See, "Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches: The Riddles of Culture" by Marvin Harris." Read it for a social anthropology class back in the mid-1970s. In a nutshell, Harris claimed and did a reasonable job of showing that many of the quirks of various religions/cultures actually were ways of adopting the culture to the environment it existed in.

Note that he didn't show that each culture's $DEITY therefore existed since they had handed down these wonderful rules. Only that various societies encoded their rules as religious beliefs. Much easier to get the ignorant to go along by saying $DEITY will smite thee if you don't obey the rules than going through the years of cultural evolution that led to the rues.

Cheers,
Dave

The large companies I have worked for tend to PURCHASE supported free software from Red Hat, SuSE, Oracle (even if it's a clone of Red Hat), IBM, etc. Indirectly this means that they end up paying for the development of free software since these open source companies all PAY their employees many of whom write code that gets licensed under the GPL and contributed as open source. All you need to do to verify this it look at the contributions to the kernel or many of the key Linux subsystems to see the bulk of the contributions are coming from RH, SuSE, IBM, etc. (Why do you think SCO sued IBM for copyright infringement for IBM's contributions to the Linux kernel?)

Most companies are not and don't want to be in the software business. Software development isn't even close to what they do. They are quite happy to pay for software that may or may not be open source. If it is open source, they want the same level of support (or better) as they get with their closed source vendors. While they may not be contributing code, they are paying the salaries of people who write open source software as their full time job by buying this support.

The person who claims that open source is failing due to "free riders" and "volunteer maintainers" hasn't looked at how open source development works. Hell, even back when classic programs like awk and grep were developed and circulated in the old Unix community it was through /usr/contrib the bulk of the developers were professional software developers. These programs (and many more) were developed by software professionals who chose to make them available to others rather than sell them (for a variety of reasons).

Yeah, there are a lot of pieces of open source that were developed and are maintained by volunteers. There's nothing wrong with that and, for quite a few years, open source has had fewer errors and has been far higher quality than the equivalent closed source programs. I'm not arguing that the OpenSSL flaw isn't serious. It is and it needs to be fixed but a certain closed source software vendor seems to patch a dozen equivalent flaws each month. I'd hardly call the OpenSSL flaw a reason to condemn the open source development model.

Cheers,
Daver

Use a pun, go to prison.

Cheers,
Dave

...welcome our new military robotic overlords, SIR!

Cheers,
Dave

Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse after the weekend along comes a space rock to turn your already bad Monday into something even worse.

Cheers,
Dave

You mean, like posting to slashdot?

Cheers,
Dave

You haven't suffered until you've worked for a stress-puppy micro-manager.

Cheers,
Dave

Strictly technical contract Linux/Unix System Administrator here. Gave up on a management track when I not only pointed out that the Emperor not only had no clothes but was also a few pounds overweight and some parts weren't very imperial in size.

Cheers,
Dave

I'm getting three to five e-mails and or phone calls a day from headhunters. I'm very senior (30+ years in the business) so I'm not cheap. 2007 through 2010 I couldn't buy a job. What changed is the labor market. It just got a lot tighter. It may not be the dot com days when if you could say computer you got hired but it's looking a lot better.

The last laugh is that a lot of hiring managers and HR dweebs haven't gotten the memo and are still pulling the same old bullshit. If you run into one of those, keep looking. There's someone out there who doesn't need a glass navel to see where they're going.

Cheers,
Dave

You (and possibly said law) use a definition of true that excludes quite a few people and their opinions. There are all sorts of "deniers" out there who dispute the truth of everything from the Holocaust to the moon landings to climate change to the shape of the earth. What is the "truth" of the subject concert review of the original article? What is the truth of the guy who started the whole right to be forgotten cause and his bankruptcy?

Hell, we have trouble getting information "erased" when it is found to be false (court case near here of a guy who was accused of rape, lost his job, was ostracized, etc. only to be able to prove he didn't do it). I somehow doubt that any and all uncomfortable data can be erased but high profile and well off people will be able to obfuscate their history even better under the "right to be forgotten."

Cheers,
Dave

Alessandra Mussolini will petition the EU for the right of her grandfather (Benito) to be forgotten? Lots of negative comments out there about him.

Cheers,
Dave

Better article at finance.yahoo.com: https://finance.yahoo.com/news... that I ran across on Tuesday.(I own some NOC stock).

Cheers,
Dave

I was thinking more along the lines of something like having the convicted party drawn and quartered, staked out on an ant hill (fire ants preferably), garroted, etc. The potential punishment needs to be a real deterrent; not whiling away the years in some minimum security resort.

/. groupthink seems to have focused on the "heroic hacker" unearthing politically embarrassing scandals while forgetting the damage that everyone from site taggers who get carried away to what common criminals, terrorists and state actors can do. There are people out there who can do real damage. Be it either without thinking or with much greed or hatred.

Cheers,
Dave

How many museums have art by Botticelli? You know. The art with lots of nudes and cherubs?

Cheers,
Dave

Carbonated beverages of all kinds (diet, non-diet) tend to contribute to osteoporosis. The carbonation leaches the calcium from your bones.

Cheers,
Dave