You forget that Democrats control congress. The Democrats haven't exactly been instituting change.
Congress will usually defer to the president, even if the president is a moron. That's the way our political system is designed to work.
Re:Hundreds of millions spent and...?
on
Water Ice On Mars
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· Score: 1
We send this probe up there with all this fancy testing equipment, only to land in the friggin' stuff we're trying to find. It's actually pretty funny...
We didn't land on Mars to find ice, we landed on Mars to examine the ice that we already knew was there.
ice on Mars is nothing new
on
Water Ice On Mars
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Finding water was one of the key goals of the Phoenix mission.
That is a bizarre statement. Large quantities of ice have been observed in numerous ways already. Even the Viking lander observed water frost directly in the 1970's:
Not only is that ice, it may actually be an outflow.
What makes the results from Phoenix exciting is that the actual experiments that Phoenix is supposed to perform depend on having landed on ice. But finding ice somewhere on Mars is not a surprise.
I don't want to be unified with supporters of McCain.
I think anybody who votes Republican after the past eight years is morally bankrupt, lacks patriotism, and lacks a commitment to basic American values.
And the tide of public opinion is rapidly changing against you - in particular after the recent Lebanon incursion ( which you were crushed in )
I'm neither Jewish nor Israeli. I don't particularly like Israeli policies or Israel.
I'm an Australian atheist and socialist.
Then you have some gall, sitting comfortably on the other side of the globe telling people how to run the Middle East or Europe. I hope you are aware that in many Islamic nations, you'd be subject to the death penalty merely for stating that.
Here's some news for: I AM A PART OF THE WEST.
I'm sorry, I mistook you for someone with an actual cause, rather than a spoiled Australian kid with no idea of history.
What's that?
Perhaps you should read up on your European history.
That's the way massive injustices are begun.
Oh, get over it. The people of the Middle East have been screwing each other over for several millennia, and when they had power, they screwed over whoever else they could. They had an empire and pissed everybody off before pissing it away. Iraq was a regime that murdered its own citizens and its neighbors. For the US to invade it was stupid, but I don't see any "injustice".
The UN is a tool of the big imperial powers.
Good. I like empires. The Romans transformed Europe into a civilization, Europeans transformed America into a civilization, Americans reconstructed Europe, and I hope the West can do the same to the Middle East; it's about time.
I can't just declare my selected land-mass a country and expect people to recognize it,
No, you can't expect that. But Israel has been recognized. Therefore, it is a country.
Of course the UN and its constituent Western imperialist powers decided
That's the way decisions get made in the world, so get used to it.
It's ironic for a Muslim to complain about "imperialist powers", given the history of the religion. Islam didn't take over the Middle East by gentle persuasion, it conquered, subjugated, oppressed, and killed. The Caliphate and its constituent Muslim imperialist powers were considerably more heavy-handed and vicious than the UN, and considerably less tolerant of other beliefs. The UN isn't perfect, but it is certainly better than the kind of rule and oppression Muslims visited on others for centuries.
And as for the rabid frothing-at-the-mouth 'pro-Israeli' fools who make absolutely sure that the world knows of the plight of the poor, innocent, fun-loving Zionists, they can go fuck themselves.
They aren't going to fuck themselves, they are going to fuck you until either (1) you manage to defeat them militarily (not bloody likely), or (2) you find an arrangement you can live with. The West isn't going to let you have exactly what you want, so you'll just have to get used to that. And the West certainly isn't going to let Muslims unite because we remember well what happened last time that happened.
I don't see any risk here that's particular to open source. Analogous issues have come up with proprietary vendors, including Microsoft. And often, there is no way to win, because no matter what you do, someone will be upset.
As for Israel, personally, I think it is a country and it has a right to exist and I'm glad that the US supports Israel.
But it is simply a fact that hundreds of millions of people do not share this view. Odd as that view may seem to you or me, it doesn't seem odd to them. And some of those people are open source developers as well.
Self-important posturing or attempts at trying to control their minds through controlling language isn't going to work. What does work is dialog and compromise. For example, I think Israel should be on the list, as should be "Palestine (occupied territory)". There is also no requirement that these lists be mutually exclusive, so if there are different views of how the world should be divided up, put all of them on there.
And if you don't like a software product or don't like to support the author because you disagree with his politics or ethics, then simply don't.
why? Apache Harmony with enough support from IBM and ORACLE could be one.
