That's why I put "sail" in the parentheses. Although a regatta does not necessarily imply sail-powered craft, the word seems to be most frequently used in that context, at least in my experience.
Funny, I seem to recall quite recently a number of people quoting Martin Luther King, Jr. saying that he was for judging people by the content of thier hearts (and presumably thier minds as well) rather than the color of their skin.
Sorry, but if you *really* think skin color matters, then *you* are a racist.
Anything but a truly level playing field (in either direction) indicates a racist position. Any special patronizing adjustments only serve to promote and extend racial bias and hostility. We cannot (and should not try) to ensure equality of outcome - we should ensure equality of opportunity - and do that without attacking the integrity of our educational and other institutions.
For any student that is even marginally literate, niether of the examples should pose a problem regardless of the test-taker's "socioeconomic background"!
Ths simple fact is that *anyone* applying to enter *college* should be well read enough to know the trivial facts that a regatta is a (sail)boat race, and a buttercup is some kind of flower. There's no cultural bias at all here - most of us have never participated in a regatta, yet it is quite reasonable to expect that we should at least know what one is. There is, on the other hand, an entirely appropriate bias toward literacy in the examples you cite.
In fact, it seems that it's your comment that contains the subtle racial bias, by implying that somehow, certain races can't be expected to measure up, so we'll have to cut them some slack. This is surely the most vile and corrosive form of racism possible!
The answer isn't to dumb down the tests, the answer is to make sure that our children can escape having their lives ruined by educrats who are more interested in hoovering dollars from Washington and making illiterate kids feel good about it (they call this "self-esteem") than they are in graduating literate, functional, citizens. (We actually graduate a non-trivial number of people in this country every year that can't read their diploma - There is no excuse for this! With any kind of proper teaching, children (with very few exceptions) can and should exhibit survival-level reading ability as they leave *first* grade!)
If you're interested in actually fixing the problem, I highly recommend the following two books to become somewhat more literate on the educational problems we face: Doug Wilson's "Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning" (which includes mystery novelist and solid thinker Dorothy Sayers' excellent essay on "The Lost Tools of Learning"), and Susan Schaeffer Macaulay's "For the Children's Sake".
QA= Quality Assurance. (Spelled Qwality some places I've seen...)
This replaced the previous term "Quality Control" which fell from favor in the mid-80's right after Car&Driver made a barbed comment about how it was a good thing GM had such a good Quality Control program because "after all, we wouldn't want it to get out of hand..."
Within a matter of months, Qwality teams across the nation had improved their processes for the naming of Qwality teams and QA had displaced QC. If they had just worked half that hard to improve real quality instead of just improving their image. (If I sound jaded, it's just because in my experience, Qwality teams are the closest thing you'll ever find to Dilbertian thinking in real life...)
Both NeWS(Network extensible Window System) and OpenLook predate Tog's tenure at Sun by several years.
You may not like them, but NeWS was James Gosling's creation and was arguably ahead of its time - Java bears more than a passing resemblance to NeWS in a number of respects. (Remember that NeWS was more than a windowing system - it provided network extensibility and transparency to applications as well, and was arguably the first serious attempt at writing a viable OO network-aware GUI.)
Personally, I think both OpenLook and NeWS were great to work with: I still haven't found scrollbars anywhere else that work that well, and the pushpin/tearoff menu metaphor that's so common now is from OL/NeWS. NeWS in particular had some very cool capabilities: several years ago it did a lot of what we're just now getting around to reinventing in KDE and GNOME. Unfortunately for NeWS in particular, it overestimated the cycles available under Moore's law, and so it was based on Display PostScript (quite cool, really) at a time when it would be several years befoer the horsepower was present to run DPS quickly. As a result (much like GNOME today?), it got a reputation for being dog-slow, and there was little interest in writing apps for it as a result.
Remember that Xerox was the other half of the OpenLook team. OL/NeWS looks a bit dated by today's standards, but it was arguably the most advanced GUI in the insustry when it was released, and broke new ground in important ways, some of which were even picked up by the Mac! It was a quantum leap improvement in Unix GUIs and was light years ahead of SunWin and the original SGI and IBM GUIs, which in their early days were hardly worthy of the name. (something as simple as TWM is a HUGE improvement on SGI's orginal windowing system...)
FYI, Tog's major project at Sun was to play movie producer and make a video short titled "Starfire", which demonstrated a vision of future UI technology in a badly acted setting of corporate politics and intrigue surrounding the near cancellation of a low-pollution car.
(For the car guys in the/. crowd, the car used was a Consulier GT, a composite ultralight, but kinda ugly car that absolutely demolished it's competition on the racetrack in the late 80's and early 90's. They tried really hard to make it look good for the film, but it was too big a challenge...)
5. E-mail requires a computer! This should be pretty obvious, but one of the real advantages of paper in general is that it's portable, consumes no power (heck, it's even a power *source*!), requires little in the way of special care to preserve the data it's carrying, and doesn't tie you to a box on a desktop or a $illy laptop with a ridiculously short battery life.
(Believe it or not, there are documented cases of paper documents sucessfully retaining their data for dozens of centuries or more!)
6. Magazines! The "killer app" for Postal Services worldwide. It will be a very, very long time before we can electronically represent the visual and pixel density richness of a simple good-quality magazine. Oh, and then there's the unparalleled browsability of magazines, something that our programs called "browsers" are notoriously poor at...
The more I use E-mail, the more I HATE IT - but not as much as I'm beginning to hate people who say we should do everything "electronically"!
Somebody moderate this moron down. This is exactly why I've told Rob we need a moderator rating for "factually incorrect". (Such a rating would be interesting in meta-moderation, to say the least...)
This guy admits to posting IRC hearsay, and it gets moderated up to 5 even though there are at least two posts below from credible people who are actually in a position to speak with authority and provide facts showing that his slanders aren't even remotely true.
From where I sit, Corel is doing quite a bit for the community, but won't keep it up if they continue to get treated like this. Is that what we want? Gee, this community could (and may yet) drive away nearly everyone.
Why do we tolerate such sloppy work on the part of our fellow/.'ers? Is is just because of the Gnazi political bias?
(I don't mean to paint the whole FSF crowd with a broad brush, just those that are reactionary and flame anyone who dares to suggest that the GPL may not be appropriate for every situation in the world - that's pretty much my meaning for the term "Gnazi".)
Look, Corel has a great distro - I just bought a copy of Corel Linux Deluxe this past week, not because I had to (I'm still pretty technically capable and have worked with Linux off and on since the 0.99 days), but because it suited my needs:
Like a lot of the end users they're aiming at, I'm unwilling to spend a lot of time tying everything together, and I'm willing to pay other professionals to do all that for me. For this reason, I tend to prefer distros such as Mandrake, Caldera, and Corel. Let's face it - even some of the commercial distros are essentially OS environment construction kits, where "some assembly required" may substantially understate the facts.
