So it refers to itself all the time? I think he just means referential.
If you were in the habit of reading movie reviews, instead of just browsing through this one because it happened to be on Slashdot, you would know that the term "self-referential" means that it depends on gags that refer to the genre itself, not the movie itself. For an example I refer you to The Onion's movie reviews, where you will find that pretty much every cartoon movie's review uses the term (at least Shrek and Monsters, Inc.). Granted, the term is confusing, but so are terms like "functional computer language" or "operating system kernel" if you don't already know what the writer is talking about. Maybe instead of automatically assuming that you're smarter than the writer, you should start by assuming that you're the ignorant one, because in this case it's true.
Yes, but I'm still driving my 1988 Honda Civic, and when I take it to the mechanic they don't tell me "Sorry, we can't fix that one for you any more, but we'll be happy to sell you this year's model for twice the price." It also doesn't have a license that says that I'm breaking the law if I open the hood to figure out how it works, and why it's making that whirring noise.
I'd say that the bloodshed and militant fundamentalism are more a product of colonialism and neo-colonialism than they are a product of the spread of democracy. Furthermore, the fact that the U.S. has frequently backed dictatorships rather than democracies in our foreign policy further complicates the issue and makes it difficult to pin anything on "democracy."
Whatever you read about "40k" troops, this will likely be a very hard fight if we intend to win it. If we try to win it, we can expect another Vietnam-like ground war where we have lots of casualties and we're never quite sure who we're fighting. Plus, in Vietnam most of the people that died on our side were Vietnamese, whereas this time we're more on our own. The only up-side in this case is that the Taliban doesn't have a major world power supplying him like the Afghan rebels did against the Soviet Union. (That power was the USA... then the rebels turned around and joined the Taliban when the Soviets left.) If, on the other hand, we're not actually planning to "win" the war, we just bomb them for a while, kill lots of people, and leave the Taliban in power just like we did with Saddam Hussein. If you think the Taliban can be defeated with bombs, think again. The country is full of mountains and caves, and the fighters don't live in "camps" like W would have you believe, they look like ordinary people and live in ordinary villages. At least, that's how it was when they fought against the USSR.
The USA has just committed to a war that we can't afford to not win without taking a major blow to our prestige, yet the chances of a clear victory are very dubious. Now who's stupid?
Bombing a country doesn't constitute being "extremely careful not to take any civilian lives," any more than it did in Iraq where we killed tons of civilians. Give it a rest. What we're paving the way for is more death and starvation from a people that's already so busy just trying to survive that they can't move to the next step of trying to make changes in their country's government.
Besides, the move you describe isn't "tactics," it's "strategy." They're two different things.
Well, most of the FreeBSD is very hostile to the GPL (you know, the "GNU Public Virus" folks), so I'm doubtful that they'll fork a GPL'd version any time soon.
Although the code bases will never be merged, there is code sharing between them. For example, the other BSD platforms borrow from NetBSD when they want to port to a new platform. I don't know much more than that; most of what I know about the BSDs is from their websites, because I've never installed them and I've only used FreeBSD.
First of all, the unqualified admin probably doesn't know that, since the Unix world probably seems too daunting to even step into. Second, having to administer the server 24x7 means you're more valuable to the company ("See, the server is down again, good thing we hired that full-time admin guy").
With Apache it would be, "That server just sits there and runs by itself. What did we hire that admin guy to do anyway? Sit around and drink coffee?"
Trasistors are hardware, not software. The issue here is software patents and open standards.
The whole point of an open standard is that anyone can implement it. If we allow the use of patents in open standards, then they cannot be implemented by just anyone, you need a license, or a whole bunch of licenses, to implement it. Furthermore, as far as I understand it companies aren't legally obligated to license a patent to any particular party, so if they decide that they don't want you, in particular, competing with them they might decide not to license it to you. All it takes is one company on the list to do this and you can *never* implement that "open standard."
We should expect this to destroy the usefulness of open standards and bring a big step back to the days when software companies had total control over your computing experience. The Internet itself only exists because of the adoption of an open, non-patented standard, TCP/IP. Imagine if Microsoft, for example, had a patent pending on TCP/IP, where would we be now? Every little Internet app author would have to fork out cash to them, probably on a yearly basis.
