As Eisenhower said when he signed the bill, the change was designed to proclaim the "dedication of our nation and our people to the Almighty". There is absolutely no question that this promotes monotheistic religions (mainly Christianity)
Christianity belonging to a group of monotheistic religions which all derive from one original such religion. Anyway it's arguable that all monotheistic religions must by definition worship the same god...
over polytheistic religions and Atheism. Only an idiot would claim, in the face of what the actual people behind the change said, that it wasn't designed to promote a specific religion.
It dosn't matter if it promotes a specific religion or an finite group of religions. Since the US Consitution explicitally bars state sponsorship of religion.
You'll forgive me if I don't blindly accept your assurance that the government isn't promoting the god of the bible, since it obviously is.
It's utterly irrelevent which god they might be promoting, since they are not allowed to promote any.
In reality, most screeners are needed because the movie company has not put a movie in general release and thus if you're a voting member in say Lake Tahoe, there is no way to see most of the movies that you're supposed to be voting on
In which case maybe the movie should simply receive no reviews from reviewers anywhere it hasn't been made available.
Ashcroft's major malfunction is forgetting that in the American system, we'd rather make the mistake of letting the guilty go free than putting the wrong person in jail. As a result, we make it hard for law enforcement to arrest and hold people. We require that proof be presented to the public when they want to do so.
But somehow the US has managed to wind up with a higher proportion of its residents in jail than any other country on the planet.
It seems that the DoJ under Ashcroft is sneaking through all these hard-core bills because everyone thinks that it won't apply to them, only to find he's turned around and "broadened" the definitions a bit. He is actually encouraging LEAs to get common criminals classed as terrorists.
It's not even quite that simple. There also appears to be preasure to get some actual terrorists classed (and prosecuted) as "common criminals".
That's why Microsoft is pushing this through the courts instead of just settling. Microsoft knows that there are literally thousands of patents held by small companies like Eolas that Microsoft infringes. If Eolas scores a big hit then companies will pop up out of the woodwork with similar suits.
At just over half a billion a time even Microsoft's 40 billion won't last long.
On the other hand you can create a blip on their radar by participating in various types of suspicious activities on a regular basis and thereby enter into the 0.001% of people they give a damn about. These activities would be: homocidal behavior, association and participation with known terrorist organizations or drug cartels and tax fraud.
These activities also include plenty of non criminal activities. Including witnessing government officials enguaged in questionble activities or even high crimes. Participating in democratic activities. Being a scapegoat for something when a real suspect is "untouchable". Where "intelligence" services have such warped minds they honestly can't tell the difference between something which is harmless and something which is dangerous. e.g. thinking that a scottish distillary might be able to manufacture WMDs...
Protesting is protected by law, who cares if you're identity is known...
Quite a few protests involve the issue of government failing to obey and uphold the law.
in fact it might benefit your goal by telling them what type of people are protesting... currently all they see is an anonymous mob, whom they can treat with disrespect because they don't know who you are or what role you play in society. What if they knew you were a grad student at a prominent university and that the guy next to you is pre-med and the girl next to him is a daughter of an amabassador... maybe they'd take it a little more seriously and listen a little closer.
But by promoting open sourced software from the get-go, any other types of software are at a huge disadvantage. What my statement intended to imply is that the government should give all other options a fair shake first, not showing favoritism one option before you've looked at them all.
This is rather hard when the status quo, for many years, has been to favour a certain type of proprietary software. As for the "huge disadvantage" anyone can use or distribute OSS. If OSS were to be mandated a free open market would be an automatic side effect.
The point is that openness and freedom are essential to properly running a government. Free software is the only means that provides that end. If you have your data tied up in proprietary formats that you can only access with proprietary software you are controlled by your vendor. This is not acceptable for governments.
If this is a foreign owned proprietary software vendor and the alarm labelled "National Security" isn't going off, then something is seriously wrong.
Open source software is a means and not an end, so if better/more cost-effective software can be created through commercial means, then it doesn't at all matter whether or not a competing, inferior product was created through open source. That said, the way things currently stand, there are precious few areas where commercial software has the advantage (off the top of my head, these are games, Mac OS X, and Opera).
