I don't know about you, but if I was in that position, I would pull an Elon Musk. Sure Notch is millionaire, but 10 mil (or whatever) is not 2 Bln. I would not sell out unless they offer me sufficient cash so I could try out some of my "non virtual" project ideas. (e.g. moon base/mining/research) Notch is sort of close to that position right now, what he makes of it is an open question.

If you want a more nuanced vision and a fun one you can read http://wattsupwiththat.com/. It sits square in the middle of "we are all going to die" and "what global warming?" and looks critically at both sides. Real charts to debunk political campaigns and often fun to read.

On the subject at hand: Monday mirthiness – 97 hours, 97 opinions, 97% consensus, 100% cartooned climate science

After reading some more about it, the case actually is cut and clear. There are not really thee bits of software, but only two. There is bukkit that is distributed under GPL and there is CraftBukkit that is distributed under GPL. So far everything is simple and clean, the GPL is not violated. There is one minor problem, CraftBukkit contains the decompiled source code of the Minrecraft server. Since CraftBukkit is released under the GPL, that part of code is released under the GPL too;as asserted by the CraftBukkit developers. (Any claim otherwise disregards the GPL.) The only valid infringement of copyright / licensing terms are against the developers who decompiled the mincreaft server and added it to CraftBukkit, in favor of Mojang. The put's Wesley's assertion the GPL was violated as completely erroneous. Mojang's copyright was violated, but they seem to be ok with it.

You can change the license of a work when you get all copyright holder to agree, that includes GPL'ed code. If you get all but Wolfe's agreement, all you need to do is (cvs|svn|git) blame and remove each line that is attributed to Wolfe. After that you can make is "all rights reserved" if the copyright holders agree.

I think I get the distinction he is trying to formulate. Red Hat focuses their products around their GNU/Linux distribution, that is without GNU/Linux they would not have a product. Rackspace on the other hand have a product that would exists even without OpenStack. Their primary gains in reduction of development costs, since other individuals and companies are contributing to the effort.

Basically these are the two vectors commercial companies have with free software. Either they provide ancillary services to existing software, that is they are basically consultants; or they copyleft some piece of software that is not their in business model and as a result reduce costs.

The funny thing with this is that, since the half life of most posts is something around one or two hours, the system will remove any offending post before the DMCA can be processed. I expect that 99% of all DMCA requests can be forwarded to /dev/null. So yea...

s/4chan/ebaumsworld/

But that is really Elon Musk's genius, he has the cash to spare and the vision to pull it through. This something that bugged the hell out of me, why do the Donald Trumps of this world not establish lunar or asteroid mining missions. They have the cash and the return will be huge, the only downside is the return will trickle down at best in a decade.

In addition the real marvel of SpaceX is not their technology; it is not really advanced, but their operational costs. Boing and Lockheed Martin are just milking government contracts; they don't really care about innovation. SpaceX is beating them hands down, because they wand and need to be on the leading edge and in the end this may be their ticket to market domination. Maybe Boing and Lockheed Martin will step up their game, but it will definitely not be easy shifting gears.

What?! There are "flying cars", it is a solved problem. The normal term is Helicopter, but if you wish can call it a Flying Car. Just because you can't afford one or the maintenance of one, does not mean it doesn't exist. The myth actually is that everybody will be able to afford a "flying car", which misses the point of how much energy is required to maintain flight.

DAFUQ did I just read?! The "Arbeit macht frei" was a sick joke that was put over the Auschwitz internment camp main entrance. The Calvinists/Huguenot is nowhere near that term. To refresh your memory the "protestant work ethic" is has it's roots in Calvinist Protestantism and that has it's roots in France. It later also had a strong movement in the Netherlands. Germany was marked by Lutheran Protestantism with had no work ethic attached to it at all. Trowing these two terms together is just a sick perversion of history!

Actually the "Internet of Things" is a term coined in the 90s, by engineers. You know in the 90s the Internet was Kool! What begs the question, why is such an old term suddenly a buzzword.

All the murder suspects say that. Now, where did you hide the bodies?

Actually what you see here is very well understood. You are seeing an inelastic market; that is if a drug or procedure will save you life, it does not matter of it costs $5 or $5000, you will find the money to pay for it. The reason why socialized healthcare drives costs down is because the government / the insurance company will bargain on your behalf. Since they are not the one who is going to die, they can not be extorted and can pit different drug makers against each other. Health care is one of the few areas where "the free market" does not work as naively expected.

I know where this joke is going. Then again the car costs a "mere" 100000 EUR, something that a high education / good credit rating person can do in Germany. In addition there are many who buy the car new and resell it after a year, is apparently cheaper than leasing. With some tax trickery even quite feasible. If you "need" the car for representational purposes, like you are a sales person, it is quite plausible that a "soda drinking" person may drive a S-Class.

Add to the fact that the guy was not tailgating by German law. If I recall correctly tailgating starts at a 0.7s separation. The guy was following at something like 1s - 1.5s separation. This separation distance is normal in Germany. I learned 2s separation Texas and my friends in Germany think I am crazy by leaving such a large separation... Then again German drivers are way more disciplined than Texan drivers...

This was obviously filmed in Germany, as the radio (Bayern 3) tells us. He is driving in the right lane, behind a truck, which puts him around 110 km/h (~70 mph). (This is rather odd for a Mercedes driver, but OK...) The 1s - 1.5s distance, although more on the low end, is rather normal in Germany, everything higher will be treated as a merging slot.

In the US traffic tends be something +/-10% of the speed limit. Which results to people not giving a fuck about only passing on the left hand side, at least in Texas. As a result, in dense traffic the left hand lanes will only move marginally faster than right lane.

On the other hand Germany the speed difference can be anywhere withing 200 km/h (125mph) and 90km/h (55 mph). In optimal conditions traffic is evenly sorted along the three lanes. Since the driver going 160 km/h (being a nice person), will let the driver doing 180 km/h pass, he will merge to the middle lane and back to the left lane. The result is that you see way more lane changes on an Autobahn than a highway. So unless you have really dense traffic the flow of traffic is very irregular or you are tailgating someone, there will probably always be sufficient space to merge in front of you; if you keep 2s or more separation.