How would you react if this story were "Packard-Bell sues over government purchase of IBMs"? In order to have IBM come in with the low bid, the government would have to do some serious fiddling of the requirements (which is what is alleged in this case). And (in a simpler world where these were the only two vendors) they darn well SHOULD fiddle the requirements - it shouldn't have to take a two-year multimillion-dollar double-blind study to prove that Packard-Bells are worthless.
(An even more realistic example would be "MS sues government for buying Palms over WinCE". From the feature tally, WinCE seems superior - until you actually try to use that junk. But I wanted to leave MS out of the issue.)
Anywhere but the government, people can buy whatever they want for whatever reason they want. And mostly, it works out pretty well. Sure, if you buy 7Up over generic lemon-lime because of their catchy "Image is nothing" campaign, you've wasted some money - but at least you aren't wasting your time trying to justify every subjective decision in terms of objective criteria.
Government purchasing rules are there for one reason - to prevent corruption. It's not that you need all those complicated RFQ processes to figure out the best, cheapest, easiest solution; the rest of the world does fine without them. It's just that when you let bureaucrats spend a lot of money that isn't theirs, you'd better have somebody to keep an eye on them - and unfortunately, we chose lawyers for the guard job.
Is this a case of out-and-out corruption? Probably not (although the previous post which mentions Al Gore has an interesting allegation). If it isn't corruption, it's just that some bureaucrat had a subjective preference for Microsoft and rigged the bid process to favor it. Much as I think they made the wrong decision in this case, I have to support their right to do that. Otherwise, our government would be eternally burdened with the equivalent of Packard-Bells and WinCE machines.
OK, this is my last post this thread. If you want me to reply any more (which I doubt you do, but who knows) email me personally.
I agreed that the crowd was denying rights to others. I simply said that police actions on Tuesday were ineffective at protecting those rights, either immediately or in the long term. Police violence on Tuesday was thus unjustified. Yes, I am saying they should have given up on protecting those particular rights for that day. I completely understand if you disagree. We actually agree to a surprising degree about Tuesday.
On Wednesday, I think you totally fail to appreciate what happened. Police arrested over 500 people on wednesday alone. The three largest locations for arrests were, in descending numerical order, westlake in the morning, first ave in the afternoon, and capitol hill at night. In Westlake there was a peaceful protest which was blocking nobody's access anywhere. It was no danger to persons, property, or freedom of movement. Hundreds were arrested, dozens were pepper-sprayed.
On first ave, there was a demonstration that initially did break the law by blocking traffic (a pretty minor infraction). This demonstration was warned to disperse and then tear gassed. This to me is excessive, but it's what comes next that's inexcusable. After being gassed, demonstrators asked the police what they should do. The police told them to go south down first. They were told that if they did so they would not be arrested. When they did, they were hemmed in on two sides by police cordons and gassed again, chased 8 blocks with no possibility of escape, and then arrested. I consider this excessive force.
On capitol hill, you had an annual Mumia protest march, unrelated to WTO, attacked without warning by gas. When local residents, angered at this assault on their neighborhood (most houses are not airtight) joined the protestors, police went on a rampage. You have seen the images of beatings, of Brian Derdowsky the county councilmember gassed and pepper sprayed as he attempted to broker a peace. Homeowners were arrested for coming out of their front door and asking the police what was happening; shoppers at QFC were gassed as they walked out with groceries; there were several beatings that were not caught on camera. I saw the 18-gram wooden bullets that were used, and I saw the massive bruises they caused. No excuse whatsoever.
Aside from these three mass-arrests, there were many other arrests with as little justification. A friend of mine, an unassuming 35-year-old, was arrested for standing alone on a street corner passing out an op-ed xeroxed from the new york times. The curfew was enforced very selectively, based on age and "alternative" appearance. My Italian friend's legal observation notes were taken from her and destroyed before her eyes as the officer made racist comments.
On the matter of Tuesday, I can respect your position and agree to disagree. When it comes to Wednesday, I cannot. I do not expect you to simply take my word on all that happened, although in no case am I reporting that I did not hear first-hand. I do expect you to either admit you don't know enough to talk informedly about Wednesday, or to take the trouble to inform yourself more fully.
1. not "fires"; one fire, at 4th and Pike. In the middle of the intersection, fueled by trash, a danger to no person or property. Notice that every media picture of a fire is that one dumpster? Don't you think the media, which was omnipresent that day, would have shown all the fires they could find?
2. You're still only talking about Tuesday. No justification whatsoever for police behavior on Wednesday.
2. Note that I already said that the police, in the main, acted legally Tuesday. Just not morally. Your argument is basically: what the protestors did was immoral, so the personal violence offerred by the police was moral. Of course, many of the protestors would turn it around. What the WTO does and plans to do is immoral, so their actions were moral. The difference being that the protester's violence was directed solely against property.
My own view of morality isn't so tit-for-tat; I'm more pragmatic. On a concrete level, the question is, would police actions predictably do more good than harm? I have to say no. They failed to prevent ANY property damage, and probably exacerbated it. They failed to allow the opening ceremony to happen. They hurt a lot of people, including a lot of those who were simply there to express first-amendment rights. Some individual policefolk were carried away to vicious extremes, and their fellow-cops did nothing to apprehend these lawbreakers. All of these things were predictable. I also think this problem was strategic and not tactical. Your "harder, sooner" hypothetical doesn't acknowledge the level of organization and preparation among the most militant protestors.
Note that on this level, the protestors, even the vandals, were justified. They prevented certain people from getting where they wanted to go for a period of a few hours; and, in their own view, they acted to prevent or bring to light crimes much larger than that. There are a lot of things you'd accept that prevent people from going where they want to go, and many of them bear as weak of a relationship to preserving health and well-being.
On a meta-level, things are more even. Here's where your NAACP argument comes in. If everybody, including your 50k white supremacists, felt that their particular ends justified any means short of bodily harm, you're right, we'd have big problems. That's why I do not support the actions of the more militant protestors.
And on a meta-level, the cops regain some shred of justification. (Not because the protestors are unjustified here; it's not a zero-sum-game.) If the cops had not demonstrated their willingness to use violence to protect freedom of movement (note that I don't mention property, as the police did nothing to protect property; in fact, demonstrators themselves in many cases prevented vandalism as the police watched), people in the future may have been encouraged to use such tactics. However, this argument is weak. Will fewer people be willing to restrict the movement of others through mass action as a result of this week's events? I really doubt it; I think outrage and triumph are stronger than fear.
