North Korea is simply an awful place. I cannot understand how anyone would seek to defend it or those who actively support it. I hope you go there sometime. That way you'd lose the obsession about the US (who doesn't want South Korea to be subject to the terrible affliction of a North Korean takeover) and recognize the North Korean government for what it really is, not a bunch of locals valiantly resisting Pax Americana but actually an evil pseudo-feudal system that has zero regard for its own citizens or other countries. Wake up and recognize evil for what it is.
There are various types of 'realtime', of course a realtime system is not the same as a high throughput system, but high throughput does help. I've personally used the RTAI realtime enhancements with Linux and I would still pick Solaris over Linux any day. VxWorks et al may be a different story, but the discussion was about realtime Linux vs Solaris. An x86_64 grid still had large latencies between the nodes compared with an *equivalent cost* Sun grid at the time. That's why Sun boxes used to be chosen for Internet-scale work (since they had a huge number of slower cores connected by a bus that was faster than any external bus). The economics has changed since then, making only a few applications worth the effort - but if you need high throughput and money is not an issue then the Solaris boxes (and associated gear) are usually still better. For fast computing then you use the X86 boxes - but that is not the same as fast throughput nor low latency. The Solaris O/S and gear also has better guaranteed low-latency response when you are interfacing with hardware. So you seem a bit confused about why x86_64 is used in supercomputing and how it actually has zero relevance to the discussion that was going on.
> On the computational side, BSD, Windows, Aix, Irix, Solaris could have all done exactly the same thing.
In theory yes, in practice, no. As a former astrophysicist we used to use Linux and Solaris for our computing despite the fact that most of the non-computing competent people used Windows on their desktops. The reason we used Linux is that it is a vastly superior development environment than Windows (Visual Studio was not useful for our purposes) and is also vastly superior (that is, easier and more open to us) for hardware integration than Windows. We also were producing and analyzing huge amounts of data, so were using 64-bit Linux while Windows users were still figuring out how to get their 16-bit legacy apps working on their 32-bit systems.
We also wanted uptimes of months whereas with Windows of the time you crossed your fingers that you'd go a day without some kind of fault happening. I'm sure fellow scientists at CERN developed a lot of software themselves and also found Linux far better for this purpose. That is why techie people prefer Linux over Windows - for practical reasons rather than 'religion' as you suppose. The reason you fail to understand this is probably because you are not trying to develop software for 'big data' problems. That's ok, please just understand that this colors your personal view with an inaccurate picture. Best to keep quiet about stuff you know nothing about.
Linux even with realtime extensions can still get stuck due to hardware I/O operations. The PC architecture isn't really up to real-time. Customized boards running Linux are less of a problem. Sparcs boxes are suitable for true realtime. Even years ago I remember having a frozen machine due to I/O problems and simply hitting Stop+A got me a working console (trying the same thing on Linux would have gotten me nowhere). Sparcs also had I/O backplanes that blew everything else out of the water - which is why they were used for moving large quantities of data around. There are many areas where Linux has moved far beyond Solaris, but I/O performance and true realtime were never one of them.
Windows is also as 'broken' as Linux or Apple to the Average Joe. *Most* people are too frightened to install software themselves and get their friends and family to do it - even on Windows. Now some people (especially the young) do take up the challenge and install stuff by themselves - and it turns out that apt-get/synaptic etc are actually *easier* to use than finding and installing the right Installshield/NSS program (or even Apple dmg) since in the latter you have to read all sort of crap and select all sorts of options to get it installed. On Linux the software is installed easily with a common configuration, only customizing the configuration requires any thought.
Linux works just as well as Windows or Apple provided you get a technical minded person to maintain it for you. If it wasn't for the techie Slashdotters looking after Windows machines then most people could not maintain access to a working computer. Therefore your argument that Linux is broken is really incorrect - what you ought to be arguing about is the degree of difficulty of (IYHO) 'broken' Linux vs 'broken' Windows vs 'broken' Mac.
