>Happy September 11th. If I wished to say those things about the United States I'd even be able to do so as a citizen. If you're an American then congratulations, you're in one of the only countries that you can do that. If you're not American I don't intend to stifle your freedom of speech, I just dare you to say that about you're own country.

My country has a government filled with extreme levels of corruption, the police is so corrupt as to be almost entirely ineffective - but when they do actually do anything it generally ends in unarmed poor (usually black) people being shot for daring to complain about it. the military is really only useful as an excuse for corrupt arms-deal contracts (mostly to buy equipment nobody is ever trained to actually be able to use), the president couldn't remove his head from his arse without major surgery, the opposition parties are no less corrupt and completely ineffective which has turned our once lofty intellectual political discourse into a farce of clowns throwing manure at each other.

Basically - we're exactly like America, only with a lot more poor people. Oh - and I have MORE civil liberties than YOU do.

>Communists in power don't force people to drink vodka & eat borscht you sniveling coward, they confiscate all your belongings, outaw dissent & condemn people to hard prison or insane asylums without fair trials.

No... that's what TYRANTS in power do. Just because we've had a lot of communist tyrants does not mean communism REQUIRES Tyrants (it doesn't) or that Tyrants are always communist (they aren't - in fact three of the worst tyrants of the 20th century were not - two were fascists [a form of capitalism] and one was a free market fundamentalist: Pinochet !)

There are variations of communist philosophy that are forms of anarchism - such as Anton Pannekoek's "Council Communism", Robert Hahnel's Parecon, Noam Chomsky's brand of Anarcho-syndicalism or the kind of libertarian socialism practised in Andalusia (Southern Spain) during the first 20 years of the last century - and would probably still be there if the scale of the world wars hadn''t overwhelmed them and gotten all of Spain under a different tyrant (Franco) with yet another economic philosophy that was fairly unique (close enough to capitalism for Spain not to be targeted during the cold war, close enough to communism for the Russians not to target them either - somewhat like facism but not enough for either side to care).

No, I don't mean a tenured position, I mean the temporary position as a program director that she was fired from. It was a temporary position, and while it took a year to get her out, the wheels began to turn in November of 2013, only 3 months after she started. Which is clearly documented in the article.

She was a member of two different organizations (Womenâ(TM)s Committee Against Genocide and New Movement in Solidarity with Puerto Rican Independence) that were associated with the organization that committed the violent acts, the May 19 Communist Organization (M19CO).

She says she didn't know in advance that the violent acts were going to occur, but when she saw them in the news, she knew they were committed by the M19CO, and that the association between the M19CO organization and her own organizations existed.

She says she was casually acquainted with two of the convicted murderers, Judith Clark and Kuwasi Balagoon, who were members of the M19CO, and she maintained a relationship with Kuwasi Balagoon with letters and an in person visit, until he died.

Knowing these facts, they don't want to trust her with the position of program director. It was a new assignment, she only had a temporary job. They didn't take away the job she'd been doing for years because of what they found. The whole point of a temporary position is that no promises are made that it's going to last, so any expectations of permanence she had were her own mistake.

The more autistic among us will play rules lawyer games and insist that, technically, she didn't tell any lies, and given the benefit of the doubt on every occasion, you can't prove that she's not as pure as the driven snow. But they miss the point. The point is, the woman is a radical. Nothing wrong with that in and of itself, but you don't put radicals at the helm of the bureaucracy.

So, the Cyborg Unplug is made by Julian Oliver. Because, PRIVACY!

Clicking through to his personal site, we're greeted with another one of his creations... the Transparency Grenade. Because, TRANSPARENCY!

http://julianoliver.com/output...

So, what happens if I throw a Transparency Grenade into a restaurant with a Cyborg Unplug running? Do they destroy each other?

HYPOCRISY!!

Climate models don't even project 10 years into the future well, they work more on 30 year time scales.

So do those from 1984 do a better job than those form 2004 when it comes to matching what we observe to be the case now? No matter how each group of models compare with the other how well do they do in absolute terms?

What about the people with stake in large multinational wind and solar producers claiming we can save ourself with all-renewable society?

Where things start getting really daft is that using wind and solar can easily mean that you need to run fossil fuel plants very inefficiently in order to "balance the grid". Thus it's possible for these to have a huge "carbon footprint". Yet nuclear power tends to be dismissed out of hand by the same people demanding "something must be done".
Similarly it's quite easy to produce "bio fuels" which require more petroleum than "petrol fuels".

There is a very real issue of toxic pollution that gets ignored in the hype over CO2.

A lot of environmental issues tend to get ignored here. Possibly including those which actually have a far greater influence on weather and climate systems.

So, you tell me, is the natural balance of emissions and absorption so precariously balanced that a couple of percentage points will result in catastrophe? Inquiring minds want to know!

If this is the case how can the Earth's climate remained stable for 4+ billion years? Alternativly what can have happened recently, but pre "industrial revolution" to have made it unstable now?

By the way, the answer I get is never supported by anything other than computer models. I know just enough about how computer models are like graphs - you draw the graph you want then plot the points.

Just about all of the climate computer "models" would be better described as "fiction".

