Yes, I am very sceptical of this article. I could kind of see ethanol using more energy than it creates, because corn-ethanol is very inefficent, and only exists because of lobbiests, not practical concerns. But when it goes on to say that biodiesal is just as bad, if not worse, my BS detectors went off big time. That has been disproven on many occasion, and with good science mind you, not wishfull-thinking hand-waving. Then they have the gaul to state that solar -> hydrogen is a more realistic alternative? That method of capturing energy from the sun requires significantly more energy than biodeisel!
I'll have to find the actuall paper when I get off work and see what it really says. I am particlarly curious to see what these unnamed "energy uses not accounted in previous studies" are. Till then I can only speculate about how they came up with the results they did, but I'm definately don't plan on taking this at face value until I've had time to read it, and compare it to other studies.
In addition to lack of mobility, and ability to modify our environment, I think part of the reason we get by with such a small genome may be because we are intellegent. That seems backwards, but think about - plants have to have everything they do hard-coded into their genes. Therefore, they must have all sorts of conditions and exceptions in their genes to survive changing environments, and their existence is just the playing out of those genes. However, humans more than most animals, can learn and think. We have an elaborate unconscious mind that is built from experience as much as from our genes, that replaces much of the special-case heuristics that would otherwise take up space in the genome. And just as importantly, instead of simply acting out our impulses generated by our sense and unconscious mind, we constantly are receiving conflicting impulses which our conscious mind must determine what to do with. While the brain requires some additional genes to create, it would take so much more genes to hard code the same survival ability.
In other words, our genome contains a small meta-algorithm to life rather than a large dumb spelled-out algorithm. Well, that's my uninformed idea at least:)
If the government wants to prevent identity theft why don't they start looking at all the problems that they themselves are creating. SSNs are probably the biggest single liability when it comes to identity theft, and yet all the wonderful new Citizen ID / Real ID/ passport changes that they have been trying to push through are even more inherently insecure.
Yes, lets broadcast your passport information to everone in the vacinity via RFID, that will make things harder for the terrorists, and safer from identity theft. We can also increase the number of government agencies that require use of SSN's making them even more widespread and unprotected. While were are at it we'll increase the the penalties for crimes, wasting more tax payer money on prisons, but not actually decreasing crime. Then we can make some empty statements about being tough on crime and securing your identity - the voters will love that.
330lbs of Pu must make one hell of a secret espionage device.
My guess would be that this is going to fuel thousands of small unattended ground sensors, not big devices. Because the are unattended, they need steady fuel for a long period of time, and because they are transmitting data (perhaps in an ad-hoc swarm manner), they will need need a moderate amount of energy.
So the correct slashdot cliche here is - in Soviet Russia a beowolf cluster of secrete espionage devices welcome you!
Basically, any country trying to get U.S. AIDS relief dollars is required to teach =only abstinence=.
The policy you are refering to is called the "ABC" (Abstain, Be faithful, use a Condom) condition, and only requires that the education/prevention money provided by the US be split equally between teaching abstinance, monogamy and condoms. And the US is most definately not demanding that safe-sex programs funded my other means be halted in order to recieve US funding as that quote suggests.
At worst, some of our tax payer money is not being used as effectively as it could be, but that does not take anything away from the rest of the money that is being spent on medicine, infrastructure, and safe sex education. Concidering that a significant majority of the tax payers in this country think that abstinance should be included as at least part of a safe sex education, I think the government has every right to spend this money as the populace sees fit.
Seeing as how they didn't link to or even cite any of these studies, I think I'll reserve judgment. Half the time the problem with "stupid science" is really stupid journalism. You'll have this perfectly good biology research that looks at how a specific enzyme facilitates a particular aspect of the metabolic system that wasn't completely understood before, and is a good step in the direction of understanding how our bodies work. And how does the news report on it? - "eating fat makes you gain weight". Well no duh. It wasn't that that was interesting, it is the details of how it causes you to gain weight that were meaningfull.
Furthermore, "common sense" can be used to explain all sorts of conflicting ideas. If the study had come out the other way, everyone would be saying that it's obvious that people are happier if they jump in and try out all sorts of things before settling on what you really want to do - "life is a journey", "you need time to find yourself". Psychology is the study of scientifically testing what common sense ideas about ourselves actually are true, to what extent, and in what situations. Of course some psychologists are better than others, but just because you could have guessed the answer doesn't mean it's not worth finding out for sure.
