I don't know if Gateway and Dell just cheap out when it comes to the CD-ROM drives they put into their machines
Of course they do. Think lowest bidder. Dropping an extra five bucks per drive is a one time hit for you that you won't notice. To them, it cuts into their margins big time.
I concurr. A cleaner disk is a set of brushes hitting the sensitive lens designed to delicately float on electromagnets at several hundred RPM(!). They are a last resort "my player is on it's last legs" scenario. Not for preventative maintainence.
Original poster, are you a smoker? The same buildup that makes white walls go yellow also builds up on the lens. You can clean it with the right tools.
I recondidition anything I have that breaks, and CD readers are a common one. You can often fix them by dismantling, cleaning, regreasing, then reassembly. It's common knowledge that mechanical parts are more prone to failure than solid-state, so the likelyhood is that in each of your devices there is a hardware problem.
Remember the original Playstation that had serious problems after a while? Problem there was that the little sled that the lens was on had a plastic runner. After X hours of seeking, it would wear down slightly, causing the lens to drop on one side. This is why turning the PSX upside down made a difference. You could fix that by filling in what had worn with some glue, filed down to make a smooth runner.
Some say that bikes in the UK can only be ridden at night with 'incandescent bulb' lights, and that LEDs are against the law.
Not entirely true. LED lights are fully legal if they don't flash, that's all there is to it. There are laws that predate LEDs on having flashing lights on vehicles. This was a minor news article when flashers first appeared, but many prominent figures came out and said they would pay for any fines should someone get in bother for having something that clearly improved their safety.
I don't think anyone has actually been prosecuted for it. So, what we are basically seeing what is a new "stupid law" that never gets enforced. Kinda like the one that states that taxi drivers must always carry a bale of hay, and that they can legally urinate in a public street provided they pee on their back wheel!
Even during the day, with the lights on or the sun coming in the windows, my eyes want to focus on the blue lights instead of on the TV
Research has shown that the particular blue used is very alluring to males. (The are many differences between men and women's vision.) This is why it is used so much in electronics. Could be the difference between a sale and a non-sale.
You are quoting the very people who have every darn interest in maximazing their supposed suffering.
As opposed to getting your knowledge from where? Everyone has a bias, that's the point of this thread!
18 000 000 is a fucking nonsensical figure - completely made up and without any scientific backing.
You know, I've heard people say the EXACT SAME THING about the holocaust. Want another source?:
"By
conservative estimates, the population of the United states prior to European contact was greater than 12 million. Four centuries later, the count was reduced by 95% to 237 thousand."
I would say you were a "little hasty" with the 20M number also. Can you point to a credible source or reference that comes close to supporting your claim?
I can't remember where I read it originally, but a quick google for "native american 20000000" found this
Of the estimated original 20,000,000 Native American inhabitants of the North American continent at the onset of European colonial invasion, some 2,000,000 remain.
So, OK, make that 18,000,000. Either way, it's worse than the Nazi holocaust if you want to be caullous and talk numbers. However, you can't compare as they were completely different circumstances. Similar goals though, conquest, self-belief in your own dogma, colonialism, ethnic superiourity, religion. The usual bullshit that's been messing things up since the begining of mankind. People need to get away from this "my country can do no wrong" attitude; it's dangerous!
It is actually quite hard to hide remains of millions and millions of people.
Nah, not really. Perhaps I was a little hasty in my "20 years or so", it was probably over a longer period all in all. We aren't talkin WW2 camps here, where genocide was horrifically paired with industrialization. There were still natives around to bury the dead in the usual way, and it's a big country. Smallpox infected blankets given to infants don't really lead to mass graves.
No one wants to hear bad things about their country. It's not a big conspiricy or anything; most media is scored on ratings/viewers/copies, and flag waving usually wins out. Just look at Jerry Bruikheimer, he's built his career on it!;-)
I am all for genetic engineering of pretty much everything, including things I stuff in my mouth... [snip]...so long as there is nothing in them that could potentially be harmful.
And thanks to you (and your children), we'll all know if they are harmful in about 10/20 years. There have been many things hailed as harmless by the companies hawking them; absbestos, Thalidomide (v. nasty), tobacco blah blah blah. They are just molecules, now we're talking genes. God, how often do we hear of the "unknown long term effects of Ecstacy" been touted as reason not to take it?
If you want to take their word for it being "harmless", then I am quite glad to have you as my guinea pig!!:-)
The problem is not that Anheuser-Busch is worried about pissing off Europe. The problem is that a drug company wants to produce rice designed to create a drug in open fields. Anheuser-Busch doesn't want that rice to contaminate their rice.
