This kind of thing sounded cool and amazing in Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age, but in real life it's just fucking creepy and perverted.

The key difference is that Stephenson's version was a primer that educated the owner about maths and science and all sorts of things, while this abomination is from a company that has a history of marketing to and exploiting children, and is a doll whose purpose is to teach rigidly oppressive gender roles, teaching girls things like "math is hard".

sadly, Stephenson's version is probably only possible in fiction. In real life, the corporate profit motive makes it just marketing spyware.

those are not the only two options available.

even five year olds can see through bullshit false dichotomies, why can't libertarians?

why all the attention?

because he's a narcissist who takes any opportunity at self-promotion. his gun-fetish is just a means to that end, the consequences of his actions don't matter as long as he gets some publicity.

in short, just another libtard psychopath.

I propose making it a crime to say "IP" or "Intellectual Property" unironically as propaganda can cause severe damage to both the thought processes of individuals and to the judicial processes of society.

So propaganda is OK merely because it's old? In that case, how old does a propaganda term have to be before it becomes legit?

copyright infringement was called "piracy" back then in an attempt to make it seem like an actual crime, and one of the worst crimes rather than a relatively harmless evasion of rent-seeking monopoly.

BTW, corporate tax evasion sounds like a harmless white-collar crime, so i propose calling it paedophilia just so that the public understands how dangerous and destructive the crime really is. In a century or two (perhaps less), that should be OK, because propaganda is OK as long as it's traditional.

Key differences between offline counterfeiting and online piracy that the copyright maximalist fascists are glossing over include:

1. counterfeitiing of physical goods is a for-profit activity, online piracy is, mostly, not. copyright laws already have higher penalties for commercial piracy (e.g. selling copied CDs or DVDs) than non-commercial piracy.

2. counterfeiting is trademark infringement, not copyright infringement. it's comparing chalk and cheese. copyright and trademarks are two completely different, unrelated things with completely different laws and rationales.

3. counterfeiting also affects the consumers and is often an act of deception against them. In some cases, that doesn't matter much (where the buyer knows they're buying a "fake" because, e.g., one t-shirt or handbag or gaudy watch is pretty much the same as any other), in other cases it matters a lot because the consumer can get an inferior, or at least wildly different, product to what they thought they were buying.

Pragmatism is only a secondary concern for free software (as opposed to open source).

People who license their software under copyleft terms don't want people who wont license their software as copyleft to benefit from their work. In that sense, them wasting their time is also the GPL working as intended. If they're not willing to pay the license "fee", then why the hell should they benefit? In other words, if you won't share, then write your own code or pay a commercial licence for proprietary code.

The GPL is more than just a software license, it's a political statement and political action about sharing and freedom for ALL users, not just for a handful of developers who want to use other people's work for free. If you want to benefit from sharing, then you also have to share.

if you don't like it or don't want to accept the terms, that's fine - but write your own code.

under international law, it is illegal for a country to render a person stateless.

i.e. it is (or can be) legal to revoke citizenship of someone with dual citizenship, but not to revoke it for someone who is a citizen of only one country.

(this is the loophole that the australian government is currently considering exploiting in order to punish australian citizens with dual citizenship who go to, e.g., syria to fight.)

no, it's not the mistake of a junior dev - it's quite clear that vmkernel is entirely based around the linux kernel, most of the code is linux with some changes and additions.

either:

1. they're recklessly ignorant about software licenses

2. they're unable/unwilling to see the difference between BSD licensed code and GPL licensed code

3. they thought they'd get away with it, either because they thought nobody would notice or because the legal costs of license enforcement would be prohibitive.

if someone sees the terms of the GPL and then chooses not to use GPL-ed code, then that is the GPL working as intended. You're only supposed to use GPL code if you are willing to pay the licensing "fee", which is that your derivative work can only be distributed under the same terms.

If you choose not to use GPL code, that's perfectly OK. That's not a bug in the GPL, it's an intended feature.

vmware's fault is that they chose to use GPL-ed code while refusing to pay the license "fee". This directly harms not only their users (whose GPL rights to the derivative work they've bought from vmware have been infringed) and Christoph Hellwig but also everyone who has ever contributed in any way to the linux kernel, as those contributions were made with an expectation that any derivative work would only be distributed under the terms of the GPL.

i'm very much in favour of regulation of businesses, but that's one of the things that I think the government has no business regulating. Govt SHOULD be regulating google's surveillance of the public, google's business practices, google's tax evasion and many other things, but the content of google's website should be beyond their ability to regulate.

it's their site, their search engine - it's entirely up to them what criteria they use for ranking pages and when and how they change that algorithm. Nobody has a *right* to either appear on google's search or to a particular page-ranking.

and from a pragmatic POV, changing the ranking algorithms is the only way that google can keep ahead of SEO spammers and the like who would otherwise make search engines complely fucking useless because you'd never find anything but spammed crap.

it's not a binary choice to regular google or to not regulate "Google-level internet entities" - of course they should be regulated, humans need protection against corporations, but it's a matter of which things can and should be regulated and which should not.

SJW.

Girls are for marrying.
Read the bible.

Rapist or wannabe.

Girls are for doing whatever they want to do.
Read the law.

now that i think about it i can see that you're absolutely right -saying "come and murder people for god" is totally acceptable and preventing people from saying it is just as bad - worse, even - than beheading people.

Christians don't want to take over the world for the same reason that corporations don't want to take over the US, the same reason that Rupert Murdoch doesn't want to take over News Corp or Fox.

they thought nothing of snowden because they're too busy being distracted by important stuff like blue-white dresses and llamas.