There is also a problem with papers written for the sole purpose of getting published, and I don't like that. I wish that more universities would wise up to the fact that knowledge is becoming more and more in-depth and specialized, and therefore it will take longer till someone is far enough along in thier specialty that they can begin doing research that is new and meaningfull. If you force people to write thesis earlier, 90% of them will be rediscovering somthing that has already been discovered.
But I stand by my statement that stupid jounalism is more of the problem than stupid research, and that knowing something is better than thinking it.
Corporations are good at one thing: providing goods and services in exchange for money as profitably as they can. They should be held responsible to operate according to the law - ie not to screw people over, but trying to make them responsible for any thing else is foolish and doomed to fail. I don't want the corporations to be responsible for creating/lobbing for labor laws as you suggest - they have a vested interest that may very likely not be in the interest of the workers.
The same goes for about everything. I don't want them to responsible for protecting the environment - an independent group without vested interests should be doing that. I don't want my employer to be responsible for my retirement - who knows if they will still be around then? I don't want companies responsible for all the things that unions demand out of them - it only burdens them and makes them less competitive abroad.
If you think that everyone is deserving of some level of pension or health care, then that is a job for the government, not companies. And for any level above that I would much rather be free to choose my own savings and insurance plan on an open market, than be locked into one picked by my employer.
There is no one institute that is the solution to all our societal needs and problems. The task of providing goods and services as efficiently as possible is beneficial to society in and of itself and the competitive market does a much better job at it than any sort of monopoly, including the government. But corporations suck at other things. Demanding that they take initiative to be socially responsible may satisfy a visceral desire to lash out against them, but it achieves no good practical results. Let the market do what the market is good at, and let the government do what government is good at.
This was originally posted on slashdot when the case started, and it is excellent news to hear that the FCC regulation was indeed overruled. It is important to note that this case was about whether the FCC had the jurisdiction to impose such regulations, not on the legality of the regulations themselves. If congress decided to pass a law requiring the broadcast flag, it would probably stand.
As an aside the American Library Association (ALA) has been very active in working to protect our fair-use rights and trying to make copyright law more balanced, even though they might not be as well known here as the EFF and ACLU are. I would highly encourage anyone who cares about these things to help support them.
I have to concur with the swapping comment. I have found very little in OS X that is CPU bound. However, even running a G5 (with panther) Expose becomes quite choppy if I have too many things loaded into memory (even if there are not alot of windows open). It could be that Tiger uses more memory, and thus you have having to swap out memory when you zoom expose, where you didn't in Panther. Also, swapping might take longer with an external harddrive, although you are already using a 2.5" drives in your laptop which are fairly slow compared to 3.5".
The point is that given two wires with the same cross sectional area the quantum wire will be 10 times better and 1/6th the weight compared to the copper wire. It wouldn't make much sense to compare wires of different sizes as you suggest.
He's complaining that the screenshots aren't very different?
Where did you get that? I read all the links and a couple other of his blog entries and didn't see anything that mentioned why he disliked it at all - just that he was disapointed, and he will have "more about that later". Which makes it a fairly pointless story to discuss, but...:)
If I were to complain about this release it would not be because it was not different, but because many of the changes are bad. Scrollbars in a menu? That isn't an issue with lack of polish leading up to the beta release - that is a stupid idea that should have never made it past the design stage. There are a few other bugs shown - look at the column headers in a non-column view of the new file explorer, but those can be written of as pre-beta problems. The visual theme also needs alot more polish which is understandable for a prebeta, but I like the direction they are taking it.
But really there isn't much to say until someone that has tried it actally writes about it unlike this story.
Yes, we really need someone who agrees with the administrations social-political goals when making sensitive decisions about the low level details of telecommunications standards. WTF???
It makes since to want someone that supports the administrations goals, when their job will be to help bring those very goals into fruition. This job however has nothing to do with the administrations goals, and I can't see any reason for it but plain vindictiveness.
Absolutely, you can create a posix complient implementation on your own. It has just been common practice for commercial companies who are creating "UNIX" functionality to license SVR5 code to speed things up and just to be safe. Especially after the BSD lawsuit.
Further, history shows that IBM is likely to use a GNU compatible license if they open the source at all.
