Do you have a really old green card? Because my green card has my picture and fingerprints on it already.

Phoronix has a history of doing long and misleading benchmarks between Linux and *BSD/Solaris, where they manage to include so many extraneous factors that the results are meaningless.

As the saying goes "don't attribute to malice ...".

Phoronix has a history of doing long and misleading benchmarks between Linux and Linux. Phoronix are idiots, if only they wouldn't keep hitting the /. front page *sigh*.

I can only hope that this happens enough, and thus. causes enough monetary loss, that someone tells the retarded programers that if they require working JavaScript for users to see text they'll be fired. Speaking as someone who's paid slightly more at amazon so I could happily ignore some other random website's "requirement" I turn JavaScript on for them, to allow me to give them money.

Well, except that SVN revision numbers are in order.

If you only use a single branch, then I guess that might be true. But the only reason you'd be doing that IMO is because SVN is utterly worthless at managing branches.

The government should not be in the mindset of taking money from the rich strictly for giving money to the poor or supporting them in some way. [...] Just because the government taxes us doesn't mean it is redistributing the wealth because the money is not necessarily given to people, especially for nothing. It is used to buy stuff that needs created (e.g. roads) or services (e.g. contract work or even defense)

You take money from X and give it to Y, and that isn't redistributing wealth? You are very confused.

Why aren't the poor or the unqualified being taxed to pay for their own health care so that everyone else can be left alone?

Why aren't the rich paying for all of the current economic bailouts, it's hardly the poor or middle classes fault that there was a bubble in RE and the financial sector? Because it would cause too much collateral damage, and in general the government should try to solve systemic problems. The "rich" complaining about universal health care is even more of a joke, because if implemented even half decently everyone's total costs should go down ... the current health care "system" in the US is very expensive (in the same way if everyone decided to build their own roads, and put tolls on them).

The poor and under-privileged are always wanting a fair chance in life which is understandable however wanting the rich to be taxed more in order to get what they want out of life is not a fair chance in life by any definition.

I'm sure many factory owners said the same thing about not being able to hire 8 year olds for 6 day work weeks (why should _I_ be deprived for _their_ education). Fortunately the intelligent option (eventually) prevailed and everyone became better off as a result.

You fail to make a distinction between the government forcing person A to give money to person B through taxation (force) versus letting person A give money to person B on their own accord which lets person A decide how much money and when to give the money, neither of which is possible when the money is forcefully taken through taxes.

If you are arguing that a government can run without any taxation, then you should buy enough drugs for everyone and share them around. But you don't seem to be saying that, later on, you say "I ... have no trouble paying for taxes that are used to pay for infrastructure, etc." making some arbitrary distinction between "infrastructure" and whatever it is you feel the government shouldn't be spending "your" money on.

So here's a clue, as soon as the government taxes anything for any reason it's redistributing wealth. It really doesn't matter if it's doing this by building roads, allowing companies/people to deduct bad investments from profits on good investments, or paying for someone's education/medical-care. All of those could be good usage of government money, and probably all three could be bad (although the later one much less so, IMNSHO).

Actually, I don't buy this argument. You don't need train-tracks "everywhere" -- you just need it "in some places". For example, I'm moving to NJ, with the house being nearly equidistant from train stations of two different branches of the railroad.

If you are trying to say that you'll be equidistant to two train stations which use two completely separate tracks to get you to the same (or roughly the same) destination ... I don't believe you.

Of course even if true, passengers aren't the real custom for any significant amount of train tracks anyway so neither company would be improving their service for you. Commercial goods transportation is roughly 10x the revenue IIRC, so it's likely a non-monopoly would provide even worse service for passengers (from both/all providers).

Generally speaking, one does not start up a console gaming company without having had a lot of previous industry experience and some sort of financial backing.

Right, follow the argument. CGC (console gaming companies) must be established to be allowed to develop, because only established CGC currently develop. Round and round we go. Maybe we should throw the developers into water, and if they float that means they can't develop games.

The obvious refutation of this circle of insanity is Braid, basically developed by one guy while living with his parents. Big shocker that it isn't out for anything but the 360.

Some of us find it a bit improper/offensive when these people claim copyright over something that doesn't actually contain any of their work.

Ahh, yes, the magic BSD world view where it's "good" if someone takes something you've created doing whatever they want with it and giving you nothing in return (possibly including the original work). But it's "bad" if someone dares to share with you, only stipulating that you not screw them over in return.

If you are a bank/credit company, would you rather have more rich clients or more poor clients?

More poor clients. Mainly because the rich clients will pay off their debt. each month, where the poor clients will only pay off the minimum (so you make a lot more money from them).

"The usual amount" for a PLAYSTATION 3 game is $60 because "the usual" PS3 game is a retail package. So Wipeout HD sells for one-third the usual amount.

If you buy a disc based game for $60 you can resell it for (at least) $20-$30, if you buy a PSN game for $20 you can't.

For example if there was a thousand little Intel's I'd wager we would have much cheaper, much slower chips - to the point that per unit of computing power we'd actually be paying more.

Well I'd wager that we'd have been where we are now, in about 1994. At half the current price. Luckily nobody can reset history so it's not like we can test that and that's assuming you could keep all of them alive, and one wouldn't become dominant again within a year or so due to a natural monopoly emerging.

It is not a bug. How much is 2+2*2?

Well I get "dc: stack empty", if I fix that bug though "0 2+2*2?" needs a line of input from the user, and has 2 and then 4 on the stack.

Personally I'm waiting for them to add better integration of PPAs into Synaptic.

Well unless the authors become dumbasses overnight, you'll probably be waiting a long time. Package management needs to be a single coherent database, making it much more distributed than it needs to be is just asking for pain ... PPAs/KoPeRs aren't terrible in moderation, and solve a couple of problems. But if you make them easily available (ie. available to people who don't know what problems they cause) the solution is much worse than the problem.

Alas. whenever they try and get a new computer the websites don't work in their web browser.

Less sarcastically, assuming there is a correlation between "runs new web browser" and "buys my product" is not the same as having actual data (and I've never seen anyone with actual data make this kind of decision).