>Something got really scrambled between the scientists and the copyrighters.

FTFY

It is evident from your posts here that you have some personal issues to deal with.

It is NOT normal to lash out with a vitriolic tirade of graphic sexual threats under ANY circumstances, much less being "provoked" by inflammatory speech. It is sick, and it should not be tolerated or even expected in a peaceful civilized society.

You don't let a thief go or belittle the victim because the door wasn't locked at the time or there were no bars on the windows so a break in should have been expected. You don't defend a rapist and blame a rape victim because she wore a bikini to the beach on a hot day. And yoy certainly don't threaten someone with grave injury or death because what they say offends you. Actions of this sort are those of sick, twisted people...not always evil people as they could be victims of their upbringings, but sick people who need help nonetheless.

Likely some MSFT graft in the picture. MSFT is relocating regional headquarters and Munich is a front runner. Lots of potential tax revenue, both directly from MSFT and indirectly from the employees and spin off economic activity.

Selection of Munich would undoubtedly be contingent on the city migrating back. I dont believe any outright bribing was involved or required. All Microsoft had to do was have a bean counting meeting with the high ups...if you go back to MSFT the extra money spent on migration, licensing, hardware and administative burden of the windows platform is more than offset over time by the economic benefits of a new major employer in the city.

And, well, how could you expect MSFT to do such a favour if you continued to spurn them at city hall?

Location data and contact/address data are sensitive yet inextricably linked to how people use trackers (also known as cell phones and other portable electronic devices). Whether the device conveys GPS coordinates, can be tracked to a remarkably small area via cell tower triangulation, or unknown (to the user) parties get the information from a proprietor (such as Apple), the privacy loss inherent in ordinary tracker operation makes it impossible to "avoid storing sensitive data on the phone".

This is no accident. When societies face the combination of nonfree software (both in OS and programs people are encouraged to install later), devices that are as close to always-on as is possible for mobile computing, and a userbase as persistently distracted away from focusing on their civil liberties as most tracker users are (no thanks to sites like /. which carry stories like these without any ethical critique to go alongside the corporate-written stockprice-sensitive spin) results like these are the outcome. Add to that the unethical ways in which trackers are made (such as Apple turning a blind eye to the environment in China or expoiting workers at Pegatron even worse than at Foxconn but Apple is certainly not alone in any of this) and you have an ugly recipe for abuse from end-to-end. Many thanks to people including Richard Stallman for compiling useful information about all of this and for his many years of warning people against nonfree software.

It's news because so many people are never taught to think of software freedom. Instead sites like this one shill for Microsoft, Apple, and a weaker "open source" message that was designed to draw attention away from ethical examination of the issue. Cutting off service and not providing programs for various systems are just two of the things proprietors with the power they wield over users. Software freedom would mean letting users maintain older OSes as much as they want to, backport programs they found valuable, and run builds of modern programs as much as desired.

You're quite right to point out that Apple is no friend on these grounds. But this shouldn't be looked at in terms of business; the effect on the user is far more important. Proprietors are the same in how they treat people because the heart of any nonfree software is unethical power over someone else's use of a computer. Richard Stallman reminds us that Apple uses this same leverage to pressure users into malicious "upgrades":

Using the lever of "You have a choice, but unless you say yes, your old activities will stop working" is something that Apple has done before, with malicious "upgrades". Apple ostensibly doesn't force people to accept the new nasty thing; it just punishes them if they don't.

Nobody should be obliged to work on developing programs and nobody should have the power to prevent users from developing the software.

Yes, you should object.

Voters can't be sure that there's any evidence of their vote entering the system accurately reflecting their vote without a voter-verified paper ballot. Electronic ballots are easily lost, misrepresented, and useless in a recount. Electronic voting doesn't improve on the problems with voter-verified paper ballots and electronic ballots introduce problems all their own. So this is an area where traditional voter-verified paper ballots are better for the voter and well worth fighting for.