This was my thinking actually. I was in a rush, so I couldn't word that better. What I really meant was: how can we isolate that hydrogen without spending as much *usable* energy to produce as we gain from burning it. We spend a lot of energy mining coal, but we still have a net energy gain from the whole deal in terms of energy that we can *use* because the coal itself has stored energy.
The previous reply pretty much spells it out, though: we'll be depending on other energy sources to provide the needed hydrogen.
This is not really an alternative energy *source* at all, it's just a fancy battery.
What I want to know is where we're going to get the hydrogen. It says in the article that you can get it from "methanol, natural gas, petroleum or renewable sources." What are the renewable sources (besides methanol)? More importantly, what are the sources that will give a net energy gain in the process from start to finish? There's no point in having renewable fuel if we need to burn coal or oil to make it useable.
Technically, nearly everything you download on the Internet is copyrighted. For example, if I download gcc, that's copyrighted by the FSF.
I assume they're talking about only protecting the copyrights of big corporations that have made a lot of noise about having their copyrights violated. This has nothing to do with protecting anyone's rights, it has everything to do with making their big business cronies happy.
Big business is never happy unless they're ripping someone off. After all, anything less obviously does not maximize profits.
I don't know any Welsh, but from what I do know of other languages and the history of the Latin alphabet I would guess that the Y *is* a vowel, and thus that word seems perfectly pronounceable.
I don't like the patent either, but the WARf is not a for-profit company. They do want to make money off the patent, but the money will never be profits, it will fund further research. In that sense we should expect them to be more scrupulous about licensing the patent than a corporation would be. I HOPE they will be more responsible, but as always there are no guarantees.
Here's a link to another
story in the Capital Times (in Madison, Wisconsin).
It puts more emphasis on interviews with researchers at the WARF. They
claim that they are being very responsible with a patent, far more so
than a private corporation would be if it owned the patent.
Unfortunately, the practice of licensing out research to private corporations
has become common practice at the University of Wisconsin and other big
research universities. Grad students sometimes do the work on research where
the company gets to keep all IP gained from the research.
The problem is that
the state keeps cutting our funds every year, so the university constantly
has to search for new sources of funding. The administration sees private
companies as a source for this research money. However, the gain from private
grants, etc., is often offset by the expenses the UW incurs by building new
facilities for this corporate-owned research. We still end up footing huge
bills, but then the public doesn't own the result.
The researchers do have a point: at least a university research institution
owns this patent, and they are concerned with the benefits of research, not
profiteering. Many patents from university research now go to corporations.
For example, earlier this year some UW researchers were given "free" access to
Third Wave Technologies' proprietary Invader OS in exchange
for promising Third Wave the right to develop any discoveries,
which I assume means pursuing patents based on the UW researchers' work.
Yes, you're right: car companies are very monopolistic too, when they get the chance. They have historically been less successful in their ploys to control the market, however. Their alternative strategy is to buy stock in other companies to reduce the impact of competition on their actual profits.
Since you're not trying to be inflamatory, neither will I. I'll just point out that his comparison was actually very astute. Why?
When faced with the prospect of abolition, the South argued that slavery should be preserved on the principle of "states' rights", in other words, states had the right to choose whether they wanted to enslave people. This in fact masked a raw excercise of power: the white people in the South, who had the money and the guns, didn't want to give up their hold over black slaves. Now, I'm not trying to be Foucauldian here despite the language used above, but I do think that in this case above and in the case of software as well, people wielding a huge amount of wealth and power are trying to frame their ability to get away with unethical actions in terms of "rights," when it should more accurately be called "exploitation."
In Dmitry's case we just saw that, like in the Dredd Scott [sp?] case, when the wealthy feel that their control is threatened they push to enact ever more restrictive laws. These laws make it increasingly difficult to avoid liability for being even associated with infringements on these unethical powers, as when the people of the North were legally obligated to hunt down escaped slaves and return them to their masters.
