I fully support unions as a group of freely associating group of people.
Freedom of association is indeed a fundamental individual freedom, so you are consistent in those beliefs. However, in many of not most cases around the world unions are not a "freely associating group". What about closed shops, where corporate executives decide to sign an agreement with union executives whereby all workers must join a specific union and pay dues to that union in order to work for that company? Sometimes to be a "licensed tradesman" you have to be a union member to get any work anywhere (the union culture in trades like pipefitting is very entrenched). Before political financing reform in Canada esentially banned union funding of political parties, unions traditionally made the bulk of their donations to socialist parties out of MANDATORY dues workers had to pay to obtain employment, even if those workers were not socialist and never voted for a socialist party in their lives.
THe problem isn't with unions in general, the problem is with unions that wield power that takes away individual liberties (such power isn't limited to governments, or corporations--abuse of liberties can occur when ANY institution obtains inappropriate power).
unfettered capitalism will lead to capital concentration and a non-free market. Therefore regulation is required to approximate one.
I think regulation whould be an action of last resort. You risk burning down the house when you fight fire with fire after all. With regulation the biggest hazzard is that you fall into the trap of protecting the wrong thing. You might set out to protect consumer rights, then slide down the slope to "protecting peoples jobs" by way of regulation to protect corporate interests to outright capitalist facism (ie. trillion dollar "stimulous programmme" where everything from billions in bailouts to public works projects are doled by departmental "Czars" and government panels to those that best follow the long list of government rules). Though monopolies might emerge on their own in a free market, it seems these days they use regulation to maintain themselves (they become "too big to fail" and manage to lobby themselves into favour with government).
But in the telecom industry in most of the world, there is no free market. The protectionist "fire" as it is, is raging out of control and has made a charred mess out of the landscape, so unfortunately the only practical way to contain it is to do a "controlled burn" to create a break to protect what pristine land is left.
I'd argue that the free market has been destroyed, if it ever existed in modern history. Some might suggest that citizens, corporations and governments have to (re)establish the free market, or at least create the conditions to foster its self-development. It's a bit like the argument that there was no peace in Korea, or the middle east, so military intervention is required to MAKE peace before peace-keepers can keep any peace and re-establish civility. Obviously these "thin liberals" do not believe in that argument (not saying they're wrong but I don't always agree--read on for my opinion). They are focusing on the "means"--whatever you do should be as little as possible from a regulatory standpoint. "Deep liberals" (the classical type, or modern Libertarians perhaps) might take a more situational approach, and would also focus on "ends" over means...ie. what are the end results of a particular policy? Might deregulation/hands-off policy redult in the entrenchmnet of a monopoly or interfere with individual liberties? Many libertarians seem lost in that they fixate on preference of private corporate interest over government control. Libertarians were supposed to believe in INDIVIDUAL rights--tilting the table in either government OR private industry's favour at the expense of personal liberty should be discouraged.
and endless bailouts for politically favored constituencies, such as the AFL-CIO, Goldman Sachs, General Motors, "green" rent-seekers...
This certainly isn't free-market to be sure...I'd describe it as "Capitalist fascism", similar to what Mussolini espoused. Seems ironic that Obama's critics complain about his socialist leanings when thus far strictly from an economic standpoint his administration is almost TEXTBOOK CAPTIALIST FACISM. You have a government that has established review panels of appointed experts to evaluate the health of your banks and decide how much government capital they can use to do business and even how much they can (over)pay their executives. The government has invested heavily in two auto companies (not to ultimately socialise them as they intend to divest themselves of their interest, but rather to control the recovery of the industry). Obama is said to appoint a "czar" of this-or-that to "oversee" various aspects of the market. There is this policy to direct private enterprise to "buy American" in return for being seleted to work on public works projects and so on. The economic policy of the current US administration would've been heartily supported by Mussolini or Hitler.
PLEASE do not take offense at the comparison of Obama's economic record to that of notorious totalitarian monsters, though I know it would be the natural reaction. Obama obviously has much more noble intentions and hasn't given the slightest indication he believes in the more insidious aspects of WWII era facism like eugenics, genocide and so on. The comparison is strictly based on MACRO-ECONOMIC POLICY.
At any rate, on the subject of Free software it is completely couter to libertarianism to do anything less than whole-heartedly support the idea. Ultimately, trhe creator of a work should be allowed to confer whatever rights he wants to the end user. If the argument is made that Free software threatens the software market and policy should curtail its use IS NOT A LIBERTARIAN AT ALL--they may be "Capitalist" but they are suggesting that individuals should be discouraged form excercising their freedoms in the name of maintaining a market. THAT IS WRONG. If an idea/concept/grassroots movement manages to make an industry obsolete such that it dies IT SHOULD BE LEFT TO DIE. Typewriter manufacturing is now a small cottage industry because the product is obsolete, and those who made them either went extinct or changed their business.to something relevant. Governments didn't give bilions Remington or to IBM to keep typewriter factories open, and they didn't establish government panels to decide on what these factories would build or try
There are no MacOS or Microsoft PCs in my household and we have an iPhone. You don't need iTunes to own an iPhone, though I suppose you miss out on the full "experience". Based upon the "experience" we had with her previous "classic" iPod and iTunes on a Windows PC (since relinquished upon layoff) it is not an experience I will miss (What's so hot about iTunes anyways? Is it only good on Macs? In my opinion it seems like Apple's best effort at making Microsoft's product look good...I miss iTunes like I miss the severely impacted wisdom teeth my dentist had to dig out during my freshman Reading Week all those years ago...).
The only thing it is good for is upgrading your firmware (only because the iPhone is defective by design and has locked you into using their big ol' piloe of garbage instead of a simple image uploader app). I suppose I could try Wine but I've had issues in the past having it work with USB peripherals properly. Thus, in the event of the need for a critical software update I modestly propose this solution: Go to one of Apple's "boutique" stores or a Best Buy or similar store with the Apple secion. Go up to the first "genius" you can find, had the learned one your iPhone and command him/her to "fix it". Apple prides itself on its reputation for service, so make sure you take maximum advantage of that.
If they wanted low maintenance customers Apple wouldn't make such asinine design decisions as requiring a massive, bloated, monolithic jukebox/multimedia player/digital storefront/electronic updater/etc to do something as basic as applying a firmware update. However, it is clear that herding everyone into their shiny little fenced-in-and-locked-up "experience" is priority one. My sweetheart does like her shiny toy (it IS a nice precious, yes), but Apple seems to have a strategy to treat customers like sheep so I cannot be bothered to act like anything but pertaining to Apple products. With Linux or MSFT or anything else I'll make an effort at troubleshooting. With Apple, it seems clear to me I'm "not allowed in", so I don't think to try to figure out with Apple--I seek out a Genius to think and fix for me.
Think about Windows Mobile (especially pre-2003): the interface carry-overs from Windows proper are the chief reason it's an also-ran on PDAs and phones,
The differences between Android and conventional Linux-based OSes run quite a bit deeper than the UI--Android is a very different architecture altogether. It's like saying MacOS X is BSD UNIX--IT ISN'T. It shares a lot of common elements, it is somewhat compatible but architecturally it is VASTLY DIFFERENT, far more than skin-deep-different. Therefore, one could say that those chief reasons for WinMo's failures could be addressed with a far more "conventional" Linux-based OS distribution. That is where Moblin comes in--it is an application framework that sits far higher up the stack. Whereas Android starts going its own way almost right above the kernel, Moblin sits atop an essentially complete core installation of Fedora, and in fact is technically "distribution agnostic" and can alternatively be installed atop Ubuntu as well. As Moblin is under the stewardship of the Linux Foundation the logical end goal would be to make Moblin an application framework upon the base install of ANY LSB-compliant OS.
And, I suggest you troll YouTube for demonstrations of Moblin--you'll quickly see it is very much NOT a "carry-over" of desktop Linux from a user perspective.
If course, Intel was the founding institution for Moblin, and its heritage is one of being optimised for the Intel Atom/x86 architecture, so Intel is pushing for Moblin smartphones because it is a software platform ready today for its hardware being released shortly..but here is an interesting situation: The Linux foundation is not beholden to Intel, Moblin is Free software and nothing impedes it from being built or optimised for another platform..notably ARM based competing platforms. For example, the Clutter 3D UI framework builds on many ARM based devices (I've seen it working nicely on the BeagleBoard), as to pretty close to all the essential parts of Moblin Core. Moblin 2.x could be ported to ARM with mostly "integration work" (figuring out compiler options, "glue logic" programming and scripts and so on).
There's no real point to extending the traditional Linux desktop to a phone for the same reason: there's nothing worthwhile to carry over.
I BEG TO DIFFER! The "Linux desktop" is more than the desktop environment/user interface, and as has been demonstrated there is quite a lot of the stack that is worthwhile to retain, even if it doesn't "make sense" in Mobile applications. Why do I say this? Because I think far too many people are demonstrating a very short-sighted view that mobile devices must always be mobile! For some reason, nobody thinks to look at how notebook/laptop PCs are used by so many people--they are carried about much of the time, but as often as not (maybe most of the time in fact) they sit on a desk connected to a full sized keyboard, mouse and monitor! This is especially the case with corporate PCs, where in many setups almost all users are issued notebooks.
If nobody gives it a second thought about something that weighs a couple kg and has occupies a footprint larger than an A4 sheet of paper being used in "two modes" then why should it be different for a pocket-sized computer? If these tiny devices are so powerful why artificially constrain the software on them to something geared towards mobile use? What is keeping us from putting USB host and HDMI ports on these devices (or on a dock the device sits in) such that we can use them on larger screens with full keyboards and mice? THAT is the problem with Android! It is designed for SMALL devices and needs some HEAVY modification to work outside those severe constraints. Critics already doubt Android's capability on netbook sized applications, much less when used in desktop or living-room-console situations! Hell, only in the most very recent release was there official coverage for something as basic as supporting DisplayMetrics t
I have already seen advertisements for mini-laptops running WinCE.
CE based mobile computers are very old news. Heck, NETBOOKS are very old news. The term netbook is just a buzzword for what we all called ultraporatbles or subnotebooks a decade ago.
Look up the "Comapq Areo 8000". It is a 10-inch netbook from TEN YEARS AGO based on a low-power orthogonal/RISC processor, has 12 hours of operational battery life, no moving parts (used a CF card instead of HDD, no cooling fan). It used WinCE in firmware as the OS. The machine is the precursor to and architcturally nearly identical to the HP iPAQ palm computers/PDAs, just in notebook format.
Windows CE based OSes (WinCE/WinMobile, etC) are a NON-STARTER. MSFT has had ten years to make CE successful in subnotebooks/netbooks and they've gone over like a lead balloon. Corporate customers knew what they were getting and there was a little bit of uptake there but by and large consumers viewed them with mild hostility. With the little palm-style PDAs there wasn't the perception it was a "real computer". They were very small, they had limited capabilities and people had limited expectations. But when that technology was scaled upwards to the subnotebook form factor they looked a little too much like "real" notebooks. Ten years ago there were still a number of people using 800x600 screens on their desktops and "real" notebooks and laptops. The Aero subnotebooks had that resolution on small-but-serviceable 10 inch colour screen, and it had a proper keyboard too, and when it booted up there was the Microsoft Windows logo and start button and everything just like in the contemporary Win9x machines. Sure the machine was very capable BUT IT STILL WASN'T COMPATIBLE! You couldn't go out and buy apps off the store shelves and load them in (no floppy or CD to begin with--and even if you docked the machine to connect it to a "real PC" you couldn't install normal apps to it).
So FWIW, the fact CE-kernel OSes from MSFT are already there for ARM it really ISN'T worth anything. In fact, the "customer confusion" factor that people claim hapered Linux would be EVEN WORSE for WinCE! At least with Linux it wasn't emblazoned with MSFT and Windows logos on it and it didn't boot up into a nearly identical LOOKING environment. People could sense a difference. Put WinCE on netbooks and they'll be REALLY confused, because it'll LOOK familiar but in fact CE is really no more compatible with NT-based Windows (XP/Vista/7) than Linux is. It'd be more consumer hostility just like 10+ years ago when they tried the first time.
Besides that, Linux-kernel OSes seem to be where it's at. Google is on its third release of Android in the time it took MSFT to more up one release. Palm's WebOS looks absolutely stellar and the company looks like it may have actually pulled its arse out of the fire. Moblin v2 is ready to debut and developers of many moblin components are actively working on ARM ports, so by the time WinMo 7/next-generation CE would be ready Linux could already have a lot of traction.
