Most of our data are totally uninteresting pieces of garbage. Think of it, a future species recovers an archive of present tweets and facebook comments.

Said by someone who obviously has never done much looking at history. The fact that "uninteresting pieces of garbage", that either everyone knew and assumed or thought didn't need to be said, were *not* written down, makes it a lot harder to understand the context in which the things we *do* have were said. Having a handful of people's full FB / twitter records will be a treasure trove of information for 50th-century historians trying to figure out what life was actually like in the 20th century.

Let us never confuse creating value with capturing value; somehow we have to get them better aligned.

Do we? Because you know, I was under the impression that not everybody measured value and success by the fatness of one's wallet.

This isn't about Linus. I'm sure that Linus is at least as happy, if not far happier, than Ballmer, Elop, or Fiorina. It's about us as society. Money is power, after all -- it's people with money that decide what buildings are built, what movies get made, what devices are produced, and so on. Giving that power to Ballmer and Elop, who are good at "capturing value" while destroying it, is bad for society.

Where are they "badmouthing" Linux? All they said was that Linux is over-kill for running a single application within a VM. Linux and OSv are different tools for different purposes.

Especially since Linux was the first hypervisor they ported to, and has the best support at the moment.

Additionally unfounded. Given that BSD sources can be downloaded, modified, and their changes never see the light of day the loss of information is virtually guaranteed. Not to say it doesn't happen with the GPL, but it's actually a legal risk to allow it to happen.

In practice, the vast majority of the time GPL and BSD are functionally equivalent. The reason is this: if a company takes a GPL project, makes changes, but doesn't do the work to upsteam them, and then just publishes their changes as patches on their own website, there is a very low probability that those patches will ever make it either upstream, or into a competitor's product. Publishing the patches on your website is not considered "contributing to the community"; actually doing the work of upstreaming is. A company that doesn't upstream anything but only publishes patches on their website is considered a "taker" by the community. The major things driving contributions to upstream are the pain of having to rebase local modifications in order to pull new code from upstream, and the benefits of being seen to "give back" to the community. These both would work the same for a BSD project.

However, just like any time you're working with other people, "what happens in the worst case" is important, and has a material impact on how you relate when there are disadgreements. If the situation becomes tense with your wife, you'll act differently if you know that in the event of a divorce she'll get half of your considerable property than if you know she can't touch a dime. Similarly, the fact that I could take those published patches and upstream them myself is important to me. And although companies like BSD when they're the only one contributing to a project, it seems to me that GPL provides a much better "worst case scenario" for you if you're working with a competitor.

If you don't want to be demeaned, don't work in a job where your role includes cleaning up human excrement and vomit from trains.

Or, we as society could stop demeaning people for doing good work and making the world a better place. Do you want to be able to take a subway without the place reeking of shit and puke? Then be thankful for the people cleaning it up; give them respect, good working conditions, and a living wage. Anyone who is creating value for society deserves that much, whether they're designing the next iPhone or washing the piss smell of a public lavatory. And if you don't give them any of that, don't be surprised if they don't deliver very much value to you.

Besides, the demeaning argument could be applied to any kind of time keeping system. So you use your finger to clock on instead of a card. So what?

If the card is exactly the same, then why go through the expense of the fancy new equipment?

If the fingerprint system really is cheaper / more robust / maintainable / whatever, then it may make sense to upgrade. If, as I suspect, it is is more expensive, and they're doing it not to reduce costs and increase efficiency of processing but to have more control over people. Either that's not necessary, in which case it's demeaning, or it is necessary, in which case (it seems to me) they're doing something else really wrong.

well the reason they don't want the scanners is that then they can't as easily sell their job when they move on - or have their cousin cover for them on a sick day.

Possibly, but another very good reason they don't want scanners is that it's demeaning and insulting.

Unless there are significant problems (and not just "significant bending of the rules", but "significant extra expense or reduction in quality"), there is no reason to treat people like criminals.

And if there are significant problems, there's a better solution: Hire people you trust, and then trust the people you hire; and don't judge them by stupid metrics like "has been physically present exactly N hours?", but by metrics like, "Is the area they were responsible for clean?" If it would take an average person working at a reasonable rate 8 hours to clean a certain area, and because of me the area is now clean, then pay me for 8 hours worth of work, whether it took me 8 hours or three hours.

That's a post from August 13, about the ruling going into this trial -- not about the actual trial or the verdict itself, which is what this article was about.