Hmm, let's see. China have invaded and occupied Tibet. Invaded Vietnam. Invaded Korea to prop up one of the worst regimes the planet has seen. Bombarded Taiwan for decades and threaten to invade. Dominate Mongolia (who had to turn to the Soviets for assistance). Bully Vietnam, Japan and The Phillipines at sea. Fought Russia in Siberia on and off for decades. Use cyber and economic warfare around the globe. Conduct military and industrial espionage around the globe. Exploit Africa worse than any former colonial power. All this while the Chinese feel they are weak. Once they feel they are strong they will be more than a handful. Wake up and don't buy the 'China is peaceful and non-expansionist' line - it does not match the historical facts.
C is great because the language as simple and portable. The complex goodness comes in the libraries. Java tries the same approach, but modernised (hence, the enormous success of C and Java). C++ does not have simplicity as its goal, which makes it horrid to read someone else's code.
I also agree with you. But the original start of this sub-thread is that people use Excel because they can't afford the license for Access. Hence, my comments about Postgresql. Then rather than mucking around trying to collaboratively edit spreadsheets (google spreadsheet disasters:)) then simple web-apps could be used to do the same thing.
Actually, many organizations have a process where you can software you need installed if you push for it (that is, jump through the IT department's evaluation hoops). If the software costs nothing and benefits the business it is almost certain that your boss can override the IT boss and get what you need installed. A company has to be particularly backward to not allow the use of proven technologies like the Postgresql database, and while there are certainly companies retarded in this way, most companies are open to people who can string a business case/solution together that uses such tech.
However, so many people are so blinkered they think that if their organization won't splash out for (shudder) Access or (yawn) MS SQL-Server than they should revert to Excel. That is not necessary when free and arguably better solutions exist (eg. Postgresql) for zero outlay.
Apologies, my bad proofreading: please change "and the economics of Linux scale vastly better than Linux" => "and the economics of Linux scale vastly better than proprietary operating systems, like Windows". Thanks.
It is simple. For large software deployments you need to pay license fees. This means organizations end up buying expensive hardware and trying to get one box to scale. They do this so that the software licensing fees are minimized (which can be an order of magnitude more expensive than the underlying hardware for "enterprise" software like databases and web app servers). With Postgresql there is no fee. You can create a cluster with as many boxes as you like and you are limited by the hardware you have and not by the software license you can afford. In fact, you can get approximately 11 times the hardware for the same price as 1 hardware + 1 license fee. This means you can scale Postgresql to *enormous* loads that you simply could not afford to scale MS-SQL Server to. This is also the huge advantage Linux has over Windows, and why Internet scale business (eg. Google) and supercomputers use Linux and not Windows, because it scales better (and the economics of Linux scale vastly better than Linux). However, if you have never designed an internet scale system you would never know this - why is why all the Windows-only weenies on Slashdot fail to grok enough to become true Internet Jedi:)
> since 99.9% of users will not have
Not all users are low-level corporate drones. Sure, if that's all you and your organization do all day then Excel is all you see - but please don't assume the entire world (or computing world) is like this.
Postgresql is free and is arguably better than MS-SQL Server anyway (proper internationalization, better support for text type, no licence fee [which means it scales easily => much better performance], cross-platform etc etc).
Actually, one or more databases are the heart of most businesses. Excel is at the heart of user workflows in small/medium businesses, but often then the 'business' part is still a database of one kind or another. Just sayin'.
"As for agriculture strains, those are natural (though changed through generations of controlled breeding). Copyright doesn't apply there."
I live in New Zealand (NZ). Millions of taxpayer dollars were spent developing a strain of apples known as New Zealand Rose. It is a delicious apple. However, Chinese tourists were found with cuttings of the apple trees (they're always found with such things) and now the apples are grown in China - destroying some of the export potential of the apple, plus also destroying the brand in the quality control that NZ maintain for their product (since the Chinese can sell inferior quality apples it taints the NZ brand).
