several glasses of wine later

A "do whatever you want" or MIT or "beerware" license may be more free for the individual, but overall it is a less free license.

The GPL *adds additional freedom* since it guarantees future revisions and public forks will also be free.

The only loss of freedom is when someone chooses to extend GPL'd software they are required to publish their code.
This person loses the freedom to keep their code a secret. They are not free to withhold free software from the world.

It is a compromise. They are taking something someone else has written- if they contribute a meaningful change, the thing that would generate the most freedom would be if they contributed it back to the world, and the GPL requires this. The GPL enforces software freedom.

Fair warning- the next person that says something to the contrary in front of me is getting a lecture.

Applying MMORPG dynamics to the reality

Justin Hall has recorded his thesis defense: Passively Multiplayer Online Games, which applies concepts from MMORPGS to reality, or at least to your computer-aided reality. For instance, he mentions a project where you install a sort of friendly spyware on your machine which tracks how often you interrupt your work to check email and when you do, it tattles on you. You lose points for doing things like that.

Video is here.

SCTP

This is a pretty awesome looking protocol-- sort of like a TCP/UDP frankenstein with what they call "mult-homing" and "multi-streaming" and a couple of other goodies.

Mult-homing is the ability to split SCTP connections across networks, so like you could aggregate a bunch of networks together even if they had different IPs.

Multi-streaming is multiple streams within an association, or connection.

There are places where overhead is much higher than TCP, but also places where it's much lower. It's also included in Linux 2.6. Check out the article here: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/…