People who think that criminals will give up the guns they possess are very silly. People who think that other people actually think that are just as silly.

The vast majority of the criminal population is made out of folks with low educational backgrounds, who have social problems and/or are desperate. Those citizens have an above-average chance of doing something we consider criminal, and the availability of guns while they're a "normal guy" will influence their readiness for violence, self-assessment (respectively overconfidence) and scale of the crime. But everybody has some of that chance, and heck, if you take the time to actually look at the fates of those people, you'll realise that it could be your neighbour or parents the day after tomorrow, if their life takes a harsh turn tomorrow.
In general people first have access to guns, and then become criminals, not the black-and-white "this person was born a criminal and will therefore go and get a gun no matter the legal availability".

The point to take home is that reducing availability and propagation of firearms will undeniably result in fewer criminals with firearms. This has been shown in most modern democracies, the main question is how big this reduction is in practice and how it weighs against the (mainly USA-specific) "guns for liberty from an oppressive government" concept.

Flash, Noscript and Adblock have been available in 64bit browsers for "ages".
I've been using Firefox exclusively compiled to 64bit for 3-4 years now (the default in the Debian sid repo) and never had came across incompatible plugin after they released Flash for 64bit. Though... I need only around 15 plugins, so heavier user may have a legitimate reason to use a 32bit browser.

Could you point out some of the plugins that actually don't support a 64bit binary? Windows is 64bit per default now too, isn't it... so you'd expect vendors to keep up.

I guess one might care because it may be a useful tool in the future or because of its cultural/technical/educational value, similar to "abandoned treasures" in other genres. But folks paying for the difference may be doing so because a) of awareness/marketing (see those repackaged LibreOffice sales) and b) it's 1% better (the improved part) than the original, yet the seller is entitled to 100% of the revenue.

It's not the end of days or anything like that, but thinking about how to improve our society, you see how this might be a bone of contention. I.e. codebases getting less attention than they "deserve" just because some company decided that it's "better" (and here it comes: yes/maybe for them, but no in general) to keep their changes secret and crowd out the original.

The modern 2/3-BSDL is FOSS by pretty much any widespread definition and has been declared as such by virtually all relevant institutions... there's nutjobs everywhere claiming strange things.

I've released enough code under the Apache License myself (besides proprietary, GPL, and some BSDL contributions) and most small scripts go as WTFPL, and I've never berated anyone for choosing BSDL (it's their code and they can go proprietary if they want). But I can easily explain why I'd choose another license for a particular project, and IMO BSDL is rarely the most fitting, if they share my values.

Also keep in mind that fighting (and I mean actually fighting) because "I like this concept and you don't so you're wrong and you must like it too" is something we've been doing for millenia, thus it's fair to say a "sense of mission" is human nature.

It's because of different standards. In the FOSS world, an unmaintained project is considered dead, gets removed from the repositories and people are very hesitant to download and install it. On Windows, I've seen folks running some installer from 2004, which always makes me cringe a little, but they simply shrug it off with "I need that functionality" and everything's fine.

Note that code which hasn't changed for a decade can be perfectly "fresh" if there is a maintainer who checks compatibility with newer systems and "guarantees" security bugfixes in case they are needed.

With source code, the count of current monthly contributions matters, and with BSD licenses, you run the "danger" of those contributions migrating out of the open source space. Of course the original source stays open, but if a proprietary derivative is more active, in some way (it's all perception, really) this makes the original less desirable, similar to stale applications described above. It often coincides with the loss of the maintainer.

Every government official who behaves like a rattlesnake should be relieved of his duties on the spot. If this isn't the case, then Swartz did his part* and we need MUCH more of that. Your government is supposed to represent the people, and if it doesn't, why the hell don't you replace them? It's not like you don't have the power (as opposed to infringing on the rights of individuals or corporations, as they are private entities), that's the very purpose of a democracy!

And don't give me that lethargic-public crap, this case should serve to rally every starry-eyed idealist into kicking the hornets nest harder (it's not supposed to be there in the first place). This is the way res publica works, and many a disobedient citizen has paid dearly for his ideals, but it's the most direct way to make a difference.

* arguably paying with your life can be considered too costly, so he may not have done it "well", but he did more than most in our time.

