OpenDOS source code derivatives bay be redistributed only for "non-commerical purposes" [sic] and thus it is Open Source but not Free Software.
Umm... this is just wrong. Open Source is a trademark of the Open Source Initiative. Their criteria for open source software explicitly prohibits restrictions on fields of use (such as the one no commercial activity clause in OpenDOS's proprietary license).
Think of Open Source as a form of brand identity for Free Software. They are both useful terms, but the latter lacks (1) a logo, (2) a single, specific formalization, (3) a license certification process, (4) important legal protections, and (5) marketability [because of the whole "free as in beer"/"free as in freedom" thing].
You're totally missing the point if you're trying to figure out why verizon is "justified" in making a change to their charges. If you're willing to pay for it, they're justified in charging for it. Nothing else matters in the business world.
Ahh... but what I'm willing to pay for is, in part, dependent on the justification for the charge. If you're just being greedy, then your complete lack of justification is a source of irritation, and thus, discussion.
Think of it another way... this chatter that you see as "missing the point" is actually a form of argument between Verizon and their customers in the court of public opinion. By examining the objective criteria (or lack thereof) behind the $2 fee, customers spread the bad word and put pressure on the company to change their mind. There's a self-feeding aspect to this too, in which the more people complain, the more media attention will be focused on the decision, the more pressure there will be to change the policy. And while I doubt it will work here (grumble non-competitive telecos grumble) it works more often than you'd think.
What really is the difference between a democratic government and a democratic group blog like Wikipedia?
Well, for one thing, Wikipedia doesn't have a police force, military, court system, and complete legal dominion over the rest of us. If they go corrupt and abuse the public trust they have earned, another site will spring up to replace them.
SOPA takes down sites. Wikipedia however allows us to categorize people as criminals, hackers, anti-social, etc. and allows an "official" opinion to predominate as to the legitimacy of their points of view.
Is that you Hans? Because most of your article appears to be based on cited, factual sources.
Look... anyone with a microphone can tarnish another's reputation. The internet gives everyone a microphone, Wikipedia gives a process for getting a consensus reality out of those microphones, and SOPA takes away microphones. I'm not really sure what your argument is, but these activities are not so close in degree as you seem to be implying. To make sense you should show how Wikipedia's similarity to a democratic government introduces problems that cause it to under-perform other information sources (Google, Facebook, mainstream media, random websites, scientific research, etc.). If you're just pointing out that it has problems... well, yeah, all human institutions do.
How many valid viewpoints have been squelched by Wikipedians refusing to recognize them?
You seem to agree that some form of squelching is necessary (with your concern about how people are depicted on biographical pages), but you disagree with what has been squelched. Care to give an example? Because from what I've seen, Wikipedians tend to do a good job rejecting the chaff while still recording notable viewpoints, even when they'recompletelyinvalid.
leave the people who want to GetThingsDone alone please with your whining. Go play and shut up.
We aren't whining, and we won't shut up. Real freedoms and real control are at stake here. People are at stake here. You may be focused on your next meal or your next dollar, but civilization--the good type that's actually half-decent to live in--can't happen without long-term thinkers, including that of idealist and philosophers.
Incidentally, why are you posting here if you think this forum is all noise and you're so intent on getting things done? Does it have anything to do with how your incoherent and uncivil rant got modded to 5 instead of being marked troll?
connecting to an unsecured wifi network is perfectly acceptable because it's publicly broadcasting a signal, but on the other hand tracking a publicly broadcasted signal from a mobile phone is a big no-no.
At a technical level, an SSID is a public invitation to join a network (granted, the owner of the device may or may not realize that). Cell phone traffic, on the other hand, is a private conversation which you are intercepting/wiretapping (possibly decrypting A5/1 or other ciphers used to secure such communications... I'm not a cell phone expert). The WIFI equivalent would be doing a packet capture on your neighbor's traffic (and possibly decrypting WEP/WAP to do so). So there's no contradiction from a technical standpoint unless you insist on boiling it down to a simplistic "reception of a publicly broadcasted signal" view.
