So long as AC is working on the kernel, all his work is GPL'ed... So whatever he does benefits everyone else too. And if it seemed he were distracted by other interests (his or his managers, if he even has any there...) then Linus would probably hand off AC's responsibilities to someone else....
Has anyone mirrored the FTP site yet? I'm downloading at 4.2 k/second.... and this is at work where i'm more used to 150+ k/second at this time of day.... I'm very eager to check out the database format, but it seems i need to first download at 50 meg file...
Based on everyones assumptions around here, this would peg the NSA as having that capability since 1990 or so (just to pick a round number)... And it only came to light this year.
VMWare's a small company with one real product (maybe there are others? if so, they're really inconsequential). They had the foresight to think that there would be a market for their product. People found a use for their product. They charge a nominal fee for the use of their product. And their reward? An opensource variant.
I'm sure the CEO, CFO, as well as all the employees who toiled away there are so excited by this.
---
If IBM, Oracle, and Sun produce superior products, people will pay for them regardless of what Micros~1 does, so they will continue to make money.
The world has already proved that it's not the superior technology that wins, just the cheapest. Witness IDE over SCSI, Win9x over MacOS, WinNT over Unix workstations, Pentium vs. RISC, the list goes on and on.
It would be crippling to so many companies if Microsoft managed to release an opensource variation of their bread and butter product with even 60% of it's functionality. They (Microsoft) aren't making money from those sales anyways, so if they can prevent others from doing so ("cutting off their air supply") while at the same time adding a new buzzword to their growing repotoire (sp?): an innovative open-source product which embraces developer mindshare...
I completely share your sentiments... As much as the idea of open source seems to be a good one, more often than not it seems more and more open source projects are springing up that simply mimic already created but "proprietary" programs.
With everyone getting down on MSFT for not innovating enough, where's the innovation in completely recreating someone else's product?
Perhaps MSFT themselves could take a play from this book and start releasing opensource versions of all of their competitors top products. It wouldn't help them in terms of gaining income from those markets, but at least it would deprive IBM, Oracle, Sun and others of much needed revenues... And they could say with a clear conscience that they've done nothing wrong, since that's just how the open-source community operates.
What really needs to happen is for a trusted oversight committee to be formed. The NSA should not and will not release anything that has any pertinence to National Security to the general public. Why? Because then it's in the open for the "enemy" as well. If the NSA's email were available for everyone to peruse as Microsofts was for their trial, that'd really spell the end of their effectiveness. Because of their secrecy, we, and everyone else not directly affiliated with them, can only speculate as to the extent of their capabilities. If their abilities were to be common knowledge, then it'd be much easier to devise ways of sidestepping them.
So, what would really need to happen is for a 3rd party committee of 100% trusted individuals should audit their work in order to accertain if they are or are not overstepping their bounds. If it's found that they are indeed breaking the law in some aspect of their operation, that can be brought to light. But until they're actually found guilty of wrongdoing, it just isn't safe to open up their innards for all to see...
It reads more like a looming threat to the recording industry... Try to make it so we can't copy your goods and we'll be sure to make it possible.
From my vantage point, I think that the huge majority of CD-Rs which contain CD-Audio are pirated CD's, not mix CDs or archival CD's... Some of those probably would have been paid for had CD-R's not been so easily accessible.
DVD Audio has the potential to add value to audio, with better sound quality, possibly more music per disk, and other gimmicks. For that, the industry should be allowed to protect their investment. That being all the money they've shoveled out and fronted to artists, studio's, etc, without knowing how well a particular act is going to sell.
It's their risk, so it should be their profit. Since DVD exists already, they don't need to go and invent a new form of media in order to add value to the music. But that opens up them up to piracy. So... like any busines, they're trying to cover their butts. If they come out with a format that's "unbreakable" to consumers, but easily crackable by/.er's, it's a win for them. They can lose these sales no problem if it means that the other 99% of the public can't dupe their works...
----------
On a second subject, maybe you all could do something about this by not supporting the industry. Ever thought of that? Don't like it? Don't buy it!!! It's just that easy.
Go a step further and think for yourself and don't even buy music from the major labels, rather than listen to whatever they shovel your way this week...
Do SOMETHING more to show your disatisfaction than ramble about how some mean old industry doesn't want anyone to copy their products....
On Tuesdays "Oddly enough" news on Excite, it was reported a company somewhere in Asia tried to patent curry, the spice. Excite seems to be down right now (? is it my firewall or something? I can get to every other site i visit except Excite today). But when it comes back, go to the Oddly enough, click one of the features, and it'll probably be in the right hand column as older news...
