Because if they didn't get their asses kicked all the time, there would be plenty of them left at the end of the series, which we already know isn't the case?
The point of this work isn't to create random sounds, but to create music that sounds tolerable to humans. It's significantly different from just generating every possible sequence of bytes that make up a valid MP3 file or valid MIDI file.
Similarly, according to dictionary.com, American Heritage Dictionary found that opposition to sense 3 have been steadily abating, and that in 1996, only 35% of their usage panel objected to comprise being used that way.
That bullshit. The drive towards democracy has lasted thousands of years. The US was just one step among many that increased the level of freedoms further. From ancient Greece, through Italian city states, the Magna Carta, the oldest proper parliaments (look at Iceland, for instance, for a parliamentary tradition around a thousand years old), and the rise of the British parliamentarism, to the French revolution, the German revolution of 1848, the Paris Commune of 1871, the original Russian revolutions (starting in the 1800's and ending with the introduction of parliamentary democracy before the Bolcheviks gained control in the October revolution), the peaceful transfer of power to parliaments in the Scandinavian countries, the African and Asian liberation movements after World War II that meant the end of colonialism and brought democracy to at least a few of them.
The US is only one of many countries that have pushed the boundary of democracy and freedom. It wasn't the first, and it isn't the country that has pushed it the furthest. By modern standards, the US electoral system is for instance fairly bad at providing a representative government, grouping it with a few of the other of the early democracies as countries that still stick to one man circuits for many types of elections.
The US weren't crucial at revitalising the concept of democracy any more than France or England or Germany or any other of the countries that had growing movements pushing for democracy were. The US was a result of an ongoing movement all over the industrialised world for liberation from feudalism, that heavily influenced your founding fathers, as it influenced thinkers, politicians and rebels everywhere.
Trying to pretend the US is some kind of beacon for freedom and democracy is an insult to the millions of people all over the world who fought, and died, to protect and extend democracy long before the US was conceived, and who has fought, and died, since then to expand democracy and freedom often in the face of international intervention to keep them down - including US government supported oppression (Chile, Indonesia, Nicaragua to name a few).
Nobody should have any reason to discredit the importance of the founding of the US and the US constitution as a step towards a more democratic world, but neither is it fair to ignore the shortcomings of the US and disregard everyone elses accomplishments and participation either.
Yes, but you aren't seriously suggesting it would be one RAID over all the disks are you?
So assuming 3 failures a day, at most 3 RAID's would be running slower a day. Assuming 4 disks per RAID that's at most 12 disks at reduced performance, or 0.3% of the total data set that isn't available at full speed. If that is an issue, you duplicate any data that MUST be available on multiple nodes.
Laugh all you want but what they are doing makes sense: Recovering a node in case of a crash or messed up filesystem is easy - you replace the dongle and hit the reset button. No need to have space wasting CD drives or floppy drives, and the rest of the OS can be pulled down over the network.
The last thing you want with a setup like this is having to haul hardware around or disconnect stuff if you for any reason can't boot of the disks anymore.
And you certainly don't want to reduce density by wasting space that could be filled with disks with other stuff.
Car prices would be a big reason to switch. UK car prices are artificially high compared to the rest of Europe because it is significantly easier for UK car dealers to control prices in part as a result of the differences in the cars.
You underestimate market pressures. If the EU and "some third world countries" (such as China, which is catching up fast enough that they are now the worlds largest market for cell phones?) move to Linux, US software companies will face one of two choices: Become irellevant, or support Linux before the competition (whether US or foreign).
The huge risk in not migrating is not being able to satisfy your customers while your competitors do.
If your clients decide TCO is compelling, then it doesn't matter what you think - someone will be there to support them, and someone will be there to send them documents in formats that work well for them, or take their data in formats you can't handle, or whatever is relevant to your business.
That's how Windows and Office came to dominate in the first place: Some people saw a benefit, and they got a domino effect from partners, customers etc. that may not have seen a direct benefit, but saw a benefit in interoperating with people who had taken the leap.