Open source does not equate to non/anti-commercial. It works best within a tertiary business model. Nor does proprietary software equate to commercial, there is plenty of proprietary software which is in no way commercial. Most notably drivers made available for download by anyone. Actually a lot of proprietary software exists within tertiary business models too. The "off-the-shelf" secondary model software is in the minority when it comes to pieces of software written anually.
First of all, if there is already existing opensorce software to do what they need to do then why should they spend a single cent on anything? So the only thing to consider is when they want something not already available in open source.
In which case you only need to write/alter the bits which don't already exist. The most obvious would be translating into local language/dialect. Which is something best done by natives anyway.
They have to pay someone for what they need. Why shouldn't they create local jobs by paying people to extend an existing opensourse project?
Also to maintain it. To cope with such things as new statutes and changes to taxation. Someone sitting in the North West US attempting to write software for the Jordanian government, using an Arabic phrase book, would be rather silly.
Exactly. Because all the jobs for writing that proprietary code are created in the developing country in question. By using a proprietary software package, you are esentially paying coders in your own developing tech job market.
If someone is being paid to code (or to modify existing code) it really dosn't matter if they are dealing with proprietary or OSS software.
Oh. Wait. No. Most of this development happens off-shore. If your countrymen are being hired to code for these projects, they had to emegrate first to do it - further weaking your own tech market.
Whereas with OSS they don't need to go anywhere. Anyway someone in Suva is likely to have a far better idea about the requirments of the Fijian Government than someone in Redmond or Bombay.
When looking at software, Governments should evaluate based on TCO, reliability, maintainability, and usability.
For several of these the difference between OSS and proprietary software is relevent.
Usability unfortunately is the most important for most users and unfortunately is not the most important goal for most OSS software I've used.
Plenty of software is poor when it comes to usability. Difference is that OSS can be fixed, with proprietary software you are dependent of the original supplier for any fixes. Who might instead spend lots of money in advertising campaigns to try and persuade people that a poor UI is the best thing since sliced bread or play "it's a feature, not a bug".
Writing the Plan of Action to insist that they automatically prefer OSS over Proprietary software is as silly as writing it to automatically prefer proprietary over OSS.
The latter is apparently quite close to the status quo.
As a previous poster pointed out... Proprietary software development employs people, which leads to people being fed... There's no moral deficit in that.
Software development employs people. It's somewhat irrelevent if the result is OSS or proprietary. The only obvious difference is that an OSS project can use any piece of OSS (or PD) code which already exists. Whereas a proprietary project might have to either duplicate the fuction of software which has already been written or pay lawyers to negotiate licencing issues.
The problem here is not just one of marketing. They have spread the idea that the BSA and Microsoft have been cramming down everyone's throats, that software should be evaluated on the merits of the product, ignoring the merits of the system involved in crating the product.
Except that if software was evaluated on its merits then in plenty of cases open source software would be chosen over proprietary software. Also involved here is the idea that a "name" gives some sort of support. Even though proprietary licences disclaim anything they possibly can.
This is like a construction company insisting that when a building project goes out to bid the only thing evaluated are price and the size of the building created with no constraints on the construction methods used, safety, environmental impact, or maintainability.
But there might restrictions on who can bid in the first place, regardless of what costs they can offer. A bit like it being very unlikely that any Arab construction company could get work in Iraq.
If you buy a Sony TV, and its found that Sony stole some resistors and used them to built your TV, they don't come in and make you pay for the resistors or take them out of your TV. They bust Sony's ass. SCO wants you to *THINK* they can sue you, but they can't.
It's more as if they are claiming that they should be paid the price of the TV. Before they have managed to prove that they own any part of the TV. At the same time refusing to identify which parts they allege are stolen.
No, since SCO has no rights to XFS. It's an SGI creation. SCO claim they have a right to it, but they believe everything is theirs.
A claim is not proof of anything. They might as well claim that Iraqi WMDs were hidden in flying saucers by space aliens. (Actually the latter might be more credible...)
Your statement implies that US courts have jurisdiction in the rest of the world.
Whilst quite a few US courts may think this is the case, SCO is unlikely to get much enforcement done anywhere else. Especially considering the high opinion the rest of the planet has of the US right now:)
I think the entire situation has reached the point of useless posturing, where no matter what the people who what the hell they're talking about, SCO will always have a glib answer that doesn't make any sense.
