Thanks for this - that means that my information at the very least was out of date.

I've read somewhere that seemed reliable that Amazon is not using AWS for most of their internal services. Unfortunately, a quick search did not find me the reference for that again. I also assume that this gets less true over time, as some of their services would certainly fit.

When you're in a firefight? So this is something that happen to you regularly? Remind me never to be around you, if chance ever comes up.

So you need to split your charges into "Smartphone support tax" and "Data plan", and not bundle them.

There's a fair amount of evidence around false accusations of rape; rates are estimated from 1.5% to 90%, with the academic consensus supposedly being at 2% to 8%; it's an odd consensus, since almost all researchers seems to come with a higher number, even the ones that only include rapes that have been thoroughly investigated and concluded that nothing happened.

Since you don't mention this at all, it seems that the absence of evidence is the absence of you looking for evidence at all, and this evidence being less pushed in your face than the evidence of rape happening. The unfortunate situation is that while most rapes are not reported to the police, many of the alleged rapes that are reported to the police never happened - in fact, from the way I superficially read the articles I've looked at, it may be that the situation many places is that while most rapes are not reported to the police, most rapes that are reported to the police never happened. This, of course, means that the police has to be diligent in investigating whether an allegation is true or not - and again, that makes it harder for real victims to report :-(

To me, that's not particularly interesting - the applications that I want to run work worse on Windows, and there's a bunch of stuff I could in theory buy that probably work nicely, but only if I'm messing around in a GUI. But which is more comfortable has a fair bit to do with what you're most experienced with.

I've not tried MSYS; but cygwin was clearly annoying, and when I last ran Windows for a while (about six to three years ago), I found I still preferred to have a Mac or Unix system at the end.

I suspect PowerShell too might be nice; there's some clean design work done in it. However, the problem (from my point of view) is in the apps - they're not designed to work nicely as building blocks, and when you run five-ten (not to mention five or ten thousand) machines, it gets to be a pain. And there is one special pain point: There is no source code. Anything fails, you have to experiment based on the docs, or, I assume, step into asm. I love being able to mod source code for the things I run, and then run it again with more logging or other changes.

Is there more money in selling home PCs to the edge case of "people that write their own software" or to the majority who do not?

I have no delusion that selling home PCs to the Unix market is a sane business model. I'm just communicating what I perceive as problems with working on Windows, and why I am attracted to Unix. It don't even have to be an accurate model of how things work - for once, it should be an adequate answer that that's how I perceive things :-)

Eivind.

Sure. But software developers care if you're tolerant; and this may be an important point among gay potential employees, and for most straight potential employees supporting same-sex marriage is a minor but positive point. I work for a different top-tier software organization; there's lots of pro-gay-marriage stickers around the office, mostly put up by people I know to be straight. Software developers are rationalists; so there's fewer fundamentalist religious than among the average population, and thus more support of gay marriage.

From my perspective: The Windows environment is not set up for easy tools writing; the command line environment there sucks.

The good command line environment on Unix leads to it being easy to write lots of small tools, and everything extending from small and simple through complex. It's made for programmers writing software for programmers. Windows is made for programmers writing software for customers; significant difference.

This way to thinking is shared by a lot of people that write their own software, leading to the Unix environment at least attracting those of us that think that way.

You show clearly why it shouldn't be called theft - it leads to confusion in people like yourself.

Copying is not taking. If somebody looks carefully at your hours and builds an identical house to the one you had, you are not deprived of your house.

When my jobless friend copied 17,000 books last year, authors and publishers were not deprived of their books. Neither were they deprived of the income from selling 17,000 copies of books - he could never afford it. They may ultimately be deprived of some purchases of their books (he can afford to do some purchases); but this is through competition. If he use the collection as his only source of reading material, he's unlikely to run out for a long time - so both authors in the collection and out of the collection will be hit. The same as if he used the public library as his only source of reading material. And it is possible he'll get into series or authors and buy more of them from having copied; and possibly even buy more overall. I know that I bought much more music when I started using Napster than I did before, and bought much less music after Napster closed and I stopped having a ton of music at my fingertips.

