So, why is this article in the Linux category, when it's talking about the legal status of an OpenBSD driver that will eventually be ported to Linux? You claim to have read TFA, but... don't seem to have.
The Linux Wireless developers asked the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) to investigate...
"Our ultimate goal is to have full support for Atheros devices included in the Linux kernel," said Luis Rodriguez, a Linux Wireless developer.... Yeah, this is about Linux, not BSD, even though the driver was originally developed for BSD.
Obviously the BSD guys benefit from this review of their legal standing too, but that's not the point of the article.
Google not bidding means they never really intended to win, they were just using this as publicity to try an force the stipulations they wanted without having to be the high bidder.
Google sure has been trying to throw their weight around a lot lately. Why don't you wait and see what happens before making judgments about a company based on what you think they'll probably do....
I'm glad someone is finally pushing the issue of the excessive fines. Me too.
Actually what I'd really like to see challenged is copyright lengths themselves. The Constitution has something to say on that as well... Sadly, that was already brought to the US Supreme Court, and it lost. The court found that a finite extension to copyright terms didn't actually make them "unlimited", even if they were so in practice. Ultimately, future Congresses would have to continue to decide to extend the period, or things would begin to expire, and that meant that, not only would the period always be "limited", but that it would also be re-negotiated by multiple sets of representatives of the people, each time allowing the people to have their say.
The problem with copyright is NOT the terms... the problem with copyright is the corruption of the Congress via bribery, which subverts the will of the people. If the corruption were removed, there would be no reasonable argument possible that any vote to extend copyright law to a larger, finite period was unconstitutional.
There's a high probability that the movie will start somewhere in the middle, like most of the episodes of ALIAS I think you can generalize that and be a bit more likely to be correct: Abrams likes to play with continuity, and tells stories out of order. Given that we already know of one character that's show at two very different ages, we can assume that he will be telling this one significantly out of order.
I would not expect this sort of thing:
EXTERIOR: Enterprise. We SEE the ship leaving a space station. We HEAR the VOICE OVER:
Kirk: Captain's Log. Stardate...
There is a tremendous EXPLOSION. The ship is blown apart. TEXT appears at the bottom of the screen as we FADE TO BLACK:
"Six months earlier..." Instead, I would expect slightly subtler re-ordering of events, possibly narrated by older Spock to different people or something of the sort.
The purpose of the GNU work is to make people aware of Freedom-related issues. Ah... look, young'un... GNU was founded to create a system that wouldn't restrict people's ability to use it to its fullest, which many of the people involved early on, including Stallman, felt needed to involve the ability to read, modify and distribute source code. It was not some sort of "sowing the seeds of freedom among the heathens," effort.
Saying Stallman insisting on calling it GNU is hubris is funny, when you consider that its not Stallman who named it after his first name. Wherein my example is quite apt... We could say that it's horrible hubris of Ford to have named his company after himself... really, the so-called "Ford" was a result of the tremendous advances made in the previous 20 years by the Steele industry. It's only fair for such a misguided naming to be corrected by the "Steele/Ford Motor Company."
No. People name things, not to ascribe merit, but in order to provide them with a label. Linux was named Linux. Why it was named Linux is irrelevant, that's it's name.
Its reasonable to request distributions that are heavily based on Linux and GNU to mention GNU in their name. Not at all.
I would also think it is reasonable for a huge codebase such as KDE to request that, too. For example, "Kubuntu" for short, and "A KDE frontend to a GNU/Linux system" for long. Great. Enjoy booting your GKXMITBSDBunnix. Bottom line: a name is a label, not a laundry list of ingredients.
Star Trek has been headed by Rick Berman since the latter years of Star Trek: The Next Generation. In that time, Berman did everything possible to destroy the show. Berman... Berman... oh! You mean the guy that isn't involved in this movie?! Yeah, take another look.
