At least they didn't die of pertussis. Unless that's your goal -- eliminate autism by letting more children die? Do you hate autistic children only, or all children?

I am 100% certain the vaccines are safer than the diseases they prevent. That's all that is required of them.

I don't know. Maybe because vaccines aren't medicines? Is your assertion even true? Who knows.. Go ask a scientist. It's strange that you seem to think your ignorance is a valid argument against science. What was that meme?... "Fucking magnets, how do they work?"

No. Do you really think their goal is to spread autism?

What you've said is true but not for the snarky reasons you think it is. As a development manager it is my job to make sure the developers can create the best software possible. If that means I need to guide them toward an incremental approach because of time constraints or I need to help them find the best solution for a bad situation so be it. If I fail to do this and they implement something they are not proud of then it is my fault, not theirs.

Also, there really are two groups: programmers that are great and programmers that suck. The great programmers group only has one member: you, right now. The group that sucks is everyone else and you from every point in the past. Thinking in this way will help a developer admit mistakes and will also encourage thinking in terms of "what would my future self think of this."

No snark necessary.

I'm doing this right now. I left a high paying job because I was more than a little tired of it and I'd knew I'd never be able to stop spending my spare time on "putting in the extra effort" instead of job seeking. At this point, I'm just looking for something interesting in an new location -- pretty open ended job search criteria. Unfortunately, I'm currently getting more recruiter calls than actual interested party call backs but I'm confident my choice to force myself to move on will pay dividends in the long run.

Should not be tolerated or not be given consideration as though it were an informed position?

I ask because one of those statements can and will eventually be enforced with guns. The other is simply the responsibility of the other participants of the discussion and no one else.

I think the GP is close, but in some cases may slightly off. E.g., the speech is often that of the user of the software, not the author of the software. Imagine a word processor with a working grammar auto-correct feature. The auto-corrected text is not the text entered by the user but surely it's not the speech of the person who wrote the word processor. His speech is the software itself. Instead, the resulting document seems clearly to be the speech of the user.

To sue for libel the content must have been published somewhere and therefore there must be a publisher involved, even if it's just Joe from Joe's Blog fame. If I write a cron job to execute "fortune > index.html" every hour I am still the publisher of that content and am taking on risk of bad ju-ju occurring if the author of fortune slipped in something that could be considered libelous.

Of course this seems to break down for the purposes of the actual article. Using the above Google would be the publisher and the author would be the person actually providing the search query and interacting with the system. That seems a bit off to me. I suppose the trickiness of it all is why there's a debate in the first place.

Is the difficulty in neatly placing generated content into a predefined constitutional cubby hole a sufficient reason to encroach on the right of free speech? It should not be a matter of asking why generated content should be protected, rather, there needs to be a compelling reason why it should not be. Because once that right is gone we're not getting it back.

Or, maybe prenatal and early childhood care is improving? A modern child's environment has less contamination from heavy metals? We no longer feed babies whiskey when they're teething?

Nah, those can't have any impact. Must be the tests that are wrong. You are right, though, that biological evolution is unlikely to be a significant factor, and the tests may in fact be crap, but there are plausible explanations that allow for the tests to stand as valid.

Thanks. I appreciate your grammar enforcement efforts. Keep up the good work.

I think Samsung probably has enough other sources of income to weather any ill effects. But, really, I am curious why you think it's a bad policy to consider more than profit motive when making business decisions? If I can't trust my partner not to sue me why should I trust that they are entering contracts on good faith? I see a lot of this sort of "business is sterile" thinking on the internet and I'm not sure that it's right. Maybe it is, but it seems wrong to me.

Two other similar concepts to yours:

1. "They have no choice! They have to grind up babies for extra profits otherwise their share holders will sue them." If that's really a concern you put "without grinding up babies" in your mission statement -- or, something about "ethics and social responsibility". The mission statement is on page 1 of the annual report so no one can claim it's not there. Granted, not all mission statements mention ethics but many do, and even more declare customer satisfaction as a goal, or something lofty like the betterment of the human condition.

