+1 to your comment. Some of the biggest problems in our current society trace back to making groups of people no longer groups of people - we pretend that corporations have a compass, when a piece of paper can have no such thing. We then treat the government as some external entity that oppresses us, when in theory the Great Experiment is supposed to be "government of the people, for the people, by the people" - *we* are the government. These people *are* uber. Are those people served by having morals, in so much as making money is concerned? Clearly they don't think so.

His text was off then, but not his subject line - "Capitalism does not reward morality." That it's possible to be moral and somewhat succeed isn't per se the point - the point/question is whether morality is a hindrance. It most certainly is one of those, when in a society (like ours) where companies can make false claims to having morality - some of us intentionally seek out moral businesses to patronize. When truthful labeling (and the like) is not mandatory, and court cases actually strike the requirement to be truthful, then there really can be no more reward for morality.

Uh, there is no way that a PC could replace my DSP...first, my DSP is a full fledged AVR putting out serious power to large speakers throughout my livingroom. Second, it can be controlled by my phone or my remote, with 3 zones and the ability to rapidly play various internet radio (and control thereof) channels, such as pandora or what-have-you. If I want to start my americana station in zone 3, watch a movie in zone 2, play a comedy station in zone 1 - all done in seconds from my phone or easy remote. Versus logging into a laptop connected to an aux port, then starting the pandora app, then saying "well, guess that's all I'm doing right now..."

Real home theatre/entertainment systems can't use a cheap PC. What in the heck would be driving my PSB Stratus Gold loudspeakers? The digital output from a PC? You're nuts. Oh wait, you want me to then get little amplifiers for each different thing, and maybe multiple video cards and sound cards so I can mimic mutli-zone. Or...and it's just an alternative - I could use a real AVR with a PS4 plugged in as a source (a source which just happens to handle the 3d bluray disks I occasionally use, though I do streaming >90% of the time).

You're a fanatic. Just accept that the rest of us aren't. I could also walk to work, since it provides the greatest flexibility of what direction I go - but instead I ride a harley, where I've got limitations such as staying in lanes (sortof) and going the same direction as everyone else. I know, I know, sheeple.

when I bought my ps4, it was a very cheap high-quality 3d blu ray player. It also happened to play games, which I enjoy. Instead of spending $2k on a PC to plug in to my $8k home theatre setup, I plug in a PS4 and it works great. I /suppose/ I could plug a PC into one of the AUX ports in front, and then awkwardly try to find a place to put my keyboard and muss around with a mouse...or - and this is just an alternative - I could use a little handheld controller thingy that pairs up with my PS4. Decisions, decisions. My overall experience with a 65" TV and hifi 7.1 sound while sitting comfortably on my couch is WAY higher, in my experience, than it would be sitting in my office upstairs - even if the graphics had slightly more detail on the PC. That way I can then have a laptop that I can use for work, and get a mid-range "gaming" laptop so it is relatively decent for a while, but not actually use it for games much...instead, I use it for home, school, work, etc. And it only needs cost me $1200 or so. I could spend $3k on a gaming laptop, but then I'd have a 17" screen with stereo sound, instead of a 65" screen with 7.1 surround. Maybe some of us don't want multiple PCs? Maybe some of us want a better overall experience, instead of just having slightly better graphics detail? Maybe those of us like that are a big enough market that consoles do actually sell, despite gaming PCs being an option?

you're a horrible person for wanting such unreasonable things. Clearly you just don't know how incredibly useful a "smarthome" is. And stuff.

and why was there a monument to Steve Jobs anyway? Seems like "today is monday" would be a good enough reason to tear it down. That said, this was a spectacularly bad reason, I'm just saying no reason was necessary. Doing something for the wrong reason doesn't make it the wrong thing to do - if I make a habit of drinking several glasses of water a day because I think the midichlorians need it for fuel, that doesn't mean I was wrong for drinking water...

the reason he brought up voting was because of your sig. There was a point being made.

First, your phone is amazingly insecure - unless you have one of the ones dedicated to security. The most valuable thing you have is you - the who of who you are. Trusting that identity to your phone is...spectacularly foolish. Second, most people don't have a phone that could survive a trip to the hotel pool or hot tub, whereas the throwaway cards can do just that, just fine.

If someone breaks the card's security, the worst you're out is the stuff in your room. The more you stuff into your phone, then the worst that could happen is you aren't you anymore.

The point is that the rules make this new feature pointless.

PS -

" Exactly what do you think in the 1980-90s you were doing to the mini computer culture of the generation before you when you made client server cheap and ubiquitous?"

Wasn't nobody doin nothin with Linux in the 80s, and the PC world (Doom, etc) was already out and in full swing before the earliest (Slackware, for instance) distros were even started.

Your history is a bit off here. Linux's earliest intent was as a workstation OS.

1) where in what I wrote did I say linux started as a server OS? Neverminding my first use of it as being just that, but "year of the linux desktop" doesn't - and never - meant that it would be the year someone would finally use it as a a desktop. I used it as one for many years.

2) Linux's first usage (and especially intent) most certainly was not as a workstation. "Workstation" has that word "Work" at the front of it because you accomplished "work" on the workstation, versus the work being the workstation. When I started using it in 94, no sane person would use it as a "workstation" because they'd be futzing with their machine too much. The mother's day release of redhat, which I still have on an old infomagic cd pack sitting on the shelf above my desk (for giggles), was not a "replacement" for a pizzabox in any far remote sense of the word.

