This is the most hilarious thing I've read in a long time. I don't have time to read all of this, but here are a few comments:
If you're so worried about the earth charter, have you actually read it? (you can download it in PDF here). The only mentions of religion I could find at all were: 12 a) about eliminating discrimination, including based on religion, 12 d) Protect and restore outstanding places of cultural and spiritual significance.
The Earth Charter has essentially nothing to with religion, and certainly doesn't advocate a "world religion".
As for the International Criminal Court, first of all the ICC is voluntary. Any nation can refuse to sign it, and the US did refuse. So what is the problem? But you also blatantly ignore the problem the ICC was set out to solve: How do we bring criminals to justice when a crime is committed outside the jurisdiction or reach of an effective nation government, or in a nation where the government refuse to take justice seriously. Specifically, the reason the US refused to accept the ICC was the prospect that US service men might be tried and convicted for crimes carried out abroad - which is understandable given the US military's tendency to ignore local laws for their service personell.
If the US were concerned about justice, there would be a whole lot less need for the ICC.
You're further quoting Jacques Cousteau, trying to pass off the quote as somehow official UN policy, when it is the opinion of one person. However what he is saying is in many ways true: The earth can't sustain an infinite number of people - growth needs to be stabilised. It can happen one of two ways: We take family planning seriously, and reduce the number of births, or it will "solve itself" with lower life expectancies due to hunger, disease or conflicts. How is it bad to suggest that something needs to be done to prevent future generations from massive suffering?
You also point to an out of context quote on private land ownership, ignoring that the main point is that public control of land use is vital to ensure that private land ownership isn't used to gain a choke hold on society. If you oppose public control of land use, does that mean you would be happy to allow me to buy the plots around your house and set up a drug addict rehabilitation centre, a brothel, an abortion clinic and a sewage dump on the respective sides of the house? I'd assume that you, like most of us, would find at least one of the above annoying as your next door neighbours.
The reason you can avoid that, is because land use is strictly government regulated, to ensure that someone doesn't abuse his or her "freedom" combined with wealth to shape society they way they please.
I also assume the page you wanted to point to was this which starts off with a fraudulent Marx' quote... I guess they assume noone visiting their site either have read the Communist Manifesto, or would bother searching for it on Google and checking. They then go on with another quote taken massively out of context (it's at the end of a paragraph explaining why this "property" they want to take away is the property aquired through exploitation of workers, which Marx' wanted redistributed, for starters through massively progressive property taxes, removal of inheritance rights and abolution landed property and land rents).
The page then goes on to present Habitat I as some sort of support for carrying out Marx' ideas, when what it is advocating is government control over land use as opposed to public (note: NOT government - in The abolition of landed property he specifically says on explaining nationalisation of land ownership "There will no longer exist a government nor a state distinct from society itself", something which was a key part of Marx' political foundation - a Marxist "communist" state is
Except he wasn't stealing, and isn't accused of stealing, but of copyright infringement. Copyright isn't propery rights - copyright was created to give a limited monopoly on the distribution of information which are NOT COVERED by property rights.
If you think there's hardly a wealth gap at all in Africa, you really, really need a better grasp of reality.
If anything, the wealth gaps in Africa is ridiculously large. You have people in most African countries that are close to the wealth levels of the richest people in the developed countries, yet the poorest people live on much less than most poor people in the developed countries, and make up
And I just can't agree with you about the "rewards". Most of the wealth held by the richest couple of percent today are in the hands of people who INHERITED their fortune or significant parts of it, and who might have grown that fortune mostly by letting investment advisors shuffle paper, and dictators or ex dictators who STOLE IT from their people.
There are a few exceptions, but often their stories will be about people who takes someone elses inventions and understand how to sell it better. Bill Gates and Larry Ellison, for instance, both fall in that category. Very few people have become wealthy as a result of true innovation of product as opposed to innovation in product placement.
I would guess the reasoning is that we know how to build in a gravity environment, and we know how to make basic robots work in a gravity environment. We do NOT have significant experience in doing that in space, and it is much harder to gain experience with zero gravity robotics. So it sort of makes sense from a perspective of reducing the amount of unknown factors.
Secondly, if we do manage to build robots that can build this out of materials found at the site, that has the potential to dramatically reduce the amount of material that needs to be transported into orbit, thus possibly dramatically reducing cost. Providing that the resulting robots won't be so much larger and heavier that they make up for the difference...
