This has been brought up before. FWIW, the president of Diebold promised the election to the Republicans before he started selling the voting machines. This isn't proof. It's only an indication. I don't have proof. Proof may no longer be available.
I believe that your unstated question should be answered "The vote in 2004 was fraudulent on a massive scale.", but belief isn't proof.
FWIW, there is proof of voting fraud on a minor scale by BOTH parties. (Check into the recent evidence scandal in Ohio, though, for a guess as to how major the fraud was. But it's got to be only a guess because the evidence was destroyed.)
Here's mine: Multiple choice fill in the dots just like I used in highschool. (Are they called "Scantron" sheets?) The difference is, instead of filling in the dots with pencil, you use bingo markers. Indelible. And you sign your ballot after you fill it in. Then the polling official signs the back of the sheet as they accept it (folded in half appox. along a pre-marked line). And each ballot is stamped twice with a number identifying the polling place and the sequence of issue. (One of them is on the tear-off receipt that you take as your "this is my ballot" receipt.) The numbers are in blue and the bingo marker is black. The numbers are on the other side of the sheet of paper from the rest of the ballot.
As with your system, the ballot is scanned with a simple scanner. You use the kind that IBM invented to score high school exams, or a modern descendant that's just as simple. You've got: 1) Simple 2) Cheap 3) Paper trail 4) Anonymity 5) Reliable 6) Fast 7) Verifiable (see 1, 3 and 5)
Diebold get the bad press because the company president publicly announced that he was going to steal the election. There's no evidence that any of the other machines are any more honest. They're a bit more discrete, however.
As someone who applied for Election Systems Software, VB + Access + Windows trumps PASCAL:-D
Trumps? I find this comment basically unintelligible. Are you talking about pre-requisites for being hired? If so, then it makes sense. Are you talking about designing a secure system? If so, then you're crazy. Are you talking about something else? (I really can't tell.) Then you need to explicate.
The number of layers needed would be proportional to log2 N, where N =the number of votes
Adding numbers within a layer is a parallelizeable problem. It can certainly be handled in a pyramid such that the height of the pyramid increases no faster than the log2 N increases with size of the count. (I.e., the number of layers needed would be proportional to log2 N, where N =the number of votes.)
I'm dissatisfied with this explanation, but I can't think of how better to say it without drawing pictures. Note that this is for the votes on any one candidate or ballot measure. Separate pyramids of counting should be constructed for each candidate/ballot measure. (Actually, for each binary choice on the ballot.)
At all events, this implies that it would be only slightly more complex to handle the US than to handle Austrailia. More volunteers would be needed, but only slightly more as a percentage of the population, and the rate of increase in volunteers needed would be proportional to log N. (Actually, probably to a*N + b*Log N, with a and b being constants, but I think that a is small in comparison to b, though it would clearly come to dominate after awhile.)
My impression is that the reason that governments prefer electronic voting over hand counts is that it allows elections to be manipulated remotely rather than requiring local support for corruption. (This isn't a new cynicism on my part, but each time the voting machines are analyzed, it seems more and more like the only reasonable rationale.)
I prefer to hate all of the record companies impartially. Except for a few very small companies that can be presumed either to not be members of the RIAA, or to have no significant input into their policies.
That Atlantic Records was the heavy here doesn't mean that I shouldn't equally despise Columbia. They hire the same goons.
I have totally stopped buying pre-recorded CDs several years ago. Any new CDs contain only data (or, possibly, programs, generally Linux distributions).
I also no longer go to movies, and don't even rent tapes (or dvds). Granted the payment that the *AA get from DVD rentals is minor to non-existent, I don't want to have the habit.
I've chosen this for my own benefit, not theirs. I grant that they won't even notice that I'm no longer their customer. But *I* will. And I won't think badly of myself.
If quitting cold turkey is too much for you...what I did as an intermediate step was whenever I went to see a movie I paid the EFF twice the ticket price. (If you want to support your local theater...patronize their snack bar. My understanding is that that's where they make most of their profits on any movie. That the MPAA gets almost all the profits from the showing of the movie itself.)
