It's plausible. But the explanation came from Microsoft, so trusting it isn't reasonable. (Neither is claiming it's a lie. It *is* plausible.)
This is one case where I have to say "Well, they might be telling the truth", and leave it at that.
Still, blocking the addresses seems like the correct move. Even if the truth has leaked out of Microsoft, there's no telling how long it would take them to fix the problem.
OK, but since I still wouldn't ascribe any trustworthiness to them, I doubt the manager's story. It's not that it's implausible, it's that it's coming from Microsoft.
Put it this way: If Microsoft said the sky was blue, I'd carry a raincoat.
I prefer proportional fonts with serifs...and use tabs for alignment.
N.B.: With many proportional fonts you can't use spaces for alignment, as they are about one pixel wide...(well, actually, less).
OTOH, with a good monospaced font I still find myself preferring tabs for alignment. It allows me to reformat the entire file merely by changing the number of spaces that each tab represents.
But I much prefer a font with serifs, whether mono-spaced or not. It does, however, depend on what I'm writing whether I prefer proportional. If there's a lot of similar stuff on adjacent lines, then perhaps monospaced is better. This is, however, relatively unusual. So I usually prefer proportional. (But I do use a lot of tabs to align adjacent lines...internally as well as externally. I'll frequently use a tab on either side of the "=" to facilitate alignment. When doing so it's important that tab size be somewhere around 3 or 4 spaces, or it starts to look ugly.)
OK. When I say large numbers, I don't actually mean statistically significant numbers, but I do mean that a significant proportion of the people that I've known who have been in a position to have an informed opinion on the topic. I haven't known anyone personally who praised the system without significant reservations.
I think that the very evolution of things like the science blogs, mailing lists, etc. is a decent argument that it's not just the people that I've known with this kind of opinion. The "refereed journals" are an excellent idea...but they've become property of some groups with agendas. Or who want to get as much cash from them as possible. (Not all, but a large proportion of them.) I do feel that some kind of refereeing system is very desireable, but just what kind is possible without creating a "center of power" that someone can capture to push an agenda isn't clear.
Until such a better system evolves, we should do the best we can with unrefereed systems. This is going to mean depending a lot on the opinions of people that we have grounds to trust, and they often won't speak up in a timely manner on topics of interest to us, so we'll need to depend on less reliable bases (basises?) for making our decisions. In this case, they guy has a string of good work behind him. That's a reasonable grounds for considering that it might be true. We don't need to make any choices of action on quick basis anyway, so that suffices. It's interesting, and it has a reasonable probability.
I'll agree that this allows other people to come to decisions that I think are stupid. They could anyway. Some of them will, even if I decide that refereed journals are the one, true, right, and only way to believe. So that makes no difference.
In short, there's no way I'll consider this report too speculative to be posted on Slashdot. That's just silly.
OK. But you can mount and read her files. So get some USB sticks and copy her files over to them. Then reformat the disk.
Yeah, it's a pain, and a lot of work. But it's a way forwards. Then, if the computer has enough power, install ubuntu and INSIDE it a virtual machine into which you install MSWind and any applications that she needs. Don't allow the virtual machine access to the internet.
I'm sure there are other ways forwards, and I don't know all the details, but this should work, though it would be a lot of work to implement.
And in what decade did this occur? I don't follow climate change deniers, so I don't know, but many of the people I'm talking about were decades ago. Most around the 1980's, but some more recent. Since then I've moved and no longer contact people who are likely to have the experience (i.e., people who submit papers for publication, esp. academics). (If you aren't doing research, you won't have the experience.)
Progress is almost never purely good. Usually it's a mixture of good and bad effects, and what a person in one situation will see as good, another, in a different situation, will see as a cost. And the costs and benefits aren't evenly distributed.