Even if he is talking about $150,000/y-person in todays dollar value he doesn't seem to take into account that 1) there's no chance in hell that the world will be willing to rely on being on the good side of the US (or any other country for that matter - this doesn't have to do with which country is being the single source supplier, but the risk of relying on a single energy source controlled by a single country), so regardless of price there is just no way the US would corner the market, 2) any potential competitors have a long time to improve technology and bring down the price differential, 3) if it's so bloody cheap and can provide so much income you'll quickly face competition from Russia, India, China, Europe and prices will plummet even further (which is good for consumers, but which means profit margins will be unlikely to be anywhere near what he suggests).
It boils down to: While having "unlimited" "almost free" energy would be great, any suggestion along the line of "this investment is guaranteed to bring ridiculous profit" about almost anything legit will be bullshit - if profit margins are significantly above average returns on investment investors will be queuing up to invest in it AND to fund competitors.
And in this case there is a long list of countries with launch capabilities that will have a significant political and economical interest in competing, and in the case of China even actual ambition to develop.
But of course if one party starts a project like this it could be the factor to finally kickstart another space race.
Of course you could "copy" the hardware aspects that make mainframes so good at IO. You'd end up with another mainframe.
It's not like mainframe technology has been standing still as everything else have speeded up. Mainframes are big, clunky and complex because that's what you get when you need extreme reliability.
Look at the typical desktop system, and what it's geared for: High processor speed, fast memory access and game level graphics.
Think about what the typical desktop system does not take into account: - The disks are bloody slow, and the CPU gets bogged down because the controller doesn't really do much. Solution? Use arrays of smaller disks, and controllers with their own CPU's.
- High end networking bogs down the CPU's. Solution: Add CPU's to the network cards (which incidentally is common on higher end gigabit ethernet even for PC's).
- Reliability is low. Solution: Double or triple everything, and spend huge amounts of money on ensuring faulty hardware is detected and doesn't get to bring down your system (IBM has some quite interesting stuff to signal likely faults in memory and CPU's before they actually fail, for instance - you can get system monitors from IBM that will call IBM and get a technician sent out with a replacement, provided the proper support contracts, to fix the problem before you even knew there was one).
All of this costs ridiculous amounts of money, so you don't replicate it unless you actually need it. Most people don't. For most people it's cheaper to either accept some downtime every now and again, or run a job overnight instead of expecting instant responses, or buy more servers (either for reliability or added performance). Mainframes cover a very specific niche: Cases where you CAN'T accept significant downtime, AND your application is very IO heavy.
If it aint broke, don't fix it. Not many new applications are written in COBOL, but vast amounts were written, debugged and got to the point were they are business criticial. You don't rewrite business critical software in a different language unless you have a VERY good reason (translation: not unless you NEED to do changes that are so massive that rewriting the system from scratch and spending years getting the bugs out of it is worth it).
"Lazy" doesn't come into it - you'd be incompetent if you suggested someone rewrite a working system if the only reason is some perceived notion that the language is outdated.
Talk about Paranoia. Novell bought SuSE to strengthen their Linux offering. SuSE went from being an independent software company with a market cap in the $210 million range, to being part of a company with a market cap well above $2 billion.
Redhat is focusing on selling products that will make it money. So Redhat won't make boxed sets of their cheapest product anymore, but who were buying them anyway? You've always been able to get it in tons of books, magazines, on the net etc., and Fedora is taking over the mantle. So what you have is a situation where companies still get support if they pay for it, just as before, and consumers get a ditro, just as before, but the name will be different, and they'll have to go to some cheap CD packager to get CD's of it much like most people have been doing anyway.
Sun? Who cares about Sun except Sun itself?
All in all I see the Novell and Redhat events as good - it will likely help both companies, which will only mean better business penetration for Linux, and that will filter down to consumers eventually.
The lawyers are given incentives for keeping the lawsuit going until they win or the company gets sold, regardless of whether or not keeping the lawsuit is in the best interest of their client. For SCO shareholders this should be a big issue, since Boies and his partnerse will only lose their time and work if SCO is bankrupted in the process, and will score massively if they succeed.
Lawyers are meant to take into account their clients best interests, not just blindly do whatever is asked of them.
Note that I don't think anyone will do anything about this, or get anywhere if they tried, but I do find it a bit fishy that a company's management enter into an agreement with a lawfirm that gives the lawyers a strong incentive to go for a specific goal regardless of the risk of significant loss for the shareholders.
