Proper medical care should not be subject to an insurance which the insurance companies could refuse to give you due to prior illness. What if someone grows up in a poor family without medical insurance and is diagnosed with a heart defect at a young age which may or may not manifest itself at an older age. If it does happen, they're practically screwed, even if the defect could be treated with proper medical care. The insurance companies could easily say that this is a prior condition that was diagnosed before the insurance was taken out.

We can argue about socialised medicine, which works pretty well in Europe, warts and all, but it baffles me that such a large portion of Americans are highly enthusiastic about a system where a large for-profit corporation with a huge profit motive can decide to screw you over, due to technicalities in your insurance contract, or because you got a test done when you where 13.

The rest of Larry Page's arguments seem nonsense to me. We, as a society, should be less judgemental and prickly or private about a lot of illnesses, but as an individual, you have to live in a society where people will judge you for your medical history. We are not ready for full disclosure and probably never will be.

"A very complex and wonderful piece of engineering"

On the contrary. We suffer from severe race conditions in the brain, we have obsolete and potentially dangerous "features" (i.e. the appendix). Replacement parts are hard to come by and we are very, very difficult to service. A simple service procedure can lead to catastrophic system failure. We're also got extremely poor interoperability with each other, leading to very large knowledge loss in transmission between systems and often disastrous and destructive intra-system interaction.

We perform impressive tasks in the same way that a PC running Microsoft Windows and Autodesk Inventor can perform impressive tasks. But like those two systems we are not so much engineered as stuck together with gaffa tape from millions of smaller components developed over a large number of years. Perhaps the best way to describe us is that we arose organically without any real engineering oversight.

"Did you know that signal DELAY is essential in organic brains? That whole hosts of disorders with debilitating effects come from signals arriving too early? Did you stop to consider that thse faults may actually be features that are essential?"

Are you saying that our maker created a system with severe race condition problems? I guess that is another issue to add to the existing; inclusion of obsolete and potentially dangerous features (the appendix), only poor and limited third party replacement parts available (i.e. limbs), design makes repairs hazardous with large potential for catastrophic system failure (surgery), poor interoperability with other units with widespread loss of data when transferring between units, etc.

If we add severe race conditions in the brain to this list of issues, I'm quite frankly surprised there hasn't yet been a massive class action suit against the manufacturer.

Using the tool may well be a criminal offence, but selling it isn't necessarily. And making it look like Firefox is Trademark violation, which is a Civil matter, not a criminal one.

It took a while for Mozilla to hear about Gamma and put together a lawsuit. I don't see how this is any different in the US.

Says the poster with a 6-digit slashdot ID using terms like M$. This is not the best way to come across as a fountain of wisdom.

If you have worked for the company for 25+ years, you must have someone in upper management who you know and who would trust your work, right? Or have the entire management system changed?

If it is the former, I would just book a meeting with your friend in upper management and your clueless new manager where you ask both of them the following questions:
1. Have I demonstrated my commitment to the company over the last 25+ years?
2. Have I given you a reason not to trust me on this?
3. Do you believe I am slacking off?

The expected answers are "Yes. No. No.". If this is the case, you can rightly ask for your new manager to start taking your estimates seriously and stop trying to question your commitment. If those are not the answers you're given, you should look for a new job immediately.

.. and they have no idea what it is. Something they have never heard of is not toxic. They hadn't heard about Google Chrome or ChromeOS either, before Google started pushing it. Android is massively well known these days, but almost nobody knows it has a Linux kernel.

The reason Google calls it ChromeOS rather than Chrome Linux or Google Linux, is that they don't want to share brand recognition with other Linux distributions, pure and simple.

It is the same reason that there is not a single mention of the word 'Linux' on the Ubuntu front web site, or the download page, or the "What is Ubuntu" page. You'll have to dig pretty hard to find any mention of the word 'Linux' on ubuntu.com at all.

The BSD license is irrelevant. The GPL does not cover aggregation, that is shipping two non-related components together in the same distribution, and it specifically provides an exception for allowing essential GPL operating system libraries to be used by proprietary applications.

There are many, many proprietary GUIs used on top of a GNU/Linux base system out there. Particularly in terms of TV Set-top boxes and other embedded systems. This alone is proof that your argument is flawed.

