Not only that... Rights are a privilege to be handed out by the police.

Texas justice comes to the rest of the USA.

First of all, virtually any built-in exploit worth having would show up on someone's network analysis. Someone would flag it as unwanted behavior, at the very least. That already puts the implementor out on a limb.

Second, the difference between getting zero-days fresh from MS and making them put backdoors in the OS or hardware is like the difference between getting your best friend's wife pregnant from a fling or locking her up in your basement as a slave.

What's telling about responses like yours is that they start off with a presumption of absolute certainty. Like anything else in life, its usually a matter of degrees. Absolutes just makes everything that's worth fighting for look impossible.

http://www.cyber-rights.org/interception/stoa/ic2kreport.htm#_Toc448565560

They got their budgets *and* general approval from the public, who would rather fantasize about "justice" as portrayed in superhero and spy fiction.

Yields 4 results in Ubuntu. You can search reputable open source archives on the web, too.

Um, really???

To look at this even more simply: Since the propeller is geared to the wheels (ground), the craft can continue picking up energy as long as there is a difference between air speed and ground speed.

...which were illegal. They have a history of bending over when the US establishment wants something.

Win8 is their second great opportunity... the first one was Vista. When Win7 was announced I realized that the Desktop Linux bandwagon hadn't just lost its wheels... it didn't have enough of them to begin with.

UserLinux, Progeny Linux, Debian Core Consortium and that attempt Mark Shuttleworth made to get distros to align their library versions... those were missed opportunities too. It just isn't within the old PC hacker mindset to come together on this issue and give consumers and esp. app developers what they need. They'd rather take consumer things apart and turn them into web servers.

Meanwhile a whole new generation of developers is re-generating the personal computing dynamic on Android.

The irony is that you can sell mostly libre Android to hundreds of millions of people, but its almost impossible to give away even the most proprietary-bejeweled "Desktop Linux".

Here's a clue as to why: The Linux Foundation had an SDK for "mobile Linux" *years* before they had one for their much older desktop spec. Of course, they were just reacting to what Google was already doing with Android.

Something I call 'greybeard distro culture' was unequipped to give people (esp. app developers) what they needed: Feature stability (from the calendar GUI right through to a standard IDE and package installer) and ABI stability (...if I try programming to explore this new idea of mine, my classmates and my cousin can run it on the first try... otherwise will just cut my programming teeth on Windows or Mac, and stay there). Greybeard rejectionists limited the role of desktop interface design to the periphery where those features could not hold stable forms, and they fostered a culture where app coders were seen as mere coders-- no differentiation except that they were "stupid" for not wanting to or knowing how to write OS code.

Those two features that make a real PC platform will engender the confidence that creative users need to invest their time and their minds to eventually become creative and brilliant *developers*. The first feature also makes remote telephone/web technical support a realistic proposition.

Hardware compatibility is another issue, but one that the Linux Foundation could have solved if they accepted the need for a limited range of offically recognized compatible models... not hard to do.

The last days of "openness" died when MS knifed OS/2 in the back. From that point on, no (typical, time-limited) consumer could count on getting new hardware with a fully-working alternative OS. A substantial fraction of popular components was (is still) poorly documented with the only *proper* drivers written only for Windows.

Nowadays, no vendor offering "Linux" as an alternative for their machine would bother to ensure that all hardware features are working and accessible to the user (yet they go out of their way for Windows). They source the chips most highly-regarded for compatibility by people who have next-to-zero resemblance to a typical computer user or even 92% of the techie demographic... so its "compatible" if you can use the features by spending days typing in a CLI.

The consumer PC market isn't "open". The target systems might as well be Macs.

Because that would mean that a martian colony is clearly more favored than an earth fallout bunker, and has a higher chance of being built, and that would totally ruin your argument!

THIS demonstrates how femtobyte elegantly and economically punctured your Mars concept: Hey, but lots of people signed up for this fantasy and will even pay!

I was actually starting to think you were arguing from a well educated and reasoned perspective, which alas turned out to be more a curtain of rhetorical talking points with a 15 year old brat behind it.

Here is a tip: Don't pitch a Mars *colony*. Go for an outpost instead. The idea of a colony is too far-fetched at our level of development, and setting ourselves up to fail at huge expense is not the way to nurture that development. Colonies exist to raise new generations of inhabitants, and attempts to raise children in that environment and with 1/3 Earth gravity would turn into an unspeakably cruel sadist's spectacle. You need a round trip proposal or else you are cutting deep against the grain of humanity.

Culture - You could call it that. More accurately it has to do with calvinistic attitudes about right and wrong, and how certain groups become demonized as a result. To most peolpe in my family, for instance, cities are demonic miserable places that should be disbanded. Yes... Cities = Evil. Of course there is a lot of identity baggage that goes along with that, emanating from social phenomena like the White Flight.

The White Flight kicked off right around the time that the Civil Rights movement did. White people became anti-urban and anti-government because they couldn't have those institutions devoted primarily to them any longer. By the late 70s, the suburbs had the inner cities increasingly surrounded and the War On Drugs commenced mainly against city inhabitants.

A better question is whether AMD or Intel will ever put backdoors into their hardware (for any purpose).

If they don't then I think we're OK.

Intelligent Grouping Transportation, AKA Taxibus...

http://www.taxibus.org.uk/index.html

People summon taxibus service with their cellphones, then a computer directs a nearby driver to a curb within a block of passengers' location... while figuring out how to accomodate more than one passenger at any given time.

If that's true then maybe Intel is making this move so they can sell more product: Power breakdowns to stand in as a replacement for technological obsolescence (which has been petering out in recent years).

And before anyone calls me cynical, I know for a fact that Intel is concerned about keeping the replacement cycle going. They have stated it at times when investors were getting jittery, and they even had a TV ad in plain view that admitted they wanted to entice people who "thought" they were perfectly happy with their existing PCs.