Re:Do we need the anti-smoking jab
on
A Geek Funeral
·
· Score: 1
Unless I missed something in biology, I'm pretty sure children will never be the end result of sodomy no matter how many hands you choose to sodomize with.
Manual stimulation is non-reproductive, but I've heard that the more, ahem, "traditional" form of sodomy can actually lead to pregnancy.
After all, where do you think lawyers come from? (rimshot...);)
(With apologies to NewYorkCountryLawyer)
Re:Do we need the anti-smoking jab
on
A Geek Funeral
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Yes, and your right to talk should end where my ears begin.
My talking doesn't inflict cancer or heart disease on others, or aggravate conditions like asthma, like secondhand smoke does. Talking doesn't cause others to smell like shit, like secondhand smoke does. Generally speaking, smokers should keep their habit to themselves, unless in the company of people who don't mind it. Covering others with the waste product of your habit is rude. That's the reason beer drinkers don't usually pee all over you.
I don't think any one form of digital storage will be adequately durable. Caring for these digital files will be an ongoing effort, not a once-and-done distribution of media.
I would store the digital archives in multiple locations (at least 3). Each location should have a disk farm with ZFS, so bit rot could be detected and fixed. Periodically (cron job, whatever) copy each file to a different volume, check for errors against the parent and parent's offsite siblings, then erase parent file. Tape backups should exist for disaster recovery purposes, and should also be refreshed from time to time. The hardware and software for the project will need updating from time to time. As hardware improves, I would expect costs to drop, but there will be a cost to maintain it. Power, people, real estate, replacement equipment, etc.
Medical institutions have to back up huge amounts of data for a long period of time (CAT scans, MRIs, etc), and people here with experience in medical IT might be able to enlighten you about planning for long-term storage of digital files.
How big are these files? How many of them are there? How many more are anticipated?
Ah, I see. The signs were there, I just didn't recognize them. The hostility, the ad hominem attacks, the alleged mountains of empirical evidence for which you don't have a reference, the apparently deliberate misunderstanding of everything I've said, the poor spelling. I should have figured out awhile ago that you are a simple troll.
The Chinese may have kept them for other reasons and eaten them as needed, much like native Americans. There is a hypothesis that dogs were domesticated shortly after civilization created garbage dumps. The idea goes that with fixed settlements came fixed garbage dumps, which drew in wild animals much like today. Evolution favored those animals less afraid of man, because they were the first ones to scavenge freshly dumped leftovers, and eventually relatively tame wolves were domesticated.
If your math actually worked, 400lbs would be down right common. It isn't.
Dude, I didn't come up with this on my own. It's basic science that has been demonstrated over and over.
A (relative) lack of 400-lb people is not proof that the laws of thermodynamics cease to exist inside your body.
Furthermore, I outlined an extreme case of a crash weight-gain diet. Most people people that large don't get there in a couple years. They get there over 2 or more decades of bad habits. As far as "common"... look around you. I see obese people on a regular basis. They are becoming common. Read some statistics on childhood obesity, and realize that we are raising a generation of fat kids.
... if you don't get enough calories, you starve. Your body stops USING the calories and starts storing them.
I'm not talking about putting your body in starvation mode. I'm talking about taking in way more calories than your body uses.
A body cannot "stop using" calories unless it is dead. It can, however, reduce the number of calories it uses, and it can use them more efficiently. Also, it can start breaking down muscle tissue for fuel instead of fat cells, which I assume is one of the "all sorts of bad things happen" you refer to.
I know of no special tax like this that was not eventually misappropriated to pay for something else, leaving the original need poorly filled. If we tax this stuff, all we are doing is giving the government more money. Hell no.
Medicare and Medicaid are wasteful and fraud-ridden, however I will not deny the good they do, or the need for it to be done.
The problem isn't the government, and there is damn little the government could or should do about it. It's the people. Those who wish to feed that lifestyle will do so regardless of a tax. It may even create a sense of entitlement.