Braille printed ballots are extra nice to have (the braille can co-exist with the ink print on the same voter-verified paper ballot). But voters who can't read ink printed text without braille (illiterate and blind voters, to name a couple of examples) can get help from a computer to help them prepare a voter-verified paper ballot. These voters can feed in a voter-verified paper ballot into a machine that is essentially a scanner/printer combo that prints marks on a traditional voter-verified paper ballot filling in the blanks in accordance with user input to the computer. The user can get the voter-verified paper ballot out of the machine and check out its accuracy, either submit it to be counted or spoil it to get a new voter-verified paper ballot and mark it themselves, Such voters can also bring someone they trust to help them vote but this is obviously less preferred as this means divulging one's vote to someone else.

I'm not convinced Wikipedia is somehow profoundly not an encylopedia. Part of the reason your post doesn't convince me is because you criticize Wikipedia for not being "on par with the Brittanica" without specifying what you think exactly that par is, or what exactly you think "the concept of an encyclopedia is". It's difficult to have a conversation about these things without understanding what you view those things to be.

I know that I don't get the same freedoms with Brittanica I get with Wikipedia: I'm not allowed to distribute verbatim or edited copies of Brittanica entries. These freedoms translate into practical outcomes for most people, most notably the main means of keeping Wikipedia viable and an (apparently) mainstream source of information. By contrast, if someone wants to build on what they view as Brittanica's articles they have to negotiate with Brittanica to do that (and I've never seen anyone do this) but I know of projects that build on Wikipedia. Many articles I find interesting and worth listing in an encyclopedia are simply missing from Brittanica but are present in Wikipedia, such as why Brittanica thinks "GNU/Linux" and "Linux" are the same (which is both inaccurate and unfair) while maintaining that the former is an operating system and the latter a kernel (which is accurate and fair).

I have no changelog for Brittanica, so I have nothing to point to there that compares with what I can get in Wikipedia's changelog. TFA implicitly shows the value of changelogs for identifying how long edits have remained and who edited what when.

As for editing by non-experts: I don't know who edits Brittanica's many editions (including the paper editions) nor do I know what their qualifications are. I find this to be roughly equivalent to Wikipedia because I don't know who edits Wikipedia either, nor do I know their qualifications.

I remember some years ago reading an article by a Brittanica affiliate who essentially proposed to weigh Brittanica and Wikipedia on an evaluation of one obscure point he knew something about. Not only is that bad surveying, but it invites critique that can be used against Brittanica just as easily. I recall being struck by how behind the times Brittanica was the last time I saw it, particularly on the free software movement, a topic I know something about. I found the lack of coverage in Brittanica telling. Where Brittanica had something to say on the matter, I found Brittanica made the usual errors and confusions people make when they've only been exposed to "open source" (such as attributing what Richard Stallman's actions with "open source" despite historical contradiction and Stallman's own words and deeds); open source movement's philosophy, practical outcomes, or history isn't the same as free software and it's a shame history and contemporary evidence weighs so lightly for Brittanica.

You'd not only rightly reject Google Chrome you'd also reject choice as a reason to favor nonfree software. Chrome is a nonfree browser so that is right out. A choice of nonfree programs doesn't satisfy what computer users need—software freedom. Choice is easily satisfied in that there's more than one alternative but choice of software says nothing about how well the alternatives address important needs to control one's computer (rather than letting the software control the users). So choice of software is a weak substitute for the freedoms to run, inspect, share, and modify software.

People who care about controlling their computers care, as should all computer users care. This is another instance in a long line of great learning opportunities to distinguish between 'free as in price' and 'free as in freedom'—software proprietors get away with malware because how the software works is kept secret from its users. TFA tells us that Electronic Arts didn't tell prospective users SecuROM was a part of the gratis Sims 2 install, probably because EA knew users wouldn't install Sims 2 if they knew it came with SecuROM. Proprietors abuse the trust users have placed in them and it's time to teach users how things actually work, not encourage dismissal that hands users over to the abusers ("who cares").

