"of which the worst is that AT&T has never threatened to sue anyone over the patent"

Earlier in the piece it describes AT&T sending off demands to prospective licensees, and then those licenses being "politely" returned. Is Mr. Pike really so naive that he doesn't understand that the demand for a license is entirely backed by the implicit threat of a lawsuit to force the same? If that weren't the case the participation level would be 0%.

In that vein, when somebody tells Linus:

"You might have fun raging on the internet, but I think your goals would be better served if..."

He rightly responds:

"Umm. I think I've been able to reach my goals on the internet better than most people."

I believe in civility and courtesy in many areas, and Linus doesn't phrase things exactly as I would. But then, I don't have his responsibility or experiences, either - and while people can disagree about whether he expresses his thoughts in a polite manner, he certainly does so in a clear one.

I don't get it. Why would someone have a website that was just some penguins on an iceberg?

Full quote: "github is a total ghetto of crap commit messages and unreadable and unusable pull requests"

Conveniently left out the part most salient to Linus' argument? Linus repeatedly stresses that he thinks Github is great as a hosting service. It is the pull/commit functionality which he finds lacking.

Just to give a short recap of who this Mads Christensen guy is, coming from a Dane:

His tag line is "Denmarks big show-off" and he basically markets himself as a provocative bragging show-off, always with the rolexes, sports cars, slick hair and better-than-thy appearance.

He's not perceived as a comedian but rather as an entertainer hired for various corporate events - some obviously less successful than others.

Unless this was booked by Dell US without doing any kind of checkup, they would've been aware what would be coming. He's knowing for his provocative presentations and I have a hard time seeing exactly how a Danish Dell branch would find it appropriate or interesting to book Mads Christensen. If they wanted stand-up comedy we've got lots of skilled comedians. Mads Christensen is not in that line of work.

To be fair I don't think Mads Christensen personally believes what he presents on stage. It's the persona he's built up. Not that that makes it better in this scenario, just so flak is directed where it's most appropriate - Dell, and especially whoever made the decision to book him.

Everyone following the anti-piracy org BREIN and it's lawsuits in NL knows that this judge is corrupt, but it cannot really be proven. BREIN always uses the same judge, they always make it impossible for the defendant to be present at the hearings (as I understand it, but I don't know much about it, they use some loophole to make it impossible for the defendant to defend itself at the moment of the verdict). And he always finds the defendant guilty in these cases, no matter how insane (like the 'links case' Falkvinge discussed, were even showing the name of a movie in the forum was considered 'illegal linking').

This should get more press, but not enough people care in NL I think as this is only dredged up as 'wow how can this be' in tech forums while it's usually only a footnote in other press. And I don't believe that's a conspiracy, but rather that, no-one cares...

To be clear, from the article, the routers themselves cost $7,800. And, if I'm rolling out a state infrastructure, and wondering what I can put in place for the next 10 years to serve as a foundation, you could certainly do worse than the 3945 - it's a very flexible ISR, and, all-things being equal, it's probably not worth the hassle of putting 2921s in some locations and 3945s in others. Who knows how much bandwidth you'll want on these high-speed fiber connections 5+ years from now - the 3945 is rated for 350 megabits/second (with features), the 2921 tops out at 75 megabits.

Amortized over 10 years, I would have chosen the 3945 everywhere versus sticking 2921s in some places (the ISR that would have been an alternative) and 3945s in others. Single Security Policy. Single IOS update Policy. Zero doubt as to what features will run in a particular location.

I think what most people have difficulty with is that they are comparing this decision to roll out a state communications infrastructure with the fact that they can go connect a $60 linksys wrt54G in their house and serve a dozen people without breaking a sweat. And get wireless as well! The issues involved in scaling that across the state, while looking to the future, and managing all that gear is a different challenge though.

I don't see any huge scandal here.

I enjoyed the story, but something bothers me (just a little bit). I don't like his attempts at sensationalizing the event:

> The protesters were surprised, I think, that my subject was interesting to them. At one point they all applauded spontaneously when I described a feature of the system.

Rob Pike is a renown scientist, at the time working on Plan9 , the most exciting project of the moment. He tried to portray the protesters as mindless sheep blindly following rms, where indeed they were smart people genuinely against the idea of software patents. After all, this is MIT we're talking about, is anyone surprised that these guys actually showed interest in Rob's talk?