Opinions here in Europe on GM are mostly sceptical. "GM free" is a selling point, and Bud cares about how many units it shifts more than anything else on the planet. If there rice were to be contaminated, it would definately make the news and cost them sales. No one would be pissed off, they just wouldn't sell any.
Sales of Bud aren't as high as they once were say 10 years ago. It's got an "asshole" stigma about it here now; it's kinda what US style "jocks" would drink if I were to think of an equivalent social group to what we have here. European beers had lots of ad drives over the last while, and frankly few could argue that Bud wins on taste. So, bud took a pasting. Risking further losses would be dangerous as they have investments in "brewed under license" franchises.
who is allowed to determine what is allowed to be viewed? employing thousands of people for the task of limiting the viewing capabilities of all the others doesn't seem very effective to me. what's stopping any one, or more, of them from building in a backdoor for themselves?
I'd bet that some (if not most) of the people who work on it have unlimited access, but their usage is monitored. As for monitoring, well given the google api and a few weeks, you could write your own bot that does searches for things you'd like to monitor. Any sites found go into a DB, which checks if the site is known or new. New ones get eyeballed. Pretty easy really. But even easier to get round if you even know a little basic net knowledge.
I find it interesting how the Chinese government is all up in arms about Japan rewriting their history books, yet censors controversial Chinese history (e.g. Tiananmen Square) as well as current events (e.g. Taiwan and Tibet).
I guarantee that wherever you are, the same thing happens. The popular version of history is rarely as unpleasant as the reality. "History is written by the winners" as the saying goes. So, while we Brits forget about us routinely using bombardment to literally terrorize "unwilling subjects" in the British Empire days, the Americans gloss-over cowboys genociding 20,000,000 native Americans over 20 or so years. If there isn't a movie/tv drama about it; it never happened.
Apologies if I didn't rake up any shit on your country. Consult your local library if you want more information. It's all there. Even the neuteral Swiss will have some dark periods of history that is glossed over in popular culture.
I have friends tied ito a 12 month contract with NTL who were told that a 7-day outage was 'normal', as was 30% packet loss.
Your friends aren't very good then. They should have to NTL they were canceling the direct debit it is is not fixed imediately. There isn't much NTL can do, other than take you to court in a case that they would lose (sale of goods act), which they would spend more on than they stood to reclaim. There is more to the law than their contract. They are bound by many laws on providing a product. Check with trading standards. If you don't know any better, you get rolled on all the time.
Oh the other hand, I've had their cable broadband for four years and the uptime has been fantastic. Two, maybe three outages the whole time, never more than a couple of hours. Their customer service sucks big time, especially if you don't have the good sense to call in the morning.
Yeah, I'd say so. E-mail has hit them hard. Not all that long ago they tried to tax e-mail in the US, and it got stayed. It'll come up again, and just maybe someone will have the balls to push for it, arguing "fighting spam" or "thinking of the children".
I'm UK based, and the Royal Mail has gone from two early morning deliveries, to one random one, usually after 10:00. They've been rebranding and trying new things, basically trying to stay afloat. It's not just e-mail, other things like phone, television and www have replaced a lot of the mail that the postal service used to handle. It's a shadow of it's former self.
On the other hand, companies that embraced new technology (like the other responder to my post) have thrived. UPS did the online-tracking thing, and made it easy for online shopping vendors to interface with them. I'm not sure on the history of the US carriers, but I'd bet that the playing field has changed vastly over the past five years.
Oh, and decimated actually means slashed by 10%. It comes from the Romans killing every 10th man for things like cowandance etc. So, it's not all that harsh a word, in terms of numbers!;-)
Crypto is illegal in france, unless you turn your keys over to the government
It's the same most everywhere else. Here in the UK, the gov. can request you hand over your keys. Plus, you are subject to a gag order if this comes, and lots of other restrictions. I'd be very surprised if the US didn't have something similar, especially given the last four years. Plus, I don't think anyone in France has actually been charged with using cryto illegally.
France also is reported to have signed this "code of conduct" without any hesitation
That bites, no doubt about it. Though, if the "report" is coming from the drafters of the code-of-conduct, I'd take it with a pinch of salt. I does sound like something they've said to back it up; "look, France is cool with it". Perhaps only a few ISPs signed up and the are BS'ing it. Wouldn't be the first time.
I don't know why you bring up that stuff about Iraq, it's not related to this story and is offtopic.