Apache Harmony is not a commercially licensable version of Java, it isn't a version of Java at all because Sun doesn't let it be tested.
Someone could buy SUN assets. And they have invested enough in Java to be interested.
Or maybe they are interested in killing it, if it's Microsoft.
And lack of commercial licenses hasn't stopped Redhat or Ubuntu of offering GPL'd Linux, isn't it?
If it didn't matter for Java, Sun wouldn't be offering commercial Java licensing, and there wouldn't be any licensees.
You can make excuse after excuse, but the fact remain: no matter how swell you think the current situation with Java is, Java is not an open standard, not even by Sun's own definition. In fact, the openness of the Java platform is little different from Microsoft Windows or.NET
As it is, neither IBM nor BEA (now Oracle unfortunately) simply slapped a logo on Sun's JDK and shipped it with their own products.
Quite right: after IBM was forced to license Java from Sun, they had to spend several years cleaning up the code. That only means that Sun Java, in addition to being proprietary, also requires a good deal of cleanup.
First of all, Xerox had a working demo and many ideas.
The Xerox Star shipped as a commercial product in 1981, together with a full GUI, WYSIWYG word processing, and Ethernet networking.
They did not have access to the APIs or code that Xerox had.
Apple got the Smalltalk-80 system, plus full documentation. In addition, Apple hired away several key developers from Xerox (as did Microsoft).
Microsoft developed Windows based on these APIs. Slight difference.
No, not really. Almost everything we take for granted in modern GUIs was developed at Xerox; both Apple and Microsoft copied liberally and pilfered Xerox's employees. Neither Apple nor Microsoft have contributed much themselves.
It has everything to do with skill. It just not necessarily the skill you have, so it might look like magic to you instead.
Do you think the Google cook that retired as with many millions of dollars was a better cook than others? No, he was simply at the right place at the right time, and he didn't screw up too badly.
It's the same with companies like Facebook. It's not like its founders brilliantly planned to start this precise company at the right time, it's that among the many companies that were founded, for this company, timing, application, and management happened to come together at the right time, and the guy didn't screw up too badly.
How does having an "independent" (whatever that means)
It would mean that someone else has managed to implement the specifications without using code from Sun. If there are no independent implementations a decade after a specification has been written and made public, it doesn't makes sense to call the platform an "open standard".
implementation make a platform "right" (or rather, lack of one make it "wrong").
It means that the way things are, Sun Java is really not much different from Microsoft Windows: a platform with a single implementation that's driven by one group of developers controlled by a single big company.
and one that alternate implementations can use to have a reasonable confidence their version of Java actually works.
But there are no "alternate implementations" that have passed the test kit, and Sun has been putting up one roadblock after another for alternate implementations to even get tested or use this software to demonstrate compatibility.
Sun doesn't want alternate implementations, and the sun test kit is a sham.
BTW, how many independent Perl implementations are there?
None. There are also no "Perl compatibility kits". Perl is licensed under the AL, so if Larry Wall falls off a cliff, commercial users can continue to use it. Perl doesn't pretend to be something it is not.
Exactly. So, if Wine and Microsoft's copious documentation don't make Windows an "open standard", why should Sun be able to claim that Java is an open standard?
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You forget that Democrats control congress. The Democrats haven't exactly been instituting change.
Congress will usually defer to the president, even if the president is a moron. That's the way our political system is designed to work.
We send this probe up there with all this fancy testing equipment, only to land in the friggin' stuff we're trying to find. It's actually pretty funny...
We didn't land on Mars to find ice, we landed on Mars to examine the ice that we already knew was there.
Finding water was one of the key goals of the Phoenix mission.
That is a bizarre statement. Large quantities of ice have been observed in numerous ways already. Even the Viking lander observed water frost directly in the 1970's:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viking_2
http://www.solarviews.com/cap/mars/frost.htm
That frost sublimated just like this ice did.
Here are other observations:
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2002/28may_marsice.htm
Here you can see a frozen crater lake:
http://esamultimedia.esa.int/images/marsexpress/210-010705-1343-6-co-01-CraterIce_H.jpg
http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Mars_Express/SEMGKA808BE_0.html
Not only is that ice, it may actually be an outflow.
What makes the results from Phoenix exciting is that the actual experiments that Phoenix is supposed to perform depend on having landed on ice. But finding ice somewhere on Mars is not a surprise.
Oh, but they do when your choice is limited.
Obama may not be anybody's ideal candidate, but he would be far better for the country than McCain.
