Many of those that will suffer pain from this spill haven't gained at all, and cannot be reimbursed for their loss. I'm speaking of non-human inhabitants of the ocean and shore.

Many of the rest that suffer pain from this spill have gained rather little, and will not be reimbursed for their loss. I'm speaking of people in the gulf region that haven't seen proportional benefits from cheap petroleum.

And the rest? Those of us that have seen great economic benefit from cheap petroleum? Our gains are only material, and only temporary.

Despite having rather little interest in this whole thing (I don't subscribe to any online music services) this is what I wondered about. Is this killing off a digital music source for Linux users? It appears so. Sadness.

Twitter isn't Facebook. It's much better.

Or, rather, Twitter is much less bad. Twitter isn't nearly so much of a time-suck. Twitter doesn't have boring profile pages. Twitter doesn't broadcast your relationship and friendship statuses to the whole world. Twitter doesn't have Farmville, Mafia Wars, or other sorts of spammy, scammy bullshit. And, most importantly, Twitter doesn't have Mark Zuckerberg, the biggest scumbag ever to start an Internet company (and that's saying something).

It's all addition by subtraction.

  - An ex-Facebook user.

Tax cheats still enjoy the benefits paid for by others' taxes; it's usually impossible to individually benefit by paying more taxes. This should be pretty obvious.

People suck, too. In high school one of my teachers accused me of plagiarism because the writing style was "too mature" for me to have done it.

There were contributing factors. My previous work in the class really wasn't very good, for one. Oh, yeah, and a bunch of kids in her honors section had just been caught cheating. They'd copy-pasted from the web and left in the font changes and blue underlined text. Oops.

I'm pretty sure she docked me a few points even though she couldn't prove anything. But that's impossible for me to prove, since there's a large subjective component to grading papers. At least in CS classes there shouldn't be much subjectivity in grading exams, and it's somewhat harder to cheat on exams.

Some other little town in rural Illinois nearly took down a big statue of Abraham Lincoln (probably in the early 'aughties) because they thought it was a terrorist risk. Fortunately cooler heads prevailed.

... is because of the proxy platform battle. Apple is managing a couple platforms now and doesn't want any of them to depend on Adobe. I'd say that includes the Mac, because so much of the Web needs Flash. If Apple can make the Web less dependent on Flash then it doesn't matter if the Mac version of Flash sucks. The less Apple has to rely on third-party support the better for them, as they have corporate developers and a developer community (including the Open Source community) that can implement standards that are open in practice (Flash is open in theory but Adobe's implementation is the only one that matters).

I'd love to see Flash die on the Web and I think Apple would, too. So our interests are a bit aligned. But I can't say I think this is the right way to go about it.

I think arguments against compatibility layers generally are silly. There's both good and bad software made with compatibility layers; ultimately the responsibility is on developers to make the UI good. Plenty of developers will make really good and useful apps using compatibility layers, and they'll be denied. Meanwhile Apple allows lots of outright crap in their App Store -- as long as it doesn't include things like, oh, political speech. Adobe may have some success striking down the compatibility layer ban -- if there are specific, tangible problems with an app Apple has every reason to keep it out of the store, but there's no reason but spite to ban it on the basis of how it was created.

Yeah, lots of engineers want to make the world a better place in some way.

They are paid by people with money in order to make them more of it. The "bonus" for the workers is that they keep their jobs.

Holy balls, man! The last thing I did was justify abusing someone's rights! Just being clear about the difference between copyright infringement and stealing. You know, like the Supreme Court does. Maybe the average person doesn't, but the average person isn't trying to have a rational discussion about copyright.

And even when you go to the average person, I think there'd be some nuance. I think an average person might consider downloading a movie on P2P something like stealing; even I think it's somewhat analogous (though there are enough differences that I wouldn't use it as the starting point for a policy discussion). But what about, for example, academics quoting Joyce in the grand academic tradition? Or playing a DVD on Linux using Free Software? I'm doing that right now, and I'm sure the right court would consider it copyright infringement. Anyone that would call it stealing is fucked up in the head.

