My point is that vehicle-involved deaths are a major health problem, and we should be working a lot harder to reduce their incidence. If it's appropriate to jail someone for a laser flash, it's certainly appropriate to jail them for blowing through a crosswalk.

...only outlaws will synthesize their own proteins.

You might very occasionally manage to kill someone with a laser, but illegal driving kills tens of thousands each and every year (just in the US).

...but at least I can keep them from being virtually killed by virtual guns.

The use case is that I'd like my kids to be able to play with Ableton, but I don't want them messing up my files.

Plus, this is so trivial to do, why *not* get it right?

Did anyone else read it that way? Might not work, but I like the sound of it...

The Boost guys seem to be grinding some sort of axe with respect to the FSF. All over their site are little digs about how awful the GPL is, etc. The benefits of various licenses are open to question, of course, but their little snipes just seem unprofessional.

Also, bjam. If you have to write your own make replacement just to compile your code, you're doing it wrong. Ugh.

...if I can't break whatever laws I like, regardless of the consequences to others.

No, but you can have a second copy of the multi-player version. W00t!

Newsflash: Yahoo chastises workers for pretending to work.

Meanwhile: Yahoo continues to pretend to be in business.

(I seem to recall that they contributed a JS toolkit, which is cool. That's about all I can recall for the last five or eight years, though. Does anyone know what else they do?)

Technically, yes. But by the same standard, Ubuntu LTS is likely just as good.

To keep my point simple, I didn't mention the many problems in OS X that I encountered while setting it up. For example, it made me type in the password to my Apple ID over and over again. It seemed truly insistent on making me fill in info for a credit card. It pummeled me over and over with license dialogs I had to "agree" to. User switching doesn't work out of the box--you have to set it up. And perhaps most inexplicably, it absolutely would not let me proceed without declaring my gender. WTF Apple?

There only one OS I know that's actually a candidate for the "Just Works" title: Chrome. I've been using a Chromebook pretty constantly since they came out, and it's amazingly trouble-free. It doesn't do as much, obviously, but I'm unable to think of a single hang-up I've had with it.

I hear what you're saying about Getting Shit Done. I have that fantasy, too, and occasionally let it play out. Although I've been a mostly-Linux guy since the 90s, I've been jones-ing for some sequencing software that would "Just Work" that I could run on a platform that would "Just Work". Bought Ableton Live and a Mac Mini to run it on. (That's well over $1000, by the way.) If there's anything that should "Just Work", it should be this.

But I almost immediately tripped over the same old minor glitches I've seen on every other platform I've ever used. In this case, the problem is that Ableton perversely installs itself in such as way that only one user can run it (though the license is for the whole box). So, I dutifully tracked down the arcane procedure for making it available system-wide (just as you get with Linux apps by default, I might add), and a couple hours later it's doing what it should have done in the first place. Yes, it works, but it doesn't "Just Work".