So it's not just Americans that have a monopoly on stupid patents, if that's any reassurance
I'd figure a scratch is a scratch. You scratch it, you lose it. Do you really want to syphon through 140 GB of files in order to determine which files resided on the scratched layer?
Does it matter what layer the data's on? If it makes things seem different, just think of it as all being on one layer, that if you scratch, you lose.:)
The solution is really simple. Keep redundant backups. Don't trust the only archive of data to a single piece of media, just as you shouldn't leave all your eggs in a single basket.
This story already ran on the Register yesterday. And, in case you didn't go read either of the sources, here's a link to the company and product in question.
It's funny how everyone downplays what they think Altavista will do, considering the success of Redhat. The points against Redhat go along the lines of:
They're only gaining popularity because of the trial against MSFT.
They're worth as much as they're worth because one day they may make a bundle of money.
They have no proprietary advantage over their competitors, in fact they have a huge potential for competition, since their product is free...
They've fared very well, thus far.
As far as Altavista goes, if they were a new search engine, then yeah, it'd be a waste of dollars. But they're not a new company. They're a well established search engine. They've got a HUGE audience. Yes, click-throughs are dropping, but they've expanded their services to include shopping, etc... so there's a clear money making scheme at work.
If Amazon and Redhat can see their market caps hit 15 billion based on the expectationt hat one day (not today) their earnings will make their share prices worthwhile, then surely Altavista can be afforded the same luxury.
And lets not forget, Altavista's being run by CMGI - a 17 billion dollar company. This will be a killer IPO, IMHO.
...and just like Redhat (i haven't tried others) does by default.
I don't think that these result mean very much myself, because they're bound to be counting the sites hosted by hosting companies, which of course are going to be using Apache. Not because of any other factor but it and Linux are free (as in beer:). And a lot of people signing up with them don't know or care to ask what server/OS they're using. Not that it matter. They just want a webpage and a domain name.
A more meaningful (in my eyes) count would be what companies run that manage their own website (only one site per distict company - the one that gets the most average hits per day). Those are results I'd like to see.
Wrong. Go here. See in the type near the bottom. It says "The host you examine will be included in future surveys".
If you click the "add your site" link, it just brings you to the generic query page, which seems to me to mean that the way a site gets checked or scheduled to be checked is by actually querrying it. That, to me, seems like it'd be incredibly easy to tilt the results one way or the other.
Not that I'm trying to defend anyone. But to say NetCraft is unbiased, to me, seems false. The sites that get queried are the ones that users ask to have queried.
I'd have to agree with the original guy here. In some fields where precedent is being set, like PERL and X Window, open-source shows great innovation. But in area's where it's not, features seems to be looked at an added only when there's a glaring weakness. Like Linux and SMP, etc...
I don't think that any project will prosper without a form of competition. It doesn't have to be financial, but just another group of people doing something that produces the same result but by a different means. That way each group could look at each others work and pick out the best.
Maybe someone or ones should begin a new HTTP server project with a completely new source tree. Take nothing from Apache, but just build the "best" server they can.
the supplied article on NTSecurity seems to be complete heresay. Like NTsecurity heard from ZDTV which heard from IETF. If it were straighter from the horses mouth it could be the basis for an intellegent conversation. But too many details are excluded to be able to formulate an opinion on what's occuring.
For instance, is he being investigated because of his suggestion for the inclusion of encryption in PPP, or have other things occured? That detail seems to be skimmed over and then forgotten. Like: "he advocated encryption and then he got investigated for treason..."
Did he, through his advocay, publish PGP or other software on his website for download to non-US citizens? If yes, then, well, as stupid as everyone thinks it is, he would have broken the law. Note, that that's pure speculation. But I honestly don't our government would waste the resources to investigate someone for treason because of a suggestion! Let's be a little more realistic, please. There have to be other factors at work...
And if there are, we need to know what they are before we go "oh, evil FBI cracks down on innocent ciziten joe...". It's too easy to jump to a conclusion - one way or the other - without presentation of all the facts.
If my very slight hypothesis is correct, and there were other factors at work aside from his suggestion, then i'll go on to say that if you don't like a law, you can't just go break it and say it's okay because it's a dumb law. You need to get it changed. Vote. Voice yourself. But don't try to be a martyr unless you're sure it will work right.
