Of course there is. It's right there in the word: Extrapolation.

Yes, but, in the words of Tim Minchin: "Ever mystery ever solved has turned out to be... not magic".

My argument is precisely that even if we assume that there is a limit to what science can explain, religion is not holding that line. Instead, religion is holding whatever line the limit of science is at right now, and once that has fallen it retreats to the next one.

Here's a metaphor for you: I claim that somewhere in my house there is a room that is larger on the inside. I stand in front of the first one and claim that this one is. You open the door, measure it, and find out I'm full of shit. But instead of admitting that I lied, I have moved to the next door and claim that this one is it.

How many doors will you open and how many rooms will you measure before you conclude that I'm simply too stubborn and too much of an asshole to admit that I was wrong all the time, and that even if such a room exists, I don't have the faintest idea where it is, either ?

I'm afraid that you've misunderstood both Goedel and science. First, Goedel's argument is an argument about levels of abstraction, where physical reality by definition is all on the same level. Second, science doesn't bother with proving anything as true (outside of mathematics and logic), but with falsifying as many theories as possible so that we get ever closer to a best fit. It's a lot more like numeric math than logic.

But - and that is my point again - even if we assume just for the sake of the argument that you are correct, then all the evidence we have indicates that all the current religions combined have no more clue about what lies beyond than my pet does.

As I said: They have a lot of experience in retreating into the areas where they are not easily falsified, so there is no such simple answer to your question. But the small history you provided pretty much proves the point I'm making all the time.

Yes, but that's an entirely different topic. I didn't bring up Iraq to bash Bush, I brought it up to contrast the tabloid-exaggeration of "eco-terrorism" with real violence. You can exchange Iraq for anything else - Afghanistan, Ireland during the IRA times, Spain during the ETA times, Israel, parts of Africa - any place where actual terrorism is taking place.

No, I suggest that knowing several languages is inherently useful.

Because they often suck with content that's non-trivial.

I did. What's your problem?

Learn another language, it's useful. :-)

One sentence summary: ABP sold out and is now owned by a shady german company that is deeply in bed with certain ad networks.

> Please explain how apple is going to destroy a project that they contribute to, but do not own.

If Apple puts all it's best work into proprietary extensions, LLVM could find that in a few years their compiler doesn't support the latest hardware, doesn't work with modern tools (debuggers etc.), and is slower than the proprietary version.

Nothing gets "destroyed" in the sense of not existing any more, but who then would use LLVM?

Copyleft is share-alike. Everyone respects the same standards of freedom for users. The whole point is that all computer users, individually or collectively, should be able to control the software they use.

LGPL is a compromise. Apache is just giving up and saying "please use my code, Mr. Company, you don't have to pay me anything for my work and you can make proprietary forks that exclude me".

It's rare that the situation is so bad that we have to get that low. Ogg audio/video formats are a good example of where we have to beg companies to accept our donation of free work. The most important thing in that sector is to get away from non-free formats.

But there's almost no other examples. Using LGPL requires at least some cooperation from the companies benefiting from the code.

> The market-based restrictions on hardware products are anti-business

What part of the licence are you referring to?

https://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html

You might want to reconsider your choice of ABP:

http://www.mobilegeeks.de/adblock-plus-undercover-einblicke-in-ein-mafioeses-werbenetzwerk/

Warning, long, investigative article in german.

Don't you guys notice anymore that this has turned into paranoid, nationalistic rambling?

Yeah, right. Anything run by the US is better than being run by anyone else. Suuuure.

You even miss that he does have a point: With the US controlling so much of the Internet, it is remarkably easy for entities like the NSA to abuse that control.

The UN certainly isn't perfect. But neither is the US. So please spare us this egomaniac nationalistic bullshit.

The Facebook office here in Hamburg (yes, I live there) is a pure marketing office. It contains no part of the Facebook infrastructure.

What you are probably mixing up is that because Facebook has a german subsidary, that company would be served with any legal proceedings.

Legal steps against a foreign corporation are more complicated and tricky, but entirely possible, especially within the EU. So withdrawing from Germany (or any other EU country) alone would buy you a little bit of administrative overhead and nothing else. Withdrawing from Europe would a) ruin your company and b) not protect you from legal steps, because there are many, many international agreements that would come into play, and that is before we consider more drastic steps such as cutting off your business within the EU, because even if you do it from another continent, the EU can freeze all the money going your way from within Europe. Whoops.

You obviously haven't worked with high-level executives. I've flown across half of Europe just to meet the people I worked for, because personal contact is very important when you are doing stuff that's considerably more expensive than ordering stuff from Amazon.

