* They've made decent-quality products in the past * They currently own SUSE, which is a very nice Linux distribution, and they've been doing interesting things with it since taking over. Meanwhile they've actively been doing good things for the open source community. So whoever's side they were on before, they're certainly on our side now.
That wouldn't really work. Stealing from OSS won't dilute the copyright; legally you can't dilute copyright. What WILL happen is that OSS will gain strength because they will have successful examples and experience under their belt with defending copylefted copyrights from theft.
I think if we're going to have a conspiracy theory, a slightly more realistic-- and more fun!-- one would be that a series of dedicated but unskilled open source programmers formed a professional suicide pact a couple years ago when the SCO case started to break off ties with one another. The pactmembers were to scatter into industry and independently begin projects which transparently steal open source code and put them into propeitary products, in hopes that these projects would be slapped down by the open source community and that the press would report on it. Once their projects were slapped down this would create positive press for the open source community and counter SCO's lie that OSS regularly steals from propreitary software and the nature of OSS makes this likely by demonstrating that it is, in fact, the other way around.
This was all, of course, orchestrated by the reanimated corpse of open-source sympathetic Nicola Tesla.
Microsoft will have to fight hard to catch up to this.
The thing about Microsoft is they don't care whether they fail, or how much money they lose, or whether they ever recoup the money lost. All they care about is whether their competitors die.
What I am trying to say is: Microsoft can fight hard and long if they need to to end the perceived threat TiVo creates. Just like with the XBox and MSIE and Windows CE, they're going to keep trying at this TiVo killer, over and over, sinking however many millions or billions are necessary, until they manage to hit something actually capable of killing TiVo. This particular product may not be a threat to TiVo. The next version of it might, or the one after. Microsoft will keep trying until they manage to do something that works. Even this is, after all, their second or third attempt at a PVR, isn't it?
This is the problem with being Microsoft's enemy. You only have to lose once and you're out of the game forever. Microsoft can lose as many times as it wants and not be hurt one bit.
The lawyers will make plenty of money... but the guy whose XBOX broke will be lucky if he gets a coupon for some games that still won't work in his defective XBOX.
Sometimes class actions of this particular type the remediation is just that the machine gets fixed. I had an Aiwa stereo of one specific model that had a defect where the CD drive would consistently break after a couple of years. There was a class action, and the settlement was that everyone who bought this particular model got a coupon to go get the CD drive repaired for free. I found this entirely satisfactory.
A serious problem is hidden within this one line, though. What if you are, as the Linux kernel is, not a discrete organization but a large and multifarious community effort? "Then don't use it" is a lot harder to enforce in such a situation. Naming and comments are one thing. But if someone misuses constructors, static object allocation or exceptions in a kernel patch, that requires close inspection to detect and actual recoding to fix if people do not strictly keep to the code standards. I do not know, but I would suspect that having to police all this stuff might make the life of the central kernel maintainers, who are used to C, a lot more difficult than if they just said "C only". That might leave these neat C++ extensions forever limited to be a fork.
It is somehting that is a rather alien concept in the west these days.
Umm... so I don't know if you've been paying attention to America lately... but here at least, nationalism has been getting more and more ubiquitous for the last 20 years or so and in the last four has reached a fever pitch.
What I would call rare in America at this point is patriotism, but that's something altogether different and I don't think that's what you're talking about.
Then again I don't think nationalism has too much to do with the XBox's failure in Japan either. I would say that's more due to the game library being heavily biased toward genres that aren't often popular in Japan, the inexplicable decision to release many of the XBox's best titles in Japan either late or not at all, marketing and public relations actions (for example the scratched dvds incident) that can be described as nothing less than incompetent, and a perception among Japanese consumers that Microsoft's XBox division does not care about them.
At some point perhaps Japanese nationalism will start to be a problem for the XBox, but at the moment there are so many other reasons why the XBox is a disaster in Japan that nationalism doesn't even really get the chance to register.
Congress lacks any authority over state-level elections.
However, it would appear they have some sort of authority over federal elections-- senators, house reps, president. The 2002 Help America Vote Act placed a range of rules and restrictions on how a state may conduct its federal elections. None of these took direct effect, and all of these took the form of requiring the states to each independently pass some sort of legislation implementing the rules HAVA dictates. In many states this local legislation applies only to elections for federal offices, saying for example that you may cast a provisional ballot for president but not governor. This appears to satisfy HAVA.
I do not know on exactly what constitutional basis HAVA exists.
