Not playing any game. I'm clearly not involved, or able to really advice anyone on this topic. Just voicing my opinion. This is slashdot.

The one refusing an objectively fair compromise. Both, either, or neither, I don't care. For reference, I don't have much bias in the question, I think both sides are partly responsible for the situation.

The point of the proposal is to force both individually to accept, or depict themselves as unreasonable. Doubly so if the other part accepts. I'm not pointing fingers.

Well, give them a chance.

Considering objecting in such a straight-forward scenario would probably be a PR-problem for the refusing party, it might just work. Just make sure both parties understand their decision is public.

Are you sure they would want to?

And yes, I happen to think that the whole RMS Sexism debacle was blown a little out of proportion, but it damaged his reputation as a speaker wherever gender-neutrality is desired.

Easy solution;

Both parties want him to Speak, let both parties pay half each. If both parties refuse, stay home, if only one accepts, then go there.

I fully understand why the Palestinians do not wish to pay the "Israeli" share, and the other way around. However, splitting the costs is fair, and all parties win.

Sure, I realize it might be impolite if the Palestinians had already been promised a visit, but I think at least the option of splitting costs should be proposed.

Do they also support commercial RHEL (not in the TFA)? Otherwise, it also happens to be a nice way to endorse "the Linux that doesn't pay the large RedHat developer team that wrote CentOS".

I don't mind CentOS, I use it lots myself, and I have a weak business case at work motivating paying for a RHEL license.

However, frankly, CentOS would not exist without RHEL, and I don't think Microsoft is feeling sorry to endorse the side of the (RedHat) ecosystem that don't pay the RedHat staff.

Do you have a better word for "valuing ones time"? In my vocabulary, it is one valid interpretation of "lazy". Not doing more than necessary to achieve the goal.

The difference lie in motivation, and what the goal IS. (Some people are greatly productive in the goal of doing nothing at all) A person motivated in something else than slacking off, will find the next problem/challenge/task and get at it. Perhaps their motivation does not pull them in the direction you want, but that's a whole different problem.

My guess is the engineers from your experience just weren't motivated, at least not in things that helped you, and they probably had the wrong job position.

TFA explicitly mentions the Statkraft project. However, there seems to be a significant difference between the two; where statkraft is using the salinity to create pressure and power a conventional turbine generator, this article is about creating current directly, which should theoretically improve efficency a lot.

According to TFA a, 50cubic meter/second flow of fresh water could yield up to 100MW.

lazy & motivated ~= productive

Lazy can be a good thing. :)

An interesting thought-experiment would be to imagine a world where the natural laws causes a spontaneous copy of a car to be created every time someone taking it out for a test-drive. What implications would that have on economy, laws and technology? Would the car never have been invented? Would the property-laws look the same?

In any case, that is pretty much the current reality in the world of digital assets, or assets that can easily be digitized.

It's both a natural AND a virtual disaster.

And a business besides search engine for pirated content.

Note: I do not defend or condone piracy. I think it's generally wrong, but I do understand why it exists;

I think it's also a matter of accessibility.

1. There is simply no legal alternative to Torrent-sites with the same range of content, at the same "same-site"-convenience and instant gratification of a download. Nomatter what price the consumer is willing to pay.
2. For anyone interested in video-content, compatibility with the media-center is key. Due to various DRM-mechanisms and special-delivery-methods of legal alternatives, formats from piracy sources are usually more compatible and "just works".
3. Geographical barriers limit the options in large parts of the world. Outside US, you just cannot get Hulu, and many other ad-driven or otherwise funded source, nomatter what you pay.
4. Release schedules. Much of the Hollywood media (TV and Movies) reaches parts of the World outside US slightly, or sometimes much later than the US premiere. Meanwhile, non-US citizens cannot conveniently access it without resorting to piracy, irregardless of willingness to pay.

While some will never accept any price, I think many of the current pirates wouldn't mind paying (many already pay for anonymity VPN services), if the 4 points above were reasonably addressed.

Supporting Example; Spotify. Before Spotify, a lot of my friends downloaded almost all music from pirate sources, even music they had already purchased. Downloading was simpler than ripping the CD, and you got it in non-DRM format. After Spotify, I hardly ever hear about anyone download pirated music. It's not worth it, since there's already a convenient legal way to get to most music anyways. In Sweden, most of music piracy is gone after Spotify. Many is satisfied with ad-driven Spotify, some purchase it, while some are still trying to get rid of the ads, equivalent of pirating it. Unfortunately, Spotify suffers from problem #3 and is not accessible throughout the world.

Simple. Physical media cannot give me the "instant gratification" of buying downloaded songs. Especially, it puts the burden of actually ripping it onto me, as well as incurr extra costs in manufacturing, shipping etc. Besides, the longevity of CD-formats vary greatly depending on the quality of plastic that is put it. (For example, my father recently discovered some of his 15-years-old CD:s doesn't play back today.) Ripping it losslessly, and backing it up to some cloud-storage is probably both more reliable AND more accessible.

Personally, I've just given up fuzzing around with music since I can never muster up enough interest to decide upon a playlist. Instead I mostly listen to Last.FM and yes, I do get inexplicable head-aches that might be attributed to digital compression. For TV-series however, I often buy the DVD-box when it comes out, just to put it on the shelf and download a pirated version instead. Much more convenient, and I get to skip over all crappy commercials and anti-piracy warnings. Now isn't that irony?

I personally would prefer to BUY in FLAC, even if I later have to transcode. If I buy lossily compressed, I can never get back original quality, but the other way is (relatively) easy. In particular, many of the music-stores are not web-outlets but requires a client-side software. (Itunes for one) If customers demanded it, it would be trivial to implement auto-conversion to the target-device, many already do, while keeping originals in fully-quality format.

Exactly. Is it the companys laptop, or your laptop?

A better analogy would be if Google only served unmodified Chrome viewers.