To be fair, trademarks would still be around...

If it's a device someone else built that you yourself is trying to replicate in your own environment, then it would be perfectly fine to do so. Those certifications are first and foremost intended as a safeguard measure so that device manufacturers does not sell equipment that are hazardous in any way. Electricity is, after all, not very healthy in large quantities, and neither is radiation.

However, in your home, noone can tell you what you can and can't build. A home-built device could be every bit as safe as an official one, but since it is home built, there are no guarantees a faulty soldering may, say, bypass a certain part making the product overheat and release poisonous gas. Therefore such a device may not be sold, but it may very well be built, at your own expense and risk.

That's easy. Hardware once created is permanent. Take the good old NES console - it's still the same old console now, as it was 1985. There's almost 30 years between that!

Therefore it won't be hard at all to get a consumer device CSA-certified. After all, some company is producing that device, meaning they are in control of how, when and why it is built. That doesn't change even if the hardware is open.

Open Hardware means the schematics are open for everyone to make use of. It does not mean that you can magically 3D-print your own super-awesome graphics card (atleast not yet) - it would require a lot of time and effort to create that card, even with the help of an RPM (Rapid Prototyping Machine) and open schematics. It is, however, easier to add your own stuff to the hardware and modify it to better suit your own needs, if you have the skill and inclination to do so. Doing that will void your warranty though, so watch out!

You seem to not have your facts straight. First off you are describing anarchy, and while anarchy is a nice thought anarchy can never exist naturally, it's fleeting state exists in the same way as alkali metals exists in nature. As part of a greater whole.

Secondly, your definition of anarchy is completely wrong. Allow me to fix it for you. "To them, freedom means being able to do whatever they want whenever they want in any way they want as long as it doesn't limit the freedoms of others."

From what I gather, it's not *that* bad - most apps depending on systemd do so for the cgroups support. If one could extract the cgroups functionality into a separate library and get projects to use that instead, the need for systemd would be a lot less.

Systemd is eating up everything low-level though. Before systemd, a Linux system would look like this:

Kernel -> (collection of init/syslog/pam/udev/whatever) -> Bash -> GUI

Now it's

Kernel -> systemd -> Bash -> GUI

And to be quite honest, I'm not sure if systemd will leave Bash well enough alone, either. I for one prefer uselessd over systemd. Others may disagree.

I don't have the time to do it myself, but check out Mediagoblin and BuddyCloud - If you can figure out a way to replace BCs media server with Mediagoblin it would probably solve everything.

And I think the absolutely best chance of success would be if one made a social "network" that allowed one to share (and possibly monetize your own) content - think Youtube, but distributed and not limited to movies but to everything - pictures, audio, video, blog posts etc. :)

Best way to accomplish that using current technology would be to use BuddyCloud and replace its mediaserver with GNU Media Goblin. In the future however, it might be possible to do this without administering a physical server - it'll all be decentralised and in the cloud. That would be most convenient, but of course there are quite a few issues to resolve before then, not the least with regards to privacy...

The government shouldn't be providing services that can be done by the private sector.

The government should provide a service whenever profit-driven models aren't good enough. Infrastructure is one such area where private companies often fail to meet the needs of its users.

  So no, not all government services are inherently "evil". But that is besides the point. If you RTFA then you'd see that the swedish model basicly require an open-access policy - once fibers are built they are there for everyone to use. Meaning, ISPs do not compete over infrastructure, they share it and compete over services.

"All daemons made when sysvinit was king will work with systemd. It is backward compatible, even with sysvinit scripts (there are some few documented corner cases)"

Yes. But that's completely beside the point.

The problem described is not that old stuff won't work/is portable; the problem is that new stuff, stuff that use fancy systemd-specific parts, are not portable. This means there will be great services, down the road, that people will want to run on other UNIX-like OSes than Linux, like say, FreeBSD or OSX.

Before systemd, this was easy to accomplish. After systemd, you need to write a software abstraction layer that hides the systemd-specific parts. It's a giant problem just waiting to come up and bite someone in the ass.

You are missing the point.

Linux has automatic updates, and a friendly icon pops up saying "We installed stuff on your computer, you should reboot at your convenience."

Windows, on the other hand, installs those updates and then tells me "you have five minutes to quit whatever it is that you are doing before we reboot your computer."

Whoever decided that was a good idea should be shot.

Sorry to hear that. Bitch at your overlords they're holding you back, because that's in essence what they are doing.

Maybe they'll listen once they realise they are the laughing stock of everyone else in the world... :)

All software has holes, but atleast Linux lets me upgrade my machine when I want it to, not force me when I'm right in the middle of something.

I still get those from Windows on a regular basis. It still annoys me. And if you say "Oh but that's so easy to fix, just do xyz" - well, it's dead-easy to fix a lot of things with Linux commandline too. And just as much a valid solution to a given problem. So there. Neither OS is better than the other, but some have more strengths than others.

I still regularly get "need to upgrade reboots" on my Windows machine. It's atleast once a month and always seems to pop up when I'm playing a game of LoL or CS:Go.

Yes, I use my Windows as a Wintendo. Got a problem with that?

If the carriers in the US are not afraid of the coming Android hegemony, then they should be. The rest of the world already is - they've seen that the iPhone and iPod is heading the same way as the Macintosh two decades earlier did. Apple is repeating the same mistakes it did then. Apple will therefore slowly sink below 10% marketshare, just as the WinPhone is now.

And regardless whether you choose to trust an expert with a most impressive track record when it comes to predicting the WinPhone market, well... Your loss. :)

First, if we're talking about getting to the "third Ecosystem" as a measurement of success, then you would need at least 10% of the market. WP is not gaining market share - it is slowly losing it. There are two ways one can gain those kind of numbers, now;

1. Someone creates a consumer phone that is an order of magnitude better than what we have today, extremely well polished, and not based on Android/iOS. Since the bar has been raised ridiculously high the chances of that happening are very slim. Or to put it this way: had the first iPhone hit the streets today, it would've been laughed out of market.
2. Carriers decide "Ok, we need to do something about this Android hegemony or forever be slaves to Google", and decide to take one of the open alternatives and collaborate on making it up to par. However, given the nature of carriers, that would be even more unlikely. Imagine Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile and Sprint all go together to create a common platform, don't really think so...

Second, the way Tomi compares the smartphone sales numbers seems legit to me. He takes all smartphone unit sales including legacy platforms still being sold today (e.g. Blackberry). If one is to ignore legacy platforms then yes, WP has a greater market share compared to Android and iOS.