Uhh... China is a capitalist tyranny, not a communist tyranny.

Litigation tends to be the last refuge of the incompetent.

Here is evidence that a low UID does not insure a clear mind.

Maybe you should have said "frivolous" litigation is the last refuge of the incompetent"?

Litigation is one of pillars which holds up a Rule of Law and provides some path to fairness and justice in a free society. Considering the startling consolidation of social power in the hands of corporate ownership and authoritarian fanatics, you may yet see what it's like to live in a society without litigation. I guarantee you're not gonna like it, Ukab.

With a 50 year long copyright, if I produced a song as a teenager, I would still own the rights even after the time that I am eligible for my pension. With a 95 year long copyright, if I produced a song, the recording industry would be profiting off of my works for decades after I am dead.

Technically if our government was OUR government then it wouldnt' distrust us to make up our own minds about "good" or "evil", would they?

This is an argument against all embargoes and other economic sanctions. There is no difference — in principle — between banning you from going there yourself (propping up the regime with your tourism money), banning you from selling them shoes, and banning you from selling them advanced military technology. A free citizen — it can be argued along your lines — ought to be free to make their own decision. And free shareholders of a bank ought to decide, whether or not freeze a particular account. Etcaetera.

So, are you against all embargoes?

Or only against those, which target regimes you sympathize with (admit it, you own a Che Guevarra T-shirt)?

So the rest of the world has somewhere to vacation without running into Americans?

date-based is good for continuous processes, which the development isn't and shouldn't be. From the user perspective, my primary concerns are comparisons - is this driver for my kernel version? Do I run the latest kernel version? Is this function available in my current version?

Numbers are easier to compare than dates. They are also international, while dates aren't. 07.01. means 1st of July in some countries and January 7th in others.

Major and minor numbers have their place, too. They tell me something about the amount of change. I'll update from 2.6.25 to 2.6.26 without a second thought, as I expect nothing important to have changed. I'll spend a few minutes on the Changelog when I go from 2.6 to 2.7 because I expect a couple of minor things to have changed. I know that going from 2 to 3 will be a major update and might result in all kinds of incompatabilities, so I'd better make sure all my apps are ready first.

That's why I hate MS year-based versioning system. "Word '97" tells me absolutely nothing about how it compares to '95, '96 or '98. A version number would at least tell me what the manufacturer thinks it's "worth" (even though with MS that was mostly a lie as well).

And if Linus thinks that "big" (26, yeah right) numbers are a problem for people, then dates will be as well. Quick, how many releases were between 2.6.20 and 2.6.24? Good. Now quick, how many days were between January 17 and March 11? And... how many releases?

As a woman who was in science for a couple of decades, I can tell you that quotas may be bad, but, like democracy, they're better than anything else we've got.

The overwhelming majority of the gatekeepers are male, and too many of them have their heads too far up their asses to recognize merit in any female.

It's not the quality of the female scientists that is the problem. It's unconscious and pervasive bigotry on the part of the guys who hand out jobs and money. Nothing but quotas will ever force a change.

Contraire: if material that Viacom says infringes were shown to have been uploaded by Viacom, Google could argue that either it doesn't infringe, or that Viacom was, in essence, trying to entrap Google/YouTube...

what the internet has done to intellectual property is pit the little guys against entrenched dying large corporate machines. usually all the little guy can do is run and hide. but when its corporate machine versus corporate machine cast in the role usually occupied by the little guy, this is good because google can throw clout into a fight where the little guy can only hope to be popped like a zit. so precedents can fly out of this that can protect the little guy