The CNN article says that the fired researcher had worked at CalTech for three years and that some of his collaborative work with former MIT professor and outgoing Caltech president David Baltimore, is being examined for fraud.
Baltimore has previously been caught, at a minimum, refusing to take scientific misconduct seriously.
Even if no wrongdoing is found on David Baltimore's part (as I think is likely) this incident will still be taken as further evidence that when strong action is not taken against an environment that is permissive of misconduct, the misconduct is likely to grow.
There are many cases when individuals and corporations deny those freedoms.
In the US we believe that by doing so, we respect the rights of those individuals and in the case of corporations, the rights of the individuals that own the corporation.
In much of the rest of the world (the text supplied here suggests that Canada may be one of those places) freedom of speech is interpreted as restraining the actions of individuals.
None of this is to suggest that the rest of the world takes freedom of speech seriously anyway. If I start a business in Quebec and talk to my employees in English, I would forfeit my freedom of speech (and potentially my business). If somebody believes that one race is superior to another race, and openly expresses this belief in Europe, he or she is liable to be arrested. Most of the rest of the world likes the concept of freedom of speech, just as long as it is isn't used to say things that the majority finds repugnant. If Voltaire was alive today, he wold be an American. I pray that in 2050 I can still say that.
Most of the root servers are outside US. What other coutries want is just a system where one stupid president cannot shut off the whole (or part of) internet in his fight agains "terrorism" Even if George Bush desperately wanted to immediately shut off the Internet, he couldn't do it. The reason why America created the Internet in the first place was (according to the funders) to create a network that would be robust in the face of nuclear attack. I doubt very much that the present incarnation of the internet achieves this, but I am confident that the Internet as it exists today is robust even if attacked by a whole swarm of pointy eared Texans.
solman: Do Europeans think that Iraq deserves Saddam Hussein? Maybe we should let the Iraq-people decide? I think that's what we are doing. The people they elected are virtually unanimous in their sentiment that Saddam Hussein should be executed. I am unaware of any representatives who are in favor of letting him out of prison and approving a constitution that restores his dictatorial powers. Do you believe that there is popular Iraqi support for returning him to power?
You cannot believe that US attacked Iraq because of Iraqians' human rights? Saddam Hussein's human rights record was derterminative in our decision to invade him. By this I mean that were 2003 Iraq a functioning Democracy that respected human rights, it is an absolute certainty that we would not have invaded Iraq.
Instead, Iraq had one of the most oppressive governments in history. Political opponents were universally tortured and killed. Professional women whose only crime was not being traditional enough were rounded up and beheaded in public by black robed fanatics. People were killed in the middle of the street, and the population was so fearful of the regime that they could be depended on not to openly react to it according to PBS (not exactly a pro-Bush organization). All this from a guy who gassed his own people, came within a year of developing nuclear weapons, and who had absolutely no qualms about invading his neighbors whenever it suited him. It is hard to think of a dictator against whom the use of force was more justified.
It was NOT because of terrorism or WMD, it was NOT because of human rights, it was because of controlling oil reserves. This is ridiculous. Show me _one_ barrel of oil that the US misappropriated from the Iraqi people since the invasion. Leading up to the war, I suppose that it was reasonable for apprehensive Europeans to believe that the US was doing this for a profit. Now that well over two years have passed and we've taken none of the Iraqi oil for ourselves and we've poured hundreds of billions of dollars into Iraq, this is slander. If you believe that there was ever an angle that would have allowed the US to make a profit off of Iraq, you are divorced from reality. At the very least, if there is any basis at all to this accusation, you should be able to show me the money.
The only profit from Operation Iraqi Freedom is the increased Freedom experienced by millions of Iraqis.
I'm going to ignore most of your comments since they are low content, but let me address this last one:
Few Americans know that attacking Iraq was not accepted in ANY other country. You haven't met many Americans, have you? Many, if not most Americans know this. We just don't care. In Planet Earth 2005, the US is the only country with the effective ability to discipline a rouge nation. With this power comes responsibility.
We did not use this power in Rwanda when Koffi Annan told the UN troops to sit idly by while 1M were killed. We did not use this power on Iraq in 1998 (when Clinton contemplated an attack after they kicked out the inspectors) and an additonal 700,000 were killed. Finally, in 2003 we did something. Every year between 2003 and who-knows-when, betwen 100,000 and 200,000 innocent people will NOT be killed because we chose to act.
This is about nothing if not battling the American arrogance.
This part is absolutely correct. Whether we're talking about forking the root servers, negotiating peace between the Israelis and Palestinians, or removing Saddam Hussein, the primary European concern is battling American arrogance.
