RMS has blogged about the harm non free software will do to OLPC
RMS is a socialist and like all socialists he's absolutely convinced that the only way there can be freedom is if there is no ownership.
Well, he should be happy then, with the third world, because, they don't own any food, they don't own any water, they don't own any housing and they have no property at all, so therefor, they are dirt poor.
Maybe all of these people that bitch about property, should live where there is none, and see what its all about.
The USA has done enough legislating of international morality for its own companies. Even Europeans would sell us out to try and get these deals for themselves. For every Boeing that gets busted by DOJ for trying to bribe someone to buy a jet, there is an Airbus waiting to take its place. If Chinese Yahoo got shut down by the US Gov't, the only result would be a European company rolling in, doing the dirty work, and the Europeans would still figure out a way to say they are morally superior for doing so. It is utterly pointless.
Best bet is to have American companies obey the local laws, and if they suck, state our case in international forums, and work for change, but, at the same time, I think Iraq shows what happens when we flaunt international conventions ourselves even if it is for the greater good.
like, let me put it to you this way. if you were so foolish as to fake an uncle's death, they would remember a year down the road in case you forgot your lie.
It turns out that most lawyers and judges have very limited imaginations and are terrible at what they do. Most likely this sort of thing would never occur to them. Quite likely, they won't even recognize the contradiction with the recent testimony mentioned in the summary.
I worked once for the law firm that helped invent the class action law suit, helped sue Exxon for billion dollars in Valdez and won, helped police the securities industry when there was no enforcement, brought down Milken...and that was just to start.
There is not a writer for a TV show or a movie that could even accurately depict just how smart these people are. Those lawyers ask those sorts of questions all the time. These are all Ivy Leaguers that came from the likes of U-Penn, Harvard and they do. It wasn't even worth lying to these people because they could just pick you apart like a rotisserie chicken and you wouldn't even know it until they are ready to throw the bones out.
The thing is, his bookstore argument isn't even right. If you go to a bookstore, there are scores of Linux books and relatively few Unix books. If anything, you would probably find Unix books in the Linux section and not the other way around. Linux is driving Unix and anyone who doesn't see that has a hole in their head the size of JFK's.
The thing is, lawyers and judges are ornery types, and, having heard McBride's bookstore theory, the judge might well take a trip to the computer section at the bookstore and see it for himself. He will see Linux everywhere, and no Unix, and probably conclude that McBride is a liar. You may as well just end the trial at that point, but it will drag on enough for the judge to probably humiliate McBride a bit.
I drive the 35 mpg car that isn't "zippy" (as my sister calls her car), but there isn't a "smart person" spigot that I can get discount gasoline from, I have to pay the same rate all the other gas guzzlers pay.
You pay less for gasoline over all and that's your reward. You don't have a right to tell other people that they can't buy more gas so they can have a sports car. And don't delude yourself into thinking that reducing American consumption is enough to make the price go down. It isn't. For every less American driver, the Chinese and Indians, combined have 10 more to replace him.
There are two ways for the price of gas to come down, and no politician has proposed either: a) we develop enough domestic production to basically impose price caps on world markets, which, environmentalists will never allow, or b) we halt the dollar decline and the dollar advances, effectively lowering the purchasing price of oil. The price we pay for that is a resumption of the bleeding of manufacturing to overseas and at a time when US exports are really the only good thing going on in the economy.
Moral of the story - if you want to pay less for gasoline, use less.
Then I found the real reason - his Intrepid never really got 35 mpg. According to fueleconomy.gov it only got an average of 22 mpg. Maybe his fuel economy seemed better because gas prices were so much lower.
Yeah... even the Dodge Neon only got 30-35, although I was able to coax 40 out of it when I had mine. But the Neon was a light car...
One thing working against today's car makers for fuel efficiency is passenger safety. Reinforced side impact resistant doors, airbags, stronger seats, GPS and other gadgets all add to the weight of the car. It's not uncommon to see 4000 lb "small" cars any more... tubby tubby tubby.
