May I ask which country you are from? When I look at the political spectrum here in Germany, then it is the 'right' wing who simultaneously wants to a) eliminate social services, b) massively grow 'the government' wherever law enforcement and the military are involved and c) put everyone and everything under complete surveillance. It is the left end of the spectrum who wants a leaner government in most departments and strong protections and safeguards for privacy.

Right and left does not (exclusively and universally) mean what you think it does.

For some definition of "in common", yes.

• Language? Well, Germany, Austria and parts of Switzerland, nothern Italy, northeastern France and a couple of smaller regions share one language, in one form or the other. Not much of an argument.
• Geography? If by that you mean location, Germany and France are right next to each other as well. If you refer to the type of geography displayed, Scotland has more in common with Bavaria or Tyrol, or some of the eastern European countries, than with most of England.
• History? Sure. For the most part a history of antagonism, war and the exertion of power. Like, say, Germany and Austria.
• Culture? Sure. Like any other geographically close region there is a certain portion of shared culture.

To quote myself:

[...] Could you kindly point out examples [...]

So far I have seen only vague accusations.

If a file does not have a license the "freedomites" fall back to default copyright, which in most cases translates to "DO NOT TOUCH!". Could you kindly point out examples where people who advocate usage of the GPL have deliberately taken third-party code with no license attached and released it under the terms of the GPL? Usually it is the other way around: People take GPL'd code and re-release it in closed source software.

Interesting aspect, that did not even occur to me. Thanks for pointing this out, I do not think I ever read this argument in a discussion on this issue.

The even larger problem, as I see it, is that being hired because of a quota is the ultimate stigma: "Look at her, she only got this job because of her tits." No-one takes the quota employee seriously - even when they actually are the best.

That is, I am afraid, a very naive view. Our social democrats, the SPD, - I assume that is what you meant with left-leaning - have earned themselves the nickname "Verräterpartei" ("traitors' party") amongst those who care about civil rights for the strong discrepancy between their election pledges and their actual voting in parliament. The party's functionaries usually state afterwards that they agreed to rights-infringing laws "mit Bauchschmerzen" ("with bellyache"); that phrase has become a meme over here. A lot of the draconian post-9/11 legislation was rushed through parliament under a social democrat government by then-minister for the interior Otto Schily, which is why the laws are known as the "Otto-Katalog" ("Otto catalogue" obviously, which is a play on German mail-order company Otto).

The actual left-leaning party, the LINKE or Linkspartei, unfortunately is lingering somewhere between 5 and 10% in elections and is politically isolated from all major parties including the SPD. They along with the German Pirate Party are amongst the very few parties over here that actually care about civil rights, but they still do not reach a critical mass of voters. So we Germans have to look to the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe for protecting us from an ever-growing "security" complex.

Well, thank you very much for spelling out the very reason this change is a disaster. My browser toolbar is becoming more crowded by the week, and my extensions have lost the ability to display any text in the UI but are limited to one or a handful of icons. NoScript has been significantly impaired by this.

I am all for sleek sexy interfaces and killing old cruft and clutter. But "UX" has become a term non grata around the office of late thanks to all the morons who use it as an excuse for taking away control from the user.

Some input from a medic from Munich, southern Germany. Depending on which part of town you get assigned to you the number of frequent flyers varies considerably. From experience - no statistics to back that up, sorry - our gold card members are most frequent

1. in the poorest quarters where half the calls turn out to be drunks, junkies (who usually did not intend to see us) and socially isolated, but not necessarily homeless people looking for someone to talk to, and
2. in the older, still not so fully urbanized incorporated villages where elderly people of modest wealth abound who cannot properly care for themselves anymore, whose children have moved too far away to provide constant care but who are too proud to move into a dedicated care facility.

What keeps amazing me is that in spite of my - and other medics' - prediction after the banking crisis and the ensuing wave of unemployment the number of FFs type a seems to be more or less constant but type b has been climbing steadily. So this is only partly an issue of poverty. It has more to do with social isolation, with the increasing difficulty of maintaining a robust social network (not Facebook, the family-and-friends variety) that can catch people when they face difficult phases in their life so that they do not hit rock bottom.

Medical care has long transitioned into social care that along the way can also give you a pill or sew up a cut.

And as to whether the medics are duped: Someone wants to see a doctor, you take them to a doctor. That is what the law says. That is what our job description says. We try to avoid it, believe me. We sweet-talk, we bribe, we threaten. But if the patient is adamant, there is no way we are going to assume the legal risk of refusing transportation. The ER staff is not naive, they know their devoted customers. They will make them go through hell, put them through every annoying and time-consuming test they can think of. But guess what: Because of this practice with increasing regularity they actually find a legitimate medical issue that had gone undiagnosed by doctors who just saw the addict or the annoying elderly or the lonesome hypochondriac and treated that instead of the complaints and symptoms.

In medicine there is no easy answer, no magical solution.

What exactly is the issue here? Maybe I misread TFS and the linked articles, but as I understand the chief complaint - apart from Google's delay in reporting to OpenSSL - is that some large commercial entities did not receive a notification before public disclosure. I did not dig all too deep into the whole issue, but as far as I can tell OpenSSL issued their advisory in lieu with a patched version. What more do they expect? And why should "Cisco[,] Juniper[,] Amazon Web Services, Twitter, Yahoo, Tumblr and GoDaddy" get a heads-up on the public disclosure? I did not get a heads-up either. Neither did the dozens or so websites not named above that I use. Neither did the governmental agency I serve with. Nor the bank whose online-banking portal I use. Are we all second-class citizens? Does our security matter less simply because we provide services to fewer people, or bring lower or no value to the exchange?

A bug was reported, a fix was issued, recommendations for threat mitigation were published. There will need to be consequences for the FLOSS development model to reduce the risk for future issues of the sort, but beyond that I do not quite understand the fuss. Can someone enlighten me please?

It is the other way around: Once a company deems a product uneconomical - subject to mandatory or voluntary warranty that is priced into the product anyways - to support they could simply release their internal documentation, source code, diagrams etc. to the public and be free of any further liability regarding bugs, future incompatibilities etc. That would be a fair compromise considering that IT is one of the very few industries that get away with delivering faulty, unstable and insecure products as the accepted norm. If houses or clothes or refrigerators were produced like software...

This is a decision by a regional court. They universally suck at rulings regarding any technology invented after 1900. A state court recently held a domain registrar responsible for copyright infringement. And nevermind the treasure trove of truly grotesque copyright-related rulings coming out of the city-state of Hamburg - they are legendary here in Germany, similar to patent cases in Texas.

This is bound to be appealed, and our higher courts usually fare better when it comes to dealing with Das Internet.

Considering that they are doing their best to kill fixed lines and go all IP I do not see that happening. They might very well be tempted to somehow degrade experience for any VoIP service but their own, but then we are back at the Netflix situation.

But I am sure you could fix all that, end world hunger and save the whales with a custom hosts file...

The subtle point of the Initiative that seems to be lost on you is that there exists a whole spectrum of possible implementations of copyright law in between the quasi-Hitlerian approach taken by Hollywood and the rest of the high-volume industry and the free-for-all approach envisioned by fourteen year olds in the comment section on TPB. Making sure artists are compensated for their work is one thing. Very few people seriously argue against that. But allowing the monopolisation of culture for the lifetime of several generations? Bankrupting or imprisoning people for sharing a few songs or films? We treat arsonists, drunk drivers and drug dealers less harshly than the punishments some of the high-profile filesharing cases resulted in.