I find myself in mixed company; most people are truly ignorant as to the facts in this case -- including most lawyers. Of course, I stated nothing about the facts in this case, just that the situation is the same and that case law seems to have veered off from sane decisions in a number of precedent setting cases similar to this.

I'm using the "if it quacks like a duck" comparison, as used in the case against Aereo recently.

The point is... they DO have a choice. Recent versions of popular packages won't run without it? Recent versions don't get included in Debian. Suddenly, recent versions get tweaked by their maintainers so that they'll get included in Debian/Ubuntu.

Really... if Red Hat is going to pull a Wal Mart, Debian can do the same thing, and be much more effective about it.

and actually, this is the same thing as the FBI pretending to be a terrorist cell and using information fed from informants, or the vice squad using a confiscated phone to set up drops. Definitely nothing new, been contested in court over and over again, and at this point seems to mostly have been accepted as "infringing, but legal by exception" which is, of course, not legal when you look at it too closely, but legal as far as case law goes.

I think what's really happened is that we've allowed government to convince us that "hard on crime" is only valid when the crime is committed by someone with a disreputable history who isn't connected to the government.

I think if the same "hard on crime" rules were applied to government employees, we wouldn't even be having this discussion.

Yeah; I think everyone needs a copy of "'Alice In Wonderlands) ; DROP TABLE Books ; --.epub" as mentioned by geantvert earlier in this thread. There's a few other titles that are equally entertaining that are must-reads.

Because "plain text" is a MAJOR issue.

If it's encrypted, then Bad Actor #1 (in this case, Adobe) steals all your personal info. All fine and dandy; you can sue them and get them to drop all that personal info, and life goes back to normal.

If it's plain-text, then opening, say, an OverDrive eBook while at Starbucks suddenly makes your entire eBook collection, including titles that have nothing to do with Adobe, available to anyone else listening in on the public WiFi.

so: outrage over the action in the first place, merited. Furor over not even taking pains to protect the data from other eyes, way more than merited.

Think about it like this: which is worse: the guy next door taking pictures through your windows night and day, or the guy next door taking pictures through your windows night and day and posting them all online? They're both bad, but the second is much worse.

Fine. Aren't we talking about open source here? What is being said isn't really that people hate Poettering, but that people disagree with a decision the Debian maintainers have made.

When this happened with OpenOffice, people left and formed LibreOffice. The fact that this hasn't happened with Debian indicates that the core dev group (the people who actually work on the OS) are generally in favour of the change. So why not just fork to Febian, take the most recent non-systemd release, and move forward with it? If systemd is really so bad, the difference will be obvious to those using it and maintaining it, and eventually Debian will go the way of the dodo, to be replaced by Febian.

I fail to see the problem here, unless the problem is that there's a vocal minority who doesn't actually have the skills to maintain such a system but disagree with the way others are doing it. The minority could be correct, but it's probably not all that big a deal.

Depends... are those major leagues, minor leagues or little leagues?

Don't throw the Doctor into the classics please -- even if he's a classic himself.

But I'd like to know why he left out the crystal skulls.

I was wondering how they ended up with a 74-teraflop -- I guess that explains it. Would have been better with a terraflop though.

Yeah; I'm surprised nobody read (or at least admitted to reading) my second comment that flagged up some of that. Lotus 1-2-3 was for the IBM PC XT. Never touched the Apple II.

However, the dates/etc. are actually accurate, somewhat.
Lotus started buying VisiCalc in 1985, but the deal wasn't actually finished until 1986.
Excel came out in 1984 (I've got a copy of it), but didn't go out through distribution channels until 1985. I was going to say 1985 on this one since that's when it was officially available in stores, but then decided to go with 1984, as it WAS available.
"Excel for MS DOS 3" came with a Windows runtime; I originally had listed it as coming out for Windows in 1987, but then figured I'd go with the marketing.

And the replacement of 1-2-3 with Excel was exactly as you said -- that, and the fact that right out of the door in 1987, you could buy a GUI that would run your old DOS apps AND came with Excel. A lot of businesses thought this was a good deal.

I was thinking that the "perfect" solar cell already existed....

http://ask.metafilter.com/1430...

Hah... and so far, nobody noticed my gaffe regarding the Apple II -- 1-2-3 actually ran on the IBM PC XT IIRC; it'd been reading too many other comments and TFS and got sucked into a reality distortion field.

Interesting that you should raise the FDIV bug (which was discovered via an Excel spreadsheet IIRC, didn't read the wiki page) -- I seem to recall there was some rounding error that hit excel spreadsheets later on in life too, where the rounding rules differed in two parts of the cell operations, so that you could have data that became more inaccurate each time the page was run.

You can always leave it; romantic relationships are not a divine right. I'm a proponent of "do lots of group activities and develop relationships based on commonality, some of which may become romantic" -- traditional/e-dating tends to be a shortcut, and like most shortcuts, has its own hazards.

Arranged marriage tends to have just as high a success ratio as marriages based on formal dating. Just saying.