The situation is complicated, and there is no "taking" - there is only copying, and its positive and negative effects. Collapsing that to "taking" and "theft" is unlikely to lead to a good resolution for anybody.

Using "stealing" or "theft" to refer to copyright infringement brings over associations from physical theft. This leads to a less clear way of thinking, and my general impression is that *everybody* that misuse the words that way are fuzzy on the actual effects of copyright infringement.

Can you please list a few cases where copyright infringement is of benefit to the copyright holder, to jog in place and clean up your mind?

For your help, I'll start with listing the case where it is directly deterimental: When the infringer does not buy a copy of the original work, but would have bought a copy if (s)he did not have the infringing copy.

RMS would agree with most of what you say. The musician Alice can take $2 for giving a copy to Bob - the question is if the musician ethically can ask society use violence[1] to enforce that Bob cannot give a copy to Carol.

RMS would, as far as I've understood him, say that it is never appropriate for society to use violence for this.

You seem to say that it is more or less generally appropriate.

I consider it to be appropriate if Alice is engaged in large scale copying for profit, but consider the collateral damage from using violence in cases of private copying to be too high. In economic-speak, the transaction cost for getting justice through the justice system is so high that having this be an offense leads to people that are accused paying a "settlement" even if they're innocent. I would also have to - the standard settlement is less costly than the risk of having the system fail.

I also consider private copying to be unlikely to be possible to regulate. It is fairly simple to do piracy securely; and over time, it will only get easier. In ten to thirty years, every teenager will have a digital copy of every song, book and movie ever made - if necessary, they'll just copy hard drive to hard drive (or SSD to SSD) when they meet up.

And the problem in regulating this is that it don't fit with people's feeling of justice. There is no harm in making a copy of something. The harm is in not buying something - but we don't try to regulate away "not buying", we try to punish copying.

Eivind.

[1] Including monetary confiscation, which is based in violence or the threat of violence; without the government's monopoly on the use of violence, this could not be done through the courts.

So? It's giving you the advice you ought to hear, rather than what you asked for. I thought I'd made you expect that...

I think the filing is very well argued and makes a good case (that's a non-lawyer opinion.)

However, there is one minor point where it seems to miss the point: In talking about being in the same swarm at the same time not (always) leading to communication, it assumes the swarm is large. If the swarm is very small, being in it at the same time can force communication - the trivial example being if the only members of the swarm are the investigators and the downloader. In this case, there would seem to be a separate defense, albeit a weird one: The downloader only downloaded from the investigator (and only uploaded to the investigator), and has to be authorized to access and distribute the content in order to do the investigation, so the downloader cannot be in violation.

I would not immediately assume that moving it somewhere else will increase uptime; it puts uptime requirements on the Internet link(s) instead of on the server or software setup. Unless the present setup is quite unreliable or he has a surprisingly good link, I think that would likely be a worse problem.

Now, the idea that you can't afford multiple server nodes: Servers can be very, very cheap. For my home server I use an Acer Revo 3600 I paid 200 euro for; the closest available today seems to be http://www.amazon.com/Acer-VN281-2G-320-Linex/dp/B005WUXW1C (at about $220 including shipping.) Assuming you don't have a license cost problem, this allows you to create a cluster for a very low cost.

Apart from that, I'd analyse what your costs are for a failure, and what the odds of a failure are, and whether your tinkering increase or decrease the odds. I'd assume the odds were fairly small to start with; in that case, it may not make any sense to tinker with the setup to create something that is supposed to be more available. I've easily had several years of uptime on single systems; introducing complexity makes that harder, and if you lack the experience with how to deal with these systems, that's likely to increase the risk. (What happens if somebody start your failover by mistake? What happens if both instances are running? etc)

For your particular use case, it sounds like I'd rather have a good alternative system for handling it if your system fails (pen and paper sounds good), and try to beef up the single machine - place it somewhere it won't have dust, vibration and heat problems, use multiple network cards to avoid risk of cable failure, use reliable disks & RAID, have a good UPS with monitoring, etc.

Minor correction: Six months, not two years (though two years some places). And not in Germany (yet). But yeah, it sucks - I don't trust the logs not to be abused.