This is not unusual, in fact the Chinese Government has a department that asks its citizens going overseas to bring back anything useful they can find and they'll be rewarded. This is called the 'Thousand grains of sand' and is an interesting approach to spying (who cares if some tourists are arrested, since there are many more you can still get interesting stuff). It is not ok for it to be government policy to conduct industrial espionage - the Chinese joined the WTO (in 2001) which means they agreed to obey international property rights agreements. Now they are not the only ones, but they certainly are the greatest and more importantly they are *deliberate and systematic* offenders. Therefore, while your post has some good points I don't think it was made understanding the true 'state of play' at the moment.
"Yes, it's fun to bash NVIDIA and try to paint them as some sort of a big, black demon worth all the hatred in the world"
Lol. I suggest you go look up the definition of the Latin word "invidia". It's fits nicely with the Slashdot lynchmob.
> The pilot project was worth an initial 250-350 million dollars, with the potential of much more to follow.
People always say this, "more work to follow" but it hardly ever works out like that. The Chinese are notorious (as in *consistently and repeatedly*) ask for samples with the promise of more orders and they take it apart and reverse engineer it. They do this with electronics, shoes, ships, MiG and Sukhoi jets, missiles, commercial agricultural strains even Austrian towns. I'm not anti-Sino, just reporting what has been documented as happening and appears to be a sustained, systematic and government condoned effort to make unlicensed copies of technology (that is, 'steal'). Perhaps NVidia were aware of this, even if many Slashdotters are not.
> Anything made in the last couple of years should run any game on the market at full shiniez at decent resolution.
Sigh. Clearly your video games diet is fairly bland. Try one of the DCS combat simulators (A-10C, Ka-50, P-51D), or even Armed Assault II and you'll quickly notice the difference between a high end video card and a run-of-the-mill one. Just because the 'mainstream' is designed as twitch games that fight on maps the size of postage stamps doesn't mean all games/simulations are like this. I guarantee if you look outside the BF3, MW3, Halo, Gears of War, Diabolo3 and other such stuff you will find games less widely known to Joe Sixpack that have a lot more interesting aspects (eg. buddy lasing coordinated laser-guided-bomb drops) than run, gun, collect new hat/badge/unlock.
The other thing is that immediate digital voting will result in a 'lynch mob' mentality where people can react based on current emotion rather than giving an opportunity for debate and multiple sides/perspectives to be heard (at least in theory). Couple that with opportunistic politicians who may push populist polices that actually aren't good long-term, coupled with instantaneous emotional voting by the populace and all of a sudden you have another 'Krystalnacht' scenario where enough of the populace are whipped into a frenzy to approve the things that the politician feels that have a sufficient popular mandate for.
Personally I quite like the concept of *secure* digital voting. I just don't think it should be used to decide things on a daily basis. Plus, only human individuals should get a vote. No corporations should vote (as corps seem to be acquiring more and more legal rights as if they were human, but no corresponding increase in responsibilities for unsociable behaviour).
Maybe they had a not null constraint on that (Oracle:)) database table, so zero was the correct token to use.
Seriously though, awarding Oracle zero damages is not the same as not awarding them damages at all. This recognizes that Oracle was "right" in the case, even if no material damage is caused. I would have preferred that the result be that Google was not liable for damages at all (even the nominal sum of zero - but I haven't read the legal summary, I could well be wrong and that is what the judgement actually means).
The Java Development Kit has always come with source code, apart from a few binary blobs. This was even before OpenJDK. It is one of the beauties of Java, the source was pretty much always available, which was a big help in diagnosing your own bugs (looking at the class library source was very illustrative in how you were supposed to use the libraries). Furthermore, the author of the code that Oracle challenged Google on basically gave the code he had given to Sun to Google as well. Oracle's legal team were incredibly stupid in the way they proceeded - but I guys lawyers at that level are so used to being right they forget they need to check their facts in case they are wrong (and very many techies are smarter than lawyers - we don't charge much because we love what we do, unlike many lawyers).
> Not to be a prick, but who the fuck gives a shit about new zealand law.
