More censorship and surveillance in the US might force the "free" internet out of US control.
That is not necessarily a bad thing for people outside the US.
Yesterday I was explaining to a coworker how DNS censorship in the US was not such a bad thing, but it might result in better DNS for everybody, by bringing attention to the risks of US centric infrastructure.

That's a dumb comparison.
Dreamweaver is a lot of tools into one.
Most HTML people I know use it as a nice text editor.
I have also seen fresh from school designers use it as a WYSIWYG editor, with awful results.

I don't mean that it's impossible to use Dreamweaver effectively as a WYSIWYG editor, only that it's not its main strenght in practice.

That 's why so many people say that you can replace it by a text editor, because so many pros use it as a text editor.

In other news, UTF-8 has not gained acceptance in US-centric websites.
It's not that hard: "La niña", "El niño"

What baffles me the most is that "the music industry" is a supranational entity.
It's not "the US music industry association", or "the Irish music industry cartel", or something like that.
There is a supranational entity, named "the music industry", and it is both big and concrete enough to sue a country that doesn't play for 'its' interests.
That is a lost battle, that there is a cartel that, in our heads, represents the whole "music industry" of the world, and speaks for all the people related to music.
What they do with that power is also important, of course, but the fact that they detent it is an issue itself.

That's right. Most people who hate PHP don't know enough of it. That's why I hate it. I could never learn how a well built application should look like in PHP.
That's why _I_ wouldn't buy anything made in PHP, it's too hard to tell good from bad, for non experts.
If you are an expert in PHP , it's OK to use it, I wouldn't pay you to do it, because it's too hard to tell if you are really an expert, and it's too hard to get another expert if you change projects.

Without the cow, there would be no beef to sell, thus the cattle is just as important as the consumers. Thus they are BOTH customers.

I don't follow your reasoning.
You seem to not trust you elected representatives. Then, you want a set of companies to play a discrediting campaign against them, and that is supposed to bring some kind of justice?

Remember that they are people you voted for, they are supposed to represent your needs better than a random company, you should even defend them, not want them to be the target of abuse.

If they are not the people that should be elected, just vote others, it's not that hard.

Good one. Whooosh to the other repliers!!
Anyhow, I don't see why some people think the Chinese can't do whatever they please, regarding patents and stuff.
Patents are an industrial decision, countries are soverreign and can treat them as they please, and better serves their interest.
Of course, if they sign treaties and fail to honour them, there might be consequences, but it's just a strategic decision they make, maybe it's worth not to honour them.

They represent the interest of shareholders.
The interest of shareholders is profit.

They would be in FPMITA prison if they failed to take action toward maximizing profit. Of course, you can't send someone to jail based on failure, but you can based on their actions.

1. Your second statement does not follow the first, that's a logical fallacy. Anyhow, I get your point, but I don't agree. Just because there is some regulation, it doesn't mean it has a design.

2. You mean that investors are good for the economy, or for others. But they don't give back. They take as much as they can, period. That's their job. Of course, there might be some benefits to society from that, but it's not because they "give back". If there is a benefit to society, it's not intentional, but inevitable.
The whole point was that capitalism is indistinguishable from greed. I thing that in order to be a difference, it would be easy to tell, for instance, a good investor from a greedy investor. I believe there is no difference. There is no such thing as too much profit.

Capitalism was never designed. It's just the statu quo. You might say it's a natural consequence of having private banks, but not much more than that.

I don't believe there is such a difference. For instance, an investor is not supposed to "give back" anything. Their job is exactly to extract money from the markets. In fact, an executive usually has the legal obligation (towards shareholders) to do exactly that.

I am not a native English speaker, but I believe the only difference between "greed" and this, is that "greed" denotes an excess in the pursuit of wealth. I don't believe there is a line between moderate or an excessive wealth, in capitalism.

The issue here is who gets rights. GPL restricts the rights of distributors, and gives them to end users. BSD is more free for distributors, the GPL is more free for users.

-1, Shill

If you develop in .NET, it's not surprising that you only have customers that run Windows. It would be odd that it was otherwise.
The fragment of a market that _can't_ run Windows is very small and irrelevant.
The portion of a market that _won't_ run Windows for you app, is not small, and relevant.
Keep in mind that most servers run Linux, so business software that doesn't run on Linux is a problem.

That could be true if you were just talking about desktop software. Other than MS Office, desktop software is not the largest kind in business.
The real money is in business software, that needs to run (at least partially) on servers. In that case, Mac is not relevant, and Windows is not a leader. There is money to be lost if you don't target multiple platforms.

Of course, you can run a successful company, even if you don't target the whole of the available market, but there are actual, relevant, missed opportunities when you target just MS Windows.

I agree that Linus is a luminary.
I don't agree that his opinion regarding UI is worth a damn.
I would be like taking fashion advice from a textile industry engineer.
His skills are orthogonal to UI, and his decisions were bad in the past (KDE!! WTF!?) .

I understand XFCE might be better suited to him, mainly because he won't need to learn new tricks.
For the general public, Gnome Shell or Unity are great, they are a lot easier to learn from scratch, more discoverable, and suited to actual newbies, a very important audience to take into account when you have a single digit marketshare.
For experts, they are also great, because they reward knowledge, are searchable, and save screen real estate.

Most importantly, they are designed by specialists, with the user in mind, and actual tests, with actual users.
A kernel developers opinion is not that relevant here.