I understand why Europeans feel this way. When you encounter somebody who is wildly successful and totally full of himself, it is only natural to want to knock him down a peg.
The question is, what price is Europe willing to pay for this?
Do Europeans think it is a good idea to fork the root servers? Do Europeans think it was a good idea for Chirac to encourage Arafat to walk away from the Paris accords in 2000? Do Europeans think that Iraq deserves Saddam Hussein? Do Europeans think that a strong PRC without human rights reforms is a good thing?
For a great many Europeans the answer to all of these questions is a firm NON.
The European response in each case is that those Arrogant Selfish Americans are acting as if they own the World, the Internet, or the Middle East. "We don't disagree with their goal, just the way they go about it."
You're right. We have acted arrogantly, as if we own the world. Its an arrogance that comes in part from a history of looking back on the consequences of our past arrogance and being satisfied with the results.
Not least of these results is the Strong, Free and Democratic Europe which hates our guts and which would not exist (twice over) were it not for the American desire to remake the world to conform to American values.
Europeans Beware!!!
If Europe keeps on fighting America, Europe will eventually start winning some battles.
You may fork the Internet. You may destroy American efforts at peace between Israel and the Palestinians. You may prevent the United States from attacking the next Saddam Hussein (can you say Kim Jong Il?). You may create a dominant PRC that doesn't have any reason to care about human rights.
Europe has to decide which European values can be sacrificed on the altar of sticking it to the Americans, and which European values must be upheld, even if it means tolerating American Hubris.
I know this much:
If European leaders think that setting up their own root servers or sabotaging a diplomatic accord here or there will cure the Americans of their Arrogance and end American Unilateralism, they fundamentally misunderstand America and the American Spirit.
I find it amusing that you take the claims of politicians at face value.
The Europeans could care less about freedom of speach for the Chineese. In fact, they're about to start selling arms to the PLA again (for the first time since Tiananmen Square) because they have decided that it is more important to counter US hegemony than it is to stick up for the freedoms of the Chineese.
This comment is idiotic for two reasons (besides the factually inacruate statement about the US's current dues):
1. This is the age of American hegemony. From a foreign policy perspective, most foreign countries see the UN's most important purpose today as providing a forum through which they can use the weight of world opinion to check the actions of the Hegemon. Without US participation, this role would be fatally compromised. If the US ceases to be part of the UN, and there is a world crisis, the key diplomatic action will not be in the open halls of the UN, but in the closed corridors of Washington, DC. This would surely not be to the benefit of the world community.
2. The United States has alawys provided an enormous portion of the funds required to run the UN (it remains over 20% today), far in excess of its share of control over the institution. Without the money from the US, a small army of diplomats and bureacrats would become unemployed. Financially, keeping the US paying its dues (without laying off the bureacrats that the US has deemed unnecessary) is the single most important task the UN bureacracy has. In short, the US is their gravy train and they know it.
As far as the UN paying for US messes, that would be nice, but its never happened. Since WW2, we've been paying the lions share of the UN's messes. Only in the first Gulf war did the rest of the world pay a reasonable share of the costs, and even that calculation is dependent on ignoring the vast trillions that the US has invested in a millitary that it uses primarilly for the benefit of others.
Based on his description, the place he was fired from may very well be in the upper half of the industry. His points are valid. I try to realize them in my companies. But statistically speaking, the vast majority of software engineering opportunities do not satisfy his stated objectives.
One of two things are going to happen:
1. The kid is going to be beaten down to accepting the conditions he criticized so adamantly.
Hubbard repeatedly publicly stated that starting your own religion was the easiest way to make money. Then he went out and did it WITH GUSTO. Come on, the souls of masacred aliens are inhabiting my body and cause all my problems? Hubbard started talking about starting his own religion in the late 1940s. If somebody in 1940s America had told me that he could make millions by inventing a religion with this as its central premise, I would have (correctly) assumed he was on drugs. Hell, I would have a difficult time believing this in 2005 if it weren't for the fact that Hubbard has already proven his point by demonstration.
I think that for accomplishing this, Hubbard deserves a vast amount of geek cred. It is unreasonable to compare such a monumental feat, with the mundane act of simultaneously being a true mormon believer and obnoxious.
Expanding your home costs serious money, and is a real hassle. It makes sense to invest time and effort to get rid of things that might even feel emotionally attached to, just so that you can avoid this.
Adding drive space is cheap and easy (USB storage can be added for well under $1/GB, takes a second to install, and will last for years). It would be quite easy, across multiple hard drive clean ups, to spend more effort organizing and deleting your hard drive content than it costs for you to simply add more storage.
If deleting items on your hard drive bothers you so much that you need to ask others how to proceed, it hardly makes sense not to spend a trivial amount of money buying more space.
