You are really missing the point.

1970's era reactors were somewhat dangerous. If you set the knobs in the control room wrong, they'd melt down. The plant would be completely destroyed. People standing nearby might even get a dangerous dose of radiation. Probably there wouldn't be any radioactive materials released because of the containment domes, but it'd still be bad news.

Modern designs largely don't have that sort of problem. You set the knobs wrong, and the plant mechanically and chemically tends towards a safe state. There's no meltdown because the system isn't unstable.

The world "monopoly" here is being used to mean "market power". This is common usage.

A firm having market power means that the market is broken. Firms abusing market power in one market to create market power in another market is a serious problem.

Whether simply having market power due to lucking out with the network effect is something that anyone should be given shit over is arguable. On the other hand, market power gained through abuse of government regulation is a serious issue that needs to be fixed.

Google's power seems to come mostly from economies of scale, somewhat from network effects, and hardly at all from government regulation.

With multiple binaries in a tar/deb/rpm you end up with multiple binaries and end users randomly trying them in the hopes that one will be the right one for their computer. A lot of users don't know their chip architecture or if it is 32 or 64 bit.

No you don't. The package has "binary.x86", "binary.x86_64", "binary.ppc", etc. The post-install script detects the architecture, installs it to the name "binary", and deletes the rest.

If you chose not to have a separate /home and use upgrades rather than fresh installs, that should work reasonably well.

That doesn't mean there aren't significant advantages to using a separate /home partition if you want to put in the effort. All you have to do is remember to move your user directory (e.g. to user-old) before doing the clean install, and you have all the advantages of a clean install without having to backup and restore your files.

You're so convinced that preference for open source software is a question of "dogma" espoused by "purists" that you haven't stopped to consider the practicalities of the issue. When it comes to drivers on Linux, proper open source releases have huge practical advantages:

• They can be distributed with distros without anyone needing to jump through weird hoops.
• They can be maintained in-kernel, so they work with new kernel releases automatically.
• They can be fixed by the community, so they have fast turnaround on annoying bugs and favorite features.
• If the device manufacturer doesn't keep up with them, they don't instantly code rot.
• They can be integrated with other standard code, so they do all the normal stuff without anyone needing to re-invent the wheel.

When it comes to graphics drivers, these issues are mitigated to a large extent by the fact that Nvidia and ATI have very active driver teams that keep up with things. There are still some advantage to Intel graphics from open source drivers: you'll never have to worry about picking "old" or "new" driver packages like Nvidia for example. Having the option to one day run OpenBSD is another. But, in general, using Nvidia or ATI blobs on Linux is reasonably painless.

The same is absolutely not true for any other kind of hardware. Proprietary network drivers, RAID drivers, printer drivers, or webcam drivers are simply a nightmare - much better to get something with in-kernel drivers that will just work out of the box. The manufacturer *will* forget about you and leave you stuck on random old kernel revisions limping along with an unsupported driver.

Basically, if the user's computer is compromised then the attacker has won. Having a device that you plug into the compromised computer doesn't help unless that device has its own input and output hardware, since the user is inputting his commands into the compromised computer.

In fact, Google's whole business model largely depends on it closely guarding the search engine's algorithms.

Not really. What do you think would happen if they published their algorithms? Hint: Nothing. It's not 1999 where Google's results are drastically better than Webcrawler's or whatever. Everyone uses Google. Everyone would keep using Google if someone else popped up and said they had Google's algorithms and a much worse database of sites.

Hell, for all we know Cuil or Bing has the greatest algorithm ever. No one will ever know because they don't go there.

Even the netbook processors (Intel Atom and VIA Nano) have full 64-bit support.

How many processes have you seen complain that they are out of address space with only 4GB?

This first came up for me a couple years ago running Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl, a mainstream Windows video game. The default Windows user address space limit on a 32 bit system is 2 gigs and Stalker wanted to use about 1700 megs of RAM. Problem is, video memory is also mapped into the user address space and I had a 512 meg video card.

In that case i was able to fix the problem by using a tool to hack the binary to make Windows give 3 gigs to the user process instead of the default of 2 gigs (the OS needs to keep a big chunk of address space for the kernel).

In any case, the moral of the story is that 32 bit address spaces have been cramped - for common applications, in practice - for a while now. Any application using more than a gig of RAM would be better off on a 64-bit machine. It's possible to work around this with silly hacks, and there's a lot of that going on, but it won't be too long before 32-bit users are a small enough minority to ignore for RAM-intensive apps.

Fortunately for them, the USPTO has, pursuant to its statutory authority (which is well-grounded in the constitution, unlike about 90% of what the federal government does), granted them a limited monopoly.

In what sense do software patents "encourage the progress of science and the useful arts"?

GNU Privacy Guard is part of the default install of Ubuntu / Debian because it's used to validate the digital signatures of .deb packages before they are installed. It can easily be used for pass-phrase file encryption with the "-c" option. If you run "gpg -c some_file" it will prompt you for a passphrase and spit out an encrypted some_file.gpg. If you then run "gpg some_file.gpg" it'll prompt you for the passphrase and recreate the origional some_file.

There are various reasons why this doesn't perfectly accomplish the goal described, but the fact that many Linux systems have user-accessible strong crypto functionality installed as an integral element of the system is definitely relevant to the topic at hand.

WTF?

If you're going to look at it that way, then people suing over corruption that directly hurts their interests is also "how things work".

The organization then writes an RFP, goes to public bid, then comes up with a reason to get XYZ over all competitors.

And if the RFP doesn't go to public bid and the contract is instead delivered to a convicted monopolist with no bidding at all, then there's a problem.

Ok. I'll back off from the "any" claim for a moment and focus entirely on SSH/SSL. Any host running one of those protocols is regenerating keys on a regular basis in such a way that farming it out to a dedicated machine doesn't make much sense.