Maybe if the GNU folks had only been working on a kernel instead of also doing the hundreds of other programs as well, they would have made more headway with HURD. And if Linus had been trying to do a whole OS and not just the kernel, Linux the kernel would still be early in development. Very doubtful.
First off, keep in mind that originally, Linux was aimed at being more on-par with Minix than Hurd. Linus would have written it even if the Gnu folks didn't exist, though it would have been written with pcc instead of gcc. Early on, he didn't have or even target creating a "whole OS", just a terminal server.
The mention of GNU should merely point out how important the GNU is in GNU/Linux. Every time I hear "GNU/Linux", I have to chuckle. It's a bit like Pittsburgh demanding that Ford vehicles be called Steel/Ford. It's the ultimate example of RMS's hubris, and frankly I find it unfortunate, since most of his fundamental ideas are not unreasonable, just his ego and his behavior.
I've had a toothache for the last week (seeing the dentist tomorrow alright?) and I've been reading Slashdot every day. Must be Slashdot causing my toothache because my friend, he doesn't read Slashdot and he doesn't have a toothache.
Science ftw. Wow, what a horrible lack of understanding of what a clinical trial is all about.
First off the OP misunderstood the article. The "detection" that the test was seeking was people becoming ill, not people saying, "OK, I think it's on now."
Second, when you have a single anecdote, there's no value in that. There are just too many variables.
In a clinical trial, you attempt to limit the variables and compare multiple people's results in order to determine the causal relationship for a given problem. For example, if I lined up 12 people to read Slashdot and they all got sick, while 12 people reading CNN.com didn't, then I'd have a starting point... From there you would seek to establish that outside factors were not involved (for example, are sickly people more attracted to Slashdot... you could find out by comparing the sickness rate between randomly selected people made to read Slashdot vs. regular Slashdot readers).
It's not that kind of insider trading like you hear about in the high drama of Wall Street. High drama? Wall Street is mostly pretty boring. It's lots of people shuffling around lots of paper. You clearly watch too many movies.
Most inside traders don't get caught. 10% maybe. 97.342% of statistics are made up. Source, please.
This is a whole 'nother economy in and of itself. Off the books and running parallel to the "official" economy. You seem to have jumped the rails, here. Are we entering tinfoil hat territory?
All business of this magnitude operate with more than one set of books. Source please.
As long as the government is involved, and you can't sue it, none of these pirates will be held accountable, outside the one or two that will be thrown in front of the bus for good PR. And the government won't be held accountable because 99% of of you keep handing the power right over to them over and over. How are you going to deal with the crooked bankers that make all this happen as long as these same bankers hold the mortgage on your house? You're not going to do anything. It has been this way for thousands of years. There is no indication that it's going to change anytime soon. For them the risk is nil. Once again, perhaps if you could be specific and back it up with some sources, we could understand what you're trying to get at.
Moore's Law dictates that in 18 months, you should be able to get a significantly more powerful laptop for $100. No, it doesn't. It predicts that in 18 months you should be able to fit significantly (twice, in fact) more transistors in the same surface area. What we do with that and how it maps to macroscopic technology is left as an exercise. I think Moore's Law must be the most mis-quoted concept since Occam's Razor.
talk: I hate wikipedia. It's at best a well spoken gentleman in a pub. It sounds right but I can't be sure. The well spoken gentleman in the pub doesn't come with citations (or if he does, they're likely to be more work to check than the conversation merits).
Where Wikipedia is well-sourced (e.g. "Good" or better graded articles), it is extremely easy to verify its content against some of the most respected sources in the world including on-line and off-line resources. Look at the featured article archive for some excellent examples. If you are expecting that all 1,000,000 articles are equal in quality to reference works that are over a hundred years old, you'll be disappointed, and clearly you do need to be able to understand when you're looking at an article that the community has poured over and something that just a handful of people have casually edited.