Among the 100-mpg vehicles that Detroit (and Japan) have claimed impossible to build comes a hybrid designed by a class of inner-city high school students in West Philadelphia
Detroit and Japan never said it was impossible to build these sorts of cars. They just said it was impossible to build these cars for 250k. Seriously, there's no secret conspiracy between Detroit and Japan and the oil companies. If Ford or GM or Toyota could invent a car that ran on air (ala Ayn Rand's Gault-mobile), then, they would invent. Every motor company has researched just about every sort of way you can put people from point A to point B in a car... Chrysler has worked on gas turbine engines... Japan has gone crazy with turbo and superchargers and Mazda has the rotary engine, and GM tried diesel once and even once upon a time Ford actually looked at putting a small nuclear reactor in a car. It just turns out that, that hydrogen carbon bond is a pretty good way of storing chemical energy, and the most efficient way of carrying those bonds is in something like, well, a gasoline.
In fact, what's with mileage going DOWN over the last 15 years?
Look at the horsepower. Given the same engine size and roughly the same fuel, for the most part,additional efficiency has been applied to produce more horsepower to the engine. In the 1980s and even into the 1990s, fuel efficient cars were so utterly anemic that the best thing to do to get any kind of performance would be to buy a truck or a 1970s muscle car.
No more.
Nowadays, you've got 4 cylinder engines supercharged up to 300hp, and GM's new V6 in the Caddy CTS is a naturally aspirated 6 that makes the same horsepower as the V8. If you want a V8, you are usually talking at least 350 hp to start, going all the way up to 500 or even close to 600 hp once you put a blower on it.
Just look at the 0-60 times. First 7 seconds was good for a stock car, then 6, and now mid 5's are common. A supercar gets you to the speed limit in 3 seconds.
Speed sells. People like to go fast and accelerate quickly, and that is what car makers made.
Most people aren't mad about the price of gasoline, except in a bitter sense, because they intuitively know that Detroit didn't victimize them - 35mpg cars have been there all along, and they know it wasn't some crazy oil conspiracy. Rather, they know it was their own dumb fault for buying a gas guzzling vehicle when we should have learned having been burnt by this first in 1973, then 1979, and certainly we would be burned again.
The thing is, yeah, the price of gas sucks. But everyone knows that the pandering by all of the candidates is not the real solution. I mean, sure , idiots can rise up like Obama blaming the "oil companies", or almost as nearly as bad, McCain trying to get the gas tax repealed, but, if you ask most people if they would rather have just drilled the shit out of the country to get every last drop of oil, turned Colorado into looking like the moon in order to get all the shale, many, shockingly, (and I would almost say foolishly) would rather preserve the environment. I guarantee you, if you really wanted to lower the price of fuel, you could put in the right environmental waivers and tax breaks, blow off global warming, and we'd be back to about $2/gallon gasoline within 3 years.
Really, most Americans intuitively know that they need to get out of their low mileage vehicles, and get higher mileage vehicles, if they are so pissed off about fuel. For some, its the environment and concerns over global warming. For some, cars aren't mystical beautiful things, just transportation and they'll consider the train. For some, its a racial hatred of arabs and a political hatred of chavez. So really, no matter how you arrive at it, a bit of conservation either saves the planet, screws the arabs, and saves some money, so, really, it's all good.
This isn't stuff we didn't know about before, but we know that now is the time to get on it.
When I was a young twenty something, bombarded by numerous messages about the horrors of drunk driving, my friends and I would go to the pub. There, they had a machine which measured your breath, and at the end of the night, we would hand the keys over to the guy who was drunkest and make him drive us all home. It was pretty dumb, but you just don't think about stuff like that when you are younger...since then I've had a few friends get killed either themselves DUI or by someone else DUI, and now, it all seems so much more horrific. But you feel invincible when you are young...
And that's why Jesus distilled Maker's Mark whisky.
Damn right He did. It is, the -finest beverage ever-... but, Knob Creek is not too bad either. Altogether, the 2000's have been a rough decade, but, at least we saw the emergence of a group of really good American whiskey's. We -need- it!
Well, let's face it. You didn't get to be an astronaut who went on to be President and beat off an invading alien dinosaur army while curing cancer and feeding a billion starving people, while mistresses of all potential clamoured for your body.