Yes, it's an oversimplification. In no way did I intend to imply that metabolism has no role in weight gain or loss, or that we lack a mechanism to eliminate solid waste.
By "what you eat", I am referring to caloric intake. Our bodies are pretty good at squeezing all they can out of the food we take in. What gets shat out is mostly water, stuff we can't readily absorb, plus a lot of bacteria. Perhaps there are those rare few who magically poop out calories they don't need that day. Sounds like a problem, if you ask me.
If your 'simple equation' were even close to accurate, we could all get to 400 pounds easily.
Are you saying that I couldn't? Is there a magic switch in my body that sweats out calories if I go over 200 lbs? I doubt it.
I am reasonably fit and trim, but I know that I gain weight if I eat or drink more than a sensible amount. I know that as I get older, that tendency will increase as my metabolism slows, but the basic principle still applies.
If I decide to eat 1 whopper w/cheese (760 kcal) and 1 medium Coke (200 kcal) per day for a year on top of my normal diet, I would be taking in about an extra 960 kcal per day, and will likely add about 1.5 to 2 pounds of body fat per week. Oh, wait, I forgot the fries. That's an additional 400 kcal per medium serving. At that rate, given my current weight of 185 - 190lbs, I'd probably be at 400 lbs within 2 years, tops. Even if by some peristaltic miracle my digestive tract eliminated half the calories I was taking in, I would only be delayed in getting to 400 by a couple years.
Of course, that's assuming that my metabolism stays the same, and that my muscle mass doesn't change. If I were heavier, perhaps I'd avoid strenuous activity, my muscles would atrophy, and my ability to burn calories would be diminished, accelerating my weight gain.
After we adjust for different metabolic rates, hormonal imbalances, bad genes, how much we poop out and every other variable that we'd like to include, it still comes down to thermodynamics and the conservation of energy. If you do exercise that requires about 3600 kcal of power, you have burned the caloric equivalent of 1 pound of fat. That power came from either a) stuff you just took in, or b) your body breaking itself down to feed its own engines. If you are doing it right, your body breaks down fat instead of muscle.
Conversely, no human can create a pound of fat out of only, say, 1200 kcal food input. People don't get fat just breathing air. It comes from somewhere.
Er, no, I disagree. The Whopper, fries and soda can be worked off in a workout regime that is less than Olympic gold caliber. If enjoyed only occasionally, the impact on overall health of an active person with proper vitamin intake and overall good nutrition is minimal.
You're absolutely right that the actual equation is more complex, but the basic truth of it is still perfectly valid.
On a side note, despite the fact that I generally hate so-called "reality" shows, I have found myself hooked on "The Biggest Loser" for the past couple seasons. I like it because a) it actually helps those on the show, b) it offers something worthwhile for those who see it. On the show, they talk about some of the metabolic challenges and apparent paradoxes (for example, you have to eat at least a certain amount to lose weight properly) that my overly simplistic equation left out.
All platforms have vulnerabilities, Linux included. However, history and reputation being what they are, I think Windows is plainly has a poorer track record. It is incumbent upon Windows 7 to prove that it can live up to the hype, and I don't think that hyperbole like "unhackable" is going to help them any. See my first sentence.
I'm not just bashing MS; Apple thought it had a secure iPhone, and yet their device kept getting hacked repeatedly, even after they pushed out multiple firmware updates to lock the thing down.
Motivation, imagination, time. The three ingredients that guarantee the eventual obsolescence of a new security measure. All three exist in abundance. All that is required is to concentrate them together sufficiently. As others have said,tis article is doing just that.
[rant]
The problem isn't the market, or even necessarily the food. The problem is that there are a lot of people who shove more in their mouths than they should. I can't believe that such a simple equation like "what you eat, minus what you burn, is what you wear on your ass and thighs" doesn't make sense to people. More likely, it makes sense, but they still can't or won't force themselves to change.
