I've never understood why people think free and speech and libel laws don't work together. You can say what you want (free speech) even if it's false, inflammatory, libellous , whatever. By suing you for the HARM caused by your speech, I am in no way infringing or curtailing your right to do it again. Gag orders are a different matter, I agree, and jail time as a sentence gets iffy, because I don't believe anyone imprisoned really has free speech, and if that jail time is a result of exercising only free speech in the first place, that's a problem. But if you incite a riot, it's free speech, go ahead. But you are partially responsible for any damages. There is a conspiracy to commit vandalism, loot, whatever. If someone dies, it's conspiracy to commit murder, or maybe manslaughter. The point is, punishing someone doesn't infringe their right to free speech automatically, and punishing someone for the results of their speech is not inherently punishing them for speaking freely. Basically, I see free speech like this: You can say what you want, and you can't be punished for saying it unless it causes harm.

Here's a link to Naomi wolf presenting on the ten steps, which she describes in her book "The End of America"; https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Crap, my tinfoil hat is still conductive! What am I going to do now?

I use Gentoo on my primary machine and on my home media centre. I sync and update weekly. I've not had any circular dependencies portage couldn't work out (except in the enlightenment overlay) for months. Yes, using a high backtrace value (which is the default) means it takes a long time to calculate dependencies, but honestly, that's not time *I* have to spend figuring crap out. I can go and get a cup of tea, and gosh, since I have a multi-core machine, I can even get work done while it compiles in the background. The problems come in when you don't update regularly, and there's basically half the portage tree to update, but then updating regularly is the whole idea behind a rolling release. At least I'm not stuck with an outdated git version, or kernel, or django ... you get the point.

Oh for mod points! Well played sir, well played!

Iceland? They seem to have a much better track record than anyone else where internet regulation is concerned. Sure people try to get shit pushed through there, but they seem to have a high proportion of tech-savvy parliamentary members who shoot the unreasonable shit down.

Honestly though, what we need is a multi national non-profit who are allowed to charge for their services, or receive funding (equal/roportional: needs more discussion) from all countries

Thanks for the informative response. I suppose I never considered the contributions as services since no-one was paying for them, but of course this means that a system of reciprocal gift giving would then be an easy way to get around the restrictions. What about post (mail) and email though? Are personal communications also heavily restricted? What about family members communicating? I'm not trying to be difficult here, it's now you've got me curious as to how this would actually work. I suppose that if personal communications are allowed, an argument could be made that patches are simply personal communications along the lines of I think this is a good way to fix your lawnmower (as an analogue equivalent).

I don't know the intricacies of U.S. law, but I was under the impression that the law regarding ecryption algorithms as munitions was no longer in place. Unless there's something else restricting software specifically, there's no economic value to restrict unless you have paid developers in restricted/embargoed territtories who are receiving money across the border. The economic value (if any) comes at a later stage when the software is distributed and possibly sold, or more likely services surrounding the software are sold. Why is this an issue?

My point is that the geek niche won't need 50K apps ported. The GP claims nothing less than the full app suite would be of sufficient value, but past the top 50 (maybe 100) most apps are either games or utilities. My point is that the utilities are already there on a GNU system.

Regarding the debian chroot. Yes it gives you most of what you want, but it screws with your warranty and STILL there's stuff I'd like to be able to do that I cant. One example is to have every phone incoming or outgoing automatically recorded, and I get the option to permanently save afterwords. Mainly for dealing with calls from companies. Debian chroot doesn't give me enough access to the kernel to do that, at least I can't figure it out. Or making my tablet make a phone call, despite the fact the phone app is banned from use on the tablet. All I want i to top up my mobile data which for some unknown reason can't be done via SMS in this country (South Africa). My hope is that a genuinely open phone would allow these sorts of things to be developed.

Yes, the people interested in a less open system have a wide range of needs, but simply having access to a GNU userspace will take care of a LOT of the utilities... No need for firewall apps, calender apps, reminder apps as long ubuntu OS exposes a decent UI to all those things. You won't need a million different file manager apps, or text editor apps???? What fucking OS doesn't come with a basic text editor, even on a phone? Games and front ends to proprietary cloud services are going to the major things that need porting. There'd be a better office suite than anything available on a phone if libre office got ported. GNU/Linux/Ubuntu comes with a heell of a lot for free (as in beer, as in effort and as in speech). Throw in a hardware slide out keyboard and you might a real spritual successor to the n900.