>However, free open source software is not the only way to do that.

Please provide a way to do that without some ability to audit the source ?

> The assumption that non-free software is bad and harmful and by extension free software is good and beneficial

Being non-free is, by itself, already bad - freedom is worth far more than money. It's generally stupid to sacrifice your life to prevent losing money as it precludes the ability to make more (which always exists), but those who sacrifice their lives to prevent the loss of liberty are widely considered heroes.
Liberty is fundamentally more valuable than almost all other considerations.
This is why the FSF distinguishes between proprietory and commercial software. The one is harmful and the other is not in terms of liberty.
Now there may or may not be other harms - there could be malware in a free software project hoping nobody looks, a non-free program could offer you a way to guarantee you'll win the lottery this week - nevertheless the free software would STILL be superior in terms of liberty.

>Stallman has a very narrow view of what software development should look like
He had never proposed any view on this topic whatsoever. He has DONE software development in a certain style (which, by the way, was no the open source methodology but the traditional bazaar style he knew) but he never declared it a better way of developing software.
He has limited his position purely to the ethical and philosophical issues of freedom, which is a higher consideration than quality or commercial success.
After all - would you agree to a law that said you couldn't tell your friends what you saw on the news last night in order to help Fox make more money by forcing more people to watch the show themselves ?
Surely you would consider that an unacceptable constraint on your personal freedom of speech.
What Stallman's arguments prove, VERY convincingly is that the four freedoms he cares about are all - JUST as important.

People who wish to paint a strawman (which you did) tend to accuse him (falsely) of not recognizing some free software as such - which is actually not true at all. Stallman has NEVER denied that any BSD system is free, nor has he denied that of any GNU/Linux distribution (except for a few very specific cases like the Tivo which really weren't).
He does however refuse to endorse a product that does not share his values. So he won't endorse openBSD or redhat, but that is not denying that those products are free, it's just not endorsing something which (in turn) endorses other things he is opposed to. That's a perfectly reasonable position to take.
If you're opposed to something, would you endorse somebody who, while not themselves engaged in that thing, do however endorse it publicly in the very same sphere where they asked for your endorsement ?

Quite a lot of smaller projects, notably ones that target individuals, have voluntary donation based business models - and make enough to keep the developers' bills paid so they can write the software. Because a dollar here or a dollar there is not prohibitively expensive, and it adds up quite a lot if you have a few thousand people who do so every month which for a reasonably successful end-user project these days would only require about a 25% donation rate.

This is the exact same business model that humble bundle uses.

For quite a few years I maintained a project that was the market-leader in it's class for free software. I never made money out of end-users but I ran a successful business based on selling features to other business. My software was a management tool used for running a type of small business - a lot of indy such businesses used it, some NGO's distributed it for variations on the theme - but there were also quite a few big companies who were franchising business built around it. They wanted customized management software that would protect their franchised brand and offer functionality that the indy guys didn't care about (like integration between franchises) - and they paid me very handsomely to develop those for them.
Of course they COULD go to anybody to do it - but they didn't because I knew the code better than anybody and could do it cheaper.
For doing it, I would charge them an hourly rate. I would also make them a choice. I could either include the features they wanted back in the main branch for others to use (including competitors) or I could keep it in it's own branch - never publicly distributed to anybody else (hence without violation of the GPL) - and if any other customer wanted the same feature I would have to pay somebody else to clean-room it. But if they wanted feature exclusivity - the rate-per-hour was doubled.
I made very good money that way - drove a nice car, had a nice home. Eventually the technology changed and the market for that kind of business dissapeared almost entirely (actually - mobile replaced it) and so I moved on to other things (no point writing code nobody needs anymore).

Basically - you have no idea how many people successfully do the very things you just claimed nobody does.

Nothing in Stallman's philosophy precludes profit-driven development - on the contrary, he actively encourages it !
He precludes a certain METHOD of profit generation, not the idea of profit.

Your response is like saying "We can't have pollution standards because saying you can't make profit by dumping strychnine in my drinking water is the same saying you can't make profit at all".

There is absolutely no free software problem with profit. There is a freedom problem with software that are sold in one PARTICULAR bad way because the harms that it causes to the public far outweigh the profit earned by the seller.

The only thing Stallman has ever done is point out the age-old lesson that if you don't force the medicine seller to tell you what's in his medicine most of it ends up being snake-oil.

Stallman has only ever allowed for "use a proprietory application" in one sole exception case:
Where there is no viable free alternative.
However, if you believe in freedom - and use it under that condition, you need to also be contributing (in whatever way your particular skills and talents allow) to projects aiming to make a free alternative viable.

1) You're making a strawman - parent said no such thing.
2) Society has already decided that you're wrong - society has already decided that there is nothing wrong in apportioning blame to the victims in certain circumstances.

You have a serious problem with logic - try telling your insurance that, yes, even though you left your car in a rough part of town, overnight, with the keys in the ignition and all the windows rolled down, that they have to pay up because "it's 100% the criminals fault". The insurance company understands risks much better than you, and thus I'm inclined (and just about every other human out there, barring SJW's) to follow their logic much better than I follow your non-logic.