Thankfully, Wikipedia provides those tools in its history mechanism and in its countless maintenance tags which clearly indicate the state of an article's editing process.
Last time I checked, aiding and abetting was a crime in this country.
Don't be hyperbolic. Limiting search results is not a crime in the U.S. (though it might expose you to civil suits)
This country's laws have no bearing on what the Chinese government does. If they did, then Cisco and Yahoo would be out millions, perhaps even billions of dollars.
Google's choice was not to display all results or just some. It was to provide search in China or not. There was no option that involved showing the Chinese people the results that you (and I) might have wanted them to see. None. If there were, I'd agree with you (and so would Google).
Note that Chinese Internet users who find a way around the Great Firewall, still have access to unfiltered Google, just as they always have. The only difference now is that they have easy access to a filtered version of Google.
What does no evil mean to you? It means that in all things, you measure the good against the ill and decide to do the most good. There are deeply gray areas, and dealing with an oppressive regime is certainly one of those areas. I'd say, however, that Google does the best they can in this respect. They refuse to be actively involved in harming Chinese citizens (unlike their competition), but they do agree to limit search results in order to provide any at all. I'm sure the average, Internet-using Chinese citizen would agree that Google is useful to them. It's just not as useful as it could be if they lived in a free society. Fixing that is something that I'm sure Google would love to do, but it's not realistically something they can accomplish.
It's not even a mission statement. It's a cute quip that got bandied about and became an "informal corporate motto". If you're talking about the "don't be evil" line, then you're deeply wrong. That phrase has tremendous legal importance to Google because it appears in their S1. An S1 (AKA a "red herring") is the document you file with the SEC that tells investors what your company does and what risks it takes. If you say, "we sell bottled water, but only to the criminally insane," in your S1, then your investors know up-front what business they're getting into, and have no grounds to complain when you don't make as much money as someone selling water to the general public.
The broad disclaimer in Google's S1 which is further explained in terms of the potential for missed revenue is a legal tool which most other public corporations do not have. It allows them to make choices that favor ethics over profits in a way that other companies cannot (literally cannot, as they would be open to lawsuits from their shareholders for not maximizing profits). Other companies' only guideline for ethics is the law... poor yardstick though it is.
That's not to say that Google is guaranteed to uphold this phrase, or any given person's interpretation of it, but it gives them the option to be ethical in situations where most companies (public ones, anyway) have no option.
Censoring free speech sites in China vs Cheap wireless broadband in the US. Actually, they don't Censor free speech sites in China.
In fact that statement doesn't even scan.
There are no free speech sites in China. There is no free speech in China.
Google can't censor someone's site.
What Google does is restricts their search results as per the guidelines of the Chinese government. They could have decided that the search results were too important to censor, but had they done that, the only difference would be that Google wouldn't be available at all in China. They're doing much more good by offering some service in China than they would be by offering none. If they had a better negotiating position, then I'd agree with you, but they literally had none.
Yep. In 1998. Then we invaded, destroyed stockpiles, and ushered in the inspection teams.
What that has to do with GWB's claims in 2003 I don't know, but I'm sure that completely unbiased and non-partisan site you linked to has an answer. You didn't read the linked article, obviously. The site he linked to is a snopes-like rumor debunking site. It's quite true that the quotes listed (between 1998 and 2003) are all true. The congress really did believe that WMDs would be found in Iraq. The question is: why did they think that? The answer is that the CIA was used as a tool to make the case for war. Tenet's book has made that pretty clear. He was somewhat complicit, and the CIA certainly did get some things wrong, but it's clear that the Bush administration was eager to go to War, and eager to convince the Congress and U.N. that there was a valid reason to do so, even if that was questionable.
These single hand keyboards are called chord keyboards and a pretty old idea. Indeed. I've tried out the Twiddler, which is very nice, and easy to learn. Over a weekend, you should be able to get back up to being useful on it, though it has its limitations. The biggest advantage is that you can rest your arm at your side and keep typing.