If nothing else, Corel should receive mondo kudos (I like that!) for bringing the excellent technology of Debian down to the rest of us. While quite excellent technically, Debian has a well-deserved reputation for being a real SOB to get completely up and configured. Corel now lets me use Debian without the pain, and the power of Debian's self-updating nature allows me to easily go beyond where Corel did if I choose to. (Besides, I never buy games, so I don't mind buying a distro or two each year - and this one *came* with a game (CTP) and Word Perfect!)
Sure, I could do all the integration and testing myself, but I don't want to. I'm *happy* to pay them money for a distro that adds value. It's like this: I am fully capable (and even have most of the tools) to do all of my own automotive work, but there are times when I *choose* to let someone else do the work - for instance, right now, my car is down in Houston getting massaged by a skilled expert (in this case far more skiled than I), while I devote my spare time to remodeling the house (which explains another reason I like Corel...)
Finally, Unix printing has been completely broken forever (or at least since we had to support something other than a directly connected CAT/4), and in my opinion, is one of the major reasons that no Unix has made seriojus inroads into general purpose corporate computing environments. A really good printing interface would be of tremendous value to the community and like WINE, is far from a "token effort." It's really quite simple: without it, you lose.
P.S.: Take a look at what Corel has contributed to Debian and many other projects over the past couple of years and you'll be surprised. Oh, and their former Netwinder division played a big part in getting Linux to run acceptably on ARM chips, too, so I'd think twice before slamming them too hard.
Disclaimer: I own some Corel stock. When it gets to 150-200, I'll sell you mine.
Your logic is completely flawed. We are commanded to love one another as brothers, but we are also commanded *not* to do some things.
The Bible is not at all ambiguous about the roles of men and women in the church: this does not result in any oppression of women in the least, but God is quite clear for hos own incontestible reasons, that women should not be in positions of authority in the church. (My wife and I make a point of belonging to a denomination that does not ordain women - her view on this issue is even stronger than mine and is in no way coerced. I have noticed that many of the women in this church are what would be called "deep thinkers" by society at large (an oddly high proportion were once lawyers) - they have thought on the issue and recognize the validity of the Law.)
Likewise, the Bible is not at all ambiguous with respect to homosexuality - it is not to be permitted or condoned. The language of the Bible leaves no wiggle-room here - this is one of the clearest principles in scripture. We are to love the sinner but hate the sin. Robbing banks is wrong, molesting children is wrong, homosexuality is wrong. It could no more right for a church to accept an unrepentant homosexual into our midst as it would be to accept an unrepentant bank robber or child molester. Asking a church to is to ask it to abdicate the very thing it believes.
On a final note, recognize that homosexuality has been unversally proscribed in every *stable* civilisation in history. There are quite good reasons for that that rely directly on God.
I have to say that although I listened to Limbaugh quite a bit some years back, I never once heard him refer to himself as a Christian, and do not even know if he is. Perhaps if he were to reason from Christian principles, he'd be right even more often? (In general, I agree with many of his conclusions, but often find his logic for arriving at them quite weak.)
And actually, your last sentence is closer to the real point - it's not other *people* saying what's right and what's wrong, it's the creator of the universe. That carries considerably more weight. (If you don't think it does now, just wait until you die and you will.) Haven't you ever wondered about why Christians aren't afraid of death?
As I point out in another post below, Puritan thought affected the end result far more than Enlightenment thought.
Don't believe every revisionist thing you read. Trust original sources, as they are far less likely to have been corrupted by those with a hostile agenda. The original sources quite clearly back my position, not yours.
(As an aside, great books (or works) are great because they make the complex approachable. With a minimal effort on the part of the reader, they are often easier to understand and considerably more concise than works *about* the great books. Again, the value of original sources.)
Your "and vice versa" proves you haven't done your own research into the motivations behind the First Amendment.
I'll grant that there were Christians on both sides. I'll even go so far as to say that R.L. Dabney's writings about the way the northern Chrisitians twisted the meaning of the Bible are right on the mark, but my point was that it was primarily Christian ideals and organizations that led to the demise of slavery in both England and the US.
As far as the quotes go, I can certainly win on the volume of evidence. I'm not even going to try to refute your quotes here, because I would first have to decide which of the literally thousands of Chritianity-affirming quotes from the founding fathers I was to use. And some of yours are out of context, by the way. If you're really interested, you might want to check out a copy of Richard(?) Lederer's "America's God and Country Encyclopaedia of Quotations", which doesn't have them all, but does provide a good cross-section.
That the enlightenment was an influencing factor, I of course agree, but every serious scholar will recognize that Puritan though had far more influence in the finl product that anything the Enlightenment brought to the table. In fact, much of what happened in the Constitutional convention (I recommend Max Farrand's (sp?) classic on this) was an outright rejection of Enlightenment values.
Secondly, you are obviously missing the intent of the First Amendment, much as many people miss the intent of the Second: After having lived under a corrupt state church (the Church of England, headed by the monarch), thier intent was quite clearly to keep the state out of the church, not the other way around. In fact, until the Supreme Court (unilaterally and with no cause of law whatsoever) changed the interpretation of the word "religion" in the Constitution, it was interpreted as "a Christian Denomination" - and had been for 150 years. Understand that the concept of "separation of church and state" is NOWHERE in the Constitution. What is says is that the government cannot establish a particular denomination as "official". That is a world of difference.
This is (very slightly) off-topic, but it seems like a good point in the thread to bring it up:
After playing with Napster, I've been wondering about the correctness of certain types of MP3 snarfing:
In particular, whether there should be anything at all wrong with grabbing a copy of an MP3 from a CD I already own. It seems to me that this is (or should be) entirely legitimate, as it simply saves me the trouble of having to rip the CD myself in order to get the MP3. I don't think even the RIAA claims that making an MP3 from a purchased CD is wrong, (presumably because it falls in to the "archival backup" category?)
The problem becomes a bit murkier in the case of grabbing an MP3 of a song I already own on tape or vinyl - is this legitimate? I don't own the CD, but I could (if I wanted to expend the effort) pipe the analog signal from the turntable of tape deck into the PC, then digitize and massage into MP3. Does the difference between analog and digital make me a criminal in this case?
I think it goes without saying that grabbing something I do not own in any form crosses the line (you may disagree with the copyright laws, but that does not change the fact that they are there and that the act clearly violates them.) Nonetheless, I have myself crossed that line for recordings that are no longer available (a lot of older music is essentially unavailable), and this seems defensible as well - I'd buy it if I could, but I can't.
Somehow, I think the people doing the downloads from my napster collection aren't being so particular.
Some of these areas seem legitimately gray and murky, even if you accept the validity of existing copyright law right up front...
Why is it that it's quite socially acceptable to exhibit, and even flaunt, bigotry against Christians in the Slashdot community? (This asked as a serious question and is on-topic in light of several comments in this thread.)
