Nobody in the US seems to see the writing on the wall. This country is an outright oligarchy. Our political institutions are completely dominated by finance and patronage. Completely unresponsive to the will of the public. We imprison more people than any country on earth. We've overthrown something like a hundred governments in the past century throughout Latin America, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. Since the end of WWII we have propped up fascist regimes responsible for killing millions of people. We operate black site torture camps like Guantanamo Bay. Our police are able to abuse their powers and seize people's property (civil forfeiture) with impunity. We live in a police state.

But all these mouth-breathers console themselves by saying things like "At least we have free speech. At least we're not an authoritarian country like China." The cognitive dissonance is absolutely mind boggling. While China is demonstrating its ability to keep private enterprise in line and plan years into the future, our tech oligarchs are schmoozing with the pentagon, facilitating dragnet surveillance, and generally ingratiating themselves with the political and financial power centers.

China may not be a Communist worker's paradise, but for anybody who is paying attention, they are clearly much more poised to deal with the challenges of this era then the sclerotic American regime, which is only capable of throwing money at snake oil salesmen, bombing third world farmers, and shooting protesters with rubber bullet grenades. People might find comfort in the whinnie the pooh memes and red scare tropes, but that doesn't change the underlying material conditions. China is a rapidly developing country of nearly one and a half billion people, and the US is a crumbling empire. It behooves us to actually study what's going on there on a deeper level than the Adrian Zenz atrocity propaganda and casual Reddit-teir racism.

The powers that be are trying to turn this into a second cold war. The American political elite cannot stand the thought that they won't be able to dominate every facet of the world economy. They are gearing us up for an apocalyptic war because they would rather rule over the ashes than allow alternate modes of production to coexist.

You understand there's a difference between Socialism and Communism, right?

RMS isn't against commercial (for profit) software at all. He's against software that is not completely transparent to the user about what it's doing (and that you can't fix yourself if it breaks). The additional restrictions in the GPLv3 are present to help prevent a company from monopolizing an open source project that was developed by someone else via threat of patent litigation. It also prevents TiVoization - because free software is meaningless to the end user if you can't tweak it and load up your modifications. Both are pretty legitimate concerns. If Canonical started selling Ubuntu laptops which will only load signed kernels (which they could do if they wanted, as the kernel is just GPL2), there's nothing stopping them other than the community gathering it's torches and pitchforks.

I was curious one time a while back about trying to make my own compiled programming language, and was quite disappointed when I started fishing around in GCC and learned that it really is designed from the ground up not to be extensible. I'm pretty sure RMS quite the hacker, so it disappoints me to see his stubbornness get in the way of writing software with a technically superior design. He has the right intentions, but he's picking the wrong battles here. Free software ideally should be superior to proprietary software in every way. Nerfing GCC and Emacs is pretty reminiscent of Microsoft's (and co.) historic strategy of vendor lock-in via proprietary ill-defined file formats and refusal to implement open standards imho.

I accidentally modded your post down when I spazzed out on the keyboard. This post should revert that.

What is this shit? Really? News for nerds my ass. This just in: Science is a conspiracy. We should all just ignore the scientists and start listening to whoever can shout the loudest.

Hell, even that would be an improvement.

I graduated in 2009 from a public school in New Jersey. To answer your question, no. There were no civics classes. Not even available as an elective. We were however required to take a mandatory class on Microsoft Office. Our priorities are completely screwed up, aren't they?

As a young American I fell very much the same. During my childhood there was a period where my country had no national debt, then all of a sudden we spend more within 8 years then the whole time since we we gained our independence. Then I became an adult. My generation was born into a 14 trillion dollar debt and that we will be paying off for the rest of our lives. For better or worse, sometimes I dream about us defaulting on this debt. It would be better then paying for the baby boomer's idiocy. If only taxation could work in a way where you could only be taxed for policies passed after the point you are allowed to vote.

I picked up an nVidia GTX 970 about a month ago, and though I had to tinker a little bit with Debian to get it up and running, after I got the newest drivers installed it's been running rock solid and I haven't noticed much of a difference in performance between Debian and Windows 7 (Maybe 4 more fps in a game on windows where the game is running with the fps in the 290s. This wasn't an ideal test though because the renderer on windows was DirectX 9, while on Linux it was OpenGL). To get it going in Jessie, the upcoming stable release, all you need to do is add experimental to your sources and apt-get -t experimental install nvidia-kernel-dkms. Experimental should be pinned by default so things won't get installed unless you are explicit.

Before I put the 970 in, I had been getting by with the integrated graphics in my i7-4770k. If you haven't built a new PC in a while, the capabilities of Intel's integrated graphics will blow you away. Yes, dedicated cards are still miles ahead in performance, but on the Haswell HD Graphics 4600 GPU I was able to play some pretty modern games at modest settings. The coolest thing about it though is the completely open source graphics drivers and stack on Linux. If you're looking for the best performance possible on a completely open source stack, Intel is your answer.

I own a laptop with an ATi graphics chipset and their drivers are absolute garbage. Their Linux driver causes visual artifacts all the time on a composited GUI, and the machine to crashes on shutdown one out of 5 times with fglrx dumping core causing the machine to never shut off (and potentially turn my laptop bag into a toaster oven x_x). I guess I'm going to return to the open source radeon drivers now that I can scratch my gaming itch on the desktop.

As someone working in manufacturing, I can tell you. Materials and expendable supplies.

Yes, and it's called EVIL for a reason :)

Hey dude, even though some of us Americans are scumbags, it isn't right to wish death upon anyone... Especially a bunch of civilian scientists.

I don't know if all shops work this way, but I work as a CNC lathe toolsetter and programmer in a non-union shop in New Jersey and what you say is pretty accurate based on my experience. Most of our operators will typically run a cell of 2 to 4 machines. As long as there are more contracts than we have machines (which is always, or we'd be out of business) we are constantly breaking down setups and retooling our machines for the next production run. We produce hundereds of different parts for some of our clients, and print revisions happen somewhat regularly. When we get a revised print, it usually only means we have to change a couple numbers in the g-code to define the new toolpath and tool the machine exactly how we did before the revision. While it may present an oppertunity to re-negotiate, It is hardly something we are willing to loose a contract over.

Now, I'm sure making microprocessors is quite a bit more sophisticated, but I can imagine that the biggest difference between different model CPUs built on the same process would be the code controlling the machine (automagically generated by CAM software from a CAD model), and they can probably be switched without making significant physical changes to the machine itself. If I remember correctly, it can easily take a couple years of calibration before a fab can produce anything reliable consistantly. I imagine once those machines are set up, they probably spend most of their time worrying about an earthquake happening on the other side of the world, not about loading a new program onto it.

I'd never trust any of this crap. All of these captains of industry complain about how few skilled workers we have here in the US - be it tech, manufacturing, whatever. All they really want is to pay as little for the labor as possible, and as long as it costs less in China, they will keep making up excuses and funding think-tanks to support their point of view. If they were trying to have their products manufactured with the best craftsmanship possible, by the most skilled workers they could employ, they wouldn't be outsourcing them to the cheapest place they could find. I'm not going to be that guy that says we do everything best in the US, but doing things best is not why we are outsourcing to China either.

Is this a case? Can someone drop the name or a link to the docket so I can follow it? (Typed in total sincerity. No sarcasm here.)

This reminds me of my mechanic's old Snap-On MODIS II OBD2 diagnostics machine. The thing is literally a handheld computer (heavy and bulky) except instead of a keyboard and mouse it has 6 buttons. When you plug it in, it takes 5-10 minutes to boot up Windows 98, then eventually the front end software starts up. It's a terrible hack of a machine.