No, it's not, it's free, doesn't require you to go to a US embassy, and requires a hell of a lot less information. It's your usual paper immigation form you already filled out done in two minutes on-line instead of in two minutes waiting in line. I've seen it, my wife has completed it.
My wife and I are going to the US to visit my mother and sister, I'm a US citizen, she's not, but we're both citizens of a country that is eligible for the visa waver program.
It's only required if you're coming in via the visa waver program(if you get or need a regular visa you don't have to get one).
It literally takes about five minutes to do and asks you substantially less than what they'll ask you to actually enter the country on said program. It's the usual stuff, name, passport number, are you a terrorist, etc. Hell they ask you less than what they'll ask me when I fly in and I have a US passport.
As far as I can tell it's only real purpose appears to be to do a quick preliminary scan of people to see whether they're likely to be rejected as part of the Visa waver program and make them go get an actual visa(which is good cause if you get rejected at the boarder for a visa waver you have to go home).
Yes, if end up not going to the US in the end you've provided DHS with some laregly useless demographic information, but this is really more of a streamlining than anything else. Absolutely everything on the form would already be required and logged for absolutely anyone entering the country, including US citizens.
The other thing is that, to be honest, the vast majority of computer programmers are not, and do not need to be, computer scientists.
It's important to know what dynamic libraries are, why you would use them, and how to invoke the linker for the language you're working on, if necessary. It's not necessarily true that you need to know exactly how the linker works, or even that it's called a linker.
This information can be useful, and you should certainly be able to find out the information(I double checked my recollection was right with a 30 second google search), but not knowing it doesn't make you a lousy programmer(maybe you're not a good fit for working on a compiler implementation though).
The nuts and bolts which older folks spent years having to know like the backs of their hands are all pretty well implemented these days. The linkers, compilers, etc pretty much just work, and knowing their insides is sort of specialized knowledge.
I work in health care, and I know more about the HL7 specification than probably 95% of the folks on slashdot, but that doesn't make me a better programmer, it just makes me a programmer who works in health care.
The software of yester-year ran largely on single threaded operating systems, didn't have to interact with the internet or defend against attacks originating from it, had to manage miniscule feature and data sets, and was still buggy.
There was no magical era of bug free computing, there was an era when systems were orders of magnitude less complex, where about a tenth of the software was running, and where features which most people depend on didn't exist. The software was still buggy and most of it was so full of security holes that it may as well have been a sieve.
Complex systems have more bugs, modern systems are more complex. The workflow of your data entry people might be fast, and perfectly adequate, but what does it cost to support those 386's, what does it cost to train someone to actually use word perfect 4.2(the old dos verisons of word perfect had a pretty high learning curve). Data entry folks are basically doing monkey work, but training them up on an older system could take days.
Well it's more like saying that if a thousand people take a leak in the Indian Ocean and you filter out a roughly equivilant amount of piss from the Atlantic that you're neutral.
You're right in the sense that you're not purely neutral, and you're right in the sense that it may never be truly neutral, but a swimming pool is disconnected from the ocean, whereas all the air is connected.
In the end it's not perfect, and it'd be better not to piss in the ocean at all, but if you have to metaphorically piss in the sea, it's better to filter it out somewhere as opposed to nowhere.
There's nothing wrong with it, the law is full to the brim with loopholes, but they all involve rather large amounts of time, effort, and cost for either the residents themselves, or the stores.
Gonzales v. Raich is a constitutional dodge created to help the war on drugs. It should have never been decided that way in the first place.
Add to that the fact that creating something new is not the same thing as preventing something old from being sold. Cultivating Marijauna(aside from the fact that the decision was bogus in the first place) involves the cultivation of a substance prohibited in other states, that cultivation creates a source for that product which cannot be controlled by those other states(it's legal) and which can provide a source for external markets.
A restriction on sale on the other hand, does nothing to prevent people in other states buying tv's that don't meet the standards, the regulation has no impact on them. It's been done a million times in other states with various and sundry things(for example Wisconsin doesn't allow 18 wheelers, if you want to transport goods through Wisconsin by truck, even if they're not destined for Wisconsin, you have to change trucks).
