The grand parent does make a good point, albeit in an oblique manner, when he states that he, as a member of society, is not responsible for the poor parenting of others. If someone decides to become a parent then we, as third parties, have no say in that decision (i.e. there in no licensing required by society to have children). It follows then that since we had no input on their decision to have children (and rightly so in my opinion) we also have NO responsibility for those children other than to grant them the same basic negative rights that we all enjoy as members of a free society (i.e. the right to an opportunity, the right not to be unduly interfered with, etc). Now let us apply these principles to the context of the New York video game law:
There is no contradiction between free speech and requiring accurate labeling of the content of products so that everyone can see what it is that they are buying. I don't think that there is anyone who disagrees with labeled ratings for video games PROVIDED that every adult (minors are under the control of their parents until they reach the age of majority) is free to make their own decision, to buy or not to buy, once that information has been conveyed without further undue interference which leads into the second part of the law:
The mandatory parental controls on consoles are a technical measure that will create inconvenience and possibly hinder the ability of third party adults to fully enjoy and use the console that they have paid for. This is where the law crosses the line into unconstitutionality. Indeed, as others have pointed out, this DRM type of system leads easily to censorship or outright bans at the pleasure of the politicians at some future date (and the parental DRM controls WILL be abused in precisely that way in the future with the state taking on the role as "parent" to us all). This is the part that many of us here on Slashdot find most objectionable.
It is interesting to note that the list of forbidden books includes (up to Vatican II when they ceased making new editions or altering the existing list) many classic works of the enlightenment, western philosophy, and science including the writings of Voltaire, Jean-Paul Sartre, Descartes, Nicolaus Copernicus, and just about every other important pre-modern western philospher and scientist up until the time when the list ceased to be actively maintained (even the Catholics could see by the 1960s that banning the basis of western civilization as heretical was not the way forward in the modern world).
One funny thing I remember from Civ III was the fact that while the laser was a required civilization advance for the space ship, it was only needed to construct "the interplanetary party lounge". Apparently the "interplanetary party lounge" is an essential component of the space ship and it cannot launch either without it or without a laser for the disco smoke machine...
Yes, except that their recalcitrance is causing the rest of us no end of trouble because their win98 pII is a member of several zombie networks, relays spam for multiple Russian "business networks", and harvests any e-mails that come in from third parties and forwards their information on to the spammers. This is analogous to someone who drives an inefficient 30 year old wreck of a car that pollutes massively and frequently dies in the middle of traffic (delaying thousands of other commuters) because he is too cheap to upgrade and too inconsiderate to care about the harm and inconvenience that he causes to other people.
The malware authors have been doing this for years now. Does anyone else remember the "website x is trying to install an active-x control from your browser is out of date and needs to be updated. click yes to continue do you wish wish to proceed?" pop-ups. This is the same thing as saying that banks should warn their users via e-mail about phishing. The bad guys have already poisoned the well in both cases. This will only make matters worse as malware exploits user confusion over official and non-official "updates" to their browsers.
Its amazing what one can do with the threat of the gun and the demonstrated ability and willingness to make good on that threat. However, just because they can doesn't make it right. One can be pleased with the results but still deplore the methods.
It will be interesting how this will play out in the social/economical dynamics of China.
perhaps not as interesting as you might think...
Will the employees be paid during the shutdown?
no
Have downstream manufactures in other areas made provisions to get alternate input sources?
yes, everyone knew in advance that the Chinese government was going to curtail or shut down the factories in and around Beijing and the surrounding regions.
Will there be any unexpected interruptions in the supply chain? Either domestic consumption or export goods.
probably not.
If downstream factories in other areas have to shutdown there will not be government support, there will be unhappy workers.
unhappy workers? You do realize this is China right? The government doesn't give a damn whether they are happy or not, they weren't elected remember? Their power derives from the gun (literally). If an average Chinese steps out of line then they send them to prison for 10 years and if they really step out of line then they "disappear" or are shot for "crimes against the state". The Chinese government doesn't play nice.
Having unhappy idle workers while the government is telling everyone to be happy about the Olympics is not a good thing.
The unhappy workers will be kicked out of Beijing and not allowed to return until they Olympics are over. In fact the Chinese authorities are already rounding up all of the homeless and other unsightly people and either kicking them out of the city or confining them to their respective slum housing districts and building walls around those districts so that the cameras will not see Beijing as it really is, but rather as the Chinese government would like to present it to the world, a clean and shiny city full of lots of "happy" people (who have been reminded that there will be consequences once the games are over and the western news coverage is gone if they dare to tell the truth).