To whom is may concern, a few words of wisdom:
"You are what you eat" - The government shouldn't have to tell you what you can and can't eat any more than it should have to wipe your ass for you. Grow a brain stem and stop ruining things for those of who manage to eat right, but still enjoy the occasional culinary sin. Which brings me to my next point:
"All things in moderation" - There is nothing wrong with having a Whopper, fries, and soda. There is everything wrong with doing it often. Oh, and moderation applies to sitting on your ass, too. Get out there and walk some.
And finally: "Monkey see, monkey do" - Parents, exercise some judgment and self-control. If not for your own health, for your kids. Teach your kids to live with some healthy discipline in their lives. Get some exercise in with them. Kill the TV every now and then. Keep the McD's to a minimum, and make them drink juice, milk, and water at home. It's not that hard, trust me. If a numskull like myself can do a halfway decent job at it, so can you.
[/rant]
None of this is new. We all know it because it's common sense, and it's been said over and over. It's bad enough some people can't do their own thinking. It gets worse when the government believes that gives them the duty to think for all of us.
A little known fact is that before modern fires were invented, cavemen used to burn themselves for warmth in a proprietary process, and were obliged to pay for licenses to do so. Eventually, the first open-source movement found a way to burn non-sentient organic matter, and released that technology into the public domain. After that, the user base of the proprietary caveman-burning technology eventually (but predictably) died out, and history gave us what we consider to be "conventional" campfires.
There was also an interesting story about the open-source "wheel" eventually winning out over the expensive and proprietary "square rock".
... that analogies (even the infamous slashdot car analogies) have a breaking point, past which they snap back in your face. And I'm about to make it worse, most likely.
"Unlimited broadband" doesn't mean you can have a car of gigantic or unlimited size, which would be like unlimited bandwidth. Instead, picture a large car on a highway with an extremely high speed limit. You can saturate your allotted bandwidth (fill your somewhat large car to capacity) and drive the length of that highway repeatedly at top speed as many times as you like between 8pm & 8am. No gas required. The cars run on electricity piped through or near the roads themselves, like a street trolley.
No, that one isn't exactly right either.
Wait, I've got it, here's another. Imagine that instead of one huge car, you had lots and lots of little cars, each of which could only carry a tiny amount of cargo, perhaps only a gram or so in mass (a "datagram", if you like). Or, since you "pack" data into the little car, we could call the car a "pack". Except that as I said, we can only put a tiny amount of data in each "pack", so perhaps we'd better add the French suffix for small, and refer to it as a "packette", or a "packet" for those who prefer the anglicized spelling. Your broadband connection is like a highway that would allow you to send a vast number of cars ("packets" or "datagrams") out, and receive an even larger number in (since they are disposable cars, they would be destroyed after the gram of data was removed). Since the cars would be too small to hold an intelligent driver, and since the highway has lots of on and off ramps and construction detours, the route the car would follow would have to be controlled by a system of semi-intelligent guides. Since their job is to help the cars follow the right route, we could call these guides "routers". The access to this highway can either be Limited or Unlimited. "Unlimited" means that the "routers" allow you to send and receive as many little cars as you can fit on the road, given the road's insanely high speed limit. "Limited" means that aggregate total of cars you can drive across it in a given period of time is arbitrarily set lower than the highway's total capacity for cars.
So ultimately... wait, what was the question again?
"subscriptions and episodic and downloadable content" already drive the cost (to the consumer) of games to $70-$80. My kid gets an XBOX game for $60. Plays it. Finishes it. Pays $5 -$10 for points to download an add-on pack, or 2 or 3 or more, and next thing you know, he has invested $70 - $80 in the game. I already assume when he buys ODST, it will cost $80 before it's all said and done, and to me, that's the real cost of the game.
I think they have to keep the initial price at $60 for now because that's the point above which more consumers would say "screw it, I'll get something else". I'm pretty sure downloadable content will soon be (if it isn't already) about the only way game makers profit.