At the hearing, one of SCO's lawyers, another young thing from Boies, Schiller & Flexner whose footwork was smooth enough to impress even Groklaw's IBM-dazzled observers,
Wow, wait, what? Is this meant to be taken as objective?
mentioned the little matter of SCO's days-old Third Amended Complaint, which, alas, is under seal reportedly because it's based on some e-mail that turned up during discovery that IBM now claims is privileged though there's supposedly no hint of attorney-client communication about it.
Notice that SCO's side in this case seems to have absolutely zero respect for the judge and his rulings? The judge rules that IBM doesn't have to produce something; this becomes "IBM won't produce this thing". The judge rules that something SCO did in the courtroom violates confidentiality and orders it sealed; this becomes some kind of who-me where-on-earth-did-this-come-from thing which is somehow implied to be IBM's fault. Don't you think, maybe, the judge so consistently failing to take SCO's side isn't just some kind of head-slapping, inexplicable coincidence, but perhaps indicates some sort of problem on the part of SCO's lawyers?
Has been entirely and quickly forthcoming with millions and millions of lines of code that SCO has basically been demanding as part of a fishing expedition.
One single piece of code out of these mountains IBM claims has gone missing.
Possible explanations from this:
1. IBM is telling the truth. 2. This is the one single piece of infringing code in all of Dynix or whatever which is infringing, and so they are hiding it.
Reasons for believing number one to be true: Well, it's extremely plausible. Given how much that IBM has produced the idea one single document among all of this has been legitimately lost within IBM is fairly believable.
Reasons for believing number two to be true: Well, nothing. But it's possible.
We certainly
SCO's strategy, for lack of a case until this point, has been to demand increasingly larger mountains of discovery until they hit something that is unreasonable. Once something proves to be unreasonable, they go to the press yelling "What does IBM have to hide???". SCO's media shills, working in a vacuum as they do, have been able to do this as often as they like despite the fact that generally, the reason IBM has not provided these things is that the judge ruled they did not have to. Meanwhile, it is probably important to keep in mind SCO has consistently refused to comply with even the most basic of discovery demands, even sometimes when ordered by the judge.
Now they appear, within this strategy, to have struck gold. They have located something which IBM is not producing, but yet the judge actually agrees IBM should produce-- and which IBM claims it is unable to produce. However, still, they have produced no evidence that this indicates wrongdoing of, well, any sort. There's no way you could make this appear so much as suspicious except by pointing to, well, the fact IBM's been so entirely forthcoming up until now. Once you do that it is possible to make it appear suspicious, yet, but not possible to actually make anything of it in court; from a court's perspective this detail is quite small. So it appears this is no victory for anyone except SCO's disconnected-from-reality PR shills.
You'd all be having a fit if this happened on Linux.
Not at all. My Linux box has updatedb automatically running periodically as root already. *
Of course, updatedb only checks filenames. But if updatedb / locate could be used to index and search file contents in addition to file names? Hell no I wouldn't be throwing a fit! That would be awesome!
Meanwhle, my Macintosh has a feature that does exactly this already, and has for like five years-- and I do believe it's a system service. But I've turned off at the moment because the last time I used it it had a tendency to do stupid things like assume i'm going to be wanting to do full text searches of binary files, like mp3s, and generates huge, slowly-updating indexes.
* (Or at least I think it is. Gentoo doesn't seem to always do what I expect.)
Given what the java API does
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The API designers have special obligations that other programmers don't. The program exiting may be something that developers would consider "predictable", but the end users would NOT.
"Monopoly" doesn't just mean a company is really big. It also, despite what Microsoft would like to convince you of, doesn't just mean the company has no competitors. It has to do with whether the company has the capacity to wield their market power as a weapon to quash or prevent competition, and the company's ability to retain customers against those customers' will and best interest. In short it isn't about the company's size in a market, it's about a company's level of control over a market.
Google is large and in search it does not have many or healthy competitors. But it would be a stretch to call it a monopoly at this point, and it is pretty clear that if Google possesses monopoly power of some sort they aren't attempting to utilize it at the moment.
A Google representative said the protocol flagged by Smith does not hint at a pending Google IM product; rather, it is merely a component used to capture IM data from AOL Instant Messenger and make it searchable on the desktop.
Everything Google has done so far has been things where the level of consumer lock-in has been relatively low. Search and news services, all that it takes to switch products is to go to a different URL. Email requires a bit more work to change but people do change their email address from time to time. Googlebar and the hard drive search, well, all that takes is installing a little program.