So what should the police have done? Simple. Ringed the convention center, the gap, old navy, niketown, banana republic, Starbucks, and B of A. With about 10 officers in a loose line at each of those stores and a solid cordon at each entrance of the convention center, they would have used far fewer than it took to block off at least 8 intersections with double-ranked badgeless troops. They would have done more good and less harm.
It's true, the very first time the police used gas, at 5th and Union, it was preceded by an order to back up/clear the street - as well as being accompanied by beatings. However, I was gassed 4 times; at no time was the gassing preceded by any kind of announcement. (I was acting as a legal observer for the National Lawyer's Guild, as a witness to police violence).
By late afternoon, I had a snorkel mask to protect myself from gas. Therefore, when the police gassed us down Pike from 6th to 2nd at 5PM, I could actually see clearly, although I was choking and about to vomit. For that entire four-block distance, the crowd was retreating in as orderly fashion as possible. There were cries of "walk, don't run" to prevent panic. The only people facing the police were cameramen walking backwards. Everyone was retreating. At fourth street, the police began firing rubber bullets at this unarmed crowd.
However, in some sense I agree with you. The majority of police violence on Tuesday was legally justified. In a very limited manner, it did serve to preserve the freedom of movement of delegates.
I do not believe that it was was morally justified. I do not believe that it served to protect property. In fact I believe that it encouraged property destruction. I do not believe that it was necessary to protect the physical safety of the delegates. Even the black-hat anarchists breaking windows and the opportunistic looters (obviously different groups, and both numbering under 50 out of 50,000 people) were absolutely non-violent when it came to human beings. The only violence I saw was from police, from delegates -- I personally saw a delegate punch an elementary school teacher who was not physically interfering with him in any way -- and from aggressively "non-violent" protestors attempting to stop property destruction. In short, I think the opposite of what you do; that an early "show of force" from the police was a tactical error, so huge as to make them morally culpable.
The story on Wednesday was far worse. Wednesday morning, hundreds of people were arrested for peaceful demonstrations that interfered with no-one's freedom of movement. Many simple passersby were arrested. A friend of mine, a calm 35-year-old-man, was arrested for standing alone on a street corner passing out an op-ed he'd photocopied from the New York Times.
Wednesday afternoon and evening, the cops rioted. First it was down by pike place market, outside the unconstitutional "protest free zone", where demonstrators were literally herded 8 blocks with tear gas, hemmed in on all sides, before being arrested. Then it was up on capitol hill, where an annual Free Mumia march unrelated to WTO was attacked - I'm sure you've seen the pictures of police misconduct there, and I have heard many personal accounts of abuse that was not caught on camera. I talked to one woman who called the National Lawyer's guild from jail; she'd been arrested for going out of her front door to ask the police what was going on. During both of these police riots, the weaponry being used was in fact stronger than that on Tuesday. There was 18-gram wooden dowels as bullets, tear gas so strong it is actually classified as a nerve agent, and voluminous pepper spray. I've seen physical evidence of all of this
For Wednesday's actions, the police are most definitely liable. And that's not even getting into the sickening abuse that went on at the Sand Point detention station and the jail; abuse that I've heard about first-hand in personal conversations. All this, of course, while arrestees were illegally being denied access to the lawyers just outside.
But you never even answered my question. How are 50,000 people supposed to express an opinion without blocking traffic?
I can definitely say that it was a minority of the protestors, and mostly out-of-towners, engaging in property destruction during the protest. Looting where I was (Niketown/Westlake area) didn't happen until after the protest had been cleared by the cops, and it seemed to be carried out mainly by local apolitical high-school students. (The situation was perhaps different at the Starbucks opposite the Westin that got much play on the news; there, protestors were hemmed in.)
On the cops side, I have to applaud most of the individual cops. Most of them, especially the Seattle Police Department, showed remarkable restraint. That being said, I still think it shows a fascist system when cops use tear gas, pepper spray, and rubber bullets from the very start on a peaceful demonstration. (Destructive punks slept in and didn't start breaking windows until their scheduled start at 11:11; tear gas had already been in use for hours at that point.) There were also a few definite bad apples among the police - mostly apparently from nearby PD's - who covered up badges, beat protestors, squirted pepper spray up inside gas masks and then held the masks on, and shot peacefully retreating protestors in the back with rubber bullets. (All of this is first hand or second hand from sources who I know and trust).
For a blow-by-blow account of my day, go to my journal.
I started "We're here, we're wet, forgive the debt." I also started "The leader's theft is not the people's debt" as an attempt at a more intelligent chant, but that one didn't get off the ground. Sorry, I've nothing to reply really, I just got a kick out of seeing my chant on slashdot. obOnTopic: I heard someone say that they counted 8,000 protestors (by 10s) going down from the church. Since we seemed to be met just before the stadium by a labor contingent that seemed about equally strong, I'd estimate the numbers were more like 12-15,000 by the time we got to the stadium. That's a pretty huge protest in normal times, and yes, I didn't see any media coverage of it.
Yes, there are still vagrants in Occidental, although many of those are drug dealers not homeless. I serve food there every week, though, and I have personally heard many reports of homeless getting increased harrassment from the police. Certainly in the downtown core, in the state of martial law, the homeless are now gone. Luckily, SHARE, a local homeless organization, has set up two tent cities; one on Capitol Hill and one near Greenlake. (Initially, the city appeared to understand that this would be necessary. However, 2 weeks ago, city bureaucrats suddenly withdrew from tent city negotiations, apparently on orders from the mayor. The tent cities have not been broken up, but they are not city-approved.)
Without labeling, at any given moment, the consumer will pay virtually the same price for either kind of beef, and the companies will soak up the extra profit.
Over the long term, if you in fact have an ideally efficient market, this will lead to lower prices for the consumer. In many cases, this does not happen in practice.
Obviously, people mean different things when they use this phrase. In general, however, it means a few simple things. There are rights to organize and unionize. That goes from basic things from not being arrested for going on strike (which happens in many countries) to more advanced rights like not getting fired on mere suspicion of union sympathies. There are the protections against child labor and forced labor. There are workplace health and safety laws.
There's no question that, even with these equal rights guaranteed, people in third world countries would still often earn wages that would be considered intolerably low in the first world. Factories would still relocate for cheaper labor.
It seems to me that to call the drive for such basic rights as these (which are lacking in much of the world) "protectionist" is missing the point entirely. If these rights were universally enforced, it could only improve the lives of millions. Yes, there are people who are happy to be making $.50 a day; no, there is no one who is happy to have to sell their child, glad to get cancer or mutilations from their job, or overjoyed to be thrown in jail for peacefully supporting a union.
But with any experiment, you must be sure that ALL conditions are the same everytime it is repeated, to be sure the results are as accurate as possible.
