Oh no, he's invoked the wrath of RMS. He's confused Free and free. It's a mortal sin, you know. Can't we just keep everything both Free and free even from a legal standpoint?
Take a collection plate around, and if your software is used enough, you should get enough to help anyhow. You could also go to the competition of these projects and take some donations too.
My favorite way of getting legal advice is writting word forms and other software for a local law firm. It makes their job easier, and most of the time they don't mind helping you out too when it comes to just drafting a letter. The best thing you can do is come prepared with a letter, and basically have a lawyer look over it and edit it. They charge by the hour and for court appearances. Just don't plan on using much time or actually going to court, because you couldn't even sue them if you wanted because you can't prove damages.
One thing you can do as the developer is revoke their license and demand they pay you to use it in that manner. Then you can show damages. Unfortunately IANAL, but you should run some of these ideas by a good one.
Possibly, if you own all the code, you could just shoot for getting money out of them to be properly licensed for commercial use. The risks are less, and you may actually get some money out of your work that way. If nothing else, if they respond at all to your threat with an offer to license, you have them screwed with an admition of guilt that you could probably walk into a court and hit them on the head with. You have to set a realistic goal for what you want though... do you want them to stop using your software? Do you want money? Those are your options, and it's sadly easier to get money out of them than to make them stop using your software, but probably more productive too.
I've learned from my legal friends that it's more about tricking/out-smarting your oponent than it ever is about the truth.
Well, in any case I think he could just argue that someone did it before it got to him, and they'll have a hard time actually collecting real evidence otherwise other than word of mouth from the various people. Even if they had a tamper resistant seal, he could just claim that the seal was broken before it was in his hands. It's really an uphill battle, and it's only useful to say "That channel is insecure and we won't send a screener through it next year."
No need to sign a contract really. The majority of the fault already lies with the developer that commits the code. What may have to happen is Distros selling Linux will have to cover liability insurance so that end users don't get into trouble over it, but I'm not so certain of what grounds you could sue an end user over it anyhow, and certainly it would be terrible press for the company that would do such a thing (like SCO). Is there anyone here that would actually suggest buying anything from SCO? I don't think so, and that's gotta hurt their market share a lot.
Basically, SCO is going after IBM for submitting the code, and if IBM did submit proprietary code, then they are at fault. I don't know where the end users lie in all this, but SCO sure is becoming more infamous every day. In any case, I think they'll have to win the case against the submitter before they could go after the end users anyhow. They have 0 chance suing an end user if they loose the case against the submitter, and I don't think it would look so great to the judge if they just went after the end users first.
Have you ever written a site in C without CGI (CGI spawns new threads and is horribly slow)? Probably not. Java performs on par or better than most server-side technologies. If you are having a problem there, you probably should check out JRocket or the IBM VM and try Jetty to run your servlets if you are using Tomcat. If you're having a specific problem with crypto that is slow, it's probably a little bugginess in the implementation, and perhaps a different VM would fix it. If not, you can always wrap servlets in filters that handle the crypto for you in other languages and still leverage the ease of use of Struts, JSP, taglibs etc. that you get from Java Servlets.
Still yet, if your project would perform 50% as well in Java, but you could save one week of development time on a team, you're more than justified in just setting up a load balancer and getting another box economically. If you have nothing else to be doing, that's a whole other story. I would rather spend my time worrying about being the best and through as much hardware as I can at the problem instead of throwing expensive development time at a performance problem.
It's all in thinking of the greater economical good. Generally C is not the overall champion of the world. Assembler is always going to be faster than C if you know exactly how the processor works as well, but we don't all go around coding in assembler, mostly because it's not portable. The same arguement that was used in the creation of UNIX in general can now be used to support Java and similar languages. Portability, security, and proficiency were the issues. An OS written in C would run on any system with a C compiler. An OS written in C wouldn't need so much type checking and the compiler would catch a lot of errors. An OS written in C would take less time to write and update. At the time C was pretty slow compared to assembler too. History is repeating itself, and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to know which boat to get on.
The chips you have should be great for FP in Java. The problem is, crypto doesn't need FP, just a fast integer unit. 64bit is even better! The problem may be that the Java crypto system you had didn't even try to use 64bit, and that would be a problem. Sadly, a 1.4 VM running on a P4 under windows is going to be the best performing Java system for your task. I don't much care for intel or windows because both make pretty inferior products in at least a few respects, but P4 hyperthreading and windows thread support coupled with SSE is probably going to be the best you can get out of Java. Your other alternatives, and I would prefer it to having a crashy server, are to pray that there is better 64bit support in the Java PKI algorithms that you are using (or try alternative libraries) or run a profiler and see what the hold up is and fix it yourself if you can. Java should not be noticably slower than anything else you are using even for crypto on the large scale. Play with it on various systems and I bet you can track the problem down pretty quickly to be something specific to your setup.
1) Java FP works just fine on real hardware (not I32/I64 shortcuts of FP math). That means when you really need FP performance, you get hardware that supports FP properly, not a C hack that estimates 2/3. Honestly, intel chips in 80bit FP are probably only accurate to 64 anyhow. If you want an 80 bit accurate calculation done, you're going to have to rely on the same math libraries that Java does, and you'll have the same abysmal performance. Tell a bank that your C application could amount to a 1 cent difference in interest calculations every 1000 or so transactions, and I think you'll be kicked out with your software. Java does FP, and X86 hardware makes it very hard and slow to do. If you want to complain about FP performance, you should be complaining to Intel and AMD, not SUN.
2) It's always been known that in most situations, the delta cost of the hardware required to run your software is generally much lower than development time differences for C and Java projects because you have to spend more time testing C programs for buffer overflows and memory leaks that just don't happen in Java. Once you slap a GC on C it performs like Java anyhow, then you have nothing to argue about.
3) The fact that someone re-benchmarked and showed Java to be slower just shows me that most people benchmarking because they are skeptical of Java performance comparisons generally don't know enough about the Java platform to get performance out of it, whereas they have wasted years learning every -f flag on every C compiler. Performance tuning with Java is basically knowing which method/class/API to use in which situation. The basics of programming in any language, but I see plenty of people converting numbers to strings with 1+"" when they should use String.valueOf(1) or they use a String for a StringBuffer. There are classes in the standard API to do what you want, just use them properly.
4) Their are other, possibly better ways of doing IO in Java as well (NIO) which make writting IO applications potentially faster in Java without having to implement a non-blocking IO system yourself. Most of the problems Java has had on Linux in the past have been IO based and have been related to poor threading support on Linux. The second benchmark was done on Kernel 2.6, which, AFAIK, the JVM hasn't been tuned to.
