While OSX is "certified UNIX", there's a lot of proprietary APIs and libraries layered on top of that to produce the GUI environment most OSX users interact with.

So the "With some care" you speak of to make "applications [...] easily be made to compilable on multiple Linux distros" includes a working implementation of those proprietary APIs and libraries. GNUStep is that, though it's currently more like OSX ancestor NeXTSTEP than it is like modern OSX

Hence the kickstarter

I think the blame on companies is rooted in the idea that big business will spend insane amounts of effort on avoiding taxation, or lobbying to make legal conditions more favorable to them, but then appears to resist very little when government agencies attempt to intrude on their customers (or users') privacy.

Of course, it kinda makes sense. Whilst a government might be actively hostile towards its people, big business tends to view customers/consumers/users more like cattle - dispassionately and as disposable.

In that light, companies that do tend to try to fight for their users (eg, a certain micro-blogging company) seem even more virtuous by comparison.

Seriously? The coalition's plan is "Let's take the Labor Party's plan, and shave a couple percent off the price by dropping the most important bit of the project!" (ie, converting from FTTH to FTTN and leaving everyone stuck with telstra's awful ancient copper system connecting to a large and unsightly roadside active cabinet)

If the NBN is going to get done, lets get it done properly, instead of doing some half-hearted poor job of it.

Dunno about the laws in the various US states, but at least in NSW, an indicator is just an indication of intent, and doesn't give anyone the right to change lanes. Unless it's a zip merge (where two lanes become one without a line indicating who gives way - and which doesn't require indication anyway), then someone changing lanes technically has to give way to everybody else. Obviously in practice people tend to let people in, but if these things were in Australia, and obeyed the road rules, many cars would get stuck in near-impossible give-way situations...

I wonder - does providing a third party with a digital copy of your key remove the "expectation of privacy" for law enforcement in the same way as using a digital messaging service (ie, email) does?

That is, I wonder if this will open the doorway to police in the US saying "Oh, well the defendant left their key readout with this company, which as a third party destroys their expectation of privacy to their locks, therefore we had the right to subpoena the key and then search the premises it unlocks".

Have you not been following the news? We ALL live in Big Brother land nowadays...

So it was advising you that it was a crime. The paperwork still didn't make it so in and of itself.

It's the "agreeing to" bit that's bothering me. If you're authorized to receive classified info it's either a crime to give it to unauthorized persons or it's not. Not something you get to agree to or not.

Perhaps I'm being pedantic... I'll just read "agree to" as "accept that you understand"

Except in practice it doesn't work that way for Copyright. For starters, your disclaimer works as far as the person who broke the chain. By handing over the code without that disclaimer, the contractor assumes liability. Not to mention that without a valid license, the aircraft company is in violation of copyright law by posessing/using the copy (sort of - it's complex and varies by jurisdiction here, but suffice to say the copy is illegal). There's no difference here to receiving a pirated copy of a movie - you're still in posession of a pirated copy even though if you received it in a way you thought "legitimate" from a pirate.

Surely a contract can't create a crime as such? It might have said that was a likely consequence, but contract breach is usually a civil matter in and of itself, even with the government. On the other hand, legislation (which would normally be needed create the crime) would technically apply whether you signed the paperwork or not.

I'm feeding a troll I'm sure - but I'm in a weird mood. So stuff it.

I love the circular reasoning in "The bible is the proven word of God. You really don't need any more proof than that." - so it's proven by the fact that it is proven. Hm. Rightio then.

Then there's a no-true-scotsman fallacy of if you've read it and don't believe it, then you've not really read it. Hm. Rightio then.

I'd love to understand why Bible believers think that, for non-believers, the Bible in particular is special?
Seriously - for someone who already doesn't believe in god(s), what would make them believe the Bible over the Torah, the Qur'an, the I Ching, the Guru Granth Sahib, the Principia Discordia or "There and Back Again" as a text of divine inspiration?

Finally - I have read the Bible several times. Fascinating read really (till you get to all the post-gospel stuff near the end to the new testament - I really don't care about early christians' "How are you doing over there then?" letters for example...)
But enlightenment did not come. Instead, the more I read the Bible the more I find it's just a curious collection of old folk tales and legends (old testament) combined with a dogma assembled by committee (new testament).
And Christians rarely live their lives strictly according to scripture btw. The average christian violates an awful lot of it whilst handwaving huge chunks as being "irrelevant" in the modern church (!). Which is fine if you accept that you're not living strictly according to the book. But don't pretend you are.

Finally - frankly, if it were written today the Bible would have a very rough time with censors. It's seriously lurid in parts. Incest, rape, slavery (both labour-based and sexual), extremely graphic violence, inciting racial hatreds... Much of which is presented as a good thing! It would probably be banned these days. I certainly will consider carefully when my son will be ready to understand the adult themes in the Bible for sure. I don't want to give him nightmares.

I don't believe in scientific results. I believe in science as a process (in the same way that I can say I believe in Democracy as a process [for better or for worse!])

I would hope many scientists would hold a similar view, but I cannot speak for them.

In terms of cosmology - science attempts to unravel the chain of causality that resulted in the world we see today. To do this, it is assumed the universe works today much like it always has (and tries to determine the edge conditions that define that). It is also assumed that there is a point beyond which causality can no longer be followed (or that it loops back on itself or whatever. That there is a beginning, anyway - that' it's not just "turtles all the way down"). Now admittedly they're big assumptions but they seem to hold up so far, and without those assumtions the questions become meaningless in the first place.

So what happens then is that you work backwards, until a point is found for which there are multiple possible explanations. Then evidence is gathered based on experimentation and observation about which of the options seems most likely. As part of this process new options might get introduced.

What you end up with is the most likely set of explanations for the way the universe came to be the way it is, based on what we know today and what we can observe today.

It's not a presented as fact, but rather what is termed a "theory" for science, based on probability. Note that in this case the word "Theory" avoids presenting something as absolute fact whilst providing the implication of a comprehensive and somewhat tested framework, and still leaving the door open for testing and even disproving. It doesn't mean "Guess".

As for "believing" that " the elements needed to create the big bang came into existence of their own accord and that the laws of physics decided to invent themselves." - this isn't a belief per se, but part of the assumption that the chain of causality ends somewhere. If something "caused" the big bang (er - other than the big bang itself), then by definition the big bang wasn't the start of the universe, but we have to go back further. So if you assume it started somewhere then you have to assume that "before" that was unknowable, as it cannot be traced back.

In this regard - if there was a "creator" - it is/was either one that can interact with/affect the observable universe or not. If it is, then we can push the start of the universe back to be the "start" of the creator. But if not then the issue is meaningless from a scientific standpoint.