It takes longer than 15 secs for Windows to start up everything. (Booting to a usable state != booting to the point where something is on the screen. The claim was to boot to a desktop - which means all all initial services up and no further initialization being performed.)
Duh. I know what a cold boot means. But there isn't a PC that can cold boot inside of 1 minute using either a regular BIOS or EFI to a Windows desktop in under a minute unless it's overclocked.
Ok, that is a wholly new piece of information and one that nobody else seems to have picked up on.
Does anyone know if there had been a shorter statute of limitations before? If so, does the statute apply at the time of the investigation OR at the time of the incident?
Two wrongs don't make a right, but they ARE wholly independent issues as far as the law is concerned. Her reasons, therefore remain immaterial when it comes to examining his actions.
Yes, you're right that knee-jerk changes to law are bad. However, I take as the underlying principle that the sole value of a nation-state for the people within it is that it raises the potential of all within it beyond the point that could be achieved by any other means. Everything comes down to that. Perpetuating a cycle of abuse is clearly NOT raising the potential of anyone and clearly if abuse + intimidation can guarantee a perp immunity from law, that violates the underlying principle I hold.
WHAT should be done - that I don't know, that requires calm, level-headed thinking and I'm not inclined to that right not. You are correct that making a law when angry is extremely bad, but that doesn't mean that identifying that a fault exists cannot be done when mad. It merely means you won't be any good at knowing what the underlying fault is or how to fix it.
We're coming up to an election year and whilst the nation (and world) may be shocked, Texas is a very violent place. There's simply no possibility of getting a 2/3rds majority of politicians to agree to removing a judge unless there's unequivocal evidence that Texans would vote against them if they didn't.
You're probably right, officials get a lot of cover. In this case, especially when it comes to Texas, as that has some marginals up for election next year and nobody is going to want to take on the risk of prosecuting him. Everyone had to look, as it would be damaging not to, but nobody could do anything after.
If she has become a monster, then it is of his design and his handiwork. It may not excuse her for her attitudes, if indeed these allegations are true, but his responsibility does not end with him, it encompasses ALL that he has done. If he has indeed broken her mind, then he is no less responsible than her for the video being posted.
Beat, yes. Educate, no. There is no evidence that beatings achieve anything beyond a brief catharsis on the part of the one doing the beating and some form of severe mental dysfunction on the part of the one being beaten. It has no redeeming qualities and is often concealed by the perp (as in this case) because he/she knows damn well it's abnormal, psychotic and depraved.
In this case, the victim has been alleged to have become dysfunctional and that this is why the tape was released. I say alleged because there's no proof of it. However, if it is true, then the judge's repeated beatings of her are the reason for her state of mind. Any monsters in her or in him are of his creation and he is responsible for them all.
The judge cannot be punished in Texas. The State Attorney there has already stated that it would have been a crime, had it been known about at the time, but the statute of limitations has run out. I would argue that the Feds were quite reasonable to examine if there was a Federal issue, since Texas has declared the incident to have been a crime but one they could not prosecute. The Feds might also argue that corrupt officials (and there's no question that he is one) should also be investigated to see if their corruption is one that they have any jurisdiction over. Obviously, in this case the answer is no.
I believe judges there are elected, not appointed. If so, he can't be fired as he was never hired.
It is very obvious that something should be done but it is also very obvious that nothing can be done as things stand.
First, we only have his word for that and I'm not inclined to accept his claims on face value.
Second, what does it matter why she released the tape? The tape was made and depicts child cruelty, child abuse (not the same thing), negligence, uncontrolled violence and addiction to violence. Ok, so he wanted this to be a family secret. (See "People of the Lie" for why this is a really good indicator of even worse depravities.) His excuses ended the moment he started thrashing her with his belt.
This might not be a Federal crime but I honestly believe it should be. It's quite clear the States have no desire to prevent this kind of behaviour.
Corporal punishment is, as child psychologists routinely point out, ineffective at disciplining and is used purely as a means of avoiding having to handle anger management issues. It should not be permitted and in civilized countries it is not.
