You must not be an X11 developer. You are also, if you can talk about Linux becoming somehow comparable to FreeBSD, not very aware of Linux usage. Linux sees far more use as a server than a desktop, and while it's possible that some other project starts eating up marketshare in that segment, I would be extremely surprised if that happened, and then we have the supercomputer, embedded, and mobile markets.

Your post is devoid of technical arguments for X11, because X11 is technically a clusterfuck. It does far too many things, and none of them well. The print server is probably the worst offense there, but by no means the only one. How many rendering interfaces are there, again? Tell me about why exactly I can't adjust my computer's volume while the screensaver is active, and how that is a good idea.

The only approximation of a coherent argument against Wayland is a repetitive drone of "network transparency means my ssh -X works as expected". Cool, but that's not what that means and that's not going away, and certainly not any time soon. Wayland is not ready for production, and not expected to be anytime soon, and it's blindingly obvious to everyone that it will not be considered ready for production until ssh -X works correctly.

I have to ask if you're even a developer, because my limited programming experiences have led me to believe that if an experienced dev says that the entire approach is crap and needs to be scrapped, more than likely this is true. It is unreasonable to expect that the display solutions of 30 years ago are remotely appropriate for today. It's also a deeply held Unix principle that programs should have a limited scope; why anyone would complain about a "stripped down windowing system" is beyond me. Especially with all of the obsolete, unused crap that even X11's adherents cannot deny that it contains.

So one the one side we have technical and philosophical arguments, and on the other -- please, please have something better than "ssh -X won't work". If you haven't seen the video, it's amusing and informative. Also if you haven't seen the video, you don't know what you're arguing.

One of my arguments was Jefferson's, so you are bizarrely dishonest in claiming that it was based on any fallacy of mine. You are also incorrect in identifying said fallacies.

If patents prevent competition, as you assert, then why is it that Apple is not the first smartphone inventor, nor Microsoft the first OS inventor, nor Dell the PC inventor? I would be harder pressed to find markets that were dominated by a single entity by virtue of patents; perhaps you can suggest some. In the strict sense though I am afraid the case is unassailable, since unless a potentially-infringing party is competing there is no case to be made for infringement. One may force an entity to cease infringing, but you can't prevent it. Even getting an injunction during a lawsuit can be tricky, as evidenced by the Apple/Samsung litigations. I am not the world's most ardent capitalist by any means, but a for-profit, government-granted monopoly is a hard thing to justify in any circumstances.

I admit you didn't say explicitly what I ascribed to you. Your example however utilized in the positive sense an inventor and as adversary a MegaCorp, which is a strong case for patents but not the common one. The example you chose was one where patents were a good thing for the "little guy". Far more often, patents are held by "big guys", who need much less help in dealing with their competition. Even if it were not the usual case for patents to be used abusively, there's no use pretending they are not a two-edged sword. Disputing one with any entity having a $100M patent portfolio would be risky no matter how righteous your cause.

If you have the time, you might attempt a real response, but I suspect that you will have to succumb to a more nuanced view on patents; Jefferson makes a compelling case, the more so because he served as the first Patent Commissioner. I will also suggest that you might not need to ask why people require explanations of these things, if you actually read the counterarguments.

I submit I am the highest authority on this specific subject here on slashdot. I grew up in Valdez, AK, the closest town to the spill. I was there when it happened. There is some documentary footage somewhere of myself and my siblings at one of these oil-soaked beaches. I've known friends to go out and do these beach surveys looking for oil, and I've fished and kayaked throughout Prince William Sound.

Firstly I have to say that, unless one goes specifically looking for it, this oil is invisible. The environment has entirely recovered, the salmon run is healthy, and there are as many sea birds, sea otters, and sea lions as there ever have been.

Secondly, the other posters make a very good points about the relative safety of oil tankers vs oil pipelines. I will additionally say that tankers are better protected from deliberate damage than pipelines. I don't know where you're getting your costs from, but I make the average oil tanker to be in the $100M range, and the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System cost $8B.

I don't know if you know about it, but there is also a proposed natural gas pipeline which was intended to run through Canada to the States. Extrapolating from the cost per mile of TAPS, an oil pipeline would probably be in the range of $15B. Setting aside whether it is actually better for the environment, it is a lot easier to suggest that environmental concerns trump economic ones when it's not your $15B.

Nuclear power is probably a good option for Alaska, whereas solar is pretty much off the table. Hopefully one day someone will take advantage of the tidal energy in the Cook Inlet as well, one lobe of that (Turnagain Arm) having the third-highest tides in the world. There are one or two problems though with putting nuclear reactors in geologically active places though, and the NRC isn't exactly putting applications through quickly at the moment.