IM though is drastically different because you don't use IM to communicate, you use IM to communicate with people you already know. Does anyone really think AIM is the best IM client? I doubt it, but AIM is what is popular because AIM lets you talk to the people you already know. The degree of lock-in for IM is immense. So launching a new IM client wouldn't seem to make a whole lot of sense. People have been making IM clients for years and years now and "alternative" IM clients have never generally seemed to get anywhere unless, like, Trillian, they can support a lot of different IM networks in one app; doing this is a lot of thankless work for not much payback. Unless you're Microsoft and you have to own everything, exactly what does "wow, people are using an IM app with my logo on it instead of an IM app with those other people's logo on it" gain you?
Maybe it would make sense if gmail added some YG-like or IM-like (or both) features between people with gmail accounts. Maybe it would make sense if gmail added some kind of small proxy so that people logged in to gmail could send and receive messages from AIM. But I think some of these googlewatchers just periodically attribute every possible software product under the sun to being part of Google's plans. So far we've had Google planning to make an operating system, a browser, and I've even heard the IM client rumor before. So far Google's new products have consistently been a bit more subtle and surprising than that.
No, it's different. MSNBC has at least a certain degree of autonomy from the parent company in order to maintain their journalistic integrity. This would be a little bit more like the web page for Microsoft's public relations department doing a story on Microsoft.
Meanwhile so far Darl's public statements have done nothing but hurt him in the actual courtroom. Recent IBM filings have used public statements made by SCO against them. I imagine in the coming months prosco.net postings will show up in legal filings against SCO as well.
That said, once this site goes up someone should start keeping a local mirror of it to make sure that if prosco says something that turns out to be embarrassing later, they can't just remove it.
So when exactly is the next big event in the continuing disintegration of SCO's legal cases? Isn't a major ruling in the IBM case going to be handed down soon concerning IBM's motion to dismiss or whatever?
But considering Microsoft is doing this as part of a court order, not out of the goodness of their hearts or anything, "it could be worse" is not good enough.
As for the "don't tax, don't spend," THAT'S THE WHOLE POINT! When people have the cash in their pocket and it doesn't go to the IRS, then THEY have economic control. What sane person doesn't want that?
Supporters of the welfare system, supporters of state-sponsored education, supporters of the freeway system, people who believe the U.S. military does some degree of good in the world, people who believe U.S. foreign aid does some degree of good in the world, and some other people. I could probably go on if you'd like.
There is, in fact, a middle ground between anarchocapitalist libertarianism and "insane" "statist"s, as you put it, and most of America is in this middle ground. The idea that the government performing functions rather than the public sector is inherently bad all the time is something which perhaps is sound as political theory, but it is not something which is a plurality political viewpoint within the united states.
The ideoloigical left is not as you think. In 2000 their issues were environmentalism and anti-globalism. In 2004 their issues are anti-war and anti-globalism, both of which put them into the ABB camp, but also makes them mistakenly support Kerry instead when he is no better, and most of them haven't figured that out yet. Badnaik is what they want on both counts, and he wants to make sure the sovereignty of the US is not compromised militarily nor economically. Neither Bush not Kerry can truthfully make that claim. But since they are both liars I expect them to.
No, having followed the ideological left very closely for the last four years I can tell you that this is definitely not the case. There has been a certain degree of issues shift within the ideological left but on all of the ideological left's issues except personal liberty there is definitely a consensus that Kerry is better than Bush, if only slightly. The only question within this group is whether Kerry is better enough on these issues to justify supporting him. This is a question that has been debated fiercely for about the last six months straight. If you believe that it just hasn't occurred to the far left that Kerry might be a flawed candidate and Badnarik is going to wake them up to this, you are deeply mistaken. No one in the ideological left is viewing Kerry through rose-colored glasses. At best (best for Kerry, I mean, of course) they are realistically facing the idea that either Kerry or Bush is going to win this election and they can help either one or the other.
Again, in 2000 the ideological left was faced with a democratic candidate who from their viewpoint could not be differentiated from the republican candidate, and so they abandoned in great numbers. The entire focus of the 2000 Green Party Nader campaign was on pointing out that the two parties were too close and that Gore was no better than Bush, and the left needed to split off and vote third party in order to remind the democrats not to ignore their base. This was a line the ideological left bought at the time. Since then Bush has proven no, he is in fact worse than Gore would have been, and the Democratic party did not as hoped freak out and start recognizing its base-- in fact if anything it's shifted further to the right, seemingly mistaking losses caused by a disillusioned base for losses caused by a national trend toward conservatism. Pretty much all of the people who supported the Greens in 2000-- which is pretty much all potential far-left voters in 2004-- recognize this has happened, and they are not interested in repeating 2000 again this year. The Greens could very certainly make a serious contention as a third party candidate this year if they desired. They are not trying. There is a reason for this.
