Setting aside the question about patens for a moment, your argument would apply to any contract. I mean, it is in the end a court that enforces a contract. Surely you don't intend for the terms of all contracts to be public, do you?

Competitors Compete. Film at 11.

I'm curious as to how they decided what is porn in the first place, and how much of their own biases leaked into what they decided constituted a "search for porn."

For most organizations, especially non-technical organizations, the availability of source code is really irrelevant. One might argue that they *could* change things if they needed to, but as a practical matter they really can't. Organizations whose mission includes software development are certainly capable of taking advantage of free and open licenses.

But it sounds like the bottom line is that, in the end, they found Windows better for them than Linux. You certainly have to admire their willingness to try something outside the norm, however. IT wouldn't have made much difference, I suspect, if Windows were open source and Linux were proprietary.

Unless you're a software development organization, source availability per se is really not a useful criterion upon which to make an IT decision.

But this is Slashdot, so, you know, it must be a conspiracy.

Prop that strawman up.

From Wikipedia on the Fairness docrine: "In August 1987, the FCC abolished the doctrine by a 4-0 vote, in the Syracuse Peace Council decision, which was upheld by a different panel of the Appeals Court for the D.C. Circuit in February 1989.[14] The FCC also suggested that because of the many media voices in the marketplace, the doctrine be deemed unconstitutional..."

I agree that the fairness doctrine was bad, for many of the reasons you say and others. But its been dead for 23 years. This particular bogeyman is not out to get you.

With all due respect, fuck your deep breath. I know that the entire budget of the NSF won;t be cut, even under the most conspiratorial scenarios.

The issue here is one of priorities. Cutting science *first* is like eating your seed corn.

The dumb fuck, anti-intellectual, knuckle-dragging, bible thumping horse's asses leading the GOP aren't qualified to judge a worthy science project, but they sure as hell ought to know that their even dumber followers are even less qualified.

This is not about the budget. This is about creating the perception of being tough by finding some projects that very few non-scientists can understand, and railing against it. Damn the consequences!

I'll bet Sarah Palin will find some research on fruit flies and try to gut that.

Jebus but these fuckers are stoopid!

We're not saying that it DID bomb. We're just asking the question -- did it bomb? Based on an unconfirmed, context free number measured against an unspecific post facto metric.

Did someone launch a missle at Los Angeles? 'Cause, you know, someone saw a contrail. And Obama's trip to India -- it cost $200M a day. Is Obama a secret muslim?

There are now four pretty good mobile operating systems to choose from, backed by companies with different design and development philosophies, and different strategies competing for an exploding market. And its obvious that all four companies are in it to win.

Windows Phone, whetever else it may be, is not a knock off of iPhone and is not a fractured ecosystem like Android.

I say, bring on the party.

This is modded "insightful?" :-) I suspect the original poster had tongue firmly implanted in cheek.

Of all the secrets that the government keeps, why is THIS one public? Why is ANYTHING having to do with the status of nuclear weapons public? WTF? There are a few things that SHOULD be secret.

I don't think there's any news here is there?

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,120137,00.html

Yeah, LiveCD is an option if you have it.

Yes, of course. Because its not even conceivable that the intruder has any local exploits.

Well, perhaps it was an inside job...

FTA, "Obviously, you only need to do this if you checked you are indeed running the backdoored version, as mentioned above."

A skilled attacker will have replaced md5sum so that it returns the hash that corresponds to the good version, and in general installed a rootkit. The remediation advice they provide is broken.

If you have installed the affected software, you should probably assume you are owned, regardless of what any local tests tell you.