Yes, thats why I said 'almost', but as far as IE goes, I suspect that our ability to break its stranglehold on the net had more to do with MS's own complacency as anything else (allowing IE's technology to stagnate). By the time they belatedly realized IE's monopoly position was in trouble, they had to restart their R&D on IE's technology/codebase, and that took too much time. By the time they caught up with FF, IE's monopoly position in the market was gone.

Of course, people like you and I helped as well. Like you, I steered a lot of my Win-using family to FF as well. :)

I do agree that monopolies are not *impossible* to break, just that they're very hard to break.

Only for power plants that can be built anywhere, and they're put near urban areas for the obvious reason: thats where the consumers are.

Not by as much as you're thinking. Otherwise, power plants in the Arizona desert or the Hoover Dam would be uneconomical. Electricity can be transmitted for hundreds of miles before the losses become severe, and in an emergency, or during periods of extreme demand, those losses are still acceptable: there's a reason we have a *national* electricity grid.

LOL, you have a very quaint notion of who rural people are, but I suppose everyone has to have a least one deceit.

It got the *wrong* message across. :)

My understanding of English says that this sentence is listing 3 'non-US' solutions: (1) pebble bed, (2) thorium, (3) Hyperion. The 'and' is normally used for last item in a list like this, it does not separate the last item from the previous ones (the adjective used as the prefix to the list still applies to it). Just an FYI.

Hyperion is a private startup, the taxpayers are not involved.

You didn't specify imminent implementations (I don't know of any), only 'solutions'. My only point was that US companies and research institutions are just as heavily involved in PBMR design/research as anyone else.

As for why there are no current implementations, have you considered the possibility that PBMR designs might have issues of their own? Perhaps it just needs a little more work before it can become viable, and that work is being done by many, including US companies/universities.

I most certainly did notice the 'era' word. Chernobyl's RBMK reactors didn't have a proper containment building. Nobody in the West has ever built a nuclear plant without one. Nobody in the West, including Westinghouse, has ever built *anything* like the RBMK-1000.

The odd reason in this case was that the criticism was BS.

Wait, is there someplace thats getting free telephone service? Where? I wanna move there!

How typical.

Hint: the telephone subsidy is much like the expansion of the USPS back in the old days. It was not to make it free for anyone, but just to make it *available* to everyone.

And if you don't get why extending mail and telephone was considered so important, why not read some of the history of those times. A large country thats disconnected and out of touch with itself could never move beyond the 2nd-world stage... never become what we are now.

Because of the higher population (more people == more taxes), sure, but can they *feed* themselves? Didn't think so.

Good thing they didn't do that in 1781, otherwise you and I would still be having to bow to royalty...

Have we forgotten about those 'freedom fries' already? Or DijonGate? And what those spawned?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_fries

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheese_Eating_Surrender_Monkeys

Take note of where that last one originated, not Fox *News*, but close enough.

And Sean Hannity's fit over POTUS's use of Dijon mustard is hilarious, in a sad, insane kind of way. (google it)

Yes, silly and stupid, and it mainly died out fairly quickly, but the trolls and morons just can't let it go.

So its mainly joking (British & American) and partly redneck arrogance (at least American - do the Brits have an equivalent of rednecks?).

They'd better not, I'm sure the Tolkien Estate would have something to say about that (and at least would have a better case than the current trolls).

Just send in the lawyer troops, keep the Nazgul in reserve, in case that lost ring shows up (or Microsoft gets frisky).

Except for the lawyers. (Not necessarily saying thats a bad thing, of course...)

Otherwise, I like it, but it won't happen. Makes too much sense.

CmdrTaco has a half-dozen replicants locked up in a basement in front of monitors doing meta-meta-moderation, 24-7. They don't eat or sleep, helluva investment.

Now if he could just teach those guys how to program, and then cut them loose on slashcode...

...Profit!

Its not a clause of the software license's legalese, they just made the 'KDE Free Qt Foundation' a co-author, in effect, giving that organization the right to relicense Qt if TT ever disappeared, or got taken over by someone hostile to FOSS.

There was, I believe, a separate document, a kind of legal 'memorandum of understanding' or whatever the lawyers call them, separately between those 2 entities that spelled out under what conditions the later could do the relicensing, but it was separate from Qt's software licenses.

And this entire, long story is really moot now, since Nokia has subsequently dual-licensed Qt under the LGPL as well.

You make it sound as if they were forced into something, but they would have not bought Trolltech if they didn't like the Qt license arrangement. This wasn't a shotgun marriage, neither one was brought kicking and screaming to the altar. :)

They did not have to invest all their own time and money that they are doing in leading the now more open & collaborative development of Qt. I'm not an insider, but they seem to be putting *more* resources into its development than TT could have.

A very open & Free Qt is part of their *plan* for their future smartphones, a foundation stone of their (also very open) Maemo OS. Being open & collaborative with Qt will (they hope) help convince devs to support their platform. They're thinking more 'open' right now than Google is with Android, never mind Apple.

They *wanted* to do this.

Sun's problems had nothing to do with the FOSS that they supported. This is the other big problem with TFA summary: Sun was never 'focused almost entirely on open source'. They were a hardware company.

They should have left Sun/MySQL out of the summary. Invalid examples.

Understood, the only reason this gets brought up all the time is because that many of the anti-nuclear folks who get obsessed about a nuclear plant's emissions don't fully realize what their current non-nuclear power plants are emitting.

Which ought to tell us that most nuclear radiation fears are vastly overrated, if not irrational (its a common natural phenomena), but hey, its got that word 'nuclear' in it, so most rationality usually gets tossed within the first 5 minutes of a discussion.

Not exactly. Its only part of the argument against coal. The CO2 and CH4 parts constitute the main part of the anti-coal argument. When you add them all up...

Of course, nuclear has its own issues too. There are no silver bullets for this problem.