Sorry dude, yours was just one of many posts jumping on the word "France" in the article. You actually seem to have a clue about things, unlike most others that populate this meme, so perhaps I replied to the wrong person. I just saw the phrase "freedom-hating France" and cringed. People forget where the word "liberty" comes from...
Does freedom have something to do with the United Nations' peacekeeping forces sitting by idly while a horrific massacre was taking place in Srebrenica?
What does that have to do with anything discussed here? Nothing...what's your point? It was Dutch UN soldiers that were captured there. Nothing to do with all of the negative propaganda about France that most American's spew out for no other reason than the fact they didn't want to go to war over a blatant lie, in which they have been proven correct by the way. But hey, France Surrenders, right?
making France the most freedom-hostile country in europe.
He he, I love that shit. American's hate the French because they don't agree with them on certain issues. Do you even know what "freedom" means? I'll help you out; it has nothing to do with "follow the leader" or "do what you are told".
The US is becoming a characture of itself, and if it wasn't for the most powerful military empire in the world, it would be funny. Right now, it's downright terrifying. What you are doing in Iraq (and the political techniques used to get your concent) is the complete opposite of freedom. Orwell is truly rolling in his grave...
I couldn't believe that I threatened the cable co and they backed down
Why not? If you are out of your minimum contract and leave them with a bad taste, they will never see your custom (and money) again. No company is that stupid.
When my cable co (who provide TV, phone and broadband) wrote to inform me that they would send out warnings to heavy users, I wrote back stating that when I receive my first one, I'll cancel everyone of their services that same day.
I've never received a warning from them yet, despite kicking the arse out of it for many months. Emule + http://www.the-realworld.de and BitTorrent + RSS running 24/7 downloading TV shows, the occasional iso and so on.
You can do this with ANY company, it's not a new thing. If you don't like their service, tell them you are leaving. Instant discounts, freebies etc to keep you there. I've even heard of people getting AOL for next to nothing just so they would remain a customer. Some companies even see the loss to a competator something that costs them money in the long run, and they will tolerate customers that just break even for them.
I think they should ask ISPs to stop people that use the Internet altogether. That way: No Internet piracy!
You meant it as a joke, but I think we all know that they would if they could. Like some other industries that have already been decimated*, and some others that are yet to come (e.g. broadcast TV)...
These are the same folk that tried to ban the VCR; the problem with the internet was that it was too rooted by the time it started to cause them problems.
Labeling already is required. You just have to look for glutamate, glutamic acid, or MSG in the ingredients list.
I missed the announcement of the creation of the global world government and legal framework, and it's subsequent ruling on this:-). Some countries differ in exactly what need to be listed you know. However, the list of alternate names of MSG is way longer than you think, and it can exist in any other ingredient without having to mention it.
Look at any soft drink, one of the ingredients is usually "favourings". MSG is a flavour enhancer, and would easilly fit under here if you wanted to. You never see "stainless steel (contains iron)" do you?
You are wrong as well. The pen was developed by the manufacturer without consulting NASA. They did it off their own back for the publicity, "space" was the big thing back then. So, yes while there was a good reason to use them, that wasn't the drive behind it. I think they even gifted them to NASA.
You could make some thermite (very easy) and incendary the little bugger yourself. Termite ought to burn through it very easily, and it involves fire which is fun!:-)
To use a form of mind control to subdue those thoughts will be temporary and will make our society dependent on brain lasers to cure our problems.
Eh, that's been the case for 100 years. Ever since we invented eye glasses, poorly sighted people are just as useful as 20-20 vision folk. So there is now no gene filter for bad eyesight, and the planets eyesight will get progressively worse over time.
Every advance we make in medicine that results in something inheriable a non-issue means us becoming dependant on that advance at some future point. If low sperm counts and floppy dick syndrome are genertic, the infertility clinics and viagra would be wise investments for future trading.
What is there to gain from removing MSG as many seem to want?
It's not removal most want, simply required labeling. Let the consumer decide, but give them the information to do so. Food allergies can be a bitch, and being allergic to something that could be in any processed food without warning is dangerous. Many folk get a headache with too much MSG (even if they are not allergic) and it is also responsible for the chinese effect, where 30 minutes later you feel hungry. MSG is essentially a drug that makes your brain think you are eating something tasty and nutricious.
Contraception is a vaccine for AIDS, it's just not as simple as an injection. Provided you don't get it though bad medical care that is, but that's unlikely provided the staff have had even very basic training.
