Does this mean I'll have to pay for a full price licences for my Tivo, Router and network enabled coffee maker instead?
Nope, the way the case works the licesne fee sets the maximum damages in the case that they took you to court.
It is unlikely that SCO can claim any damages because the plaintif in any tort is required to mitigate their damages. In other words someone drops a cigarette near your house, you watch the cigarette set fire to your lawn, your deck and you do nothing to try to stop it even though you are sitting next to a fire extinguisher. The person who dropped the ciggarett asks to use the fire extinguisher, you refuse. No you cannot claim the cost of rebuilding the house as damages.
In this case SCO has deliberately avoided mitigating its damages by refusing to be specific as to which parts of the code are in dispute. They know that the minute they do so those parts of the O/S will be rewritten whether or not there is a genuine copyright issue.
SCO cannot claim for damages that it is intentionally causing. The users of Linux have a right to avoid infringement by using an alternative implementation not covered by a SCO copyright claim.
Given the spending habits of Congress, I think Bush may actually be doing a smart thing in creating a deficit so that they can't get out of control with spending.
That would be a better theory if the Republican Congress and Republican Whitehouse had not gone on a major spending spree.
Rumsfeld started off with a plan to reorganize the Pentagon, dropping numerous weapons programs still designed for a war against the Soviets. But those programs are built in Republican Senators districts. The result is that the US is now funding both the old and the new strategy in full. The only program to be cancelled is crusader, and that has not so much been cancelled as modified.
The farm bill massively inflated subsidies to big agriculture. The education bill would also have hiked spending if it had been funding.
Sorry, the facts are conmpletely against you, this administration has shown absolutely no interest in slowing spending or making any difficult choice about what programs to cut.
Then we have the war with Iraq which has cast $75 billion so far with Congress debating an additional $87 billion. That is $162 billion over the first 18 months of what will be at least a six year engagement. Do the math, that war will end up costing at least a trillion dollars.
You are right in anticipating an eventual cash crunch. The fact is though that there is no way that the seniors are going to allow their social security or medicare programs to be cut. Most direct government services are actually paid for by the states. That leaves the Pentagon as the vast majority of the discretionary budget.
What these fiscal policies mean if continued is the end of the US as a superpower. Having spent the USSR into oblivion the GOP is busy trying to spend the US into oblivion.
As for tax cuts for the wealthiest having a beneficial economic impact, even the Whitehouse does not dare to claim that the Bush economy (either of them) is even half as good as the Clinton economy. This has nothing to do with investment, it is all about looting.
Bush is smart to lower taxes, but stupid to create hidden taxes such as farm subsidies (or any subsidies, for that matter).
The deficit is the biggest hidden tax of all. Bush has done absolutely nothing to reduce taxes, over the next twenty years the US taxes will rise steeply as a direct result of his policies.
The farm bill rises taxes twice, first it raises the cost of food in the US so consumers will pay, second it raises the debt which will exentually have to be paid.
Cutting taxes is only a good thing if you have a sustainable budget surplus or you can cut spending to match. This administration has done nothing at all to restrain spending - exepct on a tiny number of projects they are ideologically opposed to.
The result of the Bush deficits - half a billion this year at least is going to be higher borrowing and higher interest rates. That is going to reduce growth and decrease jobs.
Believe the right wing fairy stories about how eliminating the inheritance tax will create jobs if you choose, the empirical observations are against it. Barring highly punitive tax rates in the region of 75% or so, the only type of tax cut that causes a rise in tax revenues are capital gains tax cuts which tend to create a short windwall boost in income as people take the opportunity to cash out.
Time for America to wake up and realise that its been had.
How does the study of capitalism *not* relate to the study of free markets?
The term was like many political labels initially applied as a term of abuse. In this case it was Marx who identified control of capital as the means by which the upper class kept the lower orders suppressed.
I strongly suspect that if it had not been for the scare that Marx gave Victorian Britain with his predictions of revolution that the revolution he predicted would have occurred. Social conditions were pretty bad in the 1860s and if it had not been for the social reformers it is doubtful that the UK would have avoided revolution.
The 'capitalism' that Marx railled against has relatively little in common with modern economic systems. The closest comparison would be to the 'crony capitalism' of Asia or Halliburton's activities in Iraq.
The role of capital in capitalism has changed significantly because it is no longer a scarce resource in the way it once was.
Incidentally if the free market was the root of capitalism then the last farm bill would make the Us a communist nation. The US is one of the most protectionist powers on earth, particularly under this administration.
Nuclear technology is a triumph of physics--it's something no other animal has mastered.
No other animal has invented spam either, your point would be?
The problem with nuclear power is political. The industry has simply told too many lies in the past 50 years. The industry claimed that the light water reactor designs are fail-safe. That is untrue, conventional reactor designs are all based on a nuclear pile that is prevented from going critical by means of a series of fallible, albeit redundant safety systems.
This design and the pebble bed reactor design look like the type of system that should have been built all along. The problem was that civil nuclear power programs were essentially spin-offs from military programs to build bombs. All graphite core reactors are based on the pile that Fermi built on a university squash court as proof of concept for the Manhattan program.
The fact people are now suspicious of nuclear power does not show that they are either ignorant or stupid, quite the opposite. The industry has a lot to prove and the burden of proof now lies with them.
How is Sun being "destroyed by Linux?" If Sun is unable to adapt and improve their product line, aren't they killing themselves?
The SPARC processor is slow, much slower than the Pentium line. Sun cannot possibly afford to spend what it takes to keep up with Intel.
The only way Sun has been able to keep competitive is to throw more porcessors into the same box. That is an old trick and a game that two can (and do) play.
As soon as Linux arrived there was no future for Solaris at the low end. Universities are not going to buy roomfulls of SPARC boxes when they can get a faster and cheaper box from Dell.