Sort of. When they release code added to an existing project, it is released under that projects licence. But most of the code that they have released on their own is under the Common Public License (previously IBM Public License). The CPL is a very nice license, simular to the LGPL in what rights it gives to the user, and the FSF has no philosophical objections with it. However it is not compatable with the GPL for technical legal reasons. That means that you cannot compile GPL(or LGPL) code and CPL code together, although you can link CPL code against LGPL.
I also agree that it would be very difficult to open source OS/2 because of cross licensing. Just one example - OS/2 is posix compliant. I would be very suprised if IBM did not have some license agreement with the holders of the SVR4 when making the posix layer. Also because they were not planning on releasing the code, they may not have kept track of every location of licensed code. This could become a bigger nightmare then the SCO lawsuit if they tried to open it up.
Re:Exactly how many tax dollars did I pay for this
on
The Space Shuttle Returns
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Yes, I hate it when our government institutes created to advance science in our country try to inspire the next generation. I hate it when they present science and technology in a manner that captures the imagination of the public. Don't they know the place of science in this country - they should just stay in their cubicles out of the public eye where they belong.
You don't know what you are talking about. This *is* the core Gnome Product. He is just saying that work should continue on Gnome 2 after Gnome 3 comes out for people that would like to keep using it.
Exactly. The idea of keeping P2P private by encrypting the files is as silly as the idea of enforcing DRM by encrypting the files. Encryption is usefull for communication between trusted parties, while blocking third parties. But if you don't trust the recipient then encryption can't really do much for you.
While sites like drudge might switch, I don't think many newspapers would stop using stories from AP just because they have to pay extra to put them online. The larger ones will just pay the license fee and continue. For the smaller ones this will likely be the final straw that makes them realise that their online presence isn't making any money anyway. This will cause them to scale back to just posting local, self-written news or can their website altogether.
And honestly I think that is inevitable. There simply isn't any demand for hundreds of online news sites that all just regergitate AP and Reuters stories. These newspapers need to realise that once they go online they are competing with every major news source in the world. If they can't provide something unique then they will fail, and deserve to.
I don't think it's going to be long untill the major wires actually close their content to subscribers only.
They will only do that when it becomes a viable business model. People keep saying that subscription services cannot be profitable for online news services, because customers will not tolerate them - they will just move to another site. But that is assuming that all of these sites will have the same news - which is only valid so long as the wires maintain a liberal policy regarding posting their content online.
On the extreme end, if all the wires flat-out prohibited posting of their content online (or make it very expensive), then their online subscription would suddenly be very viable and lucrative. However this might anger the large newpapers enough that they turn to another wire, and therefore it will not happen soon. As (if) the newspapers become shrink in importance (and sales) and online news becomes more important, then the wires will have the motivation and leverage to become more and more restrictive regarding online posting of content. As they do so more and more news sites will die, until the only ones left are the ones that actually create content (wires & analysts), not just regergitate it. At this point subscription would be a viable model for the wires as they are no longer competing with their customers.
Of course blogs are a possible kink in this scenario. The wires won't be able to shut down every blog that reposts its stories. Will blogs be usefull news sources if they become shut down as soon as they become popular? Will cleverly run blogs be able to get away with rewording every AP article that they post? If so then subscription will not be a viable model for the wires, and things will likely stay just as they are.
Then sexuality is defacto criminal? I think that is an assumption, and one I do not happen to share with you at this point in time.
Instead of making assumptions you could have actually read his post:
What this comes down to is that we have laws restricting the age of consent so as to prevent the abuse of children by adults. The state has a valid interest in preventing emotionally immature children from being taken-advantage-of by malicious adults.
The only thing he is advocating laws against is sex between adults and children. Nothing in his post implies that he thinks that sexuality itself is inherently criminal, only sexual manipulation.
Yeah, Linux on the desktop follows the same basic WIMP model just like Windows and Mac OS. The problems are not exclusive to Linux. There are tons of "redundant" applications for windows each of which with its own selection of features, and incompatable ways of doing things. It is just more visable in Linux Systems, because alternate applications have more possibility of being used, unlike in Windows and Mac where a one appication became the dominant defacto-standard for each task, for economic and interoperability reasons related to the proprietary nature of the applications.
