I haven't served, but I have a decent amount of experience with the military.

I've met and worked with soldiers in all of the US military branches. They're really good at what they do, but they're not perfect, and they know it. As you so bluntly pointed out, there is exceptional discipline, but you can only beat people so hard before they just stop improving. Humans have limits, and despite what your commanders convinced you to believe, technology is the best way to surpass them, not more pushups.

The soldiers today are given just as much training, and they're just as good on their own as you were. Now, though, they also have better technology and better training equipment, so they're more effective than you could have been. If they need to move further, faster, they'll have a robot to carry gear so they can go the extra distance. If they need to shoot straighter, they'll have the rifle and stabilizing exoskeleton to hit their targets. If they need to watch a building for hours, they'll have a drone do it without putting a soldier in a vulnerable position.

It doesn't matter whether you trust your "good shooting mechanics" or your equipment. You are there to complete a mission, for which you are to use every means at your disposal. That desire you have to be "good with your firearm" should have been a desire to complete your mission properly. Giving up any advantage for fear of being "soft" is not honor or duty. It is stupidity.

That is correct, and normal.

You do not have an inherent right of ownership over his code. His code is a derivative work of yours, and your merged codebase would be a derivative work of his.

By modifying your code, he has created a new work, which is permitted under the terms of the earlier-version GPL. He then releases his new complete work (which includes your parts). That's also permitted under the earlier-version GPL, as long as he releases the source code. When someone wants to use the new work, they're required to have a license to it. He offers the user a later version of the GPL for his new work. Your parts are now covered by the earlier version if the user gets them from you directly, or the later version if acquired from the modifier.

In your case of merging back changes, his changes are part of his new work, which is covered in its entirety by the later license, regardless of the fact that your code is included. It's no different from merging in a bit of MIT-licensed code or even a proprietary routine: you have to comply with the terms of the license. For a later-version GPL, that means your new combined derivative work would have to be compatible with the later-version GPL.

In short, the core idea is that your codebase is a new work every time you change and republish it. To "accept changes back into my codebase" is actually creating a new derivative work, and it must be properly licensed as any other derivative work must be, regardless of your involvement in the work's ancestry.

The primary purpose of a criminal justice system is to keep society functioning peacefully. If a fugitive can hide with freedom for long enough that the statutory time limits expire, then he has demonstrated his ability to function in society. From a philosophical point of view, he has provided solid evidence of his rehabilitation, whether he needed it or not. A trial and further punishment would serve only vengeance, not justice. Similarly, even if the police know where a fugitive is hiding, the cause of justice is still being served. By the time the limits expire, Assange will effectively have served a minimum-security prison sentence. In theory, his unenforced incarceration will be a reminder to him in the future to follow the law.

As far as the law is concerned, someone in Mr. Assange's situation has already tried himself, found himself guilty, and isolated himself from society at large just as a prison sentence would. At this point, the only arguments are ideological: whether the state would give him a fair trial, possibly allowing him to be more free than he currently is. By staying in the embassy, he prevents the trial from taking place. That's why statists (who tend to see trials as being mostly fair) see it as a sign of guilt, and anti-statists (who expect the trial to be pessimal) see his retreat as a last-resort way to escape persecution.

Then you most likely have a population in the hundreds of millions, a very small proportion of which are actually under investigation. While I certainly agree that they should be a "rare" and "extreme" measure, I just don't find it unreasonable to believe that one person in a hundred thousand is under a wiretap-requiring investigation.

Read the license from the perspective of your users. If a later GPL version adds new protections against software patents, API copyrights, or whatever else the legal system dreams up, the users can opt to follow the terms of that license. If, in a moment of collective insanity, the FSF publishes a less-free GPL, the user can opt to use the earlier version your software was originally released under.

That clause actually ensures that the current version establishes a minimum set of rights.

Precisely... the two ideas are independent.

If his investments are publicly-traded, selling his stake does nothing. The companies he's invested in won't lose his money, because he'd just be selling to another individual, so "his money" becomes "the other guy's money". If it's a private investment, where he may be contractually limited in what he can do, then the whole discussion is rather moot. He may be able to sell his way out of the investment, which would reduce the company's operating capital somewhat, but unless he's a major shareholder, the impact on the company will be minimal.

On the other hand, if he keeps his investments, he likely gets votes in how the company operates. Being Bill Gates, he probably gets a few more votes and can bend a few more ears than regular folks can. If the investments do anything, good or bad, that's where it lies... they give Mr. Gates the ability to push the fossil-fuel companies in a more environmentally-friendly direction.

Indirectly, we did that.

We earned our income, and contributed our taxes to a big pool, and we elected legislators to decide if we should invest in SpaceX, industry bailouts, balancing budgets, military expansions, welfare programs, or any of the millions of other programs that all want a piece of the subsidy pie.

Ah yes, the fictional Founding Fathers, who (as revisionists would have you believe) had the foresight to predict 200 years of technological, cultural, and societal changes...

