bullshit. the US hasn't paid their UN dues for decades. they use the UN to inflict their policies on the world, and then expect the rest of the world to pay for that "privilege".
unless you can afford to enforce your patent rights against a giant corporation with millions or billions of dollars and dozens of lawyers on staff, then your patents aren't worth anything.
patents are no use against mega-corps. they are only a tool FOR them, not a weapon against them.
Business and software patents are what is really insane. Most other patents have been dragged down with them.
The insanity started before business and software patents. Usage patents for pharmaceuticals, for example. Patenting an invention relating to the method of producing a drug can be reasonable, but patenting each individual use-case for a drug is just fucking insane. It's how BigPharma has managed the evergreening scam.
The US allows patenting uses. Some other countries, like India, only allow patenting the method of production (i.e. an actual invention). That's why countries like India are under huge pressure to "harmonise" their patent laws with those of the US.
A simple and extremely effective reform would be back towards requiring a working model or prototype with a patent, and a much narrower reading on what exactly the patent covers.
Yes. The US should "harmonise" their patent laws with a) reality and b) the needs of humanity, rather than just with the needs of mega-corporations.
Three reasons why the "post-PC era" is overhyped marketing nonsense.
- tiny screens.
- virtual keyboards are nowhere near as good as real keyboards.
- loss of control over your data.
there are, obviously, many more reasons but these are IMO crucial. Together, they highlight the fact that phones and tablets are devices for the consumption of information, not for creation or editing.
mobile devices have their uses but they are not a replacement for desktop PCs, in the same way that a TV or a book is not a replacement for a PC.
my partner and i both work and have separate bank accounts. we also have a single joint account that we both deposit the same amount of money into every fortnight - this is used to pay bills (incl. house mortgage, car rego, insurance, etc), make household purchases (both small and large), etc. kind of like a kitty in a share-house. we've worked out what it costs us to live the way we want to live, add some more to cover the inevitable surprises and emergencies, and each pay half of that amount (rounded up to the next $100) every fortnight.
bills etc are paid fairly and equally, and i don't have to beg her for money to spend on my hobbies/interests, and she doesn't have to beg me for money for hers - we each still have our own money to do with as we please.
unlike most couples, we *never* argue about money. actually, we almost never argue about anything but by maintaining our individual financial identities we manage to avoid the biggest cause of arguments that couples have.
best of all - we're individuals who *choose* to be together because we want to, not because we're so financially dependant on each other that we can't afford to leave.
i'm quite sure that this is very alien to the way most people think about relationships but we couldn't imagine doing it any other way. in fact, we're both kind of horrified that most people think that marriage or long term domestic partnership or whatever you want to call it *requires* both members to surrender their individual identities and merge into some combined single entity.
please continue with your delusional thinking that a web browser is an operating system and that web apps are a sensible and desirable alternative to native apps.
i really really like having badly-written javascript code chewing up 100% CPU on every core of my 6-core machine doing ajaxy instant updates of data i don't care much about - that's so much better than having a reload button. all this javascript gives me all of the joy you get from the kind of crap code written by newbie PHP developers but running on my own computer instead of the server. brilliant!
i also love the power consumption from a constant load average of 8 or 12 or higher. and the 2 or 3 minutes of staring at the screen while the computer switches from one window to another on my core2 machine at work? sheer genius!
furthermore, i can't tell you how impressed i am that web sites that would have worked nicely with just fairly plain html in a tabbed browser now forces me to work in just the one tab because all that js crap just fucking breaks when you 'open in new tab'.
