Wait...are you trying to say that it's easier to find "some random configuration setting" in Regedit than in a.conf file? I don't know about you, but I can't do anything in Regedit unless I'm told exactly where the key should be, what it should be named, and what the value needs to be set to. If I'm using group policy, it's slightly easier, but not by much. I may not know where a particular.conf file is when I need it, but I can usually find it fairly quickly by browsing through the/etc directory (the directory where all system-wide configuration files are stored, btw).
Since you're not listening to me, or anyone else for that matter, this is my last post.
You don't think that free people in a free society making up their own minds over what they feel is important in a democracy and casting a vote on the opinions and positions they gathered from that is a well reasoned argument?
No. This has nothing to do with freedom. You are free to make your opinions on any basis you want. For example, I am free to think that I won't be hit by a car today because the sky is blue. That doesn't make it a rational decision. Opinions can be formed rationally or irrationally or a mixture of both.
People have saw Obama's actions and don't think he has what it takes to be their president.
Based on an irrational assessment of his "patriotism."
For some people, patriotic enough means respecting the traditions and at least going through the motions when the pledge or the national anthem is played.
For those people, patriotic enough is whatever they feel is patriotic enough. Don't you see? It's not a valid metric. You can't measure how much somebody love's their country, any more than you can measure how much somebody love's their cat. If you can't measure it, it's not based on intellect. It is based on emotion, and while emotions have been playing a large part in the election, they haven't been contributing much to a constructive dialogue.
I don't trust thieves or people who hang out with them. Your choice of friends leaves an impression about yourself that like it or not, you will have to deal with.
So, you didn't actually answer my question, which leads me to believe you don't have a logical answer. Ayers wasn't a thief, in the legal sense of the term. Obama didn't "hang out" with him and wasn't friends with him. If you don't want to trust Obama because of the "Ayers connection" then you need to think about what that connection is before you make that decision.
The dems are attempting to use the very same line of thinking against the republicans as we debate this.
I don't care what the democrats are doing. Everything I have said applies just as much to them. I'm not arguing for a particular candidate. I happen to prefer Obama, but I don't think McCain would be a terrible president. I'm arguing for rational discourse in the political arena.
No, if you were disregarding it, you would have shut up a long time ago.
Maybe you shouldn't be so defensive. I'm just advocating rational thought. I think a lot of people are letting themselves be manipulated because they aren't thinking carefully about their decisions. If you strive to be rational, it is harder to be manipulated.
Lol.. what the hell does engineer have to do with others forming opinions over someone's actions.
It's not the opinions. It's the reasons for those opinions. If you are a critical thinker (something I usually associate with educated people, like engineers), you should have well-reasoned out arguments for your opinions based on well-established facts.
Lol.. Ok, same thing. At least I think the question "is my wife fucking around on me" almost the same as is she leaving me.
And the fact that you are considering only one possibility, leads me to believe you haven't really thought about this. You are jumping to a conclusion because of your lack of trust and respect for your partner. Who knows, your suspicion may be true. But to conclude that it is true without any sort of investigation or discussion is not very rational, and it doesn't lead to wholesome relationships.
Lol.. They are creating and forming personal opinions of people. You do understand that opinion is not fact right?
Yes. And do you understand that not every opinion is equally valid? If I was planning to invest in the stock market (not a good time right now) and I was asking around for advice on how to invest (aka opinions), would it be better for me to ask an experienced investor or my brother who barely graduated from high school and works at McDonalds? Both have opinions, but I can trust the investor more because his opinion is going to be based on his observed facts and vetted by his knowledge and experience. My brother may have an opinion like, "I really hate Wendy's because their burgers suck, so don't invest there", but that doesn't mean it is useful at all.
Lol.. Bigoted? Because you don't agree with them?
No. Bigoted because when you have decided you don't like Obama for no real credible reason, and you start trying to dig up "facts" to support your dislike of Obama, you are a bigot. You are not subjecting your opinion to reconsideration based on the facts as they are presented, you are simply picking and choosing the parts of the facts you want to hear to support your previous opinion. That is not rational thought. If you don't like Obama, fine, but give me a good reason (like I make $300k/year and his tax plan will screw me). Questioning his patriotism is not constructive. It just rapidly deteriorates into ad hominem attacks on his character.
Obviously, others think along those same lines and see Obama's actions as a statement that either he doesn't like this country or he isn't patriotic enough.
