Oh, maybe because that's the operative meaning of hypocrisy. Could there be a better reason than that? To sit the fence, speak out of both sides of one's mouth, fork toungue...These are all derogatory for a reason. They are bad.
I think that you miss the point. It's entirely possible that IBM, as a corporation, has no stated opinion on the matter. They haven't made up their minds, and different groups within the company are expressing their views without them being the official view of the company as a whole. It happens all the time, and it doesn't represent hypocrisy on anyone's part when it does happen. Hypocrisy is not simply saying one thing and doing another; it requires more than that. Hypocrisy is falsely claiming to hold a belief in an attempt to get others to follow it while privately failing to do so yourself. As long as IBM hasn't reached a corporate decision about the importance of personal freedom vs. strong copyright protection, they can't be held to be hypocritical because they lack the necessary precondition of claiming to hold a belief one way or the other.
Not quite. AFAIK, the statute of limitations doesn't work quite that way. What it says is that if an offense happened long enough ago you can't sue for it. But from the standpoint of copyright infringement the offense happens continuously as long as the copyrighted content is available. So you'd lose your right to sue only if the content was displayed, then removed, and the appropriate time had elapsed since the removal. As long as the copyrighted content is still being displayed, there's still a cause for action. IIRC, if you keep it continuously available that also extends the right to sue for as long as it has been available, even if the statute of limitations would have expired for the time at which it was first available.
I strongly disagree. As an organization gets bigger it tends to be less monolithic and more factional. We don't (or shouldn't) label the United States Government as hypocritical when Congress and the President have different opinions on the issues and try to implement different plans. We don't (or shouldn't) lable the EU as hypocritical because the French and Germans have different policies on some issues. Why should IBM be labeled as hypocritical because two of its branches take different views about the importance of user freedom vs. restriction?
In my opinion, Word's usefulness peaked with Word 95, which had lots of useful features and was fairly stable, but has been going steadily downhill ever since. It makes my professional life miserable (I'm a tech writer).
Word 95, hell! Maybe it's because you're a professional, but as a casual user, I think that Word has been going downhill since version 5. I can't honestly think of a single feature that's been added since Word 5 that I actually use more often than once in a blue moon, but I can think of plenty of things that have been added that clutter up the menus and make it more difficult to use the features that I do use. I certainly know a lot of people who think that the Word 5-Word 6 transition was one of the worst changes in any piece of MS software. It got better between 6 and 7 (Word 95), but I still think that it wasn't as good as Word 5 was.
They basically consider that Microsoft's continued screwing of their customers (mostly contracts, but they forgot to mention prices) is driving people away.
This seems to be a completely incorrect interpretation of the events described. The office suite that's being replaced is Applix, not Microsoft. The agency that's switching to Star Office is doing so on Unix boxes where MS software wasn't available in the first place. Of course it's possible (if unlikely) that they'll be so happy with Star Office on their Unix boxen that they decide to start replacing MS Office on Windows machines, but there's no indication whatsoever that it's likely to happen. This switch has absolutely nothing to do with Microsoft.
With that said, the definition I've always used for fine art is something that will be bought by some rich idiot to hang on his walls to impress a bunch of black-dressed New York snobs that he invites to a once-a-year cocktail party so that he can feel "with it." It doesn't matter what kind of crap it is. It just has to be expensive.
Ah! This explains it. I am primarily a museum goer rather than a purchaser of fine art, so my perspective on its value is very different. To me the value of an artwork is primarily its "use value"- the value produced by the enjoyment of viewing it, rather than its resale value. I don't think that the fact that someone is willing to lay down a big chunk of cash for an artwork makes it inherently more valuable. It may only show that the buyer is a dolt. In fact, IMO, the wide availability of an artwork increases its value, as more people can derive enjoyment from it. That's why its important that great artwork be put in museums, where it can be enjoyed by anyone, rather than stuffed away in people's homes or locked up in warehouses. In that sense, digital artworks have the potential to be tremendously valuable, as their ability to be duplicated makes them very widely available.
Actually, a lot of the best digital art is genuinely breaking new ground. They aren't just drawings or paintings that made use of a new box of tools, but rather use the computer to make the artwork interact with the viewer. In that way they are computer art in the strictest sense; part of the art exists strictly inside the computer and makes good use of the computer's unique capabilities. This may or may not be what the original poster had in mind, but they are examples of computer art. Of course in many cases they include much more than just the computer and program to the point that they can't just be reproduced at will, which would probably make them classify as valuable artworks under the ease of reproduction viewpoint.