Many of you would never dream of condoning a racially inflammatory post, but have no problem tarring Christians with a broad derogatory brush when given half a chance. Painting Christians as racist is even more ridiculous - Christianity was clearly the driving force behind the worldwide elimination of slavery. (A first in world history, by the way...) Christians understand that we are all created in God's image - do you?
Further, understand that the radical ideas in the constitution you claim to support were a direct outgrowth of Protestantism - our government is more closely modeled on Presbyterian church than on anything else that existed in 1776. Oh, and don't forget that many of the original 13 states were congregational assemblies, meaning the state had an official denominational affiliation. Christianity is part of the warp and woof or American society - if you want to rip it out, you're seeking nothing less than the complete destruction of the American ideals founded on it. That said, can we get back to the real debate? This is about censorship in libraries (something I personally favor - as I've said here before, I think censorship has positive aspects and is grossly underrated in this community in particular.) Sure, Christians have a particular worldview that you may not agree with, but that does not make them wrong.
I wonder how many of you opposed to library censorship have young children of your own? Not too many I'd bet. It's really unfortunate, but if you love your kids, you really have to shield them from the Internet these days - we all know that the old saw about "having to go look for offensive material" is far from the truth now. Seriously, how many of you haven't gotten a link inappropriate for children (for all kind of valid reasons, including ideological ones) from a seemingly innocuous web search? Censorship is needed and appropriate in circumstances like this. I for one hope they succeed in running their own community as they see fit - that's a *real* conservative (even libertarian) position.
I'll probably get nuked by the moderators for this, and I really hate to write this kind of message, but sometimes, you just have to point out bigotry when you see it.
I'm one of the few (I suppose we're few) that's taken the time to read (or at least skim) all of the lawsuit material Caldera has posted on thier site. They had Microsoft cold on violations of the law that are far more serious than anything in the DOJ trial.
While it's not surprising that Microsoft should go to extraordinary lengths to keep this from going to trial (which was due to happen next week, IIRC), it *is* surprising that Caldera would be willing to do them such a favor for such a small sum of money. (C'mon, folks, LESS THAN 1%??!)
True, a trial would have been expensive for Caldera, but I still think the Caldera trial was a far bigger threat to Microsoft (both in itself and in addition as fodder for the DOJ)than the wimpy DOJ action.
Game over, man. All you college guys go get that MCSE, because they've got carte blanche to go full speed ahead, leaving behind the twisted wreckage of what was once a healthy software industry.
On the other hand, this means open source is the last best hope, even though its ability to deliver on the promise in the non-geek space has yet to be tested. I really think in a few years, this day will mark the turning point at which everything rested on the shoulders of a penguin. A fine penguin, to be sure, but very possibly not up to the task of slaying Goliath. (Note to those that moderate down any non-glowing comment about Linux: do a reality check: how many non-geeks do you know choosing Linux? A few possibly, but not a lot just yet.)
I needed a new distro this week, and just chose Corel after three happy (well, OK, not unhappy) years with Caldera. (My innate contrarianism and the fact that I'm sadly more interested in being a user than a hacker these days makes it the right choice.) Looks like I made the right choice. Winners never quit. Quitters never win. Caldera just threw in the towel before the bell even rang.
Fisrt, I'll set the stage by saying you won't find a bigger IP bigot than I am - I've been doing IP/Internet stuff daily since 1985, did the IP migration for a major oil company, and have been an Internet consultant. (Maybe more appropriately I should say I'm a bigot for the whole inet/Unix philosophy of keeping things simple by pushing the intelligence of the net to the periphery.)
That said, I developed a deep respect for the mainframe guys along about 1992, when we were hacking the mainframes into the IP intranet. (And anyone that's ever worked with an IBM 3172 protocol processor (because IP protocol processing is death to a batch-tuned machine) knows what a hack it was, especially early on.)
Although their methods and thought processes are quite different from the Internet "norm" (wow, I'm mainstream now - dangerous!), they came up with very good, very valid engineering solutions to the problems they faced at the time. SNA networking is a royal pain, and I avoid it where ever I can (which is pretty much everywhere by now). You try building a network which must be bank and hospital reliable, and connect thousands of users all over the country, often with only 9.6 kbps lines to serve an entire site!
SNA is elegant in its own twisted way, and as a network guy, I can certainly appreciate why it worked well then, and why it may well be with us for quite some time. Granted it's a pain to work with, but IBM and the other mainframe folks have very good IP support today, so it's really a non-issue. What difference does it make to you if the back-end network between the mainframes and their storage/output devices is SNA? It's (fairly ) simple, incredibly robust, and dictatorially controllable - even the IP bigot I am, I have to confess I envy the SNA guys' ability to manage and control traffic with fine-grained and even adaptable policy.
The moral is this: Don't be too quick to shoot down competing technologies until you learn a bit more about why they're there. (I say this because I could have been reading my own rant about SNA circa 1991 in one of the earlier posts...) We can learn a lot from the mainframe guys, and vice versa - and that's what makes what's happening now so much fun...
(Disclaimer: I work for Tivoli, an IBM company which does all kinds of cool systems and network management stuff for pretty much everything. We get free beer on Fridays, too... it's not your daddy's IBM.)
Sorry, but I can't let this one slide. Where do you people come up with this stuff?
Intel quite clearly owns the StrongARM processor technology, and in fact, over the past year, they've even started to recognize that what they bought is beter than what they can build.
The StrongARM website at Intel says, "Watch for next generation StrongARM® processors to make their debut during the first half of 2000." Read it for yourself at http://developer.intel.com/design/ strong/index.htm. (Actually the quote above is from a page linked to by that page, but clearly Intel is still in this game.)
Besides, I'm not aware of any NIC with an ARM chip on it, although there may be one. The ARM and DSP's (like TI's) are very different beasts.
The rapid rise of antibiotic resistant bacteria in the past few years is truly scary. Sure the docs are somewhat to blame for continuing to prescribe antibiotics when the patient appears to have a cold just to "give them the appearance of doing something". (This is probably THE major problem in medicine - the refusal to admit that there's nothing medicine can do about a lot of things.)
At the same time, they're our first line of defense at containing antibiotic resistance, so controlled access to these drugs is critical.
Do a web search on VISA and VRSA to get an idea of what's at stake here. (VRSA is Vancomycin Resistant Staphlococcus Aureus, VISA is Immune. Staph Aureus is the most common Staph bacterium, and infests most hospitals. Vancomycin is generally regarded as "the antibiotic of last resort", so VISA is very bad news, indeed.)
FYI, if you are interested in these things, you can read much of The Lancet online (the British medical journal) with registration at www.thelancet.com. As an interested party with no real medical background, I think this is a great deal - I could never justify subscribing (it's relatively expensive), but this lets me learn a lot about current research and findings without the cost or hassle of visiting a medical library, which I'd never bother to do - it's just not that important. I started out there doing research on prions, which are even scarier than VISA and a very good reason to wonder if you really want to ever go to the dentist again...
