"is I have to pay for this junk through my "BBC Tax" even though I won't be able to use it. Here in the UK a TV license is compulsory if you have a TV that can receive a signal EVEN if you pay for a subscription service through someone like Sky or Virgin Media."
I completely agree that the BBC has a duty to make this available to anyone that wants it, thus choosing an open platform for it. However, I disagree with your sentiment on the BBC tax in general. The TV license is why the UK has a healthy non-commerical broadcaster that produces some very good quality material that maybe otherwise wouldn't be commercially viable. That you pay for a subscription service in addition is completely irrelevant. You still receive all the BBC channels and it is not the BBC's fault that you chose to give money to Sky or Virgin in addition.
Non-commercially funded TV is necessary as a counterweight to commercial TV, particularly as commercial media is consolidated onto fewer and fewer hands. While I won't claim that Non-commercially funded TV is non-biased, it certainly has a different bias.
If you suggest that it should rather be included as part of the regular income tax, then I might agree. The TV license makes no distinction as to people's ability to pay the license, and almost anyone has a TV. Yes, it would be unfair on the people who do not have a TV, but no system is fair to everyone.
Please get over yourself. Flash is at best a semi-open standard with severely lacking open source implementations. If an open standard with a complete open source implementation replaces Flash then there is little reason to care who created the standard in the first place apart from blind zealotry.
"Well in the case of something non-trivial, like the military, the reason why it's a Bad Thing is because then you end up with some rich incompetent running something that they have no business running."
It isn't that simple. Most of the time these rich people turn out to be decently competent for a myriad of reasons, including pressure from family and a desire to do well.
It also means that there are rich people in the army, rather than just poor people, making the army more consistent with society as a whole. This usually makes the politicians (usually rich people) less willing to go to war over frivilous things, because some of their family and friends might be involved and might get killed.
From a European point of view, I say that your point of view is no different than the typical Slashdot point of view, regardless of country of origin.
Apple's success has nothing to do with providing more features than their competitors, but providing regular features in a sensible and intuitive way. That is what they have done with both Macs and the iPod and that is what they are trying to do with the iPhone. Yes, Sony Ericsson and Nokia has the same features, but those phones suck. They have absolutely terrible user interfaces with almost no innovation on the usability side of things since the mobile phone was introduced. The mobile phones are incredibly stagnant from a UI point of view, despite having had lot of features added to them and the industry desperately need a shake-up.
"The point being, that Berners-Lee is actually in much better company than the list given in the introduction might have suggested, and this award extends beyond the British gene pool to Americans like Eliot and Anglo-Americans like Churchill."
I find it very amusing that you suggest that Churchill is somehow "beyond the British gene pool".
Yes, Churchill had an american mother (of english descent), but he was born and raised in England (at Blenheim Palace no less) and his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, was from the Spencer Family (notably the same family as Princess Diana), and third in line for being the Duke of Marlborough.
"A few days ago we had an idiot judge (yes, a *judge*) suing cleaners $54M for the emotional stress of losing is pants"
This is because the US has punitive damages in the legal system. You would never see a similar lawsuit in most of Europe, because most countries only award actual damages.
I understand the idea of using punitive damages as a deterrent against people and companies not upholding their obligations and breaking regulations, but then the punitive damages should not go to the people suing them in the first place, but rather to some charity agreed between the two parties and the court.
Otherwise you get the daft mess of people misusing the legal system to sue people for millions for silly little things.
And if it isn't silly little things, but something like say losing a child through someones negligence, then by all means punish the person/company responsible, but no amount of money awarded to you personally is going to bring your child back.
"Slow window redraws, completely broken Windows conventions, a total lack of extensibility, and on and on."
While I agree with the first two, the last is a feature, not a flaw. There are plenty of very extensible browsers out there and if you want one, then Safari is not for you. But for the large number of people that would never install a single extension, Safari is great. Besides, the lack of extensions means you are less likely to get ridiculous toolbars installed without your consent.