Yes, you can't start a case with nothing. This is part of the reason why they have to have investigators find infringers, rather than just starting with A. Aaronson and ending with Mr. Zykowski. Rule 11 deals
Tell it to SCO. That case has truely lost my belief in any justice in the court system. SCO after 3 years (more?) still has yet to produce any evidence for their case, whatever it is. When last seen they were again changing the grounds on which they had filed their suit for ???. (Well, for money, but that's not what I meant.)
As near as I can figure out they were suing IBM for not accepting that they could cancel a license that said in it's text that it couldn't be cancelled and was fully paid up FOREVER. The ground shifted between copyright and patent and trade secret, without ever settling on anything specific that I could determine.
This has cost IBM *MILLIONS* of $$ --- and for what? To defend their good name against a bunch of, essentially, slander. But it wasn't slander, because it was based around court filings. That the court filings lacked the detail necessary to refute and that there wasn't any evidence in favor of them didn't mean that they weren't court filings, and thus immune from slander charges.
IANAL...but to me it looks like the court system is not where you look if you want to find justice. You can't even BUY justice. It's not for sale because they're out of stock.
Perhaps you didn't notice the promises that the telcos made to congress a few years back. In exchange for a tax cut and some other benefits they promissed to wire the entire country with broadband. Now they're pretending that they never made the promise, while keeping the tax cut. (Actually, I'm not keeping track. I think what they may have done is passed the tax on to the customers, when it was supposed to be a tax on them, and they needed permission to raise the prices. So officially they didn't raise the prices, but they acted as a government tax collector instead. Still, they *DID* promise.)
I currently live in a city that has apparently had a tradition of corrupt government continuously since at least 1900...and perhaps longer. This is odd, since the other local cities have no such reputation, and people move back and forth between them easily, often not even noticing which city they're in.
So. Essentially the same citizenry, but one out of, say 10 (local is hard to be specific about) local cities is corrupt. People get upset with one government and "throw the rascals out". Makes no difference. Import politicians from outside the area. Makes no difference. (Well, to be honest it was just the mayor that was imported, the council remained local politicians...it's hard to replace everyone.)
That said, even so I trust my local government more than I trust the telcos. I may end up with corrupt politicians, but their access to the levers of power is dependent on not unduly riling the citizenry. (We got them to stop cutting down trees along the local street...even though it probably meant not giving business to somebody's brother or brother-in-law.)
The cities should own the local wires and act as a common carrier. This shouldn't be any less reasonable than their owning the local streets & roads...and the access restrictions should be similar.
The significance of this is that communications companies would only need to connect to the city at one location to be accessible (salable) to everyone in the city. This would promote competition. City services should only be local...but should be available. Broadcasts of the local council meetings, etc. Candidates for local elections making presentations, and taking questions and answers. Etc. Think of it as a very fancy web site (which is what it would be) that was at a non-routeable address (because the city would choose not to route it). Ideally this should be their own TCP number, or perhaps one that they share with a group of other cities, each of which used it for local business.
The competition would be between the ISPs, which would have easy access to a large customer pool and NOT ownership or control over the lines. I suppose that the city could act as an ISP, but I doubt that this would be either necessary or cost effective. What it would be doing is providing fast access as a common carrier.
P.S.: I'm not sure that this is what the bill is talking about, but it's what it SHOULD be talking about.
I'm no lawyer, and I don't know the laws of foreign countries. The US patent system may well not be the worst patent system in the world. It's bad enough.
Actually, were I to rate how bad it was, my rating would be more on an absolute scale than on a relative scale. I feel that the US patent system is so bad that we'd be better off without any patent system at all. I'm sure this isn't the optimal answer, but it's a true one. An optimal patent system would require licensing patents for a fixed amount/copy, or an agreed upon lesser rate. It would require patents to be operationally useful, rather than the basis for legal arguments. (That one would be tricky to implement.) It would include specific tests that could allow one to reliably determine whether a patent was infringed. (Another toughie.) And it would impose an absolute limit on the total compensation that could be derived from a patent, say 50 or 500 times what it cost to develop, after which the patent would become free for common use.
Optimality is notoriously difficult to prove, and even "almost optimal" can be difficult to implement. The current system, however, is closer to "almost pessimal". (Well, perhaps I exaggerate. I'm not sure. The fact that I can't be sure is a comment on the current patent system.)
More particularly, Netscape couldn't sell it's browser for $35 after a years trial when MS was giving away IE for free, and pre-installing it in new systems.
