> This may be a non-issue for markets like the US where you can only get a phone in conjunction with > a heavily overpriced contract that by default includes data, it is an issue for other markets where > plans and phones are separated.
If you are determined enough you can get a smartphone here in the US up on the network without a data plan. I did. No damned way I'm paying more for a couple of GB of data than I'm paying for a DSL line. I'm not that dependent on the net that I can't live without it when outside WiFi range. And I don't use the phone much either. I see my device as a newer version of my old Handspring Visor that can make a few calls or texts when I need to. In other words, a PDA. So I shopped for a plan accordingly. Couple bux a month, not the insanity most folks get in their mobile bills.
> Apple obviously decided that a minimum 4S hardware platform was required
Yes, that is what the ad campaign would lead you to believe. The reality is that all of the work is server side and ANY client would work equally well. You could use a basic no frills cell phone, a landline or whatever to talk to Siri and get voice reponses. Any phone capable of hosting an app could interface with it and receive URLs or other trigger events back with a fairly simple client side application. And there are no technical limitations preventing the client from the iPhone 4S running unmodified on any of the iPhones with the same iOS revision installed. Simply, there is nothing unique to the iPhone 4S that enables Siri. But had they rolled it out as a regular iOS update or an app in the Store there wouldn't have been a 'killer feature' to hype for the new phone to drive the lemmings into the store for an upgrade. That is the scam I refer to.
Nope, and that is the scam. Basically you are calling a service. Thus they could make Siri available on every iProduct with zero effort. That they decided to hold it as an exclusive feature for the 4S to try and create the 'gotta upgrade' stampede is truly lame. Keeping it to iProducts is ok, they ain't giving away a hefty compute farm after all, who do ya think they are after all, Google? But locking access to the service to one submodel of one product line is a terrible idea.
Yup. Bad deal on this sucker. Little internal storage and no slot to add more because they want you tightly tied to them forever. So unless you have a Prime account and can use their cloud save your pennies and pay the extra $50 for the B&N tablet or sacrifice a little CPU grunt and go for the Kobo for the same $199.
Wine? Certainly. Nothing in the base application suite depends on Wine being installed. And nothing should. They are friggin Windows apps, Wine lets us run them as a last resort but we certainly wouldn't want them as default apps. They don't fit into the desktop, they look like Windows apps except with random UI glitches.
Samba is only used to interoperate with the Windows world, it isn't a part of the default experience and certainly doesn't need to go on the base install media for a desktop.
And yes, I'll go ahead and throw another turd in the punchbowl. It isn't just Mono/dotNet that doesn't belong, it is Java too. And you will notice that even though Java has been Free (and without the same fears as Mono) for a couple of years there has yet to be a Java app promoted as a default on a major distribution.
This makes perfect sense. Almost nothing depends on mono anymore. Ditch the last holdouts, replace them with alternatives without the taint and move on. Besides, Ubuntu has made it clear they see tablets as THE future and tablets run ARM. So they really can't afford to offer a second class status to ARM and thus anything that isn't portable to it has to go from the default experience.
If they were removing mono from the repository or moving it to non-free or something there would be a story here, but they ain't so there isn't.
No, I can just switch to another desktop. But GNOME2 was the last UI that end users could be plopped down in front of cold. KDE is too wierd. XFCE can be configured to be pretty close to GNOME2 but out of the box it isn't and it still has a lot of sharp edges. The minor desktops are all aimed at people like me.
But by day I'm the admin in a public library and we have been putting the general public on Linux based lab PCs since 1997. The early days were a but rough but for years now a random person can just walk in, sit down and recognize a GNOME2 desktop and instantly get to work. I have no intention to inflict Unity or GNOME Shell on them. When I can't get a modern browser and GNOME2 running together I'm not sure what happens. With luck we either get a fork of GNOME or XFCE grows up a lot by then.
Doesn't matter if Gnome Shell or Unity are pretty or not, doesn't matter if they are 'better', doesn't mater if they are better designs. They are too different from what a typical person is familiar with. They use Windows at work, school, etc. Several years from now, if Windows 8/Metro isn't a Vista scale fiasco, people might be ready to use what the GNOMEs are cooking, right now it is just not an option. And when this is pointed out they stick their fingers in their ears and hum.
> The amazon tablet, as opposed to the amazon readers, is just another tablet.
Nope, the Amazon product is, like all Kindles, totally tied to Amazon. No memory slot because you are supposed to keep everything in Amazon't cloud. No standard Android because you are supposed to depend on Amazon for everything. In other words it is a total loss leader to drive sales of other Amazon services.
Compare to the Kobo for $199 and the B&N for $249 that are actual Android tablets with the things you would expect in one. The amazing thing is Goggle wouldn't allow either of them access to the Market or Android 3.x.