So for each "progress" one should evaluate both it's costs and it's benefits from one's own position. There is much "progress" that I have chosen to pass by. E.g., I don't accept SMS messages. This is because (all of): A) it isn't worth my effort B) my carrier charges an unreasonable amount C) I don't know anyone who wants to send me one (that I know of)
I could probably add other items, but that suffices. Probably C is the most important of the reasons. The only entity that I know who has wanted to send me an SMS message is my phone carrier. I should pay them to contact me by a way that I would prefer not to bother with??
OTOH, I occasionally do receive SMS messages, but I presume that they are spam, so I've never even looked at them. (I don't want to open up that cost center.)
I've become allergic to leather (probably to part of the tanning process) in the last couple of decades, so I went to get tennis shoes. What I ended up with was "cross-trainers" at a remarkably high price. I wasn't pleased by how the options had changed, and the new "cross-trainers" don't last any longer than basketball shoes did when I was in high school. Well, this is progress that I couldn't avoid, but given the option I surely would have. I'm sure *somebody* likes the change.
About the Einstein anecdote: It's quite easy to miss noticing an earthquake while you're walking. I've missed Richter 3 and 4 earthquakes that way. Either I found out afterwards, or someone pointed out to me how the overhead wires were still vibrating. It's also easy to miss one while you're driving, unless you're in the middle of a long bridge. Up in a tall building, however, even a minor earthquake can be quite alarming. (I'm not sure that is true of the new skyscrapers with "Active stability", which are supposed to run around on wheels for the duration of the quake.) Ships at sea also are unlikely to notice even a major quake, while ships in port will be affected by even a minor one. Etc.
A better anecdote would be about how Einstein only wore one design of clothes, so that he wouldn't need to waste time thinking about what to wear today. He WAS an excellent concentrator. It was just a bad example.
You might look into the Southern Pine, then. Before people showed up and started "improving" things, the Southern Pine would shed lots of flamable needles that would build up, and cones that wouldn't release their seeds until AFTER being heated in a fire. Then they counted on a fire every few years, which would wipe out the competition.
(Southern hear means the southern US. Places like Georgia.)
P.S. Last I heard the Southern Pine was in trouble, but I haven't followed it. People tend to object to forest fires near where they live.
I didn't understand how they could be surprised that prions evolve, so I checked with the original article. They weren't. They were interested in the rates of evolution and the persistence of strains that were selected against. Quite reasonable.
Even totally inorganic matter evolves, in a rough sense. At it's basis evolution just asserts that those forms which are most suited to an environment tend to persist in that environment. This seems quite hard to challenge. Then it accepts Malthus computations on population, and asks: Given that it's obvious that not all descendants can survive, what does the two laws in combination imply?
N.B.: Darwin didn't know ANYTHING about DNA. Genetics hadn't yet been recognized. (This was after Mendel, but long before he was discovered.) So the basis of evolution clearly CAN'T depend on those facts. Evolution is really quite simple, it's just the working out of the details that is complex. (Just as Boolean logic is quite simple, but it's a long and complex way from Boole to a compiled program written in C.)
You are correct. I *didn't* try very hard. I did a once over pass to select something to investigate more closely. Firebird made the first cut, i.e., I'd heard of it and what I'd heard seemed vaguely appropriate. It failed the second cut (which had only one winner) of being the easiest to figure out how to test. The one that passed that was the one I eventually used.
I don't defend this process as a way of finding the best choice, except in the sense that it minimized the time involved in searching. But the question was "Why isn't FireBird better known?"
P.S.: I am not now and never have been an Interbase user, so referring to Interbase doesn't help me at all. (Yes, I know that some of the Firebird documentation is Interbase documentation. This doesn't help me either in feeling confident that it's current or in knowning what to do. It's also no great hinderance, as I presume that if the Firebird site is pointing to it as documentation, then it's what they are recommending as documentation. But that's the way I counted it during my evaluation.)
