Unlike lossy compression where you're always looking for better ways to exploit the bits a lossless compression has a hard limit in that you can't compress it down to less information than it actually contains. FLAC is pretty much as good as it's going to get, you can compare it to for example PNG for lossless pictures that is unchanged for the last 9 years. Sane with ZIP, RAR, 7Z etc. they use many of the same underlying algorithms and change very slowly.

So how loud? At what hours? Who decides that? Say one is a light sleeper working night shifts and the other a heavy metal fan who thinks the heavy beat is essential, are they going to agree on where the fist ends and where the nose is? Property rights are rather simple but I imagine the standard of "quiet enjoyment" is quite fuzzy.

I'm not sure what the deal is with the vegetables, but let's say it's a city ordinance against having trash lying around that might attract rodents and if there's rodents near your house they'll probably be around my house that might possibly at some point in the future get a rodent problem where your trash habits might have been a contributing cause. How far can I extend my interests before they'd clash with your interests to not give a damn?

Most libertarians I've met seem to have this simple world image where they live in their own bubble with their own property, like it doesn't interact with anyone else ever. Your car pollutes, should I have the right to tell you to stop polluting my air and get a bicycle? What about speed limits, who decides exactly what's reckless driving? I'm sure I can find some reason why you can't have a vegetable patch too, if I try hard enough.

If either side "won" it'd be bizarre. Say one individual wants to listen to very loud music at 3 AM and the collective neighborhood wants him to stop, then what? It'd be crazy if society couldn't make any rules because individual rights trumps all and it'd be crazy if society could make any rules because collective rights trumps all. Society can have the democratic consent of the governed, but it can never have the individual consent of every person in every matter, so if you didn't vote for the government that passed the law should the law still apply to you? You never consented to it, there aren't any more free territories and for the sake of argument we can assume all other nations on earth would bar your emigration there. Society does force its will on the individual, if you don't agree with that right then there's no basis for democracy or society in general.

Natural rights - if they exist, after all these are all figments of human imagination and don't exist by any law of nature - are the exception to that, individual rights that society can't take away. Or rather I should say they actually can take away, but that they morally and ethically shouldn't be able to take away. Note that you can reshape many rights as both positive and negative, for example if we agree that society can order you to not do something like play loud music at 3 AM can't they then then order you to not earn any income without paying taxes on it? There's a reason this discussion has been going on for hundreds of years and I really doubt we'll settle it tonight unless we get totally hammered, unfortunately then we won't remember the solution in the morning.

If your turds resemble mountains, you should probably see a doctor...

And it no doubt comes from organizations where the only career path is to become a manager and where everyone who doesn't have any subordinates is per definition on the lowest rung of the ladder. The more I have to do it, the more I realize I dislike managing people and particularly those who can't work independently, can't stay on focus and can't be trusted to deliver realistic feedback on progress. Given the choice between computers who do exactly what I say - despite it being totally wrong and entirely not what I intended to say and totally crash - and employees that at best do some of what they're supposed to do some of the time I'd pick computers any day. My talents are equally wasted on trying to manage people as a project manager is trying to use his people skills to fix a computer, but hey if that's the only way to get a better paycheck...

Except that's not actually true, there are many poor people around the world who have less than your typical terrorist. In fact there are plenty examples of young males living in first world countries being radicalized into becoming terrorists, head full of ideology but not suffering at all. On the contrary, many countries have been relatively peaceful and secular for a long time even though they were rather primitive and poor.

Mostly he's talking to seasoned veterans at kernel development who damn well know what the rules are, they just choose to bend them. They're always pushing and he's the one who has to push back, measured explanations is as useless as explaining to boys that trying to sneak a peek into the girl's locker room is wrong. Of course they knew that but they did it anyway and a "please don't do that" won't discourage anyone from trying again. Even if he rejects the patches unless he talks back he becomes the wall people throw crap at to see what sticks. Usually The I'd call developers who should know better behaving in ways that are destructive to the project a management problem, but he's the project manager so his way of resolving it is to give people a well-deserved ass chewing on the LKML. Don't knock it if it works...

