And they wouldn't be taxed, because they don't use a computer.

From TFA:

The 100 million being discussed is only people who are Internet users, not "the entire population of the USA" (I think that's closer to 300 million by now, actually). Since your grandparents don't use the Internet, they wouldn't be included in that count, and so wouldn't be obligated to pay the tax.

(Two weeks late! Whee! At least I'm not jumping into that 'definition of libertarianism' thread...)

Then, I'm sorry, but you interpreted it wrong.

This sort of poll is unmistakably aimed at people who keep track of, and take pride in, their system uptime - people in whose circles a respectable uptime is measured in nothing less than months.

A "reboot", for the purpose of this type of poll, is any time you voluntarily turn your computer off - or, by some standards, perhaps even non-voluntarily. The important factor is how long the computer remains on and running in between times of not doing so.

If you turn your computer off voluntarily, for anything other than exceptional reason (e.g. kernel updates, hardware changes, et cetera), then you are almost certainly not the type of person at whom the question is aimed. That doesn't mean you get to count your voluntary shutdowns as not being a reboot for the purposes of this type of poll.

You are, of course, still entirely free to think that people who are ashamed to report an uptime of less than three months are idiots - just as they are free to boggle at the notion that a computer person would willingly shut their computer down when they didn't need to.

Sure.

Now imagine how much more of a load running that many instances of e.g. WoW on that server would have involved.

And surely you don't think a full compile of WoW (by whomever actually has access to do that) is a resource-light endeavour?

Running Nethack or another roguelike can take up resources, yes - but not to nearly the extent that a more modern graphical game would.

I'm not sure he is; I know I'm not.

Rather, I don't think that programmers should necessarily need to hand-code e.g. a sorting algorithm at the drop of a hat - but I do think that they need to be able to so code one, if the circumstance really did require it. If they don't have the skill to be able to do that, then they aren't going to have the skill to be a really good programmer.

Putting it the other way around: if someone has acquired the skill necessary to be a really good programmer, then by and large, that person will also by that point be able to code a sorting algorithm - even if not necessarily an especially efficient implementation - at, as the fellow says, the drop of a hat. There will always be exceptions to that, of course, but not nearly enough to invalidate it as a general rule.

By that standard, as it happens, I myself am not an especially good programmer. I could code a bubble sort with no difficulty, and linked lists (handcoded since C doesn't provide any such thing) are an integral part of every nontrivial program I write these days - but I've never even seriously understood (as in, would be able to explain it a week later without referring back to what I'd previously read) quicksort, much less been able to implement it, and I wouldn't know where to get started on implementing a hash or a B-tree.

They don't have to come from anywhere.

If there were only one person in the world - if, hypothetically, there had only ever been one person - then that one person would be free to do whatever he, she, it, or other could manage to do.

If there were two people in the world, they would be similarly free, except insofar as one placed restrictions on the other - "stay on your side of the river or we'll fight", for instance.

Increasing the number of people beyond that doesn't change the basic picture, only the complexity of the details.

Restrictions on freedom are artificial creations, which we impose on ourselves or have imposed on us by others.

That is, at least, the view to which I subscribe (and the only one which makes sense to me), along with part of one possible rationale for it; it is what is referred to as "sea of rights", from the metaphor that there is a naturally existing sea of rights in which we create small islands of restrictions.

The opposing view, "sea of restrictions" - as the name implies, the metaphor is that there is a naturally existing sea of restrictions in which we create small islands of rights - seems somewhere between silly and abhorrent to me; certainly I've never been able to come up with a rationale for it which did not seem either utterly horrific or immediately laughable.

Oh, I'm entirely willing to support people making a living by creating music, movies, books, and software.

More specifically, I'm willing to support people who are providing me with something I want.

TPB, et al., are providing me with something I want: convenient access to other things I want.

Restricted forms of a work (copy-protected software, DRMed music, et cetera) is not something I want.

I do, in fact, send money to content creators when the mood strikes me - generally in association with running across something I particularly like, but sometimes in response to an apparent specific need on the part of the creator(s) in question. Though it's never happened, I can easily envision myself sending money to a creator whose works I had already paid for in the traditional way (i.e. an author whose book I'd bought), simply because I decide that their work is good enough to warrant it or that they are enough in need of the support to make it worthwhile to me.

TPB appear to presently be in specific need. It is therefore not surprising that people would be willing to send them money and provide other forms of support.

Not in my case.

I don't pirate much anymore - I'm not even entirely clear on how much I ever did - but when I do/did, it's almost entirely a matter of convenience. Yes, not having to pay for it is a factor, but - in my case at least - that's pretty much entirely because having to pay for it is almost inherently less convenient than not having to do so. (Even iTunes fails on this point; it's highly inconvenient for a Linux user to run as far as I've ever been aware, and when I've seen family members who run Macs try to take a non-DRMed file they bought via iTunes and make it available on the household LAN, they have had to jump through so many hoops as to make the process impracticable as a general rule.)

