Wait... what? Diseases now use Wikipedia?

Yep, I saw that very scene because my wife watches it and I happened to be around, and I also had to explain to my wife why I was laughing derisively.

I'm sure some hack can spin our common laughter into a story about how watching Scorpion is a communal experience for people in tech fields.

The language in Darmok is not at all like Chinese. I learned Chinese, and was quite able to get by in Taiwan and China without having to resort to the classics of Chinese literature. In Darmok it is impossible to communicate anything simple without knowing the history of that culture.

As much as bloggers try to claim otherwise, publishing online has generally been a rather poor substitute for peer review and generally allows for a lot of really bad science to get wide attention.

What randoms unidentified bloggers think about publishing has no bearing whatsoever on what scientists think about scientific publishing. Publishing online does not necessitate that peer review be dispensed with. I've not ever met an academic, be it in the sciences or elsewhere, who ever argued that print peer-reviewed publications should be replaced by online publications that are not peer reviewed.

You're attacking a strawman.

"Opposed" is a weasel word. There are more people who are unhappy with the ACA than people who are happy with it. However, a substantial portion of those people are unhappy with it because it is a half-baked compromise that does not really fixes the problems of the health care system; that is, it does not go far enough in reforming the system. Unhappiness with the ACA does not entail approval of the Republican bullshit.

(Bold added by me.)

Thanks for bringing this up. Their rationale for holding Delfi responsible is the same damn rationale that cheerleaders for the police state everywhere bring up, every single time. Doing the right thing would have been too hard. See, if they actually had done the right thing, they would have had to actually spend substantial effort at unmasking who actually posted anonymously. So they decided to just peg the act on a convenient actor.

FIFY

The comparison is not apposite. What Google does is akin to postal workers scanning postcards and storing them in a database which is used to profile people so as to push services on them. You can be certain that if postal workers did this, then there would be an outcry.

I've been an email postmaster since the early 90s. Your opinion is not by any means representative of "the opinion of everyone who knows anything about email." The issue is not storing the emails but the damn data mining that Google performs on them. I've never data-mined the emails stored on my server, nor have the postmasters that I've had the pleasure to work with. As a matter of fact, we take measures to avoid accidentally looking at people's emails. That they are not encrypted does not make it okay to snoop. It's called having a sense of ethics.

And we (me and the postmasters I've worked with) all think what Google is doing is shit.

I share the same policy. I bought one and only one Acer in my life. It was the first Acer I bought and is the last. Early on it would not sleep under Linux so I took at look at the BIOS. That thing was so sloppily coded! The batteries that Acer shipped with the laptop also had a manufacturing flaw that caused them to fail prematurely. Batteries degrade over time progressively but these would one day perform at 90% original specs and the next day perform the best brick impression. I owned two Acer-approved batteries for this laptop and both failed in exactly the same way. I also bought an ultra-cheap third-party battery that did not show this problem.

Torrenting does not amount to "distributing without authorization." Here's a motion picture that was distributed through torrenting by its author from the get go:

http://www.sitasingstheblues.com/

When I torrented it, I did not distribute it without authorization! And I'd expect posters on this site to know that Linux distros are distributed by torrenting, again, with authorization.

I know that the RIAA, MPAA and their ilk want everybody and their brother to believe that torrent == illegal but we should not swallow their bullshit.

You take to task another poster's understanding of the GPL and yet you do not seem to understand it yourself. Anybody who uses Ubuntu (to take just one example) is using GPLed code. They don't have to publish anything. As far as changes go, you are not required to release your changes unless you decide to release binaries derived from your changes.

Let me pick out the problematic statement in what you say here: "Not because the license says they must [contribute patches], but because they want to." The text in bracket is warranted by the context in which you've written this sentence. You're talking about some license which say people must contribute patches. Which license is this exactly? Not the GPL for sure, and I don't know of any other license which says that people modifying the software must contribute patches. At most, they require releasing the source code. Releasing source code is not the same as releasing a patch.

You've errected a strawman.

Your analysis is appreciated but, let's consider the following. I'm sure I have at least one old hard drive somewhere that I have effectively written off but I have not trashed for which I don't remember the encryption key nor have any record of the key.

Okay, so it *is* my hard disk but I cannot decrypt it. What then?

While the first couple you mention may indeed be sleeping in separate rooms because of a bad marriage, their sleeping arrangement is the sole evidence presented to us that the marriage is bad. There are many reasons for sleeping in separate rooms, sleeping disorders in particular, none of which are an indication regarding the quality of the marriage.

Other than that, I agree.