If you like VisualC++, all I can say is "That's a matter of taste, and my taste differs from yours". Actually, I barely ever used VisualC++, but I presume that it's like their VisualJ++ and like their VisualBasic, both of which I hated. IBM had a good IDE for Java (VisualAge), though. Pity they dropped it for Eclipse, as Eclipse still hasn't caught up to it. I've still got a copy, but it stopped running on Linux back during the days of Linux2.4.
FoxPro was, indeed, a good product before MS bought it. Superior I would call it. Pity MS decided to kill it. (Is even the remnant of it still viable?) I considered it far superior to MSAccess.
MS has frequently used it's monopoly position to kill superior products, even when it had to buy them to do so. In the case of FoxDB MS had trouble killing it even AFTER they bought the product. Users almost revolted. So they continued to sell it and stopped development and slowed maintenance to a crawl. I expect that by now they've finally managed to kill it. I saw the handwriting on the wall and looked elsewhere. But I had by then lost all delusions that MS had the good of it's customers as a significant consideration.
The US should not have to abide by the EU laws. Similarly the EU should not be coerced into following the US laws. When we see evidence that this is being done, we should be aware of the vile abuse of power that is occurring.
I'm not sure how often it's unreasonable to "blame the 'States". This time it's reasonable. We even heard about on-going attempts by first the film industry and then later by the US govt. to get this kind of law passed. There was even a PR campaign launched and pressed by the US govt. to get US citizens to think of Canada as a "nation of media pirates".
Were I a Canadian I would not think very charitably of the US govt., and I would definitely blame it for the passage of this law...and for any and all unpleasant results.
You're right. My instinct at that point is to stop agreeing. In fact that's why I ended up in Linux. One too many EULAs from MS. I am, however, well aware that my reaction isn't the most common one, and that most people will just stop reading them, if they ever read them in the first place.
For that matter, I'm just on the edge of getting my wife a second computer (Linux) so that I can disconnect her Mac from the internet. Every EULA that I've read has been "not too horrible...for the most part", but they keep coming...and it's not like they have a standardized form. If something says it's GPL2, then I don't need to read any further to know what it says and how I can use it.
Sorry, but this is people acting like typical people. Possibly enlightened sages don't act this way...if they don't, though, it's because you chose a definition of enlightened that excludes those who do.
People trust their friends, and are wary, sometimes unreasonably so, of strangers. That's one part of what's going on.
Now, is it the right decision? I'm not scheduling specialist, and I don't know the people involved. Linus has a track record of usually making choices that will work well, so that's the way I'd bet. Was Linus fair, honest, etc.? Others have said that he is here acting petty and spiteful. He human, so that's quite possible. Was the other guy offended? I'd bet *very*.
People often act in ways that are designed to keep their groups at the right size. Often by driving off strangers. Maybe the group of kernel hackers is at around the limit of what Linus can manage (given current techniques). Everything has multiple limits. If that's what's going on, it's too bad, but may be necessary. (Note that even if this is what's happening, it may well be that nobody realizes it. People often don't.)
Remember that Open Source isn't the same as Free Software. And that open source is something still else...and can easily be "look but don't touch".
Given that MS is asking OSI to approve their license I'd guess that it's not like the olde open source libraries that used to be provided...where the library was distributed, perhaps, along with a compiler, but you weren't permitted to use it with any other compiler.
OTOH: This license was written by lawyers and proposed by MS. I'm not going to trust it until years have passed, and then only after a succession of lawyers have found it harmless. (IANAL, so I'm not going to trust my interpretation of something MS had a lawyer write for them, even though I'm allowed to read it, unlike their EULAs, where you must purchase the product to which they apply before you're allowed to read them. And then you've got to accept a new, possibly more restrictive, license with each bug fix.)
I accept that it is conceivable that MS seriously is trying to make a truce. Unfortunately, given their track record the only safe and sensible response is to, at minimum, turn a deaf ear. So I'm not going to even bother looking. It might be tempting, but being tempted and succumbing would likely be fatal (economically if not physically).
That number had BETTER either be an environmental variable, or something else that can be detected at run time. Otherwise you have to run the program on a machine with the same number of cores as you compiled on.
And that's wrong too. The contrary of open source is closed source. The contrary of commercial is non-commercial (too many angles on that one: not for profit, public, etc.) The contrary of Free (libre) is enslaved. The contrary of Free (gratis) is costly.