Personally though, from having witnessed one of the larger oil spills in history, I don't really find them all that concerning.

You assume that patents do anything to prevent MegaCorp from competing. You also assume that it is Joe Inventor filing most of the patents, and not said MegaCorp. In practice, neither of these things are true, and the primary beneficiaries of patent litigation are lawyers.

Patents are the right to squash competition. Competition in the ideal sense is a very efficient way to allocate resources. If one company is first to market, and a competitor makes a product which is "better, faster, and shinier," what exactly is wrong with letting the market decide who gets rewarded?

Your argument hinges on the role of patents in encouraging people to bring products to market, which is actually an orthogonal process. Patents are intended to promote the disclosure of ideas. All well and good, but maybe an automatic monopoly isn't necesarily the best way to accomplish either of those things.

There are two really big problems with patents. The first is that almost all knowledge is derivative of other knowledge. Certain persons with an excess of self-interest will argue that such a thing as originality exists in some distinguishable form. I submit that even for the invention of fire there was prior art, and every invention since then was either an incremental adaptation or based on some other preexisting knowledge. Keep in mind that the ones who add to our knowledge of the world are called scientists, not inventors.

The second problem is embodied in the phrase "intellectual property." Jefferson noted that there is nothing less suited to ownership than an idea. I could not possibly improve on his argument.

Patents are a granted right, not a natural one. You are as free to pursue financial gain by sweat of the brow or toil of the mind with or without their existence. I'm not, frankly, interested in pursuing a discussion of whether there is some better way to encourage inventors, but the discussion is not advanced by conjuring a trivial and misleading hypothetical situation, ignoring actual practice, and presupposing the necessity of some legal instrument unknown through most of human history.

You seem to have a strange divergence from reality.

The deal is four billion dollars cash, the rest in stock. Facebook's net income for 2013 was $1.5 billion. The deal ate up 35% of Facebook's cash on hand, so there's not necessarily any debt here to make up, and all things being held constant, my math would have them in the green again within three years.

I don't think that Facebook has any more chance of long-term success than those people silly enough to sell operating systems, but at the moment they're both pretty good rackets. This is a heavy investment for Facebook, but they're not an untalented bunch; they have by necessity made a very fast pig out of a PHP application, and they have (apparently) a lot of money to throw at a new market. Can anyone really say that this makes less sense than whatever chunk of Google's $6.8B R&D budget is going to autonomous vehicles and Glass?

Besides, you're giving Zuckerberg & co. far too much credit for long-term thinking.

The NSA can notify whoever they want to as long as there is a public process for it. However, they should stay the hell away from that for the most part because they are a branch of the United States military and it's fucking retarded and treasonous to use military force against its own society.

This is the whole reason we have rules of evidence. We intentionally restrain the investigative branches of our civil justice system, because few citizen can entirely avoid lawbreaking, even aside from cases of civil disobedience. We also restrain these bodies because their consequences are often swift and terrible, and the mere association with crime, the suspicion only of guilt, can be enough to end a man's reputation and career. Laxity in evidentiary procedure is not really a problem we need to have. You also have a right to all the evidence used against you, specifically so that you can challenge it. Secret evidence is a hallmark of the Star Chamber, not the US Justice System.

The bigger issue though is the military nature of this investigative body. I'm sure that to some degree we are justly hoist on our own petard for our treatment of our allies, but freedom from military action is a right of all citizens. Where concerns our martial foes, we have far fewer legal restrictions on actions. War is not civil. War is Hell. We do not bring Hell home, and we do not visit arms against the shores that bore them. If we are not to raise arms ourselves against this treason, then let justice come swiftly.

But what if GP is already using Beta?

Straw man. Try what I actually said: we already have the most expansive prison program in the world, and it is objectively bad at rehabilitation. You should probably be trying to justify either the current system or your idea that somehow it's not punishing people enough. Also we might cover whether punishment or rehabilitation is the primary purpose of a prison system.

Nice soundbite though. Reactionary, fallacious and obvious: a jab to please even the most thoughtless. I hope you didn't stay up too late writing it.

There is indeed a difference. Please pardon my rhetoric; my argument is not necessarily academically rigorous. However, if we can reverse my intention with that remark, and suggest that a criminal record is an excellent way to be unemployed or otherwise in an impoverished state, the statistics range are supportive. Some of them were even shocking; one document I read indicated a low four-figure annual income for some groups. An exaggeration, one can only hope. I also do not think it beggars belief to suggest that e.g. a starving man might steal a loaf, but since he cannot be proven to do so, you must have a valid objection. I had considered striking the term, and mere laziness prevented me. Again, your pardon. If you have further argument for increased incarceration, please do continue.