And the prospect of full-blown Windows 7 on ARM? I think winning the lottery is more likely. Even if Windows 7 were to be ported, what about the apps? They'd need to port REAL MS Office, etc. and get all the vendors to rebuild too, or spend a long time on emulation/virtualisation and take a performance hit. It was a huge undertaking for Apple that happened over years (starting by a massive OS shift from OS9 to UNIX-based, multi-platform capable OS X with all sorts of frameworks to support legacy baggage, and once that was done the hardware shift to x86, etc...). It would take MSFT a decade of true dedication to herd all their cats and pull that off, and no matter what words Ballmer bellows about Mobile/CE, MSFTs actions have demonstrated they totally lack the dedication it would take to seriously support NT on non-Intel architectures.
I didn't check the CPU type but I assume it would be x86.
Being Linux-based, I suppose it would not be too hard to hack it to support Ogg Vorbis.
Being Linux-based I would've assumed it would support OGG from the factory, as the HTC Dream and Magic phones do. OGG is the format of choice for digital storage of my music being it is the least encumbered of all choices and provides more than adequate quality for my needs. It was one of the many appealing features that made me decide to go with the Magic when I replaced my phone this summer--plus it was cool to have something my American friends couldn't get for another month;-)
Unless you define the internet as the.com name space.
The.com TLD is not the internet name space, but the internet namespace does include the.com TLD, so it standa to reason that a.com domain could be the first registered on the internet.
The.edu name space is older and was just as much the internet.
.arpa,.com,.edu,.gov,.mil and.org TLDs were all established simultaneously in an RFC published in the fall of 1984. None of them is technically older than any of the others. Practically speaking though the first officially registered and functioning domain name on the internet is SYMBOLICS.COM came into being on March 1985, predating the approximately simultaneous registration of several university.edu domains by about a month.
If you want to be pedantic there were perhaps dozens of internet domain names that simultaneously became the "first domain names". These were all.arpa domains and were all temporary. Prior to the establishment of any internet-wide root nameservers resolving hostnames to domain names used a resolver that read a locally stored text file called hosts. The hosts file was generated and maintained centrally by university researchers and manually downloaded by sysadmins to EVERY COMPUTER ON THE INTERNET that needed to resolve hostnames. The "official" hosts file of the internet was flat in structure--there was no defined levels like today. An informal structure was established using hyphens as separators (a host might be named in a pattern like COMPUTERNAME-UNIVERSITYNAME) but there was no standards applied or technical significance to the structure as there is in today's DNS.
When the nameservers came online they were set up with the official hosts file as it existed at that time, within the.arpa TLD. The.arpa TLD was meant to be temporary--it allowed internet hosts to transition to DNS client resolvers from hostname files seamlessly. Config files, databases, etc. may have referred to hosts by name, and by using the temporary.arpa TLD the name resolver could be changed without disruption (note how name resolution works to this day--if you do not use a FQDN your computer appends the supplied hostname to the domain of your own host--since at the beginning all domain names were.arpa this scheme allowed dns resolution to behave exactly like the original hostname file).
All those.arpa domains are gone now--but the.arpa TLD did become permanent--when standards for doing REVERSE lookups were established the domain in-addr.arpa was created. There are a handful of.arpa domains that exist to manage the inner workings of various DNS functions, but.arpa has never been open to domain registrations from the public--all.arpa domains are established through internet standards.
So, though.arpa domains were technically the firs, YOU are wrong and the article summary was RIGHT. symbolics com was the first REGISTERED domain on the entire public internet.
That is incorrect. Farmland is plentiful. We can already produce far more calories of food than we need to survive--like TWICE as many. The problem is efficiency and distribution and politics. Whoever tells you there is a shortage of farmland is LYING.
It doesn't make much sense to hasten this trend by effectively converting space for growing food into space for fueling our vehicles.
You didn't even read the article SUMMARY did you? THEYA RE USING WASTE PRODUCTS...stuff farmers cannot sell in this case. THEY DO NOT PROPOSE TO USE ANY MORE LAND THAN THEY ALREADY ARE. There are two ways to increase efficiency of farmland: * get more people to buy local - the less distance food has to travel the less spoilage, damage, wasted fuel, etc. * USE WASTED PRODUCTION MORE WISELY--stop throwing away. REDUCE what you throw away, REUSE what you can and RECYCLE what you cannot use. What is wrong with RECYCLING wasted crop products into fuels that can be used for something else beneficial?
It won't be long before battery technology catches up and allows us to drive a reasonable distance on a charge.
It takes a LOT of energy to make these batteries...then you have to keep them charged. Where does the electricity come from? Can't come all from solar, nobody wants a new nuclear plant in their back yard...why can't the electricity come from biofuels? Whether burned or used chemically as in fuel cells?
There isn't a problem with biofuel technology it is just that it is being mis-applied. And it isn't "fuel companies" (the biggest of which are oil companies--they'd NOT want to see biofuels succeed) pressig for the use of ethanol. It is the corn growing lobby that is pushing for ethanol, which is why it emerged ahead of things like this watermelon scheme or algae-based biodiesel...corn-states buying congressional votes for politicians. Bad policy but doesn't make biofuel technology itself bad--the concept should still be pursued...just in a different way.
You can't till ALL your crop waste into the ground year after year. It has to be composted or it will hurt yields. If you composted it all in-field you'd have to fallow every other year, and that would mean having to use far more land to produce the same amount of food. A certain amount of crop debris is harmless or even beneficial, but if it is present in excess and is not managed with some combination of crop rotation, fallowing, and tilling can actually be HARMFUL to crop yields.
You cant leave fallen fruit on or near ground surface for other reasons--crop diseases (blights, insects, bacteria, etc) would be a problem especially because of the sugar content of the rotting fruit. At best this reduces yield, at worst can contaminate food supply with substances harmful to humans.
Converting food land to bio-fuels is a horrible waste of time and money.
Not making best use of the crops WE ALREADY GROW ON THIS LAND is probably even worse. You didn't even read the summary, you just saw "biofuels" and started spouting off. This solution USES ZERO EXTRA LAND to produce fuel. Biofuels needn't replace ALL fuel production--they can be a good way to make use of what is wasted today.
State laying industrial solar power in non farming area.
Don't be a dummy...where do you think plants get their energy from...THE SUN...leaves are nature's little solar panels. Put man-made solar panels in the desert..that's great...but why not make use of all the energy we can from what is collected from crops that is wasted today?
Do it fast, get it done. we can power the nation from that.
we can probablly make biofuel from the juices of wasted fruit crops just as fast or faster than from solar panels. Why not do both?
I don't understand why shape and surface issues would disqualify the fruit from use in processed foods.
The 20 percent ALREADY TAKES THAT INTO ACCOUNT...in other words, after all the "pretty ones" are sold for direct consumer sale AND as many "ugly ones" are used for "processed goods" as possible there is STILL a 20 percent portion of crop that is unsaleable. That is quite typical of many fruit crops actually. The amount of wasted edible food production is actually closer to FIFTY percent if you include all steps of production from field to 'fridge.
In the case of watermelons:
* I don't exactly see rows of cartons full of WATERMELON JUICE on the store shelves. I'm guessing the market for it is extremely small. * Texture counts as a cosmetic quality. Mushy watermelon is unfit for fruit salads too. * Surface fungus and similar defects could be removed by hand to make the rest of the melon edible, but it is too labour intensive to be cost-effective and risks contamination for food production. * "late bloomers" are underripe--edible but poor tasting. * over-ripe melons, besides being mushy, may have already started fermenting, making them unusable for processed foods (except for the tiny watermelon wine market perhaps). * America produces WAAAY more corn than could EVER be practically consumed directly by the market those producers can serve. That is a large part of why there is such an effective lobby for making an ethanol biofuel market out of their product even though there are better biofuel alternatives out there. VERY LITTLE corn is actually eaten by humans as actual corn kernels. Guess what happens to be a main output product of Corn? HIGH-FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP. And lets just say that you can tell by the physique of the average American that there is no shortage of supply of that particular sweetener, or most others. I highly doubt that watermelon producers could make a dent in THAT market.
Those in the know would agree that 20% waste is stunning, but in many cases unfortunately they'd say it was a stunningly GOOD outcome.
Ploughing waste back into the land or leaving it to decompose is hardly wasting anything - it's a natural fertiliser and reduces the need for less sustainable artificial fertilizers
I'm not sure why this is the case, but a great many/.ers and self-proclaimed environmentalists in general, reflexively dismiss anything to do with biofuel technology as if it is somehow even worse for the environment than, say, deep-water drilling, open-pit mining for coal and bitumen sands, handling nuclear waste, etc. Heaven forbid we think of using ethanol as a fuel--we'd have to mow down the rest of the rainforest to plant sugar cane and hoard all the corn from starving Africans to power our SUVs!
There is a lot of misinformation about biofuel technology, and I would not be surprised in the slightest if most of it is based on faulty science or is even outright lies. I read a study once on how inefficient corn ethanol production is, and it turns out that the study was completely faulty--they included the energy it took to build the ethanol "refinery" itself as part of the energy production (as well as other capital costs like building more tractors, silos, etc), then held that number up to well known figures on what it takes to produce a barrel of oil--except that the latter only included actual energy production costs, not the cost in energy to build drilling platforms, refineries,etc. So they published incorrect, very misleading estimates about corn ethanol. Truth be told, growing corn specifically to produce fuel is not even close to the best biofuel strategy, but in terms of production efficiency it is maybe on the order of 1/2 as efficient as conventional fuels rather than what faulty estimates originally stated (those critics used this kind of faulty estimate to conclude corn ethanol wss barely break-even--that you barely got enough energy out of using the ethanol fuel to make up for the energy expended to produce it--turns out they were wrong by more than an order of magnitude if their data was properly interpreted).
As I said, corn ethanol is a poor choice for use as biofuel, probably focused on more because of effective political lobbying than effective science. HOWEVER, biofuel technology in general is incredibly important in terms of making the world more sustainable. This "watermelon solution" is a perfect example. "Greenies" endlessly carp on how biofuels would result in food shortages, all the while ignoring the fact that over most of the industrial world we produce something like 150% of the food consumed by our population...and that counts what makes it to retail only--if you take into account what is thrown away as scrap as stock is rotated out of stores or what is tossed from our kitchens we are lucky if we actually eat much more than HALF the food we produce. Where does almost all of it go? INTO LANDFILLS.
THAT is a complete waste of potential energy right there. Food that is buried deep in landfills decomposes VERY slowly in the anaerobic environment of a landfill. "biodegradable" foodscraps can be recognisable for a few YEARS after their disposal, and as they slowly decompose they emit a greenhouse gas FAR WORSE than CO2--that being CH4. CH4--natural gas-- is a good candidate for biofuel of course, and some landfills capture what they can for electricity generation, but the process is far less efficient than it could be--more CH4 remains as emissions than is collected.
Your contention that ploughing waste back into the ground is not waste because it is fertiliser is actually false. Plants cannot take in nutrients directly from the waste of a previous crop, save perhaps any water it retains. Sugars must be broken down. Cellulose in plant fibres have no nutritional value to a plant intil they break down. To wait for the old chaff/straw/scraps to break down would require significantly more fallowing than farmers would like, thus the reason for additional tilling, harrowing, burning or removal of old crop material, etc. With fru
It's also worth noting that kernel 2.6 alone contains 186 advisories for 352 vulnerabilities with 6% unpatched. Windows Server 2008 contains 40 advisories for 82 vulnerabilities with 0% unpatched.
Your comparison is very flawed and meaningless. Linux kernel 2.6.0test was released in 2003--IT HAS BEEN AROUND 5 YEARS LONGER THAN SERVER 2008! If you want your math to actually make a real point try integrating the vulnerability rate of each OS over the same time domain. Simply put, you have to look at the combined vulnerabilities reported by Windwos Server 2003 AND 2008 when comparing against Linux 2.6.x kernel based OSes.
More proper numbers for Windows would be 242 advisories for 341 vulnerabilites. Slightly lower vulnerability count but quite a few more advisories. 6% of these vulnerabilities also remain unresolved. These numbers do not show Microsoft having any meaningful advantage in quality over the Linux kernel
And, to be more fair still, you should compare OS to OS as you said, rather than OS to kernal. For RHEL5 OS the stats are 272 advisories for 828 vulnerabilities and zero unresolved (suggests that one advisory and pne patch probably solves many separately counted vulnerabilities--perhaps because Linux-based OSes leverage shared libraries far more than Windows?) Keep in mind, however, that Comparing SLES or RHEL strictly speaking wouldn't be a complete comparison either, because in Linux OS distributions many applications are included where the equivalent in Windows would be separate (possibly extra-cost) add-ons.