Enslaving people's software use is far less serious than enslaving's someone's body and mind, but it's serious nonetheless, and more importantly it's not ethically justifiable. If I go out and punch you in the face on the street, I can't justify it by telling you how much worse it would have been if I had hit you with a bat or shot you with a gun. It could always be worse, that's not the point.
I just wrote my senior thesis in History on slavery, so please no flames telling me how much worse it is and how nothing can compare to it. You can always compare things, that's the beauty of analytical thinking.
Actually, although the GNU project encourages people to point out their role in the development of the GNU/Linux system (a point I think they have made far too big a deal of, because I think it's not worth fighting over), the GPL specifically FORBIDS anyone to REQUIRE attribution of any software. This was the reason for the modification of the BSD license: it required all derivative software to attribute part of the software to the University of California, and most distros have a long list of other parties who also developed part of the software. This is viewed by the FSF as an unreasonable requirement for software distribution, because although it is feasible for an entire operating system it's just silly and excessive if you want to redistribute a program of a few hundred lines that you derived from BSD-licensed software. Note that the "modified BSD license" has fixed this problem.
The rest of this post is not directed at the parent post specifically, but at other previous posts.
Asking people to acknowledge the contributions of the GNU project to modern Linux distros is an appeal to people's sensibilities, but it also serves an important purpose: to point out that "Linux" systems would not exist were it not for the contributions of the GNU project and the existence of Free Software. Linus himself said that he chose the GPL for Linux becuase it was the license of GCC, which was the primary GNU tool that made Linux possible. The fact that GCC was already available for various platforms made it possible to port Linux. Also, note that RMS personally coded much of GCC.
And for those of you bashing the GPL in favor the BSD licence, tell me this: what "freedom" does the BSD license give you beyond the power to take someone else's FREE work and use it in NON-FREE software? This is not a "freedom," it is a POWER, as Bradley said. Freedoms imply lack of restriction. Being allowed to use code that you get a hold of and integrate it into your own code is a freedom. Having the POWER to restrict other people's freedom to use the resulting application is not a "freedom," it is a special right granted to you by the government. The government sometimes grants special rights (such as copyright), not because you are in any way, shape, or form ENTITLED to them, but because they deem it beneficial to society as a whole. I really don't see any benefit to society coming from the power to distribute proprietary software, thus I think that this power should be dismantled. This has nothing to do with restricting anyone's freedom.
He's referring to the fact that once you have Cygwin installed on MS-Windows, you can clearly see how much of the power, functionality, and ease of use of "Linux" comes from the GNU tools, not from the Linux kernel itself. Granted, Windows runs the GNU tools much more poorly than Linux does, but the basic functionality is there.
This is all good news for KDE, but for Linux? There is no mention in the article of a switch from Windows to Linux. They were using an X display system before, now they just upgraded to the KDE desktop. This is not a big deal... everyone knows that KDE is way easier to use than other window managers.
Do you really think it will be that way? You really think that the police will "swarm" you? You really think that they are going to rely SOLELY on this software and nothing else?
Yes, yes, and yes.
The cops bother anyone that they can, and unlike the courts they generally consider you guilty until proven innocent. That's their job. Obviously you haven't been questioned by the cops lately.
Viruses or Virii, it's all the same
on
PDF Virus Spotted
·
· Score: 2, Informative
In terms of linguistics, which is concerned with actual usage rather than "proper" usage (it's descriptive rather than prescriptive), writing "virii" is just fine. Why? Because people do it. Oversimplification of linguistic rules from other languages when applying them to words from that language is a common linguistic phenomenon which can be seen, for example, in modern French as it relates to Latin. After all, if we don't speak Latin, how can we be expected to decline Latin nouns properly? In fact, classical Latin was never a household language, it was always a construct of grammaticians that came into being under the influence of Greek writing and had little to do with everyday usage. On the other hand, we should always feel perfectly free to anglicize foreign words, it's perfectly acceptable and often makes us better understood. My main point is that we shouldn't argue over such points of language in terms of who's right and who's wrong, because any word in common usage is inherently correct. That includes "ain't." (But I still like reading about the actual Latin declension of "virus.")
Real communism places all property in trust of the government (which is really just "the working class"); real capitalism doesn't let the government take anyone's property.
