And why did I capitalize modem, when it isn't an acronym? Or should it be MoDem?

I also learned to program (in Basic) on a remote system using a Teletype 33 ASR with acoustic-coupled MODEM. Where are my billions of dollars? Sigh ...

You and I know that there's nothing really new here. But the business types who don't understand how the technology works think that it is all new .. and they need new (e.g. young) developers to understand the new (i.e. variations on the old) technologies.

I'm pretty sure that if you do some research, you'll find that the Irish famine was made worse by the fact that the Irish were governed by a stable English parliamentary democracy instead of a stable Irish parliamentary democracy. The Irish did not have complete self-determination and were not allowed to try all remedies available to counter a famine.

So let me get this straight... Your comparison is between an organization that protected and moved its employees from one location to another and allowed them continued contact with children [the Catholic Church] to an organization which removes those employees from contact with children immediately (sometimes without actual proof of abuse) [the New York City Schools]. I think your evidence is actually against your point.

Well, the government does have to approve permits for new power plants and arrange for right-of-way for power-lines and transformer stations (and probably should be checking the output of coal-fired plants). I think the government's hope is that, as population density increases, that the average person's usage drops -- so they can avoid costly upgrades.

Unless your goal is to improve the technology to the point where it does become cost-effective. These types of investments are common to governments all over the world -- and are not new to the United States. It is not a sign that we are living under a repressive socialist government (at least not a repressive socialist government that started in January of 2009),

Now whether this project is a good investment or not ...

Is it too early to start calling them SCOracle?

So he's like Mark Buehrle?

As opposed to nuclear plants? They don't tend to get built in densely populated areas either.

(I agree with most of your points - I just think wind farms aren't alone with the NIMBY issues).

No thanks. Even if I get all of the achievements they'll just add more achievements to get me to buy new slashdot downloadable content.

I don't understand what you mean by "... those companies have already made it clear what their terms and conditions are and we won't compromise."

I work for a company that sells software (and support contracts for that software) for Linux (Red Hat RHEL and SuSE SLES). The user-space ABI is fairly stable. We build on two platforms RHEL 3 and RHEL 5 and run on five RHEL 3, 4, 5 and SuSE SLES 9 and 10.

Yes, the kernel driver interfaces change more frequently -- but that affects people who write device drivers, not user-space applications.

I'm fairly certain that the main reason there aren't more commercial applications on Linux is market share. All of the other reasons (e.g. ease of install, attitudes of the community) have fallen by the wayside as the Linux desktop and server experience have improved.