Oh well.
Take some of that dough, get yourself a nice tv and a good bottle of whiskey, enjoy your family at home. You hunter now, must bring home bacon for family. and, if the job you picked sucks, well, at least you got the big tv and a bottle of booze.
OTOH, if you (completely hypotetically) marry a Russian girl and she flies out of the country leaving a trail of suspicious (but ultimately irrelevant) evidence trying to frame you (*), you may also want to come here.
Nina isn't in Russia. She's dead. Nina is dead and Hans killed her. This isn't about being "weird". Most "weird" people I know are not controlling, manipulative and abusive. If Nina really did take off for Russia, she would have taken her kids with her.
Everyone keeps looking at this like it is an attack on IIS and SQL Server, but the actual body of code attacked is actually JavaScript. If the client doesn't have Javascript, then nothing bad happens - with this sort of attack.
Now, there are other attacks that rely on SQL injection... and the prevention is arguably worse than the disease. These days, a lot of DBAs will say that best practice in SQL Server or any sort of database is often said to be against using SQL directly, and wrapping everything in stored procedures, but, this has huge disadvantages.
It's more expensive - you add another layer between you and your data. It all but removes ad-hoc querying off of user pages. Granted, most developers won't have it in them to build up WHERE clauses, joins and connectors into some sort of a point and shoot form, but, why are we giving that up so that we can write two hundred stored procedures instead? This sort of security costs way too much. What's the point of having SELECT if you can't use it, especially when ISAMS already give you basic CRUD out of the box.
To stop SQL injection, all you really need are two things. First is that you have a way to disable writes at the query call level, and the second is to merely scrub quotes at input from a form.
If you disable writes at the call level, one could do something like:
query( statement, false ); and the engine would not allow -any- write no matter what was in statement. At this point, the very worst that a SQL injection attack could do would be to try and get additional information from your database, but it couldn't change anything. queries for updating and input would be more complicated, for sure, but the intent here is to more safely allow dynamic sql for querying.
No evidence? No body? No murder weapon? Who cares! The prosecutor used Power Point in his closing.. The defendant is "weird".
The following is a bit beyond "weird".
When police eventually located Hans Reiser's Honda CRX a few miles from his home, they found the interior waterlogged, the passenger seat missing, and two books on police murder investigations inside. They also found a sleeping-bag cover stained with a 6-inch wide blotch of Nina's dried blood. Reiser later testified that the couple had sex in the sleeping bag on a camping trip prior to their 2004 separation
Education focused on enriching students individually and providing them with a solid base to make a better future for themselves and their families is NOT a goal.
Do you really think that Linus Torvalds sits down and says, "gee, how is the piece of code going to feed the world". I certainly hope not. I'm looking for efficient task scheduling, memory management and interchange between various hardware devices. Developers argue that Linux is better than Windows for a laundry list of technological preferences, and that, open development was a means to get there. But, arguing that Linux is better than Windows because it is open is putting the cart before the horse. Nobody will buy a car that gets 2 miles to the gallon because it was made with love, over a car that gets 100mpg made by a bunch of Nazis, and the same thing is true with operating systems.
We measure the value of things by their utility to ourselves, not, how they were made. The more you try and marry Linux to so some sort of a cause, the more you worsen it as an operating system.
All the money Gates is doling out may have the mainstream media fooled but if you would take even a little time to research where the money is going, you would see his funding always favors big corporations over small grassroots organizations
Small grass roots organizations often do not have the logistical reach that large ones do. That's simply a fact. "Mom and Dad Love Africa" might be a nice little grass roots organization with two people that makes you feel good, but they aren't going to have the experience of managing a diversified logistical train of aircraft, ships, trucks, and food needed to distribute aid to the continent. They just aren't.
cheaper and just-as-effective generics are bypassed for over-priced, high mark-up meds from the big pharmaceutical companies
I think you need to educate yourself on this topic. Generics are the not the same as the patented, name brand medications. They simply aren't. There are plenty of reports of people, particularly in the USA, who are getting slammed into generic drugs by some insurance carriers and are not deriving the same therapeutic benefits as the actual namebrand drug. The dosage can vary and by a good bit, the binding in the pill is different and even the active ingredient can be different as well as the generic maker cannot duplicate exactly the same process as the non-generic maker. So, when Bill Gates goes and buys name brand pills for Africa, maybe he's actually researched the issue, and you haven't.