But I'd go further and argue that the technical viewpoint isn't what primarily matters here. It's perfectly fair to explore our values and moral intuitions (such as the near-universal golden rule) and decide that some action is right or wrong based on the context of use and the ramifications for individuals and societies. Intercepting the communications of a stranger is, generally speaking, wrong. Accessing a free service that someone has provided is NOT wrong (unless you're intentionally abusing that generosity with excessive usage or illegal behavior, in which case it is wrong). Accessing a free service that someone has provided unintentionally is where the WIFI situation gets a little grayer [though not by much, if the cost to them is effectively free].
Bottom line: it's really hard for me to see how you can equivocate these two situations at all, because nuances matter.
Who would have thought aliens had QR code technology?
Oh hilarious... you've figured out that it's safe to lift one-liners from the first page of the article because nobody on slashdot is going to read that far!
None of what these people do should be secret. They shouldn't be allowed anywhere without a number of cameras and microphones on them always and everything should always be transmitted out to the public.
It becomes impossible to have effective negotiations if each side must worry about how every sentence will sound to their constituencies. Americans would have flipped had they known that Kennedy agreed to remove some obsolete missile installations in Italy and Turkey to resolve the Cuban Missile Crisis, yet by doing so he avoided the very real possibility of nuclear holocaust. Just a thought...
If you're actually a source of economic value, taxes don't affect you as much as you'd think. Government takes, gives to the poor, makes them a bit richer, and they end up buying more of your product. There may not be a 1:1 correlation, but $1 in new taxes probably ends up being far less than $1 out of their pocket when all is said and done.
Not only that, but some amount of redistribution helps stabilize society as a whole, and you need a stable society in order to have consumers and educated employees down the road.
Javascript is the most common not because it's the most difficult. It's the most common because it's the most sought after.
The author has not ignored popularity: he's using the TIOBE index to correct for it. JavaScript has the highest number of questions on StackOverflow relative to its weight in the TIOBE index, which could be evidence for the "difficulty" conclusion the author makes. As others have pointed out, this isn't the only hypothesis that makes sense, but it's a somewhat reasonable one. (Personally, I don't think the TIOBE index is all that great of a measure to begin with, but that's another story.)
Incidentally, neither the StackOverflow question count nor the TIOBE index rank JavaScript as most common. If I'm reading the fine article correctly, they place it at #4 and #10, respectively.
On the other hand if it doesn't "have to" be the same everywhere, why don't you have to a) give a suitable explanation as to why it would be the same and b) come up with some experimental data that backs this up?
Because constancy is a simpler, more proven explanation that meshes with existing empirical and theoretical results?
To have the KDE 3.5 forked into an actively-developed fork will not downplay KDE 4's significance nor its own active development. This just gives us users a choice between two considerably different desktop environments.
When you fork, you gain a choice and lose synergies. If Trinity gains steam, how much development effort will it pull away from KDE 4? How much energy will it take from application developers trying to target both platforms? Will Debian divert other packaging efforts to support this new desktop? And how much extra confusion or frustration will this add for Linux users? Choices you don't care about are, in fact, drawbacks.
I'm not arguing for or against the Trinity effort. Forks can bring value to the community, especially when solving a legal dispute, circumventing a stagnant core team, trying out something really innovative, or targeting a specialized set of interests. But fragmentation has a cost, and it's not as simple as saying more choices are always better.
Basically it e-mails you asking if you are still alive, if you don't respond back, after 3 e-mails, it sends out the assigned message to who you specified. It does cost $20 a year
Sounds like a ripoff... for $20, they should be able to send certified letters and make sure that they are received, as opposed to sending an email that might get spam-trapped.
Whose liberty? Certainly not the Apple or Microsoft stockholder when you pass your little regulations. Such liberty comes at others' expense, a zero sum game.