...even modern digital images show too much of the medium.
And this is why art critics always complain about texture and brush lines and whatnot when they look at what should otherwise be considered a beautiful painting? That's bullshit, and you know it.
Hear! Hear! This is a very good point. You can make an even stronger one, though, by looking at grain in photography. It's an artifact of the process used to make the image, but people are now absolutely attached to it. Why? Because they know how to use it to artistic effect. They can use the grain in the picture to enchance what it is that they want the photograph to say.
I expect that people in the not too distant future will say the same thing about various digital artifacts. They'll figure out all sorts of uses for pixelation and compression artifacts and even deliberately introduce them into works that didn't have them in the first place just for their artistic effect. Pretty soon everyone will be so used to them that they won't even consider the fact that at one time they were considered to be undesirable and to detract from the artwork.
What a load of crap! Art is about expressing ideas, not about how unique or collectible the product is. A photograph can be fine art even though an almost unlimited number of copies can be made from the negative, and the production of reproductions of famous artworks does nothing to devalue the original.
One only has to look at fields other than the visual arts to see how ridiculous this view is. A novel or poem is an artwork, and nobody claims that it's any less significant just because it's printed or put on the web instead of hand-copied. A musical performance is a work of art whether or not it's being recorded for the masses to hear.
My question is: am I alone in believing that computer-generated work is valid field of fine arts?
You most certainly are not alone. Computer based work may be too cutting-edge for old fuddy-duddies, but it most certainly is not for Modern Art lovers. I'm a member of The Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and they most certainly have their share of computer based work in their exhibitions. They even have a digital gallery on their web site, which is part of their ongoing program of encouraging computer-based artwork. To quote:
MOCA is guided by the conviction that digital technology provides new avenues for artistic exploration, new ways to enhance experience within the museum, and a new means for artists to reach a much larger audience throughout the broader culture.
So some people in fine arts most certainly do support computer artwork.
This is absolutely, 100% wrong. Just check out this if you don't believe that. For those who don't want to follow the link, the FSF say, in part [emphasis is theirs]:
Actually we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can....
Since free software is not a matter of price, a low price isn't more free, or closer to free. So if you are redistributing copies of free software, you might as well charge a substantial fee and make some money. Redistributing free software is a good and legitimate activity; if you do it, you might as well make a profit from it.
Free software is a community project, and everyone who depends on it ought to look for ways to contribute to building the community. For a distributor, the way to do this is to give a part of the profit to the Free Software Foundation or some other free software development project. By funding development, you can advance the world of free software.
Distributing free software is an opportunity to raise funds for development. Don't waste it!
That sure doesn't sound like being opposed to selling the software. Nobody claims that RedHat or Mandrake are evil for selling copies of their software. The objection is to hooking a small bit of proprietary software onto a boatload of Free Software and using that as an excuse to restrict peoples' ability to use the Free Software as they choose.
Actually, IMPO, this is going to wind up hurting Caldera more than anyone. Why would somebody want to pay Caldera per-copy licenses when they could buy one copy from RedHat, Mandrake, Debian, etc. and install it on many computers? It's not as though Caldera's selection of packages, packaging system, or proprietary extensions make their product enough better to justify the additional charge. This is just going to scare away potential customers.
Actually, the GPL itself does not include the clause about using later versions. It is suggested that authors include in their copyright notice that the code is licensed under version foo of the GPL or, at the licensee's option any subsequent version, but that is just a suggestion. ISTR that Linux does not include the "or at your option a later version" clause specifically because Linus was worried that a later version might include a "bug" that would result in unexpected and undesired results. And, of course, they copyright holder for a piece of software can change his license after the initial release. It's just that he can't force people who licensed it under the old terms to relicense under the new terms. That means that in effect it's only possible to release under a less restrictive license (which people will voluntarily use) and not a more restrictive one (which they won't).
The pyramids were, in a real sense, not engineering marvels. They're just really huge stacks of rocks. There are a number of possible brute force approaches to getting the stones to the top that would be doable using even very simple technology. (Remember that the pyramid builders didn't even have wheels!) The pyramids are incredible more because they're huge and mobilizing the labor to build them was a tremendous political and administrative feat.