Solving some of the more debilatating diseases would go some way to solve the famine, sick people are a drain on your resources and you'd rather have them able to be productive in society. As for countries that have bad weather for crops, I'm all for the millenia old trick of migration to more hospitible lands, but politics and borders tend to screw that up these days.
You missed my point entirely. The protocall behind the client was proprietry, but the clients produced ouput (checkouts) that were not in any way tied to BK. Sure, the server DB would be proprietry as well, but it's a version control system, pretty complex stuff. Word on the other hand produces strange formats that need special filters etc. So, reverse engineering them improves interoperability.
His reverse engineering of BK cannot really be considered as being done with the aim of interoperability as it wasn't needed. I'm not saying it was illegal, just that his aim was getting around the license that he did not agree with.
Sure, Larry might not like people cloning his program. Well, tough. A clone is what is needed for interoperability.
This has NOTHING to do with interoperability. There were clients available already for the platform, and it didn't produce closed-format output (a source checkout).
Tridge was license cracking. BK is charged per-client and he was attempting to get around that. Sure, his solution would have been OSS, but that wasn't the drive behind it.
Have none of you worked with licensed software before? I don't know a single vendor that would be happy for someone to make a client that did not respect their licensing. Perhaps BK's business model is to distribute the server and make money from per-seat cost (I don't know). This client would sink their business. They gotta eat.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course they do. Think lowest bidder. Dropping an extra five bucks per drive is a one time hit for you that you won't notice. To them, it cuts into their margins big time.
Original poster, are you a smoker? The same buildup that makes white walls go yellow also builds up on the lens. You can clean it with the right tools.
I recondidition anything I have that breaks, and CD readers are a common one. You can often fix them by dismantling, cleaning, regreasing, then reassembly. It's common knowledge that mechanical parts are more prone to failure than solid-state, so the likelyhood is that in each of your devices there is a hardware problem.
Remember the original Playstation that had serious problems after a while? Problem there was that the little sled that the lens was on had a plastic runner. After X hours of seeking, it would wear down slightly, causing the lens to drop on one side. This is why turning the PSX upside down made a difference. You could fix that by filling in what had worn with some glue, filed down to make a smooth runner.
Not entirely true. LED lights are fully legal if they don't flash, that's all there is to it. There are laws that predate LEDs on having flashing lights on vehicles. This was a minor news article when flashers first appeared, but many prominent figures came out and said they would pay for any fines should someone get in bother for having something that clearly improved their safety.
I don't think anyone has actually been prosecuted for it. So, what we are basically seeing what is a new "stupid law" that never gets enforced. Kinda like the one that states that taxi drivers must always carry a bale of hay, and that they can legally urinate in a public street provided they pee on their back wheel!
Research has shown that the particular blue used is very alluring to males. (The are many differences between men and women's vision.) This is why it is used so much in electronics. Could be the difference between a sale and a non-sale.
As opposed to getting your knowledge from where? Everyone has a bias, that's the point of this thread!
18 000 000 is a fucking nonsensical figure - completely made up and without any scientific backing.
You know, I've heard people say the EXACT SAME THING about the holocaust. Want another source?:
From here. (emphasis added)
But yeah, I'm forgetting how Americans are genetically superior to everyone else, and this kind of thing is impossible! /sarcasm
I can't remember where I read it originally, but a quick google for "native american 20000000" found this
So, OK, make that 18,000,000. Either way, it's worse than the Nazi holocaust if you want to be caullous and talk numbers. However, you can't compare as they were completely different circumstances. Similar goals though, conquest, self-belief in your own dogma, colonialism, ethnic superiourity, religion. The usual bullshit that's been messing things up since the begining of mankind. People need to get away from this "my country can do no wrong" attitude; it's dangerous!
Nah, not really. Perhaps I was a little hasty in my "20 years or so", it was probably over a longer period all in all. We aren't talkin WW2 camps here, where genocide was horrifically paired with industrialization. There were still natives around to bury the dead in the usual way, and it's a big country. Smallpox infected blankets given to infants don't really lead to mass graves.
No one wants to hear bad things about their country. It's not a big conspiricy or anything; most media is scored on ratings/viewers/copies, and flag waving usually wins out. Just look at Jerry Bruikheimer, he's built his career on it! ;-)
And thanks to you (and your children), we'll all know if they are harmful in about 10/20 years. There have been many things hailed as harmless by the companies hawking them; absbestos, Thalidomide (v. nasty), tobacco blah blah blah. They are just molecules, now we're talking genes. God, how often do we hear of the "unknown long term effects of Ecstacy" been touted as reason not to take it?
