I suspect part of the reason for the choice of QNX has nothing to do with technical merit or niches. It's out of a religious belief in capitalism, and doubts that a "communist" effort like Linux can really be sustained. Or in other words, FUD. Microsoft has exploited this belief very well. What does Ford use internally on the desktop? Large companies as a rule are conservative, and Ford is a bit more conservative than average for a large company and an automaker. Expect it's mostly Windows. That they recently were partnered with MS practically guarantees it.

As to the niche QNX occupies, yes, Linux doesn't fit well, but there are free choices. There are other microkernel based OSes that have the advantage of being open source and free. Minix 3, for instance. Better to put resources towards making Minix 3 into a quality, realtime OS, and formally prove its correctness, than accept never being allowed to examine the QNX source code. I should think part of Ford's deal with QNX is access to the source code.

Oh come on, Windows 95? The OS that couldn't even sit idle without eventually crashing? That's a real low bar.

I've heard from people who work with QNX that it has plenty of bugs. It may be secure, but it's actually not that stable.

It makes sense that QNX is overhyped and not near as good as some claim. Being proprietary and small, they simply do not have the resources to polish it and keep it polished. Linux has many huge companies paying for hundreds of talented developers to work on every part. In many cases, the best algorithms for many of the problems an OS faces, such as task scheduling, storage management, and networking, are complicated and difficult to implement well. It's no accident that there are more than a dozen good file systems for Linux, each with their points. Windows is still plodding along with NTFS and FAT. And QNX? They simply cannot keep up, even if they rip good code straight from Linux. They're going to skimp on features and choices, and what they must have will be the most dead simple method that delivers adequate performance, and spin that as a virtue because the code is smaller and therefore easier to audit and prove correct. If they discover that their design imposes a fundamental limitation, they live with it, while the Linux world can think of going for a redesign, because the resources are there. QNX could never think of doing a massive reworking of the system like the replacement of X with Wayland or Mir, or the development of btrfs.

Rejected for being too smart?!? What idiots! The problem is the opposite: trying to find smart people willing to do a dangerous and often tedious and boring job that nevertheless has many judgment calls that can benefit greatly from intelligent decisions.

In Lord of Light, a Hugo Award winning novel by Zelazny, a similar thing happened. At one point in the story, the leader of the oppressors has been assassinated and the rest need to pick a new leader quickly. They reject one of candidates, possibly the best one, for being too smart. He might have lead them on a more conciliatory course, made concessions, and the rest didn't want that to happen. Instead, they selected their most extreme hardliner. It proved a stupid mistake, ending tragically for them.

Let's be clear on what plagiarism is. It's deliberately and knowingly claiming authorship of the work of others. It's lying about who created a work.

Plagiarism and intellectual property need not have anything to do with each other. The people who argue that copyright prevents plagiarism are either confused, or trying to scrape up another justification to keep copyright. I think copyright should be abolished. And, that independent of whether copyright exists or not, plagiarism will still be undesirable, and that we can detect and punish those who do it. You don't see grade school students who are caught committing plagiarism being beat over the head with a copyright lawsuit, you see them punished with a failing grade, and perhaps detention.

Having said that, we don't want to get too extreme about plagiarism, start seeing it everywhere. Duplicate chess problems, in which someone honestly creates essentially the same problem that someone else did, maybe 100 years ago, are so common that there's a term for it: anticipation. Chess has been around for centuries, and it is getting harder to find original and novel concepts. Anticipation may become a problem in many other areas as they mature. George Harrison famously committed "subconcious" copyright infringement (plagiarism really) with My Sweet Lord, how should that be handled? The day will come, may already be here, when every possible short melody has been composed. What about ghostwriting, should that be accepted? We also don't want people bogged down trying to give due credit for everything. Otherwise, a research paper would have to credit the Phonecians for inventing the alphabet, lots of Greeks for various elementary mathematical concepts, the Babylonians for the base 60 time system we still use today, and maybe the Egyptians for papyrus, if the research is indeed printed on actual paper.

I actually think we don't have the choice to keep copyright. Copyright is so dysfunctional that it didn't work well even with the highest public support it ever enjoyed. What helped it most was that copying used to be difficult. Now what keeps copyright alive is lingering public support.

