Okay, so I'm looking at this article with 39 responses, including those beyond my threshold. I can assure you that 'everyone on this board' is not fretting about the government allowing us to fly model airplanes. We seem to be responding pretty normally, really. A lot of people are saying how cool it is, some people are saying 'how could he do that?', and the rest are saying 'that's dumb'. It actually looks like a pretty good bell curve, to me.

It seems that you're the sheep: the guy who insists that everyone else is a sheep, no matter what they do. I see this a lot with people who identify as libertarian.

Guy: Hey, we flew this model airplane and took pictures and it was really cool!

Libertarian: Well, if you had really done that, the government would have shown up and arrested you, tortured you and assessed you a tax, and infringed your right to bear arms. And anyone who disagrees with me is a pawn of the gubment.

Guy: No, I mean, here is the movie, this is what we did.

Libertarian: FREEEEDOOOOOOM! *dies*

Guy: Poor fella. If he'd just chilled out, his aorta might not have burst, and he could have enjoyed this interesting movie that I made from my model airplane.

Actually, the article is trolling, too, I think. The issue here is not whether Obama is personally interested in IPv6. As someone above (who got modded troll) mentioned, Obama, himself, probably knows very little about TCP/IP, IPv4, NAT, and IPv6. It's the NTIA that's running this workshop. Printing a headline that says 'Obama' is highlighting IPv6 is just begging to turn the conversation into a bunch of partisan bullshit re: 'hope and change', Obama's personal technical competency, etc. Looking at the thread, this is exactly what happened. And that's trolling (or maybe flamebait).

Then again, it seems like we've pretty much run the whole 'IPv4 addresses running out ZOMG' topic into the ground, too. I guess it's nice to see that the feds are approaching the issue. But there's not really any controversy in 'Federal Government Explores Adopting Updated Technology'. So we make it into a partisan political issue in order to provoke responses? Bleagh.

I know that this has been said later in the thread, but I just have to repeat it. There are a lot of FOSS people who believe that there is some unwritten code of conduct for using FOSS software. That if you are a large, corporate user, then you have some responsibility to contribute to the project in some way. But that responsibility isn't written into the license. What do we expect the corporate users to do? Are they supposed to divine their responsibilities? Read them in tea leaves? If you expect people (or corporations) to contribute to the project in some way if they use your product, then spell that out in the license. This is how the world works. Unvoiced, implied ideas of responsibility aren't it. How can you expect people to live up to your expectations if you don't even tell them what they are?

Look, I've always thought about the open source license in sort of a Zen way. It's not for us to be upset when people take open source code and profit from it. That's not why we're here, to police the spread of ideas. We're here to propagate ideas. The fact that someone makes money off of them is implicitly part of the entire open source philosophy. We produce this stuff, and it's open for use. Why would we ever get pissed off that someone is using it very successfully? If we want to get entangled in arguing about how much money people are making off of it, then we should have been making commercial software.

I get what you're saying, but I assume that the OP was using 'creative class' according to the Florida definition. That most members of Florida's creative class are white men is true, but it's a descriptive condition, not a prescriptive one. I'm not saying that's not a problem, just that it's the case.

What dig?

The dig that I posted as a quote from the GP. Gamers past the age of 16 need help growing up? They don't have enough interesting or important things to think about? I disagree that that is necessarily the case, and it seemed an unnecessarily abrasive way to state the position. Granted, it provoked conversation.

That aside, I agree that if a person is playing video games, or engaging in any other activity, to the extent that it's impairing their ability to engage with the real world, then that's a problem. I never suggested that it wasn't. But I didn't get the sense that we were talking about a kid who was failing in life because of gaming, so that's not even a situation that I was trying to address.

Okay, so I see your post above, talking about how you'd rather be a 'maker' than a 'consumer'. And that's fine. Obviously, you can't be a maker all the time. You probably live in a house that someone else built out of materials that someone else produced using machinery that someone else made... etc. And that's fine. Most of us don't make everything we have from basic principles. Relatively few people probably make anything at all, outside of the requirements of their job. But it's not a bad goal to have, to be creative and productive in your free time.

What I take issue with, though, is saying that reading a fiction book is 'just' entertainment. Is there nothing we can learn from fiction? I studied creative writing as an undergraduate student; required to be a good writer is to be a good reader. In that sense, as I consume fiction, I'm strengthening my own base of experience for composition. And I'm not a writer who thinks that genre fiction is necessarily all rubbish. I certainly think we can learn from, say, a Dan Brown book, even though he doesn't have the canonical blessing of Dickens or Thoreau or Homer, or whoever. It doesn't mean we should emulate him, but any experience is an opportunity to learn.

And that's really my point: it's not about whether or not fiction is a frivolous use of time, it's that there are a lot of things out there that people scoff at as being 'just' entertainment, but all of these things have something to teach us. Consuming and experiencing the works of others, even in areas that we don't traditionally think of as high art, are vital parts of the creative process.

