The Supremacy Clause does not trump Article 1, Section 8 where the powers of the federal government are specifically enumerated, or the Bill of Rights, which was passed to capture the votes of anti-federalists who feared that the new government would get too powerful if there were not explicit checks placed on its power. Seriously, just read even the Wikipedia article on the Tenth Amendment. This is not some novel, controversial issue to people who have a clue what they're talking about.

You have no idea what you're talking about. Yes, the Constitution was supposed to be stronger than the Articles of Confederation. That is not synonymous with unlimited and all-powerful.

I have a JD and a Texas bar card that say otherwise.

The worst of the violence seemed to also coincide with the presence of out of towners showed up to join the legit Ferguson protests to their own pet causes.

I see that nobody has asked the really important question.

How do they taste?

It's good for your house too. I've seen houses where the homeowner never ran their A/C and they were proud that they saved money. They also had problems with mold, paint peeling, drywall falling apart, and various wood things in their house warping.

At one place I lived, there were ceiling fans throughout the house, which was nice. There were also some on our back porch. The ones inside stayed in almost original condition. The ones outside had rust on the metal parts, and the blades warped.

But this was a discussion about datacenters, so I talked about the corrosion problems with IT equipment.

Well, both sides get charged. We're all either charged on capacity or 95th percentile throughput.

I've never known a residential provider to charge for used throuhgput, because people have a hard time understanding it. People would flip out if their bill was $20 one month, and $300 the next. Rather, residential providers do a bit of math. They look at their bill, the aggregate bandwidth used, and the total Mb/s available to customers. Of course, they tag on a nice profit. There are additional considerations, like what do they need to provide extra services like IPTV, how much does it cost to maintain existing circuits, add new circuits, keep employees paid, travel costs for technicians, etc, etc, etc...

So, you get a nice low flat rate, because consumers don't use 100% of their bandwidth 100% of the time. Basically, they oversubscribe. If they do it right, you never know. If they do it wrong, you have shitty service and everyone complains.

At the datacenter we have equipment, we pay for the rack, power, and on the 95th percentile utilization of that circuit. So if we idle everything for a month, we barely pay anything. If we dump all the load to that datacenter,

If you're running a business where you need to be in a datacenter, your business model better cover all your costs. Otherwise, you'll be out of business quick.

No one gets a free ride. You pay for your end-user line. I pay for the line my server is one. Everyone's paid, and everything works.

That's easy to fix. If a cell has not just the existing error correction codes but also digital ones as well, then mutagenic substances (of which there are a lot) and telemere shortening can be fixed. Well, once we've figured out how to modify the DNA in-situ. Nanotech should have that sorted soonish.

The existing error correction is neither very good nor very reliable. This is a good thing, because it allows evolution. You don't want good error correction between generations. You just want it in a single person over their lifespan, and you want it restricted so that it doesn't clash with retrotranspons and other similar mechanisms. So, basically, one whole inter-gene gap/one whole gene protected by one code. Doable. You still need cell death - intercept the signal and use a guaranteed method.

Here, in the year Lemon Meringue, we decided to solve the problem once and for all.

Instead of trying to kill cancer, we hijack its techniques. We start by having nanocomputers in the vaccuelles of each brain cell. These keep a continuous backup copy of the state of the brain up to death. Cancers disable the hard limit on cell duplication that cannot otherwise be avoided. By using the techniques of cell-devouring microphages, the cancer "consumes" the old cells and replaces them with new ones. They can't spread anywhere else, because that's how the cancer is designed to spread. Once the body has been fully replaced, the cancer is disabled. The brain is then programmed by the nanocomputers and the remaining cells are specialized by means of chemical signal.

This does result in oddly-shaped livers and three-handed software developers, but so far this has boosted productivity.

The free market didn't provide alternatives. The free market created Microsoft and the other monopolies. Adam Smith warned against a free market.

The majority do not create alternatives, either. The majority like things to not change. The familiar will always better the superior in the marketplace.

