I spent my high school years as a Gringo in Peru. While I was there two of my Peruvian friends were killed by terrorists from Sendero Luminoso because they looked like the might be Americans. So excuse me if I have a strong opinion about this subject.
One of the things that I saw while I lived in Peru was that most Peruvians (as individuals) were as nice a people as you might want to meet. Most of the anti-American sentiment that existed in Peru, and there was a *lot* of it, was the direct result of manipulation by various Peruvian political leaders. Peru is a fairly screwed up country, and the political leaders there spend most of their time blaming their problems on the Devils in the United States. Now, I am not going to say that the U.S. hasn't forwarded some pretty bad South American foreign policies over the years, but Peru's major problems stem from rampant corruption of their own political system and not from any policy that the U.S. might have adopted. About the worst thing that U.S. has done in recent years is loan Peru money so that its corrupt leaders could waste it on gewgaws or leave the country with it. Despite the fact that Peru's problems are almost entirely of Peruvian manufacture the United States is every Peruvian politician's favorite scapegoat, and the Peruvian population is uneducated enough that they buy these lies wholesale.
As an example, at one point the government-sponsored TV station ran a totally bogus news story about a string of child abductions in which it was alleged that an American was running around Lima abducting children and stealing their corneas for sale in the U.S. I remember seeing one of these broadcasts on the news and the main graphic featured a silohuette with a question mark on its face backed by a U.S. flag (how they knew it was an American that was stealing the eyes was never told).
Months later one of the independent newspapers ran a story exposing the "Gringo saca ojos" story as a complete fraud, but by then the damage had been done. Heck, my father's SUV was actually attacked by a mob in downtown Lima, and the only thing that saved him was A) he spoke Spanish, and B) he had two of my little sisters in the SUV with him. He was finally able to calm the crowd down by pointing out that he was a father as well, and that he had his two little girls in the car with him. As it was quite a bit of damage was done to the car, and the incident scared the heck out of my entire family.
So what's the point to all this? The point is that it doesn't matter that the people in a country are sane if the people in power in their country are not sane. Most people believe what they are told, even cynical and well-educated people like the average American. If Peruvians are told by the government that America is responsible for their problems, then a lot of them are going to believe it. On a similar note if Moslems around the world are told that America is "the great Satan" by their religious leaders then no amount of positive PR is likely to make the average Moslem disbelieve that. America is a big target, and we make more than our share of mistakes, but much of the hatred for America is nothing more than shrewd political maneuvering. America is the enemy that all sorts of political leaders use to rally the uneducated and ill-informed into their causes.
My grandfather was an missionary for the LDS church (the Mormons) right before WWII. He barely escaped Germany with his life. A few years later he was back in Europe with a U.S. bomber squadron blasting the life out of people that just a few years earlier he had been teaching about Jesus Christ. My Grandfather loved the German people, but for whatever reason they let themselves get put into a position where the folks running the country were insane and dangerous, and so for the sake of the rest of the world he volunteered to blast Germans to bits, many of them complete innocents. Since the German people were unwilling to remove the threat that Hitler represented by themselves, my g
That's hilarious. You clearly need to re-read the Old Testament. On several ocassions the Lord commanded the Israelites to destroy every man woman and child in a city. On at least one ocassion (I'm not a Biblical scholar) Saul was even commanded to kill all of the animals in a city. Saul got in trouble because he decided that instead of destroying perfectly good animals that he would use them as sacrifices.
Wal-Mart doesn't demand censored lyrics because they are Bible thumping prudes. Wal-Mart demands censored lyrics because they sell better. Parents, for instance, are far more likely to buy their children CDs that don't have explicit lyrics stickers on them.
You ever wonder why it is that your local CD shop carries the censored versions of the CDs? The answer is that even in a record store (which generally don't count soccer moms as one of their primary customer groups) censored CDs generally compete very well with their uncensored versions. By just stocking the censored CDs Wal-Mart cuts down on their inventory significantly and does a better job of catering to their primary customer.
Wal-Mart sells 1 out of every 5 CDs. Clearly they must be doing something right. You might like the uncensored version, but that's not true of the "average" CD consumer.
I think that you are underestimating the WalMart's marketing and distribution prowess. For example, I bet it came as a shock to you that WalMart already sells 20% of all CDs in the U.S. Hard core music fans probably don't even think about purchasing music at WalMart, but that still leaves lots and lots of other folks.
