I'm almost 70 and never post here. Two-or-three years ago I knew a very warm-hearted young woman going through a very hard time in her life. She discovered Farmville and I started getting the Zynga message stream... a picture of a sad little animal and a message saying "An abandoned little baby llama has just been found and it needs to be adopted... so lost and lonely". I knew the incredible effort my friend put into fostering real animals, the insane hardships she had seen and how little money she had. And now some of that miniscule amount of money was going to Farmville. She was living in her car here in Austin scraping by with her two pet dogs and a coutimundi she was fostering (I kid you not). One afternoon we took one dog and the coutimundi out for a walk on leashes near the U. of Texas, where I live, and ever since I've been elevated by the frat boys to "The Coutimundi Dude"- a serious promotion. I didn't really know what Farmville was costing her, so after the"baby llama" emails I looked at Zynga and how it worked. What they were doing- carefully and systematically preying on the kind and the needy like some sort of hyper-evolved emotional shark while the tech press politely applauded- made me madder than anything I'd seen on the internet in years. Today I emailed the following to my now much happier and more settled young friend: "I saw thew following story and remembered the time in your life when Farmville was so important to you. I never said anything at the time, because I know how much you loved animals, even virtual ones, but I did look at the company that made Farmville, Zynga, and got incredibly upset at the tactics they were using to make money. The idea of charging for add-ons didn’t bother me at all, but the way they systematically targeting the needs of people who were both kind-hearted and vulnerable because of the way they loved without reservation and yet felt so alone really pissed me off. I’m so glad that today you are in a much better place. I just feel sorry for those who created and so generously loved those disappearing virtual pets." I'll make no comment on Zynga and its well-deserved fate. But the rest of us (including me) should remember with love and respect the sheer neediness of some of those we make for and sell to... or just meet on the street,and try to do a little better by them in 2013. Happy New Year.

I notice that you ignored my core point completely.

Bullshit.

Even if we ignore the complex -- and I suspect fundamentally specious -- arguments about how debt repayment won't be inflationary, it will cause new spending. Magically retiring all of the existing debt will erase any incentive for Congress to even pretend to ensure tax revenues meet expenditures. Why bother, when they can keep wallowing in pork and just rely on more magical PCS hacking to erase their debts?

I think the argument that debt repayment won't be inflationary is crap, too, but anyone with a brain has to see that it will stoke the furnace of new spending, guaranteed.

Actually, accidents are handled in civil court, so it's a "preponderance of the evidence" methodology.

I just do an account-to-account transfer to pay allowance.

It's just pragmatism. For every programmer competent to work on the kernel there are a thousand wannabes, so some vetting process is required. In companies, this is done via resumes and interviews -- and then generally by giving new software engineers projects of low importance so you can vet their work before trusting them with stuff that could break the business. Same thing, just a different context.

I think your estimate is an order of magnitude too low.

Because it will generate 700-800 comments.

As an "enthusiast" your userspace-breaking patch would never have made it to Linus. It would have had to go through the maintainer of its respective subsystem -- and perhaps more than one -- who would have caught the problem and told you to fix it. Likely much more nicely.

What happened here was a senior, experienced submitter did something really dumb, and it was a huge problem because he was sufficiently trusted not to do such dumb things that there was no one watching closely enough to catch it. Linus doesn't have enough hours in the day to thoroughly review everything that comes through, he has to make judgment calls based on the degree of trust he has in the source. Mauro let him down in a big way, then compounded it by trying to make excuses for it.

Another way to build credibility is to take on some of the janitor tasks which they already know they need to have done. Then once you've shown that you do a good job and don't break stuff, you're more likely to get listened to.

It's more than that.

Linux powers tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars worth of systems. It's unbelievably huge, and it's almost inconceivable that all of the megacorporations whose business depends so deeply on it didn't snatch control of the whole thing away from the lone kid who started it as a hobby project long ago. I mean, who would have predicted that even after it had become so important, Linux would still be maintained by the one guy who started it, rather than some joint committee of top-tier OS engineers -- probably dominated by IBM?

Not only is that not what's happened, but as far as I can see none of those megacorps even try to tell Linus what to do. They submit patches, humbly formatted and refactored into the form Linus wants, and they butter him up with conference tickets, free hardware and the like, and they even compete for the right to pay him a salary.

Why is that? Because whatever anyone says about him, his style, his attitude, his people skills or even his code... the results are fantastic. Linux not only works very well, it does so across an amazing variety of hardware platforms, and the design -- and Linus' good taste and fanatical attention to detail -- have proven to be able to support virtually any new idea that's worth implementing.

Love Linus or hate him... don't mess it up. Luckily, Linus is an egotistical bastard who doesn't care what anyone thinks anyway, so mere words aren't likely to change anything.

For that matter, unless they can find ways to dramatically increase the bandwidth, I don't want in-flight Internet to become cheap either. Please keep it expensive enough that most people will choose not to use it, so it'll be fast enough for those of us who are trying to get work done. Or maybe introduce tiered pricing so that those who need the higher speeds can get it.

Among others, yes.

The GGP was proposing to tax retained earnings as income, so I thought it was obvious that to have the same effect you'd need to tax capital gains as income. Actually, they're taxed as income now, if they're short-term gains.

You apparently failed to read beyond the first line of my post.