You make some valid points, but it's quite unfair to paint pharmacists as just "pill counters".
Actually, I trust the pharmacists knowledge of drugs, their uses (indications), interactions, and situations to avoid (contraindications) far more than I trust the doctor's knowledge of the same. Although the compounding chemist of the old days is sadly becoming extinct, many of the newer drugs require active and knowledgeable management by the pharmacist.
This is particularly true with the new classes of drugs called "kinetics", which are custom mixed in response to events in the patient's own body chemistry and require close cooperation between the lab, pharmacist and clinical staff. True, kinetics are mostly used in hospitals, but they are beginning to be used in more outpatient settings, and in any case, pharmacology is one of the most rapidly changing areas of medicine today.
These folks know a lot, and often know it better than the docs, who have enough trouble just keeping up with new treatments without trying to keep up with all the drug innovations, too.
First the usual caveats: I'm not a physician or pharmacist, but I've spent a fair portion of my career as a healthcare IT consultant, so I do know a little about this.
This is probably both needed and not needed. (Remember, though, that Bill and Hillary have not given up on socializing medicine in the US, and will take any incremental steps they can that will interpose government control between you and any healthcare resource. It should go without saying that such control is a bad thing.)
Pharmacies and physicians are registered with the FDA today. Every doc (and presumably every pharmacist) has an "FDA number" that they must use to identify themselves with certain classes of prescriptions, particularly narcotics. (In fact, many of the better medical web sites on the web require an FDA number to get at the "good stuff", which is presumably not safe for viewing by the riff-raff (that's us.))
Based on my consulting experience, it seems that state laws are the primary governing factor in regulating prescriptions, and that the variations from state to state complicate things for providers that operate in more than one state. In particular, only a few states allow electronic prescriptions and/or signatures - most require a written prescription because they are far more traceable, immune to tampering, and tamper evident (very important) than their electronic counterparts.
I'm talking reality, not theory here - I think electronic prescriptions would be a very bad thing: this industry can barely handle its paper, and pays seriously substandard wages to its professionals from CIOs on down. Their chance of doing this well as an industry is near-nil. Doing this right is not a trivial problem: It involves the best cryptographic systems available and must provide all the usual crypto benefits: privacy, authentication, non-repudiation, and a serious audit trail as well. Pluggable authentication was about to make this happen a few years ago, but now that we can't do that, there will have to be an entire infrastructure built on a single crypto technology which will then leave everything vulnerable and slow to react in the event it's ever cracked. The government is more than part of the problem here, so I find their desire to help kind of ludicrous.
While it might be nice to streamline the prescription process across states, it's clearly an area where the states have control today (and are granted that control under the tenth amendment.) Still, it wouldn't surprise me to see an FDA number required on all prescriptions in the near future as an attempt to normalize the process across the states. Unfortunately, that will remove the abilty of some states to continue to use their own, more effective regulations.
Now, whether the FDA should exist at all is an entirely different (and quite valid) discussion topic. (Let's just say the FDA's record is far from sterling, and places it among the very worst Federal violators of the constitution.)
First, it's more than a little unfair to lump the present FreeBSD license in with the historic commercial BSD license. Due to the AT&T concerns and other issues, they are really completely different animals.
As you no doubt know, Sun and the other workstation OEMs were under the old commercial BSD license, which does not require or even encourage reincorporation of code from the licensees. It's my understanding that even so, many (but not all) Sun improvements made it back into BSD up through the SunOS 3 & 4 days - which ended a geological epoch ago in Internet time.
(You're right about there being more Sys V code than BSD in most modern commercial Unixes - although I'm personally more comfortable with Berkeley Unix practices, when the father of BSD (Bill Joy, for the newbies) decided that the SVR3-based Solaris was the only way to provide for future needs, that sent a message!)
Sun went further than they had to in giving back any changes at all - as you corectly point out, almost no one else has given anything! I'm not sure what you're beef with either Sun or BSD is here other than, "the world isn't like it'd be if *I* were king!"
Second, although I have not taken the time to seriously try FreeBSD (I should, I know), it's probably quite premature to either declare Linux' victory or the failure of the BSD license model. In fact, it's quite possible that BSD could have the last laugh - Both Linux and FreeBSD user bases are comparatively small, and big numbers will likly come from big promoters. (Of your two factors, I think time is the big one.)
It's no secret that many commercial developers are more comfortable with the BSD license - if that ultimately translates into more commercial support for the BSDs rather than the Linuxes, then we could see a real shift in "popularity". Remember the communities are sparse enough that there's only about a 4 or 5:1 edge for Linux now, and most of the big guys are still straddling the fence. (e.g.: IBM both supporting Red Hat and buying BSD-based Whistle.)
Some people will always abuse the system, and there's no good way to stop it. (I think most of us suspect GPL'ed code has been "privatized" a time or two!) License purity is not a cure for human greed.
And no, I don't think "poisoning" the BSD waterhole with GPL would do either camp (or open/free software in general) any good at all. In reality, I think the town is more than big enough for both Linux and FreeBSD, and it appears there are things both camps could learn from one another.
Personally, I wouldn't have a censorware product that *didn't* block the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, the National Organization for Women, or the ACLU. This is one reason it's good for censorware to be very tunable.
Those organizations are right at the top of the list of groups I do *not* want my children exposed to until they have learned to discern truth from lies.
Censorship is not always a bad thing. We do need far better censoring technology, though - what's available is pathetic, and the shame of it is that this may drive me to eliminate the cable modem entirely if there isn't a good option by the time I'm ready to allow the children to use a browser. Hopefully someone will come through with good alternatives.
It's beyond me why the/. crowd is so opposed to Amazon's patent. This is a *perfect* example of a patent doing exactly what patents are supposed to do: prevent those with deep pockets from simply stealing the work of those that developed an invention, method, or improvement. (Keep in mind that Amazon was a tiny startup challenging the entrenched giants with nothing but a few web servers when they came up with this idea! We should be cheering them on!)
While it's true that some people try to abuse the patent system, PATENTS ARE A VERY, VERY, GOOD THING! They level the playing field and give the little guys a chance. Sure the big guys fund huge research labs to try to lock up the rights to improvements that are predictable (IBM is issued more patents by far than any other company), but the fundamental nature of important technology means that the most valuable ideas are inherently unpredictable (and therefore create a dislocation in the technology marketplace.) Keep in mind that patents are one of the very few effective constraints for very large, well-funded companies, especially if they are aggressive and willing to "play dirty". (Hmm, does this sound like any company you've heard of lately?)
Kill patents, and you've ensured that the huge monolithic multinationals will control technology forever, and that no rivals can effectively emerge...
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That's why I put "sail" in the parentheses. Although a regatta does not necessarily imply sail-powered craft, the word seems to be most frequently used in that context, at least in my experience.