What they are claiming to own glib, which they definitly didn't write, now?
Actually, the WTC architects designed the buildings explicitly to survive impact by the largest commonly-used airplane in use at the time: The Boeing 707 (and similar planes, like the Convair 880). The Twin Towers were brought down by Boeing 767 airplanes with substantially more weight and fuel capacity than the 707.
There isn't that much of a difference in weight or fuel capacity between a 767 and a 707. Both towers survived the plane impacts. According to the official version of events WTC's 1, 2 & 7 (which was not hit by a plane) were brought down by fires. Which is something which has not happened before or since.
And many people who commited crimes no worse than would get them 6 months community service from a city court will get 20 years in federal prison and then be exfelons forever afterward with many of their rights of citizenship permenantly removed.
At least part of the problem is that unles the crime causes X thousand dollers damage it is likely to be ignored by law enforcement. Thus inflated figures are produced. e.g. the $35 doller manual in the Mitnick case becoming a document of enormous value.
But the guns that are allowed under gun rights are usually weak, low-end ones. Guerillas would require more firewpower, which is probably forbidden by law (I'm not really familiar with weapons laws in any country though). Is there a country that allows people to own machine guns like AK-47 (#1 guerilla weapon)?
This was the case in pre-invasion Iraq.
Does even USA allow it?
The US Constitution says so, but as with other things the US Government dosn't want to go along with it.
It's similar to politicians and large special interest groups. No politician who wants to get elected can support an even wise and rational policy (e.g., let's say eliminating drug patents and reforming the way drug research is funded in the interest of lowering overall healt care costs for individuals) if you risk ticking off huge campaign donors, for you will get buried.
Even incumbent politicans risk getting the boot if they rub special interest groups (especially those with deep pockets) the wrong way.
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As Eisenhower said when he signed the bill, the change was designed to proclaim the "dedication of our nation and our people to the Almighty". There is absolutely no question that this promotes monotheistic religions (mainly Christianity)
Christianity belonging to a group of monotheistic religions which all derive from one original such religion. Anyway it's arguable that all monotheistic religions must by definition worship the same god...
over polytheistic religions and Atheism. Only an idiot would claim, in the face of what the actual people behind the change said, that it wasn't designed to promote a specific religion.
It dosn't matter if it promotes a specific religion or an finite group of religions. Since the US Consitution explicitally bars state sponsorship of religion.
You'll forgive me if I don't blindly accept your assurance that the government isn't promoting the god of the bible, since it obviously is.
It's utterly irrelevent which god they might be promoting, since they are not allowed to promote any.
Big companies like Microsoft, IBM or Oracle do not go tits-up in a day
Just because they are big is no guarentee that they cannot fall down.
even if they would, they'd most probably be contractually obliged to help in the transition to a new system.
If they go "tits up" their contracts are meaningless anyway.
In reality, most screeners are needed because the movie company has not put a movie in general release and thus if you're a voting member in say Lake Tahoe, there is no way to see most of the movies that you're supposed to be voting on
In which case maybe the movie should simply receive no reviews from reviewers anywhere it hasn't been made available.
Ashcroft's major malfunction is forgetting that in the American system, we'd rather make the mistake of letting the guilty go free than putting the wrong person in jail. As a result, we make it hard for law enforcement to arrest and hold people. We require that proof be presented to the public when they want to do so.
But somehow the US has managed to wind up with a higher proportion of its residents in jail than any other country on the planet.
It seems that the DoJ under Ashcroft is sneaking through all these hard-core bills because everyone thinks that it won't apply to them, only to find he's turned around and "broadened" the definitions a bit. He is actually encouraging LEAs to get common criminals classed as terrorists.
It's not even quite that simple. There also appears to be preasure to get some actual terrorists classed (and prosecuted) as "common criminals".
That's why Microsoft is pushing this through the courts instead of just settling. Microsoft knows that there are literally thousands of patents held by small companies like Eolas that Microsoft infringes. If Eolas scores a big hit then companies will pop up out of the woodwork with similar suits.
At just over half a billion a time even Microsoft's 40 billion won't last long.
They've been doing this for years. It's a simple plan: make movies so bad no one will want to copy them.
No doubt they'll blame "pirates" when no-one wants to go and see them either...
Sadly nothing that SCO does or says lately resembles anything like logic.
