In order for people to use open source software, someone has to write open source software. It does not appear by magic from the "software fairy".

The SFLC's primary purpose is to encourage people to write open source software, not to encourage people to use it. By encouraging people to write OSS, SFLC helps ensure that there is a large body of useful and relevant OSS available for people to use.

People who write OSS under the GPL are motivated by (among other things) the idea of sharing work: The price you pay to use my work is that you have to share any improvements you make, and you have to allow your users to share my work, too.

By bringing forward these lawsuits, the SFLC ensures that the author's sharing requirement is met, thus encouraging the author to make more OSS available.

It also doesn't say if, when arrested, she had drugs on her, which clearly means she had 1 kg of coke on her, which she was distributing in the theater.
It doesn't say which birthday it was, so clearly the sister was a minor.
It doesn't say if they were wearing clothing or not, so clearly the "family birthday party" was child pornography.
It doesn't say if she killed any of the police officers who arrested her, so we can assume she did.

This drug-dealing, cop-killing, copyright violating child pornographer got away with only 2 days in jail. What the hell is wrong with this country? She should have been sentenced to die by lethal injection, then given the antidote and killed again for good measure. These bleeding-heart liberal judges have no sense of holy retribution.

It's not quite as cut-and-dry as you think.

It could very well be illegal to follow you around the store and record every product you looked at, and then follow you around the library and see every book you look at (and then examine the records to see what you have ever checked out), then followed you to the video store and measured exactly how much time you spent looking at each title (and also examine your rental history).

The Germans lived through both the Nazis and with the KGB. They have a good reason to be sensitive about protecting people's privacy.

I disagree. Some religion is based on fear, and some is based on hope. Just like politics.

Some people get into religion because they want to control and dominate people, and some get into religion because they want to help people and to understand the world. Just like politics.

Since I've already got 2 of the 3 dinner-table-conversation killers, I should point out that some people have sex to control and dominate others, and some have sex to celebrate and please others. Just like politics.

Actually, this technology would make the data center better protected from a flood. Since each blade is sealed in its own bubble of coolant, if the entire rack is underwater because of a flood, the blades would be protected. Maybe some of the external components like the cooling pumps might be damaged, but most of the contents of the rack would be fine.

I'm not saying they could continue to operate through the flood, but after the water is gone and the mess cleaned up, you replace the UPS and fix the external things which are damaged, and you could get going again without having to actually replace the computers which are in the rack.

Lots of people have commented on how incredibly stupid these people are. I don't think it's quite that simple.

I think that they're just scared. There's so much fear in our culture, people are scared of health care, scared of a black president, scared of terrorists, scared of oil prices, scared of cell phone companies, scared of pirates (the Somalian kind), scared of pirates (the MPAA kind), scared of the RIAA and MPAA, scared of swine flu, scared of unemployment, scared of having a job that doesn't pay a living wage, scared of peanuts, scared of global warming, scared of pollution, scared of home invasions, scared of floods, earthquakes and fires, scared of nuts with guns, scared of the government taking away everyone's guns.

Fear makes you irrational. It suppresses the "carefully think about the situation" part of your brain, and supercharges the "fight or flight" part. If people stopped to think rationally about it, they would realize it is fiction. But the fear prevents them from thinking rationally.

We live in a constant state of fear, and our culture (or our media, depending on how you look at it) keeps giving us more reasons to be afraid.

What we need is more reason to be hopeful, not fearful. If we remove the irrational fears about health care, presidents, terrorists, MPAA, pirates, global warming, etc., then we would also have fewer irrational fears about the planet Nimbus crashing into Earth on December 21st, 2012.

I agree. I haven't tried all the others, but I use and am happy with PasswordSafe. It's native Windows only, but there is a Java version by someone else which works just fine on Linux x86 (and x64 with some hacking). I don't think the Java one works on other Linux platforms, since it uses JNI and requires some native libraries.

And that's exactly what the problem is. Call the media companies, the same ones that have a huge financial incentive to back a "copyright" law which gives the media companies unprecedented powers to take and keep our money. The media organizations are the ones that have been lobbying for this kind of power. Why would they shoot themselves in the foot by telling the public about it?

