Any any stray shot by some trigger-happy gun nut would likely pierce the fuselage and start decompressurization, ala Goldfinger.

No, it wouldn't. Repeated tests have shown this will not happen. If you think a hole the width of a pencil will cause a plane to lose pressure that quickly, you might want to check your physics book again.

Also, terrorist holds lady with knife to neck and tells you put down your weapon (while unseen terrorist sneaks up behind you with box-cutter).

So on a crowded plane, there would be no one behind you to see this second terrorist sneak up behind you? Even if they hold a knife to someone's neck, you're still defeating their purpose of taking over the plane. The pilot now has time to radio an emergency and make a rapid descent or throw the plane into violent maneuvers to upset their balance.

I like this, too, but what's to stop the bad guys from faking the secret frequency and crashing the plane from the safety of their hideout?

And people say I have an active imagination. How do you propose the bad guys fake this signal from a cave in Pakistan to a plane flying over the Alps? Or over the Indian Ocean? You do realize the power required to send this signal, the technology to continually track the plane in flight and the equipment needed to do all this isn't something you can go to your local Radio. . . er, Best Buy and pick up on a whim.

Stop over thinking this. Today, if someone tries to hijack a plane from within the passenger compartment, they will fail. They might be able to kill a few people on board, but they will most likely die in the process and so will not accomplish their mission.

There's a war out there, old friend. A world war. And it's not about who's got the most bullets. It's about who controls the information. What we see and hear, how we work, what we think... it's all about the information!

Thank you. I was hoping someone was going to mention this.

It wasn't as if Jeremy hadn't previously been warned and had been put on notice that another serious incident would be the end.

Being a prima donna and ranting and raving is one thing. Punching someone is quite another. While Jeremy may have unconsciously done this to not have to renew his contract, it's not something one wants to be known for.

So you have no problem with a smelting company opening next door to your house? A garbage dump? Fat rendering?

Zoning is done for a common sense reason, one you obviously fail to grasp.

I urge you to consider that Occam's Razor does not apply in the social realm, where motives are often hidden. This makes "paranoia" difficult to distinguish from "foresight".

In my personal unqualified opinion, it's like using alcohol. If there is no sign that it harms your well-being or reduces the quality of your life, then you do not have a problem. If there are such signs, then you do. In the absence of such signs, I would call it "caution".

Spooky action at a distance will make couch potatoes of us all.

I thought Amazon was doing that?

The problem isn't so much "too many calories" consumed, but that the sedimentary lifestyle people are accustomed

Yeah, sediment doesn't digest too well. No wonder people are fat.

Yes, leeching off the rest of us by not claiming you're operating a business on your taxes and not telling your insurance company you're operating as a taxi service.

Thanks for making my life more expensive.

I assume it will be the same sort of people who paid (i.e. their time and expertise) to create and make freely available other software like BitTorrent, the Linux kernel, the Apache server, etc.

There is ample reason to believe this is possible. There are numerous extant examples, far too many to enumerate here, in the form of just about every GPL'd project ever created. Perhaps you missed the part where I said it would need to be decentralized and peer-to-peer, so much like BitTorrent, the users themselves would bear the cost of the bandwidth and CPU cycles.

The question of how to host content that many users will want to share without ever-increasing costs of a centralized system to bear the load was, after all, the chief problem that BitTorrent was created to solve.

The BSD license very well could have worked, in the sense that I know of no law of physics or any other hard barrier making it impossible, yes. But generally to get something like what we've seen from the GPL Open Source movement, you need some kind of hedge against total selfishness. This is particularly true when dealing with corporations. That's the one thing the BSD license does not provide.

Perhaps in a more ideal world that does not still have such a pronounced scarcity mentality, the BSD license would have been sufficient. But in the world we know today, it's clear to me why one was more successful than the other (in terms of participation) long after a time when both were available.