Furthermore only counts are considered above, with no factor for intensity. Windows server 2008 has more than double the rate of "highly critical" vulnerabilities (35%) than does RHEL5 (16%) and it is well known that Linux exploits are far less likely to be directly remotely exploitable than is the case for Windows exploits.
Yes, MSFT has made great strides in closing the quality and security gaps in ther server OSes (quality is still sorely lacking in their desktop offerings), but even if Windows was perfect I'd still prefer a Linux OS or OpenBSD:
* can't afford Ballmer'$ ga$ * Windows is closed--I don't trust what nobody but the vendoar/author can see. Secunia et al can only report what they can observe from behaviour. As in this reported Linux exploit, third-parties can perform extremely detailed analysis with source code at hand, often releasing the patch to plug the exploit right along with the exploit itself. * licensing and actrivation take a lot of time and resources that serve no practical purpose than to enforce an increasingly questionable business model--Activation is pure bulls**t. I've wasted FAR too much time on clients issues where the root cause of functional deficiencies was improperly activated/licensed closed software (be it Windows or others). I've HAD it with closed crippleware. * I like to tinker. I like to build. The playing field is for more flat in Free software land than in Windows land. I can reconfigure kernel modules, choose which web server, DNS server, email server I want to use and evaluate them truly on their merits. In Windows, if you think IIS or Exchange or MS DNS Stinks, you can try the alternatives but they always seem hobbled by comparison. MSFT never lets third parties play by the same rules, especially when server apps are considered "windows componenets" like with IIS and DNS. They get to leap MSFT's long-professed "chinese wall" to get total access to OS internals info others do not have. ANYONE who wants to write server apps on a Free platform has the same access to info.
He's clocking out now to return it to the store he bought it from and promised to be headed to Bestbuy to pick up an iPhone 3GS on the way back...
Honestly I think this would be a dumb move, being that Apple is more "evil" than Palm, and AT&T is more "evil" than Sprint.
Consider this:
* If Microsoft pulled even HALF the shenanigans Apple does ("fixing" iTunes when thrd parties figure out ho to sync to it, suing the competition, suing people who leak info on unreleased products, etc etc) they'd be hauled into court and sued into oblivion. But, Apple can still get away with it because they are not a monopoly and their products are hip/pretty/actually work well. Doesn't make it any less evil than if MSFT had done it.
* iPhone is more closed than Pre. Yes yes, I know BSD kernel and all but there are gobs of proprietary stuff all over it. Much more opportunity to "do evil" and get away with it since it is tougher to hack. Per is comparitively open--they were MUCH quicker to release APIs, their software stack consists of far more Free software and it is architecturally VERY similar to several Free-software-friendly mobile devices (Beagleboard, Zoom, Always Innovating Touchbook, Pandora handheld). Making its Pres phone home is evil, but at least they are more open and honest than Apple has been known to be.
* All phone companies are evil, but AT&T has the dubious distinction of being a full and wililng participant in warrantless wiretapping of its own customers. It comes from a monoloply heritage. Sprint is far less notorious in that capacity...it is merely known to be incompetent and bumbling at times.
Given the choice I'd elect Pre over iPhone in a heartbeat--both the carriers and the handset manufacturers for the former are more trustworthy--or at the very least easier to keep an eye on. Apple makes the best designed and highest quality but I'm rather disenchanted with their long-time tactics of being ultra-closed. I thought that there was a chance they were changing their game when they went with Intel architecture on their Macs but since then they've proven their spots unchangeable. Pity that--they weren't that evil in their Apple II days--they sued clone makers for their blatant copyright violations but at least their machines were quite open. Perhaps if the other Steve steered the ship (but then Apple products would look far less sexy I suppose).
At least with the Pre (besides being more powerful than the iPhone) if Palm is caught pulling shenanigans it is relatively easy to find and fix it. With Apple...not so sure...if they WERE found out doing something like this, not only would it be harder to turn off, Apple would sue your arse into oblivion if you told anyone about it.
France apparently also includes portions of North America as well.
I know a guy who grew up in the French town of St. Pierre. He and his friends used to take their jet skis on the ocean from their home to Canada from time to time (no, I'm not joking...JET SKIS...from France to Canada).
Sounds impressive, no? Well as treacherous as the ocean is in the area it isn't as outrageous as it sounds because St. Pierre, France is only slightly more than 10 kilometres (6 or 7 miles) from Green Island, Newfoundland, Canada. St. Pierre is the town in the french territory of St.Pierre et Miquelon--a small group of islands just south of Newfoundland (there is a "canada-france border" in the ocean channel between them). These French islands sit on the continental shelf so you are literally right--France LITERALLY includes portions of North America.
And, yes, August is typically peak vacation season, for both French and Canadians in the region.
And the point about teachers is a primary reason--if teachers are on vacation so are students, and as such families plan their vacations at this time to avoid tkaing children out of class. I'm on the other side of the continent and it's true here as well--july and august are the slowest months because of vacations (however they are busy months in some specific industries for the same reason--including tourism and food and beverage companies--makeres of soft drinks, meat products, cheese etc for picnics and barbecues etc...THOSE are the ones living in the backwards world).
In management/business, engineering, IT work goes on but practically nothing on NEW projects happens. And, because it is vacation time workers are either away on vacation or working overtime covering for vacationers. The poster way up there IS RIGHT. Be patient and see what September brings. If the project is not a big, high-profile one the maintainer is not likely able to commit full-time to it, and if overworked OR on vacation things are on hold. If September rolls by without any response consider it abandoned for your purposes and prepare to take the reigns as maintainer of the forked project--if it is indeed that valuable to you and others you know. Since you work at an academic institution having tha backing/affiliation might work to your credit and help you pick up users from the ancestor project.
Oh yeah, and to ensure interest and adoption make Ubuntu/Debian and Fedora/RedHat (or LSB-compliant) packages available and master the art of lobbying to get those packages in widely used repositories....
Red, green and blue are the "additive" primary colours--the three primary components to making any colour with sources of light (computer displays and televisions generally emit light, hence the use of the RGB colour model for video media). You got that one right.
However two of the primary colours "for art" yo9u mentioned aren't technically correct (but they have an historical basis). The "subtractive" primary colours are magenta, yellow and cyan. This is where you get the "CMYK" cartriges for your printers. The K is for blacK (I guess it isn't called CMYB because blue already took the letter B...).
The additive and subtractive primary colours have complementary characteristics. If you combine the light from each of the additive primaries you get white. If you combine pigment of each of the subtractive primaries you get black. The subtractive and additive primaries are each exact complementary colours of each other (the complement of one primary is the combination of the other two primaries), hence:
Red -> complement is green plus blue = Cyan Green -> complement is red plus blue = Magenta Blue -> complement is red plus green = Yellow
That is how we get the acronyms for the primary colours: RGB is ordered by wavelength and CMY represents the complement of RGB.
Anyways, science hadn't established modern colour theory before much of the work done by renaissance painters was completed--colour theory of that time was based upon observation and aesthetics. They saw rainbows, came up with colour wheels, saw how their pigments blended and such and came up with their own set of primary colours. In this case they divided the colour wheel into FOUR parts and picked four primary colours such that each primary had another primary as a complement (it was all about subtractive colour theory too--they didn't know much about the additive primaries of light to have the six primaries we have now). Those colours are roughly RED, YELLOW, GREEN and BLUE (picked as they are the most prominent in rainbow spectrums observed in nature).
The colours of the Microsoft Windows logo are the four "renaissance painter's primaries". Each pair complements the other and are both bold and pleasing to the eye. The poster ianare is basically right, all four colours are pri,aries in one sense or another, though the details weren't quite complete.
It's not like they're going to send Mounties to the U.S. or require ISPs to block Facebook.
YES facebook IS VERY MUCH bound by Canadian law and it IS enforceable to a large degree. And yes, Facebook CAN be taken to court if they do not make efforts to meet the commissioner's recommendations.
If Pandora can be ordered to refuse entry to non Americans via geolocation, etc. to adhere to DMCA and license agreements in the US, you can ABSOLUTELY expect that Facebook can be ordered to shut off access in Canada (note that this does NOT involve ISPs--it is a function of the web site itself). Proxies, etc. make enforcement imperfect, but by law in both cases the website MUST take "reasonable efforts" to abide by local laws.
Only if websites refuse to cooperate would the issue be escalated to more draconian means (the Canadian gov't CAN file lawsuits in an American juristiction or an international venue you know--and CRTC can mandate ISPs follow certain rules too)
whether this is a problem or such action is right or wrong, it CAN be done.
Just because there's users on FB from all around the world, it doesn't mean that FB has to abide by all countries' laws. If that were the case, the Internet would be a hobbled and useless mess.
MadCow.
Actually it doesn't matter where servers are located--what matters is how business is conducted in the country in question. Also, the Internet is hobbled and a mess, though it is still rather useful.
There is already historical precedent. Totalitarian governments, notably those of China and Cuba, thoroughly monitor Internet traffic and routinely block sites that conflict with their propaganda. The Pirate Bay was hosted in Sweden, but it is banned in China and several EU countries have had legal battles over allowing their citizens to visit the site. Then there are legal sites that restrict access--I cannot use Pandora from home (though at my office of my former employer I could, because the corporate proxy was in the US). People in my home country have been convicted on child pornography charges based upon underground sites hosted in another continent. By Quebec law, technically a company doing "significant business" in that province MUST provide French language pages--hosting outside the province does not prevent the "language police" from taking action if they wanted to.
Nobody, not even Facebook, can operate above the law with impunity using the excuse that their computers are not in the country. They conduct business here (notably, a number of apps ARE hosted physically in Canada, so it isn't just that end users are here--they are illegally sharing private information with Canadian facebook app hosts), they have to follow our rules.
Who cares? Well I care--whether I agree with specific laws I want to know that foreign operations are held to the same standards that we must meet ourselves. And, as is apparent in the news, the Canadian government cares a great deal too.
...if you aren't comfortable with "being evil" then don't go there.
#1 More pay, most techies have a "salary cap" for their position and can only reach a certain level, managers go all the way to the top aka CEO. Also when the company starts having losses the first ones they downsize are techies.
There is such a thing as "enough pay". I don't care how rich I am, if I hate what I do to get that money I'd be unhappy. There are lots of ways to make six figures in a highly technical career. That is enough for most people--if you don't think so then you might want to re-evaluate your priorities.
Also, in the case of my former emplyer the techies were NOT the first to be laid off--the first were "middle management"--the ones that seemed to me "district X manager" or some such title, where "x" changed every other year (or even more often). Hourly labour was next when a manufacturing facility was shut down and work was consolidated in another facility. Techs were about the third round of layoffs. Thing is, if the need to cut costs is deep enough NOBODY is immune to layoffs, unless you are VERY high up the chain, and at 39, most people are at a point where they are "mid-level" in a corporate structure--and at that level it is managers that are MOST vulnerable.
#3 As you age it becomes harder and harder to understand new technical trends.
Not everyone gets dementia when they get older--most people retain more than enough of their cognitive abilities well past retirement age. It seems everyone who complains about ageism in an argument to go into management is most guilty of it themselves. You don't become mentally feeble at forty. Old dogs CAN learn new tricks, and besides, someone has to fix the messes left behind by young techies who are still over-confident in themselves and make poorly thought-out decisions.
Furthermore, making the argument that you should leave tech for management when you get older because you aren't mentally sharp enought to keep up with tech implies that management is for the feeble-minded. Please don't make such an implication--being an effective manager requires one to be mentally sharp, and besides, there are already way too many ineffective, feeble-minded managers out there.
#4 Managers have better benefits and the "golden parachute" clause in that if they fire you or lay you off, you get a nice severance package.
This is not the case unless your title includes the words "president", "chief" or "officer". Severance is generally based on salary and years of employment. If you are a mid-level techie or a mid-level manager you are likely to get similar severance pay as you're likely to have the same length of employment and not-too-different salaries. More technically oriented layoff victims are also more likely to be brought back on a consulting basis.
#5 Any company that is willing to promote a techie to a management position is a valuable company to work for,
Only if they are able to recognise if that person has a knack to manage a team of people. A technical person without an aptitude for management skills is probably worse than a manager who is good at managing but lacks technical skills--primarily because a good manager knows how to delegate such tasks effectively.
Think about how many young people are being graduated all over the world today.
Think about how many old people, particularly post WW2 baby-boomers, that are being RETIRED all over the worrld today, and in the near future.
Think how are they eager to work for way less than you get.
Think about how starved employers are for people with experience, in the primes of their careers, to replace seemingly un-replaceable retirees.
