Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: IceWeasel, Online Gambling, GPU Folding, Evolution
The facts about Debian Iceweasel. john-da-luthrun writes, "Debian Firefox/XULrunner maintainer Mike Hommey reports on the Firefox/Iceweasel wrangle, correcting various assertions that have been made in the assorted trollfests/flamewars currently raging over the proposed Firefox rename. Hommey confirms that Firefox in Etch will be renamed 'Iceweasel,' but this will only be a renamed version of the vanilla Firefox, not the GNU Iceweasel fork — though the Debian and GNU Iceweasel teams may work together in future."
A closer look at Folding@home's GPU client. TheRaindog writes, "Slashdot recently covered some impressive client statistics for Stanford's Folding@home project, but they don't tell the whole story. The Tech Report has taken a closer look at the GPU client, running it on a Radeon X1900 XTX against the CPU client on a dual-core Opteron. The results are enlightening, especially considering how Stanford has chosen to award points GPU client work units. Power consumption is more interesting, with the GPU client apparently far more power-efficient than folding with a CPU."
David Brin need not lament — KidBasic. sproketboy writes, "I was thinking about the recent slashdot story David Brin Laments Absence of Programming For Kids, and after looking around I found KidBasic. KidBasic is quite good and teaches all the basics of programming. My 4 year old nephew and I have been able to get a few simple games programmed with it."
Online gambling ban may violate international law. An anonymous reader writes, "As Slashdot noted earlier, Congress has passed an effective ban on online gambling in the U.S. This may not be the end of the story, however. The law may be struck down by the World Trade Organization on the grounds that it violates the United States' international obligation not to discriminate in favor of domestic casinos. If the WTO strikes down this U.S. gambling ban, it would not be the first time. In November of 2004, the WTO struck down a U.S. anti-gambling law as illegally discriminating against the nation of Antigua."
Human species may do whatnow?. jamie writes, "'I might have believed this nonsense could come from some late 19th century eugenicist, but now? Is there any evidence...?' That's biologist PZ Myers's comment on the BBC story that claims the human species may split in two. It was posted on Slashdot as humor, but Myers's comments are a much-needed sober appraisal of this kind of pseudoscientific claim."
Another RIAA lawsuit dropped. skelator2821 writes, "Another RIAA lawsuit has been dropped against a defendant who had been accused of illegally sharing songs online, according to Ars Technica. Looks like the Mob tactics are not paying off for our good friends at the RIAA anymore."
Penny Smith's supposed solution to the Millenium problem (Navier Stokes) turned out to be wrong.
They can permit member states to impose trade sanctions that would otherwise also be against WTO agreements if they decide a member state is in violation. It wouldn't be the first time the US has caved.
There may be one interesting consequence of the WTO opposing this law, though. The US federal government cannot regulate gambling transactions that don't cross state lines, due to the Commerce Clause in the US Constitution. This means that any federal law restricting online gambling must exempt, at least implicitly, online gambling transactions that take place all in one state. One of the grounds of complaint that other WTO members apparently have with this law is that it treats intrastate gambling transactions differently from international ones, and if the WTO rules that this part of the complaint is valid, then the US would never be able to restrict online gambling in any way, and still remain in compliance with treaty obligations, without a Constitutional amendment or without all 50 states imposing the same regulations on intrastate gambling.
For the billionth time, this is more than the logo. Debian had an understanding that let them call the version in their repository "Firefox" if they used a different logo. The mozilla.com people say that isn't good enough anymore. To use the codebase and call it Firefox Debian must:
1. Submit all patches to mozilla.com for approval. This includes security patches.
2. Debian's policy is to stick with a version of a given package for a release and backport security and stability fixes only. Mozilla.com would rather have everyone running the latest version at all times.
Basically, the codebase ceases to be Open Source if any product compiled from it is to be called Firefox. Very few other projects engage in this sort of control freakery and branding. If all Open Source projects behaved as Mozilla does, we'd have a real problem on our hands.
To pin ALL blame for this on Debian shows no understanding of what the issues are.