No matter what happens WalMart is going to continue to sell music, and with 20% of the retail sales they can't be ignored. If WalMart swings their business to a new group of independent record labels then these smaller labels will immediately become a serious force. They will have the money they need to get radio stations to play their bands, and their bands' CDs will be available at a discount price in every WalMart in the nation.
You don't honestly believe that the large record labels actually have a lock on actual "talent" do you? The record labels have prospered because they have control of the primary means of music distribution. They can get their bands on the airwaves, and they can get their CDs in stores. A deal with WalMart guarantees a huge retail market, and with that sort of a potential market getting Clear Channel and the rest to actually play the music shouldn't be too difficult. Heck, chances are good that Wal Mart with deal with Clear Channel directly. With 20% of the retail market WalMart is in position to crush the record labels like a bug. Heck, it might even be good for the music industry. It is likely that selling CDs at a discounted WalMart price might even be more profitable than the current price points.
Either way, there is a lot of inefficiency in the music industry, and WalMart is ramping up to wring the whole industry dry. Just watch, WalMart is going to steamroller the music labels. They won't even know what hit them.
With my luck Emacs keystrokes will be so embedded in my psyche that by the time they do get something like this my thought patterns will look something like this:
M-x gnus m foo@bar.com C-n What's up?
On the plus side, Emacs makes a pretty good front end for all of my digital communicatons right now.
Then perhaps Apple should consider selling a "cut down" with less features. For $3000 I could purchase a system that would blow Apple's kit clear out of the water for the features that *I* am interested in.
Indymedia "leans" left like the Pope "leans" Catholic. Everyone knows that. In fact, their slant is the one reason that they *should* have remove the RNC names immediately. It can now be construed that the folks at Indymedia wanted that information to be available. After all, lots of other information was removed immediately.
If it turns out that there is a link between the Indymedia list and the RNC folks that were accosted, then that it could easily be construed that Indymedia was complicit in those attacks. At the very least it would be fishy enough for a judge to issue a warrant.
Perhaps they overdid it and that is where they screwed up?
Well said. Clearly it would have been hard to pick a more devastating target than the World Trade Center. However, after the 9-11 attacks even the doves were crying out for blood. Clearly Al Quaida miscalculated. An attack on NY City's power supply, while not even close to being on the same scale as the 9-11 attacks, might have forwarded the terrorist agenda better than the destruction of the WTC.
Like I said before. I lived in Lima for three years, and I can testify to the effectiveness of the infrastructure attacks. They were very demoralizing, and attacks of this sort are far easier to carry out than suicide bombings. It is almost impossible to guard all of the high tension powerline towers.
That's why, while I certainly agree that the Patriot Act goes too far, I do not agree that infrastructure targets shouldn't have some reasonable protections.
9-11 also galvanized America to the point where it was willing to go to war. Al Quaida didn't want us to upset their power base in the Middle East, they wanted us to pull out of the Middle East. By destroying infrastructure Al Quaida would have shown that they could hurt us, without riling the nation up to the point where we were willing to go to war.
Fah, the basic goal of both Al-Quaida and Sendero Luminoso was to coerce a group of people into going along with their agenda. Basically they are no different than bullies. Sendero Luminoso didn't attack the infrastructure to weaken the Peruvian government. They did it to demoralize the Peruvian people. The Senderos made it clear that until Peruvians agreed with their political goals that they were going to be as disruptive as possible.
Al Quaida basically wants the U.S. to turn a blind eye to their activities in the Middle East. Threatening our water supply, our road infrastructure, or our ability to generate electricity would be a relatively easy way for these terrorists to convince more Americans to look the other way. Heck, lots of Americans believe that we have no business meddling in that part of the world already.
In fact, I personally think that an attack on our infrastructure would have been far more effective than 9-11. All 9-11 did was give the more hawkish parts of the U.S. government an excuse to root around in the Middle East for terrorists. Even liberal anti-war folks became interested in tracking down bin Laden. I truly doubt that there would have been near the outrage if New York would simply have had a massive terrorist-induced blackout for a few days. If infrastructure had been targeted for 9-11 lots of people would have blamed U.S. foreign policy for the attack and questioned our involvement in the Middle East. With thousands of New Yorkers dead many of these same people now were screaming for blood.