I'll add, "paranoia" is one of those words that gets thrown around. Properly understood, it means an unreasonable fear of what is either impossible, or so astronomically unlikely as to be completely impractical. It doesn't take much study of history to see the repeating pattern that, again and again, any form of power or authority that can be abused, has been abused. Knowledge and technology are forms of power. It is inevitable that those who can wield them will abuse them. It's a scenario that is not only inevitable, but one that should be expected and prepared for.

To do otherwise is simply foolish and naive, an act of investing tremendous trust in institutions that have repeatedly proven themselves untrustworthy. I wonder sometimes if it's merely a problem of scale. If an individual lies, deceives, manipulates, or otherwise acts dishonestly towards another individual, confidence is quickly broken and trust withdrawn, often permanently. If a government or other large institution repeatedly acts dishonestly, you often see this faith-based (certainly not fact-based) defense that it meant well, will do better next time, and deserves our continued trust. This is usually never explicitly stated, but can be readily observed in the decisions many people make.

Perhaps this is a generational difference. In school, I was taught not to write "I think this is so" or "I believe this is true" in anything even slightly resembling formal composition. I was taught that, perhaps barring a rigorous scientific publication, anytime you read any written work of any sort in which the author takes a position, what you are reading is exactly that: one person's position. It should be understood as something like an opinion, something that may change at a later date, something with which others may have good reasons for disagreement. This is one part of thinking for yourself, by the way.

The more modern trend is to assume that anytime anyone speaks, they automatically presume to speak for everyone else in the most absolute terms possible unless this is otherwise disclaimed. Therefore much time is wasted bickering about things like "but I'm an exception!" and "that's just your opinion!" and many false judgments against someone's character are made, such as yours. While condemning someone for such a flimsy reason may be a reassuring outlet for the type of insecure people who contribute nothing but love to throw stones, if you are honest, you may have noticed it's not making any progress.

I wish most religions placed half that much value on justifying their doctrines.

I don't view Stallman as having a "communistic" mind-set at all. I view him as having a post-scarcity mind-set. In terms of the modern Information Age and its ability to make virtually infinite perfect copies of bits at nearly zero cost, he is correct. That you and others who share your viewpoint would read his works and falsely liken it to a doctrine arising in the mid-1800s (i.e. Marxism/Communism) simply tells me that the man is ahead of his time.

The point about a hammer stands, because much software is used as tools for making other things. No manufacturer of hammers would last a moment in court if they tried to implement an EULA, yet in the quest to make "intellectual property" more like physical property, copyright law allows this sort of thing to be done with software. Obviously this means it goes too far. The desire for software freedom is simply a desire to achieve a more reasonable balance.

The thing I have great difficulty understanding is this need so many have to worry about the guy personally. Did you know that no one is going to try to force you to agree with him 100%? Did you realize that you can take his ideas that resonate with you and ignore the rest? For example, you can run a mostly Open Source Linux system, but then use some proprietary software such as the nVidia drivers? Yes, you can, with your own systems, achieve whatever balance *you* find reasonable, no matter what Stallman says (of course, you have this option at all because of him).

If Stallman were threatening to send storm troopers to your home to force you at gunpoint to live the way he wants, then I would understand all this vitriol against someone you never had to listen to. I've never heard of him doing that and I don't consider it likely. Meanwhile, of course the man is going to advocate what he believes. Did you expect him to advocate a philosophy he doesn't believe in? So what's the actual problem, here? That he has an audience, that when he speaks it makes headlines, and when you speak it doesn't? Is that the root of the problem? If so, that's known as simple jealousy.

Definitely "Funny", since it's an AC. If it were a logged-in user, I'd use "Insightful" to contribute in some small way to their karma score.

If you want to get rid of Facebook (have it go the way of MySpace -- remember them?) without replacing it with the next centralized panopticon, what you need is a completely standardized, completely open, secure, encrypted, cross-platform, peer-to-peer method of implementing the same features. Nothing less will do. Until then, when Facebook finally diminishes it will simply be replaced by the next Facebook-wannabe.