This might not be a very useful contribution to the discussion, but... knowing that Gaiman himself attends/... I don't know. But it makes me feel good:-)
Disclaimer: I live in Europe, ol' Italy to be precise. I'll answer you point-by-point. I understand that you're only making examples, I'll try to show you that you're using the wrong examples.
1) Buy beef rom the US. * I might be very wrong on this, but AFAIK US beef in Ol' Europe because of different regulations: US law allows *filling* your cattle with hormones to have them grow more heavy (mainly by retaining more water in their muscles and being fatter). Honestly, I wouldn't want to buy -much less eat- such a meat.
2) Genertically modified food * In Italy there is some genetically modified food. It must be marked very prominently, thus allowing people not to buy it. I don't think I'd want to buy that kind of food either: the main reason why multinationals develop transgenic food is to tie some kind of producition to their products (be it fertilizers or bug killers or whatever). Multinationals don't bother controlling very long for possible side-effects of their modifications. On many papers I read the assumption that the current dramatic rise in allergies can also be traced to transgenic food. I don't have any title to prove or disprove this, but I tend to believe them.
3) Go to whatever doctor I please * Of course I can. At any level. The worst that can happen is that I have to pay for the visit myself instead of having it paid by the Social Security system.
4) Keep a majority of what we earn * You have a point here. In Europe taxes are claimed to me higher than in the US on average. But you must also consider that some expenses you US-citizens have to do have the form of taxes here. I'm thinking about Social Security here: I think that Health insurance takes quite a chunk of a person's earnings...
5) Own a gun * I don't *WANT* to own a gun. And I don't want to go walking on the streets fearing that someone will go berserk on me (or on anyone else for that matter). Also notice that it's not forbidden to own guns here. It's just that there are quite a lot of checks done before you're allowed to carry one: this is a *very* weak point in the US law IMO - a leftover of the Wild Wild West times...
6) Transportations * See the UK and their privatization of the railroad system - and some of the problems it lead to. It's a road most railroad agencies in Europe are following. And as far as local transportation is concerned, in Italy the main bus companies are owned by the Town Council ( I really don't know how to better express the concept, sorry), certainly not by the government.
7) Taking 'non-recognized' medicines * I thought that there was a very tight control by the FDA (or whatever it is) over what kind of medicines are allowed in the US. There are pros and cons to total deregulation here: if you have a really capable medic, then he might have an idea over what he's prescribing you. On the other side, if you aren't so lucky (or rich), you're practically selling your body to the pharmaceutical industry. Are you sure you wish to go down that way? Having an authority control what medicines are allowable dampens both these effects.
We're going offtopic here though. The point I'm trying to make here is that extreme control (like the so-called "Real-world socialism" used to have and still has in some countries) is as bad as "no control at all".
I actually think that some european countries should be better studied by US regulators and students, as they sometimes can reach good compromises between these two extremes.
Ahem... wouldn't want to contradict you, but I wouldn't count Caldera in the "Big 3". Sure, Caldera is hot in the Enterprise which is its home turf, but outside it I consider Debian to be more noteworthy. Just my opinion of course, I have no intention to start distribution crusades or anything (besides, Caldera makes an excellent distro).
He didn't supply any proof. But being him one of the most respected teachers in Italy's biggest Engienering University - he's got to have some connection, hasn't he? I'd consider him a trusted source on this one.
It's also one of the most common practices in silicon chips development. While attending university lessons, my Adv. electronics professor candidly stated that something like 20% of all the R&D costs of a chip manifacturer goes into reverse engineering competitors' products....
Other comments in this same thread point out interesting facts. To those I add that another point: the target of fetchmail is limited, and tightly bound. Once it reaches that target, it is only to be expected for its codebase growth to slow down. The only alternative would be Creeping Featurism, and I don't think ESR wishes to go down that road...
It's also called "SIMD" (Single Instruction Multiple Data), and yes, it's been around forever. It was discovered by some chip makers a couple of years ago (*grin*).
Roxen Challenger offers some of the features you wrote, and some others. It has its markup language (RXML, but an XML-based version is coming up), which is easily expandable (it can use itself to define new tags). It offers quite a lot of functionalities for dynamic sites, without requiring CGIs. Native database connectivity (in RXML, but not only), web-driven configuration, support for dynamic images generation (mainly used to generate graphic texts and diagrams), support for many different protocols (HTTP, FTP, GOPHER, you can even play tetris with it), and can act as an HTTP proxy. Oh, it's fast too (the "next version"(tm) has been benchmarked [Warning! I said benchmarked!] serving 12000 requests/second on a double PII/350 running Solaris). It can run either as a single thread or multithreaded. Being a single-process server, it can cache aggressively (no more performance bottlenecks because of DNS). By the way, it has its own asynchronous implementation of the DNS protocol, a nice extra boost. It doesn't support WebDAV, but there are products based on it which offer templatized site construction. It's written in pike (it has LPC origins for you MUDders)
Or just change webserver. Some (I use Roxen Challenger) use a single-process approach. They "compile" and then embed your scripts into the main process, and so you save time because you don't need to fire up the interpreter. Also, because of the long-lived, single-process approach, you can share the DB connections among your scripts, and most of all cache
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This might not be a very useful contribution to the discussion, but... /. .. :-)
knowing that Gaiman himself attends
I don't know. But it makes me feel good
From what I've seen so far, stories submitted by /. readers are usually quite well-researched.
IMO this is a debacle which could teach us to be more careful, but it's an exception.
Actually it does (or rather, it could have done that, had Linus accepted an implementation done by Riccardo Facchetti something like 1.5 years ago).
