You've been misinformed. I don't blame you, but you've apparently never read the GPL. It explicitly says:

You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed it. However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the Program or its derivative works. These actions are prohibited by law if you do not accept this License. Therefore, by modifying or distributing the Program (or any work based on the Program), you indicate your acceptance of this License to do so, and all its terms and conditions for copying, distributing or modifying the Program or works based on it.

Thus you are free to download and use it for any purpose, provided you do not redistribute it or derive software from it. Pretty clear.

Perhaps you meant to say there's a lot of GPL software you'd like to incorporate into your own software but you can't because of the license. You would be correct. And you won't get any sympathy either. As they say, write your own code!

How do you figure? You say there have been
dozens of lawsuits. Please name a few. Because I can't think of any. I can think of arguments over look and feel and those were thrown out. I also know the DMCA specifically allows interoperability.

NVidia's may be in gray territory morally, but legally they are completely safe (at least they were before this rubbish). Their closed-source binary blob in no way links or even refers to kernel APIs. Instead the shim layer (which is GPL and distributed as source only) compiles against the kernel and then links to the blob. This is completely legal because the actual tainting is done by the end user, not NVidia. So no, their binary drivers are not "begging for a lawsuit."

The owner of the API certainly doesn't get to determine fair use. For that matter a copyright holder doesn't have the right to define this in general. Nor do third parties. They can claim fair use, but ultimately it's decided in court, which is what Google will rightly be arguing for.

I'm no Google fan, but your claims certainly don't stand up to recent history, and they aren't reflected in the law as written and interpreted up until now.

I've never had any luck with any of these streaming stick devices. The only thing that works for me a a full-blown computer connected to HDMI.

Of course there are bugs there too. It took Gigabyte two years to release a EFI firmware that fixed the HDMI audio bug where after turning off the TV, HDMI audio would disappear until you rebooted.

Depends. In the end he died as his health deteriorated. He was one of the lucky ones that had excellent healthcare insurance. So at worst there was no change for him, which was to be expected. For others I know, it has certainly been slightly better (not a whole lot better) as they finally have some health care coverage now.

I think ultimately the ACA will only improve things slightly. Had it been introduced in the 90s I think by now it would have worked a lot better. But things have deteriorated since then, and at best the ACA slows this deterioration slightly. Healthcare costs in the US are skyrocketing, with or without the ACA. Reform is going to have to cover a much wider aspect of the industry than just insurance. Had the republicans got onboard with the ACA, that would have gone a long ways to push the industry to accept some of this stuff as well. But the guys bringing out the ACA this time had the wrong jerseys on.

Across the entire globe, regardless of system, costs are climbing pretty rapidly while at the same time infrastructure of all kinds is crumbling. It's not going to be pretty.

As for the danger of a drone strike, we can safely say that the odds of losing lives and property from such a strike are not zero, even if they are small. However if drone kiddies would act in a rational and prudent manner and get their drones out of these restricted areas, those odds drop to zero. Thus it's stupid, utterly stupid, to allow these idiots to continue endangering life and property. It's a no brainer. I hope folks turn in these people and they get slapped with some heavy fines. And if an aircraft did in fact go down and hurt someone, I'd be completely in favor of a little jail time.

I guess it's time to post a significant reward for information leading to the arrest of the person who did this. Apparently just the news stories about how stupid this is isn't enough to dissuade these idiots. So a good stiff fine is needed, and his drone seized. Hopefully that would finally send a message. Time for someone to 'fess up and spread the word to others.

Being an RC airplane enthusiast myself, it angers me to see such lack of regard for the rights and property of others. It's exciting to see such technology but unfortunately the barrier to entry is now so low that people are able to act without thinking.

I find it interesting that the principles of the affordable care act were almost entirely conceived of and proposed by the Republican part back in the 90s in response to the Clinton health care reform initiative which failed. And no matter what they claim, a Republican administration in Mass (Romney) largely implemented much of the ACA on a state level and it worked very well indeed. Why it would suddenly become so repulsive to Republicans I do not know.

During the time of the passage of the ACA, my coworker, who was going through cancer treatment and other health issues read the bill in its entirety and he felt it was not at all perfect but it was better than what we had. A lot of the FUD going around (still is) was just that. He was comfortable with the bill as passed, even if the majority of congress critters seemed to not be familiar with it. I'm glad the supreme court upheld it. It the Republicrats want to get rid of it, they need to do it the proper way, and replace it with something better. No, going back to the status quo will not work. If they would propose a better, more equitable plan, I would support it. But so far they seem to be offering absolutely nothing. If they manage to get the White House, it will be over a campaign promise to roll things back to the good old days and then do absolutely nothing. The last part sounds good actually.