Actually, these are philosophical distinctions which have little to do with the actual practice of either system.
"Communism" in the Soviet or Chinese sense is a political system where the government controls all aspects of political and economic life and many aspects of social life. Decisions are made at high levels and passed down. The schools and youth organizations are designed to indoctrinate children and to identify and cultivate those children who show promise through their devotion to the communist philosophy. This system is also designed to discourage or punish independent or different thinking.
The U.S. system is not so different in many respoects, e.g. schools do a lot of indoctrination and peers discourage different thinking. However, economic organization is delegated to the "private sector," which is mainly dominated by a few large corporations with interlocking ownership (via the stock market) which discourages any real competition. Again, decisions are made at high levels by unaccountable "business leaders" who hand them down to corporate peons to be executed. We have a government that is accountable to the people, but elections are so swayed by corporate money that representatives' allegiance is divided between their voters and their financial sponsors. Small enterprise is alive, but overall it has little power to control the direction our economy heads, which makes it hopelessly vulnerable to the encroachement of big business on sectors traditionally dominated by small business: witness the spread of corporate restaurants, drug stores, grocery stores, farms, etc. in recent years. This is the spread of top-down, unaccountable economic control.
Where does the government play into this "capitalist" system? Sometimes as a referee, but very often as an accomplice that helps corporations make even more money, from the local scale (say, hiring a favorite contruction company for government projects and giving them extra pork for the job), all the way up to handouts by the federal government. Take Exxon, for example, who was ordered to pay for the Valdez cleanup, but was then allowed not to pay any taxes to make up for their losses. In fact, taxes from previous years were refunded. So, in effect the government simply handed them a lump of cash for the inconvenience of having to comply with the law.
I wonder if I can get some back taxes refunded this year to pay for my parking tickets.
But, more importantly for our discussion here, the real implication of our system is that government and Big Business go hand-in-hand, and the implication for Free Software is grave: the government has already begun passing laws that deliberately threaten our freedom to share code amongst ourselves according to the terms that we choose. This is not because it threatens the economy, it is because it threatens the vested interests of a certain group of rich people who aren't making money as fast as they would like to.
Slashdot Mirror
So it refers to itself all the time? I think he just means referential.
If you were in the habit of reading movie reviews, instead of just browsing through this one because it happened to be on Slashdot, you would know that the term "self-referential" means that it depends on gags that refer to the genre itself, not the movie itself. For an example I refer you to The Onion's movie reviews, where you will find that pretty much every cartoon movie's review uses the term (at least Shrek and Monsters, Inc.). Granted, the term is confusing, but so are terms like "functional computer language" or "operating system kernel" if you don't already know what the writer is talking about. Maybe instead of automatically assuming that you're smarter than the writer, you should start by assuming that you're the ignorant one, because in this case it's true.
Yes, but I'm still driving my 1988 Honda Civic, and when I take it to the mechanic they don't tell me "Sorry, we can't fix that one for you any more, but we'll be happy to sell you this year's model for twice the price." It also doesn't have a license that says that I'm breaking the law if I open the hood to figure out how it works, and why it's making that whirring noise.
This is a recycled flame. Ignore it, please.
I'd say that the bloodshed and militant fundamentalism are more a product of colonialism and neo-colonialism than they are a product of the spread of democracy. Furthermore, the fact that the U.S. has frequently backed dictatorships rather than democracies in our foreign policy further complicates the issue and makes it difficult to pin anything on "democracy."
> Can anyone explain why this guy gets to be
> attorney general ?
Because he is also a former senator, so his buddies in the Senate confirmed him even though they knew that he was an evil, unscrupulous bastard.
Whatever you read about "40k" troops, this will likely be a very hard fight if we intend to win it. If we try to win it, we can expect another Vietnam-like ground war where we have lots of casualties and we're never quite sure who we're fighting. Plus, in Vietnam most of the people that died on our side were Vietnamese, whereas this time we're more on our own. The only up-side in this case is that the Taliban doesn't have a major world power supplying him like the Afghan rebels did against the Soviet Union. (That power was the USA... then the rebels turned around and joined the Taliban when the Soviets left.) If, on the other hand, we're not actually planning to "win" the war, we just bomb them for a while, kill lots of people, and leave the Taliban in power just like we did with Saddam Hussein. If you think the Taliban can be defeated with bombs, think again. The country is full of mountains and caves, and the fighters don't live in "camps" like W would have you believe, they look like ordinary people and live in ordinary villages. At least, that's how it was when they fought against the USSR.