I know that if I were there, I would've definitely put up a protest sign, while still being thrilled to attend the talk.

It is not clear that what you have to say has anything to do with the article. This article is about a child who is clearly intelligent, manipulative and possessive of unhealthy behaviors outside the norm. Instead it appears that you prefer to broadly tar the field of Psychology by arguing that facts can be distorted with careful presentation of statistics.

>It has a long history of shifting its positions, and a long history of debunked and discredited bodies of theory

This is not a bad thing on its own. It just means the search space is large and complex with many potholes and convergence will take a while yet.

> Don't you think that, with a few weeks of study, I could apply any subset of mental disorders from the DSM-IV to any person I wished?

No I don't think so. Not in any substantial way that couldn't just as accurately be replicated by a markov chain with the specificity of a fortune cookie. You can't just trivialize an entire branch of study like that. Certainly there is a lot of room for improvement and terms like disorder, psychopath, multiple personality, schizophrenic are abused and misused but there are behavioural patterns and characteristics by which people can be clustered. The mistake most people make is to think these clusters are static and disjoint.

Your ideas on Psychology are outdated. What Freud believed is nonsense and without experimental feedback he could do little better. Things are better these days, there is cross-talk between areas like Machine Learning, Psychology and neurobiology. Here is a better example of what the future of Psychology will be like: http://videolectures.net/icml09_niv_tnorl/

Also: http://www.med.wisc.edu/news-events/news/psychopaths-brains-...

I've been a little quiet lately as I've been working on the next demo before the end of the Kickstarter. Based on the reactions I've gotten so far, I think you guys are in for a treat :)

Tell them you'll sign the release if they give you the first 12 months of vesting. Firing someone at 11 months is a dick move. Remember: if you're not willing to walk away, you're going to pay retail (ie, end up with 3.5 months). I'll put odds at 70% that they give you 12 months and get the release they want, and odds at 30% that they give you no months and get no release. That puts the expected return of this approach at 8 months of vesting. In either outcome you keep your self respect (priceless), and the expected return is twice as good as caving.

The key to staying on good terms with them is being respectful and polite while you make your case. If you remain respectful to them, they will remain respectful to you. If you let them walk all over you, you're likely to lose their respect and may actually end up on worse terms with them.

EDIT: Even if you end up with no agreement, your situation still has an option value, a valuation exercise I'll leave to the reader. There's a reason they want that release, and that reason only matters if they become a successful company.

This is pure, unadulterated nonsense. There are plenty of ways to manage everything you mentioned with a tiered approach to the IT needs of the municipalities of the state without resorting to grossly over accommodating every location. Hell, they could've even used some of that money for regional IT management positions, putting people back to work.

Shame on you for justifying this nonsense in any way shape or form. This is textbook waste ala bureaucratic laziness.

Software patents are bad, okay? He got into them before that became obvious. Now it is. He is too stubborn or too blind to state this truth; instead he hides behind "business community is still excited".

Stallman organizing protest can not be more wrong than Pike not acknowledging the problem.

Many lawyers will give a free consultation, have you considered consulting one to explore your options?

That seems like a pretty silly argument to me. The library with 4 computers would be just fine with the $60 router. How is it any harder to manage that gear compared to managing the completely unneeded equipment that the local employees have no clue how to run.

Not to mention spending $14k on upgrades for many places that don't need that particular upgrade. I don't care if it's a little simpler to buy all the same, it's absurd to spend millions and millions of taxpayer dollars on something that is completely unnecessary.

In Thailand this situation is quite terrible. The Mafia collects people with missing limbs and other disfigurations, basically the people who will elicit the greatest sympathy, and forces them to sit on the same corners begging day after day, month after month and year after year - and turn all of the money they collect over to them. If they steal any, they die. In return they are provided with the bare minimum subsistence living one could imagine.

This situation is so bad that the country had to pass a law giving the death penalty to anybody dismembering children for the purposes of turning them into beggars - because people were doing that on a large scale.

>I also think they were surprised that the inventor of #4,555,755 was funny, theatrical, and clever

I respect Rob as a programmer, but that came off as a little too self congratulatory.