So if you RTFA, you'll notice that the '20th Hijacker' (Mohammed al-Qahtani) was caught because the TSA agent became suspicious (for whatever reason, probably profiling if I had my guess), asked why he didn't have a return flight ticket, and the hijacker became very angry and confrontational about it.
How did the TSA send an agent back in time to before the TSA existed, and why would a time travelling TSA agent have been doing work that, even after the TSA existed, wasn't part of the TSA's job?
If you ask a TSA employee, their job is not catching terrorists. Their job is preventing "dangerous items" from getting onto an aircraft. The problem is that if that really is their job, they're horrifically bad at it.
That's not their job.
TSA was founded for several purposes: 1. To shift the power over airport security to the federal government (several subpurposes to this -- among them shifting responsibility in the case of another failure, and creating a single point of influence for contractors to target.) 2. To, simply by being created, be a visible act of "doing something", regardless of substantive effectiveness or lack thereof, in the immediate, wake of a major terrorist attack, and 3. To condition the public to accept greater arbitrary intrusions on personal liberty.
#2 was a short term goal and was probably reasonably successful (it was a political measure, and there were lots of others at the same time, so its pretty hard to isolate its effectiveness); #1 was obviously successful in general (and its subpurposes seem to have been achieved effectively). Despite some pushback over some measures, #3 seems to have been successful at least in the context in which TSA operates (though its less clear how successful it has been at conditioning the public to except more intrusion generally.)
What copyright restricts you from doing is making copies of music and distributing them without permission.
Actually, both making and distributing copies are separate exclusive rights of the copyright owner under copyright; distribution is not necessary for infringement if any of the other exclusive rights are violated (though without distribution, there often isn't provable harm, which limits the available remedies for certain classes of infringement.)
The Audio Home Recording Act created a special exception for non-commercial personal copying for certain audio recordings, but the exact scope of the AHRA protection is unclear, there is very little clear case law applying it.
Do you complain about their rape awareness programs?
I have. Of course, it was when part of the program involved hanging signs in the dorms including one whose entire text was "Men rape".
That the idea of an "awareness program" related to a particular subject might not be bad in and of itself (and might even be good) does not automatically make invalid criticism of the conduct of the "awareness program".
The problem is, if they allow any old Android software, I can buy a Nook and install Amazon's Kindle software on it, then not buy B&N books for it
B&N would probably prefer you buy a Nook to do that with than that you buy a locked-to-Amazon Kindle to buy Kindle books.
Again, as GP stated, even if people aren't buying Nooks, anything that increases Nook sales volume is good for them. As long as they aren't losing money on the hardware, which I doubt they are, people buying it for any purpose other than buying Nook books is good, people buying it and buying Nook books is better.
I'm pretty sure there is an existing implementation of Ruby, too.
Charles Nutter, the creator and lead maintainer of JRuby, is also one of the creators of Mirah. I'm pretty sure he is aware that JRuby exists. What Mirah offers compared to Java is the clean, expressive syntax that lets you get to the point. What Mirah offers compared to JRuby and other JVM dynamic languages is static typing, direct callability from Java (since Mirah classes are Java classes), better performance, and (closely related to the preceding point) not dragging around a big runtime library.
From what I've read, the Chinese people generally support their country's censorship
Yes, effective censorship assures that what you read from the people subject to it is consistent with the viewpoint the censoring entity wishes to hace expressed, while contrary messages are suppressed.That's the whole point of censorship.
This is just funded by Google. It's the group at Stanford which did the DARPA Urban Challenge that's doing the work. It's essentially the same technology. They're getting very good at this.
Well, no. Its Google engineers who are doing this. Many of those Google engineers were formerly with teams that did the DARPA Challenges (not all from the Stanford team; from a 2010 PC Magazine article on Google's work, they hired "Chris Urmson, the technical team leader of the CMU team that won the 2007 Urban Challenge; Mike Montemerlo, the software lead for the Stanford team that won the 2005 Grand Challenge; and Anthony Levandowski, who built the world's first autonomous motorcycle that participated in a DARPA Grand Challenge.")
Earlier, Google was a sponsor of the Stanford team in several of those challenges, as well.
Google isn't the first to do this, not by a long shot. Last year, there was a story about an autonomous car driving from Italy to China [ieee.org].
Last fall, there were also stories about the same Google self-driving cars in this story, so I'm not sure how what you point to shows that Google isn't the first "not by a long shot".