Linux has shifted the center of gravity of the UNIX world to the Intel processor platform. Before Linux the Intel Unices were either pretty feeble or so pricey that you might as well buy a real workstation.
Now the center of gravity has shifted Sun is on the wrong side of the cost amortization curve. They are trying to recoup their R&D costs on a shrinking revenue base so there is less for them to invest in making their product better meaning that the revenue base falls even further.
Oh and the fact that half the engineers in sun spend more time thinking about Microsoft's strategy than about Sun's is certainly not helping.
Mirosoft is the enemy. Microsoft has always been the enemy. Hell, Sun was founded with Microsoft as the the enemy. The concept goes right to their core.
Pretty wierd attitude if true, when Sun was founded Microsoft was a little itty bitty software house that made most of its money from selling applications software for the Mac. The MSDOS business was about as important as the BIOS industry is today - cash cow with little growth.
The hardware industry has always been subject to the iron law that there is no high end. To find out why read 'the innovator's dilema'. It is much easier to move upmarket than downmarket. Dell know how to build large numbers of machines with tiny margins. It is not a huge step to move from there to building large machines with lots of processors.
The talk about high bandwidth, R&D etc is pretty specious. If Dell wanted to get into the real high end they could buy the same knowledge and expertise for a pitance from SGI which trod the same path Sun is now on five to ten years earlier.
Before very long Sun won't be in the workstation and low cost server market at all. They will continue to make big iron for a while but they will always be under attack from PC makers moving upmarket.
The basic problem that Sun faces is that Intel's annual R&D budget is larger than Sun's market cap. Intel will always have access to a better fab process, better design technology, more people.
Sun's original breakthrough came because it moved to RISC at exactly the right time. At the time CPU designs were usually created by small teams of four or five lead designers and a small number of assistants. The big advantage of RISC was that you optimized the CPU design to the compiler rather than the assembly coder. RISC designs started without any legacy to support, that meant that you could complete your design faster and get to market with a cuting edge fab process a year before CISC rivals.
That advantage is long gone. At this point there is no real difference between designing the next generation SPARC and designing the next generation Pentium. Both are now decades old architectures with mountains of legacy code to support.
Even Intel finds it difficult to keep up with the development of the Pentium. Their problems with Merced are largely due to the fact that the Pentium team have a big enough resouce advantage to overcome their legacy architectural constraints.
Sun is simply playing a poker game that is too rich for its purse.
You are comparing a 1U rack optimized server(Sun) to a desktop case(Dell). If takes a lot more engineering(and money) to make a powerful server in a 1U form factor.
Go tell that to the marines.
The only reason that the whole PC industry did not switch to the 1U form factor is the fact that the original IBM PC had expansion cards mounted on an edge connector.
Making servers is actually easier than making workstation or desktop PCs in many ways. A server does not in general have to support a bus for a high end graphics card.
There are of course some differences when you get to the real high performance world, interleaved memory, wide memory busses etc. But Sun does not offer anything like that on its 'budget' range.
Sun could have been in a far better position today if they had fired that idiot Scott McNealy five years ago.
I think Scott realized that he was running the company into the ground and started the whole Microsoft feud to give himself an alibi when the company went belly up. Sun is being destroyed by Linux, not Windows.
Where's Darl McBride on the top 50? I'd say he's pretty influential right now. Look at him, he has the UNIX world groveling before him!
You have to be skeptical of the methodology. This is just a list of the top 50 best known people in tech. It says nothing about influence.
Take for example the listing of Knuth who has been retired for several years at this point. About twenty of the people on the list are CTOs or CEOs of barely known startus with a 95% probability of disappearing without a trace.
They got a small number of positions right. Linus, Gates are near the top. But why are Balmer and Tim Berners-Lee right at the bottom?
Nobody active in the IETF or OASIS standards processes is mentioned - these are the people who really set trends for the industry.
The secret of these lists is that the real parameter being measured is number of press mentions in the rag that compiles them which in turn tends to translate into number of advertisements...
Criticizing is one thing. The claims of "War Criminal" trumped up by the neo-nazis are another. Sure, I criticize Sharon, but I criticize him for having an ugly plasticy haircut.
Actually it was an Israeli judicial investigation that determined Sharon was responsible for the war crimes committed in Shabra and Chatila.
Glad to hear that you believe that right wingers that break the law should be prosecuted. I hope you will join me in calling for Schwatzenegger to be prosecuted for his admitted acts of sexual harassment.
This seems to be assuming "Trusted Computing" is intended to benefit users.
I don't necessarily expect there to be end users on the machines I intend to run Palladium on. I want an effective means of hardening a server against compromise.
Slashweeniedom might want to take a look at the people who have worked on Palladium before claiming that Microsoft employees know nothing about security. Butler Lampson won the Turing award for his work on computer security.
There are only two applications I can think of that make sense from an end user application. One is voting, the other is setting up a wallet type application for payments.
I don't think Palladium works for the RIAA DRM case. It has the same weakness as DeCSS, it can be broken through hardware compromise of a single machine.
No, he gets favor by antisemites due to his recent "code-worded" anti-semitic statements about Israel and Middle Eastern terrorism.
You know Rush, you are really insufferable on the days you can't get your oxy-contin fix.
If criticizing the Sharon government was anti-semitic then most of the jews living in Israel are anti-semitic.
The problem with you Rush is that you are a bigott and an idiot. You just spew out this stream of hatred and you can't stop it no matter how stupid it makes you look.
Have luck finding a new job now ESPN fired you. You might want to start looking before the sponsors of your radio show decide they don't want their program associated with a drug adict.
