Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Non-commercial use only (Score 2) 56

Maybe the legal experts could sit down and work out how to modify licenses (including the GPL/LGPL) to be for non-commercial use only? As long as an entity wasn't making money using FOSS, it could use it just like now. Individuals and non-commercial projects wouldn't be affected. But if you're a business making money using FOSS? Not without paying for it you're not. Yes, this would go against the free-software principles. But principles don't pay the bills every month, and none of these changes would prevent anyone from staying with the existing licenses if they wanted to.

The first thing I think of as a problem would be a company setting up a separate entity that wouldn't make money, just make services available to the company using FOSS to get around the fees. The trick to preventing this would be to phrase the terms so that that entity truly had to pay it's own bills without having the company using it's services pay anything either directly or indirectly. Not even by doing things like providing hosting "free". I'd have to sit down with a bunch of rules lawyers and game out all the ways to funnel money into that entity and how to block them, but what's life without a little challenge?

Comment Re:Psilocybin? (Score 1) 26

There's legitimacy to that. Taking a potentially dangerous drug under the supervision of a doctor who knows how things are supposed to work, what side effects look like, with drugs of consistent purity and dosage, has a lot of advantages over winging it with stuff made up random chinese chemicals and toilet bowl cleaner.

Unless you're talking about cocaine etc. brought to the penthouse by a personal assistant or something. Plenty of ultra-rich celebs have killed themselves that way.

Comment Re:The fusion delusion strikes again (Score 2) 46

While it is an enormous problem, possibly the most significant, we know how to shield against radiation, but it's going to take mass in the form of hydrogen-rich molecules like water or polyethylene (as examples). To solve that problem we are either going to have to make launches a lot cheaper, or figure out how to do it all in orbit.

It's at the edge of our technological capacity to produce such a spacecraft now, so the barrier is economic. That's a massive barrier, but in theory we definitely could, if we put a significant percentage of GDP of the wealthiest nations towards the project, produce a spacecraft that keep astronauts alive and relatively protected from ionizing radiation both on the journey and while on Mars.

As to your general assholery, I guess everyone has to have an outlet, though why Slashdot is a bit mysterious.

Comment Re:AI is becoming more "human" every day (Score 2, Insightful) 72

Rubbish. It's doing what it's programmed to do. The goal is for the AI to have complete, 100% control of the computer, to the exclusion of any human input. The tech bros want us to believe this is a good thing, that it will automate your life and make it easier, but they don't believe that either. It's about control.

They intend to make AI the 21st century form of slavery, where you are their literal property.

Some people (and I use the term loosely) don't see The Matrix as dystopian.

Comment Re:Is anyone surprised? (Score 5, Informative) 90

You haven't? How about this evidence, or this evidence, or perhaps this evidence, or...

You get the idea. The article doesn't say anything about a court order one way or the other, so we simply don't know the state there. Given previous track record, it's likely the request was made legally if Apple complied with it.

Comment Re:Sauron . . . (Score 2) 136

Oh, and Bert and Ernie were gay too, right? Of course, from a kids perspective, they were kids themselves and kids have sleep overs and *gasps* share the same bed. Guess they are all gay. It's just hogwash.

As an irrelevant side not, the producers of Sesame Street did issue a formal statement on the subject:

"They're puppets and puppets don't have a sexual orientation."

Slashdot Top Deals

"Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago." -- Bernard Berenson

Working...