A linux cluster using a hypercube topology of infiniband connections would give you a fully-connected system with full-bandwidth between any two points. A butterfly network will do that but in a slightly smaller subset of cases. A fat tree would give a much smaller subset, but it would still be superconnected. A fat tree using 10 gig ethernet wouldn't have the raw bandwidth for a superconnection but it could still be considered a supercomputer (just).
Computers don't scale linearly. Amdahl's Law. The reason home computers don't go beyond 16 cores is that even getting a 16-way SMP is a horrifically difficult problem. If you built a 32-core machine it would run SLOWER than a 16-core one because of all the overheads (locking on the bus, scheduling, interprocessor communications, stuff like that). You can't just add cores and expect a faster machine. You have to put in an enormous amount of time and effort to engineer the design and you really have to do so almost from scratch each time.
Technically, a cluster can be a supercomputer if it is tightly-coupled, which basically means high bandwidth, low latency and as little overlap on the fabric as possible. (ie: 88,128 PCs linked via the Internet could be considered a grid but it would not be considered a supercomputer. The same number of PCs in a server room using a hundred or so switches, with each switch stuffed to the gills, would be considered a regular cluster. The same PCs in the same room using high-end switches linked as a Fat Tree, Butterfly or - ideally - a hypercube topology would be considered a supercomputer. The same PCs in the Cloud would be considered a torrential downpour.)
The problem is ultimately, as Plasmaphysiker says, communication time. From a technical standpoint you can just as easily say "a supercomputer is any computer that can mimic or better a vector processor's overall performance for the same compute power". Ok, maybe not as easily as it's longer to say, but it comes to the same thing.
No thanks. Blew up four worlds and sent a fifth tumbling into a black hole after GNU chess accidentally crossed pipes with Galactic Thermonuclear War IV, the Sequel.
Oh certainly there are, but when it's clear-cut it's easy to give a definite answer. It doesn't require any kind of analysis.
You still run into the problem of when to complain, though for different reasons. In the case of McAfee violations, you might well be skewered as a supporter of virus writers or just run into the problem that they can afford really good lawyers.
EMC - closing off BSD code is within the terms of the license. I consider it unethical to do that. It's not helpful to the community, which means anything else EMC might want to leverage won't be as good as it could have been. The eyeballs were all spent on duplicating any bugfixes and useful features EMC did as closed. As such, it's not even helpful to EMC. (Think of it in combat terms. "Divide and Conquer" doesn't mean divide your own resources - the community being part of that - and be conquered.)
From the replies so far, I'd say 99% of the people here don't care much either way and they're the ones with the greatest knowledge on the subject and the greatest amount invested in community efforts. Linux is on 1% of the desktops, so I'll say 1% of the population are the ones who are geeky enough to have a motive to care. So that means you're looking at 1% of 1% of people who actually get into this sort of analysis in any depth.
I believe that to be where Code Sourcery started from, but their version had about 4-5 years worth of bugfixes, code cleanups and extensions on top of the code in that 2005 reference drop. (It's because I believe Code Sourcery forked that code when making their own version that I'm as unsure as I am as to who owned what.)
Now, that's not to say the link you found isn't useful - it is - but getting the 2009/2010 version that Code Sourcery were using would be the ideal. (Using the 2005 drop is like using X11R4 rather than X11R7.6 - it'll work and it'll do the job, it's just going to be hellish getting it into a practical state.)
Quote away. I use BSD code, I use GPL code. I actually prefer the LGPL to the GPL, precisely because there's a much clearer delineation of what is being licensed. I far prefer Public Domain to any license, but some areas of the US have ruled that Public Domain doesn't exist and that someone has to own the code -- a ruling a vehemently disagree with. If you think that anything I've said makes one license better than another, that's fine and you may well be right. I think it shows that BSD and GPL are about equal, if anything, because both seem to have no problem with things going closed.
You are correct that I have no standing, so can do nothing - at least nothing that has any direct benefit. Sometimes, stirring up trouble when no direct benefit is possible is a good thing. It can get people to ask questions, or in this case perhaps make backup copies of dual-licensed software in case a company goes rogue. Other times, it can produce a backlash that is far worse than the original problem, which is why the Occupy Wall Street protests are more likely to worsen Wall Street's depravity than fix it. The intent may be good, the points are valid, but the consequences are likely to swamp all that.