He didn't dodge: he served stateside, as have many. He didn't desert, either. The AWOL thing is an urban legend traced to some rumor from someone's girlfriend. Desertion/AWOL is an actual criminal charge: Bush was never charged with it
Bush was never charged with his insider trading at Harken, daddy appointed the investigator. The AWOL charge has been established as fact many times, his commanding officer confirms that he never saw him turn up for duty. If there was no evidence then 300 newspapers would not have published this week's Doonsbury strip which makes the same charge.
Of course, thank you Tom Daschle. The Democrats have been undercutting the administration at every turn in the efforts of increasing the deaths of US soldiers
You really are an arrogant little shit. Perhaps Tom Daschle would be the two people in the administraqtion who leaked the name of a CIA operative to Bob Novak and 6 other journalists out of spite. Yeah, that fits, Bob Novak's eyesight must have been faulty.
Even then, the Democrats have little chance. The fact remains that Lieberman is Jewish. There is a strong anti-semitic contingent in the Democratic Party
Yeah, that would be why Lieberman would be trailing Dean, Dean only has a Jewish wife and children so he takes a smaller hit on the anti-semitism front.
Lieberman has zero chance of being nominated because he is a Republican, to be precise he is Bob Dole.
I have heard from some people involved in the grid that it is a triumph of PR over substance, and that it is not going to be as well-used and participated in as the press releases suggest...
Well when I was working on the Web at CERN they already had comprehensive facilities for distributing computing jobs over large numbers of workstations. Most physics code is pretty easy to parallelise at the event level - whether it be simulations or analysis. So no, it is very clear that the grid will be extensively used. The real question is how novel it is.
The part where the article is completely off is where they describe CERN as the people who invented the Web. Nope, they kicked us all out abart from Bernard C. back in 1995 because they wanted to concentrate on physics and did not want competition for the headlines from the Web folk.
I have not seen the grid computing code. Hopefully it is better than the standard CERN fare. At the time I was there everything had to be written in FORTRAN. They were imensely proud of CERNLIB which was probably the buggiest piece of software in the history of the field, yet they all used it in their analysis.
I remain convinced that the Z0 particle is actually the result of a bug in the GEANT simulation. Meanwhile the Higgs boson has been produced in huge numbers but overlooked because of a bug in PAW (pronounced Poor). Once upon a time physicists redid each other's experiments, now they share each other's programs.
Things might have changed over the past ten years of course. I doubt that CN division is still predicated on maintenance of CERNVM being the top and only priority.
Clark will do himself in. Most of his statements are outright lies: he is living in a fantasy world.
Letsee,
Clark = purple heart, bronze star, silver star, four star General, commander of NATO.
Bush = dodged draft, deserted Texas national guard, dressed up in flight suit to play top gun on an aircraft carrier.
Which one do you think is living in a fantasy world?
As for lies, Bush repeatedly claims to have told people that his campaign pledge to balance the budget was conditional, but there is absolutely no record of him ever making that statement. A campaign pledge is a campaign pledge, even if the claim to have mentioned the conditions to a reporter were true he made no mention of them when he made his campaign pledge. Sounds to me like a playground sneak who says his promise does not count because he had his fingers crossed behind his back.
It is now crystal clear that Bush lied in the state of the union speech when he gave his rationale for invading Iraq.
Bush and Rumsfeld may not have lied when they led the country to believe that the invasion and occupation of Iraq would be a 'cakewalk' but they were certainly proved to have been wrong. And today US troops are dying as a result of the fantasies of Bush and Rumsfeld.
The report said that reliance on a single software vendor exposes one to undue security risks. Do you have any basis whatsoever for disagreeig with that conclusion?
Yes, security is merely risk control and considering any given risk in isolation is specious.
Having a single vendor may introduce certain risks, so far I have not heard any that I think are valid but they could exist. Having multiple vendors also introduces risk. In particular you have the risk that a program that has been tested on one platform will behave differently on a different one leading to errors. That is a real risk, is it undue? I do not know, nor does anyone else, it all depends on your application.
The single vendor leading to viruses risks is only valid in the particular and not in the general. If everyone in the world had an IBM PC and you were the only person in the world runing Open Genera then you are probably safe from virus attack. But it does not follow that if everyone in the world chooses Open Genera that everyone is safe.
The effect that Geer is pointing to is the fact that the propagation of a virus is dependent on the probability that the virus will infect another host. A simple virus that only targets one platform will not propagate very quickly in a multi-platform environment. But that merely forces virus writers to code viruses that attack multiple platforms.
The single host argument is frequently repeated on slashdot but that does not make it true.
The only case where the single platform argument does hold is when you have fault tolerant systems and you are concerned to make sure that they are resistant to software failures. This is an interesting theory but in practice it is probably better to commit your resources to writing one copy of the code and making that as bug free as possible. Code errors tend to have path dependencies.
>The report was a baddly written crock
This may be true -- I haven't read it.
But you think that on the basis of a slashdot discussion you have enough information to take on someone who did read it? The paper is online, it is not exactly hard to find.
There is absolutely zero reason for a paper intended to summarize problems with a company's products to contain "original ideas".
The title of the report claims to be addressing national security issues. The report itself only considers a single software vendor. The report is passing itself off in a false light.
As you point out the report does nothing but attack one vendor, that does not appear to me to be a constructive consideration of cybersecurity.
When you get inside the first thing you find is a lengthy discription of Moore's law, Metcalfs Law, pretty much everything appart from Sod's law. And at the end of it you find absolutely nothing to tell you why the enumeration of these laws has anything to do with cybersecrity in general or Microsoft code in particular.
That sets the pattern for the rest of the report. It reads like a sophomore's term paper that contains reference after reference to irrelevant material that only appears to have been thrown in for the purpose of demonstrating that the author has done the background reading.
Look, man. Come back to reality. He's working in the private sector. What the heck do you think *happens* in the private sector? Microsoft comes up with people funded to make Linux look bad all the time. Big companies do this all the time.