When I lived in Peru in the late 80's Sendero Luminoso used to target Peru's sorry excuse for a phone system quite frequently. They tended to prefer to destroy the high tension power lines, but they would settle for the phone lines in a pinch. There was also quite a few instances of terrorists attacks on the public water system while I lived in Lima (including *gasp* the destruction of at least one smallish dam).
I don't really see why outages should be Top Secret information, other than it may show terrorists the weak points in our communications infrastructure, but there definitely have been cases where telephone systems have been targets of terrorism. The difference is that when terrorists blow up parts of the public works infrastructure in Huancayo, Peru it doesn't make international news.
I am personally opposed to most of the Patriot Act, but I saw enough terrorism in Peru to know that bridges, phone systems, power systems, and other basic infrastructure pieces are key terrorist targets in areas of the world where terrorists are more thoroughly organized. The destruction of the infrastructure is very demoralizing without being nearly as risky as large scale murder.
Well said. If the Greens were arguing against some of Monsanto's practices, then I would agree with them. However, that's not the tact that they take. They consistently argue the much more sensationalist "GM Food is Bad" line, using emotion rather than reason.
Heck, they do the same thing with nuclear energy as well, and they consistently ignore the real world issues with a smaller military as well.
In short, while there are many issues where I agree with the Greens, I can't help but think that they chose their agenda by polling college freshman and beauty pageant contestants.
Microsoft has a Price/Earnings ratio over thirty and their primary revenue generators Windows and MS Office have basically finished growing. Microsoft is taking a good hard look at entering all sorts of markets.
Being a Microsoft partner is going to be an especially precarious position to be in over the next couple of years as Microsoft looks for ways to "get rid of the middleman" between Microsoft and the end user.
Yes, I realize that. Mr. Davis wrote the book on the abstraction, filtration, comparision tests and he is essentially "the man" that you get when you want the expert witness on software copyright abuse.
That being the case he still essentially ran comparator against two source code bases and read the output. I find that pretty amusing, but I certainly didn't mean to imply that Mr. Davis isn't an expert, and a certified genius.
When was the last time that a Linux patch installed a firewall, and fixed several bugs that dipshit programmers were using as 'features'?
If the largest proprietary software company in the world doesn't get security right, what evidence is there that the smaller guys do any better? Oh wait, your own words prove that the small guys don't do any better. They just code till it works and hope that Microsoft doesn't break their software with the next round of patches.
Hey, that sounds suspiciously like what the article accused Free Software of doing. The only difference is that Free Software seems to be doing a better job of it.
I hope that you got the patches for the supposed "major performance bottlenecks" that Mr. Davis mentioned. It's seems a little funny to me that Mr. Davis made $550 an hour for the difficult job of running SysV and Linux through comparator and commenting on the output. At those rates you would think he would be grateful for performance bottlenecks.
That's nice work, if you can get it.
Thanks again for all of the work you have done for Free Software. I use stuff you have written every day, and I really do appreciate it.
Oh please. Take a look at the track record for the largest commercial software vendor (Microsoft) and the Linux distribution of your choice when it comes to security updates. When was the last time that you heard of a Linux security fix that had serious repercussions to other software installed on the box, and when was the last time that a Linux patch failed to fix the problem in question and had to be backed out?
Microsoft has released some amazingly bad patches in the past.
In the "real" world Free Software is doing a very good job of providing security. Notice that even John would agree that projects like Apache and djbdns provide better security than their competitors. If push comes to shove John would probably have to give a Free Software project the nod in nearly every major server category, and yet somehow "Open Source" isn't responsible for that.
John's business is the business of auditing software for security. Free Software projects don't pay John to audit their code, and so they couldn't possibly be as secure.
If they become famous *after* I buy their unencrypted CD what the heck do I care? I still have the CD, and I can rip it to any format that I want. I simply won't buy their *next* DRMed album, but will instead find some other band that is willing to sell me music on my terms.
Re:Not suprising; I hope the book's good
on
Dive Into Python
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Dive into Python has always been a good book for some time now. The difference is that now it is available in a dead tree version, and it has had some professional editting.
His world worked out just fine. In fact, his free edition was good enough that he's getting paid to make a dead tree version while still giving away the electronic version.
It just goes to show that there is money to be made in this kind of stuff. Not huge piles of money probably, but enough to make it worth your while.
