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.

That is just bizarre.

from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_reactor

I count 5 references there to US companies and universities involved Pebble Bed reactor design.

Not sure what you mean by 'accelerated' thorium but on the list of thorium reactors from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium_fuel_cycle, the US has been involved in that as well. The only country still actively running thorium reactors is India, and thats because, understandably, they have a *lot* of thorium and very little uranium available in their own country.

As for this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperion_Power_Generation

You do realize that Hyperion is a US-based company don't you?

Name one commercial Westinghouse nuclear reactor that was built without a containment building. Just one.

Please, comparing any commercial nuclear reactor built in the West to the Soviet RBMK-1000 is a crime against logic.

Their current design, AP1000, is Gen3+, Chernobyl is considered 'early' Gen2, and that is probably an insult to all the other reactor types that fall under the Gen2 classification - its design was that bad and its implementation was, unbelievably, even worse. Hell, it was nothing more than a spiffed-up copy of an older Soviet military reactor that was designed solely for plutonium production.

Ahh, so this is an anti-US rant? Well, you're in luck, Westinghouse is A-OK-Joe, since they're now owned by Toshiba, as well as having several (separate, originally independent) European subsidiaries involved in nuclear power. Nuclear power is big, but also expensive, business, thus the players went international a long time ago.

Oh wait, do you have something against the Japanese and Europeans too?

only because it has the most headroom to grow into, considering that its *still* dead-last behind everyone else.

That later part (still dead-last) is the interesting thing, given that Silverlight's master is also the master of Windows: why hasn't Silverlight jumped to a usage percentage similar to Window's own market share?

Given the Windows monopoly, I'm astonished that Silverlight hasn't even reached 50% penetration yet. Heck, until I saw your link, I thought it *was* more wide-spread.

Wow, MS caves on SVG, and now I discover Silverlight isn't even over 50% of the market after 3 years of being pimped hard by MS. Dunno if I can handle this much good news from a Microsoft-related thread simultaneously, its certainly not what I'm used too...

[cut-n-paste of a response I made above here]

Moonlight doesn't, probably can't, so likely never will, support the Silverlight DRM codecs (that DRM is required by Netflix, and practically every other Silverlight website), thus, for this topic at least, Moonlight != Silverlight.

There is one crucial difference though: DRMed Flash works on my OS, Silverlight does not. All other technical details are irrelevant.

Moonlight doesn't, probably can't, so likely never will, support the Silverlight DRM codecs (that DRM is required by Netflix, and practically every other Silverlight website), thus, for this topic at least, Moonlight != Silverlight.

Boycotts against monopolies almost never work by definition (IE), but for your response to the GP to be relevant we would have to consider Netflix as a monopoly... I don't think so.

Until now, I didn't even know how Netflix delivered its movies, and now that I do know, I'll not ever waste my time going there.

NetFlix.com != IE (when it was a monopoly)

With a publicly traded company, the only thing that matters is what the stockholders think.

If its the shareholders demanding 'progress' on an annual, or even quarterly, basis, then who the CEO happens to be, won't make a damn bit of difference. A company's officers answer to the stockholders, and *only* the stockholders. This is the root problem: shareholders only interested in the short-term.

P&G is merely an exception to the rule; they aren't the only one, but its difficult to buck the normal stockholder's expectation of regular, near-term profits.

Ah, but what do you do when the sarcasm is *both* funny and insightful? Such a dilemma! :)

Well, since funny doesn't add to your karma, but insightful does, when I'm faced with this kind of dilemma, I go with insightful too, as the mods did in your case.

At some point Firefox was in the exact same position, yet it eventually managed to take marketshare away from IE, and without the advantage of Google's ad budget.

At this point it probably doesn't even matter. We don't even know yet how much of this rapid adoption is permanent or not. Its a lot harder to guess who are the 'winners' and 'losers', especially long-term, with so many players now in the game.

Choice is good, and nothing beats a little friendly competition at getting a complacent player off their duff and back in the game (yes, I'm looking at you Firefox: at some point you lost your 'lean-n-mean' under an avalanche of XUL chrome and plugin hell - you need to work on getting that back).

And your comment would be even more believable if you had any UID at all. At least the GP has one.

'hearing about' != 'registering as a user'

I lurked here (read-only) for at least a year or so before bothering to sign up. Maybe the GP, when he was at Google, was just too busy doing Real Work(TM) to bother?

Besides, its not like Slashdot is the center of the IT universe. What reason would anyone have to expect that every current and former Google employee is a /. member?

/. may be the center of *our* universe, but its not everyone else's Prime Attractor. :)

It was a binary driver, they were not forced to release the source code to it, only the source to the rest of the FOSS software they were using.

Which you can do with Linux.

Not being applicable to internal usage was a deliberate intent of the GPL, it is only concerned with distribution to the larger public.

??? That is not a 'private fork'. You seem to have changed subjects again...

Thats obvious. My only point is that for some companies the risk/reward of a GPLed OS makes better sense for them.

Not completely different in the technical sense, only in its licensing.

Note that I never said 'surpass' or 'dominate'. Only that those for whom the licensing works better would switch to it eventually. Just as those for whom the BSD works better already have been, or will be in the future, switching to the BSD over time.

Fair enough. That part of my post was a 'hypothetical of a hypothetical' for which I have no evidence.

You keep going back to non-OS examples, when my point was all about licensing issues related to operating systems...

And you keep ignoring my point that neither the GPL nor the BSD work for everyone, so obviously there will be plenty of examples for each side...

Becoming Webkit was never its goal, it was just KDE's internal HTML renderer, which was then taken by *others* and turned into something more than even its original designers had intended.