People keep saying "We'll just tell the general public, and the general public will revolt!" That's silly. The general public is very strongly influenced by media, advertising, propaganda. The people who are the best at producing this propaganda as well as the communicaiton channels are under the control of those who have a financial stake in getting more and more control.

Asking "the media" in general to work against stricter copyright controls is like asking Fox News to work against the Republican party. It ain't gonna happen.

Godwin's law has just trumped Asimov's laws.

<quote><p>"Yes, if your primary concern is 'how do I share my mobile internet connection with others,'"</p><p>Well, if that's not your primary concern, why bother with a Wifi router? </p></quote>

Because the ExpressCard or USB dongle is Windows only, and you use a Mac or Linux machine.
Or there are x86 Linux drivers, and your Linux laptop is ARM based.
Or your laptop is Windows 64-bit, and the only drivers available are 32-bit.
Or your company's laptop is configured to not let you install device drivers.
Or you only get good cell reception near the window, but the comfortable chair is close to the fireplace.
Or the only way to get cell reception at your cabin in the woods is to attach your MiFi router to a balloon and suspend it 300' in the air.
Or the router may include a firewall, which makes it a little harder for the evil ones to own your machine.

The word for that is "sacntions", not "terrorism". And I think that, in general, history does not agree with Isaac Asimov. See Cuba for example.

However, you do raise a good point about "things that affect them directly". I think terrorism, to be effective, requires people to think that it could have affected them. So a random car bomb that kills 10 people is terrifying, because people think they could have been one of those people. On the other hand, thousands of people dying each year because they drink and drive is not frightening, because everyone thinks "I don't do that, so I'm safe".

So terrorism is all about large things that affect other people who are just like you, and make you think it could have affected you just as easily.

Windows is generally not happy about allowing applications to write to the boot sector, partly to avoid viruses, and partly because it just isn't designed to support that information changing while it is running. Basically, Windows will happily swap out info which it thinks will never change, and re-read it when needed. If you've changed it by installing a boot loader, it gets very confused (blue-screen).

It may be possible to do this through the "do cool stuff during boot up" API (which is used for scandisk and some defrag tools), but it wouldn't be very easy.

Even if you don't have a CD burner and blank CD, you can boot from a USB drive as well. I usually download the 50 MB Debian "netinst" image onto a USB flash drive, boot it, and then run the net install.

I disagree. None of those situations you describe are terrifying. They are annoying. Disrupting the banking system means people don't get access to their assets for days or even weeks until it's straightened out. But it is eventually straightened out, and rational people know that. They also know that losing their money is not the same as literally losing an arm and a leg (as happens when you stand too close to an exploding bomb).

Even things like shutting down power or communications can cause deaths, but they are secondary deaths (e.g. people freeze to death because of no power, or preventable deaths happen because first responders didn't get there in time), and that just doesn't have the same emotional impact.

Causing crashes of mass transit is the only situation you described which I think qualify as terrorism, since it involves blood, gore, flames and people who are obviously and undeniably dead because of this action.

The thing we forget is that terrorism is NOT about killing the maximum number of people. It is about terrifying people so much that they lose all hope and stop wanting to fight back. Annoying people (even if it does cause some deaths) makes people want to fight more, and thus goes against the purpose.

"Terrorism" requires terror, not inconvenience or annoyance.

A few years back, we had an accidental shutdown of the power supply of most of the eastern North America. It was very inconvenient, and it cost a huge amount of money, and it even resulted in the loss of some lives. But it wasn't terrifying. It was just annoying.

It's not about the amount of damage, it's about the effect. A cyberterror event like a power or communications failure could result in hundreds of deaths, but there's nothing to focus on. A car exploding next to a bistro may only kill two or three people, but it is far more effective terrorism.

For terrorism to be effective, it has to produce terror. That's an emotional reaction, not an intellectual one. And to get that emotional reaction, there has to be real tangible threats, like flames, blood and gore, falling rocks, etc.

We tried positive visualization, prayer beads, and yelling really loud at the routers. Nothing worked. I guess we'll have to implement traffic shaping now.