That's not political. China didn't want option X. China wasn't going to buy, or maybe allow Red Hat to resell, with option X installed.
That's very political. China not recognising Taiwan is nothing but political.
If I don't recognize that Country Y exists, why should software in my country have a flag for a country that doesn't exist?
Telling a company that they have to confirm to your world view is called censorship. In this case, it's a small part of an ongoing strategy by mainland China to delegitimise and hide from view all aspects of Taiwans democracy and (effective) independence.
That RedHat were willing to agree to the PRC request to remove the flag shows that they considered the economic benefits to outweigh any moral issues with the implied censorship.
Apparantly, in order to improve sales in China, RedHat removed the Taiwanese flag
The amazing thing about this is that it seems to be on all versions of RH8 that this has happened (not just the ones sold to China) - so the versions sold in Taiwan won't even have their flag...
The Taiwan Linux UG have an online petition to reinstate the flag.
I suspect that the quote is talking about desktops used in companies, not at home. After all the title of the article is 'IT managers cite security and competition when choosing a Linux system', so it implies their only considering the office environment.
I could very easily believe the Linux market share for office desktop computers is bigger than at home, while, as has been pointed out, the Google stats place overall usage at 1%.
He rejected the argument that the [search] warrant should have been obtained before the data was downloaded, noting that the agents had good reason to fear that if they did not copy the data, (the) defendant¦s co-conspirators would destroy the evidence or make it unavailable."
Excuse me? Is there *any* legal basis for that? You only need apply for a search warrant after you've confiscated all the material you need if you think the bad guys might try to cover their tracks?
Incidentally, if the FBI agents knew all along that they wanted to access this data, why didn't they apply for the search warrant before starting the whole sting operation?
KDE3 has greatly improved international support - all the Unicode/il8n stuff support is built in. This means that at the GUI level it's just(!) a question of all the apps supporting and translating this - take a look at this table for information on the translation status for (Traditional) Chinese.
If you've got a full (with international support/fonts) installation of KDE you should be able to try it out fairly easily - just change the language via the GUI configuration tool.
One *big* problem that I've found trying to use Linux with Chinese is in inputting chinese characters. There is software available (e.g. 'xcin'), but it's not anywhere near as easy to use and smooth as in Windows.
This is a difficult problem to solve - there are a large number of different methods to input Chinese which all have to be supported. Then this input method has to be easy to use across all potential applications (i.e. if you change from your Abiword window to a shell to an emacs window you still want to be able to use the same input method).
It's still at the 'doable-but-painful' stage in Linux (heh! What's new there?), but something as fundamental as entering text needs to be really simple for Linux to be useable natively in Chinese.
At the moment Windows beats Linux hands-down on this front... so any progress in this area is very welcome.
Great. So he gets to read all the documents - one assumes that all of them will be marked 'confidential' (if they're not, then why didn't they let him see them in the first place?). So assuming that he'll then try to publically question some of the reports, ICANN will seek a court order to stop him releasing confidential information.
So are we just in for another round of legal battles?
I'm sure you've read the proposals much more carefully that me, but what I saw was simply that every company was (rightly) trying to emphasise how they will be reliable and have the experience to handle this. In a lot of cases, of course, this translates to "we're reliable because of our for-profit experience".
What I find more disconcerting is the raft of 'nonprofit but with commercial partners' type of applications - which seem to be just a non-profit front for commercial operations. For example, the DotOrg Foundation have already agreed to outsource all the work to register.com at $5.20/domain, and then charge Joe Public $6. Why not let register.com put in an application themselves? (To answer that myself, they have put in their own application as 'Register Organisation Inc.'). Similarly 'UIA' seems to be just a front for Verisign.
These semi-non-profit organisations then seem to have bizarre ideas about what to do with all the filthy lucre they accumulate: from giving a fraction of it to good causes (justifying overcharging by donating a tenth of their profits to charity), to using the money to develop tools which they will then sell to.org registrants (WTF?).
I would personally prefer a proper (open) non-profit organisation to run it, but wouldn't mind an accountable for-profit company. Having an open, non-profit, well-run shell organisation who shovel all the money into some shadowy forprofit partner seems a recipe for disaster.
