If someone gives you a horse you dont't expect fine print saying you can't ride it.

I've been told people shouldn't look them in the mouth...

Did you read his post? Is is a copyright owner.

You show a complete lack of understanding of the issue, the GPL and of copyright. The poster owns the copyright on the patches he made to the Linux kernel, if Google is distributing code from those patches then they need a license from the author. It sounds like he has licensed that code under the GPL. The GPL defines what source code means, and it includes definition files needed to compile to prevent a licensee from doing just this sort of thing:

The “Corresponding Source” for a work in object code form means all the source code needed to generate, install, and (for an executable work) run the object code and to modify the work, including scripts to control those activities. However, it does not include the work's System Libraries, or general-purpose tools or generally available free programs which are used unmodified in performing those activities but which are not part of the work. For example, Corresponding Source includes interface definition files associated with source files for the work, and the source code for shared libraries and dynamically linked subprograms that the work is specifically designed to require, such as by intimate data communication or control flow between those subprograms and other parts of the work.

The only standing you would have to complain about "violating the GPL" is if you owned the copyright to code that is used in their closed-source product that they had the right to use because you made it available under the GPL. It doesn't matter if they incorporate the entire Linux kernel into their product, unless you own the copyright to some of the code they use, you have no standing to complain. It doesn't matter if you own the copyright to most of the code of the ext3 filesystem, if they take that out of the code they use then you have no standing to complain. If you suspect they are using code in their closed source product that they only had the right to use because someone licensed it under the GPL, I suggest you talk to the copyright owner to see if he cares. He might well accept a small sum from the company for a closed license to his code as well.

If they own the copyright to all of the code they are releasing under a different license, there is absolutely no requirement for them to release it under the GPL. Any versions that you had that were released under the GPL would still be able to be used under the GPL, but they have no requirement to keep providing it.

Let's take one provision of the GPL as an example. If you provide the object code without the source code, you must offer to provide the source code for up to three years. If the company owns all of the code then they can stop providing the source code at any time. They are not bound by the GPL because they own the copyrights. If however they included code that they had licensed from a 3rd party under the GPL, they would be required to provide the code, or they would have been violating the terms of the GPL and therefore violating the copyrights of the person that owns the code they licensed.

Because he deals skeptically with bad astronomy. For example if someone calls themselves a macro economist, would you think they deal with macro economics or would you think that they were a large person?

To work, the attacker needs to have planted two files somewhere that can be set to the working directory for chrome. Then they need to get the user to download a file to that same directory in order to make it the working directory. Then they need to get the user to visit an SSL site, but the user cannot be using google as their search engine and the user cannot have visited another SSL site prior to changing working directories.

Read some of the papers. The models aren't "cherry-picked" by what results they give in the future, they are picked based on how well they match existing data in the past.

I mean how cool would it be to swim in a pool of mercury? The density is 13.5 times that of water and the human body, I think you could stand up in a pool of mercury and it wouldn't even reach your crotch.

Or, since people prefer (*smirk*) car analogies, tabs on top in a browser is like a major car manufacturer deciding to replace the steering wheel with a tiller in all of its designs.

If you prefer car analogies, you should use them better. It's like a new car company starting and making great cars, but only offering leather seats. Many people aren't used to them but most grow to like them. Then another car company switches their default to leather seats because most people prefer them, but they still offer fabric as an option. Then a small number of people complain online because the new company doesn't offer fabric like the old one does... And you really agreed with the previous post?

It's like your carpenter telling you that your cabinet will have sliding doors; no matter how many orders he gets for hinged doors, he'll ignore it. Sure, he can do that, but he'll be considered a quirky craftsman at best, and a bad one at worst, and I don't think his carpentry business will be viable in the long run.

That's moronic on several levels. First, this quirky carpenter just stole more customers last month from your "custom carpentry" guy. Oh, and the old mean spirited carpenter (IE) took some too. Second, it's not like a carpenter doing custom work for you. It's like one of the big 3 national cabinet manufacturer only offering bow knobs on their cabinets. You just love everything about their cabinets but you prefer round knobs. They are nice enough to have a forum to submit requests for cabinets online, but they decide not to offer round knobs. So people go online and whine about them "stifling dissent".

[...] at least half of customers' cries of how awkward and cumbersome [...]
...
If it weren't for the lack of that simple checkbox in Chrome, that's the browser I'd be using right now, but without it, it's a dealbreaker for me, and as the comments on the linked bug report demonstrate, I'm not the only one.

No, 500 people starred the bug, out of 70 million. 500 is one out of 140,000. That's 0.0007% of users that cared enough to find the bug and click a button. 188 comments were there. Several were duplicate posts, a few were developer comments and a couple were against it so let's say 180. More people were injured by lightning in the US last year (241) than cared enough to post a comment to that bug.

One of the developer comments was that many UI design professionals would say that options aren't always a good thing (I think they have a point) and that it is explicitly not Chromium's design philosophy. That is like a painter. They specifically want a consistent user experience, one of the reasons they streamlined it, don't have a menu bar and don't let plugins add bars. I've seen family where nearly have their screen is taken up by toolbars, and they like that. Are you saying that Chrome should allow Farmville to install toolbars on people's windows if 500 grandmas want it?

