
r u - would you be so kind to let me know if you are
brb - I am terribly sorry for the interruption, but I must leave you for a moment to attend to the important business of flossing my cat
bf - gentleman caller
gf - imaginary friend
thx - thank you so much! I would be forever in your debt, but that would not be politically correct
rofl - your anachronistic babbling amuses me
rl - that rustic, charming place where you live
rtfm - I suggest you improve your intelligence before continuing this conversation
fyi - but I am sure you do not care for it
ftw - is a much better alternative that you would have thought of if you were younger
afaik - by saying this I do not wish to appear to actually know anything, as that would result in ostracism by my peers
The author of the article obviously does not know how to touch type and so was unable to create a longer article before the publication deadline.
Correlation does not imply causation. Just because people with higher incomes have fewer children doesn't mean raising incomes will lower birthrates. If you think about it for a second, it becomes obvious that causation here goes the other way. Incomes will not rise until birth rates go down and families can start accumulating capital in form of houses, personal possessions, and money to spend on increasing income through education, entrepreneural financing, and just plain survival until the next paycheck without going into debt. A family with two children can do all these things easily. A family with six can not do them at all, since capital needs triple with each generation, and the existing capital dwindles at the same rate.
It always amuses me to hear all these ravings about "getting off this rock", as if doing so would somehow be of a direct benefit to you. Colonization of other planets may indeed eventually happen, in order to make our species less vulnerable to extinction due to damage or even destruction of the Earth. Likewise, we may want to send colonies to other stars to avoid going extinct if something were to happen to ours. What is definitely not going to happen is outward population migration to those other planets to alleviate population pressure, to breach new frontiers, or to find trade opportunities.
The part you're missing is just how outrageously expensive it is to move anything in space. That is always going to be true not because "I say so", but because of the basic laws of physics that dictate that any movement of matter through our solar system or between stars is going to cost a lot of energy. Energy is a limited resource and always will be. Even if we manage to discover fusion (which has been "20 years in the future" for as long as I've been alive), fuel will still cost money to mine and purify. The fixed energy cost of transport between large energy wells such as Mars and Earth will always greatly exceed the cost of just making whatever it is at the destination.
Earth has all the elements you can find on Mars or other planets, or the asteroids. They are all present here in greater or equal abundance and purity than you will find out there. Even if you had to sieve the ocean for them, it would still be cheaper than getting it off Mars and all the way over here. Physics and economics pretty much ensure that there will be no trade between planets. As for trading or recreational travel between stars, that is absolutely not going to happen. The amount of energy involved there is truly astronomical, and after we send the initial colony there will be no justification whatsoever to send anything else. Even the initial colony will almost certainly not carry people. It is much more cost effective to send a robotic ship with frozen embryos.
Once the colonies exist on other planets or other stars, they will have no tangible effect on Earth. You will never move to Mars, because it costs so much to travel, and because it is so much easier to breed people who are already there. Sure, there might be a brief initial surge of colonists, but very soon after that, in a few generations at most, immigration will be restricted by the Martians who'll want to keep Mars to themselves and their descendants. Breeding there will always be more cost effective than importing Earth overflows, and before too long they'll have their own population pressures without importing them.
So no trade, no immigration, and very expensive travel that only the very rich can afford. That's all the colonies will mean to regular people like us. We'll still have the very same problems on Earth that will in no way be solved or even alleviated by those colonies. The colonies' benefit is to the species, not to individuals.
> who are you to say the drivers are crap?
I'm the user - the one who actually uses them, and as such is the only person qualified to make the judgement. You don't have to be a whale to write "Moby Dick", and you most certainly do not have to be a contributor or even a developer to notice that your drivers are slow and buggy.
Most embryonic stem cell research is done on mouse embryos, not human ones. Human embryonic stem cells are finicky about their environment and are generally a royal PITA to work with. There is very little benefit to working with human cells when you're researching basic mechanisms of pluripotency, since they are the same in the mouse cells. Frankly, the main reasons for pushing the switch to human cells are political, and even if you don't need them or want them, the boss may push it on you anyway because the results would look "better" when you try to submit them to Nature.