P.S.: I didn't need a really powerful DB. One of the choices I considered was Kirbybase. I think I ended up using BerkeleyDB (once from SleepyCat). I was probably using Python at the time (which would mean that the Firebird interface I considered was kinterbase).
Sorry, that doesn't disprove the argument. Oracle could just be very patient.
OTOH, my guesstimate is that Oracle intends to be to databases what Google is to information access...trying to index everything on the planet. (Google's goal seems the more practical, because immutable copies count as equivalents. So, e.g., Bing indexing something doesn't interfere with Google's also indexing it.)
Having watched the judicial process in action... I doubt it. IBM would just buy a few legislators and the judges would find for IBM. Look what one company has been able to accomplish through just hiring the son of Orin Hatch. They also hired a few lawyers, admittedly. It's true the company is going to end dismembered, but they were headed that way before they started playing legal games. Without them they'd probably have been gone years ago.
So don't depend on the courts for justice. They don't have any to offer.
You don't understand what's going on. He wants MySQL to be under a BSD or equivalent license because since it's under GPL he can't make a new proprietary version.
BSD licenses have different dynamics, though not necessarily better ones. This would be like someone paying a Postgres developer to not work on it, and after he takes the money he wants to work on it anyway.... Well, not really. There is no exact comparison. But that's the flavor.
Anyway, MySql will be available under GPL. But now Sun, or Oracle, will be the only company allowed to make proprietary extensions. And unless the community puts together a project, it's not clear that the GPL version will get more development. (It's also not clear that it won't. We don't know what Sun/Oracle intends.)
Every time I've gone looking for information on how to use FireBird with my favourite language (which changes frequently) I've come away unsatisfied. So I've gone with something that was easier to figure out how to use.
That's a part of why FireBird gets ignored. It was sort of like what Linux was in the late 90's. Probably quite capable, but the documentation seemed to assume that you knew someone to coach you over the undocumented spots. Or that you were familiar with something sufficiently similar. Over the last decade Linux has backfilled, but FireBird hasn't. In fact it seems to have retrogressed, just based upon the last time I considered using it. (I didn't want to use SQLite because I wanted a system that let me use integer keys, and the SQLite interface to the language I was then using didn't. But I wanted a DB that would allow me to pick the file I was using as my database and store it locally with the program. FireBird would seem to have been ideal...but I couldn't easily figure out hot to use it, so I used something else. [I think that time I packed the integers into byte strings with each byte using only 7 bits.])
That works fine, if you've the correct personality type. Many programmers, at least, and I suspect others in IT (from more distant observation) don't have that personality type.
It doesn't seem to be something that can be learned. I've tried. I know some techniques, but using them makes me uncomfortable. I was quite glad that I could retire before certain changes took effect. (My prior workplace is no longer a place where I could be comfortable. Change in management...and in practices.)
The judge usually finds in favor of the most powerful party. It's always been that way. Only propaganda makes you believe that it's different now.
So the problem isn't that the judge doesn't understand the contract, it's that he would prefer to find in favor of the company, even if that's not how the law reads. (This doesn't mean he will, if the law is clear, but not doing so will make him uncomfortable, so he'd prefer not to.)
There's also the effect noted by Anatole France: “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets or steal bread.” — Anatole France
You are presuming that your definition is the correct one. It's one of a number of candidates.
Have you ever noticed how often dictionaries list multiple definitions for a word? That's the way language works.
Also remember that while some people have a clear image of what they mean by IT, it's a term also used by people who are uncertain whether the monitor or the keyboard is "the computer". (And I'm not talking about laptop computers.)
I'll think about signing his petition if he makes a legally binding pledge that the new product will be fully GPL3.
Mind you, I still wouldn't expect the petition to get anywhere unless he also gave back the money, but it wouldn't hurt to ask for what I want. I just don't see any advantage in him owning things rather than Sun or Oracle.
N.B.: Oracle is not well known as a friend to FOSS, in fact it's often a sponge on FOSS. But it's sure a lot better than an enemy.