Incidentally, the most amusing(worrying?) application seems to be the '.Org foundation' who claim "We want to make sure that [dot-org] is representative of the larger world and not just representative of U.S. organizations," - and follow this up by: 'Microsoft has tentatively agreed to help fund The.Org Foundation if it wins the contract, Rogers said. Details of that arrangement are still being worked out.'
As far as I can see, whoever wins has no (direct) control over the policy of who gets.org domains. The overall policy to try to ensure that.org is only for 'non-profit' organisations seems to be still wholly in the hands of ICANN - and like.com the only requirement is money. From ICANN's FAQ:
What are the rules for registration of.net and.org names?
They are the same as for.com. Traditionally, however,....org is frequently used by not-for-profit organizations.
So whoever wins this election can (possibly) change the amount charged to register a domain, and physically move the database, but will not be able to do anything about who registers the domains. If that's the case (and all the applicants seem to be saying they won't raise the price over the existing 6USD), why should we care who wins?
It should be *harder*, not easier, to prove lack of prior art.
You've got it the wrong way round. The Patent Office does not prove lack of prior art, it proves prior art. What I would say is "It should be *easier*, not harder, to prove prior art."
The failure of a database query hardly constitutes "lack of prior art"
That is exactly what happens in practise. A patent agent has a few hours to understand the patent in front of him, search for prior art, compare all the prior art he finds to the proposal, and then justify rejecting/accepting it. There is no way they are going to go trawling through archived usenet postings/search the web for detailled date-stamped documentation for every case. They *need* an easy way to search for something to compare the proposal against.
Your suggested database would result in *more*, not *fewer* bogus patents being granted, because it would accelerate the application process without adding any protection above and beyond what's already there.
I'm not suggesting that the time/patent is decreased - simply that the patent agent has more powerful tools to prove the (in)validity of a patent in that time. That has got to be a good thing.
The idea is just silly. Makes me want to go patent the Redbook standard and sue the RIAA.
Funny you should mention that... the CD Specification is stuffed full of patents (mainly from Philips & Sony) which are due to expire in a year or so. I doubt you'll notice the couple of cent drop in price of a CD due to not having to pay the patent holders when they do expire though:-)
What the JPEG Committee is proposing is a general 'prior art database' which should be generally useful for any image related dispute. This is a 'good thing'(tm) whether anyone is currently trying to claim JPEG prior-art or not. The current patent process desperately needs quick and easy ways to search for prior art.
To see why, consider the standard process for creating a patent in a large company:
You write up an overview of the patent, and submit it. Presumably you know your field, so the first 'prior art filter' is you - have you heard of anything similar?
You hand it over to your companies patent agent. (S)he will probably be assigned to a particular field (e.g. 'audio/video/image processing'), so understands the area, but is not going to be an expert.
The patent agent reads through your explanation and does a prior art search - and returns to you a selection of things that may be relevant.
You explain how your invention is novel compared to these. If you convince him, then the wheels are set in motion, and your company (eventually) submits a patent application.
The Patent Office reads it and searches for prior art. If they find none, your patent is granted, while if they find something, then it is up to you/your company to dispute their findings.
So, in steps 3 & 5 you have legal experts who understand the area, but are probably not technically expert in the exact field of the patent who have a responsibility to search for prior art. They are also under time pressure, as they have loads of proposals to deal with. So what they do is pull out a few relevant keywords from the proposal and search on them in some prior-art database.
The most obvious (and easy) database is the existing patents DB. Now, I'm sure they have other databases they use, but whenever I've been through the process, nearly all the potential prior art which has been returned to me via the patent agent has been previously published patents. So if an idea hasn't been patented before, then it's got a good chance of getting accepted as a new patent.
So if the JPEG group build an extensive, easily searchable catalogue of prior art (with times, keywords, etc.), then it will make the patent agents life a lot easier, thus increasing the quality of patents.
Now comes the weird part; if you stay at 4400m, you will start to experience an increasing height-sickness which can potentially become dangerous.
There's a standard rule about sleeping lower than you've been climbing - for two reasons: * If you start to get affected while climbing, it's easy to notice it, and you just have to walk down to recover. If you get affected while sleeping, you won't notice it as quickly, so the symptoms can become worse (and it'll be harder to go down in the middle of the night). * When you're walking/climbing you are active (so thinking about breathing - if you're not getting enough Oxygen then you breath harder). When asleep you're breathing by reflex, so might not breath enough. (I'm simplifying - as you say it is a bit wierd and noone fully understands it). Anyway - these athletes are doing the exact opposite of what climbers do by sleeping at altitude and exercising at sealevel!