Microsoft could well have done the same. They could even have used Xorg with proprietary extensions if they wanted, since the X11 license is pretty much the same as the BSD license.

The only issue would be difficulty in keeping drivers locked in to Microsoft Linux so they can't be used for regular GNU/Linux, but I imagine they would just introduce deliberately incompatible changes to stop this from being easy.

They could also move most drivers into userland where they could certainly control a proprietary driver model.

"You can't justify subjecting 5 people to the negative effects of the cure in order to save one zombie, so your discovery is completely useless."

No. You would administer it and risk killing many healthy humans, because the alternative is certain annihilation of the human race.

The premise of the story is fine though. Although my zombie analogy would be the difference between a 99% chance of no zombie outbreak in a year vs. a 99.9% chance. The former would mean a 37% chance of a zombie free century. The latter would mean a 37% chance of a zombie free millennium.

This is an enthusiasts card, pushing the boundaries of the current generation AMD GPUs to squeeze out more performance. I think it is safe to say that X will not be sufficiently small. Or more accurately; 3X will not be sufficiently small.

I would venture to guess that fan reliability scales super-linearly with fan speed and that we're talking about a speed for which the failure rate of one fan of speed X is smaller than the failure rate of any of 3 fans at 3X.

I just don't think the AMD engineers are total idiots. Obviously I have no evidence, but I prefer not to assume they are.

I share your concerns, but please allow me to moderate it slightly. X on OSX and Windows uses completely different UI toolkits between the native display server and X.

X on Wayland, on the other hand, would use GTK+/Qt on both X and Wayland. You would thus think that it would be easier for the GTK+/Qt developers to ensure the apps work transparently between the two on both display servers. It should be entirely possible to make it impossible for the user to tell whether a Window was displayed with X or Wayland.

None of this does anything to explain WHY we should switch though, other than the codebase being so "modern" and "elegant", something which doesn't matter at all to the user, and doesn't take into account all the inelegance which will be introduced when optimising Wayland and reintroducing some of the lost features.

We can also add that it will be ages before Wayland is actually as fast as X for most things on most drivers, since it simply isn't optimised yet. So we have a hope and a promise that it will one day be faster than X.

We also have a bunch of meaningless words such as "modern" and "elegant". Words that are meaningless to the users, and only give an extremely vague hint that future versions may be better because of this modernity and elegance.

I'm not completely dismissing Wayland, but I find the idea of switching such a crucial core component based on vague future promises to be absolutely insane. I'd like to see the promises become reality first. Maybe not everything, but we need enough that the switch is worth it.

However, I am less concerned about Wayland-only apps than you. I have faith in the Qt and GTK+ developers to make the backend choice transparent to the user and app developers so that an app developed with Qt or GTK+ will automatically work with both backends. Indeed it seems you simply have to set the Environment variable GDK_BACKEND (i.e. export GDK_BACKEND=wayland) and the application will choose the backend at runtime. This way, when using an SSH tunnel, the SSH startup scripts can automatically set the GDK_BACKEND to X11 and it should display on the remote X-server.

Citation needed. Employment and minimum wage is not a straight-forward linear releationship and this is subject to a lot of discussion (I know this is Wikipedia, but you should at least find references to the arguments).

In isolation, an employer is of course correct in that being required to increase the wages would mean they couldn't afford to hire as many, but with a minimum wage being enforced across the market it is entirely possible that increasing it will lead to more people being able to afford the products and services they themselves provide, thus providing a feedback loop to encourage growth.

It is more like a Pez dispenser which will only dispense candy N times a day, where N is programmable through a website, and will alert the user with an alarm and flashing light when the dispenser is ready to dispense another sweet. And even better, will alert a family member via email if the sweet has not been removed from the machine within a reasonable time frame.

In most of Europe, we have decent ones. If a product doesn't work as advertised, you return it to the vendor that sold it to you and get your money back. You very, very rarely have to go to the trouble of court.

I don't always research a £25 purchase beforehand, but I do expect that if that purchase turns out to be unusable through no fault of my own, then I can return it. EA is an exception to my usual behaviour. EA and Sony are now so infamous for poor consumer treatment that I will assume the product won't work as advertised due to draconian DRM and won't purchase it.