Meanwhile, personal liberty, the war in Iraq, and reform of the electoral system are virtually the only areas in which the ideological left agrees with Badnarik. The ideological left has been loudest about the wars against Iraq and personal freedom in the last four years,
Re:Only Microsoft
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Well, that is an API issue, not a language issue.
If you wish to address it as an issue with the Java API, the problem there is that it ignores the question of: if exceptions could be just ignored, what other changes to the Java API would be necessary in order to accommodate this? The API designers could no longer assume exceptions thrown by API methods would be caught. This would certainly have a serious impact on how the APIs are constructed and interfaced with.
If a person is incapable of coping with the unplanned, why should they be elected President of the United States?
The point I was trying to make was not whether the candidates would be able to cope with the unplanned, the point was whether the debate schedule would be able to cope with the unplanned. We would effectively wind up with three debates focusing on the comparative foreign policy of Bush and Kerry, and one debate focusing on domestic and economic policy between Bush, Kerry and Badnarik. This would cause the entire nature of the domestic policy debate to be highly different from the nature of the other two debates.
If he is unable adequately express himself to the American people without such a scripted environment, why should we believe he can do better with Congress or other heads of state?
It is not so much a matter of whether or not the environment would be scripted but a matter of his ability to formulate his responses within the debate so as to clearly outline his differences with the Bush administration within the debate's time constraints. Introducing Badnarik into the debate increases the scope of the debate, naturally making that one message somewhat more difficult to focus on. If nothing else, he would not have as much time to spend on it. I would argue that how clearly Kerry is able to outline to the public the differences between his and Bush's economic policy is fairly important to the outcome of the election.
Such a response would be entirely predicated on Badnarik's ability to express himself coherently to the American people in a way that means something to them.
This is hardly a certainty. especially on the subject of economics, where Bush, Kerry and Badnarik could step forward and say three entirely contradictory things and most Americans would lack the capacity to determine which one is accurate.
What people would have the capacity to understand, though, is that Badnarik's budget policy would be basically based on "don't spend money". This would be unlikely to impress terribly many people, since this would be in a context where either major-party candidate would be free to point out that not spending money would result in the ending of insert governmental program tv viewer approves of here. If Badnarik got across anything at all in this part of such a debate, most likely the only effect would be to put into relief that Kerry is pushing "tax and spend", Bush is spending "spend, but don't tax", and Badnarik is pushing "don't tax or spend". Ideological fiscal conservatives would certainly be impressed by such a thing, but this is a really quite small portion of the U.S. populace. Most of the U.S. thinks the government wastes money, but they do think at the government should be providing services; except for conservatives, and conservatives mostly don't really care where the federal government's money goes, they just don't want to pay taxes. Kerry's entire goal in the economic portion of the final debate will likely be to try to convince America that fiscal responsibility is a good thing, and he's facing an uphill battle at that even without having to sell the additional idea that shrinking the scope of government is a good thing.
As for the ideological left, it is already quite clearly aware of Kerry's shortcomings as a candidate in the personal rights area, and it doesn't care. The ideological left split off four years ago because they weren't being represented, and the direct result was Bush's election. I do not think they will be trying this again in this particular election. Either way though Badnarik is not going to tell them anything they aren't already fully aware of, and it's highly unlikely he's going to convince them in any serious numbers to change their votes.
Badnarik would certainly if allowed into the debate raise quite a few very important issues and raise awareness for the libertarian party. He might even manage to leave some people walking away going "hmm, that guy made a lot of sense", maybe. However there is no reason to believe he would have any impact on the question the debate is currently meant to resolve-- which is, who is going to win the election, George W. Bush or John Kerry?
A single television appearance a month before the election is not going to conceivably bring to victory a candidate with no serious previous governmental experience and whom most voters have never heard of. Whatever positive effects would result from Badnarik appearing in a presidential debate would be, directly effecting the outcome of the election would not be one of them.
However, it does seem quite plausible Badnarik could indirectly effect things by disrupting the final debate enough to prevent the debate from having some impact on the american populace it might have had otherwise-- which was the point I was originally trying to make.