Two questions. What is patriotic enough? To answer this you might need to provide a quantifiable definition of patriotism. And why would a person who "doesn't like this country" grow up here, go to school here, teach at a university, run for public office, and eventually run for President? If you didn't like your country, don't you think a better choice would be to move? You can like your country and at the same time recognize it has faults and try to address them.
When you combine Obama's actions with his preachers of 20+ years or Obama's connection to Ayers, or his wife's comments about never being proud to be an American until some point late in life and people see a picture that your refusing to look at.
This is all rhetoric. You can spin it anyway you want. If you want to form a reasoned opinion, you can't confuse rhetoric with fact. As soon as you can tell me specifically what you don't like about Obama's "association" with Ayers, this turns back into a discussion about facts and not rhetoric.
The only thing bigoted about it is your and others attempts to forbid us or others from having our own opinions.
I'm not forbidding you from having an opinion. I'm just disregarding it because, from what you have told me so far, it is not a backed up by a well-reasoned examination of the facts.
Holy crap, are you serious!? I really hope, especially if you are any kind of engineer, that you have better critical thinking skills than this.
Now, what is the first thing that will be going through anyone's mind? Infidelity right?
No, absolutely not. If this is the first thing that comes to mind when I think about my partner, I have to seriously question what the basis of our relationship might be.
Like it or not, your actions say something to other people.
Yes, you are right. The issue here, though, is whether a person is interpreting an action to reinforce a previously established opinion, or whether it is a legitimate criticism. Given the responses in this thread, I have to think an overwhelming majority believe the former is the case here.
Either way, you have to accept that people form opinions over what you call bullshit and they damn well have that right.
People certainly can choose to be bigoted, but that hardly amounts to a constructive debate of political issues. Not every interpretation of an action deserves equal attention.
No, you are misunderstanding what copy-on-write means. See here for a good explanation. In the filesystem world, copy-on-write means you have multiple pointers (for multiple snapshots) pointing to the same block until the block changes. Then the changes are written to a new block and the pointers are updated ("past time" snapshots continue to point to the old block while the "current time" snapshot is changed to point to the new block)...almost exactly what you explained for ZFS.
I haven't been following the details on the NetApp case but, as far as I can tell, it's not about copy-on-write per se, but about their specific implementation of it which preserves filesystem consistency ("the tree-of-blocks" design). There have been several implementations of copy-on-write in filesystems, so I don't imagine the concept by itself is patentable.
So are these guys the first to do an ensemble measurement of this?
They aren't the first to measure mean excited state lifetimes on DNA molecules. Without doing a literature search, though, I think they are the first to try to systematically measure it with regard to the single-stranded DNA sequence.
As ever, the biggest claims aren't supported, but they are the ones which get reported.
Yeah, unfortunately this happens a lot, often by the people doing the science in addition to the media. Sadly, it's what gets funding and keeps the public interest.
Ok, that certainly has to be the worst layman's summary of a scientific paper I have ever seen. The actual article is here. You will need a subscription to Science to read it, which most university libraries have. The researchers have used time-resolved fluorescence spectroscopy to measure excited state lifetimes of DNA molecules. They found--surprise!--that the mean lifetimes are dependent on the structure of the molecules, which is ultimately dependent on the sequence.
These are very difficult experiments to do, and the data is good, but there isn't anything particularly breathtaking about the results. Perhaps the resolution is a bit amazing. It is theoretically expected that sequences of 5'-d(AAGAAAAGAAAAGAAAAGAA)-3' and 5'-d(AAGAAGAAGAAGAAGAAGAA)-3' would have different decay properties, but you might not expect it to be measurable by an ensemble technique.
Anyway, none of this has anything to do with the summary. This isn't "light sensitivity" of DNA. This can't be applied to DNA sequencing, at least not in any practical way. And there is no possibility of repairing genetic mutations with light. The computing thing...also quite a bit of a stretch. Of course, this isn't Roland's fault. He just quoted the German press release....
Forget about the cell biology. What about the chemistry and physics? How can laser light change a base pair? Radiation can induce mutations because it can, among other things, promote photochemical reactions that make bases or base pairs unrecognizable to the cell machinery. As a result, polymerases introduce mismatched bases when replicating a sequence. I cannot think of any possible way of directly converting, say, a thymidine to a cytidine by irradiating it. Doesn't mean it's not possible, but certainly isn't something that's going to be on the table anytime soon.