Second, I think you are under-estimating the changes required. Hit SHIFT+ESC in Chrome, or hit Ctrl+Alt+Del and open your task manager. Chrome has a browser process and a separate process for each tab. The tab process owns the address bar. They did this for security and stability reasons. Putting the tabs from other processes under the address bar owned by another process is not that easy to do. I agree 100% with their philosophy on this, I've lost work in Firefox several times because Youtube crashed in another window. When that happens in Chrome I just lost that tab or other flash ones. I've had Javascript running in one tab hose the whole Firefox UI before, never happened in Chrome. If the tab processes managed tabs for other processes and it locked up for some reason, you would not be able to access those.

And all this outrage because some people can't figure out that the little thing that looks like a pin will hide your RDP header (why would someone browse the web through RDP?) or they have some stupid app like Stickies installed that likes to trample all over the UI of other apps. The tabs are part of the UI, if you have anything covering it up it is not Chrome's fault, but the fault of the other app.

Lastly, do you think the iPhone is so successful because (A) it has a nice clean UI or (B) it is highly configurable?

May have missed ? I'm fairly certain it definitely missed.

I don't think it was a comet, therefore I'm fairly certain a comet didn't miss as described so I think you're wrong.

A cometary fragment explanation is ridiculous. Bonilla's observations state that the time to cross the sun's disc was variable, between 1/3 and 1 second. If some of the bodies were moving three times as fast as others, there is no way they were fragments of the same comet.

His observations over the course of 25 hours along with a minimal escape velocity from Earth of 10 km/s give a stream that is 900,000 km long. To not be seen by Puebla or Mexico city, the stream would have to be less than 600 km wide. In the article's sample picture of a fragmented comet, the pieces are spread out over 80 pixels wide and 240 pixels long. Being generous with the figures I calculated, the stream would be 1 pixel wide and 1500 pixels long. Comets just don't break up like that. With the same 1/3 ratio as the given picture, the swarm would have been at least 300,000 km wide. Not only would that mean it was easily visible crossing the sun from anywhere on Earth (Bonilla had astronomers at Mexico City and Puebla look for them and they couldn't see them), but if it were not flat for some unthinkable reason then Earth would be well inside the swarm and many pieces would have hit us.

The more you increase the speed, the longer and narrower the stream becomes, making it even more ridiculous. The more you increase the altitude to make the stream able to be wider, the more you increase the speed. At 64,000 km the speed needs to be 593 km/s (563 km/s relative to the sun) to meet the observed crossing times. That's fast enough to leave the milky way (>= 525km/s) and certainly the Sun (40 km/s at Earth's orbit).

Now think about this: Why didn't any of this 900,000 km stream of objects impact Earth? The first object to pass would have moved 900,000 km relative to Earth, but the Earth moved 2,700,000 km relative to the sun in that time, so those objects moved either 1,800,000 or 3,600,000 km relative to the sun in that time. And every single object in this 900,000km long, 600km wide flat band was travelling at just the right speed to pass between the sun and Bonilla.

Now try to draw a graph of it, it is impossible. The comet must have been in a very similar orbit to Earth's. Imagine the Earth was not there. The first fragment would be at point A, 500-8000km from where Mexico would be in relation to the sun. 25 hours later the last observed fragment would be at point B, 2,700,000 km from point A and 500-8000km from where Mexico would be in relation to the sun at that time. There is no orbit that those two fragments could share that would make them hit those two points if they were together prior to that.

if the ocean floor didn't rise again after dropping you wouldn't get the characteristic wave.

Why not? After the slip occurs, what force would move it back to where it was before?

This same pattern of stupid comments can be seen in browser comparisons too. It's always full of people going "omg Firefox/Opera/IE is using this much memory!" while it shows that they don't understand what is really happening

Are you sure about that? It seems like pretty bad behavior for a user application to suck up available memory if it isn't needed. If all apps did that, which one would win? The only programs I've heard of doing that are server programs like SQL Server that can actually use that memory for caching, and you configure them like that. I'm sitting here running Visual Studio and several chrome sessions each with several tabs (and with SQL Server running in the background) and it's reporting 3.15gb/12gb used (Sql server about 665mb of that). 9086mb cached and 9052mb of that available. At least Windows 7 is smart enough not to show the cache as used.

On another note, memory prices have been dropping lately, you can now get 8gb (2x4gb sticks) for $40 on Newegg, under $50 for Corsair. 8gb is plenty for about anything you'd want to do short of running a server and at those prices I don't know why you'd run with anything less. So if Microsoft is trying hard to shave a few MB here and there, I'm thinking it's because they're trying to make it work well on smart phones and tablets. I'm worried they're trying to unify it all too much, I for one am not going to be leaning over my desk to swipe my monitor.

5 million dollars is the purchase price for the items on the drive. One of the torrents has over 200k books, which would be billions of dollars in damages with the U.S. copyright statute.

Accidental means unintentional, usually with undesirable outcomes. Their intention was clearly to find supernovae therefore it was in no way an accident. An accidental discovery would be Hubble taking a picture of the galaxy for other reasons and just happening to catch the supernova. The PTF survey looks at a large part of the sky and has found 858 type Ia supernovae so far.

10 GB is easily enough for today's OS with most programs (3 GB or less with some sacrifices)

What programs do you have installed? My Windows directory alone is over 34gb and My user directory is 7 gb. Those can't be moved. My Program Files directories add another 18gb and my 73.6gb (formatted 80gb drive) partition is nearly full. I can't even fit a single newer game on it, let alone my whole Steam library. I have another 4+gb of applications I've moved to another drive because of the space issues and 355 gb of installed games that cannot benefit from the SSD speed because they won't fit on it. Where do you get 10 GB from?