There are a plenty of reasons to discredit the second benchmark as unfair to Java, but for most/.'ers, it's easier to discredit any claim that Java has decent performance because of the years of hard work they might have wasted optimizing, debugging, porting, and writting applications in C and telling everyone how much better C is than any other language. There are plenty of reasons to complain about Java, but general performance isn't really one of them, especially with people having 3Ghz processors when a 500Mhz would run every app they have just fine.
>>What is it with file-sharers always *justifying* what they do? It's about greed and kudos, nothing more...
I gave a plausible legitimate reason for piracy that I don't think harms the actual artists or industry except under the circumstance that the product did not deliver to it's promise of entertainment value.
Why is it always the pirates fault by default? I thought this was a country of presumed innocence. If you presume "pirates" as being morally innocent, then the burden of proof is still to show how they harmed another. If the best you can come up with is that we should expect to get screwed then complain, then you should consider that in the US, we have every bit as much right to protect our property as they do. They have no more right to deny us a refund, which they do, and I've seen it a happen several times no matter how obnoxious or loud you get, deny you that right. I think it's fair ethical use to screen have a personal screening of a video until my right as a consumer to return a "defective" product back WITHOUT HASSLE on the grounds that it didn't fulfill it's promise of entertainment.
If there was competition in the field such that I could easily pick an alternative vendor to get those forms of entertainment under a fair agreement, then your point would be closer to accurate. The fact remains that I have no other alternative to choose from that don't fund the MPAA or RIAA. The next common arguement that I run into with the likes of you is "Entertainment is not a prerequisite to life". Of course not, but does that mean that those who don't like to get screwed by the media industry should be underprivileged because of their monopolistic practices? Then you'll argue that if there is value, then you should pay the price, and that I have a choice. That arguement only stands in a fair market, ie. competitive market. When monopolistic price fixing incentives and hidden taxes on media are being funneled into an organization, I don't think it's a fair market. I don't have a choice of funding the MPAA or not, because I burn CD's and DVD's of data. It's also hard to not buy from any MPAA backing companies as well (in the tech industry).
Argue as long as much as you like, but theives accusing anyone of being a theif will never make a rational arguement about ethic. Suggesting to me that I should just bend over and take it is not going to work. They made the rules of the game when they started taxing the media I use and artificially inflated prices well beyond what they would be in a competitive market. They'll have to live with the resistance they have created by not allowing us to vote with our wallets. Am I supposed to build a computer out of sticks and stones to use in todays technological world? I certainly couldn't buy most name brand hardware considering that a lot of them are members of the MPAA or RIAA. I would have to choose a whole different career to make a point, and probably never touch another peice of electronics. I can't think of many career opportunities I would have considering even McDonalds has POS machines that probably have chips manufactured by a company that is a member of the MPAA or RIAA. In the very least, in every dollar you spend anywhere, there is going to be some small amount that trickles to the MPAA/RIAA through their use of CD/DVD media or drives.
That arguement drives me mad. The "they want something for nothing" arguement is bull****.
1) Prove that they actually get anything to begin with. I assume that by getting something, you mean entertainment. Were you entertained by the video that you saw? No. Would you have bought it? No.
2) Prove that is for nothing. 1st, they take risks to do what they do. 2nd, a lot of the people I've known to download movies have actually bought them. If that movie that you were given was really good, would you have bought the actually DVD? Maybe. Would you have seen the sequal in the theatre? Probably.
It's not something for nothing. It's more of your own personal screening of a video than anything else. If the DVD is worth what they ask for it in the stores, you'll buy it... maybe even the collectors edition that costs 10x more than it should.
Is it illegal? Yes. I should be able to buy a movie, watch it, and return it in 30 days if I don't like it as well, but I can't. Any industry with those kinds of rules is asking for piracy. If piracy hurts any industry, it's the rental industry. If you want to be fair (not legal) then you could go rent the movie if you think it was worth the rental price to see it once. If nothing else, I'm sure you'll recommend someone to see the movie that may not have. Isn't fairness what we are trying to achieve?
You find a way to enforce fairness. I'm just showing that the overpriced hollywood mine-field is no more fair than average piracy. Everyone wants to blame piracy for their flops, when really the only people they have to blame is themselves for not offering the entertainment value they promise.
That aside, you will always have the theives as well. You won't stop them with any manner of DRM, because they always find a way of getting the content for free, even if it means shoplifting. The MPAA's anti-competitive practices are the major cause for movie piracy, not the.01% of theives.
Yes, the disconnect is that I don't think the poster understands the intent of embedded procs like this. They are used to improve performance, not stifle it. That's almost like saying "I hope they don't implement sub queries, imagine how slow they will make the system then!". This is more true than stored procedures, but there are some times that sub queries are faster. It's a hell of a lot faster than runing N+1 queries through the DB because it doesn't support sub queries when you need them! Likewise, parsing through the data on the server is the best thing ever. It reduces network load, and moves some of the processing into the DBMS where the CPU spends most of it's time waiting on the disk. Overall, any kind of stored procedure like this can be very much better performing than what we have now.
Then you port a small amount of code to the embedded languages of that DBMS. Every other DBMS has embedded functions except for MySQL, some even support Java.
Did you not think about that post? Sounds like you just dislike Java so much that hearing it in the same sentance as MySQL makes you cringe.
1) Java isn't going to slow down any queries unless you use Java functions. 2) What do you care that someone else isn't smart enough to write good software? 3) MySQL as it stands has no other way to really embed functions easily, and it's actually more effecient to run code on the server and transfer data back afterwords.
Actually, that statement is a little untrue from two angles.
1) Shareholders and shareholder agreements do have clauses for removing CEOs.
2) If a significant amount of unemployment in IT crops up, it's quite likely they will work on some project just for something to do. So, this security guy that lost his job, might find a band of other people that have lost their jobs, and join to form their own security company to discredit the first, and take their business.
What if 10% of the people who's job was shipped to India by MS actually work on other projects. The end result is MS's move to India actually had a hidden cost in competition. The question is, how much business do the people take away from MS with their competing projects vs how much MS cuts by moving to India. Immediate gains will be much greater than the long term. Linux doesn't need many more man hours of skilled labor to cause MS harm. This isn't true for just MS, but any company that ships overseas, they leave people unemployed that know how to do a portion of the work that company does.
