The article briefly mentions that there are humans inside [yes, I read it]. Until then, I was wondering how they planned to handle refueling (and maybe in the future, recharging). When they figure that one out, imagine what this kind of system will do to the trucking industry.

If your reading comprehension were as strong as your desire to feel right, you would have noticed that I never claimed boxing causes Parkinson's. I said "anything like Parkinson's". "Anything like" includes conditions that present similar symptoms, even if the causes are different, such as post-traumatic encephalopathy. This is why I didn't propose a given cause, nor did I say the causes would be the same.

You know, I don't usually respond in such a "low-brow" fashion, but I'm going to tell it to you straight: you're a bitch, you're quibbling over stupid shit like a bitch, and bitches like you are sorely degrading the enjoyment of this site. I'm sorry Daddy didn't make you feel special, or bullies picked on you, or the woman said "let's just be friends", or whatever your problem is, but splitting hairs and smugly refuting claims that were never made, just so you can convince yourself of how clever you are and how dumb someone else is, well that isn't going to fix it. If you practice insecurity, you will become more insecure as a man, not less. That much I can promise you.

Yes, and the number of people doing so can be expressed with a figure known as the average life expectancy. Of course, you knew that. It's just that for some reason, a lot of fellow Slashdotters derive an unhealthy pleasure from reading a simple and easily understood statement and looking for ways to twist it around, playing with the interpretation until they find an excuse to quibble.

I've read several of your posts in this discussion. You seem completely or almost completely unable to disagree with someone without completely distorting their stated views. The nature of your distortion is to take a relatively moderate statement and interpret it in the very most extreme manner possible. You then take your own interpretation and ascribe it to the other person. Then you proceed to berate them for it, somehow feeling justified. Really you look like you're just arguing with yourself, since it's not the other person's views you're contesting.

Do you derive any satisfaction from this? If you really wanted to do something useful or constructive, perhaps you could learn about a technique called reductio ad absurdum along with how and why it can be used. Hint: if you have to put words in someone else's mouth in order to make a point, you're doing it wrong.

Of course it isn't, but in ancient times most men didn't live long enough to worry about anything like Parkinson's.

Apparently you're not the only one who thinks so. I once bought a pair of boxing gloves to spar with friends. The cardboard box had this big bold warning on the side: "WARNING: Boxing is a contact sport"

I wish I were joking.

You say that, but someone already thought of that.

The whole point of due process is to ensure that yes, this is indeed the guilty party to be punished. Historically, the witch hunt was one popular alternative.

Whenever you relieve yourself of a responsibility by giving it to someone else, you accept that that person is not you and may not make the same decisions that you would make. If Stallman is to be blamed for anything, it should be in the form of Stallman blaming himself for choosing a maintainer who does not more closely share his views.

Now that persuasion has failed, I suppose he could fork it.

It seems like every time there is a discussion that remotely touches on the subject of freedom, someone in some form or another has to rehash this same discussion. The subject matter changes, the circumstances change, the exact pseudo-logic has a few variations, and it's articulated with varying degrees of skill, but at heart it's really the same discussion.

So he tries to persuade people to agree with him, perhaps passionately, perhaps vehemently, maybe even not so nicely ... but (to my knowledge) he has never used force or fraud to coerce people into behaving the way he thinks they should. That sounds perfectly freedom-loving to me. I'm really not seeing the problem here.

If your opinion of the guy is correct, then his methods will cause fewer people to listen to him and he will thereby undermine his own efforts. This means such a situation would be self-correcting. I've never heard of RMS using force or threat of force to make you call it "GNU/Linux". The degree of power he has over you is determined entirely by how much you decide to listen to him*. The ability to recognize this is generally called perspective.

It's as though some people have an entitlement mentality, a manner in which they are self-centered. It leads to them feeling like they've been wronged or mistreated somehow when they discover that someone doesn't agree with them, won't support or otherwise validate them (probably the part that really bothers you), and speaks against them.