Any good product, be it software, hardware or boots focus on being very good for the people that like it, not mediocre for everyone.
Some countries in Europe may have laws against photographing people, I don't know. But here we are talking about laws against publishing said photographs without express permission from the people being photographed. Many countries have such laws and the exception is typically if the person being photographed can be said to be a "public figure", in which case you are free to publicise pictures of them without permission, except if the pictures where obtained in a way that would be consider a violation of privacy (climbing over their garden fence to spy at them in their swimming pool).
The main reason for this kind of laws is that two parties freedom are directly at odds. The freedom of the photographer and publisher has to be weighed up against the freedom and privacy of the individual.
The laws surrounding surveillance cameras are in other words completely irrelevant in this discussion as we are talking about the right to publish rather than the right to monitor. The police state discussion is a different discussion altogether.
Ah, but no GOOD phone has been invented! People today like phones with MP3-players and Cameras. What is typical for these phones? They all suck, but some suck a little less.
The MP3-player interface is always much worse than on the iPod, the camera interfaces usually suck balls, the texting leaves a lot to be desired, etc. Typical for all the so-called "smart phones", is that they behave like a PC. They are basically a collection of applications, with no coherent integration.
I dare anyone to tell me that the Symbian OS for instance is a joy to use and the Microsoft Smartphone is certainly no joy either. It really baffles me that the Phone UIs are still so primitive after so many years of their existence and so many combined years of experience in UI-design in the world.
The world is CRYING out for a feature rich phone that is a joy to use and feels like a coherent whole rather than a loosely stringed together group of applications and if Apple can provide that, they have got a winner regardless of whether you can add this mythical "killer app" to it.
"If the government was serious about finding minimizing our dependency on foreign oil then this man would be exempt as he does not use foreign oil. Let's get all non-foreign oil sources (including domestic sources, if at all feasible, I'm not sure if it is) exempt from these taxes, and raise the taxes elsewhere. That way more and more people will avoid foreign oil. Then once we've achieved 0 use of foreign oil, we can start slowly putting those taxes back on, while raising the foreign oil taxes even further and lower the taxes elsewhere (wherever it was increased to make up for the loss of tax from the exemption in the first place) so it will continue to remain profitable to use domestic sources. Then, if its still an issue which I think it will be, we can repeat the entire process with more environmentally friendly fuel methods."
This, my friend, is called protectionism and it isn't exactly a new idea. Countries that go too far with this idea get punished by their trade partners with import taxes on their own, thus international trade suffers.
Also, why on earth should the US aspire to achieve 0 use of foreign oil? What good would come of that? Surely it is enough to make sure you have enough energy production of your own to sustain you in a reasonable state in case your trade partners refuse to supply you. That would require nowhere near 0 use of foreign oil.
If you happen to include GPL-code in your closed source software you may get sued, you may be forced to remove your product from the market until you have removed all GPL-code from it, and you may be forced to pay compensation. But you are still the copyright holder, and nobody has any claim to your code other than you.
The only way I can see you could be forced to open your code, is if your company don't have the means to pay compensation and don't have the finances to stop selling the product and remove all GPL-code.
GPL-code and proprietary code are thus not different. If you include either in your product without permission, you are at risk to being sued. But in neither case does the owner of included code have any claim to your code. The GPL is thus not viral, that is just a lie fed to people by for instance Microsoft marketing. Using GPL-code does not 'infect' your code, but of course you can be sued for copyright infringement.
The only difference between using someone elses proprietary code without permission and using GPL code without permission is how easy it is to find GPL-code to misuse.
Question: Can Samsung/LG/etc legally use Linux in their product once 1) They have signed one of these satanic "patent deals" 2) GPL3 is out
Linux yes, the Linux kernel license do not give anyone the right to relicense it under a higher version of the GPL. Plenty of free software, however, probably including the GNU tools have this provision.