Well, you could have seen the same thing without having to phrase it in those terms. However, it appears my comment has been modded to +5, so parhaps it did have some meritorious information content. Based on that, you probably were being a "prick" - this could be a good lesson for you to tone the bad attitude down a little. Pax:)
Interesting in the Kim DotCom case how the FBI took hard drives so that the defense team could not use them. Fortunately a New Zealand Court Order released a few days ago has ignored US excuses and forced them to make copies (the US said it didn't have the capability to copy 150TB in 21 days; fortunately the judge saw this as lame). The US was trying to deny the DotCom defence team any evidence that could be used to prevent his extradition to the US. Since DotCom is not a US citizen I guess it felt that the protections afforded to US citizens could be dispensed with (note: Assange is not a US citizen either). Fortunately the New Zealand legal system is pretty fair, no matter where you come from.
The US doesn't always achieve violence to achieve its aims, but it doesn't always follow local laws either (whether or not laws matter depend on how much in the US national interest something is). I say this as someone who is from New Zealand and is more pro-US than the average New Zealander, but man, your government really disrespects the sovereignty of the locals (plus subverts sovereignty and democratic process though sneaky trade treaties, eg. ACTA). It is also super heavy handed when it comes to digital cases, in order to get DotCom it is taken the personal data of hundreds of thousands of other users. Sure, make a copy of the data, but hand it back as soon as you can (but the US has been trying not to hand any data back - which is why the NZ courts had to force them to start).
I'm in New Zealand where the US FBI is getting the NZ Government to charge the owner of MegaUpload 'Kim DotcCom' on their behalf. There is nothing wrong with this, it is part of NZs responsibilities. However, the FBI have been duplicating the MegaUpload harddrives while in New Zealand despite not being permitted to.
In short, the FBI broke New Zealand law. Maybe the US would respect Ecuadorean law if Assange were there, maybe they wouldn't. The USA does more good things than people give them credit for, and I personally am pretty pro-US, but the evidence is the US flouts international laws and norms when it suits them.
If I were Assange then seeking asylum is possibly not a bad thing (issuing an Interpol warrant for the charges he faced is pretty extreme - it shows the lengths that the Powers That Be will go to in order to silence this whistle-blower [he didn't report anything false, just made duplicity publicly known]).
Slashdot Mirror
North Korea is simply an awful place. I cannot understand how anyone would seek to defend it or those who actively support it. I hope you go there sometime. That way you'd lose the obsession about the US (who doesn't want South Korea to be subject to the terrible affliction of a North Korean takeover) and recognize the North Korean government for what it really is, not a bunch of locals valiantly resisting Pax Americana but actually an evil pseudo-feudal system that has zero regard for its own citizens or other countries. Wake up and recognize evil for what it is.
There are various types of 'realtime', of course a realtime system is not the same as a high throughput system, but high throughput does help. I've personally used the RTAI realtime enhancements with Linux and I would still pick Solaris over Linux any day. VxWorks et al may be a different story, but the discussion was about realtime Linux vs Solaris. An x86_64 grid still had large latencies between the nodes compared with an *equivalent cost* Sun grid at the time. That's why Sun boxes used to be chosen for Internet-scale work (since they had a huge number of slower cores connected by a bus that was faster than any external bus). The economics has changed since then, making only a few applications worth the effort - but if you need high throughput and money is not an issue then the Solaris boxes (and associated gear) are usually still better. For fast computing then you use the X86 boxes - but that is not the same as fast throughput nor low latency. The Solaris O/S and gear also has better guaranteed low-latency response when you are interfacing with hardware. So you seem a bit confused about why x86_64 is used in supercomputing and how it actually has zero relevance to the discussion that was going on.
> On the computational side, BSD, Windows, Aix, Irix, Solaris could have all done exactly the same thing.
In theory yes, in practice, no. As a former astrophysicist we used to use Linux and Solaris for our computing despite the fact that most of the non-computing competent people used Windows on their desktops. The reason we used Linux is that it is a vastly superior development environment than Windows (Visual Studio was not useful for our purposes) and is also vastly superior (that is, easier and more open to us) for hardware integration than Windows. We also were producing and analyzing huge amounts of data, so were using 64-bit Linux while Windows users were still figuring out how to get their 16-bit legacy apps working on their 32-bit systems.