P.S.: Based on what I've heard, the thing to REALLY ask for is that the MySql documentation be made Creative Commons licensed. Who know, Oracle might just go for it.
I don't think that's what he meant, but if he did, he's wrong.
You need to defend the points of control. In the case of airplanes, that means the door between the crew section and the passenger section. Then if they seize the passenger section, it doesn't gain them much. If they manage to seize the crew section, though, you need to shoot the plane out of the air.
This means you've reduced the value of taking the passenger compartment to the point where it won't be done. (Well, hijackers perhaps, but not suicide pilots.)
E.g., when is the last time you heard of terrorists taking over a train?
You've got to harden minimal areas, and reduce the value ot taking the other parts. If it isn't worth it, they'll rarely do it. (And when they do, it will cost them more than it costs us. So they'll then be even weaker, relatively.)
This does mean being willing to take losses, if they're determined enough. It would still let a suicidal bomber take down a plane. But it wouldn't let him aim it at a target, so it wouldn't be worth while. (Except, of course, for the occasional lone madman. But they are quite rare. Most suicides either want to kill themselves relatively privately, or lack the courage to kill themselves, so they want to force you to kill them.)
All THAT said, yes, intelligence gathering is quite important. Defending against specific threats is quite reasonable. But trying to defend everything against everything is not only impossible, it's a recipe for a totalitarian state...which STILL can't defend all points against all threats, and is also both demoralising and quite expensive to maintain. Also, if that matters to anyone, blatantly unconstitutional.
Saying it's "for not damn reason" means that you haven't understood George Orwell and Heinrich Himmler (sp?) (See gestapo). It's for no reason that any decent person would use... but it's a proof that there are a lot of people who lack all decency.
It's proof that our government is run by subtle thugs, not just thugs. The purpose is to keep the populace afraid, and to remind them that they should be afraid. Also to direct their fears against an external enemy. If it happens to stop a terrorist or two, that's an extra benefit, but it's not the main purpose. In fact, it's important that it not stop all of them. An occasional successful attack is necessary to maintain the fear level, even if you need to launch the attack yourself. (Just make quite certain that it can't be successfully traced back to you IN THE POPULAR MIND. You do this by controlling what the news media print. The easiest way to do this is to own them, but there are other ways that are nearly as effective (but also require either lots of political power or lots of money.)
It's an interesting example, but not a really good one. ALL airlines cater to mainly the upper classes. They have very few else to cater to. So it points up the sorry conditions of US airlines, but we don't know much about the Turkish one. E.g., was it owned by the government? Did it make a profit? Etc.
Anecdotes about grocery stores or other commodities would be more relevant. (Especially about how they differ in different neighborhoods. E.g., I prefer to buy my clothes in the suburbs, because I don't shop in stores patronized only by the wealthy. Lots of reasons from quality of the clothes available to price...it's cheaper in the suburbs. And the comment about quality is even within the same chain.)
Yes, there are reasons. Lots of them. But the effect is that poorer people pay more for lower quality.
Put the responsibility where it belongs. This idiot was acting like an idiot, and will suffer. The idiots who pass additional regulations won't suffer....and they should.
It's been pointed out that the appropriate response is a strong wall between the flight crew's cabin and the passenger cabin. And that's just about it. Yeah, guns on board are a bad idea, and should be prohibited. No reason to worry about anything minor. If airlines want to take additional measures, it should be up to THEM, not to the government.
No, that question didn't answer itself. I don't really believe that cowardism has much to do with it. Astro-turfer is one possibility. Troll is possible. Just lazy is also a possibility.
It does, however, mean that they aren't worth taking seriously. Just don't presume that you know WHY they aren't worth taking seriously. (But making guesses is reasonable, as long as you remember that they are just guesses.)
Slashdot Mirror
It's plausible. But the explanation came from Microsoft, so trusting it isn't reasonable. (Neither is claiming it's a lie. It *is* plausible.)