If they indeed really suspected him of being a potential terrorist, and didn't just want to harass him, why did they alert him to the fact that he is under investigation by showing up to question him? If they really thought it was possible he was a terrorist, they just alerted anyone associated with him to lay low for a while, and stopped him before they had any indication they could pin anything on him, giving him plenty of opportunity to wait out the investigation before doing anything.
How loose your security is viewed worldwide? I know there ARE places that are probably as paranoid as the US, but I've never seen them. From my perspective, living in the UK, a country quickly turning into a police state too, the US looks more and more like a Orwellian society every day.
Face it, you are more likely to get run down by a car or die as a result of smoking than ever being the victim of terrorism - why isn't the same kind of effort being put into reducing road accidents? Why the extreme focus on terrorism instead of solving problems that costs many times as many lives, and go on killing every single day?
You mean they don't have a political message that you notice because they don't annoy you. Everyone is influenced by their political views when describing situations influenced by politics. The "obvious" examples are Sim City and Civilisation, where the games in many ways are shaped by political views about how things are.
Don't think South Park is political? To me, it's one of the clearest examples of political views being baked into entertainment out there today.
Sounds like you'd enjoy reading some of Thor Heyerdahls work. The central aspect of Heyerdahls work was that he believed people have had the capability to cross the oceans much longer than previously thought, and that large parts of the world was settled that way, with sea faring cultures settling South America from Africa, the South Pacific by boat from South America etc. His last few years were spent digging up pyramid like structures all over the place (South America, Canary Islands and Sicily), and a slightly unrelated dig of a village he believed might have been the basis for norse mythology.
He's quite controversial in many respects, in particular for his approach to testing the feasability of some of his theories (which involved crossing the Atlantic and Pacific on rafts made using designs found on old artifacts - look up Kontiki in particular), but his theories and journeys make for interesting reading regardless what you think of them...
Yuck.... When I saw the name I originally had a faint hope they'd actually try to reproduce something that paid proper respects to the original French movie (as opposed to the horrible hollywood adaptation - Codename Nina)... Imagine my disappointment. Why did they even bother recycling the name? It's not like many of the people who've seen the original would be likely to like the series, and considering how few people in the US are likely to recognise the name from the French movie it just seems weird...
Doesn't matter. Copyright is an artificial time limited monopoly granted in order to enrich the public domain. If these copyright protection mechanisms are in place, and it's illegal to break them, it changes the deal - the benefit the public gets from allowing copyright has just massively diminished.
A great deal of the copyrighted works that the movie companies try so hard to protect now have been possible to make only because of the balance of copyright law: Things eventually do pass into the public domain, and it's possible to make use of the works because they aren't protected by law or in other ways from reuse once that happens. Look at the number of Disney movies, for instance, that have been based on literary works in the public domain.
The movie industry is pushing for a massive grab of rights that copyright law was never intended to give.
Apart from that, the kind of "short-circuiting" you are suggesting would be highly unlikely to make a difference. Wine tries to model the implementation as closely as possible on how Windows actually works. That means implement as much as possible of Wine in terms of other Windows API's.
The native Windows DLL's does not run under any form of emulation, they run just as they would under Windows. The difference is that some of the Windows API calls they make may call Wine replacements instead of a native Windows DLL, and some of those Wine replacements may call Linux API's.
There's no more benefit in what you term "short-circuiting" those call chains for Wine that there is for real Windows - all the work still needs to be done, and for most of the code there's unlikely to be significant amounts of straight call forwarding.
There's nothing in the concepts Wine is based on that means a Wine DLL must be slower than the native equivalent, and nothing that means a Windows app needs to run slower under Wine than under Windows - where that is the case, it's a reflection of the current status of the Wine implementation and/or architecture, not an inherent limitation of reimplementing the Win32 API on Linux.
To make it possible to cross compile Windows applications so they run under Linux, you still need to implement all the Windows API's those applications use. In other words the whole Win32 API. Which is what Winelib (part of Wine) give you. You CAN in other words recompile Windows C/C++ applications so they run directly under Linux, but what you get is essentially an application linked directly to the Wine code. So no, it's not any easier.
The only read advantage you get from this over running the app under Wine directly is that you can combine the Windows code with Linux code to improve interoperability with Linux.