If your expertise is Perl, climbing the Python learning curve, gentle as it may be, isn't attractive,
actually, the learning curve is trivial. it's not the obstacle.
the obstacle is the million-and-one(*) different packaging systems for python modules/libraries. Perl has CPAN. Python has nothing comparable....it has *several* half-arsed imitations of it, but nothing that comes even close to being equivalent.
the second obstacle is the general "i don't give a fuck about systems integration, *my* program/library is *special*, the system must adapt to me" attitude common to many python programmers. most sysadmins will get this point. many programmers won't, or will get it and think "yes, that's important, but *my* program really is special".
disclaimer: i'm speaking as a long-time perl programmer who dabbles with (and really enjoys) python. i like programming in python enough that i've even managed to overcome my distaste for implicit braces (i.e. the white space issue, which seems to me to be a direct contradiction of one of the python maxims - "explicit is better than implicit"), but i won't see python as a viable substitute for perl until the python community sees it as part of the system, rather than a special case exception.
the geek dialect (and various sub-dialects) of english which eschews most capitalisation of words is as valid and legitimate as ANY other dialect, including mainstream dialects.
the geek dialects tend to use capitalisation for EMPHASIS, not for pointlessly highlighting that some nouns are proper nouns, or redundantly highlighting that the first word of any sentence is the first word of a sentence (a fact which is self-evident).
to someone who natively uses a geek dialect, mainstream english's excessive use of capitalisation looks almost as weird as the absurdly excessive use of capitalisation in, say, german-language text.
you're partly right, though - using "do" when you mean "does" is stupid. as is poor grammar. and e'specially apo'strophe abu'se.
and with a privatised TSA, when they waste a billion dollars they'll just ask for 1.2 or 1.5 or 2 billion (incl. profit), and congress will give it to them just as willingly...or more so because there will inevitably be kickbacks to ensure the gravy train keeps rolling.
and the government will be even less likely to turn around and decide the DHS and TSA were a stupid idea because corps will have billions of dollars per year worth of reasons to campaign against such dangerous notions that imperil the precious people.
they'd still have the backscatter machines because the government would still be paying for them. and everything else, but with a massive overhead so that corps could profit from the process.
you are missing the entire point of privatisation which is to privatise the profit (creating potential for profit as necessary) while socialising the expenses.
privatising the TSA is not going to be cheaper or more efficient. it's going to be more expensive and far less efficient because expense and inefficiency are the cracks that the private sector can exploit to extract profit from the taxpayers.
well, since none of those three options have ever worked, why not try something different and vote socialist?
Given that American currently only has far right wing, very far right wing and loony extreme right wing parties, you'll have to start a socialist party...which means you'll have to do some research to understand what socialism is - it's not what the constant propaganda you've received all your life told you it was.
1. it makes them immune to Freedom of Information laws, as they only apply to government and government agencies
2. eliminates the horrific waste of potential for profit and corporate welfare - it's never a good idea for a government to do something when they can pay corporations ten times as much to do a crappier job.
remember children: "Government Bad! Business Good!"
the processor + storage are the CHEAP part of the phone.
actually, that's why it's not stupid - upgrade the phone every year or so without tossing away the bigger screen. the phone's CPU will be significantly improved in that time, the screen won't.
(i.e. the exact opposite of the cretinously wasteful design of all-in-one computers like imacs - you can't upgrade an imac without discarding that beautiful 27" screen).
I only wish the company would license the idea as well to [...]
WTF should anyone license the idea?
they don't fucking own it. nobody owns ideas, especially fucking obvious ones like "put a screen and keyboard on an android device".
even patents don't cover an idea. patents *specifically* do not cover ideas. patents cover inventions of partcular methods of HOW to do something, not WHAT to do.
I work for a.au university on an openstack cloud service providing compute infrastructure as a service for researchers. we currently have about 2000 cores on 84 compute nodes (plus swift storage and volume storage and nova-api and database and so on) and about 700 users (and anyone with a login at any australian university can have a login with a small allocation of cores/memory/cpu-time, with larger allocations on request), with another 2000 cores ready to go as soon as the regions/zones/cells (or whatever they're calling it this week) code in nova works. we're currently running a very hacked up version of Openstack "Diablo" on Ubuntu Lucid, and will be upgrading to Openstack "Essex" on Ubuntu Precise in the very near future (next week, most likely, unless something comes up to delay us).
any of our users can login, spin up a few VMs through the web dashboard (or via command-line tools), and run or develop the code for their research project. we've also got people working on tools to enable researchers to spin up entire HPC clusters on demand within our cloud.
the openstack "Cells" code is crucial to us, because over the next couple of years we'll be expanding the research cloud in stages to have nodes in more universities - it's a national science infrastructure project, funded by the.au federal government. in the not-too-distant future there will be tens of thousands of cores.