The fact that because California is such a large market the TV companies will probably introduce said features into all their models for the purposes of cost savings doesn't make any difference. The behaviours of the tv manufacturers(beyond certain limits) are outside the control of federal government, and saying California can't do what dozens of other states have done just because it's california violates equal protection under the law.
Oprah is a lot more powerful than the PM of Germany, at least so long as she retains her show(as the PM of Germany is powerful so long as she retains her job).
Oprah has legions of fans in quite a number of countries. They may be mostly housewives, but realistically there are enough of them to swing elections. Oprah, if she had a good enough reason, could probably convince enough people to vote a certain way to choose the president of the US, and likely the prime ministers of the UK and Australia.
She's never done that, and I can't guarantee she could, but considering the reason she got sued by the beef industry is that when she bad mouthed beef enough people stopped eating it to scare the crap out of the beef industry(and this is Americans and beef).
Just because Oprah can't fire a nuke doesn't mean she doesn't have influence, very few politicians in the English speaking world could afford to really piss her off, and whether you like it or not, the politicians in the English speaking world have power than the leaders of pretty much every other country in the world(China and Russia being realistic exclusions).
For better or for worse, what the US does impacts the entire rest of the world. You can pretend that's not the case, but it's still true.
That's technically true, however it doesn't really apply to Oprah.
Oprah's very influential, and her product is herself. If she has to shutdown or redesign her website she doesn't really care, but this'll put her in the news a lot again, and for her that's not a bad thing. It's not like she's on trial for murder or some other crime which will impact her reputation.
Add to that the fact that she depends on copyright, not on patents so precedents in that area cost her nothing, and she's pretty much got nothing to lose by fighting it.
That doesn't mean she will, but there's no real cost to her in doing so.
True, they can't stop interstate transactions(well unless the feds say go ahead).
They can't stop you from buying one from out of state, and they can't stop retailers from buying them from out of state.
They can, quite legally, stop California retailers from selling them in stores in California, because that's not interstate commerce. Stores might be able to play silly buggers with having you walk into a California based store and "order" one from out of state which they'd then deliver to you, but what's in it for them to do so.
If the top three tv makers were to stop selling in California, you'd end up with a new top 3 tv makers because someone would still sell in California.
Barret is making the decision to not sell to law enforcement in California(a relatively small market) in order to try and save the ability to sell to regular people in California(a much larger market). They're risking a relatively small amount to try and save a much larger amount.
A television company is risking a massive market in order to save the $5 they should have been spending per unit to make them more efficient in the first place, which they'll more than recoup by tacking on extra costs(even when it no longer costs them a cent). Their cost of boycotting is high, their cost of compliance is low.
Better energy efficiency is a good thing, and the various companies are too damned slack to do it on their own. As for the additional costs, your problem lies more with the fact that the companies you buy from will charge a $200 price increase to cover a $5 cost increase using the legislation as an excuse. They'll have to retool things a little bit, but they have to do that with all their new models anyway.
It's not exactly a new phenomenon. It's almost always cheaper long term to buy something of very nice quality(a chipboard table might cost you $200, but it'll last for a few years, a solid oak table might cost you ten grand, but if you take care of it, it can easily last for several centuries). Of course a lot of people, even if they'll pay more over time, can't afford the more expensive item.
One of the reasons that rich people stay rich and poor people stay poor is that rich people can afford the higher up front costs.
This isn't so much an issue of fair use as it is an issue of fit for purpose.
SecuROM installs without permission(sometimes it'll even install without actually even installing the game, before you've agreed to any license whatsoever), it's almost impossible to remove, and it causes issues both with the system its installed on and sometimes with the games its installed for.
Most people do not have a principle against DRM. They do not have an objection, in principle, to companies protecting themselves from illegal infringement.
DRM is stupid, and rather pointless, but most people do not, in principle, disagree with either its goals.
What they object to is restrictions which impact them and what they feel they should be able to do. Most of the time they just ignore or work around the restrictions they don't like, but sometimes they get pissede off
As this case makes most evident, not everything is a slippery slope. SecuROM crossed the boundaries of what people found acceptable and they're going to get smacked. There are behavioural rules.
This is true, the only excuse I can come up with is that, at the time Java, and OOP was still fairly new, and its exception model is significantly different than most of the common languages preceding it.
