Bradley Manning's data leak was a single tactical incident too.

You seem to be unaware that the people who organized the Boston Tea Party weren't merely anonymous cowards, but actually disguised themselves as American Indians.

Or unwilling to donate money to a Republican.

So Linux devs should do a bunch of work for free, to help nVidia release closed-source-only drivers? Fuck that.

If nVidia release the specs for their hardware, then Linux devs will add the necessary infrastructure for Optimus, and nVidia can also use that infrastructure in their closed-source drivers. But it has to be a two-way win-win cooperation. The Linux developers don't exist to serve nVidia's selfish whims.

1. In general, companies don't want to rent perpetually from a sleazebag, and sleazebags don't want to deal with regular billing.

2. It may be arbitrary, but consider how many domains are squatted by companies that don't use them. The way trademark law works, if two companies have trademarks on "Foo", they ought to be able to have "foo.biz" and "foo.com". The way it works right now, more often than not one of the companies has registered "foo.*" even though they aren't using anything but foo.com.

1. Make domain name registrations non-transferable. That would eliminate the parasites who squat on domains.

2. Make a rule that if you have a domain in one TLD, you can't have the same domain in another TLD. That would eliminate corporate squatting of every single variation of a common word or phrase that they want to own.

The interesting thing is that if Oracle won this argument, one could presumably argue that Oracle's database on Linux is dependent upon the Linux kernel API, and hence must fall under the GPL.

Does your experience concern Philips CFLs? I have one that has lasted since 1998.

Maybe you shouldn't buy the cheap crappy CFLs. I have one from 1998 that's still going. It's a Philips, coincidentally.

Actually, DOS would have been a better choice, as they could then keep the system running indefinitely using FreeDOS.

Really, for a SCADA, there's no point having Windows unless you actually need a GUI, and maybe not even then.

Well, personally I was considering moving to Debian, but there really aren't that many APT-based distros with good KDE flavor.

The UK has three major political parties. All three are authoritarian now. The current Conservative/Liberal authoritarian government is proposing this move; the previous authoritarian Labour government introduced the long term database that tracks where you drive and keeps the information for two years, and handed access to the US in case they wanted to track people.

The Bush administration did spend money, though. They ripped out a working IBM Lotus Notes solution and replaced it with Microsoft Exchange.

It's not like the broken Bush administration e-mail system was something they inherited from a previous administration. It's something they deliberately chose to spend money to install.

UN control seems to work OK for the telephone system.

No they aren't. RFCs are coordinated by the IETF, and anyone from any country can participate in writing them.