In the United States, the outcome of legal disputes is often arbitrary and can be heavily influenced by factors that have nothing to do with the merits of the case.
Information tools do not cause this problem. In fact, they may well be the solution since:
A) They level the playing field between the powerful and the powerless. This information was once treated as a sort of trade secret by the highest priced law firms, now it is available to anyone at a greatly diminished price.
B) It renders transparent the absurdities of our legal system, greatly enhancing the chance for corrective legislative action, and shaming the worst offenders (jurisdictions and judges) with indisputable statistical comparisons.
No legal system is perfect, but in comparison to other equally developed nations, ours is dramatically worse. Compare, for example, per capita legal expenses in Japan vs. the United States. People spend money on legal expenses because they believe that by spending money they can change the outcome. Spending on lawsuits and legal expenses is directly proportional to people's belief that they can influence outcomes by spending this money.
That most basic principle of justice, that it should be determined based on the actions of the parties and not who they are and how much money they have, is in grave peril in the United States. Thank heavens for information tools that shine a light on the situation.
There is no evidence that anybody ever used this information for unauthorized purposes. Some professor left the grade report in an exposed directory on a web server. Instead of taking the server down and forgeting about the incident (like 9 out of 10 IT departments would have) the University sent letters to all of the potentially affected parties. I don't even believe that OH has a CA style law requiring such disclosure. I commend them for their honesty.
The suggestion that the University should have refunded $20K to all of its 2002 students because its theoretically possible that somebody might have gotten their information is positively bizzare.
The first thing that the author says is that variations of IQ within racial and gender categories is *much* wider than those among racial and gender categories, yet in his controversial book he claims that this smaller variation leads to the disparity in achievement found between various racial and gender groups
This is a perfectly consistent position. In his book he goes on to claim that controlling for IQ, Americans of African ancestry often do as well as or better than White Americans. For example he refers to one study that controlled for IQ (such that members of both groups had an average IQ of 114) and found that 68% of blacks with that IQ had graduated college while only 50% of whites had.
If he doesn't spend enough time on the consequences of IQ differences WITHIN groups for your taste, thats probably because the issue is completely settled. IQ differences within groups are a VERY strong predictor of personal success.
In my opinion it is tragic that people could be "suspected" of racism, simply because they study the issue and find no empiricle support for the politically correct result. At least he isn't in danger of being sent to prison.
Except for big iron (where DB2 dominates) and Micorosft environments (where SQL server dominates), Oracle is the dominant player.
I recently moved my deployments from Oracle to MySQL because:
1. MySQL supports all of the Oracle features you need to build and operate an enterprise software system.
2. MySQL's new administration tools are significantly better than Oracle's out of the box tools (This is why a year ago I refused to use MySQL for production, and now I've switched everything).
3. MySQL is much easier to manage. I don't know anybody who runs a heavily loaded Oracle server in production without spending significant $$$ on DBAs and commercial tools. I feel quite comfortable doing this with MySQL.
4. MySQL performs pretty much the same as Oracle out of the box (and I think it is easier to tune).
5. MySQL's supposed gotchas pale in to comparison to Oracle's. When I first used MySQL BLOBs it simply worked. I opened up the administration programs and I could actually see the images in the database. It was so beautiful I wanted to cry. I can't count the number of times I went through Oracle BLOB/CLOB hell with different platforms. (Not just getting them in there, but actually getting them to work with third party applications which is the real pain.)
I think that anybody deploying Oracle for non-Oracle applications is going to have to very seriously consider MySQL if for no other reason than all the DBA salaries you can get rid of.
If you want to buld a $1M cluser, stick with Oracle (for now). If you want to run application specifically designed by (or for) Oracle, stick with Oracle. Otherwise, switch at the first opportunity.
The they offer you a deal, return the cartrige and you can have it for a lower price.
If I don't want to be contractually obligated to return the cartrige, I can just buy it at the regular price.
If I do accept money (in the form of a discount) in exchange for returning the cartrige and I don't, I should be held accountable.
This is much less objectionable than Lexmark's other tactics.
Is it part of the slippery slope to click through licenses, yes. But most click through and shrinkwrapped licenses do not offer monetary compensation for the rights they take away. Lexmark offered a choice, compensation and limited rights or no compensation (and frankly uncertain rights).
SCO: We need MySQL on our platform and we'll pay you the cost of migration plus a hefty profit (for some reason we've been having difficulty hiring new developers recently).
MySQL: Because you hate open source, we refuse to take your money, even though we can use your money to make open source stronger. Go give it to some closed source company.
