Nokia fanboys? +1 funny!

That name has always bugged me. Wouldn't you expect a Trojan to be something that covertly carries a multitude of soldiers to the inside of the gates and then releases them? That's the absolute last thing you want from a condom.

On the plus side, though, in 3+ years, if current progress is maintained, a low-end 10xxx(?) will perform roughly as well as a high-end 4xxx, so it'll probably be cheap to get OpenCL support while maintaining you current computing prowess. Though 5xxx and 6xxx are only the first series to be supported. Personally, I believe they will backtrack at least to 3xxx models later on.

And Windows. Fglrx's performance isn't that great when compared to Catalyst for Windows of competing Nvidia products.

Population density, education, culture and a lot of other things matter more than gun control. That doesn't ean gun control doesn't matter. For statistics to be relevant, you'd have to take a state that just implemented stricter gun control and look at homicides by firearm before and after. Looking at completely different beasts isn't a very enlightening comparison unless you count all the states/countries, divide them in groups of strong and weak gun control and crunch the numbers.

I can't speak for him, but mine was induced by Russell's In Praise of Idleness, from 1935. He said everyone had to halve their work hours - that'd solve unemployment and people would be happier and more productive, both at work and by investing leisure time in socially meaningful personal projects. Very insightful. But when you combine this with the ever cresent automation of work, the solution is to keep cutting back hours until all you can do is punch your card, breathe once and leave. Thus work would be no longer necessary. It'd ge a good transition, too, because right now we have diminishing employment and quality of life instead of work hours.

However, after some consideration, I don't think we'll be able to make it. We would require more guts than we have historically demonstrated to set such events in motion and I don't see how the economy could flow organically to such a state from where it is now. Instead, we'll keep creating infinitely scalable jobs that do not cater to the basic needs and serve no purpose other than organizing and disputing vast sums of wealth. So maybe in the future every human will be a lawyer, stock broker, politician etc, working for fully automated megacorps. Fashion is a good bet, too.

Energy prices will still be expensive, though. I don't think it will ever be free because we have physical limitation not only on ways to get it, but also on ways to radiate it from Earth. And that's what may keep scarcity around until the end of our days, if we don't dial down the population growth.

I can't speak for him, but mine was induced by Russell's In Praise of Idleness, from 1935. He said everyone had to halve their hour of work - that'd solve unemployment and people would be happier and more productive, both at work and by investing leisure time in socially meaningful personal projects. Very insightful. But when you combine this with the ever cresent automation of work, the solution is to keep cutting back hours until all you can do is punch your card, breathe once and leave. Thus work would be no longer necessary. It'd ge a good transition, too, because right now we have diminishing employment and quality of life instead of work hours.

However, after some consideration, I don't think we'll be able to make it. We would require more guts than we have historically demonstrated to set such events in motion and I don't see how the economy could flow organically to such a state from where it is now. Instead, we'll keep creating infinitely scalable jobs that do not cater to the basic needs and serve no purpose other than organizing and disputing vast sums of wealth. So maybe in the future every human will be a lawyer, stock broker, politician etc, working for fully automated megacorps. Fashion is a good bet, too.

Energy prices will still be expensive, though. I don't think it will ever be free because we have physical limitation not only on ways to get it, but also on ways to radiate it from Earth. And that's what may keep scarcity around until the end of our days, if we don't dial down the population growth.

You touch on an interesting point, there, while talking about what Google provides. Not that I'm defending tax avoidance here (though it is a very predictable problem of a highly globalized world on which companies view countries as service providers that compete amongst themselves in price), but Google has a rather immaterial product - search.

Their data centers may be hosted on the US, but they could easily be anywhere else and it wouldn't make a difference. Considering they mostly rely on copyleft products like Android, Chrome (well, Chromium) and whatnot, what they derive from the US typical stance of strong IP laws is vastly diminished. Even more so when you consider they are more often on the receiving end of the IP suits they are involved in. Their use of roads (the quintessential "free with taxes" benefit) is pretty limited, since their analog, internet cables, is privately funded (correct me if I'm wrong, here, I don't know that much about US governmental funding of comm infrastructure) and they are even rolling out their own fiber.

Obviously they use roads indirectly, and a lot, and they benefit from it, as they use and benefit from a lot of other governmental services - Google probably wouldn't ever be on an anarchist wasteland -, but the more digital a company is, the less they tend to, and that's my point. The internet is in itself sort of an anaschist wasteland, and it is getting increasingly easier for companies to move there. So it will soon start to be viewed as competition to lots of countries. If an independent, international monetary unit is ever created and widely accepted, then taxing anything that happens on the internet, like subscriptions for services or even small scale sales, will be a nightmare.

Do you mean he drowns his sexual partners or - worse - he doesn't ever wash his sexually abused hand towels? I'm confus... wait, what does that say about you and your use of hand towels? Dude, there's such a thing called tissue paper. It's disposable, so you don't have to worry about washing it (not that you do, apparently, but put it this way - your visitors don't have to worry about drying their hands) and it works better as a metaphor in this case.

How do you use a patent "defensively"? It's like a gun: virtually useless in stopping other bullets, but it can protect you in a firefight by forcing your opponent to worry about not exposing himself to your bullets, and thus adopting a less efficient offensive behaviour. Of course, if your opponent knows you're not going to shoot back, then your gun is entirely useless in aiding your survival. And Microsoft has picked on lots of Android vendors for the last two years with litigation (is it HTC that ended up having to pay them a fee for every device sold?), so I don't see your point.

Ah, not the new /. at all, just the old /. readers.

Try reading some comments here, then. They'll explain how allowing people to purchase things more easily, if they choose to, will destroy free software and the whole western civilization.

I'm sorry to be overly blunt, but that is asnine. Ubuntu is integrating an app store to its DE, that's all. It's a convenience every other major OS already has (Windows, Android, OSX, iOS etc), only made a bit more convenient by not requiring you to open the store app. It's not the end of the world. As long as they stay firmly based on Debian, strenghtening Ubuntu strenghtens Linux and open source as a whole. The more market/mind share it gets, the better driver support we get, more attention from developers and so on.

So I wish Ubuntu lots of success. If I dislike a particular feature, I can either deactivate it in Ubuntu, use a different DE, jump ship to their source, Debian, directly, or a derivative that doesn't implement those functions, like Mint. I can even roll my own flavor of Ubuntu, since the source is public. Such plethora of alternatives is exactly what free/open software is all about and people bitching that Ubuntu is "turning their backs on open software" don't seem to understand it at all.

Both. There are separate editions.

You don't even have to go that far - you can deactivate it through Unity itself, no need to drop to the "scary" CLI. Ubuntu could have avoided the negative response by implementing a ballot like the Windows web browser selector (only for real) either during the installation or for every new user.