The US federal government cannot regulate gambling transactions that don't cross state lines, due to the Commerce Clause in the US Constitution.
In the wake of the Supreme Court's recent decision in Gonzales v. Raich, I doubt this is true. Raich essentially held that the government could ban all trade & production of cannabis in California, even that activity which involved entirely homegrown plants which never crossed state lines, on the theory that if local growers could introduce cannabis to a local marketplace, it would impact the nationwide cannabis market, and thus have a substantial cross-state effect.
(As a side note, I don't like the government banning medical marijuana, but there is no question that Raich was correctly decided. The same theory is also why landmark civil rights legislation, such as the act which forbids whites-only lunch counters, also applies to lunch counters which only serve local clients. One of the unfortunate things about constitutional law is that you often have to take the bitter with the sweet.)
The case for allowing interstate gambling to be banned is bolstered by the WTO. As has been correctly noted above, the WTO does not have the power to "strike down" laws, per se. It does, however, have the power to allow trade sanctions so onerous that any reasonable government would repeal the offending law on their own initiative. Given this framework (which is an international framework largely outside of U.S. hands), the federal government could likely defend an intrastate gambling ban on the grounds that, by banning intrastate gambling, the government avoids onerous trade sanctions, which itself has a substantial effect on interstate commerce.
The rules of evolution (from Darwin) are such that all species eventually split into seperate species.
Where'd you get that idea?
Darwin's theory was beautiful because it was simple - Those specimens most fit to live in a given environment will prevale over specimens that are less fit for that environment. That's its only claim about the future of a species. We can infer that a species will, through natural selection, become more and more fit for its environment, but that's an inferrence. Mutation is a fickle mistress, and the vast majority of her works fail to produce viable specimens, let alone ones that are more fit than their predecessors.
Splitting isn't a necessity, but it is likely when (and only when) a population is isolated. In the absence of isolation, no speciation occurs since any viable mutations are folded back into the common gene pool. That's one of the many wonders of sexual reproduction. I believe you'll agree that if anything, isolation among human populations has nearly vanished in the past hundred years, and this trend looks (quite) likely to continue as we move into the future.
I'll grant that branching of our species is possible, but for the foreseeable future I think it's unlikely, and it's certainly not a foregone conclusion. If Darwin said otherwise, I'd love to hear about it.
You can't win, Darth. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
They up the ante by having the ability to allow penalties on almost any of the violating country's exports.
The WTO does this by allowing the people making the complaints to place some decided amount of import tariffs on any of the [violating country]'s export goods. The country(s) making the complaint can decide the products they want to place tariffs on.
The net result is that you may get away with breaking the rules... but only until the complaint works its way through the WTO system. Even the U.S. has been forced to play along.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
The name Iceweasel came from Debian itself when they were first contemplating renaming Firefox® to get around trademark issues. It never came to that because Mozilla® decided to allow Debian to use the name Firefox® without requiring them to use the non-Free branding images - which Debian legally couldn't distribute in any case.
Then, about a year ago, Mozilla® decided that this was not enough. That in order to use the name Firefox®, Debian would either have to submit all patches through Mozilla® and get them approved (thereby greatly delaying critical security patches) or not call the browser Firefox®.
Mozilla® has always been a primarily Windows-based program. It's architected around Windows and ported to UNIX and other systems almost as an after-thought. This has forced every single Linux distribution to apply patches to make Firefox® a well-behaved program. Some distributions are willing to go through what should be, for an "open source" project, a completely unnecessary patch approval process.
However, that goes completely against the point of Free software. So Debian has no choice - if they want to continue distributing a secure Firefox® that works within a Linux environment, they're forced to call it something else. So they're calling it by the name they came up with when the issue came up originally: Iceweasel.
This entire issue is 100% Mozilla®'s problem. None of the blame can possibly be placed on Debian, Mozilla® is being 100% unreasonable.
Didn't Debian (TM) force people to stop using the word Debian (TM) ?
Another shining example of Debian (TM) pettiness.
Oh, that's why you need cygwin to build it -From Mozilla