Which does bring up something that I think I've commented on before. Even the open source community is not perfecly suited for this kind of project because it is very much a cathederal type project (that will hopefully create a bazaar environment when done). It will requires a level of cooperation and integration that is difficult to achieve in a situation where the standard operation procedure is to just implement what you think with improve the project, and if the project maintainers disagree then call them Nazis:)
I think I am correct in assuming that you are referring to the OpenDoc system, which both Apple and IBM worked on.
This project shares several technical similarities with OpenDoc but it has a significantly different goal. The purpose of the OpenDoc system (and OLE, COM, ActiveX,.NET, KDE KParts, and GNOME Bonobo after it) was to reduce duplicate effort on the behalf of programmers by implementing high level document objects which could be easily reused in applications. This would mean that similar tasks in different applications would be done the same way, because they were using the same code, but you would still have applications.
Now if this method of programming became widespread, applications would basically just be a bunch of documents object glued together with extra features added - commands and tools that operate on the document object. This project would do away with applications all together, by creating a system framework and graphical shell that provides the "glue" that applications used to. To compare the difference consider a library written in C vs. a set of UNIX command line tools. Both implement the same functionality, both can be save the programmer time in implementing a task, and both can be flexibly combined to do new things. However to you the C library you have to be a programmer, and have to create a library write a full program with its own interface, and finite feature set. With the command line tools, you can right a full program with them (a shell script), but you can also issue the commands in real-time from the shell. With the C library, you have to do extra work to make the application extendable (your own plug-in system), with the command line tools, the ability to add new commands and recombine them in new ways is built into the shell.
The UNIX shell has limitations though. Its interface and framework (stdin, stdout, pipes, redirect) is primarily useful for filtering documents, not for interactively editing them. Which is why all the unix editors are basically monolithic applications (with their own plug-in and scripting systems).
The goal of this project to make an operating environment that is more pleasant and powerful to use. It intends to do so by making a graphical shell and system framework that will allow for the developer to make software that consists purely of documents and tools that operate on documents, with no applications to wall things off.
I hope this explanation is useful - it is a bit abstract, but the details could fill an entire book. In fact they did:)
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, I am very sceptical of this article. I could kind of see ethanol using more energy than it creates, because corn-ethanol is very inefficent, and only exists because of lobbiests, not practical concerns. But when it goes on to say that biodiesal is just as bad, if not worse, my BS detectors went off big time. That has been disproven on many occasion, and with good science mind you, not wishfull-thinking hand-waving. Then they have the gaul to state that solar -> hydrogen is a more realistic alternative? That method of capturing energy from the sun requires significantly more energy than biodeisel!
I'll have to find the actuall paper when I get off work and see what it really says. I am particlarly curious to see what these unnamed "energy uses not accounted in previous studies" are. Till then I can only speculate about how they came up with the results they did, but I'm definately don't plan on taking this at face value until I've had time to read it, and compare it to other studies.
In addition to lack of mobility, and ability to modify our environment, I think part of the reason we get by with such a small genome may be because we are intellegent. That seems backwards, but think about - plants have to have everything they do hard-coded into their genes. Therefore, they must have all sorts of conditions and exceptions in their genes to survive changing environments, and their existence is just the playing out of those genes. However, humans more than most animals, can learn and think. We have an elaborate unconscious mind that is built from experience as much as from our genes, that replaces much of the special-case heuristics that would otherwise take up space in the genome. And just as importantly, instead of simply acting out our impulses generated by our sense and unconscious mind, we constantly are receiving conflicting impulses which our conscious mind must determine what to do with. While the brain requires some additional genes to create, it would take so much more genes to hard code the same survival ability.
:)
In other words, our genome contains a small meta-algorithm to life rather than a large dumb spelled-out algorithm. Well, that's my uninformed idea at least
If the government wants to prevent identity theft why don't they start looking at all the problems that they themselves are creating. SSNs are probably the biggest single liability when it comes to identity theft, and yet all the wonderful new Citizen ID / Real ID/ passport changes that they have been trying to push through are even more inherently insecure.
Yes, lets broadcast your passport information to everone in the vacinity via RFID, that will make things harder for the terrorists, and safer from identity theft. We can also increase the number of government agencies that require use of SSN's making them even more widespread and unprotected. While were are at it we'll increase the the penalties for crimes, wasting more tax payer money on prisons, but not actually decreasing crime. Then we can make some empty statements about being tough on crime and securing your identity - the voters will love that.
grrr
330lbs of Pu must make one hell of a secret espionage device.
