I'm boycotting these ridiculous polls.

Where are the cowboyneal options?

Say, 'One tab for every heart CowboyNeal has broken'

That's just an idea. In the end, it is up to the editors. But by gawd, CowboyNeal options used to bring a little light into my day and helped, maybe just a little, to bring together this diffuse group of sysadmins and other assorted computer folk.

He specifically says

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-not-lgpl.html

Just as free software is not a religion, proprietary developers do not have a freedom to use libraries created by free software developers. Where did you get that idea from?

Developers in general have a right to use software under the license it was released, and RMS is suggesting that free software developers use the license that best promotes the adoption of free software.

Indeed, this is one issue where he clearly shows pragmatism, by suggesting that commonly-available libraries be released under the lesser GPL. Yet you turn this around and claim that, by doing so, he is going 'to great lengths to compromise on freedom in order to push his free software religion'.

This is the prisoner's dilemma:

Two people commit a crime.

Both are arrested, but there is no physical evidence.

They are put into separate rooms and each offered a deal:
1 year in prison for you, and 10 years for your partner, if you admit to the crime first

If either of them admits to it, they both go to jail - because they both took part in the crime. If they both stay silent, they both go free. However, each has a strong incentive to admit to the crime, because the other person might admit to it first.

In this case, however, only one person might be guilty. If that's the case, the innocent party has no incentive to rat the guilty one out. The essence of the prisoner's dilemma is lost.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but to find dinosaurs you just start digging in mesozoic-aged sedimentary rock, correct? Do you focus on alluvial deposits?

I'm not up on the subtlties of this law, but as a layman:

'Protected Computers' should include those machines that store personal information. Many machines do that, some store personal information over the long term, others over the sort term, so it is difficult to express exactly what should and what shouldn't fit that definition.

Further to that, the definition of 'computer' is getting harrier all the time. Where does one start and another begin?

So maybe it makes more sense to define protected information on computer systems.

Maybe make accessing systems you do not have the authority to access a petty crime, with penalties equal to trespass.

Then, make accessing private, secret, or financial data that you don't have the authority to access a more serious crime.

So, if you break into someone's laptop but just sit at the command line, you get fined $50. If you read their private files, you get prison time.

You're safer with a gun because so many others have guns. If there were fewer guns, there would be less reason to have one to protect yourself. I'll admit the situation in the US is hard, because there are so many guns out there, but I don't think the solution to guns is more guns.

Time does not start when the attack starts. People who rely on police for protection do not rely on them only when their house is invaded, they rely on them to keep the crime rate low and put criminals in jail, where they pose no threat.

Partisans fought the Nazis by and large with guns they got after the war started. And, with the possible exception of Yugoslavia, the most they did was hinder, not evict, the occupier. In WW2, like in any other war I can think of, partisans were able to mount a fight because they possessed two things: the will to fight and outside support.

Don't nit-pick. I didn't confuse 'can't' with 'isn't allowed to', my word choice was perfectly valid. You would have a point if I had said 'one person is unable to attack another', but that would be silly.

It is a truism that the state fails at its protection every day, but perfection is an impossible test outside of math. The better test is whether a given type of weapon improves or harms individual security. Do the liberal gun laws in the US make people in general safer? Are armed people safer more or less likely to be victims of crime, or more or less likely to be harmed in a crime, than unarmed people? These are the kind of questions you should ask.

The fantasy of the armed patriots rising up against a facist new order is a silly argument to use unless you also advocate for personal ownership of RPGs, landmines, tanks, nukes, and other heavy weapons. Practically speaking, if such a totalitarian state ever takes over the US government, then there will likely by defections from the armed forces which will join the regular people in the fight against the government. That is usually what happens - see Libya and Syria recently, for example. You might point to Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia, but to that I'd just say that a plurality voted for Hitler and Russians seem to return to the strong state model often, implying they like that sort of thing, or at least it's the best model given their human geography.