This just means that LG and all the others that have signed the patent deal have to fork all these projects (if using them) if the projects decide to relicense under GPL v3. Microsoft is trying to split the community in two, and looks like they are succeeding.
"LGPL allows me to reuse the code that I've written as open source, in my boss' projects. I distribute it free because I feel it'll be useful to other developers out there."
There is nothing stopping you from using code you have written in ANY license in your boss' projects, as long as you have the full copyright for all parts of the code.
"BTW, Both sides of the argument are full of shit. Having been to many of the countries in Europe (and spent significant time in some) I have seen that most European countries are much less concerned about the environment than the US is, they require significantly lower standards and allow vehicles to smog freely."
This is complete and utter fabrication. Cars sold in the European Union is on average much more efficient than their counterparts in the US. Someone else posted the massive difference between BMW models in the US and the EU in miles per gallon. Granted, the UK gallon is 20% more than the US gallon, but the differences in MPG are several times this difference. The same goes for other cars.
Unless you spent your entire time in Europe in non-EU countries, I can't accout for how you could get such a massively wrong impression other than you just lying.
This states that the US is 15 years behind the European Union in fuel economy. And, shock horror, it is a US-source.
"Why the OpenOffice people are hostile to this project is something I've stopped wondering about... today's announcement of the "first" port of OOO to Mac not using X11 just shows how badly a project hurts itself when it refuses to work with others "
Licensing. NeoOffice code can not be reused in OpenOffice.org due to their relicensing to GPL from the original LGPL. This is done on purpose from NeoOffice, and the relationship between OpenOffice.org and NeoOffice is that of host and parasite, rather than a symbiotic one.
It has no other reason to exist but to run Windows software, so it clones the Windows API. Both Evolution and OpenOffice.org are no closer to Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Office than other competing software. They do substantially the same tasks and the free software packages certainly are influenced by the Microsoft competitors, but then again both of them are heavily influenced by the same software predecessors.
"You cannot and SHALL not legislate morality. Thought police should be shot on the basic premise that they cannot stop themselves from breaking the laws the are supposed to uphold."
I agree with your opposition to this law, but your argument is poor. An attempt is not the same as thinking about attempting something, so this has nothing to do with "thought policing".
Attempted crimes are already criminalised in most parts of the world, including the US. The obvious examples are attempted robbery and attempted murder. Just because you don't succeed, doesn't make you any less of a criminal. If we didn't criminalise attempted murder, someone could just keep on trying until they succeed without the law being able to stop them.
From TFA: "Anyone using counterfeit products who "recklessly causes or attempts to cause death" can be imprisoned for life. During a conference call, Justice Department officials gave the example of a hospital using pirated software instead of paying for it."
If I understand this correctly, this is meant to punish people that knowingly use pirated software for critical systems if the pirated software causes a malfunction in the system leading to loss of life. For instance, if you decided to implement a surgery computer using pirated Windows Vista (as dumb as that sounds) and the pirated software stops working as you operate (say due some malfunction introduced by the crackers).
Or do they want to use this against crackers if the pirated copy of Windows Vista they release causes someone's death due to some bug introduced by the crack? Wooaaah.....
It all sounds either far-fetched or redundant to me. If you recklessly cause someone else's death due to criminal neglect, that is surely manslaughter regardless of this being done by reckless use of pirated software or dangerous driving? (depending on the severity of the neglect).
.. they can not claim it isn't a religion. The church of scientology will fight tooth and nail claiming religious discrimination and they will win.
So rather than claiming that scientology isn't a religion, what can be done to avoid having to give these fraudsters tax benefits and possible government funding?
Simply stipulate that only "open" religions can be given these benefits. That is, only religions in which all the religious texts are freely reproducable and the religious services are open to anyone without payment, will be given full benefits.
This would help against a whole host of other cults it would be easy to argue that only open religions can be considered charities.
"But, they want to find Earth. Because, uh, actually, I have no idea."
