Project Gutenburg would be a counter-proof.

Well, no. The issue is whether code - or any other copyrighted work - will ever enter public domain. Mickey Mouse Protection Act says it won't, and Project Gutenbert doesn't contradict that.

Not that it matters: copyright law has almost no legitimacy whatsoever, so it simply gets ignored despite draconian punishments. The whole concept of property law seems to simply be incompatible with the digital realm, consequently various message boards and other sites depending on user-generated content basically operate as communist utopias: everyone contributes whatever they can, the results are free for everyone to use at their leisure, and even personal glory isn't an issue, at least in anonymous messageboards. That's right: aside from its current immaturity, Anonymous is pretty much a model Marxist collective.

Funny, isn't it? Capitalism won the Cold War, but its natural development is now leading to Communism because that maximizes production in the Information Age. It wasn't a good model for industrial production, but as that keeps getting automated and focus shifts on coordination and cultural production, it turns out hierarchies simply get in the way. So nominally communist countries were arranged like giant corporations, while the new organizational model everyone's learning growing up now is "contribute according to your abilities, enjoy other people's contributions freely".

I wonder if this is why neoliberalism has been so fashionable lately: it's the struggle of a fading system to maintain it's dominance rather than be relegated to handling just a small subsection of total economy?

Weak-minded government officials are an example of government corruption.

Anyone who accepted the idea, "not allowing parking lots was to push people into not having cars", was weak-minded. The idea was always to save the builders money, and have residents use the surrounding streets instead. The resulting lack of parking reduced the values of surrounding houses, because, for example, house owners could not have parties if their guests could not find a place to park.

Super Dracos are for escape in flight too, including in and past MaxQ. But they are on Crew Dragon, not Cargo Dragon. Cargo Dragon did not carry a crew and wasn't programmed to save itself.

Somebody got drunk and noisy, so what?

So your business is causing a disturbance that extends to my property. The noise and drunks are basically waste products of your business; you don't get to dump them on my lawn.

People living in those houses never drink? Never get noisy?

Sure they do, and when they do, the police comes to take the criminal scum away. But that doesn't work when you have a whole new customer lined up for the next night, and another one for the next, and another one...

Are hotels covering tourist behaviour outside of hotel premises?

Hotels are subject to zoning laws which generally put them into commercial districts, precisely for this reason.

You are full of shit, just like this entire case.

No, I'm simply defending my property rights. The hotels are defending their right to equality before law. The only one full of shit here is you, even by your own standards.

Most of us do have a need to transmit messages privately. Do you not make any online purchases?

Yes, but those have to use public-key encryption. I am sure of my one-time-pad encryption because it's just exclusive-OR with the data, and I am sure that my diode noise is really random and there is no way for anyone else to predict or duplicate it. I can not extend the same degree of surety to public-key encryption. The software is complex, the math is hard to understand, and it all depends on the assumption that some algorithms are difficult to reverse - which might not be true.

Not having insurance means this: the hotel industry lobbies the government to make competition illegal, that is all it is.

According to the summary, the customers are "partying all night, some running around naked, and generally trashing their neighborhoods". The hotel industry is perfectly within their rights to demand everyone plays by the same rules. If you can figure out a better way to run a hotel, good for you; but if you simply figure out a new way to externalize the costs, you should be forced to eat them - and for Joe Average, that means licensing and insurance.

As a side note, we have far too many people who want to be treated as business geniuses despite doing nothing but turning costs to externalities, and often even making them costlier in the process. It's that failure of human spirit that makes it impossible to have completely free markets.

If you aren't from here, haven't grown up here, live here, then you are talking out of your ass.

Roof is from there, grew up there, and lives there. I think he's made his view on what the Confederacy flag stands for quite clear. Nor does your testimony contradict his.

The oppression and racism thing ended down here back in the 60's. You just don't see that here anymore and no..the Stars and Bars for my lifetime has not been use or seen as something for oppression.

Yet here we have an incident of just that: someone who identifies with the Confederacy and southern pride murdering blacks for living like humans (that is, not knowing their place). How do you reconcile the fact that such things happen with your claim that they don't?

It was a backdrop for a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert, nothing more than that level of southern pride thing.

For you it was. For a black church, the Confederacy flag is a backdrop for a racially motivated terrorist strike. That, too, is a southern pride thing.

That said, simply banning the flag won't do anything to help the situation. It can't cast Confederacy's dispersed essence the rest of the way into oblivion because, as you keep demonstrating, it's part of a lot of people's identities; such cultural excorcism would be extremely painful, just like de-nazification was painful for post-war Germany. Nor does redeeming it seem possible, since there's no entity left which could represent it - after all, the Confederacy is no longer embodied by a political system, but lingering cultural influences. So that leaves it free to continue its war from the shadows, claiming a victim here and another there and then using those possessed meat-puppets to murder other people, incapable of coordinated action but also almost invulnerable to a counter-attack due to its intangible and distributed nature.

Issues like this are why I believe we desperately need to put resources into developing social "sciences" into real science and corresponding technology. Because then the question becomes: how do you precisely identify the memetic organism - or "spirit" - the Confederacy flag represents, remove unwanted elements - such as racism - and put the rest back together so the result is able to outcompete the original in the cultural ecosystem? No, not outcompete, "upgrade" or "reinterpretation" would be better terms.