And after the Republican sleaze campaigns of the past, I simply don't give a damn how Obama wins (as long as it's legal).
I don't want to be unified with supporters of McCain.
I think anybody who votes Republican after the past eight years is morally bankrupt, lacks patriotism, and lacks a commitment to basic American values.
I think it's a bad idea to call this a "GoogleBomb". Bombs blow up people. Bombs have no place in politics.
This, however, is valid political discourse: people decide what information is important and relevant, and they link to it.
I hope both sides will continue to do this, for both positive and negative stories.
And the tide of public opinion is rapidly changing against you - in particular after the recent Lebanon incursion ( which you were crushed in )
I'm neither Jewish nor Israeli. I don't particularly like Israeli policies or Israel.
I'm an Australian atheist and socialist.
Then you have some gall, sitting comfortably on the other side of the globe telling people how to run the Middle East or Europe. I hope you are aware that in many Islamic nations, you'd be subject to the death penalty merely for stating that.
Here's some news for: I AM A PART OF THE WEST.
I'm sorry, I mistook you for someone with an actual cause, rather than a spoiled Australian kid with no idea of history.
What's that?
Perhaps you should read up on your European history.
That's the way massive injustices are begun.
Oh, get over it. The people of the Middle East have been screwing each other over for several millennia, and when they had power, they screwed over whoever else they could. They had an empire and pissed everybody off before pissing it away. Iraq was a regime that murdered its own citizens and its neighbors. For the US to invade it was stupid, but I don't see any "injustice".
The UN is a tool of the big imperial powers.
Good. I like empires. The Romans transformed Europe into a civilization, Europeans transformed America into a civilization, Americans reconstructed Europe, and I hope the West can do the same to the Middle East; it's about time.
If SUN doesn't test it there will be some fragmentation,
No, if Sun doesn't test it, then it's not Java.
A clean room Java version from IBM will be readily accepted as long as it shows compatibility with major applications.
Yes, people are finding workarounds for the fact that Java isn't an open standard, and that's good. But Java still isn't an open standard.
AFAIK you can sell licenses as you please for your own Java version, as long as you don't call it Java. That is why IcedTea.
The legal situation is unclear because Sun holds many patents on Java.
In any case, such heroic efforts don't make Java an "open platform" any more than the existence of Wine makes Windows an "open platform".
I can't just declare my selected land-mass a country and expect people to recognize it,
No, you can't expect that. But Israel has been recognized. Therefore, it is a country.
Of course the UN and its constituent Western imperialist powers decided
That's the way decisions get made in the world, so get used to it.
It's ironic for a Muslim to complain about "imperialist powers", given the history of the religion. Islam didn't take over the Middle East by gentle persuasion, it conquered, subjugated, oppressed, and killed. The Caliphate and its constituent Muslim imperialist powers were considerably more heavy-handed and vicious than the UN, and considerably less tolerant of other beliefs. The UN isn't perfect, but it is certainly better than the kind of rule and oppression Muslims visited on others for centuries.
And as for the rabid frothing-at-the-mouth 'pro-Israeli' fools who make absolutely sure that the world knows of the plight of the poor, innocent, fun-loving Zionists, they can go fuck themselves.
They aren't going to fuck themselves, they are going to fuck you until either (1) you manage to defeat them militarily (not bloody likely), or (2) you find an arrangement you can live with. The West isn't going to let you have exactly what you want, so you'll just have to get used to that. And the West certainly isn't going to let Muslims unite because we remember well what happened last time that happened.
I don't see any risk here that's particular to open source. Analogous issues have come up with proprietary vendors, including Microsoft. And often, there is no way to win, because no matter what you do, someone will be upset.
As for Israel, personally, I think it is a country and it has a right to exist and I'm glad that the US supports Israel.
But it is simply a fact that hundreds of millions of people do not share this view. Odd as that view may seem to you or me, it doesn't seem odd to them. And some of those people are open source developers as well.
Self-important posturing or attempts at trying to control their minds through controlling language isn't going to work. What does work is dialog and compromise. For example, I think Israel should be on the list, as should be "Palestine (occupied territory)". There is also no requirement that these lists be mutually exclusive, so if there are different views of how the world should be divided up, put all of them on there.
And if you don't like a software product or don't like to support the author because you disagree with his politics or ethics, then simply don't.
why? Apache Harmony with enough support from IBM and ORACLE could be one.