The core feature of this (apart from all the bio-monitoring) seems to be the idea of keeping a whole house at equivalent air pressure to 12,000 feet. This lets the athletes train at sea level, while resting at altitude (which is seen as a 'good thing').
But doesn't it open the athletes up to altitude sickness? Granted, 12,000 feet is low to get this, but it's generally caused as much by the change in altitude as the absolute altitude (So generally if you take a week climbing to 16,000 feet you're much less likely to be afflicted than if you do it in a couple of days). Oddly enough, it affects fit people as much as (or often more than) the unfit, so I do wonder whether they have any problem with this.
Incidentally, I know that 20,000 feet is about half an atmosphere, so I guess they're talking about 2/3 (sea-level) atmosphere at 12,000 feet.
Everyone here seems to be railing against these 'cyberskeptics', saying they're out of touch with technology, trying to stifle the net, etc. So if you're for internet legislation, here's a challenge: Name one cyberlaw that you approve of. DMCA perhaps? Internet Radio legislation?
OK. If that's too hard: name one law which you want to be applied everywhere except the internet. Copyright? You want it to be legal to download MP3s but not make your own tapes? Want the freedom of speech not to apply to the net?
Sure, the internet has raised some issues with existing laws which have to be addressed (e.g. copyright, international law) - but I can't think of a single thing that I would want to be legal on the internet, and not outside it (or vice versa).
Why on earth is the whole of Slashdot arguing for more internet legislation?
That seems to be the point. Most laws are about the actions of people/companies - the internet might make some of those actions easier, but doesn't affect the legality of what they do, so why change the law?
For example, take copyright. Is it legal for me to make 100 tape copies of one of an album I have bought, and then sell/give them away? No. So is it legal for me to upload the song onto the net, and let 100 people download it? No.
So why do you need new laws to deal with people sharing music on the internet? This article is arguing that you don't.
Don't many dictatorships end in some kind of revolution?
Probably. But a lot of revolutions also end up with dictatorships. The easiest way for ICANN to be overthrown is for Microsoft to bundle an alternative system in their next OS...
You should be complaining about how ICANN is run, not how it is funded. The taxation scheme is just a change to how they are funded, and is probably more logical than the previous system - given that they're a non-profit organisation, it's unlikely they're changing drastically how much they're funded.
I don't like how they're run either - but I couldn't care less how they bill the registrars (which is all this is).
[OT]: "No taxation without representation". Is this just a famous quote, or actually part of the US constitution? If it is, do children, criminals, madmen, and foreigners working in the US really not pay tax?
I have to ask: Why is a non-profit organization levying taxes?
Non-profit does not equal no income. It means they must balance their income with their outgoings. Given that their job it to coordinate/manage IP & DNS it is eminently sensible that a part of the money you pay to register a domain goes to them. This is a non-issue: they're simply trying to rationalise how they bill the registrars.
There are serious problems with ICANN (most notably their secrecy, lack of accountability, and their 'closed shop' policies) - but this isn't one of them.
Slashdot Mirror
That's very political. China not recognising Taiwan is nothing but political.
If I don't recognize that Country Y exists, why should software in my country have a flag for a country that doesn't exist?
Telling a company that they have to confirm to your world view is called censorship. In this case, it's a small part of an ongoing strategy by mainland China to delegitimise and hide from view all aspects of Taiwans democracy and (effective) independence.
That RedHat were willing to agree to the PRC request to remove the flag shows that they considered the economic benefits to outweigh any moral issues with the implied censorship.
The amazing thing about this is that it seems to be on all versions of RH8 that this has happened (not just the ones sold to China) - so the versions sold in Taiwan won't even have their flag
The Taiwan Linux UG have an online petition to reinstate the flag.
Great! This makes life much simpler.
According to the ENUM spec my new easy-to-remember all-purpose address will be:
7.2.4.8.7.5.3.2.2.6.8.8.e164.arpa
No longer will I have to use that impossible to remember email address (1st name)@(surname).org
I suspect that the quote is talking about desktops used in companies, not at home. After all the title of the article is 'IT managers cite security and competition when choosing a Linux system', so it implies their only considering the office environment.
