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Comment Re:Amazing. (Score 1) 794

This is awesome and exactly right. I'd say that I wish more people felt this way, but honestly.. more people do feel this way every day. The world is changing, and it's a lot better place to be gay than it was say 20 years ago, or 20 years before that.

Comment Re:It's what you do in a foxhole (Score 2) 828

The turmoil of this issue is only beginning

Only for you and a few of your homophobic buddies. I expect you'll all keep whining. The rest of us will just go on getting the job done in a world that's slightly fairer than it was yesterday.

http://www.npr.org/2010/12/07/131857684/how-gay-soldiers-serve-openly-around-the-world

"Frank says all five countries he studied — Britain, Israel, Canada, South Africa and Australia — had major concerns about the potential effect on military effectiveness and recruitment patterns before their bans were dropped. But all five countries quickly implemented changes. And, Frank says, they experienced no wide-scale problems after the bans were repealed."

Science

A Lost Civilization Beneath the Persian Gulf? 277

Phoghat sends news of a new theory that a once-fertile landmass beneath the Persian Gulf may have supported some of the earliest humans outside of Africa. "Perhaps it is no coincidence that the founding of such remarkably well developed communities along the shoreline corresponds with the flooding of the Persian Gulf basin around 8,000 years ago... These new colonists may have come from the heart of the Gulf, displaced by rising water levels that plunged the once fertile landscape beneath the waters of the Indian Ocean."

Comment Re:Not very exciting (Score 1) 827

Your example is apt.

The XBox was closed from the beginning and will remain closed. Windows was open and will remain an open platform.
iOS was closed from the beginning and will remain closed. Mac OS X was open and will remain an open platform.

Some people look a few years down the road and see the world ending in a Mayan calendar apocalypse. Running around yelling the sky is falling is not a virtue.

Comment Re:Software is not a physical item (Score 1, Insightful) 510

This is amazingly disingenuous.

Commercial software that gets pirated is useful by definition... otherwise it would not be pirated.
Commercial software that gets pirated has no open source replacement of the same quality.. or people would simply use that instead.

So it is clearly not true that all useful software will be developed for free. This is the value of a commercial software market. By letting people copyright their work and sell licenses to use it, we as consumers have far more choices than we would if no such system existed.

Comment Re:OK So... (Score 1) 127

Yeah, there was the implication in one of the posts that basically said he was trying to obscure your surfing pattern by simply generating other random requests and mixing them in. I have trouble believing anyone who can program a computer would be naive enough to think this offered any sort of protection. But from the attitude of the people who know the details, it sounds like it really was that bad.

Robotics

Robots Taught to Deceive 239

An anonymous reader found a story that starts "'We have developed algorithms that allow a robot to determine whether it should deceive a human or other intelligent machine and we have designed techniques that help the robot select the best deceptive strategy to reduce its chance of being discovered,' said Ronald Arkin, a Regents professor in the Georgia Tech School of Interactive Computing."

Comment Re:I don't buy it. (Score 1) 571

Here's the relevant portion:

If the program dynamically links plug-ins, and they make function calls to each other and share data structures, we believe they form a single program, which must be treated as an extension of both the main program and the plug-ins. This means the plug-ins must be released under the GPL or a GPL-compatible free software license, and that the terms of the GPL must be followed when those plug-ins are distributed.

Emphasis mine. They believe it, but would it hold up in court? Especially if the plug-in is interpreted and isn't even compiled with GPL'd header files.

Comment Re:I don't buy it. (Score 1) 571

Sorry, I should have been more specific.

I don't buy the agument that "even if Thesis hadn't copy-and-pasted large swathes of code from WordPress (and GPL plugins) its PHP would still need to be under the GPL."

It's clear from the article that Thesis did copy GPL code and is violating the GPL. But the larger issue is the more interesting one.

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