We are moving more and more to a culture where it isn't individuals who bear the consequences and take the responsibility for the risks they take, but governments (and to a lesser extent employers and other groups). This shift has come disguised as the offering of "free" services -- a way to take responsibiliy and stress off an individual's life and simplify some of the choices they make.

However, it is now up to whatever group has taken responsibilty for the risks to keep costs down. The individual is no longer as motivated to make correct choices on his or her own because they have no exposure to the true cost of those risks. So, the "group" (bureacracy?) will step in and make those decisions -- sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse, but in almost all cases undoubtedly leaving many unhappy.

It's not really surprising... this is how we've been voting as a country for years. This sort of thing will expand to where employers or even governments are mandating certain diet, exercise and mental health requirements before individuals may participate or take advantage of health or retirement benefits (for which there may be no legal alternative).

Go Republicans. Let consumers decide which bulbs they prefer. This is not a problem that needs to be solved by expensive regulation and legislation.

Always great to see Slashdot accepting article intros with obvious bias built in! Drop the political stuff, PLEASE?

We've seen the things blamed on "Climate Change" shift from hotter temperatures, to *cooler temperatures* (as things cooled or didn't warm very much the last decade) to animals doing weird stuff we don't think they would normally do, etc., etc.

Next, weather disasters -- which have been a constant on this planet forever will now be blamed on climate change.

And guaranteed if there aren't as many weather disasters (since those are driven by an extremely complex system of which we only understand a tiny bit about) as there "should be" the depression of weather disasters will be blamed on climate change as well.

(Actually this happens with their yearly hurricane season predictions already).

The good part is that people are really wising up to this stuff. The bad part is the alarmists are still getting money.

There's a dislike plugin already.

Is a ruling group of the intelligent, progressive elites to form a ruling body that makes the correct decisions for the rest of us.

Drop this direct or representative democracy stuff.

We could call the ruling body the politburo or something?

Skeptic, but his perspective and analysis is spot-on:

http://www.coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2012/02/heartland-documents-whose-biases-are-being-revealed-here.html
http://www.forbes.com/sites/warrenmeyer/2012/02/21/peter-gleick-admits-to-stealing-heartland-documents/

Does this really reveal anything nefarious about anyone other than the clergy of the Church of Global Warming? It rightly *is* the goal of the skeptical community to combat the hysteria with both science and by exposing the lack of trustworthiness of those who would have us sink our hard earned money into this far from settled theory.

If anything, this has now backfired and truly exposed how the tide is turning in the AGW debate.

Prepare for weird weather?! Seriously?

Say "prepare for weird weather" at the beginning of every year for all eternity and you'd be spot-on.

Climate is always changing. Weather is always weird. We don't need a panel to tell us the obvious. Please go do something useful instead.

Buuut, the US Government coerced him into putting his personal data on those US servers.

Amazing to me how many repliers are still referencing "RPM Hell". RPM Hell hasn't existed for a long time, and yum is speedy and makes installing software as easy as it is under Ubuntu. Anyone who says otherwise hasn't used Fedora in a long, long time. I also tend to think Fedora has better quality packages overall... they have some pretty strict guidelines for how things are packaged up and vetted before being added to the repository (another contributing factor that limits overall size IMO).

Ubuntu does have a larger software repository however -- and don't have as many qualms about including "non-free" software that often can be the key to making things "just work" (video drivers, wifi drivers, etc). Sure there are third party repos for Fedora that do the same, but a user would need to go find them and set them up. Not as integrated.

Fedora itself also tends to be a bit more bleeding edge. This attracts the developers, but might scare away the average joe user who doesn't want to deal with quite as much churn between releases (although Fedora does a great job of QA'ing!).

Just my $0.02. I'm a Fedora user myself...

A RHEL subscription provides:

• Guaranteed timely updates

• The ability to file bugs via a paid SR and receive supported hotfixes

• Technical support

CentOS does a good job of releasing updates fairly quickly, though not necessarily between point releases. Especially if point releases occur when a point release for multiple versions of RHEL is released simultaneously. You can be stuck in a lurch for quite a while while CentOS's small team works hard to get things going.

As to getting bug fixes... this has primarily been helpful at my company as we write software that runs on RHEL and occasionally need to ensure bugs in RHEL provided software are fixed in a timely manner. It's nice to be able to escalate a BZ entry via an SR and a TAM or account rep.

Tech support you may or may not need. Perhaps if you're the only Linux "expert" or if you want that extra assurance or a vendor to "blame" if something goes south.

Ray

I thought Android's market share had exceed iphones?

Dell is actually pitching Compellent as their Tier 1 solution. They've had Equallogic for a number of years, but it is iSCSI only and definitely doesn't quite play in the same space as EMC and NetApp.

This is either a joke or an elaborate ruse by the Tea Party to visually demonstrate government waste...

Technology advances will unlock access to quite a bit more.

has a hard time holding the line against health care or tax cuts for the richest Americans.

Flamebait like this in the article summary just will veer the discussion completely off-topic.

It's also why I now have AdBlock Plus turned on when I (less frequently) browse this site.

Tone down the obvious political bias! Thanks!