And if any of my employees went off and participated in a similar hit job against a major customer I would fire them as well.
You keep saying that the report is OK because it is business. Well in business you don't have academic tenure. A CTO is paid to be a PR representative for the company. You expect your CTO at least to stay on message.
You are exactly right on this. The only damage done here is to the credibility of @stake and to Microsoft, and that is self-inflicted.
The biggest hit is to the credibility of the authors. The report was a baddly written crock. The only reason it is popular on slashdot is the choice of target. In terms of its arguments it is Matt Drudge or Michael Moore rather than Stephen Jay Gould.
I could not find a single original thought. You can find more interesting arguments in an average slashdot post.
It is not just the opinions stated in the report but the use made of them. Academics do not routinely brief the press over the papers they are releasing. Geer was clearly grinding an axe.
It is one thing to write a report that is critical of a customer's software. It is quite another to participate in a press call organized by the customer's competitors with the sole purpose of damaging the competitor.
I've seen George Will lie about Clark lying. Will cut-n-paste the transcript from the June 15th Meet the Press to construct statements Clark never said. I've seen Rush repeat Will's lie in the WSJ. I haven't seen Clark lie.
The GOP must be really scared here. I think their big fear is that they know that Shrub's military career was phony.
Clinton and Bush both dodged the draft. But Clinton did not then ponce arround aircraft carriers wearing a flight suit.
The constituency with whom you have a gripe here is not large corporations, but rather those who claim to represent supposedly small independent inventors -- this lobby group fiercely opposed international harmonization, fought the publication right, insisted on the "US-only" publication exception and limited the scope of remedies of an inventor.
Absolutely, open source has little or nothing to fear from big corporations. Microsoft and IBM both have massive patent portfolios that could be used to sink open source in a second if they chose. But most of those patents are only ever intended for defensive use. In most cases they are only filled for the sole purpose of preventing someone else filling.
I don't know if there is any presidential candidate who has ever taken the lead on intellectual property issues, at least not in this century -- can anybody think of an example?
Jefferson and Ben Franklin were both keen, but they were also genuine inventors and in those days you had to be able to carry the invention in the door to get a patent.
The Dean campaign is listening very hard to the open source community. I believe that the patent issue is the one that matters most to them.
You know, not to nitpick, but that "Top Gun stunt" was nothing more than following regs. You get into the cockpit of that plane, you are going to wear a flight suit. Period.
Which is why any other President would have used a helicopter. The carrier was within range at the time of the stunt.
Bush is the first person with the title President of the US to wear a military uniform while in office. There is a reason for that that goes right back to the founding of the republic. The founders were even more keen on the idea of separating the military and politics than separation of church and state. They did not want a Cromwellian 'protectorate'.
Gen Washington made it a point never to wear his military uniform after he was elected president. The republic was to be firmly under civilian control.
Of course Bush does not understand any of that so he broke one of the most important traditions of the republic for the sake of a phot-opportunity.
In trying to look big Bush ended up looking small.
No WMD have been found, the economy's still not creating jobs, and you think the President's biggest problem is that he took a joy ride in a government airplane?
I see it as a metaphor for a commander in chief who was from start to finish a showboat. military types don't like showboats.
Of course the top gun stunt would not have mattered much if the Iraq war had not turned sour, if the economy was not in the tank, if the budget deficit was not pushing $600 billion. But it was hubris and it was a hostage to fortune.
Dukakis got slated for taking a ride in that tank. The topgun stunt was Bush's equivalent, a self inflicted PR disaster.
The criticism of the Iraq war that nobody seems to have an argument against is the claim that the Bushies had no post-invasion planning. They were warned repeatedly that the occupation would not be the cakewalk that they had predicted and planned for. 'Mission Acomplished' my ass.
So far we have spent $80 billion on the invasion and there is a supplemental for a further $87 billion before Congress - much of which is in effect aleady spent. It does not look likely that the occupation will be over for at least another 5 years leaving a total bill of at least $400 billion. If we get out before that it will be because we have allowed the Kurds to effectively declare autonomy in the north, tolerate a pro-Iranian shia Mulahtocracy in the south and heaven help us in the middle.
"I still believe in e=mc, but I can't believe that in all of human history, we'll never ever be able to go beyond the speed of light to reach where we want to go," said Clark. "I happen to believe that mankind can do it."
Actually this is not excluded by Einstein, just that we have no idea how to do it. The key is the concept of space which is actually mutuable. There are ways that we already know about that can warp space in absolutely infintesimal ways. Could there be a way to do it on a large scale? Possibly. There are serious scientists who consider such problems.
Faster than light travel is certainly a much longer shot than fussion, we know that fussion is possible and the sun provides an existence proof. But faster than light is probably a much easier shot than building a missile defense system that can't be circumvented by the opposition. None of the proposals made so far work and none is capable even in theory of counteracting existing countermeasures such as the UK Chevalene warhead design that is so old it was recently withdrawn from service as obsolete.
What we are seeing here is an example of a classical smear attack. I strongly suspect that the original question was asked for the sole purpose of being able to trash Clark as a loony with an out of context quote. Karl Rove and his smear-team did the exact same thing with Gore last time round, they took a bunch of out of context quotes from Gore's ecology book and used them to claim that Gore was some sort of nut. In fact the prediction Gore made about the possible rise of the hydrogen economy and the decline of the internal combustion engine is far from fruitcake, thats why the Whitehouse included $100 million for H2 power research in the last budget.
Wesley Clark is cuter and has a really nice uniform. Does Dean have a cool uniform? If Clark's parties are better, I'm voting for him
Almost but not quite as irrelevant as the brand of Web server the candidate runs. I still think that Bush is going to really regret doing that stupid Top Gun stunt next November. It isn;t the uniform, its the way you wear it.
