It's not that great. He's credited with foreseeing the demise of the soviet union in the blurb, I have no idea how accurate that is, but it's no great feat as the libertarian/austrian thinkers did as well, but that would still be somewhat to his credit if he escaped the beltway groupthink enough to anticipate that. Otherwise he seems mostly to be focused on selling a much larger and more expensive military as necessary to win the future war he fantasizes about with China. Considering the size of the relative expenditures currently, his pitch of drastic increases in spending required in order to hold off a distant, relatively low tech enemy seem alarmist at best.

But what do I know, I have only read a few articles on him. Research him yourself and post what you find out.

"There are plenty of critical comments of Apple and their products on those boards."

As one should expect. Support forums are where people having problems with the products are supposed to go.

I havent noticed any such slowness with slackware startup myself, so I suspect a misconfiguration, but nonetheless, even if that were the cost, having sensible human-readable startup scripts is well worth a couple extra minutes boot time to me anyway. Seriously, how often do you reboot a *nix box? No one really cares how long it takes to do that one-in-a-blue-moon reboot.

Good point.

However the other gentleman has already replied with a good counterpoint. The fact is that there is only one human race currently living, so strictly speaking 'racism' - if by that you mean discrimination against those of another race - is impossible. We would have to first fine a way to resurrect a neanderthal, THEN we could discriminate against him.

But in fact racism is real and rampant, but racism is not discriminating by race, it's more subtle than that. It's *the delusion that multiple races of humans exist* that is the root of real racism - and discrimination just forms the icing on that particular cake of mental illness.

I am a little curious on this one myself, although you could have tried to phrase it a little less caustically.

So far as I can see the big mistake was invading Libya to begin with, once that chunk is swallowed the rest of it seems pretty minor.

"I use Linux in work, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. I had to reinstall it when I changed graphics card because it kept crashing (kernel too)."

Somehow these sort of problems always seem to involve Ubuntu. Might be a clue...

No they dont.

They release source for a lot of the infrastructure, because it's actually Free Software that they simply adapt to their needs. But a large portion of the OS is not in that class and is never released.

Truly reform minded people are trying to prosecute the people who stole our pensions and put the money back, and they want to bring the troops home and stop the empire building and prosecute the people who send them out on their killing missions. They want to abolish prohibition, on ALL levels, federal, state, and local. They want equal treatment under the law, regardless of economic status, race, etc. and demand an end to privilege based on same. And yes, we want to replace "Obamacare" with medicare for all.

The last item on that list just does not fit. You want freedom and justice - but not in medicine, just everywhere else. Why?

"Because they need to package it in order to market it to the masses."

The marketing problem I mentioned already.

"Sure, under the hood it's basically just going to be a specialised Linux distro"

And the danger, if they are going to that length already, it will make perfect sense for them to try to engineer some lock-in in the process.

" but what's the other option? Give their users Ubuntu with Steam pre-installed? That sounds rather half-baked."

Why not just release the app so that people that want it can install it on the system they are already using? And Ubuntu? See that's another problem here, if they choose a base system it will probably be something atrocious like Ubuntu - why would they wish such pain on their customers?

"Hasn't NVIDIA already responded positively? "

Nvidia has a long history and a few mumbled words from them about change are not going to impress. When nouveau supports all the features on their cards properly then there will have been progress.

In your first scenario, I am not even sure we would benefit in the driverspace. Good drivers in the tree would be wonderful, but in that case why not simply work on their client, why do they need a branded 'OS?'

If they are going to be shipping a TiVO with blobs I will not call that any sort of benefit.

"I know the die-hard free software guys shudder at the thought, but let's face it: the reason Linux is struggling on the desktop is because few developers think they can make money on the platform."

Free Software and making money have no intrinsic disagreement. To the contrary, the ability to use the code commercially is one of the pillars of the Free Software definition.

But you are right, there is a market disfunction specifically in the computers and internet field. The bulk of the customers dont have the vaguest trace of a clue what they are doing. They are thus exceptionally vulnerable to marketing, and we really have a crazy market on all kinds of levels, OS choices almost being the least of it.

Marketing displaces then supercedes engineering, in the natural cycle of things. Not sure how to fix that. Presumably once us old fogies die off a higher percentage of the oncoming generation will figure this stuff out, if only out of self-preservation, and the companies will eventually be forced to shape up or die in response (though that presumes they face competition of course.)

Vandals are a plague, but *paid vandals* are much more difficult to deal with.

Paid vandals who make admin status are even worse again, of course, but I suppose that is a different subject.