2. "Corporations are comprised of many people and therefore can't have an 'MO'." Umm yeah, there are only two ways that I've seen someone leave a partnership with Microsoft unscathed: they never entered into a partnership Microsoft or they were the largest technology corporation on the planet -- wait, no, even IBM got screwed. Just because they've destroyed all previous partnering firms that doesn't mean that they'll do it again, right?

You can't call a person not being given something that doesn't belong to them "stealing". Even the quotes you added to suggest you were already dubious of the use of the term. I may as well tell people that Gore "stole" the election from Nader. If Gore hadn't been running, Nader would have gotten all of the non-Bush votes!

Nothing will ever change if people continue to think in terms of the lesser of two evils since evil always "has a real disincentive to promote a third party."

Question:

Answer:

If we're not talking about Angry Birds then you'll be investing energy in order to learn and use any product regardless of the level of shiny. The greater the chance that the product vendor will disappear in a puff of smoke or EOL the product you are using, the larger the risk to your investment and the more attractive alternatives become.

I went out of my way to find a local independent* DSL ISP. DSL gets a bad rap because you need to be close to the pop for decent link speeds and sure, it doesn't come with "speedboost", but I'll take the constant 12Mbps I get over a capped link that only seems to hit advertised rates when using SpeedTest.net (and seems to slow down when my neighbors all pile on) any day.

* of course, it's only as independent as the next guy in the telco chain -- which happens to be AT&T. :(

You need to consider each patent separately. The UI with four icons has nothing to do with the patent on the physical design. Nor does the four icon layout have anything to do with the slide to unlock patent.

I have no opinion on the design patent question beyond it just seems silly to my non-designer mind. As an actual software developer I do take issue with the software patents and as a member of the human race I take issue with the concept of "owning" ideas in general.

But what really gets me is the litigation apologists who selectively treat these patents as either severable or not depending on the direction the wind is blowing in order to rationalize the desertification the intellectual commons.

Huh? Only one bit was actually numbers (actually somewhat interesting numbers, if true). The rest was opinion -- some of it conflicting. E.g., so does the writer think the speech was a rehash being overly praised, or a strong performance? I can't tell, both are stated.

Anywho, it doesn't matter as it has nothing to do with SuSE. It should be down-moded, as should yours as well as mine. If you want to be a dipshit political nonsense troll, go over to WaPo forums or the DailyKos. You'll have more fun over there and /. readers will enjoy their afternoons free of numbskulls that don't even know their target audience (victims) well enough to know that there needs to be an Apple, Google or MS tie-in.

E.g., Have you noticed how RNC podium was rectangular with rounded corners but the DNC podium was not. Makes you think... I know for sure I won't be voting for the anti-IP "Google" party.

You are clearly not a big picture person. What this means is that a multi-million dollar company is saving time by using open source. Time saved is money saved, and, using political algebra, every dollar saved is 30 jobs. What did Intel lose? Nothing. Meanwhile, the economy as a whole gains GDP and everyone wins.

But, absolutely, you're right, and the other guy is wrong: this is all useless because you don't like Valve's game line-up.

The company I work for has the best of both worlds. They go out and buy a $500,000 piece of Enterprise Software*, forgo the expensive contractors and dump the setup and configuration on 2 or 3 in-house developers, a project manager (who is usually an outside contractor who happens to be friends with an executive -- a budget locust, if you will) and an IT manager. After about a year the esteemed project manager moves on to the next project, the manager in charge gets promoted, the software is blamed for the lack of results and a new $500,000 purchase is made.

*For those that haven't used the stuff, Enterprise Software doesn't actually work out of the box. It's much like a do-it-yourself plane kit with lots of manuals on FAA regulations, a glossy guide full of pictures of planes "other customers" have built and a box full of parts (with a few random parts missing) but no actual assembly instructions.