Mint is the most popular GNU/Linux distribution in the DistroWatch niche. And as with all vocal minorities, they try to claim that their anecdotal evidence is generisable.

If asked to estimate, I'd say Ubuntu has roughly two orders of magnitude the install base of Mint. Similar to C vs Objective C, the latter is more popular ("hip", "in", ...) but will need a very long time to reach the amount of distribution of the former, if ever. There is no noticeable corporate pick up on Mint (if you go by the quite numerous Canonical press releases about Ubuntu contracts, coprorate deployment ranges in the hundreds of thousands... and probably a bit more we don't hear from). Educational institutions (in my country, we had a wide survey recently, but not recorded by Canonical as we don't use their support) are using Ubuntu first, Fedora/Red Hat second and then some few Debian and Suse. No mention of Mint.

Yes, may early adopters and disgruntled techies are switching to Mint (among others), and I myself have moved to Debian for my private usage... so if this trend keeps up, this might be a good indicator what the "next Ubuntu" will be. BUT that doesn't mean that Mint is anywhere near Ubuntu right now, nor that they will catch up if Ubuntu really manages to pull of that "unified device experience for the masses" plan they are aiming for (which would net the much more newcomers than leaving folks).

Privacy is only dead to those who have given up on it, e.g. you.

While the current technical possibilities make it easy for some entities to invade your privacy, it is not a technical question at all. Popularise and pass laws (remember that democracy thingie...) that punish someone who violates your expectation of privacy. I know this sounds outlandish over there, because it probably is, but where I live (Switzerland) both the government and companies have to tread very carefully with peoples data. For example Google got tons of flak (it was quite a fight for them, and the aftermath is still ongoing) for Streetview _after_ they blurred faces, numbers and all those measures that made it "acceptable" in the USA.

We look with shock and awe at things like your sex offender databases, and again, even if my internet provider can technically easily bring up a list of all my "naughty visits", they wouldn't dare even giving the impression that someone got it through them.

No company in 19th century France was insane enough to make that kind of investment (for governments different rules apply because they don't have the same goals as companies). So if the government didn't sponsor or "get in the way of" the French telecom network, it would at most exist on a much smaller and fragmented scale. I don't know of any example that shows otherwise. Look, I'm really willing to admit it's possible if you show it to me, but so far this "vibrant private infrastructure" being built to the same scale, level of quality and accessibility without government investment is just pure wishful thinking with no basis in reality (or history).

The reason we're privatising stuff after investment is that a) private is better at driving maintenance costs of existing infrastructure down, b) nepotism, acute budget needs and similar ("politics"), c) ideology and particular interests.

Basically the government writes off an investment and gives it to the society (= the companies, that's the way we do it... giving one stock paper to every citizen would be historically strange) because that is it's purpose. It can go well (e.g. German Telecom) or badly (British railway).

And it's easy to conjure up a paradise, like with communism ;).

Non-profits by definition don't fit the "... profit by selling ..." you have quoted me on.
Governments don't have market share like companies (since it's "always 100%"), have no workable concept of monetary profit (it's not a goal), there is no product in the classical sense and comparing citizens with customers is pointless: they can't take their business elsewhere, except for emigration (which is unrealistic on a market wide scale because of language/culture/financial/social/etc. barriers, save for a war or similar); they drive down prices (mostly taxes) via voting/petitioning/lobbying instead of lower demand (or market forces); modelling voters by economic agent-based frameworks requires completely changing the conditions; etc.

Example time again: a company CEO could be just as well called a "teacher" who imparts a certain amount of "knowledge" at the end of the month on his "students" for solving "homework", who in turn use it to "share those insights" with their landlord so he lets them stay in their flat.

This school-company model can be made to match a lot of company properties, but like the company-government model, it has a few obvious mismatches: the purpose of education vs. vocation is the most important IMO.
These mismatches are a good indicator of the nonsense you get when trying to cross-apply strategies, like calling a "students" (employees) parents if he behaves badly.

Company metrics like market share? Quarterly revenue? Profit? Market positioning? ROI on monetisable properties? Customer lock-in (or the currently fashionable euphemism)? No, these do not universally apply to groups within a population, but the comment I originally replied to was going along these lines.