This is one case where I have to say "Well, they might be telling the truth", and leave it at that.
Still, blocking the addresses seems like the correct move. Even if the truth has leaked out of Microsoft, there's no telling how long it would take them to fix the problem.
OK, but since I still wouldn't ascribe any trustworthiness to them, I doubt the manager's story. It's not that it's implausible, it's that it's coming from Microsoft.
Put it this way:
If Microsoft said the sky was blue, I'd carry a raincoat.
I prefer proportional fonts with serifs...and use tabs for alignment.
N.B.: With many proportional fonts you can't use spaces for alignment, as they are about one pixel wide...(well, actually, less).
OTOH, with a good monospaced font I still find myself preferring tabs for alignment. It allows me to reformat the entire file merely by changing the number of spaces that each tab represents.
But I much prefer a font with serifs, whether mono-spaced or not. It does, however, depend on what I'm writing whether I prefer proportional. If there's a lot of similar stuff on adjacent lines, then perhaps monospaced is better. This is, however, relatively unusual. So I usually prefer proportional. (But I do use a lot of tabs to align adjacent lines...internally as well as externally. I'll frequently use a tab on either side of the "=" to facilitate alignment. When doing so it's important that tab size be somewhere around 3 or 4 spaces, or it starts to look ugly.)
OK. When I say large numbers, I don't actually mean statistically significant numbers, but I do mean that a significant proportion of the people that I've known who have been in a position to have an informed opinion on the topic. I haven't known anyone personally who praised the system without significant reservations.
I think that the very evolution of things like the science blogs, mailing lists, etc. is a decent argument that it's not just the people that I've known with this kind of opinion. The "refereed journals" are an excellent idea...but they've become property of some groups with agendas. Or who want to get as much cash from them as possible. (Not all, but a large proportion of them.) I do feel that some kind of refereeing system is very desireable, but just what kind is possible without creating a "center of power" that someone can capture to push an agenda isn't clear.
Until such a better system evolves, we should do the best we can with unrefereed systems. This is going to mean depending a lot on the opinions of people that we have grounds to trust, and they often won't speak up in a timely manner on topics of interest to us, so we'll need to depend on less reliable bases (basises?) for making our decisions. In this case, they guy has a string of good work behind him. That's a reasonable grounds for considering that it might be true. We don't need to make any choices of action on quick basis anyway, so that suffices. It's interesting, and it has a reasonable probability.
I'll agree that this allows other people to come to decisions that I think are stupid. They could anyway. Some of them will, even if I decide that refereed journals are the one, true, right, and only way to believe. So that makes no difference.
In short, there's no way I'll consider this report too speculative to be posted on Slashdot. That's just silly.
OK. But you can mount and read her files. So get some USB sticks and copy her files over to them. Then reformat the disk.
Yeah, it's a pain, and a lot of work. But it's a way forwards. Then, if the computer has enough power, install ubuntu and INSIDE it a virtual machine into which you install MSWind and any applications that she needs. Don't allow the virtual machine access to the internet.
I'm sure there are other ways forwards, and I don't know all the details, but this should work, though it would be a lot of work to implement.
And in what decade did this occur? I don't follow climate change deniers, so I don't know, but many of the people I'm talking about were decades ago. Most around the 1980's, but some more recent. Since then I've moved and no longer contact people who are likely to have the experience (i.e., people who submit papers for publication, esp. academics). (If you aren't doing research, you won't have the experience.)
Just because an idiot uses an argument doesn't mean it's invalid. He may have heard of it from someone else.
I've heard "peer review" denigrated by large numbers of people in different fields. Criticism of it appears to be justified.
Progress is almost never purely good. Usually it's a mixture of good and bad effects, and what a person in one situation will see as good, another, in a different situation, will see as a cost. And the costs and benefits aren't evenly distributed.