Proprietary is the contrary of public domain. (Note that public domain is ONE of the contraries of commercial...but not an exact match. Most commercial activity requires non-public-domain material or informational components.)
One difference is that MEMs are actually working. I'd think it would make more sense to first build this kind of device out of MEMs, and let others try to solve nano-mech problems with simpler devices. I bet even building out of MEMs you'd run into extreme construction problems.
The other reasonable alternative would be to first build a half-adder at the nano-tech scale. (Simplifying the device sufficiently to test the proposed design.) Then you could work you way up to a 6502. (That was the old Apple ][ CPU chip. It's still in use for things like elevator controllers.) Note that the 6502 is a LONG way above a half-adder. Once you have your 6502 equivalents you probably want to start modifying the design so that the various individual CPUs can work in gangs. This might not be any more complex, but it would be less general purpose...still, if you're going to build nano-computers you should probably plan on massive parallel processing.
This second direction seems more like what he's proposing...but notice all the giant steps involved. I think that starting with MEMs and scaling down as technology advanced would be easier and give more certain results. OTOH, I'm not a nano-mech specialist. Maybe they've solved the problems that I've heard of earlier.
If it has to be a compelled purchase, then perhaps it's unjust. I can imagine the existence of valid arguments against this proposition, but none occur to me.
The copyright law used to allow copyrights to expire in a reasonable period of time. I felt that before the time of the "Sonny Bono Copyright act" that the period was already longer than was reasonable...so they extended it. Then with the DMCA they extended it again.
Just because I believe that some copyright laws are reasonable doesn't mean that I believe ANY copyright law is reasonable. The current laws are unjust, and the RIAA (and MPAA) are the companies that wrote and bought them.
You must not go to the same LUG that I do. Conversations are likely to include systems administration, but that's merely a fraction. Wild divergences into multitudinous other topics aren't avoided. They do, however, tend to have a computer professional's approach to things, however, which gives them a different flavor than normal conversations about, say, politics.
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This has been brought up before. FWIW, the president of Diebold promised the election to the Republicans before he started selling the voting machines. This isn't proof. It's only an indication. I don't have proof. Proof may no longer be available.
I believe that your unstated question should be answered "The vote in 2004 was fraudulent on a massive scale.", but belief isn't proof.
FWIW, there is proof of voting fraud on a minor scale by BOTH parties. (Check into the recent evidence scandal in Ohio, though, for a guess as to how major the fraud was. But it's got to be only a guess because the evidence was destroyed.)
Here's mine:
Multiple choice fill in the dots just like I used in highschool. (Are they called "Scantron" sheets?) The difference is, instead of filling in the dots with pencil, you use bingo markers. Indelible. And you sign your ballot after you fill it in. Then the polling official signs the back of the sheet as they accept it (folded in half appox. along a pre-marked line). And each ballot is stamped twice with a number identifying the polling place and the sequence of issue. (One of them is on the tear-off receipt that you take as your "this is my ballot" receipt.) The numbers are in blue and the bingo marker is black. The numbers are on the other side of the sheet of paper from the rest of the ballot.
As with your system, the ballot is scanned with a simple scanner. You use the kind that IBM invented to score high school exams, or a modern descendant that's just as simple.
You've got:
1) Simple
2) Cheap
3) Paper trail
4) Anonymity
5) Reliable
6) Fast
7) Verifiable (see 1, 3 and 5)
Diebold get the bad press because the company president publicly announced that he was going to steal the election. There's no evidence that any of the other machines are any more honest. They're a bit more discrete, however.
As someone who applied for Election Systems Software, VB + Access + Windows trumps PASCAL :-D
Trumps? I find this comment basically unintelligible. Are you talking about pre-requisites for being hired? If so, then it makes sense. Are you talking about designing a secure system? If so, then you're crazy. Are you talking about something else? (I really can't tell.) Then you need to explicate.
The number of layers needed would be proportional to log2 N, where N =the number of votes
Adding numbers within a layer is a parallelizeable problem. It can certainly be handled in a pyramid such that the height of the pyramid increases no faster than the log2 N increases with size of the count. (I.e., the number of layers needed would be proportional to log2 N, where N =the number of votes.)
