Thanks for a thought provoking post from a broad historical perspective!

"You are personally going to migrate your employer's systems because you personally do not like something, something every single major distro is moving too, and the top kernel developers are already using?"

No, AC, he said he is going to migrate his *personal* systems and those of an apparent volunteer organization he is affiliated with. Read more carefully next time before launching into the personal insults...

"Ben Franklin and others who owned printers realized that copyright didn't apply to them, so they promptly began making copies of everything - books, sheet music, etc."

I had know that for much of US history there was no respect for foreign copyrights (from other countries). I never saw anyone connect this to Ben Franklin's success before. Interesting!

Now that I look:
"Benjamin Franklin, Copyright Pirate"
http://www.tuxdeluxe.org/node/...

And:
"Benjamin Franklin, the first IP pirate?"
http://arstechnica.com/informa...

I agree we may well see cheap compact nuclear fission reactors in the 2020s like from Hyperion., Also, it is a sad truth that we could build much safer reactors if engineers had been asked to prioritize safety over other things (Freeman Dyson's TRIGA design being one example) and if the USA has not focused on a Uranium nuclear cycle that intentionally could be easily weaponized (instead of Thorium).

Still I'd expect solar will actually continue to fall in price by the 2020s too. It would not surprise me if PV was in the 15 cent per watt range by 2030 (or even less) other things remaining constant. Consider how "cheap" used "solar collectors" in terms of tree leaves are in the Fall in the USA. Solar panels potentially could be printed as cheaply as aluminum foil using advanced nanomaterials and special inks.

We haven't really seen anything like the amount of research in PV we will probably see when it reaches grid parity everywhere and people really invest in it in a huge way equivalent to previous investments in fossil fuel production and research. Some people (myself included) have been predicting this turning point for a long time, and it has been dismissed and ignored. It is easy to say PV progress will never get to grid parity until it actually happens. That has been true even though the trends for decades show a clear line towards zero cost (no doubt it will go asymptotic at some point to just be dirt cheap though).

Unfortunately, in our short-term-oriented society in the USA, until PV is cheaper than the grid it is only a niche thing for special circumstances or motivated environmentally-minded people. That has been what has been funding it as only a relative trickle of investment. Once PV is cheaper than the grid, assuming a good solution to energy storage exists (fuel cells with nickle-metal hydride storage, Lithium ion batteries, molten salt batteries, compressed air, or something else), it will be economically foolish to use anything else to generate power than PV. And then, sometime after the stampede, we will see enormous sums of money flow into PV research and production. Electric utilities may collapse all over the place as his happens because grid power becomes too pricey once the cost of delivery exceeds the cost of on-site production. Except for the value of their right of ways as internet conduits, and maybe the value of their copper wires, I would guess that most utilities if properly accounted for, given decommissioning costs and outstanding long-term debt in sunk costs, most utilities may well have a negative net worth right now given any forecast that includes these trends.

Personally, I still think it possible that hot fusion or cold fusion will displace PV (as well as nuclear fusion) in the near future. Those could potentially be really really cheap. Even if fission gets cheaper and better (including potentially as small batteries), I don't see it could compete with workable fusion (and probably neither could PV for most applications).

We'll likely also see energy efficiency increase greatly. The current best construction in Europe is to build passive solar superinsulated houses without furnaces; search on "no furnace house".

I'd love to see the solar roadways thing work out... Or even just for parking lots or driveways.
http://www.solarroadways.com/

Still, as I said elsewhere, the same reasons PV s getting cheaper (cheaper computing leading to cheaper collaboration and better designs by cheaper modeling and newer materials and so on) are the same sorts of reasons we will also see much cheaper nuclear power. Of course, there are other trends that all interact with that as well... A post by me from 2000:
"[unrev-II] Singularity in twenty to forty years?"
http://www.dougengelbart.org/c...

Sorry, system3d is two versions away.

I'm just not going to trust systemd as my init system until they've got 3 or 4 more versions under their belt. Let me know when they get to SystemV init.

government sponsors the basic research, then they kill it, then they prevent industry from commercializing it when it would threaten extant corporate profits, especially in energy, and by extension military spending and petrodollar advantage. Google 'integral fast reactor', Branson, etc.

