The parent shows you the effects of a careful propaganda campaign to divide the voters.

The propaganda machine counts pensioners together with welfare recipients to "prove" that government is keeping everyone dependent. That's Romney's "47%": anyone who pays into the system and expects to get anything back out is a "taker".

Two mainstream Presidential candidates tried to make food stamps a racial issue and claimed that all the children, disabled people, and Wal-Mart workers who receive them are lazy deadbeats.

If you can keep half the victims resenting the other half, you are well prepared to implement Jay Gould's solution: 'I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half".

>I could be in a better financial position if I quit my job, declared bakruptcy, and took the handouts.

See the victory of the propaganda? They've got somebody believing this even though he has an Internet connection and could find out the truth within minutes.

I worked for a military contractor once and was told that there was a good reason not to talk about classified material even after it appeared in the press. Our enemies couldn't be sure that the press reports were right, not without confirmation from classified sources.

The military has now done what I was told not to, confirming the authenticity of the Guardian report.

You know that more than one person expressing different opinions is not, in fact, hypocrisy, right?

Bingo. The whole point of DRM is to 'wall off parts of the web'... it exists soley to prevent people from accessing data, and has no other purpose.

Sounds good to me. It's not like you can't download all the same videos from pirate sites despite the DRM.

'Cause when you try to run that graphical program from your Ubuntu server and display the output on Windows, it doesn't work because they've invented Yet Another Graphics System that's incompatible with everything else.

The beauty of X was that you knew an app on SGI Unix would display on OS/2, SunOS, VMS or anything else that supported X in the OS or third-party addons because they all used the same protocol. You still know an X11 app on Ubuntu will display on Windows so long as it doesn't do video playback or other kinds of special cases which are just too damn slow over a LAN.

Tomorrow, who knows what will talk to what?

Mint is mostly MATE (aka Gnome 2++) and Gnome 3. So I don't see any reason why they'd have to switch to Mir.

And, as I said, what do you think those profit margins are?

They sure as heck won't be anywhere near the margins from selling high-end GPUs or CPUs in the PC market.

It's key to the whole idea of a unified country that states recognize each other's legal actions. That's why it's in black and white.

Ignoring another state's marriage violates the spirit of the constitution, its plain language, and hundreds of years of precedent, including precedent about marriages and divorces (see history of Nevada).

You have that backwards. If their drivers are inadvertantly violating a patent owned by Joe's Patent Trolls, Inc, then making the drivers open source makes that violation much easier to spot.

Patents are a huge disincentive to releasing open source drivers. Another issue the company I worked for had was hardware bugs, because having to put bizarre workarounds in closed source drivers was no big deal, but a bit embarrassing in open source.

And what do you think profit margins are for console components?

How long does it take when you get to the battery station in Nowheresville and they've run out of batteries?

And the "intrepid imaginaut" can't imagine a world where people, I don't know, have a different experience?

What makes you think I haven't tried something else? I've got a perfectly good Kindle right here. It's fine...well designed, well made, nice piece of hardware...but I /prefer/

(there's the key word, everybody)

the utility of an LCD (LED OLED whateverthehell) tablet.

The farce here is that one person somewhere thinks they've got some kind of read about Immutable Truths of How Reading Works, and that's just silly. You don't. I don't. GP doesn't. It will be OK.

You realise that Amazon owns Createspace, which is one of the largest PoD suppliers in the world right now?