Also, consider it's not terribly hard for IT people to make a living just by running a computer shop. Hell, even if IT people work at Wal-Mart, they'll be taking some of their frustration out in code.
I've never seen it a wise decision for any company to ship jobs overseas. Forming new companies and devisions overseas is great, but cutting workforce that already knows what they need to be doing is the stupidest idea I've ever heard. As soon as you train these Indian workers, they become more valuable, and thus you have to pay them more (maybe not significantly, but you do). Also, you are driving up labor costs in India via supply and demand. There are WAY to many variables to make that a justified risk. I'm all for expansion, new contracts, etc. taking the cheapest route at the time, but this is just madness so someone can line their wallets with probable kick-backs from Indian CEO's/government. 4-5 people loosing their job from the same company is enough to cause competition. There are successful businesses today that are spinoffs of companies where the employees quit to form their own company, then the parent company had to compete with them. That's why they try to put non-compete clauses that outlast work duration in employment contracts.
Actually, the bank does have to keep Euro's on hand, and they have do have to dump a lot of USD. Do you understand how much money the bank would loose if they kept their money in USD, and the Euro climbed even 10%. There are probably a trillion dollars/Euros in these banks, they would loose 100 Billion dollars in that scenario, and the Euro has been as high as 1.40$ from as low as 70 cents. That would cost a bank half a trillion dollars, and they would be out of business instantly. You have to keep sperate bank accounts for differenc currencies, and often you have to use a different bank that deals in just that currency. This way the bank doesn't loose money dealing an currencies that shift value, the actual client takes most of the loss if the currency drops in value on the market.
Moving your cash from a USD bank to a Euro bank equates to removing all your money from being invested in American companies to being invested in European one's. This actually does make the market contain more USD than needed, and less Euro, because in the very least, the bank or the person has to transfer these dollars to an exchange or another bank that has Euro's in order to pay their debt, which when the exchanges run out of actual Euro's that can exchange, and they have way too many dollars, the exchange rate has to go up. I understand very well that there aren't really finite amounts of USD on the market, but banks are limited in what they can do because of our experiences during the 30's.
When you convert wealth between forms, it actually has to occur, it's not faked. It would be fraudulent for a bank that has dollars to magically convert them to Euro's. That's about on par with inventing gold when you invest in gold. The exchange has to take place, even if it is in some computer, and it is fictitious as far as actually peices of paper. When that exchange occurs, whoever did it now has more of one than before and less of the other.
Now this post is insightful. I really wonder why that isn't done, because we all make mistakes, it's just funnier when editors make them.:)
I like your idea because then we may be able to filter out some of the crap that no one cares for, and maybe the editors could move on to worrying about getting content more than formatting it or if people will like it. It would be great to have a bunch of people edit the submission before it comes out, and the one with the most special mod points get put on the front page (only if it gets enough mod points). That would take all the fun out of April 1, but it would be more functional I would think. Not that my variety would be the best, it's just something to think about for the next version of slashcode.
BTW, I don't know how my statement of the obvious got modded as insightful, but I know it must have been some kind of moderator prank.
Python doesn't need hungarian notation. There are no types for one, and all members get self. prepended.
for i in range(n):
or if you are inside a class:
class cheese:
def __init__(self):
for i in range(self.n):
Cool eh?
Python run just about everywhere, but I've always considered it more Unix that Windows. Not that this post is directly on topic, but I thought I would smack hungarian notation around considering that well designed languages don't need it to see where variables are from. Also, most programs don't need it. If it's not in the function params, it's in the class. If it's not in the class, it's in a super class. If it doesn't inherit, some bastard is using a global variable, and it's time to be tieing that noose and checking the CVS logs.
That makes it pretty funny. I fully expected it to be deleted by now. Every post so far is off-topic strictly speaking. I think/. should have more mundane posts occasionally just to let people post off topic and kind of "mingle" just to see what the hot topics will be. It would certainly be more interesting than some of the stories that make front page, but then again, I'm pretty wacky.
Yeah, Mr. Taco needs to get his caffeine. I know Timmy is up late because I fight with insomnia from time to time, and I still get/. stories at 4AM, so it's no suprise that Timmy beat him to the punch.
I don't know why people are wasting moderator points in such a dupe though, and it would be good to get an explanation as to why my post was "insightful". Maybe it's a field day for the moderators too?:)
That's the most egotistical BS I've read in a long time. The US knows better than the collective world? Let me give you an instant replay of where we've gone wrong in the past.
1) We let our companies completely take over all the sugar cane farms of Cuba, and we left the people there to starve. This made the situation ripe for Fidel Castro to take control, and left a very negative image of the US in their minds. This later almost caused the destruction of the world due to nuclear war.
2) We funded and trained Osama, and most of his crew to fight against Russia. Later, this turned out to cost us life in a war with the Taliban, as well as some of his power that gave him the opportunity to plan and fund Sept 11 (If you believe he did it.).
3) We trained Iranian police to assasinate their leader, then we placed a weak leader in power. This was discovered soon there after, thus Iran is still angry with us. This also lead to 4.
4) We placed Saddam in power because of his strength... the weak leader in Iran didn't work, so we realized someone stronger needed to be in power. We trained his army and equiped them. We gave them the delivery technology to attack Iran, and the biological weapons, which he also used on the Kurds. He also used these rockets to fire at Israel, and used them to attack Kuwait. You know my position on the current situation, and it's entirely our fault from day 1.
5) We don't argue with Turkey, even though they gun down the Kurds quite frequently.
6) The most atrocious nation for human rights violations (Saudi Arabia) is the number one arms buyer from the US. The also have trillions of dollars invested in our markets, and the removal of which could cause more devistation than the great depression, not to mention that our oil prices would soar if they pulled their oil from the market. The US economy is dependant on Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is a dictatorship that we keep in power despite barbaric practices of amputation and public execution to keep their people in line. Most terrorists are from Saudi Arabia, and they hate America because we interfere in their government by keeping the dictatorship there up. We are responsible for our own actions of provoking terrorism by not only condoning human rights violations, but by being an active supporter with our arms and foreign policy.
I think it would be easier to list the problems we haven't been partially or entirely responsible for in the last 50-60 years. We aren't really responsible for N. Korea (that's China's doing). We aren't responsible for China or North Vietnam. We aren't responsible for Hitler (one of the few good things we've done, but our support wasn't as critical as popular English literature would have one believe, because of the deep feer and hatred of the USSR/communism). We didn't cause any of the wars in Croatia, etc. That's about it.
