I think that the larger issue with America these days is connected to our cultural tendency about measuring success in terms of money and power. In the newer generations, this is displacing the very values that made the nation great, and resulting in short term and immediate results kind of thinking. We are teaching our youth to think like a 5-year old with a tantrum, with an insane sense of entitlement and no responsibility. And the older generations are not much better. Add to this the fact that there are no visionaries among the people with power to make changes in the nation, be it the heads of large corporations, the congress, or elected officers. Long term is thought as "5 years down the road". That does not scale for the size and complexity of America today. We need a 100-year plan, not a "will do whatever necessary to get re-elected next year" plan. And this long term plan should not be based on controlling the rest of the world or waging wars when other countries do not submit to our might; we should use our resources wisely to take care of our own people instead, and shift to a sustainable economic model so we do not need resources from other countries. The only reason we have not collapsed onto ourselves is that the rest of the world is messed up too. But we can do so much better than that. My impression is that unless we start thinking long term and incorporate healthier values into education, to slowly revert this tendency, the decline of America will not only continue but accelerate in all areas, including technology, quality of life for the average citizen, and the position of our country in the world. At this rate, we will be a part of the 3rd world in 50 years. We can do better for our children.

You do not need a network to air anything these days. Put it on YouTube, and allow for linking. Post it on Slashdot, Reddit, and 10 or 20 more popular websites. Post it on Facebook, tweet about. Link it from the comments on articles about SOPA in news websites.

Because Linux is still a pain to use on the desktop. I know, because I use it every day (Ubuntu on a Thinkpad T420). I love what I can do with it, but casual use is just too painful. Tons of little annoying things. Linux on the desktop is like death by 1000 paper cuts. Wifi does not always reconnects on resume (most of the time it does), screen dims erratically sometimes (most of the times it behaves well), office applications hung (OpenOffice/Libre Office are 10 times more stable is Windows or OS X), and then the other things, like not having good support for some hardware (optimus video cards come to mind, I have to reboot and change BIOS settings to switch between integrated and discrete graphics), or like the Ubuntu kernel upgrades that break everything (had 8 kernels automatically installed by the update program, and visible from the bootloader menu, but only 2 booted up as intended). And do not get me wrong, Ubuntu is a pretty good distro.

So the available choices for desktop OS really suck right now.

On Windows 7 one ends up spending more time closing pop-up messages, reading OS alerts, updating, and virus checking than actually doing any work. XP is better than Win7 any day of the week in that department. On OS X the experience is exceptionally smooth and polished, but you have to do things the Apple(tm) way, and if your workflow does not jive with that, or if you want to do any serious programming on anything native with a GUI and do not feel like using Objective-C, well... too bad (I've used and still use OS X). Linux is yet not ready, and looking back at its evolution, starts to seem that it will never be completely polished as far as the desktop user experience goes. BSD seems like well put together and very secure and consistent, but good luck with hardware support on notebooks (it will not even boot on my machine).

There is such an opportunity for somebody to come up with a reasonable OS alternative right now.

Google has been pulling the plug on a lot of their projects lately. This will make me think twice about alternatives when starting new projects on the cloud, especially if they are based on "free" services. There is hidden price there, which can hit you in the less expected moment...

I second that. DreamHost is excellent for hosting. Fast servers, good service, and they allow you to do pretty much whatever you want with your account without hassles or unreasonable extra charges. Their prices seem competitive too, but to be honest, I am so happy with them that I have not checked out for pricing elsewhere. I've been using them for about 3 years and will not go back to other providers.

How about a car? It will eat up a lot of space...

The thing is, when talking about what is right and what is wrong, "illegal" should not be the boundary, but a far extreme towards "bad", which most companies should avoid by far. As I see it, the fact that a company does anything that is "legal" and in its power to generate profit, in real life means that the company is driven by greedy individuals and often ethically questionable practices. And if a company does something illegal, somebody somewhere has to go to jail. Period. I know, I know, there is the free market idea, too, and all that argument - if that worked so well, our economy would be in a different place. But you choose whatever you want to believe in, and live the consequences; I think that companies that have some sort of ethical self-regulation are healthier to society as a whole than the ones that just "follow the law". Think about the banking industry for a bad example of legal theft.

While I agree people in the US should in general exercise more, I do not think you can regulate people's lives with a tax increase. People getting to exercise requires a change of attitude, values, and likely education, not more taxes. Ask yourself how many smokers stopped smoking because of the tobacco tax, or how many heavy drinkers stopped drinking because of alcohol tax - it just does not work like that. Netflix is positive in which it gives you the choice of what to watch, and you do not have to endure commercials, which arguably have a worse effect on people than the movies themselves.

So this will end up either in: A) Crippled software because the patent holder cannot possibly develop all the applications for all the platforms, B) More expensive software because in order to write a simple 'reminder' application you will need to pay patent rights, C) Large companies making patent agreements, and the little guys, without a gigantic patent portfolio to negotiate with, squeezed out of the market. And the idea is not even innovative, if you work with mobile devices that are location-aware, this is pretty basic. So how does this exactly helps innovation, USPO?

If we had self-sustained habitats in which people would live for 500 years comfortably, you will likely have a hard time making the descendants of the first space travellers to get out of there comfortable spaceships and settle from scratch on a planet. Maybe instead of finding a planet like the one we have now it will be easier (and faster) to develop self-sustained space colonies in which people live in large ships, but are free and have the means to get resources from any planet.

Right, because spitting on a book they consider sacred will fix things. Instead of having alternative ideas to outrage others, you should be outraged ourselves with our politicians. I wish WE do the obvious thing, which is refuse to go through a scanner every single time. The safety argument is bogus (if you do not get it, read Schneier website, or his newsletter on security), and even knowing that, we give up on our dignity, and submit ourselves and our children to be groped and radiated. I just cannot believed how a bunch of people with special interests cajole a whole country into this. Oh, I forgot, we Americans like convenience, and 'safety'; or are just spineless. Maybe we deserve what is coming to us, then.

I would mod you up if I had any points left today.

Yes, but they appeal to a different demographics. Not everybody knows about Ritchie, or can understand how fundamental his contributions were; on the other hand, Jobs was a bit of a star for consumers in general, an iconic figure. Both of them made incredible things, thou. Setting up a day to recognise a single person is silly in a world with 7 billion people.

I do not know why this is in the front page, and I do not know why the educated crowd of Slashdot listens to BS from the CIO/CEO/CXO of the day and his new genius theory to quantify things he should not, mainly because he does not understand what technology is about. These guys should be in marketing. There are new technologies and old technologies, and jobs for all of them if you are good and know the right people. If you are very good at Fortran or Cobol you can get a job. If you excel at Java or C you can get a job. None of these are new technologies by far, and the skills are highly portable from one to the other. The basic knowledge you need is always sort of the same, a mix or common sense, knowledge of the basics (algorithms, data structures, and a brief background on the problem domain you are working on), and some minimum social skills.

One thing is to try to justify searches at the country borders. Another is to expand that to all flights, be them national or international (and I do not agree with this policy). But now, random checks in a highway? This does nothing to improve safety of citizenships, but helps to educate new generations of Americans into getting used to these outrageous privacy invasions. You can expect to see this kind of government behavior from a dictatorship, not from a democracy. What are we transforming America into?