Please stop being obtuse.

Something can be wrong and illegal without it being stealing. Copyright infringement is clearly illegal. I think most typical cases of copyright infringement (i.e. P2P piracy) are morally wrong, though I find nothing wrong with some things that people are sued or threatened for (i.e. quoting Joyce), and I think copyright terms should be short and fixed from date of publication. I don't agree with all Slashdotters on these things and that's why we argue.

I wouldn't, of course, "be OK with" someone distributing GPL-licensed code against the terms of its license, but I also wouldn't call it stealing. It's something different.

If you can't make the distinction between one and the other you can't have a rational discussion of copyright.

I'm pretty sure the only place the changes were committed was Debian patch repos. The whole thing is pretty much Debian-specific.

I think you're trying to make a larger point, so I'll make a larger semi-rebuttal. If projects only gave commit access to people that understood the whole code base they'd never get anything done. Developers with the power to commit, whether to Debian's repository or upstream, should be aware of which code they understand. They should ask questions when they don't understand something, and they shouldn't commit it until they understand the consequences.

I have commit access for Audacity and there are many parts of the program I don't know very well. That's how I operate. Anyone committing changes to OpenSSL ought to at least be as careful as I am with Audacity. I'm sure the actual OpenSSL project is a lot less permissive about giving access to their own repositories, and they probably review changes more closely.

Debian seems to carry a lot of patches against a lot of programs and doesn't seem to ensure the same level of quality. At the same time, Debian has more resources for bug tracking and user reporting than many projects, and maintains security backports for projects that are unwilling. It's a bit of a mixed bag.

I, for one, recognize the utility of Facebook. But I think that it's corrupted by its power. It can literally use any business tactic it wants and people won't leave because their friends are on it. And they've come up with some pretty awful ones. Facebook is run by Mark Zuckerberg, a man with fewer scruples than any tech magnate this side of Gates and Jobs.

The only way to influence this sort of company is by breaking the spell. You may personally benefit from Facebook but you give just as much back to the site as a network effect -- and thus give them the power to bully app developers, to invade users' privacy, to create scummy marketing programs, with no plausible repercussions. Facebook engages in many actions against the taste and interests of most of its users and never suffers for it. It's wrong.

Just quit Facebook. I did. Find out your friends' email addresses, tell them all yours, and quit the site. Send a note to all of them that you're quitting the site for ethical reasons.

Facebook's biggest hook to keep people around is their friends. They can get away with any business practice they want because nobody wants to quit on their friends. But you're not quitting on your friends. There are other ways to stay in touch.

What kind of place do you work where the whole office is supposed to keep kosher? Unless you work for a religious Jewish organization that's kind of insane.

The disclosure laws are there for a reason. If you can't satisfy their requirements in a tweet then you can't advertise pharmaceuticals on Twitter. If you can't satisfy them in a Google ad then you can't advertise pharmaceuticals in a Google ad.

This isn't affecting any one company over another or anything like that. It's just following the laws to their conclusion -- and, really, going right along with their intention. Putting a drug in your body is of much greater consequence than what company you buy your mass-produced junk from, and these laws make sure drug companies can't just do snappy, feel-good 10-second spots with no substance whatsoever like beer companies and cola companies.

A big part of advertising is repeating a brand name over and over. There's an impression made by hearing a brand name in association with positive images or text, even if you aren't very involved with the ad. The disclosure laws try to prevent companies from just spamming you with impressions and making sure there is substantial information right up front. If it's behind a link, as many of these companies propose, that's all lost. The casual eye skips over, gets the positive impression and none of the disclosure.

So... within our current framework if there's no room to disclose right up front there should be no ad at all. Maybe the disclosure laws suck, maybe the fact that drugs are advertised at all sucks... those are separate points. As the law stands now, no Twitter ads for Viagra. Yay!