All this press release means is that MySQL will be available on another platofrm (admittedly a dying platform). Its just another step on the path to dethroning Oracle [I encourage anybody still using Oracle who has not seen MySQLs new administrative tools to take a look. In my opinion they render Oracle obsolete for any new project spending less than $1M on hardware.]
If it is public domain, then anybody can use the term Linux to refer to anything.
Microsoft can release a broken version of Windows and call it "Micorosft Linux" even if it has nothing to do with the Linux kernel.
SCO, which has already changed the name of their company for legal purposes, could change the name of their product to Linux, and keep it closed source, and charge money for it, all without violating the GPL.
GPL'd software (like Linux) is NOT released in to the public domain because it would remove the protection that copyright law provides against predators like Microsoft and Linux.
Similarly, releasing the trademark into the public domain would remove the protection that presently exists against hostile companies abusing the name.
In my opinion, more serious damage can be done by abusing the trademark, than by abusing the copyright. Linux would survive some company creating a non-GPL'd fork. But if Microsoft and SCO spend millions or even billions of dollars associating the term Linux with things that are obviously not Linux, the word would lose all meaning.
I shudder at the thought of having to call it "Gnu/Linux" just to make sure people undertand what I am talking about.
It seems well established that global temperatures have in general been gradually increasing over the past century.
It seems well established by that same data that begining in the early fourties there was an extended period of gradually decreasing global temperatures.
It seems well established that atmospheric concentrations of CO2 have been increasing throughout this entire period.
How do environmentalists account for the two decades of decreasing global temperatures?
If sometimes CO2 goes up and global temperatures go up, while other times CO2 goes up and global teperatures go down and we have no explanation for this, isn't the only reasonable conclusion that we don't understand global temperature well enough to draw conclusions about the factors that drive global climate change?
I wouldn't accept any other scientific theory that suspended operation for two decades unless there were some clear explanation for this aberation. Why do we accept global warming?
And IBM's defense has significantly increased the confidence of the business community in using open source software. Imagine the impact that IBM settling with SCO would have on their multi-billion dollar Linux bet.
They would have gladly spent $100M for this kind of result.
This occurs intentionally. The US wants to provide an opportunity for our armed forces to learn how to cope with a situation in which they are overmatched. Our allies want to say that they can kick American butt. The exercises are designed so that everybody wins.
There are only about 30 seats with even a remote chance of changing hands. Realistically, there are about 15 competitive races, and five of these were created by the retaliatory Republican gerrymandering of Texas.
Thanks to a combination of Gerrymandering, Entrenched incumbents, and the McCain-Feingold legislation (which prevents parties from using soft money to neutralize the advantage of entrenched incumbents) congressional races are entirely uncompetitive. Charlie Cook today says that there is virtually no chance of the house changing hands.
So who cares where the candidates stand on the issues when only a very few people actually have the oppotunity to cast a meaningful vote.
If you've ever watched his show on PBS, its clear that believes so. If his show is journalism, then I can comfortably say that there IS no difference between Journalism and the previling brand of politics here in Cambridge, MA.
> Would it really be fair to the Iraqis to postpone > the January elections?
There is no chance that the US or anyone else is going to tell the Iraqis not to hold elections. Allawi knows that his continued power is absolutely dependent on his ability to hold elections on time.
He also knows that most Iraqis live in areas where the security situation permits voting. If a security disaster ensues and precincts containing 20% of population have to be repolled due to security incidents, then 80% of the Iraqi people will have had the chance to choose their own government and Allawi can rightly claim an historic achievement.
I also disagree with the posts that claim the polling data is out of touch with the Iraqi people. The same polls that show that Iraqis overwhelmingly want to choose their own government also show that over 80% do not believe that Americans will allow the Iraqis to choose their own government. Their views are entirely self consistent, they just don't take our goernment at its word. By enabling the Iraqis to choose their own leaders, the United States will go a tremendous distance towards easing their fears.
Instead of controlling 9 electoral votes each election, candidates would only be competing over 1 or 2 electoral votes in each election. Republicans would be guaranteed to get 4, and democrats would be guaranteed to get 3 or 4. The result would be that nobody would campaign there.
The courts have substantial experience in this issue.
Although standards still vary from circuit to circuit, virtually all US jurisdictions agree on this:
To the extent that similarities in code are necessary to ensure compatibility, they are NOT copyrightable.
We needn't fear SCO's rhetoric. If they wanted to TRY to protect something like ELF, they AT LEAST needed a patent. We can place a little confidence in the US legal system, at least in reguard to its ultimate determination of what is or is not copyrightable.
Slashdot Mirror
The CNN article says that the fired researcher had worked at CalTech for three years and that some of his collaborative work with former MIT professor and outgoing Caltech president David Baltimore, is being examined for fraud.