Also if US orders for Christmas are down because of US domestic fears then some idled factories might not find it easy to restart.
Walmart will still sell whatever they can get out of China or anywhere else for cheap. They may be annoyed about supply not quite keeping up with demand, but then again this is Walmart that we are talking about. They will probably force their suppliers to eat the loss by forcing them to give them discounts in the future or kickbacks to compensate for the short term interruption of supply. Walmart is famous for playing hardball with their suppliers and if there is a loss to be taken then you can be pretty sure that the suppliers will take it and not Walmart.
By the time the Olympics comes around, I hope that the Chineese government has enough Egg Foo Young on their face to cause them to loose face to the whole world.
You presume that they care what the rest of the world thinks about them. The Chinese view the Olympic Games through a nationalistic lens which means, unfortunately, that they will consider the games a "success" no matter what the west says. It was a mistake to believe that China would keep the promises that it made to win the Olympic Games in the first place and now they will believe (perhaps not incorrectly) that even though Europe and the United States whined and complained about human rights, Tibet, and the environment they (the Chinese) had their way with us in spite of the protests because they are a "great nation" and the world must "respect their way of doing things." It will be a major setback in getting the Chinese up to acceptable first world standards with regard to human and workers' rights and the environment.
But the reality is that this "agile" stuff only makes sense if you are improving the product. I don't want to install 38 updates to get acrobat 8.1.4 and get nothing (read: improved or added features) in return!
Some people consider quality and reliability to be features. There is a reason why BMW is perceived to be a better brand than say GM and the reason is not because the BMW has power windows and traction control while the comparable GM vehicle lacks these features. Just because a feature doesn't have high visibility doesn't mean that it isn't there.
So companies that like to sell software based on 12-18 month releases will never move to a true "agile" development... that would mean upgrading features and basic functionality without the end user paying for it... GASP!
So they charge for a subscription. There are already companies which do this.
So they subpoena the records of all of the subscribers, block the well known servers of the service provider, and have the bank accounts of those providers that are unwilling or unable to cooperate frozen. I am not suggesting that this is what should be done, but rather what may be likely given the crusading nature of state attorney generals these days and particularly the Attorney General of New York, formally Spitzer (who got busted for using high priced hookers) and now Cumo. Indeed, they have been especially pushy and nosey in recent years, threatening anyone they don't like regardless of jurisdiction. These are the types of things that happen when you combine lazy and self serving politicians with an ignorant voting populace. No politician wants to be labeled as "soft on crime" so successive office holders compete to pass ever more draconian and intrusive laws and the voters are pleased as their freedoms, rights, and protections are gradually stripped away in the name of fighting cp and the terrorists.
So the blanket criticism that assumes the US public school system is somehow fundamentally flawed, needs to be resolved with the fact that students *do* exit these schools very well educated, despite those flaws.
How can we be certain that some percentage of the high school students, the top 10% say, are no succeeding in spite of our educational system and not because of it? There will always be self motivated and intelligent students who basically see to their own needs as long as they are not actively opposed in their efforts by exceptionally incompetent teachers (yes, they are out there) and school administrators. The fact that a large number of well qualified American students are admitted to American universities every year does not necessarily imply that our high schools are delivering a quality educational experience. In fact, IMHO it is more likely that self motivated and intelligent students are seeking their own success (perhaps attending private school if their parents have a few bucks) because they realized that their high school courses were inadequate and took it upon themselves to enrich their own eduction and enhance their individual knowledge and understanding of selected topics outside of the "standard" curriculum (which even they could see was not preparing them adequately for university level study).
Thus there is no bottom limit to what the stock will reach
It cannot go lower than zero, that is why loses are limited when selling put options and theoretically unlimited when selling short (i.e. the share price could theoretically rise to infinity). Now obviously loses (negative profits) and the prospect of more to come in the future does not bolster expectations about the future value of the company, but when valuing a company one must look not only a short term results, but at what value might be obtained from either liquidating the assets OR taking valuable assets and putting them to more productive work thereby returning the company to profitability. This is what private equity firms and other big investors (like Carl Ichan) specialize in doing, buying losing firms at an attractive price and either turning them around for resale or efficiently liquidating the assets and winding down the operation.
but I note that incoming freshmen at the university where I work, are coming in quite strong with physics, chemistry, calculus, writing, and most even have good placement in a second language
Are you sure that they are not coming from outside the United States (Europe, Russia, India, China etc)? They sound like an exact description of the well prepared and intelligent students that are frequently attracted to American universities from abroad.