Slashdot Mirror
* They've made decent-quality products in the past
* They currently own SUSE, which is a very nice Linux distribution, and they've been doing interesting things with it since taking over. Meanwhile they've actively been doing good things for the open source community. So whoever's side they were on before, they're certainly on our side now.
That wouldn't really work. Stealing from OSS won't dilute the copyright; legally you can't dilute copyright. What WILL happen is that OSS will gain strength because they will have successful examples and experience under their belt with defending copylefted copyrights from theft.
I think if we're going to have a conspiracy theory, a slightly more realistic-- and more fun!-- one would be that a series of dedicated but unskilled open source programmers formed a professional suicide pact a couple years ago when the SCO case started to break off ties with one another. The pactmembers were to scatter into industry and independently begin projects which transparently steal open source code and put them into propeitary products, in hopes that these projects would be slapped down by the open source community and that the press would report on it. Once their projects were slapped down this would create positive press for the open source community and counter SCO's lie that OSS regularly steals from propreitary software and the nature of OSS makes this likely by demonstrating that it is, in fact, the other way around.
This was all, of course, orchestrated by the reanimated corpse of open-source sympathetic Nicola Tesla.
Microsoft will have to fight hard to catch up to this.
The thing about Microsoft is they don't care whether they fail, or how much money they lose, or whether they ever recoup the money lost. All they care about is whether their competitors die.
What I am trying to say is: Microsoft can fight hard and long if they need to to end the perceived threat TiVo creates. Just like with the XBox and MSIE and Windows CE, they're going to keep trying at this TiVo killer, over and over, sinking however many millions or billions are necessary, until they manage to hit something actually capable of killing TiVo. This particular product may not be a threat to TiVo. The next version of it might, or the one after. Microsoft will keep trying until they manage to do something that works. Even this is, after all, their second or third attempt at a PVR, isn't it?
This is the problem with being Microsoft's enemy. You only have to lose once and you're out of the game forever. Microsoft can lose as many times as it wants and not be hurt one bit.
The lawyers will make plenty of money... but the guy whose XBOX broke will be lucky if he gets a coupon for some games that still won't work in his defective XBOX.
Sometimes class actions of this particular type the remediation is just that the machine gets fixed. I had an Aiwa stereo of one specific model that had a defect where the CD drive would consistently break after a couple of years. There was a class action, and the settlement was that everyone who bought this particular model got a coupon to go get the CD drive repaired for free. I found this entirely satisfactory.
But why isn't anyone suing Sony for the same thing?
They did.
Make it a standard code practice
A serious problem is hidden within this one line, though. What if you are, as the Linux kernel is, not a discrete organization but a large and multifarious community effort? "Then don't use it" is a lot harder to enforce in such a situation. Naming and comments are one thing. But if someone misuses constructors, static object allocation or exceptions in a kernel patch, that requires close inspection to detect and actual recoding to fix if people do not strictly keep to the code standards. I do not know, but I would suspect that having to police all this stuff might make the life of the central kernel maintainers, who are used to C, a lot more difficult than if they just said "C only". That might leave these neat C++ extensions forever limited to be a fork.
Show me one case where any freedom of speech, press, or religion was denied in the U.S.
The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798.
Perhaps you could have phrased your question better?
It is somehting that is a rather alien concept in the west these days.
Umm... so I don't know if you've been paying attention to America lately... but here at least, nationalism has been getting more and more ubiquitous for the last 20 years or so and in the last four has reached a fever pitch.
What I would call rare in America at this point is patriotism, but that's something altogether different and I don't think that's what you're talking about.
Then again I don't think nationalism has too much to do with the XBox's failure in Japan either. I would say that's more due to the game library being heavily biased toward genres that aren't often popular in Japan, the inexplicable decision to release many of the XBox's best titles in Japan either late or not at all, marketing and public relations actions (for example the scratched dvds incident) that can be described as nothing less than incompetent, and a perception among Japanese consumers that Microsoft's XBox division does not care about them.
At some point perhaps Japanese nationalism will start to be a problem for the XBox, but at the moment there are so many other reasons why the XBox is a disaster in Japan that nationalism doesn't even really get the chance to register.
Congress lacks any authority over state-level elections.
However, it would appear they have some sort of authority over federal elections-- senators, house reps, president. The 2002 Help America Vote Act placed a range of rules and restrictions on how a state may conduct its federal elections. None of these took direct effect, and all of these took the form of requiring the states to each independently pass some sort of legislation implementing the rules HAVA dictates. In many states this local legislation applies only to elections for federal offices, saying for example that you may cast a provisional ballot for president but not governor. This appears to satisfy HAVA.
