I lived on several Polynesian islands and homosexuals there were totally unremarked upon. The gay men (I didn't meet any lesbians, as society there is pretty heavily stratified with men spending time with men, and I'm a man) had basically equal status with the other men, and no one seemed to care if you were screwing men or women at night. They also didn't have a formal marriage system like the Catholic priests who were on one island wanted, and in fact the priests finally got a whole bunch of couples to get married in the church, while I was there (some of the couples had been together for 40+ years). Of course only the hetero couples got married in this Western way, which maybe was the start of a segregating of gay couples in the culture. I haven't been back in a long time so maybe the priests are winning that one now, but I can say that I've personally witnessed cultures that don't give a crap about "marriage is just between one man and one woman."

And this doesn't even start on your notion of family: families in polynesia where I lived are very much more fluid than here. People pass kids around between *households* somewhat frequently based on whether someone has too many or too few kids to take care of, and there is no concept of "adopted" as a stigma -- children define their parents, whether blood or otherwise, as the ones who are feeding them. There is a word for "blood parent" but it's almost never used and is insignificant culturally/emotionally to the children I talked with.

Yeah totally!! I hate that my car shifts automatically, has power locks, power steering, digital tuning on the radio and anti-lock brakes. And that freaking airbag is totally annoying, waiting to go off at ANY time. Get me back to my old 61 ford falcon with a metal steering wheel and no synchros on the gear box. Those were the days when real men drove real cars.

Yeah or a 100 line Rails app..

Forget that the Rails framework still carries a very high bug load - but your 100 lines can be virtually bug free!

In fact, GPL v2 does make mention of making a living unrelated to "free as in speech": "You may charge a fee for the physical act of transferring a copy" (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.html paragraph 1).

Also it appears that GPL (at least) does not prevent someone from wrapping an installer around an installer and distributing that: "In addition, mere aggregation of another work not based on the Program with the Program (or with a work based on the Program) on a volume of a storage or distribution medium does not bring the other work under the scope of this License." Notably this indicates that the wrapping installer (nor the toolbars or whatever inside it) do not become GPL'ed itself either (which would be a significant disincentive to the behavior).

IANAL

Yeah - that's a good point. Damien specifically modeled Couch off of the good parts of Lotus Notes distribution (remember when IBM kept saying Lotus notes isn't really an email product - it just does email as a side effect? I now know why they were saying that). That said, it would be hard for my project to choose closed-licensed COTS when an OSS alternative like couch exists. Recognizing Lotus is almost certainly many times more robust and better engineered than couch for all these purposes. Thanks for pointing this option out.

Thanks - good tip on Cassandra. Riak has some capabilities that are close too. I can say that trying to do couch replication with large binary objects across unreliable networks (that is not in the same data center/peer network) is probably not a good idea anyway, even though the spec does support it..

It doesn't - you could accomplish this with NNTP if you put enough work into it (we looked at that possibility for our implementation). Certainly you could do this with a SQL system or an rsync file distribution with custom file indices. I'm just saying that in my experience couchdb gives you more out of the box to accomplish this type of set up than anything else I've found. You can get further faster with this approach if you have the kinds of requirements I was describing, IMO.

Of course I'm open to something else if it's better for this, but up to now I haven't seen anything that comes close for this, including other NoSQL databases.

Do those other systems provide for arbitrary peer-to-peer data exchange/sync networks? Last I checked Couch was the only product in the NoSQL line up that provided robust support for distributed data networks.. Maybe I'm wrong or out of date.. Most of the others when I looked were able to sync data but it was for controlled sync among known peers, much the way MySQL and Postgres handle things -- not true/messy master-master replication among disorganized nodes spread around the internet.

Yeah - talk about a serious game. What a disappointment.

I think if you got a pay-as-you-go phone plan with SMS, you could SMS the device when it's gone missing and it could reply with gps coordinates in response. Then you don't have to pay the monthly nut for data plan service? Not sure how pay-as-you-go works, but I think the minutes/service expires every few months but still cheaper than a monthly data plan..

That said, for a $5k bike, I wonder if theft insurance (not accident insurance/injury, which is much more expensive) would be cheaper than either of these on a monthly basis.

Thanks. Here is just a request from one of the teaming masses - I'd have preferred if you had said "this story is probably BS." Saying it's BS makes it sound like you have some fact or evidence that falsifies the claim, like a snopes report or personal knowledge. I wouldn't compare his story to monsters under the bed, but I do agree it has some traits in common with an urban legend.

Ah - yes. I didn't mean to imply that the Netflix app was a good experience, but that the ability to stream movies from netflix servers onto my ps3 is a good experience. If Amazon let me stream their stuff through the ps3 I might switch but unlikely until they do (for example).

How do you know that? Serious question -- b/c the story is a good one and if it's BS I'd like to know.

Sounds like a great premise for a future Bond movie! Not saying it's not real, just that there's room for a script in your concept too..

Interesting point and it makes me wonder if someone is going to figure out how to unlock the mysterious last two cores which are disabled? There must have been some reason why they didn't turn them on - maybe no MB support in the time they had to release?