It really is time for someone to ask Google some hard questions as to just what the hell sort of game they are playing. They SAY they only wanted to keep cheap crap out by imposing a minimum standard, to keep 3.x off of phones where it wouldn't work well, etc. But the Kobo is apparently good hardware and B&N certainly isn't a fly by night Chinese vendor, right? But neither could get Android 3.x and being tablets 2.3 seems to be an automatic exclusion from the Marketplace. If the Kobo & B&N had the 3.x and the Marketplace (and thus a high probability of quickly getting 4.0) the fight with Amazon would be over before it began.
> I'm actually one of those baffled new users he's referring to.
Short version, man hier. Longer version google up the linux FHS, it explains what should be where and why things were made the way it is. Personally I'd be open to eliminating/usr since the reason for its existence is not nearly as strong as it once was. But there are still people who do have a need for a tiny root fs and network mounting everything else. And since everyone is already used to it there really needs to be a compelling reason to change it, not just another of Pottering's jihads against everything UNIX/POSIX.
I'd say that is entirely in the hands of the PA. They have been offered pretty much EVERYTHING they publicly profess to desire, see Clinton's effort. They turned it down because they want it all, from the river to the sea. Thought experiment for you to see if you are an honest debater or just a pro terror apologist. Imagine tomorrow Abbas announced his desire for a two state solution (something he publicly denounces btw, and he is the moderate) and to live in peace with Israel. That it is time to end this terrible bloodshed and finally have peace and a future. Now imagine he not only lived through the next twenty four hours but that the people were finally tired of the fighting and rose up in public demonstrations of support so profound that Hamas went to ground. The suicide and mortar fire ceased and it really looked like THIS time they meant it. How long could an Israeli politician hold out against signing a treaty? That is what I mean, it is all up to them, they will have peace the second they decide they have to settle for it instead of the total victory they keep dreaming is coming real soon now. Now explain how I'm totally wrong.
> Either way, it does not annex the land and make it a part of the legal definition of Israel. The legal terms that apply to the west bank > are the same terms that applied to Japan after its defeat in 1945. Would you say that the occupied Japan was part of the US and > that its post-war status was an internal matter? If you would, then you have a very peculiar definition of "internal".
Yes, exactly the same. Except for the detail that Japan was administered by the Allied Forces instead of just the U.S. That is why half of Japan uses 60Hz electricity and the other half runs on 50Hz, it's post war reconstruction really was designed by committee. it is pretty much the same, no outside force would have been permitted to interfere with the Allied operations inside Japan until such time as we decided to grant them their independence. A better comparison would be to other Pacific islands we still hold as U.S. Territories. They are considered part of the U.S. in the sense that any outside power would be attacking the U.S. if they messed with them, we freely position military forces there, etc. but they aren't equals within the United States in that they get no votes in our Congress yet we do grant U.S. Citizenship to the inhabitants. But on the other hand they don't pay all of the same taxes as a resident of a State pays. It gets fuzzy in places but nobody would confuse Guam with an independent nation state and the UN would never be daft enough to try seating as a member state until after the U.S. signed off on independence for them.
> But why the mere recognition of Palestine as a separate and distinct entity from Israel (which it defacto is
Except it isn't. Would you like the UN meddling in US internal affairs? What if they 'recognized Puerto Rico as a full member? Not that we wouldn't kick em loose if they ever actually voted for independence but you see the point? The Territories are part of Israel and the UN has been hell bent on this project of erecting a new nation state inside their borders for decades now.
And yes, they are part of Israel. They were ATTACKED and they won that territory fair and square in war from their enemies who had to accept that in the cease fire agreements they all signed onto and in the cases of Egypt and Jordan they have actually signed full peace treaties and ended the war on those borders. If they eventually get a deal both sides would actually live with they, and they alone, have the power to grant the territories independence. Not anyone else. Of course just today the so called 'moderate' terrorist Abbas redeclared his only acceptable borders to be the entirety of Israel so even he doesn't want to see a new nation state created as anything other than a very temporary political gambit.
> it was a cold war era idea and is pretty much worthless now
It is even worse than that. It was a defective idea when it was originally proposed. Do the math. The vast majority of the nation states in existence when it was proposed were unfree tyrannies. The proposal for for 'every' nation state to be admitted into an organization where the General Assembly would operate on a "One Nation, One Vote" basis with a Security Council setup where both of the major hellholes were to have an absolute Veto. Inaction was the best case scenario, any sane examination of the design process has to conclude that a Parliament of Tyrants was the design goal.
We should withdraw from the U.N. and build a more sensible organization with some basic ground rules to only allow in entities who honor a basic minimum standard of Human Rights, at least try to use something we in the West would recognize as a Rule of Law, Representative Government, etc. Leave the unfree hellholes the carcass of the U.N. to play with after they relocate the H.Q. to China or something.
Um, Google didn't just toss GNOME/KDE/Qt/Gtk. They tossed the whole thing right down to replacing glibc because it was too bloated. If they just didn't like the LGPL they could have borrowed BSD's libc. It was the bloat.