I'm dissatisfied with this explanation, but I can't think of how better to say it without drawing pictures. Note that this is for the votes on any one candidate or ballot measure. Separate pyramids of counting should be constructed for each candidate/ballot measure. (Actually, for each binary choice on the ballot.)
At all events, this implies that it would be only slightly more complex to handle the US than to handle Austrailia. More volunteers would be needed, but only slightly more as a percentage of the population, and the rate of increase in volunteers needed would be proportional to log N. (Actually, probably to a*N + b*Log N, with a and b being constants, but I think that a is small in comparison to b, though it would clearly come to dominate after awhile.)
My impression is that the reason that governments prefer electronic voting over hand counts is that it allows elections to be manipulated remotely rather than requiring local support for corruption. (This isn't a new cynicism on my part, but each time the voting machines are analyzed, it seems more and more like the only reasonable rationale.)
I prefer to hate all of the record companies impartially. Except for a few very small companies that can be presumed either to not be members of the RIAA, or to have no significant input into their policies.
That Atlantic Records was the heavy here doesn't mean that I shouldn't equally despise Columbia. They hire the same goons.
I have totally stopped buying pre-recorded CDs several years ago. Any new CDs contain only data (or, possibly, programs, generally Linux distributions).
I also no longer go to movies, and don't even rent tapes (or dvds). Granted the payment that the *AA get from DVD rentals is minor to non-existent, I don't want to have the habit.
I've chosen this for my own benefit, not theirs. I grant that they won't even notice that I'm no longer their customer. But *I* will. And I won't think badly of myself.
If quitting cold turkey is too much for you...what I did as an intermediate step was whenever I went to see a movie I paid the EFF twice the ticket price. (If you want to support your local theater...patronize their snack bar. My understanding is that that's where they make most of their profits on any movie. That the MPAA gets almost all the profits from the showing of the movie itself.)
Yes, you can't start a case with nothing. This is part of the reason why they have to have investigators find infringers, rather than just starting with A. Aaronson and ending with Mr. Zykowski. Rule 11 deals
Tell it to SCO. That case has truely lost my belief in any justice in the court system. SCO after 3 years (more?) still has yet to produce any evidence for their case, whatever it is. When last seen they were again changing the grounds on which they had filed their suit for ???. (Well, for money, but that's not what I meant.)
As near as I can figure out they were suing IBM for not accepting that they could cancel a license that said in it's text that it couldn't be cancelled and was fully paid up FOREVER. The ground shifted between copyright and patent and trade secret, without ever settling on anything specific that I could determine.
This has cost IBM *MILLIONS* of $$ --- and for what? To defend their good name against a bunch of, essentially, slander. But it wasn't slander, because it was based around court filings. That the court filings lacked the detail necessary to refute and that there wasn't any evidence in favor of them didn't mean that they weren't court filings, and thus immune from slander charges.
IANAL...but to me it looks like the court system is not where you look if you want to find justice. You can't even BUY justice. It's not for sale because they're out of stock.
Perhaps you didn't notice the promises that the telcos made to congress a few years back. In exchange for a tax cut and some other benefits they promissed to wire the entire country with broadband. Now they're pretending that they never made the promise, while keeping the tax cut. (Actually, I'm not keeping track. I think what they may have done is passed the tax on to the customers, when it was supposed to be a tax on them, and they needed permission to raise the prices. So officially they didn't raise the prices, but they acted as a government tax collector instead. Still, they *DID* promise.)
I currently live in a city that has apparently had a tradition of corrupt government continuously since at least 1900...and perhaps longer. This is odd, since the other local cities have no such reputation, and people move back and forth between them easily, often not even noticing which city they're in.
So. Essentially the same citizenry, but one out of, say 10 (local is hard to be specific about) local cities is corrupt. People get upset with one government and "throw the rascals out". Makes no difference. Import politicians from outside the area. Makes no difference. (Well, to be honest it was just the mayor that was imported, the council remained local politicians...it's hard to replace everyone.)
That said, even so I trust my local government more than I trust the telcos. I may end up with corrupt politicians, but their access to the levers of power is dependent on not unduly riling the citizenry. (We got them to stop cutting down trees along the local street...even though it probably meant not giving business to somebody's brother or brother-in-law.)