So for each "progress" one should evaluate both it's costs and it's benefits from one's own position. There is much "progress" that I have chosen to pass by. E.g., I don't accept SMS messages. This is because (all of):
A) it isn't worth my effort
B) my carrier charges an unreasonable amount
C) I don't know anyone who wants to send me one (that I know of)
I could probably add other items, but that suffices. Probably C is the most important of the reasons. The only entity that I know who has wanted to send me an SMS message is my phone carrier. I should pay them to contact me by a way that I would prefer not to bother with??
OTOH, I occasionally do receive SMS messages, but I presume that they are spam, so I've never even looked at them. (I don't want to open up that cost center.)
I've become allergic to leather (probably to part of the tanning process) in the last couple of decades, so I went to get tennis shoes. What I ended up with was "cross-trainers" at a remarkably high price. I wasn't pleased by how the options had changed, and the new "cross-trainers" don't last any longer than basketball shoes did when I was in high school. Well, this is progress that I couldn't avoid, but given the option I surely would have. I'm sure *somebody* likes the change.
About the Einstein anecdote:
It's quite easy to miss noticing an earthquake while you're walking. I've missed Richter 3 and 4 earthquakes that way. Either I found out afterwards, or someone pointed out to me how the overhead wires were still vibrating. It's also easy to miss one while you're driving, unless you're in the middle of a long bridge. Up in a tall building, however, even a minor earthquake can be quite alarming. (I'm not sure that is true of the new skyscrapers with "Active stability", which are supposed to run around on wheels for the duration of the quake.) Ships at sea also are unlikely to notice even a major quake, while ships in port will be affected by even a minor one. Etc.
A better anecdote would be about how Einstein only wore one design of clothes, so that he wouldn't need to waste time thinking about what to wear today. He WAS an excellent concentrator. It was just a bad example.
You might look into the Southern Pine, then. Before people showed up and started "improving" things, the Southern Pine would shed lots of flamable needles that would build up, and cones that wouldn't release their seeds until AFTER being heated in a fire. Then they counted on a fire every few years, which would wipe out the competition.
(Southern hear means the southern US. Places like Georgia.)
P.S. Last I heard the Southern Pine was in trouble, but I haven't followed it. People tend to object to forest fires near where they live.
I didn't understand how they could be surprised that prions evolve, so I checked with the original article. They weren't. They were interested in the rates of evolution and the persistence of strains that were selected against. Quite reasonable.
Even totally inorganic matter evolves, in a rough sense. At it's basis evolution just asserts that those forms which are most suited to an environment tend to persist in that environment. This seems quite hard to challenge. Then it accepts Malthus computations on population, and asks: Given that it's obvious that not all descendants can survive, what does the two laws in combination imply?
N.B.: Darwin didn't know ANYTHING about DNA. Genetics hadn't yet been recognized. (This was after Mendel, but long before he was discovered.) So the basis of evolution clearly CAN'T depend on those facts. Evolution is really quite simple, it's just the working out of the details that is complex. (Just as Boolean logic is quite simple, but it's a long and complex way from Boole to a compiled program written in C.)
You are correct. I *didn't* try very hard. I did a once over pass to select something to investigate more closely. Firebird made the first cut, i.e., I'd heard of it and what I'd heard seemed vaguely appropriate. It failed the second cut (which had only one winner) of being the easiest to figure out how to test. The one that passed that was the one I eventually used.
I don't defend this process as a way of finding the best choice, except in the sense that it minimized the time involved in searching. But the question was "Why isn't FireBird better known?"
P.S.: I am not now and never have been an Interbase user, so referring to Interbase doesn't help me at all. (Yes, I know that some of the Firebird documentation is Interbase documentation. This doesn't help me either in feeling confident that it's current or in knowning what to do. It's also no great hinderance, as I presume that if the Firebird site is pointing to it as documentation, then it's what they are recommending as documentation. But that's the way I counted it during my evaluation.)