Android is bloated by the standards of TP3 but it could actually load and run at an acceptable speed on the original Android phone, which is a feat that nothing based on recent the GNU or BSD software stacks could have done. Nokia did heroic things on the Maemo devices trying to get a Gtk and then a Qt based desktop based on the current plumbing (Gtk, gstreamer, esd, dbus, etc) and failed. Just launching the terminal app on an N770 was several seconds of thrashing. The browser was pretty much unusable.
I actually ran Netscape on a 486 with 8MB RAM and an 8bit colormapped X server and it was pretty responsive. Yes we gained truecolor, html5 and all those buzzwords in years since but should we really need a thousand times the computer (RAM, cycles, HDD, everything) to run Firefox on? That is the question we should be asking.
> To interject with my own babble, why does a composited desktop require OpenGL?
Because it is assumed everyone these days possesses a GPU capable of doing the job. Thus it is a choice of doing the work on the main CPU or handing it off to an otherwise idle processor that is optimized to do the work. Doing it on the GPU is actually the more power efficient way and with so many machines running on battery power that matters as much as optimizing for bytes or CPU cycles.
Ah, you too ran OS9 on a CoCo3. I ran a BBS on mine with a Disto Super Controller II wired up to a surplus 10MB Miniscribe + Adaptec MFM to SCSI adaptor. I'd make fun of the DOS Sysops who were proud of the fact they could run Desqview and try to use their PC while running a BBS. You could always tell though, because their system would crawl, hesitating for seconds on menu selections, etc, while doing so, yet mine was fully usable by a caller while I used the console. They had studly 386 machines with megabytes of RAM while I had a 1.8Mhz CPU and 512KB. The OS makes a big difference. And it still does.
No we don't want to go back there, low resolution graphics with a couple of colors is lame. Unicode is better than ASCII for most of the world's population, etc. But we can learn some lessons from the past. Go ahead and write a quick utility that people will use at most once a month in Python. Don't write a tool tray app that runs 24/7 in Python.
And that attitude is why we lost the phone and tablet markets. There was a time when Linux was perfect for older systems... the sort of specs that also happen to match up with new small platforms. But we got that 'screw em, let them buy a real computer' attitude and now/bin/touch on my Fedora 15 laptop is 60856 bytes. The little gadget in my XFCE tray to allow me to control the backlight is currently reporting 6200K in resident set. XFCE is supposed to be the 'lighter' alternative to the GNOME freak show. Ever wonder why Google passed all the userland by and made their own for Android? Well now you know and your attitude is what caused it.
Nokia was stupid enough to believe they could build small devices by reusing parts of the Linux desktop, they failed. Good grief, look how much bloat is in little things like esd or pulseaudio. Megabytes of resident set sitting around in case something wants to make a sound? In hardware that had as little as 64MB Ram (Nokia N770 tablet) that sort of resource misuse killed them.
There was a time when System V UNIX would run on machines with a MB or two of RAM, with terminals hanging off serial ports and a couple tens of megabytes of hard drive could run a retail operation.
Yes there is something to be said for trading developer time for hardware. The time to do that is vertical apps and other applications where the number of deployed systems is small compared to the developer hours available. In a mass deployed application the developers should be required to care a little more about what they are asking millions of users to throw away to the great God of the upgrade treadmill.
In other words, since we are about to have huge waiting lists for routine tests, lets just declare that is a feature instead of a bug.
Just more of the stuff we find out after passing Obamacare I guess. And notice how I will be flamed for calling it that, which says it all. If this turd were actually popular I'd be called a racist if I DIDN'T give President Obama proper credit for his signature achievement.
No, I mean exactly what I wrote. I have never encountered a Thinkpad branded product (IBM and Lenovo periods) that I couldn't get up to a 90% working level. That covers about a dozen examples dating back to the 1990s. WinModems used to be the hardest part to get working, even with the payware driver. The video used to be a lot more bother than it is now, the closed driver might make GLXGears run really fast but often broke power management, broke the text console, that sort of thing. I remember having to twiddle ALSA on a few. And the fun fun fun of a Thinkpad 570s losing its fricking mind if you ever tried looking for sensors with lm-sensors or trying to get one to reboot. (Hint: you can't reboot one, cold shutdown and reboot is the only way.) Power management used to be lot less reliable and require a lot more google.
> For instance, why does the standard terminal in Ubuntu by default make you press Shift-Control-C and -V for Copy/Paste instead of just Control-C?
Oh. My. God. What a tool. If I were using a terminal and CTRL-C ever pasted instead of sending ^C to the running app I'd ditch the mofo in milliseconds. Or do you even know how much more important ^C is when actually using a UNIX shell? I wouldn't even look for a way to change the defaults because I'd KNOW a retard had taken over design on that desktop environment and want the hell out of there before any of their stupid got on me. When using a terminal, everyone knows you drag button one to copy and press button two to paste. It even works on a text only console if everything (i.e. gpm) was setup correctly by your distro. That is almost certainly how God Himself does it on His workstation and only a sick depraved mind would consider doing it any other way.