No, it's a basis for Western political theory. Though the GP should have said State not Government. There's nothing sinister implied by it. It simply means that only the state can condone violence. One state can attack another (a war), one person can't attack another (a fistfight or worse).

As with all rights, though, with this right the state is burdened with obligations. The most salient is the obligation to protect its own citizens. So, the state must supply a police force (to protect against people) and a military (to protect against other states).

Perhaps your mind immediately jumped to the worst-case scenario: a totalitarian, Nazi-like government that infringes on the rights of the people. In that case, the state would be in violation of its obligations, and would lose its right to a monopoly on violence.

The Falcon Heavy is still in development.

The Falcon 9 has a 75% success rate and a 25% partial success/partial failure rate after 4 launches.

The Ariane 5 has a 94% success rate, a 3% partial success/partial failure rate, and a 3% failure rate, after 66 launches.

Everything I've read says the Falcon series is likely to be very reliable, but the proof of the success is in the launching - and the Ariane 5 has more launches under its belt. I hope Musk succeeds and lowers launch costs for everyone, but he hasn't proven anything yet.

It was aesthetically pleasing, fit well with the themes of the site, and was a clever and equally valid way of writing the official logo (after all, it was just a translation from one encoding scheme to another).

The mystery didn't hurt either, even if I was too thick to figure it out :)

Very interesting - thanks for posting. I had no idea that sun-syncronous orbits existed, let alone how they worked (wiki helped with that). It sounds like it would be a great orbit to be in if you were a space tourist - the view you'd get riding the terminator would be very dramatic.

Re: the weather satellites, if things get really bad, maybe NOAA can take over that spy sat that DOD donated to NASA (as I heard it, NASA got a late-model spy sat to use for astronomy but doesn't have the cash to launch it). (ref)

Exactly. This is why the 'notability' thing pisses me off: why not let there be an article for every tiny, minor thing? Where is the harm?

If I care enough about a the history of a the street I grew up on to write an article about it, and do a decent job of it (eg back it up with sources and do a neutral job of it), Wikipedia should be glad to have the info. And once you let in all the small things, and the minor historical figures, all the little battles and sub-sub-sub fields of philosophy, you get many more than 4 million articles.

I must have missed that story arc. Another poster said something similar. And here I thought she was Picard-esque in her efforts to stand by the Prime Directive no matter how inconvenient it was.

What happened?

She has the right balance of Kirk's sense of adventure and Picard's sense of duty.

I never switched from Netscape, really -

Netscape
Mozilla Suite
Seamonkey

The switch from Mozilla Suite to Seamonkey was made against a cacophony of support for Firefox. Firefox then was like Chrome now - lean, mean, the future, in a word: cool.

People bitched and moaned about how the Mozilla Suite (and, by extension, Seamonkey) was burdened by bundling its mail, news, chat, and html edit programs together; people wanted a lean-and-mean browser.

The tables are turned now, though. By avoiding all the pointless cool chrome (to use an expression), Seamonkey has managed to stay feeling light and purposeful.

Add to that the fact that
- the UI is stable
- the version numbers are sane (and the release schedule is sane, unlike what the current top post on this story says - maybe one minor release per month. very manageable)
- the prefs don't talk down to you
- it has mail and chat attached by default (I like that!)
- it has a single address/search bar
- it uses Gecko, so under-the-hood it's up-to-date
- when you spawn a new tab, the new tab appears at the extreme right, instead of displacing the existing tabs by spawning to the immediate right of your current tab
- the new-tab button is fixed in the extreme left of the tab bar, and doesn't jump around depending on how many tabs you have open atm

There are probably other things I could list. But in general, it _is_ a browser for people who know what they want: a browser that has a perfectly workable UI and does not change based on fashion. And a browser that has a modern HTML engine.

Unless and until the HTML engine becomes stale, I see no reason to change. I like my menu bars, I like spending a few extra horizontal pixels up to have back, forward, reload and stop buttons, I like having an attached mail client. Good design is good design no matter what decade it is.