What you are saying is that our poverty in the US isn't as bad as poverty elsewhere in the world. True. That's a good thing. It means we have a working social safety net (something certain factions continuously want to eliminate, btw). The poor can still feed themselves and live in some sort of shelter, and as a result there isn't rampant crime or sick people dying in the streets...all things I would expect from living in the richest nation in the world. That, however, does not mean that there is no poverty in the US, and that they don't struggle day-to-day to meet their needs, or that there aren't some who fail to do so.
the ultimate goal of the patent and copyright system is to promote public good and societal progress.
More importantly, patents function as an incentive to inventors so that they will take significant risk bringing an invention to market, knowing that they will be granted a temporary monopoly on production of that invention. As much as I dislike drug companies, I recognize that patents on most drugs are deserved because there is a lot of time and development cost associated with bringing a new drug to the market, and the risk of a new drug failing before it can make it to market is substantial. I just don't see that with software companies, no matter how "innovative" their product is. Pay a few programmers to write something. Market it. Sell it. Sometimes your idea sucked and it fails. Sometimes it was awesome and it succeeds. It's just like any other business. I don't see why the software industry needs the protections of software patents to keep it going.
And the profit margin on Windows is something like 85%, so what's your point?
If Apple wants to tie their software to their hardware, then they should do that and not sell a retail boxed version. If they want to sell a boxed version, but provide a hardware-bundled discount, then they should do that. All of that is fine. But if they want to sell a boxed version, and then say "you can only run this on Apple computers", that's complete crap. It's a bad business decision, and I have no sympathy for Apple in this case.
I partially agree. There is a difference between tolerance and respect. You can be intolerant of someone's behavior and respectful at the same time. The problem is that people are tolerant of their politicians' behavior (or maybe just apathetic), and don't hold them to a higher standard, which they can do by not electing them. But, hey, as long as they get that corn subsidy through Congress, who cares if they're molesting children online, right?
It's an interesting question. I would agree that there isn't a lot of public scientific knowledge, but I'm not sure that means anything. Training in science doesn't necessarily mean you will make rational and well-considered decisions in every aspect of your life all the time. I've known plenty of scientists who thought broccoli causes cancer, for example. Being informed and having all of the facts is only part of the decision-making process. Exercising your rational faculties in a disciplined manner is the other (arguably more difficult) half that nobody manages to do all the time.
So, what exactly is the precedent here? I didn't think you could copyright the layout of a board game. You could copyright the rule book and trademark the name, but that's about it. I know there are tons of clones of popular games out there (Risk, Monopoly, etc), and they aren't getting sued. So I don't see how Scrabulous is any different....
Nope. If your CFLs are burning out that quickly, you, A) have a shitty supplier, B) have extremely bad luck, C) have an electrical problem with your fixtures.
They will burnout eventually, but certainly not quicker than your incandescents.
Yes, that's true. You're not supposed to use CFLs with a dimmer. There's not much point anyway. If you are dimming the lights, you aren't using as much electricity, and there isn't much advantage to using a CFL.
It hasn't been known for a long time. It's been known that a stable DNA helix can tolerate an aberrant base pair from an alternate nucleotide (maybe introducing a slight kink in the minor groove). However, entire oligonucleotides from alternate bases with complementarity and association into duplexes has definitely not been done before. Ever since the structure of DNA was determined it has been theoretically possible to create artificial helices, but that is different from actually doing it. This is some very nice work.
Well, like most of the security features Microsoft provides, IE zones are annoying and a pain to use properly. Firefox, by default, blocks most annoying Javascript behavior, but NoScript really takes it to the next level. If you ever find yourself on Firefox, you should try AdBlockPlus+NoScript. It's a pretty good combination and is very usable. See here and here for more information.
Actually, you can't with Firefox 3. It will detect a looping script and give you the option of stopping it. If you use NoScript, you can block it entirely.
Finally, there's no way to "partner" with Linux. Either you support it (at some level) or you don't. Who would you partner with?
Right, and support can simply mean an open hardware spec. Greg Kroah-Hartman and company are writing free drivers for companies who provide them with this information. They can even arrange to sign an NDA if necessary. So my response to a company that asks "What do we have to gain?" is "What do you have to lose?"
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Wait...are you trying to say that it's easier to find "some random configuration setting" in Regedit than in a .conf file? I don't know about you, but I can't do anything in Regedit unless I'm told exactly where the key should be, what it should be named, and what the value needs to be set to. If I'm using group policy, it's slightly easier, but not by much. I may not know where a particular .conf file is when I need it, but I can usually find it fairly quickly by browsing through the /etc directory (the directory where all system-wide configuration files are stored, btw).