I pray you are only trolling but experience makes me suspect you Mac people really are that defective.
> And in Unity, why do windows maximize when they're brought to the top of the screen? It's unbelievably annoying.
Preach it! Of course the reason for Unity is mostly Apple's fault. Everyone is chasing their taillights without stopping to think through whether iProduct UI conventions even make sense on a desktop. Microsoft is doing it too so all hope for sanity is lost for the next couple of years. Time to retreat to the small desktops who care about being useful to real existing people instead of wanting "The Year of Linux on the Desktop." I'm sorta happy with XFCE for now.
Yup, take the two examples I noted. The Thinkpad 200s I'm typing this on was installed with Fedora 12. During it's errata stream the kernel broke undocking. So I had to roll back and hold.... all the way through the F13 and F14 cycles I got to stay midway in F12 and hope a remote exploit didn't force me to upgrade anyway and just shutdown and reboot instead of undocking. The bugzilla is now closed since things started working with F15. So I could chose stay with a totally unsupported OS or GNOME3. I'd much preferred F14 so now I run XFCE on F15.
The Boss's Thinkpad can't update Ubuntu anymore unless great care is taken to ensiure Xorg doesn't update lest the second DVI port stop working and of course a distro update is out of the question because of the GNOME problem, so she will be stuck on 11.04 until that situation improves.
I have a machine at home with a PATA RAID card that hasn't worked with new kernels for years. RHEL4/(clone of) is rock solid though. Stuff doesn't officially go depracted very often while examples are still in the wild, but most stuff will eventually stop working unless a lot of people use it or a key kernel dev uses it.
Ubuntu has a list of Certified Hardware for ya. But I have yet to get a Thinkpad at least 90% running. I don't have the fingerprint reader on my X200s working with Fedora but everything else works, including the dock. The boss's Thinkpad T520 runs Ubuntu and has everything working except audio through the dock, but dual DVI displays on the dock do work.
Of course once you get a laptop working expect updates to constantly break things until you just get tired of rolling back failed updates and just stop, only taking critical security updates you can't live without.
It is worse with Linux because almost no OEMs are involved in keeping it working, most aren't even involved in initially getting it going so folks have to guess. But raise your hand if you haven't had to roll back a driver or update on that 'other' popular OS. Last week I had to roll back a mouse driver on a Dell laptop to get the pointer working.
> write hyperbole much? Have you ever even been to China? Since the 1970's?
Care to guess how many Chinese citizens are rotting in forced labor camps, prisons or shallow graves at this exact moment? Try publicly protesting the regime and they will do exactly the same thing to you today as Mao would have. The ChiComs embraced some aspects of a market economy when reality slapped them in the face but they are still ChiComs. A fascist doesn't change until you bury him. See Putin, Vladimir.
I used GW because it illustrates so many of the problems well. The trick is for science to fully inform the political process and not become politics wearing the mask of and usurping the good name and reputation of science.
That means #3 should stay in the realm of science. Only after science fully informs the political actors of ALL of their options and properly accounts for their costs (accounting is also a hard science. or should be.... Enron/Worldcom/CBO/OMB accounting isn't accounting it is criminal.) can the politicians make informed choices. And very well might make a choice that isn't the mathematically optimal one since every variable can't be nailed down perfectly.
I objected to the "funding solar research or healthcare for the poor" because that is an example of what science can't answer. But it can answer (or at least give a best educated estimate) of whether a billion dollars invested in solar will payoff in pure economic terms, how much CO2 it can be estimated to avoid emitting in a given time frame,etc. It can offer an estimate of whether a billion dollars of our federal health budget spent on AIDS research is likely to save more lives than the same money spent on a line of research into heart disease or stem cell research. And again, the politicians are within their rights to sometimes overrule the pure math, and award the money to AIDS research because the gay lobby is a core voting block for the Democrats. And if we object our solution is the ballot box, not trying to establish Science as superior to elections.
As someone else in this thread put far more succinctly: Scientists are staff, not command.
> Is there a neutral way to handle this? Won't showing either purported boundary result in advancing one side's cause?
You seem to thing this is a hard problem, that there is some sort of thinking required here to sort out which map to use. There isn't. There is only one map to use unless there are active hostilities ongoing, what is the reality on the ground. For example: China claims Taiwan so let us use logic to solve this... does their flag fly there? Do their warships, planes, etc. call there as guests or as rulers? Do the Taiwanese have their own functioning government? Is China in a shooting war with Taiwan? Explain where the 'dispute' is? Do you have to make sure you print a special version of any manuals, etc. to be able to sell products in China? Yes but they should ONLY be distributed inside China.
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> This may be a non-issue for markets like the US where you can only get a phone in conjunction with
> a heavily overpriced contract that by default includes data, it is an issue for other markets where
> plans and phones are separated.