Because they want to wipe out ALL of humanity and not just the other colonies? They are afraid that if they don't chase down earth and get rid of all humans, it will come back to haunt them?
If this is the case, it makes perfect sense to just follow Galactica until they've found earth and then kill everyone.
Of course they do. Don't be silly. Do you remember every single thing from your life? People certainly remember embarrassing things about you, but they don't remember EVERY embarrassing thing about you. Most things are forgotten and only the "gems" are kept. You shitting your pants was probably a gem:-)
In a society where EVERYTHING is remembered, people would have to be way more cautious about their life. That is in many ways sad and a lot less fun.
Right now, you can find 10 year old newsgroup postings from myself when searching Google. That is in my opinion too much data retention. I don't think they are particularly embarrassing now, but there was a time when my 10 year old newsgroup postings would have been posted when I was 14-15 or so.
They embarrasseed me, and I don't think I should be expected to be cautious about this issue when in my teens. People forget most of your silly mistakes from such a while ago but databases do not, unless you instruct them to.
"Making poor imitations of crappy ideas isn't clear indication of talent; quite the opposite, in fact."
I can fully understand all skepticism towards Mono but I'm not sure you can justify this sentence.
1) It assumes that.Net and Silverlight are crappy ideas. I'm not sure they are. 2) It assumes that Mono is a poor imitation. I'm not so sure this is correct either.
From what I've seen, Mono and GTK# is actually a pretty damn good programming environment.
"If you need to access a previous version of the file you need to specify a cryptic code like this: article.txt@10233745. A bit cumbersome but, hey, how often you access older version of your file anyways. Looks better than VMS' approach."
This is exactly what a graphical file manager should abstract away through concepts such as time machine.
This announcement is just Linux file systems starting to catch up with features from file systems such as ZFS. Very good news.
Slashdot Mirror
"is I have to pay for this junk through my "BBC Tax" even though I won't be able to use it. Here in the UK a TV license is compulsory if you have a TV that can receive a signal EVEN if you pay for a subscription service through someone like Sky or Virgin Media."
I completely agree that the BBC has a duty to make this available to anyone that wants it, thus choosing an open platform for it. However, I disagree with your sentiment on the BBC tax in general. The TV license is why the UK has a healthy non-commerical broadcaster that produces some very good quality material that maybe otherwise wouldn't be commercially viable. That you pay for a subscription service in addition is completely irrelevant. You still receive all the BBC channels and it is not the BBC's fault that you chose to give money to Sky or Virgin in addition.
Non-commercially funded TV is necessary as a counterweight to commercial TV, particularly as commercial media is consolidated onto fewer and fewer hands. While I won't claim that Non-commercially funded TV is non-biased, it certainly has a different bias.
If you suggest that it should rather be included as part of the regular income tax, then I might agree. The TV license makes no distinction as to people's ability to pay the license, and almost anyone has a TV. Yes, it would be unfair on the people who do not have a TV, but no system is fair to everyone.
Please get over yourself. Flash is at best a semi-open standard with severely lacking open source implementations. If an open standard with a complete open source implementation replaces Flash then there is little reason to care who created the standard in the first place apart from blind zealotry.
"Well in the case of something non-trivial, like the military, the reason why it's a Bad Thing is because then you end up with some rich incompetent running something that they have no business running."
It isn't that simple. Most of the time these rich people turn out to be decently competent for a myriad of reasons, including pressure from family and a desire to do well.
It also means that there are rich people in the army, rather than just poor people, making the army more consistent with society as a whole. This usually makes the politicians (usually rich people) less willing to go to war over frivilous things, because some of their family and friends might be involved and might get killed.
From a European point of view, I say that your point of view is no different than the typical Slashdot point of view, regardless of country of origin.
