That is the best example of coincidence theorism that I could possibly think of.

There are so many examples of over reach out there, the only reason most people don't see them is because they are so used to them being there. Look up Nick Merrill on YouTube. Look at what is being done to Wikileaks financially at the behest of the US Government.

"Oh, another /. story about the govt having everyone's underwear size again... ho hum. No reason to be alarmed."

Better off with a $200 fanless home micro server running OwnCloud.

Or running an OwnCloud instance on Linode or AWS and encrypting both the endpoint files as well as using SSH keys for transmittal, if you really don't want to be bothered with having something that requires a subpoena to access.

Still preferable to being considered a coincidence theorist. ;)

Here is my response that I also posted on the originating site:

Maybe you could fix that.

Right. Back. At. YOU.

For someone who has a degree focusing on Entrepreneurship and Innovation from MIT, you don’t seem to know the first rule of the startup: You find the problem, you fix the problem, because it is now *your* problem.

Now, here is some advice from someone who daily rubs elbows with all of those statistics you allude to in your article- the people you think can solve the problem will never solve the problem. They can’t, because they will never have the kind of empathy necessary to understand the problem. They can’t, because most of them have never had a welfare Christmas, they don’t have friends suffering from missing limbs, faces, or PTSD, and they simply never have to choose between gas to get to work or food for the baby. They have never had to consider divorce as a means of securing food and shelter for their wife and child.

There are people doing the things you think aren’t happening. Maybe you don’t value their efforts very much, because they don’t hail from the kinds of schools you think churn out “the right people” who solve problems. Maybe they don’t have the kind of solutions you would like to see. Have you ever considered that the 20-30 something graduates from top tier schools have simply been educated to perpetuate the very problems you are railing against? Do you really think that a rarified pedigree somehow confers better problem solving skills? You would be surprised how many of those people are remarkably average when it comes to solving problems they haven’t been educated to solve. And you are telling them to think out of the box really?

I’m a forty something miscegenated veteran, and son of a single working mother, who has been on the ground floor of launching two successful startups. I currently work to cut the IT overhead of state projects to that our tax dollars can go a little farther. I also work on small local projects because most of the problems you describe can only be solved at a local level. I do that because even with indiegogo, kickstarter, kiva, and other fiscal incubators, it is damned difficult to get funding off the ground for those kinds of projects. That problem is being solved, however, but not by MIT or Stanford. There are plenty of small tech incubators sprouting up all over the country, and a good part of their efforts are focused on solving these exact problems you bring up. Now, since you have expertise in finance and entrepreneurship, or so you claim, maybe *you* can solve the problem of getting cash into the hands of local developers who are working to resolve some of these issues.

I mean, in ways other than vilifying your peers and denigrating your target audience. You know, as in having some measurable results, from your direct action.

No, RedHat has been co-opting projects that give it a unique competitive edge. They pretty much own the KVM project, and now they don't have to compete with Citrix on the Xen platform. RHEL dropped support for Xen in version 6, at which point the Linux kernel devs retorted by putting Xen support into the kernel. If Xen was such a dog, then why would the Linux kernel dev team work so hard to keep it?

I'm not downing KVM or Xen. Both work well for their intended purposes. But RHEL's decision probably had more to do with RHEL's commitment to *selling* KVM centric solutions than it had to do with anything else.

I agree that humans need to leave this planet, and soon. The very human nature that has made us successful as a species will destroy us in the long run. We are very good at short term solutions to serious problems, but awful at living with long term planning and forecasting. This makes us great explorers, but lousy at maintaining what we have discovered. The problem is that our planet, and solar system in general, lack the resources to migrate humans in ships all over the nearer reaches of our galaxy.

Until we start focusing on things like foldspace gateways (think Heinlein's Tunnel in the Sky), we won't be leaving our solar system any time soon. Even Heinlein's ships (and Herbert's, as well as many others who put in a lot of thought about how to get gobs of humanity from point A to points B-Z) used a form of foldspace technology or gateways, instead of attempting direct supra-light or near light acceleration.

