The problem here is that legislation and regulation doesn't come about for the benefit of you and me, it's designed to benefit the policy makers and corporate executives who work hand in hand for mutual advantage. And the only way to avoid that is for there to be less political power for them to grasp.

I'm in the same position. All my machines run 12.04 LTS, and since that will be supported until 2017 I have plenty of time to see how the UI situation shakes out.

Except that people do it all the time here, not just in this particular thread. "Why, I remember when Slashdot was great, and no one had a six digit ID, and people wore onions on their belts, and blah blah blah." Just shut up and leave already.

Maybe it's entrepreneurs you should be consulting. From the article: "One of the more interesting concepts from this period did not come from NASA but from a model company called MPC."

Interesting. I had been thinking of him as the Bradley Manning of the free culture movement. It would be better for those he leaves behind if he ends up being its Mohamed Bouazizi. Either way, RIP.

Maybe, but still... citation needed.

Running would suck, but it would suck less than thirty years in a medieval federal prison. It probably wouldn't suck less than six months or a year, though, which is what he was realistically looking at. And it would suck a lot less than being dead.

But that's just my opinion, and it was his call. RIP.

If everyone here thinks Slashdot is so awful, then what are you all still doing here?

"Teach a man to teach others to fish, and you feed the world." -- Charles W. Evans

Not when you control the education and the information.

I figured the hyphen had stealth technology, just like a badass X-301!

Your wife flies an X-301? That is totally badass!

That's interesting, because I was guessing you would say one of the 'Stans or something like that. English language media make it sound like Slovenians are much better off today than under Tito, even that Slovenia has its act together relatively speaking, which is why it was the first of the former Yugoslavian countries to accede to the EU. Would you say they're wildly off base?

Which country?

I suppose if you're in a country that moved from communism to a different kind of top down system where government is powerful enough to control everything and bestow favors on friends of policy makers, then yeah, things would still suck. But that sort of cronyism isn't laissez faire capitalism and it certainly hasn't been every society's postcommunist experience.