To all those that get into the details of how it is unfair and/or crazy and/or unreasonable to punish Microsoft for bundling WMP specifically, I have one thing to say:
The idea is that if someone sends in a bug report, including a print of dmesg, the developers can quickly see that there's a binary only driver involved in which case the bug reports is invalid. Debugging a kernel is hard enough as it is without also catering for parts for which you do not have the source code. So, there's an actual reason for the message, 'tainted', meaning unsupported.
About the servers and bandwith, I think that for the long-term stability of a project the size of Wikipedia, some sort of p2p solution must be devised. The alternative is a strong company footing the bill (with no strings attached, yeah right). Otherwise it might go under due to its success.
However, there's plenty of bandwidth in the world, and there's plenty of people that will be willing to donate some of their bandwith to a project like wikipedia. I personally would have no problem serving 20% of my uplink permanently to it.
There just no infrastructure to utilize the bandwith to serve pages. As far as I can see, editing pages needs to be centralized, but the serving and viewing of pages could in principle be decentralized and shared amongst the users. Grossly simplified: Wikipedia will run the tracker and redirect the request to an auxillary.
Given the dynamic nature of the Wikipedia, and the fact that it needs to serve webpages, not files, the technological hurdles are daunting, but some sort of shared load does seem to be needed in order to make the project long term sustainable. And with long term, I mean a few centuries.
The EU has actually waited a long time to let the US take care of the issues with Microsoft. Only after Bush let them off the hook did the EU start to pursue this course of action. So, in all fairness, the EU has been very lenient towards Microsoft, but since the US government doesn't seem to care about its own markets, the EU starts defending theirs.
All Microsoft would have to do then is pull their products from Europe, and the EU would have a lot of problems from companies and consumers alike.
And kill themselves in the process? First off, once they pull out, the software will not magically cease functioning. European business will have time to migrate. Then they will start losing their large international customers. No more Microsoft Exchange for any company that has an office in Europe. Same goes for MS office. What use is a spreadsheet if a large part of your company cannot read it? Once the big boys are using something else, smaller fish will follow the big boys and it won't take too long before Microsoft will make software only for the Redmond city council.
An international software company that cannot operate in about a third of the world economy will necessarily become just a local player.
Doesn't work that way. If Microsoft would be foolish enough to pay the 5M a day and show that they're not amending their ways, next month the court will make it 10M, then 20M, then it will start seizing assets, and a whole string of unpleasentness will occur for the company. Effectively they'll be kicked out of the EU and that means that their monopoly will slowly crumble, as international companies dealing with the EU are forced to look for alternatives than Microsoft.
One poster here seems to have a solution: regardless of bickering about 'technical effects' and things like that, pass another law that states that merely publishing software or running software can never be a patent infringement.
Rather than making a distinction, you could allow the patents, but have a law that says that merely publishing software or running software can never be a patent infringement.
Now that's a very good idea! Someone care to mod to mod the parent up? It would seemingly solve the entire issue about 'technical effects' etc.
When reading the original post, I'm wasn't really envisioning a system where the government is being asked if something can be published or not on a per article basis. That should simply be free and unchanged: you sent in a paper, and it gets printed after peer review. What I thought about would be more like a system where for a whole bunch of journals every year a ranking is made for the top contributing countries and a bill is sent to the respective countries. If the bill is not paid, open access to the journals is prohibited for that country (while pay-per-view access still exists).
Lots of problems and problematic negotiations with this approach as well, but not impossible. Being high on such a list would be expensive, but would at the same time mean that the country is on the forefront of international research in that area. A high ranking would thus give lots of bragging points, and most governments that are interested in research would love to score high on such a list.
How do you think that currently the unemployed genius in Zimbabwe gets access to the most up to date scientific results?
I don't see the problem you are spotting. Government funded research expects the researchers to publish. So they're already funding authoring papers. Why would suddenly a government prevent scientists from publishing if they will have to foot another bill? Especially if this means that their entire country gets free access to international research, bringing the cost of maintaining an up to date library way down?
I said it elsewhere, but I think it's important enough to say it again. If you think the constitution is enough democracy for the EU for a century or so, vote yes. If you think we deserve something better than the current constitution, vote no.
If the constitution is adopted in its current form, it will most likely be ALL the democracy you will EVER see in the EU. Constitutions tend to stick around for a long time.
Indeed, constitutions are not set in stone, however, particularly the important bits are loathe to change. Addition of minor stuff like voting rights for women are commonplace, but true wholesame change of the distribution of power? The only example I can think of is France that seems to change Republics after every major crisis, but this only happens every half century or so. Do you really feel happy with the though that maybe in 2055 the executive power of the EU will be given to elected officials?
It's a tough call, this. On the one hand we want to make the EU more democratic, on the other hand, the constitution as it stands is only a step in the right direction. BUT, it's a constitution, so it is likely to be around for a long, long time. So, if you vote yes for the constitution in the expectation that it will make the EU more democratic, it possibly will, but it is all you're EVER going to get. If you vote no, it will stay undemocratic for a while longer, but with the possibility to make stepwise progress.