Under your zero-sum reckoning, a pure democracy has the same amount of liberty as a dictatorship.
I'd suggest there is an asymmetry b/t liberty for individuals and liberty for institutions, and not just because shareholders represent a fragment of the population (like the dictator), but because of the fundamental entanglements that institutions create. Take a homeowner's association (HOA) as an example... each household is less free despite the fact that they are all equal "shareholders".
Don't speak for libertarians if you aren't one.
Who said I was speaking for libertarians? Have I made any statements regarding public policy or values in either of these posts? I've merely talked about the effective dynamics of personal autonomy in order to point out the (evidently hidden?) consistency in the great-great-grandparent's post.
The tinfoil hat crowd, "government out of my life" - unless they are talking about big companies they don't like, then it's, "rain down the wrath of Big Government on them!"
The positions are consistent if you're interested in increasing the liberty of individuals. And you don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to regard the consolidation of power in various, progressively larger institutions as a reduction in the effective autonomy of your state/county/community/self.
No significant improvement since ELIZA, 45 years ago.
That's AI in a nutshell.
45 years ago, software couldn't recognize your voice, read your license plate, beat a chess grandmaster, translate foreign documents, or map your body into video games. Sure, the field has had its share of false promises, but--unlike fusion, for instance--AI has delivered solid and commercially-viable results over the past 2-3 decades by helping us solve numerous problems that were otherwise unapproachable.
Incidentally, I had an AI researcher tell me that the Loebner prize was akin to "trying to reach the moon by building successively taller ladders". E.g., according to him, the academic community sees the whole thing as pursuing a fundamentally flawed approach.
We're duplicating efforts which are already handled from the (current) federal level all the way down to the very local level at your town's city hall.
Duplication is an interesting way to look at this, but you're reaching the wrong conclusion. Take NIST for instance... would it really be better to have 50 standards bureaus instead of one? What about NOAA? Doesn't it just make more economic sense to have ONE agency handling ONE network of observatories, sensors, satellites instead of having 50+ agencies? I'd argue that we're getting good value for our tax dollars out of such consolidation.
Budget cuts would be good if they target the right sacred cows (defense, entitlements, farm subsidies), but blindly swinging the ax around will cost us civilization, not save it. Unfortunately, those sacred cows aren't going to be touched because there's too much political disincentive to do so.
You mean the "Speed up and turn on the windscreen wipers" decision?
I know you're joking, but deers are serious threats: they can really wreck a car, and deer-vehicle collisions cause about ~150 deaths/year in the US. While you obviously want to consider what traffic is behind you, I recommend that you treat deers as emergency braking events.
A deer on the side of the road should evoke almost the same level of alarm as those moments where you suddenly see brake lights rushing toward you because traffic has suddenly come to a standstill. You may think that's overkill, but those f*ckers will leap through your windshield in a heartbeat. (Okay, it probably is overkill for trafficy interstate situations where you can see the deer further off, but for your typical nightime 2-lane wooded road encounter, it's almost always appropriate to immediately brake down to the sub-15 MPH range.)
You do not "own" facts about yourself. You never did. It has never been, and will never be, illegal for someone to look at you in the bus queue and observe what clothes you're wearing, what your height is, what your hair colour is, or what number bus you're queuing for.
Yes, but it's also true that if a creepy man staked out a bus stop for months on end recording data about people, the police could get him to "move along sir". And if that creepy man was following you around all day, day in and day out, you could get a restraining order against him. Somehow I think getting a restraining order against FaceBook, Google, etc. will be a little more difficult despite the fact that they are stalking the entire world. What's needed is for the legislature to come to the rescue.
So, let me get this straight: you believe it is wrong for a company to offer two different levels of service for two different prices?
