There is exactly 1 budget to be balanced, and that is the energy budget of the planet. All the rest is just accounting tricks.

And even the energy budget can be changed, depending on the willingness to invest in space infrastructure.

Also, yes, liberals, in the American sense, are more clever than everybody else. Because everyone who believes that somehow there is a value greater than individual human happyness obtained at the expense of the happyness of no other human (with no future discounting) is a dick, but is also an idiot because he is discounting his own happyness or that of his children friends or relatives. Discounting the happyness of unknown strangers present or future is also not nice, but also idiotic, because you are betting against other humans potentially helping you in return -- against all observable odds.

There is the case where you have no children, friend or relative, but then maximising the happyness of psychopaths seems a terrible idea.

In short "conservative" is just short hand for "I either did not think very deeply about it, or I am thinking wrong (aka I am incapable of seeing the point of view of a random stranger)".

The only time in the history of Humanity where the medium of exchange had its own value was when some guy exchanged an arrowhead for a piece of lether string.

Money is nothing magical. You do some work, I do some, those things never intersect but are both necessary in society.Thus some mode of accounting is necessary that you and I exchange, within the confines of society, the product of our labour.

We call this accounting method momey, and it is just a convention that little counters serve as markers of how desirable our work is to others at large. There is no reason -- in fact it would be terrible -- that the counters themselves have value. If you think fiat money is a scam, you are an idiot who missed the train some 4000 years ago.

Note that the questions asked, though rhetorical, were in fact loaded: my usage of the idiom was unusual, but correct.

But then idioms change, and unlike "I could care less" by which people mean the opposite of what they say, begging the question in the sense that an assertion is leading to a point is to me a perfectly ok case of semantic shift.

Nice straw-man you build there.

I am not American, and even then, I know that the budget needs to originate in the House, which has been of a Republican majority for a large part of said period. And like in every single other democracy, it is the leading party/coalition's job to formulate the budget. Now to be fair, knowing that the budget will be filibustered/voted down in the senate is not highly motivating.

But then the very act of making a budget grounded in reality would be deemed treasonous by a large part of the GOP... You know, where you balance needs, wants long term and short term. Those things. And using arithmetic too.

On the other hand, this does beg the question: why are people voting for a party for which the very act of governing seems too fucking hard? Also, why is said party presenting itself when it obviously wants to do fuck all?

On others, that is. The fiscal cliff thing is just idiotic: basically, it came about because congress would not agree to pay for the budget it had voted for and set itself an ultimatum so terrifying that it would have to get its collective act together.

It turns out that the amount of pain the Congress is ready to inflict on random individuals who were just unlucky is very, very large. And this thread is full of crazies thinking it is oh-so-brave to cut funding for weather (they leave far from the hurrican paths), to stop giving money to the unemployed (they themselves have a cushy job they think is entirely due to their hard work), to not give people health care (because cancer/car accidents are the product of bad lifestyle -- always. Also, they themselves have good insurance).

So maybe the US deserves to go over the cliff and have a good 3 point of GDP recession. After all, the economy is doing so well... Or maybe the American electorate needs to pull the plug on the Republicans and the Libertards. Then the Democracts can be split into a centre right and a centre left party.

I'm pretty certain that would be the European Centre for whatever. Them being based in England and all that :)

I don't think there ever was a market in Linux retail. The money was always in services -- training, deployments, custom developments, support. Having your own solution may help, but it may also make you less attractive, as your client miss out on one of the great benefits of open source: no vendor lock-in.

But yes, the market for devices, in the retail sense is likely much larger.

Your are missing something: in the flat, near-perfect-competitive-field of opensource software, the best tech wins. In general, through anticompetitive practices or simply high cost of entry coupled with important network effects, the best tech does not win.

In general, believing in perfect markets is crazy, but within opensource, you're not too far off the mark :)

It is not so much the number of servers as the network interface. It can be installed on any number of servers mirroring one another, the server might be running in a VM, which is probably closer to what you think of when thinking cloud.

But from the point of view of the user, the important things are freedom of usage, and control over their data.

Bullshit. if the solution is OSX, then I'm not too sure what the question was... Certainly not producing a decent desktop, because between the random skeuomorphism, the horrid windowmanagement, the dismal terminal, the meh file manager, the bad managment of multiple screens (with broken drivers in the case of the latest release which won't allow using some screens at their proper resolution), the support of a tiny fraction of all existing hardware, etc., etc. There is not much to be said in favour of OSX as a desktop. The networking is flaky, too.

The apps you need to work may only run there, but that has nothing to do with the fact that it's a pretty bad platform to run on.

Clearly, there were not enough pixels in those "retina" display. Alternatively, some dick in the arts department figured that his screenshots looked cooler that way, and fuck the users. Yes I am being potty mouthed, but you can't multiply by four the number of pixels on you screen (yay!), and then try to spare an extra 20 (yay?) or so at the expense of a much less efficient interface (boo!).

There is nothing in a mailer in terms of logic which is different between the mobile and the desktop version. only the way you interact with your mails changes. The same goes for the web browser (how is the rendering engine different in the desktop browser and the mobile one?), and so on and so forth. You can absolutely abstract interface and core logic. In fact, you should!

And the reason you do that is precisely because you do not want the same experience on very different devices. Apple is actually trying to merge desktop and mobile, and as far as I can tell, it just makes the desktop interface marginally worse. Of course, in the case of Apple, they are really trying to force the desktop into the walled garden paradigm. But then, Apple being evil is no news...

OwnCloud is a cloud. On your server. your way. And it's great: who does not want access to their data all the time, through the network?

Without some corporation snooping that is...

Because the desktop is a solved problem, KDE provides an excellent, highly polished desktop experience, which contains a number of innovations -- but remains not-too-different from the desktops of the naughties.

Different devices, with different input capabilities require different interfaces. If you do it the KDE way, the inerface is largely abstracted from the core of the programmes, and you can switch fromone to the other. If you are GNOME, ubuntu of microsoft (or apple), you try to have one interface to rule them all. IMHO, this is a bad idea, but some people seem to like it, so...

If you find an element of the KDE interface which does not scale, you should report it as a bug!

But the general point is, I guess, that Mark made a big mistake when he went down the GNOME route: picking the technologically inferior option always comes back to bite you in the opensource world.

This is because when everything is free and you are competing for users and developpers, even network efects cannot win in a universe of open standards and source. The best tech wins in the end. Of course, you can keep the bad tech on life support for as long as you have money :)