The headline could be confusing. The garage was significant. My point is that people extend the concept in their heads and imagine a lot more than it really was. That is the myth part.

I travel a ton and stay in dozens of different hotels every year. Domestically, and in maybe 50% of the foreign cases, the high priced hotels had worse and slower internet up until a couple of years ago. For the last 2 years they have gotten better, on the average. Oh, I was in a 5-star Vegas resort last night that had horrible bandwidth. In the past, my joke was accurate that the difference between a Four Seasons (just an example) and a Super 8 is that at the Super 8 the internet worked and was free. The most important thing to me in a hotel is computer use. The fancy suites in major hotels are often set up for entertaining friends and DON'T even have a computer desk. I ask my wife to book me into Super 8's whenever possible.

http://www.forumsforums.com/3_9/showthread.php?t=62716

End goal: change the constitution. We need a start. It's easy to see how hard this will be and to give up early, but some of us feel the imperative to fight for it. We can change things. The vast will of the masses (corporation political donations are not equivalent to the free speech we enjoy as individuals) needs to be strategically gathered. Critical mass could take decades, as with things like gay marriage.

Spammers or hackers could get your IP turned off. But I'd do it anyway to be helpful.

Thanks. I understand and appreciate where you are coming from.

As a founder of the EFF, I do stand up for the small consumers vs. the wealthy and powerful. There is no perfect solution.

When you make the rules, you are right when you're wrong.

ESR = Eric Steven Raymond the third. I'm kidding about the the third bit.

I'm actually a Muslim, who has some interest and self and formal study on Islam. Suicide is not part of the tradition of Islam, it has approximately 30 years of history in Islam. This started with Hezbollah conducting a suicide attack during the Lebanon war. Islam is vast, full knowledge I think is beyond me, and most people. This is because the Qur'an, the hadith (sayings and actions of the prophet) are all sources. The hadith alone represent millions of accounts and sayings, which all have to be verified with the number of people retelling the same events, along the the biographies of these witnesses. Plus some parts of the Qur'an abrogate others, each verse can be a sourse of law. This is because the Quran was composed over a twenty year period of the Prophets life, and times change. These are only the sources mind you, there's a bit more than this that goes into what is considered Islam. I suggest that you learn something about Islam.

I agree with your point, culture is allways an important interpretive element, which is actively embraced in traditional Islam.

Actually in the case of someone recanting ones faith in the face of persecution Islam is ok with that, as long as you don't really mean it and your trying to save your life. What many on Slashdot don't know is it's an imperative to preserve life in Islam, we do have Muslims, with a belief backed by enormous amounts of oil money, that would use suicide in military situations though. The death under persecution argument doesn't support your hypothesis. P.S. it is very possible that there's more to it than I know.

Quite the opposite, if you file and are granted a patent for something that is later ruled invalid, there should be substantial penalties for the filer, because the purpose of a patent application is a government granted monopoly, leveraging the legal power and force of government to suppress other business. If you tell the government that you've done something novel that isn't, and prevent competition through that mechanism, there are substantial social costs (none of the benefits of invention, but all of the costs of a monopoly).

Evi has been my closest contact at CU over the years. She was always a good friend and administered the scholarship I set up there. I am very sad but hoping to hear good news from my NZ friends. Evi was a very important person when it comes to Unix and Internet routing.