Well I'd suggest that your right about the cause, and wrong about the reasons. I'd agree that indepedents probably shifted things towards John McCain, but I don't think they did it to stuff Romney or the republicans.
I voted for Al Gore in 2000, but if John McCain had won that primary, as the man he was then, I'd have voted for him instead. I think he would have made a great president.
Unfortunately he sold out to the lowest common denominator and picked a terrible vice president. If you listen to John McCains concession speech, you'll hear everything that's wrong with today's republican party. John McCain is making an eloquent speech about unity and the American dream, and his supporters are as they say, a hootin' and a hollerin'.
The republican party stopped serving the ideals of small government, states rights, etc a long time ago and all they do now is take money from big business and pander to the ignorant and bigoted.
I'm not really a Messiah kind of guy I'm more of a realist though, and I've realized the following.
Even if it was legally possible another 4 years of Bush would be intolerable.
John McCain, as much as I once believed in him, sold out his integrity to get the nomination. A good man let bad men tell him what to do and that was a tragedy. It's possible he would have regained his integrity had he actually won, but I sincerely doubt it.
Sarah Palin shouldn't even have as much power as she has as governor of Alaska, and was probably unfit to be the mayor of the podunk town she was mayor of.
The third party candidates are all wackjobs who are, for all intents and purposes, worse than the big two, Ron Paul would have destroyed the United States.
By process of elimination Obama is, at worst the best of a bad bunch, and at best a chance for change.
I'm not thrilled by this appointment, but it doesn't really surprise me. IP, whether you believe in it or not, is one of the few things the US produces domestically which anyone else actually wants to buy. For better or worse, protecting the value of IP is important to the survival of the US economy.
There was never any chance that any president was going to eliminate copyright, and there is still a chance(though slim) that, despite this appointment, Obama will work to rationalize the process. I doubt it, but on the grounds that no one else(no one sane at least) was going to do it either, it's not the end of the world.
Replace the word CPU with the word kernel and the statement is essentially correct. Of course the difference between a CPU and kernel is pretty major, but its possible the article is better written.
You can disagree with the idea of a rational self correcting market without necessarily implying that decisions should be made for others.
It debatably true that individuals will make the best(at least short term) decisions for themselves because they have the most information about their own situations. You can also probably assume that they will make the decision that seems rational within their own frame of reference most of the time.
The problem with the neo-conservative economic theory is that it presumes that individuals will make rational decisions based on a specific framework of rationality for a specific time frame, that is to say that other people will do what I think is most rational for them to do.
The problem with this is that it isn't true, and when you use this as the basis for your own decisions you are inevitably wrong.
The market is not self correcting because the people who make up the market do not have the same vision of "correct", and so their actions do not all pull towards the same "optimal conditions".
Three mile island was fairly trivial. You can't go into the site for a few hundred years, that's about it.
Chernobyl was not trivial in the general sense of the world, but considering that it was essentially a practical worst case for design, administration, and maintainence and was built by a country that couldn't even make simple machinery work more than one time in three as a worst case benchmark it's remarkably benign.
No one is saying that nuclear power is 100% without risks. What we're saying is that of the available options for power it's our best bet.
Coal, even without the whole carbon problem is about the dirtiest thing you can burn. We have better uses for oil and natural gas than power generation(and they're not all that clean either). Wind and solar are just not able to produce the kind of power levels we need in any practical way at the moment. Hydroelectric is fairly environmentally damaging and is only really practical with the right terrain. Geothermal appears to be pretty good, but again it requires you to have the right geological features available.
Nuclear is not ideal, you generally have to choose between large amounts of radioactive waste and reactors which can produce material for nuclear weapons. Neither of those scenarios are all that great.
However, if you want cleaner air and less carbon output, and you want it in the next 20 years, nuclear power is pretty much the only way to go.
Well adaptation is all well and good, but it will be rather expensive, and climate change or no, we'd be better off not pumping as much crap into the atmosphere.
For me the scariest thing about climate change isn't the flooding, or the droughts, we can adapt through that. The scary thing is the wars.
Any significant change in land structure in the world(such as that caused by shifts in climate would of necessity require large shifts in populations. The folks who live in whatever areas will become better to live in aren't exactly going to welcome the folks that come from areas which are unlivable with open arms.