Isn't that a question on the MEYER'S briggs personality test?
I didn't know they had a letter set called IDMM - or insanely dictatorial mass murderer. I guess if they did, though, millions of twenty somethings would be trying to game the test so they could be something "cool".
Then, a bunch of talking heads would get wind of the skewed test scores and immediately start beating the results into their own political agenda. We'd have guys on the right show that kids wanting to be mass murderers is proof that left wing values have failed and we'd have guys on the left arguing that this is proof that George Bush wrecked America far beyond imaginable.
From there, a number of white papers and blogs would produce 50 million pages of articles, and we'd argue it to the ground on slashdot, for political points. At somepoint, someone will post that in fact, we on slashdot are the people most likely to game the test to skew the results because we thought it would be funny to have a corporate test say that we were mass murderers. But they would be modded down as a troll.
Last time I checked, I thought the goal of One Laptop Per Child was just that, One Laptop Per Child. It wasn't "come up with a way to push Linux everywhere"... they just used Linux because it happened to be free.
But... if Microsoft ponies up a few buckazoids and delivers some value to OLPC such that it helps OLPC meets its goals, then, how is that bad for the kids getting the computers, all Windows cracks aside?
Slashdot Mirror
RMS has blogged about the harm non free software will do to OLPC
RMS is a socialist and like all socialists he's absolutely convinced that the only way there can be freedom is if there is no ownership.
Well, he should be happy then, with the third world, because, they don't own any food, they don't own any water, they don't own any housing and they have no property at all, so therefor, they are dirt poor.
Maybe all of these people that bitch about property, should live where there is none, and see what its all about.
The USA has done enough legislating of international morality for its own companies. Even Europeans would sell us out to try and get these deals for themselves. For every Boeing that gets busted by DOJ for trying to bribe someone to buy a jet, there is an Airbus waiting to take its place. If Chinese Yahoo got shut down by the US Gov't, the only result would be a European company rolling in, doing the dirty work, and the Europeans would still figure out a way to say they are morally superior for doing so. It is utterly pointless.
Best bet is to have American companies obey the local laws, and if they suck, state our case in international forums, and work for change, but, at the same time, I think Iraq shows what happens when we flaunt international conventions ourselves even if it is for the greater good.
With the speed limit being 50mph on most American highways, it must be totally mind-blowing experience to accelerate from 0 to 50 in 8 seconds.
Make that 5 seconds or under, and yes, it is great. Besides, the speed limit is usually more around 70-80 in practice.
like, let me put it to you this way. if you were so foolish as to fake an uncle's death, they would remember a year down the road in case you forgot your lie.
It turns out that most lawyers and judges have very limited imaginations and are terrible at what they do. Most likely this sort of thing would never occur to them. Quite likely, they won't even recognize the contradiction with the recent testimony mentioned in the summary.
I worked once for the law firm that helped invent the class action law suit, helped sue Exxon for billion dollars in Valdez and won, helped police the securities industry when there was no enforcement, brought down Milken...and that was just to start.
There is not a writer for a TV show or a movie that could even accurately depict just how smart these people are. Those lawyers ask those sorts of questions all the time. These are all Ivy Leaguers that came from the likes of U-Penn, Harvard and they do. It wasn't even worth lying to these people because they could just pick you apart like a rotisserie chicken and you wouldn't even know it until they are ready to throw the bones out.
Anyone who has killed themselves while intoxicated deserved it.
Bury a few and then make that proclamation.
The thing is, his bookstore argument isn't even right. If you go to a bookstore, there are scores of Linux books and relatively few Unix books. If anything, you would probably find Unix books in the Linux section and not the other way around. Linux is driving Unix and anyone who doesn't see that has a hole in their head the size of JFK's.