So, yeah, there are openstack deployments of significant size already running.
nothing's ever perfect - the current openstack code has a lot of problems....but there's also a lot that's good or even great about it, and the rate of improvement is impressive.
actually, one of the biggest problems with openstack is terminology. the various components of openstack began as separate projects, and they have re-used the same terminology (especially the word "zone") to mean very different things, which tends to make things confusing. that's one of the things that is being worked on.
England and Australia have both effectively banned private firearms ownership, recently. (meaning in the past 20 years.) Both have had ENORMOUS increases in crime committed with firearms. And now that the populate is disarmed, the erosion of civil rights is proceeding apace.
I live in Australia, and i haven't noticed any ENORMOUS increase in crime committed with firearms.
In fact, I haven't noticed any such increase.
that's most likely because your claim is complete and utter bullshit.
BTW, what we do have is decades worth of stats showing that crime levels - especially violent crimes - are steadily decreasing year after year (both before and after the changes to gun ownership laws). We also have mainstream media getting shriller and louder and more sensational about alleged "rising crime levels" in contradiction to the actual facts.
the common american definition of masculinity and many thousands of hours of cultural propaganda & brainwashing on the TV ensures that almost all males (regardless of actual height) end up with a large dose of Short Man Syndrome - hyper-aggressive anti-social nutcases with short tempers and poor impulse control.
i.e. the kind of jerks who can quote the whole De Niro "You talking to me?" routine without any trace of irony, as if it makes them look tough or cool rather than a lowbrow thug looking to manufacture an excuse for violence.
5. even if you do run RH or another Linux with a signed boot-loader & kernel, it will make it impossible to compile and boot your own custom kernel, and makes it impossible to run unsigned driver modules (just as we got a system - dkms - that actually solves all of the issues with 3rd-party and out-of-mainline-branch drivers).
and even if that's something that 99% of users never do, it still fundamentally changes the nature of using linux. it's TIVO-isation on a mass scale, TIVO-isation of generic PCs.
No really sure how flicking a firmware switch to turn off Secure Boot is that difficult for any user installing any Linux operating system.
some things for you to consider:
1. it will fuck up dual-boot. an unsigned grub won't boot if Monopoly Boot is enabled. Windows 8 won't run (or will run crippled with, e.g., media players disabled) if Monopoly Boot is disabled.
dual-booting between linux & windows is important to a lot of people.
2. the signing is for the boot-loader, not the operating system itself. this means that every upgrade of grub will need to be signed. Microsoft has effectively inserted themselves into the approval chain / release cycle of a fairly important part of the open source ecosystem.
3. ditto for network boot loaders like ipxe and gpxe, so this will make netbooting things like clonezilla and gparted a PITA. this is particularly important in large organisations (corporates and universities, for example) where central IT are particularly clueless and refuse to disable Monopoly Boot because it's called "Secure Boot"....preventing use of software like clonezilla for backup & cloning & SOE installation
4. the clueless central IT issue in 3. above will also prevent academics from running linux workstations for their research needs. and local faculty IT staff from setting up linux-based computer labs for students as central IT departments tend to take over things like purchasing and initial setup (incl. bios lockdown/passwords).
Isn't it the Linux community that is always bitching about windows security? why aren't you cheering that they are doing something about it?
because this does nothing to improve windows security. the purpose is to be a barrier to entry (installation) for non-microsoft operating systems. it doesn't have to be 100% effective, it just has to make it more difficult for non-experts to try out linux (or freebsd or whatever) or to use special-purpose linux-based boot CDs like clonezilla or gparted.
Also, there's no guarantee at all that disabling will be "as simple as flipping a single setting in BIOS". on some machines, it might be. on others, it won't.
Finally, the Vietnam conflict didn't just kill Americans "willing to die in defense of their country".