Baltimore has previously been caught, at a minimum, refusing to take scientific misconduct seriously.
Even if no wrongdoing is found on David Baltimore's part (as I think is likely) this incident will still be taken as further evidence that when strong action is not taken against an environment that is permissive of misconduct, the misconduct is likely to grow.
The original point is still quite valid.
There are many cases when individuals and corporations deny those freedoms.
In the US we believe that by doing so, we respect the rights of those individuals and in the case of corporations, the rights of the individuals that own the corporation.
In much of the rest of the world (the text supplied here suggests that Canada may be one of those places) freedom of speech is interpreted as restraining the actions of individuals.
None of this is to suggest that the rest of the world takes freedom of speech seriously anyway. If I start a business in Quebec and talk to my employees in English, I would forfeit my freedom of speech (and potentially my business). If somebody believes that one race is superior to another race, and openly expresses this belief in Europe, he or she is liable to be arrested. Most of the rest of the world likes the concept of freedom of speech, just as long as it is isn't used to say things that the majority finds repugnant. If Voltaire was alive today, he wold be an American. I pray that in 2050 I can still say that.
Most of the root servers are outside US. What other coutries want is just a system where one stupid president cannot shut off the whole (or part of) internet in his fight agains "terrorism"
Even if George Bush desperately wanted to immediately shut off the Internet, he couldn't do it. The reason why America created the Internet in the first place was (according to the funders) to create a network that would be robust in the face of nuclear attack. I doubt very much that the present incarnation of the internet achieves this, but I am confident that the Internet as it exists today is robust even if attacked by a whole swarm of pointy eared Texans.
solman: Do Europeans think that Iraq deserves Saddam Hussein?
Maybe we should let the Iraq-people decide?
I think that's what we are doing. The people they elected are virtually unanimous in their sentiment that Saddam Hussein should be executed. I am unaware of any representatives who are in favor of letting him out of prison and approving a constitution that restores his dictatorial powers. Do you believe that there is popular Iraqi support for returning him to power?
You cannot believe that US attacked Iraq because of Iraqians' human rights?
Saddam Hussein's human rights record was derterminative in our decision to invade him. By this I mean that were 2003 Iraq a functioning Democracy that respected human rights, it is an absolute certainty that we would not have invaded Iraq.
Instead, Iraq had one of the most oppressive governments in history. Political opponents were universally tortured and killed. Professional women whose only crime was not being traditional enough were rounded up and beheaded in public by black robed fanatics. People were killed in the middle of the street, and the population was so fearful of the regime that they could be depended on not to openly react to it according to PBS (not exactly a pro-Bush organization). All this from a guy who gassed his own people, came within a year of developing nuclear weapons, and who had absolutely no qualms about invading his neighbors whenever it suited him. It is hard to think of a dictator against whom the use of force was more justified.
It was NOT because of terrorism or WMD, it was NOT because of human rights, it was because of controlling oil reserves.
This is ridiculous. Show me _one_ barrel of oil that the US misappropriated from the Iraqi people since the invasion. Leading up to the war, I suppose that it was reasonable for apprehensive Europeans to believe that the US was doing this for a profit. Now that well over two years have passed and we've taken none of the Iraqi oil for ourselves and we've poured hundreds of billions of dollars into Iraq, this is slander. If you believe that there was ever an angle that would have allowed the US to make a profit off of Iraq, you are divorced from reality. At the very least, if there is any basis at all to this accusation, you should be able to show me the money.
The only profit from Operation Iraqi Freedom is the increased Freedom experienced by millions of Iraqis.
I'm going to ignore most of your comments since they are low content, but let me address this last one:
Few Americans know that attacking Iraq was not accepted in ANY other country.
You haven't met many Americans, have you? Many, if not most Americans know this. We just don't care. In Planet Earth 2005, the US is the only country with the effective ability to discipline a rouge nation. With this power comes responsibility.
We did not use this power in Rwanda when Koffi Annan told the UN troops to sit idly by while 1M were killed. We did not use this power on Iraq in 1998 (when Clinton contemplated an attack after they kicked out the inspectors) and an additonal 700,000 were killed. Finally, in 2003 we did something. Every year between 2003 and who-knows-when, betwen 100,000 and 200,000 innocent people will NOT be killed because we chose to act.
Even if the whole wo
This is about nothing if not battling the American arrogance.
This part is absolutely correct. Whether we're talking about forking the root servers, negotiating peace between the Israelis and Palestinians, or removing Saddam Hussein, the primary European concern is battling American arrogance.
I understand why Europeans feel this way. When you encounter somebody who is wildly successful and totally full of himself, it is only natural to want to knock him down a peg.
The question is, what price is Europe willing to pay for this?
Do Europeans think it is a good idea to fork the root servers?