Obelisks, OTOH, are more of an engineering challenge. They're very large single stones (as much as 100+ feet tall) raised upright. It's getting them upright in one piece that's the tricky bit. They didn't require anything like the labor that the pyramids did, but how exactly they were raised up remains something of a mystery. There are a number of possible approaches, but all of them have problems, and in that sense they're much more interesting to modern engineers.
This is an interesting view, but I think there's a bunch of people living in Israel (not to mention other parts of the world) that would strongly disagree. I'm pretty sure they have the written records to adequately describe their slavery at the time.
Your history is a bit out of whack. The pyramids were built in the Old Kingdom and the Hebrews were slaves in the New Kingdom. There's over 1000 years of time between the two; the pyramids were older when the Hebrews came to Egypt than the Gothic Cathedrals in western Europe are today.
Of course the thing under discussion in this example are obelisks, not the pyramids anyway. Obelisks were nowhere near the work to put up that the pyramids were. An obelisk is a single large block of stone that needed "only" to be lifted upright, rather than a huge pile of stones. Of course some obelisks were 100 feet or more tall, so this is not exactly a trivial task, but it's more a matter of tricky engineering than brute force labor like the pyramids.
I wonder why/., the champions of open source, aren't using a Linux box with a few NICs and some hacked-together code as a
load balancer?
IIRC, they are using a Linux box for their load ballancer. It was their router that got fried, which is a completely different beast. Heavy duty routers remain specialized boxes, and Linux hasn't really serious inroads into that market yet.
Funny that when Microsoft's router failed (probably a Cisco also) it was catastrophic incompetence but for you guy's it's just bad luck.
Not funny at all when you get the facts straight. The serious problems that MS had were with their DNS servers- which were running Windows- not their routers. IIRC the DNS servers were later cracked, too, which was rightly seen as an indication of poor security. When Microsoft uses its own products, they don't stand up to the use they're being put to, and then Microsoft has to use *BSD based systems to get working again, that's very different from when a Linux site has its non-Linux hardware melt down (and the description did make it sound like a hardware, not software, problem).
I know you're not attacking RedHat here, but I felt I should note that they do a bit more than just wrap stuff together. They've got a lot of folks doing development work on a number of those items mentioned.
They doubtless will with Postgress as well. The generall feel of the thing is that they're planning on packaging up Postgress as a default database and then making money on support and (especially) consulting. Databases are one area in which it appears pretty clear that the suggested Free Software strategy of giving away the software and making money on consulting and support has a great chance of success. In order to be able to win the support and consulting contracts, though, it will be very helpful to RH to have deep, insider knowledge of the ins and outs of the product, and that suggests that they'll be developing as well as packaging it.
California used to be very quick to exclude people from jury duty. You could get an exemption for being a officer of the court, a peace officer, being closely related to one of the above, if your employer didn't give jury duty pay, or for any one of a number of other reasons. So many people were exempt that there were serious worries about juror shortages. For a while the response was to make service longer and more frequent for the people who were eligible, but this wound up being counterproductive, as service was tough enough that everyone was looking for excuses to get out. Now they've seriously cracked down on the exemptions (to the point that the Supreme Justice was called and served on a jury) and things have gotten somewhat easier.
Now only if more bad stuff would happen to judges...
Surprisingly, this actually works. There has been significant jury duty reform here in California, and the leading proponent is the Chief Justice of the state Supreme Court. He was called for jury duty and actually wound up serving on a jury. He was so pissed off with the way he was treated that he decided that poor treatment of prospective jurors was a serious threat to the judicial system and started leading the charge for reform. Not all of the things that he's advocated (specifically decent jury duty pay) have been implemented, but it has made a big difference.
Or Europe based web sites having to comply with the narrow laws (concerning e.g. nudity, drugs, or cryptography) of hyporcrite US.
Or US web sites complying with the narrow European laws concerning Nazi paraphenalia, violence, etc. The problem, as RMS correctly points out, is that the proposed system forces the most restrictive laws to apply everywhere. US web sites could be shut down for presenting things that offend Europeans (unpopular political viewpoints) and European web sites could be shut down for presenting things that offend Americans (nudity). Everyone loses some of their freedom (except for the people who never had any to start with).