The thing is, lawyers and judges are ornery types, and, having heard McBride's bookstore theory, the judge might well take a trip to the computer section at the bookstore and see it for himself. He will see Linux everywhere, and no Unix, and probably conclude that McBride is a liar. You may as well just end the trial at that point, but it will drag on enough for the judge to probably humiliate McBride a bit.
I drive the 35 mpg car that isn't "zippy" (as my sister calls her car), but there isn't a "smart person" spigot that I can get discount gasoline from, I have to pay the same rate all the other gas guzzlers pay.
You pay less for gasoline over all and that's your reward. You don't have a right to tell other people that they can't buy more gas so they can have a sports car. And don't delude yourself into thinking that reducing American consumption is enough to make the price go down. It isn't. For every less American driver, the Chinese and Indians, combined have 10 more to replace him.
There are two ways for the price of gas to come down, and no politician has proposed either: a) we develop enough domestic production to basically impose price caps on world markets, which, environmentalists will never allow, or b) we halt the dollar decline and the dollar advances, effectively lowering the purchasing price of oil. The price we pay for that is a resumption of the bleeding of manufacturing to overseas and at a time when US exports are really the only good thing going on in the economy.
Moral of the story - if you want to pay less for gasoline, use less.
Then I found the real reason - his Intrepid never really got 35 mpg. According to fueleconomy.gov it only got an average of 22 mpg. Maybe his fuel economy seemed better because gas prices were so much lower.
Yeah... even the Dodge Neon only got 30-35, although I was able to coax 40 out of it when I had mine. But the Neon was a light car...
One thing working against today's car makers for fuel efficiency is passenger safety. Reinforced side impact resistant doors, airbags, stronger seats, GPS and other gadgets all add to the weight of the car. It's not uncommon to see 4000 lb "small" cars any more... tubby tubby tubby.
Among the 100-mpg vehicles that Detroit (and Japan) have claimed impossible to build comes a hybrid designed by a class of inner-city high school students in West Philadelphia
Detroit and Japan never said it was impossible to build these sorts of cars. They just said it was impossible to build these cars for 250k. Seriously, there's no secret conspiracy between Detroit and Japan and the oil companies. If Ford or GM or Toyota could invent a car that ran on air (ala Ayn Rand's Gault-mobile), then, they would invent. Every motor company has researched just about every sort of way you can put people from point A to point B in a car... Chrysler has worked on gas turbine engines... Japan has gone crazy with turbo and superchargers and Mazda has the rotary engine, and GM tried diesel once and even once upon a time Ford actually looked at putting a small nuclear reactor in a car. It just turns out that, that hydrogen carbon bond is a pretty good way of storing chemical energy, and the most efficient way of carrying those bonds is in something like, well, a gasoline.
In fact, what's with mileage going DOWN over the last 15 years?
Look at the horsepower. Given the same engine size and roughly the same fuel, for the most part,additional efficiency has been applied to produce more horsepower to the engine. In the 1980s and even into the 1990s, fuel efficient cars were so utterly anemic that the best thing to do to get any kind of performance would be to buy a truck or a 1970s muscle car.
No more.
Nowadays, you've got 4 cylinder engines supercharged up to 300hp, and GM's new V6 in the Caddy CTS is a naturally aspirated 6 that makes the same horsepower as the V8. If you want a V8, you are usually talking at least 350 hp to start, going all the way up to 500 or even close to 600 hp once you put a blower on it.
Just look at the 0-60 times. First 7 seconds was good for a stock car, then 6, and now mid 5's are common. A supercar gets you to the speed limit in 3 seconds.
Speed sells. People like to go fast and accelerate quickly, and that is what car makers made.
Most people aren't mad about the price of gasoline, except in a bitter sense, because they intuitively know that Detroit didn't victimize them - 35mpg cars have been there all along, and they know it wasn't some crazy oil conspiracy. Rather, they know it was their own dumb fault for buying a gas guzzling vehicle when we should have learned having been burnt by this first in 1973, then 1979, and certainly we would be burned again.