Linux the kernel runs extremely well on everything from smartphones to supercomputers, obviously it's more than ready for the desktop. The challenge (remember, we don't have problems anymore) is the desktop environment and the applications, none of which are Linus' responsibility. And right now I'd take bets that Android hybrids conquers the desktop before Unity, Gnome 3, KDE or any of the existing solutions do. Too bad we can't clone him so he could run those projects too, because he's got both the doer gene and the manager gene. Forget about the kernel for a moment, remember the BitKeeper debacle? Other managers of a huge project like the kernel might do a lot of things, but I don't know anyone else but Linus who sits down and cranks out git on top of everything else. He's not just floating on past glory, he keep earning that respect he enjoys.

People apply for jobs with fake diplomas and work certificates for degrees they never earned and work they never did, faking many years of their CV. Flip the situation around, you had this dude come into your office pretending he'd written some software but it had someone else's name on it and you let him smooth talk you into thinking it must be the new maintainer that had copy&replaced his name instead? Hey, I've got a bridge to sell you...

Who says he didn't have permission, if I was a contractor I'd at a minimum try to have a "show, but not use" clause part of my standard contract so I'd have a portfolio of my work. That maybe it says so in the contract someone signed two years ago doesn't mean you have a reference on hand or even at all anymore that can back that up, the legal department will have the contract but they won't know what you wrote and the people who hired you might have left. I know companies have an HR department that can verify employment dates but I don't keep references on hand that can testify to everything I've done and certainly not on speed dial, if I had this happen to me I'd probably be caught equally flat-footed. I think you're making up entirely unreasonable demands to make this his fault.

Really? That sounds like a silly thing to do, as you'd lose the right to write for example sequels (derivative works), movie rights, video game adaptations, merchandising rights and whatnot. I'd expect it to be some form of exclusive reproduction/distribution agreement of the book itself while all other rights are negotiable. That you'd might want to sell eBook rights, foreign language rights and book club rights as well seems likely, but it would be very unwise to sell the "unknowns" for a pittance if your book is a smashing hit. And certainly not the right to write derivative works, that's just aiming a double-barreled shotgun to your feet and give them one each for good measure.

Other people don't understand WTF you're talking about either, they're just better at faking it.

Real world calling, most home networks have gone wireless and most use laptops, tablets or other portable devices that don't get plugged in more than they need to. Even if you have a family server or one of the kids is a gamer with a desktop it still won't go any faster. The GigE cap is only if you need to move huge amounts of data between two wired - or at least plugged in for the occasion - boxes in the same house, which is quite rare. That anybody feels speed is a limitation is rarer still, cables are more reliable, always work at close to rated speed rather than "up to" wireless and there's no need for setting up encryption and typing in access keys but ~10 seconds per gigabyte is a BluRay in less than ten minutes. You need that down to less than one a minute? What I'd like is GigE Internet to my GigE home network, 10G doesn't really do anything for me.

Not much, except that all modern Linux software already does this because X is utterly obsolete as a drawing toolkit. Wayland is pretty much the answer to "If we assume the toolkits look at X like a dumb framebuffer, how much of X can we throw away? And fix some deep design issues in a process." That's it, nothing more. It's not an either-or, nothing prevents you from building an overlay that talks geometry to clients and pixels to Wayland, if you can get any traction for that. But then you're probably going to compete with similar functionality in GTK+, Qt, wxWidgets, OpenGL, OpenGL ES, SDL and so on that all like to render pixels. Unless you can force developers to use one library like Windows and OS X can you'll be just another library clamoring for support. But they all need something to render on and that's Wayland.

That's not the real issue, the real issue is that developing new code is fun while maintaining and reworking it is boring. You build a house and things are a bit rough all around but instead of polishing it until it's the best house it can be you've already jumped on building your new house that will become even better while the old house is left abandoned. It's pretty tough to resist when you don't have a boss who'll tell you enough is enough and just leave it be already.