Since you're not listening to me, or anyone else for that matter, this is my last post.
You don't think that free people in a free society making up their own minds over what they feel is important in a democracy and casting a vote on the opinions and positions they gathered from that is a well reasoned argument?
No. This has nothing to do with freedom. You are free to make your opinions on any basis you want. For example, I am free to think that I won't be hit by a car today because the sky is blue. That doesn't make it a rational decision. Opinions can be formed rationally or irrationally or a mixture of both.
People have saw Obama's actions and don't think he has what it takes to be their president.
Based on an irrational assessment of his "patriotism."
For some people, patriotic enough means respecting the traditions and at least going through the motions when the pledge or the national anthem is played.
For those people, patriotic enough is whatever they feel is patriotic enough. Don't you see? It's not a valid metric. You can't measure how much somebody love's their country, any more than you can measure how much somebody love's their cat. If you can't measure it, it's not based on intellect. It is based on emotion, and while emotions have been playing a large part in the election, they haven't been contributing much to a constructive dialogue.
I don't trust thieves or people who hang out with them. Your choice of friends leaves an impression about yourself that like it or not, you will have to deal with.
So, you didn't actually answer my question, which leads me to believe you don't have a logical answer. Ayers wasn't a thief, in the legal sense of the term. Obama didn't "hang out" with him and wasn't friends with him. If you don't want to trust Obama because of the "Ayers connection" then you need to think about what that connection is before you make that decision.
The dems are attempting to use the very same line of thinking against the republicans as we debate this.
I don't care what the democrats are doing. Everything I have said applies just as much to them. I'm not arguing for a particular candidate. I happen to prefer Obama, but I don't think McCain would be a terrible president. I'm arguing for rational discourse in the political arena.
No, if you were disregarding it, you would have shut up a long time ago.
Maybe you shouldn't be so defensive. I'm just advocating rational thought. I think a lot of people are letting themselves be manipulated because they aren't thinking carefully about their decisions. If you strive to be rational, it is harder to be manipulated.
Lol.. what the hell does engineer have to do with others forming opinions over someone's actions.
It's not the opinions. It's the reasons for those opinions. If you are a critical thinker (something I usually associate with educated people, like engineers), you should have well-reasoned out arguments for your opinions based on well-established facts.
Lol.. Ok, same thing. At least I think the question "is my wife fucking around on me" almost the same as is she leaving me.
And the fact that you are considering only one possibility, leads me to believe you haven't really thought about this. You are jumping to a conclusion because of your lack of trust and respect for your partner. Who knows, your suspicion may be true. But to conclude that it is true without any sort of investigation or discussion is not very rational, and it doesn't lead to wholesome relationships.
Lol.. They are creating and forming personal opinions of people. You do understand that opinion is not fact right?
Yes. And do you understand that not every opinion is equally valid? If I was planning to invest in the stock market (not a good time right now) and I was asking around for advice on how to invest (aka opinions), would it be better for me to ask an experienced investor or my brother who barely graduated from high school and works at McDonalds? Both have opinions, but I can trust the investor more because his opinion is going to be based on his observed facts and vetted by his knowledge and experience. My brother may have an opinion like, "I really hate Wendy's because their burgers suck, so don't invest there", but that doesn't mean it is useful at all.
Lol.. Bigoted? Because you don't agree with them?
No. Bigoted because when you have decided you don't like Obama for no real credible reason, and you start trying to dig up "facts" to support your dislike of Obama, you are a bigot. You are not subjecting your opinion to reconsideration based on the facts as they are presented, you are simply picking and choosing the parts of the facts you want to hear to support your previous opinion. That is not rational thought. If you don't like Obama, fine, but give me a good reason (like I make $300k/year and his tax plan will screw me). Questioning his patriotism is not constructive. It just rapidly deteriorates into ad hominem attacks on his character.
Obviously, others think along those same lines and see Obama's actions as a statement that either he doesn't like this country or he isn't patriotic enough.
Two questions. What is patriotic enough? To answer this you might need to provide a quantifiable definition of patriotism. And why would a person who "doesn't like this country" grow up here, go to school here, teach at a university, run for public office, and eventually run for President? If you didn't like your country, don't you think a better choice would be to move? You can like your country and at the same time recognize it has faults and try to address them.
