Yeah, probably. This is definitely a great new political trick. As it was, the bill was only barely able to pass using all kinds of [documented cases of] bribery and interesting legislative tricks. If it had been called a tax in the first place, the bill obviously would not have even passed. If we can expect to see more of this, legislators can just stop using the word "tax" entirely and let the courts call it what it is. God knows there's a large enough portion of the American populace sucking on the government tit as it is and don't care care about anything besides getting more "free" stuff, getting their "fair share," or screwing the "rich" generally, but for those who do care about the details (like how to actually pay for something), there probably is a significant portion of them who are too retarded to see a spade for a spade or a tax for a tax without their legislators using the correct keywords. It obviously worked this time.

And the FreeBSD people would have absolutely not problem with this, assuming it were true. But alas, it isn't true. It just happens that most of Apple's changes aren't incorporated into FreeBSD because it just doesn't make much sense for them to be (e.g. the changes are particular to Apple products or their own operating system), but they do release those changes in the open source version of their OS (Darwin). The parts of Mac OS X that aren't open source or distributed with Darwin are mostly parts which didn't come from FreeBSD anyway. Other code released by Apple that is more general and more appropriate for FreeBSD (like LLVM) is used by FreeBSD.

Regardless, it's a common argument that the GPL has supposedly helped Linux become what it is, but that really short-changes Linux which is really just a kick-ass kernel regardless of the license. The reason Linux "won" over BSD-licensed alternatives was not because of the GPL but because of fortunate timing (USL v. BSDi was obviously a major setback for BSD) and also because Linux is a great kernel.

The GPL itself doesn't do anything to promote a strong free software environment. It just creates a lot of license compatibility problems within a community that would otherwise work better with less duplicated effort. It doesn't even succeed at forcing companies to "give back," it just forces the use of ugly hacks (see how binary blob drivers are implemented). The free software environment already incentivizes companies to "give back," without the need for complicated and incompatibility-inducing license terms, because of reduced maintenance costs (e.g. do companies really want to spend the money maintaining their own fork or patchset? really?), and there are also many good business reasons for a company to release their own code without the GPL supposedly forcing their hand (e.g. to promote interoperability with their products). It's interesting to recognize that most new code released by companies today are not copyleft-licensed but are usually licensed under an Apache license or the MIT or BSD licenses.

Stallman and the FSF should be given credit for the many positive contributions they have made to the free/open source community (GCC and the GNU userland are fantastic and well appreciated), but the GPL just isn't one of those positive contributions.

I don't know that Zimmerman did confront Martin. The operator told him he didn't need to follow, and it's unclear what happened after that because of conflicting testimony. Considering how few real facts are known, the only reasonable response is to say that I have no idea whether Zimmerman's actions are acceptable or not. However, following someone is not usually illegal. Having a gun is not illegal. And, in Florida, shooting someone and killing them with a gun is not illegal under certain (very special) conditions which you may or may not agree with, although it is the law.

Now it seems the prosecutor has collected enough facts that she thinks she can convict Zimmerman for breaking the law. A panel of Zimmerman's peers will determine whether or not he really is guilty. If he is guilty, I hope the trial is the least of his discomforts. If he is innocent, the trial will probably not be any worse than how the media and race baiters have already ruined his life, but having to battle false charges certainly wouldn't make things any easier. Whether he is guilty or innocent, let justice prevail.

Nope, it is where it belongs (in court) if the prosecutor decides to bring charges, and not before that time. It's easy to sit in your armchair and pretend to know facts that can really only come out of a thorough investigation, but there may be a time, if you ever happen to just be in the wrong place at the wrong time, that you are grateful that such things are investigated before arrests and charges are made. False charges have ruined the lives of innocent people before. The system may have flaws, but the fact that crimes (which may not be crimes) are investigated before charges are filed is not one of those flaws.

In this case--unless the prosecutor is simply bowing to pressure from the uninformed masses, which would be disgusting--the prosecutor was not convinced of George Zimmerman's story or believes his actions were not sanctioned by the current laws on the books. In that case, a trial is perfectly reasonable. If Zimmerman is found guilty by a panel of his peers, he will be punished. If not, he will walk. This is the way it should be, but only after a proper police investigation and review of the facts by the prosecutor--not the supposed "facts" you get from your nightly news anchor, but the real facts insofar as they can be determined.