The USA has just committed to a war that we can't afford to not win without taking a major blow to our prestige, yet the chances of a clear victory are very dubious. Now who's stupid?
Bombing a country doesn't constitute being "extremely careful not to take any civilian lives," any more than it did in Iraq where we killed tons of civilians. Give it a rest. What we're paving the way for is more death and starvation from a people that's already so busy just trying to survive that they can't move to the next step of trying to make changes in their country's government.
Besides, the move you describe isn't "tactics," it's "strategy." They're two different things.
Well, most of the FreeBSD is very hostile to the GPL (you know, the "GNU Public Virus" folks), so I'm doubtful that they'll fork a GPL'd version any time soon.
Although the code bases will never be merged, there is code sharing between them. For example, the other BSD platforms borrow from NetBSD when they want to port to a new platform. I don't know much more than that; most of what I know about the BSDs is from their websites, because I've never installed them and I've only used FreeBSD.
First of all, the unqualified admin probably doesn't know that, since the Unix world probably seems too daunting to even step into. Second, having to administer the server 24x7 means you're more valuable to the company ("See, the server is down again, good thing we hired that full-time admin guy").
With Apache it would be, "That server just sits there and runs by itself. What did we hire that admin guy to do anyway? Sit around and drink coffee?"
Trasistors are hardware, not software. The issue here is software patents and open standards.
The whole point of an open standard is that anyone can implement it. If we allow the use of patents in open standards, then they cannot be implemented by just anyone, you need a license, or a whole bunch of licenses, to implement it. Furthermore, as far as I understand it companies aren't legally obligated to license a patent to any particular party, so if they decide that they don't want you, in particular, competing with them they might decide not to license it to you. All it takes is one company on the list to do this and you can *never* implement that "open standard."
We should expect this to destroy the usefulness of open standards and bring a big step back to the days when software companies had total control over your computing experience. The Internet itself only exists because of the adoption of an open, non-patented standard, TCP/IP. Imagine if Microsoft, for example, had a patent pending on TCP/IP, where would we be now? Every little Internet app author would have to fork out cash to them, probably on a yearly basis.
This was my thinking actually. I was in a rush, so I couldn't word that better. What I really meant was: how can we isolate that hydrogen without spending as much *usable* energy to produce as we gain from burning it. We spend a lot of energy mining coal, but we still have a net energy gain from the whole deal in terms of energy that we can *use* because the coal itself has stored energy.
The previous reply pretty much spells it out, though: we'll be depending on other energy sources to provide the needed hydrogen.
This is not really an alternative energy *source* at all, it's just a fancy battery.
What I want to know is where we're going to get the hydrogen. It says in the article that you can get it from "methanol, natural gas, petroleum or renewable sources." What are the renewable sources (besides methanol)? More importantly, what are the sources that will give a net energy gain in the process from start to finish? There's no point in having renewable fuel if we need to burn coal or oil to make it useable.
Technically, nearly everything you download on the Internet is copyrighted. For example, if I download gcc, that's copyrighted by the FSF.
I assume they're talking about only protecting the copyrights of big corporations that have made a lot of noise about having their copyrights violated. This has nothing to do with protecting anyone's rights, it has everything to do with making their big business cronies happy.
Big business is never happy unless they're ripping someone off. After all, anything less obviously does not maximize profits.
I don't know any Welsh, but from what I do know of other languages and the history of the Latin alphabet I would guess that the Y *is* a vowel, and thus that word seems perfectly pronounceable.
I don't like the patent either, but the WARf is not a for-profit company. They do want to make money off the patent, but the money will never be profits, it will fund further research. In that sense we should expect them to be more scrupulous about licensing the patent than a corporation would be. I HOPE they will be more responsible, but as always there are no guarantees.
