Is that message "Australia is a crucial part of the USA"? I'm a little confused.

Right, cut out the expensive appeals process. Remove the sliver of legitimacy and watch the innocent death rate climb. My primary problem with the death penalty is the certainty that we kill innocent people. Second is a difference of opinion with our criminal justice system: I think we should optimize human wellbeing, not just focus on punishment. Third is a desire to keep our government out of the business of killing civilians or causing civilians to be killed.

But people aren't persuaded by moral or ethical considerations. Big Government Wasting Money... now that makes people mad.

Stupid fuckin capitol punishment is dumbass bullshit. Costs billiontards of dollars, kills innocents around 5% of the time. Lock 'em up and throw away the key for pennies on the dollar!

So just like Australians then...

(Disclaimer: NZ is one of my favourite places in the world. Australia... not so much)

No, really it's not. Plenty of us have experienced this...

According to the summary, it's where the string "ugly hack" appears in the code - so it would consider this comment (and yours) to be an "ugly hack"...

Degreelessness Mode?

Well, a 'Oh, shucks, a bad thing happened, that sucks.' press release isn't precisely 'nothing', but it's about what I expect.

It seems you're not a believer in GP's right to freedom of speech - no wonder you post as AC.

... as opposed to the other kind?

And right there we have "tautology of the week"

The NSA?

It's mostly based on the fact that gold is pretty...

I don't think that your statement of a generality applies to the specific, Bruce. The modifier "if you want to patent the changes" must not be discounted. So if you write a research paper on how you can tweak their architecture to produce some feature, you can simply elect not to patent it. If somebody else tries to patent the same thing, even the company in question, your research is prior art that anybody can use to strike the patent down.

As an academic who has done patentable research, I can tell you that universities are keenly interested in building their IP portfolios. And any informed patent holder knows that any violation must be prosecuted, or the validity of the patent evaporates. End result: taxpayers getting sued for violating patents generated 100% within universities with public funding. No company need get involved.

I don't know what century you live in... but universities operate like large corporations these days. They mistreat and underpay their workers as much as the law allows, they build massive IP portfolios, they pay their executives millions of dollars... I could go on.

I see very little good code. I see an awful lot of bad code

Sadly, there also always been buyers for bad code.