Ignore the sheeple. They've been around since humans first evolved, and aren't going away anytime soon.

Bad laws do go away, but only with great effort, struggle, and sometimes societal collapse and rebirth. Humanity is due for a good colonic, IMNSHO.

Excuse me, sonny boy, but "younger" isn't the problem. Some of us old folk (aka, fifty in my case) know what the hell is going on here: We're all being frelled by morons and ignorati with this bill and other pieces of stupid legisilation.

I don't give a damn about who's on my lawn (literally, kids walk thru my yard all the time) -- I want these damned politicians out of my head, thank you very much.

You can't buy fast food with food stamps.

And I was talking fish and fruit. Chicken is packed with hormones; red meat is fatty and has other "bad" elements". If we're suppoed to be eating fish and fruit, that isn't evenly vaguely cheap.

I live surrounded on three sides by ocean.

Fish is hideously expensive, as compared to chiecken, beef, and pork.

Same thign for fresh fruit -- I live in a state (Florida) that produces lots of fruit, but the stores have incredibly high prices.

I know people on Food stamps (a large percentage of the U.S.population now, btw) -- and they can't AFFORD to eat healthy. There's a reason poor people are fat -- bad diet, because good food is too expensive.

I was never a huge fan of her works, just a matter of taste -- yet I appreciated her creation of female protagonists, and her depiction of dragons as allies of man.

A computer is a tool. Use the best tool for the job.

Windows is where I do most of the work that pays my bills (currently; that will change next year with a new project). I like Word and Excel -- there is no free alternative that comes even close to Office 2010 in terms of polish and functionality. And I game (WoW, Dragon Age, old games), .

I judge an OS by how much cussing I do while working with it. Right now, I cuss slightly less at a Kubuntu 11.10 box than I do at Windows 7. The difference is not enough for me to dump Windows.

For software development, I use both Linux systems and Visual Studio. Truly, Visual Studio is an amazing product; however, I'm quite happy and comfortable with multiple consoles, editor windows, and working from the console. Specialization is for insects, as Heinlein said. I'm very Buddhist in my approach to computing and software development; I use what works, be it C, C#, Python, or Javascript. My goal is to accomplish things, not fight some endless philosophical war that has no real meaning.

Sure, I could switch to Libre Office and run games under Wine -- but why? Just to make some political point? That would be stupid. Libre Office is clunky, less capable, and ugly when compared to Word 2010. Most of the stuff I do in Excel doesn't work in OpenOffice or Gnumeric -- lots of complex macros and formulas, DDE connections to live data (that is only provided via DDE)... and again, the "open" alternatives are just plain UGLY.

If I could have only one computer, it would be a Kubuntu or other KDE Linux system. Fortunately, I don't need to limit myself.

The Palestinians are hoisting the U.S by it's own petard. The U.S. government passed the 1994 law as a "do what we say or else" measure, under the false belief that this would force the UN to follow U.S. policy. Instead, the Palestinians are being admitted to UN agencies anway, and we're cutting our own throat automatically.

It's not the Palestinians who should be worried.

Bethesda is being stupid. Bad PR for them -- although the addicts will buy Skyrim anyway. Most people I know don't call Bethesda's games "Elder Scrolls"; they play "Morrowind" or "Oblivion" or "Skyrim". No one goes looking for "Elder Scrolls IV mods", they look for "Oblivion mods".

And only an idiot would confuse a collectible card game from and indie publisher with a single-player RPG from a major software house. By all the gods, am I going to be sued by Bethesda because my novels have mountains and scrolls in them? Sheesh.

While I'm sure Bethesda doesn't care about my opinion or my money, I will not be buying Skyrim, nor will I purchase any other Bethesda products, or products that they are involved in. I will, however, buy Scrolls from Mojang.

I prefer C, C++, Python, and OCaml. I make much of my living from writing portable code.