I don't know about PERL's license, but Linux is certainly not free. Yeah, it's free as in beer, but as in speech, because you can't restrict it in anyway, it's not exactly free... Free would be if you could do whatever you wanted to do with it and decide for yourself if you wanted your changes redistributed with the whole or not. But aside from that....
Yeah, there's lots of cool shareware and freeware out there for Windows, Macs and everything else... But with the advent of the internet, there's become a way that people can use freeware as a marketing ploy... and we get all shocked when they do.
For instance, RealJukebox. Sounded like an awesome piece of software. With it's on the fly MP3-ripping, CD playing, etc... there's no guarentee that Real would see anything in return for it, except maybe a bunch of good karma and brownie points. Unfortunately, they messed up and didn't tell anyone what they were doing.
Same as with this cursor thing... If only they'ed said...
What's really funny though, is how people defend Id for only taking their video hardware without their knowledge, as if that's okay, but these other two privacy violations are not...
They.... You mean the people who expect something for nothing by putting links to their software on their website?
They, the people that go "hmmm, let me run that useless software just for the hell of it".
Or they, that allow users to use the software they developed for free, and just happened to forget to mention thewy wanted something in return?
Too me, it would seem fairly obvious that somethings amiss about their offering. So little in the world is free. On the internet, almost all the free stuff comes at the cost of personal information. It doesn't excuse them for not attempting to tell users about the tracking functions. But why wasn't anyone asking?
Since it's alpha, people shouldn't be suggesting that what it really needs is "marketing something-or-other". It needs development. That's the point I was trying to make.
Everyone loves to hate Corel, forgetting that they've delivered the best Word Processor available for Linux (GUIed, i mean).
I don't even think that Corel is buyable at this point, unless they WANT to be aquired. They do have a poison pill, which prevented Adobe from seriously considering purchasing them a few years back.
And lastly, Red Hat buying Sun???? Hello? We're on Planet EARTH... Redhat's not buying Sun, today tomorrow or 5 years from now. I'd hate to see that occur, and i can't imagine how anyone could think that would be beneficial to anybody, anywhere. I won't rant, though:)
There's no point in marketing a product that isn't marketable (yet).
How about getting Mozilla to work without the constant lockups? There seem to be a lot of "features" that completely crash it at this point.
Just as Windows is claimed to have lowered peoples expectations for stability in their OS's, Mozilla could suceed at lowering expectations in terms of software reliablity if it were heavily pushed on the public right now.
The browser isn't Linux's most glaring weakness on the desktop at the moment. Try MS Office. Star Office doesn't stack up to it. How about a quick and dirty database, such as Access or Filemaker Pro? For SOHO and home users, where's Quicken and Quickbooks?
Until there's many more web apps than are available currently, as well as more fully featured apps, the browser is no where near 1st as far as getting Linux accepted on the desktop.
Re:humans as patent infringments?!
on
New Patent Treaty
·
· Score: 2
As was pointed out above, the site seemed slashdotted, or just really slow and i lost patience. Either way, I couldn't read the text.
Continuing, what would be so terribly wrong about letting companies and/or individuals patent their MODIFICATIONS to DNA structures. That way, the naturally occuring version would always be "free", and the modified version would always "cost" in a sense.
I'll go on the record as saying I'm all for patents and other IP protections, but I do think that the current system is (a tad bit:) antiquated and out of touch with today's realitys. But in the end, whoever funds the research into a project definetly should be first in line to reap the monetary rewards.
Not being a Geography-buff, I don't know the countries... But there's that 7 mile gap between Russia and Alaska... Something "straights". So long as they secured that corridor, they'ed have a very efficient way of moving troops to this side of the Pacific.
Of course, they'ed have to go through Canada prior to getting at us...;)
Well then, hey, why don't we put Bill Gates on the list of greatest hackers?:)
I mean, he hasn't ever invented anything, just integrated and re-sold other peoples work. That in my mind, is not a hacker, sorry... Bill Gates is a great businessman (his ethics may be a little or a lot off, but he's got the worlds most valuable company).
I would probably put Linus more in that category than in the "hacker" category. If in 5 or 10 years, all of the predictions he's made and every other Linux advocate has made come true, then wow! he did something amazing. But I think we're way too much in the early stages of this phenomenon to gauge it's long term-effects.
Slashdot Mirror
So long as AC is working on the kernel, all his work is GPL'ed... So whatever he does benefits everyone else too. And if it seemed he were distracted by other interests (his or his managers, if he even has any there...) then Linus would probably hand off AC's responsibilities to someone else....
