In a comment on this topic I asked a similar question.

An argument that RMS will likely use, is that if you use proprietary software, you are helping to keep the majority of software proprietary, while if you use and advocate Free Software, you will help in improving it, which leads to a better medium-term situation.

The same argument can be used for situations where a vendor benefits from the network effect to keep people locked into their service. These arguments can be made for using the metric system in the USA or for resisting the Mafia in Sicily; in many cases it is hard to get everyone to behave in a way that leads to optimal situation.

I use a proxy that I wrote myself to surf the web. Its purpose is similar to the Firefox add-on RequestPolicy: to selectively block requests to website B that originate from a visit to website A. An example is the loading of content from google-analytics or scorecardresearch.com.

This proxy is written in Javascript and runs on Node.JS. I have not put it online and not plan to share it soon. Nevertheless, a similar script could be used to cache your web site visits and index their content.

Here is a slightly philosophical question.

When using Free Software, a lot of time is spent in trying to find the right software or in writing it. The software store model, where controlled devices offer cheap software, allows the market place for software to work efficiently. Programmers have an incentive to write good software because there is a lot of competition. With a market like that, when you choose to use closed software, you often get functionality faster.

A simple definition of freedom might be: being able to do what you want to do. If I need to write software to do what I want to do, that could be considered to be less free than when I have the ability to use a closed product that does what I want instantly.

Talking about freedom in this way, is quite different from the way the Free Software movement looks at it. In Free Software, freedom is linked to more control. In closed software the emphasis is on more convenience and more spare time. Do see the balance between control and convenience as black and white?

He explains it right there. We live in an abundance of webpages. I think this workflow might actually work fine once you have a good archive of reference materials local and properly indexed.

The web is not just a source of information, it's also a source of distraction. By building in a latency, one can be more productive. Stallman is not the only one that does this.

In addition, by limiting himself to fewer types of communication channel instead of a complex mix of twitter, facebook, irc, mail, telephone, web, voip, text and more, he needs less brain cycles to deal with the different formats.

Or if you want to combine Java, JavaScript, and a few other scripting languages in a Node-like server, use Vert.x.

Redhat with Fedora is a good model. The codebases are quite different. Fedora takes the community input: code and questions for free support. Redhat takes the large support contracts with more mature codebase.

Then let them enter the company address or the account number before speaking to a human. If they cannot provide this data, they are connected to an operator that does no technical support whatsoever and only tries to resolve the contract status of the caller.

How do you currently know if a caller has a support contract?

Tim Berners-Lee promotes the idea of linked data everywhere. Wikipedia is on board with wikidata. The Nokia N9 features a triple store, the same one that is used in Gnome. KDE implements Nepomuk. The UK is linking all legislature with RDF.

Ubuntu could make a large contribution by making the data graph of the user and of the distribution visible and searchable. Do you see a future for the semantic web and will you participate in it?

There should not be any installers. A software package should be one file that is download and run. The file should not be unpacked, it should simple be one executable with all necessary parts inside.

Any software that is not simple a single file is complex and brittle.

#2 is not Linus. I guess CmdrTaco prefers the author of Harry Potter over Linus.

Is dressing childeren in a particular clothing that is offensive to some immoral? Is it immoral to teach them religion or a specific (minority) first language? Should children be given boys or girls toys or no toys at all? Must you learn a child to play the piano when it is five? Or is reading and writing more important? Is it immortal to make you child immortal? May you kill to feed your child? And if so, only plants or also animals and perhaps other humans?

Parents in modern society have responsibility for the welbeing of their childeren. The welbeing is defined very broadly. Malnourishment and violence is not allowed, but smoking while pregnant or refusing vaccination is permitted. Children are designed or at least formed by their environment. The genetic makeup (genotype) is just one aspect of the outcome (fenotype). Today parent have the ability to steer the genotype more than ever and many will use this ability, be it to steer the sex, the skin color or simply to avoid hereditary diseases.

This is a very interesting development and I'm eagerly awaiting the spectacle. We have plenty of humans and a large portion will eagerly make use of the new possibilities. The companies that provide these services will need to improve their marketing though.

Case in point: terminator in movies vs in reality.

Movies require action and emotions. This makes them very bad for predicting the future.

I wonder if this application will be open sourced. A high profile person like Romney could get many young people interested in programming.

e-paper is nice way of reading. The only reason why i do not own an e-reader is that the time to go from page to page is too long. With these improved speeds (12 fps or 80ms) this last drawback is being solved. That is very good news. Playing video well on these screens will take longer, but already the speed improvement will really help selling e-readers.

You can use identica or tweeter for seeding and logging. Get the most recent message of a public source and use that to prove that there was no prerecording. While recording, push a hash to a public server regularly. To the readers, these hashes will be unintelligible and when you publish them at regular intervals regardless of what you are doing, you are not even letting know that you are currently actively awake.