Sigh... when did I ever say the GPL worked for everyone? All I said was the corollary of your above point is also true. Thats why the GPL and BSD will always both be around.. because neither one works best for everyone.

If there are enough of those people to form a large enough dev community for the BSDed OSes, then the BSDs will eventually catch up to Linux, and those people will switch.

My point is only that you shouldn't expect Linux to die at the point, since, for some/many people, its licensing works better for them (again, a corollary)...

Not at all, you keep making the mistake of assuming I'm one of those 'GNU zealots' who hates the BSD and wants to see it die.

My only point from the beginning was that the 'BSD zealots' who believe that Linux and the GPL will die once they've caught up to it, are simply deluding themselves. There is a reason both exist and are being actively used.

And yet C has been eclipsed by many other languages since then, in terms of 'popularity'. On the other hand, its still around and being used because its still useful to some people. Really, I don't understand your point here.

No, that's what you think I'm arguing. You're not reading what I'm actually saying.

I think I'm done here.

Only that an OS and an app have different characteristics when it comes to the license issue. First, OSes are far more complex. Second, for gadget makers who need an embedded OS, the OS is just the foundation of a software stack, and its usually 'hidden', so gadget makers will have less of an issue with using an OS that their competitors can also use (and see). For those 2 reasons the enforced collaboration/sharing that the GPL requires makes more sense for some companies/people.

My previous/current comments were/are referring to code that is distributed, thus my examples involving companies using an embedded OS on consumer products.

Besides, private forks are irrelevant to this discussion since they don't need a license anyway.

Encourages, but doesn't require, unless the GPL is used. Some companies will not consider it acceptable to risk contributing if their competitors are not also required to accept the exact same risks (and rewards). Thus a level playing field.

No, they're choosing a GPLed OS rather then a BSDed OS precisely because of the license, but not for the usual 'religious' reasons. Again, as above, its a level playing field.

We're talking about a hypothetical here, the history doesn't help us.

I never claimed the GPL works for everyone, only that it works better for some.

Thank you. The whole 'GNU zealots' thing is getting real old, especially since real 'GNU zealots' are as rare as hen's teeth around here.

This is where we (still) disagree. I don't believe the BSDed OSes would 'win' just because they arrived first, and by the same reasoning I believe Linux is not as popular as it is just because it arrived first.

So as soon as our hypothetical GPLed OS did become available, those companies/people for whom the GPL works better would migrate to it because it *does* work better for them, no matter how long the prior BSDed OSes had been around.

If one license is universally better than the other one, in all circumstances, then we'll inevitably see a movement to that one 'superior' license. The fact that that doesn't appear to be happening tells me that the licensing does matter, and that the different licenses are useful to different people (or the same folks but in different circumstances).

That strikes me as a really odd thing to say. Most people put more thought into what license they chose than this. Linux is no longer a young project, yet Linus himself has said he doesn't regret using the GPL, and Linus did give it a lot of thought, after all, he deliberately chose to use GPLv2-only, if he had done as you suggest he'd have used the default GPLv2-or-later without thinking twice about it.

Perhaps the BSD will gain on the GPL, and if it does then great, I have no problem with that (I love competition, and abhor monopolies - of any kind), but to believe something is popular because its users are basically idiots (thats what you're implying here, even if you didn't mean to) is illogical in this case given that the users we're talking about are mostly fairly intelligent computer programmers. After all, not all FOSS code out there is being written by 'stupid amateurs' who just pick their software license based on its 'buzz-factor' or by flipping a coin. :)

Seriously, do you really believe that some/many coders who go to the trouble of writing an app and releasing it to the public, just use whichever license they think is the most popular?

My guess is that those people are so few as to just be statistical noise...

Thing is, you're the only one who keeps bringing this point up, it was never part of the original issue, and the post you initially responded to said nothing about this.

Now here's the problem you have: there are plenty of people who agree with your point above... but also use the GPL. To them, you're starting off on a GPL rant, and ending up on piracy/MPAA/whatever, is merely going off-topic, not making a point.

I'd suggest that you actually verify your implicit assumption that everyone who advocates the use of the GPL also advocates piracy, and once you discover this assumption is false, save the second half of your rant just for those to whom it actually applies.

None of your contrary examples are operating systems.

You forgot the other group that has become very significant to the relative success of Linux: commercial companies that use Linux (and contribute code to it) because they know their competitors can't take anything they contribute, put it in a closed-source alternative, and use it against them. Meanwhile, they all get the advantage from the code contributions of others. Its a more level playing field for many commercial entities, and they don't have the hassle of maintaining their own private fork.

It all depends on the nature of the market. For normal apps, the license issue is not that significant (except to the zealots - on whichever side), but, as an example, for commercial companies who need an embedded OS for something (where the OS itself is not the center-piece of their product - thus the fact that their competitors can use it too is irrelevant), the license really does make a difference, and many of them are deliberately choosing the GPLed Linux (for completely agnostic, practical reasons).

The point I'm trying to make here is that the license issue is actually important (in both directions) to a *lot* of people/companies, not just the 'zealots' (of either side).

No, but then again, if Linus hadn't of done it, it would only have been a matter of time before someone else released a GPLed OS kernel, and once that happened, I believe the same results would have happened as well: it would have become popular despite the pre-existence of the BSDs, because for some people, and for some companies in some markets, the GPL makes better sense for them.

You sound like you desperately want to believe the only reason the GPL and Linux is so widespread is because of zealotry, but I don't see that, there just aren't that many GPL zealots out there (they're obviously badly outnumbered here on /.). RMS's army of smelly, bearded holy warriors isn't *that* big. :)

There really is more going on here than just zealotry...