The cities should own the local wires and act as a common carrier. This shouldn't be any less reasonable than their owning the local streets & roads...and the access restrictions should be similar.
The significance of this is that communications companies would only need to connect to the city at one location to be accessible (salable) to everyone in the city. This would promote competition. City services should only be local...but should be available. Broadcasts of the local council meetings, etc. Candidates for local elections making presentations, and taking questions and answers. Etc. Think of it as a very fancy web site (which is what it would be) that was at a non-routeable address (because the city would choose not to route it). Ideally this should be their own TCP number, or perhaps one that they share with a group of other cities, each of which used it for local business.
The competition would be between the ISPs, which would have easy access to a large customer pool and NOT ownership or control over the lines. I suppose that the city could act as an ISP, but I doubt that this would be either necessary or cost effective. What it would be doing is providing fast access as a common carrier.
P.S.: I'm not sure that this is what the bill is talking about, but it's what it SHOULD be talking about.
Perhaps people are just a trifle upset at the telcos they have to deal with?
I'm no lawyer, and I don't know the laws of foreign countries. The US patent system may well not be the worst patent system in the world. It's bad enough.
Actually, were I to rate how bad it was, my rating would be more on an absolute scale than on a relative scale. I feel that the US patent system is so bad that we'd be better off without any patent system at all. I'm sure this isn't the optimal answer, but it's a true one. An optimal patent system would require licensing patents for a fixed amount/copy, or an agreed upon lesser rate. It would require patents to be operationally useful, rather than the basis for legal arguments. (That one would be tricky to implement.) It would include specific tests that could allow one to reliably determine whether a patent was infringed. (Another toughie.) And it would impose an absolute limit on the total compensation that could be derived from a patent, say 50 or 500 times what it cost to develop, after which the patent would become free for common use.
Optimality is notoriously difficult to prove, and even "almost optimal" can be difficult to implement. The current system, however, is closer to "almost pessimal". (Well, perhaps I exaggerate. I'm not sure. The fact that I can't be sure is a comment on the current patent system.)
More particularly, Netscape couldn't sell it's browser for $35 after a years trial when MS was giving away IE for free, and pre-installing it in new systems.
If you like VisualC++, all I can say is "That's a matter of taste, and my taste differs from yours". Actually, I barely ever used VisualC++, but I presume that it's like their VisualJ++ and like their VisualBasic, both of which I hated. IBM had a good IDE for Java (VisualAge), though. Pity they dropped it for Eclipse, as Eclipse still hasn't caught up to it. I've still got a copy, but it stopped running on Linux back during the days of Linux2.4.
FoxPro was, indeed, a good product before MS bought it. Superior I would call it. Pity MS decided to kill it. (Is even the remnant of it still viable?) I considered it far superior to MSAccess.
MS has frequently used it's monopoly position to kill superior products, even when it had to buy them to do so. In the case of FoxDB MS had trouble killing it even AFTER they bought the product. Users almost revolted. So they continued to sell it and stopped development and slowed maintenance to a crawl. I expect that by now they've finally managed to kill it. I saw the handwriting on the wall and looked elsewhere. But I had by then lost all delusions that MS had the good of it's customers as a significant consideration.
The US should not have to abide by the EU laws. Similarly the EU should not be coerced into following the US laws. When we see evidence that this is being done, we should be aware of the vile abuse of power that is occurring.
I'm not sure how often it's unreasonable to "blame the 'States". This time it's reasonable. We even heard about on-going attempts by first the film industry and then later by the US govt. to get this kind of law passed. There was even a PR campaign launched and pressed by the US govt. to get US citizens to think of Canada as a "nation of media pirates".
Were I a Canadian I would not think very charitably of the US govt., and I would definitely blame it for the passage of this law...and for any and all unpleasant results.
You're right. My instinct at that point is to stop agreeing. In fact that's why I ended up in Linux. One too many EULAs from MS. I am, however, well aware that my reaction isn't the most common one, and that most people will just stop reading them, if they ever read them in the first place.
For that matter, I'm just on the edge of getting my wife a second computer (Linux) so that I can disconnect her Mac from the internet. Every EULA that I've read has been "not too horrible...for the most part", but they keep coming...and it's not like they have a standardized form. If something says it's GPL2, then I don't need to read any further to know what it says and how I can use it.