If you are determined enough you can get a smartphone here in the US up on the network without a data plan. I did. No damned way I'm paying more for a couple of GB of data than I'm paying for a DSL line. I'm not that dependent on the net that I can't live without it when outside WiFi range. And I don't use the phone much either. I see my device as a newer version of my old Handspring Visor that can make a few calls or texts when I need to. In other words, a PDA. So I shopped for a plan accordingly. Couple bux a month, not the insanity most folks get in their mobile bills.
> Apple obviously decided that a minimum 4S hardware platform was required
Yes, that is what the ad campaign would lead you to believe. The reality is that all of the work is server side and ANY client would work equally well. You could use a basic no frills cell phone, a landline or whatever to talk to Siri and get voice reponses. Any phone capable of hosting an app could interface with it and receive URLs or other trigger events back with a fairly simple client side application. And there are no technical limitations preventing the client from the iPhone 4S running unmodified on any of the iPhones with the same iOS revision installed. Simply, there is nothing unique to the iPhone 4S that enables Siri. But had they rolled it out as a regular iOS update or an app in the Store there wouldn't have been a 'killer feature' to hype for the new phone to drive the lemmings into the store for an upgrade. That is the scam I refer to.
> I thought it ran on the phone itself.
Nope, and that is the scam. Basically you are calling a service. Thus they could make Siri available on every iProduct with zero effort. That they decided to hold it as an exclusive feature for the 4S to try and create the 'gotta upgrade' stampede is truly lame. Keeping it to iProducts is ok, they ain't giving away a hefty compute farm after all, who do ya think they are after all, Google? But locking access to the service to one submodel of one product line is a terrible idea.
> Amazon has great PR.
Yup. Bad deal on this sucker. Little internal storage and no slot to add more because they want you tightly tied to them forever. So unless you have a Prime account and can use their cloud save your pennies and pay the extra $50 for the B&N tablet or sacrifice a little CPU grunt and go for the Kobo for the same $199.
> The "taint"? I assume WINE and Samba are next.
Wine? Certainly. Nothing in the base application suite depends on Wine being installed. And nothing should. They are friggin Windows apps, Wine lets us run them as a last resort but we certainly wouldn't want them as default apps. They don't fit into the desktop, they look like Windows apps except with random UI glitches.
Samba is only used to interoperate with the Windows world, it isn't a part of the default experience and certainly doesn't need to go on the base install media for a desktop.
And yes, I'll go ahead and throw another turd in the punchbowl. It isn't just Mono/dotNet that doesn't belong, it is Java too. And you will notice that even though Java has been Free (and without the same fears as Mono) for a couple of years there has yet to be a Java app promoted as a default on a major distribution.
This makes perfect sense. Almost nothing depends on mono anymore. Ditch the last holdouts, replace them with alternatives without the taint and move on. Besides, Ubuntu has made it clear they see tablets as THE future and tablets run ARM. So they really can't afford to offer a second class status to ARM and thus anything that isn't portable to it has to go from the default experience.
If they were removing mono from the repository or moving it to non-free or something there would be a story here, but they ain't so there isn't.
No, I can just switch to another desktop. But GNOME2 was the last UI that end users could be plopped down in front of cold. KDE is too wierd. XFCE can be configured to be pretty close to GNOME2 but out of the box it isn't and it still has a lot of sharp edges. The minor desktops are all aimed at people like me.
But by day I'm the admin in a public library and we have been putting the general public on Linux based lab PCs since 1997. The early days were a but rough but for years now a random person can just walk in, sit down and recognize a GNOME2 desktop and instantly get to work. I have no intention to inflict Unity or GNOME Shell on them. When I can't get a modern browser and GNOME2 running together I'm not sure what happens. With luck we either get a fork of GNOME or XFCE grows up a lot by then.
Doesn't matter if Gnome Shell or Unity are pretty or not, doesn't matter if they are 'better', doesn't mater if they are better designs. They are too different from what a typical person is familiar with. They use Windows at work, school, etc. Several years from now, if Windows 8/Metro isn't a Vista scale fiasco, people might be ready to use what the GNOMEs are cooking, right now it is just not an option. And when this is pointed out they stick their fingers in their ears and hum.
> The amazon tablet, as opposed to the amazon readers, is just another tablet.
Nope, the Amazon product is, like all Kindles, totally tied to Amazon. No memory slot because you are supposed to keep everything in Amazon't cloud. No standard Android because you are supposed to depend on Amazon for everything. In other words it is a total loss leader to drive sales of other Amazon services.
Compare to the Kobo for $199 and the B&N for $249 that are actual Android tablets with the things you would expect in one. The amazing thing is Goggle wouldn't allow either of them access to the Market or Android 3.x.
It really is time for someone to ask Google some hard questions as to just what the hell sort of game they are playing. They SAY they only wanted to keep cheap crap out by imposing a minimum standard, to keep 3.x off of phones where it wouldn't work well, etc. But the Kobo is apparently good hardware and B&N certainly isn't a fly by night Chinese vendor, right? But neither could get Android 3.x and being tablets 2.3 seems to be an automatic exclusion from the Marketplace. If the Kobo & B&N had the 3.x and the Marketplace (and thus a high probability of quickly getting 4.0) the fight with Amazon would be over before it began.
