As an FBI informant he probably also possessed immunity, either by acting as an agent of the state, or by becoming an informant as part of a plea agreement in lieu of criminal charges.
What really ticks me off is when the feds effectively punish marriages by lumping couples together into a single household and penalize them by presuming that two people enjoying economies of scale should be handicapped out of fairness for single people.
Keeping a customer happy often depends on making maintainable software, which indirectly impacts the complexity issue.
You can be a neatness zealot, or a hairy coder, but at the end of the day, if you (or your co-workers) cannot maintain the codebase the way the customer wants it, you're shooting yourself in the foot if you make it hard for yourself.
I blame unscrupulous companies trying to use patents to undermine the goals of open source.
And by the way, you completely misread the GPL.
The GPL says NOTHING about kicking changes back upstream. It only says you have to punt your source code downstream to your users.
It's to protect your users from getting locked out by proprietary software keeping the source code under wraps so that they can't change it. It says nothing about forcing you to let upstream freeload off of your work.
The difference between the GPL and BSD in that regard is that the GPL prevents you from locking your own changes down on YOUR users. There is no difference between them as far as your relations with your upstream goes.
As far as people making unacceptable changes, the GPL requires you to put notices on anything you change so that you don't get blamed for their bugs.
The notion that the government will not molest the biggest collector of marketing data is insane.
What I'd like to know is if Google could expect to say "no" and not suffer for it.
Why I even heard that the FTC was nudged into going after Google for antitrust issues even though there were other companies that were at least twice as bad.
Strangely, at the time, Google was also one of the most uncooperative companies with the government.
I wonder if Mt. Gox having their bank accounts seized by the feds has anything to do with it.
That's the thing about asset forfeiture. If the feds drop a nuke on you, anyone you owe money to gets shafted by the fallout even if they're completely innocent.
I wouldn't be surprised if they're really using the hacking as an excuse to go after him when it was actually TPB that pissed them off but wasn't popular enough to use as the official reason.
Slashdot Mirror
"treason" is whatever the PTB say it is.
Looking at how often they get away with revenge for people that piss them off, you really shouldn't be surprised.
Get out of jail free cards have a bit of a black market value because in a civilized society you wouldn't even need them as often to begin with.
As an FBI informant he probably also possessed immunity, either by acting as an agent of the state, or by becoming an informant as part of a plea agreement in lieu of criminal charges.
Hear hear.
What really ticks me off is when the feds effectively punish marriages by lumping couples together into a single household and penalize them by presuming that two people enjoying economies of scale should be handicapped out of fairness for single people.
"married filing separately" deprives you of the EIC and a few other tax credits and deductions IIRC.
If you try to file as single to avoid those penalties, you get tossed in PMITA for tax fraud.
And that's also precisely why they won't.
Anything that falls under "shit they SHOULD do" also usually falls under "stuff that will piss off special interests"
I both have said and not said many things, but you will never know which is which unless you listen.
Keeping a customer happy often depends on making maintainable software, which indirectly impacts the complexity issue.
You can be a neatness zealot, or a hairy coder, but at the end of the day, if you (or your co-workers) cannot maintain the codebase the way the customer wants it, you're shooting yourself in the foot if you make it hard for yourself.
Said "walling off" of course being done by entrenched special interests threatening to take their ball and go home.
DRM is not in the best interests of the web, only the greedy content producers threatening a boycott if they don't get their way.
The whole thing about source code for proprietary products is a load of bupkis when it comes to patents.
Patents are about what your code actually does, and not what its source code looks like.
Closed sourcing something doesn't protect it from infringing patents.
All it really does is make it harder for you to get caught.
This, truly, is one reason why companies fear open source. They're afraid of getting their hands caught in someone else's cookie jar.
I don't blame the GPL.
I blame unscrupulous companies trying to use patents to undermine the goals of open source.
And by the way, you completely misread the GPL.
The GPL says NOTHING about kicking changes back upstream. It only says you have to punt your source code downstream to your users.
It's to protect your users from getting locked out by proprietary software keeping the source code under wraps so that they can't change it. It says nothing about forcing you to let upstream freeload off of your work.
The difference between the GPL and BSD in that regard is that the GPL prevents you from locking your own changes down on YOUR users. There is no difference between them as far as your relations with your upstream goes.
As far as people making unacceptable changes, the GPL requires you to put notices on anything you change so that you don't get blamed for their bugs.
Stop spreading FUD.
Indeed, I'm assuming that's why you hired him instead of doing it yourself.
Complete with a free lawsuit!
Sadly there are some companies that WOULD sue over that.
That won't work.
There are plenty of high powered sociopaths that actually have a need for other people to suffer or be subjugated.
And there's also greed and jealousy.
You can't make everyone happy at the same time if one of your needs is relative superiority.
I agree.
Not only did you miss the reference, but you misquoted the figure entirely. Nobody told you that you were allowed to round.
The notion that the government will not molest the biggest collector of marketing data is insane.
What I'd like to know is if Google could expect to say "no" and not suffer for it.
Why I even heard that the FTC was nudged into going after Google for antitrust issues even though there were other companies that were at least twice as bad.
Strangely, at the time, Google was also one of the most uncooperative companies with the government.
"early retirement of plants to extract concessions" -- leverage and coercion right there.
I wonder if Mt. Gox having their bank accounts seized by the feds has anything to do with it.
That's the thing about asset forfeiture. If the feds drop a nuke on you, anyone you owe money to gets shafted by the fallout even if they're completely innocent.
More like his TPB stuff made them throw the book at him harder for the hacking than they would have otherwise.
Not officially.
I wouldn't be surprised if they're really using the hacking as an excuse to go after him when it was actually TPB that pissed them off but wasn't popular enough to use as the official reason.
If outsiders contributed to it they are no longer the sole copyright owners.
Are these GMO bananas?
somehow I read that as "uranus" instead of "urbanus"
Finally, a good reason to stick with IPv4.