There is no artificial scarcity here, there is natural scarcity and artificial abundance due to possible cloning. The keeper of the register do not want to consider clones, fine. Somebody else will do it? fine. This has nothing to do with patents, they did not patent what was already there, nor invent and claim anything.

It's not a monopoly if the item is scarce. What if I built an exact replica of a vintage Bugatti and then insist on having it registered as an official Bugatti? What if I built a hackintosh and insist on apple putting a serial number and a logo on it? The proper answer is "No, f*ck you!".

Do the official registry prevent the creation of a cloned animals registry? Let the damn market choose which registry to consider.

In freedom, one could create the registry of ogm free stuff, male-only (or female-only, or white-only) clubs, and so on. As long as I don't hurt anybody, directly or with negative propaganda, nobody has any business interfering.

There is no cowardice in refusing to get an ID.

> What problem are they trying to solve here?
The problem is that the NSA hasn't got enough data on our kids' assignments. Next.

> I'll grant you bash is more mature and intuitive, sure - but you can do things in powershell that just either aren't possible with bash without writing helper applications in a non-scripting language or are exceedingly convoluted.

even without touching powershell I am sure bash is uglier. And sure it relies on external tools. It's the latter which makes bash stronger, bash + the wealth of already available, fast, mature unix commands. And did I mention Free? free.

"Go forth and multiply and populate the earth", which does not really equal to overpopulate it, right?

If you only say "go forth and multiply" you are missing out a key detail about your wacky thesis (it is wacky because I don't see humanity following many and often reiterated religious precepts like do not kill, why they should follow a single passage in genesis).

And, by saying "go forth and multiply" you also could have people reply "3 4 *". With a straight face.

Yes, sure, but if he REALLY wanted to pay homage to the spirit of windows 3.11 he should have released an early beta.

I have no issues in imagining that, the problem is indeed the opposite. If there COULD be a particle, everything is ok. If there MUST be a particle, there is lack of imagination. Sometimes that is good, speeds up the search for an explanation. Sometimes that makes the explanation difficult or impossible to reach. With neutrinos it was good.

It would be strange was referred to dark matter being indeed the manifestation of an error of calculation, not to the fact that models are imperfect.

Another solution is changing MAC address every day. I think a one line cron job would do it on GNU/Linux. Unfortunately I have an Android/Linux/run/some/binaries/from/untrusted/places/to/gain/root toy, instead.

Besides, those who really can track you have the IMEI.

Until dark matter can be directly, or indirectly but consistently detected (e.g. we can take a bunch of dark matter and move it around, if it doesn't move it is a property of that particular region of space, not something contained in it), dark matter stays as an abstraction that helps our formulas to explain, pardon, model gravitational interactions.

That is, now you can either consider it an as yet undetected physical object, or the rationalization of an error, as you prefer, and orient your own research accordingly.

I point this out because "our models do not match our observations" can be either resolved by "therefore there is something more to be modelled" which in this case implies the dark matter hypothesis, or "therefore our models are wrong/too general/too limited", which would be strange but not impossible. Even after modeling every single past present and future aspect of reality, you cannot claim you completely know it, since you are speaking from the inside of it. It would be like testing every I/O combination in a unit test and then proclaiming you have achieved 100% code coverage. Those are two different things on two different levels.
Many scientists know this, not all of them unfortunately.

Yep, and I wonder what the prices would be if there were no Linux or BSDs, and people had to choose between MS, solaris, some other flavours of unix, OSX.
Free software helps even those not adopting it.

LOL Like proprietary software didn't steal ideas from university research, or amateurs even, and like the linux kernel weren't inspired by something else!

I'll give you 1/5 for the trolling content, but 4/5 for the trolling style. Hopefully you were not really convinced of what you wrote.

Indeed TFA makes the assumption that those in power don't understand, so that they demonize hackers. Which is incredibly naive, because people in power are usually *better* than the average at getting and rating information.

Once they get this information, they reason like: "how is this going to affect my career?" and take the necessary steps to profit from the information, just like parent said.

Indeed, I am thankful that seamonkey still has those prefs and is noscript compatible.

I thought I was a firefox user up until I explored other options, turns out that I am a noscript user.