And according to the article above this one on the/. front page, open source software has fewer bugs (and hence one would suppose it is more secure) than ever. This looks like a classic case of a for-profit company with little to offer their customers over their open-source competition, so they resort to FUD. Does "Linux is a cancer" ring a bell for anyone?
Another lawsuit revealed an interesting piece of information that will likely impact these proceedings:
What's most interesting about the lawsuit is a single disclosure early in the lawsuit complaint. Not only does Skype not own the core P2P technology underlying the service, but they don't even have access to the source code (emphasis added):
A source code version of the GI Software is licenced by Joltid to Joost, allowing Joost to be the first company to successfully deliver television and other video content in real-time over a peer-to-peer network. An executable-only object code form of the GI Software was licensed by Loltid to Skype, a well-known Internet-based company that provides users throughout the world wiht free or low-cost telephone services over the Internet. Skype did not obtain a license to the GI Software source code, however, and the license it did obtain was terminated based on SKype's breaches of the license agreement.
I don't know enough of either suit to definitively make heads or tails out of it, but it appears that the code Skype is suing eBay over may not even be theirs to begin with.
Since when is the Apple app store about open source? It's not, therefore it's irrelevant. The "crime" here isn't that authoritarian software vendors exist. Apple has zero to do with this, except your desire to bash people. Bash all you want, I really don't care, but at least try to have a logical basis for your attack, or else you look frikkin' stupid.
The "crime", if you want to call it that, is that after years of scuzzball tactics, FUD, lawsuits, smears, and namecalling ("linux is a cancer"... remember that?), a true blue, died-in-the-wool authoritarian software vendor is posing as a "look-at-me-I'm-hip-now" open source software vendor, likely while trying to find yet another way to screw the real open source community. Judging by the way they structured their "open source" (to use the term veeeerrryy loosely) initiative, they seem to think that open source means "will do what we tell them for free", proving that they still don't get it.
Slashdot Mirror
Unless I missed something in biology, I'm pretty sure children will never be the end result of sodomy no matter how many hands you choose to sodomize with.
Manual stimulation is non-reproductive, but I've heard that the more, ahem, "traditional" form of sodomy can actually lead to pregnancy.
...) ;)
After all, where do you think lawyers come from? (rimshot
(With apologies to NewYorkCountryLawyer)
Yes, and your right to talk should end where my ears begin.
My talking doesn't inflict cancer or heart disease on others, or aggravate conditions like asthma, like secondhand smoke does. Talking doesn't cause others to smell like shit, like secondhand smoke does. Generally speaking, smokers should keep their habit to themselves, unless in the company of people who don't mind it. Covering others with the waste product of your habit is rude. That's the reason beer drinkers don't usually pee all over you.
I don't think any one form of digital storage will be adequately durable. Caring for these digital files will be an ongoing effort, not a once-and-done distribution of media.
I would store the digital archives in multiple locations (at least 3). Each location should have a disk farm with ZFS, so bit rot could be detected and fixed. Periodically (cron job, whatever) copy each file to a different volume, check for errors against the parent and parent's offsite siblings, then erase parent file. Tape backups should exist for disaster recovery purposes, and should also be refreshed from time to time. The hardware and software for the project will need updating from time to time. As hardware improves, I would expect costs to drop, but there will be a cost to maintain it. Power, people, real estate, replacement equipment, etc.
Medical institutions have to back up huge amounts of data for a long period of time (CAT scans, MRIs, etc), and people here with experience in medical IT might be able to enlighten you about planning for long-term storage of digital files.
How big are these files? How many of them are there? How many more are anticipated?
... sung to the tune of the Cookie Monster singing "C is for cookie". As a side note, I'm sure the Cookie Monster would feel ill if he read this.
Ah, I see. The signs were there, I just didn't recognize them. The hostility, the ad hominem attacks, the alleged mountains of empirical evidence for which you don't have a reference, the apparently deliberate misunderstanding of everything I've said, the poor spelling. I should have figured out awhile ago that you are a simple troll.