You can't use generalizations to explore the subtleties by which participants in a transaction see that deal as fair or unfair. You've got to look at the specifics. I don't play MMORPG's, but if I did, I suspect I would be more satisfied with a one-price-buys-all model than a nickle-and-dime payment model. I know this is true with amusement parks: I get really irked if a ride/attraction requires an extra fee beyond the price of admission, but I'm okay paying more for food and souvenirs.
CCP designed the stuff, they have the right to choose what to charge for it. No amount of money you've spent on their *other* products gives you the right to demand access to the rest for free.
Grandparent isn't suing CCP, he's describing what he felt he deserved for the subscription fee. Presumably, he will take his business to another MMORPG that is more attentive to the mechanics of customer satisfaction. (And actually, you probably will see a lawsuit someday where somebody argues that the purchase/subscription fee implied full access to the game.)
no, seriously, didn't Google just abandon the Go language?
What makes you say that? The latest release was a Sept. 07th... about a month ago. Dart may or may not threaten Go at some point, but for now it seems that Dart is more focused on client/GUI code and Go is more focused on server code (e.g., as a systems programming language). Google probably intends to throw resources behind both to see whether either (or both) succeed.
He didn't say it was bad, he said it was "unscientific" and proceeded to list 3 justifications for that word choice stemming from the inherit lack of rigor in a public performance.
I do not understand why Mathematicians should appear as some sage-like, ascetic monks.
You have a slashdot account but haven't read Anathem? Seriously? The monk thing totally works for mathematicians.
No, it's more like two different theologies for the same faith. Most adherents don't really care about the nit-picky distinctions, but the more orthodox branch (FSF) wastes a lot of energy over it. What's ironic is that having a diversity of approaches to a common goal can be a really good thing (put HURD joke here, for instance), but the leadership usually sees it as threatening (this is a really common problem for social movements, actually).
Slashdot Mirror
"and yes, tomorrow it all starts all over again. but we'll deal with that tomorrow."
It's already started. PIPA and STOP are both SOPA renamed. They are not "enjoying the moment", they are 2 steps ahead of us already.
Moreover... how can we go on the offensive? We need to draft a constitutional amendment to prevent this junk from happening EVER.
OpenDOS source code derivatives bay be redistributed only for "non-commerical purposes" [sic] and thus it is Open Source but not Free Software.
Umm... this is just wrong. Open Source is a trademark of the Open Source Initiative. Their criteria for open source software explicitly prohibits restrictions on fields of use (such as the one no commercial activity clause in OpenDOS's proprietary license).
Think of Open Source as a form of brand identity for Free Software. They are both useful terms, but the latter lacks (1) a logo, (2) a single, specific formalization, (3) a license certification process, (4) important legal protections, and (5) marketability [because of the whole "free as in beer"/"free as in freedom" thing].
You're totally missing the point if you're trying to figure out why verizon is "justified" in making a change to their charges. If you're willing to pay for it, they're justified in charging for it. Nothing else matters in the business world.
Ahh... but what I'm willing to pay for is, in part, dependent on the justification for the charge. If you're just being greedy, then your complete lack of justification is a source of irritation, and thus, discussion.
Think of it another way... this chatter that you see as "missing the point" is actually a form of argument between Verizon and their customers in the court of public opinion. By examining the objective criteria (or lack thereof) behind the $2 fee, customers spread the bad word and put pressure on the company to change their mind. There's a self-feeding aspect to this too, in which the more people complain, the more media attention will be focused on the decision, the more pressure there will be to change the policy. And while I doubt it will work here (grumble non-competitive telecos grumble) it works more often than you'd think.
What really is the difference between a democratic government and a democratic group blog like Wikipedia?
Well, for one thing, Wikipedia doesn't have a police force, military, court system, and complete legal dominion over the rest of us. If they go corrupt and abuse the public trust they have earned, another site will spring up to replace them.
SOPA takes down sites. Wikipedia however allows us to categorize people as criminals, hackers, anti-social, etc. and allows an "official" opinion to predominate as to the legitimacy of their points of view.
Is that you Hans? Because most of your article appears to be based on cited, factual sources.
