In most of America, only two companies are allowed to run wires into your home, the local telco monopoly and the local cable monopoly.
Not true. In California (and many other states), there is no dejure cable monopoly. All cable companies are "allowed" to run cable if they so elect. The nature of the problem isn't that they aren't allowed, but rather that they'd rather not. I.e., they are indeed a natural monopoly. Alas, they are not regulated as one.
It's a very good question. In my region, and I believe most regions, cable is not a dejure monopoly. It is a defacto one. I.e, it is a purely natural monopoly due to the disincentive to a potential competitor of having to lay down duplicate lines. They don't compete with one another because... they don't.:) Herein lies a great deal of the difficulty.
I view thing's like Verizon's FIOS as to be extremely promising in that regard. Alas, I'm stuck with SBC (now AT&T... whoa, blast from the past... you'd think that we would have learned!).
The a la carte system will eventually happen, just not yet. Once all the broadband connections going into enough homes are sufficient to handle the bandwidth (and likewise the core infrastructure along with it), what you'll see is middlemen (like cable companies) getting eliminated. End users will buy their products directly from the manufacturer, so to speak. I'm just waiting for the day where I can buy CNN, the History Channel, SCI-FI, and, um, the Hustler Channel or something. And that's all. Won't be long now. Any delays will be associated with the broadband itself. That's all that's in the way.
Ironically, I don't consider myself "much" of an environmentalist. And I know that she certainly the hell did.
Me, I'm like one of those guys who would wear the PETA: "people for the eating of tasty animals" T-shirts.
Clean air and responsible use of our world's natural resources is just good stewardship.
So does watching out for endangered species, but for me, this is more holistic than about the specifics.
The plight of the snowy owl? *shrug*
Scraping the bottom of the ocean and destroying the basis for many ocean fisheries? Bad stewardship.
I don't really get all excited by peak oil, either. Whatever. It'll just make the renewables more compelling.
The of the $1B a month being shipped of to Iraq right now. I wonder what $1B a month would do if it went into geothermal, wind, and solar panels domestically?
Capitalism in action. Fuck the environment unless it makes you money.
All capitalism really does is reflect popular sentiment through a kind of voting system.
Consider:
Many years back I was speaking with a coworker of mine about Green Mountain Energy, here in California. The price was essentially the same as local power, although occasionally more expensive. I had switched to Green Mountain. My coworker said that she'd looked into it, and that it wasn't worth the price.
The catch? I knew my coworker to be what I call an "environazi". I.e., she was one of those types always going on and on about obscure environmental issues, like the vernal tide pool thingy and the evilness of the local walmart.
It would appear that where it counted, I was more of an environmentalist than she was.
If the "convey" language holds up, then Microsoft could become subject to the GPL if any vouchers get redeemed with GPLv3 code. If it doesn't hold up, then Novell would be in violation of the GPLv3 for releasing code without a correspondingly "viral" patent license.
I don't see how. Microsoft is not a signatory to any GPLv3 agreement. The GPL relies first on ordinary copyright law in order to acquire its legal power, only becoming a contract second, by becoming the one thing the party can depend on to claim that they weren't illegally creating or distributing a derivative work. The definition of "distribute" here is one left to congress to define, or the courts to interpret, as the case may be, according to the copyright laws of the US, not any contract. Since Microsoft does not make or distribute any derivative works of any GPL work, I don't see how the contractual terms can apply.
I recently went to the trouble of reviewing various web sites where this has been talked about at length. There are some claiming that the vouchers either A) constitute a form of distribution, or B) are "contributory infringement" of the same, ala Napster.
I don't understand Claim A at all, and would love to hear coherent argument about how that could be, and Claim B will be rather weak, it is certain, as the concept of "contributory infringement" is itself quite new and rather murky indeed.
And as I said previously, there are plural doctrines of jurisprudence and centuries of judicial interpretation that argue wholesale against the idea of an obscure boo boo suddenly requiring a large company to surrender vast swaths of its property in response to an accident of paperwork. I will summarize them here: "that wouldn't be fair or equitable."
Deep down in their chests, as much as the community doesn't like Microsoft, if one cannot see my summary to be true, one needs to go off into deep contemplation for a while.
I wasn't under the impression that Microsoft currently conveys, or plans to convey, any GPL based code at all. Are you saying they do? If so, I agree with your analysis.
If you're not saying that they do, I disagree with you. Microsoft has no agreement with any GPL holder, and the GPL3 cannot come back to haunt them, except to prevent them from distributing GPLv3 software.