I do not know on exactly what constitutional basis HAVA exists.
At the hearing, one of SCO's lawyers, another young thing from Boies, Schiller & Flexner whose footwork was smooth enough to impress even Groklaw's IBM-dazzled observers,
Wow, wait, what? Is this meant to be taken as objective?
mentioned the little matter of SCO's days-old Third Amended Complaint, which, alas, is under seal reportedly because it's based on some e-mail that turned up during discovery that IBM now claims is privileged though there's supposedly no hint of attorney-client communication about it.
Notice that SCO's side in this case seems to have absolutely zero respect for the judge and his rulings? The judge rules that IBM doesn't have to produce something; this becomes "IBM won't produce this thing". The judge rules that something SCO did in the courtroom violates confidentiality and orders it sealed; this becomes some kind of who-me where-on-earth-did-this-come-from thing which is somehow implied to be IBM's fault. Don't you think, maybe, the judge so consistently failing to take SCO's side isn't just some kind of head-slapping, inexplicable coincidence, but perhaps indicates some sort of problem on the part of SCO's lawyers?
Has been entirely and quickly forthcoming with millions and millions of lines of code that SCO has basically been demanding as part of a fishing expedition.
One single piece of code out of these mountains IBM claims has gone missing.
Possible explanations from this:
1. IBM is telling the truth.
2. This is the one single piece of infringing code in all of Dynix or whatever which is infringing, and so they are hiding it.
Reasons for believing number one to be true: Well, it's extremely plausible. Given how much that IBM has produced the idea one single document among all of this has been legitimately lost within IBM is fairly believable.
Reasons for believing number two to be true: Well, nothing. But it's possible.
We certainly
SCO's strategy, for lack of a case until this point, has been to demand increasingly larger mountains of discovery until they hit something that is unreasonable. Once something proves to be unreasonable, they go to the press yelling "What does IBM have to hide???". SCO's media shills, working in a vacuum as they do, have been able to do this as often as they like despite the fact that generally, the reason IBM has not provided these things is that the judge ruled they did not have to. Meanwhile, it is probably important to keep in mind SCO has consistently refused to comply with even the most basic of discovery demands, even sometimes when ordered by the judge.
Now they appear, within this strategy, to have struck gold. They have located something which IBM is not producing, but yet the judge actually agrees IBM should produce-- and which IBM claims it is unable to produce. However, still, they have produced no evidence that this indicates wrongdoing of, well, any sort. There's no way you could make this appear so much as suspicious except by pointing to, well, the fact IBM's been so entirely forthcoming up until now. Once you do that it is possible to make it appear suspicious, yet, but not possible to actually make anything of it in court; from a court's perspective this detail is quite small. So it appears this is no victory for anyone except SCO's disconnected-from-reality PR shills.
You'd all be having a fit if this happened on Linux.
Not at all. My Linux box has updatedb automatically running periodically as root already. *
Of course, updatedb only checks filenames. But if updatedb / locate could be used to index and search file contents in addition to file names? Hell no I wouldn't be throwing a fit! That would be awesome!
Meanwhle, my Macintosh has a feature that does exactly this already, and has for like five years-- and I do believe it's a system service. But I've turned off at the moment because the last time I used it it had a tendency to do stupid things like assume i'm going to be wanting to do full text searches of binary files, like mp3s, and generates huge, slowly-updating indexes.
* (Or at least I think it is. Gentoo doesn't seem to always do what I expect.)
The API designers have special obligations that other programmers don't. The program exiting may be something that developers would consider "predictable", but the end users would NOT.
"Monopoly" doesn't just mean a company is really big. It also, despite what Microsoft would like to convince you of, doesn't just mean the company has no competitors. It has to do with whether the company has the capacity to wield their market power as a weapon to quash or prevent competition, and the company's ability to retain customers against those customers' will and best interest. In short it isn't about the company's size in a market, it's about a company's level of control over a market.
Google is large and in search it does not have many or healthy competitors. But it would be a stretch to call it a monopoly at this point, and it is pretty clear that if Google possesses monopoly power of some sort they aren't attempting to utilize it at the moment.
And saw this part at the end:
A Google representative said the protocol flagged by Smith does not hint at a pending Google IM product; rather, it is merely a component used to capture IM data from AOL Instant Messenger and make it searchable on the desktop.
Everything Google has done so far has been things where the level of consumer lock-in has been relatively low. Search and news services, all that it takes to switch products is to go to a different URL. Email requires a bit more work to change but people do change their email address from time to time. Googlebar and the hard drive search, well, all that takes is installing a little program.
