Symbiotic co-everspecialization? Perhaps hummingbirds and orchids, where the beaks of individual species of humming birds are designed to feed on one and only one species of orchid. That orchids can only be pollinated by that one species of hummingbird. If one goes away, both go away. You see this sort of thing quite often with pollination, and sometimes even with seed dispersal; In Costa Rica there are several different species of fig, each of which ripens at different times in the year. There is a monkey that takes advantage of this and has become fairly specialized on eating the different figs. If one or two species of fig would die out, the monkeys would also die out or at least thing out significantly. Once the monkeys are gone, the figs can no longer spread their seeds and so they all die out. And then interestingly, all of these different figs rely on different specific species of insects for pollination, so one species of insect going exist can wipe out the whole... symbiotic group: insects, figs and monkeys. I think there also birds that rely on the figs, but they digest them differently and so do not spread viable seeds. So the birds would be gone if the whole thing tumbles apart.
But rainforests are generally very highly interdependant, as their climate was historically very stable. Another interesting fact about rain forests is that generally they are not actually in areas geographically amenable to as much growth as they have, except the huge amount of biomass (particularilly vegetative) leads to a huge increase in humidity, which causes the rain that defines the rain forest. If you chop down enough trees, you are left with desert.
Because very little actually goes to education. Take a look at the budget and see what percentage of the fed. goes to the military, vs education. Then take a look at your paycheck and see what percentage of that goes to the fed, and you'll see why universities have to look for alternate sources of funding.
And besides, if my acquaintances lied to me about video game store employees lying about availability, that would in and of itself show a tendancy for video game employees to lie. Unless they were lying about actually working there in the first place:b
They don't say that they don't have it, they just say there's only one or two in stock when in reality they have plenty. Customers will then assume that everyone else is almost sold out, and not go elsewhere. And as I said, this could be false information.
A rapidly spinning superconductor does indeed cause an obect over it to levitate somewhat, and for the purpose of this argument we can assume that these are indeed gravitonic effects. Doesn't really matter
The biggest problem comes as your vehicle rises, the spinning disk would have to be lifted, and I assume you would use magnetics in the vehicle to lift the disk. Those magnetic forces would then pull down on the remainder of the vehicle's structure (every action has an equal and opposite reaction) eliminating the levitative forces. Trying to get this working would be like trying to grab yourself by the shirt collar and lift yourself off the ground.
This is not to say that there isn't usable tech provided by the phenomenon. A roadway of these could possibly be made that would allow vehicles to travel over them. Or more likely, a launch pad could be made which would reduce the amount of fuel that has to be loaded onto a rocket or aircraft to initially fight off gravity and launch. For these applications it's just a question of whether spinning the superconductors would be more energy efficient than just using traditional thrust.
The patent would become the property of the University, which can then sell production rights to the pharm. companies, funding the school and other education. Otherwise, the pharm. companies would just take the idea and make the drugs, and the schools would be out valuable funding.
It takes less than a minute to mug someone and get away with a wallet full of cash
It takes longer than that to come up with the plan, obtain the tools necessary, find the right place, sufficiently mask your identity, wait for a good target to come by, flee the scene, get rid of any evidence and then have a convincing alibi when all is said and done.
Not following all of those procedures (and probably more) will significantly increase your risk of getting caught. And all this for... what's the average amount of cash that people carry on them. Maybe $50? Sure, you can wait for victims which have a higher likelyhood of carrying more money, but then that simply takes more time, preperation and might put you in a more risky location (risky to the criminal, not necesarilly the victim.)
It is possible that you would get away with it at least once, probably even likely. But mugging people enough times to actually make a living off of it will draw a lot of suspicion and greatly increase your likelyhood of getting caught. Or finding that your mark is packing heat and pissed off.
Much of the time, criminals simply do not realize that crime does not pay.
Theifs are drawn in by the idea that they can make a lot of money quick, but don't take into account the resources needed to actually get the job done. With many schemes that I've heard people describe, the hourly wage of just going to work for McDonald's is about as profitable. And if you throw in the jail time spent if you do get caught, you're working for just about nothing. Now there are some crimes that pay short term, but long term they don't seem to be a good idea.