In recent decades we've seen support for copyright weaken greatly, thanks in no small part to industry actions to strengthen it. Instead of adapting to the changing situation of copying becoming far, far easier and cheaper to do, they've called for overly restrictive terms that come across as petty, mean, greedy, and not really effective at helping artists make a living, while causing a great deal of inconvenience and sometimes dramatic reduction in value to the users. They've attempted to elevate copyright to some sort of higher right that trumps all other rights. They've tried to tell the public that we can't use new technology because it harms copyright, and they've even had the gall to whine about long standing traditions such as the used book store, demanding that those places be closed. They've been forced to agree that time and format shifting are not illegal, but they begrudge it and still act as if it is immoral. They've gone on well publicized terror campaigns, abusing our legal system to bully ordinary people. They think they have the right and duty to take any action necessary to protect holy copyright. They're so extreme I would not be surprised if some would like to impose the death penalty on pirates. If that wasn't enough, they've also run propaganda campaigns, done their utmost to confuse the public, get people to accept the false proposition that copying is equivalent to stealing. Once that lie is believed, they then try to appeal to our sense of morals. But it's no longer working too well. What kind of delusional, senseless, alternate reality thinking does it take to come up with an idea like Captain Copyright? They really believed a comic superhero could win if not adults, perhaps gullible children over to a hopeless cause like that, and never expected that Captain Copyright would be an instant laughingstock that just looks plain silly and stupid? All that these desperation measures really show is that copyright is badly broken. And not just the implementation, but the concept.

Yes, I think some kind of patronage system is the leading idea to replace copyright. While in past centuries it was a system that only worked for the rich, today, patronage, like copying and many other things, can now be done by the masses.

Evidence is moot because copying should not be a crime, not even a civil infraction. Sharing/copying should be encouraged as a social good. Sharing of knowledge is what made our civilization, and keeps it alive. Voluntarily allow a few elite control over what may be copied and who can copy, and you weaken civilization. Perhaps not fatally, but why take that chance for something so trivial as a broken business model? There are other ways for artists to earn a living.

Disagree. Look how different our culture is to just 3 centuries ago, before the Industrial Revolution and the telegraph. The steam engine was in its infancy, too recently arrived to matter much at that time, and such railroads as existed used wooden rails. There used to be massive business ecosystems that revolved around horses and sailing which hung on until the 1920s and the 1850s respectively. The fastest a message or person could travel between London and NYC was 18 days, if the ship had favorable winds. Average was more like 30 days. Many people wore "homespun" -- made their own clothes at home, from threads they also spun at home, from crops they grew for that purpose. The change from horse to automobile changed NYC dramatically. No more horse manure in the streets, with the accompanying threats of typhoid fever and other diseases vastly reduced.

You could argue that human behavior has not changed much, and won't. I am not so sure of that either. We are evolving at a furious rate. But people are prejudiced against seeing many of them. We used to have duels, as depicted in the start of the Three Musketeers story, and more than stories. The mathematician Galois and politician Alexander Hamilton and his son were killed in duels. After a last surge in the wild west, that custom has faded away, and good riddance. Even so, there were a number of unwritten rules about dueling that made it less deadly, like that the duelist could purposely shoot to miss on the first shot, and somehow signal that the miss was deliberate. Then the other was supposed to also shoot to miss, and then both parties could honorably back down. War could be all out, no holds barred, until the Cold War. Now, total war could kill us all off. We've had to evolve to be less hot headed, and we have. This wasn't a recent change, this has been ongoing for centuries as weapons grew more powerful. Why was the disagreement over slavery settled through the US Civil War, rather than voting? Hotheads helped start that war. The result was a long brutal war that killed close to a million, not a few short battles delivering a knockout blow to end the dispute quickly. The hotheads at least put their lives where their minds were, and ended up dead. Evolution in action. The hotheaded tendencies also ultimately hurt the Confederate war effort. Despite being on the defensive, most Civil War battles feature Confederate assaults that killed more Confederate soldiers than Union ones. But that was the kind of fighting they wanted, manly and showy. There's the whole idea of the "southern gentleman" somehow being more manly than the men of the North. Cooler heads in the South surely realized the war was unwinnable, given the large imbalance in power between the sides, but if they were going to fight, dragging the war out was the better strategy.

Why did OPEC and the Saudis send oil and gas prices downwards in recent weeks? From over $3/gallon in the US to $2.50 and still falling. Maybe batteries and electric cars scare them too?

Publishers wish they had that choice. No, the choice is, will they release it, or will they be left behind when someone else releases it, legally or not? The law can't stop piracy. DRM is just fake security, it can't stop piracy either. Nothing can stop piracy.

Nor should we want piracy stopped. Sharing of knowledge is crucial to our advancement. It is these rent seeking parasites who are the real criminals. Their anti-social hostage taking of knowledge that they did not help create could result in us not discovering something crucial in time to act on it. I'm not talking about mere cures for diseases, I'm talking about knowledge that could save civilization. What if, unknown to us, a big asteroid is headed on a collision course with Earth, and we would have learned of it in time if some damned publisher hadn't locked the knowledge away? And that's only one of the most obvious dangers. More subtle dangers abound, anything from climate change to large scale chemical imbalances, atmospheric and magnetic changes that let radiation through.