Would any of us remember Warhol if not for his inspiration by such otherwise utterly mundane things as Campbell's Soup? Where would Lichtenstein have been without comic books, which are, even today, derided as a waste of time?

Entertainment is only 'just' entertainment if you learn nothing from it and refuse to be creative, yourself. Like it or not, video games and fiction are a large part of our culture. Our immersion in this culture informs our creative choices. If we spend too much of our time consuming, it interferes with our own expressions of creativity, and that's a problem. But I don't think you should feel guilty for spending an afternoon at a book, as long as you possess the analytical ability to take something from the experience. And if you don't have that ability, you probably wouldn't feel guilty about it, anyway.

I think anyone who spends a lot of time on games past about 16 years needs some help growing up. The need to play so much indicates (to me) that they don't have enough interesting, more important things to think about.

I'm unclear on whether this dig at the end of your otherwise reasonable post is flamebait, or if I misunderstand what you mean be 'a lot of time', or if I just completely disagree with your premise. I'm far past 16 years old, and I still play games on my PC and consoles. Not every evening, not every weekend, and not the number and variety of games that I played when I was much younger. But still, regularly enough that I consider myself to be a 'gamer' when I buy PC hardware. I look forward to certain releases, like Fallout 3 or Assassin's Creed 2. I've got plenty of interesting, important things to think about. I have a full-time job in software development, and I'm starting graduate school in the fall. For me, gaming can be a fun way to relax in the evening. I don't feel compelled to think about interesting, important things at every waking moment. Do I need some help growing up, or can I spend my free time on the pursuits of my choice?

I don't think that it's clear that this is vigilantism, at all. What Downs has done is designed a multimedia interface to a series of newspaper articles in the Washington Post. It looks like she's essentially put the existing information into an effective presentation format: across the top, the attacks are organized by time, and you can click on one to get a summary, some detailed info broken out, and a map and a photo. It's a fancy, interactive infographic: The Washington Post page with the flash app on it

I'd agree that tracking a specific person's movements and making a lot of their personal information available is generally a bad thing. But, in this case, we're not even talking about a specific person. This is an abstraction: The East Coast Rapist. There's nobody for a vigilante to attack. There's no name, no address, nothing more than what's appeared in the newspaper about the guy. And I don't think it's undermining our justice system to have a clear layout of factual information like this.

Oh, I agree with you, and I see your point, and I don't think it unfair for researchers to spend their time doing the things that they're specifically rewarded for doing. But if the granting agency requires them to propose and implement a data management plan, then they will be punished for not doing so: they'll stop getting grants. When these policies of the NSF get in to full swing, that should be an obvious incentive.

The NSF has recently taken more of an interest in research data management. They're definitely starting to make it a requirement of grant funding that the research data be digitally stored, backed up, and, after a cooling-off period to allow the principal researchers to publish, made available to the public. I'm working on a research data management group at my university, and the researchers generally seem open to the idea, though they're loathe to put in any extra effort to make it work.

It seems like one of the biggest justifications for software patents is this:

Say I develop an algorithm that performs some task better than other existing algorithms. As soon as I ship my software, it can be reverse-engineered by my clever competitors who figure out my algorithm and implement it in their own software, where they can presumably undercut me on price because their reverse-engineering was less expensive than my original development. This makes me unhappy, because I feel like I've wasted my money on a new innovation. So I want to patent my algorithm so that I have a government-granted exclusive right to use it (or license it to others) for a period of time.

We have already identified several problems with this pattern. First, we feel like patents are granted inappropriately by the USPTO: the running gag (which is not all that separated from reality) is that a person can take any ordinary activity or item from real life, append 'on a computer/on the internet' to the end, and patent it. Second, we're only supposed to be able to patent 'non-obvious' things, and the determination of what's obvious in algorithms (as well other areas) is not clear. Third, since computer algorithms are isomorphic with mathematical algorithms (which are arguably not patentable), we think there's justification for software patents to be invalidated.

Now, I don't think it serves the public interest for algorithms to be patented. But here's an idea of how companies can get around this whole mess. And I apologize for the buzzwords, but this is a great opportunity to go for Software as a Service or Cloud Computing. Google, for example, has their pagerank algorithm, the specifics of which they keep secret. And since they don't deploy pagerank to customer sites, there's little opportunity for reverse-engineering. They get to keep their algorithm secret, there's no need for patents, the consumer gets the benefit of using Google's software, and competitors have to develop their algorithms on their own. Everyone wins, right?

I'm not really a big fan of always-on-line software. I don't want my stats analysis system to have to outsource its processing to another machine across the Internet. But if the makers of the software want to keep their algorithms secret, this seems like the only way to do it. And let's ditch software patents, because I think they do more harm than good.