Here's a link to another story in the Capital Times (in Madison, Wisconsin). It puts more emphasis on interviews with researchers at the WARF. They claim that they are being very responsible with a patent, far more so than a private corporation would be if it owned the patent.
Unfortunately, the practice of licensing out research to private corporations has become common practice at the University of Wisconsin and other big research universities. Grad students sometimes do the work on research where the company gets to keep all IP gained from the research.
The problem is that the state keeps cutting our funds every year, so the university constantly has to search for new sources of funding. The administration sees private companies as a source for this research money. However, the gain from private grants, etc., is often offset by the expenses the UW incurs by building new facilities for this corporate-owned research. We still end up footing huge bills, but then the public doesn't own the result.
The researchers do have a point: at least a university research institution owns this patent, and they are concerned with the benefits of research, not profiteering. Many patents from university research now go to corporations. For example, earlier this year some UW researchers were given "free" access to Third Wave Technologies' proprietary Invader OS in exchange for promising Third Wave the right to develop any discoveries, which I assume means pursuing patents based on the UW researchers' work.
Yes, you're right: car companies are very monopolistic too, when they get the chance. They have historically been less successful in their ploys to control the market, however. Their alternative strategy is to buy stock in other companies to reduce the impact of competition on their actual profits.
Since you're not trying to be inflamatory, neither will I. I'll just point out that his comparison was actually very astute. Why?
When faced with the prospect of abolition, the South argued that slavery should be preserved on the principle of "states' rights", in other words, states had the right to choose whether they wanted to enslave people. This in fact masked a raw excercise of power: the white people in the South, who had the money and the guns, didn't want to give up their hold over black slaves. Now, I'm not trying to be Foucauldian here despite the language used above, but I do think that in this case above and in the case of software as well, people wielding a huge amount of wealth and power are trying to frame their ability to get away with unethical actions in terms of "rights," when it should more accurately be called "exploitation."
In Dmitry's case we just saw that, like in the Dredd Scott [sp?] case, when the wealthy feel that their control is threatened they push to enact ever more restrictive laws. These laws make it increasingly difficult to avoid liability for being even associated with infringements on these unethical powers, as when the people of the North were legally obligated to hunt down escaped slaves and return them to their masters.
Enslaving people's software use is far less serious than enslaving's someone's body and mind, but it's serious nonetheless, and more importantly it's not ethically justifiable. If I go out and punch you in the face on the street, I can't justify it by telling you how much worse it would have been if I had hit you with a bat or shot you with a gun. It could always be worse, that's not the point.
I just wrote my senior thesis in History on slavery, so please no flames telling me how much worse it is and how nothing can compare to it. You can always compare things, that's the beauty of analytical thinking.
Actually, although the GNU project encourages people to point out their role in the development of the GNU/Linux system (a point I think they have made far too big a deal of, because I think it's not worth fighting over), the GPL specifically FORBIDS anyone to REQUIRE attribution of any software. This was the reason for the modification of the BSD license: it required all derivative software to attribute part of the software to the University of California, and most distros have a long list of other parties who also developed part of the software. This is viewed by the FSF as an unreasonable requirement for software distribution, because although it is feasible for an entire operating system it's just silly and excessive if you want to redistribute a program of a few hundred lines that you derived from BSD-licensed software. Note that the "modified BSD license" has fixed this problem.
The rest of this post is not directed at the parent post specifically, but at other previous posts.
Asking people to acknowledge the contributions of the GNU project to modern Linux distros is an appeal to people's sensibilities, but it also serves an important purpose: to point out that "Linux" systems would not exist were it not for the contributions of the GNU project and the existence of Free Software. Linus himself said that he chose the GPL for Linux becuase it was the license of GCC, which was the primary GNU tool that made Linux possible. The fact that GCC was already available for various platforms made it possible to port Linux. Also, note that RMS personally coded much of GCC.