Surely the people at Google have read The Mythical Man Month and are smart enough to know that 3 programmers of lesser talent do not in any way equal 1 programmer of greater talent. Just as 9 women can't make a baby in 1 month, adding more people to a project rarely speeds it up and almost always slows it down. This is a massive over-simplification. 9 women cannot produce a baby any faster than one (assuming fertilization is trivial). However, 2 programmers certainly can do more work than 1... if (and this is a huge if) there's enough isolatable work for two people. I've worked in many environments where 10-100 people have done work that half or less of their number could not have accomplished in the same time.
The problem is that management of those 10-100 people is not an easy problem, and most companies will spin their wheels on the management and get 1-10 people worth of work out of them.
Now, back to Google and the question of quality. I think the point here is that Google has hired a broad spectrum of people for a broad spectrum of roles. When they are looking for a star filesystem hacker, perhaps they settle for the 10th best filesystem hacker in the world when they could have gotten the 4th best from overseas.
This isn't a matter of hiring 10 knuckle-dragging Java-certified schema-monkeys because you couldn't hire the one domain expert you wanted from overseas.
Your range theory is a misunderstanding of RNG (true or pseudo). To restrict the range of values output is simply a matter of interpreting the bitsream in whatever way you choose. You're approaching this from a computer science standpoint, where fundamentally all values are bit-strings. Granted, in that environment, you can discount the bits that you don't want and call the rest the random value. In that case, you will always have a value between 0 and 2**bits-1. However, in a purely mathematical sense, and a sense which has tremendously important application in the real world, a random value is a value with the properties I described. There is no restriction on the definition of a random number that indicates that its range must intersect any point including the origin, that it must be contiguous or any other property of the sort. For practical application, these ranges are often mapped to a contiguous space which either begins at 0 or whose mid-point is 0. That's all well and good, but you're placing that restriction on the generation and not the mapping, incorrectly.
There is only one universal restriction on the range of a random number generation function: it may not be infinite. Any generator with an infinite range has an expected value of infinity, no matter what the distribution is, and that's highly problematic in terms of the statistical properties of the function. When we say "random", we imply a finite, but sometimes not a countable, range.
This is all as I understand it, but feel free to point me to a reference that disagrees.
No, please do not. Send along your concerns about the Constitution and the current administration's abuse of it, but please leave the inflammatory text of this article out of it.
Actually, a random number generator isn't really random unless it is possible for it to generate the number 42 a thousand times in a row... Not so.
A random number generator might generate numbers in the range 0x10000000 to 0xfffffff0 (and thus never generate 42 (0x0000002a) as a result). As long as the distribution within that range is uniform, non-periodic, and lacking in underlying structure, it's random. If it meets the first and last requirement, but is periodic, then it's pseudo-random.
I swear every single time microsoft does some form of asshatery someone on slashdot makes some form of the same idealistic knee-jerk response "Wow finally this is going to be the last straw. Everyone will stop using Microsoft. Hurray!". Speaking of straws, that's a nice strawman you have there. Unfortunately for your rant, I said nothing of the sort. Of course MS won't push this out in a rush. They hire some of the best and the brightest marketing folk in the world.
I was only making a sarcastic, contrarian comment about the likelihood that this would see the light of day in as naked a form as it appears in this article. I assumed my audience was mature and sophisticated enough to understand the situation, and thus my humorous take on it.
Microsoft is around to stay for a long time. Likely, but I'm not sure that they'll be the same company in 10 years that they are today. Linux or Apple or an unknown could easily take the desktop from Microsoft only to find that Microsoft has abandoned that territory for the gaming platform and Web application service markets which may replace the desktop.
There is an entrenched application, user and developer base and this isn't changing overnight despite our best wishes and hard work. Of course.