You miss the point. The problem isn't that our elected representatives lack the energy and desire to do a good job. It's that there simply isn't enough time in the day or brainpower in the human mind for anyone to learn everything about every issue (or even a moderate ammount about most issues) that the government has to deal with. This is very literally true; there are many congressional sub-committees meeting at a time, so it's physically not possible for any one person to attend them all, and probably not possible even for one person to read the minutes. And those meetings only scratch the surface of the potentially relevant information about the issues of the day. Our representatives must struggle with partial information about the issues simply because it's not possible for any person to get anything like complete information about all of the issues.
Actually, the problem with the "Turing test" is that people have failed to follow Turing's original criteria. The Turing test, as originally proposed, was supposed to involve a skeptical tester "talking" to a person and a machine, and making a deliberate, wide ranging attempt to tell them apart. There were not supposed to be limits on the range of topics available for conversation or the types of questions that could be asked. Most importantly, the tester was supposed to be doing his utmost to tell the two apart. It's much, much tougher to fool somebody when you've told him in advance that somebody is going to be trying to fool him and that his job is to figure out who than when you lie and claim that somebody is a fool for not figuring it out. A program that could pass a rigorous Turing test in the original sense would require a reasonable approximation of human intelligence.
You must deal with very different people from me. I don't know anyone who wants their data stored on somebody else's machine. Even at my work, where we have some kind of confidence that the data will be secure and well looked after, ITS has had a hell of a time convincing people to save their data over the network instead of locally. Most "Joe consumer" types still live at the ends of narrow pipes and find downloading even modestly sized files obnoxious; they're not going to put up with having to do that with the files they own as well as the ones they're downloading from somebody else.
My '97 Ford Escort has a speed regulator that won't let me get over 107Mph or so. I understand that a lot of cars have similar things these days.
This is typically done for safety (and liability) reasons, and is specifically aimed at tire problems. Street tires have a maximum speed rating that is related to their ability to handle heat. Some common ratings are, IIRC, 107, 130, and 155 MPH (which I assume are really 170, 210, and 250 KMPH). Manufacturers will select a tire that gives an acceptable tradeoff between cost, handling, comfort, treadlife, and speed for the design of the car. If it turns out that the car's enginge and aerodynamics would let it go faster than the safe rating for the tires, they'll put in a speed limiter. That gives them some legal protection against claims that they put tires onto the car that were unsuitable for its speed capability.
This has actually led to an aftermarket in engine control computers. Hotrodders will reprogram the engine computer to adjust the fuel injectors and the like (often as part of a more comprehensive reworking of the engine) and take out the speed limiter at the same time. Of course the people who do that will usually put on higher performance tires at the same time, so it's not a big deal, and by messing with the car that way they obviously give the manufacturer a legal defense if something bad happens.
Actually, one of the interesting points that they make in the article (taken straight from Ingo Molnar) is that much of the speedup in Apache is a result of inherited advantages from Tux. Many of the speedups that made Tux so fast have now been rolled into the mainstream kernel, so every application can take advantage of them. Molnar is quoted as saying that in the latest version of Tux, only 2% of the total time on the benchmark was spent in Tux-specific code, as opposed to over 50% in the original version.
You can say that this is an example of the real strength of Free Software. Tux served as a testing ground for a whole bunch of cool new technologies. When they showed how useful they are, Linus was able to roll them into the mainstream kernel. None of that would have been possible if Linus and Ingo hadn't been able to share their code.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that you miss the point. It's entirely possible that IBM, as a corporation, has no stated opinion on the matter. They haven't made up their minds, and different groups within the company are expressing their views without them being the official view of the company as a whole. It happens all the time, and it doesn't represent hypocrisy on anyone's part when it does happen. Hypocrisy is not simply saying one thing and doing another; it requires more than that. Hypocrisy is falsely claiming to hold a belief in an attempt to get others to follow it while privately failing to do so yourself. As long as IBM hasn't reached a corporate decision about the importance of personal freedom vs. strong copyright protection, they can't be held to be hypocritical because they lack the necessary precondition of claiming to hold a belief one way or the other.