I know there's lots of google fan boys on Slashdot, but I find it frightening that Chrome use has been growing so much. Google already has a very powerful market presence on the web, and I don't think putting them in charge of your browser is a good idea.
Clearly, lots of other people disagree with your assessment...
They are a corporation for profit, and hence inherently evil, like any machine that cares about nothing but profit would inherently be.
A for-profit corporation isn't necessarily one that "cares about nothing but profit", its simply one that is not structured in a special manner such that it does not accrue profits to the benefit of shareholders. Corporations represent the shared interests of their voting stockholders, essentially; usually, for a widely held company that shared interest is nothing but profits (for closely held companies, it is more likely that the voting stockholders, or a sizable enough share of them to direct the company, will share other interests beyond profits), but that may not be the case for Google (which structured its stock so that voting rights were disproportionately weighted in favor of the stock held by the founders and other pre-IPO insiders.)
The choice to use Firefox is obvious because it's the best browser.
Of the major browsers, I find Firefox to have been passed by Chrome and Opera and maybe Safari in quality; its still better than IE. Obviously, which is the best is subjective, but I don't find it to be the best.
But people should stick with Firefox anyway because it's OPEN SOURCE, and no corporation could abuse the power of it's market share for that fact alone.
Open source or not is a factor in evaluating it (and one which weighs in its favor.)
Then after that go for Libre Office (perfect example of the nature of Open Source killing evil corporation right there, "Good BYE Open Office!!"), and then eventually get your people onto Linux Mint.
What if I prefer Koffice and Kubuntu?
t's the best OS already, and 9 times out of 10 people will come to love it's stability, speed, ease of use, and inherently preferable nature due to it's FOSS character.
Oh, yeah, I forgot that your subjective preferences as to desirability of software were universal truths.
Like iTunes, the Android Market charges 30% on app purchases and 30% on in-app purchases conducted through the Market, as well. The difference is that the Open Handset Alliance doesn't require you to use the Android Market to deliver apps to Android devices, and does not appear require that content subscriptions are available through in-app purchase on the same terms as out-of-app purchases (they do require that payment you receive for the app itself be through the Market, but do not appear to prohibit out-of-Market purchases for services or content that may be accessed through the app, especially services/content that are not exclusive to the app so that they aren't just a form of payment for the app.)
The Android Market gets paid by encouraging developers that using the Market is worth using for distributing apps and for in-app purchases.
Who cares what the W3C says? This doesn't really make any sense. Remember how HTML5 signifies the shift to "Versionless"? The W3C is essentially trying to undermine WhatWG's guidance.
No, W3C is documenting stable standards, and WhatWG is coordinated collaboration on forward looking development. The processes have different needs, but integrate reasonably well together. The WhatWG HTML living standard documents, essentially, features that browser vendors are willing to work toward implementing, the W3C HTML5 standard will document a subset of a point-in-time version of that standard for which interoperable complete implementations actually exist.
Alright, I know it's popular to bash Flash on Slashdot and as much as I love open standards, it pains me to say that HTML5 by itself is NOT a Flash replacement. In order to get all of the features of Flash, you have to cobble together HTML5 + CSS + SVG + ECMAScript + Javascript + Canvas.
Wow, that's redundant. You made that sound really big, but if you remove the redundant parts, that's just HTML5 + CSS + SVG + JavaScript, and ECMAScript & JavaScript are the same thing, and Canvas is an HTML element with a defined JavaScript API.
HTML (content) + CSS (presentation) + JavaScript (behavior) is pretty much the standard way for doing stuff on the web anyhow, even for things much simpler than you'd use Flash for.
3 years is an eternity in web time. By 2014, the web will have evolved once again into something nobody can foresee today.
In three years, the W3C HMTL5 standard will probably document a safe, nearly universally available, baseline standard. It won't document anything interesting or cutting edge, but that's not really the point, that's what the "living standard" for HTML maintained by WHATWG, which "actually now defines the next generation of HTML after HTML5."
That does, in part, also depend on how one defines "implement" and for that matter "high speed rail". If you consider a 200 mph train from San Francisco to Sacramento to be a good implementation, then great.
I don't, neither does anyone else, no such a thing has not been proposed as a "high-speed rail" project.
We could possibly do that before most people reading this today are dead.
Or we could do either of the proposed actual, much longer and more useful, initial operating segments of the California High Speed Rail system by the end of the decade, along with building regional high-speed rail in several other places.