Has anyone mirrored the FTP site yet? I'm downloading at 4.2 k/second.... and this is at work where i'm more used to 150+ k/second at this time of day.... I'm very eager to check out the database format, but it seems i need to first download at 50 meg file...
Based on everyones assumptions around here, this would peg the NSA as having that capability since 1990 or so (just to pick a round number)... And it only came to light this year.
oh, and first post too... maybe
VMWare's a small company with one real product (maybe there are others? if so, they're really inconsequential). They had the foresight to think that there would be a market for their product. People found a use for their product. They charge a nominal fee for the use of their product. And their reward? An opensource variant.
I'm sure the CEO, CFO, as well as all the employees who toiled away there are so excited by this.
---
If IBM, Oracle, and Sun produce superior products, people will pay for them regardless of what Micros~1 does, so they will continue to make money.
The world has already proved that it's not the superior technology that wins, just the cheapest. Witness IDE over SCSI, Win9x over MacOS, WinNT over Unix workstations, Pentium vs. RISC, the list goes on and on.
It would be crippling to so many companies if Microsoft managed to release an opensource variation of their bread and butter product with even 60% of it's functionality. They (Microsoft) aren't making money from those sales anyways, so if they can prevent others from doing so ("cutting off their air supply") while at the same time adding a new buzzword to their growing repotoire (sp?): an innovative open-source product which embraces developer mindshare...
I completely share your sentiments... As much as the idea of open source seems to be a good one, more often than not it seems more and more open source projects are springing up that simply mimic already created but "proprietary" programs.
With everyone getting down on MSFT for not innovating enough, where's the innovation in completely recreating someone else's product?
Perhaps MSFT themselves could take a play from this book and start releasing opensource versions of all of their competitors top products. It wouldn't help them in terms of gaining income from those markets, but at least it would deprive IBM, Oracle, Sun and others of much needed revenues... And they could say with a clear conscience that they've done nothing wrong, since that's just how the open-source community operates.
What really needs to happen is for a trusted oversight committee to be formed. The NSA should not and will not release anything that has any pertinence to National Security to the general public. Why? Because then it's in the open for the "enemy" as well. If the NSA's email were available for everyone to peruse as Microsofts was for their trial, that'd really spell the end of their effectiveness. Because of their secrecy, we, and everyone else not directly affiliated with them, can only speculate as to the extent of their capabilities. If their abilities were to be common knowledge, then it'd be much easier to devise ways of sidestepping them.
So, what would really need to happen is for a 3rd party committee of 100% trusted individuals should audit their work in order to accertain if they are or are not overstepping their bounds. If it's found that they are indeed breaking the law in some aspect of their operation, that can be brought to light. But until they're actually found guilty of wrongdoing, it just isn't safe to open up their innards for all to see...
With Celeron and then later, Itanium...
What the hell is itanium? almost itanium??? It just does not convey any meaning in the world to me...
It reads more like a looming threat to the recording industry... Try to make it so we can't copy your goods and we'll be sure to make it possible.
/.er's, it's a win for them. They can lose these sales no problem if it means that the other 99% of the public can't dupe their works...
From my vantage point, I think that the huge majority of CD-Rs which contain CD-Audio are pirated CD's, not mix CDs or archival CD's... Some of those probably would have been paid for had CD-R's not been so easily accessible.
DVD Audio has the potential to add value to audio, with better sound quality, possibly more music per disk, and other gimmicks. For that, the industry should be allowed to protect their investment. That being all the money they've shoveled out and fronted to artists, studio's, etc, without knowing how well a particular act is going to sell.
It's their risk, so it should be their profit. Since DVD exists already, they don't need to go and invent a new form of media in order to add value to the music. But that opens up them up to piracy. So... like any busines, they're trying to cover their butts. If they come out with a format that's "unbreakable" to consumers, but easily crackable by
----------
On a second subject, maybe you all could do something about this by not supporting the industry. Ever thought of that? Don't like it? Don't buy it!!! It's just that easy.
Go a step further and think for yourself and don't even buy music from the major labels, rather than listen to whatever they shovel your way this week...
Do SOMETHING more to show your disatisfaction than ramble about how some mean old industry doesn't want anyone to copy their products....