I see one big issue for the Open Source Community in the next election and it is not promoting open source. The big issue is PATENTS and Dean is at least listening to the right people here - Larry Lessig.
We don't want much here, we just want the USPTO to actually apply in practice the principles that it claims to apply.
Novel should mean novel, do something on the Internet that has been done for 20 years is not novel.
Prior review get rid of the secrecy in the process, all applications to be subject to a one year protest period, same as the Europeans do
You have to invent it there are a ridiculous number of speculative patents filled where the inventor has actually invented nothing. Typical cases are in the genetics field where the first person to sequience a gene often files a patent that claims the use of the gene to solve every imaginable ailment before the 'inventor' knows anything about what the gene does
Anyone care to claim a bigger priority? This is a platform that everyone can agree on from Redmond WA to Cambridge MA.
It's important to realise that this is *not* an open source development effort for a presidential campaign.
Deanspace have forked Drupal 4.2 and added their own custom modules. They don't actually talk much to the folk at drupal.org (certainly not on the developers list), which is a pity. We've yet to see any contributed code come back to our CVS server.
Sounds to me like you ar griping because the Dean folk forked. Well sorry buddy, that is part and parcel of the OSS game. Anyone can fork anytime.
I suspect that the issue here is more likely to be that the Dean folk who are developing the Web site would not want to be advertised as such on a developer list and the fact that political campaigns tend to be rather hecktic. I would not expect to see much code put back into the source tree until sometime in November 2004.
The Deanies have put the tools out there in the public domain, maybe not in the form you would wish but they are out there.
Slashdot Mirror
Nope, the way the case works the licesne fee sets the maximum damages in the case that they took you to court.
It is unlikely that SCO can claim any damages because the plaintif in any tort is required to mitigate their damages. In other words someone drops a cigarette near your house, you watch the cigarette set fire to your lawn, your deck and you do nothing to try to stop it even though you are sitting next to a fire extinguisher. The person who dropped the ciggarett asks to use the fire extinguisher, you refuse. No you cannot claim the cost of rebuilding the house as damages.
In this case SCO has deliberately avoided mitigating its damages by refusing to be specific as to which parts of the code are in dispute. They know that the minute they do so those parts of the O/S will be rewritten whether or not there is a genuine copyright issue.
SCO cannot claim for damages that it is intentionally causing. The users of Linux have a right to avoid infringement by using an alternative implementation not covered by a SCO copyright claim.
That would be a better theory if the Republican Congress and Republican Whitehouse had not gone on a major spending spree.
Rumsfeld started off with a plan to reorganize the Pentagon, dropping numerous weapons programs still designed for a war against the Soviets. But those programs are built in Republican Senators districts. The result is that the US is now funding both the old and the new strategy in full. The only program to be cancelled is crusader, and that has not so much been cancelled as modified.
The farm bill massively inflated subsidies to big agriculture. The education bill would also have hiked spending if it had been funding.
Sorry, the facts are conmpletely against you, this administration has shown absolutely no interest in slowing spending or making any difficult choice about what programs to cut.
Then we have the war with Iraq which has cast $75 billion so far with Congress debating an additional $87 billion. That is $162 billion over the first 18 months of what will be at least a six year engagement. Do the math, that war will end up costing at least a trillion dollars.
You are right in anticipating an eventual cash crunch. The fact is though that there is no way that the seniors are going to allow their social security or medicare programs to be cut. Most direct government services are actually paid for by the states. That leaves the Pentagon as the vast majority of the discretionary budget.
What these fiscal policies mean if continued is the end of the US as a superpower. Having spent the USSR into oblivion the GOP is busy trying to spend the US into oblivion.
As for tax cuts for the wealthiest having a beneficial economic impact, even the Whitehouse does not dare to claim that the Bush economy (either of them) is even half as good as the Clinton economy. This has nothing to do with investment, it is all about looting.
The deficit is the biggest hidden tax of all. Bush has done absolutely nothing to reduce taxes, over the next twenty years the US taxes will rise steeply as a direct result of his policies.
The farm bill rises taxes twice, first it raises the cost of food in the US so consumers will pay, second it raises the debt which will exentually have to be paid.
Cutting taxes is only a good thing if you have a sustainable budget surplus or you can cut spending to match. This administration has done nothing at all to restrain spending - exepct on a tiny number of projects they are ideologically opposed to.
The result of the Bush deficits - half a billion this year at least is going to be higher borrowing and higher interest rates. That is going to reduce growth and decrease jobs.
Believe the right wing fairy stories about how eliminating the inheritance tax will create jobs if you choose, the empirical observations are against it. Barring highly punitive tax rates in the region of 75% or so, the only type of tax cut that causes a rise in tax revenues are capital gains tax cuts which tend to create a short windwall boost in income as people take the opportunity to cash out.
Time for America to wake up and realise that its been had.
The term was like many political labels initially applied as a term of abuse. In this case it was Marx who identified control of capital as the means by which the upper class kept the lower orders suppressed.
I strongly suspect that if it had not been for the scare that Marx gave Victorian Britain with his predictions of revolution that the revolution he predicted would have occurred. Social conditions were pretty bad in the 1860s and if it had not been for the social reformers it is doubtful that the UK would have avoided revolution.
The 'capitalism' that Marx railled against has relatively little in common with modern economic systems. The closest comparison would be to the 'crony capitalism' of Asia or Halliburton's activities in Iraq.
The role of capital in capitalism has changed significantly because it is no longer a scarce resource in the way it once was.
Incidentally if the free market was the root of capitalism then the last farm bill would make the Us a communist nation. The US is one of the most protectionist powers on earth, particularly under this administration.
No other animal has invented spam either, your point would be?
