> First, what does Stallman have to do with Linux?

The core of "free software" philosophy, and much of the early work, was due to Richard M. Stallman. The Free Software Foundation, which he founded and which does very good work for "free as in speech" software, maintains all of the software at www.gnu.org. This includes.

                        autoconf
                        bash
                        binutils (with command like "ls", "rm", and "mv")
                        glibc
                        gcc
                        make
                        tar
                        wget

In order to _build_ the Linux kernel and much of the free software and open source software in the world, you need those tools or tools very much like them, maintained separately. Maintaining compilers, particularly, is filled with danger. I'm not aware of any Linux distribution that does not rely on "gcc".

Do look up the early history of Linux: while Mr. Stallman can be aggravating, his political and technical concerns seem well founded and have often proven prescient in their concerns for legal and technical abuse by software companies.

The most common and effective tool for this is "zip", which is universally with built-in tools on every operating system.

The RAR protocol requires a commercial license for archiving documents: there are plenty of free tools to unbundle with it, but the most common archival tools are commercially licensed and awkward to install and certainly not universal. RAR is most common on bittorrented bulky documents, for various reasons, mostly becuase it supports splitting documents quite well.

Or an apron, and some gloves. Go out to a homeless shelter, do some work with humans who *do not care* if your manners aren't sophisticated, and prove you're worth something, and stop wanking about how well integrated you are. Earn some space on the planet, and stop worrying about how special you are or not, and go out and *prove* how you matter to someone else.

> Really short when compared to more mature laws, e.g. laws against theft and murder.

Does being thousands of years old really make a law mature, wise, or appropriate today? Or somehow "innate", which was part of The Mighty Yar's original point about copyright? Then oh, my, let's ignore the last 150 years of US law and centuries of various country's laws and return to Old Testament slavery law from Exodus, at the core of all the Hebrew originated faiths:

        Exodus 21:20-21 If a man strikes his male or female slave with a rod and he dies at his hand, he shall be punished. If, however, he survives a day or two, no vengeance shall be taken; for he is his property.

The Kung Gao, one of the ldest Chinese legal documents, apparently discusses the treatment of slaves, as does the Code of the Nessilim from the Hittie Empire of Turkey. And yet, despite their maturity, modern law forbids slavery in almost in all nations and in the UN's Slavery Convention. Does that mean that the law is "immature" or somehow invalid?

The "Roman copyright would have extended the Dark Ages" claims is so confused, on so many different levels, I'm unsure where to begin. I will mention that with printing, which is the key technology that copyright exists for, that the Roman Empire might have lasted another 500 years due to the technological, economic, and military advantages it provides. So saying "it would have extended the Dark Ages" is confusing.

> The quote implies that there is no such thing as rightness.

The Hogfather quote is a bit deeper than that, I think. It implies that many human beliefs and policies have no physical basis, but we use them and call them "real" anyway. The very concept of "rights" is itself one of those beliefs and policies, so it's very difficult for them to be "innate". Their being "innate" does not make them more real, in this case, than mercy or justice.

Recorded copyright law goes back to the 1700's in England, printing privileges date back to the 1400's in Venice. That's roughly 500 years of precedent. Or are you somehow saying that laws more recent than that lack validity?

> producers have no innate right - only virtual rights granted by law.

To quote Terry Pratchett's book, the Hogfather:

YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME...SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.

Intellectual property, the power of knowledge, can be considered as valid as any other concept. And it has history and law behind it.

What concerns me is that I'm seeing the dotcom businesses starting over, and the next round of neo-libertarians are getting soaked for all their parent's money. How many of the "bitcoin millionaires" who did the actual bitcoin mining actually paid for the power and machinery, rather than "borrowing" the resources? I can't personally think of a single one of the several "bitcoin millionaires" I've met who actually paid for the cost of their fortune themselves.

> Basically mains hum, what dam mains hum.

The 60 cycle shows up modulating the "switching" frequencies on many modern, inexpensive power fupplies. If one looks at the noise on the lines carelessly, one will see the relatively high frequency ripple as just that, modest noise, that one ignores. Lock a really good oscilloscope to the local power supply as a trigger, however, filter out the high frequencies, and you'll see a 60 cycle hum on _everything_ that comes out of most modern supplies, including the ground line. And the high frequency switching noise from the rest of the building also tends to pass right through most filtering systems: they're really not built to stop things like ground bounce.

It doesn't matter for most uses, but I spent a fascinating day a few years ago with a scientist doing low level research, and the 60 cycle was coupling to _everything_, including the ground lines. He eventually had to to to isolated battery supplies, and run everything off of a motor generator to keep out the ground bounce.

Hermaphroditic, of course.

This is not a base OS configuration problem. It's a personal taste of working environment problem, especially for your environment's web server needs.

So look to service configuration tools, like cfengine, puppet, chef, or any of the dozens of other tools that already have setups for this.

You will hear of such users now, I think. Gnome has become much too large to be reliable or even stable anymore I have clients preferring to use CygWin's X windows, and ssh access to X applications, rather than use current Linux releases and deal with the excessive bloat of Gnome.

If it takes too long to boot, to switch appications, to accept input, has too short a battery life, or cannot keep with simple video applications due to hardware limitations, the architectural fanboys are not going to be enough of a market to keep it in business. Small sales won't bring down the cost of manufacturing to compete.

I'm afraid that you're going on to expose part of the underlying problems. 100,000 individually built, individual managed servers are likely to suffer 50,000 catastrophic failures for dozens of different reasons, ranging from lost passwords, accidental deletion with no snapshots, hardware failures, breakins due to incompetence such as using FTP, breakins because they choose terrible passwords, and others. These are _precisely_ why so many people are going to cloud services

Frankly, many of the "just ask around" answers you'll find even from technical friends, are horrible and have profound consequences to the safety or reliability of your data. I make quite a bit of my own salary helping companies clean up the results of technologically skilled admins. Many of them didn't bother, or didn't know how, to run real backup services and the results are devastating.

> personal FTP server

I'm afraid that, in this day and age, with the monitoring of FTP logins in man-in-the-middle attacks worldwide, no public facing FTP server should be considered "private". FTPS or FTPS or any of several other good protocols all can help with this. But I've encountered far too many environments where people use the same password for their FTP, and their email access, and insist on making it publicly available. Then they wonder why their systems get broken into.