* I started to add "and use his software", but then I realized that's not true - you could use Emacs with the LLVM debugger ... or not, whether anyone else likes it or not, because the GPL and LLDB's NCSA license are compatible. RMS deliberately chose a license allowing this to happen. Did you fail to recognize the significance of that? That freedom means people might do things with which he disagrees does not remove his right to disagree. Are you suggesting it should? If not, what exactly are you trying to say, if you are not in fact expressing another entitlement mentality?

There is one good lesson they're teaching this boy: those with authority are not to be trusted.

By the way, now that I re-read this during a spare moment and once again think about it, I can again respond to you in what I hope to be a worthy way, yet this time focus on a different dimension of the thing at hand.

I would ask you to consider, simply, this other and possibly alien point of view: the "name-calling" types are simply enacting the lower (or if you like, "gutter") form of an idea that is nonetheless technically true. The name-callers are merely those who recognize this but also have a need to make you look worse in order that they know better, or otherwise focus on what they think is wrong with you, with little or no serious constructive suggestion concerning what precisely is wrong with your view and how better to regard the situation. Liike the thinking individuals, they see what the problem is; otherwise, they lack the clarity and objectivity to identify the problem and suggest a sensible solution. By contrast, they're simply bitching. But even those people are correctly identifying that somethng is amiss. They're just the least clever and easiest to ridicule among those who all arrive at the same conclusion.

That's because there is a limit to how many times they can lie to people, blatantly and without remorse, before the people stop trusting them. My grandparents grew up during a time when this went on, like it does today, but not nearly as much and was not well known (consider Hoover's FBI, or the involuntary radiation exposure experiments carried out against black people, or the use of the CIA to overthrow democratically elected foreign leaders). They saw it as a matter of honor or duty to have trust and faith in the republic and the leaders its processes have put there. That's been shattered and won't be repaired any time soon.

In the personal realm, most people become suspicious of everything someone says after the very first confirmed deliberate deception. The amazing part is that government is given so many chances, that people are so impressed with official symbols and pomp and circumstance that they would ever believe known liars who have never faced any serious consequences for their deceptions.

The idea is that limiting police powers in order to safeguard freedoms (and with them, the balance of power between the individual and the government) is acknowledged as making the job of police harder. The polices' job being harder does, in fact, mean that some number of criminals will go free some of the time, criminals who otherwise would have been caught and prosecuted. This is why absolute security is the antithesis of absolute freedom, so the question then is how to balance the two. When you safeguard liberty as your first priority and assign a lower priority to the effectiveness of law enforcement, you understand that you are taking a higher risk that you yourself will be harmed by a criminal that law enforcement could have stopped.

That's why freedom is not for cowards. The problems you worry about are well known to people who understand and value freedom. They choose freedom anyway. They also realize that the danger with which you're so concerned has been overstated. You're much more likely to be killed by a cop than a terrorist, and any factual inquiry into that based on facts would lead you to the same conclusion. Incidentally, you're also more likely to be injured by lightning. In the last 100 years, many, many more people were killed by their own governments than by any foreign enemy, so the credibility of this danger has been well established. Limited, transparent government is a time-tested manner of managing this danger.

As an aside, if terrorism is truly such a great problem and we want to reduce it in a real and effective manner, we should also stop giving excuses to the people who hate us. It's much easier for an enemy to justify their position, raise their troops' morale, and recruit new members into their brand of exteremism when they can point to concrete acts of ruthless domination the USA has actually committed. Law enforcement would certainly be more effective if its list of potential suspects could be reduced, facilitating a more focused approach on those that remain.

Anyway, the real spirit of freedom, the more value-based, individual, and courageous part that you and so many others keep failing to even recognize, let alone try to understand, is that those who understand freedom realize that a few more guilty men may go free. They consider that a small price to pay, an exchange of a finite quantity that numbers can describe in order go gain something priceless and worthwhile. It's yet another instance of failing to comprehend a viewpoint because you do not personally share it, therefore you get sidetracked by related but irrelevant issues because you have no idea how to articulate a meaningful response to it.