Look... anyone with a microphone can tarnish another's reputation. The internet gives everyone a microphone, Wikipedia gives a process for getting a consensus reality out of those microphones, and SOPA takes away microphones. I'm not really sure what your argument is, but these activities are not so close in degree as you seem to be implying. To make sense you should show how Wikipedia's similarity to a democratic government introduces problems that cause it to under-perform other information sources (Google, Facebook, mainstream media, random websites, scientific research, etc.). If you're just pointing out that it has problems... well, yeah, all human institutions do.
How many valid viewpoints have been squelched by Wikipedians refusing to recognize them?
You seem to agree that some form of squelching is necessary (with your concern about how people are depicted on biographical pages), but you disagree with what has been squelched. Care to give an example? Because from what I've seen, Wikipedians tend to do a good job rejecting the chaff while still recording notable viewpoints, even when they're completely invalid.
leave the people who want to GetThingsDone alone please with your whining. Go play and shut up.
We aren't whining, and we won't shut up. Real freedoms and real control are at stake here. People are at stake here. You may be focused on your next meal or your next dollar, but civilization--the good type that's actually half-decent to live in--can't happen without long-term thinkers, including that of idealist and philosophers.
Incidentally, why are you posting here if you think this forum is all noise and you're so intent on getting things done? Does it have anything to do with how your incoherent and uncivil rant got modded to 5 instead of being marked troll?
connecting to an unsecured wifi network is perfectly acceptable because it's publicly broadcasting a signal, but on the other hand tracking a publicly broadcasted signal from a mobile phone is a big no-no.
At a technical level, an SSID is a public invitation to join a network (granted, the owner of the device may or may not realize that). Cell phone traffic, on the other hand, is a private conversation which you are intercepting/wiretapping (possibly decrypting A5/1 or other ciphers used to secure such communications... I'm not a cell phone expert). The WIFI equivalent would be doing a packet capture on your neighbor's traffic (and possibly decrypting WEP/WAP to do so). So there's no contradiction from a technical standpoint unless you insist on boiling it down to a simplistic "reception of a publicly broadcasted signal" view.
But I'd go further and argue that the technical viewpoint isn't what primarily matters here. It's perfectly fair to explore our values and moral intuitions (such as the near-universal golden rule) and decide that some action is right or wrong based on the context of use and the ramifications for individuals and societies. Intercepting the communications of a stranger is, generally speaking, wrong. Accessing a free service that someone has provided is NOT wrong (unless you're intentionally abusing that generosity with excessive usage or illegal behavior, in which case it is wrong). Accessing a free service that someone has provided unintentionally is where the WIFI situation gets a little grayer [though not by much, if the cost to them is effectively free].
Bottom line: it's really hard for me to see how you can equivocate these two situations at all, because nuances matter.
Who would have thought aliens had QR code technology?
Oh hilarious... you've figured out that it's safe to lift one-liners from the first page of the article because nobody on slashdot is going to read that far!
None of what these people do should be secret. They shouldn't be allowed anywhere without a number of cameras and microphones on them always and everything should always be transmitted out to the public.
It becomes impossible to have effective negotiations if each side must worry about how every sentence will sound to their constituencies. Americans would have flipped had they known that Kennedy agreed to remove some obsolete missile installations in Italy and Turkey to resolve the Cuban Missile Crisis, yet by doing so he avoided the very real possibility of nuclear holocaust. Just a thought...
If you're actually a source of economic value, taxes don't affect you as much as you'd think. Government takes, gives to the poor, makes them a bit richer, and they end up buying more of your product. There may not be a 1:1 correlation, but $1 in new taxes probably ends up being far less than $1 out of their pocket when all is said and done.
Not only that, but some amount of redistribution helps stabilize society as a whole, and you need a stable society in order to have consumers and educated employees down the road.
Javascript is the most common not because it's the most difficult. It's the most common because it's the most sought after.