NONE of the Americans who died in the Vietnam War died "in defense of their country". The Vietnamese dead did that. The Americans who died there died as foreign invaders.
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bullshit. the US hasn't paid their UN dues for decades. they use the UN to inflict their policies on the world, and then expect the rest of the world to pay for that "privilege".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_and_the_United_Nations#The_U.S._arrears_issue
unless you can afford to enforce your patent rights against a giant corporation with millions or billions of dollars and dozens of lawyers on staff, then your patents aren't worth anything.
patents are no use against mega-corps. they are only a tool FOR them, not a weapon against them.
The insanity started before business and software patents. Usage patents for pharmaceuticals, for example. Patenting an invention relating to the method of producing a drug can be reasonable, but patenting each individual use-case for a drug is just fucking insane. It's how BigPharma has managed the evergreening scam.
The US allows patenting uses. Some other countries, like India, only allow patenting the method of production (i.e. an actual invention). That's why countries like India are under huge pressure to "harmonise" their patent laws with those of the US.
Yes. The US should "harmonise" their patent laws with a) reality and b) the needs of humanity, rather than just with the needs of mega-corporations.
Three reasons why the "post-PC era" is overhyped marketing nonsense.
- tiny screens.
- virtual keyboards are nowhere near as good as real keyboards.
- loss of control over your data.
there are, obviously, many more reasons but these are IMO crucial. Together, they highlight the fact that phones and tablets are devices for the consumption of information, not for creation or editing.
mobile devices have their uses but they are not a replacement for desktop PCs, in the same way that a TV or a book is not a replacement for a PC.
my partner and i both work and have separate bank accounts. we also have a single joint account that we both deposit the same amount of money into every fortnight - this is used to pay bills (incl. house mortgage, car rego, insurance, etc), make household purchases (both small and large), etc. kind of like a kitty in a share-house. we've worked out what it costs us to live the way we want to live, add some more to cover the inevitable surprises and emergencies, and each pay half of that amount (rounded up to the next $100) every fortnight.
bills etc are paid fairly and equally, and i don't have to beg her for money to spend on my hobbies/interests, and she doesn't have to beg me for money for hers - we each still have our own money to do with as we please.
unlike most couples, we *never* argue about money. actually, we almost never argue about anything but by maintaining our individual financial identities we manage to avoid the biggest cause of arguments that couples have.
best of all - we're individuals who *choose* to be together because we want to, not because we're so financially dependant on each other that we can't afford to leave.
i'm quite sure that this is very alien to the way most people think about relationships but we couldn't imagine doing it any other way. in fact, we're both kind of horrified that most people think that marriage or long term domestic partnership or whatever you want to call it *requires* both members to surrender their individual identities and merge into some combined single entity.
because they're still individuals with separate identities, and should both maintain their own individual accounts as well as a joint account.
(including firefox, chromium, and others)
please continue with your delusional thinking that a web browser is an operating system and that web apps are a sensible and desirable alternative to native apps.
i really really like having badly-written javascript code chewing up 100% CPU on every core of my 6-core machine doing ajaxy instant updates of data i don't care much about - that's so much better than having a reload button. all this javascript gives me all of the joy you get from the kind of crap code written by newbie PHP developers but running on my own computer instead of the server. brilliant!
i also love the power consumption from a constant load average of 8 or 12 or higher. and the 2 or 3 minutes of staring at the screen while the computer switches from one window to another on my core2 machine at work? sheer genius!
furthermore, i can't tell you how impressed i am that web sites that would have worked nicely with just fairly plain html in a tabbed browser now forces me to work in just the one tab because all that js crap just fucking breaks when you 'open in new tab'.
lovely! and totally "web-scale"!
keep up the great work!
actually, the learning curve is trivial. it's not the obstacle.
the obstacle is the million-and-one(*) different packaging systems for python modules/libraries. Perl has CPAN. Python has nothing comparable....it has *several* half-arsed imitations of it, but nothing that comes even close to being equivalent.
the second obstacle is the general "i don't give a fuck about systems integration, *my* program/library is *special*, the system must adapt to me" attitude common to many python programmers. most sysadmins will get this point. many programmers won't, or will get it and think "yes, that's important, but *my* program really is special".
disclaimer: i'm speaking as a long-time perl programmer who dabbles with (and really enjoys) python. i like programming in python enough that i've even managed to overcome my distaste for implicit braces (i.e. the white space issue, which seems to me to be a direct contradiction of one of the python maxims - "explicit is better than implicit"), but i won't see python as a viable substitute for perl until the python community sees it as part of the system, rather than a special case exception.