From what I've seen at least half the addicts that I've seen here became addicted based on the advice of a medical professional. Workplace injuries and other accidents led to prescription pain meds that brought on their addiction.

It also doesn't help that they are in an emotionally fragile state, on account of them being unemployable living on disability and other social assistance, with a sudden reduction in income and feeling worthless.

The rest, well yeah Darwin's law can take care of them I suppose, but very many addicts did not get where they are out of selfish pursuit of a high. Some were just dealt a bad hand.

It should be noted that the drug in question is not caffeine or sugar. Red bull gives you wings because it contains TAURINE. Without that stimulant it would be tamer than a double-double coffee from Tim Hortons

If the drive's software were flashable (the device could be updated with different software) and the software were Free Software, there would be no reason to fear Intel's connection to the NSA. Users would have the freedoms they need to make sure the software does what they want it to do. Proprietary encryption, no matter who writes it or distributes it, is always untrustworthy for the same reason proprietary software is untrustworthy—you don't really know what it's doing and neither does anyone you can trust to help you understand what it's doing. Furthermore you can't make it do what you want and you can't help others by distributing improved versions that respect other user's freedoms.

Early Tuesday, gamers woke up to find out that they couldn't log in to any Sony Online Entertainment games--no Everquest, no Planetside 2, none of them.

Could the users have used another server to connect with each other? Or is this a case of DRM ("Digital Restrictions Management", when properly viewed from the perspective of its effect on the users) and, more generally, nonfree software restricting users from running the games with other people?

[...] not everything has to be blessed by Stallmann to be acceptable

Regarding this point, Stallman certainly does endorse Free Software. And so much of what is in OpenBSD is Free Software—software that respects a user's software freedom—and the same goes for OpenSSL. Stallman (and his organization, the Free Software Foundation(FSF)) are known for standing up for a user's software freedom. Non-copylefted Free Software is Free Software. Furthermore, in 2004 the FSF gave Theo de Raadt an award for the Advancement of Free Software, "[f]or recognition as founder and project leader of the OpenBSD and OpenSSH projects, Theo de Raadt's work has also led to significant contributions to other BSD distributions and GNU/Linux. Of particular note is Theo's work on OpenSSH". A free system need not include GNU software or be licensed under a GNU license (such as the GPL) to respect a user's software freedom.

The FSF is quite clear why it doesn't list OpenBSD (or the other BSD distributions) in their list of Free system distributions:

FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD all include instructions for obtaining nonfree programs in their ports system. In addition, their kernels include nonfree firmware blobs.

Nonfree firmware programs used with Linux, the kernel, are called "blobs", and that's how we use the term. In BSD parlance, the term "blob" means something else: a nonfree driver. OpenBSD and perhaps other BSD distributions (called "projects" by BSD developers) have the policy of not including those. That is the right policy, as regards drivers; but when the developers say these distributions âoecontain no blobsâ, it causes a misunderstanding. They are not talking about firmware blobs.

No BSD distribution has policies against proprietary binary-only firmware that might be loaded even by free drivers.

Including nonfree software and pointing users to nonfree software is quite common among those who endorse the open source philosophy, as the FSF has long pointed out (older essay, newer essay). The open source movement's philosophy is a development methodology built to toss aside software freedom for practical convenience in an attempt to be "more acceptable to business". So this philosophical difference sets up a radically different reaction in the face of reliable, powerful proprietary software. Quoting the newer essay:

A pure open source enthusiast, one that is not at all influenced by the ideals of free software, will say, "I am surprised you were able to make the program work so well without using our development model, but you did. How can I get a copy?" This attitude will reward schemes that take away our freedom, leading to its loss.

The free software activist will say, "Your program is very attractive, but I value my freedom more. So I reject your program. Instead I will support a project to develop a free replacement." If we value our freedom, we can act to maintain and defend it.

You don't need to buy Micros to get your hands on that data!

(Hint: Micros has suffered some really bad breaches in the past, basically hanging their customers out to dry.)