The difference between the GPL and pretty much all EULAs and ToSes is: the former grants extra rights while the latter takes away rights. If everything else were exactly the same, except the license did not exist, your use of MySpace would be freer, but your use of GPL code would be... nonexistent. It's someone else's copyrighted material, which is simply illegal to insert into your own work without permission. The only reason that people may redistribute GPL code is the GPL itself.

I fully support anyone's right to ignore stupid EULAs and ToSes. I also support their right to ignore the GPL, and not use the code. The hypocrisy is from anyone who thinks they should be allowed the freedoms given to them by one part of the GPL without the requirements laid down by the other part.

Bad analogy. ISPs are in a position of power over its users. Generally there are only a handful of plausible choices for broadband internet in a given location. Wikipedia is just one information-gathering web site out of thousands. If you don't like Wikipedia's conditions, you can put your stuff somewhere else, including many completely free wiki sites. Whereas you can't set up your own independent broadband connection without a huge investment of money and effort.

p.s. Even worse, he's doing it ON THE INTERNET! Just like a CRAIGSLIST call girl!

Hmm... that Elastic Vapor guy is from Toronto, Canada. It seems FOREIGNERS are very happy indeed about this new database.

So, how many days until the 10:00 news is crowing that Obama is spending our tax dollars to give American secrets to other countries?

Antibodies against HIV are extremely hard to get right. For example, Dan Barouch has kept a group of vaccinated monkeys with an SIV/HIV hybrid alive for years... except for one whose virus mutated in just the wrong way. Based on the limited information in the article, it seems like the U Penn study works similarly.

Umm... so what is the bigger problem you are implying? And what exactly can't you agree with? When a lot of 2.4GHz devices are all operating in close proximity (such as apartments in a city) there will be more interference than if those devices are farther apart. It's simple physics.

I know from direct experience that a single 2.4GHz consumer product (such as this one, which BTW does not tell you it uses 2.4GHz video anywhere on or in the box, and only states the much lower frequency of its control channel) can completely swamp WiFi across the width of a suburban house. If there weren't a big yard between us, it would probably knock out my neighbor's WiFi too.

Doofus. Firehed didn't say that you were "making shit up". He said that the human authors of the Bible made that bit about God cutting people's lifespans so that their earlier fictions about Methuselah and friends would make more sense.

1: No matter how much people on ALL sides of the debate like to scream about the latest short-term variation, one or two years of air temperature data do not constitute a trend. Decades are probably the smallest useful increment for considering climate change.

2: Everyone knows global temperature has fallen recently because of the valiant efforts of Somali environmentalists. Ramen!

If Taco wanted to implement semantics-aware achievements, he'd need to hire a few thousand well-trained page readers. Or clone an army of three-assed Tim Berners Lees.

However, several of the ones in the later half of your list could be handled by a tiny Perl script, and therefore are great ideas.

The other possibility is "iPhone Pro".

But it's really unlikely to be a "Mac" product. Lord Steve has been gradually fulfilling his 1996 quote, and he probably wants to finish it before he dies.

http://www.google.com/search?q=steve+jobs+milk+worth+busy+great

It's been about 20 years since I took E&M Physics, but... How exactly would "two perpendicular electric fields" be different from one diagonal electric field equal to the vector sum? Mathematically, you can only describe two things as "perpendicular" if they are reasonably linear and uniform.