Linux is what it is because it fills a niche, the niche of people who want to be free to tinker. That is incompatible with marketing. Marketing is about making a product appealing to as much people as possible - and then maximizing the profit derived from it. This means branding, limiting, artificially segmenting, making it fit into help desk scripts. In other words, this would kill Linux.

"We also hire immigrant or work-visa employees who are willing to work for around 2/3 the salary of an American born and bred here."

Please stop spreading this. It is just not true. Yes, plenty of employers hire foreigners for less money than they would pay a domestic worker, but in almost all cases those are illegal, undocumented workers. A work visa requires a review and certification by the department of labor to establish what the appropriate wages are in the place of employment. The process requires an ad being posted in major newspapers in the area and documentation showing that no citizen or permanent resident qualified. The work visa expires in 1 to 3 years and can be renewed exactly once, for 1 to 3 years. The renewal process requires an audit. Also, as a work-visa employee, your view of "the conditions back home" are mistaken. There are many reasons why somebody would work abroad, and escaping the backwaters for the promised land of America is more cliche than anything else. That being said, I am sure there are those who abuse the system. Like any system. But don't generalize. It's a lie, and a harmful one.

To each his/her own, it takes all kinds, and all that... :)

I have just been promoted to management, after 20 years in the front line. I still haven't moved from the cube farm to my new office, and I've only had one meeting with my new reports. I was doing the same job as always up until last week. So a new manager, or old IT guy, if you will. I used to think like you, and in some ways I still do. But I can tell you first hand that management, even IT management, is not about technology, computers, or network security. Management is about people, and it only took me this long to get this promotion because this is how long it took me to learn that fact. Understand that managers are not typically worried about user interfaces, operating systems, coding, or even network security. That is *your* job. Managers are worried about people, goals, and budget. If you're lucky, in that order. Don't get me wrong, your technical expertise and opinions are important to your manager, or should be. But thinking about a way to let an employee take an extra day off to go visit his daughter he hasn't seen in two years because her ship will only be in port for two days before going back to Afghanistan, without affecting the bottom line too much, without affecting the deadline too much, and without being able to discuss this very personal issue with the guy's coworkers, sometimes take precedence. Then you are left with no explanation why Joe gets an extra day off, it's probably the slacker manager protecting his own kind of people because he's a slacker himself. Try to remember this: IT is about technology, but management is about people.

In this instance, we are not simply "users." We are owners. We have purchased devices, we have payed for them with our money, either upfront or by signing up for a multi-year contract, after which time the device belongs to the buyer. We are owners, buyers, proprietors, NOT users. We may be users from the point of view of the software licenses that usually come attached to these types of devices, but we should be able to wipe that software and install whatever we please on the OUR devices...

in 1995 I switched from Windows to Linux. Some things were hard at first, because a lot of the niceties of today were nonexistent. StarOffice was written in Java and it was crap. No presentation software to speak of, etc. But understanding what my system was doing made my life a lot easier, and this is something diehard Windows users will never understand - regardless of anything else, it is impossible to know what your Windows computer is doing at any given moment. I stayed with Linux on my desktop until 2008, when I bought a Mac Pro. This is an impressive machine even 3 years later: 2 quad xeons, 20 GB RAM, recently upgraded hard drives to 4 2TB in RAID 5 with a RAID controller, 1 30" Mac Display + 2 21" Dells. This made me happy because, even if I was losing some control by going to a proprietary OS, the fact is that the Mac OS X experience is superior to both Windows and Linux with any of the available window managers. Having a GUI that actually works and a real OS underneath (meaning Unix) has allowed me to tinker when I wanted to tinker, without being forced to tinker to get work done. But them Apple started acting up. First, was the stupid App store on my desktop. Then, Lion took away more than it gave me. And it signals that Mac OS may be going in the direction of turning my desktop into a tablet, which is definitely not what I want. My computer was never a "consumer device," an online shopping machine like what Apple created with the iPad. I bought a laptop 3 months ago, MacBook Pro, just before Lion was released. But I think that this is my last Mac. I'm excited about my next machine, which will be going back to Linux. Both my desktop and laptop still have plenty of life in them, so I'm not contemplating a purchase in the next 2 to 3 years, but check back with me then, and I suspect I will say that my best upgrade ever was going back from Mac to Linux.

I just hope there is one Hari Seldon among all those social scientists...

Yes, I know, it can't be made secure, etc. There are many problems. If we ever make it viable, however, this could lead to the next stage of natural development in democracy: direct voting on issues. Who needs Congress when every citizen can propose legislation and vote on the propositions of others? Of course ways would need to be developed in order to control the sheer volume, but I think something not too different from /.'s own moderation/meta-moderation could be used for that. This will require a lot more than universal access and e-voting, but it sounds like a good starting point.

What people don't understand, including those defending their FB addiction here, and those who think they control what goes into FB, is that FB is not a free service. You pay for it with the explicit permission for them to use your data any way they see fit. What you are paying FB makes them a 50 billion dollar company. They couldn't care less about the consequences for you, when they monetize that information. They care about the bucks your information is worth to them. This is fundamentally immoral. If I decide my phone service has become too expensive, or too intrusive, or for whatever reason I want to stop rewarding them with my money, I just look for a different carrier, or I stop using a cell phone for a while. With FB, you can never take it back. What you give them, you give them forever, regardless if you use their service, or not.

Advertisement works, that's the problem. Want less ads? Stop following them. Actively boycott sites that abuse advertising. If enough of us do it, things will change. In the mean time, please stop whining.

should have no bearing on my ability to expresse myself. If you are unable to make your intentions clear within the language system that makes up most of what our species reads and writes, it's you own fault, not that of the language. Have you considered that you're just not telented?

Not disturbed in the least. I have read the Bible many times. It is the source of much wisdom, it summarizes a lot of what came to be known as Western thinking; it also happens to be the source of a lot of hogwash. The Bible is many things. The problem is not in the Bible. The problem is with the people quoting it, and making it say whatever they want. I suspect a lot of those Texans I'm talking about have never actually read the Bible; they have recited it blindly, they have been to classes that teach them to pick and choose only the parts that interest with current church ideology - but really read it critically? I don't think so. Finally, we know for a fact that he is quoting Spock because he says so, citing Wrath of Khan right there in the legal finding, and tracing the ideas's history back a couple of generations, as you would have known if you had read the article.

If Texans cited Star Trek at least as often as they cite the Bible, Texas, the US and actually the whole would be a happier place...

Good thinking. Yup, the city is the state's capital.