Try getting a multi-million deal signed by video conference. Good luck.

Video conferencing isn't exactly new technology. It did have an impact on meeting culture and business trips, but the pipe dream that it would replace physical meetings hasn't come anywhere near true in 49 years. Why do you think it would be different in another 20 ?

Estimates are in the range of 2M defensive gun uses a year. Most of these may not even involve the criminal seeing the gun, merely hearing it or hearing the owner yell he has one. Very few involves actually shooting a gun.

Studies have consistently shown the conceal carry permittees commit fewer crimes than off duty cops, and conceal carry permittees kill more criminals with fewer side effects than cops.

Anyone who still thinks ordinary people can't be trusted with guns has blinders on.

> GPLv3 which is incompatible with the way most software companies do business

Marketing FUD. What part of GPLv3 is anti-business? The part that says you can't give someone software and then sue them for patent infringement when they use it?

> They've released anything and everything related to it under BSD license

Apple's approach to free software is to use the BSD licence for stuff that already exists elsewhere (makes them look good and they get others to maintain it for free) and use a proprietary licence for the vast majority of code that would have contributed new functionality to the free software community.

Prime example: FreeBSD. I can download the kernel. Great. But we already had five highly functional kernels, including one that's clearly more functional, and the FreeBSD kernel was available for download before Apple came along anyway.

Has Apple brought FreeBSD to a higher level? Nope. Have they profited massively from the free labour? Yep.

You have two assumptions in there that are wrong.

One, that physical presence matters for legal questions. It doesn't.
Two, that technical details determine where a corporation has a physical presence. They don't.

I can only repeat my example again. Google does not, to the best of my knowledge, have any servers in Germany. It does, however, have several offices and a german subsidary - for marketing purposes. Because your big customers want you to come to their office to sign that big deal.

I don't get how you got there from my argument, which has nothing to do with enumeration. The point I was making is that this strategy of modern religion clearly demonstrates that there are very likely no truths in it anywhere. Because every truth seems to be given up so easily as soon as science produces the real answer, and then the same argument is made about the next deeper layer.

Basically, when you argue against religion, the opponent keeps claiming that A, B and C are absolute truths that religion knows thanks to divine messages and science can never know. Then science produces a definite answer A. The next morning, you have a 1984 moment with religion claiming that B, C and D are absolute truths that religion... uh, ok? Then science answers B and the next morning, religion claims that C, D and E are absolute truths that religion... uh, what? Deja vu moment?

If you've gone through this iteration a couple times, it stops being a stretch to simply extrapolate and say that L, M and N are almost certainly as true and absolute as A, B, C, ... K were.

You are quoting from a source that has a vital interest in making the label "terrorism" as broad and threatening as possible.

I'm looking at actual, past events. Sure, some extremist eco groups have a couple dead on their list, and quite a bit of damage. But, as I said, the entire history of eco-terrorism sums up to less than what happens on an average day in Iraq.

There are no absolutes in this world. I wouldn't ever claim that there will never be an eco-motivated suicide bomber. But all evidence we have points to that guy being a lone lunatic, not a trend. And that's quite an important difference.

Copyright doesn't allow your git or text editor examples, but I would agree that those two situations would be wrong. Tools shouldn't be able to tell users what they can do. It'd be like pencil's coming with terms and conditions.

But it's also not true that GPL'ing a library would cause its terms to apply to code you had nothing to do with. The third-party coder has a choice: write his own library, or use yours and share-alike. That's just fair. Nobody's forced.

If proprietary developers can ask for payment in the same conditions, why is it wrong for freedom coders to ask for a code contribution that's going to be shared with everyone? It's not even selfish.

LGPL isn't about being fair, it's about doing less for freedom in certain circumstances when we're in a weak bargaining position.

> As opposed to using the free libc that's part of clang/LLVM?

Apple and other proprietary software companies would love everyone to move to LLVM. That's why Apple's funding it: LLVM's success benefits Apple (and other companies that don't want to compete against free software).

Funding LLVM is a tactical compromise that Apple was forced into. FSF's use of the LGPL succeeded in making it too hard to get everyone to move away from free software, so Apple has to settle for undermining the copyleft system that encourages people to contribute to free software.

Apple's doing an embrace, extend, extinguish.
1. We love this free software compiler. We fund it. It's free. We're friends.
2. We've developed an amazing extension module. It's proprietary but it's sooo slick.
3. Sure, everyone has the choice of using the free code. It makes slower binaries and doesn't support modern debugging and won't work on our latest hardware, but it's still there.

If we want free software to exist in ten or twenty years time, we have to support copyleft today.