The US has been involved in just about every screw up since using the nuclear bomb. In order to justify using the nuke, you would have to justify terrorism (the killing of civilians during a time of war). We have caused a hell of a lot of screw ups with the policy that we know what's best for the rest of the world. The rest of the world can take care of themselves, if they needed our help, they would ask for it at the UN. That's how the world should be run, not by one large government hell bent on bullying the rest of the world with our massive "defence". What we use the armed forces for is very much the oposite of "defence" in a very Orwellian sense.
Why don't you at least point out at least a few cases where we've done some good to compensate for the near destruction kind of danger we've put the world in? We let the Philipines go? Republicans hate the whole Bosnia thing. I can't think of a single time that the UN has endangered the entire world, but I can name plenty of times where they've done good (with our help, not our domination) like the first Gulf War. The UN may make mistakes, but it has the wisdom of
I despise the UN for making me side with Bush on any issue:) If we are paying the bill, I think we are to be the ones that decide where that money should go. If MS was crying that I wasn't buying their software I'ld tell them to go screw themselves, it's my money. Whiney French/German people aren't going to change my mind on that issue. It's not about "we took a risk" it's about "it's our damned money". I don't have a problem with them not paying it back after all the damage done by the sanctions that we wouldn't let the UN lift to keep the Iraqis healthy, and besides, technically, we're the ones that destroyed their country.
That said, the problem with the issue is that Bush can't handle foreign relations. He's the worst president in history (except maybe Andrew Jackson) at handling foreigners. If he just said, "It's our money, we're going to spend it how we see fit." instead of trying to twist a knife in their side, it would go over much better. He wants to control everything, and he doesn't care about anyone else's opinion. He's funny to watch, but it's hard to laugh when people are really suffering and/or dead partly because of his decisions.
I think the key point to the entire arguement now is if Saddam can't even hide himself, how is he going to hide a WMD? WMD are measured in tons, he's measured in kilograms. Saddam didn't require a lab to be created either.
I think it's pretty ridiculous that people actually believe he had any amounts of toxins that would classify as a WMD when he couldn't even hide himself. Which would you be more concerned with, your own safety, or the safety of your weapons?
I like your post... I'll be using that arguement now that Saddam has been captured as further evidence of a complete lack of WMD program, because it's the most compelling evidence that we have thus far of the lack of a WMD program. (Which we shouldn't have to prove the non-existance of something that no one has found evidence of.)
Lets make it a little more realistic. You have to make a biological weapon, hide both the weapon and the lab, and you have to do it with hundreds of people roaming Texas. Oh yeah, and you have to do it without equipment, money, or chemicals more deadly than pesticide. Oh, I almost forgot, you have to do this with periodic bombings, and ruthless murderers all looking for a way to get more power. I almost forgot, you have a country full of pissed off people dieing from diseased water and lack of medicine.
Look, Saddam lacked the science, equipment, and materials to make WMD. He couldn't even clean his water. Making biological weapons isn't easy. The best you could do is try to make mustard gas from the salt in the salt water the same way that subs do on accident. Which, if he could get chlorine, I think he would have at least used some of it to purify his water to at least make it appear legitimate.
I'm really sick of the analogy "It's easy to hide milk jugs in a place the size of Texas". It's not easy to make, and people were dieing all the time because he couldn't even make the SIMPLEST biological weapon (mustard gas/chlorine) for cleaning his water.
Yeah, but you couldn't tell me which books I haven't read, like I can you. This is a more important measure than "Which books have you read?" because it shows a bias to actually aquiring information vs. aquiring biased information.
I didn't say war with Iraq is a bad thing, I'm just saying there has been nothing, including the capture, to justify the costs that couldn't have been obtained through the UN by loosening the sanctions. It's not our place to institute democracy in third world countries despite the better judgement of the world/UN.
Hans Blix (cheif inspector) didn't have any problems at all saying that with reasonable certainty that Iraq didn't have any WMD. So, it sounds to me that the UN ispectors were doing a decent enough job. If you keep believing everything Fox News tells you, you're going to be a sad old paranoid man thinking that Clinton "not inhaling" is better than Bush's definate snorting. Or that getting a blow job is terribly morally wrong, but being good buddies with dictators from Saudi Arabia that hold public executions via beheading for religious and political reasons is OK.
I'll take my tin foil hat off when people like you actually take your responsibility as a citizen seriously and stop taking superficial evidence as fact. When we stop living in a facist regime of our own here in the US, I may judge it safe to take my tin foil hat off:)
(I don't really wear a tin foil hat, it's a metaphore... maybe I'll actually wear one now as a political symbol to end the facist big-brother attitudes of the government in general. Maybe I'll make an chrome plated Fedora. Maybe think geek would make one out of Aluminum duct tape.)
Damn, I almost don't want to respond to you because you're obviously an ill-informed troll. Syria doesn't pose a threat to us right now, not even economically, and they don't have significant oil. I very much doubt any movement after them. Bush will depend on China to screw around with N.Korea (don't call it just Korea... S.Korea is a pretty good place). Do you think China wants any more people around them with Nukes? That being said, they are the #2 thread behind China, but we aren't going to do anything to China unless they attack Taiwan, then you can expect another US-Russian style long drawn out war.
As for the Saudi issue, you are completely on crack. 1) Saudi Arabia is the #1 investor in the US (Trillions of $$$'s) 2) Saudi Arabia pumps most of our oil 3) Saudi Arabia buys a lot of our goods (mostly weapons to keep their citizens in line) 4) Saudi Arabia calls the Bush family his second family. 5) Bush's businesses are mostly funded by the Bin Ladens and other Saudis I could go on forever, but suffice it to say that Shrub grew up with the ruling family of Saudi Arabia, and he's not going to attack them. He's also good buddies with Sharon from Israel know for his cruelty as well.
If want a good summary of Bush and his ties to Saudi Arabia and the Bin Laden's, just read "Dude, Where's My Country?". It has nice little nuggets of information about Saudi privet jets that flew around the country days after sept 11, picking up Bin Laden's family and taking them to Paris without letting the FBI or any other agency question them really. I swear if I ever hear anything about the "Liberal Media" again, I'll never talk to that person again, because it's the media's fault you haven't heard these stories in the main stream media. Doesn't sound too liberal to me. These are facts, not rumors.
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Oh no, he's invoked the wrath of RMS. He's confused Free and free. It's a mortal sin, you know. Can't we just keep everything both Free and free even from a legal standpoint?