Not quite. AFAIK, the statute of limitations doesn't work quite that way. What it says is that if an offense happened long enough ago you can't sue for it. But from the standpoint of copyright infringement the offense happens continuously as long as the copyrighted content is available. So you'd lose your right to sue only if the content was displayed, then removed, and the appropriate time had elapsed since the removal. As long as the copyrighted content is still being displayed, there's still a cause for action. IIRC, if you keep it continuously available that also extends the right to sue for as long as it has been available, even if the statute of limitations would have expired for the time at which it was first available.
I strongly disagree. As an organization gets bigger it tends to be less monolithic and more factional. We don't (or shouldn't) label the United States Government as hypocritical when Congress and the President have different opinions on the issues and try to implement different plans. We don't (or shouldn't) lable the EU as hypocritical because the French and Germans have different policies on some issues. Why should IBM be labeled as hypocritical because two of its branches take different views about the importance of user freedom vs. restriction?
Word 95, hell! Maybe it's because you're a professional, but as a casual user, I think that Word has been going downhill since version 5. I can't honestly think of a single feature that's been added since Word 5 that I actually use more often than once in a blue moon, but I can think of plenty of things that have been added that clutter up the menus and make it more difficult to use the features that I do use. I certainly know a lot of people who think that the Word 5-Word 6 transition was one of the worst changes in any piece of MS software. It got better between 6 and 7 (Word 95), but I still think that it wasn't as good as Word 5 was.
This seems to be a completely incorrect interpretation of the events described. The office suite that's being replaced is Applix, not Microsoft. The agency that's switching to Star Office is doing so on Unix boxes where MS software wasn't available in the first place. Of course it's possible (if unlikely) that they'll be so happy with Star Office on their Unix boxen that they decide to start replacing MS Office on Windows machines, but there's no indication whatsoever that it's likely to happen. This switch has absolutely nothing to do with Microsoft.
Ah! This explains it. I am primarily a museum goer rather than a purchaser of fine art, so my perspective on its value is very different. To me the value of an artwork is primarily its "use value"- the value produced by the enjoyment of viewing it, rather than its resale value. I don't think that the fact that someone is willing to lay down a big chunk of cash for an artwork makes it inherently more valuable. It may only show that the buyer is a dolt. In fact, IMO, the wide availability of an artwork increases its value, as more people can derive enjoyment from it. That's why its important that great artwork be put in museums, where it can be enjoyed by anyone, rather than stuffed away in people's homes or locked up in warehouses. In that sense, digital artworks have the potential to be tremendously valuable, as their ability to be duplicated makes them very widely available.
Actually, a lot of the best digital art is genuinely breaking new ground. They aren't just drawings or paintings that made use of a new box of tools, but rather use the computer to make the artwork interact with the viewer. In that way they are computer art in the strictest sense; part of the art exists strictly inside the computer and makes good use of the computer's unique capabilities. This may or may not be what the original poster had in mind, but they are examples of computer art. Of course in many cases they include much more than just the computer and program to the point that they can't just be reproduced at will, which would probably make them classify as valuable artworks under the ease of reproduction viewpoint.
Hear! Hear! This is a very good point. You can make an even stronger one, though, by looking at grain in photography. It's an artifact of the process used to make the image, but people are now absolutely attached to it. Why? Because they know how to use it to artistic effect. They can use the grain in the picture to enchance what it is that they want the photograph to say.
I expect that people in the not too distant future will say the same thing about various digital artifacts. They'll figure out all sorts of uses for pixelation and compression artifacts and even deliberately introduce them into works that didn't have them in the first place just for their artistic effect. Pretty soon everyone will be so used to them that they won't even consider the fact that at one time they were considered to be undesirable and to detract from the artwork.
What a load of crap! Art is about expressing ideas, not about how unique or collectible the product is. A photograph can be fine art even though an almost unlimited number of copies can be made from the negative, and the production of reproductions of famous artworks does nothing to devalue the original.
One only has to look at fields other than the visual arts to see how ridiculous this view is. A novel or poem is an artwork, and nobody claims that it's any less significant just because it's printed or put on the web instead of hand-copied. A musical performance is a work of art whether or not it's being recorded for the masses to hear.
You most certainly are not alone. Computer based work may be too cutting-edge for old fuddy-duddies, but it most certainly is not for Modern Art lovers. I'm a member of The Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and they most certainly have their share of computer based work in their exhibitions. They even have a digital gallery on their web site, which is part of their ongoing program of encouraging computer-based artwork. To quote:
So some people in fine arts most certainly do support computer artwork.