So, financially, criminal acts are generally stupid. Crimes of passion wouldn't really be covered by the financial aspects, but if you are capable of figuring out all the ways that you can get caught, you usually realize that major criminal activity just isn't worth it. So the ones that do the crimes would, by definition, be the ones that aren't capable of figuring out what gets them caught. So crime is generally commited by people who have very little to lose if they actually do get caught.
My guess is they just checked his web browser's history. Google searches for "foo" show up as "foo-Google Search.
Searching for information does not prove in and of itself that you commited a crime.
But it can be used to establish that you had the means to commit a crime.
Just like growing poppies in the United States is by no means against the law.
Unless you know how to turn them into an opiate.
This is actually more sensical than you make it out to be.
RIM, who makes the Blackberry, is a Canadian company.
NTP, who is the patentholder suing RIM, is based in the US.
The United States fed. is basically trying to give a foreign company temporary use of a US. held patent due to concerns over their own employees being able to get their job done.
Frankly, I hope more of this happens. That way maybe the patent office will be forced to actually follow the mandate that patents are non-obvious and not over-reaching. Maybe that would mean that the patent office will recieve enough funding to adequately determine if the patent should be valid. Or maybe the whole patent system will be analyzed to see if it does actually help innovation or even the united states economy in general (A man can dream.) I'd be willing to bet that an analysis would show that the patent system causes more harm to the US than good as it has been shown that people will just move their operations elsewhere to avoid patent and other IP litigation, such as the movie industry setting up shop in Hollywood to avoid litigation from patentholders on the east coast.
There's another reason to not believe game store employees: in the past, they have been instructed to lie to the customers about availability. I have friends who worked at various video game stores, and when a hot new item finally hit the market, they were supposed to tell the customer that there's only one or two left even if there was a whole pallete of PS2s, Wavebirds or whatever left. They almost never ran out of stock on release day or even the first week on highly anticipated releases.
The obvious benefits to the store for doing this are 1)it prevents the customer for shopping around. Not so much that prices are different, but many game stores have required bundles on release and it is the bundle where they really make their overhead. 2)Customers are more likely to pre-order in the future if they think the video game manufacturors don't really supply the full demand at launch.
Now it is possible that this is simply a regional thing. I live in the Midwest, so I can see how in other markets they do actually sell out. The larger markets wouldn't have a reason to lie about availability if they honestly do sell every unit they get. It is also possible that these friends of mine were lying, spreading a myth similar to cow tipping, but I would find it odd that people who were employed by all the major video game stores would have the same story. It is also possible that lying to the customer is now forbidden rather than encouraged (I always heard the lying was ordered from on high) but I don't really see this happening as that means their main competition is now Wal-Mart.
It looks like this software can send the information to another computer (not SpyMon's servers, but to a computer of your choice when installing.) Perhaps they classified it as spyware simply because of attempts to make a network connection.
Then again, this was all according to the manufacturer. There is a chance that they charge, and ALSO have spyware bundled in. If that's true, then they are truly evil. Buy if that's true, then I don't know if the judge would have even bothered hearing the case. Although it could just be a bluff for an out of court settlement.
Maybe, if this was actually spyware. Okay, it does "spy" on the user, but it is monitoring software. It gets installed on the computer for the express purpose of monitoring another user's activities, such as a boss monitoring their employees or a parent monitoring what their children are doing. This software has to be purchased and intentionally installed, it doesn't just get surreptiously installed along with some screen saver, video game or internet cursors.
I personally think this is generally morally reprehensive if the user is not notified of the logging software, but the owner of the computer is probably within their rights to install this on their own property.
I'd imagine the replacement cap is the smallest part of the cost of fixing the mobo. Consider probably 5 minutes of talking to the person on the phone, 1/2 hour (probably less than 10 minutes once you have it down, but you have to consider troubleshooting and there are probably additional QA procedures they perform after repair) are a pretty decent amount of money, but not too much. A little bit of overhead in coordinating the whole thing, lease on space used, etc. The big price is probably in the actual RMA of the part. Shipping, packaging etc cost a fair amount of money. If I recall Toshiba and UPS teamed up such that UPS was doing the warranty work on Toshiba laptops, saving Toshiba a large amount of money and getting the parts back to the customer much quicker.