a typical program had to call a privileged instruction or an API routine to do it.
what about a program, written in C for example, that uses inline assembly code without making a call to the APIs provided by the operating system? At that low level isn't it possible to write bytes to an area of memory that you know the program counter will return to when the stack is popped and execution returns to the main branch so that the new (possibly malicious) instructions are executed instead? Granted, it has been a decade since I hand coded assembly (only in school projects, never for actual work), but I seem to recall that most of the registers (EAX, EDX, ESP, etc) and all of the instructions (MULT, PUSH, POP, ADD, BRANCH, etc) were all available to the programmer. Now in practice it might be difficult to manipulate things so that the computer does some desired action rather than simply crashing when you start messing with the stack, but it has been done right (worms, trojans, viruses, etc)?
It is not all Microsoft's fault. The mixing of "data" and "program" goes much deeper than just Windows because ever since the Intel 8080 modern commodity processors, with a few exceptions, have made no clear distinction between data and programmatic instructions when it comes to loading registers, shifting data, jumping to addresses, etc from a common memory address space. This original design decision lies at the heart of many modern computer problems and hacks (i.e. smashing the stack). So although Microsoft hasn't helped matters, they certainly weren't the first to make the "mistake" or perpetuate the status quo with regard to mixing of data and instructions.
I don't have a Facebook account and I don't want one and only a fool *always* pushes first (why tip your hand to a potential adversary when observing before reacting might yield the same or even a better result with less effort?), but EULA, terms of service, and the like are generally silly documents which fly in the face of concepts, like first sale, that have been around since humans invented trade. The wiser person recognizes when a contract is important and when the other party has nothing that he needs or is being petty with attempts to impose a silly "terms of service" or "end user license agreement" contract on top of what should be a simple sale or trade of goods or services. Some contracts, and particularly EULAs on websites where a fake identity is being used, are just not worth paying attention to in any case and that was my point.
they need a real address, creditcard, etc in which to bill you and send you your goods. So you can't really lie there, even if you wanted to.
The real address can be either a mail drop or an address controlled by a private trust. It is the same thing with the credit card, it is in the name of the trust which is managed by the private trustee who remains legally anonymous behind the trust. IANAL, but it is common knowledge that trusts are used by politically well connected and other high profile people so that they may conduct business publicly without revealing their true interests or identities (or at least without making them blatantly obvious to any casual observers, advertisers, or information brokers). It all depends upon how much you value your privacy and how much you are able and willing to spend to protect it, but there are ways.
Lieing to facebook about your idenity is against the facebook eula and terms of service
Well cry me a river, why should people give a crap about their terms of service? The worst they can do is ban your throwaway account. People care about terms of service when and if someone finally serves them with a lawsuit or they care about losing work that they have put into something.
In my opinion if you do not wish to agree to and submit to facebooks terms of service, you should not use facebooks services. It really is that simple.
In general, I do what I please until somebody pushes back because that is how the real world works. Some people and certain relationships are important to and others are not and I treat them accordingly.
There is nothing to prevent them from recording ALL transactions reported to them by their affiliates and either associating them with you when you do create an account OR even if you never create an Facebook account attempting to maintain a dossier of transactions which Facebook believes are likely to have been made by the same person. This is why one should never provide accurate information concerning one's identity online unless it is absolutely necessary. If you are not feeling creative then you can always use Fake Name Generator to create a throw away identity.
This is correct. Most private property, in the United States anyway, is owned in fee simple as opposed to allodial title which is absolute ownership of land free of any encumbrances including liens, mortgages, and taxes.
That is true, but it has also become clear to the open source community over the years that the "share and share alike" provisions would never be enforceable in the absence of copyright. If the source code becomes exposed or is given away AND there is no copyright, then there is nothing to prevent anyone from taking that code, making modifications or improvements, and then refusing to redistribute the modifications or improvements to that source code while at the same time creating a de-facto competing, and possibly incompatible, binary version of the software. If you take away the stick completely then the carrot and the good will of the open source software community will not be enough by themselves to ensure that the source code remains open for anyone to view, modify, or improve.
