There's nothing wrong with people rocking the boat. That's the claim politicians make to get elected, and it's what they try for to get reelected.
What scares the government is when someone tries to capsize the boat. If your anti-religion rants are a means to radicalize people against a supposedly-religious government in an effort to spark a civil war, then yes, the FBI should be watching. That's a large part of its job.
I've been involved with a particular group of people who like to build rather energetic exothermic chemical devices, and set them off (legally and safely). We had the FBI come out and watch us for a while, and a few folks had some probing questions, but they've left us alone ever since it was clear that we're a bunch of nerds with no political ambitions whatsoever.
The reason we don't want to make another nation look like a petulant child is that it wouldn't help us at all. We want to trade with them. We get an economic boon from the trade as well, but insulting/embarrassing other nations will either accomplish nothing or, as you've noted, give them an opportunity to do the same to us. The only way we come out ahead is if we play the game so everyone wins.
America might think they're good reasons, but another party might disagree. Politics is far more complicated than "we like these guys now".
There was a time when China (the communist mainland) wouldn't deal with any organization that recognized the government of China (the government in exile on Taiwan). If they had to interact with such organizations, the PRC would make sure they got a better deal than the ROC did.
Your simple solution doesn't work so well in the real world.
Actually, I very intentionally did not refer to any particular country. Frankly, I'm not a fan of courtesy, period. I'd much prefer honest communication between all parties in discussions, with everyone being mature enough to ignore offenses until it's their turn to voice concerns, and everyone being mature enough to make sure everyone gets their turn.
This is politics, though. Maturity is seldom a politician's strongest trait. In that case, courtesy is often a good-enough mechanism to keep the system moving.
You shouldn't have to pay it, because the stolen card was used fraudulently.
If you give me blanket permission to use your card, and I use it for medical expenses, you may not (under HIPAA) have the legal right to ask what those charges are, but you still authorized use of your credit, so you are required to pay.
In a case like this, an itemized bill is a bit of a muddy subject. A clear bill should be itemized, but the risk of information leaks is pretty high, so using codes is considered a reasonable attempt to stop casual observers from knowing anything about the patient's treatment.
I was speaking generally, but yes, that's wrong. A few months, I could understand, as a courtesy to the less-transparent governments in the group... but years irritates me.
Not quite. According to HIPAA, third parties are anyone other than the patient or the doctor currently treating the patient. A husband may not want his wife to know about his vasectomy. A teenage girl may not want her parents to know about her abortion. A patient may not want their old doctor to know about the second opinion he got while perparing his malpractice lawsuit.
Sure, the third parties can get the information through fraudulent means, but it must not be handed directly to them if they aren't trying to find it.
The final laws aren't secret, but during some parts of the lawmaking process, their details may be kept secret, for exactly the reason in TFS. People tend to react poorly when they think they're being offended, regardless of whether the offensive terms ever make it into a final version of the bill. It could be Vietnam being offended that they're not America's best friend like Japan, or it could be that the initial drafts of a particular law could be read to discriminate against a particular group, before that group's representative gets a chance to weigh in.
In either case, the result is often the same. The offended people get to complain, everybody gets mad, the bill is changed much the same as it would be without the outrage, and life goes on, only with a bit more resentment for the media-fueled mud-slinging.
"digital native" means someone that expects technology to "just work"...
...and considers it unacceptable when a system requires tinkering.
On a recent trip through the IKEA labyrinth, I noticed a few RGB LED strips. They have a controller that lets you pick any color for the lights. The tinkerer in me thinks that's great, but the practical user wonders why I'd ever change it from my favorite. I'd rather have two separate controllers to suit the two ideals.
For a development team, that translates into two very different design paradigms. On the tinkerer side, the end product is much like Linux - very configurable, open, and able to do anything the user wants. A "digital native", on the other hand, would design a product more like OS X, where all of the functionality is configured from the start as the designers want it, with more emphasis on immediate usability right out of the box.