Too bad i threw out my bookmark, but here goes:
On Tuesdays "Oddly enough" news on Excite, it was reported a company somewhere in Asia tried to patent curry, the spice. Excite seems to be down right now (? is it my firewall or something? I can get to every other site i visit except Excite today). But when it comes back, go to the Oddly enough, click one of the features, and it'll probably be in the right hand column as older news...
So it's not just Americans that have a monopoly on stupid patents, if that's any reassurance
I'd figure a scratch is a scratch. You scratch it, you lose it. Do you really want to syphon through 140 GB of files in order to determine which files resided on the scratched layer?
:)
Does it matter what layer the data's on? If it makes things seem different, just think of it as all being on one layer, that if you scratch, you lose.
The solution is really simple. Keep redundant backups. Don't trust the only archive of data to a single piece of media, just as you shouldn't leave all your eggs in a single basket.
This story already ran on the Register yesterday. And, in case you didn't go read either of the sources, here's a link to the company and product in question.
LINK
It's the first one down - FMD ROM (Read Only Memory) Disk... Pretty cool how it's clear, huh?
It's funny how everyone downplays what they think Altavista will do, considering the success of Redhat. The points against Redhat go along the lines of:
They're only gaining popularity because of the trial against MSFT.
They're worth as much as they're worth because one day they may make a bundle of money.
They have no proprietary advantage over their competitors, in fact they have a huge potential for competition, since their product is free...
They've fared very well, thus far.
As far as Altavista goes, if they were a new search engine, then yeah, it'd be a waste of dollars. But they're not a new company. They're a well established search engine. They've got a HUGE audience. Yes, click-throughs are dropping, but they've expanded their services to include shopping, etc... so there's a clear money making scheme at work.
If Amazon and Redhat can see their market caps hit 15 billion based on the expectationt hat one day (not today) their earnings will make their share prices worthwhile, then surely Altavista can be afforded the same luxury.
And lets not forget, Altavista's being run by CMGI - a 17 billion dollar company. This will be a killer IPO, IMHO.
...and just like Redhat (i haven't tried others) does by default.
:). And a lot of people signing up with them don't know or care to ask what server/OS they're using. Not that it matter. They just want a webpage and a domain name.
I don't think that these result mean very much myself, because they're bound to be counting the sites hosted by hosting companies, which of course are going to be using Apache. Not because of any other factor but it and Linux are free (as in beer
A more meaningful (in my eyes) count would be what companies run that manage their own website (only one site per distict company - the one that gets the most average hits per day). Those are results I'd like to see.
Wrong. Go here. See in the type near the bottom. It says "The host you examine will be included in future surveys".
If you click the "add your site" link, it just brings you to the generic query page, which seems to me to mean that the way a site gets checked or scheduled to be checked is by actually querrying it. That, to me, seems like it'd be incredibly easy to tilt the results one way or the other.
Not that I'm trying to defend anyone. But to say NetCraft is unbiased, to me, seems false. The sites that get queried are the ones that users ask to have queried.
I'd have to agree with the original guy here. In some fields where precedent is being set, like PERL and X Window, open-source shows great innovation. But in area's where it's not, features seems to be looked at an added only when there's a glaring weakness. Like Linux and SMP, etc...
I don't think that any project will prosper without a form of competition. It doesn't have to be financial, but just another group of people doing something that produces the same result but by a different means. That way each group could look at each others work and pick out the best.
Maybe someone or ones should begin a new HTTP server project with a completely new source tree. Take nothing from Apache, but just build the "best" server they can.
the supplied article on NTSecurity seems to be complete heresay. Like NTsecurity heard from ZDTV which heard from IETF. If it were straighter from the horses mouth it could be the basis for an intellegent conversation. But too many details are excluded to be able to formulate an opinion on what's occuring.
For instance, is he being investigated because of his suggestion for the inclusion of encryption in PPP, or have other things occured? That detail seems to be skimmed over and then forgotten. Like: "he advocated encryption and then he got investigated for treason..."
Did he, through his advocay, publish PGP or other software on his website for download to non-US citizens? If yes, then, well, as stupid as everyone thinks it is, he would have broken the law. Note, that that's pure speculation. But I honestly don't our government would waste the resources to investigate someone for treason because of a suggestion! Let's be a little more realistic, please. There have to be other factors at work...
And if there are, we need to know what they are before we go "oh, evil FBI cracks down on innocent ciziten joe...". It's too easy to jump to a conclusion - one way or the other - without presentation of all the facts.