Because, as a certain other terrorist demonstrated, lingering darkness coming out of hiding, possessing people and causing havok is hardly an issue limited to America. And it's just a matter of time before one happens to get access to nukes rather than a mere rifle.

Most algorithms to do this use the time between keypresses, measured to very high precision so that the lower bits are chaotic. So it doesn't really matter what keys you hit, and it doesn't matter how rythmic your typing is.

The problem with FM static is that you could start receiving a station, and if you don't happen to realize you are now getting low-entropy data, that's a problem.

There are many well-characterized forms of electronic noise: thermal noise, shot noise, avalanche noise, flicker noise, all of these are easy to produce with parts that cost a few dollars.

True randomness comes from quantum mechanical phenomena. Linux /dev/random is chaotic, yes, enough to seed a software "R"NG. But we can do better and devices to do so are cheap these days.

I wouldn't trust anything but diode noise for randomness. If I had a need to transmit messages privately, I'd only trust a one-time pad.

As someone that has grown up in the south and is more than a few years old...no, that is not the case.

Cayenne... are you black? Because, to put it bluntly, horrible oppression is often a sweet deal for the oppressor. It's how it gets their willing participation in horrendous crimes, especially if it can outsource the direct application of violence to sadistic thugs and let Joe Average pretend he's not doing anything wrong, despite it being Joe who supplies the truly vital ingredient: legitimacy.

This uproar and associated meanings with the Rebel Battle Flag is a recent occurrence.

No, it's not. The flag has always stood for racism and slavery. The uproar is new, simply because the concept of civil rights for the blacks in America is.

I grew up with it and it was never that way....it was a backdrop for a Lynyrd Skynryd concert, or the top of the General Lee.

The Nazi flag was a backdrop to the Olympics, once. The people who watched them were unlikely to be any worse than the average person anywhere. They went home with golden memories of a wonderful day. But the culture that flag stood for was still monstrous.

Harmless symbols of southern pride.

And southern pride was about keeping oppression going even after military defeat. It's not harmless. It is, in fact, murderous.

The Allies forcefully de-nazified Germany after the war and forced the people to confront the truth. Unfortunately, the North couldn't force the South to repent, since it was just barely better itself. This terrorist attack is simply yet another surfacing of that lingering taint, a spring that keeps pushing poisoned water from endless aquifers, a weed that can keep growing back forever since the roots remain in the ground.

All this because one jackass that killed a bunch of innocent people had a picture of him holding a small version of it.

Southern culture contains structural violence embedded to it by its history. Everyone who takes it in - as everyone must, growing up - also takes in the poison. Some manage to avoid the worst of it and are relatively fine, while some turn into Ku Klux Klan fodder. And if a particular mind happens to be particularly vulnerable, either inherently or because of the specific conditions they're in, their own personal identity can take a backseat to one of the archetypes of their culture. In the US, especially in the south, one very prominent archetype is the racist lyncher who kills any blacks who get "uppity". That's the archetype the entire Confederacy was founded on. It's all there ever was to it.

Roof may be a "jackass", but he's also the embodiment of Confederacy as it truly was and is. Nations come and go, their spirits tend to live on, sometimes with their own name and sometimes as seemingly random aspects of culture. And the Confederacy's spirit is still alive and inspiring the only thing it ever stood for: tyrany.

Communism has been tried on a large scale - see Mao's Great Leap Forward.

Nope. That was a totalitarian socialist program pushing a collectivism that didn't work. Communism is a post-scarcity society and obviously scarcity was the thing Mao produced best.

It's amazing to me how much Slashdot readers hate discussing business management. Discussing business management is often painful, but I think we should accept the pain and get the job done. For example:

Marissa Meyer is not competent, in my opinion. A dishonest or sneaky CEO should be fired. This is the 2nd recent nasty manipulation Meyer has arranged. This is the first:

Has Firefox been Embraced and Extended with the intention of Extinguishing it by Microsoft? Mozilla Foundation now gets most of its money from Microsoft. Microsoft pays Yahoo. Yahoo pays Mozilla Foundation to make "Yahoo search" (actually Microsoft Bing search) the default search engine in Firefox. Most people don't have the technical knowledge to know how they've been manipulated, or how to restore the default search engine to Google search. Marissa Meyer's sneakiness is damaging Firefox's reputation.

The Thunderbird and SeaMonkey Composer GUIs have been damaged, apparently deliberately. Every time you do a file save, the newer versions of both ask for a new file name, and don't suggest the last file name chosen. The damage was reported several months ago, but has not been fixed. Is that another example of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish? People who feel forced away from Thunderbird may choose Microsoft software to replace it. Is that what Microsoft is trying to accomplish?

Change in subject: It's amazing how fast computer programming languages die. Pascal died in 2 years. Java is almost dead because the U.S. government issued a very negative warning.

We've seen the Rebel flag suddenly become a horrible symbol of oppression, and hate and vilified all of a sudden and yanked even from online stores and private individual sales on ebay.

The Confederacy flag always was a horrible symbol of oppression. People just got a little reminder of just what it actually stands for. I guess some of them don't like the real face of the Confederacy so much.