Maybe that patch is still floating around...
AFAIK computers are to be kept off during flights too. So a combo cell/PDA would fit into both categories, and definitely be kept turned off.
I don't think it's possible, that is copyrighted material.
It can be cited though.
Disclaimer: I live in Europe, ol' Italy to be precise. I'll answer you point-by-point. I understand that you're only making examples, I'll try to show you that you're using the wrong examples.
1) Buy beef rom the US.
* I might be very wrong on this, but AFAIK US beef in Ol' Europe because of different regulations: US law allows *filling* your cattle with hormones to have them grow more heavy (mainly by retaining more water in their muscles and being fatter). Honestly, I wouldn't want to buy -much less eat- such a meat.
2) Genertically modified food
* In Italy there is some genetically modified food. It must be marked very prominently, thus allowing people not to buy it. I don't think I'd want to buy that kind of food either: the main reason why multinationals develop transgenic food is to tie some kind of producition to their products (be it fertilizers or bug killers or whatever). Multinationals don't bother controlling very long for possible side-effects of their modifications. On many papers I read the assumption that the current dramatic rise in allergies can also be traced to transgenic food. I don't have any title to prove or disprove this, but I tend to believe them.
3) Go to whatever doctor I please
* Of course I can. At any level. The worst that can happen is that I have to pay for the visit myself instead of having it paid by the Social Security system.
4) Keep a majority of what we earn
* You have a point here. In Europe taxes are claimed to me higher than in the US on average. But you must also consider that some expenses you US-citizens have to do have the form of taxes here. I'm thinking about Social Security here: I think that Health insurance takes quite a chunk of a person's earnings...
5) Own a gun
* I don't *WANT* to own a gun. And I don't want to go walking on the streets fearing that someone will go berserk on me (or on anyone else for that matter). Also notice that it's not forbidden to own guns here. It's just that there are quite a lot of checks done before you're allowed to carry one: this is a *very* weak point in the US law IMO - a leftover of the Wild Wild West times...
6) Transportations
* See the UK and their privatization of the railroad system - and some of the problems it lead to. It's a road most railroad agencies in Europe are following. And as far as local transportation is concerned, in Italy the main bus companies are owned by the Town Council ( I really don't know how to better express the concept, sorry), certainly not by the government.
7) Taking 'non-recognized' medicines
* I thought that there was a very tight control by the FDA (or whatever it is) over what kind of medicines are allowed in the US.
There are pros and cons to total deregulation here: if you have a really capable medic, then he might have an idea over what he's prescribing you. On the other side, if you aren't so lucky (or rich), you're practically selling your body to the pharmaceutical industry. Are you sure you wish to go down that way? Having an authority control what medicines are allowable dampens both these effects.
We're going offtopic here though.
The point I'm trying to make here is that extreme control (like the so-called "Real-world socialism" used to have and still has in some countries) is as bad as "no control at all".
I actually think that some european countries should be better studied by US regulators and students, as they sometimes can reach good compromises between these two extremes.
Ahem... wouldn't want to contradict you, but I wouldn't count Caldera in the "Big 3".
Sure, Caldera is hot in the Enterprise which is its home turf, but outside it I consider Debian to be more noteworthy.
Just my opinion of course, I have no intention to start distribution crusades or anything (besides, Caldera makes an excellent distro).
AFAIK the SCSL has been around for quite some time..
He didn't supply any proof. But being him one of the most respected teachers in Italy's biggest Engienering University - he's got to have some connection, hasn't he?
I'd consider him a trusted source on this one.
It's also one of the most common practices in silicon chips development.
While attending university lessons, my Adv. electronics professor candidly stated that something like 20% of all the R&D costs of a chip manifacturer goes into reverse engineering competitors' products....
Other comments in this same thread point out interesting facts.
To those I add that another point: the target of fetchmail is limited, and tightly bound. Once it reaches that target, it is only to be expected for its codebase growth to slow down.
The only alternative would be Creeping Featurism, and I don't think ESR wishes to go down that road...
I've heard good rumours about IBM's JDK for Linux.
Granted, it's not Java2 yet, but...
It's also called "SIMD" (Single Instruction Multiple Data), and yes, it's been around forever.
It was discovered by some chip makers a couple of years ago (*grin*).
Roxen Challenger offers some of the features you wrote, and some others.
It has its markup language (RXML, but an XML-based version is coming up), which is easily expandable (it can use itself to define new tags). It offers quite a lot of functionalities for dynamic sites, without requiring CGIs. Native database connectivity (in RXML, but not only), web-driven configuration, support for dynamic images generation (mainly used to generate graphic texts and diagrams), support for many different protocols (HTTP, FTP, GOPHER, you can even play tetris with it), and can act as an HTTP proxy.
Oh, it's fast too (the "next version"(tm) has been benchmarked [Warning! I said benchmarked!] serving 12000 requests/second on a double PII/350 running Solaris). It can run either as a single thread or multithreaded. Being a single-process server, it can cache aggressively (no more performance bottlenecks because of DNS). By the way, it has its own asynchronous implementation of the DNS protocol, a nice extra boost.
It doesn't support WebDAV, but there are products based on it which offer templatized site construction.
It's written in pike (it has LPC origins for you MUDders)
Or just change webserver.
Some (I use Roxen Challenger) use a single-process approach.
They "compile" and then embed your scripts into the main process, and so you save time because you don't need to fire up the interpreter.
Also, because of the long-lived, single-process approach, you can share the DB connections among your scripts, and most of all cache