Think how faster than you they are at learning new things.
Think about how arrogant some of these young people are, fresh faced and book-smart that question even what works well because they think there is a better way, but don't have the experience to know why things are done the way they are.
Now where'd you put the only asset you have, i.e. experience?
Well, my experience is highly technical, and I have an aptitude for technically-oriented jobs. I am also fairly creative. Because of that and the fact I am fairly introverted and have to work at "people-oriented" tasks harder than others, I'd direct ny career towards areas where my natural strengths are in more demand. For example, technical consulting, engineering/design, etc. and avoid a career focused more on pure management.
I find that people who are just "managers" are more disposable anyways. From what I've seen in bigt corporations most of them get to a certain level then they are shuffled around like deck chairs, and in this recession in particular they seem to be the first targets for layoffs and take the longest to find new work. Only people who are REALLY GOOD managers (MBA or no) that become presidents and CEOs and stuff do well--and the chance of that is the same as the chance your son in little-league has of eventually getting into the majors. If you are strongly technical you can learn what management skills you require and leverage your strengths as a highly paid consultant. They always seem busier than managers anyways...
In my experience, ageism in any professional career is very real. Management is no more immune in its quest for "fresh blood" at times.
Get on the management track while you can
I think that is quite bad advice, and I think that the perception that you have to go into a management role, with a fancy title, as you get older to be respected or seen as successful is maybe the single biggest reason so many disposable "PHB" type managers are out there. Not everyone has an aptitude for management and I'd say perhaps slightly more than half of managers are not suited to the task--hence the stereotype.
The best way to counter ageism is to pursue a career path that you truly enjoy and that you are inclined to do well--if you do that you become MORE highly regarded with age, as older and WISER, rather than being regarded as old and stale. That said, I cannot give this person the right advice--only they can decide for themselves. If you are conflicted you probably don't know yourself as well as you could.
As part of a package when I was laid off I got a good severance plus my former employer paid for the use of an employment agency with workshops and "career coaches" and things. They have you take these aptitude tests that seem pretty silly and time consuming at first, but they spit out reports that can be pretty insightful. I know myself pretty well so I found it was more validation of the test for the most part, however even then the results report contained very good adjectives and a "personality summary" that are perfect for resumes (the Birkman test is well established and still popular though there are others). In the article poster's case it may show an aptitude slightly more toward technical than managerial, or it might show he is a "persuasive" personality that could be suited to technical sales (or some other option not considered). I urge people at a career crossroads to look into the services of these kinds.
I know people in their 60s that are in design/engineering/technical professions that still make a comfortable living and are highly respected and sought after. There is no law that you can only program in COBOL or FORTRAN77 once you enter middle age--experience transcends the technology of the day. Furthermore there is no need for a technical career to stop progressing at hard technical skills. You don't need to stay in tech support, or be a code jockey cranking out lines of Java, or assembling PCBs. You can go into electronic design (make your own processors, etc), or be a software or systems "architect" who selects/designs technologies/platforms/protocols/interfaces/etc and writes the specs that programmers and testers work against. You can still be a highly paid "technical consultant" as well--I don't do much in the way of project management but I often find myself as the "technical lead" responsible for the architecture of systems, consulting on the technical aspects of the work more than on managing the work as it is being done. In those technical career areas, "old and wise" is respected, so don't discount ANY career option because you think you are "too old". That is too often an excuse to accept being in a career path that makes you miserable.
Clearly it is the most evil code on the planet. It kills baby seals I heard. GTK is responsible for all that subprime lending that triggered this massive economic meltdown too, right? Geeeez.
The think I like least about each of Firefox, OpenOffice and GIMP is the user interface, for which I blame GTK. For example, Firefox's application chooser dialog makes me want to slit my wrists.
Yes, GTK's ancestry is tied to GIMP in some long dark distant past...but to blame shortcomings in ANY of those applications you mention on GTK makes about as logical and sensible as the statement I made above. First and foremost it doesn't matter if you use the greatest toolkit/framework/tools/etc in the universe, you can make an application that is absolutely horrible to use. KDE and KOffice weren't horrible, but to many they've lacked in features, design and usability at various points in time. The massive upheaval between KDE 3.x and KDE 4.x wasn't just done on a whim--their development communities went headlong into what they had to know was going to be a long, painful process to make KDE relevant again, and all through that time qt adherents would probably argue that qt was a more elegant platform throughout. The thing is, GNOME had the upper hand from a usability perspective for some time because much was done to make the environment more usable, perhaps at the expense of the DEVELOPER experience. Now KDE is back to being competitive in that space and some might say has the upper hand again because in addition to being competititve as a user environment it has a more elegant native development toolkit in the form of qt.
With Mozilla and Oo.org in particular your assertion makes no sense at all--both of those applications don't even natively depend upon GTK OR qt at all! Integration with GTK (or, at a desktop level, GNOME) or qt (or KDE) in both of these apps is a "retrofit" and it sometimes shows. Since FF and Oo.org both place a very high degree of emphasis on cross-platform support they may make sacrifices in native UI environment integration from time to time--or at least questionable choices. FF does have its won XUL-based alternative if I recall, so you can still get around any GTK limitations. However, there is much that could be done by FF developers to better use the GTK wigit, and GTK being GPLed there is nothing at all preventing mozilla developers from contributing to the GTK project to address shortcomings pointed out by their users. Perhaps the argument is there that GTK ought to rethink the design of its file chooser, but that isn't really an example of an overall GTK design/architectural shortcoming but rather a higher-level discussion.
This study seems to be mis-reported. It isn't that being a bit overweight reduces mortality slightly--it is that the definition of "overweight" based upon an arbitrary number calculated using an incorrect formula called BMI is incorrect.
If studies are showing that people who have lower mortality and/or better health overall are in the wrong classification, it is time to re-define the classifications at the least, or overhaul the entire methodology.
First of all, BMI is such a flawed measure of health that it is not only useless it borders on harmful. The formula itself makes no sense physically--it is a ratio of mass to SQUARE of height. The SQUARE? That rougly correlates to an area...hence the formula only makes sense if people are rougly the shape of a sheet of paper! A more reasonable approximation would have us use the CUBE of our height. Better yet, use the power of 2.5 as body shape varies with height in a similar fashion. Even better, the heght^2 factor should be modified to (waist circumference)* (height^2) as it is clinically demonstrated that carrying mass about the waist causes increased health problems.
There are also assumptions that are made that many people don't fit into, making all statistics based on BMI invalid and discredited:
* the BMI standards indicating 25 and up is overweight assume a sedentary lifestyle. Those who work in labour-intensive jobs (construction, farm labour, etc) or do weight training are likely to skew upwards. Likewise active people who run marathons, or do cardio-intensive activities might skew downwards and report underweight even though they are in very good health.
* Becasue of the flawed formula to calulate BMI subjects it only demonstrates significant validity within a narrow height range--perhaps between 1.65m to 2m in height. As such, children cannot be measured against the standard BMI scale (charts are used instead but even those are flawed). Very tall people are also found to be mis-classified.
* 25 is an arbitrary cut-off with no clinical evidence conclusively justifying the overweight label. This study suggests the limit should be raised if BMI continues being used as an indicator. It is bewildering, but some suggest the number should be LOWERED--but that is mostly suggested in Asia where people tend to be shorter than the range where the normal standard works and the standards need adjusting.
By BMI I am 4kg away from being "clinically obese" yet by percentage body fat I am just inside the "physically fit" category most of the time (I vary between 15 to 20 percent fat depending on method used to estimate and time of year, etc--fair bit higher than "athelete" but in a healthy range). I am health conscious but no means exceptionally different in build from a great many people, especially those raised in rural Canada as I was. The BMI does loosely correlate with health problems, but becasue of how severely flawed it is it is dangerous to put too much credence in it, yet disturbingly BMI is too often abused:
* governments base health policies on BMI--public money is spent to combat obeisity as defined using this incorrect methodology
* insurance companies and so on base premiums in part on BMI. Being falsely classified as obese could be costly.
* people, especially women, are always under pressure to lower weight to meet what is oftentimes an unrealistic goal. Instead of focusing on health, there is a fixation on achieving an arbitrary look or number. The BMI is all the more damaging because unlike Cosmo which is all image and no substance, BMI is preceived as a clinical measurement that indicates health. There may be many weight consious people fixated on BMI when...FOR THEM...it may not be adviseable to worry about being "under 25" and instead just focus on a healthy diet and level of physical activity.
My thought is, as joking posted elsewhere in this discussion, that BMI is perpetuated by an large by the weight-loss industry. If focus was put on actual health indicators--or at
...but copyright is the wrong battle here I think.
But how can someone sue for a copyright violation when there was no copyright?
There is always a copyright. All works are protected by copyright law, including this very post and yours (yeah I quoted you...if you wanted you could sue me but your case for damages would be weak, but you still have that right).
You would've figured that out if you RTFA--and you didn't even need to follow a link to do it! But, this is/. and RTFA is just not done here unless you are weird I guess--especially if you are trying to be first post.
Anyways, there is a problem with using copyright as the legal weapon in this battle. Since you are too busy to RTFA, this is why:
1 the work is NON-registered. Without registering copyright in a timely manner you are limited to actual, direct monetary damages. 2 the "work" is a catty rant on myspace--little to no tangible worth to that being supply exceeds demand by a huge margin and nobody has to pay to see it. 3 do the math: 1 plus 2 equals you get nothing in court. Daddy lost his business? Sorry. not actual, direct damages to the creator. Denied.
A civil case based on "false light publication" is a better alternative I'd think, as briefly mentioned in the article. The principal acted in appalling fashion and should lose his job and be sued into oblivion. Sad how such an immature person of such weak moral character could be in a position of professional responsibility like that. Perhaps a symptom of low pay and inadequate respect for the job. The newspaper also did very shoddy work in publishing the letter without verifying the source. I mean...that seems like a very basic common sense thing to do. Intent was clearly malicious and meant to deceive. Strictly speaking if the principal should have prefaced the letter with something like "this is what one of my students thinks about this town" and as a professional kept the contributor anonymous...and disclosed that he/she was the contributor of the letter not the original author. Teachers always tell students to properly cite works not created by them...it is disgraceful that the principal would not set a proper example.
Additionally, criminal prosecution should be pursued against those making treats. Either this girl said something especially offensive or she is right about her town. People who would utter threats or work to destroy the livelihood of innocent family members not associated with the author's statements hardly deserve to be called human beings. But, I suppose the author herself might have been a nasty person herself...I can't make those judgements conclusively without knowing the whole story.
So what does SCO have other than a few patents that may or may not be invalid, the name, and a whole lot of bad press?
Their thin and questionable patent portfolio is probably a diversion tactic. The takeover of its legitimate operations by the shell corporation unXis is, as PJ concludes, a crass attempt to shelter assets from losses related to litigation, the way a deadbeat tries to avoid child support by selling all his assets into a corporation in the Cayman Islands. It leaves SCO itself to be the little rubber room in which Darl can bounce around his delusional claims. Of course, the devil is in the details, and though they would be two corporate entities they'd be involved in each others affairs like dirty shirts...meaning that the smaller or weaker customers of unXis could be offered for sacrifice before the altar of Darl, in return for being isolated from IBM and Novel's countersuits.
One thing PJ doesn't highlight but sounds "interesting" to me is that significant investment through unXis will be directed toward the development of a "next generation UNIX platform". This bears some attention as far as interaction with SCO goes as well. In weird and wacky SCO-land they believe Linux is a derivative of their own "one true UNIX". Their wild Dr. Evil plan could involve the development of a Linux-based distribution. unXis would provide "enhancements" to their own distribution including DRM and activation, perhaps through technology licensed from Microsoft (who, based on their own filed patents, are at the forefront of crippleware technology). Needless to say, they'd provide no source code at all and would break Linux compatability or retain it where they feel it makes strategic sense in the marketing dept. This would be an unXis product, but the SCO litigation machine would continue to exist to continue the litigation circus claiming that since the "UNIX IP" belongs to unXis (because SCO sold it to them) and that Linux stole important parts of UNIX, that Linux is unXis' to steal back, so the GPL be damned. Though the courts have ruled that UNIX wasn't SCOs to sell, that is under appeal and being delusional, they are optimistic the decision will be reversed on appeal and some day decades from now they'll be awarded billions from IBM that they can invest in the legal destruction of Linux and perhaps the GPL itself.
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I fully support unions as a group of freely associating group of people.