Innovation does not always lead to future profit. Sometimes you sink billions into a project only to find out that it can't possibly work. Taking chances like that requires disposable income, which is not available when times are bad. In a boom a company can easily afford to invest in long-term projects that provide no immediate benefits, but now when companies struggle to stay afloat amid all that debt they took on while betting on infinite growth, it would be totally insane to spend money on flakey things like research.
90% of the population are not paid by the hour, so they don't really care how long it will take. Learning something takes conscious effort, and therefore is hard. Only the boss cares, and that's why he sends them to training seminars.
When on this subject, I always recall that great movie "You've Got Mail", where a small "Shop Around The Corner" is out-foxed by a big chain. "Can we save the Shop Around The Corner?" Asks Kathleen Kelley and the crowd goes wild. Of course, while offering verbal encouragement, the crowd continues to not offer its business. Is that evil? Uncharitable? Unwise? "I've heard Joe Fox compare books to olive oil", says Kathleen Kelley. Kathleen Kelley is a walking encyclopedia on the subject of children's books and can offer you advice on what to read with your kids. Kathleen Kelley hosts a reading hour to get kids interested in reading. Kathleen Kelley knows who you are and always offers service with a smile. Is it worth it?
The Shop Around The Corner employs four people: the owner, Kathleen Kelley, and two college students. Let's peg decent wages for them at, say, $100000, $60000, and 2x$20000. In New York, you can barely live on this. Let's add rent on the place at $20000/year, and other miscellaneous expenses of $20000/year on business license, electricity, insurance, whatever. That comes to $240000/year, $960/day. "Is that why it costs so much?" "That's why it's worth so much." The store is open, say, 12 hours a day, 8am-8pm. That's $80/hour, or $1.33/minute. How fast can you check out? Friendly service with a smile takes time.
Small shops can get away with higher markup. The books, after all, are already there, so there's an expectation of immediate satisfaction which can tolerate a higher price. Let's say $10 markup for hardcovers and $2 on paparbacks, which is just barely on the line between making a profit and losing your customers. If an average customer buys a hardcover and two paperbacks, each checkout nets you $14. You need to get a customer like that every 10 minutes to get the aforementioned income level. Now, if you've ever been to a small bookstore, you'd know that they are usually empty. I don't know if people hate books, or what, but I've never seen more than ten people in a store at once, and that's a crowd. That was twenty years ago. I imagine now things are even worse. I can not imagine how anyone can run a small bookstore profitably.
What exactly do you get at "Shop Around The Corner" that you do not get on Amazon? Customer service. If you are the kind who likes to chat, to ask advice, and to receive books from a real human being, that must be invaluable to you. Only, can't you get better social interaction by spending time with your friends? Ok, there's also advice about what to read. After all, Kathleen Kelley knows everything. Well, that's why we have friends who tell us what we might like, book clubs, review sites, and amazon lists and recommendations. Ok, but isn't it nice to pick up a real book, feel the binding, smell the pages, and flip through it to see if what's inside? A nice thing to have indeed, but is it really worth a $10 markup?
The bottom line is: you go to the bookstore to buy a book. You don't need to go there to socialize or to ask advice. You just need the book. Amazon gets you the book with minimum overhead, so you can spend that money you saved on something you like instead of on keeping Kathleen Kelley in business. Oh, by the way, the author of the book is surely more important to you than she is, and the authors get 40% royalties when they publish on Amazon, and maybe 10% elsewhere (if they haggle real hard). Isn't it better to reward the creators rather than useless, but nice, middlemen?
So it's a tablet with an operating system that nobody develops for (WebOS), that puts all my stuff "in the cloud", that looks as locked down as the iPad without any of the benefits of the iPad. I mean, seriously, what in the world am I going to do with this thing?
Let's not forget that the essense of GPL is not that anyone can use it, but that everyone who uses it must pass it on to others.