Yes, that's exactly right. The problems in our schools are little more than reflections of the problems in the modern family. If you limit the population of the school to children with parents that care and are willing to discipline their children then it is easy to have good schools.
Heck, that's the same reason that home schooled children also tend to do well academically. Home schools typically have very little in the way of resources, and the teaching skills of the average home school teacher (probably a parent) are low at best. However, having parents that care about education more than makes up the difference.
The West's free market has produced all sorts of software from Microsoft Office to vi, all of which get used on a regular basis. Consumers regularly choose MS Office over Corel PerfectOffice, Lotus SmartSuite, Applix Office, Sun's StarOffice, Abiword, Gnumeric, etc, but that's not because Microsoft is pointing a gun at their heads. Microsoft got to where they currently are by being "good enough" at the lowest price.
In the end market forces are very likely to push consumers towards Free Software. There is almost no question that Microsoft Office is going to find it harder and harder to compete with OpenOffice.org in the future, and Linux is all set to make a run at Windows as well.
That, by the way, is another benefit of a free market. A truly competitive marketplace means that even those companies that have been successful have to be very careful.
Yes, I tend to agree. If a parent isn't concerned enough about their child's education to put them in a decent school when they have a choice of schools then it is hard to imagine how the child has a chance no matter what society does. Private school vouchers solve the problems of poor public school systems for those parents that actually care about their child's education.
Spot on. I went to a private school myself for my last two years of high school, and I was amazed at the difference.
It wasn't that the children in the private schools were brighter. Instead it was the fact that private school teachers could spend their time teaching instead of babysitting. Private school teachers can send home piles of homework and simply expect it to get done, and private school teachers can depend on the child's parents for most of the discipline. Even the dimmest of my classmates at the private school cared what kind of grades they got.
The advantage of planned economies is that you can afford to take the long view. The problem with the planned economy is that if your leaders guess incorrectly you don't really have a backup plan.
In a free market economy lots of people make bets. Some of those bets pan out, and some of them don't, but the success of the economy doesn't rely on any one of the bets. Sure, none of the free market bets are as grandiose as the planned economy bets (capital tends to get spread out among the many choices), but chances are good that you end up with something that works. Free Market economies don't end up building The Great Wall of China, but that's all right, because they Great Wall didn't really work that well anyhow.
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As a matter of fact, he was, and the two friends of mine that were killed by Sendero Luminoso they were (Peruvian) LDS missionaries.
I spent my high school years as a Gringo in Peru. While I was there two of my Peruvian friends were killed by terrorists from Sendero Luminoso because they looked like the might be Americans. So excuse me if I have a strong opinion about this subject.
One of the things that I saw while I lived in Peru was that most Peruvians (as individuals) were as nice a people as you might want to meet. Most of the anti-American sentiment that existed in Peru, and there was a *lot* of it, was the direct result of manipulation by various Peruvian political leaders. Peru is a fairly screwed up country, and the political leaders there spend most of their time blaming their problems on the Devils in the United States. Now, I am not going to say that the U.S. hasn't forwarded some pretty bad South American foreign policies over the years, but Peru's major problems stem from rampant corruption of their own political system and not from any policy that the U.S. might have adopted. About the worst thing that U.S. has done in recent years is loan Peru money so that its corrupt leaders could waste it on gewgaws or leave the country with it. Despite the fact that Peru's problems are almost entirely of Peruvian manufacture the United States is every Peruvian politician's favorite scapegoat, and the Peruvian population is uneducated enough that they buy these lies wholesale.
As an example, at one point the government-sponsored TV station ran a totally bogus news story about a string of child abductions in which it was alleged that an American was running around Lima abducting children and stealing their corneas for sale in the U.S. I remember seeing one of these broadcasts on the news and the main graphic featured a silohuette with a question mark on its face backed by a U.S. flag (how they knew it was an American that was stealing the eyes was never told).
Months later one of the independent newspapers ran a story exposing the "Gringo saca ojos" story as a complete fraud, but by then the damage had been done. Heck, my father's SUV was actually attacked by a mob in downtown Lima, and the only thing that saved him was A) he spoke Spanish, and B) he had two of my little sisters in the SUV with him. He was finally able to calm the crowd down by pointing out that he was a father as well, and that he had his two little girls in the car with him. As it was quite a bit of damage was done to the car, and the incident scared the heck out of my entire family.