Freedom of association is indeed a fundamental individual freedom, so you are consistent in those beliefs. However, in many of not most cases around the world unions are not a "freely associating group". What about closed shops, where corporate executives decide to sign an agreement with union executives whereby all workers must join a specific union and pay dues to that union in order to work for that company? Sometimes to be a "licensed tradesman" you have to be a union member to get any work anywhere (the union culture in trades like pipefitting is very entrenched). Before political financing reform in Canada esentially banned union funding of political parties, unions traditionally made the bulk of their donations to socialist parties out of MANDATORY dues workers had to pay to obtain employment, even if those workers were not socialist and never voted for a socialist party in their lives.
THe problem isn't with unions in general, the problem is with unions that wield power that takes away individual liberties (such power isn't limited to governments, or corporations--abuse of liberties can occur when ANY institution obtains inappropriate power).
unfettered capitalism will lead to capital concentration and a non-free market. Therefore regulation is required to approximate one.
I think regulation whould be an action of last resort. You risk burning down the house when you fight fire with fire after all. With regulation the biggest hazzard is that you fall into the trap of protecting the wrong thing. You might set out to protect consumer rights, then slide down the slope to "protecting peoples jobs" by way of regulation to protect corporate interests to outright capitalist facism (ie. trillion dollar "stimulous programmme" where everything from billions in bailouts to public works projects are doled by departmental "Czars" and government panels to those that best follow the long list of government rules). Though monopolies might emerge on their own in a free market, it seems these days they use regulation to maintain themselves (they become "too big to fail" and manage to lobby themselves into favour with government).
But in the telecom industry in most of the world, there is no free market. The protectionist "fire" as it is, is raging out of control and has made a charred mess out of the landscape, so unfortunately the only practical way to contain it is to do a "controlled burn" to create a break to protect what pristine land is left.
I'd argue that the free market has been destroyed, if it ever existed in modern history. Some might suggest that citizens, corporations and governments have to (re)establish the free market, or at least create the conditions to foster its self-development. It's a bit like the argument that there was no peace in Korea, or the middle east, so military intervention is required to MAKE peace before peace-keepers can keep any peace and re-establish civility. Obviously these "thin liberals" do not believe in that argument (not saying they're wrong but I don't always agree--read on for my opinion). They are focusing on the "means"--whatever you do should be as little as possible from a regulatory standpoint. "Deep liberals" (the classical type, or modern Libertarians perhaps) might take a more situational approach, and would also focus on "ends" over means...ie. what are the end results of a particular policy? Might deregulation/hands-off policy redult in the entrenchmnet of a monopoly or interfere with individual liberties? Many libertarians seem lost in that they fixate on preference of private corporate interest over government control. Libertarians were supposed to believe in INDIVIDUAL rights--tilting the table in either government OR private industry's favour at the expense of personal liberty should be discouraged.
and endless bailouts for politically favored constituencies, such as the AFL-CIO, Goldman Sachs, General Motors, "green" rent-seekers...
This certainly isn't free-market to be sure...I'd describe it as "Capitalist fascism", similar to what Mussolini espoused. Seems ironic that Obama's critics complain about his socialist leanings when thus far strictly from an economic standpoint his administration is almost TEXTBOOK CAPTIALIST FACISM. You have a government that has established review panels of appointed experts to evaluate the health of your banks and decide how much government capital they can use to do business and even how much they can (over)pay their executives. The government has invested heavily in two auto companies (not to ultimately socialise them as they intend to divest themselves of their interest, but rather to control the recovery of the industry). Obama is said to appoint a "czar" of this-or-that to "oversee" various aspects of the market. There is this policy to direct private enterprise to "buy American" in return for being seleted to work on public works projects and so on. The economic policy of the current US administration would've been heartily supported by Mussolini or Hitler.
PLEASE do not take offense at the comparison of Obama's economic record to that of notorious totalitarian monsters, though I know it would be the natural reaction. Obama obviously has much more noble intentions and hasn't given the slightest indication he believes in the more insidious aspects of WWII era facism like eugenics, genocide and so on. The comparison is strictly based on MACRO-ECONOMIC POLICY.
At any rate, on the subject of Free software it is completely couter to libertarianism to do anything less than whole-heartedly support the idea. Ultimately, trhe creator of a work should be allowed to confer whatever rights he wants to the end user. If the argument is made that Free software threatens the software market and policy should curtail its use IS NOT A LIBERTARIAN AT ALL--they may be "Capitalist" but they are suggesting that individuals should be discouraged form excercising their freedoms in the name of maintaining a market. THAT IS WRONG. If an idea/concept/grassroots movement manages to make an industry obsolete such that it dies IT SHOULD BE LEFT TO DIE. Typewriter manufacturing is now a small cottage industry because the product is obsolete, and those who made them either went extinct or changed their business.to something relevant. Governments didn't give bilions Remington or to IBM to keep typewriter factories open, and they didn't establish government panels to decide on what these factories would build or try
I believe it would mean instant discommendation for any mac user who installs Zune software on his mac.
How about Microsoft Office? There'd be a LOT of Mac users wearing the scarlet letter then eh?
You really can't own an iPhone without it.
There are no MacOS or Microsoft PCs in my household and we have an iPhone. You don't need iTunes to own an iPhone, though I suppose you miss out on the full "experience". Based upon the "experience" we had with her previous "classic" iPod and iTunes on a Windows PC (since relinquished upon layoff) it is not an experience I will miss (What's so hot about iTunes anyways? Is it only good on Macs? In my opinion it seems like Apple's best effort at making Microsoft's product look good...I miss iTunes like I miss the severely impacted wisdom teeth my dentist had to dig out during my freshman Reading Week all those years ago...).
The only thing it is good for is upgrading your firmware (only because the iPhone is defective by design and has locked you into using their big ol' piloe of garbage instead of a simple image uploader app). I suppose I could try Wine but I've had issues in the past having it work with USB peripherals properly. Thus, in the event of the need for a critical software update I modestly propose this solution: Go to one of Apple's "boutique" stores or a Best Buy or similar store with the Apple secion. Go up to the first "genius" you can find, had the learned one your iPhone and command him/her to "fix it". Apple prides itself on its reputation for service, so make sure you take maximum advantage of that.
If they wanted low maintenance customers Apple wouldn't make such asinine design decisions as requiring a massive, bloated, monolithic jukebox/multimedia player/digital storefront/electronic updater/etc to do something as basic as applying a firmware update. However, it is clear that herding everyone into their shiny little fenced-in-and-locked-up "experience" is priority one. My sweetheart does like her shiny toy (it IS a nice precious, yes), but Apple seems to have a strategy to treat customers like sheep so I cannot be bothered to act like anything but pertaining to Apple products. With Linux or MSFT or anything else I'll make an effort at troubleshooting. With Apple, it seems clear to me I'm "not allowed in", so I don't think to try to figure out with Apple--I seek out a Genius to think and fix for me.
Think about Windows Mobile (especially pre-2003): the interface carry-overs from Windows proper are the chief reason it's an also-ran on PDAs and phones,
The differences between Android and conventional Linux-based OSes run quite a bit deeper than the UI--Android is a very different architecture altogether. It's like saying MacOS X is BSD UNIX--IT ISN'T. It shares a lot of common elements, it is somewhat compatible but architecturally it is VASTLY DIFFERENT, far more than skin-deep-different. Therefore, one could say that those chief reasons for WinMo's failures could be addressed with a far more "conventional" Linux-based OS distribution. That is where Moblin comes in--it is an application framework that sits far higher up the stack. Whereas Android starts going its own way almost right above the kernel, Moblin sits atop an essentially complete core installation of Fedora, and in fact is technically "distribution agnostic" and can alternatively be installed atop Ubuntu as well. As Moblin is under the stewardship of the Linux Foundation the logical end goal would be to make Moblin an application framework upon the base install of ANY LSB-compliant OS.
And, I suggest you troll YouTube for demonstrations of Moblin--you'll quickly see it is very much NOT a "carry-over" of desktop Linux from a user perspective.
If course, Intel was the founding institution for Moblin, and its heritage is one of being optimised for the Intel Atom/x86 architecture, so Intel is pushing for Moblin smartphones because it is a software platform ready today for its hardware being released shortly..but here is an interesting situation: The Linux foundation is not beholden to Intel, Moblin is Free software and nothing impedes it from being built or optimised for another platform..notably ARM based competing platforms. For example, the Clutter 3D UI framework builds on many ARM based devices (I've seen it working nicely on the BeagleBoard), as to pretty close to all the essential parts of Moblin Core. Moblin 2.x could be ported to ARM with mostly "integration work" (figuring out compiler options, "glue logic" programming and scripts and so on).
There's no real point to extending the traditional Linux desktop to a phone for the same reason: there's nothing worthwhile to carry over.
I BEG TO DIFFER! The "Linux desktop" is more than the desktop environment/user interface, and as has been demonstrated there is quite a lot of the stack that is worthwhile to retain, even if it doesn't "make sense" in Mobile applications. Why do I say this? Because I think far too many people are demonstrating a very short-sighted view that mobile devices must always be mobile! For some reason, nobody thinks to look at how notebook/laptop PCs are used by so many people--they are carried about much of the time, but as often as not (maybe most of the time in fact) they sit on a desk connected to a full sized keyboard, mouse and monitor! This is especially the case with corporate PCs, where in many setups almost all users are issued notebooks.
If nobody gives it a second thought about something that weighs a couple kg and has occupies a footprint larger than an A4 sheet of paper being used in "two modes" then why should it be different for a pocket-sized computer? If these tiny devices are so powerful why artificially constrain the software on them to something geared towards mobile use? What is keeping us from putting USB host and HDMI ports on these devices (or on a dock the device sits in) such that we can use them on larger screens with full keyboards and mice? THAT is the problem with Android! It is designed for SMALL devices and needs some HEAVY modification to work outside those severe constraints. Critics already doubt Android's capability on netbook sized applications, much less when used in desktop or living-room-console situations! Hell, only in the most very recent release was there official coverage for something as basic as supporting DisplayMetrics t
I have already seen advertisements for mini-laptops running WinCE.
CE based mobile computers are very old news. Heck, NETBOOKS are very old news. The term netbook is just a buzzword for what we all called ultraporatbles or subnotebooks a decade ago.
Look up the "Comapq Areo 8000". It is a 10-inch netbook from TEN YEARS AGO based on a low-power orthogonal/RISC processor, has 12 hours of operational battery life, no moving parts (used a CF card instead of HDD, no cooling fan). It used WinCE in firmware as the OS. The machine is the precursor to and architcturally nearly identical to the HP iPAQ palm computers/PDAs, just in notebook format.
Windows CE based OSes (WinCE/WinMobile, etC) are a NON-STARTER. MSFT has had ten years to make CE successful in subnotebooks/netbooks and they've gone over like a lead balloon. Corporate customers knew what they were getting and there was a little bit of uptake there but by and large consumers viewed them with mild hostility. With the little palm-style PDAs there wasn't the perception it was a "real computer". They were very small, they had limited capabilities and people had limited expectations. But when that technology was scaled upwards to the subnotebook form factor they looked a little too much like "real" notebooks. Ten years ago there were still a number of people using 800x600 screens on their desktops and "real" notebooks and laptops. The Aero subnotebooks had that resolution on small-but-serviceable 10 inch colour screen, and it had a proper keyboard too, and when it booted up there was the Microsoft Windows logo and start button and everything just like in the contemporary Win9x machines. Sure the machine was very capable BUT IT STILL WASN'T COMPATIBLE! You couldn't go out and buy apps off the store shelves and load them in (no floppy or CD to begin with--and even if you docked the machine to connect it to a "real PC" you couldn't install normal apps to it).
So FWIW, the fact CE-kernel OSes from MSFT are already there for ARM it really ISN'T worth anything. In fact, the "customer confusion" factor that people claim hapered Linux would be EVEN WORSE for WinCE! At least with Linux it wasn't emblazoned with MSFT and Windows logos on it and it didn't boot up into a nearly identical LOOKING environment. People could sense a difference. Put WinCE on netbooks and they'll be REALLY confused, because it'll LOOK familiar but in fact CE is really no more compatible with NT-based Windows (XP/Vista/7) than Linux is. It'd be more consumer hostility just like 10+ years ago when they tried the first time.
Besides that, Linux-kernel OSes seem to be where it's at. Google is on its third release of Android in the time it took MSFT to more up one release. Palm's WebOS looks absolutely stellar and the company looks like it may have actually pulled its arse out of the fire. Moblin v2 is ready to debut and developers of many moblin components are actively working on ARM ports, so by the time WinMo 7/next-generation CE would be ready Linux could already have a lot of traction.