The purpose of IP is to provide return on investment for research and development, plain and simple. This is because if there were no return on investment people wouldn't invest(and investment means time as well as money).
Good quality research and development takes time and money, and it isn't unreasonable for people to expect a return from that time and money. That's the reason why companies deserve some portion of the returns from your work for them(though not necessarily ownership of your idea, perhaps a perpetual license would be more appropriate.
That's not to say that there aren't problems with the patent system(and with IP in general) both in its implementation and in its current seeming goals. Nor is it to say that sharing ideas is in anyway bad, or that there are not moral issues with withholding inventions which can provide massive improvements in health or quality of life from people who cannot afford to pay high prices for them.
What it is saying is that the world, and the economy needs people to create and invent things, that creating and inventing things is expensive, and that that expense has to be in some way repaid and rewarded to encourage continued advancement.
As I said, there are plenty of problems with the way the world views intelectual property, but in order to encourage the creation and implementation of ideas, ideas must be owned, temporarily(which is one of the problems), and things you own are property. Of course the value of intelectual property should be in the value you can obtain by implementing the idea and not because you can sue other people who implement the idea(anyone who has a patent and isn't actively attempting to implement it should have that patent stripped from them).
To get back on topic, it is probably fair that universities get a portion of the money generated by certainly their staff and probably their students(at least when using substantial university resources), but full ownership of the patent and charging the original creator to use their own idea is most decidedly wrong. Without this sort of thing, university would cost an awful lot more(either in term of tuition or taxes), which isn't any better for the overall economy either.
As my understanding goes, Linus built the kernel independent of RMS and the GNU foundation, I can't recall exactly what his motivations where, but I think they were mostly curiosity.
RMS and the GNU foundation then adopted that kernel because the kernel they were developing, HURD, was not complete and the linux kernel either was licensed under the GPL or Linus was willing to do so(can't recall which). GNU provided most of the core system itself(though admitedly a lot of it is based off of BSD code, and existed there first), but the kernel is what turned it from a hypothetical into an actual Operating System.
HURD development began in 1990 and 19 years later there is still no stable version. Without Linus there would be no Linux(and as a consequence no copyleft software of any consequence), whether the kernel would have been combined with BSD utilities and compilers, and whether the resulting OS would have been as successful is something we'll never know. It's even possible that if the Linux kernel had not been available that HURD might actually have been completed(though this is unlikely). However we can say that linux, as it stands today, and likely the vast majority of free software could not exist without the kernel, and that the kernel would not exist without Linus.
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No, it's not, it's free, doesn't require you to go to a US embassy, and requires a hell of a lot less information. It's your usual paper immigation form you already filled out done in two minutes on-line instead of in two minutes waiting in line. I've seen it, my wife has completed it.
My wife and I are going to the US to visit my mother and sister, I'm a US citizen, she's not, but we're both citizens of a country that is eligible for the visa waver program.
It's only required if you're coming in via the visa waver program(if you get or need a regular visa you don't have to get one).
It literally takes about five minutes to do and asks you substantially less than what they'll ask you to actually enter the country on said program. It's the usual stuff, name, passport number, are you a terrorist, etc. Hell they ask you less than what they'll ask me when I fly in and I have a US passport.
As far as I can tell it's only real purpose appears to be to do a quick preliminary scan of people to see whether they're likely to be rejected as part of the Visa waver program and make them go get an actual visa(which is good cause if you get rejected at the boarder for a visa waver you have to go home).
Yes, if end up not going to the US in the end you've provided DHS with some laregly useless demographic information, but this is really more of a streamlining than anything else. Absolutely everything on the form would already be required and logged for absolutely anyone entering the country, including US citizens.
after all every single performance review at a company like this will continue to do so for the rest of time.
The other thing is that, to be honest, the vast majority of computer programmers are not, and do not need to be, computer scientists.
It's important to know what dynamic libraries are, why you would use them, and how to invoke the linker for the language you're working on, if necessary. It's not necessarily true that you need to know exactly how the linker works, or even that it's called a linker.