Slashdot Mirror
The grand parent does make a good point, albeit in an oblique manner, when he states that he, as a member of society, is not responsible for the poor parenting of others. If someone decides to become a parent then we, as third parties, have no say in that decision (i.e. there in no licensing required by society to have children). It follows then that since we had no input on their decision to have children (and rightly so in my opinion) we also have NO responsibility for those children other than to grant them the same basic negative rights that we all enjoy as members of a free society (i.e. the right to an opportunity, the right not to be unduly interfered with, etc). Now let us apply these principles to the context of the New York video game law:
There is no contradiction between free speech and requiring accurate labeling of the content of products so that everyone can see what it is that they are buying. I don't think that there is anyone who disagrees with labeled ratings for video games PROVIDED that every adult (minors are under the control of their parents until they reach the age of majority) is free to make their own decision, to buy or not to buy, once that information has been conveyed without further undue interference which leads into the second part of the law:
The mandatory parental controls on consoles are a technical measure that will create inconvenience and possibly hinder the ability of third party adults to fully enjoy and use the console that they have paid for. This is where the law crosses the line into unconstitutionality. Indeed, as others have pointed out, this DRM type of system leads easily to censorship or outright bans at the pleasure of the politicians at some future date (and the parental DRM controls WILL be abused in precisely that way in the future with the state taking on the role as "parent" to us all). This is the part that many of us here on Slashdot find most objectionable.
It is interesting to note that the list of forbidden books includes (up to Vatican II when they ceased making new editions or altering the existing list) many classic works of the enlightenment, western philosophy, and science including the writings of Voltaire, Jean-Paul Sartre, Descartes, Nicolaus Copernicus, and just about every other important pre-modern western philospher and scientist up until the time when the list ceased to be actively maintained (even the Catholics could see by the 1960s that banning the basis of western civilization as heretical was not the way forward in the modern world).
One funny thing I remember from Civ III was the fact that while the laser was a required civilization advance for the space ship, it was only needed to construct "the interplanetary party lounge". Apparently the "interplanetary party lounge" is an essential component of the space ship and it cannot launch either without it or without a laser for the disco smoke machine...
mon.ey laun.der [muhn-ee lawn-der] - verb (used with object):
To conceal the source of money as by channeling it through an intermediary...
Yes, except that their recalcitrance is causing the rest of us no end of trouble because their win98 pII is a member of several zombie networks, relays spam for multiple Russian "business networks", and harvests any e-mails that come in from third parties and forwards their information on to the spammers. This is analogous to someone who drives an inefficient 30 year old wreck of a car that pollutes massively and frequently dies in the middle of traffic (delaying thousands of other commuters) because he is too cheap to upgrade and too inconsiderate to care about the harm and inconvenience that he causes to other people.
The malware authors have been doing this for years now. Does anyone else remember the "website x is trying to install an active-x control from your browser is out of date and needs to be updated. click yes to continue do you wish wish to proceed?" pop-ups. This is the same thing as saying that banks should warn their users via e-mail about phishing. The bad guys have already poisoned the well in both cases. This will only make matters worse as malware exploits user confusion over official and non-official "updates" to their browsers.
Its amazing what one can do with the threat of the gun and the demonstrated ability and willingness to make good on that threat. However, just because they can doesn't make it right. One can be pleased with the results but still deplore the methods.
It will be interesting how this will play out in the social/economical dynamics of China.
perhaps not as interesting as you might think...
Will the employees be paid during the shutdown?
no
Have downstream manufactures in other areas made provisions to get alternate input sources?
yes, everyone knew in advance that the Chinese government was going to curtail or shut down the factories in and around Beijing and the surrounding regions.
Will there be any unexpected interruptions in the supply chain? Either domestic consumption or export goods.
probably not.
If downstream factories in other areas have to shutdown there will not be government support, there will be unhappy workers.
unhappy workers? You do realize this is China right? The government doesn't give a damn whether they are happy or not, they weren't elected remember? Their power derives from the gun (literally). If an average Chinese steps out of line then they send them to prison for 10 years and if they really step out of line then they "disappear" or are shot for "crimes against the state". The Chinese government doesn't play nice.
Having unhappy idle workers while the government is telling everyone to be happy about the Olympics is not a good thing.
The unhappy workers will be kicked out of Beijing and not allowed to return until they Olympics are over. In fact the Chinese authorities are already rounding up all of the homeless and other unsightly people and either kicking them out of the city or confining them to their respective slum housing districts and building walls around those districts so that the cameras will not see Beijing as it really is, but rather as the Chinese government would like to present it to the world, a clean and shiny city full of lots of "happy" people (who have been reminded that there will be consequences once the games are over and the western news coverage is gone if they dare to tell the truth).