The problem with nuclear power is political. The industry has simply told too many lies in the past 50 years. The industry claimed that the light water reactor designs are fail-safe. That is untrue, conventional reactor designs are all based on a nuclear pile that is prevented from going critical by means of a series of fallible, albeit redundant safety systems.
This design and the pebble bed reactor design look like the type of system that should have been built all along. The problem was that civil nuclear power programs were essentially spin-offs from military programs to build bombs. All graphite core reactors are based on the pile that Fermi built on a university squash court as proof of concept for the Manhattan program.
The fact people are now suspicious of nuclear power does not show that they are either ignorant or stupid, quite the opposite. The industry has a lot to prove and the burden of proof now lies with them.
The SPARC processor is slow, much slower than the Pentium line. Sun cannot possibly afford to spend what it takes to keep up with Intel.
The only way Sun has been able to keep competitive is to throw more porcessors into the same box. That is an old trick and a game that two can (and do) play.
As soon as Linux arrived there was no future for Solaris at the low end. Universities are not going to buy roomfulls of SPARC boxes when they can get a faster and cheaper box from Dell.
Linux has shifted the center of gravity of the UNIX world to the Intel processor platform. Before Linux the Intel Unices were either pretty feeble or so pricey that you might as well buy a real workstation.
Now the center of gravity has shifted Sun is on the wrong side of the cost amortization curve. They are trying to recoup their R&D costs on a shrinking revenue base so there is less for them to invest in making their product better meaning that the revenue base falls even further.
Oh and the fact that half the engineers in sun spend more time thinking about Microsoft's strategy than about Sun's is certainly not helping.
Pretty wierd attitude if true, when Sun was founded Microsoft was a little itty bitty software house that made most of its money from selling applications software for the Mac. The MSDOS business was about as important as the BIOS industry is today - cash cow with little growth.
The hardware industry has always been subject to the iron law that there is no high end. To find out why read 'the innovator's dilema'. It is much easier to move upmarket than downmarket. Dell know how to build large numbers of machines with tiny margins. It is not a huge step to move from there to building large machines with lots of processors.
The talk about high bandwidth, R&D etc is pretty specious. If Dell wanted to get into the real high end they could buy the same knowledge and expertise for a pitance from SGI which trod the same path Sun is now on five to ten years earlier.
Before very long Sun won't be in the workstation and low cost server market at all. They will continue to make big iron for a while but they will always be under attack from PC makers moving upmarket.
The basic problem that Sun faces is that Intel's annual R&D budget is larger than Sun's market cap. Intel will always have access to a better fab process, better design technology, more people.
Sun's original breakthrough came because it moved to RISC at exactly the right time. At the time CPU designs were usually created by small teams of four or five lead designers and a small number of assistants. The big advantage of RISC was that you optimized the CPU design to the compiler rather than the assembly coder. RISC designs started without any legacy to support, that meant that you could complete your design faster and get to market with a cuting edge fab process a year before CISC rivals.
That advantage is long gone. At this point there is no real difference between designing the next generation SPARC and designing the next generation Pentium. Both are now decades old architectures with mountains of legacy code to support.
Even Intel finds it difficult to keep up with the development of the Pentium. Their problems with Merced are largely due to the fact that the Pentium team have a big enough resouce advantage to overcome their legacy architectural constraints.
Sun is simply playing a poker game that is too rich for its purse.
Go tell that to the marines.
The only reason that the whole PC industry did not switch to the 1U form factor is the fact that the original IBM PC had expansion cards mounted on an edge connector.
Making servers is actually easier than making workstation or desktop PCs in many ways. A server does not in general have to support a bus for a high end graphics card.
There are of course some differences when you get to the real high performance world, interleaved memory, wide memory busses etc. But Sun does not offer anything like that on its 'budget' range.
Sun could have been in a far better position today if they had fired that idiot Scott McNealy five years ago.
I think Scott realized that he was running the company into the ground and started the whole Microsoft feud to give himself an alibi when the company went belly up. Sun is being destroyed by Linux, not Windows.
You have to be skeptical of the methodology. This is just a list of the top 50 best known people in tech. It says nothing about influence.
Take for example the listing of Knuth who has been retired for several years at this point. About twenty of the people on the list are CTOs or CEOs of barely known startus with a 95% probability of disappearing without a trace.
They got a small number of positions right. Linus, Gates are near the top. But why are Balmer and Tim Berners-Lee right at the bottom?
Nobody active in the IETF or OASIS standards processes is mentioned - these are the people who really set trends for the industry.
The secret of these lists is that the real parameter being measured is number of press mentions in the rag that compiles them which in turn tends to translate into number of advertisements...
Actually it was an Israeli judicial investigation that determined Sharon was responsible for the war crimes committed in Shabra and Chatila.
Glad to hear that you believe that right wingers that break the law should be prosecuted. I hope you will join me in calling for Schwatzenegger to be prosecuted for his admitted acts of sexual harassment.
I don't necessarily expect there to be end users on the machines I intend to run Palladium on. I want an effective means of hardening a server against compromise.
Slashweeniedom might want to take a look at the people who have worked on Palladium before claiming that Microsoft employees know nothing about security. Butler Lampson won the Turing award for his work on computer security.
There are only two applications I can think of that make sense from an end user application. One is voting, the other is setting up a wallet type application for payments.
I don't think Palladium works for the RIAA DRM case. It has the same weakness as DeCSS, it can be broken through hardware compromise of a single machine.
You know Rush, you are really insufferable on the days you can't get your oxy-contin fix.
If criticizing the Sharon government was anti-semitic then most of the jews living in Israel are anti-semitic.
The problem with you Rush is that you are a bigott and an idiot. You just spew out this stream of hatred and you can't stop it no matter how stupid it makes you look.
