There are 2 relevant cliches:

* You can please some of the people some of the time but you can't please all the people all of the time
* Show me your strength and I'll show you your weakness

Note: Capitalism has the same strengths and weaknesses as Open Source. Let me explains ...

The strength of having diversity in "competing" open source programs is that they help feed off one another to make themselves better. Think of a little friendly healthy competition. The user in this case benefits as "vendors" try to "market" to the user by providing a solution that fits the user's needs.

Unfortunately it also leads to wasted and duplicated effort as everyone (re) struggles to re-invent the wheel. This is caused by different user requirements. The user in this case is marginalized, and/or frustrated.

There is a balance between a small program that does one thing well, and a big program that does lots of things but only adequate. This balance of S/N is extremely difficult to get right.

The "Barrier to Entry" makes it somewhat difficult for outsiders to start contributing -- code, docs, test cases, etc. So people get frustrated and start their own project. It is a vicious cycle.

Open source has the benefit that you are given the freedom to actually fix things. It is extremely empowering as a programmer that you have the source to step into when debugging. You also never have to power about money grabbing nickel-and-dime licensing issues as you do with proprietary software.

Eventually open source will be "good enough" for the masses (we're almost there!), and we'll look back on closed source software as archaic: Someone who thought more about what they could get, then what they could give to the world. If businesses were smart they would financially support open source software by sharing the burden instead of bitching about paying the Microsoft "Tax" or other extortion licensing fees.

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If you can't duplicate the experiment it is NOT real Science!.
A thought experiment is an oxymoron and teaches you nothing new that you didn't already know.

The solution is obvious: spend less time consuming media and more time hassling your politicians to change these stupid laws. Sucking on the glass teat until you die is no way to spend a life.

Maybe if you spent less time making apathetic comments on /. and more time working to change things, it wouldn't be impossible anymore. The fact is that grass roots organizing works, and we've seen it work. Making cynical, apathetic comments also works, but the effect is has is to dissuade people from doing what works.

That the supernatural is outside of science is well known, if not too well understood. Science deals only with the natural. I don't care for Russell's Teapot, as it is intentionally ridiculous, and too easily taken as mockery however deserved that may be, and reason to instantly dismiss anything else the rationalists have to say. I enjoy the FSM, but it has the same problem. I prefer "the Earth is 5 years old".

I find that the age of the Earth works well as a vehicle for imparting this bit of philosophy. We know the Earth is about 4.5 billion years old, not 10,000 or 6,000 years old. When Young Earth Creationists demand proof of the Earth's age or insist that no one can really know, they're not really asking for the truckload of evidence we have in support of the 4.5 billion years, they're pounding on a philosophical point concerning the nature of proof. What is proof? What I've found that works better is some logic. If the Earth could be 10,000 years old because a supernatural entity created it, as they say could be true, and yes it could be true, then why couldn't the Earth be only 5 years old? Or 5 hours old? We could all be going about our lives, thinking we remember things that happened yesterday or 10 years ago, but actually they didn't and a supernatural being implanted those memories while creating the Earth a short time ago. Maybe we all live in a giant simulation, as depicted in the movie the Matrix, but more perfect. How can we tell the difference? We can't. That's the point that the religiously dogmatic didn't grasp, that it can't be proven that what we observe is in fact reality. We operate on the quite reasonable assumption that observable reality is reality. Once they see that refusing to accept this reasonable assumption leads to a position where you can't prove anything at all, where no proof of anything is good enough, because something supernatural could have stepped in at any time to make things just so, and that science can't make assertions about the supernatural and doesn't invalidate faith, doesn't threaten their core religious values, they usually become more comfortable and less irrational and hysterical.

I don't agree with this logic. If that tactic of hammering on the one liner works, it points to a problem with your own legal team and message, or perhaps to the adversarial court system if you are not being granted an opportunity to tell the full story. Or, could it be that your organization has been negligent and deserves to lose the court case? If not, hiding and burying information doesn't seem like a good idea. That can make you look even worse if the opposition succeeds in showing that you have more pertinent info and you're withholding it.