Funny, I seem to recall quite recently a number of people quoting Martin Luther King, Jr. saying that he was for judging people by the content of thier hearts (and presumably thier minds as well) rather than the color of their skin.
Sorry, but if you *really* think skin color matters, then *you* are a racist.
Anything but a truly level playing field (in either direction) indicates a racist position. Any special patronizing adjustments only serve to promote and extend racial bias and hostility. We cannot (and should not try) to ensure equality of outcome - we should ensure equality of opportunity - and do that without attacking the integrity of our educational and other institutions.
For any student that is even marginally literate, niether of the examples should pose a problem regardless of the test-taker's "socioeconomic background"!
Ths simple fact is that *anyone* applying to enter *college* should be well read enough to know the trivial facts that a regatta is a (sail)boat race, and a buttercup is some kind of flower. There's no cultural bias at all here - most of us have never participated in a regatta, yet it is quite reasonable to expect that we should at least know what one is. There is, on the other hand, an entirely appropriate bias toward literacy in the examples you cite.
In fact, it seems that it's your comment that contains the subtle racial bias, by implying that somehow, certain races can't be expected to measure up, so we'll have to cut them some slack. This is surely the most vile and corrosive form of racism possible!
The answer isn't to dumb down the tests, the answer is to make sure that our children can escape having their lives ruined by educrats who are more interested in hoovering dollars from Washington and making illiterate kids feel good about it (they call this "self-esteem") than they are in graduating literate, functional, citizens. (We actually graduate a non-trivial number of people in this country every year that can't read their diploma - There is no excuse for this! With any kind of proper teaching, children (with very few exceptions) can and should exhibit survival-level reading ability as they leave *first* grade!)
If you're interested in actually fixing the problem, I highly recommend the following two books to become somewhat more literate on the educational problems we face: Doug Wilson's "Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning" (which includes mystery novelist and solid thinker Dorothy Sayers' excellent essay on "The Lost Tools of Learning"), and Susan Schaeffer Macaulay's "For the Children's Sake".
QA= Quality Assurance. (Spelled Qwality some places I've seen ...)
This replaced the previous term "Quality Control" which fell from favor in the mid-80's right after Car&Driver made a barbed comment about how it was a good thing GM had such a good Quality Control program because "after all, we wouldn't want it to get out of hand..."
Within a matter of months, Qwality teams across the nation had improved their processes for the naming of Qwality teams and QA had displaced QC. If they had just worked half that hard to improve real quality instead of just improving their image. (If I sound jaded, it's just because in my experience, Qwality teams are the closest thing you'll ever find to Dilbertian thinking in real life...)
Both NeWS(Network extensible Window System) and OpenLook predate Tog's tenure at Sun by several years.
/. crowd, the car used was a Consulier GT, a composite ultralight, but kinda ugly car that absolutely demolished it's competition on the racetrack in the late 80's and early 90's. They tried really hard to make it look good for the film, but it was too big a challenge...)
You may not like them, but NeWS was James Gosling's creation and was arguably ahead of its time - Java bears more than a passing resemblance to NeWS in a number of respects. (Remember that NeWS was more than a windowing system - it provided network extensibility and transparency to applications as well, and was arguably the first serious attempt at writing a viable OO network-aware GUI.)
Personally, I think both OpenLook and NeWS were great to work with: I still haven't found scrollbars anywhere else that work that well, and the pushpin/tearoff menu metaphor that's so common now is from OL/NeWS. NeWS in particular had some very cool capabilities: several years ago it did a lot of what we're just now getting around to reinventing in KDE and GNOME. Unfortunately for NeWS in particular, it overestimated the cycles available under Moore's law, and so it was based on Display PostScript (quite cool, really) at a time when it would be several years befoer the horsepower was present to run DPS quickly. As a result (much like GNOME today?), it got a reputation for being dog-slow, and there was little interest in writing apps for it as a result.
Remember that Xerox was the other half of the OpenLook team. OL/NeWS looks a bit dated by today's standards, but it was arguably the most advanced GUI in the insustry when it was released, and broke new ground in important ways, some of which were even picked up by the Mac! It was a quantum leap improvement in Unix GUIs and was light years ahead of SunWin and the original SGI and IBM GUIs, which in their early days were hardly worthy of the name. (something as simple as TWM is a HUGE improvement on SGI's orginal windowing system...)
FYI, Tog's major project at Sun was to play movie producer and make a video short titled "Starfire", which demonstrated a vision of future UI technology in a badly acted setting of corporate politics and intrigue surrounding the near cancellation of a low-pollution car.
(For the car guys in the
5. E-mail requires a computer!
This should be pretty obvious, but one of the real advantages of paper in general is that it's portable, consumes no power (heck, it's even a power *source*!), requires little in the way of special care to preserve the data it's carrying, and doesn't tie you to a box on a desktop or a $illy laptop with a ridiculously short battery life.
(Believe it or not, there are documented cases of paper documents sucessfully retaining their data for dozens of centuries or more!)
6. Magazines!
The "killer app" for Postal Services worldwide. It will be a very, very long time before we can electronically represent the visual and pixel density richness of a simple good-quality magazine. Oh, and then there's the unparalleled browsability of magazines, something that our programs called "browsers" are notoriously poor at...
The more I use E-mail, the more I HATE IT - but not as much as I'm beginning to hate people who say we should do everything "electronically"!
Somebody moderate this moron down. This is exactly why I've told Rob we need a moderator rating for "factually incorrect". (Such a rating would be interesting in meta-moderation, to say the least...)
/.'ers? Is is just because of the Gnazi political bias?
This guy admits to posting IRC hearsay, and it gets moderated up to 5 even though there are at least two posts below from credible people who are actually in a position to speak with authority and provide facts showing that his slanders aren't even remotely true.
From where I sit, Corel is doing quite a bit for the community, but won't keep it up if they continue to get treated like this. Is that what we want? Gee, this community could (and may yet) drive away nearly everyone.
Why do we tolerate such sloppy work on the part of our fellow
(I don't mean to paint the whole FSF crowd with a broad brush, just those that are reactionary and flame anyone who dares to suggest that the GPL may not be appropriate for every situation in the world - that's pretty much my meaning for the term "Gnazi".)
Look, Corel has a great distro - I just bought a copy of Corel Linux Deluxe this past week, not because I had to (I'm still pretty technically capable and have worked with Linux off and on since the 0.99 days), but because it suited my needs:
Like a lot of the end users they're aiming at, I'm unwilling to spend a lot of time tying everything together, and I'm willing to pay other professionals to do all that for me. For this reason, I tend to prefer distros such as Mandrake, Caldera, and Corel. Let's face it - even some of the commercial distros are essentially OS environment construction kits, where "some assembly required" may substantially understate the facts.
