Nobody said they would be testing to failure. You can test every unit to say 150% of failure. If the material is rated for 1000% of failure then 150% should be safe. If it doesn't fail at 150% once it probably won't fail at 100% 100 times. So now you're at 99 times until mean failure instead of 100.

So a song supposedly written in the last 80 years or so having a copyright still on it means that you have zero respect for the GPL?

1) If Microsoft wanted to include a secret NSA screen recording app they could hide it in the code and you would never know.
2) If your'e worried about exploits then you should just worry about the fact that your GPU's drivers already offer this capability.
3) Recording your screen is the most useless way to learn things about you that I can think of. If you have access to the system to such a level that you can execute arbitrary code it's far more effective to run a keylogger than a video screen system which would require gigabytes of data to get meaningful information. Install your keylogger and then have millions of computers dump their keystrokes to a database that doesn't require you to sneak terrabytes of data from millions of computers to your server. Then run some data mining software to identify likely username/password combinations.

This is occum's razor shit people. Screen capture software only requires 1-2MBs. It's not like they can't be hidden. And even if they couldn't be easily hidden they're mostly useless.

The Linux community doesn't really stand a chance since Microsoft isn't 100% technical where as most of the "linux community" doesn't have any overhead or advertising or accounting or datacenters or call centers or executives or web designers or game developers or.... For instance up until recently Microsoft's highest level woman employed was in HR. There is no HR (although maybe there should be :P) on a github project.

The other contributing factor is that Microsoft does hire a lot of women in technical positions but a lot of them are international where tech is viewed as just a "Good high paying job" not as "A bunch of geeks and mouth breathing virgins". That's why I always bang my head on the table when stories go something like this: "Tech is a toxic soup of misogynistic assholes... and we need more women to choose computer science!" Regardless if it's true as long as that stigma sticks around women aren't going to be knocking down the doors to be the first person to be victimized and discriminated against. However while women are far more likely to pursue tech in a developing country like India, it's mostly because "Tech is a good high paying job" not "Tech gives you the opportunity to contribute to an ideologically driven project that is an unpaid position in your free time!" That's the opposite of a "Good high paying job" that's a no paying job.

Also the "Linux Community" is all around pretty small. It doesn't take *that* many people to create an operating system. Even if the Linux community had the same demographics as Microsoft it's safe to say that Microsoft employs about as many people to develop windows as the number of people working on the linux project. Both projects are similar in scope and design. By comparison, Microsoft not only makes windows they also have Office and Xbox and Azure and Microsoft Game Studios and Movies and Music and Hotmail and MSN.com and Cortana and Bing and Here and Lumia and Surface and... So you would need to do an apples to apples comparison of Microsoft's Windows Team vs the 'Linux Community'.

Yeah, I'm surprised that computer geeks don't more broadly embrace electric vehicles based solely on the principle of flexibility.

Electric cars far better embody the Unix philosophy of atomization and portability than ICEs do. If you're in the woods you could trickle charge your car off of solar. Or you could put a turbine in a stream and power your car from a creek, or you could hire a few people on bicycles to pedal away for a couple days to charge it up, or you could setup a wind turbine, or you could have a small ICE generator burning gasoline, or you could have a generator run from nuclear power, or you could have a generator run from a wood fire or coal or anything.

The beauty of electricity is that it's a common currency just like text is to a unix application. You don't mandate an energy source you can mix and match and switch power sources dynamically.

Electric vehicles are also simple and easy to understand. Electric motors have pretty much the one single moving part. Even battery technology is modular, you could have an electric car that has no batteries, just an ICE generator in the trunk providing electricity.

From a form factor perspective it should also appeal to computer geeks' ideals of Aesthetics. A design in which you might need wheels, but otherwise the sky is the limit on where you place critical components.

Yes I am saying that. There are a couple reasons for that. For one thing there is a lot of inertia in the industry and for good reason. You don't want to move from a tool that you know works, has worked on dozens of features previously and adopt something which might not work. Arnold is only creeping into production. Render TDs aren't familiar with raytracing in general. Lighting TDs are used to cheating everything. Only 1 production renderer historically had been the renderer of choice for feature film work (PRMan) so only it had gotten the AOVs, custom shaders, flexible scene graph manipulation and such that feature film teams want. So your choice before Arnold was essentially "We can take a mostly ready renderer like say Arnold, Brazil or Vray and hammer it into what we want or we can keep using PRMan which does everything we want albeit slowly." The "right" choice was PRMan. A few groups who didn't have the same constraints such as ILM's rogue and digimatte departments went with raytracers (for instance the opening forest shot of Avatar is a Brazil shot) also DD's commercial division was mostly Vray so when Tron came along they had a moment of power and sort of injected Vray on to Digital Domain at large (which is in my opinion why Vray suddenly started getting good focused development towards being a usable feature production renderer). And of course Arnold re-emerged after 12 years of underground development in SPI's basement. So DD and Sony did decide to put in the herculean effort to take a promising production raytracer and turn it into a competitive production renderer.

But as I'm sure you know speed isn't everything. Prman is exactly as you say all about:

Arnold years ago: too immature to do any of that.
Brazil: massive displacement was extremely glitchy until briefly before it was acquired and killed. It also had no implicit hair spline rendering.
Vray: Had nobody using it in features so as a result it was back-asswords for feature production with feedback and bug reports only coming from Arch-Viz artists. It also didn't have the stability or capabilities of handling multi-billion poly scenes at the time
.
And none of the above had something like RIB.