Linux's earliest intent was to be a hobby plaything. It was for people who wanted to tinker around and play their hand at writing a device driver, or otherwise really know what it was their PC was doing. As for Linux being disruptive to UNIX - no, it wasn't. It was just cheap/free UNIX clone ala MINIX and other "learn-what-is-really-happening" educational tools of the time, but it still held the same "do one thing, do it well" principle, it came from/was birthed from the community/culture of UNIX users of the time, thus had more or less that same community and their ideals. Linux also never coopted anything - it eventually matured enough to be a competitor to the giants that came before it. Poettering's stunt was pure agism, as was that which allowed it to succeed. Change for the sake of change is and has always been stupid - don't try to paint it as a cycle, that Linux started the same way. Linux was an educational tool, and 100% of the rebellion of it was communistic; Ubuntu quite literally was anti-community from the start, as a core principle - as is and was systemd.

(stay with me here...) Once upon a time there was a community. In the community were lots of different opinions - Slackware, Redhat, Debian, the weird *BSD folk - we all worked together, despite being of different religions. We'd yell at each other, and to an outsider we'd look as though we hated each other, but we were yelling at each other at the same bar while buying each other drinks. We yelled at each other because that's just what we liked to do. We had a certain set of rules that we all followed - and those rules were our real religion. We contributed code upstream. We filed bug reports. We did code review. We contributed. We Kept It Simple, Stupid. RMS was one of our major prophets - maybe even a god (though, we often started rolling our eyes and heading home for the night if he showed up at the bar to drink with us). We laughed at people who would declare, year after year, that this would be the Year of The Linux Desktop.

Then, along came two things - Ubuntu, and modern capitalism/culture/media/whatever - a mindset where there should be no plan, just go go go new feature new feature new feature go go go (I'm looking at you Agile, facebook, google...). Suddenly, the highest and best praise your project can get became whether it was "disruptive."

The *NIX/FOSS community would not have been a place for this to take hold, were it not for Ubuntu. Ubuntu decided they would break all our paradigms - they'd refuse to contribute patches upstream, they'd take simple processes that worked well and left tremendous power in the user's hands, and replace them with very broken messes of stuff. (In contrast to what we had...) they'd make an experience that mostly worked for complete novices - to be distinguished from most other distros that rarely worried much if even their initial installer failed because meh, you should know enough to know how to fix it yourself. They'd ignore religious ideals like only using OSS. And last but most certainly not least, they replaced init.d.

Problem is, when a lot of new people started in on the scene via Ubuntu (and the like), the established distros decided that they had always wanted their distro to be the desktop featured in The Year of the Linux Desktop, and realized they were losing overall "market" share (@#$%@ for those nitwits thinking of people as a "market," when we had been a "community" for ages), even though the number of users of each of the major distros was still increasing. So they looked around at what Ubuntu was doing to become popular, and tried to decide what to adopt from it. Unfortunately, this new crop of people included the likes of Lennart Poettering, who would have ideas such as this one, regarding systemd. Instead of seeing diversity and differences as good things, those of his ilk decided to destroy (yes, a harsh word...but it's pretty much accurate) the FOSS community. An entire set of ideals just...disappeared. No longer are simple things kept simple, no longer is "Do one thing and do it well" followed, no longer do we try to let open inter-connectivity organically solve problems of integration (instead, we just birth a giant Rock Biter to mow our laws).

Systemd came from a new set of ideals where solving problems that don't exist is great, so long as the big bad Establishment is taken out. I actually saw it as a bit of agism - where youth expected to be peers to those who had been around for ages, and when they weren't immediately accepted as experts they just co-opted the entire environment and left us old farts without any toys anymore. Oh wait...you wanted something good about systemd. Um, well, my laptop now boots 0.5 seconds faster than it otherwise would have, even if I no longer know why and can no longer really do anything about it. That's good, right?

the discussion is about internet access, not cable tv. That they run on the same lines by the same companies is not part of the conversation - there are countries that were decades behind us in getting internet access, and are now (seemingly) decades ahead of us. Those countries have found that providing broadband access to nearly everyone dramatically improved the economies there. Yet here, we still have people who can only get 128k (or maybe slightly better) from DSL. I have a client that has a location (which I'm currently sitting in) where ~300 people use a 3mb connection. They're constantly losing calls, have problems with web conferences, etc - dramatically hurts their productivity. There just isn't decent access available in this area - and it's in a relatively nice area of Houston, a relatively modern metro in the US. This isn't the 90s, we can get speed not measured in kbps or single-digit mbps now...we should be looking at gig, like they've had for years elsewhere.

Given the type of IT consulting I do, I have to stay comfortable with Windows - I've been trying out Win10 on my fairly new high-end gaming laptop, installed on a SDD, and have been amazed at how often a seemingly menial task can lag - or even hang up the entire UI. For instance, I started up IE a bit ago - while using a blank default/home page - and it froze up the entire desktop for a few seconds (even briefly sputtering the audio of a movie I had playing in another window). Seems to me like they have more to work on than animations - maybe they should focus on usability for a bit first.

I've got solar. I don't imagine that those who are in areas where they burn dirty coal and dead babies for energy are big markets for Tesla. California accounted for 36% of Tesla sales in 2013 - and hey, what do you know, not only does California have a growing percentage from renewable, but there's incentives for installing solar in California too. Oh and even in most of the metro areas in Texas, you can choose to pay extra to get renewable for your portion added to the grid. So....yeah.