On the other hand if you want to see 250+ mph trains going cross country linking the most important cities from the interior of the US to the coastal cities, nobody should count on that happening any time remotely soon.
Nor has anyone proposed that as a high-speed rail project. Essentially, you seem to think that the two things that people could mean by "high-speed rail" are two things that aren't what the actual proposals are about. The near term goal has been building high-speed rail in a number of regional corridors that offer the most bang-for-the-buck from intercity arrangements. In the long term, those might interconnect, but that's not really key to the goal of providing a more efficient and, in long-term costs, economical alternative to cars and aircraft for high-traffic regional intercity routes.
However, even if the project was funded, it would inevitably end up quickly de-funded as well.
Inevitably? How?
Considering President Lawnchair will sign just about anything that crosses his desk,
You mean, President Obama, who vetoed two bills passed by the Congress in which his party had a majority in both houses even before the Republicans took a majority in the House? Clearly, this is not a President who will "sign just about anything that crosses his desk."
Actually, Defense spending is one of the few pieces of government spending which has been trending downward [cbo.gov].
Nice out-of-context, unexplained chart, but it definitely needs explanation. If, as many such things do, it includes only on-budget spending on not off-budget "emergency supplementals" (like those used to fund, among other things, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq prior to FY 2010, when they were brought into the budget as "Overseas Contingency Operations"), its pretty meaningless as a reflection of actual defense spending.
The outrage over the amount of military spending made sense back in the 1960s - if we were at Vietnam War-era spending levels today, the Defense budget would be around $1.2 trillion instead of only $660 billion.
Total defense spending (including spending outside of DoD, but excluding debt service costs attributable to past defense spending) is just under $1 trillion today.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but..doesn't the house have a bit MORE power when it comes to the budget...
When it comes to taxation, the House has a special procedural role (any revenue-raising bills must originate in the House; Art. I, Sec. 7 of the Constitution), but they don't have any more substantive power even there, since the bill still has to pass a majority vote of both houses and not be vetoed, or have a veto overridden by a 2/3 majority of both houses.
When it comes to spending, the House doesn't even have that special procedural role.
Defense spending will not be cut because it's *one of the few legitimate and constitutionally required functions of government*.
There are many legitimate functions of government, but "defense spending" in general does not all go to Constitutionally-required functions. There aren't many Constitutionally required functions of government. Some of it goes to the Constitutionally-required function to protect the states within the U.S. from invasion, but most defense spending is used for functions which have, at best, a distant and speculative relation to that Constitutionally-required function.
Well, at least to the party that has a majority in the House of Representatives.
OTOH, since the U.S. government has neither a unicameral legislature nor parliamentary soveriegnty, but instead has a bicameral legislature and legislative/executive power separation with an executive veto on legislation, a simple majority in one house of the legislature just gives you a certain degree of negotiating power, not the power to dictate policy.
You're either not familiar with smartphones and the costs associated with internet access (here's a clue - that landline you propose people replace with a smartphone is mucn MUCH cheaper than the wireless data plan) or you are one of the middle-class employed people that doesn't really understand how expensive this stuff actually is, and how unaffordable for the poor.
Or you are not familiar with the President's National Wireless Initiative that is being discussed here, which includes:
reform of the “Universal Service Fund” to ensure millions more Americans will be able to use this technology.
Sounds to me like the law is only treating symptoms. How about a law that makes it illegal to sell customer info without their express written consent?
Selling isn't the only problem addressed here, the merchant's own use of the information is also a problem.
And the initial collection and recording of the unnecessary information isn't a "symptom", its an essential precondition for any use of sale of the information. If you make it illegal to collect and record the information -- and enforce that law, then you address both unwanted internal use and unwanted sale.
Asking for a ZIP code IS a legitimate way of verifying a card isn't stolen. Probably not the best method, but it's a common one in the wild.
Common, but not even remotely good, and I'm not sure its "legitimate" except in the sense of "legal".
Physical credit cards are most often kept in wallets or similar things. The same places people tend to keep driver's licenses or similar ID. Which tend to include the ZIP code. It is, therefore, highly probable that someone who has stolen a physical credit card would also have acquired the victim's ZIP code in the process.
Yes, Qt in its current form will be freely available, but what if nobody from Nokia works on it?
Then the people working on it won't be from Nokia. If its important to other open source projects, and the existing Qt main project is abandoned, at least one of those other open source projects is likely to start maintaining and distributing its own fork of Qt with the patches and upgrades they need for their work; eventually that fork (or one of them) will be the main version of Qt being distributed and used in new work and will become the "main" Qt distribution for all intents and purposes.