I think the philosophical differences are valid hiring criteria. If I'm building an application that needs configurability, I don't want a developer that thinks his preference will be suitable for everyone else. If I'm building an application that I expect my mother to use, I don't want a developer who thinks every aspect of the system is within the user's domain.
However, I'm quite certain it's possible to get both approaches from developers of any age. Stereotyping a particular demographic as having a particular attitude is just as discriminatory as any other criterion.
I cannot do the equivalent and just move to live in a slaved up country so that I have a maid etc.
Why not?
Visa workers come here, work long isolated hours for 5 years, and then retire back home as a rich person because their cost of living is so much lower. They have options I don't.
Really, there's very little preventing you from amassing your fortune here in America, then moving to a developing country where you can buy a mansion, staff, and decent security (which you will likely want) for a few thousand dollars a year. For a few thousand more dollars, you can buy yourself the favor of the local population, by honoring the local leadership, building infrastructure, and/or investing in local businesses. Be a guest at weddings, and offer lavish $20 gifts. Visit the local bars, and make friends with the local folks. Patronize the local artists, and learn and appreciate the local culture. Don't pay your employees substandard wages, don't threaten layoffs, and don't demand absurd hours. Pretty much, become the 1% to the community, and behave how you'd want the 1% to behave here.
You get several years of luxury (depending on your savings, working capabilities, and retirement plans), and the locals working for you get high pay without having to work long isolated hours over here for 5 years. Everybody wins, as long as you're careful not to be detrimental to the local society.
Ah, but you probably don't want to. You probably want to stay near your family and friends, and be with your local culture, and living where a personal security team isn't necessary. It's not that foreign workers have options that you don't... Rather, they are willing to accept options which you won't.
The whole point of free trade is to help equalize the economies of the world. As an American, you see only the drain on your local economy, but as a citizen from a developing country, you would see the influx of money, and the improvement that can (with appropriate guidance) come with it. You can free wage slaves, cover the sewers, etc. As the vehicle for the money transfer, you have the opportunity (and in some folks' opinions, the duty) to decide how the money is directed. If you personally benefit, especially in terms of luxury or prestige, then that's the return for your time, isolation, and management work.
Guess where all the material that built giant limestone (high pH) cliffs precipitated out of?
I'm certainly not a geologist, and no, I'm not going to do particularly much research, but I'm going to go mostly with what I found at Wikipedia: It "precipitated" (if you insist on that term) from the crushed skeletal remains of coral and other prehistoric marine life, since calcium carbonate doesn't dissolve very well in neutral or alkaline water.
I believe you're looking for a biological process, not a simple chemical one.
...just radio "on the Internet", with the logical efficiencies that unicast delivery can provide.
...as much bullshit as every one of the patents that demanded rent for some existing thing and then added "on the Internet" on the end.
What, exactly, are these "logical efficiencies" that can be applied to "just radio" ?
Can I tune my old car radio to it? I have some of those nice pop-out buttons for the 8-track, AM, FM... is there now a button labeled "IP"? No? Do I perhaps need some other device, like an FM transmitter on my cell phone? I suppose we should consider the cell phone, towers, multiplexers, phone OS, and various interfaces as well... those certainly aren't simple enough to be ignored. On the "just radio" side, there are the stream generators, broadcast gateways, relays, and support infrastructure in place, all of which is wildly different from putting, for example, a simple website "on the Internet".
Some engineer had to figure this all out, and test it, debug it, update it, and otherwise ensure that the system actually works well enough to put on the market. At one point, that engineer was me. I used to work for a traditional radio station as the "Internet Guy" on the engineering team. Since this was back before Internet-based radio was a popular thing, I only pushed a single stream to about five or six listeners, but that was also just about all our budget could handle, thanks to the limitations of the traditional licensing model.