Now, the GPLv3 can haunt Suse very easily. That's a different matter.
I find the whole "Look at all these clever circumstances in our new GPL3 situation that means that we've fucked M$ good an proper" just to be amusing. The Courts uniformly reject these sorts of attempts to ambush someone by contract into unintended consequences. Will never be upheld. The idea fails on not just one but many doctrines of contract interpretation. You can forget it.
In the U.S. I believe it is called an adhesion contract and they are generally valid as long as the terms are reasonable, reasonable to a judge not slashdot readers.:-) To be unreasonable, or more accurately legally unconscionable, oppression or surprise is usually involved.
Or something that wouldn't have been agreed to, had any reasonable person actually read the contract. Another way of looking at it is that if the offerror of the contract had reason to believe it wouldn't have been agreed to had the terms been known, the terms are definitionally "unconcionable."
I meant (price) compared to VMWare. Virtuozzo has management features far beyond Solaris Containers. And hosts Windows, if that's what you need (or not, as the case may be).
Enterprise Management Associates conducted a survey of big users of Virtualization, and asked them to rank order the importance of certain functions of virtualization to their organizations. It was ranked thus:
1. Disaster Site Operations (specifically the use case where main operations are still on metal, but the disaster site is virtual; this is a use case where there are less physical boxes than there are operating systems, so this is a consolidation case, just not the usual one).
2. Increased Agility (as in, clone virtual machines to deploy servers fast).
3. Classic Consolidation.
4. Increased Availability (virtual machines seen as more reliable due to the uniform driver model).
Well; deal is the word "God" to most means some thingy that engages us in our affairs in one way or another, a concept he specifically denied. Meanwhile, he's off in Spinoza's cosmos somewhere, which is deeply into vaguely noncommittal spiritual universe stuff... i.e., less religious than Buddhists, or so it would seem. A vague faith indeed.
Nukes are by far my favorite weapon. "Nuke" is the shortest spelling there is for n-a-t-i-o-n-a-l s-o-v-e-r-e-i-g-n-t-y I can possibly think of. I freaking love nukes. Of course, really our nuclear sub fleet is the balz, and all we need. We should keep those babies hot.
Now, the rest of our military, well, I think we should decommission about half the army, keep the navy hot, and spruce up the marines by quite a lot. The Marine Expeditionary Force force organization concept is also the balz. They were back doing 'joint' when it wasn't a word. Joint by design and all that shit.
Einstein's reverence in the Cosmos, to the degree that one can call it a religion at all, is so far departing from any other modern religious structure, in particular its utter avoidance of Judeo-Christian-Islam beliefs entirely (including the idea of a creator in particular an anthropormophic one, and the idea of life after death, which he not only did not believe in but explicity ridiculed) makes referring to him as "religious" in any normal sense of the word a complete farce.
He wrote entire treatises on the subject, easily found for your reading pleasure. While I will agree that he did believe in "something," I am accustomed to hearing Christians citing Einstein, with his capital 'G' references to God, as if somehow Einstein's 'G' references indicate that he should be supported as something in favor of Judeo-Christian beliefs. Nothing could be further from the truth.
"I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly." -- Albert Einstein
Or to engage your last quote, he specifically denies a God "who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings."
Contemplate this last carefully. The word "religious" is an overloaded operator of the worst kind. However, this last is incompatible with the most *common* "religious" operator in its entirety.
Am I the only one who's worried, and a bit disturbed, that the government is auctioning a natural resource, without being required to have all taxpayers vote on it?
Which country you from? Tax payers don't vote on stuff like this. There's not even a system for collecting such a vote. While some States have such systems, "voter initiatives" or "proposition systems," like California, there is no analogous Federal system.
Slashdot Mirror
In most of America, only two companies are allowed to run wires into your home, the local telco monopoly and the local cable monopoly.
Not true. In California (and many other states), there is no dejure cable monopoly. All cable companies are "allowed" to run cable if they so elect. The nature of the problem isn't that they aren't allowed, but rather that they'd rather not. I.e., they are indeed a natural monopoly. Alas, they are not regulated as one.
C//
It's a very good question. In my region, and I believe most regions, cable is not a dejure monopoly. It is a defacto one. I.e, it is a purely natural monopoly due to the disincentive to a potential competitor of having to lay down duplicate lines. They don't compete with one another because... they don't. :) Herein lies a great deal of the difficulty.
I view thing's like Verizon's FIOS as to be extremely promising in that regard. Alas, I'm stuck with SBC (now AT&T... whoa, blast from the past... you'd think that we would have learned!).
