OK, based on what you wrote I propose following formulation:

Everybody has a right not to participate in some "progress". All progress needs to be done only with those people, and only to those people, who agree to it.

So, if you do NOT want a cell phone, nobody will force you to use it. If you do NOT to be a borg, nobody will force you to become part of it. Plus, for the borg case: to maintain the social contract, others will try to protect you in cases when borg will try to integrate you against your will.

Would that be OK?

Practical honest answer from one Linux user which puts some emphasis on the "free stuff" (as in Freedom):

I've stopped buying NVidia gear years ago precisely because the only workable drivers were (and still are) closed source. It goes against what I consider important. Plus it made a maintenance of my PC harder (even with lots of effort spent on this by NVidia and RPM Forge).

From that time on I'm buying Intel or ATI - they might not have the best 3D performance, but FOSS drivers DO work (I've played say UFO Aftermath using Wine with ATI card and FOSS driver which is part of Fedora distribution, 1080p video playback on some Intel chipset works too). The only "sad" part was spending 12â on the game or on DVDs. :)

Thus, thanks to Intel and ATI and FOSS volunteers I do have options other than NVidia. So I think by not providing decent FOSS drivers, NVidia is hurting only themself.

The direct, immediate cost of the war in Afghanistan to date is on the order of $600 billion, with essentially zero tangible benefit to anyone ...

Maybe except this:

preservation of the petrodollar

But it might be just a rumor.

I guess that such state of the email can be attributed to the structure of that company (and all large organizations in general), not to the email itself.

In my opinion it is down to policies and tactics like CYI (Cover Your Ass), micromanagement, dictatorship, "I know it better than techies", ... and plain old bureaucracy to name a few. They lower the quality/usefulness of any communication medium.

If those are not addressed, nothing will be solved. And any new communication medium which will be chosen to replace email will be killed in short future too.

Maybe we can also look at "paperless office" to learn the same. :)

Too late. Image is on the Internet now so nobody will ever take it down now.

And now my high hopes for Linux are all ruined.

:)

Well, Ericsson seems to be either helfull or bowed to some pressure but they offer to unlock the bootloader for some (newest I presume) phones: Unlocking the bootlader. Thus, unlocked bootloader does not seems to prevent the adoption of Linux/Android. Locking migt be simply seens as a needed step from childhoot to maturity. :)

And quoting LWN's Android, forking, and control:

The Android developers, beyond forking the kernel, also took the position that the GPL is bad for business. The project's original goal was to avoid GPL-licensed code altogether; the plan was to write a new kernel as well. In the end, a certain amount of reason prevailed, and the (GPL-licensed) Linux kernel was adopted; there are a few other GPL-licensed components as well. So, James said, we can thank Andy Rubin - from whom the dislike of the GPL originates - for conclusively demonstrating that a handset containing GPL-licensed code can be successful in the market. It turns out that downstream vendors really don't care about the licensing of the code in their devices; they only care that it's clear and compliant.

it seems that also the GPL is not that great block to the Linux/Android adoption either. Again, companies simply needs some time to understand it properly, get comfortable and than move along to doing the actual business instead of fighting petty wars.

IMHO

IIRC, In Slovakia, we already do have such a law. It states something along the lines: if you have/operate a network which connect more than X users (X is around 100 or so) you need to do some stuff (some stuff meaning notifying telecommunication authority). You fail to do that, you are operating in legally risky waters.

Now, yes, it does not outlaw private networks. But it for sure is a road block for the growth of private networks. At minimum, it is an increased operational cost thus making it less appealing to operate "bigger" networks for common citizens or small companies. And I guess there might be more to that: as soon as you notify the authority, then some "officers" will arrive latter on when they found your network of interest and demand something (user info, snoop access, ...) citing some other law as excuse. And that again means more operational costs and ... less free network.

Did we get there by getting older?

I'm a long time user of Mozilla, later on Firefox. Sort of. Because I've been using it mostly as Galeon - lightweight browser which uses Mozilla's renderer.

That being said it does not matter to me that much how many features Firefox has or does not have. Galeon feature set (and Feirefox renderer abilities) matters most to me. And while Galeon is something like "dead" for few years (no new features, only minor maintenance tweaks to get it running with newer Firefox releases), I have to say that my browsing needs seems to be stable for now and I'm satisfied.

But there is one big concern growing: library bundling by Firefox. It's against Fedora packaging policies, it's against what I consider good software engineering. Coupled with slower "inivation", why would I want to destabilize my whole desktop just to get slowly evolving Firefox?

So, either Firefox goes to its roots or I have to look for another browser.

Chrome is bundling forked libraries too, so out of question for me. That leave WebKit based browsers.

So, we'll see.

That seems quite logical and, consequently, should drive people to buying over the counter.

Or negotiate and demand same rights for the downloaded software in the EULA (or something) and do not buy downloads without those same right granted "in writing".

So, will Science become some kind of secret, underground guild in the US?

How then they plan to maintain their position of global bully and thus their standard of living?

Because with a lot of manufacturing (and more recently also some R&D) being moved out of US, what else can they use to maintain their status?

To protect "ideas", they (US) still need physical power.

And if they do have physical power to enforce their "ideas" world-wide, they can lower the costs and improve earnings by simply dropping the "creative business" altogether. Replacing it by simple "protection service": you pay us and we do not beat you up.

So ... I guess the future of US is to become a protection racket (if it is not already).

Is there any relation between Novel's problems and Novel's "friendship" with Microsoft?

Something like ... maybe ... "Novel is loosing customers because they are friendly towards Microsoft"?