PulseAudio is a piece of crap. Uninstall it, uninstall Skype, and use something else like Ekiga. Don't let a minor pissant program like Skype pull in the SystemD of audio.

Damnit Slashdot!

Corrected post is here.

The US does libel and slander pretty well. For instance, if you're slandering/libeling a public figure, the burden of proof the public figure bears is higher than if you're talking about some random dude. The libeled individual has to prove the statement is false. There are cases of abuse, such as where someone gets sued by a rich person just to harass. It's not perfect. But I think anti-SLAPP laws are a better fix for that than saying, "it's perfectly okay to spread vicious lies about anyone you want."

It's true that popular speech doesn't need protection. But it's one thing to say, "I think <insert race or gender or hair color here> people are a bunch of savages, and they should all be locked up!" It's another thing to say, "This particular <insert race or gender or hair color here> person is a pedophile, raped my wife, and tortures animals for fun!" One of these things is stupid, but rightly protected speech. The other is harassment of a particular individual. There's a difference.

The US does libel and slander pretty well. For instance, if you're slandering/libeling a public figure, the burden of proof the public figure bears is higher than if you're talking about some random dude. The libeled individual has to prove the statement is false. There are cases of abuse, such as where someone gets sued by a rich person just to harass. It's not perfect. But I think anti-SLAPP laws are a better fix for that than saying, "it's perfectly okay to spread vicious lies about anyone you want."

It's true that popular speech doesn't need protection. But it's one thing to say, "I think people are a bunch of savages, and they should all be locked up!" It's another thing to say, "This particular person is a pedophile, raped my wife, and tortures animals for fun!" One of these things is stupid, but rightly protected speech. The other is harassment of a particular individual. There's a difference.

So, your system would have people able to say anything, and then you read someone's mind to figure out he didn't hire you, or didn't invite you to his party, or stopped being your friend because he thought you're a pedo, and then you sue all those people. Meaning you're making EVERYTHING a protected class for the purposes of hiring and killing freedom of association while you're at it. That sounds like a much more restrictive world to me than the current one, which just has, "don't spread nasty lies about people" as the prohibition.

I'll be more serious now: no, it's not. We fit the definition of animals, yes, but we're freaks of nature. We're smarter than all other animals we know of; our brains have more synapses than any other animal we know of; we have more complex societies than any other animal we know of; and, we've been able to harness more energy in directed ways than any other animals we know of (exhibited by electrical grids, cars, planes, and rockets that leave the fucking atmosphere and send objects into space). You wouldn't necessarily expect, say, a mouse or fish to have the same problems with emotional neglect that human children have if they aren't "shown love" but still have all their basic nutritional needs met. That's something that's going to fuck up humans much, much more than most other animals. It'll fuck up monkeys (someone did a morally reprehensible experiment, referred to elsewhere in this thread, that proved that). According to the GP, it'll fuck up dogs, too, which you might expect since they're relatively smart. But you can't go the other way. You can't say, "this level of social interaction is fine for my dog, so my kid'll be fine if I treat him like that, too". Because we're not like dogs. We're an extreme of nature. We're freaks.

Dude, that's no excuse. You still need to stop peeing on my lawn.

I'm not sure how one might think patents on methods of optimizing database queries would not qualify as software patents. As someone else said below, it's applied mathematics. Heck, the "relational" part of "relational database" comes from the theory of set relations. And if databases are your field, you know that. And if you'd donated the patents to the EFF, then you wouldn't be asking this question.

Trying to play devil's advocate the only counterargument I can come up with is, "the optimizations are useful because of the way this particular computer is architected." But that's silly; much of number theory is useful and studied because it's applicable to cryptography. Being useful in an engineering situation doesn't turn mathematics into engineering.

I don't believe in telling people to fuck off for asking an honest question. At the same time, I'm not personally inclined to help you with your problem, because you're asking with help engaging in an antisocial activity. The weird thing is, from your comment, it seems we're in agreement on that, but you don't see that what you're doing is what we both believe is wrong. Dude, those kinds of patents are the types of things most software developers talk about when they mean software patents. Amazon one-click and Microsoft's FAT patent are just talked about more because *EVERYONE* runs into those, whereas only compiler developers run into the asinine register allocation patents, and only database developers run into yours. But they're still bad, just bad in a narrower field. Look up the history of register allocation in GCC and LLVM if you want to see what patents can do to OSS. LLVM uses linear scan register allocation, which is faster than the standard graph coloring algorithm, but worse-performing. Guess which consideration is most important in 2014 when you can compile on 16 CPUs at once? GCC, as usual, does something totally fucked up because it's been around so long accumulating cruft, but its algorithm was originally designed around exactly the same patents LLVM had to design around.

