It's about control. You give up control over your own games and your own computer and hand it to a third party. Regardless if you're doing anything illegal, they have the power you your property. Normally they're kept in check because abusing that power would lend them fewer sales, but occasionally, due to greed or a bug or a conflict of interest, you can be sure that they will.

It isn't falsifiable because if they come up with a theory that matches the recorded data, there is no experiment that you can repeat in order to falsify their claims.

The whole point of GNU/Linux is that you have complete control over and significant trust of your system. If you bring closed, proprietary, DRM-infested software onto it, you're just turning it into another Windows; you might as well just go back to it.

No, what we need to get these people to do is to give us the code to their engines (even if under a mostly proprietary license). That way we will be able to continue enjoying what makes GNU/Linux attractive and play games as well.

I've used it ever since they renamed mozilla to seamonkey. I've always liked searching from inside the address bar, which has been the main reason I did not switch to Firefox. I don't talk about it much in the same way I don't talk about using libgettext: it's just a browser, it gets the job done. Browsers and web development are overrated and overhyped.

Look at the graphs in the article. The residual variations in the rate of decay are proportional to 1/R^2, where R is the Sun-Earth distance. Compare that to the force of gravity, F=GMm/R^2, where GMm is constant. Perhaps the Sun is helping to pull the atoms apart via inflicted gravitational force on a very slight level. It doesn't have to be anything fancy like neutrino flux.

A colony doesn't need to be fully self-sustaining. As long as there is something valuable on Mars that can be exported to Earth, it can form the basis for interplanetary trade and allow the colony to co-exist with Earth without unilaterally draining resources from her.

I know that you're joking, but you have it the other way around. It is the pressure of the environment that causes people to do useful, productive work. Send all useless and lazy people to Mars and within a few generations Earth will be full of them again. But send all sorts of people to the Marsian frontier and there the rough environment will only reward the enterprising, useful and fit, and eventually most inhabitants will become like that. Well, until Mars becomes like Earth and we'll need to go out and colonise further planets.

You don't know any prostitutes? You are very lacking in knowledge. But you are right that the depiction they get in sci-fi TV series is misleading. Here, let me show you what real prostitutes are like.

Just because someone has invested a lot of time or effort into making a sequence of bits, it does not mean that they are entitled to profit from it.

The new thinking is that the right of people to share comes before the right of distributors to enforce payment for making copies. The old thinking reverses these priorities.

If the new thinking means that distributors (or creators) cannot make a profit, then so be it. They will have to put their sense of entitlement aside and adapt to the new market reality.

The same people who want to share also want new movies, games and music. If that means they have to pay up-front kickstarter/vodo-style, then they will. It's a new idea with lots of issues to work out, but faced with no other choice, the creators and the public will eventually settle into a functioning system.

There is no going back to strict copyright control without monitoring and censoring all private communications. This is why I think that it is only a matter of time before non-commercial copying is legalised and an alternative creator compensation system becomes everyday reality.

Goto isn't used in Linux for performance reasons. It's used because C does not have exceptions and using goto to jump to clean-up code prevents code duplication. Any sufficiently experienced C programmer will encourage you to do the same.

Of course, Java has exceptions and the finally keyword, so goto is not strictly needed for this purpose.

The original owners did not lose their credit card numbers. Therefore it's not theft, it's unauthorised copying! I'm surprised that this is pointed out so many times under articles about file sharing, but not in cases like this.

Because all sorts of services won't talk to you if you are on a spam blacklist. And pretty much all dynamic address pools are on such blacklists.

The GPL3 does indeed state that. But isn't the purpose of section 7 only to allow the copyright holder to work around the fact that the header of the license states that changing it is not allowed? Section 7 explicitly mentions that you have to have permission from the copyright holder to add additional clauses. You may thus add restrictions to the license which are not counter to the spirit of the vanilla GPL3.

But the question is, how does this affect compatibility between "GPL3 with additional restrictions" and just "GPL3"? Since without permission from the copyright holder you cannot add or remove additional restrictions, you may not use the licenses interchangeably. Because the additional restrictions are not present in the vanilla GPL3 (which does not allow additional restrictions unless you are the copyright holder and these restrictions fall under section 7), if you combine GPL3 code and "GPL3 with restrictions" code, it seems to me that there is no possible way to satisfy the terms of both licenses simultaneously.

So the way I see it, although GPL3 allows you to add these terms, by doing so you make your license GPL3-incompatible. If this is the case then it is troubling, and I would welcome any clarification from someone who knows the details behind this.

It seems that the licensing is a mess.

The header in the source files state that the code is GPLv3 or any later version, with additional clauses added.

However, it seems that it is only possible to apply these additional terms to GPL version 3 exactly (and not any later version):

These additional terms seem to be just disclaimers of liability and an indemnity clause, but it is entirely possible that they make the source GPL-incompatible, which, if true, would be a huge disappointment.

So not only is the license not self-consistent, it is likely also GPL-incompatible. The additional terms may further make the license non-free, and definitely non-DFSG-compliant. Thanks go to the corporate lawyers who have turned Carmack's good intentions into an abomination. I hope that they can re-release this under saner terms.

I can never tell if these words in quotes are meant to be taken as literary citations or an indication of sarcasm. I think this 'style' of writing should be 'retired'.