Indeed. I wonder how much the Bill of Materials is. The innovation premium appears to be too high on this one.

Cars are quite reasonably priced in US. Why are motorcycles so expensive though? (lack of a mass market making them special interest products?) For the price of an $800 electric wheel, one can buy an entire motorcycle from a recognized brand in Asia (starting from $500), where cars cost about the same as in US.

Unpaid, hobby work can produce Dillo. It cannot produce Firefox or WebKit. A Dillo does not diminish the value of the paid programmers at Mozilla.

Open Source allows money making vendors to collaborate. For instance, the Apache project produces open source code from many profitable vendors. Each project may not be viable when executed by any single vendor. But together, it makes the work lighter and the individual vendors can focus and compete on their core strengths while sharing the common load. Note that everyone is making money in the process.

> even though about 99% make zero money

Where are you drawing these numbers from? Most of the quality open source code is from paid people working on the clock. Are there many small projects done off the clock? Sure. But a very large chunk of critical and widely adopted code is created and maintained by paid people, with occasional exceptions leading to bugs like Heartbleed.

There are projects that are meant to be open source projects (especially common infrastructure bits that we can all agree on) and there are projects that make economic sense only as proprietary projects and there is stuff in between. Open source is adding value, not diminishing it. You are seeing software value as a closed system when it isn't. Many of the traditional ideas of material markets don't exactly translate to software markets. Given the vibrancy and growth of software markets, it is that the other [markets and human enterprises] should take lessons from software markets when valid, not that the software markets should learn from classical markets.

You don't understand open source at all. There is nothing that says you cannot have a business model on top of open source. Most of the open source software I use is written by paid programmers.

Also, not every creative activity needs to be an economic activity. Many of the cherished human accomplishments through history were not driven by economic motives. Only a subset of activities which can be predictably modeled with cost-benefit analyses lend themselves to be cast as economic activities. If you entirely stick to such things, you will have more in common with ants and bees than with being human.

When I do work for an economic motive, I have expectations of fairness, transparency and justice. I do not surrender these expectations by merely engaging in non-economic activity.

> Russia thinks so. China does too.

The Russians and the Chinese think he is an *American* Patriot.

> Can you be a patriot to more than one country?

Sure. People have dual citizenships and they can act in the better interests of both countries. Most first generation Americans have dual loyalties that are not in conflict.

What stopped you from using your Dell after 3 years? Did it break? Did Dell refuse to fix it?

I blame the mobile OS vendors for this, especially in case of Android. A modern mobile OS must give full control for the user to understand and control which apps are accessing which data services. The user should be able to have a log of all these requests. The user should be able to wire fake data sources to these apps. There are very few apps that I would trust with my contacts list, account names and location information. Cyanogen Mod is working towards this and Google's attempts to acquire it do not engender any trust. The last company with legitimate use for Cyanogen Mod would be Google.

Jokes aside, Democracy game series is critically acclaimed and regarded as even educational.

Which better technology sites? Which editors are you referring to?

Baloney. I learnt it that way and it was a waste of time. Math should be about learning the splendor of numbers, shapes, change etc... not about learning to be a clerk in a pre-digital age. I recommend you to read "A Mathematician’s Lament" by Paul Lockhart. Don't argue with me. Argue against his arguments.

I was thinking of the LiveCD they provide. I agree that it should not be called a distro since it is just an optional build environment.

Does anyone use LFS for production at all? It is more of a learning distro.

Suse minimal install used about 7MB RAM to run, when I tested it some 3 years ago. Most popular server Linux distros provide a minimal option. Ubuntu had (had - because I am not sure if it is still being maintained) JeOS (Just Enough OS) just for VMs.

Evolution and social studies, I get. But math? How is that even remotely against their religion? Wasn't most of school math present or developed during caliphate days? Algebra is an Arabic word. Sure, Geometry was developed adequately before their religion came along and they stopped short of Calculus. But in what conceivable way would math be seen as against their religion? I am almost tempted to smell pre-war propaganda that exaggerates some real findings.

> 4mbps is not "enough" for the modern Internet

Oh, it is enough for Internet as it stands today. It may not be enough for poorly optimized sites and services, but it is otherwise fine.

> even low bandwidth streams wouldn't work well.

I am not in US. So I don't do Hulu or Netflix. I do however do a lot of YouTube. YouTube classifies 360p as low-def. 480p as standard-def. I do 360p, with ease, on my *1 mbps* connection.

I also do Coursera. Its 480p videos are very well compressed. 1 mbps is about 7.5 MB/min. Coursera vids are often about 1.5-3 MB/min, and not commonly, 5 MB/min. I used to do video conferencing for work with 6 other people on the same 1 mbps connection.

Video compression technology has come a long way in the last few years. Google's VP9 codec is said to do 1080p at under 3 mbps.

I am not disputing that more bandwidth is always good and I certainly would not mind more. Telcos do need to keep up with times to earn their keep. But I do want to make a point that you can do a lot with humble speeds and quite comfortably at that. I feel that the things that I am missing are only a few unimportant things. I have used Internet at 100 mbps at the university and so know what it is like. But it has not been hard to adapt to much slower speeds. I can actually pay US prices and get typical US residential speeds. But meh, this works well enough.

> In a year or two, when it becomes clear that there are certain kinds of things that can only be done on that years' hardware

Rather than argue speculatively like this, why not argue more concretely with a case where what we have have today is not possible with 3 or 4 year old hardware? I can't think of anything off the top of my head. Even if there is some technique like that, how widespread is its use in today's content? And how much would a person miss by not having that itty bitty feature?

PC gaming has worked fine on 5 (or more) year old hardware for a while now. It is not a requirement to have to max out every setting of diminishing return, all the time, or to miss an occasional Crysis like game that is intended to show the future than anything else. Our lives won't be empty without that extra little post-processing, which in most cases, would not even be something we would even notice unless specifically told about it. Statistically speaking, the users that chase the edge are a very small minority. Yet, we make them the face of PC gaming and chase away regular people to console gaming, which is far more expensive once all the costs are exposed, based on this faux need to upgrade constantly.