Apple's success has nothing to do with providing more features than their competitors, but providing regular features in a sensible and intuitive way. That is what they have done with both Macs and the iPod and that is what they are trying to do with the iPhone. Yes, Sony Ericsson and Nokia has the same features, but those phones suck. They have absolutely terrible user interfaces with almost no innovation on the usability side of things since the mobile phone was introduced. The mobile phones are incredibly stagnant from a UI point of view, despite having had lot of features added to them and the industry desperately need a shake-up.
"The point being, that Berners-Lee is actually in much better company than the list given in the introduction might have suggested, and this award extends beyond the British gene pool to Americans like Eliot and Anglo-Americans like Churchill."
I find it very amusing that you suggest that Churchill is somehow "beyond the British gene pool".
Yes, Churchill had an american mother (of english descent), but he was born and raised in England (at Blenheim Palace no less) and his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, was from the Spencer Family (notably the same family as Princess Diana), and third in line for being the Duke of Marlborough.
"A few days ago we had an idiot judge (yes, a *judge*) suing cleaners $54M for the emotional stress of losing is pants"
This is because the US has punitive damages in the legal system. You would never see a similar lawsuit in most of Europe, because most countries only award actual damages.
I understand the idea of using punitive damages as a deterrent against people and companies not upholding their obligations and breaking regulations, but then the punitive damages should not go to the people suing them in the first place, but rather to some charity agreed between the two parties and the court.
Otherwise you get the daft mess of people misusing the legal system to sue people for millions for silly little things.
And if it isn't silly little things, but something like say losing a child through someones negligence, then by all means punish the person/company responsible, but no amount of money awarded to you personally is going to bring your child back.
"Slow window redraws, completely broken Windows conventions, a total lack of extensibility, and on and on."
While I agree with the first two, the last is a feature, not a flaw. There are plenty of very extensible browsers out there and if you want one, then Safari is not for you. But for the large number of people that would never install a single extension, Safari is great. Besides, the lack of extensions means you are less likely to get ridiculous toolbars installed without your consent.
Any good product, be it software, hardware or boots focus on being very good for the people that like it, not mediocre for everyone.
Some countries in Europe may have laws against photographing people, I don't know. But here we are talking about laws against publishing said photographs without express permission from the people being photographed. Many countries have such laws and the exception is typically if the person being photographed can be said to be a "public figure", in which case you are free to publicise pictures of them without permission, except if the pictures where obtained in a way that would be consider a violation of privacy (climbing over their garden fence to spy at them in their swimming pool).
The main reason for this kind of laws is that two parties freedom are directly at odds. The freedom of the photographer and publisher has to be weighed up against the freedom and privacy of the individual.
The laws surrounding surveillance cameras are in other words completely irrelevant in this discussion as we are talking about the right to publish rather than the right to monitor. The police state discussion is a different discussion altogether.
"No, the phone has already been invented."
Ah, but no GOOD phone has been invented! People today like phones with MP3-players and Cameras. What is typical for these phones? They all suck, but some suck a little less.
The MP3-player interface is always much worse than on the iPod, the camera interfaces usually suck balls, the texting leaves a lot to be desired, etc. Typical for all the so-called "smart phones", is that they behave like a PC. They are basically a collection of applications, with no coherent integration.
I dare anyone to tell me that the Symbian OS for instance is a joy to use and the Microsoft Smartphone is certainly no joy either. It really baffles me that the Phone UIs are still so primitive after so many years of their existence and so many combined years of experience in UI-design in the world.
The world is CRYING out for a feature rich phone that is a joy to use and feels like a coherent whole rather than a loosely stringed together group of applications and if Apple can provide that, they have got a winner regardless of whether you can add this mythical "killer app" to it.
"If the government was serious about finding minimizing our dependency on foreign oil then this man would be exempt as he does not use foreign oil. Let's get all non-foreign oil sources (including domestic sources, if at all feasible, I'm not sure if it is) exempt from these taxes, and raise the taxes elsewhere. That way more and more people will avoid foreign oil. Then once we've achieved 0 use of foreign oil, we can start slowly putting those taxes back on, while raising the foreign oil taxes even further and lower the taxes elsewhere (wherever it was increased to make up for the loss of tax from the exemption in the first place) so it will continue to remain profitable to use domestic sources. Then, if its still an issue which I think it will be, we can repeat the entire process with more environmentally friendly fuel methods."