Take a collection plate around, and if your software is used enough, you should get enough to help anyhow. You could also go to the competition of these projects and take some donations too.
My favorite way of getting legal advice is writting word forms and other software for a local law firm. It makes their job easier, and most of the time they don't mind helping you out too when it comes to just drafting a letter. The best thing you can do is come prepared with a letter, and basically have a lawyer look over it and edit it. They charge by the hour and for court appearances. Just don't plan on using much time or actually going to court, because you couldn't even sue them if you wanted because you can't prove damages.
One thing you can do as the developer is revoke their license and demand they pay you to use it in that manner. Then you can show damages. Unfortunately IANAL, but you should run some of these ideas by a good one.
Possibly, if you own all the code, you could just shoot for getting money out of them to be properly licensed for commercial use. The risks are less, and you may actually get some money out of your work that way. If nothing else, if they respond at all to your threat with an offer to license, you have them screwed with an admition of guilt that you could probably walk into a court and hit them on the head with. You have to set a realistic goal for what you want though... do you want them to stop using your software? Do you want money? Those are your options, and it's sadly easier to get money out of them than to make them stop using your software, but probably more productive too.
I've learned from my legal friends that it's more about tricking/out-smarting your oponent than it ever is about the truth.
Well, in any case I think he could just argue that someone did it before it got to him, and they'll have a hard time actually collecting real evidence otherwise other than word of mouth from the various people. Even if they had a tamper resistant seal, he could just claim that the seal was broken before it was in his hands. It's really an uphill battle, and it's only useful to say "That channel is insecure and we won't send a screener through it next year."
No need to sign a contract really. The majority of the fault already lies with the developer that commits the code. What may have to happen is Distros selling Linux will have to cover liability insurance so that end users don't get into trouble over it, but I'm not so certain of what grounds you could sue an end user over it anyhow, and certainly it would be terrible press for the company that would do such a thing (like SCO). Is there anyone here that would actually suggest buying anything from SCO? I don't think so, and that's gotta hurt their market share a lot.
Basically, SCO is going after IBM for submitting the code, and if IBM did submit proprietary code, then they are at fault. I don't know where the end users lie in all this, but SCO sure is becoming more infamous every day. In any case, I think they'll have to win the case against the submitter before they could go after the end users anyhow. They have 0 chance suing an end user if they loose the case against the submitter, and I don't think it would look so great to the judge if they just went after the end users first.
You're an odd one. :)
Have you ever written a site in C without CGI (CGI spawns new threads and is horribly slow)? Probably not. Java performs on par or better than most server-side technologies. If you are having a problem there, you probably should check out JRocket or the IBM VM and try Jetty to run your servlets if you are using Tomcat. If you're having a specific problem with crypto that is slow, it's probably a little bugginess in the implementation, and perhaps a different VM would fix it. If not, you can always wrap servlets in filters that handle the crypto for you in other languages and still leverage the ease of use of Struts, JSP, taglibs etc. that you get from Java Servlets.
Still yet, if your project would perform 50% as well in Java, but you could save one week of development time on a team, you're more than justified in just setting up a load balancer and getting another box economically. If you have nothing else to be doing, that's a whole other story. I would rather spend my time worrying about being the best and through as much hardware as I can at the problem instead of throwing expensive development time at a performance problem.
It's all in thinking of the greater economical good. Generally C is not the overall champion of the world. Assembler is always going to be faster than C if you know exactly how the processor works as well, but we don't all go around coding in assembler, mostly because it's not portable. The same arguement that was used in the creation of UNIX in general can now be used to support Java and similar languages. Portability, security, and proficiency were the issues. An OS written in C would run on any system with a C compiler. An OS written in C wouldn't need so much type checking and the compiler would catch a lot of errors. An OS written in C would take less time to write and update. At the time C was pretty slow compared to assembler too. History is repeating itself, and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to know which boat to get on.
The chips you have should be great for FP in Java. The problem is, crypto doesn't need FP, just a fast integer unit. 64bit is even better! The problem may be that the Java crypto system you had didn't even try to use 64bit, and that would be a problem. Sadly, a 1.4 VM running on a P4 under windows is going to be the best performing Java system for your task. I don't much care for intel or windows because both make pretty inferior products in at least a few respects, but P4 hyperthreading and windows thread support coupled with SSE is probably going to be the best you can get out of Java. Your other alternatives, and I would prefer it to having a crashy server, are to pray that there is better 64bit support in the Java PKI algorithms that you are using (or try alternative libraries) or run a profiler and see what the hold up is and fix it yourself if you can. Java should not be noticably slower than anything else you are using even for crypto on the large scale. Play with it on various systems and I bet you can track the problem down pretty quickly to be something specific to your setup.
It'll be hard for you to find that case.
/.'ers, it's easier to discredit any claim that Java has decent performance because of the years of hard work they might have wasted optimizing, debugging, porting, and writting applications in C and telling everyone how much better C is than any other language. There are plenty of reasons to complain about Java, but general performance isn't really one of them, especially with people having 3Ghz processors when a 500Mhz would run every app they have just fine.
1) Java FP works just fine on real hardware (not I32/I64 shortcuts of FP math). That means when you really need FP performance, you get hardware that supports FP properly, not a C hack that estimates 2/3. Honestly, intel chips in 80bit FP are probably only accurate to 64 anyhow. If you want an 80 bit accurate calculation done, you're going to have to rely on the same math libraries that Java does, and you'll have the same abysmal performance. Tell a bank that your C application could amount to a 1 cent difference in interest calculations every 1000 or so transactions, and I think you'll be kicked out with your software. Java does FP, and X86 hardware makes it very hard and slow to do. If you want to complain about FP performance, you should be complaining to Intel and AMD, not SUN.
2) It's always been known that in most situations, the delta cost of the hardware required to run your software is generally much lower than development time differences for C and Java projects because you have to spend more time testing C programs for buffer overflows and memory leaks that just don't happen in Java. Once you slap a GC on C it performs like Java anyhow, then you have nothing to argue about.
3) The fact that someone re-benchmarked and showed Java to be slower just shows me that most people benchmarking because they are skeptical of Java performance comparisons generally don't know enough about the Java platform to get performance out of it, whereas they have wasted years learning every -f flag on every C compiler. Performance tuning with Java is basically knowing which method/class/API to use in which situation. The basics of programming in any language, but I see plenty of people converting numbers to strings with 1+"" when they should use String.valueOf(1) or they use a String for a StringBuffer. There are classes in the standard API to do what you want, just use them properly.