In other words, only vote yes for the consitution if you think this is the way the EU needs to be governed for the next couple of centuries. If you need more to feel happy with the EU, vote no. I guess.
Young boys are violent and aggressive. Simple as that. I grew up with two brothers and any prolonged period of inactivity (like watching television for half an hour) was bound to lead to a period of heightened activity, a.k.a. a fight. Violent games were and are great, although we also loved pinball. At school young boys will fight with each other. They will also play soldier and tend to have greatest fun playing to shoot eachother. Give two young boys a stick each and ten to one they will (a) shoot eachother with it, or (b) start fighting as if they were swords. It's in the nature of the beast.
I honestly don't see that yet another game, say grand-theft auto, will really enhance the violent fantasies of boys. They don't need a stinking computer game to be violent, really.
Wow, and after Cpt'n Hector speaks, the entire fabric of psychological, sociological research caves in, bringing also the entire healthcare industry to its knees in its wake. Causation in these fields is usually untestable, all there is is correlation. All the testing done on rats and other furry laboratory animals to test new drugs only show correlation, not causation. The further tests on human subjects only add to the correlation, not to the causation. The fact that an asprin works has never been proven, there's only correlations.
Ok, having that off my chest, the research cited by the GP sounds extremely suspicious, not because of the correlation issue, but because of the results. First off, a difference of 2% in such low ranges, needs an awful lot of people to be significant. Furthermore, you need to be extremely careful about selecting your groups here. There's for instance a very distinct possibility that people that are susceptible to violant crime actually like to play violant games (this is where the correlation != causation card can be played). If that is the case, maybe violent games reduce violant crime, who knows. All in all it is very difficult to test all this in a 8 year study with the appropriate control groups in place, but I don't have definite criticism as I didn't actually read it. The correlation != causation is however the wrong form of critisism for a scientific study of this sort.
I'm sorry, you need to qualify this: publically traded corporations in the US and the UK are required to maximize return on investment for their investors. This is called the Anglo-Saxon model of corporate governance. Next to this there is also the (failing) Rhineland model, and I'm sure the French and Italians have their own idea of the duties of a publically traded corporation. In Europe there's a fairly well-developed notion of stakeholders next to shareholders, and a corporation is not run at the whim of the latter only. There is a movement currently to adopt more and more of the Anglo-Saxon model, but given the amount of drivel about being unethical is a corporations duty that comes from this, I doubt it'll last.
In this particular case, EU commisioner McCreevy (the one in charge of this area) has explained to the parliament that the move to apparently push it through is to force the council of ministers to make a decision here. It's the council of ministers that put the proposal on the table last year and they are the ones that should clean up the mess. They are the ones that ignored the EU parliament the first time around, and they are the ones (most notably the German and Dutch) that ignored their own parliaments. It's up to them now.
For people unaware of this, the council of ministers is democratically elected and is formed by the ministers in the government of the separate nations. They are a bunch of backstabbing hypocrites, just like any other politician, but the situation is not as bleak as suggested by the parent. The EU parliament is indeed pretty powerless, but then again, the EU is not a federation and when you hear your government tell you that 'Europe' has decided something, it is always the council of ministers (i.e., the lying basterds themselves) that voted it into legislation. The EU commission can do no such thing.
Paying the CEO a 7 figure salary and 8 figure bonus is going to cost money.
Paying out the shareholders is going to cost money. Running a huge advertisement budget is going to cost money. Finding inventive ways of not paying tax is going to cost money. Buying the local officials to grant you a monopoly is going to cost money. Buying legislation in DC is going to cost money.
Not that I'm saying government run services is going to be cheaper, but I am fed up with the myth that (big) business is lean and mean.
Better still, use the avian carrier protocol to transmit packets to google. If you select carriers attractive enough, I'm sure it will distort google's search technology.
Slashdot Mirror
And in an equally loose sense 3.6 is a double of 2.4
Ah, but you said it in a designated free speech zone. Now try to say it somewhere where it can be heard, by him, or by his followers.
Al Capone was convicted for tax fraud.
What Gauss did do was prove was The Fundamental Theorem of Algebra, showing that there is no need for other numbers next to the real and imaginary.
The idea is that if someone sends in a bug report, including a print of dmesg, the developers can quickly see that there's a binary only driver involved in which case the bug reports is invalid. Debugging a kernel is hard enough as it is without also catering for parts for which you do not have the source code.
So, there's an actual reason for the message, 'tainted', meaning unsupported.
However, there's plenty of bandwidth in the world, and there's plenty of people that will be willing to donate some of their bandwith to a project like wikipedia. I personally would have no problem serving 20% of my uplink permanently to it. There just no infrastructure to utilize the bandwith to serve pages. As far as I can see, editing pages needs to be centralized, but the serving and viewing of pages could in principle be decentralized and shared amongst the users. Grossly simplified: Wikipedia will run the tracker and redirect the request to an auxillary.
Given the dynamic nature of the Wikipedia, and the fact that it needs to serve webpages, not files, the technological hurdles are daunting, but some sort of shared load does seem to be needed in order to make the project long term sustainable. And with long term, I mean a few centuries.