If nothing else, Corel should receive mondo kudos (I like that!) for bringing the excellent technology of Debian down to the rest of us. While quite excellent technically, Debian has a well-deserved reputation for being a real SOB to get completely up and configured. Corel now lets me use Debian without the pain, and the power of Debian's self-updating nature allows me to easily go beyond where Corel did if I choose to. (Besides, I never buy games, so I don't mind buying a distro or two each year - and this one *came* with a game (CTP) and Word Perfect!)
Sure, I could do all the integration and testing myself, but I don't want to. I'm *happy* to pay them money for a distro that adds value. It's like this: I am fully capable (and even have most of the tools) to do all of my own automotive work, but there are times when I *choose* to let someone else do the work - for instance, right now, my car is down in Houston getting massaged by a skilled expert (in this case far more skiled than I), while I devote my spare time to remodeling the house (which explains another reason I like Corel...)
Finally, Unix printing has been completely broken forever (or at least since we had to support something other than a directly connected CAT/4), and in my opinion, is one of the major reasons that no Unix has made seriojus inroads into general purpose corporate computing environments. A really good printing interface would be of tremendous value to the community and like WINE, is far from a "token effort." It's really quite simple: without it, you lose.
P.S.: Take a look at what Corel has contributed to Debian and many other projects over the past couple of years and you'll be surprised. Oh, and their former Netwinder division played a big part in getting Linux to run acceptably on ARM chips, too, so I'd think twice before slamming them too hard.
Disclaimer: I own some Corel stock. When it gets to 150-200, I'll sell you mine.
Your logic is completely flawed. We are commanded to love one another as brothers, but we are also commanded *not* to do some things.
The Bible is not at all ambiguous about the roles of men and women in the church: this does not result in any oppression of women in the least, but God is quite clear for hos own incontestible reasons, that women should not be in positions of authority in the church. (My wife and I make a point of belonging to a denomination that does not ordain women - her view on this issue is even stronger than mine and is in no way coerced. I have noticed that many of the women in this church are what would be called "deep thinkers" by society at large (an oddly high proportion were once lawyers) - they have thought on the issue and recognize the validity of the Law.)
Likewise, the Bible is not at all ambiguous with respect to homosexuality - it is not to be permitted or condoned. The language of the Bible leaves no wiggle-room here - this is one of the clearest principles in scripture. We are to love the sinner but hate the sin. Robbing banks is wrong, molesting children is wrong, homosexuality is wrong. It could no more right for a church to accept an unrepentant homosexual into our midst as it would be to accept an unrepentant bank robber or child molester. Asking a church to is to ask it to abdicate the very thing it believes.
On a final note, recognize that homosexuality has been unversally proscribed in every *stable* civilisation in history. There are quite good reasons for that that rely directly on God.
I have to say that although I listened to Limbaugh quite a bit some years back, I never once heard him refer to himself as a Christian, and do not even know if he is. Perhaps if he were to reason from Christian principles, he'd be right even more often? (In general, I agree with many of his conclusions, but often find his logic for arriving at them quite weak.)
And actually, your last sentence is closer to the real point - it's not other *people* saying what's right and what's wrong, it's the creator of the universe. That carries considerably more weight. (If you don't think it does now, just wait until you die and you will.) Haven't you ever wondered about why Christians aren't afraid of death?
As I point out in another post below, Puritan thought affected the end result far more than Enlightenment thought.
Don't believe every revisionist thing you read. Trust original sources, as they are far less likely to have been corrupted by those with a hostile agenda. The original sources quite clearly back my position, not yours.
(As an aside, great books (or works) are great because they make the complex approachable. With a minimal effort on the part of the reader, they are often easier to understand and considerably more concise than works *about* the great books. Again, the value of original sources.)
Your "and vice versa" proves you haven't done your own research into the motivations behind the First Amendment.
I'll grant that there were Christians on both sides. I'll even go so far as to say that R.L. Dabney's writings about the way the northern Chrisitians twisted the meaning of the Bible are right on the mark, but my point was that it was primarily Christian ideals and organizations that led to the demise of slavery in both England and the US.
As far as the quotes go, I can certainly win on the volume of evidence. I'm not even going to try to refute your quotes here, because I would first have to decide which of the literally thousands of Chritianity-affirming quotes from the founding fathers I was to use. And some of yours are out of context, by the way. If you're really interested, you might want to check out a copy of Richard(?) Lederer's "America's God and Country Encyclopaedia of Quotations", which doesn't have them all, but does provide a good cross-section.
That the enlightenment was an influencing factor, I of course agree, but every serious scholar will recognize that Puritan though had far more influence in the finl product that anything the Enlightenment brought to the table. In fact, much of what happened in the Constitutional convention (I recommend Max Farrand's (sp?) classic on this) was an outright rejection of Enlightenment values.
Secondly, you are obviously missing the intent of the First Amendment, much as many people miss the intent of the Second: After having lived under a corrupt state church (the Church of England, headed by the monarch), thier intent was quite clearly to keep the state out of the church, not the other way around. In fact, until the Supreme Court (unilaterally and with no cause of law whatsoever) changed the interpretation of the word "religion" in the Constitution, it was interpreted as "a Christian Denomination" - and had been for 150 years. Understand that the concept of "separation of church and state" is NOWHERE in the Constitution. What is says is that the government cannot establish a particular denomination as "official". That is a world of difference.
This is (very slightly) off-topic, but it seems like a good point in the thread to bring it up:
After playing with Napster, I've been wondering about the correctness of certain types of MP3 snarfing:
In particular, whether there should be anything at all wrong with grabbing a copy of an MP3 from a CD I already own. It seems to me that this is (or should be) entirely legitimate, as it simply saves me the trouble of having to rip the CD myself in order to get the MP3. I don't think even the RIAA claims that making an MP3 from a purchased CD is wrong, (presumably because it falls in to the "archival backup" category?)
The problem becomes a bit murkier in the case of grabbing an MP3 of a song I already own on tape or vinyl - is this legitimate? I don't own the CD, but I could (if I wanted to expend the effort) pipe the analog signal from the turntable of tape deck into the PC, then digitize and massage into MP3. Does the difference between analog and digital make me a criminal in this case?
I think it goes without saying that grabbing something I do not own in any form crosses the line (you may disagree with the copyright laws, but that does not change the fact that they are there and that the act clearly violates them.) Nonetheless, I have myself crossed that line for recordings that are no longer available (a lot of older music is essentially unavailable), and this seems defensible as well - I'd buy it if I could, but I can't.
Somehow, I think the people doing the downloads from my napster collection aren't being so particular.
Some of these areas seem legitimately gray and murky, even if you accept the validity of existing copyright law right up front...
Why is it that it's quite socially acceptable to exhibit, and even flaunt, bigotry against Christians in the Slashdot community? (This asked as a serious question and is on-topic in light of several comments in this thread.)