Again: software patents have crippled open source compilers' register allocation algorithms from the dawn of GCC to the rise of LLVM. How disgusting is that? And the register allocation patents are what happens when we're aware of the patents and they're held by an OSS-friendly company (IBM).

If you're not going to stop patenting software, but you care about the ethical implications of your work, my minimal request to you would be to donate the patents somewhere like the EFF or FSF in your will. If you don't, your heirs might decide to sell your work to SCOracle and you'll fuck up every OSS database for a LONG. TIME. I'm sure you don't want that to be your legacy.

And btw, if you haven't, you should have your estate planning done anyway. Everyone with even a small amount of assets should. Shit happens, it's not as expensive as you might think, and a competent attorney will also prepare "collaterals" where you say, among other things, what you want to happen if you end up like Terri Schiavo. And if you're not aware of why you really need to make that absolutely clear in a totally legally binding way ... just look at the Wikipedia article for "Terri Schiavo".

Disk encryption > file shredding, 100 times over. Yes, BitLocker shouldn't be trusted because of the NSA, but, even if the NSA did backdoor it, it would still be impenetrable to standard law enforcement. Handwaving this problem away is either bluster or ignorance. Either way, he's a hack.

This isn't the first ebola outbreak West Africa has had. It's not an especially "fast moving" disease, either. And "soldier on to what may be a post apocalyptic world" is a great way not to spread panic</sarcasm>. In the developed world, we can contain ebola. If it spreads past the infected Texas healthcare workers, that wouldn't be good, but the world's not ending.

Reading your post, I'm reminded of a Slashdot poster during the housing crisis who said he was betting with his investments on sustained, deep economic decline. I wonder how that worked out for him.

Oh ... didn't see the joke. I see it now. Good one :)

Settlements get recorded by the court as judgments. They pull that, he can go to the sheriff and take his pound of flesh in seized cable boxes from their local office.

Glad he won at least. Harassment can cut across both genders. Too often people forget that.

How much of an imbalance there is depends a lot on the labor market and the individual. The employer often doesn't know what imbalance, if any, exists, which helps the employee.

If I have a marketable degree, I can probably find another job soon. That reduces the imbalance of power.
If I have 2 years of savings, I don't have to find another job that soon. That reduces the imbalance of power.
If I have a good family safety net (i.e., spouse works), I don't have to find another job that soon. That reduces the imbalance of power.
If I'm working for minimum wage in a market where the salary would be below minimum wage without government intervention (so there is necessarily unemployment due to Economics 101), have a preexisting health condition pre-ACA and either health insurance through my job only or no health insurance at all, have no savings, no family, and live in an apartment where I need my very next paycheck for the rent, then there is quite an imbalance of power.

There are various ways and individual can help himself move from that bottom category to one of the other ones. There are various ways society can help people in the bottom category (but minimum wage IS NOT one of them). It's good to think about these things, because, yeah, some employment relationships can be pretty unfair. Unions aren't necessarily the answer, though. I personally think trying to reduce poverty more directly is a better tactic (basic income, etc.).

"Half-blind" was intended to mean, "poor, uncorrectable vision in both eyes". Not being an eye doctor, I have no opinion on whether being blind in one eye but having perfect or perfectly correctable vision in the other eye would be an issue. It seems like it would because the second eye is what gives you depth perception, but maybe not, and, in any case, denying someone the right to drive, especially in the United States, is a very serious infringement on liberty by the state, so I'd probably agree with you that someone with one working eye should be allowed to drive if he is still able to demonstrate competence behind the wheel.

I wasn't necessarily saying I agree or disagree with lax regulations for driving. Since you brought up the topic, my main issue with driving in the US is lax penalties for intentionally doing unsafe things while driving. This includes driving while intoxicated (with alcohol or drugs), speeding, going so slow in the left lane as to cause a hazard because people try to pass you on the right, street racing, talking on the phone while driving, doing lipstick while driving, doing X while driving, etc. These violations, on a second offense at least, should result in at least a temporary license suspension. People can't control whether they're blind in one eye. People can control whether they talk on the phone.

But, back to the topic, all I was saying is that, as a society, we're likely to vote ourselves less safety and more freedom regarding the privilege of piloting airplanes if flying cars become a reality. Because that's what we've done with normal cars.

Not sure, but I think Google does hire its chefs directly. I thought I saw a job posting for one once on Google's careers website, but I could be wrong.