maybe the lawyers can double as walls instead?

So... the idea is that "flying humvees" can drive most of the way, and fly over the dangerous parts, right? Now the only question that springs to mind is, how do they know which parts of the way to fly and which parts of the way to drive?

Do I think this should be a firing offense? Sure. It's simply bad stewardship to make the network crash with you.

Do I think this is a criminal offense? Nope, not really. I'd give him the benefit of the doubt that this wasn't about extortion (for money or career opportunities), and more about there being no proper protocols in place for transferring control - something his superiors should have worked out long before this happened.

Any other person in any other position would simply have been given the sack. If it was critical they have the passwords (ie. rebuilding the network would cause enormous disruption) his superiors should have foreseen this. What if he got hit by a bus? What if he simply forgets (dementia, amnesia, whatever).

This trial always seemed to me as a clash of personalities, than about actual harm done (or even intent to harm).

And sentencing in the US is just completely bonkers.

As someone who actually used Bluetooth headsets (A2DP, HFP, HSP) both with and without Pulseaudio (through alsa, or through gstreamer plugins, whatever) I can honestly say Pulseaudio provides a superior solution.

As for latency: with BT there's some inherent latency, independent of the software stack. If you mean sync issues, BT (even on A2DP) has no way of reporting back latency. So Bluetooth sucks, not PA.

Only if you call Mono an emulator too. Or if you call Glib/GTK or QT on Windows a "Linux emulator".

I see Wine as an (alternative) implementation of the win32/win64 API and libs.

The TP-LINK TL-WR1043ND seems to be a pretty good deal.

802.11n, gigabit ethernet, usb2 port, ath9k-based and pretty cheap. Anything else you'd need?

Well you're talking about the US two-party system, which seems to not have failed completely yet - a good counter-point that proves it can still work.

However, I was referring to the upcoming UK elections. Tell _me_ with a straight face that voting for the Tories in 2001 would have avoided the UK to invade Iraq.

The two parties in the US are still very different, I agree (the examples you listed prove that). What happens when they no longer are, and become increasingly out of step with what the middle wants? Is there any way then still to redress the balance? I think an important property of a good governance system is how easily it can be fixed when things go wrong.

I suppose I could be on the fringe, but as you say my perspective doesn't matter. I used a big issue like the Iraq war as an example because for that issue it was clear there was never any popular support for it in the UK. Yet the electorate was unable to avoid any of it, and felt they were unable to punish Labour for their mistakes in the general elections of 2005, because the Tories were on the same side on this issue.

Vote? When the only voting options are two parties that make the _exact_ same decisions?

So you want people to vote, as long as they can't actually affect policy - right.

I'm not claiming it wouldn't have happened, I'm saying in a two party system the electorate can't punish them for this decision to go to war (UK case), or for anything else the general public thinks were bad decisions. So the two parties end up being nearly unaccountable.

Also, the two parties tend to stand for such a broad range of issues, that it's very difficult for the electorate to express what they find good and bad in them. With a coalition government system, if there's an election, and a single party of a coalition takes a hammering while the other parties in the same coalition improve, it gives a much better hint at what the electorate is unhappy with.

I see it in terms of a spectrum with direct democracy (ancient greece style) on one end, and oligarchy or dictatorship on the other end, with the government systems we're discussing somewhere in between. I believe "FPP"/two-party systems are much less democratic and aren't kept in check as much as coalition governments.

Now democracy is a means to an end, i.e. good governance; and if a bit less accountability and more concentration of power leads to better governance, then fine. But that's not what I'm seeing from where I'm sitting. Your claim is that two party system is pandering to the middle. But the way I see it is that the middle is dragged to wherever the two parties want to take it - because the middle has no choice in the matter anyway.

It's my impression that "the middle" in the US seems far more on the right than in a lot of other parts of the world. Is it because the US people are inherently more right wing, or because that's where the two parties went, and for lack of choice the electorate followed?

What do you do when both major parties don't pander to the middle or the will of the general population, and take the country into a direction that the general population doesn't agree with. There's few people who will "risk" not voting for a fringe party in a FPP system.

Take how the war with Iraq was viewed in the UK for instance - the general population was completely against it, it was a very important issue with many lives in the balance, yet both parties were dead set on doing it anyway. How can a voter punish them, really (we'll see what happens om May 6 I suppose)? I'm not from the UK, but from an outside perspective it seems to me that "New Labour" has become pretty much as right wing (I suppose I should say social conservative) as the Tories, based on their decisions in the last ten years.

Coalition governments try to find common ground in their programs. Single (or few) issue parties also make more sense in coaltion governments, and if anything the will of the people gets communicated better to the politicians. IMHO.

Even so, that's at least 2%, and what's left from "a vast majority" that most likely is still licensed under the GPL.

And in addition to this, I suspect you'll have a hard time convincing people that it isn't a "derivative work" of a GPL codebase, even if you have rewritten most of it.

Remember why for example the broadcom reverse engineers have two teams: one to look at and document the proprietary code, and one to implement a driver based on the documentation. They have to make sure the new driver isn't a derivative of the proprietary code - in the Nexuiz case it's in the other direction.

I have no stake in this; I was just curious if things were handled appropriately in this case.

Indeed - there's a few studies that show that excessive prison sentences don't act as a deterrent. Only increasing the likelihood you get caught does.

So criminals don't care whether they'd have to go to prison for 5 years instead of 2. However they do care if they feel that it's twice as likely to get caught than before.

But politicians actively go for the quick fix of increasing prison sentences, instead of improving the organisation and funding of the police and the courts.

I don't think the Gimp UI is perfect, but I don't particularly like the Photoshop UI either. However there's several features and functionality in Photoshop that GIMP could adopt (and I suspect they will soon). But I'm not sure a Photoshop clone (UI wise) is what they should be aiming for.

While I might agree with you on the GPL, do you really think they'd sit down and write a BSD version if there's a LGPL version?

Another option might be a DECT cordless phone network - I vaguely remember it being used in Italian city centres as an alternative to cell phones.