Significant enough numbers of grown-ups are sufficiently unable to act like grownups that yeah, the rest of us really do need to fix it.

More importantly, this is not new. Interpersonal struggles and conflict are as old as humanity itself, and we've discovered, as a species, that we really do benefit from having rules, laws, guidelines, and social norms to help us navigate these choppy waters.

"Just deal with it like grownups" is a cop-out philosophy of managers not wanting to do their jobs and employees not wanting to grow beyond what they already are. "Just deal with it like grownups" means nothing more than "I don't like dealing with the strife and drama that is the human condition, therefore I'll pretend that MY employees/co-workers are somehow magically above all that."

Lastly, if you think that the world has survived without people having done anything to fix this, well, you haven't been paying any attention at all.

That might save them from being sued by the users but not the publishers. They are creating unauthorized derivative copies of copyrighted works.

That's illegal.

A third party can't waive your right to defend your IP.

LK

It appears that China does care if you want to smoke at least one certain non-tobacco plant in China, at least.

OS X, unless you're willing to violate the license and whip up a Hackintosh, requires a computer from Apple. Linux doesn't, so, unlike OS X, it's less likely require you to buy a new computer in order to be able to use it.

Code that thinks it's cheap to look at all volumes needs to be introduced to reality. Spinning disks up isn't even the worst case; think about attempting to contact a remote volume mounted from a slow server, or a server on a slow network, or a disconnected server.

Not Al Gore, given that he went to Harvard, not Yale.

There was an 11 year hunt for Bin Laden

Was there? The whole thing was classified at best. Keep in mind that Bush explicitly stated that he dhttp://news.slashdot.org/story/15/06/07/0313256/everyone-hates-harvard#idn't care about Osama anymore, once he got into Iraq.

why are we making video games that intimidate wider and wider ranges of people?

Given the millions playing LoL, I don't get the impression that they "intimidate" anyone. On the other hand, there are people who like to play the game AND like seeing people play it at the highest levels possible, and this is true for many games.

Nintendo has already shut down Smash Bros. tournaments

They have? Last I checked they have since backtracked to the point of sponsoring some tournaments. Which one did they shut down?

Capcom routinely requires royalty payments to hold Street Fighter tournaments

If you're for-profit charge people to watch, yes.

Once more publishers adopt that practice, e-sports leagues may have to move to developing games for distribution under a free software license.

The leagues aren't relevant if no one plays the game. And given the leagues are usually for-profit, I'm not understanding the problem...?

Well, on thing that might not be going on inside those blobs is "running on the CPU". The Intel download page for the firmware says of the GuC firmware:

GuC is designed to perform graphics workload scheduling on the various graphics parallel engines. In this scheduling model, host software submits work through one of the 256 graphics doorbells and this invokes the scheduling operation on the appropriate graphics engine. Scheduling operations include determining which workload to run next, submitting a workload to a command streamer, pre-empting existing workloads running on an engine, monitoring progress and notifying host SW when work is done.

and of the DMC firmware:

DMC provides additional graphics low-power idle states. It provides capability to save and restore display registers across these low-power states independently from the OS/Kernel.

The first of those sounds as if it runs on the graphics processor - the host submits work to the GPU, and it schedules the work to be done. The latter of those sounds as if it might run on the graphics processor as well, saving and restoring the display registers from within the GPU.

So this might not be running in the driver at all; the driver might just be loading that firmware into the GPU.

The Markovian module (although, by comparison to Mr. Shaney's posts, that was, well, rather broken Markovian; perhaps it was published by the Dissociated Press).

Can you prove that the microcode running in the GPU isn't a binary-blob-in-Flash that will spy on you? What makes these binary blobs special?

Because I run Linux on VMs when I'm trying to do platform-specific work (and, as a core developer for a library with rather a lot of platform-dependent - and platform-OS-version-dependent - code implementing those attempting-to-be-mostly-platform-independent APIs, there's a fair bit of that involved).

As a result, I want to spend as little time as possible dicking with the OS, leaving as much time as possible to actually adding new capabilities and fixing bugs. Ubuntu seems to do a good job of that; if you have another distribution to recommend for this, please do. Note that, whilst I haven't yet had to do any kernel work (other people fixed the kernel issues before I got around to building a kernel with my changes), I'd like a distribution where the process of building and installing a new kernel is as simple a process as possible. Fedora fails here. (In the OS on which I last did kernel work, it's pretty much

make; mv /mach_kernel /mach_kernel.save; cp mach_kernel /; reboot

and it was, as I remember, similarly simple in the previous UN*X on which I did kernel work.)

"Sold here in the UK" does not necessarily imply "not built in India". The current 105 is another fine Microsoft product. I suspect it's built by Nokia at the aforementioned Indian facility; if not, it's probably built by Microsoft at one of the factories that Nokia did sell them.

By this, do you mean "the corporation named Nokia manufactures, in addition to mobile telephony infrastructure equipment, mobile phones", or "there are mobile phones that happen to be sold by Nokia", or "the corporation named Nokia makes mobile phones that they sell"?

If the former, are you referring to the phones made by Nokia's Indian manufacturing facilities? Those were one of the parts of the Devices and Services business not sold to Microsoft, as part of the deal selling most of that business to Microsoft, due to them being "subject to an asset freeze by the Indian tax authorities as a result of ongoing tax proceedings"? If so, that press release says that Nokia will use them to "produce mobile devices for Microsoft", so that they're Nokia-made but not Nokia-sold. I.e., Nokia is just acting as a contract manufacturer for Microsoft here, so they make phones in the same sense that, say, Foxconn makes phones; it's not clear that they have a long-term interest in being in the featurephone business. (Yes, I am familiar with the term "featurephone".)

Microsoft appear, at least for the short term, to still be interested in making featurephones, so, if, as, and when the tax issues are resolved, Nokia may sell the Indian facilities to Microsoft as well, finishing the job of getting rid of their mobile phone handset business.