"Oh, the reason you couldn't reproduce my experiment is that your conditions weren't the same. Jupiter was in Taurus when you did it."
Science isn't about making ALL conditions the same. Science is about deciding what conditions are important, and making them the same. (In that regard, your comments are very scientific: you've decided what's unimportant and actually completely forgotten about it.) So one of you is arguing "implementation is unimportant, algorithm is what matters", and the other one is arguing "who writes the implementation really is important, because there's a finite chance they'll screw it up, by mistake or on purpose". Guess what: you're both right.
So find a solution that solves both problems. Here's a hint: it's going to involve social engineering. The scientists and the hackers are going to have to actually listen to each other if they want to reach a good accomodation. It's not just a matter of the hackers shutting up and doing what they're told.
The language and regulations contained in TRIPS is old news. The prospect of having the enforcement power of the WTO behind this agreement is definitely not old news; it is going on right now, here in Seattle.
The WTO's power lies in imposing punitive tariffs on countries that flaunt its rules. No country can afford to stand up to them for long.
So, do I think that governments should be able to flaunt treaties that they've signed? I'd like to be able to say "Yes, if the treaties suck", but that's the easy way out. The real question is, who interprets the treaties, and in the last resort, who decides if the treaty has come into conflict with some right more fundamental than it. If you understand your local justice system, you know who's making those choices when treaties are enforced by the governments that sign them.
With the WTO, you might imagine that there's some impartial body adhering to the letter and spirit of the treaty, in this case TRIPS. No way. WTO decisions are made in secret by 3-judge panels. The panelists have almost universally been corporate lawyers at some point in their past. The panel absolutely refuses to hear testimony from anyone but corporations and governments, as you can read about in this leaked ruling. The results are predictable: not once has the WTO ruled in favor of a local law. When you look at it like this, you see the WTO for what it is: not just a way of enforcing treaties, but an unprecedented power-grab by corporations.
So when you read TRIPS, don't read it as a neutral document that will be judiciously enforced. Try reading between the lines, stretching every phrase to its ultimate limit in favor of the big guys. Imagine, at the very least, a whole new set of legal fees to keep the individual patent-holder (or any future "GNU free-patent" organization) out of the game entirely. Then decide what you think of this latest news.
Since the WTO sees everything through the lens of trade, any law that could affect trade counts as a tariff to them. That includes environmental laws (such as the famous sea turtle ruling among many others), labor laws, human rights laws, etc. Would it be free trade if UCITA-like provisions are rammed down sovreign countries throats (by punitive tariffs), as could very well be a consequence of the Seattle TRIPS (trade-related IP) negotiations?
The WTO puts unprecedented power to challenge laws into the hands of corporations. Anyone who thinks that they won't try to use that new power for whatever purpose suits them, rather than just legitimate free trade, is deluded.
(And see the text of the sea turtle ruling, linked above, for the WTO's attitude towards open process... basically, if you're not a government or a corporation with money on the line, don't bother sending them briefs, they won't even read them.)
Working quantum computers with a reasonable number of qubits will render all current public-key encryption techniques useless, regardless of the key length used.
What do you mean, "reasonable number"? You are talking about at least 4 kilobytes, right? 16,000 bits / 3 for error correction / 2+ for Schor's factoring algorithm heck of a lot of qbits.
Assuming "forseeable breakthroughs", QC is probably going to be expensive and slow. Chances are, you're going to have serious cooling infrastructure, and radiation shielding, and possibly massive magnetic fields if you're using spin-based quantum states. You're going to have effective number of bits cut by at least a factor of three through error correction (and there's really NO way around that). In order to move data from place to place, you're probably going to have to either physically move something around or actually transfer data through a long chain of intervening bits from source to destination. And there are reasons why you won't want the clock rate to get too high.
Even assuming that we do get kilobyte- or megabyte- quantum computing, I don't think encryption would be useless. If "polynomial time" means "6 hours on a million-dollar machine", then I think it's still worth encrypting things. And if Moore's law holds for QC (I doubt it will; QC is too specialized a need to bring to bear the societal resources that have caused Moore's law) we wouldn't have QC on that scale for 20-40 years.
[A year or so ago, I amused myself by projecting Moore's law outwards for both classical and quantum computing. I believe both halves of this projection are overoptimistic, but it's fun. The answer I got was that the first time you would ever be able to solve any problem more cheaply using QC was in 2026.]
The last paragraph of the parent to this comment, though, is very important. We haven't even built linear quantum QC's yet, and already it's looking as if they'll only buy us a square root on NP-complete problems. When it comes to nonlinear quantum QC's, the algorithms are an order of magnitude more mindbending. This is really, really hard stuff, and nobody really knows what's possible. It may be that nonlinear effects make simple error correction exponentially hard, and then you're back where you started.
What I meant is, this seems to have become a personal discussion on the issue of pre-columbian demographics, not a discussion on China. Any sane slashdot reader besides the two of us is not reading this. There is nothing to be afraid of from emailing me. Karma's honor: I will use your email for no more than one reply per message recieved and probably less than that. If you do feel the need to talk on slashdot, please, at least check the "No score +1 bonus" box; I do.
Let me get this straight: I do NOT believe that there were 20m native americans at the time of Columbus. I have said that. I am simply quoting, from memory, the source that I have cited (Ward Churchill). He said 3 things, IIRC: 1) The Smithsonian said that there were 1m; 2) if you look at the derivation of that number, it had been revised downwards by a factor of close to 2 at least 3 separate times; 3) some person who I forget the name of estimated 20m as maximum supportable nutritionally given archeological evidence of agricultural methods. I put far more credence in 1) and 2) than in 3, which is why my own estimate would be in the 5-8m range.
You say your numbers are "supported" by something you read several years ago, yet you cite no source. Meanwhile, you say my numbers have no support "other than certain liberal organizations with political objectives". That's a pretty ill-considered way to talk. It's true, as I realize, that Ward Churchill is not always the most credible source in the world (although I'm not sure whether you had any specific knowledge of that fact). However, he is a scholar, not an "organization" - in context, that's just a smear-word. And for cryin' out loud, everyone has political objectives, that has nothing to do with whether you're a good scholar. No more ad hominem arguments, please.
I agree that you can't judge people from many years ago on today's value system. However, my arguement was that there are certain moral universals which do transcend time and place. If anything belongs on that list, genocide does. No, it doesn't make people "evil" across the board, but the action and attude themselves are evil wherever and whenever they occur.
As to the relevancy to today, and specifically to whether the US or Chinese government is morally superior - well, there you are (almost [1]) 100% right. I'm sorry, I popped into this discussion merely because someone had come up with the 100m number and you had countered by saying that was orders of magnitude too high (ie, 1m). I felt I could add something by actually citing a source, rather than arguing from intuition.