You may be a troll, but I think this is sort of important. In a further posting, the OP notes that the real deciding factor is consent. Consent is required for a marriage (and many other legal agreements). This is why, for example, I shouldn't be able to marry the Eiffel Tower: it is impossible for an inanimate object to offer consent. This is also a refutation of the common claim that allowing gay marriage inevitably leads to institutionalized bestiality. That's just a gross-out scare tactic. A dog or cat (or any other kind of animal) is not legally capable of consent, so there is no danger of codifying a relationship with an animal as 'marriage'.

So, this argument would seem to permit plural marriage. I don't have a problem with that. As long as all the people in a relationship are freely, understandingly consenting to their arrangement, what's the problem with that? Yes, it causes some trouble with things like spousal medical benefits and taxes and other things that are based on single-partner relationships, but I think we can come up with ways to deal with those problems.

There's kind of an idea in this country that we all know what marriage is, and it's this one particular thing. But is it, really? When we talk about 'protecting the institution of marriage', whose idea of the institution of marriage are we protecting? Many Catholics, for example, would say that there's really no such thing as a divorce; marriage is an eternal bond made before God, and when you swear that oath 'til death do you part, you don't get to change your mind, later. Still, about half of all marriages in the US end in divorce. It seems pretty silly for straight people to beat the 'sanctity of marriage' drum when they can't even get it right, themselves, half the time.

The real key, in my mind, is to disassociate the legal agreement of marriage with the religious ceremony of marriage. I don't see any special reason why religious marriage should be recognized as a special institution by the government. Civil marriage contracts should be required for legal purposes, and should only be potentially coincidental to religious marriage. Why did we make the Mormons give up plural marriage? Their religion defined it as acceptable, but the majority religion in the US did not. For a country that supposedly separated church and state, we have some pretty suspiciously Christian rules in place.

p.s. - I realize that many 'plural marriages' today are little more than excuses for disgusting men to have sex with a lot of young girls. That's not really a plural marriage, at all, because informed consent and freedom to dissolve the contract are completely absent from those situations. I absolutely don't support the practice of enslaving young girls and calling it 'marriage'.

Man, remember writing init strings? That was a skill. Every new modem you got, you sat down and figured out how it interpeted the AT codes. Then, you had to fine-tune the string. How long did your line need dialtone before you dialed? How fast could you dial the numbers (in ms)? Of all my memories of dial-up, I think some of my best are of tweaking the init string so you could dial in as fast as possible. After all, there was a good chance you'd get a busy signal; you need to hang up and redial ASAP!

It's amazing to me to look at the rest of the comments and see how readily people dismiss your scenario completely and apparently without any thought. A lot of comments run along the lines of 'if a person becomes a psychopath after playing a game, he must have been one to begin with.'

Here's a big part of where I take issue. You posit a simulation that is so indistinguishable from reality that we can't easily tell the difference. Now, we play a game in that simulator that involves (perhaps even tangentially) killing people. There's no moral consequences of killing people in the simulation, obviously, since they're not really people. But what you're doing is systematically desensitizing yourself to the action of killing. You're potentially getting rewarded for doing so, invoking classical conditioning. You're using the same fundamental psychological techniques that the military uses to train soldiers not to hesitate in killing an enemy on the battlefield. I don't understand how people can claim that there's not even the slightest possibility that this activity could affect your reactions outside the simulator.

I don't have this problem with violent games, today. It's easy for me to tell the difference between GTA4 on my TV and real life. If I should run over a pedestrian and kill them in the game, it's not generally a problem. Maybe I even get a little cash! But the experience of driving a car in a video game is so different from driving in real life that they don't share the same conditioning and impulses in my brain. In real life, I avoid running over pedestrians at all costs. I am not even slightly worried that because of playing GTA4, I will go on a crime spree with the vague notion of having my car repainted at the end to escape responsibility.

Like you, though, I can imagine a game so realistic that I really couldn't immediately tell the difference. The conditioning from the game could easily transfer to the real world. It's not a technical feasibility right now to create such a simulator. But given the existence of one, I think it's absurd to dismiss out-of-hand the notion that people may err in real life because of conditioning that they've developed in-game.

Y'know, this kind of article is exactly the reason why we're always having conversations about whether or not Linux (and other FOSS) is ready for general purpose use. Here you have all these open-source advocates, telling anyone who'll listen how great FOSS is, and how it's got this low TCO. That sounds great, but then it turns out there are strings attached. You're a bad FOSS citizen if you're not contributing some completely unquantified amount back to the project. Look, guys, you can't give something away for FREE! and then start laying a guilt trip on whoever took you up on the offer. If you expect X amount of contribution from the users of the software, then you need to move to a licensing model that supports that.

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This entire, whiny article sounds like the Chotchke's manager trying to get his employees to wear more than 15 pieces of flair. If you have some expectation, then make that expectation known. Don't lie about your expectation. If you expect your employees to wear 37 pieces of flair, then make that expectation clear. If you expect users of your software to contribute in some specific amount, then make that expectation clear. But if you lie about your expectations, don't bitch about it when they aren't met.