> I'm actually one of those baffled new users he's referring to.
Short version, man hier. Longer version google up the linux FHS, it explains what should be where and why things were made the way it is. Personally I'd be open to eliminating /usr since the reason for its existence is not nearly as strong as it once was. But there are still people who do have a need for a tiny root fs and network mounting everything else. And since everyone is already used to it there really needs to be a compelling reason to change it, not just another of Pottering's jihads against everything UNIX/POSIX.
> how about making the filesystem a bit more intuitive, call it "Programs" or "Applications"
For the same reason we call it cp instead of copy, mv instead of rename, etc. We aren't drag and drool mouse users, we type.
I really wish we had insisted the Windows refugees had been properly assimilated into UNIX culture before we gave you guys commit rights on our repos.
> But is it really temporary?
I'd say that is entirely in the hands of the PA. They have been offered pretty much EVERYTHING they publicly profess to desire, see Clinton's effort. They turned it down because they want it all, from the river to the sea. Thought experiment for you to see if you are an honest debater or just a pro terror apologist. Imagine tomorrow Abbas announced his desire for a two state solution (something he publicly denounces btw, and he is the moderate) and to live in peace with Israel. That it is time to end this terrible bloodshed and finally have peace and a future. Now imagine he not only lived through the next twenty four hours but that the people were finally tired of the fighting and rose up in public demonstrations of support so profound that Hamas went to ground. The suicide and mortar fire ceased and it really looked like THIS time they meant it. How long could an Israeli politician hold out against signing a treaty? That is what I mean, it is all up to them, they will have peace the second they decide they have to settle for it instead of the total victory they keep dreaming is coming real soon now. Now explain how I'm totally wrong.
> Either way, it does not annex the land and make it a part of the legal definition of Israel. The legal terms that apply to the west bank
> are the same terms that applied to Japan after its defeat in 1945. Would you say that the occupied Japan was part of the US and
> that its post-war status was an internal matter? If you would, then you have a very peculiar definition of "internal".
Yes, exactly the same. Except for the detail that Japan was administered by the Allied Forces instead of just the U.S. That is why half of Japan uses 60Hz electricity and the other half runs on 50Hz, it's post war reconstruction really was designed by committee. it is pretty much the same, no outside force would have been permitted to interfere with the Allied operations inside Japan until such time as we decided to grant them their independence. A better comparison would be to other Pacific islands we still hold as U.S. Territories. They are considered part of the U.S. in the sense that any outside power would be attacking the U.S. if they messed with them, we freely position military forces there, etc. but they aren't equals within the United States in that they get no votes in our Congress yet we do grant U.S. Citizenship to the inhabitants. But on the other hand they don't pay all of the same taxes as a resident of a State pays. It gets fuzzy in places but nobody would confuse Guam with an independent nation state and the UN would never be daft enough to try seating as a member state until after the U.S. signed off on independence for them.
> But why the mere recognition of Palestine as a separate and distinct entity from Israel (which it defacto is
Except it isn't. Would you like the UN meddling in US internal affairs? What if they 'recognized Puerto Rico as a full member? Not that we wouldn't kick em loose if they ever actually voted for independence but you see the point? The Territories are part of Israel and the UN has been hell bent on this project of erecting a new nation state inside their borders for decades now.
And yes, they are part of Israel. They were ATTACKED and they won that territory fair and square in war from their enemies who had to accept that in the cease fire agreements they all signed onto and in the cases of Egypt and Jordan they have actually signed full peace treaties and ended the war on those borders. If they eventually get a deal both sides would actually live with they, and they alone, have the power to grant the territories independence. Not anyone else. Of course just today the so called 'moderate' terrorist Abbas redeclared his only acceptable borders to be the entirety of Israel so even he doesn't want to see a new nation state created as anything other than a very temporary political gambit.
> it was a cold war era idea and is pretty much worthless now
It is even worse than that. It was a defective idea when it was originally proposed. Do the math. The vast majority of the nation states in existence when it was proposed were unfree tyrannies. The proposal for for 'every' nation state to be admitted into an organization where the General Assembly would operate on a "One Nation, One Vote" basis with a Security Council setup where both of the major hellholes were to have an absolute Veto. Inaction was the best case scenario, any sane examination of the design process has to conclude that a Parliament of Tyrants was the design goal.
We should withdraw from the U.N. and build a more sensible organization with some basic ground rules to only allow in entities who honor a basic minimum standard of Human Rights, at least try to use something we in the West would recognize as a Rule of Law, Representative Government, etc. Leave the unfree hellholes the carcass of the U.N. to play with after they relocate the H.Q. to China or something.
> No, it's not.