Bookkeeping? Planning? Logic? Yes, but these aren't company-specific.

You really shouldn't apply strategies geared for companies and thus terminlogy (since the meaning is bound in practice) to government, because it explicitly doesn't have to "compete for market share and profit by selling a product/service".

They did fully open source WebOS, and the sourcecode you downloaded to your hard drive stays GPL.
However, they own the copyright on all code and can freely choose whatever license they want at any point. If it's proprietary, you are not allowed to download it from their webpage again and redistribute it freely, even though you already have exact copy of that very same code. The changes you make to your GPL piece of code stay GPLd and you can publish them to the public for comment/usage/improvement/distribution. The changes to LGs proprietary piece of code stay proprietary, thus the code bases diverge with time.

One policy many FOSS projects have (e.g. the Linux kernel) is to spread copyright over many different contributors such that no single entity can take control of it and try any shenanigans (or at least has to buy up every single copyright).
But also note that we don't know even know yet if LG is going to relicense the code to something proprietary or keep it open.

The "can and should" are implied by knowing only how to use a hammer and thus declaring every problem a nail.

In a population, we have various groups (companies, governmental organisations, families, non-profits, teaching classes, fan clubs, ...) and the "compete for market share and profit by selling a product/service" model only really describes one of them well.

I know an upper management guy of a small company who is an amateur kids hockey trainer. He tried to run his team like a company for a while, including structure and terminology... needless to say, he later declared it a bad idea. Same goes for government.

Yep, this is pretty much what "sponsoring" implies. I don't think it's realistic for companies to build up a nationwide infrastructure, and I'm honestly not aware of any case this has happened. This is because doing so doesn't suit their reason for existance (= own profit with at most a few decades years ROI) while it suits that of a government (whose "ROI" isn't profit but a happy population). Of course we get the case where government jointly builds infrastructure with some company, which is why I said "sponsored" and not "built".

The French telecommunications network has been actually built by the government (as everywhere) and its operation has been privatised only recently (in the last decade).

You missed to provide what you understand to be a company. For example, a government is a group of people that ... [see my previous comment], and a company (corporation, firm, ...) is a legal entity (not necessarily group of people) that exists to generate profit.

Sure they are both have people behind them at some point, and those are made of atoms, but that doesn't imply that we can (or at least should) apply company metrics to governments.

The difference (reasons we have them for) is quite essential, which is what I've tried to highlight. The fact that "laws" for the one lead to strange effects (perpetual consistent money loss, like you say) when applied to the other shows that doing this is not meaningful.

However, with people from this mindset having a very strong influence in our society (look at the share of economists and law folks in politics), the idea to run a government like a company has been shoehorned into what nowadays many people see as the default.

Again, the notion of economic competition doesn't make sense in a government... for starters, there's only a single entity of it, and it can create monopolies at will (a power agreed on by the population), bend the rules, etc. A government doesn't compete in an economy against the companies because they have completely different goals.

A government can define a market, set the framework and do all the important bits required for the well being of its population. But if it (or rather the people) decides that every house should have access to water, and thus starts a nationwide plumbing project, then the water providing companies that were making money off of water transport up to this point may get trouble meeting their bottom line... they may try and make profit elsewhere. The important bit to note here is that the government didn't outcompete them, because its goal isn't profit, but simply took a measure to improve the quality of life of the people, regardless of market dynamics, "outside" of this part of the market economy.

Sure the government has a budget, but then again, I do too. It also has a shopping list (like I do for groceries, just a bit bigger). Silliness aside, having a spreadsheet with planned proceeds and expenses has little to do with market rules.

Obviously, you can't use more of a resource than you have (with money, keep debts in mind), but efficient allocation of resources (a definition of economics that I like, but it's by far not the full story) per se still has nothing to do with "competition" or a "customer base".

Since the government should be all about the society, it can't become "more important" unless something went wrong (corruption, dictatorship, etc.). Economy on the other hand doesn't care for the society (but that's OK since we make good use of it nonetheless), and a free market doesn't "have" the mission (or even cares) to make sure the population is well taken care of.

Economy should really be a tool of the population, but since that is logistically hard to do, we represent the tool wielders with a capable (:D) representative sample of the population, called government. But nowadays it looks like the government (and by proxy the people) are are being played by economic particular interests.

