i never said i felt that way at all. I was providing an analogy that more correctly described the FSF's position, not mine. Do you disagree that the analogy represents the FSF position accurately?

well, the only one you would have heard of would be apple.

well, the only way that microsoft could be doing that server-side would be to pass the key to the server from the client, which you could see in the source code. It doesn't tell you what they are doing with it on the server, but there's no reason to store the encrypted data and the key on the server unless you intend decrypt it without the involvement of the client, and that'd be a big red flag that something questionable was happening.

To go with your analogy, it'd be more like :

The company that built the houses in your subdivision put shitty locks on the houses and installed them improperly.
Your neighbor's house just got broken into because of this.
The construction company is now going through the subdivision and replacing all of the locks with a new, better lock.

The FSF's position is this :
That's nice and all, but we don't trust you to pick a good lock and put it on correctly this time.
If we cannot inspect the job you did and the lock you chose, there's no way for us to know if the house is actually secure to our satisfaction.
How about you just give us the specifications for the door and frame and we'll just go buy whatever lock we feel comfortable with and install it ourselves?

In addition to your points, the option for people to look at your code makes your code better because it makes you more diligent when you write it.

I suspect everyone has had a conversation like this :
Bob : check out my awesome-sauce application. it's bad ass
Boss : cool. give Jeff access to the source code. i'd like him to integrate it into our Fabulosity suite.
Bob : er, ok. just give me a couple of days to clean up the code so it is ready for integration.
(translation, give me a couple days to fix all the fucked up hack shortcuts i took and add some comments so the code is remotely presentable/maintainable before i let someone else look at it)

The fear of someone else looking at your code makes you write cleaner, more readable code. It also makes you more diligent in checking for errors and exploits (nobody wants their code release to embarass them).
It should also make people and companies hesitant to put back doors and other sketchy things in their applications.

In that case, we need to act quickly and decisively to protect the talentless whores who take off their clothes. As long as they are willing to do that, i'll do my part by loading up their music video, muting it, and listening to good music while i enjoy their best attributes.

Seriously though, i don't care if shitty music i don't like continues to exist. I'll do what i do now... which is not listen to it.

Well, if they were renting space on a server owned by the hosting provider, informing the hosting provider is probably sufficient as they are the property owner for the server that was taken. I don't know if that's the case, but it is possible that this particular item is not a 4th amendment violation.

I would say, even without a pretty well documented history of the FBI abusing its power, it is generally a good thing for people and organizations to watch and question the actions of any law enforcement organization; especially if something looks amiss. It keeps them from getting lazy and it keeps us from getting caught napping by those whom we give power.

Actually, I don't think this is entirely true. In 2009, in Herring v. United States, the U.S. Supreme Court held that illegally obtained evidence could be used in court as long as it wasn't deliberate, reckless, or grossly negligent conduct that led to the evidence being illegal. (that case was about a man who was arrested on a warrant that was left active by a clerical error. When arrested he was found to have drugs on him. The court ruled the drug evidence could still be used against him even though they had no proper cause to search him and find it in the first place.)

I expect you will argue that in this case it meets the deliberate, reckless, or grossly negligent conduct requirement; and that may be true. I am not saying their actions wouldn't invalidate any evidence they collected. I'm just saying that there is an avenue for them to argue to keep the evidence, even if it was determined they had violated the 4th amendment in collecting it.
 

Encrypt my email?!? Hell, I encrypt my slashdot posts.

this one is encrypted with a simple rot-26 algorithm.

This is trivial to get around. You incorporate, file the patent as owned by the incorporated entity, then sell the incorporated entity to the person who wants to buy the patent. The patent is still owned by the original owner, but the original owner is now owned by the megacorp.

what makes you think the engineer would do it for free?

well, technically Doohan is a has-been considering he's dead. That shouldn't take anything away from the quality of work he did when he was alive or the impact it had on anyone's life.

On topic though, I don't get why it would be a problem that a person who played an iconic character in popular culture that relates to space exploration did this. It would certainly make less sense for someone who is currently popular but has no relationship to the subject matter to have been selected.

Programmers without marketing produce work which languishes in obscurity until the company goes bankrupt. For people to become aware that your software exists, someone needs to let them know. That someone is doing marketing, even if it's the programmers themselves pimping their work on blogs or slashdot. Someone is doing marketing.

What reputation? Awesomesoft and their new Awesomizer application have no reputation until people discover that Awesomizer really is awesome and buy it in droves. Then their new Fabulosity Engine can be sold on the reputation they built. Until they've built that reputation, how do they get people to buy Awesomizer without someone advertising its existence?

Well.....that's not true across the board. The financial industry proved you can succeed for a long time without something to sell.

Seriously though, marketing is a support structure for the company, like IT. And like IT, the company could survive without that department, but it'd be a miserable pain in the ass and make everything harder for everyone.

The real problem is that groups like IT are viewed as cost centers because the costs of the department are tangible and the benefits tend to be abstract, so they don't get as much respect from upper management as they should.
Marketing produces exposure which drives sales. Generating correlations between good marketing projects and increases in revenue are fairly easy, so upper management views them as profit drivers and they get disproportionate credit.

Marketing is valuable, but not moreso than the rest of the support infrastructure of a company.

it is available. i own the box set.

The Avogadro project (the thing in your link) has been going on since 2007.

The NIST (the U.S. measurements standards body) provided an implementation of another possible solution to the problem in April of 2007.

To say that the U.S. is just now objecting is inaccurate.

To say that the U.S. is late in its objection ignores the fact that the U.S. has been working on the problem with international standards bodies for many years.

What (unsurprisingly) the Fox News article gets wrong is that the NIST is not submitting a formal objection.
The Consultative Committee for Units (one of the advisory groups for CIPM), of which the NIST is a member, has submitted a formal resolution to change the definition to the CIPM. The CIPM is about to submit that resolution to the CGPM, which is the international body that regulates these definitions.

Metallica encouraged tape trading of their shows and their demo tapes. Between songs during their sets, they told audiences to share their music. That is exactly how they got their record deal. They really didn't start giving a crap about people sharing their music until the whole napster thing. Even then, I think it's just Lars. I'm not convinced the rest care.

Lars was always kind of an ass. He's a crafty business man, though.

It's a terrible analogy as evidenced by the fact that nobody in your target audience accepts its premise. Analogies exist to compare like objects. If nobody accepts that they are like objects, the analogy is useless.

that is nothing like an entity that exists in time recording an event and watching it later.

To be honest, i don't know why you are bothering with the analogy in the first place. You could simply say that if one is willing to accept the paradox of an omniscient being that exists outside of time, there is no reason to not also accept the paradox that human beings have free will in spite of the existence of an omniscient being that already knows what they are going to do.

Magic makes anything possible.