Alternatives are created by small groups of people being disreputable, commercially unproductive and at total odds with the consumer. These alternatives will typically take 7-14 years to develop. Adoption will typically reach peak after another 7-14 years. By the 30th year after first concept, the idea will be "obvious" and its destiny an "inevitable consequence" of how things are done.

In reality, it takes exceptional courage and a total disregard for "how things are done". 7-14 years with guaranteed losses is not how the marketplace works. Even thinking along those lines is often met with derision and calls of "Socialism!" by the market. No, real inventors are the enemy of the free market.

If you want a Linux desktop, you must forgo all dreams of wealth. You must subject yourself to the abject poverty that is the lot of an inventor in a market economy, or move to somewhere that supports the real achievers.

The problem is corruption. OSDL were working on a Linux desktop environment, but a key (financial) figure in the organization worked hard to kill off success and left around the time the unit went bankrupt. Several organizations they've been linked to have either gone belly up or have suffered catastrophic failure.

I won't name names, no point. What is the point is that such people exist in the Linux community at all, parasites that destroy good engineering and good work for some personal benefit of their own.

X is not great, but it's just a specification. People have developed Postscript-based GUIs using it. It's merely an API that you can implement as you like (someone ported it to Java) and extend as you like (Sun did that all the time). The reference implementation is just that. Interoperability of just that set of functions used by Glib/Gtk and Qt would give you almost all the key software.

Alternatively, write a GUI that has a port of those three libraries. You could use Berlin as a starting point, or build off Linux framebuffers, or perhaps use SDL, or write something unique. If it supports software needing those libraries, then almost everything in actual use will be usable and almost everything written around X in the future will also be usable. If what you write is better than X, people will switch.

Binary drivers exist and are loadable so long as they are properly versioned.

Block drivers can always use FUSE.

Automatic builders can recompile a shim layer with new kernels (or even the git tree version), automatic test harnesses or a repurposed Linux Test Project can validate the shim. You don't need to validate the driver for everykernel, if it's totally isolated from the OS and worked before then it'll remain working.

Automated distributors can then place the binaries in a corporate yum/apt repository.

What has an ABI got to do with it? Only gets in the way of writing clean code.

The commands to the bus don't change.
The commands sent to the hardware don't change.
The internal logic won't change.

That leaves the specific hooks to the OS and the externally visible structures.

Nobody is insane enough to use globals directly and structures are subject to change without notice. So external stuff will already be isolated.

If the hardware is available for any two of HyperTransport, PCI Express 2.x, VME/VXI or one of the low-power busses used on mobile hand-warmers, err, smart devices, then the actual calls to the bus hardware will be compartmentalized or go through an OS-based abstraction layer.

So 95% of a well-written driver is OS-agnostic and the remaining 5% is already is isolated.

So either drivers are very badly written (which is a crime against sanity) or the hardware vendor could place the OS-dependent code in its own DLL at bugger-all cost to them. Since the OS-dependent code has nothing trade secret in it, they can publish the source for the shim at no risk. Since the shim isn't the driver, there's no implication of support for OS' they don't know or understand. It's not their problem what the shim is used for.

Everyone's happy. Well, happier. The companies don't get harassed, the Linux users get their drivers, Microsoft gets fewer complaints about badly-written drivers killing their software. It's not open, it's not supported, but it's good enough.

No, you're thinking of some government that you just made up. Go read the Constitution, especially the 10th Amendment. The states wanted to make it very clear that they were giving the federal government only specific, enumerated powers. Then FDR told the court where it could stick its Constitution (as the GP said) and told them that if they didn't back down, he would stack the court with yes-men who would give him his way. The court backed down, and the result was 75 years of the federal government encroaching into everyday life until you couldn't buy a shower head without Uncle Sam's permission, and people like you who don't even realize anymore that it was supposed to be a government of specific, enumerated powers.

This will obviously ultimately lead to Mothra, which will be aswesome, especially if these guys also figure out how to build Godzilla so they can have an epic battle to the death that wrecks a scale model of Tokyo.