Goodbye.
The Chinese may have kept them for other reasons and eaten them as needed, much like native Americans. There is a hypothesis that dogs were domesticated shortly after civilization created garbage dumps. The idea goes that with fixed settlements came fixed garbage dumps, which drew in wild animals much like today. Evolution favored those animals less afraid of man, because they were the first ones to scavenge freshly dumped leftovers, and eventually relatively tame wolves were domesticated.
If your math actually worked, 400lbs would be down right common. It isn't.
Dude, I didn't come up with this on my own. It's basic science that has been demonstrated over and over. A (relative) lack of 400-lb people is not proof that the laws of thermodynamics cease to exist inside your body.
... look around you. I see obese people on a regular basis. They are becoming common. Read some statistics on childhood obesity, and realize that we are raising a generation of fat kids.
Furthermore, I outlined an extreme case of a crash weight-gain diet. Most people people that large don't get there in a couple years. They get there over 2 or more decades of bad habits. As far as "common"
... if you don't get enough calories, you starve. Your body stops USING the calories and starts storing them.
I'm not talking about putting your body in starvation mode. I'm talking about taking in way more calories than your body uses.
A body cannot "stop using" calories unless it is dead. It can, however, reduce the number of calories it uses, and it can use them more efficiently. Also, it can start breaking down muscle tissue for fuel instead of fat cells, which I assume is one of the "all sorts of bad things happen" you refer to.
I know of no special tax like this that was not eventually misappropriated to pay for something else, leaving the original need poorly filled. If we tax this stuff, all we are doing is giving the government more money. Hell no.
Medicare and Medicaid are wasteful and fraud-ridden, however I will not deny the good they do, or the need for it to be done.
The problem isn't the government, and there is damn little the government could or should do about it. It's the people. Those who wish to feed that lifestyle will do so regardless of a tax. It may even create a sense of entitlement.
By "what you eat", I am referring to caloric intake. Our bodies are pretty good at squeezing all they can out of the food we take in. What gets shat out is mostly water, stuff we can't readily absorb, plus a lot of bacteria. Perhaps there are those rare few who magically poop out calories they don't need that day. Sounds like a problem, if you ask me.
If your 'simple equation' were even close to accurate, we could all get to 400 pounds easily.
Are you saying that I couldn't? Is there a magic switch in my body that sweats out calories if I go over 200 lbs? I doubt it.
I am reasonably fit and trim, but I know that I gain weight if I eat or drink more than a sensible amount. I know that as I get older, that tendency will increase as my metabolism slows, but the basic principle still applies.
If I decide to eat 1 whopper w/cheese (760 kcal) and 1 medium Coke (200 kcal) per day for a year on top of my normal diet, I would be taking in about an extra 960 kcal per day, and will likely add about 1.5 to 2 pounds of body fat per week. Oh, wait, I forgot the fries. That's an additional 400 kcal per medium serving. At that rate, given my current weight of 185 - 190lbs, I'd probably be at 400 lbs within 2 years, tops. Even if by some peristaltic miracle my digestive tract eliminated half the calories I was taking in, I would only be delayed in getting to 400 by a couple years.
Of course, that's assuming that my metabolism stays the same, and that my muscle mass doesn't change. If I were heavier, perhaps I'd avoid strenuous activity, my muscles would atrophy, and my ability to burn calories would be diminished, accelerating my weight gain.
After we adjust for different metabolic rates, hormonal imbalances, bad genes, how much we poop out and every other variable that we'd like to include, it still comes down to thermodynamics and the conservation of energy. If you do exercise that requires about 3600 kcal of power, you have burned the caloric equivalent of 1 pound of fat. That power came from either a) stuff you just took in, or b) your body breaking itself down to feed its own engines. If you are doing it right, your body breaks down fat instead of muscle.
Conversely, no human can create a pound of fat out of only, say, 1200 kcal food input. People don't get fat just breathing air. It comes from somewhere.
