lol, they've just signed their company's death warrant. They couldn't even get people to use NX when it was free! What hope is there now? Oh well... Hopefully Wayland will be able to do this much better anyway.

> "whether customers can someday realistically drop their cable subscriptions and go online-only for their TV"

Um...what? Someday? I've been doing this for 3 years now, and before that my roommate had it, not I. I can't fathom how or why anyone would ever pay the exorbitant prices for cable television! Seriously...do people think they NEED TV that much? That's just sad... Then again, this is the U.S. we're talking about, where the government had to pay people just so that they wouldn't lose their precious TV when switching to digital.

I realize most people are thinking the same thing, but it needs to be said... What were the creators of this site thinking, using Flash? It just makes no sense to me. Was there no thought put into it at all? Are there actually Linux users/advocates out there who do not hate Flash?

In my opinion, being Linux-friendly *cannot* exclude being Open-Source and GPL-friendly, as these are really the heart and soul of Linux. Releasing a free *license* is not like releasing the source code. This should not be applauded.

I'm glad I don't work in your office, or have to pay the software bill every couple years MS decides to release a new version merely to read all the proprietary formats. Seriously--working in that kind of environment would be so miserable.

You don't think that people who are residents only of the U.S. exist? Do you think the entire American continent (North and South) is like one country? Do you realize that outside of the U.S. and Canada, everyone else on this continent thinks it is ONE continent called America, not two separate ones? There is absolutely nothing misguided about wanting a separate adjective--whatever it's called--to refer to people from the U.S. only, excluding the other 600 million people who live in America.

As for leaving the country--believe me, if it was easier to do, I would have done it long ago. As soon as I find a way I will get the hell out of here. Self-loathing would imply that I associate myself with the United States, which I most certainly do not. Of course there are bad people everywhere--it's all about where that line is drawn in the sand. There just happen to be a lot more of them in the U.S., and for the most part they actually *like* that attribute. They also have a hell of a lot more power than in other places in the world, which is why they get more attention than others, and rightly so.

Condemning a culture and condemning a race are two ENTIRELY different things. One is largely a choice, the other is merely a physical (and scientifically proven meaningless) attribute. To equate the two is actually quite offensive. Bigot and racist are also entirely different terms. I have no problem being called a bigot when it comes to my opinion of residents of the U.S. I also don't think this is a bad thing. Of course I am talking about certain generalized behaviours exhibited by a majority of the people here, not every single individual simply because they were born here. You making such an inference is just wrong.

Wow, congratulations, you somehow managed to completely miss the whole point. Well done!

I never said everyone in the Americas speaks Spanish, did I? And I didn't even mention Brazil. I imagine it would be equally insulting to Brazilians as it would Americans and French-Canadians to refer to an "American accent" only representative of the majority of Spanish-speaking people. That is the point. The variations between different dialects only strengthens it.

You are indeed an ignorant American who needs to spend a little more time thinking things through. Race was not mentioned once in any post in this thread until you brought it up. Perhaps you should also study the definition of racism while you are at it. To the extent that "race" even exists, there is no USian race at all. There is most definitely a USian culture which I despise. And I should know, I was born in the U.S. and have had to live around you disgusting people my entire life.

You are really an ass. This is why people (myself included) hate people from the U.S. so much. The United States of America is a SUBSET of all the states of America. It's rude to insult all Americans when typically it is just those from the U.S. that fuck things up so much. We desperately need a new adjective to refer to a person from the U.S. but until one formally exists, USian will have to do. Just don't ever use the word "American" unless you mean it to refer to everyone on this hemisphere.

And to the others who have commented on this thread offering various comparisons--none of them are valid. I can't think of any other similar situation, except perhaps using the word "Soviets" to refer ONLY to Russians and not all of the countries that were a part of the USSR.

You could also compare it to the phrase "British accent" which is entirely meaningless, considering the wide variation in accents between Scotland, England, Wales, etc. If you can find a Scot who is actually proud to be British (hard to find, I realize!), I could see them being quite offended at people calling an English accent "British" as if it represented the entire country.

Similarly, an "American Accent" is Spanish-speaking accent, as that is the language spoken by the majority of Americans, though I could imagine a few people in the U.S. who wouldn't be happy about this.

The traditional TV networks, recording companies, movie producers, etc. are *never* going to give up their business model. EVER. They are dinosaurs and simply will not change. It's futile to think that they will. The only option is for them to go out of business. They will, of course, but it's going to be a long wait, unfortunately. They will continue to fight us at every turn, but eventually, they will be gone. Until then, our job is to hang in there, continue to support independent projects, use torrents so that they lose advertising revenue, and teach as many people as we know to do the same.

Depends on how long it took to write. If it took him 3 hours, and he charges $100/hour (reasonable if he's some amateur) then pay him $300. Very, very simple. If it saves 1 million man hours, then it's a net win for the human race . Yay.

Yes. Exactly. Fucking selfish, capitalist pigs is what they are. And why shouldn't they be, as long as we as a society allow them to continue doing this? They don't just want to make money off of their WORK, they want to make money for it once, and then make money again without doing any more work, and then continue to make money for it, over and over and OVER again without ever doing a fucking thing. People should be paid for the actual work they do, not indefinitely. It is that simple.

Apple users are used to paying for costly proprietary applications, so of course there is a better revenue opportunity. I just find it so disgusting that there are so many developers all of a sudden interested in making money from their code. It seems Apple is doing more to destroy the environment created by the open source community than any other company...

What is this mysterious portal thing? A quick "apt-cache search portal" doesn't reveal much of interest besides:

dotlrn - e-learning portal system based on OpenACS
liblemonldap-ng-portal-perl - Lemonldap::NG authentication portal part