During the FUD and absolute crap going around during the passage of the ACA, many people talked about socialized systems in other countries (who was it that said they'd move to Canada to get away from the ACA?). The irony of all that is that between the VA, Medicare, and Medicaid, the US gov't runs the largest socialized healthcare system in the world. And it's one of the most expensive. Maybe the gov't should merge them all together into one program, and then require all federal employees, including elected officials and the president and all his advisors to use it as their primary health care insurance provider and system. You can bet all the problems would clear up in a a matter of months! And it just might end up being a really good program.

But it's not your risk to take, nor the drone kiddie's right to take that risk. You honestly think people should be "free" to fly drones in a reckless manner that endangers the lives of others, particularly passengers on an aircraft? That's a strange idea of "freedom." What about the freedom of the pilots already risking their lives to fight the fire? What about the freedom of people just wanting to travel safely from point a to point b. Surely the pilot's freedom to fly how they need to to fight a fire overrides the freedom of some drone kiddie to get a cool look at the fire.

  Look I never said we should ban drones, UAVs, or RC aircraft. And if people would use them responsibly then we wouldn't need to regulate any part of it. But people seem incapable of understanding where the limits of their own freedom are and what their responsibilities in a free society are. Consequently regulations will come. Even ones that really do take away one's freedoms even more so.

Are you going to argue that people should be able to drive their cars anywhere they want with no regard for traffic signals, lane markings, etc? Cause it's freedom. Are you going to say, as long as they are not hitting other cars it's okay?

This sort of comment infuriates me. The fact is that flying any sort of aircraft is risky and lives are on the line, moreso with aerial fire fighting. Any risk that can be eliminated should be. A drone may be small and unlikely to damage full scale aircraft but why take that risk? To do so is foolish and stupid. Like a lot of drone kiddies seem to be. Keeping idiots with their drones away from airports, highways, fire fighting, etc should be done because it's the smart and prudent thing to do.

Yes it still works, but it's not obvious or discoverable. And it's jarring. I typically read the blurb to decide if it's interesting, then click the read more at the bottom of the blurb to read the whole thing and the comments. Also the number of comments was right there at the bottom too, which made it nice and fast to see what were the interesting stories. Now that information is in the upper right-hand corner, so I just don't notice it straight away. I guess Dice once again has forgotten the value of slashdot and the interesting aspect of slashdot is the user-generated comments. Dice seems to be rolling out the beta site with all its crap and and its de-emphasis on user-provided content, but under the guise of the classic site. Not working guys!

If someone can post some greasemonkey scripts to fix the site, that'd be wonderful. Also if we could just turn off the video bytes stuff that would be good also. And put the polls back where they belong!

In the meantime, there is soylent. It's not been very good lately but if enough people go there and comment, and submit stories, maybe it will get better and be a proper replacement.

Since the vast majority of people don't know or care and have done nothing different, we can only assume that those people that are adopting strong encryption tools must be terrorists. Because no one else would need to use weapons-grade encryption.

How do they judge whether or not a server is contributing useful information? I have two person VPSs out there that do almost nothing on the public internet. They mostly act as a place where I can store data as a form of backup, but also a place I can access when I need it to test programs, get a really fast download, etc. But most of the time these vps's just act as central nodes in my private VPN. So by their definition are my servers in the 1/3 "zombie" serviers? I pay the rent, so to speak, so I'm paying for the energy costs.

And I'm sure Windows has at least that many bugs open, if not more. And many with also never get fixed. In any case Linux (Linux Mint) still, for all its bugs, works better and more reliably for me and my purposes than Windows does. That's not to say Windows isn't more useful to many.

Ahh well that's all right then. The solution is clearly to just let industry do whatever they way, right? That will clearly benefit customers. Sure regulation does have unintended consequences. But no regulation is surely worse. We've learned that the hard way in Alberta with the privatization and deregulation of utilities. None of the promises of such action came true. There is not more competition and prices for electricity and distribution have more than tripled since we embarked down this road. Not enough regulation is clearly bad for consumers, society, and governments, and too much regulation is clearly bad too.

I agree with the other commenter that telecom companies should all be publicly-owned. Especially when they make their money by exploiting public assets such as right of ways.

Seconded! The share button is something I will never use and the lack of the read more link makes the web page a lot hard to use. Hope you'll do the right thing and stop screwing with things for change sake. Stop trying to bring the beta site back!