Um, Google didn't just toss GNOME/KDE/Qt/Gtk. They tossed the whole thing right down to replacing glibc because it was too bloated. If they just didn't like the LGPL they could have borrowed BSD's libc. It was the bloat.
Android is bloated by the standards of TP3 but it could actually load and run at an acceptable speed on the original Android phone, which is a feat that nothing based on recent the GNU or BSD software stacks could have done. Nokia did heroic things on the Maemo devices trying to get a Gtk and then a Qt based desktop based on the current plumbing (Gtk, gstreamer, esd, dbus, etc) and failed. Just launching the terminal app on an N770 was several seconds of thrashing. The browser was pretty much unusable.
I actually ran Netscape on a 486 with 8MB RAM and an 8bit colormapped X server and it was pretty responsive. Yes we gained truecolor, html5 and all those buzzwords in years since but should we really need a thousand times the computer (RAM, cycles, HDD, everything) to run Firefox on? That is the question we should be asking.
> To interject with my own babble, why does a composited desktop require OpenGL?
Because it is assumed everyone these days possesses a GPU capable of doing the job. Thus it is a choice of doing the work on the main CPU or handing it off to an otherwise idle processor that is optimized to do the work. Doing it on the GPU is actually the more power efficient way and with so many machines running on battery power that matters as much as optimizing for bytes or CPU cycles.
Ah, you too ran OS9 on a CoCo3. I ran a BBS on mine with a Disto Super Controller II wired up to a surplus 10MB Miniscribe + Adaptec MFM to SCSI adaptor. I'd make fun of the DOS Sysops who were proud of the fact they could run Desqview and try to use their PC while running a BBS. You could always tell though, because their system would crawl, hesitating for seconds on menu selections, etc, while doing so, yet mine was fully usable by a caller while I used the console. They had studly 386 machines with megabytes of RAM while I had a 1.8Mhz CPU and 512KB. The OS makes a big difference. And it still does.
No we don't want to go back there, low resolution graphics with a couple of colors is lame. Unicode is better than ASCII for most of the world's population, etc. But we can learn some lessons from the past. Go ahead and write a quick utility that people will use at most once a month in Python. Don't write a tool tray app that runs 24/7 in Python.
And that attitude is why we lost the phone and tablet markets. There was a time when Linux was perfect for older systems... the sort of specs that also happen to match up with new small platforms. But we got that 'screw em, let them buy a real computer' attitude and now /bin/touch on my Fedora 15 laptop is 60856 bytes. The little gadget in my XFCE tray to allow me to control the backlight is currently reporting 6200K in resident set. XFCE is supposed to be the 'lighter' alternative to the GNOME freak show. Ever wonder why Google passed all the userland by and made their own for Android? Well now you know and your attitude is what caused it.
Nokia was stupid enough to believe they could build small devices by reusing parts of the Linux desktop, they failed. Good grief, look how much bloat is in little things like esd or pulseaudio. Megabytes of resident set sitting around in case something wants to make a sound? In hardware that had as little as 64MB Ram (Nokia N770 tablet) that sort of resource misuse killed them.
There was a time when System V UNIX would run on machines with a MB or two of RAM, with terminals hanging off serial ports and a couple tens of megabytes of hard drive could run a retail operation.
Yes there is something to be said for trading developer time for hardware. The time to do that is vertical apps and other applications where the number of deployed systems is small compared to the developer hours available. In a mass deployed application the developers should be required to care a little more about what they are asking millions of users to throw away to the great God of the upgrade treadmill.
In other words, since we are about to have huge waiting lists for routine tests, lets just declare that is a feature instead of a bug.
Just more of the stuff we find out after passing Obamacare I guess. And notice how I will be flamed for calling it that, which says it all. If this turd were actually popular I'd be called a racist if I DIDN'T give President Obama proper credit for his signature achievement.
No, I mean exactly what I wrote. I have never encountered a Thinkpad branded product (IBM and Lenovo periods) that I couldn't get up to a 90% working level. That covers about a dozen examples dating back to the 1990s. WinModems used to be the hardest part to get working, even with the payware driver. The video used to be a lot more bother than it is now, the closed driver might make GLXGears run really fast but often broke power management, broke the text console, that sort of thing. I remember having to twiddle ALSA on a few. And the fun fun fun of a Thinkpad 570s losing its fricking mind if you ever tried looking for sensors with lm-sensors or trying to get one to reboot. (Hint: you can't reboot one, cold shutdown and reboot is the only way.) Power management used to be lot less reliable and require a lot more google.
> For instance, why does the standard terminal in Ubuntu by default make you press Shift-Control-C and -V for Copy/Paste instead of just Control-C?
Oh. My. God. What a tool. If I were using a terminal and CTRL-C ever pasted instead of sending ^C to the running app I'd ditch the mofo in milliseconds. Or do you even know how much more important ^C is when actually using a UNIX shell? I wouldn't even look for a way to change the defaults because I'd KNOW a retard had taken over design on that desktop environment and want the hell out of there before any of their stupid got on me. When using a terminal, everyone knows you drag button one to copy and press button two to paste. It even works on a text only console if everything (i.e. gpm) was setup correctly by your distro. That is almost certainly how God Himself does it on His workstation and only a sick depraved mind would consider doing it any other way.
