"The plan" is a misnomer though, I currently have a Nexus One on a $10 a month plan.

"So, are you trying to ban etrade.com and "flipping houses"? Or is risk taking in general ok, and you just want to impose your peculiar morality about playing cards on others?"

They are not the same, Equities are investments, I don't know of any gambling site that pays dividends, do you?

Talk to the people who bought Bank of America stock at $40+. See if they think there is any "gambling" (or more commonly called risk in this context) in equities. Might want to ask them how their wonderful dividends are doing too.

"Redhat Enterprise Linux 5" is essentially a massive kernel fork at 2.6.18.

Backporting a lot of patches is not the definition of fork, for any sane person. Esp. when that same group of people are actively working upstream on the latest releases.

Depending on who you ask, RHEL can be more risky than mainline.

Sure, if you ask stupid people questions they can often give you stupid answers. But I've yet to see anyone intelligent run a vanilla upstream kernel in a production environment. Google are probably the closest, and they basically have a mini-RHEL kernel team that they employ ... I guess wasting huge amounts of money to do that isn't a big deal when you are Google.

I've definitely had RHEL panics take down production, only to later discover linux kernel bugs that had been fixed in mainline for a while, but that redhat hadn't backported to their ancient linux fork

Shocker, software having bugs. But here's a hint, if we play chess 30 times and you win 1 match ... that doesn't mean we are both winners, "depending on who you ask". Maybe you really are trying to say that RHEL vs. vanilla are going to have roughly the same number of bugs (and the same time to get them fixed) ... but you'd be a pretty small minority at that point.

By default vim will make a backup copy of the file you are about to edit, which is why your HD was on fire. You can turn that feature off with -n (or in the config. file, see man vim) ... but then recovery after a crash is impossible. As the original poster said, vim does not load the entire file into memory.

> Red Hat is really a distributor. What original products have they developed?

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/RedHatContributions

And how is this different from SUN? Oh, wait, SUNs OS is open-source, and, because the platform is open, it is easy enough to put Linux on.

Except Solaris isn't the same as OpenSolaris, in fact one of the biggest complaints I see from the few people still running Solaris is that they still can't get access to the source ... just to see wtf is going on. And OpenSolaris only happened as a last ditch effort before Solaris died to Linux, being forced to do something before you die because you didn't is hardly "leading".

NFS, NIS, Solaris, JAVA, OpenOffice, VirtualBox, MySQL

NFS and NIS can only be classed as open source projects if you are delusional. Yes, they dumped some code to try and make a de-facto std. ... but they were never an upstream. Solaris being open source is a lie. Java only because open source because Red Hat+IBM+etc. were going to create a real open source version, if they didn't. Open Office, you can have (although again, they were pretty much forced to open source it ... and there is no real community, because Sun are clueless about open source). MySQL was bought, complete with community (and only a significant part of Sun if you take their inflated price at face value). I know nothing about Virtual box, so maybe you can have that ... for what it's worth.

Yeh, I do that with my foot too. But I'm pretty sure a lot of that is instinctual, because although I've done it to great success with class cups etc. ... I've also done it with knives and heavy metal objects (while not wearing shoes :).

*BSD runs the BSD userland instead of the GNU userland. So it is just like linux with a worse UI.

Be fair. They have a worse kernel too.

Welcome to reality. The amount of electricity to your house is not limited

Not true, even ignoring the physical problems there's a main breaker (which you can't play with without the electric companies approval) which has a limit. But I've also never seen the electric company advertise "unlimited" electricity.

And I think network usage has to go the same way. The reason that's scary to a lot of people is because most "per-megabyte" rates are way, way too high.

That is a worry ... but the biggest problem is still "we sold you unlimited, but have now realized we can't give it to you".

The thing is the only thing overseas sub-contracting has to offer are lower costs. So it makes sense that the overseas companies will "optimize" everything for cost, this implies the cheapest labour you can get. This probably works "acceptably" for a level 1 call centre, not so much for knowledge workers.

By the same token, I've never seen a small .us contracting company primarily optimize for cost (they may exist, and I just haven't worked with/for them).

As someone who makes his living selling content through the Internet, I want people to think several times before building a tool like AdBlock.

You are speaking to the wrong people, IMO. NoScript/AdBlock/etc. are there because users want them. So you are saying "please don't do what users want, because it'll make me more money". Well, sucks to be you then.

If you really want to make a difference and see Ads be viable on the web. N years from now ... you need to speak to "most" of the large content providers. For instance my wife is pretty clueful and had happily not been using NoScript/etc. ... until recently when she hit usatoday and a giant popup came up and refused to go away (so she couldn't read the content). Now she has NoScript installed and only approved sites can run any JS.

It's the same with TV, 5 minutes of commercials every 10 minutes (33%) is just way too much and their real customers fought back ... so now they get 0% ads from a growing percentage of people. Yeh, that implies bad things for the future of TV, but then in many ways nothing really is better than what was there before.

They recently stopped buying third party maps, and are now reportedly paying mobile providers to put their google maps app. on the phones (which they can only do because they aren't locked into the map provider duopoly). Which speaks to, a least, a significant amount of forward planning on their side.

But, yeh, brilliance is hard to measure. Some of the DNS tricks they just released, and more, I've wanted some Linux DNS software to do for at least 10 years ... so it's not "genius". But the number of useful things they've actual got out implies they are way above average (as a company), IMO.

However, even the most jaded, cynical atheist cannot deny that organized religions have also done some amazing things for the societies in which they existed.

Yeh, I'm sure Scientology has done some good. So what? Are you suggesting we try and keep some kind of score card, we can put "imprison children and malke them slaves" on one side and "feed homeless" on the other? Not sure what we do when they "convert" a follower with those "selfless acts" though.

Of course Atheists never do any charitable works on their own, so as long as the nutjobs "help" roughly as many as they screw over, it's all good.

is every bit as ignorant and superficial as claiming that someone cannot drive because their plumbing is different than mine ...

That's right, I forgot that most "organised" religions fought so hard for equal rights and civil rights, oh wait...

And for anyone else who is not an economist "negative income elasticity" means "prefer cheaper, lower quality, goods".

Depends, I don't see many people using wordpad/gedit instead of MS-word/OO-writer. Features always matter, and they often matter more than speed/security/usability (all of which have their fans who ask "why can't all apps. consider X, and stop being bloated") ... but sometimes, if you do _really_ well on one of those three and you are "close enough" feature wise, then people can live without the features you don't have. But it's a big gamble, much bigger than just adding features as fast as possible.