So what's the point to all this? The point is that it doesn't matter that the people in a country are sane if the people in power in their country are not sane. Most people believe what they are told, even cynical and well-educated people like the average American. If Peruvians are told by the government that America is responsible for their problems, then a lot of them are going to believe it. On a similar note if Moslems around the world are told that America is "the great Satan" by their religious leaders then no amount of positive PR is likely to make the average Moslem disbelieve that. America is a big target, and we make more than our share of mistakes, but much of the hatred for America is nothing more than shrewd political maneuvering. America is the enemy that all sorts of political leaders use to rally the uneducated and ill-informed into their causes.
My grandfather was an missionary for the LDS church (the Mormons) right before WWII. He barely escaped Germany with his life. A few years later he was back in Europe with a U.S. bomber squadron blasting the life out of people that just a few years earlier he had been teaching about Jesus Christ. My Grandfather loved the German people, but for whatever reason they let themselves get put into a position where the folks running the country were insane and dangerous, and so for the sake of the rest of the world he volunteered to blast Germans to bits, many of them complete innocents. Since the German people were unwilling to remove the threat that Hitler represented by themselves, my g
That's hilarious. You clearly need to re-read the Old Testament. On several ocassions the Lord commanded the Israelites to destroy every man woman and child in a city. On at least one ocassion (I'm not a Biblical scholar) Saul was even commanded to kill all of the animals in a city. Saul got in trouble because he decided that instead of destroying perfectly good animals that he would use them as sacrifices.
Perhaps you should have quoted the New Testament.
Wal-Mart doesn't demand censored lyrics because they are Bible thumping prudes. Wal-Mart demands censored lyrics because they sell better. Parents, for instance, are far more likely to buy their children CDs that don't have explicit lyrics stickers on them.
You ever wonder why it is that your local CD shop carries the censored versions of the CDs? The answer is that even in a record store (which generally don't count soccer moms as one of their primary customer groups) censored CDs generally compete very well with their uncensored versions. By just stocking the censored CDs Wal-Mart cuts down on their inventory significantly and does a better job of catering to their primary customer.
Wal-Mart sells 1 out of every 5 CDs. Clearly they must be doing something right. You might like the uncensored version, but that's not true of the "average" CD consumer.
I think that you are underestimating the WalMart's marketing and distribution prowess. For example, I bet it came as a shock to you that WalMart already sells 20% of all CDs in the U.S. Hard core music fans probably don't even think about purchasing music at WalMart, but that still leaves lots and lots of other folks.
No matter what happens WalMart is going to continue to sell music, and with 20% of the retail sales they can't be ignored. If WalMart swings their business to a new group of independent record labels then these smaller labels will immediately become a serious force. They will have the money they need to get radio stations to play their bands, and their bands' CDs will be available at a discount price in every WalMart in the nation.
You don't honestly believe that the large record labels actually have a lock on actual "talent" do you? The record labels have prospered because they have control of the primary means of music distribution. They can get their bands on the airwaves, and they can get their CDs in stores. A deal with WalMart guarantees a huge retail market, and with that sort of a potential market getting Clear Channel and the rest to actually play the music shouldn't be too difficult. Heck, chances are good that Wal Mart with deal with Clear Channel directly. With 20% of the retail market WalMart is in position to crush the record labels like a bug. Heck, it might even be good for the music industry. It is likely that selling CDs at a discounted WalMart price might even be more profitable than the current price points.
Either way, there is a lot of inefficiency in the music industry, and WalMart is ramping up to wring the whole industry dry. Just watch, WalMart is going to steamroller the music labels. They won't even know what hit them.
With my luck Emacs keystrokes will be so embedded in my psyche that by the time they do get something like this my thought patterns will look something like this:
M-x gnus m foo@bar.com C-n What's up?
On the plus side, Emacs makes a pretty good front end for all of my digital communicatons right now.
Then perhaps Apple should consider selling a "cut down" with less features. For $3000 I could purchase a system that would blow Apple's kit clear out of the water for the features that *I* am interested in.
Indymedia "leans" left like the Pope "leans" Catholic. Everyone knows that. In fact, their slant is the one reason that they *should* have remove the RNC names immediately. It can now be construed that the folks at Indymedia wanted that information to be available. After all, lots of other information was removed immediately.
If it turns out that there is a link between the Indymedia list and the RNC folks that were accosted, then that it could easily be construed that Indymedia was complicit in those attacks. At the very least it would be fishy enough for a judge to issue a warrant.
