Converting that R&D into actual products and services, I'd wager, is quite difficult without a profit incentive. It's like the difference between having a great idea for a startup and actually turning it into a functioning company.
Without invoking too many absolutes, there's so much bullshit involved in the latter that people doing the former aren't willing to put up with. It's mostly two different kinds of people with two different skillsets.
Doesn't capitalism either directly or indirectly fund that academic research? When I was in a university lab, all of my work was funded by private companies
> To find a time when the planet’s air was consistently above 400 ppm you have to look much farther back to the warm part of the Miocene, some 16 million years ago, or the Early Oligocene, about 25 million years ago, when Earth was a very different place and its climate totally dissimilar from what we might expect today.
Towards the end Miocene was when grasses began to emerge significantly
> The higher organic content and water retention of the deeper and richer grassland soils, with long-term burial of carbon in sediments, produced a carbon and water vapor sink. This, combined with higher surface albedo and lower evapotranspiration of grassland, contributed to a cooler, drier climate. C4 grasses, which are able to assimilate carbon dioxide and water more efficiently than C3 grasses, expanded to become ecologically significant near the end of the Miocene between 6 and 7 million years ago.
Companies don't pay VAT on their purchases; the consumer pays the VAT.
Would they sell their products for 20% less; or would they decide consumers were happy to pay at that price so keep the price the same and keep the extra as profits?
NHS isn't a for profit healthcare system; and they'll break even earlier on the early detection and diagnosis as since it covers you for life treating you early is less expensive then treating you later when the treatment costs would be higher.
Considerations would be different if the MRI scanner was running as for profit; or you could switch coverage so the later costs would be borne by someone else.
treating you early is less expensive then treating you later when the treatment costs would be higher.
This is true retrospectively, for anyone who it turns out really has the disease.
But studies show that prospectively (when you don't know if somebody actually has a given disease), the cost of preventative care - including follow-up tests and unnecessary treatments - exceeds the benefit that you outlined.
EDIT: add quote to clarify what I'm responding to.
> File intensive operations like git clone, npm install, apt update, apt upgrade, and more will all be noticeably faster. The actual speed increase will depend on which app you’re running and how it is interacting with the file system. Initial tests that we’ve run have WSL 2 running up to 20x faster compared to WSL 1 when unpacking a zipped tarball, and around 2-5x faster when using git clone, npm install and cmake on various projects.
Nice post. Looks like some of dotnet core boffins are hard at work on a new grpc client / server impl. If that becomes the fastest version then dotnet will be even harder to ignore....
One reason might be that the tools have telemetry (i.e., automatically gathering and sending data about your system and your use of it to Microsoft) enabled by default[1], which is unexpected and off-putting to people in the free software world. It seems to reflect a very different attitude to some fundamental cultural values.
According to the comments on the issue tracker, it was supposed to be OK because it was anonymized – but oops, there was a bug, so it wasn't totally anonymized. But it's OK because you can disable it if you happen to know about it – but oops, the disabling mechanism had a bug.
Things that are important to many free software users are not important to Microsoft. I was excited about .NET Core until I became aware of this stark misalignment of goals and priorities.
Mainly historical ones I think. It's been open source for 4 years, but for most of that time there was a paralell closed source implementation which complicated the ecosystem a fair bit.
I'd say it's only really in this last year that it's really started escaping its legacy and started really making sense as a non-microsoft stack.
Mono still exists for the same reason .NET 4.X still receives updates, amongst other things. It also has better mobile and crossplat support for targets outside of the server realm
