Using the API doesn't invoke the GPL -- it's actually the linking process. When you link against the kernel, your binary becomes a derivative work partially based on the kernel. Since the kernel is covered by the GPL, creating any derivative work from it requires you abide by the terms of the GPL. I doubt any FSF lawyer would have anything negative to say about cloning a project's public API in order to create a completely new implementation under a different license.

Another example: If I created a GPL program with an API that did not make it necessary to link against a library to use - e.g. you talked to my program via IPC or a wire protocol like SOAP, then you could utilize my API all you wanted without triggering the GPL. You could distribute your program that uses my API under whatever license you want.

This is why it's common for software that has a GPL server component to distribute the client driver libraries under the LGPL. Modifications the the server or the client driver itself must be shared, but programs that merely link to the driver may remain proprietary.

It's not that weird. The IOS messaging app shows messages organized by sender with the most recent message summarized under each sender's name. If a message is being cropped incorrectly and causing the crash, then wh3n another message comes in from that sender, the new message will replace the problematic one in the summary.

Are they going to charge trucks 6000-9000 times what they charge cars? Because that's the difference in wear and tear on roads between the two.

Unless, of course, the government goes on a pogrom against any large scale yeast operation, in which case only organizations with the resources to operate one illicitly will be able to benefit: the cartels and the Taliban.

Just my take, but: If you want to land on it instead of crashing, you have to carry a bunch of extra fuel to burn off the delta-V that got you there in the first place. If you have enough extra fuel to slow down, you might as well burn it getting there faster so you have more energy when you impact. Essentially if you slow down to land, you're wasting a bunch of energy in the form of the ship's momentum which you could be putting into changing the course of the asteroid.

A psychopath CEO will see the fine associated with dumping toxins in a river is smaller than the increased profits to be realized by not disposing of chemicals legally: organization and CEO goals aligned. A person with a conscience will a) want to obey a reasonable law and b) have some moral qualms about potentially poisoning a bunch of people, regardless of whether it will be traced back to them.

Corporations are basically amoral, immortal, and wield an enormous amount of influence in politics. One of the best counterbalance is having someone of decent character in charge of them.

The problem is contracts generally have a statement of work saying what you will do and a date saying when you will deliver it by. If you don't accomplish the things in the SOW by the deadline, you don't get the $$$. Unless you are doing pure R&D, you rarely have the luxury of being as hand-wavy about the requirements as agile seems to want you to be.

I worked for over a decade as an SE for an org that was both a hospital-IT vendor and a covered entity in its own right (we sold a PMS, a PACS, operated multiple HIEs, and were a claims clearinghouse). When choosing libraries and server technology, never once was the open source status of a piece of technology a consideration with regards to HIPAA. We would occasionally have to run things by the legal team to evaluate a new license or check our compliance, but that was it. HIPAA considerations were mostly operational: Is PHI encrypted when at rest or transmitted over the open internet? Are we ensuring only authorized personnel can see PHI? How are we handling backups? The ops team took care of most of those things and they didn't care what we built the software out of, as long as it conformed to the requirements.

Another interesting question is whether there is increased risk when transferring control from the automated system to the human driver. I'd be curious to know if the two accidents with a human operator were in the moments immediately following a hand off of control. I imagine that it might take a few seconds to go from "passenger mode" to "driver mode" as you might not have the same level of situational awareness as when you are in control of the vehicle.

There are still plenty of clients out there that support neither SNI nor IP6, so the implication of everyone going to SSL is that everyone needs a static IP4 address. That sounds unsustainable to me.

Kickstarter is explicitly not a VC platform. A kickstarter pledge isn't an investment, it's a gift. The "thank you rewards" are the equivalent of the tote bag you get for pledging to PBS. Kickstarter was started as an alternative to fund projects that couldn't get funding through traditional avenues of grants, patronage, or VC. This was a way to get the $50k for your student film without maxing your parents' credit cards.

The first amendment says that. It prohibits the government from restraining speech or establishing a state religion ("..the government shall make no law..."). To the extent that other non-state actors are forced to respect the 1st amendment, it's usually because they are acting as agents of the government because a law delegates regulatory authority to them or because they are accepting public money to perform a service.

Many if not most universities accept government subsidies, to a certain extent they are government actors and may have part of their funding tied to respecting civil rights.

And all of these organizations have the right to respond in any legal manner they want to in response to your speech. The union might kick you out (or not, there are a lot of other laws and regulations covering union behavior). Your employer might fire you if they don't like what you have to say. Google is free to decline to do business with you if they don't like the message of your ad.

You might have free speech, but no one is obligated to facilitate the distribution of your speech unless they are operating as a common carrier (e.g. the phone company).

And yet, the federal government makes loans to grad students in the 6% to 7% range. A failing tech company with a billionaire owner gets low interest loans because of the potential for the future, but low and middle income grad students, who really are the future get high rate loans.

To be fair, these are unsecured loans. Yes, the rate is higher than the ~4% you would get for a mortgage, but it's better than the 18% you would pay on a credit card and on par with the rate you pay on a car loan. The crazy part is that you are barred from refinancing your student debt.

I think you might be cherry-picking neighborhoods. You can get into a single family in Boston for under $500k if you are patient.

There's a distinction here that is being missed between a Electronic Health Record (EHR) and a Practice Management System (PMS). The PMS usually handles scheduling, billing, claims, remittances, and maybe registration -- the business side of healthcare. The EHR holds the patient's actual clinical data. These systems can and should talk to each other: the EMR will need the ADT (Admit/Discharge/Transfer) feed from the PMS and the PMS will need the procedure codes to bill for from the EHR. However, the PMS is not a health record and shouldn't be used as one. You can't get a proper continuity of care record out of a financial tool and likewise will have a hard time doing billing with a clinical tool: they're specialized for different use cases.

Unless you are at family practice, the docs don't usually mess around in the practice management software: it's more of a tool for the front desk and accountants. On the PMS side we've had pretty good standardization of formats dues to HIPAA. The government had a pretty good lever here to force compliance: Medicare. When HIPAA went into effect, CMS set a deadline that sometime in 2004 (IIRC) they would no longer accept non-X12 claims. Since Medicare/caid are such a huge part of everyone's revenue stream, everyone had a real motivation to comply. This worked so well that when I left my previous job in 2012, our claims clearinghouse division was actually shrinking because the software to connect directly to insurers had become a commodity feature in most practice management systems.

There is, as far as I know, no equivalent government body that everyone interacts with for clinical data that could force a similar standardization across EHR vendors. I know where I worked we tried to support the IHE profiles as much as we could, but I don't know how wide-spread that behavior is.