If you want to take their word for it being "harmless", then I am quite glad to have you as my guinea pig!! :-)
The problem is not that Anheuser-Busch is worried about pissing off Europe. The problem is that a drug company wants to produce rice designed to create a drug in open fields. Anheuser-Busch doesn't want that rice to contaminate their rice.
Opinions here in Europe on GM are mostly sceptical. "GM free" is a selling point, and Bud cares about how many units it shifts more than anything else on the planet. If there rice were to be contaminated, it would definately make the news and cost them sales. No one would be pissed off, they just wouldn't sell any.
Sales of Bud aren't as high as they once were say 10 years ago. It's got an "asshole" stigma about it here now; it's kinda what US style "jocks" would drink if I were to think of an equivalent social group to what we have here. European beers had lots of ad drives over the last while, and frankly few could argue that Bud wins on taste. So, bud took a pasting. Risking further losses would be dangerous as they have investments in "brewed under license" franchises.
I'd bet that some (if not most) of the people who work on it have unlimited access, but their usage is monitored. As for monitoring, well given the google api and a few weeks, you could write your own bot that does searches for things you'd like to monitor. Any sites found go into a DB, which checks if the site is known or new. New ones get eyeballed. Pretty easy really. But even easier to get round if you even know a little basic net knowledge.
I guarantee that wherever you are, the same thing happens. The popular version of history is rarely as unpleasant as the reality. "History is written by the winners" as the saying goes. So, while we Brits forget about us routinely using bombardment to literally terrorize "unwilling subjects" in the British Empire days, the Americans gloss-over cowboys genociding 20,000,000 native Americans over 20 or so years. If there isn't a movie/tv drama about it; it never happened.
Apologies if I didn't rake up any shit on your country. Consult your local library if you want more information. It's all there. Even the neuteral Swiss will have some dark periods of history that is glossed over in popular culture.
Your friends aren't very good then. They should have to NTL they were canceling the direct debit it is is not fixed imediately. There isn't much NTL can do, other than take you to court in a case that they would lose (sale of goods act), which they would spend more on than they stood to reclaim. There is more to the law than their contract. They are bound by many laws on providing a product. Check with trading standards. If you don't know any better, you get rolled on all the time.
Oh the other hand, I've had their cable broadband for four years and the uptime has been fantastic. Two, maybe three outages the whole time, never more than a couple of hours. Their customer service sucks big time, especially if you don't have the good sense to call in the morning.
Yeah, I'd say so. E-mail has hit them hard. Not all that long ago they tried to tax e-mail in the US, and it got stayed. It'll come up again, and just maybe someone will have the balls to push for it, arguing "fighting spam" or "thinking of the children".
I'm UK based, and the Royal Mail has gone from two early morning deliveries, to one random one, usually after 10:00. They've been rebranding and trying new things, basically trying to stay afloat. It's not just e-mail, other things like phone, television and www have replaced a lot of the mail that the postal service used to handle. It's a shadow of it's former self.
On the other hand, companies that embraced new technology (like the other responder to my post) have thrived. UPS did the online-tracking thing, and made it easy for online shopping vendors to interface with them. I'm not sure on the history of the US carriers, but I'd bet that the playing field has changed vastly over the past five years.
Oh, and decimated actually means slashed by 10%. It comes from the Romans killing every 10th man for things like cowandance etc. So, it's not all that harsh a word, in terms of numbers! ;-)
It's the same most everywhere else. Here in the UK, the gov. can request you hand over your keys. Plus, you are subject to a gag order if this comes, and lots of other restrictions. I'd be very surprised if the US didn't have something similar, especially given the last four years. Plus, I don't think anyone in France has actually been charged with using cryto illegally.
France also is reported to have signed this "code of conduct" without any hesitation
That bites, no doubt about it. Though, if the "report" is coming from the drafters of the code-of-conduct, I'd take it with a pinch of salt. I does sound like something they've said to back it up; "look, France is cool with it". Perhaps only a few ISPs signed up and the are BS'ing it. Wouldn't be the first time.
I don't know why you bring up that stuff about Iraq, it's not related to this story and is offtopic.
Sorry dude, yours was just one of many posts jumping on the word "France" in the article. You actually seem to have a clue about things, unlike most others that populate this meme, so perhaps I replied to the wrong person. I just saw the phrase "freedom-hating France" and cringed. People forget where the word "liberty" comes from...