[1]The only way this would be relevant to today would be if specific current-day official practices wrt native americans were morally wrong (for non-genocidal reasons) and historically outgrowths of genocidal attitudes. Which I would argue is true, but it is a tiny nitpick compared to a lot of what the Chinese government does and has done in the current era.
You "suspect"? That's exactly how the 1m figure came about in the first place - people working just from intuition.
When you say "closer", do you mean on linear or logarithmic scale? On linear scale, of course 1m is probably closer than 20m. 20m is maximum supportable number. But on logarithmic scale - more appropriate for such wildly different numbers - I'm sure you're wrong. Even neglecting the agricultural interpolations, just look at the earliest estimates from colonizers. You get numbers that would multiply out to over 5m.
Your arguments about bounties and doctors definitely hold some water numerically. It's very plausible that a majority of Indians would have died anyway. However, I would not believe any number much less than 1m for killed-by-malice. And regardless of numbers, a universal bounty shows genocidal intent. Malicious genocide is more repugnant than can ever be excused; we can't ever let anyone off the hook for condoning it.
Oh, but I did make a big mistake. I was trying to give my source and I mentioned Wade Davis (wrong) rather than Ward Churchill.
We really do know more about what we're talking about than back then.
It's like arguing about when Moore's law will end. Most reasonable people agree that at some point it will end. There are fundamental barriers where the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle meets Information Theory. Yes, that's "only according to the current paradigm of physics", but even supposing we could somehow overcome such a barrier, it would take a serious scientific revolution. It requires a very high degree of faith to assume that such a revolution will fit within the constraints of Moore's law - it would almost definitely be either too fast or too slow.
So, physics and CS are in the same boat. Both are riding a developmental process, unprecedented in history, that will eventually end. In both cases, human nature provides an inexhaustable store of unimaginative prophets to predict that the end is near. And in both cases, there is no fundamental barrier to valid prophesying. That means that not only will one of the prophets one day be right; they'll probably be right for most of the right reasons.
The question thus becomes: how do we separate the wise prognosticators from the deluded ones? If you can't answer that question for yourself, you need to work on your epistemology. Personally, I can see so many differences between Weinberg's argument and that of the turn-of-the-century end-of-science prognosticators - and not just differences of degree - that I feel confident giving him more credence. Moreover, I think that, posing the question as I have posed it, it would have been easy to see through the end-of-science claims last time the century turned, without any anachronistic knowledge of physice.
Note that Weinberg does not actually claim we'll have a TOE (theory of everything) by 2050, just that we'll have a GUT (grand unified theory). The difference is, a TOE would explain the fundamental physics of everything, whereas a GUT only covers everything that happens at energies of less then 10^18 GeV or so. Now, some physicists believe that these two are the same thing, and some don't. This is mostly an article of faith. Moreover, it's totally immaterial on a practical scale. As Weinberg explains, it would take an accelerator light-years long (and magnetic fields strong enough to rip apart normal matter) to begin to see the difference. With a GUT, for the first time in history we'd know everything there is to know about the fundamental physics of everything currently observable, and we could settle down and spend the next millenia or so working out the implications of that knowledge.
Actually, Wade Davis talks a lot about population numbers. As of 1940, the accepted number for population of land currently held by US pre-columbus, promulgated by the Smithsonian, was under 1m. This had been arrived at by each generation of historians looking at the previous generation's estimates, looking around for all those Indians, then "judiciously" revising the number downwards. Going back to primary sources, you get a much higher number. Native American agricultural methods and area covered would have probably supported about 20m, and a conservative population estimate is about half that. Every state in the continental US at one time offered a bounty for dead Indians, and even disease was deliberately spread (besides the famous smallpox blankets, which happened in Canada, there are documented cases of doctors deliberately giving advice that would lead to spreading disease - "It's a curse, the only cure is for everyone to go to their village of origin and have a feast"). So you can probably say on the whole more than one generation was slaughtered, putting this guy within an order of magnitude. Which is pretty good for statistics he PULLED OUT OF HIS ASS, and for all I know better than the 60m cultural revolution figure.
Have you seen the sp t1700? PalmOS-based, with 802.11. Also, there should be several wireless lan Handspring cards coming out soon, including a bluetooth one from widComm.
Palm has a true multitasking kernel (AMX). Unfortunately, their license forbids them from giving you the multitasking API. You can use the features, however, if you pay AMX $5000. Or, hackers who don't care about publishing what they've done could just hack into it and not get caught. But we don't have any of those around here, now, do we?
A lot of the power of the linux kernel is page files and swap space and all that jazz. If your volatile and nonvolatile storage are identical, well, as people have already said, there's just not much point.
Re:Please to enlighten me...
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Any palm III or higher (except a visor or the IIIe special edition) has flashable ROM. This contains a smallrom [not to be replaced unless you REALLY know what you're doing] with minimal boot and debugger code, and a largerom, which contains everything in the smallrom plus an OS and the built-in apps. The rom image, I assume, is only a largerom image and not a widerom (small+large). Thus, if you reset with the up key held down you'd boot back into Palm's smallrom and could reflash back to your old largerom (if you'd kept a copy).
One chip to rule them all One chip to mock them One chip to bring them all and in its circuits overclock them
Wait... so what does that make Linus?
Win by losing, folks just remember you lost
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Can anyone here name the anticompetitive tactics that IBM was being sued for? (Well, this is slashdot, so probably yes. But rhetorically speaking...) Of course not, because that's all in the past. If the person on the street has even heard of the IBM antitrust action, they know maybe three things: The government sued IBM, the trial took a long time, the government lost. Ergo, it was a waste of money. If that happens twice, it's a pattern, and it'll take a braver attorney general than we're likely to get to start gunning for the next Microsoft. No one will care that the increased scrutiny of the lawsuit made room for Linux or whatever.
Of course, the case, and the remedy, should be decided on merits, not on what sends the right political message. But I hope that the justice system can remember that this is a case about actions situated in a historical time. If the case drags on past Microsoft's actual monopoly, I'd still want to see them get the punishment they deserved when they took those actions.
This is exactly MS's best strategy. In fact, by writing "intel" into the *market* portion of the FoF instead of the "barriers to entry" (as in, we already have Intel hardware on every desk in this company, we can't exactly switch to MacOS) Judge Jackson made his greatest mistake. (go ahead, mod me down as redundant, so long as you mod him up. Assuming "sethg"=a "him".)
