You might want to bring your sarcasm detector in to the shop. I don't believe it is working correctly :D

It seems to me you are arguing semantics.

While it is true that Google's search and search algorithms are proprietary, the foundation for these is FOSS. In fact, wasn't it Google who released a bunch of performance patches for MySQL as FOSS? What about Google's summers of code? Google has given back to the Free software community much much more than MS, Oracle et al ever have. It is only natural that they reserve *some* knowledge so that they may continue to exist and, *Deity Forbid*, proft.

As far as "scorching the earth of mobile providers" that can't happen fast enough IMHO. I am tired of getting gouged by these SOBs. Don't get me wrong, I am all for a company turning a profit, but these leeches with their insane data plans and text bundling can't die fast enough. Not too mention, how are these providers being run out of business? These are the folks *enabling* Google by selling what their customers *want*.

I don't always agree with Google and their strategies, but compared to pretty much all of their competitors (and most of the members of this "FairSearch" group) they are saints. Imagine if MS had not been so slow to get the whole "internet" and later "mobile" things? Microsoft is a predator in all senses of the word and has proven this over and over throughout the course of their history. This is coming from a guy whose only tech certs are with MS.

I have long thought that Free software often made better sense than proprietary software, yet Free software has difficulty making in-roads. Usually (not always) it is because there is no one lobbying for FOSS and offering kickbacks, legal threats, etc.. Now that someone is lobbying for FOSS you are saying that is unfair? Really?

That's unpossible!!!! Everyone knows there is no way to make money off of open source software, especially if you just give it away.

All profits must be tied to walled gardens and license fees. /end sarcasm

Sweet!! I am going to open my own store for iOS to sell 3rd party apps.... Oh wait...

This might be construed as monopolistic behaviour. Imagine if MS declined allowing the installation of any application that was not sold through their App store.

DRM is probably...

As an example, the DRM being used for Flash is most likely....

I would bet on....

Do you have any actual facts to bring to the conversation or simply pure speculation?

I don't recall there ever being a patent argument in any of the SCO cases. All I recall are copyright infringement claims.

Wikipedia agrees with this.

From the previously linked article:

SCO has not claimed patent infringement, as according to the US Patent and Trademark Office database, no AT&T or Novell patent was ever assigned to SCO.

....Microsoft paid SCO $6M (USD) in May 2003 for a license to "Unix and Unix-related patents", despite the lack of Unix-related patents owned by SCO.

If you are aware of SCO owned patents, please do tell.

....plus there's the fact that the XP-64 was shit. It was and is buggier then hell, lacks drivers for common hardware as no one was offering them - high end was decently supported but forget about most workstations and printers! Drivers simply weren't there even for most corporate printers.

Amen brother. I also had several games that I had purchased for my (then new quad-core intel w/8GB RAM) that *refused to install* because they thought it was a *server* OS. *sigh*

XP-64 was simply MS saying "Wait guys, don't defect... we have 64bit for the workstation too!!!"

First off, I didn't say that was my belief. I was playing devil's advocate by answering the question in a way that *many* people in the open source community would agree with.

I don't have a problem with systemd per se, but the breakage introduced into udev is unacceptable and Lennart's attitude towards anyone that disagrees with him is not only insulting but degrading as well. All in all he makes a poor representative for a premier Linux company and I am surprised RH has put him in that position. There are also concerns about Lennart's attention span and how quickly he delegates major projects to a maintainer only to move on to the next big thing.

Systemd is also obfuscated and counter-intuitive in many areas. Having all of your startup located in one directory in nice human readable scripts certainly has its advantages. Systemd also has its advantages as well - quick boot due to parallel execution of init, service dependencies, etc...

The other thing that concerns me with systemd, as explained by Lennart, is not only providing the ability to boot a shell-less system but striving towards that as the end goal. That I have a problem with. If I wanted to use Windows, I know where to find it.

Pulseaudio is one of those things I guess either works out of the box and you love it or is a complete nightmare to set up and you end up hating it. I fall into both camps having had both experiences. Maybe I just love to hate it :D

I recently switched over from Gentoo to Arch Linux on several of my machines just so I could wrap my head around systemd (amongst other things). I also like the idea of a rolling distribution with *less* compilation time. Once I understood systemd and its underpinnings it is not so bad and remains mostly out of my way. Changing the naming convention of network devices that has been in place for decades really pissed me off at first and Arch's decision to drop net-tools by default (really???) did not help matters in this regard.

The jury is still out on pulseaudio in my book.

I'm just wondering why you think Red Hat wants to kill open source?

Two words. Lennart Poettering.

See also systemd and pulseaudio. Or better yet, ask Linus himself.

High pay by itself isn't going find anyone....

Speak for yourself!

Seriously though, I have a job I love and while not startup/rockstar pay grade, I am quite comfortable and happy.

Best $15 I ever spent.

I believe he might be referring to block heaters. However, block heaters are plugged into an outlet, they are not run off the batteries. I assume they are run off an outlet because the energy demands would drain the batteries. This suggests that a heating solution suitable for a battery pack the size of which OP is referring would probably not leave much reason for using an energy efficient vehicle to begin with.

Amen Brother! I really don't like GTK, and Razor-qt has really become quite usable on my old laptop (PIII 1.2Ghz, 512MB RAM, GeForce2MX Mobile 32MB).

I also use it as a fall back desktop on my Gentoo machines in event I break something on the main desktop. Razor-qt compiles in a few minutes compared to the hours it takes to recompile KDE.

Also, if you use kwin as the window manager you get all the desktop effects available in KDE without the overhead of Plasma.

Sweet!!! I am going to go download the beta drivers for OSX to try out the new bug fixes.. oh, wait, I can't do that...
Nevermind -- when are the chipset fixes coming out for the 780i/790i chipsets that cause SATA to act all funny under Linux? Any day now.. oh, wait, never..
Well hell, I am going to go grab the BeOS drivers for my NVidia card so I can hack on that OS... oh wait... no such drivers...

In the future, please don't assume that your needs cover everyone's needs.

Since ReactOS is clean room reverse engineered....

That works fine for copyright, but has no affect on the patented bits. If you violate a patent, despite the manner of your solution, you are liable.