4) Their are other, possibly better ways of doing IO in Java as well (NIO) which make writting IO applications potentially faster in Java without having to implement a non-blocking IO system yourself. Most of the problems Java has had on Linux in the past have been IO based and have been related to poor threading support on Linux. The second benchmark was done on Kernel 2.6, which, AFAIK, the JVM hasn't been tuned to.
There are a plenty of reasons to discredit the second benchmark as unfair to Java, but for most
>>What is it with file-sharers always *justifying* what they do? It's about greed and kudos, nothing more...
I gave a plausible legitimate reason for piracy that I don't think harms the actual artists or industry except under the circumstance that the product did not deliver to it's promise of entertainment value.
Why is it always the pirates fault by default? I thought this was a country of presumed innocence. If you presume "pirates" as being morally innocent, then the burden of proof is still to show how they harmed another. If the best you can come up with is that we should expect to get screwed then complain, then you should consider that in the US, we have every bit as much right to protect our property as they do. They have no more right to deny us a refund, which they do, and I've seen it a happen several times no matter how obnoxious or loud you get, deny you that right. I think it's fair ethical use to screen have a personal screening of a video until my right as a consumer to return a "defective" product back WITHOUT HASSLE on the grounds that it didn't fulfill it's promise of entertainment.
If there was competition in the field such that I could easily pick an alternative vendor to get those forms of entertainment under a fair agreement, then your point would be closer to accurate. The fact remains that I have no other alternative to choose from that don't fund the MPAA or RIAA. The next common arguement that I run into with the likes of you is "Entertainment is not a prerequisite to life". Of course not, but does that mean that those who don't like to get screwed by the media industry should be underprivileged because of their monopolistic practices? Then you'll argue that if there is value, then you should pay the price, and that I have a choice. That arguement only stands in a fair market, ie. competitive market. When monopolistic price fixing incentives and hidden taxes on media are being funneled into an organization, I don't think it's a fair market. I don't have a choice of funding the MPAA or not, because I burn CD's and DVD's of data. It's also hard to not buy from any MPAA backing companies as well (in the tech industry).
Argue as long as much as you like, but theives accusing anyone of being a theif will never make a rational arguement about ethic. Suggesting to me that I should just bend over and take it is not going to work. They made the rules of the game when they started taxing the media I use and artificially inflated prices well beyond what they would be in a competitive market. They'll have to live with the resistance they have created by not allowing us to vote with our wallets. Am I supposed to build a computer out of sticks and stones to use in todays technological world? I certainly couldn't buy most name brand hardware considering that a lot of them are members of the MPAA or RIAA. I would have to choose a whole different career to make a point, and probably never touch another peice of electronics. I can't think of many career opportunities I would have considering even McDonalds has POS machines that probably have chips manufactured by a company that is a member of the MPAA or RIAA. In the very least, in every dollar you spend anywhere, there is going to be some small amount that trickles to the MPAA/RIAA through their use of CD/DVD media or drives.
That arguement drives me mad. The "they want something for nothing" arguement is bull****.
.01% of theives.
1) Prove that they actually get anything to begin with. I assume that by getting something, you mean entertainment. Were you entertained by the video that you saw? No. Would you have bought it? No.
2) Prove that is for nothing. 1st, they take risks to do what they do. 2nd, a lot of the people I've known to download movies have actually bought them. If that movie that you were given was really good, would you have bought the actually DVD? Maybe. Would you have seen the sequal in the theatre? Probably.
It's not something for nothing. It's more of your own personal screening of a video than anything else. If the DVD is worth what they ask for it in the stores, you'll buy it... maybe even the collectors edition that costs 10x more than it should.
Is it illegal? Yes. I should be able to buy a movie, watch it, and return it in 30 days if I don't like it as well, but I can't. Any industry with those kinds of rules is asking for piracy. If piracy hurts any industry, it's the rental industry. If you want to be fair (not legal) then you could go rent the movie if you think it was worth the rental price to see it once. If nothing else, I'm sure you'll recommend someone to see the movie that may not have. Isn't fairness what we are trying to achieve?
You find a way to enforce fairness. I'm just showing that the overpriced hollywood mine-field is no more fair than average piracy. Everyone wants to blame piracy for their flops, when really the only people they have to blame is themselves for not offering the entertainment value they promise.
That aside, you will always have the theives as well. You won't stop them with any manner of DRM, because they always find a way of getting the content for free, even if it means shoplifting. The MPAA's anti-competitive practices are the major cause for movie piracy, not the
Yes, the disconnect is that I don't think the poster understands the intent of embedded procs like this. They are used to improve performance, not stifle it. That's almost like saying "I hope they don't implement sub queries, imagine how slow they will make the system then!". This is more true than stored procedures, but there are some times that sub queries are faster. It's a hell of a lot faster than runing N+1 queries through the DB because it doesn't support sub queries when you need them! Likewise, parsing through the data on the server is the best thing ever. It reduces network load, and moves some of the processing into the DBMS where the CPU spends most of it's time waiting on the disk. Overall, any kind of stored procedure like this can be very much better performing than what we have now.
In any case, you should know that there will be a "skip-java" directive in the config file :)
Then you port a small amount of code to the embedded languages of that DBMS. Every other DBMS has embedded functions except for MySQL, some even support Java.
Did you not think about that post? Sounds like you just dislike Java so much that hearing it in the same sentance as MySQL makes you cringe.
1) Java isn't going to slow down any queries unless you use Java functions.
2) What do you care that someone else isn't smart enough to write good software?
3) MySQL as it stands has no other way to really embed functions easily, and it's actually more effecient to run code on the server and transfer data back afterwords.
Actually, that statement is a little untrue from two angles.
1) Shareholders and shareholder agreements do have clauses for removing CEOs.
2) If a significant amount of unemployment in IT crops up, it's quite likely they will work on some project just for something to do. So, this security guy that lost his job, might find a band of other people that have lost their jobs, and join to form their own security company to discredit the first, and take their business.
What if 10% of the people who's job was shipped to India by MS actually work on other projects. The end result is MS's move to India actually had a hidden cost in competition. The question is, how much business do the people take away from MS with their competing projects vs how much MS cuts by moving to India. Immediate gains will be much greater than the long term. Linux doesn't need many more man hours of skilled labor to cause MS harm. This isn't true for just MS, but any company that ships overseas, they leave people unemployed that know how to do a portion of the work that company does.