To stop a $210 million friendly take-over of a private company? Not bloody likely unless it had been in a heavily regulated area (think arms manufacturer, nuclear technology or similar). The regulators involved are likely to do more than yawn - this is peanuts from a government point of view.
Teoma may do the same as Google, but are they making money? And are they making as much as Google? If you are to invest in Google, you should invest in the customer base (advertisers) and userbase and the ability to sustain and grow that business, not the technology.
It's not important whether Google is the best search engine or not, and whether or not they can maintain the technical lead.
What IS important is whether they manage to maintain SUFFICIENT quality that they can maintain or grow enough of a userbase that their marketing and sales force manages to grow their ad revenue.
What also matters is whether they restrict their tech. spending to only what is needed to maintain that position, rather than going overboard and insist on trying to be the best whatever the cost - it might very well be better for business to let someone else take the lead and copy what they do, even when factoring in the risk of patents restricting them.
The point is the search engine business is mostly an advertising business. They need eyeballs and clicks, and that is as much based on reputation, marketing and inertia as it is on technical excellence.
(Disclaimer: I work for Yahoo, which owns lots of search engines that competes with Google)
It's not as if auction software is hard to write, or as if you can't purchase it from a lot of companies already.
The reason most companies don't do this is because it gives them consideraly less control over the price range and success of the IPO. With the investment banks they can spend time talking it over with analysts, and they know that if the bank takes them on it will likely push the stock heavily to their investors including large institutional investors who have a significant influence.
An IPO auction could be a real problem for the company if it flounders, while going through the investment banks means they more or less know in advance for at least some of the shares that will be issues, and can avoid much of the PR circus if they decide they need to delay or cancel the offering.
The flaw with this is exactly that it allows easy filtering. Spammers want to reach you regardless of whether you are filtering or not, so would likely not care about *.spm.
And for porn sites: If they are all on *.xxx they will be filtered, but much of that filtering would happen by people apart from their clients themselves. Yes, it would remove children (which I'm sure the porn sites would be very happy about - if you're in a business that require credit card signups and where your primary cost is bandwidth, would you like to have an underage person with no credit card but all the time in the world to download your preview content over and over again and wasting your bandwidth accessing your site?), but it would also remove people surfing from work (you'd be surprised - I've run several networks where all traffic went through a Squid proxy, and the traffic stats were "interesting" considering it came from people working in glass cubicles), from any country that decides to stop the "immoral" porn sites, from any municipality or state with powers to order ISP's to filter, and a wide variety of other situations.
The porn industry would likely hate *.xxx for those reasons: It makes it easy to censor them.
And we should be vary of any attempt to force controversial content to be labelled for exactly that reason.
Another problem is who sets the standards. In some countries kissing publicly is considered obscene. Some countries consider bare womens limbs obscene. Some countries are pretty liberal about underage nudity as long as it's not in a sexual setting (some places parents taking pictures of their children playing naked on the beach would be ok on a page with their holiday pics, but would be considered child porn if they were put on a porn site, for instance)
This is why the.kids proposal was altered to.kids.us - it restricts the above problem to standards within a single country. But in the.kids.us case it's about positive labelling: Label what you explicitly want to allow rather than that which some people will want to restrict, so the problem was smaller to start with.
A.spm would have some of the same problems. As long as the criteria would be made purely based on delivery method and volume I wouldn't be too concerned, but again the question would be in what cases mass distribution could be made outside of.spm, and how to verify that it taken place.
Also, a.spm would need more than just that - a major problem of spam is the cost of handling it for ISPs. Making it harder to reach users, but giving spammers a specifically legal way of delivery, would likely exacerbate that by forcing spammers to massively increase their volume to make up for reduced reach.
It is new information because it was not previously known exactly how the predator populations and the lemming populations interacted. In this case it's not nearly as simple as you describe.
One of the problems was that not all of the predators involved in the cycle have lemmings as their primary food - only the stoat do. The other predators that eat lemmings only resort to lemmings when they are so plentiful that hunting them is too easy to miss out on.
Another issue was that the lemming cycle is extremely static. Most other predator prey cycles are relatively chaotic, but the lemming population usually cycles in four years.
This is a result of the particular predators involved. The stoats population number follow the lemmings, but approximately a year delayed, because it depends entirely on the lemmings for survival, whereas the other predators aren't particularly affected because they have other food sources. Once the lemming population start exploding it manages to get really big because the stoat doesn't catch up until a year after, then it drops dramatically because of the stoat, and is kept low until the stoat population have dropped down at which point it explodes again.