The thing is, yeah, the price of gas sucks. But everyone knows that the pandering by all of the candidates is not the real solution. I mean, sure , idiots can rise up like Obama blaming the "oil companies", or almost as nearly as bad, McCain trying to get the gas tax repealed, but, if you ask most people if they would rather have just drilled the shit out of the country to get every last drop of oil, turned Colorado into looking like the moon in order to get all the shale, many, shockingly, (and I would almost say foolishly) would rather preserve the environment. I guarantee you, if you really wanted to lower the price of fuel, you could put in the right environmental waivers and tax breaks, blow off global warming, and we'd be back to about $2/gallon gasoline within 3 years.
Really, most Americans intuitively know that they need to get out of their low mileage vehicles, and get higher mileage vehicles, if they are so pissed off about fuel. For some, its the environment and concerns over global warming. For some, cars aren't mystical beautiful things, just transportation and they'll consider the train. For some, its a racial hatred of arabs and a political hatred of chavez. So really, no matter how you arrive at it, a bit of conservation either saves the planet, screws the arabs, and saves some money, so, really, it's all good.
This isn't stuff we didn't know about before, but we know that now is the time to get on it.
When I was a young twenty something, bombarded by numerous messages about the horrors of drunk driving, my friends and I would go to the pub. There, they had a machine which measured your breath, and at the end of the night, we would hand the keys over to the guy who was drunkest and make him drive us all home. It was pretty dumb, but you just don't think about stuff like that when you are younger...since then I've had a few friends get killed either themselves DUI or by someone else DUI, and now, it all seems so much more horrific. But you feel invincible when you are young...
And that's why Jesus distilled Maker's Mark whisky.
Damn right He did. It is, the -finest beverage ever-... but, Knob Creek is not too bad either. Altogether, the 2000's have been a rough decade, but, at least we saw the emergence of a group of really good American whiskey's. We -need- it!
Well, let's face it. You didn't get to be an astronaut who went on to be President and beat off an invading alien dinosaur army while curing cancer and feeding a billion starving people, while mistresses of all potential clamoured for your body.
Oh well.
Take some of that dough, get yourself a nice tv and a good bottle of whiskey, enjoy your family at home. You hunter now, must bring home bacon for family. and, if the job you picked sucks, well, at least you got the big tv and a bottle of booze.
welcome to america buddy....
OTOH, if you (completely hypotetically) marry a Russian girl and she flies out of the country leaving a trail of suspicious (but ultimately irrelevant) evidence trying to frame you (*), you may also want to come here.
Nina isn't in Russia. She's dead. Nina is dead and Hans killed her. This isn't about being "weird". Most "weird" people I know are not controlling, manipulative and abusive. If Nina really did take off for Russia, she would have taken her kids with her.
The old Slashdot, if you hit back on FireFox accidently, you would not lose your comment. The new one, you do.
Everyone keeps looking at this like it is an attack on IIS and SQL Server, but the actual body of code attacked is actually JavaScript. If the client doesn't have Javascript, then nothing bad happens - with this sort of attack.
Now, there are other attacks that rely on SQL injection... and the prevention is arguably worse than the disease. These days, a lot of DBAs will say that best practice in SQL Server or any sort of database is often said to be against using SQL directly, and wrapping everything in stored procedures, but, this has huge disadvantages.
It's more expensive - you add another layer between you and your data. It all but removes ad-hoc querying off of user pages. Granted, most developers won't have it in them to build up WHERE clauses, joins and connectors into some sort of a point and shoot form, but, why are we giving that up so that we can write two hundred stored procedures instead? This sort of security costs way too much. What's the point of having SELECT if you can't use it, especially when ISAMS already give you basic CRUD out of the box.
To stop SQL injection, all you really need are two things. First is that you have a way to disable writes at the query call level, and the second is to merely scrub quotes at input from a form.
If you disable writes at the call level, one could do something like:
query( statement, false ); and the engine would not allow -any- write no matter what was in statement. At this point, the very worst that a SQL injection attack could do would be to try and get additional information from your database, but it couldn't change anything. queries for updating and input would be more complicated, for sure, but the intent here is to more safely allow dynamic sql for querying.
scrubbing quotes is just common sense.
Here in Brazil, to prosecute for any crime, the D.A. has to show
So I guess if you want to kill your wife, you should move to Brazil...