I really miss Groklaw's coverage and analysis of this whole thing.

Where is your god now??

Giving people's choices dignity and meaning by allowing them (and others around them) to experience consequences for those choices.

You are crazy. If you look at deaths per yer per 100K vehicles [wikipedia.org], the rate ranges from 14,050 (Togo) down to 4.6 (Malta). Other samples: UK (5.1), US (15), Russia (55), Bangladesh (6,300).

Wait, 14% of the population dies every year in Togo due to automobile accidents? That's just not possible. There must be a mistake somewhere.

Games have nothing to do with it. It seems rather self-evident that doing that involves learning something reasonably challenging for an hour a day for two months would boost cognitive flexibility.

Click through and read the paper -- it's not paywalled, is relatively short, and I think the big picture is pretty understandable.

If you do, you'll find that 1) cognitive flexibility is a technical term for a specific class of mental abilities 2) StarCraft was shown to increase cognitive flexibility, but (as expected) not some other mental abilities 3) in addition to the control group, he had two SC groups: one which had only one base to control, and one which had 2 bases to control. The ones with two bases to control showed more improvement in cognitive flexibility than those with only one base.

So it does have to do with StarCraft in particular. My question is, in what real-life situations is this "cognitive flexibility" actually useful? He keeps saying there is a "benefit", but it's not clear to me what benefit there is other than being able to do better on some artificial lab tests. (And of course being able to play SC better, which is of course a benefit in itself.)

And as the brief actually points out, a person's beliefs about whether what he did was illegal or not are completely irrelevant to whether or not a crime was actually committed. If what you did was illegal, you are punished even if you believe it to be legal; but the converse holds true as well -- if what you did was legal, you should not be punished, even if you believed that it was illegal.

From the actual ruling (majority opinion):

But the Fifth Amendment guarantees that no one may be “compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself,” not an unqualified “right to remain silent.” In any event, it is settled that forfeiture of the privilege against self-incrimination need not be knowing.

And:

...Although “no ritualistic formula is necessary in order to invoke the privilege,” Quinn v. United States , 349 U. S. 155, 164 (1955), a witness does not do so by simply standing mute. Because petitioner was required to assert the privilege in order to benefit from it, the judgment of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals rejecting petitioner’s Fifth Amendment claim is affirmed.

I agree with the 4 dissenting judges:

Far better, in my view, to pose the relevant question directly: Can one fairly infer from an individual’s silence and surrounding circumstances an exercise of the Fifth Amendment’s privilege? The need for simplicity, the constitutional importance of applying the Fifth Amendment to those who seek its protection, and this Court’s case law all suggest that this is the right question to ask here. And the answer to that question in the circumstances of today’s case is clearly: yes.

But that's the law of the land right now; so make sure everyone you know knows this.

Apple is definitely having an idea shortage. Nothing comparable to Google Glass (which may or may not be a success, but at least is an advance in some direction). Nothing comparable to Microsoft's new-generation Kinect (which is a significant technical development, even if it needs an off switch). Not even a ruggedized iPhone (something several competing vendors now offer).

But doing something completely new has never been Apple's modus operandi. Instead, they let other people try things that are completely new, see how they fail, then come in and "do it right":

• There were lots of mp3 players before the iPod. But they never gained mass market appeal; Apple changed that.
• I had a smartphone before the iPhone came out. I had even purchased apps and installed them; but overall, the experience was very unsatisfying, and I had basically determined that there wasn't much point in having a tiny computer in your pocket. The iPhone changed that.
• Microsoft and others had been trying to get tablets to take off for years; Apple brought out the iPad and kick-started a whole new movement towards tablets.

If things follow historical trends (which is a big if), then Google (and maybe some others) will come out with Google Glass, it will be a big flop, people will realize how useless having a HUD is and just about decide it's not worth it anymore -- and then Apple will come out with iSpec and redefine the market.

Why not - they wouldn't have found all those witches in 1692 without crowdsourcing.

Actually, the worst of the Salem witch trials was that they weren't crowd-sourced, but were an epic failure of the actual legal system at the time. Every person killed was tried and sentenced by a panel of 7 professional judges with years of experience, most of whom carried on with their professional careers afterwards. Reading it is like a textbook example of why we have these basic rights, like "presumption of innocence", "trial by jury", "right to an attourney", &c -- and should be a warning to anyone who thinks that we need to "get tough on crime" by taking away protections like these.