It was, leaves open the question if this is normal indexing, but google does seem to disregard robots.txt for indexing news.
Basically, it's the US's own fault.
And kill themselves in the process? First off, once they pull out, the software will not magically cease functioning. European business will have time to migrate. Then they will start losing their large international customers. No more Microsoft Exchange for any company that has an office in Europe. Same goes for MS office. What use is a spreadsheet if a large part of your company cannot read it? Once the big boys are using something else, smaller fish will follow the big boys and it won't take too long before Microsoft will make software only for the Redmond city council.
An international software company that cannot operate in about a third of the world economy will necessarily become just a local player.
Microsoft will comply, no doubt about that.
One poster here seems to have a solution: regardless of bickering about 'technical effects' and things like that, pass another law that states that merely publishing software or running software can never be a patent infringement.
Now that's a very good idea! Someone care to mod to mod the parent up? It would seemingly solve the entire issue about 'technical effects' etc.
Lots of problems and problematic negotiations with this approach as well, but not impossible. Being high on such a list would be expensive, but would at the same time mean that the country is on the forefront of international research in that area. A high ranking would thus give lots of bragging points, and most governments that are interested in research would love to score high on such a list.
How do you think that currently the unemployed genius in Zimbabwe gets access to the most up to date scientific results?
I don't see the problem you are spotting. Government funded research expects the researchers to publish. So they're already funding authoring papers. Why would suddenly a government prevent scientists from publishing if they will have to foot another bill? Especially if this means that their entire country gets free access to international research, bringing the cost of maintaining an up to date library way down?
If the constitution is adopted in its current form, it will most likely be ALL the democracy you will EVER see in the EU. Constitutions tend to stick around for a long time.
Indeed, constitutions are not set in stone, however, particularly the important bits are loathe to change. Addition of minor stuff like voting rights for women are commonplace, but true wholesame change of the distribution of power? The only example I can think of is France that seems to change Republics after every major crisis, but this only happens every half century or so. Do you really feel happy with the though that maybe in 2055 the executive power of the EU will be given to elected officials?
In other words, only vote yes for the consitution if you think this is the way the EU needs to be governed for the next couple of centuries. If you need more to feel happy with the EU, vote no. I guess.
Young boys are violent and aggressive. Simple as that. I grew up with two brothers and any prolonged period of inactivity (like watching television for half an hour) was bound to lead to a period of heightened activity, a.k.a. a fight. Violent games were and are great, although we also loved pinball. At school young boys will fight with each other. They will also play soldier and tend to have greatest fun playing to shoot eachother. Give two young boys a stick each and ten to one they will (a) shoot eachother with it, or (b) start fighting as if they were swords. It's in the nature of the beast.
I honestly don't see that yet another game, say grand-theft auto, will really enhance the violent fantasies of boys. They don't need a stinking computer game to be violent, really.
Ok, having that off my chest, the research cited by the GP sounds extremely suspicious, not because of the correlation issue, but because of the results. First off, a difference of 2% in such low ranges, needs an awful lot of people to be significant. Furthermore, you need to be extremely careful about selecting your groups here. There's for instance a very distinct possibility that people that are susceptible to violant crime actually like to play violant games (this is where the correlation != causation card can be played). If that is the case, maybe violent games reduce violant crime, who knows. All in all it is very difficult to test all this in a 8 year study with the appropriate control groups in place, but I don't have definite criticism as I didn't actually read it. The correlation != causation is however the wrong form of critisism for a scientific study of this sort.
I'm sorry, you need to qualify this: publically traded corporations in the US and the UK are required to maximize return on investment for their investors. This is called the Anglo-Saxon model of corporate governance. Next to this there is also the (failing) Rhineland model, and I'm sure the French and Italians have their own idea of the duties of a publically traded corporation. In Europe there's a fairly well-developed notion of stakeholders next to shareholders, and a corporation is not run at the whim of the latter only.
There is a movement currently to adopt more and more of the Anglo-Saxon model, but given the amount of drivel about being unethical is a corporations duty that comes from this, I doubt it'll last.
For people unaware of this, the council of ministers is democratically elected and is formed by the ministers in the government of the separate nations. They are a bunch of backstabbing hypocrites, just like any other politician, but the situation is not as bleak as suggested by the parent. The EU parliament is indeed pretty powerless, but then again, the EU is not a federation and when you hear your government tell you that 'Europe' has decided something, it is always the council of ministers (i.e., the lying basterds themselves) that voted it into legislation. The EU commission can do no such thing.
Paying the CEO a 7 figure salary and 8 figure bonus is going to cost money. Paying out the shareholders is going to cost money. Running a huge advertisement budget is going to cost money. Finding inventive ways of not paying tax is going to cost money. Buying the local officials to grant you a monopoly is going to cost money. Buying legislation in DC is going to cost money.
Not that I'm saying government run services is going to be cheaper, but I am fed up with the myth that (big) business is lean and mean.
yeah, that might work as well.
Better still, use the avian carrier protocol to transmit packets to google. If you select carriers attractive enough, I'm sure it will distort google's search technology.