Why stop at ice cream? There's a lot of activities that have some kind of risk associated with them, it wouldn't be fair to single some out. Riding your bike? 5 bucks to your accident insurance because you could have an accident. Climbing a ladder to change a light bulb? 2 bucks because you could fall down. Fucking ... depends, is it your wife or someone random? The latter is of course more expensive due to STDs.

But I really do NOT want to know where the detector for that would have to be located...

Often you can't even defend against it in your private environment. Want power? Gotta accept having a smart meter. Of course you can opt out to live like it's 1799, it's all opt-in, you see?

Don't want to be totally controlled while driving? No problem, you may of course walk. Public transport, you say? Sure, you just have to accept pretty much the same deal as you'd have to in your car.

Even opt-in isn't always really opt-in.

Certainly not at a big studio. All big studios crank out today is the n-th iteration of their franchise. Either by applying new textures to the same old crap and changing the year in the title to the current one or by simply increasing the version number. All the while touting some minor flavor changes like it was the reinvention of the game industry, or at least the redefinition of the genre.

Be honest, do you really want to play that? I mean, sales numbers tend to indicate it... though my inner cynic would say that people just buy the next iteration of the game 'cause the multiplayer servers for their favorite game goes offline and they don't want to learn the controls to a new game.

If you want to be part of an exciting game, most of all one that does not simply rehash what has been done a billion times before, your only bet is to do it on your own.

Mostly because what's considered "the left" in the US is considered "the moderate right" in most of the rest of the world.

Oh for fuck's sake, what does liberal have to do with communism? Are you trying to convince anyone that Stalin was a liberal?

From your point of view, that's quite possible. After all, for the Commies, everyone in the West was a fascist imperialist.

You must be an American if you equate liberal with socialist. In Europe, they tend to be the very opposite of each other.

Everything cool is either illegal, immoral or fattening.

Sorry, but nope. Even that had to be taken into account when accounting for the safety zone.

These fireworks are shot up from mortars. Essentially a tube with a ball (the "payload") and a propelling charge underneath. The safety zone must account for misfires of all kinds, including propelling charges that are too weak to hurl the payload far enough. Which is, essentially, what would happen when it hits something on its way.

If that now happened, i.e. if the "ball" hit the quad, what would have happened is that it either cracked due to the impact (NOT exploded, these things don't have contact fuses...), the quad tumbling down out of control and hitting the ground eventually with the fireworks ball falling apart and not becoming a nice star. Or, if it happened JUST at the moment of detonation of the charge, part of the explosives would have hit the quad (there is no "shell" to speak of, so it's kinda unlikely that something solid would hit the quad) and probably made it crash.

Under no circumstances I could possibly imagine this could have led to fireworks "spuzzing around under the the seats of the audience".

Since this was a professional fireworks display, it is safe to assume that the person or organization orchestrating it had to take into consideration that what goes up must come down, i.e. the area where the stuff that goes boom up there lands eventually is "safe". Also because the odd black shell may come down, and the quad isn't that much heavier. Essentially, if it goes down it's basically a black shell without the possibility to detonate.

If it could hit someone in that process, the fireworks display may have been much but not very professional!

Sure, you always needed a hint of luck and a bit of "right place, right time". That's how the game ran. But that just isn't true anymore. It's no longer "be at the right place at the right time, have some luck and work hard". It's "know the right people, have some luck, no work required. If there is some required, find some idiot you can swindle out of his share".

To own a gun you need no law, you need a GUN.

They're a clever bunch. If they do, they first bullshit a judge into giving them a free pass.

The point isn't that making money with GPL code would be "bad". But if you harassed, say, Facebook, do you think they'd not have the right to simply kick you out and not let you use their service? If you pissed off MS, would it be not in their right to simply tell you to go to hell and disallow you to use their software?

Why should it be different with code under the GPL? Because there's no huge corporation behind it?

If you issue a DMCA takedown notice against a product licensed under GPL, you no longer may use any products under the GPL. You have shown that you value milking software for money over its free distribution, and hence you obviously have no need for software that can be distributed openly.