:-)

You make it sound like starving people are getting fat too.

If they are becoming obese, the particular individual has a surplus of caloric intake, if only for this year or month. This is not to say that they have proper nutrition. So I am not at all clear that the fact that there is obesity in the third world is confounding evidence.

Easy. Because they all still have big businesses selling Windows desktops and laptops - and don't dare piss Microsoft off too much. That plus the fact that Linux lacks 3rd party app support - but so does the Mac to some extent. Essentially, though, there's not a big enough market for such a thing - certainly not big enough to invest in the capability to offer phone support. Between Windows desktops/laptops, Macs, iPhones/iPads, Android phones and tablets and Chromebooks, there's a lot of competition out there for a new platform. And they can still sell their hardware to Linux fans. Unfortunately, that means Linux fans still have to pay the Microsoft tax.

For most of the existence of mankind and indeed all of mankind's progenitors, having too much food was a rare problem and being hungry all of the time was a fact of life. We are not necessarily well-evolved to handle it. So, no surprise that we eat to repletion and are still hungry. You don't really have any reason to look at it as an illness caused by anything other than too much food.

More like Microsoft tried to clone Comouserv, AOL, and whatever else was popular before the internet came along and showed how uncreative they were. And now they're still trying to clone Google...

WINE on the Mac uses XQuartz too. It works well, except when it doesn't. I've had it freeze up my display completely - happens when I exit my WIN32 app and then restart it. If I wait a while before restarting, it's okay. But if I restart it too soon, X launches and the screen goes all white. That's when you find out that the Mac's equivalent of Windows task manager is pretty crappy. It won't come up either, so you need to reboot...

Martin,

The last time I had a professional video produced, I paid $5000 for a one-minute commercial, and those were rock-bottom prices from hungry people who wanted it for their own portfolio. I doubt I could get that today. $8000 for the entire conference is really volunteer work on Gary's part.

Someone's got to pay for it. One alternative would be to get a corporate sponsor and give them a keynote, which is what so many conferences do, but that would be abandoning our editorial independence. Having Gary fund his own operation through Kickstarter without burdening the conference is what we're doing. We're really lucky we could get that.

We do charge entry to the convention. We get really nice facilities for the people who actually travel there and for the speakers. Last year's location was subperb. But I don't see why they should actually subsidize the folks who do not attend.

I think TAPR's policy is that the presentations be freely redistributable, but I don't know what they and Gary have discussed. I am one of the speakers and have always made sure that my own talk would be freely redistributable. I wouldn't really want it to be modifiable except for translation and quotes, since it's a work of opinion. Nobody should get the right to modify the video in such a way as to make my opinion seem like it's anything other than what it is.

If I remember correctly, it was 4 video channels last year: tracking on presenter, proscenium, audience, projector.

Yes. I put in $100, and I am asking other people to put in money to sponsor these programs so that everyone, including people who did not put in any money at all, can see them for free. If you look at the 150+ videos, you can see that Gary's pretty good at this (and he brought a really professional-seeming cameraman to Hamvention, too) and the programs are interesting. Even if at least four of them feature yours truly :-) He filmed every one of the talks at the TAPR DCC last year (and has filmed for the past 5 years) and it costs him about $8000 to drive there from North Carolina to Austin, Texas; to bring his equipment and to keep it maintained, to stay in a motel, to run a multi-camera shoot for every talk in the conference, and to get some fair compensation for his time in editing (and he does a really good job at that).

They said "hacking or manipulation", they mean that there are potentially bugs which could be triggered by malicious input. The computer doing the tally is not connected to the internet. This is a bit alarmist and they have only tried playing the card recently, the AEC seems to be getting desperate.

The real reason is the other one that they offered, "underpins the industrial and fee-for-service election counting systems". The AEC makes a fair bit of money running elections private organisations and other countries. While what they primarily offer is impartiality, technical assistance is a strong component and they obviously feel that releasing their software would impact that business.

The AEC tallies have been independently verified several times, there isn't a substantial case that the election outcomes are being distorted. However I still believe that the code should be public.

Just out of curiousity, what kind of parts are you talking about, where a 3D printed piece of plastic would be an acceptable replacement? In my work on my own older home, the things that are in the can't find/hard to find category are all either structural (2x4s that are actually 2 inches by 4 inches), functional (doorknobs, etc), or decorative (plaster rosettes, etc). None of those are suitably replaced with a piece of plastic, regardless of whether or not it actually 'fits'.

What legal precidence are you talking about? That is completely incorrect. Take something that looks like it might be copyrighted to Kinko's and ask them to copy it. They won't.