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How would you react if this story were "Packard-Bell sues over government purchase of IBMs"? In order to have IBM come in with the low bid, the government would have to do some serious fiddling of the requirements (which is what is alleged in this case). And (in a simpler world where these were the only two vendors) they darn well SHOULD fiddle the requirements - it shouldn't have to take a two-year multimillion-dollar double-blind study to prove that Packard-Bells are worthless.
(An even more realistic example would be "MS sues government for buying Palms over WinCE". From the feature tally, WinCE seems superior - until you actually try to use that junk. But I wanted to leave MS out of the issue.)
Anywhere but the government, people can buy whatever they want for whatever reason they want. And mostly, it works out pretty well. Sure, if you buy 7Up over generic lemon-lime because of their catchy "Image is nothing" campaign, you've wasted some money - but at least you aren't wasting your time trying to justify every subjective decision in terms of objective criteria.
Government purchasing rules are there for one reason - to prevent corruption. It's not that you need all those complicated RFQ processes to figure out the best, cheapest, easiest solution; the rest of the world does fine without them. It's just that when you let bureaucrats spend a lot of money that isn't theirs, you'd better have somebody to keep an eye on them - and unfortunately, we chose lawyers for the guard job.
Is this a case of out-and-out corruption? Probably not (although the previous post which mentions Al Gore has an interesting allegation). If it isn't corruption, it's just that some bureaucrat had a subjective preference for Microsoft and rigged the bid process to favor it. Much as I think they made the wrong decision in this case, I have to support their right to do that. Otherwise, our government would be eternally burdened with the equivalent of Packard-Bells and WinCE machines.
My verdict: just another silly lawsuit.
OK, this is my last post this thread. If you want me to reply any more (which I doubt you do, but who knows) email me personally.
I agreed that the crowd was denying rights to others. I simply said that police actions on Tuesday were ineffective at protecting those rights, either immediately or in the long term. Police violence on Tuesday was thus unjustified. Yes, I am saying they should have given up on protecting those particular rights for that day. I completely understand if you disagree. We actually agree to a surprising degree about Tuesday.
On Wednesday, I think you totally fail to appreciate what happened. Police arrested over 500 people on wednesday alone. The three largest locations for arrests were, in descending numerical order, westlake in the morning, first ave in the afternoon, and capitol hill at night.
In Westlake there was a peaceful protest which was blocking nobody's access anywhere. It was no danger to persons, property, or freedom of movement. Hundreds were arrested, dozens were pepper-sprayed.
On first ave, there was a demonstration that initially did break the law by blocking traffic (a pretty minor infraction). This demonstration was warned to disperse and then tear gassed. This to me is excessive, but it's what comes next that's inexcusable. After being gassed, demonstrators asked the police what they should do. The police told them to go south down first. They were told that if they did so they would not be arrested. When they did, they were hemmed in on two sides by police cordons and gassed again, chased 8 blocks with no possibility of escape, and then arrested. I consider this excessive force.
On capitol hill, you had an annual Mumia protest march, unrelated to WTO, attacked without warning by gas. When local residents, angered at this assault on their neighborhood (most houses are not airtight) joined the protestors, police went on a rampage. You have seen the images of beatings, of Brian Derdowsky the county councilmember gassed and pepper sprayed as he attempted to broker a peace. Homeowners were arrested for coming out of their front door and asking the police what was happening; shoppers at QFC were gassed as they walked out with groceries; there were several beatings that were not caught on camera. I saw the 18-gram wooden bullets that were used, and I saw the massive bruises they caused. No excuse whatsoever.
Aside from these three mass-arrests, there were many other arrests with as little justification. A friend of mine, an unassuming 35-year-old, was arrested for standing alone on a street corner passing out an op-ed xeroxed from the new york times. The curfew was enforced very selectively, based on age and "alternative" appearance. My Italian friend's legal observation notes were taken from her and destroyed before her eyes as the officer made racist comments.
On the matter of Tuesday, I can respect your position and agree to disagree. When it comes to Wednesday, I cannot. I do not expect you to simply take my word on all that happened, although in no case am I reporting that I did not hear first-hand. I do expect you to either admit you don't know enough to talk informedly about Wednesday, or to take the trouble to inform yourself more fully.
1. not "fires"; one fire, at 4th and Pike. In the middle of the intersection, fueled by trash, a danger to no person or property. Notice that every media picture of a fire is that one dumpster? Don't you think the media, which was omnipresent that day, would have shown all the fires they could find?
2. You're still only talking about Tuesday. No justification whatsoever for police behavior on Wednesday.
2. Note that I already said that the police, in the main, acted legally Tuesday. Just not morally. Your argument is basically: what the protestors did was immoral, so the personal violence offerred by the police was moral. Of course, many of the protestors would turn it around. What the WTO does and plans to do is immoral, so their actions were moral. The difference being that the protester's violence was directed solely against property.
My own view of morality isn't so tit-for-tat; I'm more pragmatic. On a concrete level, the question is, would police actions predictably do more good than harm? I have to say no. They failed to prevent ANY property damage, and probably exacerbated it. They failed to allow the opening ceremony to happen. They hurt a lot of people, including a lot of those who were simply there to express first-amendment rights. Some individual policefolk were carried away to vicious extremes, and their fellow-cops did nothing to apprehend these lawbreakers. All of these things were predictable. I also think this problem was strategic and not tactical. Your "harder, sooner" hypothetical doesn't acknowledge the level of organization and preparation among the most militant protestors.
Note that on this level, the protestors, even the vandals, were justified. They prevented certain people from getting where they wanted to go for a period of a few hours; and, in their own view, they acted to prevent or bring to light crimes much larger than that. There are a lot of things you'd accept that prevent people from going where they want to go, and many of them bear as weak of a relationship to preserving health and well-being.
On a meta-level, things are more even. Here's where your NAACP argument comes in. If everybody, including your 50k white supremacists, felt that their particular ends justified any means short of bodily harm, you're right, we'd have big problems. That's why I do not support the actions of the more militant protestors.
And on a meta-level, the cops regain some shred of justification. (Not because the protestors are unjustified here; it's not a zero-sum-game.) If the cops had not demonstrated their willingness to use violence to protect freedom of movement (note that I don't mention property, as the police did nothing to protect property; in fact, demonstrators themselves in many cases prevented vandalism as the police watched), people in the future may have been encouraged to use such tactics. However, this argument is weak. Will fewer people be willing to restrict the movement of others through mass action as a result of this week's events? I really doubt it; I think outrage and triumph are stronger than fear.
