When a small group (say, .001%) controls the vast majority of wealth, the two are not mutually exclusive.

Plutocracy.

Bollocks. He quit to get himself out of the public eye before he was arrested, and our scumbags do the same thing all the time. My own district "representative" just quit after being busted for coke.

I don't care what country you're in: if they were capable of feeling "shame," they wouldn't be in politics.

"Who takes cloth for green leader is green leader..."

Hey, at least it'll be less bent than the current system.

You have it backwards. The republic is what we (supposedly) had before being all but completely subverted. The problem with direct democracy, which doesn't have any of this "unrepresentative representative" nonsense, is that it scales very, very badly.

Not all "support specialists" are "Bob" in the callcenter talking to lusers about downloading the internet. Even medium-sized companies often have an internal support department. From some I've seen firsthand, $28 is doing pretty well, but not so well as to be in "pipe dream" territory.

Having actually used touchscreen laptops (as opposed to tablets), I question that assertion. They've been saying that since touchscreens entered the consumer market, and it always comes down to the same problem: ape-arm. Even more, now that tablets exist to fill the "touchscreen media consumption" niche, touchscreen laptops don't even have a real use case anymore.

That remains to be seen. And even if they're solvent, the budgetary crisis will at least cut down on the damage they can do for awhile.

You can keep saying that, but you acknowledged yourself that they lost the battle for the "right hardware," but they haven't cut their losses and gone back to a position that makes sense. Instead, they've stuck their fingers in their ears and screamed "lalalala" while people continue to make excuses for them, and just keep compounding their mistake.

Then that just underlines thier incompetence even more clearly, since approximately 0% of the "growing phone/tablet market" has any interest in any linux that's not twisted into Android, and they released a "usable" (and I use that word very charitably) desktop installation before any tablet release.

Except that desktop machines are the wrong place to put touch-friendly interfaces, and GNOME is a desktop machine project. They're entirely different use cases, and what they're doing is precisely backwards.

Who cares? I'm just glad they're failing (that's what schadenfreude is).

"Touch-enabled interface is more important than keyboard/mouse for a desktop?" You're one of those UX bullshit artists, aren't you?

That's the kind of thinking that's got me soaking in the schadenfreude from this story.

That's the big difference. The big corporate sites who would have been negatively impacted by SOPA (Google, e.g.) carried those protests. The fact that blocking the law turned out better for actual people was really just a happy accident.

Unfortunately, a big part of the objection to Rice is the fear of DB becoming even more hostile to the concept of user privacy. Extra space aside, google isn't a particularly viable alternative.

It strikes me that 500 years, practically the blink of an eye, might not be quite sufficient to determine trends on geological scales...