such as the massive & ongoing civil rights violations/infringements that most people agree are wrong, regardless of what political stripe they self-identify as.

But I think that's wrong.

You and I may not agree with this, but I think that MOST people are quite happy to trade-away their civil liberties for the illusion of security. Particularly those who are convinced that since they "do nothing wrong", they have nothing to fear from such violations.

It's a very sad commentary on our democratic peers, but unfortunately, factual, and consistent with pretty much everything else that's gone on since 9/11, (and more-or-less, since the McCarthy era - with regard to "communists").

We're not going to unite in this country. Period. It's like Morpheus said, in The Matrix: "Most people are not ready to be unplugged from the system, and will fight to protect it." Cliche, but true.

Not that I can blame you, but I guess you've all blocked this from your memories.

you know. Those various black societies are very inclusive and generally run by very nice people.

Black people in America have lived with 200 years of institutionalized racism. I've got a black trucker friend who doesn't do runs through the South to this day. So I can't really begrudge them their societies...

On the other hand I'd say Whites are tremendous victims of racism: their own. The right wing in this country has convinced the white man that "Welfare Queens" (read: Black people) are a bigger problem then declining wages and competing with slave labor. The think tanks aren't even very secretive about it. Google "Southern Strategy".

I'm just pointing out that you are acting like a sociopath. A license (contract) is supposed to be a "meeting of minds"; perverting the intention of the contract terms is a sociopathic thing to do. Not ad hominem -- merely an observation.

Because as he has made clear many many times that's all that matters, what the authors of the GPLv2 think about that or what you think they intended the license for has no relevance whatsoever.

To whom?

So? Clearly the authors of the GPLv2 didn't consider it either or they didn't care about Tivoization at all.

Clearly. If they didn't care theyd' never have released a GPLv3 specifically to close that loop hole in what they wrote vis-a-vis their intent. Oh wait... they did release a GPLv3. Guess they cared.

if the license explicitly placed restrictions on the use of the code outside of contributing it back then the GPLv2 would not have been used because Linus has made clear many times that it is about "tit for tat" and nothing more.

Its impossible to say what Linus would have done at 22 years old in 1992 if the GPL had been slightly differently worded. Whether he'd have cared about an anti-tivoization clause at the time... you'll maybe recall that Linux 0.01 through 0.11 was released under a license that forbade commercial use in 1991.

He switched to the GPL in 1992. Your indulging in some serious mythologizing to even suggest he had such an extremely nuanced understanding and appreciation for a license that had only been around for a couple years. (GPL v1 was released in 89), and GPLv2 was barely 6 months old when Linus adopted it.

You are saying the same person that you argue thought tivoization was a good thing when he selected GPL was against any commercial use at all just a few months earlier? That doesn't add up. Unless maybe, just maybe Linus' stance on the license has evolved and become a lot more nuanced over the last 20+ years.

So what is your point?

1) That Linus in 2007 isn't really the same kid that picked GPLv2 for his experimental kernel project in 1992.

2) That Linus in 1992 wasn't really making pro-tivoization arguments in 1992 when he selected that license.

The owner will need insurance, but it will be much lower for self driving cars without any manual controls. Even self driving cars with a manual mode will be cheaper, on the assumption that people will drive on auto much of the time.

I hate being a passenger because I can't read in cars without feeling sick. All I can do is listen to the radio or audio books. The seats are too uncomfortable to sleep in... But perhaps if someone made a car with seats that folded flat like a bed it would work.

Do you ever fly? All modern aircraft use fly-by-wire, so you are trusting the programmers. Most modern cars have some kind of drive-by-wire system, especially performance models that often do things like braking force distribution and traction control.

No he isn't. He is saying that black people need more opportunities to get those jobs, i.e. more access to training that is lacking in the areas where many black people live. Rather than going after H1B visas the tech companies should be trying to bring better education to parts of America that are not well served, but there is a lot of stigma associated with them that prevents it happening.

You are projecting your own feeling of persecution onto what it he says, rather than paying attention to what he actually said.

They want the society to change the meaning of the word "marriage" to include homosexual unions (which no civilization in the history of the world has ever equated with regular marriage).

You sure about that? Pre christian roman, ancient chinese, and ancient egypt all have instances of same sex marriages.

For example, the Roman Empire's equivalent of gay marriage was banned in the 3rd century Roman Empire, where it had previously been legal.

Your sense of the word marry as being specifically man to female is clearly proto-Christian; and quite bluntly archaic in the face of modern understanding that many *people* are neither strictly maile or female. Are you going to deny them the ability to get married too? If you are hermaphroditic? What if you are chimeric with both male and female DNA? Nevermind the transgendered.

There is no way the legal status 'marriage' in any modern country should be tied to such an archaic and religious definition. Society itself has largely moved on to understand and accept that a relationship can have all the characteristics of marriage irrespective of the absence or presence of physical appendages or genetic markers.

"Straight marriage" is just as much a tautology [..]

Anthropologists say that some type of marriage has been found in every known human society since ancient times.

