Well said. Over the years I went out with women from different cultures/professions/etc and I was exposed to many influences I wouldn't have otherwise experienced. My recommendation is to test your boundaries and expand your horizons. My wife is a singer/film producer who was born on the opposite side of the world to me.

Regimes like that don't get a little thing like evidence get in the way of them keeping control. Anyone caught with a handset which can be traced to subversive messages in deep doodoo. Their relatives and friends probably are too.

The problem is that the definition of pandemic used by WHO is different to the one that you and I might use in common speech. By the WHO definition they are correct in calling this a pandemic. The WHO definition itself needs to change.

I believe an end user won't see much of a difference between an app uploaded by the original developer or one patched by another developer or a sysadmin. Most end users don't know what source code is, let alone that it might be modified before they receive the app. Ask a non-IT relative if they know what source code is. Be prepared to explain it.

"Unless they promised that the service would go on forever, there has been no breach of contract." Maybe, maybe not. Legislation often imposes requirements on contractual agreements. Allowing someone to sign up and then canning the service a couple of months later may well breach consumer legislation. Laws like this vary a lot by jurisdiction. IANAL.

This is just a repository. Granted doing it for MS-Windows will make it attractive to a wider audience.

Another similar point is the argument that if they can make a narrow band EM transmission then they must understand the concept of physics. While this may be the common ground needed to communicate I can still envision a situation in which their physics and mathematics are based on entirely different concepts to ours but still lead to the same conclusions. Would we be able to bridge the gap? Who knows.

We have no idea how extraterrestrials might see the Universe. It is conceivable that we will not be able to communicate with them in any meaningful way. Even if we can actually decoding their language(s) may take decades or centuries. They may find our languages just as perplexing.

I've been a member of the open source community for 15 years (back before we call it open source of course). My position is that they are required to comply with the licencing, nothing more nothing less. Yes it would be nice if they did more but I don't think it is appropriate for us to complain that they didn't do more than we asked of them.

Therein lies the problem of proprietary solutions.

"...and if we don't figure out some way to prevent online chaos, the quantity, quality and availability of the kinds of entertainment, literature, art and scholarship we need to have a healthy, vibrant culture will suffer.'"

Well naturally. There was no such thing as vibrant culture before western capitalism appeared, right?