SCO's market cap has NOTHING to do with whether or not they would have the cash on hand to redeem Baystar - the only thing that affects that is SCO's assets. They could make SCO's shares tank as much as they want, and it wouldn't change SCO's cash holdings.
Or it may mean that the people in question have decided they are likely to earn more elsewhere. SCO has dropped so much that for someone who shorted at the top, it would take fairly large percentage wise drops from the current level to significantly add to their profit, so their money might be put to better use in other shares.
There could be a zillion different reasons that's unrelated to their performance, so unless this turns into a lasting trend it's not worth reading too much into it.
... and if you mention that in a job interview, the interviewers first response should be "we can't risk hiring this person". I know that's what I would be thinking. If ANY of that code was written while you were employed somewhere else, you would be a legal risk to the company if you indicate a willingness to reuse ANYTHING but general knowledge from your "library".
Because obviously there is no infighting and bickering between companies that develop proprietary software?
Dragging up these kinds of conflicts as a problem with open source projects is a lousy excuse at best.
In the real world, if clients are "appalled by the infighting and bickering" what it really means is that they are appalled because they got to see what would otherwise to a large extent happen behind closed doors protected by ridiculous membership fees for industry consortiums, or they somehow see it as "infighting and bickering" when it happens on a mailing-list and serious, worthwhile competition when it happens in the form of press releases from large companies.
If your clients can't handle that, they need to learn - openness means dirty laundry IS aired in public, and ultimately it's a strength that allow users to take organizational risk into account when choosing a software solution, something which is inherently hard to do with companies where all the nasty stuff happens behind the users backs.
No, it is NOT generally understood that written correspondance is owned by the one who receives it. Information can't be "owned". You can have rights to certain aspects, such as redistribution, covered by copyright, or usage, covered by patents, but it is not property.
However in the case of written correspondance, it is VERY clear that copyright stays with the person writing (if what is being written is original - if it reproduces someone elses work, then copyright stays with the original author), and patent rights aren't affected at all.
Only the specific instance of data received is "owned" in any sense by the recipient - in the case of snail mail, you have property rights to the letter, but not the contents. Since you have property rights to the physical copy, you can use the contents without violating copyright law, but except as provided by the fair use and first sale doctrines you do not have any right to copy and redistribute the contents without permission from the author.
However this is a side issue in this case. The issue is privacy, not ownership. If you have a reasonable expectation that a conversation is not on record, you are likely to respond differently to many situations and questions. Many places you are for this reason not allowed to record a conversation without consent of any parties present. The issue here is whether a user would expect a permanent record to be made of a chat conversation.
The decision seems to imply that where logging and recording is part of the chat system, the user should be expected to know this, and a record is fine - just like a person could hardly claim that recording was done without consent if recording equipment is on the table, and visibly running, and the person doesn't protest, or if the user goes somewhere where it is commonly known that recording takes place - such as a TV studio.
However where the logging and recording is done with separate tools (copying the contents of the chat window to another application, video tape etc.) because the chat system in question does not record conversations on its own the user may not expect recording to take place.
The closest analogy is probably a phone line: Everyone knows that recording equipment can be attached to a phone line, but people do not normally expect their conversations to be taped, so many jurisdictions require consent, as people in most cases have an expectation of a certain level of privacy when talking to someone on the phone.
E-mail would not naturally fall in the same category, as most people have the expectation that e-mail might be stored, printed, forwarded and otherwise kept because of the nature of how e-mail is used by most people - it is a closer match to sending a letter than a phone conversation in terms of peoples expectations.
Shrink wrap software houses employ a miniscule fraction of the total pool of engineers. Most engineers are working on inhouse, bespoke systems. Open source enables companies to focus resources on adapting open source solutions instead of purchasing properietary applications at ridiculous profit margins, meaning a potentially significantly larger portion of the money spent on software actually end up in the pockets of engineers creating new software.
Open source is good to engineers because it enables a lot of projects that would otherwise be economically infeasible. It is, on the other hand, likely to be bad to the tiny minority working for software houses that make shrink wrap apps.