And the prospect of full-blown Windows 7 on ARM? I think winning the lottery is more likely. Even if Windows 7 were to be ported, what about the apps? They'd need to port REAL MS Office, etc. and get all the vendors to rebuild too, or spend a long time on emulation/virtualisation and take a performance hit. It was a huge undertaking for Apple that happened over years (starting by a massive OS shift from OS9 to UNIX-based, multi-platform capable OS X with all sorts of frameworks to support legacy baggage, and once that was done the hardware shift to x86, etc...). It would take MSFT a decade of true dedication to herd all their cats and pull that off, and no matter what words Ballmer bellows about Mobile/CE, MSFTs actions have demonstrated they totally lack the dedication it would take to seriously support NT on non-Intel architectures.
I didn't check the CPU type but I assume it would be x86.
You
Being Linux-based, I suppose it would not be too hard to hack it to support Ogg Vorbis.
Being Linux-based I would've assumed it would support OGG from the factory, as the HTC Dream and Magic phones do. OGG is the format of choice for digital storage of my music being it is the least encumbered of all choices and provides more than adequate quality for my needs. It was one of the many appealing features that made me decide to go with the Magic when I replaced my phone this summer--plus it was cool to have something my American friends couldn't get for another month ;-)
Unless you define the internet as the .com name space.
The .com TLD is not the internet name space, but the internet namespace does include the .com TLD, so it standa to reason that a .com domain could be the first registered on the internet.
The .edu name space is older and was just as much the internet.
.arpa, .com, .edu, .gov, .mil and .org TLDs were all established simultaneously in an RFC published in the fall of 1984. None of them is technically older than any of the others. Practically speaking though the first officially registered and functioning domain name on the internet is SYMBOLICS.COM came into being on March 1985, predating the approximately simultaneous registration of several university .edu domains by about a month.
If you want to be pedantic there were perhaps dozens of internet domain names that simultaneously became the "first domain names". These were all .arpa domains and were all temporary. Prior to the establishment of any internet-wide root nameservers resolving hostnames to domain names used a resolver that read a locally stored text file called hosts. The hosts file was generated and maintained centrally by university researchers and manually downloaded by sysadmins to EVERY COMPUTER ON THE INTERNET that needed to resolve hostnames. The "official" hosts file of the internet was flat in structure--there was no defined levels like today. An informal structure was established using hyphens as separators (a host might be named in a pattern like COMPUTERNAME-UNIVERSITYNAME) but there was no standards applied or technical significance to the structure as there is in today's DNS.
When the nameservers came online they were set up with the official hosts file as it existed at that time, within the .arpa TLD. The .arpa TLD was meant to be temporary--it allowed internet hosts to transition to DNS client resolvers from hostname files seamlessly. Config files, databases, etc. may have referred to hosts by name, and by using the temporary .arpa TLD the name resolver could be changed without disruption (note how name resolution works to this day--if you do not use a FQDN your computer appends the supplied hostname to the domain of your own host--since at the beginning all domain names were .arpa this scheme allowed dns resolution to behave exactly like the original hostname file).
All those .arpa domains are gone now--but the .arpa TLD did become permanent--when standards for doing REVERSE lookups were established the domain in-addr.arpa was created. There are a handful of .arpa domains that exist to manage the inner workings of various DNS functions, but .arpa has never been open to domain registrations from the public--all .arpa domains are established through internet standards.
So, though .arpa domains were technically the firs, YOU are wrong and the article summary was RIGHT. symbolics com was the first REGISTERED domain on the entire public internet.
Good cropland is scarce enough as it is.
That is incorrect. Farmland is plentiful. We can already produce far more calories of food than we need to survive--like TWICE as many. The problem is efficiency and distribution and politics. Whoever tells you there is a shortage of farmland is LYING.
It doesn't make much sense to hasten this trend by effectively converting space for growing food into space for fueling our vehicles.
You didn't even read the article SUMMARY did you? THEYA RE USING WASTE PRODUCTS...stuff farmers cannot sell in this case. THEY DO NOT PROPOSE TO USE ANY MORE LAND THAN THEY ALREADY ARE. There are two ways to increase efficiency of farmland:
* get more people to buy local - the less distance food has to travel the less spoilage, damage, wasted fuel, etc.
* USE WASTED PRODUCTION MORE WISELY--stop throwing away. REDUCE what you throw away, REUSE what you can and RECYCLE what you cannot use. What is wrong with RECYCLING wasted crop products into fuels that can be used for something else beneficial?
It won't be long before battery technology catches up and allows us to drive a reasonable distance on a charge.
It takes a LOT of energy to make these batteries...then you have to keep them charged. Where does the electricity come from? Can't come all from solar, nobody wants a new nuclear plant in their back yard...why can't the electricity come from biofuels? Whether burned or used chemically as in fuel cells?
There isn't a problem with biofuel technology it is just that it is being mis-applied. And it isn't "fuel companies" (the biggest of which are oil companies--they'd NOT want to see biofuels succeed) pressig for the use of ethanol. It is the corn growing lobby that is pushing for ethanol, which is why it emerged ahead of things like this watermelon scheme or algae-based biodiesel...corn-states buying congressional votes for politicians. Bad policy but doesn't make biofuel technology itself bad--the concept should still be pursued...just in a different way.
You can't till ALL your crop waste into the ground year after year. It has to be composted or it will hurt yields. If you composted it all in-field you'd have to fallow every other year, and that would mean having to use far more land to produce the same amount of food. A certain amount of crop debris is harmless or even beneficial, but if it is present in excess and is not managed with some combination of crop rotation, fallowing, and tilling can actually be HARMFUL to crop yields.
You cant leave fallen fruit on or near ground surface for other reasons--crop diseases (blights, insects, bacteria, etc) would be a problem especially because of the sugar content of the rotting fruit. At best this reduces yield, at worst can contaminate food supply with substances harmful to humans.
Converting food land to bio-fuels is a horrible waste of time and money.
Not making best use of the crops WE ALREADY GROW ON THIS LAND is probably even worse. You didn't even read the summary, you just saw "biofuels" and started spouting off. This solution USES ZERO EXTRA LAND to produce fuel. Biofuels needn't replace ALL fuel production--they can be a good way to make use of what is wasted today.
State laying industrial solar power in non farming area.
Don't be a dummy...where do you think plants get their energy from...THE SUN...leaves are nature's little solar panels. Put man-made solar panels in the desert..that's great...but why not make use of all the energy we can from what is collected from crops that is wasted today?
Do it fast, get it done. we can power the nation from that.
we can probablly make biofuel from the juices of wasted fruit crops just as fast or faster than from solar panels. Why not do both?
I don't understand why shape and surface issues would disqualify the fruit from use in processed foods.
The 20 percent ALREADY TAKES THAT INTO ACCOUNT...in other words, after all the "pretty ones" are sold for direct consumer sale AND as many "ugly ones" are used for "processed goods" as possible there is STILL a 20 percent portion of crop that is unsaleable. That is quite typical of many fruit crops actually. The amount of wasted edible food production is actually closer to FIFTY percent if you include all steps of production from field to 'fridge.
In the case of watermelons:
* I don't exactly see rows of cartons full of WATERMELON JUICE on the store shelves. I'm guessing the market for it is extremely small.
* Texture counts as a cosmetic quality. Mushy watermelon is unfit for fruit salads too.
* Surface fungus and similar defects could be removed by hand to make the rest of the melon edible, but it is too labour intensive to be cost-effective and risks contamination for food production.
* "late bloomers" are underripe--edible but poor tasting.
* over-ripe melons, besides being mushy, may have already started fermenting, making them unusable for processed foods (except for the tiny watermelon wine market perhaps).
* America produces WAAAY more corn than could EVER be practically consumed directly by the market those producers can serve. That is a large part of why there is such an effective lobby for making an ethanol biofuel market out of their product even though there are better biofuel alternatives out there. VERY LITTLE corn is actually eaten by humans as actual corn kernels. Guess what happens to be a main output product of Corn? HIGH-FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP. And lets just say that you can tell by the physique of the average American that there is no shortage of supply of that particular sweetener, or most others. I highly doubt that watermelon producers could make a dent in THAT market.
Those in the know would agree that 20% waste is stunning, but in many cases unfortunately they'd say it was a stunningly GOOD outcome.
Ploughing waste back into the land or leaving it to decompose is hardly wasting anything - it's a natural fertiliser and reduces the need for less sustainable artificial fertilizers
I'm not sure why this is the case, but a great many /.ers and self-proclaimed environmentalists in general, reflexively dismiss anything to do with biofuel technology as if it is somehow even worse for the environment than, say, deep-water drilling, open-pit mining for coal and bitumen sands, handling nuclear waste, etc. Heaven forbid we think of using ethanol as a fuel--we'd have to mow down the rest of the rainforest to plant sugar cane and hoard all the corn from starving Africans to power our SUVs!
There is a lot of misinformation about biofuel technology, and I would not be surprised in the slightest if most of it is based on faulty science or is even outright lies. I read a study once on how inefficient corn ethanol production is, and it turns out that the study was completely faulty--they included the energy it took to build the ethanol "refinery" itself as part of the energy production (as well as other capital costs like building more tractors, silos, etc), then held that number up to well known figures on what it takes to produce a barrel of oil--except that the latter only included actual energy production costs, not the cost in energy to build drilling platforms, refineries,etc. So they published incorrect, very misleading estimates about corn ethanol. Truth be told, growing corn specifically to produce fuel is not even close to the best biofuel strategy, but in terms of production efficiency it is maybe on the order of 1/2 as efficient as conventional fuels rather than what faulty estimates originally stated (those critics used this kind of faulty estimate to conclude corn ethanol wss barely break-even--that you barely got enough energy out of using the ethanol fuel to make up for the energy expended to produce it--turns out they were wrong by more than an order of magnitude if their data was properly interpreted).
As I said, corn ethanol is a poor choice for use as biofuel, probably focused on more because of effective political lobbying than effective science. HOWEVER, biofuel technology in general is incredibly important in terms of making the world more sustainable. This "watermelon solution" is a perfect example. "Greenies" endlessly carp on how biofuels would result in food shortages, all the while ignoring the fact that over most of the industrial world we produce something like 150% of the food consumed by our population...and that counts what makes it to retail only--if you take into account what is thrown away as scrap as stock is rotated out of stores or what is tossed from our kitchens we are lucky if we actually eat much more than HALF the food we produce. Where does almost all of it go? INTO LANDFILLS.
THAT is a complete waste of potential energy right there. Food that is buried deep in landfills decomposes VERY slowly in the anaerobic environment of a landfill. "biodegradable" foodscraps can be recognisable for a few YEARS after their disposal, and as they slowly decompose they emit a greenhouse gas FAR WORSE than CO2--that being CH4. CH4--natural gas-- is a good candidate for biofuel of course, and some landfills capture what they can for electricity generation, but the process is far less efficient than it could be--more CH4 remains as emissions than is collected.
Your contention that ploughing waste back into the ground is not waste because it is fertiliser is actually false. Plants cannot take in nutrients directly from the waste of a previous crop, save perhaps any water it retains. Sugars must be broken down. Cellulose in plant fibres have no nutritional value to a plant intil they break down. To wait for the old chaff/straw/scraps to break down would require significantly more fallowing than farmers would like, thus the reason for additional tilling, harrowing, burning or removal of old crop material, etc. With fru
It's also worth noting that kernel 2.6 alone contains 186 advisories for 352 vulnerabilities with 6% unpatched. Windows Server 2008 contains 40 advisories for 82 vulnerabilities with 0% unpatched.
Your comparison is very flawed and meaningless. Linux kernel 2.6.0test was released in 2003--IT HAS BEEN AROUND 5 YEARS LONGER THAN SERVER 2008! If you want your math to actually make a real point try integrating the vulnerability rate of each OS over the same time domain. Simply put, you have to look at the combined vulnerabilities reported by Windwos Server 2003 AND 2008 when comparing against Linux 2.6.x kernel based OSes.
More proper numbers for Windows would be 242 advisories for 341 vulnerabilites. Slightly lower vulnerability count but quite a few more advisories. 6% of these vulnerabilities also remain unresolved. These numbers do not show Microsoft having any meaningful advantage in quality over the Linux kernel
And, to be more fair still, you should compare OS to OS as you said, rather than OS to kernal. For RHEL5 OS the stats are 272 advisories for 828 vulnerabilities and zero unresolved (suggests that one advisory and pne patch probably solves many separately counted vulnerabilities--perhaps because Linux-based OSes leverage shared libraries far more than Windows?) Keep in mind, however, that Comparing SLES or RHEL strictly speaking wouldn't be a complete comparison either, because in Linux OS distributions many applications are included where the equivalent in Windows would be separate (possibly extra-cost) add-ons.