IM though is drastically different because you don't use IM to communicate, you use IM to communicate with people you already know. Does anyone really think AIM is the best IM client? I doubt it, but AIM is what is popular because AIM lets you talk to the people you already know. The degree of lock-in for IM is immense. So launching a new IM client wouldn't seem to make a whole lot of sense. People have been making IM clients for years and years now and "alternative" IM clients have never generally seemed to get anywhere unless, like, Trillian, they can support a lot of different IM networks in one app; doing this is a lot of thankless work for not much payback. Unless you're Microsoft and you have to own everything, exactly what does "wow, people are using an IM app with my logo on it instead of an IM app with those other people's logo on it" gain you?
Maybe it would make sense if gmail added some YG-like or IM-like (or both) features between people with gmail accounts. Maybe it would make sense if gmail added some kind of small proxy so that people logged in to gmail could send and receive messages from AIM. But I think some of these googlewatchers just periodically attribute every possible software product under the sun to being part of Google's plans. So far we've had Google planning to make an operating system, a browser, and I've even heard the IM client rumor before. So far Google's new products have consistently been a bit more subtle and surprising than that.
No, it's different. MSNBC has at least a certain degree of autonomy from the parent company in order to maintain their journalistic integrity. This would be a little bit more like the web page for Microsoft's public relations department doing a story on Microsoft.
Meanwhile so far Darl's public statements have done nothing but hurt him in the actual courtroom. Recent IBM filings have used public statements made by SCO against them. I imagine in the coming months prosco.net postings will show up in legal filings against SCO as well.
That said, once this site goes up someone should start keeping a local mirror of it to make sure that if prosco says something that turns out to be embarrassing later, they can't just remove it.
There's enough potential victims to go around.
So when exactly is the next big event in the continuing disintegration of SCO's legal cases? Isn't a major ruling in the IBM case going to be handed down soon concerning IBM's motion to dismiss or whatever?
But considering Microsoft is doing this as part of a court order, not out of the goodness of their hearts or anything, "it could be worse" is not good enough.
As for the "don't tax, don't spend," THAT'S THE WHOLE POINT! When people have the cash in their pocket and it doesn't go to the IRS, then THEY have economic control. What sane person doesn't want that?
Supporters of the welfare system, supporters of state-sponsored education, supporters of the freeway system, people who believe the U.S. military does some degree of good in the world, people who believe U.S. foreign aid does some degree of good in the world, and some other people. I could probably go on if you'd like.
There is, in fact, a middle ground between anarchocapitalist libertarianism and "insane" "statist"s, as you put it, and most of America is in this middle ground. The idea that the government performing functions rather than the public sector is inherently bad all the time is something which perhaps is sound as political theory, but it is not something which is a plurality political viewpoint within the united states.
The ideoloigical left is not as you think. In 2000 their issues were environmentalism and anti-globalism. In 2004 their issues are anti-war and anti-globalism, both of which put them into the ABB camp, but also makes them mistakenly support Kerry instead when he is no better, and most of them haven't figured that out yet. Badnaik is what they want on both counts, and he wants to make sure the sovereignty of the US is not compromised militarily nor economically. Neither Bush not Kerry can truthfully make that claim. But since they are both liars I expect them to.
No, having followed the ideological left very closely for the last four years I can tell you that this is definitely not the case. There has been a certain degree of issues shift within the ideological left but on all of the ideological left's issues except personal liberty there is definitely a consensus that Kerry is better than Bush, if only slightly. The only question within this group is whether Kerry is better enough on these issues to justify supporting him. This is a question that has been debated fiercely for about the last six months straight. If you believe that it just hasn't occurred to the far left that Kerry might be a flawed candidate and Badnarik is going to wake them up to this, you are deeply mistaken. No one in the ideological left is viewing Kerry through rose-colored glasses. At best (best for Kerry, I mean, of course) they are realistically facing the idea that either Kerry or Bush is going to win this election and they can help either one or the other.
Again, in 2000 the ideological left was faced with a democratic candidate who from their viewpoint could not be differentiated from the republican candidate, and so they abandoned in great numbers. The entire focus of the 2000 Green Party Nader campaign was on pointing out that the two parties were too close and that Gore was no better than Bush, and the left needed to split off and vote third party in order to remind the democrats not to ignore their base. This was a line the ideological left bought at the time. Since then Bush has proven no, he is in fact worse than Gore would have been, and the Democratic party did not as hoped freak out and start recognizing its base-- in fact if anything it's shifted further to the right, seemingly mistaking losses caused by a disillusioned base for losses caused by a national trend toward conservatism. Pretty much all of the people who supported the Greens in 2000-- which is pretty much all potential far-left voters in 2004-- recognize this has happened, and they are not interested in repeating 2000 again this year. The Greens could very certainly make a serious contention as a third party candidate this year if they desired. They are not trying. There is a reason for this.