You can patent the combination of two existing things, but only if they are combined in a way that isn't obvious to a person trained in the field. Otherwise you couldn't patent anything - everything is at some level a combination of existing elements.
The key is that what's "obvious" is often hard for someone to decide after the fact, especially if they're not trained in the field, as can be judged by looking at how often the same ideas pop up from multiple sources at almost the same time, because they happen to be the logical extension to the current state of the field, while the same ideas clearly wouldn't have been obvious a few years previously.
As for the ideas you mention, some of them might be patentable if you could create a design for a specific embodiment of them. For instance, if you found a smart design for how to use a car as a generator that makes it sufficiently different from the "obvious" ways of doing so, you would likely be able to get a patent (on the other hand, it would likely be an easy patent to get around, so unless your specific design offered real advantages it would be unlikely to have any benefit).
One thing that is often missed with regards to terraforming is that terraforming can be highly useful long before reaching the point where humands can walk on the surface without an environmental suit:
Increasing temperature reduces the danger of failures in heating habitats, and reduces the need for heating habitats. Increasing the athmospheric pressure makes it easier build large scale domes, either to replace sealed housing, or to complement it, and makes leaks less dangerous. Increasing the oxygen contents of the athmosphere similarly reduces the risk of leaks in habitats. Combine these together, and the opportunity "quickly" arises for larger habitats.
Many of the terraforming techniques considered would also be useful in sealed, or "almost sealed" habitats. For instance by doming some smaller impact craters. In such limited space, techniques such as microbes and machinery could bring livable areas very quickly, while the full scale terraforming continue outside, slowly reducing the need for completely sealing the domes (as the pressures equalise, and the amount of air and heat escaping is small enough to be replaced on an ongoing basis).
Terraforming isn't an all or nothing thing - people live on earth under what to me seem like ridiculous conditions (from some of the hottest deserts, to areas in Siberia where the lowest recorded temperature is below -70 degrees celsius). As long as habitats can guarantee some minimums, such as sufficient oxygen, people will endure, and an ongoing terraforming will help gradually expand their freedom of movement, the areas suitable for habitation, and gradually reduce their dependence on safety measures.
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Because if they didn't get their asses kicked all the time, there would be plenty of them left at the end of the series, which we already know isn't the case?
The point of this work isn't to create random sounds, but to create music that sounds tolerable to humans. It's significantly different from just generating every possible sequence of bytes that make up a valid MP3 file or valid MIDI file.
Similarly, according to dictionary.com, American Heritage Dictionary found that opposition to sense 3 have been steadily abating, and that in 1996, only 35% of their usage panel objected to comprise being used that way.
The US is only one of many countries that have pushed the boundary of democracy and freedom. It wasn't the first, and it isn't the country that has pushed it the furthest. By modern standards, the US electoral system is for instance fairly bad at providing a representative government, grouping it with a few of the other of the early democracies as countries that still stick to one man circuits for many types of elections.
The US weren't crucial at revitalising the concept of democracy any more than France or England or Germany or any other of the countries that had growing movements pushing for democracy were. The US was a result of an ongoing movement all over the industrialised world for liberation from feudalism, that heavily influenced your founding fathers, as it influenced thinkers, politicians and rebels everywhere.
Trying to pretend the US is some kind of beacon for freedom and democracy is an insult to the millions of people all over the world who fought, and died, to protect and extend democracy long before the US was conceived, and who has fought, and died, since then to expand democracy and freedom often in the face of international intervention to keep them down - including US government supported oppression (Chile, Indonesia, Nicaragua to name a few).
Nobody should have any reason to discredit the importance of the founding of the US and the US constitution as a step towards a more democratic world, but neither is it fair to ignore the shortcomings of the US and disregard everyone elses accomplishments and participation either.
You mean for companies like Novell, IBM and Redhat?
So assuming 3 failures a day, at most 3 RAID's would be running slower a day. Assuming 4 disks per RAID that's at most 12 disks at reduced performance, or 0.3% of the total data set that isn't available at full speed. If that is an issue, you duplicate any data that MUST be available on multiple nodes.
The last thing you want with a setup like this is having to haul hardware around or disconnect stuff if you for any reason can't boot of the disks anymore. And you certainly don't want to reduce density by wasting space that could be filled with disks with other stuff.