If my very slight hypothesis is correct, and there were other factors at work aside from his suggestion, then i'll go on to say that if you don't like a law, you can't just go break it and say it's okay because it's a dumb law. You need to get it changed. Vote. Voice yourself. But don't try to be a martyr unless you're sure it will work right.
I don't know about PERL's license, but Linux is certainly not free. Yeah, it's free as in beer, but as in speech, because you can't restrict it in anyway, it's not exactly free... Free would be if you could do whatever you wanted to do with it and decide for yourself if you wanted your changes redistributed with the whole or not. But aside from that....
Yeah, there's lots of cool shareware and freeware out there for Windows, Macs and everything else... But with the advent of the internet, there's become a way that people can use freeware as a marketing ploy... and we get all shocked when they do.
For instance, RealJukebox. Sounded like an awesome piece of software. With it's on the fly MP3-ripping, CD playing, etc... there's no guarentee that Real would see anything in return for it, except maybe a bunch of good karma and brownie points. Unfortunately, they messed up and didn't tell anyone what they were doing.
Same as with this cursor thing... If only they'ed said...
What's really funny though, is how people defend Id for only taking their video hardware without their knowledge, as if that's okay, but these other two privacy violations are not...
They.... You mean the people who expect something for nothing by putting links to their software on their website?
They, the people that go "hmmm, let me run that useless software just for the hell of it".
Or they, that allow users to use the software they developed for free, and just happened to forget to mention thewy wanted something in return?
Too me, it would seem fairly obvious that somethings amiss about their offering. So little in the world is free. On the internet, almost all the free stuff comes at the cost of personal information. It doesn't excuse them for not attempting to tell users about the tracking functions. But why wasn't anyone asking?
Since it's alpha, people shouldn't be suggesting that what it really needs is "marketing something-or-other". It needs development. That's the point I was trying to make.
You were making sense up until #6, 7 and 8.
:)
Everyone loves to hate Corel, forgetting that they've delivered the best Word Processor available for Linux (GUIed, i mean).
I don't even think that Corel is buyable at this point, unless they WANT to be aquired. They do have a poison pill, which prevented Adobe from seriously considering purchasing them a few years back.
And lastly, Red Hat buying Sun???? Hello? We're on Planet EARTH... Redhat's not buying Sun, today tomorrow or 5 years from now. I'd hate to see that occur, and i can't imagine how anyone could think that would be beneficial to anybody, anywhere. I won't rant, though
There's no point in marketing a product that isn't marketable (yet).
How about getting Mozilla to work without the constant lockups? There seem to be a lot of "features" that completely crash it at this point.
Just as Windows is claimed to have lowered peoples expectations for stability in their OS's, Mozilla could suceed at lowering expectations in terms of software reliablity if it were heavily pushed on the public right now.
The browser isn't Linux's most glaring weakness on the desktop at the moment. Try MS Office. Star Office doesn't stack up to it. How about a quick and dirty database, such as Access or Filemaker Pro? For SOHO and home users, where's Quicken and Quickbooks?
Until there's many more web apps than are available currently, as well as more fully featured apps, the browser is no where near 1st as far as getting Linux accepted on the desktop.
As was pointed out above, the site seemed slashdotted, or just really slow and i lost patience. Either way, I couldn't read the text.
:) antiquated and out of touch with today's realitys. But in the end, whoever funds the research into a project definetly should be first in line to reap the monetary rewards.
Continuing, what would be so terribly wrong about letting companies and/or individuals patent their MODIFICATIONS to DNA structures. That way, the naturally occuring version would always be "free", and the modified version would always "cost" in a sense.
I'll go on the record as saying I'm all for patents and other IP protections, but I do think that the current system is (a tad bit
Not being a Geography-buff, I don't know the countries... But there's that 7 mile gap between Russia and Alaska... Something "straights". So long as they secured that corridor, they'ed have a very efficient way of moving troops to this side of the Pacific.
;)
Of course, they'ed have to go through Canada prior to getting at us...
Well then, hey, why don't we put Bill Gates on the list of greatest hackers? :)
I mean, he hasn't ever invented anything, just integrated and re-sold other peoples work. That in my mind, is not a hacker, sorry... Bill Gates is a great businessman (his ethics may be a little or a lot off, but he's got the worlds most valuable company).
I would probably put Linus more in that category than in the "hacker" category. If in 5 or 10 years, all of the predictions he's made and every other Linux advocate has made come true, then wow! he did something amazing. But I think we're way too much in the early stages of this phenomenon to gauge it's long term-effects.