What are these strange and mystic words you use?

Take it to the next step: Mechanics have realized that the benefit of others not knowing how to fix cars is that Mechanics have a skill for which they can ask to be paid. They can be as arrogant as they want about their superior car knowledge, as long as they don't tick off the paying customers. The programmer who has thrown his incomplete hack on a server and called it FOSS is not getting paid, and sees no reason to put in any "extra" effort.

If I might review your scenario from a slightly different perspective, we might see why Linux has still not taken over the desktop.

The programmer has implemented something that doesn't fully work, because it's "good enough" and/or the programmer can't be bothered to make it right. The writer, like a normal user, is surprised when a casual experiment fails dismally. The programmer might (in a dream world) be embarrassed by the poor quality of his/her work, or (more likely) reacts with anger at the implied accusation of low quality (rather than accept the input as a feature request/prioritization), which anger is reflected back by the writer inferring that the programmer is not just uncaring but incompetent.

Someone offering to handle documentation *is* offering an altruistic gift of time and effort, just like any other open source contributor, though expecting gratefulness is sort of hopeless, mainly because most programmers would *not* see the documentation as an aspect of the project at all, but as a separate afterthought.

Normal people want stuff to work, and they don't want to remanufacture stuff first to make it work. Normal people assume that "published" or "released" stuff is ready to be used, not an experiment or a hobby project. Yes, they're getting stuff for free; but they're still comparing it against other stuff where people worked on the dull parts as well as the fun parts.

If someone "forked the code", presumably there is an earlier version that everyone can still get. If the point is that someone has essentially appropriated open source work, well, yes, that can happen, and the appropriate response is to boycott the offender.

"Honest, I only added a few symbols! Why doesn't the program work anymore?" Besides, computer science used to be part of either math or engineering, depending in which school you went to; we could just go back to that and suggest that it be a REAL SUBJECT instead of just tossing web images together and claiming you "wrote" something.

On "24", someone would just hang you over the side of a building and threaten to drop you.

Microsoft is an American company. The court is asking Microsoft for license and registration, whichever pocket it happens to be in at the moment (oops, I meant email and whichever server). That's different from you being a Dutch citizen (I assume if you are from Amsterdam) and being arrested for doing something *here*. The comparison would be, if a Dutch court wanted to talk to you about your account on a US game company's servers.

This. This is what has taken me out of the "suspension of disbelief" in each of the first two Hobbit segments - the feeling that I'm looking at the preview of a ride, designed for that purpose rather than designed to be a film.

You may have a problem. I have never found fuck boring.

Similar problem with another health club, due to a merger/acquisition. They referred it to collections before contacting the customer (me).

Do you also remember Nasser saying things like “Our basic objective will be the destruction of Israel." and "We will not accept any coexistence with Israel" and ordering the UN peacekeepers out of the way? And moving troops and tanks up to Israel's southern border?

Let's imagine your neighbor spends his days sitting on his porch steps, polishing his guns and cursing at you and your family every time he sees you. Well, that's his right, free speech, his property, yadda yadda. Then he starts pointing his gun at you and your family while he talks about how much he'd like to kill all of you. In the US there should be *some* kind of civil action one could take, but countries don't answer to policemen, so let's assume you can't call anyone. How tenable would you find this situation?

It's not a token. It's a freely elected representation. There are also Druze and Christian members. Are you suggesting that a government isn't free unless it's a minority in its own country?

Correction: They are able to exercise that right - they could marry one person of the opposite gender. The fact that they don't *want* to be married to a person of the opposite gender is their own limitation, and the fact that much of society has come around to the idea of changing those rules to remove the "opposite gender" restriction - thereby overturning centuries of tradition in order to make life better for a minority - shows that we are making progress.

Are you encouraging people to use hostages as shields? Are you encouraging people to deliberately endanger their own civilians by firing from within a crowd? Of course, nobody can tell who fired from within the crowd, because there are no uniforms or insignia.

Seems to me that the Palestinians belonging to Hamas put an unequal value on Hamas and non-Hamas life. Like a gang, or a movie Mafia family, only the members are "real people", and everyone else is just a nonentity to be used or risked at whim. They're almost as dangerous to their neighbors as to their enemies.