Do Europeans think it was a good idea for Chirac to encourage Arafat to walk away from the Paris accords in 2000?
Do Europeans think that Iraq deserves Saddam Hussein?
Do Europeans think that a strong PRC without human rights reforms is a good thing?
For a great many Europeans the answer to all of these questions is a firm NON.
The European response in each case is that those Arrogant Selfish Americans are acting as if they own the World, the Internet, or the Middle East. "We don't disagree with their goal, just the way they go about it."
You're right. We have acted arrogantly, as if we own the world. Its an arrogance that comes in part from a history of looking back on the consequences of our past arrogance and being satisfied with the results.
Not least of these results is the Strong, Free and Democratic Europe which hates our guts and which would not exist (twice over) were it not for the American desire to remake the world to conform to American values.
Europeans Beware!!!
If Europe keeps on fighting America, Europe will eventually start winning some battles.
You may fork the Internet.
You may destroy American efforts at peace between Israel and the Palestinians.
You may prevent the United States from attacking the next Saddam Hussein (can you say Kim Jong Il?).
You may create a dominant PRC that doesn't have any reason to care about human rights.
Europe has to decide which European values can be sacrificed on the altar of sticking it to the Americans, and which European values must be upheld, even if it means tolerating American Hubris.
I know this much:
If European leaders think that setting up their own root servers or sabotaging a diplomatic accord here or there will cure the Americans of their Arrogance and end American Unilateralism, they fundamentally misunderstand America and the American Spirit.
I find it amusing that you take the claims of politicians at face value.
The Europeans could care less about freedom of speach for the Chineese. In fact, they're about to start selling arms to the PLA again (for the first time since Tiananmen Square) because they have decided that it is more important to counter US hegemony than it is to stick up for the freedoms of the Chineese.
This comment is idiotic for two reasons (besides the factually inacruate statement about the US's current dues):
1. This is the age of American hegemony. From a foreign policy perspective, most foreign countries see the UN's most important purpose today as providing a forum through which they can use the weight of world opinion to check the actions of the Hegemon. Without US participation, this role would be fatally compromised. If the US ceases to be part of the UN, and there is a world crisis, the key diplomatic action will not be in the open halls of the UN, but in the closed corridors of Washington, DC. This would surely not be to the benefit of the world community.
2. The United States has alawys provided an enormous portion of the funds required to run the UN (it remains over 20% today), far in excess of its share of control over the institution. Without the money from the US, a small army of diplomats and bureacrats would become unemployed. Financially, keeping the US paying its dues (without laying off the bureacrats that the US has deemed unnecessary) is the single most important task the UN bureacracy has. In short, the US is their gravy train and they know it.
As far as the UN paying for US messes, that would be nice, but its never happened. Since WW2, we've been paying the lions share of the UN's messes. Only in the first Gulf war did the rest of the world pay a reasonable share of the costs, and even that calculation is dependent on ignoring the vast trillions that the US has invested in a millitary that it uses primarilly for the benefit of others.
Based on his description, the place he was fired from may very well be in the upper half of the industry. His points are valid. I try to realize them in my companies. But statistically speaking, the vast majority of software engineering opportunities do not satisfy his stated objectives.
One of two things are going to happen:
1. The kid is going to be beaten down to accepting the conditions he criticized so adamantly.
OR
2. The kid is going to start his own company.
I hope it is the latter.
How can you compare Card's religion to Hubbard's.
Hubbard repeatedly publicly stated that starting your own religion was the easiest way to make money. Then he went out and did it WITH GUSTO. Come on, the souls of masacred aliens are inhabiting my body and cause all my problems? Hubbard started talking about starting his own religion in the late 1940s. If somebody in 1940s America had told me that he could make millions by inventing a religion with this as its central premise, I would have (correctly) assumed he was on drugs. Hell, I would have a difficult time believing this in 2005 if it weren't for the fact that Hubbard has already proven his point by demonstration.
I think that for accomplishing this, Hubbard deserves a vast amount of geek cred. It is unreasonable to compare such a monumental feat, with the mundane act of simultaneously being a true mormon believer and obnoxious.
Expanding your home costs serious money, and is a real hassle. It makes sense to invest time and effort to get rid of things that might even feel emotionally attached to, just so that you can avoid this.
Adding drive space is cheap and easy (USB storage can be added for well under $1/GB, takes a second to install, and will last for years). It would be quite easy, across multiple hard drive clean ups, to spend more effort organizing and deleting your hard drive content than it costs for you to simply add more storage.
If deleting items on your hard drive bothers you so much that you need to ask others how to proceed, it hardly makes sense not to spend a trivial amount of money buying more space.