A major advantage of open source is that if code is important to you and the existing maintainer decides that its not worth maintaining you aren't stuck when they EoL the code.
Slashdot Mirror
How did the TSA send an agent back in time to before the TSA existed, and why would a time travelling TSA agent have been doing work that, even after the TSA existed, wasn't part of the TSA's job?
That's not their job.
TSA was founded for several purposes:
1. To shift the power over airport security to the federal government (several subpurposes to this -- among them shifting responsibility in the case of another failure, and creating a single point of influence for contractors to target.)
2. To, simply by being created, be a visible act of "doing something", regardless of substantive effectiveness or lack thereof, in the immediate, wake of a major terrorist attack, and
3. To condition the public to accept greater arbitrary intrusions on personal liberty.
#2 was a short term goal and was probably reasonably successful (it was a political measure, and there were lots of others at the same time, so its pretty hard to isolate its effectiveness); #1 was obviously successful in general (and its subpurposes seem to have been achieved effectively). Despite some pushback over some measures, #3 seems to have been successful at least in the context in which TSA operates (though its less clear how successful it has been at conditioning the public to except more intrusion generally.)
What copyright restricts you from doing is making copies of music and distributing them without permission.
Actually, both making and distributing copies are separate exclusive rights of the copyright owner under copyright; distribution is not necessary for infringement if any of the other exclusive rights are violated (though without distribution, there often isn't provable harm, which limits the available remedies for certain classes of infringement.)
The Audio Home Recording Act created a special exception for non-commercial personal copying for certain audio recordings, but the exact scope of the AHRA protection is unclear, there is very little clear case law applying it.
Do you complain about their rape awareness programs?
I have. Of course, it was when part of the program involved hanging signs in the dorms including one whose entire text was "Men rape".
That the idea of an "awareness program" related to a particular subject might not be bad in and of itself (and might even be good) does not automatically make invalid criticism of the conduct of the "awareness program".
The problem is, if they allow any old Android software, I can buy a Nook and install Amazon's Kindle software on it, then not buy B&N books for it
B&N would probably prefer you buy a Nook to do that with than that you buy a locked-to-Amazon Kindle to buy Kindle books.
Again, as GP stated, even if people aren't buying Nooks, anything that increases Nook sales volume is good for them. As long as they aren't losing money on the hardware, which I doubt they are, people buying it for any purpose other than buying Nook books is good, people buying it and buying Nook books is better.
I'm pretty sure there is an existing implementation of Ruby, too.
Charles Nutter, the creator and lead maintainer of JRuby, is also one of the creators of Mirah. I'm pretty sure he is aware that JRuby exists. What Mirah offers compared to Java is the clean, expressive syntax that lets you get to the point. What Mirah offers compared to JRuby and other JVM dynamic languages is static typing, direct callability from Java (since Mirah classes are Java classes), better performance, and (closely related to the preceding point) not dragging around a big runtime library.
From what I've read, the Chinese people generally support their country's censorship
Yes, effective censorship assures that what you read from the people subject to it is consistent with the viewpoint the censoring entity wishes to hace expressed, while contrary messages are suppressed.That's the whole point of censorship.
This is just funded by Google. It's the group at Stanford which did the DARPA Urban Challenge that's doing the work. It's essentially the same technology. They're getting very good at this.
Well, no. Its Google engineers who are doing this. Many of those Google engineers were formerly with teams that did the DARPA Challenges (not all from the Stanford team; from a 2010 PC Magazine article on Google's work, they hired "Chris Urmson, the technical team leader of the CMU team that won the 2007 Urban Challenge; Mike Montemerlo, the software lead for the Stanford team that won the 2005 Grand Challenge; and Anthony Levandowski, who built the world's first autonomous motorcycle that participated in a DARPA Grand Challenge.")
Earlier, Google was a sponsor of the Stanford team in several of those challenges, as well.
Google isn't the first to do this, not by a long shot. Last year, there was a story about an autonomous car driving from Italy to China [ieee.org].
Last fall, there were also stories about the same Google self-driving cars in this story, so I'm not sure how what you point to shows that Google isn't the first "not by a long shot".
I know there's lots of google fan boys on Slashdot, but I find it frightening that Chrome use has been growing so much. Google already has a very powerful market presence on the web, and I don't think putting them in charge of your browser is a good idea.
Clearly, lots of other people disagree with your assessment...