Make paying for music (and movies, and TV-show episodes, and so forth) just as convenient as not doing so, and give me the same or a better end product (comparable or better quality, no use restrictions as with DRM, etc.), and very soon buying it will again be the first thing I think of when I want something. Until that is achieved - and it's a difficult enough target that I wouldn't be surprised if it never happened - the more convenient option will almost certainly remain my reflexive choice.

But you said

That statement, itself, has nothing to do with licensing terms. In order for it to be true, you would have to have - in some sense - already had that $9 per each such person.

If the person who downloaded it would have paid the $9 - that is, bought a copy - if the "download without paying" option were not available, then you did in some sense have that $9 for that person.

If, on the other hand, the person in question would not have paid the $9 - and would have gone without - then you did not in any sense already have that $9, so it cannot be said to have been stolen from you, and you have not lost anything. (The person in question, by comparison, has gained something - and it would be possible to argue that the overall gain to people in this category is enough to outweigh the overall loss from people in the other category. I'm not interested in trying to argue it now, and it's possible that the argument would be wrong, but it would be possible to make.)

The trouble is that there is little or no practical ability to tell the two classes of person from one another, save by anecdotal evidence, and so no ability to assess just how much could be said to have been taken. ("No one is ever told what would have happened.")

I don't have any especially memorable spam subject lines to report, but I've seen some amusing From: names.

For a while, I was receiving spam from people who apparently assembled their From: names randomly based on the pattern "Adjective X. Noun", where the X could be any letter. The first of those I noticed was "Statesmanlike M. Quadruped", which has remained good for a laugh ever since.

And, while it was a halfway decent game, it wasn't Zork.

I haven't tried this newest offering yet - I'm at work, and I have slightly more integrity than that (though apparently not much, as I'm reading Slashdot) - but from descriptions, it sounds even less like Zork than RtZ was.

I'd probably drive you crazy, then.

I run Enlightenment, with my pager set to 4x8 - four desktops wide by eight high - and the only reason I don't do 8x8 is because then the pager would be wider than gkrellm and steal more horizontal space on each desktop. At least two of my brothers are much the same way.

What do I do with all of them?

Partly I do what someone else mentioned, group related windows for the same task together.

Partly I have a few dozen maximized xterms on different desktops for convenience purposes. (Some of them are just there by habit by now, but I always have uses for them.)

Partly I like to be able to have multiple browser windows for different sets of tasks - particularly so that when one task requires opening an ungodly number of tabs, it doesn't shrink the tab width beyond usability or push the newest tabs off the right edge of the tab bar (requiring scrolling).

Partly I like to know that I can always jump to a new desktop, open a new xterm and have a clean (usually temporary) environment to work in, without colliding with any of the other things I have active.

I get by at work in Windows, but there I'm rarely doing more than three things at once, and most of them use the same programs. For the sorts of things I prefer to do on my own time, I'd chafe at as little as the four desktops which are the default for some LiveCDs I've tried.

Of course, but when you're probably going to go back to them soon and it takes work to get back to the "ready to do the next thing" situation after opening the program, why would you want to?

On the original topic: I don't care about desktop environments. I turn off all the graphical frills of Enlightenment, set the desktop background to black and disable anything resembling a screensaver except for simple screen blanking. I certainly don't use a program-launcher menu, and I don't care what source a program comes from as long as it fits what I want.

I haven't changed window managers in at least ten years (unless moving from E16 to E17 counts), and I'm not likely to soon either; getting this one configured to suit me is enough of a hassle, I've got no real desire to try to do it with another one when I don't need to. I do want to experiment with other WMs, in case one would happen to fit my needs better, but not badly enough to shut everything down and restart X for the purpose - and I don't yet have a place to hook up a spare machine to test such things on.

The trouble with this is that Microsoft, et al., don't sell things.

They license them.

They try to cover this up by talking about "selling a license", et cetera, but this is a bogus claim. They can cancel or otherwise revoke the license under the right conditions, and keep the money paid; if it were a sale, then you would retain the license and all associated rights no matter what they did, unless and until you sold or gave it to someone else.

DRM and its kin, in all their many permutations and by all their many names, are simply an extension of this and an attempt to enforce it by means more direct than that of the law.

The "license it, don't sell it" model is the problem.

Even if you move that hard drive to a different computer?

I'm fairly sure the GP meant that "'open source' is the thing that's coming in trying to displace the old system" - i.e. "new" in the sense of "not what's already being used in these places".

In HTML as I learned it - as I said, roughly the HTML 3 era - there was no such thing as a </p> tag; it was one of the standalone tags, like <br> and <hr>. It was, in most but not all cases, functionally equivalent to two consective <br> tags (owing to comparatively crude browser implementations).

It's faintly possible that this learning actually took place in a parallel universe, and I've yet again sideslipped into a universe which is almost but not quite practically identical to the one I had been in before. That is, however, the language as I learned it.