We also wanted uptimes of months whereas with Windows of the time you crossed your fingers that you'd go a day without some kind of fault happening. I'm sure fellow scientists at CERN developed a lot of software themselves and also found Linux far better for this purpose. That is why techie people prefer Linux over Windows - for practical reasons rather than 'religion' as you suppose. The reason you fail to understand this is probably because you are not trying to develop software for 'big data' problems. That's ok, please just understand that this colors your personal view with an inaccurate picture. Best to keep quiet about stuff you know nothing about.
Linux even with realtime extensions can still get stuck due to hardware I/O operations. The PC architecture isn't really up to real-time. Customized boards running Linux are less of a problem. Sparcs boxes are suitable for true realtime. Even years ago I remember having a frozen machine due to I/O problems and simply hitting Stop+A got me a working console (trying the same thing on Linux would have gotten me nowhere). Sparcs also had I/O backplanes that blew everything else out of the water - which is why they were used for moving large quantities of data around. There are many areas where Linux has moved far beyond Solaris, but I/O performance and true realtime were never one of them.
Windows is also as 'broken' as Linux or Apple to the Average Joe. *Most* people are too frightened to install software themselves and get their friends and family to do it - even on Windows. Now some people (especially the young) do take up the challenge and install stuff by themselves - and it turns out that apt-get/synaptic etc are actually *easier* to use than finding and installing the right Installshield/NSS program (or even Apple dmg) since in the latter you have to read all sort of crap and select all sorts of options to get it installed. On Linux the software is installed easily with a common configuration, only customizing the configuration requires any thought.
Linux works just as well as Windows or Apple provided you get a technical minded person to maintain it for you. If it wasn't for the techie Slashdotters looking after Windows machines then most people could not maintain access to a working computer. Therefore your argument that Linux is broken is really incorrect - what you ought to be arguing about is the degree of difficulty of (IYHO) 'broken' Linux vs 'broken' Windows vs 'broken' Mac.
Hmm, let's see. China have invaded and occupied Tibet. Invaded Vietnam. Invaded Korea to prop up one of the worst regimes the planet has seen. Bombarded Taiwan for decades and threaten to invade. Dominate Mongolia (who had to turn to the Soviets for assistance). Bully Vietnam, Japan and The Phillipines at sea. Fought Russia in Siberia on and off for decades. Use cyber and economic warfare around the globe. Conduct military and industrial espionage around the globe. Exploit Africa worse than any former colonial power. All this while the Chinese feel they are weak. Once they feel they are strong they will be more than a handful. Wake up and don't buy the 'China is peaceful and non-expansionist' line - it does not match the historical facts.
C is great because the language as simple and portable. The complex goodness comes in the libraries. Java tries the same approach, but modernised (hence, the enormous success of C and Java). C++ does not have simplicity as its goal, which makes it horrid to read someone else's code.
I also agree with you. But the original start of this sub-thread is that people use Excel because they can't afford the license for Access. Hence, my comments about Postgresql. Then rather than mucking around trying to collaboratively edit spreadsheets (google spreadsheet disasters :)) then simple web-apps could be used to do the same thing.
Actually, many organizations have a process where you can software you need installed if you push for it (that is, jump through the IT department's evaluation hoops). If the software costs nothing and benefits the business it is almost certain that your boss can override the IT boss and get what you need installed. A company has to be particularly backward to not allow the use of proven technologies like the Postgresql database, and while there are certainly companies retarded in this way, most companies are open to people who can string a business case/solution together that uses such tech.
However, so many people are so blinkered they think that if their organization won't splash out for (shudder) Access or (yawn) MS SQL-Server than they should revert to Excel. That is not necessary when free and arguably better solutions exist (eg. Postgresql) for zero outlay.
Apologies, my bad proofreading: please change "and the economics of Linux scale vastly better than Linux" => "and the economics of Linux scale vastly better than proprietary operating systems, like Windows". Thanks.