The author has not ignored popularity: he's using the TIOBE index to correct for it. JavaScript has the highest number of questions on StackOverflow relative to its weight in the TIOBE index, which could be evidence for the "difficulty" conclusion the author makes. As others have pointed out, this isn't the only hypothesis that makes sense, but it's a somewhat reasonable one. (Personally, I don't think the TIOBE index is all that great of a measure to begin with, but that's another story.)
Incidentally, neither the StackOverflow question count nor the TIOBE index rank JavaScript as most common. If I'm reading the fine article correctly, they place it at #4 and #10, respectively.
On the other hand if it doesn't "have to" be the same everywhere, why don't you have to a) give a suitable explanation as to why it would be the same and b) come up with some experimental data that backs this up?
Because constancy is a simpler, more proven explanation that meshes with existing empirical and theoretical results?
To have the KDE 3.5 forked into an actively-developed fork will not downplay KDE 4's significance nor its own active development. This just gives us users a choice between two considerably different desktop environments.
When you fork, you gain a choice and lose synergies. If Trinity gains steam, how much development effort will it pull away from KDE 4? How much energy will it take from application developers trying to target both platforms? Will Debian divert other packaging efforts to support this new desktop? And how much extra confusion or frustration will this add for Linux users? Choices you don't care about are, in fact, drawbacks.
I'm not arguing for or against the Trinity effort. Forks can bring value to the community, especially when solving a legal dispute, circumventing a stagnant core team, trying out something really innovative, or targeting a specialized set of interests. But fragmentation has a cost, and it's not as simple as saying more choices are always better.
Basically it e-mails you asking if you are still alive, if you don't respond back, after 3 e-mails, it sends out the assigned message to who you specified. It does cost $20 a year
Sounds like a ripoff... for $20, they should be able to send certified letters and make sure that they are received, as opposed to sending an email that might get spam-trapped.
Whose liberty? Certainly not the Apple or Microsoft stockholder when you pass your little regulations. Such liberty comes at others' expense, a zero sum game.
Under your zero-sum reckoning, a pure democracy has the same amount of liberty as a dictatorship.
I'd suggest there is an asymmetry b/t liberty for individuals and liberty for institutions, and not just because shareholders represent a fragment of the population (like the dictator), but because of the fundamental entanglements that institutions create. Take a homeowner's association (HOA) as an example... each household is less free despite the fact that they are all equal "shareholders".
Don't speak for libertarians if you aren't one.
Who said I was speaking for libertarians? Have I made any statements regarding public policy or values in either of these posts? I've merely talked about the effective dynamics of personal autonomy in order to point out the (evidently hidden?) consistency in the great-great-grandparent's post.
The tinfoil hat crowd, "government out of my life" - unless they are talking about big companies they don't like, then it's, "rain down the wrath of Big Government on them!"
The positions are consistent if you're interested in increasing the liberty of individuals. And you don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to regard the consolidation of power in various, progressively larger institutions as a reduction in the effective autonomy of your state/county/community/self.
No significant improvement since ELIZA, 45 years ago. That's AI in a nutshell.
45 years ago, software couldn't recognize your voice, read your license plate, beat a chess grandmaster, translate foreign documents, or map your body into video games. Sure, the field has had its share of false promises, but--unlike fusion, for instance--AI has delivered solid and commercially-viable results over the past 2-3 decades by helping us solve numerous problems that were otherwise unapproachable.
Incidentally, I had an AI researcher tell me that the Loebner prize was akin to "trying to reach the moon by building successively taller ladders". E.g., according to him, the academic community sees the whole thing as pursuing a fundamentally flawed approach.
People like you scare me.
Be scared... the "don't use software for life-critical functions" ship sailed a long, long time ago.
We're duplicating efforts which are already handled from the (current) federal level all the way down to the very local level at your town's city hall.