Many of you would never dream of condoning a racially inflammatory post, but have no problem tarring Christians with a broad derogatory brush when given half a chance. Painting Christians as racist is even more ridiculous - Christianity was clearly the driving force behind the worldwide elimination of slavery. (A first in world history, by the way...) Christians understand that we are all created in God's image - do you?
Further, understand that the radical ideas in the constitution you claim to support were a direct outgrowth of Protestantism - our government is more closely modeled on Presbyterian church than on anything else that existed in 1776. Oh, and don't forget that many of the original 13 states were congregational assemblies, meaning the state had an official denominational affiliation. Christianity is part of the warp and woof or American society - if you want to rip it out, you're seeking nothing less than the complete destruction of the American ideals founded on it.
That said, can we get back to the real debate? This is about censorship in libraries (something I personally favor - as I've said here before, I think censorship has positive aspects and is grossly underrated in this community in particular.) Sure, Christians have a particular worldview that you may not agree with, but that does not make them wrong.
I wonder how many of you opposed to library censorship have young children of your own? Not too many I'd bet. It's really unfortunate, but if you love your kids, you really have to shield them from the Internet these days - we all know that the old saw about "having to go look for offensive material" is far from the truth now. Seriously, how many of you haven't gotten a link inappropriate for children (for all kind of valid reasons, including ideological ones) from a seemingly innocuous web search? Censorship is needed and appropriate in circumstances like this. I for one hope they succeed in running their own community as they see fit - that's a *real* conservative (even libertarian) position.
I'll probably get nuked by the moderators for this, and I really hate to write this kind of message, but sometimes, you just have to point out bigotry when you see it.
Sure, it's offtopic, but it's funny. Somebody toss this guy some points...
I'm one of the few (I suppose we're few) that's taken the time to read (or at least skim) all of the lawsuit material Caldera has posted on thier site. They had Microsoft cold on violations of the law that are far more serious than anything in the DOJ trial.
While it's not surprising that Microsoft should go to extraordinary lengths to keep this from going to trial (which was due to happen next week, IIRC), it *is* surprising that Caldera would be willing to do them such a favor for such a small sum of money. (C'mon, folks, LESS THAN 1%??!)
True, a trial would have been expensive for Caldera, but I still think the Caldera trial was a far bigger threat to Microsoft (both in itself and in addition as fodder for the DOJ)than the wimpy DOJ action.
Game over, man. All you college guys go get that MCSE, because they've got carte blanche to go full speed ahead, leaving behind the twisted wreckage of what was once a healthy software industry.
On the other hand, this means open source is the last best hope, even though its ability to deliver on the promise in the non-geek space has yet to be tested. I really think in a few years, this day will mark the turning point at which everything rested on the shoulders of a penguin. A fine penguin, to be sure, but very possibly not up to the task of slaying Goliath. (Note to those that moderate down any non-glowing comment about Linux: do a reality check: how many non-geeks do you know choosing Linux? A few possibly, but not a lot just yet.)
I needed a new distro this week, and just chose Corel after three happy (well, OK, not unhappy) years with Caldera. (My innate contrarianism and the fact that I'm sadly more interested in being a user than a hacker these days makes it the right choice.) Looks like I made the right choice. Winners never quit. Quitters never win. Caldera just threw in the towel before the bell even rang.
Fisrt, I'll set the stage by saying you won't find a bigger IP bigot than I am - I've been doing IP/Internet stuff daily since 1985, did the IP migration for a major oil company, and have been an Internet consultant. (Maybe more appropriately I should say I'm a bigot for the whole inet/Unix philosophy of keeping things simple by pushing the intelligence of the net to the periphery.)
That said, I developed a deep respect for the mainframe guys along about 1992, when we were hacking the mainframes into the IP intranet. (And anyone that's ever worked with an IBM 3172 protocol processor (because IP protocol processing is death to a batch-tuned machine) knows what a hack it was, especially early on.)
Although their methods and thought processes are quite different from the Internet "norm" (wow, I'm mainstream now - dangerous!), they came up with very good, very valid engineering solutions to the problems they faced at the time. SNA networking is a royal pain, and I avoid it where ever I can (which is pretty much everywhere by now). You try building a network which must be bank and hospital reliable, and connect thousands of users all over the country, often with only 9.6 kbps lines to serve an entire site!
SNA is elegant in its own twisted way, and as a network guy, I can certainly appreciate why it worked well then, and why it may well be with us for quite some time. Granted it's a pain to work with, but IBM and the other mainframe folks have very good IP support today, so it's really a non-issue. What difference does it make to you if the back-end network between the mainframes and their storage/output devices is SNA? It's (fairly ) simple, incredibly robust, and dictatorially controllable - even the IP bigot I am, I have to confess I envy the SNA guys' ability to manage and control traffic with fine-grained and even adaptable policy.
The moral is this: Don't be too quick to shoot down competing technologies until you learn a bit more about why they're there. (I say this because I could have been reading my own rant about SNA circa 1991 in one of the earlier posts...) We can learn a lot from the mainframe guys, and vice versa - and that's what makes what's happening now so much fun...
(Disclaimer: I work for Tivoli, an IBM company which does all kinds of cool systems and network management stuff for pretty much everything. We get free beer on Fridays, too... it's not your daddy's IBM.)
Sorry, but I can't let this one slide. Where do you people come up with this stuff?
Intel quite clearly owns the StrongARM processor technology, and in fact, over the past year, they've even started to recognize that what they bought is beter than what they can build.
The StrongARM website at Intel says, "Watch for next generation StrongARM® processors to make their debut during the first half of 2000." Read it for yourself at http://developer.intel.com/design/ strong/index.htm. (Actually the quote above is from a page linked to by that page, but clearly Intel is still in this game.)
Besides, I'm not aware of any NIC with an ARM chip on it, although there may be one. The ARM and DSP's (like TI's) are very different beasts.
The rapid rise of antibiotic resistant bacteria in the past few years is truly scary. Sure the docs are somewhat to blame for continuing to prescribe antibiotics when the patient appears to have a cold just to "give them the appearance of doing something". (This is probably THE major problem in medicine - the refusal to admit that there's nothing medicine can do about a lot of things.)
At the same time, they're our first line of defense at containing antibiotic resistance, so controlled access to these drugs is critical.
Do a web search on VISA and VRSA to get an idea of what's at stake here. (VRSA is Vancomycin Resistant Staphlococcus Aureus, VISA is Immune. Staph Aureus is the most common Staph bacterium, and infests most hospitals. Vancomycin is generally regarded as "the antibiotic of last resort", so VISA is very bad news, indeed.)
FYI, if you are interested in these things, you can read much of The Lancet online (the British medical journal) with registration at www.thelancet.com. As an interested party with no real medical background, I think this is a great deal - I could never justify subscribing (it's relatively expensive), but this lets me learn a lot about current research and findings without the cost or hassle of visiting a medical library, which I'd never bother to do - it's just not that important. I started out there doing research on prions, which are even scarier than VISA and a very good reason to wonder if you really want to ever go to the dentist again...
