I'm not aware of any solid reasoning to support human rights and morality without it.

(Universal) Human Rights were a reaction to the abuses of the feudal and monarchical systems in Europe during the Enlightenment. I don't believe that the morality contained in them needs any kind of religious basis. It's largely a case of "why can the nobles and clergy treat us like insects? We have worth too, and we should all be equal."

Which turns out eminently sensible, although it required breaking a few eggs to get here..

Duh, it is well known that belief in one's doctor (aka the placebo effect) affects the outcome positively. Whether it's because the patient thinks his doctor is a god, or that god is himself a doctor would be an interesting research question.

Let's not forget that he (Google's Eric Schmidt) is a vindictive bastard, too. When CNET journalists dug out some publically available information on him personally, (read for yourself) he attacked their livelihood by banning them from talking with the whole of Google for a year.

Frankly, he's a bit of a loose cannon, if I was a Google executive, I'd think about ways to muzzle him.

Isn't it the other way around, though? You have the code, and it compiles and runs today. Therefore, that snapshot will always compile and run with the toolset you've got right now. So a "dead" open source project cannot just stop working, but a "live" one easily can, if you keep getting the upgrades and the devs change their minds on how things should be done.

But the gist of what you're saying is very sensible. If you are deprived of a vital resource tomorrow, how will you deal with that contingency?

How can I protect my privacy in a "public" place? To me, it's an oximoronic situation.

You misunderstand the meaning of "public". It means something belonging to, or used by, the population as a whole. A park is public, not because people can see who is in the park, but because anybody from the community has access to it. A public company allows anyone from the population to own it through buying shares. Etc.

A good example is a public toilet. It is public, because anyone may use it. But it certainly not intended that anyone should watch what goes on in a stall.

Meh, you're right. Let's see if they can kill dice next!

The reality is that if it is done withing public view it can not be private.

Wrong. Behaviour and intent matters enormously.

For example, say the girl in the bikini is followed the whole day, everywhere she goes, by some guy who always stands a foot next to her and sticks his head in front of her tits the whole day, that's harassment. Even though she's in public, and he's making sure not to touch her and he's just looking at her.

Same thing with Google. Sure, a lot of the data they collect is public, but actually systematically collecting it all and searching it and compiling secret summaries for law enforcement is bordering on harassment, even though the people who are being harassed don't realize it's happening and aren't being _directly_ harmed (but _indirectly_ very much).

Indeed, let's cut to the chase. Regardless of where anyone falls within the DRM debate, the fact is that DRM extensions have no business being part of HTML. Those are apples and oranges, and shouldn't be mixed. Period.

So please, Netflix, stop arguing for this nonsense, build or buy your DRM any which way you like, *just not in HTML*.

For example, if you buy a Samsung TV at walmart, it is the same one you'll buy at worst buy, only it (usually) costs less and it's always right around the corner so you don't need to use as much gas (and the dreaded carbon footprint) to find a worst buy all the way across town.

That's actually wrong. If you look at the serial numbers of the products you buy at Walmart, they are a different series. The products are cheaper because they are slightly inferior. In fact, Walmart often sell products which are specially manufactured only for them, to keep costs low. You don't notice because Walmart have purchased the right to market their products under the same brand name.

When any electronics device is built, there are design specs which call for certain components. These components exist in different grades, which aren't the same price, although they are often interchangeable. The same is true with other goods, eg the screws might be low grade / inferior quality on cheaper items.

For example, if a factory makes an LCD panel, there may be a small number of pixels which are dead on some of the units. The factory sorts the otherwise identical LCDs into low grade (a few dead pixels) and high grade (no dead pixels), and sells the low grade a bit cheaper. You can build the "same" TV with low grade or high grade components, and the price will be lower or higher. Sometimes it's also convenient to not include a particular component from the initial design, for example in laptops or tablets there's room for a GSM modem, but it isn't always included.

Manufacturers like Samsung keep track of the exact contents of your TV by giving it a special serial number. Maybe to you two TVs look identical, but if you know how to read the serial numbers, you can tell which one has higher quality components or extra features.

So no, Walmart doesn't always sell the exact same products other stores sell, and yes, they often sell a lower grade version of the same product - and that's a major reason why it is cheaper.

It's saying 121% of the gains which is impossible.

There's nothing impossible about that sentence. It is obvious that the total amount of gains is being used as a unit for the purpose of discourse. If I tell you that the distance between two objects is 1.21 metres, your argument boils down to complaining that this is impossible, because the rod in Paris that defines the metre is only 1 metre long.

What the privacy advocates don't want to admit here is that anyone using a free, ad-supported service has no moral right to not have their use evaluated for better advertising.

Those are weasel words. Anyone has a moral right to not being tracked by private companies. Therefore, they have a moral right to not be subject to behavioural studies intended to improve advertising effectiveness. Let's not forget that advertising is a form of brainwashing, propaganda designed to induce particular behaviours. It is essentially conspiracy to psychological assault.

Where the companies go wrong is in assuming that tracking people without explicit consent is ok. Where the companies go wrong is in assuming that once given, that consent cannot be taken away again. On the contrary, people are allowed to change their minds.

By all means, companies should if they so wish track people without the ability, IN ANY WAY, to identify a specific individual. And this SHOULD BE VERIFIABLE, either through a formal audit similar to an IRS audit with serious consequences for noncompliance, or through letting any individual at any time demand a comlete list of the information gathered about them together with the option to completely eradicate said information verifiably, or be sued.

Sounds like a "Disney Experience". I can't wait until they make it into a Hookers'N'Blow theme park ride for the MILFs with toddlers, complete with animatronics blaring the "it's a small world" soundtrack.

No, it was made for *both* non-developers and developers.

The GPL allows free modification of the software, which is valuable to developers.

The GPL allows non-developers to engage (hire or convince) any developer of their choice to modify the software for them.

For example, take a game like SimCity, which has had all sorts of braindead problems. If this game had been released under the GPL instead, then any slashdotter who can program could have fixed a couple of the more glaring issues and made the game playable for lots of people. Alternatively, any gamer (non-programmer) who had a lot of experience with the gameplay and who figured out some improvements could post a message on a forum calling on programmers to make that *exact* change for him.

As it is, SimCity isn't GPL licensed, so anyone with a suggestion has to email EA with an idea, which may or may not be responded to, and may or may not fit with the plans EA has for monetizing the game.

The world is changing, and the GPL must move with the times. Today, "the network is the computer" has never been more true. It is best to start thinking of PCs like cores in a single internet wide computer system. This paradigm is where high performance computing models in computer science are headed, at any rate.

If it makes sense that the GPL should apply regardless of the particular core a piece of GPL'd software runs on, then it makes sense that the GPL should apply regardless of the particular server a piece of GPL'd software runs on, too.

I'm not an expert on either of those licenses, but do you really mean that you can't change BSD to AGPL? In that case that's news to me.

You can give out your virginity once only. If you licence under BSD, anyone can take your code and run with it. If you later relicence to GPL, companies can still use the earlier BSD licensed code instead of following the GPL rules.

1) If you license BSD, companies can use the code, and if they sprinkle their own code on top and distribute the software, nobody can take their modified code and freely sprinkle another set of changes on that.

2) If you license GPL, companies can use the code, and if they sprinkle their own code on top and distribute the software, anyone else can freely sprinkle new changes on that.