Exactly. Until vacation time is put into law as a mandatory requirement, then people will come in when they're sick in order to ration the few days that they have off. Employers will only give the bare minimum that doesn't make them too unattractive to employees and most employers lump vacation time with sick time.

I can see what you're saying, but the problem with that comparison is that Red Hat does contribute back in other ways to the community. They're one of the largest contributors to the Linux kernel and they've also paid developers to create their own projects, such as with the nouveau driver. Meanwhile, Oracle seems to go in the opposite direction, such as the recent moves with MySQL. So, from an ethical perspective, Red Hat is a hell of a lot higher compared to Oracle or other companies.

Red Hat wouldn't need to start obfuscating their patches in the first place. You'd think with all the billions of dollars Oracle and its consultants mooches off of companies that they would at least be able to develop their own Linux distribution instead of relying on something else.

Unfortunately, any beefing up of labor regulations and vacation time would be decried as socialism, so the only thing you can do is find a company that has a good work-life balance. Those are rare however and anyone in IT will tell you it has been that way for some time.

Because that would require management to do their job instead of trying to justify their 6-figure salaries. Personally, I'd say the reason why labor is exploited for overtime is because of the exempt salary provision in the law. Remove the exempt portion of it so all employees are covered by the overtime rules and such. That way, if managers think you need to be there beyond 8 hours, they'll pay you for it. Right now, if management tells me that I need to "work until the job is done", they are free to do so without providing anything extra for it.

I'd agree from the perspective of a low-budget desktop machine (unless you need things to run quietly), but for a laptop it's a different story. A 10 watt TDP difference on a mobile processor can make the difference between a cool machine and one that overheats, depending on the design of it. The Ivy Bridge in my current laptop hardly gets warm ever under load, whereas the Core 2 Duo/X1650 combo in my previous one would overheat to the point of shutting down. Plus, the Intel chips offer a lot smoother Linux graphics experience.

Don't worry, I'm sure NetBSD support it.

You mean, companies will collude together in order to raise the price of goods in that market? I'm shocked, shocked I tell ya!

What mechanical operation requires 16 hours of prep?

Windows.

I never quite understood the whole net neutrality bandwagon. It seems that whenever this issue appears, there are always hoards of people screaming about the end of the internet and how bad corporations are and how if we don't get the government to regulate something right away, then the world is going to explode. But then again, this is Slashdot after all.

David Farber gives a good response on why we should be cautious of NN: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/200606/msg00014.html

Particularly one idea that lawmakers should focus on is the monopolies that are essentially granted to the cable companies for their service. It's hardly a free market system as most people seem to think.