Even if we found a way of creating warp drives, there would still be a severely limited fleet of very small ships with the task of traveling distances that could easily take still take half a lifetime just to survey, much less colonize, a handful of nearby systems that may or may not be suitable. The logistics of ship based travel between the stars are just way too expensive, especially with all of the exploration that needs to be done in order to find worlds that could be considered habitable with "limited" terraforming. Living between the stars isn't feasible either- between the high levels of cosmic radiation, the materiel limitations, and the fact that humans are quite lousy at self-sufficiency, large floating space colonies aren't a likelihood, even as waypoints.

15% is a very reasonable cut to do basic business management and cold calling for freelancers. It is much better than what a lot of "recruiters" (aka pimps) take as a cut for their "consulting agencies", which can be as high as 80% of the hourly rate. Even using something like TriNet to handle most of the business stuff still doesn't compare because you still have to either find someone with business contacts or do all the calling yourself on unpaid time (which you then need to charge for later as part of your bill rate, or starve).

I really hope this practice starts putting some downward pressure on the pimps and time wasters who populate the IT recruiting market to start doing better work for a more reasonable rate. Nobody deserves 80% of a developer's pay just because they made a few phone calls. I would definitely consider working for or with a group of freelancers if someone was handling the business side at 15%.

I did this for my daughter, using KVM and one of the KVM gui's. Two caveats:

1. Can't play windows games on the vm. This isn't much of an issue for her, as she is heavy into minecraft.
2. Windows only sites like Rosetta Stone can be a pain in the rear to config for passthrough media. Camera, audio, mic all may need signed drivers that have to be tracked down and installed "just so". Mostly, that is an issue with Rosetta Stone building their Flash apps to work only with Windows.

Overall, not that big of an issue, but it isn't like there isn't something in the vm gui that points you to signed drivers. I would rather signed drivers for KVM Windows instances be released as packages instead. This isn't a Linux issue; if MS wants to make future sales of their OS, they will need to start distributing these kinds of drivers themselves via Windows Update.

I have absolutely no other complaints aside from those two minor ones. The kid does her own backups, maintains her own packages and software, and plays flash games on the net without any issues.

And ground effect lights. Everything goes faster with those.

This is the exact reason I stopped contracting and working on my own startup. I'm working on the startup idea again, but it is taking so much longer now that I am an established FTE at someone else's business.

SEIU isn't the only union out there.

FTA: Nonetheless, “because it is undisputed that the appellant used his wireless telephone while holding it in his hand as he drove his vehicle,” the conviction was allowed to stand.

This isn't about using GPS. This is not about using GPS mounted on a dashboard. This is not about using a phone's GPS in "car mode" while it is in a dash mount. This is about fumbling around for a phone when both hands should have been on the wheel. And the change in the law from a few months ago was plastered all over billboards and the Amber Alert signs all over the highway for several months. It isn't as if the consequences were unknown or sprung upon him by surprise.

I've talked with CHP who have pulled over and cited drivers regarding all of the other gripes you have listed. The CHP can't be everywhere all at once.

He would be better off at smashing bugs and developing with Posix compliancy in mind. THEN tackle multi-platform issues.

I mean, unless he thinks it is *done*, as in no code on the original project is going to change significantly from this point forward. Wait, that would be Cinelerra. Why doesn't he just make a dumbed down interface for Cinelerra? This way, he doesn't need to code for a bunch of codecs and transforms that have already been coded for? I mean, he could take his existing interface, slap it on Cinelerra with a bunch of Easy Bake presets, and then help out optimizing Cinelerra's code so it could run across all Linux platforms, much less anything else. Which would be nice, because Cinelerra has solved a lot of issues this guy wants to introduce on a cross-platform basis.

You see, this guy is basically making the same mistakes of thinking that all Linuxes are alike. They aren't. There are big differences between various distributions now, and even getting something as dependent upon multiple sources trees with different compile time options to work seamlessly is going to be a major pain in the ass over the long haul. And the guy who has been working on Cinelerra is even saying this after almost 30 years of hacking on video and audio editors.