My guess would be that this is going to fuel thousands of small unattended ground sensors, not big devices. Because the are unattended, they need steady fuel for a long period of time, and because they are transmitting data (perhaps in an ad-hoc swarm manner), they will need need a moderate amount of energy.
So the correct slashdot cliche here is - in Soviet Russia a beowolf cluster of secrete espionage devices welcome you!
Basically, any country trying to get U.S. AIDS relief dollars is required to teach =only abstinence=.
The policy you are refering to is called the "ABC" (Abstain, Be faithful, use a Condom) condition, and only requires that the education/prevention money provided by the US be split equally between teaching abstinance, monogamy and condoms. And the US is most definately not demanding that safe-sex programs funded my other means be halted in order to recieve US funding as that quote suggests.
At worst, some of our tax payer money is not being used as effectively as it could be, but that does not take anything away from the rest of the money that is being spent on medicine, infrastructure, and safe sex education. Concidering that a significant majority of the tax payers in this country think that abstinance should be included as at least part of a safe sex education, I think the government has every right to spend this money as the populace sees fit.
But I'd never forget my toaster.
Seeing as how they didn't link to or even cite any of these studies, I think I'll reserve judgment. Half the time the problem with "stupid science" is really stupid journalism. You'll have this perfectly good biology research that looks at how a specific enzyme facilitates a particular aspect of the metabolic system that wasn't completely understood before, and is a good step in the direction of understanding how our bodies work. And how does the news report on it? - "eating fat makes you gain weight". Well no duh. It wasn't that that was interesting, it is the details of how it causes you to gain weight that were meaningfull.
Furthermore, "common sense" can be used to explain all sorts of conflicting ideas. If the study had come out the other way, everyone would be saying that it's obvious that people are happier if they jump in and try out all sorts of things before settling on what you really want to do - "life is a journey", "you need time to find yourself". Psychology is the study of scientifically testing what common sense ideas about ourselves actually are true, to what extent, and in what situations. Of course some psychologists are better than others, but just because you could have guessed the answer doesn't mean it's not worth finding out for sure.
There is also a problem with papers written for the sole purpose of getting published, and I don't like that. I wish that more universities would wise up to the fact that knowledge is becoming more and more in-depth and specialized, and therefore it will take longer till someone is far enough along in thier specialty that they can begin doing research that is new and meaningfull. If you force people to write thesis earlier, 90% of them will be rediscovering somthing that has already been discovered.
But I stand by my statement that stupid jounalism is more of the problem than stupid research, and that knowing something is better than thinking it.
Corporations are good at one thing: providing goods and services in exchange for money as profitably as they can. They should be held responsible to operate according to the law - ie not to screw people over, but trying to make them responsible for any thing else is foolish and doomed to fail. I don't want the corporations to be responsible for creating/lobbing for labor laws as you suggest - they have a vested interest that may very likely not be in the interest of the workers.
The same goes for about everything. I don't want them to responsible for protecting the environment - an independent group without vested interests should be doing that. I don't want my employer to be responsible for my retirement - who knows if they will still be around then? I don't want companies responsible for all the things that unions demand out of them - it only burdens them and makes them less competitive abroad.
If you think that everyone is deserving of some level of pension or health care, then that is a job for the government, not companies. And for any level above that I would much rather be free to choose my own savings and insurance plan on an open market, than be locked into one picked by my employer.
There is no one institute that is the solution to all our societal needs and problems. The task of providing goods and services as efficiently as possible is beneficial to society in and of itself and the competitive market does a much better job at it than any sort of monopoly, including the government. But corporations suck at other things. Demanding that they take initiative to be socially responsible may satisfy a visceral desire to lash out against them, but it achieves no good practical results. Let the market do what the market is good at, and let the government do what government is good at.
This was originally posted on slashdot when the case started, and it is excellent news to hear that the FCC regulation was indeed overruled. It is important to note that this case was about whether the FCC had the jurisdiction to impose such regulations, not on the legality of the regulations themselves. If congress decided to pass a law requiring the broadcast flag, it would probably stand.
.