Duplication is an interesting way to look at this, but you're reaching the wrong conclusion. Take NIST for instance... would it really be better to have 50 standards bureaus instead of one? What about NOAA? Doesn't it just make more economic sense to have ONE agency handling ONE network of observatories, sensors, satellites instead of having 50+ agencies? I'd argue that we're getting good value for our tax dollars out of such consolidation.
Budget cuts would be good if they target the right sacred cows (defense, entitlements, farm subsidies), but blindly swinging the ax around will cost us civilization, not save it. Unfortunately, those sacred cows aren't going to be touched because there's too much political disincentive to do so.
It's wise of Microsoft to go after the high-price, low-IQ market.
But Apple's already filled that niche... :O
You mean the "Speed up and turn on the windscreen wipers" decision?
I know you're joking, but deers are serious threats: they can really wreck a car, and deer-vehicle collisions cause about ~150 deaths/year in the US. While you obviously want to consider what traffic is behind you, I recommend that you treat deers as emergency braking events.
A deer on the side of the road should evoke almost the same level of alarm as those moments where you suddenly see brake lights rushing toward you because traffic has suddenly come to a standstill. You may think that's overkill, but those f*ckers will leap through your windshield in a heartbeat. (Okay, it probably is overkill for trafficy interstate situations where you can see the deer further off, but for your typical nightime 2-lane wooded road encounter, it's almost always appropriate to immediately brake down to the sub-15 MPH range.)
You do not "own" facts about yourself. You never did. It has never been, and will never be, illegal for someone to look at you in the bus queue and observe what clothes you're wearing, what your height is, what your hair colour is, or what number bus you're queuing for.
Yes, but it's also true that if a creepy man staked out a bus stop for months on end recording data about people, the police could get him to "move along sir". And if that creepy man was following you around all day, day in and day out, you could get a restraining order against him. Somehow I think getting a restraining order against FaceBook, Google, etc. will be a little more difficult despite the fact that they are stalking the entire world. What's needed is for the legislature to come to the rescue.
So, let me get this straight: you believe it is wrong for a company to offer two different levels of service for two different prices?
You can't use generalizations to explore the subtleties by which participants in a transaction see that deal as fair or unfair. You've got to look at the specifics. I don't play MMORPG's, but if I did, I suspect I would be more satisfied with a one-price-buys-all model than a nickle-and-dime payment model. I know this is true with amusement parks: I get really irked if a ride/attraction requires an extra fee beyond the price of admission, but I'm okay paying more for food and souvenirs.
CCP designed the stuff, they have the right to choose what to charge for it. No amount of money you've spent on their *other* products gives you the right to demand access to the rest for free.
Grandparent isn't suing CCP, he's describing what he felt he deserved for the subscription fee. Presumably, he will take his business to another MMORPG that is more attentive to the mechanics of customer satisfaction. (And actually, you probably will see a lawsuit someday where somebody argues that the purchase/subscription fee implied full access to the game.)
no, seriously, didn't Google just abandon the Go language?
What makes you say that? The latest release was a Sept. 07th... about a month ago. Dart may or may not threaten Go at some point, but for now it seems that Dart is more focused on client/GUI code and Go is more focused on server code (e.g., as a systems programming language). Google probably intends to throw resources behind both to see whether either (or both) succeed.
This is a cheap publicity stunt, nothing more.
And that is a bad thing exactly how?
He didn't say it was bad, he said it was "unscientific" and proceeded to list 3 justifications for that word choice stemming from the inherit lack of rigor in a public performance.
I do not understand why Mathematicians should appear as some sage-like, ascetic monks.
You have a slashdot account but haven't read Anathem? Seriously? The monk thing totally works for mathematicians.
No, it's more like two different theologies for the same faith. Most adherents don't really care about the nit-picky distinctions, but the more orthodox branch (FSF) wastes a lot of energy over it. What's ironic is that having a diversity of approaches to a common goal can be a really good thing (put HURD joke here, for instance), but the leadership usually sees it as threatening (this is a really common problem for social movements, actually).