This, my friend, is called protectionism and it isn't exactly a new idea. Countries that go too far with this idea get punished by their trade partners with import taxes on their own, thus international trade suffers.
Also, why on earth should the US aspire to achieve 0 use of foreign oil? What good would come of that? Surely it is enough to make sure you have enough energy production of your own to sustain you in a reasonable state in case your trade partners refuse to supply you. That would require nowhere near 0 use of foreign oil.
... as long as you are the copyright holder.
If you happen to include GPL-code in your closed source software you may get sued, you may be forced to remove your product from the market until you have removed all GPL-code from it, and you may be forced to pay compensation. But you are still the copyright holder, and nobody has any claim to your code other than you.
The only way I can see you could be forced to open your code, is if your company don't have the means to pay compensation and don't have the finances to stop selling the product and remove all GPL-code.
GPL-code and proprietary code are thus not different. If you include either in your product without permission, you are at risk to being sued. But in neither case does the owner of included code have any claim to your code. The GPL is thus not viral, that is just a lie fed to people by for instance Microsoft marketing. Using GPL-code does not 'infect' your code, but of course you can be sued for copyright infringement.
The only difference between using someone elses proprietary code without permission and using GPL code without permission is how easy it is to find GPL-code to misuse.
Question: Can Samsung/LG/etc legally use Linux in their product once
1) They have signed one of these satanic "patent deals"
2) GPL3 is out
Linux yes, the Linux kernel license do not give anyone the right to relicense it under a higher version of the GPL. Plenty of free software, however, probably including the GNU tools have this provision.
This just means that LG and all the others that have signed the patent deal have to fork all these projects (if using them) if the projects decide to relicense under GPL v3. Microsoft is trying to split the community in two, and looks like they are succeeding.
"LGPL allows me to reuse the code that I've written as open source, in my boss' projects. I distribute it free because I feel it'll be useful to other developers out there."
There is nothing stopping you from using code you have written in ANY license in your boss' projects, as long as you have the full copyright for all parts of the code.
"BTW, Both sides of the argument are full of shit. Having been to many of the countries in Europe (and spent significant time in some) I have seen that most European countries are much less concerned about the environment than the US is, they require significantly lower standards and allow vehicles to smog freely."
This is complete and utter fabrication. Cars sold in the European Union is on average much more efficient than their counterparts in the US. Someone else posted the massive difference between BMW models in the US and the EU in miles per gallon. Granted, the UK gallon is 20% more than the US gallon, but the differences in MPG are several times this difference. The same goes for other cars.
Unless you spent your entire time in Europe in non-EU countries, I can't accout for how you could get such a massively wrong impression other than you just lying.
This states that the US is 15 years behind the European Union in fuel economy. And, shock horror, it is a US-source.
"Why the OpenOffice people are hostile to this project is something I've stopped
wondering about... today's announcement of the "first" port of OOO to Mac not
using X11 just shows how badly a project hurts itself when it refuses to work
with others "
Licensing. NeoOffice code can not be reused in OpenOffice.org due to their relicensing to GPL from the original LGPL. This is done on purpose from NeoOffice, and the relationship between OpenOffice.org and NeoOffice is that of host and parasite, rather than a symbiotic one.
It has no other reason to exist but to run Windows software, so it clones the Windows API. Both Evolution and OpenOffice.org are no closer to Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Office than other competing software. They do substantially the same tasks and the free software packages certainly are influenced by the Microsoft competitors, but then again both of them are heavily influenced by the same software predecessors.
"You cannot and SHALL not legislate morality. Thought police should be shot on the basic premise that they cannot stop themselves from breaking the laws the are supposed to uphold."