Most of those legislative ancestors had slaves, and according to primary sources, they treated those slaves about as well as any of their peers did. They held pretty normal views on most societal issues of the day, with a bit of irritation at specific injustices perpetrated by the British colonial government. From a historical perspective, the Founding Fathers were not radical liberals, or ultimate paragons of social justice. They were mostly wealthy middle- and upper-class colonists, primarily distinguished from other rebellious colonists by the fact that they played a very good political game to gather and sustain support during their revolution.

We could simply say that they had the realistic foresight to build a government that is merely able to change with society, but that won't reinforce that lovely pedestal we hold so dear. Instead, we project our own morals onto the deceased diplomats, and assume that they support our causes.

This is not to say anything about whether the recent decision being good or bad. Rather, this is a plea to give credit where credit is due. The recent legal changes originate with the recently-changed opinions of American society as a whole, rather than the opinions of a few long-rotted corpses. This is why a public awareness campaign is so important, and why complaining about politicians accomplishes so little. Whether you approve of the current law or not, we did this together, for better or worse.

The right thing to do would be to make engineering toys that aren't "for" anyone.

Make a toy that stands on its own merits, then market it to everybody. It's not a "science kit for girls", it's just a science kit, and it's advertised across all applicable demographics, regardless of gender.

I did not say both were equally probable. I said they're equally reasonable, which is to say that believing either requires no more of a leap of faith than the other, and neither has more evidence than the other.

Perhaps we should apply the same examination to this "law of nature" as you have to the idea of a supernatural being?

The theories which underlie the idea of a spawned universe are conjecture, based on the idea that our universe exists in an unobservable space adjacent to another universe, and that given the right set of circumstances, our universe could have been created, with the initial collapsing quantum effects being manifest in now-our dimensions as the Big Bang.

Unfortunately, we have no proof of this. We can invent mathematical theories that come close to describing a multiverse where such an event is possible, but we have no proof that those theories are actually correct. There is no surviving evidence of their use in the Big Bang, and currently no means to travel beyond our universe to observe those "laws of nature" directly. To note your final concern, those theories also have not produced any testable predictions, as far as I know.

In short, such a "law of nature" is as much a human invention as a story of an extradimensional intelligence that likes to create sentient creatures in his spare time. For the purpose of satisfying the human desire to know everything, both are sufficient tales.

There is precisely nothing, apart from ignorance, that isolates a church from science. It is worth nothing that the ignorance to which I refer is both yours and the church's.

The point of a faith is to reconcile the human desire for knowledge with the understanding of the unknowable. Humans are smart enough to grasp that there is a limit to our observations. Common limits are the experience after biological death, the spacial boundaries of the universe, and the historical events prior to the Big Bang. These are things that currently we do not know about, and cannot know about, beyond vague guesses. Those guesses are a mix of the very-limited theories we have (like assuming that the rules of our universe extended before our universe had formed) and pure faith. It is just as reasonable to say that a God created our universe as it is to say that another universe deformed and spawned our dimensions.

Between the extremes of "known" and "cannot be known", however, there is a wide gap of "we don't know yet", and that is the domain of science. Science gives us the ability to know more, and push the unknowable limits out further. We may be able to invalidate a few religions with our discoveries, but there will always be certain limits to our knowledge, and beyond those limits, faith will still hold sway.

There are a few churches that have not only accepted the role of science, but embraced it. Now the pope is saying that climate change is not a matter of faith, but of science. He's acknowledging that we know enough about our planet to know that we can affect it, despite previous assertions by more-ignorant church members that only God could affect a planet's climate. This does not invalidate the religion, but merely declares that science is still something for humans to deal with, not deities.

It's actually cheaper than trying to maintain only a loose synchronization. You just use prebuilt time equipment, which is almost always built for unnecessary precision, and have the service stop if the times are too far out of sync (indicating that a server stopped getting updates). If you have several servers in several sites, a single site losing its time service is not a big deal, as the service will fail over to the other sites. However, if none of your time clocks can handle the leap second, you'll lose all of your servers at the same time, as they all realize they aren't getting updates.

It's a hazard of having a uniform environment. Unfortunately, uniform environments are also far more cost-efficient to manage.

Similarly, a five-minute offset will prohibit logins and group policy updates. If your Windows Time Service configuration is pushed via group policy, you're kinda screwed, and you'll need to have a local admin on site to nudge the clock in the right direction.

It's a forum that gets Slashdotted all day, every day.

I know a guy who wrote about some of his research, and it was Slashdotted. He analyzed the traffic pattern, and though I can't find that analysis any more, he estimated the budget it'd take to survive the story's front-page run without downtime. It was not a small number.

Extrapolate that to running all day, every day, and serving more than a simple static HTML page, and even with the improvements in technology, we're still going to be dealing in numbers where the rounding error is larger than the staff's paychecks.