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

Look, even cables get laid

Really? And what would you replace them with? An Apple Monopoly? an IBM one? Linux?

Notice how many Linux distro's are being sponsored by big companies these days? Ok, this is a good thing as part of an active OS ecosystem, but name one you'd happily hand a majority share of the OS market to.

Microsoft can't be excised from the IT world. If they, for the sake of argument, collapsed next week, there would be a worldwide IT company crash of epic proportions. We would all suffer.

Like it or not, we need them to stick around. In order to survive they will have to evolve as a company, just like IBM did. I hope they do, as much as I like Linux (and I do, a lot), I wouldn't like it if that was all there was aside from Apple's OS.

We're not over-populated. Take every single living person on this earth. All 6.6 billion. Stick them on the land mass of Texas only (none of the lakes or rivers). You'll have lower population density than greater New York City and most of the European capitals.

Now take the remaining farmland in the US, Alberta, and Saskatchewan. Don't convert an acre of forest, park, or city. No mountains, or prairies. Only the existing farmland. You can grow enough food for everyone (via a vegetarian diet).

Now take the fresh water outflow of the Columbia river - the river separating Washington from Oregon. You've got 27 gallons of fresh water per person per day.

Now put 700 nuclear plants in the deserts of Nevada. You have enough power for everyone to live at the energy consumption level of the US.

Go do the research, you'll see this all to be true. We could support every single person on the face of the earth within 40% of the North American continent. No one on any other continent, island, or waterway.

There aren't too many people; the issue is distribution of the resources. That is a political - not scientific - problem. We could feed the world and provide fresh water for everyone, if we could get countries to agree.

And note that it is almost always the country that would benefit that restricts the offer of aid. Think Myanmar, Zimbabwe, Haiti, Turkmenistan, North Korea. Those countries are stricken with poverty because of the G8 or the first world; they are stricken because twisted, maniacal leaders are power-drunk.

Overpopulated? Not by a long shot. Poor distribution? Sure. The solution is to encourage free and expanded trade - and in some cases like Zimbabwe and Myanmar - a few well placed bullets. Economic growth is required to free more people.

And when there's more people with freedom and no longer having to worry about their next meal, or their next drink of water, you'll find a lot more participation in solving other big problems facing the world.

Ok, think of the /. effect. Now take that on almost any website who's servers aren't as strong. This is basically a huge DDoS attack on many websites by AVG that has a reason behind it. But it is still a DDoS attack.

How exactly do the websites getting slammed with this bullshit traffic "not even install this part of the program" and "if you don't like it don't use it"?

Did you miss this part: (on Slashdot, we're seeing them as like 6% of our page traffic now)

So how does Slashdot "just not use" the AVG product and recover that 6% of their page traffic again?

The complaint is that they are "spamming the internet with deceptive traffic". That's a server/hosting complaint, not a user complaint about some user who can't figure out how to disable that feature.

Kudos on getting a "4 Insightful" for a ridiculously inapplicable and nonsensical response though!

The French government and courts have a long history of issuing prejudiced laws and decisions in favor of French companies (especially in cases where the opposition are American or British companies), but this is disturbing even by their standards. While ostensibly about counterfeit goods, this ruling goes FAR beyond that--giving the original producer full control of resell rights for even LEGITIMATE goods. In short, the ruling (if allowed to stand) basically says that no one actually owns any physical object anymore or can resell said object without permission of the original producer.

Want to resell your Corrola? Sorry, you have to get Toyota's permission first.

Want to resell your house? Not unless the original builder says okay!

Want to sell your soul? Well, that one you can do. Just become a French judge!