See, the way our station was licensed, we were charged by the size of our listening area. A certain number of people could possibly be listening to our broadcast, so we paid licensing fees for them. If we apply that model to our Internet streaming, our half-dozen listeners would have been counted as a few million, and the licensing fees would have exploded similarly, easily consuming our budget for the Internet experiment.
I know it's easy to simply say "on the Internet", and assume that the engineering will fall into place, but the reality is that putting something online and making it work is often rather difficult, and that affects the balance of effort put forth. It is ridiculous to think, then, that the same licensing model should apply when the underlying technology is so different.
Let's not forget that this is a typical Slashdot hivemind-feeding story... Everything in TFS apparently comes from testimony (which may or may not be accurate, and may or may not be accepted as a fact by the court), and let's also not forget that even lacking a search warrant, officers are allowed to do a sweep of the area to ensure their safety.
Even if we accept that the accused officers did violate their suspect's rights, and they did search excessively without a warrant, and they did threaten him, they've been indicted for it. They got caught being bad cops, by other cops, and now they get to go through the whole justice process from the other side. The system isn't perfect, but it's not beyond hope.
I think I still got a version on a stick somewhere
You just gave them enough for a search warrant.
don't ask me just where in my mess that stick is... but you have a warrant
Now you've admitted to concealing evidence, and you've acknowledged the warrant.
Granted, these are all slight stretches and distortions of what you actually intended to say, but they're all things to be argued in court. I'm usually one to give the police the benefit of the doubt, but if you're involved in anything where they're looking for passwords (or any other situation where you're not free to walk away at any moment), you need a lawyer and a closed mouth.
What you fail to understand about the legal system is that written law doesn't really matter. Precedent doesn't really matter, and your precious perfect logic doesn't matter.
The only thing that matters is what a judge thinks (or can be assumed to think, without contest) about a particular situation at a particular time. Everything else serves only to influence how the judge decides. Legal precedent gives the judge a background of similar decisions to compare against, written laws provide a basis for how legislators (and by representation, the society at large) think the decision should go, and logic (as presented by the lawyers in the court) is simply a means to convince the judge which of the conflicting opinions really best fits the situation.
For this particular case, the judge has decided that it's reasonable to consider the chimpanzees to be legally-recognized entities, because that allows for the most reasonable context in which to consider the remainder of the case. Issues like marriage, taxation, and voting rights are all matters for another case, to be decided if or when such a dispute reaches a court. Having a legal decision "in a vacuum" is not actually a problem.
Four comments in, and this discussion is effectively over.
Yes, random mutations happen randomly. Sometimes they happen in hospitals using antibiotics, but usually they happen anywhere else. Sometimes, those mutations happen to survive long enough to become widespread through a population. Sometimes that population is isolated, and the mutation becomes common. Sometimes a particular antibiotic (natural or synthesized) affects the balance of variants in the population.
Very rarely, we humans have suitable circumstances to actually notice.
Despite the common misconception, there is actually no general legal requirement that corporations must act to the benefit of their shareholders. Rather, United States law holds only that the company act according to its charter, which may actually have practically any terms the founders see fit. There may be no terms, permitting executives to have free reign over the company, or there may be very restrictive terms detailing precisely how the corporation is to be run, which is particularly useful for incorporated charities.
With that out of the way, why should there be any question about giving away anything for free? I can't recall any large company whose marketing department didn't get a wide variety of samples or freebies to promote the brand. For anything with an engineering department, the offer to make an expensive system work with other expensive systems has been a common sales tactic. These ideas are not new or questionable at all.
Also falling into the "not new" category is Microsoft's ongoing strategy. For the last two decades, Microsoft's primary business model has been to attach their products to existing business dependencies, encourage their use (forming new dependencies), then drop support for the original dependencies in favor of their own new products, leaving their own product as the only upgrade path for a now-locked-in customer.
For several years, Microsoft has clung to a few bad decisions (most notably ignoring the Internet until it was too late, then ignoring the business need for easy provisioning), leaving room for open-source solutions to grow. Having now completed their compatibility phase, Microsoft moves on to encouraging their products' use. A low initial price tag helps that effort.