That given: Not all code needs to or should be shared. Really. In most business ecosystems, no one gives a rat's ass about Linux or BSD or whatever outside the server room. And for vertical apps and internal code, C# is very nice, sort of a Java with better libraries. Microsoft won't abandon it, no one cares if these apps port, and code development is quick and easy.

Please, you zealots wouldn't even be interested in the C# I write. It's not cool, it's not innovative, it's freaking GUI data entry crap.

Well, okay, I have one C# app on my web site, a nice piece of signal visualization written at the behest of a now defunct company. The original was tied to proprietary hardware with proprietary drivers that only worked on Windows. The company went tits up, but I liked the code so much, I removed the hardware dependencies and released it for fun. That company, however, was creating a commercial product, and I *told* them C#/Windows was a mistake. They're dead now. But that's a different story from where most C# is used, which is for vertical market and internal apps in shops where no one is or will be running anything other than Windows.

I'm revising the signal program, BTW. in portable C++. C# is not a good solution in many cases, but that doesn't make it crap, either.

But I'm sure no facts will lessen the anti-MS zealotry.

Yeah, that's pretty much my thinking -- why would anyone want to do this, outside of very specialized circumstances?

I used virtual machines, of course -- for example, I keep a Fedora 15 install on my Window machines via Virtal Box, and I do run the Win XP that comes with Win 7 Pro. But those are simply conveniences, with only one layer of abstraction, and even with only that, both run highly inefficiently and fail to fully use the hardware I paid for.

I don't understand why people would buy high-powered equipment and then run something that cripples it. What's the advantage or purpose of running Win XP in a browser? I can't think or a single one.

Over a decade ago, a school psychologist noticed "odd" behavior in one of my daughters. Under the guise of "vigilence", they looked for people to put on drugs. My girls, in grades 1 and 3, were interrogated -- without my permissions or knowledge -- by a school psychologist, who diagnose them with various psychotic disorders. Why? Because the girls told wild tales -- one claimed to know how to fly, and the other told dark tales ala Poe and Lovecraft.

This bitch of a psychiatrist demanded that we drug our children, and began the process of forcing us to give the girls "medicine" (i.e., anti-psychotic and ADHD drugs), even when other psychiatrists said that my daughters were fine. When asked why she was so insistent on treating my daughters for something that didn't exist, the offending psychiatrist said:

"I've been taking these drugs most of my life. I know they're good for your kids."

Needless to say, I no longer live in Colorado, where this travesty was legal. My girls are intelligent, creative, productive young adults (with lots of quirks, like any smart person). Now that they're adults, they can chose what the do and do not put in their bodies.

American society is driven by a need by people's to feel like a victim, by fear, and by selfish greed. It is a recipe for disaster.

The binary driver cannot be redistributed with the linux distros..

I've never had a problem with this. I always go to nVidia's or AMD's web site for my video drivers (on Windows). And some Linux distros DO provide binary drivers. I'll take a high-performance proprietary driver any day over a "free" but ineffective alternative. That said, I did pick one of my recent machines because it had a driver supported intrinsically by XOrg. Choice is good.

The binary driver may drop support for older hardware at any point, and the older versions which still support your hardware are unlikely support current kernels or X11 versions.

The only real argument you have, and a very good one at that.

You cannot fix a binary blob driver yourself, you are beholden to the vendor to do so.

Oh please. I doubt even 99% of Slashdot readers could fix a bug in a video driver -- particularly one for complex and high-performance hardware like nVidia and AMD video cards. Let's just put this old lie to rest, shall we? I have real work to do; I don't have time to be futzing about in some hardware driver for free, just for "free" software people can feel sanctimonious.

Also that "100%" is relative to the binary driver itself, its possible that given time the open driver will surpass it.

Possible, yes. Likely, no.

Well said, sir.

Electric lights were better than candles because they lasted longer and didn't set the house on fire (usually) and didn't need to be changed as often. Vast difference between that and "let's get rid of light switches because we can" bullcrap."

Instead of being a snarky fool, why not explain how using my Android phone to turn on and off my light is better than a simple light switch?