P.S.: I didn't need a really powerful DB. One of the choices I considered was Kirbybase. I think I ended up using BerkeleyDB (once from SleepyCat). I was probably using Python at the time (which would mean that the Firebird interface I considered was kinterbase).
Sorry, that doesn't disprove the argument. Oracle could just be very patient.
OTOH, my guesstimate is that Oracle intends to be to databases what Google is to information access...trying to index everything on the planet. (Google's goal seems the more practical, because immutable copies count as equivalents. So, e.g., Bing indexing something doesn't interfere with Google's also indexing it.)
Having watched the judicial process in action... I doubt it. IBM would just buy a few legislators and the judges would find for IBM. Look what one company has been able to accomplish through just hiring the son of Orin Hatch. They also hired a few lawyers, admittedly. It's true the company is going to end dismembered, but they were headed that way before they started playing legal games. Without them they'd probably have been gone years ago.
So don't depend on the courts for justice. They don't have any to offer.
You don't understand what's going on. He wants MySQL to be under a BSD or equivalent license because since it's under GPL he can't make a new proprietary version.
BSD licenses have different dynamics, though not necessarily better ones. This would be like someone paying a Postgres developer to not work on it, and after he takes the money he wants to work on it anyway. ... Well, not really. There is no exact comparison. But that's the flavor.
Anyway, MySql will be available under GPL. But now Sun, or Oracle, will be the only company allowed to make proprietary extensions. And unless the community puts together a project, it's not clear that the GPL version will get more development. (It's also not clear that it won't. We don't know what Sun/Oracle intends.)
Every time I've gone looking for information on how to use FireBird with my favourite language (which changes frequently) I've come away unsatisfied. So I've gone with something that was easier to figure out how to use.
That's a part of why FireBird gets ignored. It was sort of like what Linux was in the late 90's. Probably quite capable, but the documentation seemed to assume that you knew someone to coach you over the undocumented spots. Or that you were familiar with something sufficiently similar. Over the last decade Linux has backfilled, but FireBird hasn't. In fact it seems to have retrogressed, just based upon the last time I considered using it. (I didn't want to use SQLite because I wanted a system that let me use integer keys, and the SQLite interface to the language I was then using didn't. But I wanted a DB that would allow me to pick the file I was using as my database and store it locally with the program. FireBird would seem to have been ideal...but I couldn't easily figure out hot to use it, so I used something else. [I think that time I packed the integers into byte strings with each byte using only 7 bits.])
That works fine, if you've the correct personality type. Many programmers, at least, and I suspect others in IT (from more distant observation) don't have that personality type.
It doesn't seem to be something that can be learned. I've tried. I know some techniques, but using them makes me uncomfortable. I was quite glad that I could retire before certain changes took effect. (My prior workplace is no longer a place where I could be comfortable. Change in management...and in practices.)
The judge usually finds in favor of the most powerful party. It's always been that way. Only propaganda makes you believe that it's different now.
So the problem isn't that the judge doesn't understand the contract, it's that he would prefer to find in favor of the company, even if that's not how the law reads. (This doesn't mean he will, if the law is clear, but not doing so will make him uncomfortable, so he'd prefer not to.)
There's also the effect noted by Anatole France:
“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets or steal bread.”
— Anatole France
You are presuming that your definition is the correct one. It's one of a number of candidates.
Have you ever noticed how often dictionaries list multiple definitions for a word? That's the way language works.
Also remember that while some people have a clear image of what they mean by IT, it's a term also used by people who are uncertain whether the monitor or the keyboard is "the computer". (And I'm not talking about laptop computers.)
I'll think about signing his petition if he makes a legally binding pledge that the new product will be fully GPL3.
Mind you, I still wouldn't expect the petition to get anywhere unless he also gave back the money, but it wouldn't hurt to ask for what I want. I just don't see any advantage in him owning things rather than Sun or Oracle.