You know most clothing manufacturors do the same thing. I really doubt the cost of producing a pair of shoes in indonesia now is much more than the cost of producing a pair of shoes in the United States was in 1990. The cost of a comparable pair of shoes has more than doubled in that time. I recall being able to regularilly find Canvas Converse Chuck Taylor's (triple stitched, american made) for less than $20 at any shoe store. Now, Canvas Converse Chuck Taylor's (double stitched, Chinese or Indonesian) run about $40 or more. And they honestly do not last as long as they used to.
The record companies don't subsidize musicians anymore. Generally all of the costs associated with recording, promoting etc are a loan to the musician. If the record company doesn't get that money... the musician is screwed out of anything coming to them, and are in financial debt to the record company, with interest.
Maybe some musicians are able to get a good enough contract where this isn't the case, but they generally can't argue for that kind of contract unless the record company is sure that it'll be a hit. Not to mention, large record companies are signing fewer and fewer new acts sticking with proven cash cows.
It's not a valid point. One of the most common test for a logical construction is to replace another conclusion but follow the same logical construct.
The argument that he is putting forth is:
It's okay to do whatever you need to do to keep a job.
The music execs need to put DRM in music to keep their job.
Therefore it's okay for the music execs to put DRM in music.
Now, you change the argument, but keep the same construction.
It's okay to do whatever you need to do to keep a job.
Guards in Nazi concentration camps had to kill thousands of people to keep their jobs.
Therefore it's okay for guards in Nazi concentration camps to kill thosands of people.
Note that I'm not equating the use of DRM to the atrocities commited in World War II, I'm just using it to disprove the logical construction used. And I personally don't really care if music companies want to include DRM, so long as it is disclosed to the consumer prior to purchase, or the consumer can return the merchandise once they find out about the DRM. DRM in and of itself isn't evil; it could be mitigated to allow for fair trade, even though I don't know of any CDs that put the DRM info right on the packaging and I know for a fact that you can no longer return a CD except for defect in manufacturing.
In fact, the new immigrants do not even have to be of a different race, just somehow different and make less money. There is simply a different value system between older residents and newer immigrants. New immigrants tend to relatively have these things in common: less financially well off, louder (in fights or in celebrations), percieved problems with youth gangs, and often will attempt to do a lot of gardening for food rather than just buying from a grocery store. These things are generally considered aesthetically unapealling to more wealthy people who had been there for a while.
A good example of this in one neighborhood is Riverwest, by Tom Tolan. In this book he explores many different waves of immigrants to the Riverwest neighborhood in Milwaukee, starting with the "original" German Settlers, moving to the Polish in the early 1900's, to black people coming from the rural south during the civil rights movement, to Puerto Ricans in the early 1960's, to hippies in the late 1960's and early 1970's to punk-rockers in the 1990's and first part of this decade. Every single group of "old school" residents felt the same way about new immigrants that the previous group felt about them (except for the German group, where they were originally wealthy settlers and businessmen and started the whole neighborhood essentially as any sprawling suburb begins today.) Some of these waves of immigration may have been at about the same time, but took places in different places in Riverwest, leading to some level of clash when the boundaries started to cross.
Sorry if you can't find the book, it was a rather limited print. A basic review of the timeline presented in the book can be found in the neighborhood's local paper, but it does not go into the difficulties that each generation of immigrants went through.
From my understanding, it would be perfectly acceptable to use the term African for the culture of immigrants to france from the Maghreb. A good majority of the people leaving the area are the native people who are fleeing from the oppresion of the Arab ruling class. For a cultural example of the refuge taken by the native Maghrebi in france look to Raï music and it's adaptation in Paris, similar to how the oppresion felt by Afro-Caribbeans can be explored through reggae.
True, the Maghrebi are culturally different than other sub-saharan people, but not calling them Native African would be like calling people of Aztec blood Native Americans but not calling Inuit people Native Americans.