Apache Harmony is not a commercially licensable version of Java, it isn't a version of Java at all because Sun doesn't let it be tested.
Someone could buy SUN assets. And they have invested enough in Java to be interested.
Or maybe they are interested in killing it, if it's Microsoft.
And lack of commercial licenses hasn't stopped Redhat or Ubuntu of offering GPL'd Linux, isn't it?
If it didn't matter for Java, Sun wouldn't be offering commercial Java licensing, and there wouldn't be any licensees.
You can make excuse after excuse, but the fact remain: no matter how swell you think the current situation with Java is, Java is not an open standard, not even by Sun's own definition. In fact, the openness of the Java platform is little different from Microsoft Windows or .NET
As it is, neither IBM nor BEA (now Oracle unfortunately) simply slapped a logo on Sun's JDK and shipped it with their own products.
Quite right: after IBM was forced to license Java from Sun, they had to spend several years cleaning up the code. That only means that Sun Java, in addition to being proprietary, also requires a good deal of cleanup.
Nothing in the definition of "open standard" says that "someone else" has to implement it.
Sun's own definition says so:
http://www.sun.com/software/standards/definition.xml
1. Sun has a free (open source?) set of complete tests you can run to check compatibility between your implementation of the 1.6 JDK.
They most certainly do not. There was a big stink about that fact with the Apache developers.
2. BEA and IBM have successfully written their own implementations of the JDK 1.6 that do pass said tests.
No, they have not. Both of them are licensed derivatives of Sun's code.
OpenJdk is GPL'ed. So what happens if Sun falls off a cliff?
Then there will be no commercially licensable version of Java at all anymore. And that's a problem.
First of all, Xerox had a working demo and many ideas.
The Xerox Star shipped as a commercial product in 1981, together with a full GUI, WYSIWYG word processing, and Ethernet networking.
They did not have access to the APIs or code that Xerox had.
Apple got the Smalltalk-80 system, plus full documentation. In addition, Apple hired away several key developers from Xerox (as did Microsoft).
Microsoft developed Windows based on these APIs. Slight difference.
No, not really. Almost everything we take for granted in modern GUIs was developed at Xerox; both Apple and Microsoft copied liberally and pilfered Xerox's employees. Neither Apple nor Microsoft have contributed much themselves.
As Bill Gates was saying in so many words: the secret to Microsoft's success is lying.
Trust me, as an introvert, texting is god-sent: you don't actually have to talk to anybody :-)
It has everything to do with skill. It just not necessarily the skill you have, so it might look like magic to you instead.
Do you think the Google cook that retired as with many millions of dollars was a better cook than others? No, he was simply at the right place at the right time, and he didn't screw up too badly.
It's the same with companies like Facebook. It's not like its founders brilliantly planned to start this precise company at the right time, it's that among the many companies that were founded, for this company, timing, application, and management happened to come together at the right time, and the guy didn't screw up too badly.
How does having an "independent" (whatever that means)
It would mean that someone else has managed to implement the specifications without using code from Sun. If there are no independent implementations a decade after a specification has been written and made public, it doesn't makes sense to call the platform an "open standard".
implementation make a platform "right" (or rather, lack of one make it "wrong").
It means that the way things are, Sun Java is really not much different from Microsoft Windows: a platform with a single implementation that's driven by one group of developers controlled by a single big company.
Sure, it's a good unit test kit.
and one that alternate implementations can use to have a reasonable confidence their version of Java actually works.
But there are no "alternate implementations" that have passed the test kit, and Sun has been putting up one roadblock after another for alternate implementations to even get tested or use this software to demonstrate compatibility.
Sun doesn't want alternate implementations, and the sun test kit is a sham.
The Viking lander already observed frost:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viking_2
Furthermore, experiments with simulated soil and athmosphere suggest that that frost actually turns liquid when it melts.
BTW, how many independent Perl implementations are there?
None. There are also no "Perl compatibility kits". Perl is licensed under the AL, so if Larry Wall falls off a cliff, commercial users can continue to use it. Perl doesn't pretend to be something it is not.
So, what does your question have to do with Java?
Exactly. So, if Wine and Microsoft's copious documentation don't make Windows an "open standard", why should Sun be able to claim that Java is an open standard?
There has been multiple compliant java-implementations for years now.
RTFP. Those are not independent Java implementations, they are licensed derivatives.
Your argument is like saying that Microsoft Windows is an open standard because both HP and Dell ship it.