We've known how to make all the clean energy we need and clean up our nuclear waste problem at the same time for the past 20 years. We have a government problem, not a technical one.

Only 50k to sell my soul for having them spy on more people... including myself?
Nope.

Of course not you - but the kinds of people who will submit are going to get job offers from the NRO. They are willing to make that deal, they're not bright enough to run off to industry, and they might have a glimmer of talent that cannot be cultivated in the university system. Plus, $50k isn't enough to quit and start a company, so it's a well-considered recruiting effort.

There's ways to MAKE more, and improve nuclear power at the same time. But nobody wants to talk about it.

You mean like France, which has lots of nuclear power, active plutonium extraction and reprocessing capability? I don't want to get the ESA all tangled up with France or anything, but if they asked nicely...

Jefferson used to complain about the long line of people at the White House who were there to see him - most of them looking for a job hand-out, but some with legitimate issues for him to deal with.

Perhaps Congress could start by dissolving the enivronment that has caused so many people to want to do antisocial things like harming a President, who is mostly supposed to be a CEO of the government, and occasionally lead a defensive war against the country.

Oh, nm, that's just crazy-talk. Might as well fill the moat with hunter-killer boats from Lockheed.

No, they can't and it shows.

A STRANGE GAME ... THE ONLY WINNING MOVE IS NOT TO PLAY.

HOW ABOUT A NICE GAME OF CHESS?

anti-lameness: qq ww ee rr tt yy uu ii oo pp aa ss dd ff gg hh jj kk ll zz xx cc vv bb nn mm

When you already have a defined program (and machine in this case) in front of you for review, then you can determine whether or not it will halt

except when you cant

For any computer program with a finite number of states (finite memory) you can determine whether it halts by running it long enough that it must be looping.

For a computer with 16384 states (An 8 state turing machine with an 8 position binary tape. 8 states * 8 positions * 2^8 values that can be on the tape) you can tell if any arbitrary program terminates by running it for 16385 steps. Any program that doesn't terminate in 16385 steps will run forever.

people are interested in benefiting from this

Come to the dark side, we have untold riches and unlimited power.

And cookies!

Does it make me a crony capitalist or a welfare queen when I decide I'd rather the power go to those I can vote out of office than those I can't?

If you think voting significantly changes the government, that just makes you naive. The bureaucrats run most things and are unaccountable.

If the entire government became Libertarian today, it would take less than 10 years for corporations to take total control of governance

Do you mean they'd have private armies in the streets? Like in the US from 1776-1870, before permanent corporations were legal?

I already pay a small fortune in school tax. Let them find the money for it from there.

Last I checked, my local government school has a 3 meg connection because that's what Comcast gives them for free. They have a three million dollar budget but can't find $3000 a year to upgrade that to a hundred meg.

It could be that after all the teachers' salaries and benefits are paid for they don't have any money left (and considering the reams of copy paper we get home...) or it could be that high-speed internet allows remote teaching which is seen as a threat to union jobs.

I do work for one private school (area towns tuition their kids there) and they paid a lot of money to get fiber brought to their facility.

The incentives are aligned differently.

I fail to understand the reasoning for choice as well.

I think I get this.

One example: I have a handful of shell and perl scripts that I use to manage virtual machine interdependencies at startup time - this vm needs to be listening on this port before I can think about starting this other vm, etc. and I express that in a JSON tree for configuration.

I've recently been noticing that the dependency "engine" is a bit buggy and also duplicates much of what systemd already provides (pre-dating it by some years), so I'm going to look at making it work with systemd instead and cutting out a bunch of the code. That also gets me pretty easy dependency tracking on various filesystem mounts, network status, etc., so it could be better than 'sleep 20' in some spots.

Now, if I wanted to offer that up to the community, somebody could choose to package that into Debian. Assuming my experiment works, systemd would be a hard requirement to use this particular system.

Somebody in the Debian community proposed that for this package to be accepted I would also have to [re]write another dependency engine and support that. I can't see doing that if the systemd approach works.

Does it make sense that people who don't want to run systemd (which is fine) also can't impose additional work on developers who do want to use systemd?