Reading through TFA, the justification seems to be that Microsoft contributes to a large number of open-source projects:
...made it easier for Linux, Java, and other developers to use Azure...
...helped bring Microsoft’s services and APIs to iOS and Android...
...brought Office 365 to the Moodle learning platform...
...collaborating with the industry on standards for HTML5, HTTP/2, and WebRTC/ORTC...
In other words, Microsoft is still Microsoft. They've firmly established the "extend" part of their usual strategy, and now it's time to start slowly dropping support for those old, outdated open technologies in favor of the newest crap spewing forth from Redmond.
If I contribute to an open source project which forms part of the infrastructure for cancer research... do I get tax-exempt status..
If you can convince the government that your open-source project should fall into the 501(c)(3) category (which will involve a good deal of paperwork on your project's behalf), then yes.
What if that work were also part of my day job?
I'm not sure. Ask a lawyer and/or tax professional.
My opinion was always that Wikipedia should be treated as a single interview with an expert in a field. It is generally accurate, but almost certainly wrong on a few details, that other unrelated sources should be used to verify.
From that perspective, it's certainly a good starting point for learning about the "unknown unknowns" in a field, and getting a path for further study. It might even be suitable as the main source for a select few kinds of research.
You say "privilege", but the usual word is "freedom".
I am free to choose to support my local homeless shelters more than my local roads, rather than entirely accepting the distribution that my elected representatives have chosen.
It's still not a unilateral election, because to qualify as a "charity", organizations must jump through several bureaucratic hoops to get approval, effectively giving the government a means of control over what's a society-supporting charity or not.
Slashdot Mirror
There's nothing wrong with people rocking the boat. That's the claim politicians make to get elected, and it's what they try for to get reelected.
What scares the government is when someone tries to capsize the boat. If your anti-religion rants are a means to radicalize people against a supposedly-religious government in an effort to spark a civil war, then yes, the FBI should be watching. That's a large part of its job.
I've been involved with a particular group of people who like to build rather energetic exothermic chemical devices, and set them off (legally and safely). We had the FBI come out and watch us for a while, and a few folks had some probing questions, but they've left us alone ever since it was clear that we're a bunch of nerds with no political ambitions whatsoever.
The reason we don't want to make another nation look like a petulant child is that it wouldn't help us at all. We want to trade with them. We get an economic boon from the trade as well, but insulting/embarrassing other nations will either accomplish nothing or, as you've noted, give them an opportunity to do the same to us. The only way we come out ahead is if we play the game so everyone wins.
America might think they're good reasons, but another party might disagree. Politics is far more complicated than "we like these guys now".
There was a time when China (the communist mainland) wouldn't deal with any organization that recognized the government of China (the government in exile on Taiwan). If they had to interact with such organizations, the PRC would make sure they got a better deal than the ROC did.
Your simple solution doesn't work so well in the real world.
Actually, I very intentionally did not refer to any particular country. Frankly, I'm not a fan of courtesy, period. I'd much prefer honest communication between all parties in discussions, with everyone being mature enough to ignore offenses until it's their turn to voice concerns, and everyone being mature enough to make sure everyone gets their turn.
This is politics, though. Maturity is seldom a politician's strongest trait. In that case, courtesy is often a good-enough mechanism to keep the system moving.
You shouldn't have to pay it, because the stolen card was used fraudulently.
If you give me blanket permission to use your card, and I use it for medical expenses, you may not (under HIPAA) have the legal right to ask what those charges are, but you still authorized use of your credit, so you are required to pay.
In a case like this, an itemized bill is a bit of a muddy subject. A clear bill should be itemized, but the risk of information leaks is pretty high, so using codes is considered a reasonable attempt to stop casual observers from knowing anything about the patient's treatment.
I was speaking generally, but yes, that's wrong. A few months, I could understand, as a courtesy to the less-transparent governments in the group... but years irritates me.
