If I had mod points I might mod this insightful.

I couldn't figure out what their angle here is. They will lose on the arguments they are putting out.

Now, Scientology doesn't really care if they win or lose a case, as long as they gain something or damage an enemy worse.

This wouldn't damage the enemy at all if they lost. I couldn't see what they'd gain in a loss.

But as you point out, they may be able to start waving the persecution flag and gain some beneficial PR out of this. Now it's starting to make sense.

A smarter defense, that might actually stand a snowballs chance in hell of winning, would be to run with the context of the Scientology content of this training.

Their argument basically should be "Yes, we used some content from and inspired by Scientology in developing this training material. However, we did not teach the religious content of Scientology, only management and study techniques that are equally applicable to secular life"...

That might actually work.

While Perl is a wonderful language, it is not at all easy to learn. Many of the features it has to make things easier on daily users will just utterly confuse a newbie.

I'm sure an introductory programming course could be designed to use Perl succesfully, but with Python and Ruby out there... why bother with the effort? Both have the same advantages to a beginner, without the disadvantages.

I will say that Perl is my favorite language, but it just isn't for a complete beginner to programming.

Pre-.NET VB I'd agree. That language was a mess. It theoretically had the language support for proper programming practices, but it was a ridiculous pain to actually code that way.

VB.NET changed that a great deal. It's actually good.

That said, I've seen books, and the VB course I took in college, that did little more than update VB6 material to use VB.NET syntax. This is not going to work. VB.NET was not a simple syntax update, it is basically a new language with a few coincidental similarities. It's about as close to VB6 as C# is to C.

Easy because theres no sense teaching him a more difficult heavy duty language if he's just going to dabble and give it up.

Multiparadigm because if he does stick with programming, he'll be able to learn a much wider variety of concepts and problem solving strategies from day one. Even if he ends up working in a single paradigm language later on, he'll benefit from the exposure to other techniques.

I'd probably look at either Ruby or Python. Both support multiple paradigms, both are fairly easy to use, both are capable of modern, real world work, and both are available on multiple platforms.

Does she deserve the punishment headed her way?

Yes, I believe she does.

But if the law does not recognize the act as a crime, then they should not be punished under the law.

Those who would pursue charges against her have two real options.

The first option, and the ideal one, is to find a law that more clearly criminalizes her conduct.

The second option would be to push for new laws to be made to cover future offenders. While this would leave Lori Drew unpunished, that is a necesary price for a nation where the rule of law is applied fairly and impartially. It may also be appropriate to pursue this along with option 1, to strengthen the applicable laws that did exist.

Stretching the law they used this far sets a dangerous precedent and spits in the face of the rule of law.

At first I liked the verdict, because I really think that the conduct involved should be a crime, at least on some level.

But yeah, this has much wider and scarier implications than i first realized. Really obvious too, I normally pick up on things like this. Don't know why I didn't this time.

If this stands as is, it really is a troubling precedent.

That said, I do think what Lori Drew did should be a crime(assuming that the suicide can be tied to her conduct). But it will require a new law with enough specificity to avoid the pitfalls this verdict creates. Maybe extend manslaughter to include harassment that unintentionally leads to suicide of the target?

You have something of a point here. While such a course would be useless to actual science majors in college or university, it could be quite beneficial to others.

The article goes into a lot more than that. It details how this problem is effecting science classes taken by people headed into science and engineering fields, not just the general classes everyone takes. It also highlights problems with the standardized test regimen in the UK, and the disgustingly low standards for a pass.

And can set the terms for use of their software, and provision of their support, as they see fit. They can set terms in their partnership contracts restricting what those partners can do with the software, that would take precedence over the license of the software itself. This does, of course, assume that they themselves hold copyright on all code covered by their commercial license and partnership contracts, or have secured permission from the copyright holders for distribution under these terms.

That said, if you simply download the GPL version and then have nothing to do with them or their partners, you are still free to do anything with it that the GPL normally permits, provided their GPL version does not use an altered GPL.

When I was in, there were several applications we used for various mapping tasks that required us to insert CD-ROMs full of the map data.

We only had CDs for roughly half the region we were concerned with, and this totalled a couple hundered CDs.

While hard drive space and bandwith has gone up tremendously since then, its a safe assumption that the amount of data involved has also grown tremendously.

Unless this order has some exceptions, this could be a serious blow to the effectiveness of some units and duty sections, that would outweigh pretty much any benefit that could plausibly come of this order. Doesn't matter how secure you are if you can't do your job in the first place.

Good luck. It would be great if NCSoft did something, even explicit authorization for server emulation I think would be a great way to retain some goodwill. Actual code release would be ideal, but there may be other companies code in there that they aren't authorized to release. You guys may want to retain an attorney to help on that, unless you've already got one in the group willing to help out.

Server emulation may be a second best solution, but at least it would allow the game to survive in some form.

If the employee is required to be present, they should get paid. It's really that simple.

If the relevant laws in the states concerned don't reflect that basic principle, those laws should be changed.

It may be the case that support is generally longer term(I haven't looked at in depth personally) with open source. The problem is there is no guarantee, and outside of a few vendors like Red Hat or IBM, the developers don't have the resources to credibly commit to a guarantee even if they wanted to.

It goes like this.

Software A is an open source project from a reputable developer with a likely term of support of 5 years.

Software B is a commercial project from a reputable vendor with a guaranteed term of support of 3 years.

Most buisinesses, if support duration become the deciding factor, will go with Software B because they can count on that duration. They can count on Software B being around, they can get compensation if the term of support is not upheld.

Software A would require significant contingency planning in the event that needed support dissapeared early. Chances are they wouldn't be able to recover anything for the early withdrawal of support, even if the developer gave legally binding guarantees the chances the recovery would be enough to matter are not very good.

This certainly isn't to say that Software A is never a good business decision, for instance if Software A fully covered needs and Software B was merely close, A would probably be chosen. Or if the cost of Software B was judged to be greater than the risk of Software A support going away.

There are good reasons to take OSS into businesses, but expected duration of support is not typically one of them.

Obviously, if you get your OSS from someone like IBM or Red Hat, their OSS offerings would fall more into the Software B category.

Open source developers have jobs, families, expenses, other hobbies. While long term support would be ideal, and I suspect most developers probably want to give it, it isn't always practical.

If they've got the spare time and can afford the expense, I'd say providing support to a comparable duration of similar commercial products is ideal.

If that isn't practical, or was but no longer is, dump all your support documentation into the tarball so people can find their own way or someone else can take up the support job.

Most projects situations will probably land in between those extremes.

Just be glad you have the software. The bulk of open source development and support work is on a volunteer basis. Don't forget this.

For this database you need, perhaps you can email the last maintainer and ask for a copy of the last version? Then you can host it yourself, they will probably be quite happy to see someone help them out on that.