Maybe they are about to annonce some kind of partnership with a major government. Just getting in practice of speaking the same kind of "lingo"?
On the other hand you can create a blip on their radar by participating in various types of suspicious activities on a regular basis and thereby enter into the 0.001% of people they give a damn about. These activities would be: homocidal behavior, association and participation with known terrorist organizations or drug cartels and tax fraud.
These activities also include plenty of non criminal activities. Including witnessing government officials enguaged in questionble activities or even high crimes. Participating in democratic activities. Being a scapegoat for something when a real suspect is "untouchable". Where "intelligence" services have such warped minds they honestly can't tell the difference between something which is harmless and something which is dangerous. e.g. thinking that a scottish distillary might be able to manufacture WMDs...
Protesting is protected by law, who cares if you're identity is known...
Quite a few protests involve the issue of government failing to obey and uphold the law.
in fact it might benefit your goal by telling them what type of people are protesting... currently all they see is an anonymous mob, whom they can treat with disrespect because they don't know who you are or what role you play in society. What if they knew you were a grad student at a prominent university and that the guy next to you is pre-med and the girl next to him is a daughter of an amabassador... maybe they'd take it a little more seriously and listen a little closer.
Or they would know how best to silence protests.
But by promoting open sourced software from the get-go, any other types of software are at a huge disadvantage. What my statement intended to imply is that the government should give all other options a fair shake first, not showing favoritism one option before you've looked at them all.
This is rather hard when the status quo, for many years, has been to favour a certain type of proprietary software. As for the "huge disadvantage" anyone can use or distribute OSS. If OSS were to be mandated a free open market would be an automatic side effect.
The point is that openness and freedom are essential to properly running a government. Free software is the only means that provides that end. If you have your data tied up in proprietary formats that you can only access with proprietary software you are controlled by your vendor. This is not acceptable for governments.
If this is a foreign owned proprietary software vendor and the alarm labelled "National Security" isn't going off, then something is seriously wrong.
Open source software is a means and not an end, so if better/more cost-effective software can be created through commercial means, then it doesn't at all matter whether or not a competing, inferior product was created through open source. That said, the way things currently stand, there are precious few areas where commercial software has the advantage (off the top of my head, these are games, Mac OS X, and Opera).
Open source does not equate to non/anti-commercial. It works best within a tertiary business model.
Nor does proprietary software equate to commercial, there is plenty of proprietary software which is in no way commercial. Most notably drivers made available for download by anyone.
Actually a lot of proprietary software exists within tertiary business models too. The "off-the-shelf" secondary model software is in the minority when it comes to pieces of software written anually.
First of all, if there is already existing opensorce software to do what they need to do then why should they spend a single cent on anything? So the only thing to consider is when they want something not already available in open source.
In which case you only need to write/alter the bits which don't already exist. The most obvious would be translating into local language/dialect. Which is something best done by natives anyway.
They have to pay someone for what they need. Why shouldn't they create local jobs by paying people to extend an existing opensourse project?
Also to maintain it. To cope with such things as new statutes and changes to taxation.
Someone sitting in the North West US attempting to write software for the Jordanian government, using an Arabic phrase book, would be rather silly.
Exactly. Because all the jobs for writing that proprietary code are created in the developing country in question. By using a proprietary software package, you are esentially paying coders in your own developing tech job market.
If someone is being paid to code (or to modify existing code) it really dosn't matter if they are dealing with proprietary or OSS software.
Oh. Wait. No. Most of this development happens off-shore. If your countrymen are being hired to code for these projects, they had to emegrate first to do it - further weaking your own tech market.
Whereas with OSS they don't need to go anywhere. Anyway someone in Suva is likely to have a far better idea about the requirments of the Fijian Government than someone in Redmond or Bombay.
When looking at software, Governments should evaluate based on TCO, reliability, maintainability, and usability.
For several of these the difference between OSS and proprietary software is relevent.
Usability unfortunately is the most important for most users and unfortunately is not the most important goal for most OSS software I've used.
Plenty of software is poor when it comes to usability. Difference is that OSS can be fixed, with proprietary software you are dependent of the original supplier for any fixes. Who might instead spend lots of money in advertising campaigns to try and persuade people that a poor UI is the best thing since sliced bread or play "it's a feature, not a bug".
