I support it. Wholeheartedly.

My primary reason is to spite Slashdotters. Is it working? I'm so fucking shit of the constant "there taking our JERBS!" bullshit and hypocrisy on this site.

The Microsoft party-line has always been that retraining employees to use Linux is far more expensive than paying those license fees...

Does "Microsoft party-line" mean that Microsoft has actually expressed this? Or is it code for, "I heard a lot of Slashdotters bitching about this"?

Or in other words, cite please?

What's stopping him from going on the roof? I doubt the police would try and snag him into a helicopter.

She was apparently in charge of a $25 million budget. Let's hope that money was being spent on more than travel costs for speeches!

I'm also pretty sure:

Luna has been engineered from the ground up to be light on its toes. It starts up quickly, logs in instantly, and uses the bare minimum of resources so that your apps enjoy a speed boost as well. And with Luna, you get the same Linux foundation chosen for the worldâ(TM)s fastest supercomputers.

is a flat-out lie, considering it's using the Linux kernel. Unless they're claiming they had an engineer re-examine every line of code in the Linux kernel "from the ground up".

Actually, no, that is really annoying, because you end up with a computer that does stuff behind your back, and is using bandwidth/processor power when I need it.

The CPU power is a non-issue for an application like this.

Windows solved the bandwidth problem by creating BITS, Background Intelligent Transfer Service, that only consumes bandwidth when no other processes are making bandwidth demands. So if you're halfway through a 2-GB patch, and start up Battlefield 4, the patch download will automatically stop until BF4 is done using the network.

Surely Linux has a feature like that that can be used? This should be a 100% solved problem in 2014.

You do realize that the software product Visio predates the TV brand by a solid decade, right?

If you count the prices of the missiles launched at Israel, you'd have enough to get food to most of the Palestinians, to repair most of the buildings, to create medic centers, schools, ...

How could they repair the buildings, when the Israelis won't let them import building materials?

"Allegedly" is right. The level of rhetoric here is nuts: Mayday's stated goal is to change the way that campaigns are funded such that each person (voter) can contribute equally to the campaigns of their choice.

That's the exact problem I have with it. It's an effective tax raise, and what happens to the money raised? It goes to support candidates I might vehemently disagree with. To buy them TV commercials. I find that pretty objectionable.

I have no issue with Lessig's end-goal here, I think it's noble and needed. But the way he's going about it is awful, and I won't be contributing money to it.

I have - they should be e-liminated, not limited.

Ok. Fine. That works too. But you're missing the point.

The issue I have with this entire thing is they want to use *my* tax money to buy ads for politicians I don't support. If they have another solution to the problem that doesn't involve spending my money, well great. But that's not what Lessig is soliciting money for right now. He's soliciting money to (effectively) raise my tax rate, with the additional funds going towards political campaigns.

I also have to wonder how many people actually read their proposal instead of the feel good vagueness on the homepage... it seems strange to me that $5 million-worth of donors would actually want this. But maybe I'm just projecting.

The system is purely money-driven, doubtful if the idea behind MAYDAY-PAC can change that, but worth a try.

If the problem is, "money has too much influence", I don't see how adding more money into the system could possibly change that. But hey, whatever.

I have no problem with laws *limiting* campaign donations. If Lessig's campaign was aimed at that goal, I might even contribute myself.

But I do have a problem with the government taking my tax money, and giving it to some political candidate so they can buy TV commercials. That is what both of his proposals involve.

As for your aversion of using tax money used - where do you think is all that corporate money coming from?

Whether or not it *does* come from there does not change the fact that it *should not* come from there.

If he's successful, he'll take tax money from you and 300 million others and give it to candidates running for office.

If he's unsuccessful, you'll be a sucker and we'll all be a lot better off.

This is true. But it is not a weakness of the language

Yes it is. Programming languages are designed for human beings to use. If it's difficult for human beings to use them, that is 100% a weakness of the programming language.

I don't know what you think programming languages are for if not humans.

Human brains are finite. The simpler* a language is, the more likely the developer can fit the entire thing in his head and still have room for the actual problem he's trying to solve.

If your programming language is unusable without weeks of rote-memorization, it's a bad language. That's not to say C# or VB.Net are better languages than Perl; just that your argument to the contrary doesn't make sense.

The best, ideal, language would have near-zero cognitive load, so none of the programmer's memory is consumed for the quirks of the language and all of it is available for the problem being solved.

*) Simpler being defined as, "easier to fit in your head", which is completely circular definition but you get what I'm getting at I hope. I think nobody would argue that JavaScript is simpler than Perl, for example.

Hm. Ok, good point.

Then I guess the question is, "why the hell is this newsworthy?"

Alternate headline: "Guy Does Something 10,000+ People Have Already Done"