In the United States, the outcome of legal disputes is often arbitrary and can be heavily influenced by factors that have nothing to do with the merits of the case.
Information tools do not cause this problem. In fact, they may well be the solution since:
A) They level the playing field between the powerful and the powerless. This information was once treated as a sort of trade secret by the highest priced law firms, now it is available to anyone at a greatly diminished price.
B) It renders transparent the absurdities of our legal system, greatly enhancing the chance for corrective legislative action, and shaming the worst offenders (jurisdictions and judges) with indisputable statistical comparisons.
No legal system is perfect, but in comparison to other equally developed nations, ours is dramatically worse. Compare, for example, per capita legal expenses in Japan vs. the United States. People spend money on legal expenses because they believe that by spending money they can change the outcome. Spending on lawsuits and legal expenses is directly proportional to people's belief that they can influence outcomes by spending this money.
That most basic principle of justice, that it should be determined based on the actions of the parties and not who they are and how much money they have, is in grave peril in the United States. Thank heavens for information tools that shine a light on the situation.
There is no evidence that anybody ever used this information for unauthorized purposes. Some professor left the grade report in an exposed directory on a web server. Instead of taking the server down and forgeting about the incident (like 9 out of 10 IT departments would have) the University sent letters to all of the potentially affected parties. I don't even believe that OH has a CA style law requiring such disclosure. I commend them for their honesty.
The suggestion that the University should have refunded $20K to all of its 2002 students because its theoretically possible that somebody might have gotten their information is positively bizzare.
The first thing that the author says is that variations of IQ within racial and gender categories is *much* wider than those among racial and gender categories, yet in his controversial book he claims that this smaller variation leads to the disparity in achievement found between various racial and gender groups
This is a perfectly consistent position. In his book he goes on to claim that controlling for IQ, Americans of African ancestry often do as well as or better than White Americans. For example he refers to one study that controlled for IQ (such that members of both groups had an average IQ of 114) and found that 68% of blacks with that IQ had graduated college while only 50% of whites had.
If he doesn't spend enough time on the consequences of IQ differences WITHIN groups for your taste, thats probably because the issue is completely settled. IQ differences within groups are a VERY strong predictor of personal success.
In my opinion it is tragic that people could be "suspected" of racism, simply because they study the issue and find no empiricle support for the politically correct result. At least he isn't in danger of being sent to prison.
Except for big iron (where DB2 dominates) and Micorosft environments (where SQL server dominates), Oracle is the dominant player.
I recently moved my deployments from Oracle to MySQL because:
1. MySQL supports all of the Oracle features you need to build and operate an enterprise software system.
2. MySQL's new administration tools are significantly better than Oracle's out of the box tools (This is why a year ago I refused to use MySQL for production, and now I've switched everything).
3. MySQL is much easier to manage. I don't know anybody who runs a heavily loaded Oracle server in production without spending significant $$$ on DBAs and commercial tools. I feel quite comfortable doing this with MySQL.
4. MySQL performs pretty much the same as Oracle out of the box (and I think it is easier to tune).
5. MySQL's supposed gotchas pale in to comparison to Oracle's. When I first used MySQL BLOBs it simply worked. I opened up the administration programs and I could actually see the images in the database. It was so beautiful I wanted to cry. I can't count the number of times I went through Oracle BLOB/CLOB hell with different platforms. (Not just getting them in there, but actually getting them to work with third party applications which is the real pain.)
I think that anybody deploying Oracle for non-Oracle applications is going to have to very seriously consider MySQL if for no other reason than all the DBA salaries you can get rid of.
If you want to buld a $1M cluser, stick with Oracle (for now). If you want to run application specifically designed by (or for) Oracle, stick with Oracle. Otherwise, switch at the first opportunity.
The sell toner cartriges for one price.
The they offer you a deal, return the cartrige and you can have it for a lower price.
If I don't want to be contractually obligated to return the cartrige, I can just buy it at the regular price.
If I do accept money (in the form of a discount) in exchange for returning the cartrige and I don't, I should be held accountable.
This is much less objectionable than Lexmark's other tactics.
Is it part of the slippery slope to click through licenses, yes. But most click through and shrinkwrapped licenses do not offer monetary compensation for the rights they take away. Lexmark offered a choice, compensation and limited rights or no compensation (and frankly uncertain rights).
What would you have MySQL do?
SCO: We need MySQL on our platform and we'll pay you the cost of migration plus a hefty profit (for some reason we've been having difficulty hiring new developers recently).
MySQL: Because you hate open source, we refuse to take your money, even though we can use your money to make open source stronger. Go give it to some closed source company.
