You speak as if people have much of a choice.

Witness scott walker. All he talks about is destroying unions, and workers rights. I'm in Chicago (area) where we have a Democrat (a Democrat in theory) talking about destroying unions. Right to work laws, that in some cases are designed to pull money from unions - the unions can organize, but in effect are starved of funding until they die.

We're working on eliminating near minimum wage jobs. A restaurant needs X waiters/waitstaff to wait on N tables. Lets get tablets to convert X waiters to Y (where Y X) servers. Google car, Uber Car, most driving jobs gone. Watson? a bunch of doctor and lawyer jobs gone. So, you spent 100,000 a year to be a doc or a lawyer, and now can't find work. How you gonna pay for loans? Hell, Watson isn't even fully out, and the lawyer thing is RIGHT NOW.

Tech change is happening on Moore's law time, but people don't work on Moore's law, we work on human generational scales, about 20 years or so. Remember that both the Luddites and the original saboteurs, Les Sabot, weren't protesting tech per se, but tech that destroyed jobs.

BSD was free before that. Since the 70's. BSD used to pass tapes around to a lot of Universities. They'd add things, and then pass the tapes back. Sneakernet opensource.

AT&T sued to make it not free. But just because AT&T wanted to shut it down, doesn't mean it wasn't free software in spirit at the time. You can think of the BSD lawsuit as validating BSD, and free software (no capitals) as well.
Linus didn't think it wasn't free, but didn't want to deal with the mess. The original F.U.D.

godfather of the free software movement

But I disagree with the having Stalman as the locus of free software. There was free software before him (BSD, etc) and will be free software after him. Maybe capitalize it right. Yeah, he created the Free Software Foundation. Just call it that.. godfather of the FSF.

Stalman has done a lot, but sometimes his ideas get in the way of actual software. Hurd? after decades still not shipped. gcc? Got out of hand until it got taken over by egcs. Was also the "Cathedral" in "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" as the example of what NOT to do. emacs? Witness the hassle with xemacs and emacs.

Meh. The SCO you remember was old SCO, that actually did something besides sue.

Even then, they weren't THAT great. They helped make Xenix with MS help, then that became SCO OpenServer. (Yeah, MS got some cash from UNIX sales, and now gets cash on every Android sale). I actually worked with it. It wasn't that good of a distro, and got killed in the marketplace when Linux got rolling. Eventually they bought out the UNIX copyright/trademark for SVR4. They did eventually release SVR4.2, and SVR5, but neither set the world on fire.

They were "good" when there weren't too many other alternatives for x86 UNIX (remember *BSD was mired in lawsuits with AT&T). In comparison to a very raw Linux or FreeBSD at the time, OpenServer was just passable. The world quickly passed them by.

They did spin off some web thing called Tarantella. It got decent reviews at the time. But I don't think i've heard any mention of it in the last decade.

Of course i haven't read TFA, but the limiting specifically to the "planned obsolescence" part reminded me of the ink cartridges that guess how much ink should have flowed through them and "runs out of ink" after X number of pages, just to stop people from refilling cartridges. Of course the cartridge makes some random ass guess as to percentage of coverage and percentage of B/W vs full color, so you never get what you actually paid for.

Finally in this case refers to the cleanup after the Heartbleed mess. Yeah, those releases were marked stable, but in this context, the auditors expected massive code shifts immediately post-Heartbleed and decided not worth the time to audit code that was possibly being culled anyway. They still had Win95 code for example, do you audit that? VAX code?

Orange is the new black, C++ is the new Perl.

If i wanted to really know someone, I'd bug the computer in their pocket with the GPS and the microphone.

The big news is, when does the "hey lets go after foreign enemies" change to "well, american, foreign, it's all the same to me"

The hacked compiler is kind of interesting too. Lets insert backdoors into ALL TEH iTHINGs!!!

How's that go? Your freedom to shake your fist ends at my nose.

There are consequences to all actions, even speech. You basically posit that the good actions to the speech sayer and all other speech sayers are always greater than the negative effects of the rest of humanity. I posit that's not always the case.

Didn't we just pass some laws to protect cops from recording (cause they'd never break the law - umm Homan Square), so I'm not sure if this is still the case.

No troll feeding right? anyways...

Im a programmer, who's done low level things including some kernel work in both Windows 95 (yeah, dating me some) and a couple UNIXen. I have two Macs at home. The Windows box has been shut down since WinXP stopped getting updates. You gonna make fun of me for the jump from XP? "yeah, you're so hosed, you've got a Mac when I've got WINDOWS VISTA." I tried playing around with Windows 8 when it first came out, and I couldn't even figure out how to do a pic slideshow on it. I'm no anti-Windows snob - I had been using DOS since 5.0 and DOSSHELL, and every Windows version from 3.1 to XP (including WinNT 3.1 on a dec alpha), and I got lost in the UI. I spent 20 minutes trying to find the network settings to get WiFi working, and then had to do odd folder indirection to just show some pics off of a DVD. Again, im no newb... I've done work on IBM Mainframes, UNIX, Mac, Linux, DOS, and Windows. I've done HCI Classes, and I can usually model a new UI in my head. Nope, i was fucked. Multiply that wasted time by a hundred if it was my personal box. That's why I use a Mac. I just get shit done. No Fanboi-ism. I just want to work.

My sister in law had Vista on her laptop, and we never got it running right. Part of the issue was they de-contented Vista so they could charge the same for the upgrade, and nickel and dime you for the next SKU going up. Is that home premium, home ultimate, home premium ultimate super-size plus fries and a thirty two ounce coke? Mac updates from this time scale were i think $10, no tiering. They are now free. I was able to update my very very hideously techphobic mother in law recently, bumping two Mac OS X versions (for free) with no training. Her biggest issue? The desktop wallpaper changed. Imagine going from WinVista to Win8 and saying that same thing. I was confident enough to send her home (to taiwan - imagine tech support with a 14 hour time zone difference) with the change. Imagine leaving someone from WinVista to Win8 and saying "ok you're updated, good luck with that". You'd be on the phone every other hour.

Anyways, at home, I have two running computers instead of a Windows Vista or a Win8 box that I'd spend hours configuring.

Yeah, people like MacOSX enough that they're able to charge a premium on Mac hardware. This popularity is a failure how? The ability to be so popular you can charge more - not sure how that's a "haha Mac you suck" criticism. It's kind of like the "no one goes there any more - it's too crowded". YOU may not think the premium is worth it, but enough do that they don't have to charge prices you wish they did.

Why do folks keep on bringing up the First Amendment when people act like clowns?

1) the first amendment only prevents the government from slapping you down. This was a slapdown by a private entity.

2) Freedom of speech does not mean freedom of consequences. Act like a clown, expect them to slap a clown suit on you.

Reread the message. Google Chromium is called spyware. They don't want to add TSYNC to support this software bundle they consider spyware.

I once lost a game of chess to a guy who was partially stoned, and who didn't know the complete ruleset. Yes, I'm that sloppy.

That said, I once did beat the reigning extended family chess player with a very very risky move that required me to sacrifice my queen and have a couple moves after that. Very risky. That's my fave fame of pretty much anything ever because of that.

I despise sports.

Watch "The 16th Man" from ESPN's 30 for 30. Also known as Invictus with Morgan Freeman.

Sports, watching sports as a nation, changed a nation and prevented a cataclysmic race riot.