Sorry, but this is people acting like typical people. Possibly enlightened sages don't act this way...if they don't, though, it's because you chose a definition of enlightened that excludes those who do.
People trust their friends, and are wary, sometimes unreasonably so, of strangers. That's one part of what's going on.
Now, is it the right decision? I'm not scheduling specialist, and I don't know the people involved. Linus has a track record of usually making choices that will work well, so that's the way I'd bet. Was Linus fair, honest, etc.? Others have said that he is here acting petty and spiteful. He human, so that's quite possible. Was the other guy offended? I'd bet *very*.
People often act in ways that are designed to keep their groups at the right size. Often by driving off strangers. Maybe the group of kernel hackers is at around the limit of what Linus can manage (given current techniques). Everything has multiple limits. If that's what's going on, it's too bad, but may be necessary. (Note that even if this is what's happening, it may well be that nobody realizes it. People often don't.)
Remember that Open Source isn't the same as Free Software. And that open source is something still else...and can easily be "look but don't touch".
Given that MS is asking OSI to approve their license I'd guess that it's not like the olde open source libraries that used to be provided...where the library was distributed, perhaps, along with a compiler, but you weren't permitted to use it with any other compiler.
OTOH: This license was written by lawyers and proposed by MS. I'm not going to trust it until years have passed, and then only after a succession of lawyers have found it harmless. (IANAL, so I'm not going to trust my interpretation of something MS had a lawyer write for them, even though I'm allowed to read it, unlike their EULAs, where you must purchase the product to which they apply before you're allowed to read them. And then you've got to accept a new, possibly more restrictive, license with each bug fix.)
I accept that it is conceivable that MS seriously is trying to make a truce. Unfortunately, given their track record the only safe and sensible response is to, at minimum, turn a deaf ear. So I'm not going to even bother looking. It might be tempting, but being tempted and succumbing would likely be fatal (economically if not physically).
That number had BETTER either be an environmental variable, or something else that can be detected at run time. Otherwise you have to run the program on a machine with the same number of cores as you compiled on.
And that's wrong too.
The contrary of open source is closed source.
The contrary of commercial is non-commercial (too many angles on that one: not for profit, public, etc.)
The contrary of Free (libre) is enslaved.
The contrary of Free (gratis) is costly.
Proprietary is the contrary of public domain. (Note that public domain is ONE of the contraries of commercial...but not an exact match. Most commercial activity requires non-public-domain material or informational components.)
According to other posters:
1) That's what Monsanto reported.
2) An independent lab gave much lower, and more varied (per field), numbers.
One difference is that MEMs are actually working. I'd think it would make more sense to first build this kind of device out of MEMs, and let others try to solve nano-mech problems with simpler devices. I bet even building out of MEMs you'd run into extreme construction problems.
The other reasonable alternative would be to first build a half-adder at the nano-tech scale. (Simplifying the device sufficiently to test the proposed design.) Then you could work you way up to a 6502. (That was the old Apple ][ CPU chip. It's still in use for things like elevator controllers.) Note that the 6502 is a LONG way above a half-adder. Once you have your 6502 equivalents you probably want to start modifying the design so that the various individual CPUs can work in gangs. This might not be any more complex, but it would be less general purpose...still, if you're going to build nano-computers you should probably plan on massive parallel processing.
This second direction seems more like what he's proposing...but notice all the giant steps involved. I think that starting with MEMs and scaling down as technology advanced would be easier and give more certain results. OTOH, I'm not a nano-mech specialist. Maybe they've solved the problems that I've heard of earlier.
If it has to be a compelled purchase, then perhaps it's unjust. I can imagine the existence of valid arguments against this proposition, but none occur to me.
The copyright law used to allow copyrights to expire in a reasonable period of time. I felt that before the time of the "Sonny Bono Copyright act" that the period was already longer than was reasonable...so they extended it. Then with the DMCA they extended it again.
Just because I believe that some copyright laws are reasonable doesn't mean that I believe ANY copyright law is reasonable. The current laws are unjust, and the RIAA (and MPAA) are the companies that wrote and bought them.
You must not go to the same LUG that I do. Conversations are likely to include systems administration, but that's merely a fraction. Wild divergences into multitudinous other topics aren't avoided. They do, however, tend to have a computer professional's approach to things, however, which gives them a different flavor than normal conversations about, say, politics.