Writing the Plan of Action to insist that they automatically prefer OSS over Proprietary software is as silly as writing it to automatically prefer proprietary over OSS.
The latter is apparently quite close to the status quo.
As a previous poster pointed out... Proprietary software development employs people, which leads to people being fed... There's no moral deficit in that.
Software development employs people. It's somewhat irrelevent if the result is OSS or proprietary. The only obvious difference is that an OSS project can use any piece of OSS (or PD) code which already exists. Whereas a proprietary project might have to either duplicate the fuction of software which has already been written or pay lawyers to negotiate licencing issues.
The problem here is not just one of marketing. They have spread the idea that the BSA and Microsoft have been cramming down everyone's throats, that software should be evaluated on the merits of the product, ignoring the merits of the system involved in crating the product.
Except that if software was evaluated on its merits then in plenty of cases open source software would be chosen over proprietary software. Also involved here is the idea that a "name" gives some sort of support. Even though proprietary licences disclaim anything they possibly can.
This is like a construction company insisting that when a building project goes out to bid the only thing evaluated are price and the size of the building created with no constraints on the construction methods used, safety, environmental impact, or maintainability.
But there might restrictions on who can bid in the first place, regardless of what costs they can offer. A bit like it being very unlikely that any Arab construction company could get work in Iraq.
If you buy a Sony TV, and its found that Sony stole some resistors and used them to built your TV, they don't come in and make you pay for the resistors or take them out of your TV. They bust Sony's ass. SCO wants you to *THINK* they can sue you, but they can't.
It's more as if they are claiming that they should be paid the price of the TV. Before they have managed to prove that they own any part of the TV. At the same time refusing to identify which parts they allege are stolen.
No, since SCO has no rights to XFS. It's an SGI creation. SCO claim they have a right to it, but they believe everything is theirs.
A claim is not proof of anything.
They might as well claim that Iraqi WMDs were hidden in flying saucers by space aliens. (Actually the latter might be more credible...)
Anyone who's using XFS owes $699 to SCO?
Only if SCO can prove that they have the rights to XFS. Which is something they so far havn't even made a credible attempt at.
Your statement implies that US courts have jurisdiction in the rest of the world.
:)
Whilst quite a few US courts may think this is the case, SCO is unlikely to get much enforcement done anywhere else.
Especially considering the high opinion the rest of the planet has of the US right now
I think the entire situation has reached the point of useless posturing, where no matter what the people who what the hell they're talking about, SCO will always have a glib answer that doesn't make any sense.
What they are claiming to own glib, which they definitly didn't write, now?
Actually, the WTC architects designed the buildings explicitly to survive impact by the largest commonly-used airplane in use at the time: The Boeing 707 (and similar planes, like the Convair 880). The Twin Towers were brought down by Boeing 767 airplanes with substantially more weight and fuel capacity than the 707.
There isn't that much of a difference in weight or fuel capacity between a 767 and a 707. Both towers survived the plane impacts.
According to the official version of events WTC's 1, 2 & 7 (which was not hit by a plane) were brought down by fires. Which is something which has not happened before or since.
And many people who commited crimes no worse than would get them 6 months community service from a city court will get 20 years in federal prison and then be exfelons forever afterward with many of their rights of citizenship permenantly removed.
At least part of the problem is that unles the crime causes X thousand dollers damage it is likely to be ignored by law enforcement. Thus inflated figures are produced. e.g. the $35 doller manual in the Mitnick case becoming a document of enormous value.
But the guns that are allowed under gun rights are usually weak, low-end ones. Guerillas would require more firewpower, which is probably forbidden by law (I'm not really familiar with weapons laws in any country though). Is there a country that allows people to own machine guns like AK-47 (#1 guerilla weapon)?
This was the case in pre-invasion Iraq.
Does even USA allow it?
The US Constitution says so, but as with other things the US Government dosn't want to go along with it.
It's similar to politicians and large special interest groups. No politician who wants to get elected can support an even wise and rational policy (e.g., let's say eliminating drug patents and reforming the way drug research is funded in the interest of lowering overall healt care costs for individuals) if you risk ticking off huge campaign donors, for you will get buried.
Even incumbent politicans risk getting the boot if they rub special interest groups (especially those with deep pockets) the wrong way.