In contrast, in many other predator-prey cycles the cycle is controlled externally based on the prey's access to food, which tend to depend on weather patterns and temperature levels which affect the amount of specific plants that grow, but the lemmings food sources are almost always plentiful and hence you get a pattern that is controlled by breeding cycles of the predator instead.
I think you can safely assume that Disney treated a lot of their "documentaries" as they would any fiction: Write the script, and go out and film the scenes. And when you expect to follow a script and nature starts being difficult, they did what they could with the same persistence as they'd fake weather or scenery for any other movie.
I guess they thought it was only the end product that mattered.
You're partly wrong. The lemming suicides were NOT cooked up by Disney - the idea of lemmings mass suicides preceeded their documentary by half a century at least. Disney faked their documentary because they believed the mass suicide story but they didn't manage to get any film of it, and instead of questioning whether the suicides actually happened they faked a scene to illustrate what they thought was supposed to happen.
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Microsoft's new CLI
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· Score: 3, Informative
Of course we already have something close to Intellisense in Bash: Custom tab completion. Take a look at the bash completion package on Freshmeat, and you have something way better than the default tab completion...
You're missing the best usage of quantum encryption: Exchanging keys. Symmetric crypto if done right is safe, quantum computers or non-quantum computers. The problem with symmetric crypto is that to do it right you need to never reuse keys, and if "the bad guys" get hold of your keys it doesn't matter that your crypto is otherwise unbreakable.
Consider this: You send a set of random data as photons with polarised in different ways. Your receiver observe the photons. Now your receiver has a set of bits, an eaves dropper may have a set of bits, and the sender will have a set of bits. Because observing the photons quantum states will change them, either the receiver, the eavesdropper or both will have the wrong data - the eavesdropper and the receiver will be extremely unlikely to have the same data.
Now all you need to do is agree (which you can do over a public channel) wich of the bits you want to use as a real key. You do that by exchanging information about the data transmitted in such a way that you determine to a high likelihood which bits the receiver managed to receive correctly.
This means that even though an eavesdropper may have intercepted a large amount of data, almost all of that data is just random noise that you won't use.
The result is a encryption key that can be made secure to an arbitrary high probability (it's a matter of how much data you transfer as a potential key, and how much of it you discard) you can then use as a one time pad to send your real data. The encrypted real data can "safely" be sent in the open provided that the encryption keys are immediately and safely destroyed after the sender and receiver are done exchanging the data.
Uhm... There's a BIG problem with your assumption: You assume that a quantum computer will take exponentially longer to break the keys for any increase in key size. The entire point of quantum computing is that it allow you to reduce the time complexity of many algorithms. Shor's algorithm has polynomial complexity, not exponential complexity.
Your logic breaks down because you're assuming RSA is 2^512 times harder to break for 512 bit keys as for 256 bit keys both for a classical computer and for a quantum computer, but that's simply not true.
I think you need to read up on what quantum computing means. You seem to have some twisted idea of quantum computers disturbing space time or something, which has nothing to do with reality.
Quantum computers are interesting because they can carry out operations massively parallel by exploiting quantum states instead of by duplicating processing units. It's important to realise that this is a limiting factor of a quantum computer: It WILL NOT speed up problems that can't be restated to take advantage of the parallelism that a quantum computer offers.
The most likely use of quantum computers for the foreseeable future would be as simple co-processors for a conventional computer, with just a small number of qubits, as there are many smaller tasks that could likely be speeded up dramatically. Imagine doing string searches and comparisons where every character is compared against the pattern at once for instance - would have a dramatic impact on query times for databases and full text search systems... Systems depending on large amounts of matrix calculations would be another.
Applying quantum computing in piecemeal for algorithms that are small, self contained and frequently used will be immensely beneficial long before software engineers catch up and get experience with developing algorithms for quantum computers.
Disclaimer: I haven't spent much time reading up on quantum computers, so I'm likely completely clueless about the subject:-)
The invention of plumbing was a couple of thousand of years ahead of the industrial revolution. Incidentally, electricity was also known, and most of the advances in the research of electricity was unencumbered by IP rights until Edison.