Also if US orders for Christmas are down because of US domestic fears then some idled factories might not find it easy to restart.
Walmart will still sell whatever they can get out of China or anywhere else for cheap. They may be annoyed about supply not quite keeping up with demand, but then again this is Walmart that we are talking about. They will probably force their suppliers to eat the loss by forcing them to give them discounts in the future or kickbacks to compensate for the short term interruption of supply. Walmart is famous for playing hardball with their suppliers and if there is a loss to be taken then you can be pretty sure that the suppliers will take it and not Walmart.
By the time the Olympics comes around, I hope that the Chineese government has enough Egg Foo Young on their face to cause them to loose face to the whole world.
You presume that they care what the rest of the world thinks about them. The Chinese view the Olympic Games through a nationalistic lens which means, unfortunately, that they will consider the games a "success" no matter what the west says. It was a mistake to believe that China would keep the promises that it made to win the Olympic Games in the first place and now they will believe (perhaps not incorrectly) that even though Europe and the United States whined and complained about human rights, Tibet, and the environment they (the Chinese) had their way with us in spite of the protests because they are a "great nation" and the world must "respect their way of doing things." It will be a major setback in getting the Chinese up to acceptable first world standards with regard to human and workers' rights and the environment.
The overall cost of burning fossil fuels is much higher than they think. Cancer rates doubled in the industrial revolution.
Yes, but life is cheap in a country with 2 billion people. That simple observation explains much about why China behaves as it does.
and yet they wonder why their share price is perpetually in the toilet?
But the reality is that this "agile" stuff only makes sense if you are improving the product. I don't want to install 38 updates to get acrobat 8.1.4 and get nothing (read: improved or added features) in return!
Some people consider quality and reliability to be features. There is a reason why BMW is perceived to be a better brand than say GM and the reason is not because the BMW has power windows and traction control while the comparable GM vehicle lacks these features. Just because a feature doesn't have high visibility doesn't mean that it isn't there.
So companies that like to sell software based on 12-18 month releases will never move to a true "agile" development... that would mean upgrading features and basic functionality without the end user paying for it... GASP!
So they charge for a subscription. There are already companies which do this.
bingo!
So they subpoena the records of all of the subscribers, block the well known servers of the service provider, and have the bank accounts of those providers that are unwilling or unable to cooperate frozen. I am not suggesting that this is what should be done, but rather what may be likely given the crusading nature of state attorney generals these days and particularly the Attorney General of New York, formally Spitzer (who got busted for using high priced hookers) and now Cumo. Indeed, they have been especially pushy and nosey in recent years, threatening anyone they don't like regardless of jurisdiction. These are the types of things that happen when you combine lazy and self serving politicians with an ignorant voting populace. No politician wants to be labeled as "soft on crime" so successive office holders compete to pass ever more draconian and intrusive laws and the voters are pleased as their freedoms, rights, and protections are gradually stripped away in the name of fighting cp and the terrorists.
So the blanket criticism that assumes the US public school system is somehow fundamentally flawed, needs to be resolved with the fact that students *do* exit these schools very well educated, despite those flaws.
How can we be certain that some percentage of the high school students, the top 10% say, are no succeeding in spite of our educational system and not because of it? There will always be self motivated and intelligent students who basically see to their own needs as long as they are not actively opposed in their efforts by exceptionally incompetent teachers (yes, they are out there) and school administrators. The fact that a large number of well qualified American students are admitted to American universities every year does not necessarily imply that our high schools are delivering a quality educational experience. In fact, IMHO it is more likely that self motivated and intelligent students are seeking their own success (perhaps attending private school if their parents have a few bucks) because they realized that their high school courses were inadequate and took it upon themselves to enrich their own eduction and enhance their individual knowledge and understanding of selected topics outside of the "standard" curriculum (which even they could see was not preparing them adequately for university level study).
