I see. So any foreigner coming to invest 10 million in your country is a conspiracy. That's like, what? 0.001% of your country's GDP?

I brought a ThinkPad with me all the time when I was in college for easy access to lecture notes, book chapters that're posted in .pdf format, and also external references, and that didn't stop me at getting straight As from Comp. Sci. classes. Same for many of my friends. I've never been fond of the old stack-of-paper approach - paper get lost easily and are hard to organize when you have a large bunch of them, why bother?

For students who can manage it, bringing a laptop to class is progress. We should never stop progress because some loser can't concentrate with a laptop in front of him - that's a nanny policy. Arguably bad for high schools, and a big-NO for universities. What do you think university students are? 3-year-olds?

But how about even faster growing functions like factorial and the up arrows? When are we going to see an advert like this..

"Whazzarop is a super technological breakthrough potentially enabling up arrows increase in computing performance."

You wouldn't run out of IPv6 addresses even if we uniquely identify every cell in every person's body on this planet. 2^128 is a really big number.

Ok, you can cram 1000 cores into one CPU chip - but feeding all 1000 CPU cores with enough data for them to process and transferring all the data they spit out is gonna be a big problem. Things like OpenCL work now because the high end GPUs these days have 100GB/s+ bandwidth to the local video memory chips, and you're only pulling out the result back into system memory after the GPU did all the hard work. But doing the same thing on a system level - you're gonna have problems with your usual DDR3 modules, your SSD hard disk (even PCI-E based) and your 10GE network interface.

Oops, you ninja-d me by just one minute :P

PayPal, SpaceX, Tesla... you can literally change the world with technology, and get reasonably rich doing that.

User friendliness is about being simple, not having more colors or fancy widgets - see Windows Vista as an example.

The way I see it, if Linux were to win in the consumer market, what it needs to do is not more, but less - and do those "less" things 100X better than Apple, Google or Microsoft.

The mess with X is actually being addressed, with project Wayland. The philosophy behind Wayland is exactly simplification - most people don't need that network transparency logic, so re-factor it out and keep the core simple and fast. It's a different architecture than X and so it's gonna take time to get the whole UI software stack to work on that, but Ubuntu is behind it.

Configurations and integration between services in a Linux machine is still a pain in the ass, and sadly, I'm not seeing any project addressing that yet. I used to be an open source dev but now I have a tech company to manage. But that's where I'd really like to see progress on the FOSS front.

Finally.. I think the FOSS community may be setting their target too low with Windows, and the "I don't care about consumer market/we already own the server space" crowd are simply ignoring reality. Apple and Google are beating the shit out of Microsoft's products lately - Windows and Office are pretty much still there because of inertia. Having to compare Linux to Windows, is already implying Linux is in a very bad shape in the consumer market. On a higher level, none of the current high profile players (Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon - who's on the server side!!, even Facebook) or products (e.g. iOS, Android, Chrome, ...) are truly independent players like Mozilla Foundation or the Linux kernel community. So, it's really not a time to be content with Linux share on the server side and bash M$, Apple, etc. as proprietary... FOSS still has a long way to go and improve.

Microsoft issued a pretty nasty response the last time this was posted in the public. That could have... helped.

If you've registered a URL schema to the OS, and the OS calls up your app when it sees that URL schema... how's that different from any other OS (w/ the associated software suite), like Windows and Linux?

The OS could help by telling your app things like "this URL comes from an Internet URL on Safari".. but it's by no means the OS's fault. It's just doing what it's supposed to do, an intermediary.

Yet, there're many unwritten rules on Slashdot that have nothing to do with your comment's quality:

1. If you post near the top, you're more likely to get modded up even if your comment is only mediocre or group think. You can actually quite accurately predict a post's mod points by measuring its position on the thread and its relevance - mod are lazy.
2. Any rebuttal to your comment, even a very half-assed one, and especially the personal attack kind (!), is likely to get you, the parent poster, modded down. Happened to me many times, the mods are basically encouraging flamewars.
3. Long, original posts take a long time to get moderation points - even though it can eventually get a 5 Informative from patient mods. Long, unoriginal post get the same points very easily because the poster copied it from the article or Wikipedia. So, original insights are being discouraged from this system unless you're someone famous like Steve Woz.

Most people can't grasp the fact that if you put a random employee in place of the CEO in the company, the company will most likely grind to a halt or even disintegrate. When you consider the fact that it's hard to get a few Slashdot engineers to agree on a single issue, you should know it takes a ton of skills for someone to pull the board, the investors, marketing, engineering, accounting, etc. together and have them actually do work.

Watch out for when your secretary learns to fly, then - for she's coding in Python and she's gonna import antigravity!

But there's no information proving that a coder in-the-know can't turn the DEP-inactive exploit into a DEP-active exploit.

If Linux wants to win, make it easier to use and develop on than an iPhone, without Apple's kind of closed walled garden. Make it more pervasive than HTML5/JavaScript/CSS without all the mess with browser incompatibilities. Trying to compare Linux to the dead last OS-to-go (fact: Windows' market share has been declining, on both desktop and mobile - especially mobile) in the consumer market is already a sign of weakness in the FOSS space.