Oh, and the internet was developed using US tax payers money, just the way that most early work on computers was done by researchers using public money or working on their own WITHOUT APPLYING FOR PATENTS or otherwise retaining restrictive IP rights. It's quite interesting that you bring up the internet, considering that a large part in the success of the internet is that all specifications for the basic infrastructure are available in the open, and NOT covered by any IP rights that restricts reuse.
Try to guarantee all you want that Intel and Apple wouldn't do years of R&D if their competitors could steal it once they go to market, but the idea is ludicrous. Companies DO steal their ideas as soon as they go to market - patents doesn't stop that. It stops the blanket copying. However who would copy Intels chip designs when they lack the technical capability to manufacture the chips, and when reverse engineering the designs would take them so long the next generation chips would already be out?
And further back in the field what you will see is that sharing of information unecumbered by patents and copyright was what advanced the computing field.
Some IP rights might be warranted - authors of non-bestseller books don't usually make lots of money (unless they're one hell of a negotiator when dealing with their publisher), and many of them might never have gotten written or published if they could have been copied by another publisher right away. In that case not having any IP rights would have been a loss to the public.
But most major scientific advances have not been protected by patents or copyright.
You point to the Polio vaccine, but the "invention" of the vaccine by Salk was often heavily criticized by other researchers as containing nothing new of substance, but being just a result of combining research already in the public domain. And in fact Albert Sabin soon developed a new vaccine that more or less superceded the Salk vaccine. Add to that that the research wasn't done by a private company, but a university and the idea that lack of IP rights would have prevented it gets ridiculous.
TV is perhaps the only area you mentioned where patents had much of an impact, but even there there is little doubt from looking at the history of it that the research would have happened regardless of patent rights - perhaps slower, perhaps faster.
Nah, they just looked into this hat of seer stones, and an angel told them where to find some gold tablets you see, and the gold tablets told them that they should attack Linux. Of course they put the gold tablets back where they found them and it isn't their fault that they've gone without a trace. (yeah, yeah, so it's a cheap shot at the origin of the mormon church)
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If you're so worried about the earth charter, have you actually read it? (you can download it in PDF here). The only mentions of religion I could find at all were: 12 a) about eliminating discrimination, including based on religion, 12 d) Protect and restore outstanding places of cultural and spiritual significance.
The Earth Charter has essentially nothing to with religion, and certainly doesn't advocate a "world religion".
As for the International Criminal Court, first of all the ICC is voluntary. Any nation can refuse to sign it, and the US did refuse. So what is the problem? But you also blatantly ignore the problem the ICC was set out to solve: How do we bring criminals to justice when a crime is committed outside the jurisdiction or reach of an effective nation government, or in a nation where the government refuse to take justice seriously. Specifically, the reason the US refused to accept the ICC was the prospect that US service men might be tried and convicted for crimes carried out abroad - which is understandable given the US military's tendency to ignore local laws for their service personell.
If the US were concerned about justice, there would be a whole lot less need for the ICC.
You're further quoting Jacques Cousteau, trying to pass off the quote as somehow official UN policy, when it is the opinion of one person. However what he is saying is in many ways true: The earth can't sustain an infinite number of people - growth needs to be stabilised. It can happen one of two ways: We take family planning seriously, and reduce the number of births, or it will "solve itself" with lower life expectancies due to hunger, disease or conflicts. How is it bad to suggest that something needs to be done to prevent future generations from massive suffering?
You also point to an out of context quote on private land ownership, ignoring that the main point is that public control of land use is vital to ensure that private land ownership isn't used to gain a choke hold on society. If you oppose public control of land use, does that mean you would be happy to allow me to buy the plots around your house and set up a drug addict rehabilitation centre, a brothel, an abortion clinic and a sewage dump on the respective sides of the house? I'd assume that you, like most of us, would find at least one of the above annoying as your next door neighbours.
The reason you can avoid that, is because land use is strictly government regulated, to ensure that someone doesn't abuse his or her "freedom" combined with wealth to shape society they way they please.
I also assume the page you wanted to point to was this which starts off with a fraudulent Marx' quote... I guess they assume noone visiting their site either have read the Communist Manifesto, or would bother searching for it on Google and checking. They then go on with another quote taken massively out of context (it's at the end of a paragraph explaining why this "property" they want to take away is the property aquired through exploitation of workers, which Marx' wanted redistributed, for starters through massively progressive property taxes, removal of inheritance rights and abolution landed property and land rents).