So what should the police have done? Simple. Ringed the convention center, the gap, old navy, niketown, banana republic, Starbucks, and B of A. With about 10 officers in a loose line at each of those stores and a solid cordon at each entrance of the convention center, they would have used far fewer than it took to block off at least 8 intersections with double-ranked badgeless troops. They would have done more good and less harm.
check out this image
It's true, the very first time the police used gas, at 5th and Union, it was preceded by an order to back up/clear the street - as well as being accompanied by beatings. However, I was gassed 4 times; at no time was the gassing preceded by any kind of announcement. (I was acting as a legal observer for the National Lawyer's Guild, as a witness to police violence).
By late afternoon, I had a snorkel mask to protect myself from gas. Therefore, when the police gassed us down Pike from 6th to 2nd at 5PM, I could actually see clearly, although I was choking and about to vomit. For that entire four-block distance, the crowd was retreating in as orderly fashion as possible. There were cries of "walk, don't run" to prevent panic. The only people facing the police were cameramen walking backwards. Everyone was retreating. At fourth street, the police began firing rubber bullets at this unarmed crowd.
However, in some sense I agree with you. The majority of police violence on Tuesday was legally justified. In a very limited manner, it did serve to preserve the freedom of movement of delegates.
I do not believe that it was was morally justified. I do not believe that it served to protect property. In fact I believe that it encouraged property destruction. I do not believe that it was necessary to protect the physical safety of the delegates. Even the black-hat anarchists breaking windows and the opportunistic looters (obviously different groups, and both numbering under 50 out of 50,000 people) were absolutely non-violent when it came to human beings. The only violence I saw was from police, from delegates -- I personally saw a delegate punch an elementary school teacher who was not physically interfering with him in any way -- and from aggressively "non-violent" protestors attempting to stop property destruction. In short, I think the opposite of what you do; that an early "show of force" from the police was a tactical error, so huge as to make them morally culpable.
The story on Wednesday was far worse. Wednesday morning, hundreds of people were arrested for peaceful demonstrations that interfered with no-one's freedom of movement. Many simple passersby were arrested. A friend of mine, a calm 35-year-old-man, was arrested for standing alone on a street corner passing out an op-ed he'd photocopied from the New York Times.
Wednesday afternoon and evening, the cops rioted. First it was down by pike place market, outside the unconstitutional "protest free zone", where demonstrators were literally herded 8 blocks with tear gas, hemmed in on all sides, before being arrested. Then it was up on capitol hill, where an annual Free Mumia march unrelated to WTO was attacked - I'm sure you've seen the pictures of police misconduct there, and I have heard many personal accounts of abuse that was not caught on camera. I talked to one woman who called the National Lawyer's guild from jail; she'd been arrested for going out of her front door to ask the police what was going on. During both of these police riots, the weaponry being used was in fact stronger than that on Tuesday. There was 18-gram wooden dowels as bullets, tear gas so strong it is actually classified as a nerve agent, and voluminous pepper spray. I've seen physical evidence of all of this
For Wednesday's actions, the police are most definitely liable. And that's not even getting into the sickening abuse that went on at the Sand Point detention station and the jail; abuse that I've heard about first-hand in personal conversations. All this, of course, while arrestees were illegally being denied access to the lawyers just outside.
But you never even answered my question. How are 50,000 people supposed to express an opinion without blocking traffic?
can 50,000 people express a point of view without blocking traffic?
I was there. The police used started to use gas and beat people at 9:10 on tuesday, 2 full hours before the first windown was broken.
I can definitely say that it was a minority of the protestors, and mostly out-of-towners, engaging in property destruction during the protest. Looting where I was (Niketown/Westlake area) didn't happen until after the protest had been cleared by the cops, and it seemed to be carried out mainly by local apolitical high-school students. (The situation was perhaps different at the Starbucks opposite the Westin that got much play on the news; there, protestors were hemmed in.)
On the cops side, I have to applaud most of the individual cops. Most of them, especially the Seattle Police Department, showed remarkable restraint. That being said, I still think it shows a fascist system when cops use tear gas, pepper spray, and rubber bullets from the very start on a peaceful demonstration. (Destructive punks slept in and didn't start breaking windows until their scheduled start at 11:11; tear gas had already been in use for hours at that point.) There were also a few definite bad apples among the police - mostly apparently from nearby PD's - who covered up badges, beat protestors, squirted pepper spray up inside gas masks and then held the masks on, and shot peacefully retreating protestors in the back with rubber bullets. (All of this is first hand or second hand from sources who I know and trust).
For a blow-by-blow account of my day, go to my journal.
I started "We're here, we're wet, forgive the debt." I also started "The leader's theft is not the people's debt" as an attempt at a more intelligent chant, but that one didn't get off the ground. Sorry, I've nothing to reply really, I just got a kick out of seeing my chant on slashdot. obOnTopic: I heard someone say that they counted 8,000 protestors (by 10s) going down from the church. Since we seemed to be met just before the stadium by a labor contingent that seemed about equally strong, I'd estimate the numbers were more like 12-15,000 by the time we got to the stadium. That's a pretty huge protest in normal times, and yes, I didn't see any media coverage of it.
Yes, there are still vagrants in Occidental, although many of those are drug dealers not homeless. I serve food there every week, though, and I have personally heard many reports of homeless getting increased harrassment from the police. Certainly in the downtown core, in the state of martial law, the homeless are now gone. Luckily, SHARE, a local homeless organization, has set up two tent cities; one on Capitol Hill and one near Greenlake. (Initially, the city appeared to understand that this would be necessary. However, 2 weeks ago, city bureaucrats suddenly withdrew from tent city negotiations, apparently on orders from the mayor. The tent cities have not been broken up, but they are not city-approved.)
Without labeling, at any given moment, the consumer will pay virtually the same price for either kind of beef, and the companies will soak up the extra profit.
Over the long term, if you in fact have an ideally efficient market, this will lead to lower prices for the consumer. In many cases, this does not happen in practice.
Obviously, people mean different things when they use this phrase. In general, however, it means a few simple things. There are rights to organize and unionize. That goes from basic things from not being arrested for going on strike (which happens in many countries) to more advanced rights like not getting fired on mere suspicion of union sympathies. There are the protections against child labor and forced labor. There are workplace health and safety laws.
There's no question that, even with these equal rights guaranteed, people in third world countries would still often earn wages that would be considered intolerably low in the first world. Factories would still relocate for cheaper labor.
It seems to me that to call the drive for such basic rights as these (which are lacking in much of the world) "protectionist" is missing the point entirely. If these rights were universally enforced, it could only improve the lives of millions. Yes, there are people who are happy to be making $.50 a day; no, there is no one who is happy to have to sell their child, glad to get cancer or mutilations from their job, or overjoyed to be thrown in jail for peacefully supporting a union.
