So, I see this as rationalization.

The fact is, you took a leadership position, and later turned your coat for reasons that perhaps made sense to you. But they don't really make sense to anyone else. So, yes, everyone who supported you then is going to feel burned.

You also made yourself a paid voice that was often hostile to Free Software, all the way back to the SCO issue. Anyone could have told you that was bound to be a losing side and you would be forever tarred with their brush.

So nobody is going to believe you had any reason but cash, whatever rationalization you cook up after the fact. So, the bottom line is that you joined a list of people who we're never going to be able to trust or put the slightest amount of credibility in.

And ultimately it was for nothing. I've consistently tried to take the high road and it's led to a pretty good income, I would hazard a guess better than yours, not just being able to feel good about myself.

Meh, it's easy to find people with skill. With values, OTOH...

You have a point.

It's sort of a chicken-and-egg issue. Debian doesn't get the help because Debian doesn't make itself worthy of getting the help. There have previously been paid developers working on Debian, they simply weren't paid by Debian.

Copyrights don't apply in this case. Patents might. The Supreme Court has recently been struggling with drawing a line between "abstract ideas" (which are not patent-eligible) and concrete methods (which are patent eligible). In general, you can't patent the math per se, but you can patent (for example) a space craft programmed to perform that particular maneuver. As applied to ship building, if it's sufficiently novel, you may be able to patent a ship having certain hull parameters, but you won't generally get a patent just for "make it BIGGAR!" The patentability will usually lie in your solution to the problems you encountered in the process of making it bigger, which means that if somebody finds a different way to make it bigger, you may not be able to stop them. (This isn't legal advice, of course.)

I call BS. I can buy a brand-spanking-new replacement for literally any part of my Garand except the receiver. In fact, when I bought it, the receiver was probably the only part that was still original. I know for sure that the spiffy walnut stock and Criterion barrel were new off-the-shelf. I can also buy clips, bayonets, ammo pouches, and other accessories on the cheap. I don't personally own a Lee-Enfield, but it's a fairly popular hunting rifle. You can get parts for it. This reeks of a contract for the contract's sake.

I am beginning to be wary of systemd, but no. I am talking about anal-retentive policy wonks who believe they only make the distribution for themselves and have (perhaps without intending to) systematically marginalized Debiian and made the project a whore to Ubuntu.

There is a certain contingent in Debian that is not good for the project, IMO. I would like to see which side of a fork they are on, and pick tthe other.

Burning Man has created an artificial monopoly for ice. By the description it sounds much like bread lines in Russia. If you try to bottleneck and manage essential goods at a single source, it invariably gets unmanageable as it scales up. They're dealing with a pretty large population these days for a bunch of festival organizers.

Based on the commenter who described the actual process via way of being a volunteer, a short term solution without getting into the political questions is to massively increase parallelism during peak times. Despite the pretty simple process, the peak demand is straining the system.

If they kept statistics about load vs. time they could figure out easily when to have a whole bunch more labor present to get the job done more quickly for the throngs of thousands.

I don't know if Boeing patented that method or not, but if they did patent it for the 1969 moon shot, the patent has long since expired. (Yes, I am a patent attorney.)

It depends on how you use it. You could wear-out a SSD in six months if you're continuously writing and re-writing to it; but for 99.9% of people the SSD will probably last longer.

I note an amazing correlation between the rise in prison population and the 'war on drugs'. I wonder what the graph would look like minus all drug-related sentences.

About half the prisons in California, land of three strikes and tough-on-crime, are private for-profit entities. Draw your own conclusions.

This is actually two bets, isn't it? One is that I live to be 93. Not terribly likely.

OK, you're on. Not that $10,000 is likely to be worth as much in 2050.

Let's make a bet then. You pay me $1 if there is no credible commercially utilized cold fusion by 2024. I'll pay you $10,000 if there is. And please don't bother me until then.

But incarceration rate per population doesn't tell you if the population is being over-incarcerated unless you know the crimes-worthy-of-incarceration rate. If America's rate of crime-worthy-of-incarceration is several times the European, then it's perfectly natural the US has a several-times-higher incarceration rate.

Now, there are all sorts of difficulties in calculating such a rate. But it doesn't seem too unreasonable to guess that, however it's calculated, the general rate of crime-worthy-of-incarceration would correlate with the homicide rate. So, let's use the homicide rate as a normalizer. How many incarcerated persons does a country have per annual intentional homicide? Using the Wikipedia numbers for prisoners and annual intentional homicides, we get:

Australia: 121
Belgium: 68
Bulgaria: 73
Canada: 74
Croatia: 90
Czech Republic: 163
Denmark: 91
Estonia: 46
Finland: 36
France: 103
Germany: 98
Greece: 71
Hungary: 142
Iceland: 157
Ireland: 74
Israel: 138
Italy: 111
Japan: 170
Latvia: 56
Lithuania: 48
Luxembourg: 164
Netherlands: 91
New Zealand: 203
Norway: 33
Poland: 175
Portugal: 115
Romania: 96
Slovakia: 134
Slovenia: 94
South Korea: 109
Spain: 180
Sweden: 86
Switzerland: 145
Taiwan: 91
UK: 147
US: 147

Thus, the US incarceration rate differential is within the normal variation seen in developed countries, after you account for the fact that the US has a lot more violent crime than other developed countries (as seen in its much higher homicide rate).