The page then goes on to present Habitat I as some sort of support for carrying out Marx' ideas, when what it is advocating is government control over land use as opposed to public (note: NOT government - in The abolition of landed property he specifically says on explaining nationalisation of land ownership "There will no longer exist a government nor a state distinct from society itself", something which was a key part of Marx' political foundation - a Marxist "communist" state is
Except he wasn't stealing, and isn't accused of stealing, but of copyright infringement. Copyright isn't propery rights - copyright was created to give a limited monopoly on the distribution of information which are NOT COVERED by property rights.
If anything, the wealth gaps in Africa is ridiculously large. You have people in most African countries that are close to the wealth levels of the richest people in the developed countries, yet the poorest people live on much less than most poor people in the developed countries, and make up
And I just can't agree with you about the "rewards". Most of the wealth held by the richest couple of percent today are in the hands of people who INHERITED their fortune or significant parts of it, and who might have grown that fortune mostly by letting investment advisors shuffle paper, and dictators or ex dictators who STOLE IT from their people.
There are a few exceptions, but often their stories will be about people who takes someone elses inventions and understand how to sell it better. Bill Gates and Larry Ellison, for instance, both fall in that category. Very few people have become wealthy as a result of true innovation of product as opposed to innovation in product placement.
Secondly, if we do manage to build robots that can build this out of materials found at the site, that has the potential to dramatically reduce the amount of material that needs to be transported into orbit, thus possibly dramatically reducing cost. Providing that the resulting robots won't be so much larger and heavier that they make up for the difference...
Of course this is all loose speculation :)
At least that's the general idea of most of the suggested approaches I've read about.
It boils down to: While having "unlimited" "almost free" energy would be great, any suggestion along the line of "this investment is guaranteed to bring ridiculous profit" about almost anything legit will be bullshit - if profit margins are significantly above average returns on investment investors will be queuing up to invest in it AND to fund competitors.
And in this case there is a long list of countries with launch capabilities that will have a significant political and economical interest in competing, and in the case of China even actual ambition to develop.
But of course if one party starts a project like this it could be the factor to finally kickstart another space race.
It's not like mainframe technology has been standing still as everything else have speeded up. Mainframes are big, clunky and complex because that's what you get when you need extreme reliability.
Look at the typical desktop system, and what it's geared for: High processor speed, fast memory access and game level graphics.
Think about what the typical desktop system does not take into account: - The disks are bloody slow, and the CPU gets bogged down because the controller doesn't really do much. Solution? Use arrays of smaller disks, and controllers with their own CPU's.
- High end networking bogs down the CPU's. Solution: Add CPU's to the network cards (which incidentally is common on higher end gigabit ethernet even for PC's).
- Reliability is low. Solution: Double or triple everything, and spend huge amounts of money on ensuring faulty hardware is detected and doesn't get to bring down your system (IBM has some quite interesting stuff to signal likely faults in memory and CPU's before they actually fail, for instance - you can get system monitors from IBM that will call IBM and get a technician sent out with a replacement, provided the proper support contracts, to fix the problem before you even knew there was one).
All of this costs ridiculous amounts of money, so you don't replicate it unless you actually need it. Most people don't. For most people it's cheaper to either accept some downtime every now and again, or run a job overnight instead of expecting instant responses, or buy more servers (either for reliability or added performance). Mainframes cover a very specific niche: Cases where you CAN'T accept significant downtime, AND your application is very IO heavy.
"Lazy" doesn't come into it - you'd be incompetent if you suggested someone rewrite a working system if the only reason is some perceived notion that the language is outdated.
Redhat is focusing on selling products that will make it money. So Redhat won't make boxed sets of their cheapest product anymore, but who were buying them anyway? You've always been able to get it in tons of books, magazines, on the net etc., and Fedora is taking over the mantle. So what you have is a situation where companies still get support if they pay for it, just as before, and consumers get a ditro, just as before, but the name will be different, and they'll have to go to some cheap CD packager to get CD's of it much like most people have been doing anyway.
Sun? Who cares about Sun except Sun itself?
All in all I see the Novell and Redhat events as good - it will likely help both companies, which will only mean better business penetration for Linux, and that will filter down to consumers eventually.
Lawyers are meant to take into account their clients best interests, not just blindly do whatever is asked of them.
Note that I don't think anyone will do anything about this, or get anywhere if they tried, but I do find it a bit fishy that a company's management enter into an agreement with a lawfirm that gives the lawyers a strong incentive to go for a specific goal regardless of the risk of significant loss for the shareholders.