As an aside the American Library Association (ALA) has been very active in working to protect our fair-use rights and trying to make copyright law more balanced, even though they might not be as well known here as the EFF and ACLU are. I would highly encourage anyone who cares about these things to help support them
Did the editors check a single link?
See foot icon - insert in mouth icon.
I have to concur with the swapping comment. I have found very little in OS X that is CPU bound. However, even running a G5 (with panther) Expose becomes quite choppy if I have too many things loaded into memory (even if there are not alot of windows open). It could be that Tiger uses more memory, and thus you have having to swap out memory when you zoom expose, where you didn't in Panther. Also, swapping might take longer with an external harddrive, although you are already using a 2.5" drives in your laptop which are fairly slow compared to 3.5".
The point is that given two wires with the same cross sectional area the quantum wire will be 10 times better and 1/6th the weight compared to the copper wire. It wouldn't make much sense to compare wires of different sizes as you suggest.
He's complaining that the screenshots aren't very different?
... :)
Where did you get that? I read all the links and a couple other of his blog entries and didn't see anything that mentioned why he disliked it at all - just that he was disapointed, and he will have "more about that later". Which makes it a fairly pointless story to discuss, but
If I were to complain about this release it would not be because it was not different, but because many of the changes are bad. Scrollbars in a menu? That isn't an issue with lack of polish leading up to the beta release - that is a stupid idea that should have never made it past the design stage. There are a few other bugs shown - look at the column headers in a non-column view of the new file explorer, but those can be written of as pre-beta problems. The visual theme also needs alot more polish which is understandable for a prebeta, but I like the direction they are taking it.
But really there isn't much to say until someone that has tried it actally writes about it unlike this story.
Yes, we really need someone who agrees with the administrations social-political goals when making sensitive decisions about the low level details of telecommunications standards. WTF???
It makes since to want someone that supports the administrations goals, when their job will be to help bring those very goals into fruition. This job however has nothing to do with the administrations goals, and I can't see any reason for it but plain vindictiveness.
Absolutely, you can create a posix complient implementation on your own. It has just been common practice for commercial companies who are creating "UNIX" functionality to license SVR5 code to speed things up and just to be safe. Especially after the BSD lawsuit.
You are correct. I was simplifying.
Further, history shows that IBM is likely to use a GNU compatible license if they open the source at all.
Sort of. When they release code added to an existing project, it is released under that projects licence. But most of the code that they have released on their own is under the Common Public License (previously IBM Public License). The CPL is a very nice license, simular to the LGPL in what rights it gives to the user, and the FSF has no philosophical objections with it. However it is not compatable with the GPL for technical legal reasons. That means that you cannot compile GPL(or LGPL) code and CPL code together, although you can link CPL code against LGPL.
I also agree that it would be very difficult to open source OS/2 because of cross licensing. Just one example - OS/2 is posix compliant. I would be very suprised if IBM did not have some license agreement with the holders of the SVR4 when making the posix layer. Also because they were not planning on releasing the code, they may not have kept track of every location of licensed code. This could become a bigger nightmare then the SCO lawsuit if they tried to open it up.
Yes, I hate it when our government institutes created to advance science in our country try to inspire the next generation. I hate it when they present science and technology in a manner that captures the imagination of the public. Don't they know the place of science in this country - they should just stay in their cubicles out of the public eye where they belong.
You don't know what you are talking about. This *is* the core Gnome Product. He is just saying that work should continue on Gnome 2 after Gnome 3 comes out for people that would like to keep using it.
Exactly. The idea of keeping P2P private by encrypting the files is as silly as the idea of enforcing DRM by encrypting the files. Encryption is usefull for communication between trusted parties, while blocking third parties. But if you don't trust the recipient then encryption can't really do much for you.
While sites like drudge might switch, I don't think many newspapers would stop using stories from AP just because they have to pay extra to put them online. The larger ones will just pay the license fee and continue. For the smaller ones this will likely be the final straw that makes them realise that their online presence isn't making any money anyway. This will cause them to scale back to just posting local, self-written news or can their website altogether.
And honestly I think that is inevitable. There simply isn't any demand for hundreds of online news sites that all just regergitate AP and Reuters stories. These newspapers need to realise that once they go online they are competing with every major news source in the world. If they can't provide something unique then they will fail, and deserve to.
I don't think it's going to be long untill the major wires actually close their content to subscribers only.