Also, consider it's not terribly hard for IT people to make a living just by running a computer shop. Hell, even if IT people work at Wal-Mart, they'll be taking some of their frustration out in code.
I've never seen it a wise decision for any company to ship jobs overseas. Forming new companies and devisions overseas is great, but cutting workforce that already knows what they need to be doing is the stupidest idea I've ever heard. As soon as you train these Indian workers, they become more valuable, and thus you have to pay them more (maybe not significantly, but you do). Also, you are driving up labor costs in India via supply and demand. There are WAY to many variables to make that a justified risk. I'm all for expansion, new contracts, etc. taking the cheapest route at the time, but this is just madness so someone can line their wallets with probable kick-backs from Indian CEO's/government. 4-5 people loosing their job from the same company is enough to cause competition. There are successful businesses today that are spinoffs of companies where the employees quit to form their own company, then the parent company had to compete with them. That's why they try to put non-compete clauses that outlast work duration in employment contracts.
Actually, the bank does have to keep Euro's on hand, and they have do have to dump a lot of USD. Do you understand how much money the bank would loose if they kept their money in USD, and the Euro climbed even 10%. There are probably a trillion dollars/Euros in these banks, they would loose 100 Billion dollars in that scenario, and the Euro has been as high as 1.40$ from as low as 70 cents. That would cost a bank half a trillion dollars, and they would be out of business instantly. You have to keep sperate bank accounts for differenc currencies, and often you have to use a different bank that deals in just that currency. This way the bank doesn't loose money dealing an currencies that shift value, the actual client takes most of the loss if the currency drops in value on the market.
Moving your cash from a USD bank to a Euro bank equates to removing all your money from being invested in American companies to being invested in European one's. This actually does make the market contain more USD than needed, and less Euro, because in the very least, the bank or the person has to transfer these dollars to an exchange or another bank that has Euro's in order to pay their debt, which when the exchanges run out of actual Euro's that can exchange, and they have way too many dollars, the exchange rate has to go up. I understand very well that there aren't really finite amounts of USD on the market, but banks are limited in what they can do because of our experiences during the 30's.
When you convert wealth between forms, it actually has to occur, it's not faked. It would be fraudulent for a bank that has dollars to magically convert them to Euro's. That's about on par with inventing gold when you invest in gold. The exchange has to take place, even if it is in some computer, and it is fictitious as far as actually peices of paper. When that exchange occurs, whoever did it now has more of one than before and less of the other.
Now this post is insightful. I really wonder why that isn't done, because we all make mistakes, it's just funnier when editors make them. :)
I like your idea because then we may be able to filter out some of the crap that no one cares for, and maybe the editors could move on to worrying about getting content more than formatting it or if people will like it. It would be great to have a bunch of people edit the submission before it comes out, and the one with the most special mod points get put on the front page (only if it gets enough mod points). That would take all the fun out of April 1, but it would be more functional I would think. Not that my variety would be the best, it's just something to think about for the next version of slashcode.
BTW, I don't know how my statement of the obvious got modded as insightful, but I know it must have been some kind of moderator prank.
Python doesn't need hungarian notation. There are no types for one, and all members get self. prepended.
for i in range(n):
or if you are inside a class:
class cheese:
def __init__(self):
for i in range(self.n):
Cool eh?
Python run just about everywhere, but I've always considered it more Unix that Windows. Not that this post is directly on topic, but I thought I would smack hungarian notation around considering that well designed languages don't need it to see where variables are from. Also, most programs don't need it. If it's not in the function params, it's in the class. If it's not in the class, it's in a super class. If it doesn't inherit, some bastard is using a global variable, and it's time to be tieing that noose and checking the CVS logs.
That makes it pretty funny. I fully expected it to be deleted by now. Every post so far is off-topic strictly speaking. I think /. should have more mundane posts occasionally just to let people post off topic and kind of "mingle" just to see what the hot topics will be. It would certainly be more interesting than some of the stories that make front page, but then again, I'm pretty wacky.
/. stories at 4AM, so it's no suprise that Timmy beat him to the punch.
:)
Yeah, Mr. Taco needs to get his caffeine. I know Timmy is up late because I fight with insomnia from time to time, and I still get
I don't know why people are wasting moderator points in such a dupe though, and it would be good to get an explanation as to why my post was "insightful". Maybe it's a field day for the moderators too?
Nothing like the smell of fresh dupe in the morning :)
That's the most egotistical BS I've read in a long time. The US knows better than the collective world? Let me give you an instant replay of where we've gone wrong in the past.
1) We let our companies completely take over all the sugar cane farms of Cuba, and we left the people there to starve. This made the situation ripe for Fidel Castro to take control, and left a very negative image of the US in their minds. This later almost caused the destruction of the world due to nuclear war.
2) We funded and trained Osama, and most of his crew to fight against Russia. Later, this turned out to cost us life in a war with the Taliban, as well as some of his power that gave him the opportunity to plan and fund Sept 11 (If you believe he did it.).
3) We trained Iranian police to assasinate their leader, then we placed a weak leader in power. This was discovered soon there after, thus Iran is still angry with us. This also lead to 4.
4) We placed Saddam in power because of his strength... the weak leader in Iran didn't work, so we realized someone stronger needed to be in power. We trained his army and equiped them. We gave them the delivery technology to attack Iran, and the biological weapons, which he also used on the Kurds. He also used these rockets to fire at Israel, and used them to attack Kuwait. You know my position on the current situation, and it's entirely our fault from day 1.
5) We don't argue with Turkey, even though they gun down the Kurds quite frequently.
6) The most atrocious nation for human rights violations (Saudi Arabia) is the number one arms buyer from the US. The also have trillions of dollars invested in our markets, and the removal of which could cause more devistation than the great depression, not to mention that our oil prices would soar if they pulled their oil from the market. The US economy is dependant on Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is a dictatorship that we keep in power despite barbaric practices of amputation and public execution to keep their people in line. Most terrorists are from Saudi Arabia, and they hate America because we interfere in their government by keeping the dictatorship there up. We are responsible for our own actions of provoking terrorism by not only condoning human rights violations, but by being an active supporter with our arms and foreign policy.
I think it would be easier to list the problems we haven't been partially or entirely responsible for in the last 50-60 years. We aren't really responsible for N. Korea (that's China's doing). We aren't responsible for China or North Vietnam. We aren't responsible for Hitler (one of the few good things we've done, but our support wasn't as critical as popular English literature would have one believe, because of the deep feer and hatred of the USSR/communism). We didn't cause any of the wars in Croatia, etc. That's about it.
