That doesn't actually preclude our doing it, although we won't be able to do it with a robot arm any time soon. (Would love to be wrong.) It might be possible to do it with biotech, though.

If you're using somewhere near the inverter's peak output, then you can get as much as 90% efficiency. Inverters are getting smaller all the time, which makes it more feasible to gang modules instead of using monolithic units which will provide very low conversion efficiency for low outputs.

It's still unfortunate to leave 10% on the table. But a lot of DC-DC power supplies are also not very efficient. Best-case, they are only around 95% efficient, and you can easily lose another 10-15% if you execute them poorly. So yes, optimally they have half the peak loss, and even bad ones are likely to be better, but we can make better inverters and we will as the demand increases.

Well, we could argue about that all day, but I argue that it doesn't really matter: no matter what it means, they're more likely to use Android. If it just means they are going to want to use a broad variety of apps from disparate sources, that's Android. If it means they want to customize their phone as much as possible, even just bling-bling style, that's Android. If it means they want to tinker with the internals, obviously that is Android. If they care about security and controlling what apps can do on their phone, that's also Android, albeit one of the cooked-down versions and without Google services — but you can do that if you want to.

You could argue that any of these desires makes you a "power user", but clearly any of them will also lead you to Android. If you took some of them to extremes you might end up someplace else, but it wouldn't be iOS or Windows Phone.

I don't even remember there being a pay-for version of CDE for Linux. I'm not saying it didn't happen. I just remember you could buy a Motif tarball from Metrolink that would get you Motif and mwm, not like you would ever use mwm when you had fvwm. And then later you could buy Caldera Network Desktop, which came with Metrolink Motif. You could also buy AccelX, which got you a substantially faster X server back in those days, with meaningful support for your video card's 2d acceleration features... something that XFree eventually achieved, of course. Apparently you can build CDE for Linux these days, but I haven't tried. (why...)

Yes, actually. Why should they bother, in this case?

Not really. TL;DR: Linus doesn't say so, and he holds the trademark, so he gets to decide what makes "Linux(tm)".

HOPE for CHANGE. Where have I heard this before?

Yay, you can find a tiny handful of examples of people who support your argument! But most of the people who support mine, you'll never know their names, they're just in the background making money while you pay for it.

Unfortunately, they often wind up just shuffling that money between themselves, and it never trickles down to us poor ignorant saps in the trenches. It should not be a news bulletin to you that trickle-down economics does not work, but that's precisely what you're arguing. The truth is that the rich don't buy stuff from poor people. They shop on different streets than poor people, let alone in different stores.

Yeah, his trust issues caused me a problem.

No, the fact it got owned later on is how we know he's not as smart as he thinks he is.

Oh no, the absolute best part was that because the guy was the boss' friend, I didn't even get to do the post-mortem on the machine that got owned, which means I didn't even get access to the warez. Well, no. The absolute best part was that I got blamed for the server existing, because stuff like that was my job. Lesson learned: firewall outgoing traffic, even in a small org where surely that would be more hassle than it would provide actual technical reward? (I could literally walk to all the desks and had only one person beneath me.) Be more BOFH, not less, because that is the only way to CYA. And if people don't like it, they ought to remember that they get the IT department that they deserve.

Yeah, I asked that question, I didn't get an answer. As it turned out it had entirely to do with him being a) arrogant and b) buddy-buddy with the boss, so he got away with it. He was just a special snowflake who thought he knew better than me, but he was obviously wrong. But he went to school with the boss.

You misread that. He undertook to raise the server on his own, he got away with creating a warez site by doing something I was supposed to do because he was friends with the boss.

Bullshit. They say no to specific requests which are stupid. They don't say no when you come to them and ask them how you can accomplish something. You're upset for the IT department not answering the right questions when they're being asked the wrong ones. Stop coming to the IT department like you know what you're doing, tell them what you need to do, and you'll get the results you're looking for. Also, come to them when you first know that you have an IT need, not at the last minute. You're creating your own problems.

You are correct, AC. They weren't idiots, they were evil, and they still are.

In a war between haves and have-nots, the have-nots have one thing: gross numerical superiority. The haves have seen to that. Which returns to my earlier statement: Share your wealth with us, or we will share our poverty with you. There will be a class war. When that happens, the wealthy burn along with the poor, and we all lose.

That was my reaction as well. That is precisely the opposite of how it works. If you become a Power User, you go Android, because that's the only phone in the game so far where you can build the system yourself from sources. By definition, the more of a power user you are, the more you're going to be an Android user.

I don't have to; I can read and other people have done the studies for me, as you can see in the links I posted in the prior discussion. People with credibility, unlike yourself. People who have actually done peer-reviewed studies, unlike yourself. I don't fall into the fallacy of thinking I'm smarter than everyone — that's why I looked it up.