It's not just percentages. We could be waiving whole conditions for particular countries, or requiring extra terms for others.
Not quite. According to HIPAA, third parties are anyone other than the patient or the doctor currently treating the patient. A husband may not want his wife to know about his vasectomy. A teenage girl may not want her parents to know about her abortion. A patient may not want their old doctor to know about the second opinion he got while perparing his malpractice lawsuit.
Sure, the third parties can get the information through fraudulent means, but it must not be handed directly to them if they aren't trying to find it.
The final laws aren't secret, but during some parts of the lawmaking process, their details may be kept secret, for exactly the reason in TFS. People tend to react poorly when they think they're being offended, regardless of whether the offensive terms ever make it into a final version of the bill. It could be Vietnam being offended that they're not America's best friend like Japan, or it could be that the initial drafts of a particular law could be read to discriminate against a particular group, before that group's representative gets a chance to weigh in.
In either case, the result is often the same. The offended people get to complain, everybody gets mad, the bill is changed much the same as it would be without the outrage, and life goes on, only with a bit more resentment for the media-fueled mud-slinging.
It's not a rollover bug; It's a rollover feature!
And similarly, it doesn't stop the anti-fracking protesters from launching the usual counter-attacks.
I guess the logic goes that the fracking folks are evil, and since they're complaining about the report, it must be good. Enemy of my enemy, right?
That's precisely the problem.
"digital native" means someone that expects technology to "just work"...
...and considers it unacceptable when a system requires tinkering.
On a recent trip through the IKEA labyrinth, I noticed a few RGB LED strips. They have a controller that lets you pick any color for the lights. The tinkerer in me thinks that's great, but the practical user wonders why I'd ever change it from my favorite. I'd rather have two separate controllers to suit the two ideals.
For a development team, that translates into two very different design paradigms. On the tinkerer side, the end product is much like Linux - very configurable, open, and able to do anything the user wants. A "digital native", on the other hand, would design a product more like OS X, where all of the functionality is configured from the start as the designers want it, with more emphasis on immediate usability right out of the box.
I think the philosophical differences are valid hiring criteria. If I'm building an application that needs configurability, I don't want a developer that thinks his preference will be suitable for everyone else. If I'm building an application that I expect my mother to use, I don't want a developer who thinks every aspect of the system is within the user's domain.
However, I'm quite certain it's possible to get both approaches from developers of any age. Stereotyping a particular demographic as having a particular attitude is just as discriminatory as any other criterion.
I cannot do the equivalent and just move to live in a slaved up country so that I have a maid etc.
Why not?
Visa workers come here, work long isolated hours for 5 years, and then retire back home as a rich person because their cost of living is so much lower. They have options I don't.
Really, there's very little preventing you from amassing your fortune here in America, then moving to a developing country where you can buy a mansion, staff, and decent security (which you will likely want) for a few thousand dollars a year. For a few thousand more dollars, you can buy yourself the favor of the local population, by honoring the local leadership, building infrastructure, and/or investing in local businesses. Be a guest at weddings, and offer lavish $20 gifts. Visit the local bars, and make friends with the local folks. Patronize the local artists, and learn and appreciate the local culture. Don't pay your employees substandard wages, don't threaten layoffs, and don't demand absurd hours. Pretty much, become the 1% to the community, and behave how you'd want the 1% to behave here.
You get several years of luxury (depending on your savings, working capabilities, and retirement plans), and the locals working for you get high pay without having to work long isolated hours over here for 5 years. Everybody wins, as long as you're careful not to be detrimental to the local society.
Ah, but you probably don't want to. You probably want to stay near your family and friends, and be with your local culture, and living where a personal security team isn't necessary. It's not that foreign workers have options that you don't... Rather, they are willing to accept options which you won't.