I could very easily believe the Linux market share for office desktop computers is bigger than at home, while, as has been pointed out, the Google stats place overall usage at 1%.
Now *that* is a much nicer analogy:
It seems ISOC is a body which is busy reforming itself to reduce the power of individual members
Excuse me? Is there *any* legal basis for that? You only need apply for a search warrant after you've confiscated all the material you need if you think the bad guys might try to cover their tracks?
Incidentally, if the FBI agents knew all along that they wanted to access this data, why didn't they apply for the search warrant before starting the whole sting operation?
KDE3 has greatly improved international support - all the Unicode/il8n stuff support is built in.
This means that at the GUI level it's just(!) a question of all the apps supporting and translating this - take a look at this table for information on the translation status for (Traditional) Chinese.
If you've got a full (with international support/fonts) installation of KDE you should be able to try it out fairly easily - just change the language via the GUI configuration tool.
One *big* problem that I've found trying to use Linux with Chinese is in inputting chinese characters. There is software available (e.g. 'xcin'), but it's not anywhere near as easy to use and smooth as in Windows.
... so any progress in this area is very welcome.
This is a difficult problem to solve - there are a large number of different methods to input Chinese which all have to be supported. Then this input method has to be easy to use across all potential applications (i.e. if you change from your Abiword window to a shell to an emacs window you still want to be able to use the same input method).
It's still at the 'doable-but-painful' stage in Linux (heh! What's new there?), but something as fundamental as entering text needs to be really simple for Linux to be useable natively in Chinese.
At the moment Windows beats Linux hands-down on this front
So are we just in for another round of legal battles?
What I find more disconcerting is the raft of 'nonprofit but with commercial partners' type of applications - which seem to be just a non-profit front for commercial operations. For example, the DotOrg Foundation have already agreed to outsource all the work to register.com at $5.20/domain, and then charge Joe Public $6. Why not let register.com put in an application themselves? (To answer that myself, they have put in their own application as 'Register Organisation Inc.'). Similarly 'UIA' seems to be just a front for Verisign.
These semi-non-profit organisations then seem to have bizarre ideas about what to do with all the filthy lucre they accumulate: from giving a fraction of it to good causes (justifying overcharging by donating a tenth of their profits to charity), to using the money to develop tools which they will then sell to .org registrants (WTF?).
I would personally prefer a proper (open) non-profit organisation to run it, but wouldn't mind an accountable for-profit company. Having an open, non-profit, well-run shell organisation who shovel all the money into some shadowy forprofit partner seems a recipe for disaster.
Incidentally, the most amusing(worrying?) application seems to be the '.Org foundation' who claim "We want to make sure that [dot-org] is representative of the larger world and not just representative of U.S. organizations," - and follow this up by: 'Microsoft has tentatively agreed to help fund The .Org Foundation if it wins the contract, Rogers said. Details of that arrangement are still being worked out.'
There is no way they are going to go trawling through archived usenet postings/search the web for detailled date-stamped documentation for every case. They *need* an easy way to search for something to compare the proposal against. I'm not suggesting that the time/patent is decreased - simply that the patent agent has more powerful tools to prove the (in)validity of a patent in that time. That has got to be a good thing.
The only recent time Philips has got upset with the RIAA was when they weren't sticking to the Redbook standard!
To see why, consider the standard process for creating a patent in a large company:
- You write up an overview of the patent, and submit it. Presumably you know your field, so the first 'prior art filter' is you - have you heard of anything similar?
- You hand it over to your companies patent agent. (S)he will probably be assigned to a particular field (e.g. 'audio/video/image processing'), so understands the area, but is not going to be an expert.
- The patent agent reads through your explanation and does a prior art search - and returns to you a selection of things that may be relevant.
- You explain how your invention is novel compared to these. If you convince him, then the wheels are set in motion, and your company (eventually) submits a patent application.
- The Patent Office reads it and searches for prior art. If they find none, your patent is granted, while if they find something, then it is up to you/your company to dispute their findings.
So, in steps 3 & 5 you have legal experts who understand the area, but are probably not technically expert in the exact field of the patent who have a responsibility to search for prior art. They are also under time pressure, as they have loads of proposals to deal with. So what they do is pull out a few relevant keywords from the proposal and search on them in some prior-art database.The most obvious (and easy) database is the existing patents DB. Now, I'm sure they have other databases they use, but whenever I've been through the process, nearly all the potential prior art which has been returned to me via the patent agent has been previously published patents. So if an idea hasn't been patented before, then it's got a good chance of getting accepted as a new patent.