Well said. Clearly it would have been hard to pick a more devastating target than the World Trade Center. However, after the 9-11 attacks even the doves were crying out for blood. Clearly Al Quaida miscalculated. An attack on NY City's power supply, while not even close to being on the same scale as the 9-11 attacks, might have forwarded the terrorist agenda better than the destruction of the WTC.
Like I said before. I lived in Lima for three years, and I can testify to the effectiveness of the infrastructure attacks. They were very demoralizing, and attacks of this sort are far easier to carry out than suicide bombings. It is almost impossible to guard all of the high tension powerline towers.
That's why, while I certainly agree that the Patriot Act goes too far, I do not agree that infrastructure targets shouldn't have some reasonable protections.
9-11 also galvanized America to the point where it was willing to go to war. Al Quaida didn't want us to upset their power base in the Middle East, they wanted us to pull out of the Middle East. By destroying infrastructure Al Quaida would have shown that they could hurt us, without riling the nation up to the point where we were willing to go to war.
Fah, the basic goal of both Al-Quaida and Sendero Luminoso was to coerce a group of people into going along with their agenda. Basically they are no different than bullies. Sendero Luminoso didn't attack the infrastructure to weaken the Peruvian government. They did it to demoralize the Peruvian people. The Senderos made it clear that until Peruvians agreed with their political goals that they were going to be as disruptive as possible.
Al Quaida basically wants the U.S. to turn a blind eye to their activities in the Middle East. Threatening our water supply, our road infrastructure, or our ability to generate electricity would be a relatively easy way for these terrorists to convince more Americans to look the other way. Heck, lots of Americans believe that we have no business meddling in that part of the world already.
In fact, I personally think that an attack on our infrastructure would have been far more effective than 9-11. All 9-11 did was give the more hawkish parts of the U.S. government an excuse to root around in the Middle East for terrorists. Even liberal anti-war folks became interested in tracking down bin Laden. I truly doubt that there would have been near the outrage if New York would simply have had a massive terrorist-induced blackout for a few days. If infrastructure had been targeted for 9-11 lots of people would have blamed U.S. foreign policy for the attack and questioned our involvement in the Middle East. With thousands of New Yorkers dead many of these same people now were screaming for blood.
When I lived in Peru in the late 80's Sendero Luminoso used to target Peru's sorry excuse for a phone system quite frequently. They tended to prefer to destroy the high tension power lines, but they would settle for the phone lines in a pinch. There was also quite a few instances of terrorists attacks on the public water system while I lived in Lima (including *gasp* the destruction of at least one smallish dam).
I don't really see why outages should be Top Secret information, other than it may show terrorists the weak points in our communications infrastructure, but there definitely have been cases where telephone systems have been targets of terrorism. The difference is that when terrorists blow up parts of the public works infrastructure in Huancayo, Peru it doesn't make international news.
I am personally opposed to most of the Patriot Act, but I saw enough terrorism in Peru to know that bridges, phone systems, power systems, and other basic infrastructure pieces are key terrorist targets in areas of the world where terrorists are more thoroughly organized. The destruction of the infrastructure is very demoralizing without being nearly as risky as large scale murder.
Well said. If the Greens were arguing against some of Monsanto's practices, then I would agree with them. However, that's not the tact that they take. They consistently argue the much more sensationalist "GM Food is Bad" line, using emotion rather than reason.
Heck, they do the same thing with nuclear energy as well, and they consistently ignore the real world issues with a smaller military as well.
In short, while there are many issues where I agree with the Greens, I can't help but think that they chose their agenda by polling college freshman and beauty pageant contestants.
Microsoft has a Price/Earnings ratio over thirty and their primary revenue generators Windows and MS Office have basically finished growing. Microsoft is taking a good hard look at entering all sorts of markets.
Being a Microsoft partner is going to be an especially precarious position to be in over the next couple of years as Microsoft looks for ways to "get rid of the middleman" between Microsoft and the end user.
Yes, I realize that. Mr. Davis wrote the book on the abstraction, filtration, comparision tests and he is essentially "the man" that you get when you want the expert witness on software copyright abuse.
That being the case he still essentially ran comparator against two source code bases and read the output. I find that pretty amusing, but I certainly didn't mean to imply that Mr. Davis isn't an expert, and a certified genius.