4. Outlooks+Exchange are a better Enterprise calendering system than anything I have seen from FOSS. If that problem is solved, a whole lot of businesses would jump ship to FOSS tomorrow. Problem is, not many people outside of industry care about calendering, and not many people inside have time for it.
Lots of people will jump to, "what about accessing Google Calendar from Sunbird?" Sadly, this isn't even close.
Google Calendar is hosted outside the office, so it's a non-starter (you can't have people putting "meeting with super secret new customer" in Google Calendar).
Google Calendar can't handle allocation of resources (such as conference rooms or A/V equipment).
Google Calendar doesn't do a great job of integrating with third-party devices, though it has SMS messaging which is a step in the right direction, and may be more moot as handheld wireless Internet becomes more common.
We can only hope that this makes it into an early service pack for Vista, and that Microsoft announces it poorly, resulting wholesale defection of their corporate user-base to Apple and Linux-based desktops.
I'm glad to see the RIAA tightening the noose on Internet radio. It's bad for the Internet radio stations that tried to play nice with the RIAA, and I'm sorry for them, but in the end the more pressure the RIAA puts on the Internet to avoid their music, the more independent artists on independent labels have a chance to figure out that, together, they can create the next generation of radio over the Internet. It needs to be DRM-free, and it needs to have a blend of pre-recorded and interesting original content (the way radio used to before it became the drone of commuter background noise). Once someone does this well, it won't take much to get the avalanche started.
Slashdot Mirror
"Our ultimate goal is to have full support for Atheros devices included in the Linux kernel," said Luis Rodriguez, a Linux Wireless developer.
Obviously the BSD guys benefit from this review of their legal standing too, but that's not the point of the article.
Google sure has been trying to throw their weight around a lot lately. Why don't you wait and see what happens before making judgments about a company based on what you think they'll probably do....
The problem with copyright is NOT the terms... the problem with copyright is the corruption of the Congress via bribery, which subverts the will of the people. If the corruption were removed, there would be no reasonable argument possible that any vote to extend copyright law to a larger, finite period was unconstitutional.
Sadly, the latter problem is much harder to fix.
I would not expect this sort of thing: EXTERIOR: Enterprise. We SEE the ship leaving a space station. We HEAR the VOICE OVER:
Kirk: Captain's Log. Stardate...
There is a tremendous EXPLOSION. The ship is blown apart. TEXT appears at the bottom of the screen as we FADE TO BLACK:
"Six months earlier..." Instead, I would expect slightly subtler re-ordering of events, possibly narrated by older Spock to different people or something of the sort.
No. People name things, not to ascribe merit, but in order to provide them with a label. Linux was named Linux. Why it was named Linux is irrelevant, that's it's name. Its reasonable to request distributions that are heavily based on Linux and GNU to mention GNU in their name. Not at all. I would also think it is reasonable for a huge codebase such as KDE to request that, too. For example, "Kubuntu" for short, and "A KDE frontend to a GNU/Linux system" for long. Great. Enjoy booting your GKXMITBSDBunnix. Bottom line: a name is a label, not a laundry list of ingredients.
First off, keep in mind that originally, Linux was aimed at being more on-par with Minix than Hurd. Linus would have written it even if the Gnu folks didn't exist, though it would have been written with pcc instead of gcc. Early on, he didn't have or even target creating a "whole OS", just a terminal server. The mention of GNU should merely point out how important the GNU is in GNU/Linux. Every time I hear "GNU/Linux", I have to chuckle. It's a bit like Pittsburgh demanding that Ford vehicles be called Steel/Ford. It's the ultimate example of RMS's hubris, and frankly I find it unfortunate, since most of his fundamental ideas are not unreasonable, just his ego and his behavior.
Science ftw. Wow, what a horrible lack of understanding of what a clinical trial is all about.
First off the OP misunderstood the article. The "detection" that the test was seeking was people becoming ill, not people saying, "OK, I think it's on now."
Second, when you have a single anecdote, there's no value in that. There are just too many variables.