So if the JPEG group build an extensive, easily searchable catalogue of prior art (with times, keywords, etc.), then it will make the patent agents life a lot easier, thus increasing the quality of patents.
Now comes the weird part; if you stay at 4400m, you will start to experience an increasing height-sickness which can potentially become dangerous.
There's a standard rule about sleeping lower than you've been climbing - for two reasons:
* If you start to get affected while climbing, it's easy to notice it, and you just have to walk down to recover. If you get affected while sleeping, you won't notice it as quickly, so the symptoms can become worse (and it'll be harder to go down in the middle of the night).
* When you're walking/climbing you are active (so thinking about breathing - if you're not getting enough Oxygen then you breath harder). When asleep you're breathing by reflex, so might not breath enough.
(I'm simplifying - as you say it is a bit wierd and noone fully understands it). Anyway - these athletes are doing the exact opposite of what climbers do by sleeping at altitude and exercising at sealevel!
The core feature of this (apart from all the bio-monitoring) seems to be the idea of keeping a whole house at equivalent air pressure to 12,000 feet. This lets the athletes train at sea level, while resting at altitude (which is seen as a 'good thing').
But doesn't it open the athletes up to altitude sickness? Granted, 12,000 feet is low to get this, but it's generally caused as much by the change in altitude as the absolute altitude (So generally if you take a week climbing to 16,000 feet you're much less likely to be afflicted than if you do it in a couple of days). Oddly enough, it affects fit people as much as (or often more than) the unfit, so I do wonder whether they have any problem with this.
Incidentally, I know that 20,000 feet is about half an atmosphere, so I guess they're talking about 2/3 (sea-level) atmosphere at 12,000 feet.
Also, Brititany has done "kernel-2.4.19.tgz". ...
Yeah. But it's not a patch on her more experimental '-ac' work
Everyone here seems to be railing against these 'cyberskeptics', saying they're out of touch with technology, trying to stifle the net, etc. So if you're for internet legislation, here's a challenge:
Name one cyberlaw that you approve of.
DMCA perhaps? Internet Radio legislation?
OK. If that's too hard: name one law which you want to be applied everywhere except the internet.
Copyright? You want it to be legal to download MP3s but not make your own tapes? Want the freedom of speech not to apply to the net?
Sure, the internet has raised some issues with existing laws which have to be addressed (e.g. copyright, international law) - but I can't think of a single thing that I would want to be legal on the internet, and not outside it (or vice versa).
Why on earth is the whole of Slashdot arguing for more internet legislation?
That seems to be the point. Most laws are about the actions of people/companies - the internet might make some of those actions easier, but doesn't affect the legality of what they do, so why change the law?
For example, take copyright. Is it legal for me to make 100 tape copies of one of an album I have bought, and then sell/give them away? No. So is it legal for me to upload the song onto the net, and let 100 people download it? No.
So why do you need new laws to deal with people sharing music on the internet? This article is arguing that you don't.
Have you ever heard a more blatent admission of IP theft? Lock him up now, I say!
P.S. Please ignore this post if you didn't grow up in England in the 70s/80s...
Probably. But a lot of revolutions also end up with dictatorships. The easiest way for ICANN to be overthrown is for Microsoft to bundle an alternative system in their next OS
You should be complaining about how ICANN is run, not how it is funded. The taxation scheme is just a change to how they are funded, and is probably more logical than the previous system - given that they're a non-profit organisation, it's unlikely they're changing drastically how much they're funded.
I don't like how they're run either - but I couldn't care less how they bill the registrars (which is all this is).
[OT]: "No taxation without representation". Is this just a famous quote, or actually part of the US constitution? If it is, do children, criminals, madmen, and foreigners working in the US really not pay tax?
Non-profit does not equal no income. It means they must balance their income with their outgoings. Given that their job it to coordinate/manage IP & DNS it is eminently sensible that a part of the money you pay to register a domain goes to them. This is a non-issue: they're simply trying to rationalise how they bill the registrars.
There are serious problems with ICANN (most notably their secrecy, lack of accountability, and their 'closed shop' policies) - but this isn't one of them.