This information can be useful, and you should certainly be able to find out the information(I double checked my recollection was right with a 30 second google search), but not knowing it doesn't make you a lousy programmer(maybe you're not a good fit for working on a compiler implementation though).
The nuts and bolts which older folks spent years having to know like the backs of their hands are all pretty well implemented these days. The linkers, compilers, etc pretty much just work, and knowing their insides is sort of specialized knowledge.
I work in health care, and I know more about the HL7 specification than probably 95% of the folks on slashdot, but that doesn't make me a better programmer, it just makes me a programmer who works in health care.
The software of yester-year ran largely on single threaded operating systems, didn't have to interact with the internet or defend against attacks originating from it, had to manage miniscule feature and data sets, and was still buggy.
There was no magical era of bug free computing, there was an era when systems were orders of magnitude less complex, where about a tenth of the software was running, and where features which most people depend on didn't exist. The software was still buggy and most of it was so full of security holes that it may as well have been a sieve.
Complex systems have more bugs, modern systems are more complex. The workflow of your data entry people might be fast, and perfectly adequate, but what does it cost to support those 386's, what does it cost to train someone to actually use word perfect 4.2(the old dos verisons of word perfect had a pretty high learning curve). Data entry folks are basically doing monkey work, but training them up on an older system could take days.
Well it's more like saying that if a thousand people take a leak in the Indian Ocean and you filter out a roughly equivilant amount of piss from the Atlantic that you're neutral.
You're right in the sense that you're not purely neutral, and you're right in the sense that it may never be truly neutral, but a swimming pool is disconnected from the ocean, whereas all the air is connected.
In the end it's not perfect, and it'd be better not to piss in the ocean at all, but if you have to metaphorically piss in the sea, it's better to filter it out somewhere as opposed to nowhere.
There's nothing wrong with it, the law is full to the brim with loopholes, but they all involve rather large amounts of time, effort, and cost for either the residents themselves, or the stores.
Gonzales v. Raich is a constitutional dodge created to help the war on drugs. It should have never been decided that way in the first place.
Add to that the fact that creating something new is not the same thing as preventing something old from being sold. Cultivating Marijauna(aside from the fact that the decision was bogus in the first place) involves the cultivation of a substance prohibited in other states, that cultivation creates a source for that product which cannot be controlled by those other states(it's legal) and which can provide a source for external markets.
A restriction on sale on the other hand, does nothing to prevent people in other states buying tv's that don't meet the standards, the regulation has no impact on them. It's been done a million times in other states with various and sundry things(for example Wisconsin doesn't allow 18 wheelers, if you want to transport goods through Wisconsin by truck, even if they're not destined for Wisconsin, you have to change trucks).
The fact that because California is such a large market the TV companies will probably introduce said features into all their models for the purposes of cost savings doesn't make any difference. The behaviours of the tv manufacturers(beyond certain limits) are outside the control of federal government, and saying California can't do what dozens of other states have done just because it's california violates equal protection under the law.
Oprah is a lot more powerful than the PM of Germany, at least so long as she retains her show(as the PM of Germany is powerful so long as she retains her job).
Oprah has legions of fans in quite a number of countries. They may be mostly housewives, but realistically there are enough of them to swing elections. Oprah, if she had a good enough reason, could probably convince enough people to vote a certain way to choose the president of the US, and likely the prime ministers of the UK and Australia.
She's never done that, and I can't guarantee she could, but considering the reason she got sued by the beef industry is that when she bad mouthed beef enough people stopped eating it to scare the crap out of the beef industry(and this is Americans and beef).
Just because Oprah can't fire a nuke doesn't mean she doesn't have influence, very few politicians in the English speaking world could afford to really piss her off, and whether you like it or not, the politicians in the English speaking world have power than the leaders of pretty much every other country in the world(China and Russia being realistic exclusions).
For better or for worse, what the US does impacts the entire rest of the world. You can pretend that's not the case, but it's still true.
That's technically true, however it doesn't really apply to Oprah.
Oprah's very influential, and her product is herself. If she has to shutdown or redesign her website she doesn't really care, but this'll put her in the news a lot again, and for her that's not a bad thing. It's not like she's on trial for murder or some other crime which will impact her reputation.