They are a corporation for profit, and hence inherently evil, like any machine that cares about nothing but profit would inherently be.
A for-profit corporation isn't necessarily one that "cares about nothing but profit", its simply one that is not structured in a special manner such that it does not accrue profits to the benefit of shareholders. Corporations represent the shared interests of their voting stockholders, essentially; usually, for a widely held company that shared interest is nothing but profits (for closely held companies, it is more likely that the voting stockholders, or a sizable enough share of them to direct the company, will share other interests beyond profits), but that may not be the case for Google (which structured its stock so that voting rights were disproportionately weighted in favor of the stock held by the founders and other pre-IPO insiders.)
The choice to use Firefox is obvious because it's the best browser.
Of the major browsers, I find Firefox to have been passed by Chrome and Opera and maybe Safari in quality; its still better than IE. Obviously, which is the best is subjective, but I don't find it to be the best.
Open source or not is a factor in evaluating it (and one which weighs in its favor.)
What if I prefer Koffice and Kubuntu?
t's the best OS already, and 9 times out of 10 people will come to love it's stability, speed, ease of use, and inherently preferable nature due to it's FOSS character.
Oh, yeah, I forgot that your subjective preferences as to desirability of software were universal truths.
Like iTunes, the Android Market charges 30% on app purchases and 30% on in-app purchases conducted through the Market, as well. The difference is that the Open Handset Alliance doesn't require you to use the Android Market to deliver apps to Android devices, and does not appear require that content subscriptions are available through in-app purchase on the same terms as out-of-app purchases (they do require that payment you receive for the app itself be through the Market, but do not appear to prohibit out-of-Market purchases for services or content that may be accessed through the app, especially services/content that are not exclusive to the app so that they aren't just a form of payment for the app.)
The Android Market gets paid by encouraging developers that using the Market is worth using for distributing apps and for in-app purchases.
Who cares what the W3C says? This doesn't really make any sense. Remember how HTML5 signifies the shift to "Versionless"? The W3C is essentially trying to undermine WhatWG's guidance.
No, W3C is documenting stable standards, and WhatWG is coordinated collaboration on forward looking development. The processes have different needs, but integrate reasonably well together. The WhatWG HTML living standard documents, essentially, features that browser vendors are willing to work toward implementing, the W3C HTML5 standard will document a subset of a point-in-time version of that standard for which interoperable complete implementations actually exist.
Alright, I know it's popular to bash Flash on Slashdot and as much as I love open standards, it pains me to say that HTML5 by itself is NOT a Flash replacement. In order to get all of the features of Flash, you have to cobble together HTML5 + CSS + SVG + ECMAScript + Javascript + Canvas.
Wow, that's redundant. You made that sound really big, but if you remove the redundant parts, that's just HTML5 + CSS + SVG + JavaScript, and ECMAScript & JavaScript are the same thing, and Canvas is an HTML element with a defined JavaScript API.
HTML (content) + CSS (presentation) + JavaScript (behavior) is pretty much the standard way for doing stuff on the web anyhow, even for things much simpler than you'd use Flash for.
3 years is an eternity in web time. By 2014, the web will have evolved once again into something nobody can foresee today.
In three years, the W3C HMTL5 standard will probably document a safe, nearly universally available, baseline standard. It won't document anything interesting or cutting edge, but that's not really the point, that's what the "living standard" for HTML maintained by WHATWG, which "actually now defines the next generation of HTML after HTML5."
That does, in part, also depend on how one defines "implement" and for that matter "high speed rail". If you consider a 200 mph train from San Francisco to Sacramento to be a good implementation, then great.
I don't, neither does anyone else, no such a thing has not been proposed as a "high-speed rail" project.
We could possibly do that before most people reading this today are dead.
Or we could do either of the proposed actual, much longer and more useful, initial operating segments of the California High Speed Rail system by the end of the decade, along with building regional high-speed rail in several other places.
On the other hand if you want to see 250+ mph trains going cross country linking the most important cities from the interior of the US to the coastal cities, nobody should count on that happening any time remotely soon.
Nor has anyone proposed that as a high-speed rail project. Essentially, you seem to think that the two things that people could mean by "high-speed rail" are two things that aren't what the actual proposals are about. The near term goal has been building high-speed rail in a number of regional corridors that offer the most bang-for-the-buck from intercity arrangements. In the long term, those might interconnect, but that's not really key to the goal of providing a more efficient and, in long-term costs, economical alternative to cars and aircraft for high-traffic regional intercity routes.