We have the highest incarceration rate in the world, and you're arguing that not enough people are being jailed? Poverty is causally linked to crime! Assault, rape, and robbery have been in decline for years, and prison sentences have been lengthening.

It should be a surprise to no one that statistics on the income level of incoming prisoners are heavily biased towards the lowest levels of income. Income statistics for released felons are even worse. We stigmatize prison to such a degree that it destroys people's ability to earn a living afterwards, and you wonder why we have a >60% recidivision rate. Our "corrections system" is fundamentally broken, and by all measures worsening. Isn't prison supposed to prevent people from returning to a life of crime?

I am appalled at your ignorance, and the idea of a higher incarceration rate is vile. If you have no human compassion, have at least the sense to see when a solution isn't working.

Yes, yes, Gnome3 depends on logind/systemd. Also ConsoleKit ceased development. It's almost as if they think it's a better technology. But hey, you want to install a massive monolithic DE, it's gonna pull in some dependencies that you may or may not like. That is not Debian's problem, actually -- if they showed any signs of being amenable to discussion on the matter, then you might complain to the Gnome developers.

This vote ignored the issue of what kind of default the default should be, because it only had one question that was being decided. It is unlikely to be the end of the discussion on the matter, so I am sure that all those with opinions will get their fair say -- just not on this vote. I realize that the vote may not have gone your way, but those grapes were probably sour anyway.

What if you win, and Dice decides that they, like so many of /.'s other owners, can't make a dime off the site as it is?

Because as far as I can tell they already have made that decision, and the beta is the only thing keeping them in this game at all. What are you going to do when you get your wish, the Beta goes away -- and the rest of the site with it? Congratulate yourself on your victory, no doubt.

I want them to have an open development process. I want Slashcode to be on github, and for all this bile to be replaced with an adult conversation, an issue tracker, and a mailing list. Failing that I see no reason for profanity or vandalism. It is not a necessary part of anything, especially not civil disobedience. Hatred begets hatred, and the haters have not the bargaining power that they think they do. There is nothing to stop Dice from pulling the plug on the whole show, and if the site is destined to dry up and blow away in either case, I don't want my lasting memories of the place to include this uninhibited flood of vitriol.

No, it is loathed by a small, vocal, percentage of system administrators, who have very little in the way of technical arguments at their disposal. This vote may be considered evidence in that respect.

There is very little to recommend init scripts. I dismiss arguments that they are any easier for any average mortal to deal with than any other piece of code, and there is very little justification for wasting CPU time on a non-interactive process. Additionally, this will merely be a default -- those who want slow boots, or think cgroups are evil, can go ahead and install systemv-init and purge systemd. Or, since systemd, d-bus, pulseaudio, and wayland are evidently the future of Linux, the malcontents can install BSD -- it comes with a free chip for your other shoulder.

The idea of military specialists of whatever type being employed against the society they belong to, is treasonous and fucking retarded no matter what legal acrobatics are employed in their defense.

You may have some sort of mystic devotion to the law, but I believe laws are made by (generally corrupt) men for their own interests, and I am familiar enough with the world outside the borders and political influence of the United States to know there is an enormous difference between legality and rightousness. The U.S.A. may not be the kind of country where you are expected to bribe every public official however minor -- we generally reserve that for higher office. It takes a special kind of idiocy to use military forces against their homeland, though.

Government at its core is the body to which we have delegated our inherent right to violence -- a right being defined in this case as something which cannot be taken from you. We delegate this right to others, specialized in its use, with the express understanding that [a] as applied to civilian life, the exercise of violence by police will be applied fairly and equally as men can manage, and [b] that the unrestricted expression of this (as embodied by military force) be only employed against our enemies. War is hell, and we do not bring hell home.

Snowden is a patriot, and the NSA is treasonous -- whether or not the law can be made to serve whichever purpose. Beyond all other argument, potentially felonious violation of the law is so common with the continual proliferation of laws that lawfulness cannot be the only measure of either justice or rightousness. May all those who support the NSA have a fair trial.

You're assuming that none of these 'clones' would be any good. This is not a solid premise. First demonstrate that only Nintendo could have created these works.

I think Zynga is a good counterexample; I am sure they have some original content but they mostly seem to use concepts that originated elsewhere. There is no reason in a world with more limited copyrights that some other company could not take whichever IP and run with it, and create a product at least equal to the original. I would imagine that it would actually spur developers to create new content or gameplay, as opposed to the rent-seeking unending sequels that get published today.