It is simple. For large software deployments you need to pay license fees. This means organizations end up buying expensive hardware and trying to get one box to scale. They do this so that the software licensing fees are minimized (which can be an order of magnitude more expensive than the underlying hardware for "enterprise" software like databases and web app servers). With Postgresql there is no fee. You can create a cluster with as many boxes as you like and you are limited by the hardware you have and not by the software license you can afford. In fact, you can get approximately 11 times the hardware for the same price as 1 hardware + 1 license fee. This means you can scale Postgresql to *enormous* loads that you simply could not afford to scale MS-SQL Server to. This is also the huge advantage Linux has over Windows, and why Internet scale business (eg. Google) and supercomputers use Linux and not Windows, because it scales better (and the economics of Linux scale vastly better than Linux). However, if you have never designed an internet scale system you would never know this - why is why all the Windows-only weenies on Slashdot fail to grok enough to become true Internet Jedi :)
> since 99.9% of users will not have
Not all users are low-level corporate drones. Sure, if that's all you and your organization do all day then Excel is all you see - but please don't assume the entire world (or computing world) is like this.
Postgresql is free and is arguably better than MS-SQL Server anyway (proper internationalization, better support for text type, no licence fee [which means it scales easily => much better performance], cross-platform etc etc).
Actually, one or more databases are the heart of most businesses. Excel is at the heart of user workflows in small/medium businesses, but often then the 'business' part is still a database of one kind or another. Just sayin'.
"As for agriculture strains, those are natural (though changed through generations of controlled breeding). Copyright doesn't apply there."
I live in New Zealand (NZ). Millions of taxpayer dollars were spent developing a strain of apples known as New Zealand Rose. It is a delicious apple. However, Chinese tourists were found with cuttings of the apple trees (they're always found with such things) and now the apples are grown in China - destroying some of the export potential of the apple, plus also destroying the brand in the quality control that NZ maintain for their product (since the Chinese can sell inferior quality apples it taints the NZ brand).
This is not unusual, in fact the Chinese Government has a department that asks its citizens going overseas to bring back anything useful they can find and they'll be rewarded. This is called the 'Thousand grains of sand' and is an interesting approach to spying (who cares if some tourists are arrested, since there are many more you can still get interesting stuff). It is not ok for it to be government policy to conduct industrial espionage - the Chinese joined the WTO (in 2001) which means they agreed to obey international property rights agreements. Now they are not the only ones, but they certainly are the greatest and more importantly they are *deliberate and systematic* offenders. Therefore, while your post has some good points I don't think it was made understanding the true 'state of play' at the moment.
"Yes, it's fun to bash NVIDIA and try to paint them as some sort of a big, black demon worth all the hatred in the world"
Lol. I suggest you go look up the definition of the Latin word "invidia". It's fits nicely with the Slashdot lynchmob.
> The pilot project was worth an initial 250-350 million dollars, with the potential of much more to follow.
People always say this, "more work to follow" but it hardly ever works out like that. The Chinese are notorious (as in *consistently and repeatedly*) ask for samples with the promise of more orders and they take it apart and reverse engineer it. They do this with electronics, shoes, ships, MiG and Sukhoi jets, missiles, commercial agricultural strains even Austrian towns. I'm not anti-Sino, just reporting what has been documented as happening and appears to be a sustained, systematic and government condoned effort to make unlicensed copies of technology (that is, 'steal'). Perhaps NVidia were aware of this, even if many Slashdotters are not.
> Anything made in the last couple of years should run any game on the market at full shiniez at decent resolution.
Sigh. Clearly your video games diet is fairly bland. Try one of the DCS combat simulators (A-10C, Ka-50, P-51D), or even Armed Assault II and you'll quickly notice the difference between a high end video card and a run-of-the-mill one. Just because the 'mainstream' is designed as twitch games that fight on maps the size of postage stamps doesn't mean all games/simulations are like this. I guarantee if you look outside the BF3, MW3, Halo, Gears of War, Diabolo3 and other such stuff you will find games less widely known to Joe Sixpack that have a lot more interesting aspects (eg. buddy lasing coordinated laser-guided-bomb drops) than run, gun, collect new hat/badge/unlock.