The whole point of free trade is to help equalize the economies of the world. As an American, you see only the drain on your local economy, but as a citizen from a developing country, you would see the influx of money, and the improvement that can (with appropriate guidance) come with it. You can free wage slaves, cover the sewers, etc. As the vehicle for the money transfer, you have the opportunity (and in some folks' opinions, the duty) to decide how the money is directed. If you personally benefit, especially in terms of luxury or prestige, then that's the return for your time, isolation, and management work.
Guess where all the material that built giant limestone (high pH) cliffs precipitated out of?
I'm certainly not a geologist, and no, I'm not going to do particularly much research, but I'm going to go mostly with what I found at Wikipedia: It "precipitated" (if you insist on that term) from the crushed skeletal remains of coral and other prehistoric marine life, since calcium carbonate doesn't dissolve very well in neutral or alkaline water.
I believe you're looking for a biological process, not a simple chemical one.
Or executives, or pirates, or anyone with a "clever" idea...
Pretty much, it's the natural state of humans to believe themselves to be better than everyone else.
...just radio "on the Internet", with the logical efficiencies that unicast delivery can provide.
...as much bullshit as every one of the patents that demanded rent for some existing thing and then added "on the Internet" on the end.
What, exactly, are these "logical efficiencies" that can be applied to "just radio" ?
Can I tune my old car radio to it? I have some of those nice pop-out buttons for the 8-track, AM, FM... is there now a button labeled "IP"? No? Do I perhaps need some other device, like an FM transmitter on my cell phone? I suppose we should consider the cell phone, towers, multiplexers, phone OS, and various interfaces as well... those certainly aren't simple enough to be ignored. On the "just radio" side, there are the stream generators, broadcast gateways, relays, and support infrastructure in place, all of which is wildly different from putting, for example, a simple website "on the Internet".
Some engineer had to figure this all out, and test it, debug it, update it, and otherwise ensure that the system actually works well enough to put on the market. At one point, that engineer was me. I used to work for a traditional radio station as the "Internet Guy" on the engineering team. Since this was back before Internet-based radio was a popular thing, I only pushed a single stream to about five or six listeners, but that was also just about all our budget could handle, thanks to the limitations of the traditional licensing model.
See, the way our station was licensed, we were charged by the size of our listening area. A certain number of people could possibly be listening to our broadcast, so we paid licensing fees for them. If we apply that model to our Internet streaming, our half-dozen listeners would have been counted as a few million, and the licensing fees would have exploded similarly, easily consuming our budget for the Internet experiment.
I know it's easy to simply say "on the Internet", and assume that the engineering will fall into place, but the reality is that putting something online and making it work is often rather difficult, and that affects the balance of effort put forth. It is ridiculous to think, then, that the same licensing model should apply when the underlying technology is so different.
Let's not forget that this is a typical Slashdot hivemind-feeding story... Everything in TFS apparently comes from testimony (which may or may not be accurate, and may or may not be accepted as a fact by the court), and let's also not forget that even lacking a search warrant, officers are allowed to do a sweep of the area to ensure their safety.
Even if we accept that the accused officers did violate their suspect's rights, and they did search excessively without a warrant, and they did threaten him, they've been indicted for it. They got caught being bad cops, by other cops, and now they get to go through the whole justice process from the other side. The system isn't perfect, but it's not beyond hope.
I tried it a while ago
You just admitted to using TrueCrypt.
I think I still got a version on a stick somewhere
You just gave them enough for a search warrant.
don't ask me just where in my mess that stick is ... but you have a warrant
Now you've admitted to concealing evidence, and you've acknowledged the warrant.
Granted, these are all slight stretches and distortions of what you actually intended to say, but they're all things to be argued in court. I'm usually one to give the police the benefit of the doubt, but if you're involved in anything where they're looking for passwords (or any other situation where you're not free to walk away at any moment), you need a lawyer and a closed mouth.
What you fail to understand about the legal system is that written law doesn't really matter. Precedent doesn't really matter, and your precious perfect logic doesn't matter.