If the largest proprietary software company in the world doesn't get security right, what evidence is there that the smaller guys do any better? Oh wait, your own words prove that the small guys don't do any better. They just code till it works and hope that Microsoft doesn't break their software with the next round of patches.
Hey, that sounds suspiciously like what the article accused Free Software of doing. The only difference is that Free Software seems to be doing a better job of it.
I hope that you got the patches for the supposed "major performance bottlenecks" that Mr. Davis mentioned. It's seems a little funny to me that Mr. Davis made $550 an hour for the difficult job of running SysV and Linux through comparator and commenting on the output. At those rates you would think he would be grateful for performance bottlenecks.
That's nice work, if you can get it.
Thanks again for all of the work you have done for Free Software. I use stuff you have written every day, and I really do appreciate it.
Oh please. Take a look at the track record for the largest commercial software vendor (Microsoft) and the Linux distribution of your choice when it comes to security updates. When was the last time that you heard of a Linux security fix that had serious repercussions to other software installed on the box, and when was the last time that a Linux patch failed to fix the problem in question and had to be backed out?
Microsoft has released some amazingly bad patches in the past.
In the "real" world Free Software is doing a very good job of providing security. Notice that even John would agree that projects like Apache and djbdns provide better security than their competitors. If push comes to shove John would probably have to give a Free Software project the nod in nearly every major server category, and yet somehow "Open Source" isn't responsible for that.
John's business is the business of auditing software for security. Free Software projects don't pay John to audit their code, and so they couldn't possibly be as secure.
If they become famous *after* I buy their unencrypted CD what the heck do I care? I still have the CD, and I can rip it to any format that I want. I simply won't buy their *next* DRMed album, but will instead find some other band that is willing to sell me music on my terms.
Dive into Python has always been a good book for some time now. The difference is that now it is available in a dead tree version, and it has had some professional editting.
His world worked out just fine. In fact, his free edition was good enough that he's getting paid to make a dead tree version while still giving away the electronic version.
It just goes to show that there is money to be made in this kind of stuff. Not huge piles of money probably, but enough to make it worth your while.
Yes, that's exactly right. The problems in our schools are little more than reflections of the problems in the modern family. If you limit the population of the school to children with parents that care and are willing to discipline their children then it is easy to have good schools.
Heck, that's the same reason that home schooled children also tend to do well academically. Home schools typically have very little in the way of resources, and the teaching skills of the average home school teacher (probably a parent) are low at best. However, having parents that care about education more than makes up the difference.
The West's free market has produced all sorts of software from Microsoft Office to vi, all of which get used on a regular basis. Consumers regularly choose MS Office over Corel PerfectOffice, Lotus SmartSuite, Applix Office, Sun's StarOffice, Abiword, Gnumeric, etc, but that's not because Microsoft is pointing a gun at their heads. Microsoft got to where they currently are by being "good enough" at the lowest price.
In the end market forces are very likely to push consumers towards Free Software. There is almost no question that Microsoft Office is going to find it harder and harder to compete with OpenOffice.org in the future, and Linux is all set to make a run at Windows as well.
That, by the way, is another benefit of a free market. A truly competitive marketplace means that even those companies that have been successful have to be very careful.
Yes, I tend to agree. If a parent isn't concerned enough about their child's education to put them in a decent school when they have a choice of schools then it is hard to imagine how the child has a chance no matter what society does. Private school vouchers solve the problems of poor public school systems for those parents that actually care about their child's education.
Spot on. I went to a private school myself for my last two years of high school, and I was amazed at the difference.
It wasn't that the children in the private schools were brighter. Instead it was the fact that private school teachers could spend their time teaching instead of babysitting. Private school teachers can send home piles of homework and simply expect it to get done, and private school teachers can depend on the child's parents for most of the discipline. Even the dimmest of my classmates at the private school cared what kind of grades they got.
The advantage of planned economies is that you can afford to take the long view. The problem with the planned economy is that if your leaders guess incorrectly you don't really have a backup plan.
In a free market economy lots of people make bets. Some of those bets pan out, and some of them don't, but the success of the economy doesn't rely on any one of the bets. Sure, none of the free market bets are as grandiose as the planned economy bets (capital tends to get spread out among the many choices), but chances are good that you end up with something that works. Free Market economies don't end up building The Great Wall of China, but that's all right, because they Great Wall didn't really work that well anyhow.