Er, no, I disagree. The Whopper, fries and soda can be worked off in a workout regime that is less than Olympic gold caliber. If enjoyed only occasionally, the impact on overall health of an active person with proper vitamin intake and overall good nutrition is minimal.
My bad.
;)
"Eating the occasional Whopper, fries, and soda probably won't kill you, if you can stay 1 step ahead of the good taste police"
Better?
You're absolutely right that the actual equation is more complex, but the basic truth of it is still perfectly valid.
On a side note, despite the fact that I generally hate so-called "reality" shows, I have found myself hooked on "The Biggest Loser" for the past couple seasons. I like it because a) it actually helps those on the show, b) it offers something worthwhile for those who see it. On the show, they talk about some of the metabolic challenges and apparent paradoxes (for example, you have to eat at least a certain amount to lose weight properly) that my overly simplistic equation left out.
All platforms have vulnerabilities, Linux included. However, history and reputation being what they are, I think Windows is plainly has a poorer track record. It is incumbent upon Windows 7 to prove that it can live up to the hype, and I don't think that hyperbole like "unhackable" is going to help them any. See my first sentence.
I'm not just bashing MS; Apple thought it had a secure iPhone, and yet their device kept getting hacked repeatedly, even after they pushed out multiple firmware updates to lock the thing down.
Motivation, imagination, time. The three ingredients that guarantee the eventual obsolescence of a new security measure. All three exist in abundance. All that is required is to concentrate them together sufficiently. As others have said,tis article is doing just that.
[rant]
The problem isn't the market, or even necessarily the food. The problem is that there are a lot of people who shove more in their mouths than they should. I can't believe that such a simple equation like "what you eat, minus what you burn, is what you wear on your ass and thighs" doesn't make sense to people. More likely, it makes sense, but they still can't or won't force themselves to change.
To whom is may concern, a few words of wisdom:
"You are what you eat" - The government shouldn't have to tell you what you can and can't eat any more than it should have to wipe your ass for you. Grow a brain stem and stop ruining things for those of who manage to eat right, but still enjoy the occasional culinary sin. Which brings me to my next point:
"All things in moderation" - There is nothing wrong with having a Whopper, fries, and soda. There is everything wrong with doing it often. Oh, and moderation applies to sitting on your ass, too. Get out there and walk some.
And finally: "Monkey see, monkey do" - Parents, exercise some judgment and self-control. If not for your own health, for your kids. Teach your kids to live with some healthy discipline in their lives. Get some exercise in with them. Kill the TV every now and then. Keep the McD's to a minimum, and make them drink juice, milk, and water at home. It's not that hard, trust me. If a numskull like myself can do a halfway decent job at it, so can you.
[/rant]
None of this is new. We all know it because it's common sense, and it's been said over and over. It's bad enough some people can't do their own thinking. It gets worse when the government believes that gives them the duty to think for all of us.
XKCD
A little known fact is that before modern fires were invented, cavemen used to burn themselves for warmth in a proprietary process, and were obliged to pay for licenses to do so. Eventually, the first open-source movement found a way to burn non-sentient organic matter, and released that technology into the public domain. After that, the user base of the proprietary caveman-burning technology eventually (but predictably) died out, and history gave us what we consider to be "conventional" campfires.
There was also an interesting story about the open-source "wheel" eventually winning out over the expensive and proprietary "square rock".
... that analogies (even the infamous slashdot car analogies) have a breaking point, past which they snap back in your face. And I'm about to make it worse, most likely.
... wait, what was the question again?
"Unlimited broadband" doesn't mean you can have a car of gigantic or unlimited size, which would be like unlimited bandwidth. Instead, picture a large car on a highway with an extremely high speed limit. You can saturate your allotted bandwidth (fill your somewhat large car to capacity) and drive the length of that highway repeatedly at top speed as many times as you like between 8pm & 8am. No gas required. The cars run on electricity piped through or near the roads themselves, like a street trolley.
No, that one isn't exactly right either.
