It has been very nearly 30 years since the founding of the GNU Foundation. In all that time, what is your biggest regret?

In fact you can register for their beta-program right now.

Thank you for mentioning this without actually linking to the survey. I don't want a flood of Slashdotters lowering my chances of getting in the beta early.

It isn't the function of government to protect your "intent" against your own stupidity.

Bingo! Furthermore, the last few wireless routers I've setup automatically prompted to turn on some form of encryption during that process. If you choose not to use this feature, it should be viewed as a deliberate (not ignorant) choice in the nature of your setup.

We all knew that! Of Course "Anonymous Coward" doesn't use Facebook -- you have to log in first. </snark>

No, the ultimate message of the denial lies in the phrasing. My words may say the same basic thing: "No, what you are asking is potentially illegal / unethical". However, the potential tone, presentation, and listed context says: "I am lying to you, and I need you to be aware I am lying to you." Together, the unspoken implication is twofold: "I am willing to be unethical as long as it is not obvious" and "If you take this information, it will only be on my terms."

It's a very, very nasty piece of social engineering to pull in interviews. Sure, 9 times out of 10 it will result in a negative recommendation from that reviewer (you called them on their bullshit), but it's that tenth time that actually nets you the really interesting jobs.

When the article about the Facebook checking company appeared, I determined in advance what I would say to any prospective employer asking me to grant them access to Facebook:

"Ahem. I do not have any public social networking accounts. If I did, I regret what you are asking would violate their terms of service, and I would have to respond in the negative."

That would be literal, even down to cleanly enunciating the word "ahem", and even if I had been recruited via a social networking contact. I'd probably try to make it sound stilted, or look at my cupped hand like I was reading from a cue card, to make it painfully clear this is a prepared response.

Try this analogy. How would it work if we "deregulated" football and hockey? Trust the players to regulate themselves. No more penalties. No more central authority to impose rules.

What a beautiful straw man! Good job confusing anarchy and zero government (in your analogy the penalties) with a free market. Are you trying to argue that the only choice is binary, between a Soviet-style "central control" and "no-government anarchy"? The very fact we have a regulated market shows there is a broad middle ground. All I suggest is that maybe we've moved too far in one direction, not that we should immediately shoot to the opposite extreme.

free markets are a good thing but they need some amount of government regulation to balance out greedy dishonest a-holes.

OK, how about something simple, straightforward and universal, like ending the idea of corporate personhood, or perhaps "corporate fraud automatically 'pierces the veil' allowing lawsuits against executives and stockholders"?

OK, I'll try: domain registrars do not operate in a free market.... If they were in a truly free market, GoDaddy could (and almost certainly would) simply refuse to transfer any domains away from themselves.

You are absolutely, 100% correct in your premise, but you arrive at the wrong conclusion; this is unfortunately all too common because very few people understand what "free market" really means.

Your argument is phrased like this:
* Domain registrars do not operate in a free market.
Correct: a "free market" is one where buyers may select freely from vendors offering different services. Regulation prevents this differentiation, and thus closes off the market from being "free".

* GoDaddy, a registrar, could refuse to transfer names in an unregulated market.
Correct, but you overlook the competition from other registrars -- your conclusion:...

* Therefore, we can expect an unregulated market in domain names to provide fewer services [transfers] than a regulated one.
...is thereby invalid. In a free market, it would be an advertising advantage to allow transfers to your company; furthermore, we can expect each business' interests to force any such agreements to be reciprocal and thus forcing businesses to allow transfers away as well.

I'm sorry, you seem to be conflating corporations -- who have a position within a market, and long term goals -- with the market as a whole. Let me demonstrate by removing the pronouns from your statement:

...still believe that free markets work. Free markets [note: only plural antecedent] have repeatedly proven that free markets need to be regulated or free markets will take advantage of their position.

I can't make head or tails of what you mean by "free markets will take advantage of their position". Markets, as a whole, don't have a position -- that only can make sense within a market, which requires your use of "they" to referring to a smaller unit, not previously mentioned. I'd assume you mean corporations, in which case you're confused as to what "free market" means -- it is when buyers have freedom to select from among multiple sellers, and refers to corporations not one whit.

For the next year (or so), this will be my counter-example when I debate politics with people who argue that a centrally regulated economy is better than the free market -- as in, "I will happily agree with you, if first you explain this one annoying fact please."

* Constituents and businesses pleaded with Congress [the regulatory body of US "central economic planning"] not to pass SOPA. Congress did anyway.
* People threaten to boycott GoDaddy (direct financial loss) due to supporting SOPA and they reverse course immediately.

I feel the answer is clear, obvious, and simple: businesses are more responsive to their "constituents" then politicians are. Therefore, we should discard [most of] the business regulations -- by which I mean things like minimum wage or union laws, not universal "regulatory" laws like EPA pollution controls -- and go back to a free market.

(Oh, and before people asks: EPA regulations are "universal" because private individuals can violate them just like big business does, for example by developing protected land, or burning waste material. Wage and hiring laws are not "universal" because private individuals cannot be in violation of those laws, only businesses.)

I have long described both MMO gaming and Facebook social games as being a "well-padded Skinner box" for their staggered/random reward system. Do you see any possibility for anything else to eventually replace this model?

Is this is the end stage for the ownership of ideas: that just as there is no longer "public land" in the sense that every piece of land has an owner (even if it is the government), every idea will need an owner?

But when you buy software, you aren't usually buying the software, but rather a license to use the software

What dirty, dirty, lies! I can tell you for a fact* that I have never once personally licensed software despite purchasing several valid copies. I have four reasons for saying this:

— First, having a debugger installed on my PC means I can modify the installer [while running] to show no EULA at all, so further proof is required I have agreed to whatever blatherskite the software publisher is trying to push.
— Second, I have never been presented the EULA terms before paying for software, so all claims the transaction was not a sale occur ex post facto.
— Third, I have never given my money directly to the software publisher, but to a retailer such as GameStop, Amazon, or Best Buy, so the publisher becomes a "third party" to this transaction and lacks any legal standing to decide its' status.
— Finally, because US copyright law allows me to make copies as "an essential step in the utilization of the computer program" and one copy as a backup (see Title 17 section 117), I have a pre-existing right to install the software; the typical EULA therefore grants no quid pro quo to me and therefore is contractually void.

Disclaimer: This is not legal advice, I am not your lawyer, and in fact I am not a lawyer at all! I do play one on ... I mean, work with them every day, and several of them have agreed that the above arguments are strong enough that certain other people would lose sleep at night should I ever find cause to argue them in a courtroom.

[[*: This is hyperbole, really, although I suppose you could say it is "pending legal review". I don't feel the need to go beyond what copyright law permits... and that's pretty much what a typical EULA asks anyway. Until there's sufficient harm in the divergence between my interpretation and the demands in the EULA for any software I have purchased, I have no reason for me to actually test these arguments in a court of law. So far I've skirted this by avoiding really problematic publishers, but I fear the day of testing is fast approaching.]]

No, job security is programming in Lisp:

1. Your code will never "fail" when you cover all bases with restarts; and
2. It's fast to write from specification, so you get big props as a get-'er-done type.
3. Third, nobody else can debug it because they can't figure out what is being done in even a simple one-liner like "(eq TODAY (cdr (car *LIFE*)))".
4. Finally, nobody can be hired to replace you because all the schools don't teach the basics of data structure and code flow analysis but the grammar of the latest "l33t"ness in this year's dialect of VB-dot-net-sharp-plus-plus.