In a clinical trial, you attempt to limit the variables and compare multiple people's results in order to determine the causal relationship for a given problem. For example, if I lined up 12 people to read Slashdot and they all got sick, while 12 people reading CNN.com didn't, then I'd have a starting point... From there you would seek to establish that outside factors were not involved (for example, are sickly people more attracted to Slashdot... you could find out by comparing the sickness rate between randomly selected people made to read Slashdot vs. regular Slashdot readers).
It's not that kind of insider trading like you hear about in the high drama of Wall Street. High drama? Wall Street is mostly pretty boring. It's lots of people shuffling around lots of paper. You clearly watch too many movies. Most inside traders don't get caught. 10% maybe. 97.342% of statistics are made up. Source, please. This is a whole 'nother economy in and of itself. Off the books and running parallel to the "official" economy. You seem to have jumped the rails, here. Are we entering tinfoil hat territory? All business of this magnitude operate with more than one set of books. Source please. As long as the government is involved, and you can't sue it, none of these pirates will be held accountable, outside the one or two that will be thrown in front of the bus for good PR. And the government won't be held accountable because 99% of of you keep handing the power right over to them over and over. How are you going to deal with the crooked bankers that make all this happen as long as these same bankers hold the mortgage on your house? You're not going to do anything. It has been this way for thousands of years. There is no indication that it's going to change anytime soon. For them the risk is nil. Once again, perhaps if you could be specific and back it up with some sources, we could understand what you're trying to get at.
Where Wikipedia is well-sourced (e.g. "Good" or better graded articles), it is extremely easy to verify its content against some of the most respected sources in the world including on-line and off-line resources. Look at the featured article archive for some excellent examples. If you are expecting that all 1,000,000 articles are equal in quality to reference works that are over a hundred years old, you'll be disappointed, and clearly you do need to be able to understand when you're looking at an article that the community has poured over and something that just a handful of people have casually edited.
Thankfully, Wikipedia provides those tools in its history mechanism and in its countless maintenance tags which clearly indicate the state of an article's editing process.
- Don't be hyperbolic. Limiting search results is not a crime in the U.S. (though it might expose you to civil suits)
- This country's laws have no bearing on what the Chinese government does. If they did, then Cisco and Yahoo would be out millions, perhaps even billions of dollars.
- Google's choice was not to display all results or just some. It was to provide search in China or not. There was no option that involved showing the Chinese people the results that you (and I) might have wanted them to see. None. If there were, I'd agree with you (and so would Google).
- Note that Chinese Internet users who find a way around the Great Firewall, still have access to unfiltered Google, just as they always have. The only difference now is that they have easy access to a filtered version of Google.
What does no evil mean to you? It means that in all things, you measure the good against the ill and decide to do the most good. There are deeply gray areas, and dealing with an oppressive regime is certainly one of those areas. I'd say, however, that Google does the best they can in this respect. They refuse to be actively involved in harming Chinese citizens (unlike their competition), but they do agree to limit search results in order to provide any at all. I'm sure the average, Internet-using Chinese citizen would agree that Google is useful to them. It's just not as useful as it could be if they lived in a free society. Fixing that is something that I'm sure Google would love to do, but it's not realistically something they can accomplish.The broad disclaimer in Google's S1 which is further explained in terms of the potential for missed revenue is a legal tool which most other public corporations do not have. It allows them to make choices that favor ethics over profits in a way that other companies cannot (literally cannot, as they would be open to lawsuits from their shareholders for not maximizing profits). Other companies' only guideline for ethics is the law... poor yardstick though it is.
That's not to say that Google is guaranteed to uphold this phrase, or any given person's interpretation of it, but it gives them the option to be ethical in situations where most companies (public ones, anyway) have no option.
In fact that statement doesn't even scan.
There are no free speech sites in China. There is no free speech in China.
Google can't censor someone's site.