Add to that the fact that she depends on copyright, not on patents so precedents in that area cost her nothing, and she's pretty much got nothing to lose by fighting it.
That doesn't mean she will, but there's no real cost to her in doing so.
True, they can't stop interstate transactions(well unless the feds say go ahead).
They can't stop you from buying one from out of state, and they can't stop retailers from buying them from out of state.
They can, quite legally, stop California retailers from selling them in stores in California, because that's not interstate commerce. Stores might be able to play silly buggers with having you walk into a California based store and "order" one from out of state which they'd then deliver to you, but what's in it for them to do so.
If the top three tv makers were to stop selling in California, you'd end up with a new top 3 tv makers because someone would still sell in California.
Barret is making the decision to not sell to law enforcement in California(a relatively small market) in order to try and save the ability to sell to regular people in California(a much larger market). They're risking a relatively small amount to try and save a much larger amount.
A television company is risking a massive market in order to save the $5 they should have been spending per unit to make them more efficient in the first place, which they'll more than recoup by tacking on extra costs(even when it no longer costs them a cent). Their cost of boycotting is high, their cost of compliance is low.
Better energy efficiency is a good thing, and the various companies are too damned slack to do it on their own. As for the additional costs, your problem lies more with the fact that the companies you buy from will charge a $200 price increase to cover a $5 cost increase using the legislation as an excuse. They'll have to retool things a little bit, but they have to do that with all their new models anyway.
One of the reasons that rich people stay rich and poor people stay poor is that rich people can afford the higher up front costs.
The SecuROM issue is not about copyright.
The administration can be pro-copyright, and even pro-DRM while still being anti-SecuROM. SecuROM is DRM taken way too far.
This isn't so much an issue of fair use as it is an issue of fit for purpose.
SecuROM installs without permission(sometimes it'll even install without actually even installing the game, before you've agreed to any license whatsoever), it's almost impossible to remove, and it causes issues both with the system its installed on and sometimes with the games its installed for.
Most people do not have a principle against DRM. They do not have an objection, in principle, to companies protecting themselves from illegal infringement.
DRM is stupid, and rather pointless, but most people do not, in principle, disagree with either its goals.
What they object to is restrictions which impact them and what they feel they should be able to do. Most of the time they just ignore or work around the restrictions they don't like, but sometimes they get pissede off
As this case makes most evident, not everything is a slippery slope. SecuROM crossed the boundaries of what people found acceptable and they're going to get smacked. There are behavioural rules.
This is true, the only excuse I can come up with is that, at the time Java, and OOP was still fairly new, and its exception model is significantly different than most of the common languages preceding it.
I voted for Al Gore in 2000, but if John McCain had won that primary, as the man he was then, I'd have voted for him instead. I think he would have made a great president.
Unfortunately he sold out to the lowest common denominator and picked a terrible vice president. If you listen to John McCains concession speech, you'll hear everything that's wrong with today's republican party. John McCain is making an eloquent speech about unity and the American dream, and his supporters are as they say, a hootin' and a hollerin'.
The republican party stopped serving the ideals of small government, states rights, etc a long time ago and all they do now is take money from big business and pander to the ignorant and bigoted.
I'm not really a Messiah kind of guy I'm more of a realist though, and I've realized the following.
I'm not thrilled by this appointment, but it doesn't really surprise me. IP, whether you believe in it or not, is one of the few things the US produces domestically which anyone else actually wants to buy. For better or worse, protecting the value of IP is important to the survival of the US economy.
There was never any chance that any president was going to eliminate copyright, and there is still a chance(though slim) that, despite this appointment, Obama will work to rationalize the process. I doubt it, but on the grounds that no one else(no one sane at least) was going to do it either, it's not the end of the world.
Replace the word CPU with the word kernel and the statement is essentially correct. Of course the difference between a CPU and kernel is pretty major, but its possible the article is better written.
You can disagree with the idea of a rational self correcting market without necessarily implying that decisions should be made for others.
It debatably true that individuals will make the best(at least short term) decisions for themselves because they have the most information about their own situations. You can also probably assume that they will make the decision that seems rational within their own frame of reference most of the time.
The problem with the neo-conservative economic theory is that it presumes that individuals will make rational decisions based on a specific framework of rationality for a specific time frame, that is to say that other people will do what I think is most rational for them to do.