Thus there is no bottom limit to what the stock will reach
It cannot go lower than zero, that is why loses are limited when selling put options and theoretically unlimited when selling short (i.e. the share price could theoretically rise to infinity). Now obviously loses (negative profits) and the prospect of more to come in the future does not bolster expectations about the future value of the company, but when valuing a company one must look not only a short term results, but at what value might be obtained from either liquidating the assets OR taking valuable assets and putting them to more productive work thereby returning the company to profitability. This is what private equity firms and other big investors (like Carl Ichan) specialize in doing, buying losing firms at an attractive price and either turning them around for resale or efficiently liquidating the assets and winding down the operation.
but I note that incoming freshmen at the university where I work, are coming in quite strong with physics, chemistry, calculus, writing, and most even have good placement in a second language
Are you sure that they are not coming from outside the United States (Europe, Russia, India, China etc)? They sound like an exact description of the well prepared and intelligent students that are frequently attracted to American universities from abroad.
a typical program had to call a privileged instruction or an API routine to do it.
what about a program, written in C for example, that uses inline assembly code without making a call to the APIs provided by the operating system? At that low level isn't it possible to write bytes to an area of memory that you know the program counter will return to when the stack is popped and execution returns to the main branch so that the new (possibly malicious) instructions are executed instead? Granted, it has been a decade since I hand coded assembly (only in school projects, never for actual work), but I seem to recall that most of the registers (EAX, EDX, ESP, etc) and all of the instructions (MULT, PUSH, POP, ADD, BRANCH, etc) were all available to the programmer. Now in practice it might be difficult to manipulate things so that the computer does some desired action rather than simply crashing when you start messing with the stack, but it has been done right (worms, trojans, viruses, etc)?
It is not all Microsoft's fault. The mixing of "data" and "program" goes much deeper than just Windows because ever since the Intel 8080 modern commodity processors, with a few exceptions, have made no clear distinction between data and programmatic instructions when it comes to loading registers, shifting data, jumping to addresses, etc from a common memory address space. This original design decision lies at the heart of many modern computer problems and hacks (i.e. smashing the stack). So although Microsoft hasn't helped matters, they certainly weren't the first to make the "mistake" or perpetuate the status quo with regard to mixing of data and instructions.
I don't have a Facebook account and I don't want one and only a fool *always* pushes first (why tip your hand to a potential adversary when observing before reacting might yield the same or even a better result with less effort?), but EULA, terms of service, and the like are generally silly documents which fly in the face of concepts, like first sale, that have been around since humans invented trade. The wiser person recognizes when a contract is important and when the other party has nothing that he needs or is being petty with attempts to impose a silly "terms of service" or "end user license agreement" contract on top of what should be a simple sale or trade of goods or services. Some contracts, and particularly EULAs on websites where a fake identity is being used, are just not worth paying attention to in any case and that was my point.
they need a real address, creditcard, etc in which to bill you and send you your goods. So you can't really lie there, even if you wanted to.
The real address can be either a mail drop or an address controlled by a private trust. It is the same thing with the credit card, it is in the name of the trust which is managed by the private trustee who remains legally anonymous behind the trust. IANAL, but it is common knowledge that trusts are used by politically well connected and other high profile people so that they may conduct business publicly without revealing their true interests or identities (or at least without making them blatantly obvious to any casual observers, advertisers, or information brokers). It all depends upon how much you value your privacy and how much you are able and willing to spend to protect it, but there are ways.
Lieing to facebook about your idenity is against the facebook eula and terms of service
Well cry me a river, why should people give a crap about their terms of service? The worst they can do is ban your throwaway account. People care about terms of service when and if someone finally serves them with a lawsuit or they care about losing work that they have put into something.
In my opinion if you do not wish to agree to and submit to facebooks terms of service, you should not use facebooks services. It really is that simple.
In general, I do what I please until somebody pushes back because that is how the real world works. Some people and certain relationships are important to and others are not and I treat them accordingly.
There is nothing to prevent them from recording ALL transactions reported to them by their affiliates and either associating them with you when you do create an account OR even if you never create an Facebook account attempting to maintain a dossier of transactions which Facebook believes are likely to have been made by the same person. This is why one should never provide accurate information concerning one's identity online unless it is absolutely necessary. If you are not feeling creative then you can always use Fake Name Generator to create a throw away identity.
This is correct. Most private property, in the United States anyway, is owned in fee simple as opposed to allodial title which is absolute ownership of land free of any encumbrances including liens, mortgages, and taxes.
That is true, but it has also become clear to the open source community over the years that the "share and share alike" provisions would never be enforceable in the absence of copyright. If the source code becomes exposed or is given away AND there is no copyright, then there is nothing to prevent anyone from taking that code, making modifications or improvements, and then refusing to redistribute the modifications or improvements to that source code while at the same time creating a de-facto competing, and possibly incompatible, binary version of the software. If you take away the stick completely then the carrot and the good will of the open source software community will not be enough by themselves to ensure that the source code remains open for anyone to view, modify, or improve.
suck so bad that nothing, not even light can escape.
except for a well thrown chair aimed directly at Eric Schmidt's head.