The other thing is that immediate digital voting will result in a 'lynch mob' mentality where people can react based on current emotion rather than giving an opportunity for debate and multiple sides/perspectives to be heard (at least in theory). Couple that with opportunistic politicians who may push populist polices that actually aren't good long-term, coupled with instantaneous emotional voting by the populace and all of a sudden you have another 'Krystalnacht' scenario where enough of the populace are whipped into a frenzy to approve the things that the politician feels that have a sufficient popular mandate for.
Personally I quite like the concept of *secure* digital voting. I just don't think it should be used to decide things on a daily basis. Plus, only human individuals should get a vote. No corporations should vote (as corps seem to be acquiring more and more legal rights as if they were human, but no corresponding increase in responsibilities for unsociable behaviour).
No worries mate :)
Maybe they had a not null constraint on that (Oracle :)) database table, so zero was the correct token to use.
Seriously though, awarding Oracle zero damages is not the same as not awarding them damages at all. This recognizes that Oracle was "right" in the case, even if no material damage is caused. I would have preferred that the result be that Google was not liable for damages at all (even the nominal sum of zero - but I haven't read the legal summary, I could well be wrong and that is what the judgement actually means).
The Java Development Kit has always come with source code, apart from a few binary blobs. This was even before OpenJDK. It is one of the beauties of Java, the source was pretty much always available, which was a big help in diagnosing your own bugs (looking at the class library source was very illustrative in how you were supposed to use the libraries). Furthermore, the author of the code that Oracle challenged Google on basically gave the code he had given to Sun to Google as well. Oracle's legal team were incredibly stupid in the way they proceeded - but I guys lawyers at that level are so used to being right they forget they need to check their facts in case they are wrong (and very many techies are smarter than lawyers - we don't charge much because we love what we do, unlike many lawyers).
> Not to be a prick, but who the fuck gives a shit about new zealand law.
Well, you could have seen the same thing without having to phrase it in those terms. However, it appears my comment has been modded to +5, so parhaps it did have some meritorious information content. Based on that, you probably were being a "prick" - this could be a good lesson for you to tone the bad attitude down a little. Pax :)
Interesting in the Kim DotCom case how the FBI took hard drives so that the defense team could not use them. Fortunately a New Zealand Court Order released a few days ago has ignored US excuses and forced them to make copies (the US said it didn't have the capability to copy 150TB in 21 days; fortunately the judge saw this as lame). The US was trying to deny the DotCom defence team any evidence that could be used to prevent his extradition to the US. Since DotCom is not a US citizen I guess it felt that the protections afforded to US citizens could be dispensed with (note: Assange is not a US citizen either). Fortunately the New Zealand legal system is pretty fair, no matter where you come from.
The US doesn't always achieve violence to achieve its aims, but it doesn't always follow local laws either (whether or not laws matter depend on how much in the US national interest something is). I say this as someone who is from New Zealand and is more pro-US than the average New Zealander, but man, your government really disrespects the sovereignty of the locals (plus subverts sovereignty and democratic process though sneaky trade treaties, eg. ACTA). It is also super heavy handed when it comes to digital cases, in order to get DotCom it is taken the personal data of hundreds of thousands of other users. Sure, make a copy of the data, but hand it back as soon as you can (but the US has been trying not to hand any data back - which is why the NZ courts had to force them to start).
I'm in New Zealand where the US FBI is getting the NZ Government to charge the owner of MegaUpload 'Kim DotcCom' on their behalf. There is nothing wrong with this, it is part of NZs responsibilities. However, the FBI have been duplicating the MegaUpload harddrives while in New Zealand despite not being permitted to.
In short, the FBI broke New Zealand law. Maybe the US would respect Ecuadorean law if Assange were there, maybe they wouldn't. The USA does more good things than people give them credit for, and I personally am pretty pro-US, but the evidence is the US flouts international laws and norms when it suits them.
If I were Assange then seeking asylum is possibly not a bad thing (issuing an Interpol warrant for the charges he faced is pretty extreme - it shows the lengths that the Powers That Be will go to in order to silence this whistle-blower [he didn't report anything false, just made duplicity publicly known]).