C//
The a la carte system will eventually happen, just not yet. Once all the broadband connections going into enough homes are sufficient to handle the bandwidth (and likewise the core infrastructure along with it), what you'll see is middlemen (like cable companies) getting eliminated. End users will buy their products directly from the manufacturer, so to speak. I'm just waiting for the day where I can buy CNN, the History Channel, SCI-FI, and, um, the Hustler Channel or something. And that's all. Won't be long now. Any delays will be associated with the broadband itself. That's all that's in the way.
C//
Maybe God just likes puffies, you know?
We all have our fetishes. I know I do.
This is my uncle Ron's web site:
http://www.americanenergyindependence.com/
C//
Ironically, I don't consider myself "much" of an environmentalist. And I know that she certainly the hell did.
Me, I'm like one of those guys who would wear the PETA: "people for the eating of tasty animals" T-shirts.
Clean air and responsible use of our world's natural resources is just good stewardship.
So does watching out for endangered species, but for me, this is more holistic than about the specifics.
The plight of the snowy owl? *shrug*
Scraping the bottom of the ocean and destroying the basis for many ocean fisheries? Bad stewardship.
I don't really get all excited by peak oil, either. Whatever. It'll just make the renewables more compelling.
The of the $1B a month being shipped of to Iraq right now. I wonder what $1B a month would do if it went into geothermal, wind, and solar panels domestically?
C//
US Federal budget is almost $3 trillion. Lots of both government as well as commercial investment capabilities exist.
No reason for alarm.
C//
800 to a billion dollars is less than what the US spends on the Iraq war in a week...
l _budget,_2007
The defense budget in 2007 was $699 billion. Total revenue was $2.6 trillion.
Look here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federa
C//
Capitalism in action. Fuck the environment unless it makes you money.
All capitalism really does is reflect popular sentiment through a kind of voting system.
Consider:
Many years back I was speaking with a coworker of mine about Green Mountain Energy, here in California. The price was essentially the same as local power, although occasionally more expensive. I had switched to Green Mountain. My coworker said that she'd looked into it, and that it wasn't worth the price.
The catch? I knew my coworker to be what I call an "environazi". I.e., she was one of those types always going on and on about obscure environmental issues, like the vernal tide pool thingy and the evilness of the local walmart.
It would appear that where it counted, I was more of an environmentalist than she was.
Amusing.
Anyway, this sort of thing is typical.
C//
If the "convey" language holds up, then Microsoft could become subject to the GPL if any vouchers get redeemed with GPLv3 code. If it doesn't hold up, then Novell would be in violation of the GPLv3 for releasing code without a correspondingly "viral" patent license.
I don't see how. Microsoft is not a signatory to any GPLv3 agreement. The GPL relies first on ordinary copyright law in order to acquire its legal power, only becoming a contract second, by becoming the one thing the party can depend on to claim that they weren't illegally creating or distributing a derivative work. The definition of "distribute" here is one left to congress to define, or the courts to interpret, as the case may be, according to the copyright laws of the US, not any contract. Since Microsoft does not make or distribute any derivative works of any GPL work, I don't see how the contractual terms can apply.
I recently went to the trouble of reviewing various web sites where this has been talked about at length. There are some claiming that the vouchers either A) constitute a form of distribution, or B) are "contributory infringement" of the same, ala Napster.
I don't understand Claim A at all, and would love to hear coherent argument about how that could be, and Claim B will be rather weak, it is certain, as the concept of "contributory infringement" is itself quite new and rather murky indeed.
And as I said previously, there are plural doctrines of jurisprudence and centuries of judicial interpretation that argue wholesale against the idea of an obscure boo boo suddenly requiring a large company to surrender vast swaths of its property in response to an accident of paperwork. I will summarize them here: "that wouldn't be fair or equitable."
Deep down in their chests, as much as the community doesn't like Microsoft, if one cannot see my summary to be true, one needs to go off into deep contemplation for a while.
C//
Interesting claim. Explain. Part of the problem is I've never seen one of these "vouchers".
C//
I wasn't under the impression that Microsoft currently conveys, or plans to convey, any GPL based code at all. Are you saying they do? If so, I agree with your analysis.
If you're not saying that they do, I disagree with you. Microsoft has no agreement with any GPL holder, and the GPL3 cannot come back to haunt them, except to prevent them from distributing GPLv3 software.
Now, the GPLv3 can haunt Suse very easily. That's a different matter.