Meanwhile, personal liberty, the war in Iraq, and reform of the electoral system are virtually the only areas in which the ideological left agrees with Badnarik. The ideological left has been loudest about the wars against Iraq and personal freedom in the last four years,
Well, that is an API issue, not a language issue.
If you wish to address it as an issue with the Java API, the problem there is that it ignores the question of: if exceptions could be just ignored, what other changes to the Java API would be necessary in order to accommodate this? The API designers could no longer assume exceptions thrown by API methods would be caught. This would certainly have a serious impact on how the APIs are constructed and interfaced with.
If a person is incapable of coping with the unplanned, why should they be elected President of the United States?
The point I was trying to make was not whether the candidates would be able to cope with the unplanned, the point was whether the debate schedule would be able to cope with the unplanned. We would effectively wind up with three debates focusing on the comparative foreign policy of Bush and Kerry, and one debate focusing on domestic and economic policy between Bush, Kerry and Badnarik. This would cause the entire nature of the domestic policy debate to be highly different from the nature of the other two debates.
If he is unable adequately express himself to the American people without such a scripted environment, why should we believe he can do better with Congress or other heads of state?
It is not so much a matter of whether or not the environment would be scripted but a matter of his ability to formulate his responses within the debate so as to clearly outline his differences with the Bush administration within the debate's time constraints. Introducing Badnarik into the debate increases the scope of the debate, naturally making that one message somewhat more difficult to focus on. If nothing else, he would not have as much time to spend on it. I would argue that how clearly Kerry is able to outline to the public the differences between his and Bush's economic policy is fairly important to the outcome of the election.
Such a response would be entirely predicated on Badnarik's ability to express himself coherently to the American people in a way that means something to them.
This is hardly a certainty. especially on the subject of economics, where Bush, Kerry and Badnarik could step forward and say three entirely contradictory things and most Americans would lack the capacity to determine which one is accurate.
What people would have the capacity to understand, though, is that Badnarik's budget policy would be basically based on "don't spend money". This would be unlikely to impress terribly many people, since this would be in a context where either major-party candidate would be free to point out that not spending money would result in the ending of insert governmental program tv viewer approves of here. If Badnarik got across anything at all in this part of such a debate, most likely the only effect would be to put into relief that Kerry is pushing "tax and spend", Bush is spending "spend, but don't tax", and Badnarik is pushing "don't tax or spend". Ideological fiscal conservatives would certainly be impressed by such a thing, but this is a really quite small portion of the U.S. populace. Most of the U.S. thinks the government wastes money, but they do think at the government should be providing services; except for conservatives, and conservatives mostly don't really care where the federal government's money goes, they just don't want to pay taxes. Kerry's entire goal in the economic portion of the final debate will likely be to try to convince America that fiscal responsibility is a good thing, and he's facing an uphill battle at that even without having to sell the additional idea that shrinking the scope of government is a good thing.
As for the ideological left, it is already quite clearly aware of Kerry's shortcomings as a candidate in the personal rights area, and it doesn't care. The ideological left split off four years ago because they weren't being represented, and the direct result was Bush's election. I do not think they will be trying this again in this particular election. Either way though Badnarik is not going to tell them anything they aren't already fully aware of, and it's highly unlikely he's going to convince them in any serious numbers to change their votes.
Badnarik would certainly if allowed into the debate raise quite a few very important issues and raise awareness for the libertarian party. He might even manage to leave some people walking away going "hmm, that guy made a lot of sense", maybe. However there is no reason to believe he would have any impact on the question the debate is currently meant to resolve-- which is, who is going to win the election, George W. Bush or John Kerry?
A single television appearance a month before the election is not going to conceivably bring to victory a candidate with no serious previous governmental experience and whom most voters have never heard of. Whatever positive effects would result from Badnarik appearing in a presidential debate would be, directly effecting the outcome of the election would not be one of them.
However, it does seem quite plausible Badnarik could indirectly effect things by disrupting the final debate enough to prevent the debate from having some impact on the american populace it might have had otherwise-- which was the point I was originally trying to make.