The only thing that matters is what a judge thinks (or can be assumed to think, without contest) about a particular situation at a particular time. Everything else serves only to influence how the judge decides. Legal precedent gives the judge a background of similar decisions to compare against, written laws provide a basis for how legislators (and by representation, the society at large) think the decision should go, and logic (as presented by the lawyers in the court) is simply a means to convince the judge which of the conflicting opinions really best fits the situation.
For this particular case, the judge has decided that it's reasonable to consider the chimpanzees to be legally-recognized entities, because that allows for the most reasonable context in which to consider the remainder of the case. Issues like marriage, taxation, and voting rights are all matters for another case, to be decided if or when such a dispute reaches a court. Having a legal decision "in a vacuum" is not actually a problem.
Four comments in, and this discussion is effectively over.
Yes, random mutations happen randomly. Sometimes they happen in hospitals using antibiotics, but usually they happen anywhere else. Sometimes, those mutations happen to survive long enough to become widespread through a population. Sometimes that population is isolated, and the mutation becomes common. Sometimes a particular antibiotic (natural or synthesized) affects the balance of variants in the population.
Very rarely, we humans have suitable circumstances to actually notice.
Despite the common misconception, there is actually no general legal requirement that corporations must act to the benefit of their shareholders. Rather, United States law holds only that the company act according to its charter, which may actually have practically any terms the founders see fit. There may be no terms, permitting executives to have free reign over the company, or there may be very restrictive terms detailing precisely how the corporation is to be run, which is particularly useful for incorporated charities.
With that out of the way, why should there be any question about giving away anything for free? I can't recall any large company whose marketing department didn't get a wide variety of samples or freebies to promote the brand. For anything with an engineering department, the offer to make an expensive system work with other expensive systems has been a common sales tactic. These ideas are not new or questionable at all.
Also falling into the "not new" category is Microsoft's ongoing strategy. For the last two decades, Microsoft's primary business model has been to attach their products to existing business dependencies, encourage their use (forming new dependencies), then drop support for the original dependencies in favor of their own new products, leaving their own product as the only upgrade path for a now-locked-in customer.
For several years, Microsoft has clung to a few bad decisions (most notably ignoring the Internet until it was too late, then ignoring the business need for easy provisioning), leaving room for open-source solutions to grow. Having now completed their compatibility phase, Microsoft moves on to encouraging their products' use. A low initial price tag helps that effort.
Reading through TFA, the justification seems to be that Microsoft contributes to a large number of open-source projects:
...made it easier for Linux, Java, and other developers to use Azure...
...helped bring Microsoft’s services and APIs to iOS and Android...
...brought Office 365 to the Moodle learning platform...
...collaborating with the industry on standards for HTML5, HTTP/2, and WebRTC/ORTC...
In other words, Microsoft is still Microsoft. They've firmly established the "extend" part of their usual strategy, and now it's time to start slowly dropping support for those old, outdated open technologies in favor of the newest crap spewing forth from Redmond.
If I contribute to an open source project which forms part of the infrastructure for cancer research... do I get tax-exempt status..
If you can convince the government that your open-source project should fall into the 501(c)(3) category (which will involve a good deal of paperwork on your project's behalf), then yes.
What if that work were also part of my day job?
I'm not sure. Ask a lawyer and/or tax professional.
My opinion was always that Wikipedia should be treated as a single interview with an expert in a field. It is generally accurate, but almost certainly wrong on a few details, that other unrelated sources should be used to verify.
From that perspective, it's certainly a good starting point for learning about the "unknown unknowns" in a field, and getting a path for further study. It might even be suitable as the main source for a select few kinds of research.
You say "privilege", but the usual word is "freedom".
I am free to choose to support my local homeless shelters more than my local roads, rather than entirely accepting the distribution that my elected representatives have chosen.
It's still not a unilateral election, because to qualify as a "charity", organizations must jump through several bureaucratic hoops to get approval, effectively giving the government a means of control over what's a society-supporting charity or not.