The problem with this is that it isn't true, and when you use this as the basis for your own decisions you are inevitably wrong.
The market is not self correcting because the people who make up the market do not have the same vision of "correct", and so their actions do not all pull towards the same "optimal conditions".
Three mile island was fairly trivial. You can't go into the site for a few hundred years, that's about it.
Chernobyl was not trivial in the general sense of the world, but considering that it was essentially a practical worst case for design, administration, and maintainence and was built by a country that couldn't even make simple machinery work more than one time in three as a worst case benchmark it's remarkably benign.
No one is saying that nuclear power is 100% without risks. What we're saying is that of the available options for power it's our best bet.
Coal, even without the whole carbon problem is about the dirtiest thing you can burn. We have better uses for oil and natural gas than power generation(and they're not all that clean either). Wind and solar are just not able to produce the kind of power levels we need in any practical way at the moment. Hydroelectric is fairly environmentally damaging and is only really practical with the right terrain. Geothermal appears to be pretty good, but again it requires you to have the right geological features available.
Nuclear is not ideal, you generally have to choose between large amounts of radioactive waste and reactors which can produce material for nuclear weapons. Neither of those scenarios are all that great.
However, if you want cleaner air and less carbon output, and you want it in the next 20 years, nuclear power is pretty much the only way to go.
For me the scariest thing about climate change isn't the flooding, or the droughts, we can adapt through that. The scary thing is the wars.
Any significant change in land structure in the world(such as that caused by shifts in climate would of necessity require large shifts in populations. The folks who live in whatever areas will become better to live in aren't exactly going to welcome the folks that come from areas which are unlivable with open arms.
The purpose of IP is to provide return on investment for research and development, plain and simple. This is because if there were no return on investment people wouldn't invest(and investment means time as well as money).
Good quality research and development takes time and money, and it isn't unreasonable for people to expect a return from that time and money. That's the reason why companies deserve some portion of the returns from your work for them(though not necessarily ownership of your idea, perhaps a perpetual license would be more appropriate.
That's not to say that there aren't problems with the patent system(and with IP in general) both in its implementation and in its current seeming goals. Nor is it to say that sharing ideas is in anyway bad, or that there are not moral issues with withholding inventions which can provide massive improvements in health or quality of life from people who cannot afford to pay high prices for them.
What it is saying is that the world, and the economy needs people to create and invent things, that creating and inventing things is expensive, and that that expense has to be in some way repaid and rewarded to encourage continued advancement.
As I said, there are plenty of problems with the way the world views intelectual property, but in order to encourage the creation and implementation of ideas, ideas must be owned, temporarily(which is one of the problems), and things you own are property. Of course the value of intelectual property should be in the value you can obtain by implementing the idea and not because you can sue other people who implement the idea(anyone who has a patent and isn't actively attempting to implement it should have that patent stripped from them).
To get back on topic, it is probably fair that universities get a portion of the money generated by certainly their staff and probably their students(at least when using substantial university resources), but full ownership of the patent and charging the original creator to use their own idea is most decidedly wrong. Without this sort of thing, university would cost an awful lot more(either in term of tuition or taxes), which isn't any better for the overall economy either.
As my understanding goes, Linus built the kernel independent of RMS and the GNU foundation, I can't recall exactly what his motivations where, but I think they were mostly curiosity.
RMS and the GNU foundation then adopted that kernel because the kernel they were developing, HURD, was not complete and the linux kernel either was licensed under the GPL or Linus was willing to do so(can't recall which). GNU provided most of the core system itself(though admitedly a lot of it is based off of BSD code, and existed there first), but the kernel is what turned it from a hypothetical into an actual Operating System.
HURD development began in 1990 and 19 years later there is still no stable version. Without Linus there would be no Linux(and as a consequence no copyleft software of any consequence), whether the kernel would have been combined with BSD utilities and compilers, and whether the resulting OS would have been as successful is something we'll never know. It's even possible that if the Linux kernel had not been available that HURD might actually have been completed(though this is unlikely). However we can say that linux, as it stands today, and likely the vast majority of free software could not exist without the kernel, and that the kernel would not exist without Linus.