Have luck finding a new job now ESPN fired you. You might want to start looking before the sponsors of your radio show decide they don't want their program associated with a drug adict.
Bush was never charged with his insider trading at Harken, daddy appointed the investigator. The AWOL charge has been established as fact many times, his commanding officer confirms that he never saw him turn up for duty. If there was no evidence then 300 newspapers would not have published this week's Doonsbury strip which makes the same charge.
Of course, thank you Tom Daschle. The Democrats have been undercutting the administration at every turn in the efforts of increasing the deaths of US soldiers
You really are an arrogant little shit. Perhaps Tom Daschle would be the two people in the administraqtion who leaked the name of a CIA operative to Bob Novak and 6 other journalists out of spite. Yeah, that fits, Bob Novak's eyesight must have been faulty.
Even then, the Democrats have little chance. The fact remains that Lieberman is Jewish. There is a strong anti-semitic contingent in the Democratic Party
Yeah, that would be why Lieberman would be trailing Dean, Dean only has a Jewish wife and children so he takes a smaller hit on the anti-semitism front.
Lieberman has zero chance of being nominated because he is a Republican, to be precise he is Bob Dole.
Well when I was working on the Web at CERN they already had comprehensive facilities for distributing computing jobs over large numbers of workstations. Most physics code is pretty easy to parallelise at the event level - whether it be simulations or analysis. So no, it is very clear that the grid will be extensively used. The real question is how novel it is.
The part where the article is completely off is where they describe CERN as the people who invented the Web. Nope, they kicked us all out abart from Bernard C. back in 1995 because they wanted to concentrate on physics and did not want competition for the headlines from the Web folk.
I have not seen the grid computing code. Hopefully it is better than the standard CERN fare. At the time I was there everything had to be written in FORTRAN. They were imensely proud of CERNLIB which was probably the buggiest piece of software in the history of the field, yet they all used it in their analysis.
I remain convinced that the Z0 particle is actually the result of a bug in the GEANT simulation. Meanwhile the Higgs boson has been produced in huge numbers but overlooked because of a bug in PAW (pronounced Poor). Once upon a time physicists redid each other's experiments, now they share each other's programs.
Things might have changed over the past ten years of course. I doubt that CN division is still predicated on maintenance of CERNVM being the top and only priority.
Letsee,
Clark = purple heart, bronze star, silver star, four star General, commander of NATO.
Bush = dodged draft, deserted Texas national guard, dressed up in flight suit to play top gun on an aircraft carrier.
Which one do you think is living in a fantasy world?
As for lies, Bush repeatedly claims to have told people that his campaign pledge to balance the budget was conditional, but there is absolutely no record of him ever making that statement. A campaign pledge is a campaign pledge, even if the claim to have mentioned the conditions to a reporter were true he made no mention of them when he made his campaign pledge. Sounds to me like a playground sneak who says his promise does not count because he had his fingers crossed behind his back.
It is now crystal clear that Bush lied in the state of the union speech when he gave his rationale for invading Iraq.
Bush and Rumsfeld may not have lied when they led the country to believe that the invasion and occupation of Iraq would be a 'cakewalk' but they were certainly proved to have been wrong. And today US troops are dying as a result of the fantasies of Bush and Rumsfeld.
Yes, security is merely risk control and considering any given risk in isolation is specious.
Having a single vendor may introduce certain risks, so far I have not heard any that I think are valid but they could exist. Having multiple vendors also introduces risk. In particular you have the risk that a program that has been tested on one platform will behave differently on a different one leading to errors. That is a real risk, is it undue? I do not know, nor does anyone else, it all depends on your application.
The single vendor leading to viruses risks is only valid in the particular and not in the general. If everyone in the world had an IBM PC and you were the only person in the world runing Open Genera then you are probably safe from virus attack. But it does not follow that if everyone in the world chooses Open Genera that everyone is safe.
The effect that Geer is pointing to is the fact that the propagation of a virus is dependent on the probability that the virus will infect another host. A simple virus that only targets one platform will not propagate very quickly in a multi-platform environment. But that merely forces virus writers to code viruses that attack multiple platforms.
The single host argument is frequently repeated on slashdot but that does not make it true.
The only case where the single platform argument does hold is when you have fault tolerant systems and you are concerned to make sure that they are resistant to software failures. This is an interesting theory but in practice it is probably better to commit your resources to writing one copy of the code and making that as bug free as possible. Code errors tend to have path dependencies.
This may be true -- I haven't read it.
But you think that on the basis of a slashdot discussion you have enough information to take on someone who did read it? The paper is online, it is not exactly hard to find.
There is absolutely zero reason for a paper intended to summarize problems with a company's products to contain "original ideas".
The title of the report claims to be addressing national security issues. The report itself only considers a single software vendor. The report is passing itself off in a false light.
As you point out the report does nothing but attack one vendor, that does not appear to me to be a constructive consideration of cybersecurity.
When you get inside the first thing you find is a lengthy discription of Moore's law, Metcalfs Law, pretty much everything appart from Sod's law. And at the end of it you find absolutely nothing to tell you why the enumeration of these laws has anything to do with cybersecrity in general or Microsoft code in particular.
That sets the pattern for the rest of the report. It reads like a sophomore's term paper that contains reference after reference to irrelevant material that only appears to have been thrown in for the purpose of demonstrating that the author has done the background reading.
Look, man. Come back to reality. He's working in the private sector. What the heck do you think *happens* in the private sector? Microsoft comes up with people funded to make Linux look bad all the time. Big companies do this all the time.
And if any of my employees went off and participated in a similar hit job against a major customer I would fire them as well.
You keep saying that the report is OK because it is business. Well in business you don't have academic tenure. A CTO is paid to be a PR representative for the company. You expect your CTO at least to stay on message.
