Given the way that gtk3 "improved" over gtk2, that's not a bad idea. I would really like to not be dependent upon it, because who knows what garbage they'll make and call gtk4.

OTOH, most of the KDE Office suite is unusable. This isn't because of the Qt libraries, though. I haven't been able to figure out WHAT their goal is, but its been nearly a decade and they haven't significantly improved. I used to use KMail, but at one point it broke, and other people's comments have dissuaded be from trying it again.

*IS* Red Hat giving them a compilable version? I doubt it. I think they acquire it from a third party who legally acquired it.

The point isn't that your (or I) read all the code, but that the author can't control who will look at it, and lots of people are likely to, particularly if they notice anything suspicious about how it acts.

As for you being a customer of Fedora...how much did you pay them? I could see you claiming to be a customer of Red Hat, but of Fedora? (OTOH, it's true this code is likely to eventually make its way into Red Hat's commercial offerings...so if you are a customer of Red Hat, i.e. purchase one of their commercial packages with support contract), you do have reasonable grounds to claim to be a customer. But I rather doubt that you are.

P.S.: I rarely look at the code, but I do occasionally look at some piece if I want to figure out how they are doing some particular thing. And I suspect that the number of people who occasionally look at a piece of the code here and there is much higher than you expect, even though very few do it full time, or even very much of the time.

IIUC, Fedora is not increasing the export of code, but rather allowing the import of code. As such, I don't see why the law should have anything to do with it. If it does, then this needs to be explained more clearly.

What this seems to be doing is allowing Fedora to import code with names assigned, but without geocoding it. It is true that this would imply that the contributor had, in some manner, got hold of the original code, but this doesn't mean that Fedora gave them access. Probably they got it from some other source which legally got the code from Fedora (i.e., Red Hat).

And, if I am understanding correctly, this does not violate any intentional wording of the law. It may, of course, violate a carelessly worded portion of the law...but so might anything. Legal bugs rarely get corrected except via legal interpretations by appellate courts...and though are nearly as likely to introduce bugs as to fix the old one, and often seem to introduce new bugs while still not fixing the old one. Which is a small part of why there are so many stupid, ill-conceived, and harmful laws on the books. Bribery of legislators is, of course, the predominate reason.

FWIW, I have little respect the for US legal system. There are worse ones, but the percentage of worse legal systems is growing fewer each year...usually without the rest of the world improving. The wholesale bribery of legislative bodies without anyone being punished does not inspire ANY respect. Neither does the wealthy blatantly abusing the less powerful. Neither does the choice of viable candidates for office.

There have been supreme court justices that disagree with your opinion, though I agree that it is by far the majority opinion.

FWIW, when I am on a jury, I decide based on justice. And I don't let any judge tell me what justice is, not with the corrupt way they have gamified the court system, to the point where I will not call it a "justice system".

As it happens, every time I've been on a jury, the case was, AFAIKT, a valid case, and I happened to agree with the judge. This doesn't mean that if I felt that equity and justice were being violated I would accept his dicta WRT how and on what basis I should vote.

There's not much justification for that, but what about teaching them that pi == 3? There's authority for that in the Bible. (Somewhere about the building of the temple by Solomon, there's described a round vessel with a circumference 3 times its diameter.)

Sorry, but voluntary ignorance is necessary in an age of information overload. I routinely decline to inform myself of the contents of junk mail, e.g.

You need to rethink your statement. You might also want to think carefully about what your definitions are for good and evil. It torturing bacteria good or evil? Why? What about nematodes? Grasshoppers? Does it depend on your motives? All or them, or only the ones you admit?

Please note, it is possible to teach children how to make explosives. Is it evil to keep them in ignorance?

You don't know his use case. He may have a very good reason.

FWIW, I don't know how to do it either, but I don't do web programming, so that's not surprising. But I would expect that there would be some client-side javascript, or possibly java, that could acquire and retransmit the information.

The reason that the people who took the loans aren't held as guilty as the people who loaned the money is because many people have experienced being talked into something by a fast-talking salesman who sold them something they didn't really understand. It's happened to me. You don't expect the people who take out loans to be experts at understanding contract law, and those are the only people who had a reasonable chance of being certain what they had signed. (Even then it's only a reasonable chance. Let me hand you an obfuscated program you've never studied and press you for a quick signature while I tell you about the wonderful things it will do for you.)

For that matter, when is the last time you actually read and understood the EULA for the software you've just installed? Are you sure?

P.S.: The main reason I am now running Linux rather than Apple is that I actually read some of the EULAs. MS was worse, and I left them earlier. And as IANAL, I must admit that perhaps they weren't quite as bad as I believed that they were...but they could as easily have been much worse. But the Real Estate market doesn't have anything analogous to the GPL or BSD licenses.

Which is sort of his point. (sorry if I missed the joke.)

While a definite point, that's not an argument that the criminals involved weren't government actors.

This is, after all, one of the things governments do. They destroy competing currencies. And we have considerable evidence that the US govt was seriously involved in researching how bitcoin exchanges worked. We don't have any particular reason to assume that they were the only one. And NO government is going to defend them.

OTOH, this is just an argument of plausibility, and is certainly not a proof. The Russian Mafia might be as plausible an explanation...but I don't really find it any more plausible. (Perhaps if I knew more about what happened, I might alter my beliefs. E.g., if it happened via internal subversion, that might make one player or another more likely...but which?)

First plausible defense I've heard. Now the question: Are there any grounds for assuming that GCHQ wanted his head?

If they did, then that's a plausible scenario. Or, plausibly, if they wanted his boss' head. Otherwise it's quite unlikely.

Given the legal definition of "child porn", I am unable to accept this defense of the legal process. If they were to remove drawings, anime, manga, and similar from the category I would be much more willing to accept it. I *do* agree that actual children should not be exploited for sex, including pictures. But even pictures of actual children aren't automatically fit subjects for legal control. Most parents either take or took nude photos of their children. And drawings, unless from life, or "photoshopped images" of exploitative images, should never merit censorship...though perhaps it should be illegal to use them in advertisements.

History of human societies indicates that when cocaine is not illegal, there is much less violence associated with it. This does not mean that it is not destructive, but the destructiveness is turned in a more inwards direction. You could read Freud on his experiences with cocaine, but he was more controlled than are most people.

Watched the war news recently?

Admittedly, there is no provable connection, and I have doubts that the effect works as proposed, but it is true that people can become desensitized to what would have been horrifying images by seeing them repeatedly.