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A Contrarian View of Open Source
Bruce Sterling's OSCON speech is now online - fun, light reading. And a reminder: the Global Civil Society design contest (which we mentioned before) is ending soon.
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How is it well-written? It's some incoherent mess about going from System 9 to System X and then Microsoft black putty. "I still don't get it about System X". What?
As is Scotland, Ireland, Northern Ireland and Wales. They all have well defined national borders. The unity is purely political. If you are a natural British citizen, your nationality will be English, Scottish, Welsh, or Northern Irish.
Originally, Scotland, England, Wales and Ireland all had kings. Monarchs, rather.
Wales was conquered by England and no longer has a monarch. It became a principality of England (i.e. one of the monarch's children is the Prince of Wales), and the combined country is officially called "England and Wales". Wales has identical laws to England, although it was recently granted a Welsh Assembly which is politically between the UK Parliament and the local councils in Wales.
Scotland and England joined their monarchies in union, and they renamed the entire country "the United Kingdom", and took on the Union Flag (called the Union Jack when mounted on a ship's jackstaff). Scotland was not conquered, it is still voluntarily joined in union and could break its union if it wanted to. One of the acts of union was to join the Scottish and English parliaments, but recently the Scottish parliament has reopened, despite not being permitted to directly collect taxes from Scottish residents. It also has its own law system, and all the Scottish banks print their own banknotes, unlike English banks which have to have all their money printed for them by the Bank of England.
Great Britain, by the way, is geographical name of the main landmass and the archipelago of islands surrounding it, but not including Ireland and its little islands. Ireland and Britain are seperated by the Irish Sea. Britain is also known as the British Isles.
The UK then conquered Ireland, and shipped non-Catholics to the northern parts of it while keeping the native Irish under duress. Many years later, when Ireland was conquered back from the British by the IRA. However, the non-Catholic settlers protested, so they split the country into the still-British Northern Ireland, and the Irish Ireland.
The country is now known officially as "The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland". In a strange twist of language, your passport says "British citizen" and identifies you as coming from the "United Kingdom".
To offer a different reading on this topic, which assumes that the story presented in the Bible is factual, -
I think that Jesus was rather disgusted at the layers of elitism that the moneychangers were putting between the common folk and God. First, the moneychangers and other merchants there were also "inspectors" that looked over the animals that the Jews would bring to sacrifice, to inspect that they met ceremonial laws. They would then deny the animal a passing status, and would offer to buy the animal, and sell an acceptable sacrifice for an extra fee. Then, they would turn around and sell the animal that they had just denied was an acceptable sacrifice as an acceptable sacrifice. Secondly, they were set up in the court of the Gentiles, taking it over, which basically denied the non-Jewish God-fearers a place to worship.
Doc made a front row MD recording. I'll be putting it up eventually along w/ the rest my OSCON recordings. It will probably come across better than the transcript.