That sounds like a reasonable, balanced approach. We need more guys like you here on Slashdot.

If MS carries through with open-sourcing all of the C#/.NET stuff, it will be a great ecosystem. I'd love to write C# for Linux server back-end stuff, without being constrained to some subest of the language, and with full ".NET native" compiler support (or distribution support for the .NET runtime).

Unless you're Mel, in which case you make awesomely unintuitive and necessarily complex systems to save one or two clock cycles in the inner loop, and become a legend.

You're mixing income tax with consumption tax. If you want to tax income, tax income. But if we're taxing consumption, then those who consume more pay more than those who consume less, and those who consume least because they have the least to spend pay the least in taxes because of the baseline exemption. The upper middle class guy who's busting his butt to pay off his student loans, and who saves as much as he can, is not going to pay a disproportionate amount in taxes. (Or are we going to tax his student loan payments as consumption, even though he paid consumption tax while living on those loans? What about deposits in a savings account, or stock purchases? If we're going to do that, we may as well just call it an income tax, because that's what it is.)

If he pays off his student loans and still chooses to live modestly, he continues to pay a low tax rate. If he instead decides to start living large, then he'll start paying more in taxes. Either way, he essentially chooses his tax bracket, because he chooses every day what to buy, and how much to spend on it. This is especially true if we're giving him a front-loaded exemption on expected costs for rent and groceries. In other words, we're not taxing him for living, eating, and having shelter, and we're not taxing him for working and earning money. We're taxing whatever life style he chooses above and beyond the baseline. This tax is progressive in that people who choose to live modestly or who cannot afford to live extravagantly pay very little in taxes. Those who are able and choose to live extravagantly pay much more in taxes. Yes, you could have a billionaire who pays no taxes because he chooses to live in an efficiency and drive an '86 Yugo. That's only a problem if you believe that the government owns all income, and is naturally entitled to its "fair share," because class warfare or whatever. I prefer the tax theory of take from people the very least necessary for government to function. And I suspect there would be very few billionaires living tax free under this system, because it has an actual lifestyle cost to them. The only cost now for billionaires to live tax-free is they pay their accountants and lawyers $900/hour to get creative with shell entities.

The 'high number' of people with gluten intolerance suggests there are idiots who self-diagnose, wrongly.

Hard. If you don't render the page exactly like other browsers, and the web pages 'break' in your browser as a result, then no one will use your browser. The result is you need pixel-perfect rendering of a standard that was designed specifically to not allow pixel-perfect rendering. And of course, there are multiple HTML standards......

Seriously, the ISS group needs to skip a new station and allow private space to take that on.

Instead, the ISS group should focus on getting a base on the Moon and then on Mars. Private Space will be going to the moon around 2020-2022. Europe, Japan, Canada, Russia, etc should join the private space and push to create the side infrastructure that can be used on the moon. In particular, robotics, nuclear power, etc.

and your point is?

Except that Java is covered under the GPL which would forbid that. Oracle can still be dicks about it but the Oracle - Google case, the lower court ruled for Google. It was remanded for reconsideration back to the lower court. The other difference is that Sun open sourced Java and Jonathan Schwartz (former Sun CEO) did not think that Google did anything wrong. It was Oracle who later bought Sun that re-interpreted what they would allow.

In this case MS from the beginning has issues with claiming .NET to be "open source" if it imposes these conditions.

We have old gen II reactors that are being extended, but really should not be. However, there is NO replacement for them.
In addition, there is loads of spent fuel not only at these sites, but others that have been retired.

With transatomic and other companies molten salt approach, we can not only create a reactor that is INCAPABLE OF FAILURE (unless a number of physical LAWS are not true), but, these can burn up the majority of the 'spent fuel'. What will remain will be only 5-10% of the original volume, and will be safe in under 200 years.
Even once we build these (and we will), at some future point, AE combined with FUSION power, will likely become very viable. BUT, it is still better to run these fission reactors to process the 'waste' and turn it safer.

Actually, nothing could be further from the truth WRT new reactors. In POF, TransAtomic's molten salt reactor is impossible to melt down. Just like pebble reactors, heat makes the fuel become self-regulating.

In fact, the SMARTEST thing that America can do, is push for multiple companies to develop these and replace the OLD reactors with these new ones. They can use the spent fuel that is simply sitting on-site and burn it for the next 100 years. Likewise, we can use new thorium reactors to replace coal plants, rather than switching to nat gas.

Yes, there is a difference between open source and free. But you completely missed the point in that the authors are complaining that "Open Source" .NET does not comply with standard open source terms. The promise not to sue over patents is flimsy at best. In the article it paraphrases one of the most troubling aspects as "Microsoft won't sue you so long as you use the code for .NET Runtime projects" which means no code can be used for anything other than .NET ie not for other C# (or C/C++) projects.

For example, if there was a library that I wanted to port from .NET into C++ to use for MythTV, MS might sue me for that. Other open source like GPL projects would have only required that I make the source code changes available to everyone. BSD would not have required me to do anything other than keep the original copyright notices in the files.

Arguing that we should have the right not to do business with groups we dislike, which was precisely the excuse given in the 60's by people who didn't blacks in their restaurant, is not-so-thinly veiled bigotry. It's painful listening to those who don't know history trying to repeat it, desperately hoping that this time it will be different and they'll be allowed to show "those people" who's in charge.

For the record, I'm not black, gay, or liberal. But things like this are exactly the reason why I'm no longer a Republican. I just can't go along willingly with the Attempt Of The Week to make this a hyperconservative theocracy. When someone inevitably comes along and wants to deny my right to fully participate in society, I hope we'll have built the momentum to shut it down.

I'm afraid you got that backwards. MS imposed very strict requirements on corporate use because IE (and MS) gave the finger to standards compliance for a very long time. Now that they have a huge install base on a browser in a mess they created. Either IE breaks with backwards compatibility for standards compliance on the next version or they have to release a different browser (Spartan) and keep IE for legacy. Either way it's going to be painful.

Basic HTML is easy. HTML5 and extensions like scripting are harder; however, that's why other browsers have spent years working on these whereas MS has tried to stay entrenched on their browser and lock-in. They are just playing catchup now.

Uh.....it is hard.....so far everyone who has tried has died doing so.