Furthermore only counts are considered above, with no factor for intensity. Windows server 2008 has more than double the rate of "highly critical" vulnerabilities (35%) than does RHEL5 (16%) and it is well known that Linux exploits are far less likely to be directly remotely exploitable than is the case for Windows exploits.
Yes, MSFT has made great strides in closing the quality and security gaps in ther server OSes (quality is still sorely lacking in their desktop offerings), but even if Windows was perfect I'd still prefer a Linux OS or OpenBSD:
* can't afford Ballmer'$ ga$
* Windows is closed--I don't trust what nobody but the vendoar/author can see. Secunia et al can only report what they can observe from behaviour. As in this reported Linux exploit, third-parties can perform extremely detailed analysis with source code at hand, often releasing the patch to plug the exploit right along with the exploit itself.
* licensing and actrivation take a lot of time and resources that serve no practical purpose than to enforce an increasingly questionable business model--Activation is pure bulls**t. I've wasted FAR too much time on clients issues where the root cause of functional deficiencies was improperly activated/licensed closed software (be it Windows or others). I've HAD it with closed crippleware.
* I like to tinker. I like to build. The playing field is for more flat in Free software land than in Windows land. I can reconfigure kernel modules, choose which web server, DNS server, email server I want to use and evaluate them truly on their merits. In Windows, if you think IIS or Exchange or MS DNS Stinks, you can try the alternatives but they always seem hobbled by comparison. MSFT never lets third parties play by the same rules, especially when server apps are considered "windows componenets" like with IIS and DNS. They get to leap MSFT's long-professed "chinese wall" to get total access to OS internals info others do not have. ANYONE who wants to write server apps on a Free platform has the same access to info.
He's clocking out now to return it to the store he bought it from and promised to be headed to Bestbuy to pick up an iPhone 3GS on the way back...
Honestly I think this would be a dumb move, being that Apple is more "evil" than Palm, and AT&T is more "evil" than Sprint.
Consider this:
* If Microsoft pulled even HALF the shenanigans Apple does ("fixing" iTunes when thrd parties figure out ho to sync to it, suing the competition, suing people who leak info on unreleased products, etc etc) they'd be hauled into court and sued into oblivion. But, Apple can still get away with it because they are not a monopoly and their products are hip/pretty/actually work well. Doesn't make it any less evil than if MSFT had done it.
* iPhone is more closed than Pre. Yes yes, I know BSD kernel and all but there are gobs of proprietary stuff all over it. Much more opportunity to "do evil" and get away with it since it is tougher to hack. Per is comparitively open--they were MUCH quicker to release APIs, their software stack consists of far more Free software and it is architecturally VERY similar to several Free-software-friendly mobile devices (Beagleboard, Zoom, Always Innovating Touchbook, Pandora handheld). Making its Pres phone home is evil, but at least they are more open and honest than Apple has been known to be.
* All phone companies are evil, but AT&T has the dubious distinction of being a full and wililng participant in warrantless wiretapping of its own customers. It comes from a monoloply heritage. Sprint is far less notorious in that capacity...it is merely known to be incompetent and bumbling at times.
Given the choice I'd elect Pre over iPhone in a heartbeat--both the carriers and the handset manufacturers for the former are more trustworthy--or at the very least easier to keep an eye on. Apple makes the best designed and highest quality but I'm rather disenchanted with their long-time tactics of being ultra-closed. I thought that there was a chance they were changing their game when they went with Intel architecture on their Macs but since then they've proven their spots unchangeable. Pity that--they weren't that evil in their Apple II days--they sued clone makers for their blatant copyright violations but at least their machines were quite open. Perhaps if the other Steve steered the ship (but then Apple products would look far less sexy I suppose).
At least with the Pre (besides being more powerful than the iPhone) if Palm is caught pulling shenanigans it is relatively easy to find and fix it. With Apple...not so sure...if they WERE found out doing something like this, not only would it be harder to turn off, Apple would sue your arse into oblivion if you told anyone about it.
France apparently also includes portions of North America as well.
I know a guy who grew up in the French town of St. Pierre. He and his friends used to take their jet skis on the ocean from their home to Canada from time to time (no, I'm not joking...JET SKIS...from France to Canada).
Sounds impressive, no? Well as treacherous as the ocean is in the area it isn't as outrageous as it sounds because St. Pierre, France is only slightly more than 10 kilometres (6 or 7 miles) from Green Island, Newfoundland, Canada. St. Pierre is the town in the french territory of St.Pierre et Miquelon--a small group of islands just south of Newfoundland (there is a "canada-france border" in the ocean channel between them). These French islands sit on the continental shelf so you are literally right--France LITERALLY includes portions of North America.
And, yes, August is typically peak vacation season, for both French and Canadians in the region.
And the point about teachers is a primary reason--if teachers are on vacation so are students, and as such families plan their vacations at this time to avoid tkaing children out of class. I'm on the other side of the continent and it's true here as well--july and august are the slowest months because of vacations (however they are busy months in some specific industries for the same reason--including tourism and food and beverage companies--makeres of soft drinks, meat products, cheese etc for picnics and barbecues etc...THOSE are the ones living in the backwards world).
In management/business, engineering, IT work goes on but practically nothing on NEW projects happens. And, because it is vacation time workers are either away on vacation or working overtime covering for vacationers. The poster way up there IS RIGHT. Be patient and see what September brings. If the project is not a big, high-profile one the maintainer is not likely able to commit full-time to it, and if overworked OR on vacation things are on hold. If September rolls by without any response consider it abandoned for your purposes and prepare to take the reigns as maintainer of the forked project--if it is indeed that valuable to you and others you know. Since you work at an academic institution having tha backing/affiliation might work to your credit and help you pick up users from the ancestor project.
Oh yeah, and to ensure interest and adoption make Ubuntu/Debian and Fedora/RedHat (or LSB-compliant) packages available and master the art of lobbying to get those packages in widely used repositories....
Red, green and blue are the "additive" primary colours--the three primary components to making any colour with sources of light (computer displays and televisions generally emit light, hence the use of the RGB colour model for video media). You got that one right.
However two of the primary colours "for art" yo9u mentioned aren't technically correct (but they have an historical basis). The "subtractive" primary colours are magenta, yellow and cyan. This is where you get the "CMYK" cartriges for your printers. The K is for blacK (I guess it isn't called CMYB because blue already took the letter B...).
The additive and subtractive primary colours have complementary characteristics. If you combine the light from each of the additive primaries you get white. If you combine pigment of each of the subtractive primaries you get black. The subtractive and additive primaries are each exact complementary colours of each other (the complement of one primary is the combination of the other two primaries), hence:
Red -> complement is green plus blue = Cyan
Green -> complement is red plus blue = Magenta
Blue -> complement is red plus green = Yellow
That is how we get the acronyms for the primary colours: RGB is ordered by wavelength and CMY represents the complement of RGB.
Anyways, science hadn't established modern colour theory before much of the work done by renaissance painters was completed--colour theory of that time was based upon observation and aesthetics. They saw rainbows, came up with colour wheels, saw how their pigments blended and such and came up with their own set of primary colours. In this case they divided the colour wheel into FOUR parts and picked four primary colours such that each primary had another primary as a complement (it was all about subtractive colour theory too--they didn't know much about the additive primaries of light to have the six primaries we have now). Those colours are roughly RED, YELLOW, GREEN and BLUE (picked as they are the most prominent in rainbow spectrums observed in nature).
The colours of the Microsoft Windows logo are the four "renaissance painter's primaries". Each pair complements the other and are both bold and pleasing to the eye. The poster ianare is basically right, all four colours are pri,aries in one sense or another, though the details weren't quite complete.
It's not like they're going to send Mounties to the U.S. or require ISPs to block Facebook.
YES facebook IS VERY MUCH bound by Canadian law and it IS enforceable to a large degree. And yes, Facebook CAN be taken to court if they do not make efforts to meet the commissioner's recommendations.
If Pandora can be ordered to refuse entry to non Americans via geolocation, etc. to adhere to DMCA and license agreements in the US, you can ABSOLUTELY expect that Facebook can be ordered to shut off access in Canada (note that this does NOT involve ISPs--it is a function of the web site itself). Proxies, etc. make enforcement imperfect, but by law in both cases the website MUST take "reasonable efforts" to abide by local laws.
Only if websites refuse to cooperate would the issue be escalated to more draconian means (the Canadian gov't CAN file lawsuits in an American juristiction or an international venue you know--and CRTC can mandate ISPs follow certain rules too)
whether this is a problem or such action is right or wrong, it CAN be done.
Just because there's users on FB from all around the world, it doesn't mean that FB has to abide by all countries' laws. If that were the case, the Internet would be a hobbled and useless mess.
MadCow.
Actually it doesn't matter where servers are located--what matters is how business is conducted in the country in question. Also, the Internet is hobbled and a mess, though it is still rather useful.
There is already historical precedent. Totalitarian governments, notably those of China and Cuba, thoroughly monitor Internet traffic and routinely block sites that conflict with their propaganda. The Pirate Bay was hosted in Sweden, but it is banned in China and several EU countries have had legal battles over allowing their citizens to visit the site. Then there are legal sites that restrict access--I cannot use Pandora from home (though at my office of my former employer I could, because the corporate proxy was in the US). People in my home country have been convicted on child pornography charges based upon underground sites hosted in another continent. By Quebec law, technically a company doing "significant business" in that province MUST provide French language pages--hosting outside the province does not prevent the "language police" from taking action if they wanted to.
Nobody, not even Facebook, can operate above the law with impunity using the excuse that their computers are not in the country. They conduct business here (notably, a number of apps ARE hosted physically in Canada, so it isn't just that end users are here--they are illegally sharing private information with Canadian facebook app hosts), they have to follow our rules.
Who cares? Well I care--whether I agree with specific laws I want to know that foreign operations are held to the same standards that we must meet ourselves. And, as is apparent in the news, the Canadian government cares a great deal too.
...if you aren't comfortable with "being evil" then don't go there.
#1 More pay, most techies have a "salary cap" for their position and can only reach a certain level, managers go all the way to the top aka CEO. Also when the company starts having losses the first ones they downsize are techies.
There is such a thing as "enough pay". I don't care how rich I am, if I hate what I do to get that money I'd be unhappy. There are lots of ways to make six figures in a highly technical career. That is enough for most people--if you don't think so then you might want to re-evaluate your priorities.
Also, in the case of my former emplyer the techies were NOT the first to be laid off--the first were "middle management"--the ones that seemed to me "district X manager" or some such title, where "x" changed every other year (or even more often). Hourly labour was next when a manufacturing facility was shut down and work was consolidated in another facility. Techs were about the third round of layoffs. Thing is, if the need to cut costs is deep enough NOBODY is immune to layoffs, unless you are VERY high up the chain, and at 39, most people are at a point where they are "mid-level" in a corporate structure--and at that level it is managers that are MOST vulnerable.
#3 As you age it becomes harder and harder to understand new technical trends.
Not everyone gets dementia when they get older--most people retain more than enough of their cognitive abilities well past retirement age. It seems everyone who complains about ageism in an argument to go into management is most guilty of it themselves. You don't become mentally feeble at forty. Old dogs CAN learn new tricks, and besides, someone has to fix the messes left behind by young techies who are still over-confident in themselves and make poorly thought-out decisions.
Furthermore, making the argument that you should leave tech for management when you get older because you aren't mentally sharp enought to keep up with tech implies that management is for the feeble-minded. Please don't make such an implication--being an effective manager requires one to be mentally sharp, and besides, there are already way too many ineffective, feeble-minded managers out there.
#4 Managers have better benefits and the "golden parachute" clause in that if they fire you or lay you off, you get a nice severance package.
This is not the case unless your title includes the words "president", "chief" or "officer". Severance is generally based on salary and years of employment. If you are a mid-level techie or a mid-level manager you are likely to get similar severance pay as you're likely to have the same length of employment and not-too-different salaries. More technically oriented layoff victims are also more likely to be brought back on a consulting basis.
#5 Any company that is willing to promote a techie to a management position is a valuable company to work for,
Only if they are able to recognise if that person has a knack to manage a team of people. A technical person without an aptitude for management skills is probably worse than a manager who is good at managing but lacks technical skills--primarily because a good manager knows how to delegate such tasks effectively.
Think about how many young people are being graduated all over the world today.
Think about how many old people, particularly post WW2 baby-boomers, that are being RETIRED all over the worrld today, and in the near future.