Bad enough that we have propagandists of the school of Big Tobacco alive and doing well, we should not make life even easier for them. Copyright is too often misused for censorship, with DMCA takedown notices one of their favorite methods.

No, I do not agree with that defeatism. They have not won. In fact, their cause is a losing cause. And they know it. Secrecy and treaties tried as attempts to bypass legislatures are not signs of power, they're signs of weakness. Enforcement is utterly impractical. No organization has the power to force everyone to obey copyright. It only works somewhat because people are willing to obey it, thinking that doing so helps artists.

What can we do? If we do nothing, they lose. The only way copyright cartels can win is if we help them win. Don't help them. That's all you and everyone else has to do. Don't buy DVDs or CDs, or devices that play them. Don't buy devices that enforce DRM. If you want to help, we can do a bit more than that. Use your public library, and not corporate bookstores (*cough* Amazon *cough*). Help crowdfund art projects. Tell your schools to use open, libre textbooks. Tell the library and politicians you want libraries and schools to have digital options for everything, as soon as possible.

Copyright infringement is not stealing! It should never have been criminalized. It should not even be a civil violation, or thought immoral or wrong. Sharing is a public good, and as such should be encouraged. Yes, encouraged. The government should never have tried to regulate sharing. Restricting copying was a terrible way to raise revenue for any purpose, and as for the stated purpose of enabling producers to profit and thereby encouraging more production, it is failing miserably. Instead, copyright and patent law are frequently misused to censor and suppress the very arts and sciences it was supposed to encourage.

The real greedy scum in this show are the RIAA and MPAA members. Many people, and apparently you too, have swallowed their line of reasoning. They are nothing more than slimy monopolists. They squelch most art to keep the rest small enough for them to manage it all themselves. They own it, or they bury it. In doing so, they hold us all back. Who knows what scientific advances we would have now-- cures for cancer, solutions for famines, and so much more, if they had not created this climate of denial of knowledge.

Want to be careful about criminalizing an action. Governments are all too likely to seize upon that as a revenue opportunity. If the rules are themselves bad or counterproductive, breaking them may be to everyone's benefit, and the only way to get the government to see that a particular change is necessary.

Especially in software engineering, which is notorious for being difficult to estimate, customers are always paranoid that they are getting a bad deal, and often compensate by making excessive demands. They will try to put the screws to you, threatening to take their business elsewhere if you resist their extreme demands. You have to finesse that kind of pressure. Not an outright, flat no, but counterproposals that won't break your company. I've seen more than one business fail because they didn't push back hard enough. Sometimes the customer got what they wanted, at far too low a price and then the vendor folds, and sometimes they didn't because the vendor folded before delivery.

This problem is harder to avoid than it might appear. in one case, the company was screwed by their own employees, that, to be fair, they had put in a bad position. The employees were told that if the company didn't win the contract, they would all be laid off. So what happened? The employees did anything they had to, to win the contract. They lowballed their own company. They severely underestimated the effort and work required, coming up with a plan that called for the job to be finished in just 6 weeks, with another 6 weeks margin of error. Even the customer was doubtful that the work could be done that fast, but the deal was so good, from their point of view, that they accepted. Why management approved it, I'm not sure. Desperation maybe? They blew right past the 3 month mark of course. A deathmarch was nowhere near enough to compensate. After 8 months, they managed to deliver one working part, just enough so that the customer grudgingly decided not to sue them. The customer had little appreciation or sympathy for the vendor's plight. The rest of the work was abandoned. The company lost a lot of money on the deal. One bad deal wasn't fatal, but they made several other bad deals, and those were enough to kill them.

To add to the parent, austerity helps the rich and hurts the poor. How? By driving inflation so far into the dirt that we have deflation. Deflation makes debt more burdensome. If you have debt, and your income gets cut thanks to deflation, it's now harder to pay off your debt. Your material assets also go down in value, so selling to pay off your debt isn't as effective. You may be underwater, your house now worth less than the amount you still owe on the mortgage, and it may be impossible to pay off your debt. Meanwhile, piles of money are worth even more. And it becomes a better idea to sit on piles of money, rather than invest it in business ventures. Trickle down economics is completely backwards. Give the rich more money, through tax breaks and austerity, and they won't respond by creating more jobs. Instead they'll hoard. You have to have some inflation to keep the economy moving. Just how much inflation is the question, but 2% is thought to be too low.

What's so crazy is that we really do have a lot of work to do. We have crumbling infrastructure that's been neglected for years thanks to relentless budget slashing. We also have a big problem with Climate Change. The work is not getting done. In times like these, workers are dirt cheap, but even now employers still want wages pushed further down, and refuse to let the government compete for workers. It's nuts. We may have to see some more bridge collapses, like in Minneapolis, to get some attitudes changed. If the elite aren't careful, we will have riots, like what happened in Greece.