I haven't seen the specifics of the agreement, but it appears that IBM could indeed use the hardware company's patents if the use is for the Linux kernal or certain packages which run on linux (Anything with GNU liscense maybe?) In fact, anybody could use the hardware company's patents in creating Linux open source software. Okay, it seems that this is going to apply more for software patents than hardware patents, but a hardware company could still hold software patents. In fact, the software patents which a hardware company would hold would most likely be the sort of thing that would be beneficial to the Linux kernel itself (device drivers, compiler optimizations, real time computing and the like.)
Basically, IBM, Novell and Sony have put a decent investment into the furthering of Linux. They are now trying to protect that investment from predatory patent suits. Big problem here lies in that while this does protect against companies that hold patents which may be harmful to Linux but want to use something the OIN provides, it doesn't seem to have any effect against companies popping up which do not actually make anything, but simply research and hoard patents, waiting to spring lawsuits on people they percieve as violating the patents. However, these houses will have a chilling effect on ALL innovation, not just open source.
It sounds basically like a license agreement for use of a patent. Basically, by licensing an OIN patent from the patentholder you agree not to sue Linux developers over infringing on any patents you hold. By suing someone over infringement of one of your patants, you are infringing the OIN patent. I really can't tell if you basically agree not to ever sue against Linux, or if it is simply limited to the term in which you are using the patent. I haven't been able to actually find the text of an OIN agreement, and of course the snippets that are in all the news releases aren't really going to clarify anything.
The significant added value is in summarizing the results, breaking responses down to positive and negative is something that I doubt any of the sites you mentioned do. It also analyzes trends in discussion, so you can then figure out what is creating buzz and what is a flop.
Now, this DOES assume that a comuter can analyze written language and pull actual meaning from it. Sarcasm is probably sure to throw a monkey wrench into the whole works, though. Hell, sarcasm is often lost on human readers; I don't give computers a chance on this point for a long time.
I was treated to the idea that Wikipedia... is going to be dead-treed and sent to Africa
I'd assume the major reason that Wikipedia is considered non-canonical is the possibility of trolls defacing the page and putting in false information. A book on paper would be difficult to hack remotely. Plus, I assume any dead tree version will go through a formal editing and review process, making it canonical.
Slashdot Mirror
Symbiotic co-everspecialization? Perhaps hummingbirds and orchids, where the beaks of individual species of humming birds are designed to feed on one and only one species of orchid. That orchids can only be pollinated by that one species of hummingbird. If one goes away, both go away. You see this sort of thing quite often with pollination, and sometimes even with seed dispersal; In Costa Rica there are several different species of fig, each of which ripens at different times in the year. There is a monkey that takes advantage of this and has become fairly specialized on eating the different figs. If one or two species of fig would die out, the monkeys would also die out or at least thing out significantly. Once the monkeys are gone, the figs can no longer spread their seeds and so they all die out. And then interestingly, all of these different figs rely on different specific species of insects for pollination, so one species of insect going exist can wipe out the whole... symbiotic group: insects, figs and monkeys. I think there also birds that rely on the figs, but they digest them differently and so do not spread viable seeds. So the birds would be gone if the whole thing tumbles apart.
But rainforests are generally very highly interdependant, as their climate was historically very stable. Another interesting fact about rain forests is that generally they are not actually in areas geographically amenable to as much growth as they have, except the huge amount of biomass (particularilly vegetative) leads to a huge increase in humidity, which causes the rain that defines the rain forest. If you chop down enough trees, you are left with desert.
Because very little actually goes to education. Take a look at the budget and see what percentage of the fed. goes to the military, vs education. Then take a look at your paycheck and see what percentage of that goes to the fed, and you'll see why universities have to look for alternate sources of funding.
And besides, if my acquaintances lied to me about video game store employees lying about availability, that would in and of itself show a tendancy for video game employees to lie. Unless they were lying about actually working there in the first place :b
They don't say that they don't have it, they just say there's only one or two in stock when in reality they have plenty. Customers will then assume that everyone else is almost sold out, and not go elsewhere. And as I said, this could be false information.
This device would never work as a flying car.
A rapidly spinning superconductor does indeed cause an obect over it to levitate somewhat, and for the purpose of this argument we can assume that these are indeed gravitonic effects. Doesn't really matter
The biggest problem comes as your vehicle rises, the spinning disk would have to be lifted, and I assume you would use magnetics in the vehicle to lift the disk. Those magnetic forces would then pull down on the remainder of the vehicle's structure (every action has an equal and opposite reaction) eliminating the levitative forces. Trying to get this working would be like trying to grab yourself by the shirt collar and lift yourself off the ground.
