Don't the researchers find it strange that of all the substances it could synthesize it chose one that was already there? I doubt it.
Either the experiment is flawed or the bacteria have some sort o Lamarkian evolution mechanism working inside. They probably did develop the ability to metabolize a number of other substances. And since none of those other substances were available, nobody noticed and the ability probably just randomly disappeared again a while later.
The AG got the companies because they had in their TOS a clause that specificly prohibited child pornography. Therefore when the sting operation's user complained about it and the ISP's did their standard "nothing" it became fraud. I don't get it. A TOS only applies to what subscribers are allowed to do. How does "our customers may not post kiddy porn" get twisted into "we promise to prevent our customers from seeing kiddy porn posted elsewhere"?
An LED-backlit 24-inch widescreen monitor, the DreamColor features 30-bit imaging with a over billion colors. That's 64 times the standard LCD color gamut
No it isn't. Gamut is something like how far apart the most different colors it can show are, and depends on what colors the actual pixel elements are. The number of bits just determines how close together the most similar colors it can show are.
Perfectly feasible if the users get enough annoying pop-ups that they just click OK on the "invalid certificate" warning, or if they have an installer that adds extra ssl root certificates.
There are legitimate questions about what sort of material should be available to minors. I'm on the side of requiring the parents to do most of the footwork to protect their children, but it might also be helpful if extra tools were provided.
In particular, what if games came with an age group flag when they were installed, and operating system users could also have an age limit specified, so that applications with a "18+" flag would not launch of a user configured as "13."
And who decides what's allowed for what age groups? Probably better to have well-defined ratings from 1-5 on various categories, that at least would let the parent (instead of some quasi-official regulatory body) do the deciding and just use the computer to help enforce that decision. Something like "No, little Johnny doesn't need exposure to this extreme violence. But a little minor nudity never hurt anyone." probably wouldn't work so well with US age-based ratings.
I think any distributed version control system (ie, pretty much all the new free ones except SVN) will encourage branching, lack of a central authority just about requires this.
Of course, when he says "software" he really means "users," and when he says "users" he really means "developers," and that inaccuracy of terminology doesn't help him make his point clearly.
Of course, half the people talking about this issue make a similar mistake [...]
It's not a mistake, it's a disagreement. Users vs. developers is an artificial distinction, and it is possible to do things to the software which I am not free to share with others.
If you read the article, you'll see that the FBI is investigating. This generally has to be done before they get prosecuted, so they know what exactly to prosecute them for.
Losing those features is a necessary step toward a fully free desktop. Sure, you might lose them now, but that gives incentive for them to be developed so that we *have* free and open source drivers later. Really? How does a distro with no (sane) users give incentive for companies to do anything? I'd expect much larger incentives from the ability to offload driver maintenance work and potentially better compatibility with new features that they'd get from letting others fix/improve their drivers. The incentives would come from being able to do more with less, not the mostly invisible grandstanding of some fringe group.
Honestly, what's the bullshit with no bottles of water allowed? Isn't it time that somebody sue the TSA to get them to drop this ass-in-9 practice? I kind of assumed it was really just meant to increase profitability for the airport food vendors.
This guy should be promoted to CIO for the company Um, being able to say "wtf you're stupid" and being able to make sound long-term plans dealing with expensive amounts of technology and more expensive amounts of users' time are not exactly the same skillset.
And what if someone copies a new product instantly? The creator will not benefit, but the society as a whole will. Is it really possible to copy most things instantly? For anything physical (except seeds and other biology, I supposed) you can only copy it if you understand it well enough to build it, and gaining that understanding takes time and research. Plus you need to obtain appropriate facilities for building it.
And the solution to the unfavorable contracts is some combination of education (but is "don't be a sucker" really that easy to teach?) and restrictions on what kinds of contracts are allowed. "freedom of contract" is supposed to be based on the idea that the parties have equal power, but that is rarely the case now.
Sometimes it increases adoption (Linux kernel), sometimes it doesn't. How do we separate the effect of the license from the effect of the development methodology? Or in this particular case, from the old BSD/ATT disputes?
There's absolutely no ethical reason to choose a less restrictive license over the GPL. That depends on who you ask.
The only thing the GPL restricts is the ability to restrict others. Funny thing is, it isn't possible anyway to "restrict others" in that fashion without their cooperation (buying/downloading your software). It restricts the choices available to the end user by causing certain products to not exist.
Slashdot Mirror
It looked better in the brochure.
Perfectly feasible if the users get enough annoying pop-ups that they just click OK on the "invalid certificate" warning, or if they have an installer that adds extra ssl root certificates.
There are legitimate questions about what sort of material should be available to minors. I'm on the side of requiring the parents to do most of the footwork to protect their children, but it might also be helpful if extra tools were provided.
In particular, what if games came with an age group flag when they were installed, and operating system users could also have an age limit specified, so that applications with a "18+" flag would not launch of a user configured as "13."
And who decides what's allowed for what age groups? Probably better to have well-defined ratings from 1-5 on various categories, that at least would let the parent (instead of some quasi-official regulatory body) do the deciding and just use the computer to help enforce that decision. Something like "No, little Johnny doesn't need exposure to this extreme violence. But a little minor nudity never hurt anyone." probably wouldn't work so well with US age-based ratings.
Because "inappropriate" and "illegal" are always the same thing...
I think any distributed version control system (ie, pretty much all the new free ones except SVN) will encourage branching, lack of a central authority just about requires this.
Of course, when he says "software" he really means "users," and when he says "users" he really means "developers," and that inaccuracy of terminology doesn't help him make his point clearly.
Of course, half the people talking about this issue make a similar mistake [...]
It's not a mistake, it's a disagreement. Users vs. developers is an artificial distinction, and it is possible to do things to the software which I am not free to share with others.
If you read the article, you'll see that the FBI is investigating. This generally has to be done before they get prosecuted, so they know what exactly to prosecute them for.
Market forces don't work very well if there is a large disparity is power between the participants (same for the principle of freedom of contract).
I have it mapped as a hotkey for "open terminal window"...
GE is different because they have Lawyers and Lobbyists.
And the solution to the unfavorable contracts is some combination of education (but is "don't be a sucker" really that easy to teach?) and restrictions on what kinds of contracts are allowed. "freedom of contract" is supposed to be based on the idea that the parties have equal power, but that is rarely the case now.
"Here's the spec, do whatever you want with it, but you can only use our name for it if you pass this huge test suite."
Wouldn't that be "open spec" instead of "open source", with the open source reference implementation being a separate issue?