I pray you are only trolling but experience makes me suspect you Mac people really are that defective.
> And in Unity, why do windows maximize when they're brought to the top of the screen? It's unbelievably annoying.
Preach it! Of course the reason for Unity is mostly Apple's fault. Everyone is chasing their taillights without stopping to think through whether iProduct UI conventions even make sense on a desktop. Microsoft is doing it too so all hope for sanity is lost for the next couple of years. Time to retreat to the small desktops who care about being useful to real existing people instead of wanting "The Year of Linux on the Desktop." I'm sorta happy with XFCE for now.
> Is this really your current experience?
Yup, take the two examples I noted. The Thinkpad 200s I'm typing this on was installed with Fedora 12. During it's errata stream the kernel broke undocking. So I had to roll back and hold.... all the way through the F13 and F14 cycles I got to stay midway in F12 and hope a remote exploit didn't force me to upgrade anyway and just shutdown and reboot instead of undocking. The bugzilla is now closed since things started working with F15. So I could chose stay with a totally unsupported OS or GNOME3. I'd much preferred F14 so now I run XFCE on F15.
The Boss's Thinkpad can't update Ubuntu anymore unless great care is taken to ensiure Xorg doesn't update lest the second DVI port stop working and of course a distro update is out of the question because of the GNOME problem, so she will be stuck on 11.04 until that situation improves.
I have a machine at home with a PATA RAID card that hasn't worked with new kernels for years. RHEL4/(clone of) is rock solid though. Stuff doesn't officially go depracted very often while examples are still in the wild, but most stuff will eventually stop working unless a lot of people use it or a key kernel dev uses it.
Ubuntu has a list of Certified Hardware for ya. But I have yet to get a Thinkpad at least 90% running. I don't have the fingerprint reader on my X200s working with Fedora but everything else works, including the dock. The boss's Thinkpad T520 runs Ubuntu and has everything working except audio through the dock, but dual DVI displays on the dock do work.
Of course once you get a laptop working expect updates to constantly break things until you just get tired of rolling back failed updates and just stop, only taking critical security updates you can't live without.
It is worse with Linux because almost no OEMs are involved in keeping it working, most aren't even involved in initially getting it going so folks have to guess. But raise your hand if you haven't had to roll back a driver or update on that 'other' popular OS. Last week I had to roll back a mouse driver on a Dell laptop to get the pointer working.
> write hyperbole much? Have you ever even been to China? Since the 1970's?
Care to guess how many Chinese citizens are rotting in forced labor camps, prisons or shallow graves at this exact moment? Try publicly protesting the regime and they will do exactly the same thing to you today as Mao would have. The ChiComs embraced some aspects of a market economy when reality slapped them in the face but they are still ChiComs. A fascist doesn't change until you bury him. See Putin, Vladimir.
I used GW because it illustrates so many of the problems well. The trick is for science to fully inform the political process and not become politics wearing the mask of and usurping the good name and reputation of science.
That means #3 should stay in the realm of science. Only after science fully informs the political actors of ALL of their options and properly accounts for their costs (accounting is also a hard science. or should be.... Enron/Worldcom/CBO/OMB accounting isn't accounting it is criminal.) can the politicians make informed choices. And very well might make a choice that isn't the mathematically optimal one since every variable can't be nailed down perfectly.
I objected to the "funding solar research or healthcare for the poor" because that is an example of what science can't answer. But it can answer (or at least give a best educated estimate) of whether a billion dollars invested in solar will payoff in pure economic terms, how much CO2 it can be estimated to avoid emitting in a given time frame,etc. It can offer an estimate of whether a billion dollars of our federal health budget spent on AIDS research is likely to save more lives than the same money spent on a line of research into heart disease or stem cell research. And again, the politicians are within their rights to sometimes overrule the pure math, and award the money to AIDS research because the gay lobby is a core voting block for the Democrats. And if we object our solution is the ballot box, not trying to establish Science as superior to elections.
As someone else in this thread put far more succinctly: Scientists are staff, not command.
> Is there a neutral way to handle this? Won't showing either purported boundary result in advancing one side's cause?
You seem to thing this is a hard problem, that there is some sort of thinking required here to sort out which map to use. There isn't. There is only one map to use unless there are active hostilities ongoing, what is the reality on the ground. For example: China claims Taiwan so let us use logic to solve this... does their flag fly there? Do their warships, planes, etc. call there as guests or as rulers? Do the Taiwanese have their own functioning government? Is China in a shooting war with Taiwan? Explain where the 'dispute' is? Do you have to make sure you print a special version of any manuals, etc. to be able to sell products in China? Yes but they should ONLY be distributed inside China.