I keep a sleeping bag and blanket in my truck - it's Iowa, what're you gonna do in a blizzard? I'm a loner with a quirky sense of humor.
so, if your friend disappears, are you going to rip out your seat, get 8k in cash, then hide your truck?
Any one or two things would be explainable, but all of them?
No evidence? No body? No murder weapon? Who cares! The prosecutor used Power Point in his closing.. The defendant is "weird".
The following is a bit beyond "weird".
When police eventually located Hans Reiser's Honda CRX a few miles from his home, they found the interior waterlogged, the passenger seat missing, and two books on police murder investigations inside. They also found a sleeping-bag cover stained with a 6-inch wide blotch of Nina's dried blood. Reiser later testified that the couple had sex in the sleeping bag on a camping trip prior to their 2004 separation
Education focused on enriching students individually and providing them with a solid base to make a better future for themselves and their families is NOT a goal.
Do you really think that Linus Torvalds sits down and says, "gee, how is the piece of code going to feed the world". I certainly hope not. I'm looking for efficient task scheduling, memory management and interchange between various hardware devices. Developers argue that Linux is better than Windows for a laundry list of technological preferences, and that, open development was a means to get there. But, arguing that Linux is better than Windows because it is open is putting the cart before the horse. Nobody will buy a car that gets 2 miles to the gallon because it was made with love, over a car that gets 100mpg made by a bunch of Nazis, and the same thing is true with operating systems.
We measure the value of things by their utility to ourselves, not, how they were made. The more you try and marry Linux to so some sort of a cause, the more you worsen it as an operating system.
All the money Gates is doling out may have the mainstream media fooled but if you would take even a little time to research where the money is going, you would see his funding always favors big corporations over small grassroots organizations
Small grass roots organizations often do not have the logistical reach that large ones do. That's simply a fact. "Mom and Dad Love Africa" might be a nice little grass roots organization with two people that makes you feel good, but they aren't going to have the experience of managing a diversified logistical train of aircraft, ships, trucks, and food needed to distribute aid to the continent. They just aren't.
cheaper and just-as-effective generics are bypassed for over-priced, high mark-up meds from the big pharmaceutical companies
I think you need to educate yourself on this topic. Generics are the not the same as the patented, name brand medications. They simply aren't. There are plenty of reports of people, particularly in the USA, who are getting slammed into generic drugs by some insurance carriers and are not deriving the same therapeutic benefits as the actual namebrand drug. The dosage can vary and by a good bit, the binding in the pill is different and even the active ingredient can be different as well as the generic maker cannot duplicate exactly the same process as the non-generic maker. So, when Bill Gates goes and buys name brand pills for Africa, maybe he's actually researched the issue, and you haven't.
Isn't that a question on the MEYER'S briggs personality test?
I didn't know they had a letter set called IDMM - or insanely dictatorial mass murderer. I guess if they did, though, millions of twenty somethings would be trying to game the test so they could be something "cool".
Then, a bunch of talking heads would get wind of the skewed test scores and immediately start beating the results into their own political agenda. We'd have guys on the right show that kids wanting to be mass murderers is proof that left wing values have failed and we'd have guys on the left arguing that this is proof that George Bush wrecked America far beyond imaginable.
From there, a number of white papers and blogs would produce 50 million pages of articles, and we'd argue it to the ground on slashdot, for political points. At somepoint, someone will post that in fact, we on slashdot are the people most likely to game the test to skew the results because we thought it would be funny to have a corporate test say that we were mass murderers. But they would be modded down as a troll.
Last time I checked, I thought the goal of One Laptop Per Child was just that, One Laptop Per Child. It wasn't "come up with a way to push Linux everywhere"... they just used Linux because it happened to be free.
But... if Microsoft ponies up a few buckazoids and delivers some value to OLPC such that it helps OLPC meets its goals, then, how is that bad for the kids getting the computers, all Windows cracks aside?
Would you mind if I e-mailed this around to my friends?
Please do.
How do you propose making a bomb made up of material with stable nuclei?
Maybe I'm wrong, but I would think that, if the element has a half-life, by definition, it is not stable.