The US has been involved in just about every screw up since using the nuclear bomb. In order to justify using the nuke, you would have to justify terrorism (the killing of civilians during a time of war). We have caused a hell of a lot of screw ups with the policy that we know what's best for the rest of the world. The rest of the world can take care of themselves, if they needed our help, they would ask for it at the UN. That's how the world should be run, not by one large government hell bent on bullying the rest of the world with our massive "defence". What we use the armed forces for is very much the oposite of "defence" in a very Orwellian sense.
Why don't you at least point out at least a few cases where we've done some good to compensate for the near destruction kind of danger we've put the world in? We let the Philipines go? Republicans hate the whole Bosnia thing. I can't think of a single time that the UN has endangered the entire world, but I can name plenty of times where they've done good (with our help, not our domination) like the first Gulf War. The UN may make mistakes, but it has the wisdom of
I despise the UN for making me side with Bush on any issue :) If we are paying the bill, I think we are to be the ones that decide where that money should go. If MS was crying that I wasn't buying their software I'ld tell them to go screw themselves, it's my money. Whiney French/German people aren't going to change my mind on that issue. It's not about "we took a risk" it's about "it's our damned money". I don't have a problem with them not paying it back after all the damage done by the sanctions that we wouldn't let the UN lift to keep the Iraqis healthy, and besides, technically, we're the ones that destroyed their country.
That said, the problem with the issue is that Bush can't handle foreign relations. He's the worst president in history (except maybe Andrew Jackson) at handling foreigners. If he just said, "It's our money, we're going to spend it how we see fit." instead of trying to twist a knife in their side, it would go over much better. He wants to control everything, and he doesn't care about anyone else's opinion. He's funny to watch, but it's hard to laugh when people are really suffering and/or dead partly because of his decisions.
You're post gave me another arguing point.
I think the key point to the entire arguement now is if Saddam can't even hide himself, how is he going to hide a WMD? WMD are measured in tons, he's measured in kilograms. Saddam didn't require a lab to be created either.
I think it's pretty ridiculous that people actually believe he had any amounts of toxins that would classify as a WMD when he couldn't even hide himself. Which would you be more concerned with, your own safety, or the safety of your weapons?
I like your post... I'll be using that arguement now that Saddam has been captured as further evidence of a complete lack of WMD program, because it's the most compelling evidence that we have thus far of the lack of a WMD program. (Which we shouldn't have to prove the non-existance of something that no one has found evidence of.)
Lets make it a little more realistic. You have to make a biological weapon, hide both the weapon and the lab, and you have to do it with hundreds of people roaming Texas. Oh yeah, and you have to do it without equipment, money, or chemicals more deadly than pesticide. Oh, I almost forgot, you have to do this with periodic bombings, and ruthless murderers all looking for a way to get more power. I almost forgot, you have a country full of pissed off people dieing from diseased water and lack of medicine.
Look, Saddam lacked the science, equipment, and materials to make WMD. He couldn't even clean his water. Making biological weapons isn't easy. The best you could do is try to make mustard gas from the salt in the salt water the same way that subs do on accident. Which, if he could get chlorine, I think he would have at least used some of it to purify his water to at least make it appear legitimate.
I'm really sick of the analogy "It's easy to hide milk jugs in a place the size of Texas". It's not easy to make, and people were dieing all the time because he couldn't even make the SIMPLEST biological weapon (mustard gas/chlorine) for cleaning his water.
Yeah, but you couldn't tell me which books I haven't read, like I can you. This is a more important measure than "Which books have you read?" because it shows a bias to actually aquiring information vs. aquiring biased information.
I didn't say war with Iraq is a bad thing, I'm just saying there has been nothing, including the capture, to justify the costs that couldn't have been obtained through the UN by loosening the sanctions. It's not our place to institute democracy in third world countries despite the better judgement of the world/UN.
http://www.rferl.org/nca/features/2000/11/01112000 160846.asp
It was actually approved by the UN for them to operate under the Euro.
Hans Blix (cheif inspector) didn't have any problems at all saying that with reasonable certainty that Iraq didn't have any WMD. So, it sounds to me that the UN ispectors were doing a decent enough job. If you keep believing everything Fox News tells you, you're going to be a sad old paranoid man thinking that Clinton "not inhaling" is better than Bush's definate snorting. Or that getting a blow job is terribly morally wrong, but being good buddies with dictators from Saudi Arabia that hold public executions via beheading for religious and political reasons is OK.
:)
I'll take my tin foil hat off when people like you actually take your responsibility as a citizen seriously and stop taking superficial evidence as fact. When we stop living in a facist regime of our own here in the US, I may judge it safe to take my tin foil hat off
(I don't really wear a tin foil hat, it's a metaphore... maybe I'll actually wear one now as a political symbol to end the facist big-brother attitudes of the government in general. Maybe I'll make an chrome plated Fedora. Maybe think geek would make one out of Aluminum duct tape.)
Damn, I almost don't want to respond to you because you're obviously an ill-informed troll. Syria doesn't pose a threat to us right now, not even economically, and they don't have significant oil. I very much doubt any movement after them. Bush will depend on China to screw around with N.Korea (don't call it just Korea... S.Korea is a pretty good place). Do you think China wants any more people around them with Nukes? That being said, they are the #2 thread behind China, but we aren't going to do anything to China unless they attack Taiwan, then you can expect another US-Russian style long drawn out war.
As for the Saudi issue, you are completely on crack.
1) Saudi Arabia is the #1 investor in the US (Trillions of $$$'s)
2) Saudi Arabia pumps most of our oil
3) Saudi Arabia buys a lot of our goods (mostly weapons to keep their citizens in line)
4) Saudi Arabia calls the Bush family his second family.
5) Bush's businesses are mostly funded by the Bin Ladens and other Saudis
I could go on forever, but suffice it to say that Shrub grew up with the ruling family of Saudi Arabia, and he's not going to attack them. He's also good buddies with Sharon from Israel know for his cruelty as well.
If want a good summary of Bush and his ties to Saudi Arabia and the Bin Laden's, just read "Dude, Where's My Country?". It has nice little nuggets of information about Saudi privet jets that flew around the country days after sept 11, picking up Bin Laden's family and taking them to Paris without letting the FBI or any other agency question them really. I swear if I ever hear anything about the "Liberal Media" again, I'll never talk to that person again, because it's the media's fault you haven't heard these stories in the main stream media. Doesn't sound too liberal to me. These are facts, not rumors.