Anwar al-Awlaki - intentionally executed without trial.
Samir Khan - unintentionally executed as part of the execution of Anwar al-Awlaki.
Jude Kenan Mohammad - intentionally executed. Had previously been convicted of terrorism conspiracy, but not to a sufficient degree to actually be imprisoned.
Abdulrahman al-Awlaki - 16 year old with no personal involvement in terrorism, but who had a father (Anwar al-Awlaki) who was involved. Robert Gibbs, former White House press secretary, stated that he "should have had a more responsible father." Unclear at what level the execution was a mistake.

Three of the four are arguably "bad guys" - but they should still have gotten a proper trial, so we could determine if they are. The last one doesn't even seem to be a bad guy, just somebody that happened to be born to an unfortunate father.

That's a common meme for people that don't know the psychology of suicide. Suicide generally takes a fair bit of strength of character. The problem is not being "a pussy" or "taking a pussy way out" - it's an unfortunate evaluation, often from wrong premises. A common one is that a bunch of psychological or life situation issues are permanent/long term, while they are usually possible to change. Another is overestimating how much the person is a burden to other people in their lives, and wanting to lighten their load.

Yes, I have. It's embarrassingly low. A little less than what Greece gives, about half of what Germany gives, about 1/5th of what Sweden gives.

There's some stats over at http://www.statisticbrain.com/countries-that-give-the-most-in-foreign-aid-statistics/

The US has a lot of good points. Foreign aid isn't one of them, and neither is consumption patterns.

(Oh, and I live in the US and am originally from Norway, if that makes a difference.)

The transaction costs for paying bitcoin are fairly high. I'd need to find somewhere to buy bitcoin (Mt Gox, I presume), find out how to pay with it, probably install some software, etc. So that's a hassle even though I know a bunch about Bitcoin, as I haven't used them before - and hassle is a major part of transaction costs.

If you're looking for more technical transaction costs, they're about $6.59 per transaction at the moment, paid by the entire network through expansion of the monetary base (using today's block payment of 25 bitcoins per block, the rate of one block every ten minutes, yesterday's transaction count of 51923, and this moment's cost of bitcoins of $95) . That transaction cost will drop if the hashing power compared to buying activity goes down.

Or the transaction costs of paying money is higher than the transaction costs of paying CPU time.

If I'm installing something, the transaction cost of letting it run a task on my machine is very close to zero. The transaction cost of having to get my credit card, key in the number, verify that the site I'm keying it into isn't too shady, keying in my address, and the risk of having my credit card hit one more site is significantly higher.

For 96% of the world's population, there is no access to "Amazon Instant".

And the comment here is that legal access would lead to less piracy. I believe that; I actually buy and rip DVDs or Blurays for everything I watch, but it is an utter pain and I am oh so tempted of going for the much easier route of just pointing my computer at the right torrent files and getting it pre-ripped and quicker. There's so much hassle put in the way of a good experience for those of us that want to stay legit.

That like your opinion, man.

There's a million different ways to argue this, from "Stallman poisioned the well by using propaganda techniques to make people into GPL zealots" to "The Linux community had a structure that was better able to scale development and evangelization". The truth is that there were many different causes, and we'll almost certainly never know how important each was, and how much of this was basically random chance.

I can counterfact some of your hypotheses above, in case you're interested in having a clearer picture, though:

For the "because of the lawsuit" argument, you seem to be arguing against a straw man. The argument was about being on a similar exponential curve, and Linux getting ahead, and the idea of network effects has always been included - ie, Linux got bigger, and because Linux got bigger it got a bunch of advantages that is just because of it being bigger, leading to extra growth for Linux and less growth for BSD. (I think this is a very partial truth, myself, and that there are structural differences that are much more important.)

There was very little focus on recruiting in the BSD community - there was a "put it out there and let them use it if they want to" and recruiting developers from the existing set of BSD users. There was no focus on recruiting from the Unix community - it just happened to that kind of people that discovered BSD.

Your GPL view may be biased by what side you've been following - you may well have seen companies that would contribute to GPLed projects because they would "get protection" - I've been on the opposite side of the fence, and seen a lot of contributions that were from companies that did this because they could have the freedom to do whatever they wanted, and would contribute the parts they wanted to contribute, and would have used a proprietary codebase to work from if they hadn't been able to use BSD licensed code. Overall, it is very hard to estimate which of these effects is larger - what I personally have seen (from watching the BSD community from the inside and the Linux community from the outside) would make me estimate the positive effect of freedom on company contributions to be much larger than the positive effect of restrictions, but people on the opposite side tend to consistently make the opposite estimation.