What does that have to do with anything discussed here? Nothing...what's your point? It was Dutch UN soldiers that were captured there. Nothing to do with all of the negative propaganda about France that most American's spew out for no other reason than the fact they didn't want to go to war over a blatant lie, in which they have been proven correct by the way. But hey, France Surrenders, right?
He he, I love that shit. American's hate the French because they don't agree with them on certain issues. Do you even know what "freedom" means? I'll help you out; it has nothing to do with "follow the leader" or "do what you are told".
The US is becoming a characture of itself, and if it wasn't for the most powerful military empire in the world, it would be funny. Right now, it's downright terrifying. What you are doing in Iraq (and the political techniques used to get your concent) is the complete opposite of freedom. Orwell is truly rolling in his grave...
Why not? If you are out of your minimum contract and leave them with a bad taste, they will never see your custom (and money) again. No company is that stupid.
When my cable co (who provide TV, phone and broadband) wrote to inform me that they would send out warnings to heavy users, I wrote back stating that when I receive my first one, I'll cancel everyone of their services that same day.
I've never received a warning from them yet, despite kicking the arse out of it for many months. Emule + http://www.the-realworld.de and BitTorrent + RSS running 24/7 downloading TV shows, the occasional iso and so on.
You can do this with ANY company, it's not a new thing. If you don't like their service, tell them you are leaving. Instant discounts, freebies etc to keep you there. I've even heard of people getting AOL for next to nothing just so they would remain a customer. Some companies even see the loss to a competator something that costs them money in the long run, and they will tolerate customers that just break even for them.
You meant it as a joke, but I think we all know that they would if they could. Like some other industries that have already been decimated*, and some others that are yet to come (e.g. broadcast TV)...
These are the same folk that tried to ban the VCR; the problem with the internet was that it was too rooted by the time it started to cause them problems.
* travel agents, postal services and so on
I missed the announcement of the creation of the global world government and legal framework, and it's subsequent ruling on this :-). Some countries differ in exactly what need to be listed you know. However, the list of alternate names of MSG is way longer than you think, and it can exist in any other ingredient without having to mention it.
Look at any soft drink, one of the ingredients is usually "favourings". MSG is a flavour enhancer, and would easilly fit under here if you wanted to. You never see "stainless steel (contains iron)" do you?
You are wrong as well. The pen was developed by the manufacturer without consulting NASA. They did it off their own back for the publicity, "space" was the big thing back then. So, yes while there was a good reason to use them, that wasn't the drive behind it. I think they even gifted them to NASA.
You could make some thermite (very easy) and incendary the little bugger yourself. Termite ought to burn through it very easily, and it involves fire which is fun! :-)
Eh, that's been the case for 100 years. Ever since we invented eye glasses, poorly sighted people are just as useful as 20-20 vision folk. So there is now no gene filter for bad eyesight, and the planets eyesight will get progressively worse over time.
Every advance we make in medicine that results in something inheriable a non-issue means us becoming dependant on that advance at some future point. If low sperm counts and floppy dick syndrome are genertic, the infertility clinics and viagra would be wise investments for future trading.
It's not removal most want, simply required labeling. Let the consumer decide, but give them the information to do so. Food allergies can be a bitch, and being allergic to something that could be in any processed food without warning is dangerous. Many folk get a headache with too much MSG (even if they are not allergic) and it is also responsible for the chinese effect, where 30 minutes later you feel hungry. MSG is essentially a drug that makes your brain think you are eating something tasty and nutricious.
Contraception is a vaccine for AIDS, it's just not as simple as an injection. Provided you don't get it though bad medical care that is, but that's unlikely provided the staff have had even very basic training.
Solving some of the more debilatating diseases would go some way to solve the famine, sick people are a drain on your resources and you'd rather have them able to be productive in society. As for countries that have bad weather for crops, I'm all for the millenia old trick of migration to more hospitible lands, but politics and borders tend to screw that up these days.
His reverse engineering of BK cannot really be considered as being done with the aim of interoperability as it wasn't needed. I'm not saying it was illegal, just that his aim was getting around the license that he did not agree with.
This has NOTHING to do with interoperability. There were clients available already for the platform, and it didn't produce closed-format output (a source checkout).
Tridge was license cracking. BK is charged per-client and he was attempting to get around that. Sure, his solution would have been OSS, but that wasn't the drive behind it.
Have none of you worked with licensed software before? I don't know a single vendor that would be happy for someone to make a client that did not respect their licensing. Perhaps BK's business model is to distribute the server and make money from per-seat cost (I don't know). This client would sink their business. They gotta eat.