You make some valid points, but it's quite unfair to paint pharmacists as just "pill counters".
Actually, I trust the pharmacists knowledge of drugs, their uses (indications), interactions, and situations to avoid (contraindications) far more than I trust the doctor's knowledge of the same. Although the compounding chemist of the old days is sadly becoming extinct, many of the newer drugs require active and knowledgeable management by the pharmacist.
This is particularly true with the new classes of drugs called "kinetics", which are custom mixed in response to events in the patient's own body chemistry and require close cooperation between the lab, pharmacist and clinical staff. True, kinetics are mostly used in hospitals, but they are beginning to be used in more outpatient settings, and in any case, pharmacology is one of the most rapidly changing areas of medicine today.
These folks know a lot, and often know it better than the docs, who have enough trouble just keeping up with new treatments without trying to keep up with all the drug innovations, too.
First the usual caveats: I'm not a physician or pharmacist, but I've spent a fair portion of my career as a healthcare IT consultant, so I do know a little about this.
This is probably both needed and not needed. (Remember, though, that Bill and Hillary have not given up on socializing medicine in the US, and will take any incremental steps they can that will interpose government control between you and any healthcare resource. It should go without saying that such control is a bad thing.)
Pharmacies and physicians are registered with the FDA today. Every doc (and presumably every pharmacist) has an "FDA number" that they must use to identify themselves with certain classes of prescriptions, particularly narcotics. (In fact, many of the better medical web sites on the web require an FDA number to get at the "good stuff", which is presumably not safe for viewing by the riff-raff (that's us.))
Based on my consulting experience, it seems that state laws are the primary governing factor in regulating prescriptions, and that the variations from state to state complicate things for providers that operate in more than one state. In particular, only a few states allow electronic prescriptions and/or signatures - most require a written prescription because they are far more traceable, immune to tampering, and tamper evident (very important) than their electronic counterparts.
I'm talking reality, not theory here - I think electronic prescriptions would be a very bad thing: this industry can barely handle its paper, and pays seriously substandard wages to its professionals from CIOs on down. Their chance of doing this well as an industry is near-nil. Doing this right is not a trivial problem: It involves the best cryptographic systems available and must provide all the usual crypto benefits: privacy, authentication, non-repudiation, and a serious audit trail as well. Pluggable authentication was about to make this happen a few years ago, but now that we can't do that, there will have to be an entire infrastructure built on a single crypto technology which will then leave everything vulnerable and slow to react in the event it's ever cracked. The government is more than part of the problem here, so I find their desire to help kind of ludicrous.
While it might be nice to streamline the prescription process across states, it's clearly an area where the states have control today (and are granted that control under the tenth amendment.) Still, it wouldn't surprise me to see an FDA number required on all prescriptions in the near future as an attempt to normalize the process across the states. Unfortunately, that will remove the abilty of some states to continue to use their own, more effective regulations.
Now, whether the FDA should exist at all is an entirely different (and quite valid) discussion topic. (Let's just say the FDA's record is far from sterling, and places it among the very worst Federal violators of the constitution.)
Bruce,
Two things:
First, it's more than a little unfair to lump the present FreeBSD license in with the historic commercial BSD license. Due to the AT&T concerns and other issues, they are really completely different animals.
As you no doubt know, Sun and the other workstation OEMs were under the old commercial BSD license, which does not require or even encourage reincorporation of code from the licensees. It's my understanding that even so, many (but not all) Sun improvements made it back into BSD up through the SunOS 3 & 4 days - which ended a geological epoch ago in Internet time.
(You're right about there being more Sys V code than BSD in most modern commercial Unixes - although I'm personally more comfortable with Berkeley Unix practices, when the father of BSD (Bill Joy, for the newbies) decided that the SVR3-based Solaris was the only way to provide for future needs, that sent a message!)
Sun went further than they had to in giving back any changes at all - as you corectly point out, almost no one else has given anything! I'm not sure what you're beef with either Sun or BSD is here other than, "the world isn't like it'd be if *I* were king!"
Second, although I have not taken the time to seriously try FreeBSD (I should, I know), it's probably quite premature to either declare Linux' victory or the failure of the BSD license model. In fact, it's quite possible that BSD could have the last laugh - Both Linux and FreeBSD user bases are comparatively small, and big numbers will likly come from big promoters. (Of your two factors, I think time is the big one.)
It's no secret that many commercial developers are more comfortable with the BSD license - if that ultimately translates into more commercial support for the BSDs rather than the Linuxes, then we could see a real shift in "popularity". Remember the communities are sparse enough that there's only about a 4 or 5:1 edge for Linux now, and most of the big guys are still straddling the fence. (e.g.: IBM both supporting Red Hat and buying BSD-based Whistle.)
Some people will always abuse the system, and there's no good way to stop it. (I think most of us suspect GPL'ed code has been "privatized" a time or two!) License purity is not a cure for human greed.
And no, I don't think "poisoning" the BSD waterhole with GPL would do either camp (or open/free software in general) any good at all. In reality, I think the town is more than big enough for both Linux and FreeBSD, and it appears there are things both camps could learn from one another.
Personally, I wouldn't have a censorware product that *didn't* block the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, the National Organization for Women, or the ACLU. This is one reason it's good for censorware to be very tunable.
Those organizations are right at the top of the list of groups I do *not* want my children exposed to until they have learned to discern truth from lies.
Censorship is not always a bad thing. We do need far better censoring technology, though - what's available is pathetic, and the shame of it is that this may drive me to eliminate the cable modem entirely if there isn't a good option by the time I'm ready to allow the children to use a browser. Hopefully someone will come through with good alternatives.
Smart-ass.
(Sorry, I just couldn't resist that one...)
It's beyond me why the /. crowd is so opposed to Amazon's patent. This is a *perfect* example of a patent doing exactly what patents are supposed to do: prevent those with deep pockets from simply stealing the work of those that developed an invention, method, or improvement. (Keep in mind that Amazon was a tiny startup challenging the entrenched giants with nothing but a few web servers when they came up with this idea! We should be cheering them on!)
While it's true that some people try to abuse the patent system, PATENTS ARE A VERY, VERY, GOOD THING! They level the playing field and give the little guys a chance. Sure the big guys fund huge research labs to try to lock up the rights to improvements that are predictable (IBM is issued more patents by far than any other company), but the fundamental nature of important technology means that the most valuable ideas are inherently unpredictable (and therefore create a dislocation in the technology marketplace.) Keep in mind that patents are one of the very few effective constraints for very large, well-funded companies, especially if they are aggressive and willing to "play dirty". (Hmm, does this sound like any company you've heard of lately?)
Kill patents, and you've ensured that the huge monolithic multinationals will control technology forever, and that no rivals can effectively emerge...