There's another danger. Don't want the logs politicized. That's no solution either. Making the lawyers' lives easier by making developers lives impossible doesn't work. That could easily happen if the company's own lawyers or managers get control and insist on "cleaning up" the language and "sanitizing" the bug reports. I've seen bug reporting tools rendered useless wastes of time because some liar with too much authority didn't want anything negative in writing. Bug reports are negative by nature, and this foolish demand meant they really couldn't be written at all. In a saner company, this would immediately bring about a revolt, and the developers would kick out of the bug reporting process this unreasonable demand and the people who made it. In the case where the developers had to "compromise" and submit to some censorship, all that succeeded in doing was driving the developers away from the official bug reporting tool, while still forcing them to spend enough time using it to make it appear like their processes had not changed, and resenting the waste of time particularly when management is of course also pressuring the team to work faster, as they are wont to do. Real bug reporting and resolution had to be moved off the record. Naturally, many developers refused to put up with it, and moved on to other jobs.

A nice point yourself. I'd noticed this flavor of decline before, no more high elven king thanks mainly to not enough high elves left in Middle Earth to form a kingdom, the lost realm of Arnor, Gondor and allies severely outnumbered by their enemies and in peril, the earlier Atlantis like loss of Numenor. Even the Ents are in permanent decline. Only the dwarves have advanced somewhat, and that too is in danger. All that fits early Middle Age societies, living as they did within the ruins of Roman civlization, still using some Roman aqueducts, roads, and buildings centuries after losing the knowledge necessary to build more or even maintain existing ones, and unable to rediscover much thanks to the constant threats of war, disease, and food shortages. But I overlooked that this time.

There's no escaping shades of reality in any SF/Fantasy I've ever read. Scratch at any of them, and huge problems are revealed.

McCaffrey's dragons are too powerful. Large size, flying, and fire breathing is pretty stock stuff for dragons. But her dragons are also telepathic, and so emo they each bond with a chosen human rider so closely they kill themselves if their rider dies, and they can teleport (mere flying just ain't good enough), and worst of all, time travel. I'm guessing she realized she'd gone too far, but couldn't make any acknowledgment. Instead, she tried to paper over the problems by introducing restrictions and limitations that unfortunately come across as too arbitrary.

An integral and needless law of Tolkien's world serves only to make things needlessly more special and their loss more tragic. It's this notion that great things can only be done once. Why can't Yavanna simply grow more trees to light the world? Why did she quit at 2 trees to start with? Why can't Feanor make more Silmarillions? No explanation is offered, we're simply told that's the way things are. There's enough real misery in the world, there's no need to invent reasons to be even more miserable. But some people, especially story tellers, do that to be more dramatic, more poignant. This desire for specialness also infects authors' thinking on copyright. Even apart from the obvious self-interested reasons, they're predisposed to like copyright, like the way it puts art on a pedestal.

Another problem with many fantasy stories is what I call the Godzilla or King Kong problem. Huge scary powerful solo monsters that no one expected certainly are dramatic. But improbable. Monster movies are inherently ridiculous because even if such a monster appeared, it would have no chance whatsoever of doing much damage before the massed might of millions of people brought it down. The Watcher in the Water at the west entrance to Moria would in all likelihood starve very quickly. One need only wait. If, somehow, the monster is magically sustained, there are all sorts of other things a crew of engineering sorts like dwarves could do to solve the problem it created. For one, could open another exit nearby, but out of its quite limited reach. Or, could probably set off a rock avalanche, crushing anything in the pool as well as displacing all the water with debris. Could also undermine the dam and drain the pool that way. Or perhaps a more low key approach might work, like dumping poison in the pool. To prevail against all the things a crew of determined engineers could try, the monster would need extraordinary abilities by the dozen. Even the Balrog should have a very difficult time prevailing against an entire nation of dwarves. The Balrog only ran them out of Moria. The sandworms of Dune are slightly more plausible, but still not a real problem for a civilization that can travel interplanetary space. Only Sauron went as far as setting up a rival empire, and thereby stood a real chance of prevailing.

