There is still no legal Linux DVD player in the USA that I've found. The only "legal" ones are in Windows emulation tools.

CentOS, Scientific Linux, the old "Whitebox" distribution, and other free rebuilds resemble the "Red Hat" distributions before RHEL. They're quite fascinating free and open source software projects. Red Hat has been model open source and freeware contributors in their publication of all legally permissible source code: they do retain some projects where the source code is licensed form others and cannot be published directly, such as the old Sun Java packages.

I agree that Scientific Linux could now consider simply adding separate packages. The difficulty is that those package would still not be in the base CD or DVD distributions, not even access to those packages would be permitted. CentOS has been very, very clear that they do not include non-RHEL software in the base distribution. Scientific Linux includes access to EPEL, which has recently been activated for CentOS. It also provides easy activated access to the "rpmfusion" and "atrpms" websites for software Red Hat cannot safely provide due to patent and DMCA regulation, Adobe access presents licensing issues, NVidia drivers, and MPEG drivers in various repositories, and some old packages with strange licensing.

Scientific Linux has been very helpful at enabling access to these without painful manual steps. Red Hat, and thus CentOS, will not be able to do so without taking on profound legal liabilities.

Because they also show up on the background check, and establish a pattern of ongoing illegal activity. A felony conviction for vehicular manslaughter, on New Year's Day coming home from a celebration, with no history of drug or alcohol abuse, can be described as a single tragic event. A vehicular homicide after a long history of DUI convictions and failed treatment programs means a real addiction risk: it's just the sort of thing that background checks should detect.

It depends profoundly on what the felony conviction was for. I'm afraid the fact that you asked a very vague question and expect a somehow useful answer is, itself, a much stronger indication that you do _not_ belong in IT. Expecting a useful answer from such a vague question is not a good engineering approach, especially in IT where incredible resources can be wasted addressing unspecified requirements. I'm afraid that, if I saw your resume after this, I'd reject it on the grounds of the horrible question without even having to consider the felony itself.

I've met people with drug convictions and who practice medicine, after treatment and with regular blood tests. I even knew of a child care worker with a kidnapping conviction. (She helped hide a mother and children from an abusive father under extraordinary circumstances.) And if "expunging" is not available, perhaps a pardon is feasible: Ohio apparently can seal court records with a pardon, though it's not automatic.

So a conviction is not necessarily career ending. But without more details, the question is too vague to be usefully answered.

They handled it the same way US citizens handle the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay. They ignored it.

Don't forget disputed insurance claims, and new employee paperwork with medical and life insurance applications with records of pre-existing conditions.

XKCD already did a better job on just this issue.

          http://xkcd.com/936/

He also got patent abuse right (such as Tivo tried to do and MPEG patents), legislative abuse to protect poor quality source code (such as the DMCA and DVD encryption), and the abuse of "open source" licenses to create closed, propeietary "add-ons" which rely on but do not properly cooperate with the open source users and developers. (Yes, I'm referring to Citrix Xen and NVidia.)

"Open Source" , rather than free software, has been repeatedly abused.

> we already have it in the form of everyone with a cell phone camera. if anything remotely interesting in public happens, 5 or 6 people are filming it and its uploaded within the hour and mirrored forever beyond any possible take back within a few hours

"If anything interesting happens", yes. If it's just a citizen at a traffic stop, no one else is close enough to record the conversation or where the citizen's hands are placed. There are numerous webcam and cell phone cam videos over on Youtube of police misbehaving. The videos of rights activists flying drones near pigeon shoots and police ordering them off of public property, and the videos of open carry stops, are fascinating in the _range_ of police reactions.

Then there is this cop, who earns the YouTube listing of "Best Open Carry Stop Ever".

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

And this officer, who is very clear on protecting First Amendment rights in the face of local bureaucracy.

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

> Taking away someone's driving license doesn't ruin their life

If you live 30 miles from work, with no direct public transit, it ruins your ability to get to work. It also ruins your job if you work on the third shift, when public transit is unavailable. If you have family to care for, especially, it limits your ability to get them to school, doctors, dentists, their other family, or even to a friend's home for visits and to return the favor.

This does not mean drunk drivers deserve leniency: but yes, losing their license and especially having their vehicle taken away can be a very profound punishment.

There are also older managers who will not hire you: they appreciate the willingness of younger engineers, without strong experience, to be driven or manipulated to make specific goals and not to _question_ the wisdom of management. It's very difficult to be in the field without some sense of politics, or to know when management is lying to you, and such a manager will not appreciate having their work questioned.

But to stay active, I'd strongly urge getting active in freeware and open source projects. Whatever freeware your current role relies on, get involved in. It keeps up your skills, it helps to mentor the new users, and it keeps your name visible on Google searches for the technology listed on your resume. And it helps guide the software to be the way _you_ want it to work.

> he does have to understand he will probably reach a relatively low ceiling of pay

Yes, the Peter Principle applies to programmers and systems administrators as well. It can be resisted: some of us would much rather continue to do our best work in the best field for our skills rather than move "up" to higher authority fields.

> Even if you could rent, what's wrong with financing a home via mortgage.

The devil is in the details, I'm afraid. Please look carefully at what happened with the sub-prime mortgages, where people over-invested in homes with mortgages they could not afford, and in many cases were defrauded by the real estate agents and even misled or defrauded by the banks providing the mortgages. The typical "20% down" for a mortgage serves many purposes, but a very large purpose of it is proving that you can live within your means and set aside part of your income on a continuing basis.

The original "homeopath", Samuel Hahnemann, actually had useful things to say and was careful to document and test his claims. The modern followers of homeopathy seem to have completely lost touch with his original claims. He believed in _testing_ medical claims, and did his educated best to verify his work and older medical cleaims. Given that he was working in the lat 1700's, he deserves credit as an enlightened medical scientist.

What happened to his work after his death would clearly have shocked and horrified him.

> Then why aren't you hearing anything from the Red Hat customer base? If anyone wants reliability it's the enterprise which is Red Hat's entire market. The fact that nothing is coming from that side tells me that this is about something else entirely where people are more concerned about the political process and symbolism than the technical merits.

We did speak up, but not on Slashdot. RHEL is, fundamentally, a rebuild of Fedora for new features and with far greater stability than Fedora. systemd was introduced to Fedora as the default in 2011, and there was a great deal of concern. There are some advantages to it, such as improved daemon reliability and boot-time logging.