Car prices would be a big reason to switch. UK car prices are artificially high compared to the rest of Europe because it is significantly easier for UK car dealers to control prices in part as a result of the differences in the cars.
The huge risk in not migrating is not being able to satisfy your customers while your competitors do.
If your clients decide TCO is compelling, then it doesn't matter what you think - someone will be there to support them, and someone will be there to send them documents in formats that work well for them, or take their data in formats you can't handle, or whatever is relevant to your business.
That's how Windows and Office came to dominate in the first place: Some people saw a benefit, and they got a domino effect from partners, customers etc. that may not have seen a direct benefit, but saw a benefit in interoperating with people who had taken the leap.
It just sounds too stupid.
Face it, you are more likely to get run down by a car or die as a result of smoking than ever being the victim of terrorism - why isn't the same kind of effort being put into reducing road accidents? Why the extreme focus on terrorism instead of solving problems that costs many times as many lives, and go on killing every single day?
Don't think South Park is political? To me, it's one of the clearest examples of political views being baked into entertainment out there today.
He's quite controversial in many respects, in particular for his approach to testing the feasability of some of his theories (which involved crossing the Atlantic and Pacific on rafts made using designs found on old artifacts - look up Kontiki in particular), but his theories and journeys make for interesting reading regardless what you think of them...
Yuck.... When I saw the name I originally had a faint hope they'd actually try to reproduce something that paid proper respects to the original French movie (as opposed to the horrible hollywood adaptation - Codename Nina)... Imagine my disappointment. Why did they even bother recycling the name? It's not like many of the people who've seen the original would be likely to like the series, and considering how few people in the US are likely to recognise the name from the French movie it just seems weird...
A great deal of the copyrighted works that the movie companies try so hard to protect now have been possible to make only because of the balance of copyright law: Things eventually do pass into the public domain, and it's possible to make use of the works because they aren't protected by law or in other ways from reuse once that happens. Look at the number of Disney movies, for instance, that have been based on literary works in the public domain.
The movie industry is pushing for a massive grab of rights that copyright law was never intended to give.
Apart from that, the kind of "short-circuiting" you are suggesting would be highly unlikely to make a difference. Wine tries to model the implementation as closely as possible on how Windows actually works. That means implement as much as possible of Wine in terms of other Windows API's.
The native Windows DLL's does not run under any form of emulation, they run just as they would under Windows. The difference is that some of the Windows API calls they make may call Wine replacements instead of a native Windows DLL, and some of those Wine replacements may call Linux API's.
There's no more benefit in what you term "short-circuiting" those call chains for Wine that there is for real Windows - all the work still needs to be done, and for most of the code there's unlikely to be significant amounts of straight call forwarding.
There's nothing in the concepts Wine is based on that means a Wine DLL must be slower than the native equivalent, and nothing that means a Windows app needs to run slower under Wine than under Windows - where that is the case, it's a reflection of the current status of the Wine implementation and/or architecture, not an inherent limitation of reimplementing the Win32 API on Linux.
The only read advantage you get from this over running the app under Wine directly is that you can combine the Windows code with Linux code to improve interoperability with Linux.
SCO's market cap has NOTHING to do with whether or not they would have the cash on hand to redeem Baystar - the only thing that affects that is SCO's assets. They could make SCO's shares tank as much as they want, and it wouldn't change SCO's cash holdings.
There could be a zillion different reasons that's unrelated to their performance, so unless this turns into a lasting trend it's not worth reading too much into it.
... and if you mention that in a job interview, the interviewers first response should be "we can't risk hiring this person". I know that's what I would be thinking. If ANY of that code was written while you were employed somewhere else, you would be a legal risk to the company if you indicate a willingness to reuse ANYTHING but general knowledge from your "library".
Dragging up these kinds of conflicts as a problem with open source projects is a lousy excuse at best.
In the real world, if clients are "appalled by the infighting and bickering" what it really means is that they are appalled because they got to see what would otherwise to a large extent happen behind closed doors protected by ridiculous membership fees for industry consortiums, or they somehow see it as "infighting and bickering" when it happens on a mailing-list and serious, worthwhile competition when it happens in the form of press releases from large companies.