Middle Earth follows many rules of nature. The land is for the most part geologically plausible and sound, with mountains in ranges, rivers rising in the mountains and flowing downhill to the oceans, and woods, marshes, grasslands, deserts and ice in places one might expect. Despite the prominent place of magic in the typical fantasy story, its impact is really quite limited. Gandalf used his brains as much or more than his wizardry. Since the land is familiar to so many readers, why not model its climate for fun?

That was code for 'orgy' back in the day ;-) /ducks

He's a dick. Unable to respect someone else's opinion and finds another person's tragedy comedy.

> More likely Win7 and Win8 are much harder to pirate,

So is that why even Microsoft tells you where to download Win7 !?!?!
http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-windows_install/windows-7-reinstall-download-needed-after-hard/d47f2375-4501-439c-9455-51b1d240635c?msgId=c27e4378-0f7b-413b-bfd8-f653b0f253d6

e.g. Don't let the "msvista" directory name fool you; it is the real McCoy, er, Win7.
* Win7 Home Premium x86: http://msft-dnl.digitalrivercontent.net/msvista/pub/X15-65732/X15-65732.iso
* Win7 Home Premium x64: http://msft-dnl.digitalrivercontent.net/msvista/pub/X15-65733/X15-65733.iso
* Win7 Professional x86: http://msft-dnl.digitalrivercontent.net/msvista/pub/X15-65804/X15-65804.iso
* Win7 Professional x64: http://msft-dnl.digitalrivercontent.net/msvista/pub/X15-65805/X15-65805.iso

Agreed that Win7 is easy to pirate. Just google: "win7 iso" and lots of places to download the ISO.

Heck even Microsoft tells you where to download it !?!?!
http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-windows_install/windows-7-reinstall-download-needed-after-hard/d47f2375-4501-439c-9455-51b1d240635c?msgId=c27e4378-0f7b-413b-bfd8-f653b0f253d6

e.g. Don't let the "msvista" directory name fool you.
* Home Premium x86: http://msft-dnl.digitalrivercontent.net/msvista/pub/X15-65732/X15-65732.iso
* Home Premium x64: http://msft-dnl.digitalrivercontent.net/msvista/pub/X15-65733/X15-65733.iso
* Professional x86: http://msft-dnl.digitalrivercontent.net/msvista/pub/X15-65804/X15-65804.iso
* Professional x64: http://msft-dnl.digitalrivercontent.net/msvista/pub/X15-65805/X15-65805.iso

> windows 7 has a huge OEM hole that makes it effortless to crack
Uh you don't even need to "crack" Win 7. Resetting the WPA garbage is trivial too; every ~30 days reboot to reset your system back to a clean un-activated copy :-)

Reboot
press F8 at startup
Repair Computer
System Recovery Options: Keyboard: US
Username/Password
(you will see: Windows found on Drive ?:)
Command Prompt
D:
reg load HKLM\MY_SYSTEM "D:\Windows\System32\config\system"
reg delete HKLM\MY_SYSTEM\WPA /f
reg unload HKLM\MY_SYSTEM
exit
Reboot

to display

slmgr /dli
slmgr /dlv

WinXP is not that hard to find. There are MicroXP and TinyXP versions around.

Concur 100% that cracking XP is more of a PITA to find the various boot-loaders.

Even my Apple ][ DOS 3.3 had 30 character filenames WITH spaces in 1980.

Microsoft is always late to the party.

References:
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_systems#Limits
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_DOS

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Big Bang^H^H^H^H Sham Theory, Noun: popular Pseudo-Science-Fiction theory where no experimental results can be duplicated. Can we stick to REAL science please?