You've repeated the same thing!

If, on the other hand, you state that every problem you come across should be fixed with a government program, even if there are other options, then you most certainly are stating, in effect, "the government is better at spending your money than you are."

There is a whole continuum between limited, pre-defined services and fixing every problem.

Some problems are best solved by individuals and the free market. Other problems are best solved by the government because the whole system falls apart if individuals don't want to opt in (e.g. fire service, garbage collection and so on).

Likewise some other systems (education) are sufficiently important that even if parents don't want to pay to have educated kids, having an educated population is sufficiently important that the country cannot run without it and therefore it is best provided by the government.

Likewise, the free market and charitable donations will not solve large scale social problems. To a limited extent the government can, or at least mitigate them to the extent that significant amounts of the population do not need to be in gaol.

To repeat:

there is a continum between "government provides limited serivices" and "government is better at spending money so should solve all problems".

Your world, while appealingly simple, is just too simple to adequately reflect reality.

Please read my ENTIRE post, I didn't say that.

Well, I did. The rest of the post seemed to be about how you thought taxes should work. That didn't seem to have any bearing on the first bit.

They also were promoting beyond govt funding needs, to basically redistribution to others that weren't as lucky or talented or hard working as the rest.

Some degree of redistribution is required. Some people are simply not capable of looking after themselves. If you don't basically hand money to them you'll have to hand more to the police (to catch them when they turn to crime) and more to the prison for when they get caught.

Either way you spend the money. The former makes more people happier and costs considerably less.

Some of them seem to think that the government can do MUCH better with your money than you can, better deeds, more efficiently,etc.

I love how you translate: "country needs government and therefore taxes to operate" to "these people believe that the government can do much better with your money than you can".

I hope I speak for more than just me when I say: "huh?".

Even without an IOMMU, you could have drivers in ring >0; you'd just run the risk of them snarfing precious bodily fluids via PCI DMA.

I thought that was one of the things that IOMMUs were supposed to fix (e.g. like the firewire security hole).

But really, microkernels aren't supposed to be the solution to the Wonky Unreliable Driver Issue. Virtualization is. Personally I'm glad we'll have widespread IOMMUs in about ten years' time.

Well, do the two not work well together? The microkernel alleviates teh segfault in a wonky driver part: the driver just crashes. Without an IOMMU, though it doesn't solve a piece of hardware scribbling all over memory, certainly.

So, google isn't going to throw a hissy fit and back out of a 2.5 trillion dollar economy. Say it ain't so!

Remember all this stuff is on taxes on profit! This is the stuff they get to keep after all expenses come out. So it's merely a question of pocketing a bit less of a vast amount of money.

Amazing they're not thinking of leaving, really.

Yeah, he's a bit out there, but it would be incredibly hypocritical not to give credit where due.

Not only that, but he has the annoying habit of actually being right years in advance and banging on about topics that on one cares about because he's far ahead.

Like GNU/Linux. No one cared. But now Android came along and it makes much more sense as people make funny non sensical comments about Linux, confusing the OS and the kernel.

The world does indeed need guys like RMS and they will always seem odd and stubborn. But no normal flexible person will devote their life to an important cause, so you can't have one without the other.

Well played!

Stallman is entertainingly single minded, but I hope anyone can respect someone who actually manages to live day to day by the principles he claims to have[*].

[*]Well I say "anyone", of couse, but if your principles include mass murder etc, then respect is perhaps not due.

If they dumped Hurd now it would be a complete loss of face

Yay it's the daily make shit up about the FSF/RMS thread!

http://blog.reddit.com/2010/07/rms-ama.html

TL;DR

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-hurd/2010-08/msg00000.html

Seriously, is it hard to google RMS Hurd before posting crap?

Not sure I follow the comment about more than two rings.

Wouldn't a 2 ring system with an IOMMU be sufficient? That way drivers could sit in ring 1, but still have access to the piece of hardware required.

This may not be a sane question: I have read a fair but, but I've never tried to write a kernel.

Does anyone here know much about the Hurd?

I know it got stuck in "which microkernel shall we use" hell for the longest time. They seem to have settled, but it's not clear if the new one is a modern high performance one (under the Mach name), or if they just settled on the older one and suffered a performance hit.

Also, why is a microkernel OS so apparently difficult to construct?

As far as I can see, the basic bits of hurd are all in place: the things that make it an operating system that actually works. But what took it so long? Micro kernel based things sound like they ought to be easier to develop (segfaults instead of a lockup, for instance), but apparently they are not.

Anyone got any experience?

On the other hand, not having a stocked kitchen to some extent makes the place really miserable.

At a minimum standard tea+milk and coffee needs to be provided. Every single co-working place I've worked has provided that and they have zero incentive to make me work long hours.

The best co-working place I had had tea, a coffee machine with an inbuilt grinder (they provided beans too), a biscuit barrel and free printing within reason.

The thing is that providing some free stuff is really worthwhile if that stuff is disproportionally faffy for individuals to provide.

Consoles are great not because they have good specs (they mostly have shitty ones).

The Cell proessor did boast a quite astonishing peak floating point throughput when it debuted. Whether it was better is left as an exercise for the poor sods who had to program the blighter, but in some domains it had much better performance than the top end PCs at the time.

Not sure what you mean about Blu-ray being obsolete

He believes that everyone has a fast internet connection, I suppose. He's forgotten that even people London (e.g. me) have to suffer on a 4mbps DSL connection due to a mix of non upgraded exchanges and very strict planning rules blocking visible RCU boxes.

On a 32 bit machine it is trycky to go over 2GB per process since you suddenly have to become awfully careful about pointer differences.