This is not to say that there isn't usable tech provided by the phenomenon. A roadway of these could possibly be made that would allow vehicles to travel over them. Or more likely, a launch pad could be made which would reduce the amount of fuel that has to be loaded onto a rocket or aircraft to initially fight off gravity and launch. For these applications it's just a question of whether spinning the superconductors would be more energy efficient than just using traditional thrust.
The patent would become the property of the University, which can then sell production rights to the pharm. companies, funding the school and other education. Otherwise, the pharm. companies would just take the idea and make the drugs, and the schools would be out valuable funding.
It takes less than a minute to mug someone and get away with a wallet full of cash
It takes longer than that to come up with the plan, obtain the tools necessary, find the right place, sufficiently mask your identity, wait for a good target to come by, flee the scene, get rid of any evidence and then have a convincing alibi when all is said and done.
Not following all of those procedures (and probably more) will significantly increase your risk of getting caught. And all this for... what's the average amount of cash that people carry on them. Maybe $50? Sure, you can wait for victims which have a higher likelyhood of carrying more money, but then that simply takes more time, preperation and might put you in a more risky location (risky to the criminal, not necesarilly the victim.)
It is possible that you would get away with it at least once, probably even likely. But mugging people enough times to actually make a living off of it will draw a lot of suspicion and greatly increase your likelyhood of getting caught. Or finding that your mark is packing heat and pissed off.
Well, you look like a foreigner. And we all know that acts of terrorism are always commited by foreigners.
Wow, considering the topic, you might not actually want to click on those links.
Much of the time, criminals simply do not realize that crime does not pay.
Theifs are drawn in by the idea that they can make a lot of money quick, but don't take into account the resources needed to actually get the job done. With many schemes that I've heard people describe, the hourly wage of just going to work for McDonald's is about as profitable. And if you throw in the jail time spent if you do get caught, you're working for just about nothing. Now there are some crimes that pay short term, but long term they don't seem to be a good idea.
So, financially, criminal acts are generally stupid. Crimes of passion wouldn't really be covered by the financial aspects, but if you are capable of figuring out all the ways that you can get caught, you usually realize that major criminal activity just isn't worth it. So the ones that do the crimes would, by definition, be the ones that aren't capable of figuring out what gets them caught. So crime is generally commited by people who have very little to lose if they actually do get caught.
My guess is they just checked his web browser's history. Google searches for "foo" show up as "foo-Google Search.
Searching for information does not prove in and of itself that you commited a crime.
But it can be used to establish that you had the means to commit a crime.
Just like growing poppies in the United States is by no means against the law.
Unless you know how to turn them into an opiate.
This is actually more sensical than you make it out to be.
RIM, who makes the Blackberry, is a Canadian company.
NTP, who is the patentholder suing RIM, is based in the US.
The United States fed. is basically trying to give a foreign company temporary use of a US. held patent due to concerns over their own employees being able to get their job done.
Frankly, I hope more of this happens. That way maybe the patent office will be forced to actually follow the mandate that patents are non-obvious and not over-reaching. Maybe that would mean that the patent office will recieve enough funding to adequately determine if the patent should be valid. Or maybe the whole patent system will be analyzed to see if it does actually help innovation or even the united states economy in general (A man can dream.) I'd be willing to bet that an analysis would show that the patent system causes more harm to the US than good as it has been shown that people will just move their operations elsewhere to avoid patent and other IP litigation, such as the movie industry setting up shop in Hollywood to avoid litigation from patentholders on the east coast.
There's another reason to not believe game store employees: in the past, they have been instructed to lie to the customers about availability. I have friends who worked at various video game stores, and when a hot new item finally hit the market, they were supposed to tell the customer that there's only one or two left even if there was a whole pallete of PS2s, Wavebirds or whatever left. They almost never ran out of stock on release day or even the first week on highly anticipated releases.