To stop a $210 million friendly take-over of a private company? Not bloody likely unless it had been in a heavily regulated area (think arms manufacturer, nuclear technology or similar). The regulators involved are likely to do more than yawn - this is peanuts from a government point of view.
It's not important whether Google is the best search engine or not, and whether or not they can maintain the technical lead.
What IS important is whether they manage to maintain SUFFICIENT quality that they can maintain or grow enough of a userbase that their marketing and sales force manages to grow their ad revenue.
What also matters is whether they restrict their tech. spending to only what is needed to maintain that position, rather than going overboard and insist on trying to be the best whatever the cost - it might very well be better for business to let someone else take the lead and copy what they do, even when factoring in the risk of patents restricting them.
The point is the search engine business is mostly an advertising business. They need eyeballs and clicks, and that is as much based on reputation, marketing and inertia as it is on technical excellence.
(Disclaimer: I work for Yahoo, which owns lots of search engines that competes with Google)
The reason most companies don't do this is because it gives them consideraly less control over the price range and success of the IPO. With the investment banks they can spend time talking it over with analysts, and they know that if the bank takes them on it will likely push the stock heavily to their investors including large institutional investors who have a significant influence.
An IPO auction could be a real problem for the company if it flounders, while going through the investment banks means they more or less know in advance for at least some of the shares that will be issues, and can avoid much of the PR circus if they decide they need to delay or cancel the offering.
And for porn sites: If they are all on *.xxx they will be filtered, but much of that filtering would happen by people apart from their clients themselves. Yes, it would remove children (which I'm sure the porn sites would be very happy about - if you're in a business that require credit card signups and where your primary cost is bandwidth, would you like to have an underage person with no credit card but all the time in the world to download your preview content over and over again and wasting your bandwidth accessing your site?), but it would also remove people surfing from work (you'd be surprised - I've run several networks where all traffic went through a Squid proxy, and the traffic stats were "interesting" considering it came from people working in glass cubicles), from any country that decides to stop the "immoral" porn sites, from any municipality or state with powers to order ISP's to filter, and a wide variety of other situations.
The porn industry would likely hate *.xxx for those reasons: It makes it easy to censor them.
And we should be vary of any attempt to force controversial content to be labelled for exactly that reason.
Another problem is who sets the standards. In some countries kissing publicly is considered obscene. Some countries consider bare womens limbs obscene. Some countries are pretty liberal about underage nudity as long as it's not in a sexual setting (some places parents taking pictures of their children playing naked on the beach would be ok on a page with their holiday pics, but would be considered child porn if they were put on a porn site, for instance)
This is why the .kids proposal was altered to .kids.us - it restricts the above problem to standards within a single country. But in the .kids.us case it's about positive labelling: Label what you explicitly want to allow rather than that which some people will want to restrict, so the problem was smaller to start with.
A .spm would have some of the same problems. As long as the criteria would be made purely based on delivery method and volume I wouldn't be too concerned, but again the question would be in what cases mass distribution could be made outside of .spm, and how to verify that it taken place.
Also, a .spm would need more than just that - a major problem of spam is the cost of handling it for ISPs. Making it harder to reach users, but giving spammers a specifically legal way of delivery, would likely exacerbate that by forcing spammers to massively increase their volume to make up for reduced reach.
One of the problems was that not all of the predators involved in the cycle have lemmings as their primary food - only the stoat do. The other predators that eat lemmings only resort to lemmings when they are so plentiful that hunting them is too easy to miss out on.
Another issue was that the lemming cycle is extremely static. Most other predator prey cycles are relatively chaotic, but the lemming population usually cycles in four years.
This is a result of the particular predators involved. The stoats population number follow the lemmings, but approximately a year delayed, because it depends entirely on the lemmings for survival, whereas the other predators aren't particularly affected because they have other food sources. Once the lemming population start exploding it manages to get really big because the stoat doesn't catch up until a year after, then it drops dramatically because of the stoat, and is kept low until the stoat population have dropped down at which point it explodes again.
In contrast, in many other predator-prey cycles the cycle is controlled externally based on the prey's access to food, which tend to depend on weather patterns and temperature levels which affect the amount of specific plants that grow, but the lemmings food sources are almost always plentiful and hence you get a pattern that is controlled by breeding cycles of the predator instead.
I guess they thought it was only the end product that mattered.