Ok, I'll agree with that, only we don't know what patches they took (accreditation is worse than it was in the Linux kernel prior to SCO) or what other source trees they obtained code from (it's likely they did, but it's not certain they did). As a result, we've no means of knowing what agreements were made.
In the case of Mentor buying Code Sourcery, again we've no information on what it was that Mentor actually bought. They bought the company, sure, but VSIPL++'s open source variant was under a DoD contract and I've no idea what the terms of that contract said in regards to the GPLed tree or whether the DoD actively conferred any special rights to Mentor after for any portions considered GOTS that may be in the software.
Pestering Mentor to obtain that information is unlikely to produce a good response and may well result in a distinct chilling of government and commercial involvement in open source software. So no matter what Mentor was or was not entitled to do, I can see absolutely no path to a satisfactory result.
It Simple Doesn't Matter If It Was Lawful. We can't know what they were entitled to, we will never have that information and any attempt to obtain it can only make things worse.
Therefore, it is obvious that the line is NOT drawn according to what is legal. But if it's not drawn there, then where?
My point is not to throw the book and even to say that under certain circumstances violations should actually be tolerated because it's more important to achieve the desired goal of greater openness than to win specific battles that nobody will ever use the code from anyway. Equally, there may be times when technically legal but non-kosher situations SHOULD produce a stronger response. The technicalities of the situation are an extremely bad and naive place to start, you have to start with the long-term objective and then establish what steps take you closer or further from it.
My goal is to know where that line should be and whilst I've seen a handful of excellent posts that come very close to answering what I actually asked, I've been much more successful in establishing that only that handful of respondents have even realized that there were questions to be asked at all.
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It takes longer than 15 secs for Windows to start up everything. (Booting to a usable state != booting to the point where something is on the screen. The claim was to boot to a desktop - which means all all initial services up and no further initialization being performed.)
Duh. I know what a cold boot means. But there isn't a PC that can cold boot inside of 1 minute using either a regular BIOS or EFI to a Windows desktop in under a minute unless it's overclocked.
Ok, that is a wholly new piece of information and one that nobody else seems to have picked up on.
Does anyone know if there had been a shorter statute of limitations before? If so, does the statute apply at the time of the investigation OR at the time of the incident?
Two wrongs don't make a right, but they ARE wholly independent issues as far as the law is concerned. Her reasons, therefore remain immaterial when it comes to examining his actions.
Yes, you're right that knee-jerk changes to law are bad. However, I take as the underlying principle that the sole value of a nation-state for the people within it is that it raises the potential of all within it beyond the point that could be achieved by any other means. Everything comes down to that. Perpetuating a cycle of abuse is clearly NOT raising the potential of anyone and clearly if abuse + intimidation can guarantee a perp immunity from law, that violates the underlying principle I hold.
WHAT should be done - that I don't know, that requires calm, level-headed thinking and I'm not inclined to that right not. You are correct that making a law when angry is extremely bad, but that doesn't mean that identifying that a fault exists cannot be done when mad. It merely means you won't be any good at knowing what the underlying fault is or how to fix it.
We're coming up to an election year and whilst the nation (and world) may be shocked, Texas is a very violent place. There's simply no possibility of getting a 2/3rds majority of politicians to agree to removing a judge unless there's unequivocal evidence that Texans would vote against them if they didn't.
You're probably right, officials get a lot of cover. In this case, especially when it comes to Texas, as that has some marginals up for election next year and nobody is going to want to take on the risk of prosecuting him. Everyone had to look, as it would be damaging not to, but nobody could do anything after.
If she has become a monster, then it is of his design and his handiwork. It may not excuse her for her attitudes, if indeed these allegations are true, but his responsibility does not end with him, it encompasses ALL that he has done. If he has indeed broken her mind, then he is no less responsible than her for the video being posted.