The idea that it necessarily and inherently implies straight is as ridiculous as the idea that it implies male ownership of the bride as chattel, such as it did in the Hebrew bible.

You are confusing cause and effect. Most kids don't dream of becoming drug dealers, they simply have little choice because their schools suck and parents don't care.

Jackson is making the point that there is talent available in the US, it just gets wasted due to lack of opportunity. Instead of lobbying for more H1B visas and employing overseas recruitment specialists the tech companies should be trying to fix the problems that prevent minorities getting the opportunity to work for them. Of course they won't do it without being forced to because business only ever does what is most profitable.

Part of the problem for developers is that Apple has banned some of the most profitable types of app, i.e. anything that competes with the functionality of Apple apps. For example alternative web browsers that are more than just a skin like Firefox. I'm amazed they bowed to pressure and allowed 3rd party keyboards, which are always top sellers on other platforms.

The other part of the problem is that Apple does little to prevent developers being screwed, and to be fair most app stores are guilty of this. If someone has an interesting idea you can guarantee that about 15 minutes later Zynga will have cloned it, and then thrown money at marketing it and probably sued the original developer for good measure. The App Store only rewards Zynga for this behaviour.

What reasons? Because it isn't obvious.

Printing a fake card is dirt cheap, and the 'customer can put an accomplices number on the back. Remember, the whole scam revolves around the card not working properly in the machine; so they can pretty much hand you anything.

You must call your own merchant account provider, and THEY will look up any bank phone numbers that they might need to validate the card and authorize the transaction.

On the other hand, if something else does go wrong, the firewall become another obstacle for the attacker.

What is this "something else that goes wrong"?

That someone outside the system gains access to the system via the ports that were publicly open, that the firewall would have let them in through anyway? (And once in, they can change your firewall... so that's not buying you much.)

What else can go wrong? That you the admin opened a service you weren't supposed to? Ok... yes, that could happen.

And a firewall gives you some defense in depth to that. But so would a separate hardware firewall between the server and the rest of the network.

I suppose you could misconfigure THAT one too. Oops. Is adding yet another firewall really a solution? Why not 2 hardware firewalls, one after the other? Why not 7 just in case you botch the first 6? Is that better? If you need that, maybe you shouldn't be in network admin?

Meanwhile, this additional firewall you add, its software, so you've added another point of failure that could itself have vulnerabilities, defects, and of course you have to configure it correctly.

Sure, in 99% of scenarios a local firewall makes sense, is a no-brainer, is defense in depth, etc. But one can absolutely deploy a system without one in the right circumstances.

I'm getting a little bit tired of the never ending fascination with QM 'weirdness', because it seems to me that it tries to see everything as 'weird' simply because it is 'quantum', with the danger that that it makes people blind to what might be explainable by more intuitive means.

In this case I think we see an illustration of the fact that the notion of a particle as a mathematical point in space - something with zero dimensions - is an abstraction; an approximation that works well enough because we can't in that much detail any way, and it makes the equations so much easier. We have always known, somewhere, that this is not true - things like the mysterious wavefunction that mysteriously collapses as soon as we measure it is a big hint, I would say. As explanations go, that one has always sounded a bit strained - hopefully we will be able to handle the maths of a better model in the not too remote future.

A more likely scenario, in my view, is that what we call particles is something more distributed in space, and that somewhere in that 'distributed particle' we can explain how a particle can travel through several paths at once. I mean, it isn't even an altogether new observation - the famous electron diffraction experiment shows something similar.

Not true. If we redefine, what "karate" means [...]

Then there is no point in talking about karate anymore in the context of the argument, and we should switch to another sport that is defined such that the point makes sense.

Arbitrarily redefining the terms to suit your argument doesn't make you right, and ins't a valid form. If karate is suddenly redefined as something else, then naturally any claims I've made about it become meaningless.

Why not redefine "marriage" as "eat" and then "barglespock" as what was formerly meant by marriage, and perhaps "homosexual" to mean "fish" and "cheetos" as what was formerly meant by homosexual. And then you can triumphantly declare that homosexuals can marry (fish can eat) all they like. Win!!

But the real debate now is whether cheetos can barglespock.

So how about we leave "marriage" and "karate" defined the way they commonly defined, rather than try to splice new semantics which only confuse the argument.

There are, indeed, organizations trying to keep the semantics of the term "marriage" from being redefined to include same-sex partners.

Nobody is out there trying to prevent homosexuals from marrying somebody of the opposite sex. It is not the law, that prevents them from entering into marriage, it is their own biology (or preference, or whatever).

Now you are just being obtuse. Gays want to be "married". We all KNOW what they mean by that. And your silly argument is attempting to substitute a particularly narrow legal definition of marriage (that only applies in *some* jurisdictions) for the common and well understood broad definition of marriage, in a silly attempt to score points.

Stop playing games with sematics. Its clear to everyone that when I wrote "the law prevents gays from getting married" I was not suggesting that the law prevented gays from entering into straight marriages.

At this stage your just trolling. Perhaps that was your intent, in which case, gratz, you got me.