And for those of you bashing the GPL in favor the BSD licence, tell me this: what "freedom" does the BSD license give you beyond the power to take someone else's FREE work and use it in NON-FREE software? This is not a "freedom," it is a POWER, as Bradley said. Freedoms imply lack of restriction. Being allowed to use code that you get a hold of and integrate it into your own code is a freedom. Having the POWER to restrict other people's freedom to use the resulting application is not a "freedom," it is a special right granted to you by the government. The government sometimes grants special rights (such as copyright), not because you are in any way, shape, or form ENTITLED to them, but because they deem it beneficial to society as a whole. I really don't see any benefit to society coming from the power to distribute proprietary software, thus I think that this power should be dismantled. This has nothing to do with restricting anyone's freedom.
He's referring to the fact that once you have Cygwin installed on MS-Windows, you can clearly see how much of the power, functionality, and ease of use of "Linux" comes from the GNU tools, not from the Linux kernel itself. Granted, Windows runs the GNU tools much more poorly than Linux does, but the basic functionality is there.
This is all good news for KDE, but for Linux? There is no mention in the article of a switch from Windows to Linux. They were using an X display system before, now they just upgraded to the KDE desktop. This is not a big deal... everyone knows that KDE is way easier to use than other window managers.
Yes, yes, and yes.
The cops bother anyone that they can, and unlike the courts they generally consider you guilty until proven innocent. That's their job. Obviously you haven't been questioned by the cops lately.
In terms of linguistics, which is concerned with actual usage rather than "proper" usage (it's descriptive rather than prescriptive), writing "virii" is just fine. Why? Because people do it. Oversimplification of linguistic rules from other languages when applying them to words from that language is a common linguistic phenomenon which can be seen, for example, in modern French as it relates to Latin. After all, if we don't speak Latin, how can we be expected to decline Latin nouns properly? In fact, classical Latin was never a household language, it was always a construct of grammaticians that came into being under the influence of Greek writing and had little to do with everyday usage. On the other hand, we should always feel perfectly free to anglicize foreign words, it's perfectly acceptable and often makes us better understood. My main point is that we shouldn't argue over such points of language in terms of who's right and who's wrong, because any word in common usage is inherently correct. That includes "ain't." (But I still like reading about the actual Latin declension of "virus.")
Actually, these are philosophical distinctions which have little to do with the actual practice of either system.
"Communism" in the Soviet or Chinese sense is a political system where the government controls all aspects of political and economic life and many aspects of social life. Decisions are made at high levels and passed down. The schools and youth organizations are designed to indoctrinate children and to identify and cultivate those children who show promise through their devotion to the communist philosophy. This system is also designed to discourage or punish independent or different thinking.
The U.S. system is not so different in many respoects, e.g. schools do a lot of indoctrination and peers discourage different thinking. However, economic organization is delegated to the "private sector," which is mainly dominated by a few large corporations with interlocking ownership (via the stock market) which discourages any real competition. Again, decisions are made at high levels by unaccountable "business leaders" who hand them down to corporate peons to be executed. We have a government that is accountable to the people, but elections are so swayed by corporate money that representatives' allegiance is divided between their voters and their financial sponsors. Small enterprise is alive, but overall it has little power to control the direction our economy heads, which makes it hopelessly vulnerable to the encroachement of big business on sectors traditionally dominated by small business: witness the spread of corporate restaurants, drug stores, grocery stores, farms, etc. in recent years. This is the spread of top-down, unaccountable economic control.
Where does the government play into this "capitalist" system? Sometimes as a referee, but very often as an accomplice that helps corporations make even more money, from the local scale (say, hiring a favorite contruction company for government projects and giving them extra pork for the job), all the way up to handouts by the federal government. Take Exxon, for example, who was ordered to pay for the Valdez cleanup, but was then allowed not to pay any taxes to make up for their losses. In fact, taxes from previous years were refunded. So, in effect the government simply handed them a lump of cash for the inconvenience of having to comply with the law.
I wonder if I can get some back taxes refunded this year to pay for my parking tickets.
But, more importantly for our discussion here, the real implication of our system is that government and Big Business go hand-in-hand, and the implication for Free Software is grave: the government has already begun passing laws that deliberately threaten our freedom to share code amongst ourselves according to the terms that we choose. This is not because it threatens the economy, it is because it threatens the vested interests of a certain group of rich people who aren't making money as fast as they would like to.
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