Beat, yes. Educate, no. There is no evidence that beatings achieve anything beyond a brief catharsis on the part of the one doing the beating and some form of severe mental dysfunction on the part of the one being beaten. It has no redeeming qualities and is often concealed by the perp (as in this case) because he/she knows damn well it's abnormal, psychotic and depraved.
In this case, the victim has been alleged to have become dysfunctional and that this is why the tape was released. I say alleged because there's no proof of it. However, if it is true, then the judge's repeated beatings of her are the reason for her state of mind. Any monsters in her or in him are of his creation and he is responsible for them all.
The judge cannot be punished in Texas. The State Attorney there has already stated that it would have been a crime, had it been known about at the time, but the statute of limitations has run out. I would argue that the Feds were quite reasonable to examine if there was a Federal issue, since Texas has declared the incident to have been a crime but one they could not prosecute. The Feds might also argue that corrupt officials (and there's no question that he is one) should also be investigated to see if their corruption is one that they have any jurisdiction over. Obviously, in this case the answer is no.
I believe judges there are elected, not appointed. If so, he can't be fired as he was never hired.
It is very obvious that something should be done but it is also very obvious that nothing can be done as things stand.
First, we only have his word for that and I'm not inclined to accept his claims on face value.
Second, what does it matter why she released the tape? The tape was made and depicts child cruelty, child abuse (not the same thing), negligence, uncontrolled violence and addiction to violence. Ok, so he wanted this to be a family secret. (See "People of the Lie" for why this is a really good indicator of even worse depravities.) His excuses ended the moment he started thrashing her with his belt.
This might not be a Federal crime but I honestly believe it should be. It's quite clear the States have no desire to prevent this kind of behaviour.
Corporal punishment is, as child psychologists routinely point out, ineffective at disciplining and is used purely as a means of avoiding having to handle anger management issues. It should not be permitted and in civilized countries it is not.
A linux cluster using a hypercube topology of infiniband connections would give you a fully-connected system with full-bandwidth between any two points. A butterfly network will do that but in a slightly smaller subset of cases. A fat tree would give a much smaller subset, but it would still be superconnected. A fat tree using 10 gig ethernet wouldn't have the raw bandwidth for a superconnection but it could still be considered a supercomputer (just).
Computers don't scale linearly. Amdahl's Law. The reason home computers don't go beyond 16 cores is that even getting a 16-way SMP is a horrifically difficult problem. If you built a 32-core machine it would run SLOWER than a 16-core one because of all the overheads (locking on the bus, scheduling, interprocessor communications, stuff like that). You can't just add cores and expect a faster machine. You have to put in an enormous amount of time and effort to engineer the design and you really have to do so almost from scratch each time.
Basically, yes. The distinction is whether a system is tightly-coupled or loosely-coupled.
Technically, a cluster can be a supercomputer if it is tightly-coupled, which basically means high bandwidth, low latency and as little overlap on the fabric as possible. (ie: 88,128 PCs linked via the Internet could be considered a grid but it would not be considered a supercomputer. The same number of PCs in a server room using a hundred or so switches, with each switch stuffed to the gills, would be considered a regular cluster. The same PCs in the same room using high-end switches linked as a Fat Tree, Butterfly or - ideally - a hypercube topology would be considered a supercomputer. The same PCs in the Cloud would be considered a torrential downpour.)
The problem is ultimately, as Plasmaphysiker says, communication time. From a technical standpoint you can just as easily say "a supercomputer is any computer that can mimic or better a vector processor's overall performance for the same compute power". Ok, maybe not as easily as it's longer to say, but it comes to the same thing.
No thanks. Blew up four worlds and sent a fifth tumbling into a black hole after GNU chess accidentally crossed pipes with Galactic Thermonuclear War IV, the Sequel.
The only way I can think you can boot to desktop on Win7 cold is if you mean liquid nitrogen cold with severe overclocking.
You've got to remember that booting the OS doesn't mean that the login or MIC mechanisms actually work, it just means they're running.
Oh certainly there are, but when it's clear-cut it's easy to give a definite answer. It doesn't require any kind of analysis.
You still run into the problem of when to complain, though for different reasons. In the case of McAfee violations, you might well be skewered as a supporter of virus writers or just run into the problem that they can afford really good lawyers.