All this press release means is that MySQL will be available on another platofrm (admittedly a dying platform). Its just another step on the path to dethroning Oracle [I encourage anybody still using Oracle who has not seen MySQLs new administrative tools to take a look. In my opinion they render Oracle obsolete for any new project spending less than $1M on hardware.]
The whole point of this exercise is that Linus decides who can and can not license Linux and for what purpose.
If you think that Linus is going to grant Microsoft a license to market non-Linux products as Linux, then you are smoking something very interesting.
If it is public domain, then anybody can use the term Linux to refer to anything.
Microsoft can release a broken version of Windows and call it "Micorosft Linux" even if it has nothing to do with the Linux kernel.
SCO, which has already changed the name of their company for legal purposes, could change the name of their product to Linux, and keep it closed source, and charge money for it, all without violating the GPL.
GPL'd software (like Linux) is NOT released in to the public domain because it would remove the protection that copyright law provides against predators like Microsoft and Linux.
Similarly, releasing the trademark into the public domain would remove the protection that presently exists against hostile companies abusing the name.
In my opinion, more serious damage can be done by abusing the trademark, than by abusing the copyright. Linux would survive some company creating a non-GPL'd fork. But if Microsoft and SCO spend millions or even billions of dollars associating the term Linux with things that are obviously not Linux, the word would lose all meaning.
I shudder at the thought of having to call it "Gnu/Linux" just to make sure people undertand what I am talking about.
It seems well established that global temperatures have in general been gradually increasing over the past century.
It seems well established by that same data that begining in the early fourties there was an extended period of gradually decreasing global temperatures.
It seems well established that atmospheric concentrations of CO2 have been increasing throughout this entire period.
How do environmentalists account for the two decades of decreasing global temperatures?
If sometimes CO2 goes up and global temperatures go up, while other times CO2 goes up and global teperatures go down and we have no explanation for this, isn't the only reasonable conclusion that we don't understand global temperature well enough to draw conclusions about the factors that drive global climate change?
I wouldn't accept any other scientific theory that suspended operation for two decades unless there were some clear explanation for this aberation. Why do we accept global warming?
And IBM's defense has significantly increased the confidence of the business community in using open source software. Imagine the impact that IBM settling with SCO would have on their multi-billion dollar Linux bet.
They would have gladly spent $100M for this kind of result.
This occurs intentionally. The US wants to provide an opportunity for our armed forces to learn how to cope with a situation in which they are overmatched. Our allies want to say that they can kick American butt. The exercises are designed so that everybody wins.
There are only about 30 seats with even a remote chance of changing hands. Realistically, there are about 15 competitive races, and five of these were created by the retaliatory Republican gerrymandering of Texas.
Thanks to a combination of Gerrymandering, Entrenched incumbents, and the McCain-Feingold legislation (which prevents parties from using soft money to neutralize the advantage of entrenched incumbents) congressional races are entirely uncompetitive. Charlie Cook today says that there is virtually no chance of the house changing hands.
So who cares where the candidates stand on the issues when only a very few people actually have the oppotunity to cast a meaningful vote.
If you've ever watched his show on PBS, its clear that believes so. If his show is journalism, then I can comfortably say that there IS no difference between Journalism and the previling brand of politics here in Cambridge, MA.
> Would it really be fair to the Iraqis to postpone
> the January elections?
There is no chance that the US or anyone else is going to tell the Iraqis not to hold elections. Allawi knows that his continued power is absolutely dependent on his ability to hold elections on time.
He also knows that most Iraqis live in areas where the security situation permits voting. If a security disaster ensues and precincts containing 20% of population have to be repolled due to security incidents, then 80% of the Iraqi people will have had the chance to choose their own government and Allawi can rightly claim an historic achievement.
I also disagree with the posts that claim the polling data is out of touch with the Iraqi people. The same polls that show that Iraqis overwhelmingly want to choose their own government also show that over 80% do not believe that Americans will allow the Iraqis to choose their own government. Their views are entirely self consistent, they just don't take our goernment at its word. By enabling the Iraqis to choose their own leaders, the United States will go a tremendous distance towards easing their fears.
Instead of controlling 9 electoral votes each election, candidates would only be competing over 1 or 2 electoral votes in each election. Republicans would be guaranteed to get 4, and democrats would be guaranteed to get 3 or 4. The result would be that nobody would campaign there.
The courts have substantial experience in this issue.
Although standards still vary from circuit to circuit, virtually all US jurisdictions agree on this:
To the extent that similarities in code are necessary to ensure compatibility, they are NOT copyrightable.
We needn't fear SCO's rhetoric. If they wanted to TRY to protect something like ELF, they AT LEAST needed a patent. We can place a little confidence in the US legal system, at least in reguard to its ultimate determination of what is or is not copyrightable.