But with any experiment, you must be sure that ALL conditions are the same everytime it is repeated, to be sure the results are as accurate as possible.
"Oh, the reason you couldn't reproduce my experiment is that your conditions weren't the same. Jupiter was in Taurus when you did it."
Science isn't about making ALL conditions the same. Science is about deciding what conditions are important, and making them the same. (In that regard, your comments are very scientific: you've decided what's unimportant and actually completely forgotten about it.) So one of you is arguing "implementation is unimportant, algorithm is what matters", and the other one is arguing "who writes the implementation really is important, because there's a finite chance they'll screw it up, by mistake or on purpose". Guess what: you're both right.
So find a solution that solves both problems. Here's a hint: it's going to involve social engineering. The scientists and the hackers are going to have to actually listen to each other if they want to reach a good accomodation. It's not just a matter of the hackers shutting up and doing what they're told.
The language and regulations contained in TRIPS is old news. The prospect of having the enforcement power of the WTO behind this agreement is definitely not old news; it is going on right now, here in Seattle.
The WTO's power lies in imposing punitive tariffs on countries that flaunt its rules. No country can afford to stand up to them for long.
So, do I think that governments should be able to flaunt treaties that they've signed? I'd like to be able to say "Yes, if the treaties suck", but that's the easy way out. The real question is, who interprets the treaties, and in the last resort, who decides if the treaty has come into conflict with some right more fundamental than it. If you understand your local justice system, you know who's making those choices when treaties are enforced by the governments that sign them.
With the WTO, you might imagine that there's some impartial body adhering to the letter and spirit of the treaty, in this case TRIPS. No way. WTO decisions are made in secret by 3-judge panels. The panelists have almost universally been corporate lawyers at some point in their past. The panel absolutely refuses to hear testimony from anyone but corporations and governments, as you can read about in this leaked ruling. The results are predictable: not once has the WTO ruled in favor of a local law. When you look at it like this, you see the WTO for what it is: not just a way of enforcing treaties, but an unprecedented power-grab by corporations.
So when you read TRIPS, don't read it as a neutral document that will be judiciously enforced. Try reading between the lines, stretching every phrase to its ultimate limit in favor of the big guys. Imagine, at the very least, a whole new set of legal fees to keep the individual patent-holder (or any future "GNU free-patent" organization) out of the game entirely. Then decide what you think of this latest news.
Since the WTO sees everything through the lens of trade, any law that could affect trade counts as a tariff to them. That includes environmental laws (such as the famous sea turtle ruling among many others), labor laws, human rights laws, etc. Would it be free trade if UCITA-like provisions are rammed down sovreign countries throats (by punitive tariffs), as could very well be a consequence of the Seattle TRIPS (trade-related IP) negotiations?
The WTO puts unprecedented power to challenge laws into the hands of corporations. Anyone who thinks that they won't try to use that new power for whatever purpose suits them, rather than just legitimate free trade, is deluded.
(And see the text of the sea turtle ruling, linked above, for the WTO's attitude towards open process... basically, if you're not a government or a corporation with money on the line, don't bother sending them briefs, they won't even read them.)
Working quantum computers with a reasonable number of qubits will render all current public-key encryption techniques useless, regardless of the key length used.
What do you mean, "reasonable number"? You are talking about at least 4 kilobytes, right? 16,000 bits / 3 for error correction / 2+ for Schor's factoring algorithm heck of a lot of qbits.
Assuming "forseeable breakthroughs", QC is probably going to be expensive and slow. Chances are, you're going to have serious cooling infrastructure, and radiation shielding, and possibly massive magnetic fields if you're using spin-based quantum states. You're going to have effective number of bits cut by at least a factor of three through error correction (and there's really NO way around that). In order to move data from place to place, you're probably going to have to either physically move something around or actually transfer data through a long chain of intervening bits from source to destination. And there are reasons why you won't want the clock rate to get too high.
Even assuming that we do get kilobyte- or megabyte- quantum computing, I don't think encryption would be useless. If "polynomial time" means "6 hours on a million-dollar machine", then I think it's still worth encrypting things. And if Moore's law holds for QC (I doubt it will; QC is too specialized a need to bring to bear the societal resources that have caused Moore's law) we wouldn't have QC on that scale for 20-40 years.
[A year or so ago, I amused myself by projecting Moore's law outwards for both classical and quantum computing. I believe both halves of this projection are overoptimistic, but it's fun. The answer I got was that the first time you would ever be able to solve any problem more cheaply using QC was in 2026.]
The last paragraph of the parent to this comment, though, is very important. We haven't even built linear quantum QC's yet, and already it's looking as if they'll only buy us a square root on NP-complete problems. When it comes to nonlinear quantum QC's, the algorithms are an order of magnitude more mindbending. This is really, really hard stuff, and nobody really knows what's possible. It may be that nonlinear effects make simple error correction exponentially hard, and then you're back where you started.
What I meant is, this seems to have become a personal discussion on the issue of pre-columbian demographics, not a discussion on China. Any sane slashdot reader besides the two of us is not reading this. There is nothing to be afraid of from emailing me. Karma's honor: I will use your email for no more than one reply per message recieved and probably less than that. If you do feel the need to talk on slashdot, please, at least check the "No score +1 bonus" box; I do.
Let me get this straight: I do NOT believe that there were 20m native americans at the time of Columbus. I have said that. I am simply quoting, from memory, the source that I have cited (Ward Churchill). He said 3 things, IIRC: 1) The Smithsonian said that there were 1m; 2) if you look at the derivation of that number, it had been revised downwards by a factor of close to 2 at least 3 separate times; 3) some person who I forget the name of estimated 20m as maximum supportable nutritionally given archeological evidence of agricultural methods. I put far more credence in 1) and 2) than in 3, which is why my own estimate would be in the 5-8m range.
You say your numbers are "supported" by something you read several years ago, yet you cite no source. Meanwhile, you say my numbers have no support "other than certain liberal organizations with political objectives". That's a pretty ill-considered way to talk. It's true, as I realize, that Ward Churchill is not always the most credible source in the world (although I'm not sure whether you had any specific knowledge of that fact). However, he is a scholar, not an "organization" - in context, that's just a smear-word. And for cryin' out loud, everyone has political objectives, that has nothing to do with whether you're a good scholar. No more ad hominem arguments, please.
I agree that you can't judge people from many years ago on today's value system. However, my arguement was that there are certain moral universals which do transcend time and place. If anything belongs on that list, genocide does. No, it doesn't make people "evil" across the board, but the action and attude themselves are evil wherever and whenever they occur.