Think how are they eager to work for way less than you get.
Think about how starved employers are for people with experience, in the primes of their careers, to replace seemingly un-replaceable retirees.
Think how faster than you they are at learning new things.
Think about how arrogant some of these young people are, fresh faced and book-smart that question even what works well because they think there is a better way, but don't have the experience to know why things are done the way they are.
Now where'd you put the only asset you have, i.e. experience?
Well, my experience is highly technical, and I have an aptitude for technically-oriented jobs. I am also fairly creative. Because of that and the fact I am fairly introverted and have to work at "people-oriented" tasks harder than others, I'd direct ny career towards areas where my natural strengths are in more demand. For example, technical consulting, engineering/design, etc. and avoid a career focused more on pure management.
I find that people who are just "managers" are more disposable anyways. From what I've seen in bigt corporations most of them get to a certain level then they are shuffled around like deck chairs, and in this recession in particular they seem to be the first targets for layoffs and take the longest to find new work. Only people who are REALLY GOOD managers (MBA or no) that become presidents and CEOs and stuff do well--and the chance of that is the same as the chance your son in little-league has of eventually getting into the majors. If you are strongly technical you can learn what management skills you require and leverage your strengths as a highly paid consultant. They always seem busier than managers anyways...
Ageism in tech is very real,
In my experience, ageism in any professional career is very real. Management is no more immune in its quest for "fresh blood" at times.
Get on the management track while you can
I think that is quite bad advice, and I think that the perception that you have to go into a management role, with a fancy title, as you get older to be respected or seen as successful is maybe the single biggest reason so many disposable "PHB" type managers are out there. Not everyone has an aptitude for management and I'd say perhaps slightly more than half of managers are not suited to the task--hence the stereotype.
The best way to counter ageism is to pursue a career path that you truly enjoy and that you are inclined to do well--if you do that you become MORE highly regarded with age, as older and WISER, rather than being regarded as old and stale. That said, I cannot give this person the right advice--only they can decide for themselves. If you are conflicted you probably don't know yourself as well as you could.
As part of a package when I was laid off I got a good severance plus my former employer paid for the use of an employment agency with workshops and "career coaches" and things. They have you take these aptitude tests that seem pretty silly and time consuming at first, but they spit out reports that can be pretty insightful. I know myself pretty well so I found it was more validation of the test for the most part, however even then the results report contained very good adjectives and a "personality summary" that are perfect for resumes (the Birkman test is well established and still popular though there are others). In the article poster's case it may show an aptitude slightly more toward technical than managerial, or it might show he is a "persuasive" personality that could be suited to technical sales (or some other option not considered). I urge people at a career crossroads to look into the services of these kinds.
I know people in their 60s that are in design/engineering/technical professions that still make a comfortable living and are highly respected and sought after. There is no law that you can only program in COBOL or FORTRAN77 once you enter middle age--experience transcends the technology of the day. Furthermore there is no need for a technical career to stop progressing at hard technical skills. You don't need to stay in tech support, or be a code jockey cranking out lines of Java, or assembling PCBs. You can go into electronic design (make your own processors, etc), or be a software or systems "architect" who selects/designs technologies/platforms/protocols/interfaces/etc and writes the specs that programmers and testers work against. You can still be a highly paid "technical consultant" as well--I don't do much in the way of project management but I often find myself as the "technical lead" responsible for the architecture of systems, consulting on the technical aspects of the work more than on managing the work as it is being done. In those technical career areas, "old and wise" is respected, so don't discount ANY career option because you think you are "too old". That is too often an excuse to accept being in a career path that makes you miserable.
Clearly it is the most evil code on the planet. It kills baby seals I heard. GTK is responsible for all that subprime lending that triggered this massive economic meltdown too, right? Geeeez.
The think I like least about each of Firefox, OpenOffice and GIMP is the user interface, for which I blame GTK. For example, Firefox's application chooser dialog makes me want to slit my wrists.
Yes, GTK's ancestry is tied to GIMP in some long dark distant past...but to blame shortcomings in ANY of those applications you mention on GTK makes about as logical and sensible as the statement I made above. First and foremost it doesn't matter if you use the greatest toolkit/framework/tools/etc in the universe, you can make an application that is absolutely horrible to use. KDE and KOffice weren't horrible, but to many they've lacked in features, design and usability at various points in time. The massive upheaval between KDE 3.x and KDE 4.x wasn't just done on a whim--their development communities went headlong into what they had to know was going to be a long, painful process to make KDE relevant again, and all through that time qt adherents would probably argue that qt was a more elegant platform throughout. The thing is, GNOME had the upper hand from a usability perspective for some time because much was done to make the environment more usable, perhaps at the expense of the DEVELOPER experience. Now KDE is back to being competitive in that space and some might say has the upper hand again because in addition to being competititve as a user environment it has a more elegant native development toolkit in the form of qt.
With Mozilla and Oo.org in particular your assertion makes no sense at all--both of those applications don't even natively depend upon GTK OR qt at all! Integration with GTK (or, at a desktop level, GNOME) or qt (or KDE) in both of these apps is a "retrofit" and it sometimes shows. Since FF and Oo.org both place a very high degree of emphasis on cross-platform support they may make sacrifices in native UI environment integration from time to time--or at least questionable choices. FF does have its won XUL-based alternative if I recall, so you can still get around any GTK limitations. However, there is much that could be done by FF developers to better use the GTK wigit, and GTK being GPLed there is nothing at all preventing mozilla developers from contributing to the GTK project to address shortcomings pointed out by their users. Perhaps the argument is there that GTK ought to rethink the design of its file chooser, but that isn't really an example of an overall GTK design/architectural shortcoming but rather a higher-level discussion.
This study seems to be mis-reported. It isn't that being a bit overweight reduces mortality slightly--it is that the definition of "overweight" based upon an arbitrary number calculated using an incorrect formula called BMI is incorrect.
If studies are showing that people who have lower mortality and/or better health overall are in the wrong classification, it is time to re-define the classifications at the least, or overhaul the entire methodology.
First of all, BMI is such a flawed measure of health that it is not only useless it borders on harmful. The formula itself makes no sense physically--it is a ratio of mass to SQUARE of height. The SQUARE? That rougly correlates to an area...hence the formula only makes sense if people are rougly the shape of a sheet of paper! A more reasonable approximation would have us use the CUBE of our height. Better yet, use the power of 2.5 as body shape varies with height in a similar fashion. Even better, the heght^2 factor should be modified to (waist circumference)* (height^2) as it is clinically demonstrated that carrying mass about the waist causes increased health problems.
There are also assumptions that are made that many people don't fit into, making all statistics based on BMI invalid and discredited:
* the BMI standards indicating 25 and up is overweight assume a sedentary lifestyle. Those who work in labour-intensive jobs (construction, farm labour, etc) or do weight training are likely to skew upwards. Likewise active people who run marathons, or do cardio-intensive activities might skew downwards and report underweight even though they are in very good health.
* Becasue of the flawed formula to calulate BMI subjects it only demonstrates significant validity within a narrow height range--perhaps between 1.65m to 2m in height. As such, children cannot be measured against the standard BMI scale (charts are used instead but even those are flawed). Very tall people are also found to be mis-classified.
* 25 is an arbitrary cut-off with no clinical evidence conclusively justifying the overweight label. This study suggests the limit should be raised if BMI continues being used as an indicator. It is bewildering, but some suggest the number should be LOWERED--but that is mostly suggested in Asia where people tend to be shorter than the range where the normal standard works and the standards need adjusting.
By BMI I am 4kg away from being "clinically obese" yet by percentage body fat I am just inside the "physically fit" category most of the time (I vary between 15 to 20 percent fat depending on method used to estimate and time of year, etc--fair bit higher than "athelete" but in a healthy range). I am health conscious but no means exceptionally different in build from a great many people, especially those raised in rural Canada as I was. The BMI does loosely correlate with health problems, but becasue of how severely flawed it is it is dangerous to put too much credence in it, yet disturbingly BMI is too often abused:
* governments base health policies on BMI--public money is spent to combat obeisity as defined using this incorrect methodology
* insurance companies and so on base premiums in part on BMI. Being falsely classified as obese could be costly.
* people, especially women, are always under pressure to lower weight to meet what is oftentimes an unrealistic goal. Instead of focusing on health, there is a fixation on achieving an arbitrary look or number. The BMI is all the more damaging because unlike Cosmo which is all image and no substance, BMI is preceived as a clinical measurement that indicates health. There may be many weight consious people fixated on BMI when...FOR THEM...it may not be adviseable to worry about being "under 25" and instead just focus on a healthy diet and level of physical activity.
My thought is, as joking posted elsewhere in this discussion, that BMI is perpetuated by an large by the weight-loss industry. If focus was put on actual health indicators--or at
...but copyright is the wrong battle here I think.
But how can someone sue for a copyright violation when there was no copyright?
There is always a copyright. All works are protected by copyright law, including this very post and yours (yeah I quoted you...if you wanted you could sue me but your case for damages would be weak, but you still have that right).
You would've figured that out if you RTFA--and you didn't even need to follow a link to do it! But, this is /. and RTFA is just not done here unless you are weird I guess--especially if you are trying to be first post.
Anyways, there is a problem with using copyright as the legal weapon in this battle. Since you are too busy to RTFA, this is why:
1 the work is NON-registered. Without registering copyright in a timely manner you are limited to actual, direct monetary damages.
2 the "work" is a catty rant on myspace--little to no tangible worth to that being supply exceeds demand by a huge margin and nobody has to pay to see it.
3 do the math: 1 plus 2 equals you get nothing in court. Daddy lost his business? Sorry. not actual, direct damages to the creator. Denied.
A civil case based on "false light publication" is a better alternative I'd think, as briefly mentioned in the article. The principal acted in appalling fashion and should lose his job and be sued into oblivion. Sad how such an immature person of such weak moral character could be in a position of professional responsibility like that. Perhaps a symptom of low pay and inadequate respect for the job. The newspaper also did very shoddy work in publishing the letter without verifying the source. I mean...that seems like a very basic common sense thing to do. Intent was clearly malicious and meant to deceive. Strictly speaking if the principal should have prefaced the letter with something like "this is what one of my students thinks about this town" and as a professional kept the contributor anonymous...and disclosed that he/she was the contributor of the letter not the original author. Teachers always tell students to properly cite works not created by them...it is disgraceful that the principal would not set a proper example.
Additionally, criminal prosecution should be pursued against those making treats. Either this girl said something especially offensive or she is right about her town. People who would utter threats or work to destroy the livelihood of innocent family members not associated with the author's statements hardly deserve to be called human beings. But, I suppose the author herself might have been a nasty person herself...I can't make those judgements conclusively without knowing the whole story.
So what does SCO have other than a few patents that may or may not be invalid, the name, and a whole lot of bad press?
Their thin and questionable patent portfolio is probably a diversion tactic. The takeover of its legitimate operations by the shell corporation unXis is, as PJ concludes, a crass attempt to shelter assets from losses related to litigation, the way a deadbeat tries to avoid child support by selling all his assets into a corporation in the Cayman Islands. It leaves SCO itself to be the little rubber room in which Darl can bounce around his delusional claims. Of course, the devil is in the details, and though they would be two corporate entities they'd be involved in each others affairs like dirty shirts...meaning that the smaller or weaker customers of unXis could be offered for sacrifice before the altar of Darl, in return for being isolated from IBM and Novel's countersuits.
One thing PJ doesn't highlight but sounds "interesting" to me is that significant investment through unXis will be directed toward the development of a "next generation UNIX platform". This bears some attention as far as interaction with SCO goes as well. In weird and wacky SCO-land they believe Linux is a derivative of their own "one true UNIX". Their wild Dr. Evil plan could involve the development of a Linux-based distribution. unXis would provide "enhancements" to their own distribution including DRM and activation, perhaps through technology licensed from Microsoft (who, based on their own filed patents, are at the forefront of crippleware technology). Needless to say, they'd provide no source code at all and would break Linux compatability or retain it where they feel it makes strategic sense in the marketing dept. This would be an unXis product, but the SCO litigation machine would continue to exist to continue the litigation circus claiming that since the "UNIX IP" belongs to unXis (because SCO sold it to them) and that Linux stole important parts of UNIX, that Linux is unXis' to steal back, so the GPL be damned. Though the courts have ruled that UNIX wasn't SCOs to sell, that is under appeal and being delusional, they are optimistic the decision will be reversed on appeal and some day decades from now they'll be awarded billions from IBM that they can invest in the legal destruction of Linux and perhaps the GPL itself.