On no, a big bad evil corporation is making money. I can't call myself a friend to Apple or Microsoft, but this statement is just retarded. Companies charge what people are willing to pay. A lot of people (apparently) disagree with your valuation of Apple products, and nobody was tricked into buying an iPod or iPhone. There were so many sold that there is no excuse for somebody to not know what they were getting when they threw down their money, and the cost was obviously worth it to them.

Err, where's the unintended pun? It's too subtle for me.

From the blog post:

So, this is only an issue for the Linux version of Flash. Even then, they are providing security updates for the non-Pepper version of Flash on Linux for five years. Mozilla may choose to eventually implement PPAPI just so Linux users can use the Pepper version of Flash, but that need is clearly not as great as you imply.

Nobody is saying science is religion or religion is science, just that they do not have to be at odds. Nobody is saying that when they profess a religious belief that they are doing science, just that they think they know something before it has been definitively proven to be true or false.

And no, creationism (even "strict" creationism) has not been proven false. The Bible does not say that the Earth is only a few thousand years old, and indeed it is not; it's obviously much older. The Bible does not say that the Earth was created in six days. Rather, the actual Hebrew word used in Genesis is much more vague, indicating merely some expanse of time. The Bible does say that Adam was the first human and that a woman was created from his rib, but that doesn't mean that humans did not evolve from another species which also also had some measure of intelligence.

As long as we don't know why anything exists or who or what started the universe, it's not anti-science for someone to choose to believe that God did it. On the contrary, the scientific method allows us to hypothesize before we experiment or before we even know how to perform an experiment. That's what faith is, a choice to believe, or a hypothesis.

Sanderson doesn't seem like a good fit to finish A Song of Ice And Fire. I haven't read all of Sanderson's books, but my impression is that GRRM's series is far too risque for Sanderson to handle well. I haven't read any Wheel of Time either, though, so my impression could be way off base.

Your concern is wasted on the people who actually choose to live in those places. Those who really care so much about how connected they are to the rest of the world can just as easily choose to relocate nearer to a city. The rest will continue to live happy lives as they always have. The only ones who think these people's lack of fast internet or mobile data is such a travesty are people like you who already have a fast connection and think that everyone else should want the same thing.

But don't worry. Our brilliant politicians in Washington agree with you, so they will spend millions of taxpayer dollars in order to bring 3G speeds to people that couldn't care less. Really smart. The only tunnel vision is that of those who stubbornly refuse to acknowledge that the free market is responsible for much of the good that they take for granted every day.

You're missing the point. It was said that atheism has no belief system when in fact it does; there is even an active choice what (and what not) to believe in. Those who are self-declared atheists choose to believe that life, the universe, and everything came into existence by unintelligent means. That is a belief system, and it is shared by people who identify with atheism.

Furthermore, some atheists also congregate with other atheists, and it is inevitable that culture sharing will occur and that they will come to also share a set of common moral values (even if they deny absolute truth or the eternal nature of these values). There doesn't need to be 100% agreement (or anything approaching that), in the same way that there does not exist a complete consensus among religious non-atheists on morality, but there is, without a doubt, moral sharing among a significant portion of atheists.

So, to sum up: Shared belief system, shared culture, shared moral values... atheism is definitely a religion. Even if an atheist does not congregate or explicitly share these things, it would be like a christian who only believes in his heart and doesn't associate with any organized church. Both are practicing unorganized religion, and it makes no sense to call one religious and the other not.

I understand that a lot of atheists like to think that they are enlightened and above religion (that dirty word), but logic and reason, ironically, are not on their side in this. Ironic because logic and reason (since they deny revelation) are usually important facets of the doctrine of Atheism.

You can try to trivialize it, but the truth is many of us who sympathize with Tea Party principles (i.e. small, non-intrusive government) saw PIPA and SOPA for what they obviously were (or are): another power grab by a government out of control. This should have been an issue we all could have agreed on, except it's now painfully obvious (if it wasn't before) that too many elected Democrats are in bed with Hollywood and Big Media.

I don't really share that concern. The GPL has been the major obstacle in most open source license incompatibilities long before GPLv3 came out. Most people need to look at this fairly complicated reference table in order to figure out the compatibility issues the GPL has with itself, saying nothing of the issues it has with other open source licenses. If GNU really likes the GPLv3, I say let them have it. After all, look what it's given us in just this one case: LLVM! I've appreciated GCC for a long time, but maybe competition within the open source universe isn't so bad.