(*) a very slight exaggeration
Is it web scale?
the geek dialect (and various sub-dialects) of english which eschews most capitalisation of words is as valid and legitimate as ANY other dialect, including mainstream dialects.
the geek dialects tend to use capitalisation for EMPHASIS, not for pointlessly highlighting that some nouns are proper nouns, or redundantly highlighting that the first word of any sentence is the first word of a sentence (a fact which is self-evident).
to someone who natively uses a geek dialect, mainstream english's excessive use of capitalisation looks almost as weird as the absurdly excessive use of capitalisation in, say, german-language text.
you're partly right, though - using "do" when you mean "does" is stupid. as is poor grammar. and e'specially apo'strophe abu'se.
i thought that car analogies were dumb.
but misogynstic battered-wife analogies are even worse.
and with a privatised TSA, when they waste a billion dollars they'll just ask for 1.2 or 1.5 or 2 billion (incl. profit), and congress will give it to them just as willingly...or more so because there will inevitably be kickbacks to ensure the gravy train keeps rolling.
and the government will be even less likely to turn around and decide the DHS and TSA were a stupid idea because corps will have billions of dollars per year worth of reasons to campaign against such dangerous notions that imperil the precious people.
they'd still have the backscatter machines because the government would still be paying for them. and everything else, but with a massive overhead so that corps could profit from the process.
you are missing the entire point of privatisation which is to privatise the profit (creating potential for profit as necessary) while socialising the expenses.
privatising the TSA is not going to be cheaper or more efficient. it's going to be more expensive and far less efficient because expense and inefficiency are the cracks that the private sector can exploit to extract profit from the taxpayers.
well, since none of those three options have ever worked, why not try something different and vote socialist?
Given that American currently only has far right wing, very far right wing and loony extreme right wing parties, you'll have to start a socialist party...which means you'll have to do some research to understand what socialism is - it's not what the constant propaganda you've received all your life told you it was.
here's a good starting point for you that describes one of the most appealing forms of socialism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_socialism
"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."
-- Albert Einstein
1. it makes them immune to Freedom of Information laws, as they only apply to government and government agencies
2. eliminates the horrific waste of potential for profit and corporate welfare - it's never a good idea for a government to do something when they can pay corporations ten times as much to do a crappier job.
remember children: "Government Bad! Business Good!"
actually, that's why it's not stupid - upgrade the phone every year or so without tossing away the bigger screen. the phone's CPU will be significantly improved in that time, the screen won't.
(i.e. the exact opposite of the cretinously wasteful design of all-in-one computers like imacs - you can't upgrade an imac without discarding that beautiful 27" screen).
WTF should anyone license the idea?
they don't fucking own it. nobody owns ideas, especially fucking obvious ones like "put a screen and keyboard on an android device".
even patents don't cover an idea. patents *specifically* do not cover ideas. patents cover inventions of partcular methods of HOW to do something, not WHAT to do.
I work for a .au university on an openstack cloud service providing compute infrastructure as a service for researchers. we currently have about 2000 cores on 84 compute nodes (plus swift storage and volume storage and nova-api and database and so on) and about 700 users (and anyone with a login at any australian university can have a login with a small allocation of cores/memory/cpu-time, with larger allocations on request), with another 2000 cores ready to go as soon as the regions/zones/cells (or whatever they're calling it this week) code in nova works. we're currently running a very hacked up version of Openstack "Diablo" on Ubuntu Lucid, and will be upgrading to Openstack "Essex" on Ubuntu Precise in the very near future (next week, most likely, unless something comes up to delay us).
any of our users can login, spin up a few VMs through the web dashboard (or via command-line tools), and run or develop the code for their research project. we've also got people working on tools to enable researchers to spin up entire HPC clusters on demand within our cloud.
the openstack "Cells" code is crucial to us, because over the next couple of years we'll be expanding the research cloud in stages to have nodes in more universities - it's a national science infrastructure project, funded by the .au federal government. in the not-too-distant future there will be tens of thousands of cores.