I only wish there weren't so many people claiming that free market is good because of the concept itself and should be applied everywhere.

So the problem is dumb people? Well, it's called democracy, deal with it!

Agree.

Hmm, just for clearness: the government is subject to the laws of phyics, but that doesn't mean it's useful to measure the speed of congressmen entering the building, require them to pass a weight measurement every morning and thus predict the "energy they'll have going into that conference". Still, that conference needs a location that can hold the body volume and withstand impulse of arriving members, so "it's just physics".

Both the laws of physics and of economics apply to the government, but still there is no point in using company benchmarks/terminology (or my silly physics example). Many general economic premises sure hold for governments, but the comment I was replying to originally was fairly company-centric, which I think is a highly inadequate model for a government.

I agree that they have to evaluate whether it's worth it. But as an aside, do you know of any country that has a wide broadband infrastructure not sponsored by the government? And do you really think that everyone (including bad-ROI customers) will have a high speed connection without government involvement?

Repeat after me: the government is not a company, it makes no sense to view it as a company. The government is not a company...

You're completely right when talking about market dynamics, but consider the reason for the existence of a (modern western) government: it's funded in order to bring benefits to the population in ways a smaller group or an individual can't, i.e. large scale infrastructure, standards (there is no case of actually working privatised food safety regulation, and there probably never will be), modern arms defense, etc.
Notions like "competition" and "market" (and pricing, profit, etc..) make no sense at all, that's just economists (who have a lot of spotlight nowadays) superimposing their limited model on a much more general construct that has a different purpose from a company.
As an aside: governments that turn a profit are doing it wrong and should be replaced.

Yes, economy is important, but the economy should be a tool of the government (and thus obviously in the service of the population), not vice versa (like the current USA).
There is no point in having a free market by and in itself. It's like the large scale version of owning a domestic animal: the market is supposed to benefit the population as much as possible, and if it doesn't do a good enough job, well... there's the birch.
The problem of the USA is not "too much/little free market/competition/...", but a corrupt government that is owned by the economy. That last part should be fixed.

Precisely because not everybody and their grandmother knows how to do it, this is an issue. If everybody and their grandmother made the informed decision to send all their computer contents to Amazon with every search, this would be perfectly fine with RMS. But they are not informed (which is why we need the outcry) and usually don't know how to turn it off even if they could google it (which is why it needs to be off by default) ... I mean, do you see _your_ grandmother googling how to edit privacy settings on her computer (assuming you currently have a grandmother and she owns a computer)?

Don't worry, enough people are reading it. Noone responded so far, but that's not the point: the most useful thing is probably for you to talk about it, coping and such.

I'm really sorry for you, and I wish the things that happened to you didn't. But (here's the but): from your story, I'm not sure this guy did anything illegal at any point. Morally he's a douchebag, but it's not against the law to be an asshole. It's not illegal to be in a relationship where one side is overbearingly dominant and takes way more than it gives.
There's a reason we don't regulate emotional relationships. It's not illegal to cheat on your spouse, and from what I'm reading, I assume you think it should be. Still most people have the basic attitude that leads to viewing cheating as something that shouldn't be criminalised (me too btw).
Likewise it's not illegal to overinflate yourself just to get a woman into bed, or to keep trying unless he is stopped by things the law says are not allowed. You said you gave him (weak?) signs, but then went along. "Actions say more than words" plus his wishful thinking: "you don't say OK to having sex in order to not appear as a slut, but play along because you want it" ... quite common in men, and I think sex is the expected result. He failed to be a gentleman - not illegal. But rape by definition is... what now?

I don't want to say that it's your own fault, or that you had it coming, because you clearly are the victim of an asshole. Still I have to kinda say that you could have simply walked out of it if you wanted... that's because I can't imagine my neighbour literally pissing over me and me being OK with it (=in my actions) but not really (=in my mind). I'd kick his ass.
If this were my basic attitude, I'd think that it's a problem with myself. Maybe because I'm not a woman (here we go with sexism again :\ but men and women are obviously different), and I don't think you should "attack" yourself.
But if I were your "purely-legal-and-not-at-all-moral lawyer", based on your actions I'd have a hard time finding something to fault that guy for.