C//
I find the whole "Look at all these clever circumstances in our new GPL3 situation that means that we've fucked M$ good an proper" just to be amusing. The Courts uniformly reject these sorts of attempts to ambush someone by contract into unintended consequences. Will never be upheld. The idea fails on not just one but many doctrines of contract interpretation. You can forget it.
C//
Sure. It's a surprise. But not all surprises are exempted. Only those that would be unconcionable ones. :)
In the U.S. I believe it is called an adhesion contract and they are generally valid as long as the terms are reasonable, reasonable to a judge not slashdot readers.
Or something that wouldn't have been agreed to, had any reasonable person actually read the contract. Another way of looking at it is that if the offerror of the contract had reason to believe it wouldn't have been agreed to had the terms been known, the terms are definitionally "unconcionable."
C//
I meant (price) compared to VMWare. Virtuozzo has management features far beyond Solaris Containers. And hosts Windows, if that's what you need (or not, as the case may be).
C//
...why did Intel just invest $218.5 million in VMware?
Intel has over 60,000 computers in their data centers. Over 40,000 of those servers run VMWare.
Maybe they did it for the discount? Ha.
Joe.
Enterprise Management Associates conducted a survey of big users of Virtualization, and asked them to rank order the importance of certain functions of virtualization to their organizations. It was ranked thus:
1. Disaster Site Operations (specifically the use case where main operations are still on metal, but the disaster site is virtual; this is a use case where there are less physical boxes than there are operating systems, so this is a consolidation case, just not the usual one).
2. Increased Agility (as in, clone virtual machines to deploy servers fast).
3. Classic Consolidation.
4. Increased Availability (virtual machines seen as more reliable due to the uniform driver model).
5. Decreased Cost of Administration.
C//
What you are looking for:
Virtuozzo. OpenVZ. Solaris Containers. BSD Jails. Linux has something (at least one!) too, I forget the name.
In terms of Enterprise class features, Virtuozzo is the best of them, and comparatively cheap.
C//
Well; deal is the word "God" to most means some thingy that engages us in our affairs in one way or another, a concept he specifically denied. Meanwhile, he's off in Spinoza's cosmos somewhere, which is deeply into vaguely noncommittal spiritual universe stuff... i.e., less religious than Buddhists, or so it would seem. A vague faith indeed.
Anyway, check out this http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/religion to see where I'm coming from, when I object to calling Einstein "religious".
C//
Nukes are by far my favorite weapon. "Nuke" is the shortest spelling there is for n-a-t-i-o-n-a-l s-o-v-e-r-e-i-g-n-t-y I can possibly think of. I freaking love nukes. Of course, really our nuclear sub fleet is the balz, and all we need. We should keep those babies hot.
Now, the rest of our military, well, I think we should decommission about half the army, keep the navy hot, and spruce up the marines by quite a lot. The Marine Expeditionary Force force organization concept is also the balz. They were back doing 'joint' when it wasn't a word. Joint by design and all that shit.
C//
Lazlo is just a failed open-source version of Flex-like framework. They open-sourced it since they couldn't sell it.
You are, of course, aware that Adobe is open sourcing Flex, also?
Anyway, I like Flex.
Joe.
Einstein's reverence in the Cosmos, to the degree that one can call it a religion at all, is so far departing from any other modern religious structure, in particular its utter avoidance of Judeo-Christian-Islam beliefs entirely (including the idea of a creator in particular an anthropormophic one, and the idea of life after death, which he not only did not believe in but explicity ridiculed) makes referring to him as "religious" in any normal sense of the word a complete farce.
He wrote entire treatises on the subject, easily found for your reading pleasure. While I will agree that he did believe in "something," I am accustomed to hearing Christians citing Einstein, with his capital 'G' references to God, as if somehow Einstein's 'G' references indicate that he should be supported as something in favor of Judeo-Christian beliefs. Nothing could be further from the truth.
"I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly." -- Albert Einstein
Or to engage your last quote, he specifically denies a God "who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings."
Contemplate this last carefully. The word "religious" is an overloaded operator of the worst kind. However, this last is incompatible with the most *common* "religious" operator in its entirety.
C//
KVM is doing paravirt also, FYI
Am I the only one who's worried, and a bit disturbed, that the government is auctioning a natural resource, without being required to have all taxpayers vote on it?
Which country you from? Tax payers don't vote on stuff like this. There's not even a system for collecting such a vote. While some States have such systems, "voter initiatives" or "proposition systems," like California, there is no analogous Federal system.
C//