The obvious benefits to the store for doing this are 1)it prevents the customer for shopping around. Not so much that prices are different, but many game stores have required bundles on release and it is the bundle where they really make their overhead. 2)Customers are more likely to pre-order in the future if they think the video game manufacturors don't really supply the full demand at launch.
Now it is possible that this is simply a regional thing. I live in the Midwest, so I can see how in other markets they do actually sell out. The larger markets wouldn't have a reason to lie about availability if they honestly do sell every unit they get. It is also possible that these friends of mine were lying, spreading a myth similar to cow tipping, but I would find it odd that people who were employed by all the major video game stores would have the same story. It is also possible that lying to the customer is now forbidden rather than encouraged (I always heard the lying was ordered from on high) but I don't really see this happening as that means their main competition is now Wal-Mart.
It looks like this software can send the information to another computer (not SpyMon's servers, but to a computer of your choice when installing.) Perhaps they classified it as spyware simply because of attempts to make a network connection.
Then again, this was all according to the manufacturer. There is a chance that they charge, and ALSO have spyware bundled in. If that's true, then they are truly evil. Buy if that's true, then I don't know if the judge would have even bothered hearing the case. Although it could just be a bluff for an out of court settlement.
Maybe, if this was actually spyware. Okay, it does "spy" on the user, but it is monitoring software. It gets installed on the computer for the express purpose of monitoring another user's activities, such as a boss monitoring their employees or a parent monitoring what their children are doing. This software has to be purchased and intentionally installed, it doesn't just get surreptiously installed along with some screen saver, video game or internet cursors.
I personally think this is generally morally reprehensive if the user is not notified of the logging software, but the owner of the computer is probably within their rights to install this on their own property.
I'd imagine the replacement cap is the smallest part of the cost of fixing the mobo. Consider probably 5 minutes of talking to the person on the phone, 1/2 hour (probably less than 10 minutes once you have it down, but you have to consider troubleshooting and there are probably additional QA procedures they perform after repair) are a pretty decent amount of money, but not too much. A little bit of overhead in coordinating the whole thing, lease on space used, etc. The big price is probably in the actual RMA of the part. Shipping, packaging etc cost a fair amount of money. If I recall Toshiba and UPS teamed up such that UPS was doing the warranty work on Toshiba laptops, saving Toshiba a large amount of money and getting the parts back to the customer much quicker.
You know most clothing manufacturors do the same thing. I really doubt the cost of producing a pair of shoes in indonesia now is much more than the cost of producing a pair of shoes in the United States was in 1990. The cost of a comparable pair of shoes has more than doubled in that time. I recall being able to regularilly find Canvas Converse Chuck Taylor's (triple stitched, american made) for less than $20 at any shoe store. Now, Canvas Converse Chuck Taylor's (double stitched, Chinese or Indonesian) run about $40 or more. And they honestly do not last as long as they used to.
The record companies don't subsidize musicians anymore. Generally all of the costs associated with recording, promoting etc are a loan to the musician. If the record company doesn't get that money... the musician is screwed out of anything coming to them, and are in financial debt to the record company, with interest.
Maybe some musicians are able to get a good enough contract where this isn't the case, but they generally can't argue for that kind of contract unless the record company is sure that it'll be a hit. Not to mention, large record companies are signing fewer and fewer new acts sticking with proven cash cows.
It's not a valid point. One of the most common test for a logical construction is to replace another conclusion but follow the same logical construct.
The argument that he is putting forth is:
It's okay to do whatever you need to do to keep a job.
The music execs need to put DRM in music to keep their job.
Therefore it's okay for the music execs to put DRM in music.
Now, you change the argument, but keep the same construction.
It's okay to do whatever you need to do to keep a job.
Guards in Nazi concentration camps had to kill thousands of people to keep their jobs.
Therefore it's okay for guards in Nazi concentration camps to kill thosands of people.
Note that I'm not equating the use of DRM to the atrocities commited in World War II, I'm just using it to disprove the logical construction used. And I personally don't really care if music companies want to include DRM, so long as it is disclosed to the consumer prior to purchase, or the consumer can return the merchandise once they find out about the DRM. DRM in and of itself isn't evil; it could be mitigated to allow for fair trade, even though I don't know of any CDs that put the DRM info right on the packaging and I know for a fact that you can no longer return a CD except for defect in manufacturing.