So while they were all faster, if you can't rely on it for every shot it's a bad choice. You don't want to get 90% of the way into a shot and then have the renderer shit the bed and have to change renderers and redo all of your work on the shot. Renderman has always been spectacularly reliable, fast? No. Reliable, absolutely.

What finally happened though was that Arnold popped up out of stealth maturation in SPI's pipeline and made a mockery of Renderman's performance. More and more effects were raytraced and Renderman's raytracer was a kludgy tacked on piece of shit. Arnold overcame the deficiencies of Vray and Brazil for features and implemented all of the stuff that feature films want: bullet proof displacement, solid instancing, implicit hair shapes, AOVs, a RIB like scene graph with ASS plus it brought the speed and artist friendly workflow of something like Brazil or Vray.

So yes, the renderman team went back to the drawing board and turned renderman into a path tracer before they lost the entire market. But it's only been in a stable release availability for 2 years, compared to the optimization and tuning that Arnold has had going on for well over a decade. Renderman is catching up but it's definitely on defense and trying to catch up.

But all of that is irrelevant for Blender users even now you don't really want a path tracer unless you're doing animation. Most blender artists are doing essentially arch-viz and path tracing is sllllloooowwwwww. There is a reason Brazil and Arnold which were animation focused renderers spent a lot of time on their brute force GI performance while Vray which was dominating the arch-viz scene focused on the quality of its irradiance caching/Final Gather/whatever you want to call it sub-sampled GI. For stills sub-sampled GI is an order of magnitude faster. It's flickery useless garbage for animation beyond fly-throughs and such but it's what the vast majority of blender users would benefit the most from. So even with Renderman catching up the legacy raytracers on performance, it's still not focused on performance for hobbyist applications. And none of the CPU production renderers can compare to the responsiveness of a lightweight non-production renderer like Octane or Cycles for simple small scenes.

A free Renderman isn't really useful to Blender users except for the Whizbang "Yay we're using otherwise expensive software" bragging rights. The comments on the article for Blendernation are telling. "No GPU? Cycles is faster with a GPU than PRMan on the CPU." This is true. In fact PRman has historically been incredibly slow in comparison to other production renderers for almost a decade let alone stripped down hobbyist renderers. Yes Pixar uses, yes ILM uses it but outside of ILM and Pixar applications PRMan is poorly suited for what most smaller boutique studios do let alone what a hobbyist does. A hobbyist would read comments in Cinefex magazine with wonderment when a VFX Supervisor says that Iron Man was the first film where ILM used area lights or Cars one of the first films where PRman did raytracing in any substantial way.

Whatever you're rendering, you probably aren't benefiting from PRMan's really distinguishing features if you're using blender.

How is this different from the linux kernel? Answer it's not. If you aren't on a maintenance build branch you're going to need to update in order to continue receiving security updates. Only maintenance branches get guaranteed security updates without features tagging along.

There is a false dichotomy because there are 3 obnoxious groups.

1) "God put that oil in the ground for our benefit and he'll return before the world gets too warm!"
2) "Oil and Nuclear power are driven by evil chemicals!"
But there is also the
3) "I'm going to smugly pretend that not having an opinion makes me balanced and superior."
clan.

We have a popular YouTube video which suddenly started getting jibberish comments on it. I'm pretty sure someone's using the comments section as a C&C server.

I think this illustrates the problem. If Public Transit is already more convenient and quick then you will ride it even if it costs *more*. If driving is already more convenient and quick then you will drive even if it costs *more. People are less price conscious than they are convenience focused. I don't think free public transit would make a huge impact since everyone who is priced out of car ownership, already rides transit and everybody who feasibly can own a car does.

For two arm rests, I would happily be facing another seat. And I've flown first class facing backwards a number of times, I thought it would be weird but I found it wasn't strange at all to be facing backwards. Especially once we all have Oculus headset equivalents. Then we sit down, slip on our headset and enjoy both our physical space as well as our visual space. I was on a transpacific flight this year with an Oculus. Turn on the oculus, load up a movie theater set on the beach and presto you're in your own little world. Marvelous.

So you want everybody to be able to live in a suburban house with a yard and a fence/garage but you also want to have fast and easy access to the city? Sorry but adding lanes isn't the solution. If you want city life, live in the city. If you want to live in the country, there are going to be consequences/compromises and first and foremost is the commute.

What Seattle has needed for ages and what finally is starting to move forward is a rail system. 12 lane highways won't solve our problems, what will solve our problem is true high volume transit solutions. That's what every other large city has done. New York doesn't keep moving thanks to megahighway or more roads, it operates because of rail. All of the cities that really operate efficiently rely on subways and rail. Los Angeles took an automobile focused approach and its result is sprawl where you can drive for nearly 5 hours and not get out of the city. Every city around the world that I've been to of substantial size that has an efficient transit system relies on rail as a backbone.

I'm paying the taxes that Microsoft dodges thanks to their lobbyists, extortion by threatening to leave if they don't exactly what they want and their corruption in former Microsoft lawyers writing the laws that get signed off by legislators who have little to no recourse.

If I write a contract and then say "sign it or else" it's good old fashioned extortion. Meanwhile people such as myself then have to make up for the fact that one of the largest employers in the state isn't paying taxes like every other business. They've got enough clout that they legitimately threaten to destroy the state economy by leaving. When you're too big to fail or too big to lose the law no longer applies to you and it's just a formality to officially recognize whatever the corporation's current desires are. If I went to the state house and said "My company also doesn't want to pay taxes." they would say "too bad."

The "Linux Developers" are mostly for-profit corporate employees. They aren't so much donating as collaborating on a shared asset.