>So instead of the load being distributed properly, you want the government to shift most of the load to your back?

that argument is no logically different than saying, "well if that nigger escapes from the plantation, the master will make us other niggers work harder"

It's just plain stupid.

"I have spent a lot of time fighting far larger lobbying organizations in DC and believe that the right way to win on a cause is to argue the merits of that cause"

HAHHHA HAHHA HH AHA HA HAH AH HAH A HA HAH A HH A HAHA

Yeah, uh huh.

2^31 = 2,147,483,648 = $21,474,836.48 when counted in pennies. I once worked for a software company where a call came into the support desk from one of our customers accounting departments. Once their sales reached a certain point, their books were suddenly off by exactly that amount (minus 1 cent). While everybody else was scratching their heads about the missing 21 million dollars, I recognized the number, and knew exactly what the problem was. They were storing the number as a 32 bit signed int which had overflowed. That's also how I got promoted from the support desk to a software developer.

IMHO, this is possibly why the max number of bitcoins was designed to be 21 million. Even though the number is not stored as an int in the bitcoin clients, it still avoids a lot of potential problems across platforms, and in scripts, and in data transfer to other systems in other formats. Just a thought.

You see, between all the proprietary crap messing with peoples heads, and all the technology egos, and those daytime prisons they call public schools, it becomes really hard to find a good programmer.

IMHO, the best way to find a great programmer is to find some high-school kid who hasn't been corrupted by the public school system, who can think analytically, and who has a good attitude, and train him.

... but you made my point though, (the same is true with MS security too) you can get it right if you go through a bunch of bullshit, but they always make it a pain in the ass, or gouge you.

Everything abut Microsoft is frustrating. Constant popupups, talking nagging paper-clips, can only log in one user account at a time unless you pay out the nose, a window8 GUI trying to shove apps down out throats even if we're a desktop, all versions of word are more incomparable with each other than open office is, how they try to force me into bing, how they try to obsolete older versions like XP - even though it works perfectly fine on older PC's, even worse, how they try to obsolete older versions of office. Don't even get me started with VB VBscript, and their basterdized versions of html and javascript.

However, all of these annoyances are not problems, they are symptoms of a company who can't compete on service, so instead they try to compete by shoving proprietary crap down our throats. Then they wonder why companies that 'get it' like google, waltz in and rip them a new asshole, while linux effectively kicked their ass in the dataceter market. I know being able to gouge the fuck out of people with proprietary licensing is like a security blanket to them, but really, in order to compete they just need to give it up. It's dulling them.

IMHO, the problem is that these companies with the help of the government want to use intellectual property rights laws to control people. These (IPR) laws are the problem, and DRM is the tool they intend to use to impose them. That's why I don't think fighting DRM will solve our problems. They'll never stop this crap till we cut it off at the root, and stand up against the laws being imposed on us.

Oil and fuel can be re factored from both coal and natural gas if necessary, so in truth, it's not a matter of amount, but a matter of price. Once the price reaches a certain level - other means of getting fuel become more economical. In fact, once oil reaches a certain price, you can literally use nuclear power (or hydro/solar) and pull co2 from the air, and reprocess it into fuel.

In the end, there is no one foundation or company. We have to use technology to create p2p/distributed types of solutions that can bypass the state and proprietary controls, even assuming they have 100% control over the infrastructure.

It's not either/or, but both/and. Bugs are fixed, usability is improved .. AND work is ongoing at making necessary infrastructural improvements.

If what you got from this article was "new colors! new shapes!" you have somehow misunderstood what you were seeing. The colors and shapes are completely secondary to the work being done to modularize the existing libraries and have support for hardware accelerated rendering for the entire desktop shell. The colors and shapes are parts of a test framework designed to, well, test the underlying framework; they are not a user-facing product.

Perhaps /. isn't the best place for topics that aren't about cosmetics.

As Sebastian has noted clearly time and again, the effects shown in the demo are what are used to test the framework. They are not the default effects that will be part of the actually released product. It is not unusual for framework test applications to look odd or even plain out ugly as their job is to push the framework and test the various capabilities.

So, no .. this isn't about wobbling things. It's about having a working hardware accelerated canvas that can be extended in several ways, one of which includes OpenGL shaders...

Those aren't windows, those are desktop widgets. Nice try, though.

Does anybody else just wish ReactOS and/or WINE would just take over, and reach a point where everything can run on them. That way we could kick out Microsoft and not have to play their upgrade and licensing games all the time.

Because in the USA, at least, you can't patent an interface. You can patent all sorts of other stuff, but interface patents are one of the few things you can't patent? That's why AMD and Compaq were able to waltz in and kick IBM's and Intel's ass when it came to pin-socket compatible PC's.