Nobody is going to say "No" to Apple in California.

The Slashdot title might be wrong, but the original author is perfectly clear that it is a model of a model train. That's two meta-levels, and can be as removed from the original as it needs. obj = model(model(train)).

But if you take this as "a victory for LGBT" and not let this be for his memory alone, then you have robbed and victimized him yet again.

True, but this is for Alan Turing personally. This statement should not be diluted to be more generally applicable. Let this one be for him alone, since he was the victim in this particular instance. Rather, if another public statement is required, then work toward that.

I would suspect that unforeseen developments, such as big advances in 3d circuit design, would alter this schedule a lot. This is simply daydreaming.

Common sense is your searchable database of experience. It is basically meta-knowledge about what you have learned in the past. Like when your reasoning is: "Should I try to run this red light? I don't see any policeman," and your meta-knowledge is "Last time I used that reasoning, I received a citation." Thus the true but unfair observation that children lack common sense.

> Impressed and alarmed by advances in artificial intelligence

Just who are these people? If you read articles by Minsky or Kurzweil, you would think that AI progress has stalled completely. General AI seems to have stagnated in the 80's. Ask an industry marketer, he will use the same buzzwords that have been brandished since the early 90's. Self-initiation of reasoning and logic are still very far away.

Admit it! A summer week at Asilomar Beach is more than enough reason to proclaim some headline-grabbing topic.

It has exactly what you need, an html-like format, but tagged by meaning, not presentation. The project has tools to convert it to printable formats.

The spec: http://www.docbook.org/

The tools: http://docbook.sourceforge.net/

I don't think that companies actually have problems with the concept of contributing to open source. Many of them do. Big example: Eclipse, with a LOT of corporate support.

I think the reason is that they are trying to keep their legal burden to a minimum. Requiring legal assistance to determine what is proprietary and what is open, assurance of provenance (did not borrow/steal from O/S), etc, is just too much for some companies and their teams to worry about. A considerable amount of documentation would need to be maintained to delineate the border between contributing and not contributing. A rule of "don't contribute" is the simple, clean and easy way to avoid it. Possibly if there were some commonly agreed-upon public and open mechanism to assist in this, there would be much more O/S contribution, especially from smaller firms.

When Win9x support was dropped, it was in order to end the dependency on legacy code and to enable new features. And I am sure that a complete Mozilla build on Win9x was pure hell.

This discussion does not mention software issues at all, but merely the level of effort for official (paid?) support. So I would not be surprised if Firefox continued working on Win2k for a while. Will their compiler -really- check OS level?

Actually, I think that announcing it on the show is an attempt at a graceful way to say "no."

If you read the article, you will see that it is likely that the vote will be 8-7 against this proposal.

Inner Fence's attempt to deflect criticism by redirecting complaints to http://groups.google.com/group/gmail-labs-help-text-messaging/topics is so unfair to the honest service users who were already there. People who really need, or offer information or help are being buried in an avalanche of whiny tripe.

So Inner Fence has punished another group of people, this time innocent.

I don't mean ignore users, nor put out bad code.

Actually, it looks like the people working on the session code are doing an excellent job, and doing the best they can to create a quality package. It just appears that, unfortunately, either Ubuntu or Gnome made a release cut in the midst of the session package's gradual migration from one IPC mechanism to another. The session code itself is not an issue, as far as I can tell. So, where was the problem generated, and who gets blamed? I see 3 points of contact, with 2 or 3 different organizations. Even with everyone doing the right thing, mistakes can happen.

My only issue with the posting is the idea that the user-developer relationship is a one-way thing, with users driving the development, and receiving free labor in return. That is not how it is (or should) work.

Open source is a collaboration between users and developers with mutual respect among all. They share ideas, goals, designs, etc, for the benefit of everyone. Developers -need- user feedback, SME info, the "second pair of eyes," etc. This frees the developer from the narrow focus on the work they are doing. Otherwise the package is a hothouse flower which is useful to nobody.

And it is a fair relationship, because a developer of one package is a user of all others.

What is the incentive for unpaid developers to abandon their private lives to go into crunch mode developing something for some(thankless)one else? A thousand "me too" on a bug tracker or a million "+1"s have yet to purchase a cup of coffee. "Market share" and "exposure" have little value to encourage altruism in project members. But endless bitching has enormous power to discourage it.

A smart member of this project would neither post to nor reply to that bugtracker thread.

But that's only because this discussion is missing the point. The value of user-developer communication is for the fostering of ideas efforts for everyone's benefit. It is -not- a mob government to drive the project's direction, nor is it a help desk.