When you combine Obama's actions with his preachers of 20+ years or Obama's connection to Ayers, or his wife's comments about never being proud to be an American until some point late in life and people see a picture that your refusing to look at.
This is all rhetoric. You can spin it anyway you want. If you want to form a reasoned opinion, you can't confuse rhetoric with fact. As soon as you can tell me specifically what you don't like about Obama's "association" with Ayers, this turns back into a discussion about facts and not rhetoric.
The only thing bigoted about it is your and others attempts to forbid us or others from having our own opinions.
I'm not forbidding you from having an opinion. I'm just disregarding it because, from what you have told me so far, it is not a backed up by a well-reasoned examination of the facts.
Holy crap, are you serious!? I really hope, especially if you are any kind of engineer, that you have better critical thinking skills than this.
Now, what is the first thing that will be going through anyone's mind? Infidelity right?
No, absolutely not. If this is the first thing that comes to mind when I think about my partner, I have to seriously question what the basis of our relationship might be.
Like it or not, your actions say something to other people.
Yes, you are right. The issue here, though, is whether a person is interpreting an action to reinforce a previously established opinion, or whether it is a legitimate criticism. Given the responses in this thread, I have to think an overwhelming majority believe the former is the case here.
Either way, you have to accept that people form opinions over what you call bullshit and they damn well have that right.
People certainly can choose to be bigoted, but that hardly amounts to a constructive debate of political issues. Not every interpretation of an action deserves equal attention.
No, you are misunderstanding what copy-on-write means. See here for a good explanation. In the filesystem world, copy-on-write means you have multiple pointers (for multiple snapshots) pointing to the same block until the block changes. Then the changes are written to a new block and the pointers are updated ("past time" snapshots continue to point to the old block while the "current time" snapshot is changed to point to the new block)...almost exactly what you explained for ZFS.
I haven't been following the details on the NetApp case but, as far as I can tell, it's not about copy-on-write per se, but about their specific implementation of it which preserves filesystem consistency ("the tree-of-blocks" design). There have been several implementations of copy-on-write in filesystems, so I don't imagine the concept by itself is patentable.
So are these guys the first to do an ensemble measurement of this?
They aren't the first to measure mean excited state lifetimes on DNA molecules. Without doing a literature search, though, I think they are the first to try to systematically measure it with regard to the single-stranded DNA sequence.
As ever, the biggest claims aren't supported, but they are the ones which get reported.
Yeah, unfortunately this happens a lot, often by the people doing the science in addition to the media. Sadly, it's what gets funding and keeps the public interest.
Ok, that certainly has to be the worst layman's summary of a scientific paper I have ever seen. The actual article is here. You will need a subscription to Science to read it, which most university libraries have. The researchers have used time-resolved fluorescence spectroscopy to measure excited state lifetimes of DNA molecules. They found--surprise!--that the mean lifetimes are dependent on the structure of the molecules, which is ultimately dependent on the sequence.
These are very difficult experiments to do, and the data is good, but there isn't anything particularly breathtaking about the results. Perhaps the resolution is a bit amazing. It is theoretically expected that sequences of 5'-d(AAGAAAAGAAAAGAAAAGAA)-3' and 5'-d(AAGAAGAAGAAGAAGAAGAA)-3' would have different decay properties, but you might not expect it to be measurable by an ensemble technique.
Anyway, none of this has anything to do with the summary. This isn't "light sensitivity" of DNA. This can't be applied to DNA sequencing, at least not in any practical way. And there is no possibility of repairing genetic mutations with light. The computing thing...also quite a bit of a stretch. Of course, this isn't Roland's fault. He just quoted the German press release....
Forget about the cell biology. What about the chemistry and physics? How can laser light change a base pair? Radiation can induce mutations because it can, among other things, promote photochemical reactions that make bases or base pairs unrecognizable to the cell machinery. As a result, polymerases introduce mismatched bases when replicating a sequence. I cannot think of any possible way of directly converting, say, a thymidine to a cytidine by irradiating it. Doesn't mean it's not possible, but certainly isn't something that's going to be on the table anytime soon.
What you are saying is that our poverty in the US isn't as bad as poverty elsewhere in the world. True. That's a good thing. It means we have a working social safety net (something certain factions continuously want to eliminate, btw). The poor can still feed themselves and live in some sort of shelter, and as a result there isn't rampant crime or sick people dying in the streets...all things I would expect from living in the richest nation in the world. That, however, does not mean that there is no poverty in the US, and that they don't struggle day-to-day to meet their needs, or that there aren't some who fail to do so.
