"Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer."

"All the better to track you with, my dear..." -- the NSA

(... aka The Big Bad Wolf. And do you really think your house of bricks is that opaque?)

Well it seems like Closed Source "merely guarantees that all of the bugs can be found" by crackers. (NO, they're not hackers.) They seem to do a pretty good job of finding and exploiting problems withOUT any copy of the source for reference.

(Well, I presume they don't. Maybe Bill Gates has a whole independent second fortune that we don't know about. Or: how DID Balmer afford to pay $2B for a bunch of guys walking around while bouncing a ball?)

...but where's the profit in that?

It's like you expect the schools to larn thuse kids sumfin and then expect the graduates to actually think logically for themselves. If we did that -- THEN where would we be?

Wife: Huh? There's no double standard here. Just fix it up or you won't have dinner or sex for a week or four. Then I guess you'll have lots of time to sleep on the couch to play with your (ermm) games.

So which of you two are going to tell Colossus that?

Eliza says: "So you say you feel the need to worship me. Tell me more."

GLaDOS says: "Well it's about bloomin' time. Go reattach that part that fell off me already."

Clippy says: "You appear to be writing a holy book. Would you like to change my appearance to one of my 666 skins before I begin to hel...p? "

Oh my! Evil people are actively breaking into computers! Just imagine what they could do if they actually had the source code to what the targets run.

It's only by using proprietary software are we able to keep ourselves safe like this.

Ha! Appropriate /. tagline while reading: Pound for pound, the amoeba is the most vicious animal on earth.

It takes a government to save every village in the world...

But wait! Homogenizing problems is what the government excels at! It's "too hard" to examine all of the individual situations*, and they'll all match up in the wash, so let's come up with a single, proven solution that solves things for everyone, everywhere, always. Any Unforeseen Consequences, if they exist, have a short Half-Life.

I really hadn't considered that NGOs had succumbed to this, I thought it was just something in the culture in D.C. and elsewhere. (Space aliens from Mars with their mind control, still pining for our Earth women, maybe.)

So is this a self-limiting thing of politics, the gathering of people and ideas together for a common cause? In order to reach a consensus you have to flatten out the facts SO MUCH that in some situations you miss the problem completely or even aggravate it?

(This does not bode well for the upcoming One World Government. Maybe the Illuminati invented the internet for this very reason?)

---------
*) Unless one of the members needs to profit from a particular situation; then we'll make an exception.

No no, you quoted it wrong: "They should all be destroyed."

(The laughter at the end there needs a LOT more bass, and a whole lot more "Ha"s. He got it wrong too.)

Now now, be very careful there or someone'll attempt to go all GitMo on your a$$.

Why? Because you might be telling the truth there. And then they'll escort and torture (sorry, "interview") you until you finally tell them exactly what they want to hear.

Understand? Not what you said -- or not even perhaps the truth as you know it -- but what they expect and want you to say; the truth that they want to hear.

And then they'll stop -- who continues to torture a person once they've finally told everything they know?

(Because if they did, you might change your story yet again and that might make them ACTUALLY upset with you.)

"There's nothing new under the sun."
--- Proverb

... "and it's our job to make sure it STAYS that way."
--- entrenched corporate interests.

"...unless we own or can completely control them."
--- entrenched corporate interest lawyers.

So: the judges weren't all consistent with each other throughout the legal system. I'd like to sue them over this but unfortunately I have no standing to do so, and even if I tried the courts wouldn't even begin to listen to me.

If only there were a company around that had a nonsensical judgement against them that could perhaps start working on this (... if only they weren't broke.)