This is why I reject morality and go with ethics instead.

s/hardware/car/

There is actually a precedent. There is the right to repair laws in EU that demand that hardware manufacturers make the error codes and service interfaces available to anyone.

That is true for anything the person has valuable including banking codes. It doesn't mean they should not have access to their bank account.

Better news is that Linux hardware and windows hardware will diverge and we are excused from paying the tax. Or manufacturers provide an override. Or windows will get exploited to load Linux. And windows 7 is here to stay for the next decade. Nothing will stay locked if there is a need...

I think what your daughter describes is pretty much how you teach someone with Asperger's to consider others. It takes a lot of patience but it might actually work. Your daughter has the makings of a teacher I suspect:)

If you already can program then you can skip the QA and dive straight into debugging. Just one thing to remember tho, if the bug that's bugging you is present on the stable version that you are most likely to have, go get the development code first and check its still there. Then go join some developer haven where you can ask for pointers and then just dive into code. Developers are usually very very happy to see intelligent people capable of telling them where the bug is. don't rush to code a fix tho, without talking to developers first. There are many ways to fix an issue and most of them are wrong way of going about it.

Oh well... Nothing we can really do about it. Ive been using google mail for my main email account for some time now. It will be hard to replace it specially because of the aggregation/generic mail client features. But I guess I have to, since in google's book I am with my extremely stable(15+ years in use) pseudonym a persona non grata. Many people have extremely good reasons for using pseudonyms. I'm not one of them. I simply chose a different name to live my creative/online life under and I intend to keep it. If Google thinks that makes me unfit to consume their services, then I will have to find something else.

Because it's gonna bite :) Its working now btw...

The first desktop I built myself ca 2003 serves today as mothers computer. The second desktop I built myself serves as fathers computer. The used computer I bought knowing it had faults ca 2005 still serves, clocked down, as a home router at my parents place. Has had a hard-drive failure and power supply failure, but after a few spares from the heap of parts with minor faults it still works. My monster of a Dell laptop is still live and well as far as I know. My cousin got it. And that machine was declared dead as two different computers before I got/assembled it:P I mentioned I might be looking into new computer for myself last week because 4G of RAM just isn't enough... One of my younger sisters immediately volunteered to rid me of my old one, even if it has no windows and she would have to live with Ubuntu:P

Aah, but you weren't negotiating. And you aren't rich enough to buy someone to negotiate for you... That's what you get in a society that values lining ones own pockets over everything else and labels anyone thinking differently with a nasty label - yes, the dreaded "socialist" one.

Nobody is happy. But this is what you get when one side is not interested in win-win solutions, and just goes for screwing the other guy over.

That just summs up to a very late variant of birth control. Less kids would leave more resources and thus better chances of growing into adulthood for those that are born. World is a zero sum game.

Birth control is the key. A country that cant feed itself probably has a shortage of medical services too. And without modern medicine giving birth is dangerous business, so any female would be very much interested in limiting the birth rate in a way that wouldn't depend on the males who only get the fun bits and none of the pain of giving birth. Giving away free 5 year birth control implants for example would save the world from many an extra mouth.

600 years ago? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1918_flu_pandemic Put that into modern globalized world. Medicine takes time to catch up and if there is something that has a rapid spread and 3 day latency most of the infection would be done by the time people understand something is wrong. And for a killer bacteria to develop only one needs to survive sterilization and breed and yes of course there are people who drop their antibiotics way too soon and use all sorts of aggressive cleaning techniques on household surfaces or do other stupid things.