They will only do that when it becomes a viable business model. People keep saying that subscription services cannot be profitable for online news services, because customers will not tolerate them - they will just move to another site. But that is assuming that all of these sites will have the same news - which is only valid so long as the wires maintain a liberal policy regarding posting their content online.
On the extreme end, if all the wires flat-out prohibited posting of their content online (or make it very expensive), then their online subscription would suddenly be very viable and lucrative. However this might anger the large newpapers enough that they turn to another wire, and therefore it will not happen soon. As (if) the newspapers become shrink in importance (and sales) and online news becomes more important, then the wires will have the motivation and leverage to become more and more restrictive regarding online posting of content. As they do so more and more news sites will die, until the only ones left are the ones that actually create content (wires & analysts), not just regergitate it. At this point subscription would be a viable model for the wires as they are no longer competing with their customers.
Of course blogs are a possible kink in this scenario. The wires won't be able to shut down every blog that reposts its stories. Will blogs be usefull news sources if they become shut down as soon as they become popular? Will cleverly run blogs be able to get away with rewording every AP article that they post? If so then subscription will not be a viable model for the wires, and things will likely stay just as they are.
Then sexuality is defacto criminal? I think that is an assumption, and one I do not happen to share with you at this point in time.
Instead of making assumptions you could have actually read his post:
What this comes down to is that we have laws restricting the age of consent so as to prevent the abuse of children by adults. The state has a valid interest in preventing emotionally immature children from being taken-advantage-of by malicious adults.
The only thing he is advocating laws against is sex between adults and children. Nothing in his post implies that he thinks that sexuality itself is inherently criminal, only sexual manipulation.
Straw man attacks do not deserve +5 Insightful.
Yeah, Linux on the desktop follows the same basic WIMP model just like Windows and Mac OS. The problems are not exclusive to Linux. There are tons of "redundant" applications for windows each of which with its own selection of features, and incompatable ways of doing things. It is just more visable in Linux Systems, because alternate applications have more possibility of being used, unlike in Windows and Mac where a one appication became the dominant defacto-standard for each task, for economic and interoperability reasons related to the proprietary nature of the applications.
:)
Which does bring up something that I think I've commented on before. Even the open source community is not perfecly suited for this kind of project because it is very much a cathederal type project (that will hopefully create a bazaar environment when done). It will requires a level of cooperation and integration that is difficult to achieve in a situation where the standard operation procedure is to just implement what you think with improve the project, and if the project maintainers disagree then call them Nazis
I think I am correct in assuming that you are referring to the OpenDoc system, which both Apple and IBM worked on.
.NET, KDE KParts, and GNOME Bonobo after it) was to reduce duplicate effort on the behalf of programmers by implementing high level document objects which could be easily reused in applications. This would mean that similar tasks in different applications would be done the same way, because they were using the same code, but you would still have applications.
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This project shares several technical similarities with OpenDoc but it has a significantly different goal. The purpose of the OpenDoc system (and OLE, COM, ActiveX,
Now if this method of programming became widespread, applications would basically just be a bunch of documents object glued together with extra features added - commands and tools that operate on the document object. This project would do away with applications all together, by creating a system framework and graphical shell that provides the "glue" that applications used to. To compare the difference consider a library written in C vs. a set of UNIX command line tools. Both implement the same functionality, both can be save the programmer time in implementing a task, and both can be flexibly combined to do new things. However to you the C library you have to be a programmer, and have to create a library write a full program with its own interface, and finite feature set. With the command line tools, you can right a full program with them (a shell script), but you can also issue the commands in real-time from the shell. With the C library, you have to do extra work to make the application extendable (your own plug-in system), with the command line tools, the ability to add new commands and recombine them in new ways is built into the shell.
The UNIX shell has limitations though. Its interface and framework (stdin, stdout, pipes, redirect) is primarily useful for filtering documents, not for interactively editing them. Which is why all the unix editors are basically monolithic applications (with their own plug-in and scripting systems).
The goal of this project to make an operating environment that is more pleasant and powerful to use. It intends to do so by making a graphical shell and system framework that will allow for the developer to make software that consists purely of documents and tools that operate on documents, with no applications to wall things off.
I hope this explanation is useful - it is a bit abstract, but the details could fill an entire book. In fact they did