There probably will be a dead tree book--but I seriously doubt that you will be able to physically hold it in your hands for a significant interval unless you're a world-class bodybuilder. Note that the special edition of The C++ Programming Language is over 1,000 pages, and it's over a decade old!

"Open" in "Open Cable" essentially means "open to more companies than just the two that dominated set top boxes when the standard was developed" (Scientific Atlanta and one other, I think Motorola); it has nothing to do with openness in the sense we understand it, alas.

"Unfortunately on the internet - and in free software in particular - we have a lot of people whose voices aren't heard very loudly, and we have to take their needs into accounts as well as those who are vocal."

Go ahead and call them the "Silent Majority". You know you want to.

What really surprised me, though, was how he just came out and said you don't want to make it too easy to figure out how to change things, and that letting the user customize things is undesirable..."And I think there is a lot of value to have that experience you show the world to be consistent. In GNOME2 we didn't do that particularly well because everyone's desktop was different." I think that GNOME3 really carries through the premise of gnome-screensaver, another result of Mr. McCann's work--in it, the user is the enemy, and can't be trusted not to do something evil if you let him configure things, (Kind of like the justification for DRM, come to think of it.)

It will collapse when the young finally revolt over being taxed the amounts needed to keep the elderly living in the style to which they've become accustomed.

Some Congresscritter will come up with the idea of making everyone with cell phones, VoIP, and broadband connections pay even more to subsidize the dwindling number of PSTN users.

Isn't it more accurate to say they get screwed over if they don't install Windows on every computer they sell?

Employer-subsidized health insurance is a result of having to get arond WWII wage controls (see http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/22/is-employer-based-health-insurance-worth-saving/ for info). Unfortunately, it continued after the war, and the result is that people who lose their jobs lose their insurance (that being the majority of the "N milliion uninsured" figure that is bandied about).

Um. remember Archimedes's Principle. Not the one about what is displaced when you put something in the water, this one: give me a positive real number, and no matter how small it is, there's an integer that I can multiply it by to make the product of the two as big as you want. Or, Senator Dirksen's more famous version: "A billion here, and a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money."

Yes, if entitlements aren't killed, nothing else matters, and the US will continue its plummet into ruin. That doesn't mean that small programs should be immune. Read a book called Demosclerosis. Small programs accumulate because the parasites are highly motivated, while the hosts have to put out a lot of effort for what is admittedly a small amount per victim.

No, a union is a cartel, like OPEC or de Beers. The only difference is that the Organization of Petroleum Extorting Countries are a cartel for oil; a union is a cartel for labor. (OK, that's not quite right; OPEC doesn't have the government to coerce people on their behalf, the way the unions have the NLRB or whatever might correspond to it in your country.) Both keep the price of their product artificially high. Unions also do their best to prevent competition. I recall when the bus drivers struck here in Des Moines, and the newspaper reported rocks being tossed off overpasses where buses passed.

Me too--just do it in a window manager-independent way.

People change their behavior in response to changes in tax law; how can that be predicted and taken into account?

Repeal the Sixteenth Amendment.

Kind of funny how "Microsoft can't help it if some users are stupid" gets trotted out when malware is under discussion, but "Linux is too difficult for Joe User/my grandma" is the line when the subject is Linux on the desktop.

Actually, it seems that his argument is that gdm has to start up a GNOME session so it can have power management consistent with GNOME... because surely nobody would ever use anything other than GNOME, right?

"Mono" is Spanish for "monkey". The people working on Mono are "Ximian" (simian). Why the monkey theme? Got me.