That would have been a short-sighted decision. CDMA was a much better upgrade path form our existing networks than GSM was and better suited for large rural areas, which the US has more of than western/central Europe. Where the FCC screwed up was that the way LTE frequency was allocated let to greater fragmentation, when it should have been an opportunity to improve compatibly and thus competition.

If I'm not so special, then why do my mundane activities need to be recorded? What benifit does it serve? Certainly not mine; the activities being recording are so unexceptional the only people to gain by having a recording of them are my loved ones who want a momento of the event or people looking for dirt on me. If I don't know you, but you are sending video of me into some cloud service, then no good can possibly come to me as a result. The most likely outcome is that nothing will come of it. But that is also the best case. The less likely cases are that I could loose my job, or be convicted of some bullshit crime.

I can appreciate the argument that you shouldn't do things in public that you don't want people to know. However the areas that are considered a "public space" has been expanding conciderably to the point where your personal home is the only real private space. But people aren't solitary creatures. They need to be able to congregate with others like them without having their activities scrutinized by the entire world, just by the community that they are interacting with. We need freedom to not spend our lives living like a PR representative on the stage every hour that we are outside of our homes.

LibreOffice is licensed under LGPL, like Sun OpenOffice.org was before it. Apache OpenOffice is licensed under the Apache license, which is more permissive than the LGPL. There is no problem using Apache licensed code with LGPL code, however the Apache Foundation refuses to use any license that is less permissive than Apache license in any of it's projects. It is one of the core tenants of the foundation. So OpenOffice can choose to merge into LibreOffice, but the opposite cannot happen short of getting every developer who has worked on LibreOffice/Go-OO over the past decade to agree to re-license their code.

Then how do applications even display images to the user if they won't fit in memory?

Weird, I don't see that last link. I even searched the page for "explore" and got nothing. I tried with the lastest version of Firefox on windows, Iceweasel 10 & Chromium 6 on Debian.

Okay, I must be blind. Where is the link to the site where you can choose what to look at? All I can find are the four canned videos.

The collection of these taxes isn't included in the bill that just passed.

The bill that passed includes rules that require exactly that (and you forgot that some some states don't collect any sales tax).

They don't. The bill passed requires the internet sales/use taxes to be uniform for the entire state. So there are less than 50 sets or rules that the retailers have to deal with.

Secondly, you could say the same thing about credit card processing. How can a small mom and pop deal with the rigors and complexity of PCI compliance? They don't - they contract out the work to a credit card processor, and don't worry about it.

The same thing will happen here. These credit card processors already have the ability to handle collecting sales tax in every possible jurisdiction, because they already work with thousands of mom & pop's who combined span every possible tax jurisdiction. They will do all the work of computing, collecting, and tabulating all the taxes, and at most the mom & pop's will just have to file the forms that the processors give them.

There is a distinction between enjoying art separately from it's creator, and participating in commerce that funds people and organizations that you don't support.

Maybe you can answer this since the website doesn't. What is the difference between aptosid and just running sid?

But you don't need to go orbital, just a ballistic. While the trajectories of some of the longer flights like Sydney to London are approaching the energy needed for orbit, there are plenty of medium length ones like LA to NY, or NY to London that are well within the grasp of a scaled-up version of SS2.

Even more aptly, it only took 3 years for SpaceShipOne to go from concept to first powered flight. And a little less than an year after that to complete the X-prize. SpaceShipTwo has taken three times as long to get to the same point in development. I know that building the craft for commercial customers and not experimental jet pilots would take some extra time, but I figured most of that would be testing related, and they would have gotten to this point long ago. That engine explosion must have really set them back a long time.

This isn't a problem that is unique to open source. Several commercial libraries that we have used in the past have entered the twilight zone where the developer is neglecting them, and refuses to release any sort of roadmap or EOL announcement. Eventually, you just have to make your own call based on how much work it will be to move to a new library vs the risk of staying with the current one. At least with open source if you get stuck with a dead library you can choose to take over maintaining it on your own either as a long term strategy or a short-term stop-gap until you can move onto something else.

Well the GPL specificly isn't a problem here, however it is really nice to have an alternative to GCC that actually encourages and facilitates reuse of their code rather than one that puts up deliberate obsticles to reuse even by other free software projects.

One of the big reasons that CLang was created was because there were some free software developers that wanted to integrate high quality front-ends (parser, etc) into other projects like IDEs, LLVM, and such. They prefered to work together with GCC to share the effort, but GCC refused. They were so paranoid about proprietary applications using GCC code that they refused to seperate the front-end into a GPL library that GPL applications could use. Their rational was that someone could easily write a GPL wrapper application around that GPL library that just serialized the data to/from a text representation, which could then be legally used with a proprietary application. In their mind, it was more important to make it difficult for proprietary applications to use their code than to make it easy for free software to use their code.

So LLVM was forced with the decision to either fork GCC or write their own. GCC was never designed with front-end modularity in mind, and a lot of changes would be necessary to do so. Once that massive refactoring was complete, it would be difficult to share improvements between the two codebases. Between that and some compelling technical reasons they chose go write their own and CLang was born.