Wait, I've got it, here's another. Imagine that instead of one huge car, you had lots and lots of little cars, each of which could only carry a tiny amount of cargo, perhaps only a gram or so in mass (a "datagram", if you like). Or, since you "pack" data into the little car, we could call the car a "pack". Except that as I said, we can only put a tiny amount of data in each "pack", so perhaps we'd better add the French suffix for small, and refer to it as a "packette", or a "packet" for those who prefer the anglicized spelling. Your broadband connection is like a highway that would allow you to send a vast number of cars ("packets" or "datagrams") out, and receive an even larger number in (since they are disposable cars, they would be destroyed after the gram of data was removed). Since the cars would be too small to hold an intelligent driver, and since the highway has lots of on and off ramps and construction detours, the route the car would follow would have to be controlled by a system of semi-intelligent guides. Since their job is to help the cars follow the right route, we could call these guides "routers". The access to this highway can either be Limited or Unlimited. "Unlimited" means that the "routers" allow you to send and receive as many little cars as you can fit on the road, given the road's insanely high speed limit. "Limited" means that aggregate total of cars you can drive across it in a given period of time is arbitrarily set lower than the highway's total capacity for cars.
So ultimately
Healthy old folks are directly beneficial to social groups.
You bet. They keep all the kids off my lawn.
"subscriptions and episodic and downloadable content" already drive the cost (to the consumer) of games to $70-$80. My kid gets an XBOX game for $60. Plays it. Finishes it. Pays $5 -$10 for points to download an add-on pack, or 2 or 3 or more, and next thing you know, he has invested $70 - $80 in the game. I already assume when he buys ODST, it will cost $80 before it's all said and done, and to me, that's the real cost of the game.
I think they have to keep the initial price at $60 for now because that's the point above which more consumers would say "screw it, I'll get something else". I'm pretty sure downloadable content will soon be (if it isn't already) about the only way game makers profit.
I fail to see how this is a troll. Any thoughts?
And according to the article above this one on the /. front page, open source software has fewer bugs (and hence one would suppose it is more secure) than ever. This looks like a classic case of a for-profit company with little to offer their customers over their open-source competition, so they resort to FUD. Does "Linux is a cancer" ring a bell for anyone?
What's most interesting about the lawsuit is a single disclosure early in the lawsuit complaint. Not only does Skype not own the core P2P technology underlying the service, but they don't even have access to the source code (emphasis added):
A source code version of the GI Software is licenced by Joltid to Joost, allowing Joost to be the first company to successfully deliver television and other video content in real-time over a peer-to-peer network. An executable-only object code form of the GI Software was licensed by Loltid to Skype, a well-known Internet-based company that provides users throughout the world wiht free or low-cost telephone services over the Internet. Skype did not obtain a license to the GI Software source code, however, and the license it did obtain was terminated based on SKype's breaches of the license agreement.
I don't know enough of either suit to definitively make heads or tails out of it, but it appears that the code Skype is suing eBay over may not even be theirs to begin with.
I'm not completely sold on #3 and #4, but the first two are pure genius.
If his sentence removes him from the dating pool long enough, he may end up a virtual Darwin winner.
Since when is the Apple app store about open source? It's not, therefore it's irrelevant. The "crime" here isn't that authoritarian software vendors exist. Apple has zero to do with this, except your desire to bash people. Bash all you want, I really don't care, but at least try to have a logical basis for your attack, or else you look frikkin' stupid.
... remember that?), a true blue, died-in-the-wool authoritarian software vendor is posing as a "look-at-me-I'm-hip-now" open source software vendor, likely while trying to find yet another way to screw the real open source community. Judging by the way they structured their "open source" (to use the term veeeerrryy loosely) initiative, they seem to think that open source means "will do what we tell them for free", proving that they still don't get it.
The "crime", if you want to call it that, is that after years of scuzzball tactics, FUD, lawsuits, smears, and namecalling ("linux is a cancer"