As to the relevancy to today, and specifically to whether the US or Chinese government is morally superior - well, there you are (almost [1]) 100% right. I'm sorry, I popped into this discussion merely because someone had come up with the 100m number and you had countered by saying that was orders of magnitude too high (ie, 1m). I felt I could add something by actually citing a source, rather than arguing from intuition.
[1]The only way this would be relevant to today would be if specific current-day official practices wrt native americans were morally wrong (for non-genocidal reasons) and historically outgrowths of genocidal attitudes. Which I would argue is true, but it is a tiny nitpick compared to a lot of what the Chinese government does and has done in the current era.
You "suspect"? That's exactly how the 1m figure came about in the first place - people working just from intuition.
When you say "closer", do you mean on linear or logarithmic scale? On linear scale, of course 1m is probably closer than 20m. 20m is maximum supportable number. But on logarithmic scale - more appropriate for such wildly different numbers - I'm sure you're wrong. Even neglecting the agricultural interpolations, just look at the earliest estimates from colonizers. You get numbers that would multiply out to over 5m.
Your arguments about bounties and doctors definitely hold some water numerically. It's very plausible that a majority of Indians would have died anyway. However, I would not believe any number much less than 1m for killed-by-malice. And regardless of numbers, a universal bounty shows genocidal intent. Malicious genocide is more repugnant than can ever be excused; we can't ever let anyone off the hook for condoning it.
Oh, but I did make a big mistake. I was trying to give my source and I mentioned Wade Davis (wrong) rather than Ward Churchill.
We really do know more about what we're talking about than back then.
It's like arguing about when Moore's law will end. Most reasonable people agree that at some point it will end. There are fundamental barriers where the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle meets Information Theory. Yes, that's "only according to the current paradigm of physics", but even supposing we could somehow overcome such a barrier, it would take a serious scientific revolution. It requires a very high degree of faith to assume that such a revolution will fit within the constraints of Moore's law - it would almost definitely be either too fast or too slow.
So, physics and CS are in the same boat. Both are riding a developmental process, unprecedented in history, that will eventually end. In both cases, human nature provides an inexhaustable store of unimaginative prophets to predict that the end is near. And in both cases, there is no fundamental barrier to valid prophesying. That means that not only will one of the prophets one day be right; they'll probably be right for most of the right reasons.
The question thus becomes: how do we separate the wise prognosticators from the deluded ones? If you can't answer that question for yourself, you need to work on your epistemology. Personally, I can see so many differences between Weinberg's argument and that of the turn-of-the-century end-of-science prognosticators - and not just differences of degree - that I feel confident giving him more credence. Moreover, I think that, posing the question as I have posed it, it would have been easy to see through the end-of-science claims last time the century turned, without any anachronistic knowledge of physice.
Note that Weinberg does not actually claim we'll have a TOE (theory of everything) by 2050, just that we'll have a GUT (grand unified theory). The difference is, a TOE would explain the fundamental physics of everything, whereas a GUT only covers everything that happens at energies of less then 10^18 GeV or so. Now, some physicists believe that these two are the same thing, and some don't. This is mostly an article of faith. Moreover, it's totally immaterial on a practical scale. As Weinberg explains, it would take an accelerator light-years long (and magnetic fields strong enough to rip apart normal matter) to begin to see the difference. With a GUT, for the first time in history we'd know everything there is to know about the fundamental physics of everything currently observable, and we could settle down and spend the next millenia or so working out the implications of that knowledge.
Actually, Wade Davis talks a lot about population numbers. As of 1940, the accepted number for population of land currently held by US pre-columbus, promulgated by the Smithsonian, was under 1m. This had been arrived at by each generation of historians looking at the previous generation's estimates, looking around for all those Indians, then "judiciously" revising the number downwards. Going back to primary sources, you get a much higher number. Native American agricultural methods and area covered would have probably supported about 20m, and a conservative population estimate is about half that. Every state in the continental US at one time offered a bounty for dead Indians, and even disease was deliberately spread (besides the famous smallpox blankets, which happened in Canada, there are documented cases of doctors deliberately giving advice that would lead to spreading disease - "It's a curse, the only cure is for everyone to go to their village of origin and have a feast"). So you can probably say on the whole more than one generation was slaughtered, putting this guy within an order of magnitude. Which is pretty good for statistics he PULLED OUT OF HIS ASS, and for all I know better than the 60m cultural revolution figure.
Have you seen the sp t1700? PalmOS-based, with 802.11. Also, there should be several wireless lan Handspring cards coming out soon, including a bluetooth one from widComm.
Palm has a true multitasking kernel (AMX). Unfortunately, their license forbids them from giving you the multitasking API. You can use the features, however, if you pay AMX $5000. Or, hackers who don't care about publishing what they've done could just hack into it and not get caught. But we don't have any of those around here, now, do we?
A lot of the power of the linux kernel is page files and swap space and all that jazz. If your volatile and nonvolatile storage are identical, well, as people have already said, there's just not much point.
Any palm III or higher (except a visor or the IIIe special edition) has flashable ROM. This contains a smallrom [not to be replaced unless you REALLY know what you're doing] with minimal boot and debugger code, and a largerom, which contains everything in the smallrom plus an OS and the built-in apps. The rom image, I assume, is only a largerom image and not a widerom (small+large). Thus, if you reset with the up key held down you'd boot back into Palm's smallrom and could reflash back to your old largerom (if you'd kept a copy).
That's my birthday, and how appropriate:
One chip to rule them all
One chip to mock them
One chip to bring them all
and in its circuits overclock them
Wait... so what does that make Linus?
Can anyone here name the anticompetitive tactics that IBM was being sued for? (Well, this is slashdot, so probably yes. But rhetorically speaking...) Of course not, because that's all in the past. If the person on the street has even heard of the IBM antitrust action, they know maybe three things: The government sued IBM, the trial took a long time, the government lost. Ergo, it was a waste of money. If that happens twice, it's a pattern, and it'll take a braver attorney general than we're likely to get to start gunning for the next Microsoft. No one will care that the increased scrutiny of the lawsuit made room for Linux or whatever.
Of course, the case, and the remedy, should be decided on merits, not on what sends the right political message. But I hope that the justice system can remember that this is a case about actions situated in a historical time. If the case drags on past Microsoft's actual monopoly, I'd still want to see them get the punishment they deserved when they took those actions.
This is exactly MS's best strategy. In fact, by writing "intel" into the *market* portion of the FoF instead of the "barriers to entry" (as in, we already have Intel hardware on every desk in this company, we can't exactly switch to MacOS) Judge Jackson made his greatest mistake.
(go ahead, mod me down as redundant, so long as you mod him up. Assuming "sethg"=a "him".)