Coincidentally, I ran into some text on Wikipedia yesterday that gives a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Free_Documentation_License">some interpretation by Richard Stallman of the "GNU Free Documentation License" (GFDL). I've seen miscellaneous other interpretations of the GPL attributed to him over the years. His opinion - whether you agree with it or not - has generally struck me as irrelevant from a legal point of view: lawyers have more expertise in this, and courts get the final say. So, the value of his opinion, if any, has seemed to me to be only that of a spiritual leader of his movement. The True Believers of any religion should, of course, carefully study and heed each word given to them by their prophet. Fortunately, with Stallman, and Apostle Eben Moglen still around, True Believers need not interpret things for themselves, as they necessarily must do in older religions.

For example, years ago when the license for Python 1.6 was being formulated, it was repeatedly revised in one section until Stallman declared it to be "GPL compatible". Since he's neither a lawyer or a court, I wondered why it mattered so much to Tim Peters (who, as in so many things, seemed to speak for Python's creator, Guido Van Rossum.) I eventually realized that Stallman's opinion was highly important in terms of swaying the True Believers - who Tim/Guido did not dare offend. And of course, on a more practical level, none of the conventional legal authority knew or cared anything about the situation, so perhaps Stallman was the highest available court to adjudicate the issue.

I figured such points would be made. Anyway, I don't see any advantage in using a security product from a country that is increasingly at odds with my own. Russian folks (that is, the ones who still live there, unlike my friend) may feel the same way about the American companies.

My Russian friend makes the point that everybody thinks they're the good guy, and that everybody else is the bad guy. So in reality, maybe everybody is the bad guy. Oh, except that my friend has many positive things to say about Putin and even Stalin. Go figure.

One striking and objective difference between Us and Them is that Them has a dictator whereas Us has a lame duck. I much prefer the lame duck system, regardless of the particular lame duck involved. The lame duck system also saves folks like Mussolini and Gaddafi the indignity of having their corpses mutilated after their term expires.

As a real Sync user (from 2012), my experience has been that its problems have more to do with user interface than "stability". Even if QNX improves on the latter, it does nothing for the former. The main problems are:

- The user interface for navigating features isn't very intuitive
- It relies too much on a voice recognition system that doesn't really work well. Either make that work well (a hard problem) or don't rely on it so much (an easy problem).

Oh, and regarding the problem playing from a USB stick mentioned above, the basic trick is that you have to format your USB with FAT32. Well, obviously.

Let's hope so. That's a sure formula for winning in Vegas.

Luckily, Kaspersky is based in Moscow, so that's one high-tech business that's likely to continue operating in Russia, regardless of Russian isolation.

I'm sure Putin appreciates having a firm that is dedicated to protecting the world's computers form malware located right handy there in the Russian capital. I recently switched from Kaspersky to another product when a Russian friend of mine pointed out the obvious fact that an anti-malware product that's popular worldwide could be quite a dangerous thing in the hands of a dictator.

In America, you bloggers are disputin' registering.
In Russia, dis Putin is registering you bloggers!

Which reminds me, there's a version of "Levon" by Jon Bon Jovi that's pretty good. It's kindda fun to see how he tries to make Elton's 'garage' (rhymes with 'carriage') work when he says in the American way (rhymes with 'barrage'.)

Yep, I realized that during a "shower moment" a few minutes ago. Couldn't finish the shower in time to correct it, though. Oh, and BTW, that's not "electric boots", it's "electric boobs". At least that's what I heard...

I used to wonder why Sting would brag about his billiard skills (besides just his stalking) in "Every Breath You Take". "I'm a pool hall ace / with every breath you take".

Another long-time favorite in this way is "Benny and the Jets". In that case, though, it was hard to figure out in spots what Elton was singing at all. It turns out the most difficult section translates to "Get about as oiled as a diesel train".

Oh, and let's not forget this gem from Devo's "Whip it": "Tattoo detective" translates to "Try to detect it." Personally, though, I like my version better...

Don't you mean 'idioums'?

Actually, it's hard to give up such geographic language differences even within a single country. My favorite example is 'pop' or 'soda' or 'coke'. I went to a university in Missouri which has a population of students from a mix of both the Kansas City and St. Louis areas, though more from the latter. Notice from the map that 'pop' and 'soda' divides somewhere down the middle of Missouri. You'd hear both there. In fact, some of the St. Louis folks even even had their own special name for pop/soda/coke: they called it 'sodah'. Go figure.

Are you sure that one was from Mao? - wasn't Hitler the one who was always shooting his mouth off?

BTW, I just heard someone talking on his phone as he was using the urinal in the Men's room. Borg or no Borg, I ain't ever gonna do that...

Darn, I'd put that the thing about "lumberjacks" in, hoping that everybody who hadn't gotten it yet would finally C my Objective. ;-)

Outside of their respective organizations, I'm not sure these things are really catching on. Adoption of Go seems to have come to a standstill. Uptake of Swift has been kindda slow. And Hack seems to been ignored even by dedicated underground computer hobbyists. As well as lumberjacks.

In my own case, now that I've given in and become one of the Borg, I've decided to embrace it wholeheartedly. I now do things I used to look down on others for doing - and I do them knowingly and with gusto. For example, while waiting for a table at a restaurant, why bother talking to the people you came with? And when watching a sport on TV, why not play a phone game during the commercials? Heck, I enjoy that so much that I sometimes continue when the game comes back on. And here's one that _really_ used to bug me: I used to hate it when

(Sorry, gotta go - my phone just buzzed.)