The biggest hit is to the credibility of the authors. The report was a baddly written crock. The only reason it is popular on slashdot is the choice of target. In terms of its arguments it is Matt Drudge or Michael Moore rather than Stephen Jay Gould.
I could not find a single original thought. You can find more interesting arguments in an average slashdot post.
It is not just the opinions stated in the report but the use made of them. Academics do not routinely brief the press over the papers they are releasing. Geer was clearly grinding an axe.
It is one thing to write a report that is critical of a customer's software. It is quite another to participate in a press call organized by the customer's competitors with the sole purpose of damaging the competitor.
The GOP must be really scared here. I think their big fear is that they know that Shrub's military career was phony.
Clinton and Bush both dodged the draft. But Clinton did not then ponce arround aircraft carriers wearing a flight suit.
Absolutely, open source has little or nothing to fear from big corporations. Microsoft and IBM both have massive patent portfolios that could be used to sink open source in a second if they chose. But most of those patents are only ever intended for defensive use. In most cases they are only filled for the sole purpose of preventing someone else filling.
I don't know if there is any presidential candidate who has ever taken the lead on intellectual property issues, at least not in this century -- can anybody think of an example?
Jefferson and Ben Franklin were both keen, but they were also genuine inventors and in those days you had to be able to carry the invention in the door to get a patent.
The Dean campaign is listening very hard to the open source community. I believe that the patent issue is the one that matters most to them.
Which is why any other President would have used a helicopter. The carrier was within range at the time of the stunt.
Bush is the first person with the title President of the US to wear a military uniform while in office. There is a reason for that that goes right back to the founding of the republic. The founders were even more keen on the idea of separating the military and politics than separation of church and state. They did not want a Cromwellian 'protectorate'.
Gen Washington made it a point never to wear his military uniform after he was elected president. The republic was to be firmly under civilian control.
Of course Bush does not understand any of that so he broke one of the most important traditions of the republic for the sake of a phot-opportunity.
In trying to look big Bush ended up looking small.
I see it as a metaphor for a commander in chief who was from start to finish a showboat. military types don't like showboats.
Of course the top gun stunt would not have mattered much if the Iraq war had not turned sour, if the economy was not in the tank, if the budget deficit was not pushing $600 billion. But it was hubris and it was a hostage to fortune.
Dukakis got slated for taking a ride in that tank. The topgun stunt was Bush's equivalent, a self inflicted PR disaster.
The criticism of the Iraq war that nobody seems to have an argument against is the claim that the Bushies had no post-invasion planning. They were warned repeatedly that the occupation would not be the cakewalk that they had predicted and planned for. 'Mission Acomplished' my ass.
So far we have spent $80 billion on the invasion and there is a supplemental for a further $87 billion before Congress - much of which is in effect aleady spent. It does not look likely that the occupation will be over for at least another 5 years leaving a total bill of at least $400 billion. If we get out before that it will be because we have allowed the Kurds to effectively declare autonomy in the north, tolerate a pro-Iranian shia Mulahtocracy in the south and heaven help us in the middle.
Actually this is not excluded by Einstein, just that we have no idea how to do it. The key is the concept of space which is actually mutuable. There are ways that we already know about that can warp space in absolutely infintesimal ways. Could there be a way to do it on a large scale? Possibly. There are serious scientists who consider such problems.
Faster than light travel is certainly a much longer shot than fussion, we know that fussion is possible and the sun provides an existence proof. But faster than light is probably a much easier shot than building a missile defense system that can't be circumvented by the opposition. None of the proposals made so far work and none is capable even in theory of counteracting existing countermeasures such as the UK Chevalene warhead design that is so old it was recently withdrawn from service as obsolete.
What we are seeing here is an example of a classical smear attack. I strongly suspect that the original question was asked for the sole purpose of being able to trash Clark as a loony with an out of context quote. Karl Rove and his smear-team did the exact same thing with Gore last time round, they took a bunch of out of context quotes from Gore's ecology book and used them to claim that Gore was some sort of nut. In fact the prediction Gore made about the possible rise of the hydrogen economy and the decline of the internal combustion engine is far from fruitcake, thats why the Whitehouse included $100 million for H2 power research in the last budget.
Almost but not quite as irrelevant as the brand of Web server the candidate runs. I still think that Bush is going to really regret doing that stupid Top Gun stunt next November. It isn;t the uniform, its the way you wear it.
I see one big issue for the Open Source Community in the next election and it is not promoting open source. The big issue is PATENTS and Dean is at least listening to the right people here - Larry Lessig.
We don't want much here, we just want the USPTO to actually apply in practice the principles that it claims to apply.
Novel should mean novel, do something on the Internet that has been done for 20 years is not novel.
Prior review get rid of the secrecy in the process, all applications to be subject to a one year protest period, same as the Europeans do
You have to invent it there are a ridiculous number of speculative patents filled where the inventor has actually invented nothing. Typical cases are in the genetics field where the first person to sequience a gene often files a patent that claims the use of the gene to solve every imaginable ailment before the 'inventor' knows anything about what the gene does
Anyone care to claim a bigger priority? This is a platform that everyone can agree on from Redmond WA to Cambridge MA.
Deanspace have forked Drupal 4.2 and added their own custom modules. They don't actually talk much to the folk at drupal.org (certainly not on the developers list), which is a pity. We've yet to see any contributed code come back to our CVS server.
Sounds to me like you ar griping because the Dean folk forked. Well sorry buddy, that is part and parcel of the OSS game. Anyone can fork anytime.
I suspect that the issue here is more likely to be that the Dean folk who are developing the Web site would not want to be advertised as such on a developer list and the fact that political campaigns tend to be rather hecktic. I would not expect to see much code put back into the source tree until sometime in November 2004.
The Deanies have put the tools out there in the public domain, maybe not in the form you would wish but they are out there.