I agree with your opposition to this law, but your argument is poor. An attempt is not the same as thinking about attempting something, so this has nothing to do with "thought policing".
Attempted crimes are already criminalised in most parts of the world, including the US. The obvious examples are attempted robbery and attempted murder. Just because you don't succeed, doesn't make you any less of a criminal. If we didn't criminalise attempted murder, someone could just keep on trying until they succeed without the law being able to stop them.
From TFA:
"Anyone using counterfeit products who "recklessly causes or attempts to cause death" can be imprisoned for life. During a conference call, Justice Department officials gave the example of a hospital using pirated software instead of paying for it."
If I understand this correctly, this is meant to punish people that knowingly use pirated software for critical systems if the pirated software causes a malfunction in the system leading to loss of life. For instance, if you decided to implement a surgery computer using pirated Windows Vista (as dumb as that sounds) and the pirated software stops working as you operate (say due some malfunction introduced by the crackers).
Or do they want to use this against crackers if the pirated copy of Windows Vista they release causes someone's death due to some bug introduced by the crack? Wooaaah.....
It all sounds either far-fetched or redundant to me. If you recklessly cause someone else's death due to criminal neglect, that is surely manslaughter regardless of this being done by reckless use of pirated software or dangerous driving? (depending on the severity of the neglect).
.. they can not claim it isn't a religion. The church of scientology will fight tooth and nail claiming religious discrimination and they will win.
So rather than claiming that scientology isn't a religion, what can be done to avoid having to give these fraudsters tax benefits and possible government funding?
Simply stipulate that only "open" religions can be given these benefits. That is, only religions in which all the religious texts are freely reproducable and the religious services are open to anyone without payment, will be given full benefits.
This would help against a whole host of other cults it would be easy to argue that only open religions can be considered charities.
"But, they want to find Earth. Because, uh, actually, I have no idea."
Because they want to wipe out ALL of humanity and not just the other colonies? They are afraid that if they don't chase down earth and get rid of all humans, it will come back to haunt them?
If this is the case, it makes perfect sense to just follow Galactica until they've found earth and then kill everyone.
"People don't forget squat, I'm afraid to say."
:-)
Of course they do. Don't be silly. Do you remember every single thing from your life? People certainly remember embarrassing things about you, but they don't remember EVERY embarrassing thing about you. Most things are forgotten and only the "gems" are kept. You shitting your pants was probably a gem
In a society where EVERYTHING is remembered, people would have to be way more cautious about their life. That is in many ways sad and a lot less fun.
Right now, you can find 10 year old newsgroup postings from myself when searching Google. That is in my opinion too much data retention. I don't think they are particularly embarrassing now, but there was a time when my 10 year old newsgroup postings would have been posted when I was 14-15 or so.
They embarrasseed me, and I don't think I should be expected to be cautious about this issue when in my teens. People forget most of your silly mistakes from such a while ago but databases do not, unless you instruct them to.
"Making poor imitations of crappy ideas isn't clear indication of talent; quite the opposite, in fact."
.Net and Silverlight are crappy ideas. I'm not sure they are.
I can fully understand all skepticism towards Mono but I'm not sure you can justify this sentence.
1) It assumes that
2) It assumes that Mono is a poor imitation. I'm not so sure this is correct either.
From what I've seen, Mono and GTK# is actually a pretty damn good programming environment.
"If you need to access a previous version of the file you need to specify a cryptic code like this: article.txt@10233745. A bit cumbersome but, hey, how often you access older version of your file anyways. Looks better than VMS' approach."
This is exactly what a graphical file manager should abstract away through concepts such as time machine.
This announcement is just Linux file systems starting to catch up with features from file systems such as ZFS. Very good news.
This is easily summarised by The Mythical Man Month.
Throwing more people at IE would make it worse, not better. Therefore, it is better to spend those people doing other useful projects.