You're partly wrong. The lemming suicides were NOT cooked up by Disney - the idea of lemmings mass suicides preceeded their documentary by half a century at least. Disney faked their documentary because they believed the mass suicide story but they didn't manage to get any film of it, and instead of questioning whether the suicides actually happened they faked a scene to illustrate what they thought was supposed to happen.
Consider this: You send a set of random data as photons with polarised in different ways. Your receiver observe the photons. Now your receiver has a set of bits, an eaves dropper may have a set of bits, and the sender will have a set of bits. Because observing the photons quantum states will change them, either the receiver, the eavesdropper or both will have the wrong data - the eavesdropper and the receiver will be extremely unlikely to have the same data.
Now all you need to do is agree (which you can do over a public channel) wich of the bits you want to use as a real key. You do that by exchanging information about the data transmitted in such a way that you determine to a high likelihood which bits the receiver managed to receive correctly.
This means that even though an eavesdropper may have intercepted a large amount of data, almost all of that data is just random noise that you won't use.
The result is a encryption key that can be made secure to an arbitrary high probability (it's a matter of how much data you transfer as a potential key, and how much of it you discard) you can then use as a one time pad to send your real data. The encrypted real data can "safely" be sent in the open provided that the encryption keys are immediately and safely destroyed after the sender and receiver are done exchanging the data.
Your logic breaks down because you're assuming RSA is 2^512 times harder to break for 512 bit keys as for 256 bit keys both for a classical computer and for a quantum computer, but that's simply not true.
Quantum computers are interesting because they can carry out operations massively parallel by exploiting quantum states instead of by duplicating processing units. It's important to realise that this is a limiting factor of a quantum computer: It WILL NOT speed up problems that can't be restated to take advantage of the parallelism that a quantum computer offers.
The most likely use of quantum computers for the foreseeable future would be as simple co-processors for a conventional computer, with just a small number of qubits, as there are many smaller tasks that could likely be speeded up dramatically. Imagine doing string searches and comparisons where every character is compared against the pattern at once for instance - would have a dramatic impact on query times for databases and full text search systems... Systems depending on large amounts of matrix calculations would be another.
Applying quantum computing in piecemeal for algorithms that are small, self contained and frequently used will be immensely beneficial long before software engineers catch up and get experience with developing algorithms for quantum computers.
Disclaimer: I haven't spent much time reading up on quantum computers, so I'm likely completely clueless about the subject :-)
Oh, and the internet was developed using US tax payers money, just the way that most early work on computers was done by researchers using public money or working on their own WITHOUT APPLYING FOR PATENTS or otherwise retaining restrictive IP rights. It's quite interesting that you bring up the internet, considering that a large part in the success of the internet is that all specifications for the basic infrastructure are available in the open, and NOT covered by any IP rights that restricts reuse.
Try to guarantee all you want that Intel and Apple wouldn't do years of R&D if their competitors could steal it once they go to market, but the idea is ludicrous. Companies DO steal their ideas as soon as they go to market - patents doesn't stop that. It stops the blanket copying. However who would copy Intels chip designs when they lack the technical capability to manufacture the chips, and when reverse engineering the designs would take them so long the next generation chips would already be out?
And further back in the field what you will see is that sharing of information unecumbered by patents and copyright was what advanced the computing field.
Some IP rights might be warranted - authors of non-bestseller books don't usually make lots of money (unless they're one hell of a negotiator when dealing with their publisher), and many of them might never have gotten written or published if they could have been copied by another publisher right away. In that case not having any IP rights would have been a loss to the public.
But most major scientific advances have not been protected by patents or copyright.
You point to the Polio vaccine, but the "invention" of the vaccine by Salk was often heavily criticized by other researchers as containing nothing new of substance, but being just a result of combining research already in the public domain. And in fact Albert Sabin soon developed a new vaccine that more or less superceded the Salk vaccine. Add to that that the research wasn't done by a private company, but a university and the idea that lack of IP rights would have prevented it gets ridiculous.
TV is perhaps the only area you mentioned where patents had much of an impact, but even there there is little doubt from looking at the history of it that the research would have happened regardless of patent rights - perhaps slower, perhaps faster.
You have to realise that "security" refers to job security for lawyers and law enforcement officials... :)
Nah, they just looked into this hat of seer stones, and an angel told them where to find some gold tablets you see, and the gold tablets told them that they should attack Linux. Of course they put the gold tablets back where they found them and it isn't their fault that they've gone without a trace. (yeah, yeah, so it's a cheap shot at the origin of the mormon church)