Absolutely, in the U.S. where "laws" prevent competition. The results elsewhere will likely be better. Remember basic economics: in a market with enough buyers and sellers that none can exert inordinate influence on prices, those prices will tend toward the marginal cost of production. That doesn't happen here in the U.S. mainly because of regulatory capture - telecom regs are written by the telecom companies and are designed to hinder competition to the greatest extent possible.

While starvation is uncommon in the U.S., malnutrition, especially among the poorest (which would be the working poor - they are generally worse off than people on welfare), is not. It is damned-near universal among the children of the working class, as well as the children of those with substance abuse and/or mental health issues. Almost every family in my church - and most of us are at best lower-middle-class ourselves - helps to feed other kids in our neighborhoods. We mostly have access to cars and such, which children and the poorest adults don't, and to places one can buy food that is reasonably healthful and affordable, which most people in the inner city, regardless of income, can't unless they drive. Now, there are always things to eat . . but . . NOT necessarily healthy things. Not for the inner-city poor, the vast majority of them children.

Your argument appears to be "we haven't solve the technical and practical challenges yet, so we never will." Progress is disappointingly slow; I'll give you that. The challenges are hard. I'll give you that too. However, given what human ingenuity has managed to accomplish just in the past 20 years, I think it is a very, very poor strategy to bet against it in the long term. Part of why we're not solving these challenges is that we're frankly not trying that hard. What we have now is still good enough for now. When that changes, when sufficiently larger players start taking fusion research seriously, I think the game will change pretty dramatically.

A lot of wisdom I do agree with. Regarding the storage problem - which I also agree to be the main bottleneck toward adoption of cleaner energy: why not use that energy at the point of production, to crack other hydrocarbons (biomass, corn husks, dirty coal, other carbon-rich waste), into liquid fuels using that energy, and store/transport these liquid fuels to the point where they will be used? I realize the process is not yet optimally efficient and not quite carbon-neutral, but it seems to me no worse and in many incremental ways better, than our current strategy of "burn whatever, just tax the crap out of it so we can bomb more brown people."

I feel really bad when I trap a mouse or a rat, which I had to do a couple days ago. I prefer nonlethal traps when they work, but sometimes they don't, and on Saturday I managed to trap one in a way that badly hurt but didn't kill it. I felt really bad. I understand that they are intelligent and sentient creatures. They don't belong in our food, and the diseases they carry don't belong in our home, so I do have to deal with them from time to time. But I so much wish that non-lethal traps actually worked, that I could just catch and release them in nearby woods. Alas, most of the time, that doesn't happen. :(

Agreed. It's completely irrelevant to most use cases. But not all. For instance, pro audio, which is a part of what I do, still benefits greatly from increased CPU speed as well as reduced cache latency. The tools I use have not been architected to take advantage of the immense power of modern GPUs. Eventually they likely will be, but, for now, every couple years' worth of CPU improvements does make a significant difference for what I do.

Back in MY day, we didn't have those newfangled computer doohickeys. We had adding machines and slide rules, and we liked them. "Innernet" was where you hoped the fish would go when you went fishing with a net. "Netflix" was what you would do if a bug got on your fishing net . . you "flicks" it off. A "color TV" was a huge thing that took half your living room, and the only thing "color" about it was the color of the cabinet; the picture itself was black and white. We had 3 channels, and we liked them. Now git off my lawn!!!

OK, sorry, my fault for not carefully RTFA. I did not mention that while my family and I do drive a great deal, almost all of it is within 75km of home. This *plus* a standard battery probably handles my situation, plus the occasional longer road trip, just fine.

When I worked in one inner suburb of a medium-sized city, and lived in another, I commuted about 50km each way, 100km in total, and hence 3000km over the course of a little over a month. Commutes 3-4 times that long are not unheard of in larger cities. But for me, would have meant a battery swap about 10 times a year. I don't know how long the swap should take, but I do know I would not have time to visit a dealer - the closest being about a half hour away - anywhere near that frequently, even if it were a short and painless process.

Like much of what tries to pass for modern science, nutritional research is tainted by the influence of those with a vested interest in the outcome. A healthy dose of skepticism is completely understandable. But there are things I believe we are learning. For instance, while it's been known for centuries that sugars and what we now recognize as high-glycemic starches tend to encourage obesity, it's only fairly recently that we've come to understand why. The role of various micronutrients, again long suspected to be important but not fully understood, is now coming into sharper focus. We're learning that many pesticides and herbicides are far more toxic to humans, especially over long periods of time, than was known previously. Many cancers, autoimmune disorders, and other illnesses are now known to be triggered by entire classes of substances previously regarded as safe. It is now known that we are actually symbionts, that our intestinal flora are such an important part of our normal digestive and immune system functioning that we cannot live healthy lives without them. These are just a few of the newer revelations off the top of my head, and I'm not in any way an expert in the field. So, here as in all areas, I try for a healthy balance of skepticism and openness. Truth does eventually come out.

The TC license you'll probably have to hunt for a bit, as it has been pulled from the Web and was never included in the Wayback Machine. I was not able to find it. But as for the DFSG, I mentioned them because (a) you did first, and (b) it is more or less what the OSI uses as its definition of Open Source. The FSF's definition is extremely similar.

You've already referenced the Debian Free Software Guidelines. That would be a perfectly good place to start. Read the TrueCrypt license (as I have, although it was a couple years ago) and compare with the four freedoms mentioned therein. I think you will find it violates at least the first.

By "more difficult" I mean "not worth their effort." I'm hoping to dissuade them from even trying, not because what I have to protect is particularly valuable, but because in principle I don't want them snooping on my stuff, *or* anyone else's either. I want the bar for them to do so to be high enough that they won't bother unless there is some plausible reason for them to do so.

Here is what my belief explains that yours does not: if their actions were not coerced, then the only other possible explanation is that they were rude, unhelpful, not in keeping with the general standards of open (or in this case semi-open) software in general, and burned every possible bridge back to the security community forever. There was no possible incentive for them to do this and every reason not to. The only reasonable alternative is that they were coerced, and the only entity likely to do so, and capable of getting away with it, would be some agency of the U.S. government.

OK, you got me on this one. Some people are that stupid. What I should have said was, "even most within Corporate America." No one in any of the companies I've ever worked for would trust it, and I'm not certain that any publicly traded company legally even can, because of Sarbanes-Oxley.

The license under which TrueCrypt was distributed is neither Free by the FSF definitition, nor Open by the OSI's, mostly because of usage restrictions which are not allowed by either. None of this is in any way controversial. It is simple fact, acknowledged by anyone who is familiar with all three. You do not appear to be familiar with any, thus your confusion. Source availability is a necessary but NOT sufficient condition for both freedom and openness.