This is absolutely, 100% wrong. Just check out this if you don't believe that. For those who don't want to follow the link, the FSF say, in part [emphasis is theirs]:
That sure doesn't sound like being opposed to selling the software. Nobody claims that RedHat or Mandrake are evil for selling copies of their software. The objection is to hooking a small bit of proprietary software onto a boatload of Free Software and using that as an excuse to restrict peoples' ability to use the Free Software as they choose.
Actually, IMPO, this is going to wind up hurting Caldera more than anyone. Why would somebody want to pay Caldera per-copy licenses when they could buy one copy from RedHat, Mandrake, Debian, etc. and install it on many computers? It's not as though Caldera's selection of packages, packaging system, or proprietary extensions make their product enough better to justify the additional charge. This is just going to scare away potential customers.
Actually, the GPL itself does not include the clause about using later versions. It is suggested that authors include in their copyright notice that the code is licensed under version foo of the GPL or, at the licensee's option any subsequent version, but that is just a suggestion. ISTR that Linux does not include the "or at your option a later version" clause specifically because Linus was worried that a later version might include a "bug" that would result in unexpected and undesired results. And, of course, they copyright holder for a piece of software can change his license after the initial release. It's just that he can't force people who licensed it under the old terms to relicense under the new terms. That means that in effect it's only possible to release under a less restrictive license (which people will voluntarily use) and not a more restrictive one (which they won't).
Important point:
The pyramids were, in a real sense, not engineering marvels. They're just really huge stacks of rocks. There are a number of possible brute force approaches to getting the stones to the top that would be doable using even very simple technology. (Remember that the pyramid builders didn't even have wheels!) The pyramids are incredible more because they're huge and mobilizing the labor to build them was a tremendous political and administrative feat.
Obelisks, OTOH, are more of an engineering challenge. They're very large single stones (as much as 100+ feet tall) raised upright. It's getting them upright in one piece that's the tricky bit. They didn't require anything like the labor that the pyramids did, but how exactly they were raised up remains something of a mystery. There are a number of possible approaches, but all of them have problems, and in that sense they're much more interesting to modern engineers.
Your history is a bit out of whack. The pyramids were built in the Old Kingdom and the Hebrews were slaves in the New Kingdom. There's over 1000 years of time between the two; the pyramids were older when the Hebrews came to Egypt than the Gothic Cathedrals in western Europe are today.
Of course the thing under discussion in this example are obelisks, not the pyramids anyway. Obelisks were nowhere near the work to put up that the pyramids were. An obelisk is a single large block of stone that needed "only" to be lifted upright, rather than a huge pile of stones. Of course some obelisks were 100 feet or more tall, so this is not exactly a trivial task, but it's more a matter of tricky engineering than brute force labor like the pyramids.
You know, I think that this was funnier when User Friendly did it. Much more creative, too.
IIRC, they are using a Linux box for their load ballancer. It was their router that got fried, which is a completely different beast. Heavy duty routers remain specialized boxes, and Linux hasn't really serious inroads into that market yet.
Not funny at all when you get the facts straight. The serious problems that MS had were with their DNS servers- which were running Windows- not their routers. IIRC the DNS servers were later cracked, too, which was rightly seen as an indication of poor security. When Microsoft uses its own products, they don't stand up to the use they're being put to, and then Microsoft has to use *BSD based systems to get working again, that's very different from when a Linux site has its non-Linux hardware melt down (and the description did make it sound like a hardware, not software, problem).
They doubtless will with Postgress as well. The generall feel of the thing is that they're planning on packaging up Postgress as a default database and then making money on support and (especially) consulting. Databases are one area in which it appears pretty clear that the suggested Free Software strategy of giving away the software and making money on consulting and support has a great chance of success. In order to be able to win the support and consulting contracts, though, it will be very helpful to RH to have deep, insider knowledge of the ins and outs of the product, and that suggests that they'll be developing as well as packaging it.
California used to be very quick to exclude people from jury duty. You could get an exemption for being a officer of the court, a peace officer, being closely related to one of the above, if your employer didn't give jury duty pay, or for any one of a number of other reasons. So many people were exempt that there were serious worries about juror shortages. For a while the response was to make service longer and more frequent for the people who were eligible, but this wound up being counterproductive, as service was tough enough that everyone was looking for excuses to get out. Now they've seriously cracked down on the exemptions (to the point that the Supreme Justice was called and served on a jury) and things have gotten somewhat easier.