I don't know if AC's get notified about reponses to their comments, but either way, this question goes out in response.

The phrase "come up with" implies some measure of deliberate but spurious inventiveness, as if you made the changes exclusively to get a new patent, rather than to improve the drug itself. While the grandparent's post mentioned adding pink dye, and that surely is a trival change, if you are "coming up" with changes, it sound like your are fixing something that isn't broken, and the only reason your tinkering beyond adding a dye is precisely because that is not enough to get a patent. In other words, you are ding precisely enough to get more money (as a company), rather than making the best possible drug.

So, genuine questions here:

Why do you think such behaviour should be rewarded?

Why should limited tinkering that was done to change the drug without the eventual aim of improvement extend a patent?

Oh yeah, I forgot, Governments can't ever do ANYTHING right. My bad, let's just give up on the whole idea...

But really. Consider the cost of climate of change. In America, the distribution plan requires very few major infrastructural changes. New power generation plants are needed, and they are going to be built anyway. And solar will cost less than coal, oil or gas as soon as the costs of environmental cleanup and damage control are taken into accout. A direct solution, building hundreds of atmospheric carbon scrubbers and sequestering the captured carbon, would take billions of dollars. Add that to your current power costs. Distributing the storage could be economically faesible. There's already a distribution network for transmission of the power, no nee to fix/upgrade/change that. Households would be responsible for purchasing their own hydrogen plants, same way they need to by their own geysers. The utilities then price accordingly, cheap during the day, expensive at night. If a household is using it's own stored energy, it get's to buy cheap. If it chooses not to have storage, then it pays the increased rate. Hydrogen plants can be sold at various capacities, via the private sector. There's no need to involve government in any of this. The only tricky things are; a) developing a working safe hydrogen plant, and b) hashing out non-technical aspects of the smart grid. And by non-technical I mean getting together the political clout to force the utilities to stop profiteering and actually implement one of the many possible technical solutions to make a smart grid. Again, in can be opt in, and doesn't require government involvement beyond mandating the utilities allow housholds to instal smart meters, and pay for energy those households release back in to the grid fairly. If a house hold doens't want a smart meter, it just never gets any money back, and they can't donate unused energy back to the grid.... they either store it or waste it. Over a decade or so, most households will be included. By the time the next big coal power plant would be built, this would hopefully make it less attractive than solar.

And finally, consider that this isn't just about America. There are vast tracts of the third world where the infrastructue hasn't been built yet, but it is going to be. We may as well try to future proof it a bit while we plan it.

Distribute the storage. Don't store the energy to keep the country powered at the station. End consumers can draw that power while it's being generated and store it themselves. The ideal solution here would be for every household to have a hydrogen power plant, and the hydrogen can be renewed during the day by a solar powered grid. Hell! Even better, go full smart grid, and allow households to distribute directly to their neighbours when they're in need using their own solar power panels and or hydrogen plants. The technology is there already. It's just corrupt politics getting in the way.

No Mystery. Managers and executives are exempt from having to learn to use the tools of their trade, which are generally reporting tools. Most of the time, even a small business would be WAY better off with a web based client-server core business system (be it stock management, documentation tracking, transaction handling, etc) with reporting baked right in. Instead, they all use Excel and Email. This is understandble for a very small business, in which there simply isn't time to deal with IT and getting uch a system set up is a hefty capital outlay, but in business of 15 or more people where management heirarchies start emerging, the managers ought to know what tools are available (i.e. software packages), and how to use them. Statisticians, mathematicians, mining scouts... you name it; if there is specialised software for the field, students of the field are expected to learn how to use at least two or three different options in an undergraduate course. But MBA's aren't taught how to capture/store/generate their own data. Jesus! Acess would better than excel and relational algebra is NOT THAT HARD. Would you contract the services of a builder who only knew how to use a hammer and used it for everything?

Well, since Swoden is apparently in Russia, doesn't he qualify as a sort of cosmonaut in this case? It's a sort of a nod ;)