This shows that science is just a mass of arbitrary assertions.
This abject, craven, flip flopping about face allows me to justifiably substitute my own preferred notions into the debate as fact.
This effectively proves that global warming, vaccination, evolution, and all other liberal plots are bald faced lies.

Its an outrage! If scientists can revise their theories based on improved evidence, science is untrustworthy claptrap that must be excluded from debate.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_tarpit

Don't be ridiculous. "All Turing complete languages are Turing complete" is not an argument, its a tautology.
The question is how easily a concept can be expressed and reasoned about. By your logic, because diophantine equations can encode a lisp interpreter, they are a reasonable way to implement ... anything. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.6.7628&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Maybe because its a slow, me-too, mashed together dynamic language rather than a cohesive, statically typed language, designed in a peer reviewed environment with modularity, performance, safety, concurrency, and expressivity in mind?

Your claim is that paying for a patent licence in "merely aggregated" software results in being unable to distribute any software under the GPL. In the cases you state - Fraunhofer & Dolby, the patent licenced software is in userspace, which is a clear "mere aggregation" boundary set out by major copyright holders. Seperate processes, or running your code in a chip, are also pretty much watertight boundaries. And almost certainly other "not quite" process things like running a bit of firmware in kernel space is very very unlikely to be found to be a derived work of the kernel and thus have any effect on this ... so, unless tivo are idiotic enough to do codecs in a kernel module rather than in hardware or in userspace, it doesn't matter.

This case is different, it is about patent violations *in* a particular bit of GPL'ed software, ie FAT in the kernel. And no, I'm not a GPL zealot, I find it incredibly irritating in a huge number of situations - basically the point at which a project grows up and realises it wants to be a platform or library, and then has to go through a relicencing nightmare. I would never make new code GPL'd, unless its on a project that can't possibly relicence.

However I do get tired of people claiming to have found fatal flaws in the GPL : the aim I think is wrong, but take some time to understand that the implementation is solid.

The legal coward solution to this is to use a fuse implementation of vfat, and pay the ridiculous MS tithe. This way you don't impact on the GPL licence you were granted for the kernel.

Make sure you read the mere aggregation clause.
Dunce.

The problem is the attitude that the vast majority of indian programmers have.

1. They can never be wrong, or hav e made a mistake.
2. They deny reality - ie everything is always going fine, until its blatantly clear that its not, and even then its somehow still ok, if you ignore the reality that the system was meant to work.
3. Its impossible to know whether they actually understand what you said. Because they will always claim to have understood, you literally have to quiz them in detail, which can be very tedous..
4. They can't bear to disappoint someone, even when they should. I've had programmers impersonate each other on the phone, just to avoid admitting that they weren't there. But its such a half assed job that they don't even tell the other guy that they impersonated them.

Any halfway decent indians move to the UK, US and Europe *very* quickly. Also, I've seen *plenty* of utterly shit programmers from IITs. The vast majority of "successful" indian outsourcing I've seen has consisted of ~20 indian programmers producing reams of shit, and then their UK based "boss" rewriting the lot and getting a pat on the back for making outsourcing work.

Now Eastern Europeans are arrogant fucks who find it very hard to admit they are wrong as well. They do have a good sense of doom however, which makes them far less likley to lie about the state of their projects. In general they are hugely better than indians.

This is all cultural - its shocking how much more angry a westernised ( can admit mistakes, doesn't have to be percieved as omniscient) will get at working with the standard dross. I've never heard of these kinds of cultural traits being engineered in or out of a society, but I seriously hope it can be done for Indias sake. Unfortunately, this would involve facing reality and admitting they have a problem....

No, its season 7&8. 1&2 were the real thing, 3-6 were ok. 7&8 were unwatchable.

I'd love to know your definition of a non editable file...

The only thing that *should* be legally permissable is something signed with your private key. Now, who on earth is going to sign mp3s with their private key before sticking them on a p2p network, or give their private key to Apple so they can do it... oh wait.

Its a point about the politics of the thing - nothing to do with the practicality. MS will never require a piece of hardware that laptops can't have built in to be a "genuine" windows machine, and no game dev will spend their own money ( rather than a hardware manufacturers VC money ) on supporting a peripheral that is not required.

There is no economic sense in a game developer using this. Until Microsoft mandates that a bit of hardware is required for a "Genuine" windows machine, it will not factor in to any rational developers plans. And in this case its never going to happen, because it notionally excludes laptops, and no matter how painful it is in reality to play a mouse and keyboard game on a touchpad, its still "possible".

Anyway, MS want PC gaming dead just as much as everybody else now that X360 has been a relative success: any hardware innovation has to come from single source manufacturers, and in reality that means console manufacturers - and only Nintendo actually wants to even try - and Apple. All the clone makers just like to cower in a corner and pray for a behemoth like Intel, MS, or Google to innovate for them...

Its sad really, that the 80's with myriad incompatible silos of innovation seem so bright nowadays...