N.B.: Oracle is not well known as a friend to FOSS, in fact it's often a sponge on FOSS. But it's sure a lot better than an enemy.
P.S.: Based on what I've heard, the thing to REALLY ask for is that the MySql documentation be made Creative Commons licensed. Who know, Oracle might just go for it.
I don't think that's what he meant, but if he did, he's wrong.
You need to defend the points of control. In the case of airplanes, that means the door between the crew section and the passenger section. Then if they seize the passenger section, it doesn't gain them much. If they manage to seize the crew section, though, you need to shoot the plane out of the air.
This means you've reduced the value of taking the passenger compartment to the point where it won't be done. (Well, hijackers perhaps, but not suicide pilots.)
E.g., when is the last time you heard of terrorists taking over a train?
You've got to harden minimal areas, and reduce the value ot taking the other parts. If it isn't worth it, they'll rarely do it. (And when they do, it will cost them more than it costs us. So they'll then be even weaker, relatively.)
This does mean being willing to take losses, if they're determined enough. It would still let a suicidal bomber take down a plane. But it wouldn't let him aim it at a target, so it wouldn't be worth while. (Except, of course, for the occasional lone madman. But they are quite rare. Most suicides either want to kill themselves relatively privately, or lack the courage to kill themselves, so they want to force you to kill them.)
All THAT said, yes, intelligence gathering is quite important. Defending against specific threats is quite reasonable. But trying to defend everything against everything is not only impossible, it's a recipe for a totalitarian state...which STILL can't defend all points against all threats, and is also both demoralising and quite expensive to maintain. Also, if that matters to anyone, blatantly unconstitutional.
Saying it's "for not damn reason" means that you haven't understood George Orwell and Heinrich Himmler (sp?) (See gestapo). It's for no reason that any decent person would use ... but it's a proof that there are a lot of people who lack all decency.
It's proof that our government is run by subtle thugs, not just thugs. The purpose is to keep the populace afraid, and to remind them that they should be afraid. Also to direct their fears against an external enemy. If it happens to stop a terrorist or two, that's an extra benefit, but it's not the main purpose. In fact, it's important that it not stop all of them. An occasional successful attack is necessary to maintain the fear level, even if you need to launch the attack yourself. (Just make quite certain that it can't be successfully traced back to you IN THE POPULAR MIND. You do this by controlling what the news media print. The easiest way to do this is to own them, but there are other ways that are nearly as effective (but also require either lots of political power or lots of money.)
See also "agent provocateur".
It's an interesting example, but not a really good one. ALL airlines cater to mainly the upper classes. They have very few else to cater to. So it points up the sorry conditions of US airlines, but we don't know much about the Turkish one. E.g., was it owned by the government? Did it make a profit? Etc.
Anecdotes about grocery stores or other commodities would be more relevant. (Especially about how they differ in different neighborhoods. E.g., I prefer to buy my clothes in the suburbs, because I don't shop in stores patronized only by the wealthy. Lots of reasons from quality of the clothes available to price...it's cheaper in the suburbs. And the comment about quality is even within the same chain.)
Yes, there are reasons. Lots of them. But the effect is that poorer people pay more for lower quality.
Put the responsibility where it belongs. This idiot was acting like an idiot, and will suffer. The idiots who pass additional regulations won't suffer....and they should.
It's been pointed out that the appropriate response is a strong wall between the flight crew's cabin and the passenger cabin. And that's just about it. Yeah, guns on board are a bad idea, and should be prohibited. No reason to worry about anything minor. If airlines want to take additional measures, it should be up to THEM, not to the government.
No, that question didn't answer itself. I don't really believe that cowardism has much to do with it. Astro-turfer is one possibility. Troll is possible. Just lazy is also a possibility.
It does, however, mean that they aren't worth taking seriously. Just don't presume that you know WHY they aren't worth taking seriously. (But making guesses is reasonable, as long as you remember that they are just guesses.)