EMC - closing off BSD code is within the terms of the license. I consider it unethical to do that. It's not helpful to the community, which means anything else EMC might want to leverage won't be as good as it could have been. The eyeballs were all spent on duplicating any bugfixes and useful features EMC did as closed. As such, it's not even helpful to EMC. (Think of it in combat terms. "Divide and Conquer" doesn't mean divide your own resources - the community being part of that - and be conquered.)
From the replies so far, I'd say 99% of the people here don't care much either way and they're the ones with the greatest knowledge on the subject and the greatest amount invested in community efforts. Linux is on 1% of the desktops, so I'll say 1% of the population are the ones who are geeky enough to have a motive to care. So that means you're looking at 1% of 1% of people who actually get into this sort of analysis in any depth.
Ah yes. The mysterious forces of the universe compelled you to read the discussion.
I believe that to be where Code Sourcery started from, but their version had about 4-5 years worth of bugfixes, code cleanups and extensions on top of the code in that 2005 reference drop. (It's because I believe Code Sourcery forked that code when making their own version that I'm as unsure as I am as to who owned what.)
Now, that's not to say the link you found isn't useful - it is - but getting the 2009/2010 version that Code Sourcery were using would be the ideal. (Using the 2005 drop is like using X11R4 rather than X11R7.6 - it'll work and it'll do the job, it's just going to be hellish getting it into a practical state.)
It doesn't mean you have to distribute it forever, but you DO have to distribute the source for as long as you distribute the binaries.
Quote away. I use BSD code, I use GPL code. I actually prefer the LGPL to the GPL, precisely because there's a much clearer delineation of what is being licensed. I far prefer Public Domain to any license, but some areas of the US have ruled that Public Domain doesn't exist and that someone has to own the code -- a ruling a vehemently disagree with. If you think that anything I've said makes one license better than another, that's fine and you may well be right. I think it shows that BSD and GPL are about equal, if anything, because both seem to have no problem with things going closed.
You are correct that I have no standing, so can do nothing - at least nothing that has any direct benefit. Sometimes, stirring up trouble when no direct benefit is possible is a good thing. It can get people to ask questions, or in this case perhaps make backup copies of dual-licensed software in case a company goes rogue. Other times, it can produce a backlash that is far worse than the original problem, which is why the Occupy Wall Street protests are more likely to worsen Wall Street's depravity than fix it. The intent may be good, the points are valid, but the consequences are likely to swamp all that.
For VSIPL++:
Ok, I'll agree with that, only we don't know what patches they took (accreditation is worse than it was in the Linux kernel prior to SCO) or what other source trees they obtained code from (it's likely they did, but it's not certain they did). As a result, we've no means of knowing what agreements were made.
In the case of Mentor buying Code Sourcery, again we've no information on what it was that Mentor actually bought. They bought the company, sure, but VSIPL++'s open source variant was under a DoD contract and I've no idea what the terms of that contract said in regards to the GPLed tree or whether the DoD actively conferred any special rights to Mentor after for any portions considered GOTS that may be in the software.
Pestering Mentor to obtain that information is unlikely to produce a good response and may well result in a distinct chilling of government and commercial involvement in open source software. So no matter what Mentor was or was not entitled to do, I can see absolutely no path to a satisfactory result.
It Simple Doesn't Matter If It Was Lawful. We can't know what they were entitled to, we will never have that information and any attempt to obtain it can only make things worse.
Therefore, it is obvious that the line is NOT drawn according to what is legal. But if it's not drawn there, then where?
My point is not to throw the book and even to say that under certain circumstances violations should actually be tolerated because it's more important to achieve the desired goal of greater openness than to win specific battles that nobody will ever use the code from anyway. Equally, there may be times when technically legal but non-kosher situations SHOULD produce a stronger response. The technicalities of the situation are an extremely bad and naive place to start, you have to start with the long-term objective and then establish what steps take you closer or further from it.
My goal is to know where that line should be and whilst I've seen a handful of excellent posts that come very close to answering what I actually asked, I've been much more successful in establishing that only that handful of respondents have even realized that there were questions to be asked at all.