In fact, the new immigrants do not even have to be of a different race, just somehow different and make less money. There is simply a different value system between older residents and newer immigrants. New immigrants tend to relatively have these things in common: less financially well off, louder (in fights or in celebrations), percieved problems with youth gangs, and often will attempt to do a lot of gardening for food rather than just buying from a grocery store. These things are generally considered aesthetically unapealling to more wealthy people who had been there for a while.
A good example of this in one neighborhood is Riverwest, by Tom Tolan. In this book he explores many different waves of immigrants to the Riverwest neighborhood in Milwaukee, starting with the "original" German Settlers, moving to the Polish in the early 1900's, to black people coming from the rural south during the civil rights movement, to Puerto Ricans in the early 1960's, to hippies in the late 1960's and early 1970's to punk-rockers in the 1990's and first part of this decade. Every single group of "old school" residents felt the same way about new immigrants that the previous group felt about them (except for the German group, where they were originally wealthy settlers and businessmen and started the whole neighborhood essentially as any sprawling suburb begins today.) Some of these waves of immigration may have been at about the same time, but took places in different places in Riverwest, leading to some level of clash when the boundaries started to cross.
Sorry if you can't find the book, it was a rather limited print. A basic review of the timeline presented in the book can be found in the neighborhood's local paper, but it does not go into the difficulties that each generation of immigrants went through.
From my understanding, it would be perfectly acceptable to use the term African for the culture of immigrants to france from the Maghreb. A good majority of the people leaving the area are the native people who are fleeing from the oppresion of the Arab ruling class. For a cultural example of the refuge taken by the native Maghrebi in france look to Raï music and it's adaptation in Paris, similar to how the oppresion felt by Afro-Caribbeans can be explored through reggae.
True, the Maghrebi are culturally different than other sub-saharan people, but not calling them Native African would be like calling people of Aztec blood Native Americans but not calling Inuit people Native Americans.
I haven't seen the specifics of the agreement, but it appears that IBM could indeed use the hardware company's patents if the use is for the Linux kernal or certain packages which run on linux (Anything with GNU liscense maybe?) In fact, anybody could use the hardware company's patents in creating Linux open source software. Okay, it seems that this is going to apply more for software patents than hardware patents, but a hardware company could still hold software patents. In fact, the software patents which a hardware company would hold would most likely be the sort of thing that would be beneficial to the Linux kernel itself (device drivers, compiler optimizations, real time computing and the like.)
Basically, IBM, Novell and Sony have put a decent investment into the furthering of Linux. They are now trying to protect that investment from predatory patent suits. Big problem here lies in that while this does protect against companies that hold patents which may be harmful to Linux but want to use something the OIN provides, it doesn't seem to have any effect against companies popping up which do not actually make anything, but simply research and hoard patents, waiting to spring lawsuits on people they percieve as violating the patents. However, these houses will have a chilling effect on ALL innovation, not just open source.
It sounds basically like a license agreement for use of a patent. Basically, by licensing an OIN patent from the patentholder you agree not to sue Linux developers over infringing on any patents you hold. By suing someone over infringement of one of your patants, you are infringing the OIN patent. I really can't tell if you basically agree not to ever sue against Linux, or if it is simply limited to the term in which you are using the patent. I haven't been able to actually find the text of an OIN agreement, and of course the snippets that are in all the news releases aren't really going to clarify anything.
I think at that point a dongle makes much more sense.
The significant added value is in summarizing the results, breaking responses down to positive and negative is something that I doubt any of the sites you mentioned do. It also analyzes trends in discussion, so you can then figure out what is creating buzz and what is a flop.
Now, this DOES assume that a comuter can analyze written language and pull actual meaning from it. Sarcasm is probably sure to throw a monkey wrench into the whole works, though. Hell, sarcasm is often lost on human readers; I don't give computers a chance on this point for a long time.
I was treated to the idea that Wikipedia... is going to be dead-treed and sent to Africa
I'd assume the major reason that Wikipedia is considered non-canonical is the possibility of trolls defacing the page and putting in false information. A book on paper would be difficult to hack remotely. Plus, I assume any dead tree version will go through a formal editing and review process, making it canonical.