Surprisingly, this actually works. There has been significant jury duty reform here in California, and the leading proponent is the Chief Justice of the state Supreme Court. He was called for jury duty and actually wound up serving on a jury. He was so pissed off with the way he was treated that he decided that poor treatment of prospective jurors was a serious threat to the judicial system and started leading the charge for reform. Not all of the things that he's advocated (specifically decent jury duty pay) have been implemented, but it has made a big difference.
Or US web sites complying with the narrow European laws concerning Nazi paraphenalia, violence, etc. The problem, as RMS correctly points out, is that the proposed system forces the most restrictive laws to apply everywhere. US web sites could be shut down for presenting things that offend Europeans (unpopular political viewpoints) and European web sites could be shut down for presenting things that offend Americans (nudity). Everyone loses some of their freedom (except for the people who never had any to start with).
You miss the point. The problem isn't that our elected representatives lack the energy and desire to do a good job. It's that there simply isn't enough time in the day or brainpower in the human mind for anyone to learn everything about every issue (or even a moderate ammount about most issues) that the government has to deal with. This is very literally true; there are many congressional sub-committees meeting at a time, so it's physically not possible for any one person to attend them all, and probably not possible even for one person to read the minutes. And those meetings only scratch the surface of the potentially relevant information about the issues of the day. Our representatives must struggle with partial information about the issues simply because it's not possible for any person to get anything like complete information about all of the issues.
Actually, the problem with the "Turing test" is that people have failed to follow Turing's original criteria. The Turing test, as originally proposed, was supposed to involve a skeptical tester "talking" to a person and a machine, and making a deliberate, wide ranging attempt to tell them apart. There were not supposed to be limits on the range of topics available for conversation or the types of questions that could be asked. Most importantly, the tester was supposed to be doing his utmost to tell the two apart. It's much, much tougher to fool somebody when you've told him in advance that somebody is going to be trying to fool him and that his job is to figure out who than when you lie and claim that somebody is a fool for not figuring it out. A program that could pass a rigorous Turing test in the original sense would require a reasonable approximation of human intelligence.
You must deal with very different people from me. I don't know anyone who wants their data stored on somebody else's machine. Even at my work, where we have some kind of confidence that the data will be secure and well looked after, ITS has had a hell of a time convincing people to save their data over the network instead of locally. Most "Joe consumer" types still live at the ends of narrow pipes and find downloading even modestly sized files obnoxious; they're not going to put up with having to do that with the files they own as well as the ones they're downloading from somebody else.
This is typically done for safety (and liability) reasons, and is specifically aimed at tire problems. Street tires have a maximum speed rating that is related to their ability to handle heat. Some common ratings are, IIRC, 107, 130, and 155 MPH (which I assume are really 170, 210, and 250 KMPH). Manufacturers will select a tire that gives an acceptable tradeoff between cost, handling, comfort, treadlife, and speed for the design of the car. If it turns out that the car's enginge and aerodynamics would let it go faster than the safe rating for the tires, they'll put in a speed limiter. That gives them some legal protection against claims that they put tires onto the car that were unsuitable for its speed capability.
This has actually led to an aftermarket in engine control computers. Hotrodders will reprogram the engine computer to adjust the fuel injectors and the like (often as part of a more comprehensive reworking of the engine) and take out the speed limiter at the same time. Of course the people who do that will usually put on higher performance tires at the same time, so it's not a big deal, and by messing with the car that way they obviously give the manufacturer a legal defense if something bad happens.
Actually, one of the interesting points that they make in the article (taken straight from Ingo Molnar) is that much of the speedup in Apache is a result of inherited advantages from Tux. Many of the speedups that made Tux so fast have now been rolled into the mainstream kernel, so every application can take advantage of them. Molnar is quoted as saying that in the latest version of Tux, only 2% of the total time on the benchmark was spent in Tux-specific code, as opposed to over 50% in the original version.
You can say that this is an example of the real strength of Free Software. Tux served as a testing ground for a whole bunch of cool new technologies. When they showed how useful they are, Linus was able to roll them into the mainstream kernel. None of that would have been possible if Linus and Ingo hadn't been able to share their code.