If your clients can't handle that, they need to learn - openness means dirty laundry IS aired in public, and ultimately it's a strength that allow users to take organizational risk into account when choosing a software solution, something which is inherently hard to do with companies where all the nasty stuff happens behind the users backs.
However in the case of written correspondance, it is VERY clear that copyright stays with the person writing (if what is being written is original - if it reproduces someone elses work, then copyright stays with the original author), and patent rights aren't affected at all.
Only the specific instance of data received is "owned" in any sense by the recipient - in the case of snail mail, you have property rights to the letter, but not the contents. Since you have property rights to the physical copy, you can use the contents without violating copyright law, but except as provided by the fair use and first sale doctrines you do not have any right to copy and redistribute the contents without permission from the author.
However this is a side issue in this case. The issue is privacy, not ownership. If you have a reasonable expectation that a conversation is not on record, you are likely to respond differently to many situations and questions. Many places you are for this reason not allowed to record a conversation without consent of any parties present. The issue here is whether a user would expect a permanent record to be made of a chat conversation.
The decision seems to imply that where logging and recording is part of the chat system, the user should be expected to know this, and a record is fine - just like a person could hardly claim that recording was done without consent if recording equipment is on the table, and visibly running, and the person doesn't protest, or if the user goes somewhere where it is commonly known that recording takes place - such as a TV studio.
However where the logging and recording is done with separate tools (copying the contents of the chat window to another application, video tape etc.) because the chat system in question does not record conversations on its own the user may not expect recording to take place.
The closest analogy is probably a phone line: Everyone knows that recording equipment can be attached to a phone line, but people do not normally expect their conversations to be taped, so many jurisdictions require consent, as people in most cases have an expectation of a certain level of privacy when talking to someone on the phone.
E-mail would not naturally fall in the same category, as most people have the expectation that e-mail might be stored, printed, forwarded and otherwise kept because of the nature of how e-mail is used by most people - it is a closer match to sending a letter than a phone conversation in terms of peoples expectations.
Open source is good to engineers because it enables a lot of projects that would otherwise be economically infeasible. It is, on the other hand, likely to be bad to the tiny minority working for software houses that make shrink wrap apps.
The key is that what's "obvious" is often hard for someone to decide after the fact, especially if they're not trained in the field, as can be judged by looking at how often the same ideas pop up from multiple sources at almost the same time, because they happen to be the logical extension to the current state of the field, while the same ideas clearly wouldn't have been obvious a few years previously.
As for the ideas you mention, some of them might be patentable if you could create a design for a specific embodiment of them. For instance, if you found a smart design for how to use a car as a generator that makes it sufficiently different from the "obvious" ways of doing so, you would likely be able to get a patent (on the other hand, it would likely be an easy patent to get around, so unless your specific design offered real advantages it would be unlikely to have any benefit).
Increasing temperature reduces the danger of failures in heating habitats, and reduces the need for heating habitats. Increasing the athmospheric pressure makes it easier build large scale domes, either to replace sealed housing, or to complement it, and makes leaks less dangerous. Increasing the oxygen contents of the athmosphere similarly reduces the risk of leaks in habitats. Combine these together, and the opportunity "quickly" arises for larger habitats.
Many of the terraforming techniques considered would also be useful in sealed, or "almost sealed" habitats. For instance by doming some smaller impact craters. In such limited space, techniques such as microbes and machinery could bring livable areas very quickly, while the full scale terraforming continue outside, slowly reducing the need for completely sealing the domes (as the pressures equalise, and the amount of air and heat escaping is small enough to be replaced on an ongoing basis).
Terraforming isn't an all or nothing thing - people live on earth under what to me seem like ridiculous conditions (from some of the hottest deserts, to areas in Siberia where the lowest recorded temperature is below -70 degrees celsius). As long as habitats can guarantee some minimums, such as sufficient oxygen, people will endure, and an ongoing terraforming will help gradually expand their freedom of movement, the areas suitable for habitation, and gradually reduce their dependence on safety measures.