To me it would be business as usual, with one less "customer".
Agree with your general point, but it's not quite that trivial...the US is a big customer.
the ultimate goal of the patent and copyright system is to promote public good and societal progress.
More importantly, patents function as an incentive to inventors so that they will take significant risk bringing an invention to market, knowing that they will be granted a temporary monopoly on production of that invention. As much as I dislike drug companies, I recognize that patents on most drugs are deserved because there is a lot of time and development cost associated with bringing a new drug to the market, and the risk of a new drug failing before it can make it to market is substantial. I just don't see that with software companies, no matter how "innovative" their product is. Pay a few programmers to write something. Market it. Sell it. Sometimes your idea sucked and it fails. Sometimes it was awesome and it succeeds. It's just like any other business. I don't see why the software industry needs the protections of software patents to keep it going.
And the profit margin on Windows is something like 85%, so what's your point?
If Apple wants to tie their software to their hardware, then they should do that and not sell a retail boxed version. If they want to sell a boxed version, but provide a hardware-bundled discount, then they should do that. All of that is fine. But if they want to sell a boxed version, and then say "you can only run this on Apple computers", that's complete crap. It's a bad business decision, and I have no sympathy for Apple in this case.
I partially agree. There is a difference between tolerance and respect. You can be intolerant of someone's behavior and respectful at the same time. The problem is that people are tolerant of their politicians' behavior (or maybe just apathetic), and don't hold them to a higher standard, which they can do by not electing them. But, hey, as long as they get that corn subsidy through Congress, who cares if they're molesting children online, right?
It's an interesting question. I would agree that there isn't a lot of public scientific knowledge, but I'm not sure that means anything. Training in science doesn't necessarily mean you will make rational and well-considered decisions in every aspect of your life all the time. I've known plenty of scientists who thought broccoli causes cancer, for example. Being informed and having all of the facts is only part of the decision-making process. Exercising your rational faculties in a disciplined manner is the other (arguably more difficult) half that nobody manages to do all the time.
So, what exactly is the precedent here? I didn't think you could copyright the layout of a board game. You could copyright the rule book and trademark the name, but that's about it. I know there are tons of clones of popular games out there (Risk, Monopoly, etc), and they aren't getting sued. So I don't see how Scrabulous is any different....
Nope. If your CFLs are burning out that quickly, you, A) have a shitty supplier, B) have extremely bad luck, C) have an electrical problem with your fixtures.
They will burnout eventually, but certainly not quicker than your incandescents.
Yes, that's true. You're not supposed to use CFLs with a dimmer. There's not much point anyway. If you are dimming the lights, you aren't using as much electricity, and there isn't much advantage to using a CFL.
I get mine from IKEA, although I'm sure there's a better place. Costco, BJ's, Home Depot...CFLs are everywhere. Where have you been looking?
I've never had a CFL burnout, flicker, or buzz. They do have whiter light, but I prefer that myself.
It hasn't been known for a long time. It's been known that a stable DNA helix can tolerate an aberrant base pair from an alternate nucleotide (maybe introducing a slight kink in the minor groove). However, entire oligonucleotides from alternate bases with complementarity and association into duplexes has definitely not been done before. Ever since the structure of DNA was determined it has been theoretically possible to create artificial helices, but that is different from actually doing it. This is some very nice work.
Thanks you. Very well said.
Yeah, it may have been in Firefox 2 as well...I don't remember exactly when they added that feature.
Well, like most of the security features Microsoft provides, IE zones are annoying and a pain to use properly. Firefox, by default, blocks most annoying Javascript behavior, but NoScript really takes it to the next level. If you ever find yourself on Firefox, you should try AdBlockPlus+NoScript. It's a pretty good combination and is very usable. See here and here for more information.
Actually, you can't with Firefox 3. It will detect a looping script and give you the option of stopping it. If you use NoScript, you can block it entirely.
Wait...are you trying to claim that somehow the GPL is a communist license and the BSD license is not?
Care to share why you would "not even consider contributing anything to a GPL project?" Just curious.
Finally, there's no way to "partner" with Linux. Either you support it (at some level) or you don't. Who would you partner with?
Right, and support can simply mean an open hardware spec. Greg Kroah-Hartman and company are writing free drivers for companies who provide them with this information. They can even arrange to sign an NDA if necessary. So my response to a company that asks "What do we have to gain?" is "What do you have to lose?"