What Google does is restricts their search results as per the guidelines of the Chinese government. They could have decided that the search results were too important to censor, but had they done that, the only difference would be that Google wouldn't be available at all in China. They're doing much more good by offering some service in China than they would be by offering none. If they had a better negotiating position, then I'd agree with you, but they literally had none.
Yep. In 1998. Then we invaded, destroyed stockpiles, and ushered in the inspection teams.
What that has to do with GWB's claims in 2003 I don't know, but I'm sure that completely unbiased and non-partisan site you linked to has an answer. You didn't read the linked article, obviously. The site he linked to is a snopes-like rumor debunking site. It's quite true that the quotes listed (between 1998 and 2003) are all true. The congress really did believe that WMDs would be found in Iraq. The question is: why did they think that? The answer is that the CIA was used as a tool to make the case for war. Tenet's book has made that pretty clear. He was somewhat complicit, and the CIA certainly did get some things wrong, but it's clear that the Bush administration was eager to go to War, and eager to convince the Congress and U.N. that there was a valid reason to do so, even if that was questionable.
The problem is that management of those 10-100 people is not an easy problem, and most companies will spin their wheels on the management and get 1-10 people worth of work out of them.
Now, back to Google and the question of quality. I think the point here is that Google has hired a broad spectrum of people for a broad spectrum of roles. When they are looking for a star filesystem hacker, perhaps they settle for the 10th best filesystem hacker in the world when they could have gotten the 4th best from overseas.
This isn't a matter of hiring 10 knuckle-dragging Java-certified schema-monkeys because you couldn't hire the one domain expert you wanted from overseas.
Keep in mind that this tax is very similar to the solution proposed by the EFF and differs only in its government-run collection system.
There is only one universal restriction on the range of a random number generation function: it may not be infinite. Any generator with an infinite range has an expected value of infinity, no matter what the distribution is, and that's highly problematic in terms of the statistical properties of the function. When we say "random", we imply a finite, but sometimes not a countable, range.
This is all as I understand it, but feel free to point me to a reference that disagrees.
- Forward this article to your local paper.
- ...
No, please do not. Send along your concerns about the Constitution and the current administration's abuse of it, but please leave the inflammatory text of this article out of it.A random number generator might generate numbers in the range 0x10000000 to 0xfffffff0 (and thus never generate 42 (0x0000002a) as a result). As long as the distribution within that range is uniform, non-periodic, and lacking in underlying structure, it's random. If it meets the first and last requirement, but is periodic, then it's pseudo-random.
I was only making a sarcastic, contrarian comment about the likelihood that this would see the light of day in as naked a form as it appears in this article. I assumed my audience was mature and sophisticated enough to understand the situation, and thus my humorous take on it. Microsoft is around to stay for a long time. Likely, but I'm not sure that they'll be the same company in 10 years that they are today. Linux or Apple or an unknown could easily take the desktop from Microsoft only to find that Microsoft has abandoned that territory for the gaming platform and Web application service markets which may replace the desktop. There is an entrenched application, user and developer base and this isn't changing overnight despite our best wishes and hard work. Of course.
Lots of people will jump to, "what about accessing Google Calendar from Sunbird?" Sadly, this isn't even close.
We can only hope that this makes it into an early service pack for Vista, and that Microsoft announces it poorly, resulting wholesale defection of their corporate user-base to Apple and Linux-based desktops.
I'm glad to see the RIAA tightening the noose on Internet radio. It's bad for the Internet radio stations that tried to play nice with the RIAA, and I'm sorry for them, but in the end the more pressure the RIAA puts on the Internet to avoid their music, the more independent artists on independent labels have a chance to figure out that, together, they can create the next generation of radio over the Internet. It needs to be DRM-free, and it needs to have a blend of pre-recorded and interesting original content (the way radio used to before it became the drone of commuter background noise). Once someone does this well, it won't take much to get the avalanche started.