However, even if the project was funded, it would inevitably end up quickly de-funded as well.
Inevitably? How?
Considering President Lawnchair will sign just about anything that crosses his desk,
You mean, President Obama, who vetoed two bills passed by the Congress in which his party had a majority in both houses even before the Republicans took a majority in the House? Clearly, this is not a President who will "sign just about anything that crosses his desk."
Actually, Defense spending is one of the few pieces of government spending which has been trending downward [cbo.gov].
Nice out-of-context, unexplained chart, but it definitely needs explanation. If, as many such things do, it includes only on-budget spending on not off-budget "emergency supplementals" (like those used to fund, among other things, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq prior to FY 2010, when they were brought into the budget as "Overseas Contingency Operations"), its pretty meaningless as a reflection of actual defense spending.
The outrage over the amount of military spending made sense back in the 1960s - if we were at Vietnam War-era spending levels today, the Defense budget would be around $1.2 trillion instead of only $660 billion.
Total defense spending (including spending outside of DoD, but excluding debt service costs attributable to past defense spending) is just under $1 trillion today.
We won't end up implementing high speed rail in this country any time soon
Well, we certainly won't if we don't fund it. If we do fund it, we will implement it quite soon. Its pretty much that simple.
Constant war is a constitutionally required function of the government?
Yes, its in Amendment MCMLXXXIV.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but..doesn't the house have a bit MORE power when it comes to the budget...
When it comes to taxation, the House has a special procedural role (any revenue-raising bills must originate in the House; Art. I, Sec. 7 of the Constitution), but they don't have any more substantive power even there, since the bill still has to pass a majority vote of both houses and not be vetoed, or have a veto overridden by a 2/3 majority of both houses.
When it comes to spending, the House doesn't even have that special procedural role.
Defense spending will not be cut because it's *one of the few legitimate and constitutionally required functions of government*.
There are many legitimate functions of government, but "defense spending" in general does not all go to Constitutionally-required functions. There aren't many Constitutionally required functions of government. Some of it goes to the Constitutionally-required function to protect the states within the U.S. from invasion, but most defense spending is used for functions which have, at best, a distant and speculative relation to that Constitutionally-required function.
The DoD is the sacred cow to end all sacred cows
Well, at least to the party that has a majority in the House of Representatives.
OTOH, since the U.S. government has neither a unicameral legislature nor parliamentary soveriegnty, but instead has a bicameral legislature and legislative/executive power separation with an executive veto on legislation, a simple majority in one house of the legislature just gives you a certain degree of negotiating power, not the power to dictate policy.
You're either not familiar with smartphones and the costs associated with internet access (here's a clue - that landline you propose people replace with a smartphone is mucn MUCH cheaper than the wireless data plan) or you are one of the middle-class employed people that doesn't really understand how expensive this stuff actually is, and how unaffordable for the poor.
Or you are not familiar with the President's National Wireless Initiative that is being discussed here, which includes:
reform of the “Universal Service Fund” to ensure millions more Americans will be able to use this technology.
Sounds to me like the law is only treating symptoms. How about a law that makes it illegal to sell customer info without their express written consent?
Selling isn't the only problem addressed here, the merchant's own use of the information is also a problem.
And the initial collection and recording of the unnecessary information isn't a "symptom", its an essential precondition for any use of sale of the information. If you make it illegal to collect and record the information -- and enforce that law, then you address both unwanted internal use and unwanted sale.
Asking for a ZIP code IS a legitimate way of verifying a card isn't stolen. Probably not the best method, but it's a common one in the wild.
Common, but not even remotely good, and I'm not sure its "legitimate" except in the sense of "legal".
Physical credit cards are most often kept in wallets or similar things. The same places people tend to keep driver's licenses or similar ID. Which tend to include the ZIP code. It is, therefore, highly probable that someone who has stolen a physical credit card would also have acquired the victim's ZIP code in the process.
Yes, Qt in its current form will be freely available, but what if nobody from Nokia works on it?
Then the people working on it won't be from Nokia. If its important to other open source projects, and the existing Qt main project is abandoned, at least one of those other open source projects is likely to start maintaining and distributing its own fork of Qt with the patches and upgrades they need for their work; eventually that fork (or one of them) will be the main version of Qt being distributed and used in new work and will become the "main" Qt distribution for all intents and purposes.
A major advantage of open source is that if code is important to you and the existing maintainer decides that its not worth maintaining you aren't stuck when they EoL the code.