So, yeah, there are openstack deployments of significant size already running.
nothing's ever perfect - the current openstack code has a lot of problems....but there's also a lot that's good or even great about it, and the rate of improvement is impressive.
actually, one of the biggest problems with openstack is terminology. the various components of openstack began as separate projects, and they have re-used the same terminology (especially the word "zone") to mean very different things, which tends to make things confusing. that's one of the things that is being worked on.
I live in Australia, and i haven't noticed any ENORMOUS increase in crime committed with firearms.
In fact, I haven't noticed any such increase.
that's most likely because your claim is complete and utter bullshit.
BTW, what we do have is decades worth of stats showing that crime levels - especially violent crimes - are steadily decreasing year after year (both before and after the changes to gun ownership laws). We also have mainstream media getting shriller and louder and more sensational about alleged "rising crime levels" in contradiction to the actual facts.
it's more than just this.
the common american definition of masculinity and many thousands of hours of cultural propaganda & brainwashing on the TV ensures that almost all males (regardless of actual height) end up with a large dose of Short Man Syndrome - hyper-aggressive anti-social nutcases with short tempers and poor impulse control.
i.e. the kind of jerks who can quote the whole De Niro "You talking to me?" routine without any trace of irony, as if it makes them look tough or cool rather than a lowbrow thug looking to manufacture an excuse for violence.
and one very important point i forgot to mention:
5. even if you do run RH or another Linux with a signed boot-loader & kernel, it will make it impossible to compile and boot your own custom kernel, and makes it impossible to run unsigned driver modules (just as we got a system - dkms - that actually solves all of the issues with 3rd-party and out-of-mainline-branch drivers).
and even if that's something that 99% of users never do, it still fundamentally changes the nature of using linux. it's TIVO-isation on a mass scale, TIVO-isation of generic PCs.
some things for you to consider:
1. it will fuck up dual-boot. an unsigned grub won't boot if Monopoly Boot is enabled. Windows 8 won't run (or will run crippled with, e.g., media players disabled) if Monopoly Boot is disabled.
dual-booting between linux & windows is important to a lot of people.
2. the signing is for the boot-loader, not the operating system itself. this means that every upgrade of grub will need to be signed. Microsoft has effectively inserted themselves into the approval chain / release cycle of a fairly important part of the open source ecosystem.
3. ditto for network boot loaders like ipxe and gpxe, so this will make netbooting things like clonezilla and gparted a PITA. this is particularly important in large organisations (corporates and universities, for example) where central IT are particularly clueless and refuse to disable Monopoly Boot because it's called "Secure Boot"....preventing use of software like clonezilla for backup & cloning & SOE installation
4. the clueless central IT issue in 3. above will also prevent academics from running linux workstations for their research needs. and local faculty IT staff from setting up linux-based computer labs for students as central IT departments tend to take over things like purchasing and initial setup (incl. bios lockdown/passwords).
because this does nothing to improve windows security. the purpose is to be a barrier to entry (installation) for non-microsoft operating systems. it doesn't have to be 100% effective, it just has to make it more difficult for non-experts to try out linux (or freebsd or whatever) or to use special-purpose linux-based boot CDs like clonezilla or gparted.
Also, there's no guarantee at all that disabling will be "as simple as flipping a single setting in BIOS". on some machines, it might be. on others, it won't.
in soviet amerikkka, america is always valiant defender against foreign invaders
even, especially, when they are the ones doing the invading.
you know something? america as the arrogant rapist of the world is actually pretty accurate imagery.
NONE of the Americans who died in the Vietnam War died "in defense of their country". The Vietnamese dead did that. The Americans who died there died as foreign invaders.