As for user friendliness: I switched from Linux to BSD back in 1996 because I found BSD easier to use than Linux, almost immediately after install. For many definitions of "ease of use", Linux has now beat BSD - but back then, BSD seemed at least to me to be much easier to deal with.

If I understand the article correctly, the problem isn't that Apple has an overall minimum - it's that Apple is setting a minimum per carrier and using that to force market share, somewhat similar to the per-CPU licensing that Microsoft did in the 90s.

Assuming I understand the implications of the article correctly (and it doesn't spell this out), the Apple trick works somewhat like this:

Carrier X has 100,000 customers, 10,000 of which are super-Apple-fanboys as customers. If they don't get their iPhone, they'll go elsewhere.
There's also another 5,000 customers that will buy the iPhone if Carrier X does a hard sell, but where carrier X would be better served by selling these customers something else (e.g, because the customers would be happier with something else, and that's good advertising.)

Apple will run their numbers and say "Carrier X has 15,000 customers it can make buy the numbers, we will offer them a minimum buy of 15,000 units". If carrier X says no to buying 15,000 units, they're losing 10,000 customers. If carrier X says yes to buying 15,000 units and don't do a hard sell of the iPhone to the 5,000 (e.g, leading them to buy a phone that they'll be more happy with), carrier X is out the cost of 5,000 phones. The only reasonable option for carrier X is to buy the 15,000 units and do hard sell for 5,000 - leading to a worse outcome for those customers (or for the carrier, depending on why the carrier wanting to sell another phone.)

If the number of Apple fanboys was really small, then this wouldn't be an issue - the carrier would just take the loss of those customers. However, if the number is relatively large - and supposedly is - then this is using their (state granted) monopoly on the iPhone directly to extend into a larger market share, which may be against anti-trust laws. Or at least that seems to be the hypothesis. (This is not legal advice, I'm not a lawyer, and even if I was a lawyer I would not be your lawyer.)

Thanks for this - that means that my information at the very least was out of date.

I've read somewhere that seemed reliable that Amazon is not using AWS for most of their internal services. Unfortunately, a quick search did not find me the reference for that again. I also assume that this gets less true over time, as some of their services would certainly fit.

When you're in a firefight? So this is something that happen to you regularly? Remind me never to be around you, if chance ever comes up.

So you need to split your charges into "Smartphone support tax" and "Data plan", and not bundle them.

There's a fair amount of evidence around false accusations of rape; rates are estimated from 1.5% to 90%, with the academic consensus supposedly being at 2% to 8%; it's an odd consensus, since almost all researchers seems to come with a higher number, even the ones that only include rapes that have been thoroughly investigated and concluded that nothing happened.

Since you don't mention this at all, it seems that the absence of evidence is the absence of you looking for evidence at all, and this evidence being less pushed in your face than the evidence of rape happening. The unfortunate situation is that while most rapes are not reported to the police, many of the alleged rapes that are reported to the police never happened - in fact, from the way I superficially read the articles I've looked at, it may be that the situation many places is that while most rapes are not reported to the police, most rapes that are reported to the police never happened. This, of course, means that the police has to be diligent in investigating whether an allegation is true or not - and again, that makes it harder for real victims to report :-(

To me, that's not particularly interesting - the applications that I want to run work worse on Windows, and there's a bunch of stuff I could in theory buy that probably work nicely, but only if I'm messing around in a GUI. But which is more comfortable has a fair bit to do with what you're most experienced with.

I've not tried MSYS; but cygwin was clearly annoying, and when I last ran Windows for a while (about six to three years ago), I found I still preferred to have a Mac or Unix system at the end.

I suspect PowerShell too might be nice; there's some clean design work done in it. However, the problem (from my point of view) is in the apps - they're not designed to work nicely as building blocks, and when you run five-ten (not to mention five or ten thousand) machines, it gets to be a pain. And there is one special pain point: There is no source code. Anything fails, you have to experiment based on the docs, or, I assume, step into asm. I love being able to mod source code for the things I run, and then run it again with more logging or other changes.

Is there more money in selling home PCs to the edge case of "people that write their own software" or to the majority who do not?

I have no delusion that selling home PCs to the Unix market is a sane business model. I'm just communicating what I perceive as problems with working on Windows, and why I am attracted to Unix. It don't even have to be an accurate model of how things work - for once, it should be an adequate answer that that's how I perceive things :-)

Eivind.

Sure. But software developers care if you're tolerant; and this may be an important point among gay potential employees, and for most straight potential employees supporting same-sex marriage is a minor but positive point. I work for a different top-tier software organization; there's lots of pro-gay-marriage stickers around the office, mostly put up by people I know to be straight. Software developers are rationalists; so there's fewer fundamentalist religious than among the average population, and thus more support of gay marriage.