As was originally reported, Abramoff's clients spent $50 million to lobby Congress and the executive branch--in all, $55 million spent on political influence.
So, I would not wave off any interest or suspicion because of that revision.
As far as I can tell, the Gates family is the controlling owner. I can't see how else they would have been able to get Preston, a 100-year-old firm, to merge with Gates 10 years ago. IMO the intent was for the firm to be a proxy regarding anti-trust. Lots of journalists have said something similar, so I'm not out on a limb.
They weren't intended to be active hyperlinks. The speech as you see it is the file of notes from which I spoke, and I didn't have time to pretty it up.
I did remove the party attribution in the senate race, as it was incorrect.
Not sleazy at all. We know that lobbying was going on. I pointed out a more high-profile lobbying activity to make the point that those folks lobby at the highest level, and I pointed out that a potential presidential candidate who is involved with ODF because it's in his state has already had to react to the lobbying. I didn't say that Tom Delay was lobbied about ODF - but left it open for others to look into what Tom Delay and others were lobbied about other than Indian Casinos. Especially while BSA was paying the Abramoff's law firm.
We know that their side engages in all sorts of sleaze. I have pointed out a lead for people to pursue. Maybe we'll find more sleaze.
I brought the site back up. It seems to have been down for about 3 hours, while I was asleep. I'd better upgrade to Ruby on Rails 1.1 (it's running 1.0) and do some stress testing.
Well, list the most important things in your life, in order, and that will tell you a lot.
For me, it used to be that Open Source was #1. For Richard, Free Software always will be. For me now, being a dad is #1. And I find that I can look at Open Source with more objectivity because of this.
Well, I'm married and have a kid, and thus have more balance in my life than Eric and a lot more than Richard. In their defense, I'm not sure that either one can help it. But I won't stop showering, don't worry.
I want people to look into this stuff and find more evidence. I also want people to understand that we are touching the highest level of politics. I understand that some of this will only hit blogs, because it's less substantiated. I can deal with that that without making X-files out of it.
You can tell those "write some code" trolls: I published ModelSecurity, substantial Free Software, in 2005 and am working on other programs now. In 2005 I also published in Law (speech accepted for an American Bar Association conference) and Economics (on First Monday), and spoke in front of the UN.
Even if Linux kernel violated SCO's patent, could anyone really stop Linux kernel development?
Well, they could do a pretty decent job of stopping you from distributing it or using it anywhere that is publicly visible. Now, the law doesn't stop meth labs, but I don't want those who choose to develop or use Free Software to have to operate like a meth lab.
It used to be that people thought that the law had no real mechanism that could touch the Internet. Enough people like Skylarov have gone to jail for writing the wrong software or have had their net worth made negative through the need to mount a legal defense against an unjust civil or criminal claim. I don't want Tridge or Jeremy Allison to go to jail for reverse-engineering Windows file and printer sharing or infringing on some improperly-granted patent. I don't want to go to jail for using it.
To take a frivolous comment seriously, we seem to have folded up the vendor organization that used to do publicity for desktop linux - which I spoke for - in favor of efforts by OSDL, freedesktop.org, etc. Since I have a lot to do, that's no problem. But I'm available to give a speech about the desktop if anyone wants one.
Well, they're doing that rat thing here on Slashdot, and so on. I guess we need to trust the moderators to deal with the substance-free objection-for-its-sake postings, to correct over-moderation when necessary, to correct badly-motivated down-mods, and so on.
Back then the DPL was not elected, at least not formally. But I was elected to SPI's board a year or two ago, and still hold that position, and SPI is Debian's corporation.
The Free Software Definition published by FSF did not exist when I created the Debian Free Software Guidlines. It still did not exist when I later re-labeled the DFSG to be the Open Source Definition. Richard put it up later, I think years later. I guess he put it up because felt a need to differentiate from Open Source. Eric Raymond tried to drive an IMO entirely unnecessary rift between Free Software and Open Source, and some of Richard's later reaction stems from that.
IMO I am seeing some astroturfing from the pro-software-patent camp around this speech, and not only on Slashdot. Only folks who can see IP numbers, etc., of people posting could track that down, and even then it might be difficult, so all I can say is that some comments do look suspicious.
Sometimes when you think a connection might be there, the best you can do is put that connection in front of empowered people who might find something. Abramoff was working as a lobbyist for Gates. I'd imagine the main thing on the agenda would be anti-trust, but competition with Free Software in government might be there as well. After all, we have had multiple published incidents where US diplomats lobbied a foreign government not to make a pro-free-software decision.
Well, the point is that politicians in Massachussets were heavily lobbied to oppose ODF. Even the Governor, a presidential candidate, rated 2nd by the last Republican leadership congress and thus likely to be in the primary - seems to be doing some realpolitic about the lobbying.
Hm, do we have no discovery process since Abramoff plead guilty? In that case we may never know what he was talking about. But he was working for Gates. Did he take a bullet for his boss by pleaing guilty?
Your complaints about Java are well-taken, but don't seem to be relevant for building a word processor. That's one case where we do want to have a separate window from the web site and don't want it to look like the web site.
The point of the VM is to provide object-code portability between disparate CPU instruction sets. On the server platform, source-code portability is probably more than sufficient. We go to great lengths like JIT compiling to get around the fact that the object is delivered as a sort of p-code. If you're going to compile it, compile it to native code.
Sun made a point of bringing Java bigwigs over to Pixar when they made Java's debut. At that time, they were pretty clear about being browser-embedded.
I agree that lots of people still use Java for server-side development. My employer supports them. But I've always felt that a VM on the server does not make very much sense. At this point, I would find it difficult to justify basing a new web project on Java. It's just too slow to develop. And Rails scalability doesn't seem to be an issue. Technocrat.net, which is built on Rails - by me alone - and uses a lot of caching, can service 850 pages per second with just one dispatcher process. Disabling the cache, we still get around 150 pages per second. We should be so lucky as to need to scale above that.
Slashdot Mirror
So, I would not wave off any interest or suspicion because of that revision.
Bruce
Thanks
Bruce
Thanks
Bruce
I did remove the party attribution in the senate race, as it was incorrect.
Bruce
We know that their side engages in all sorts of sleaze. I have pointed out a lead for people to pursue. Maybe we'll find more sleaze.
Bruce
Bruce
Bruce
For me, it used to be that Open Source was #1. For Richard, Free Software always will be. For me now, being a dad is #1. And I find that I can look at Open Source with more objectivity because of this.
Bruce
Bruce
I want people to look into this stuff and find more evidence. I also want people to understand that we are touching the highest level of politics. I understand that some of this will only hit blogs, because it's less substantiated. I can deal with that that without making X-files out of it.
Bruce
Bruce
Well, they could do a pretty decent job of stopping you from distributing it or using it anywhere that is publicly visible. Now, the law doesn't stop meth labs, but I don't want those who choose to develop or use Free Software to have to operate like a meth lab.
It used to be that people thought that the law had no real mechanism that could touch the Internet. Enough people like Skylarov have gone to jail for writing the wrong software or have had their net worth made negative through the need to mount a legal defense against an unjust civil or criminal claim. I don't want Tridge or Jeremy Allison to go to jail for reverse-engineering Windows file and printer sharing or infringing on some improperly-granted patent. I don't want to go to jail for using it.
Bruce
Bruce
It was nice when we could just have a discussion.
Bruce
Bruce
Bruce
Bruce
Bruce
Bruce
Bruce
Hm, do we have no discovery process since Abramoff plead guilty? In that case we may never know what he was talking about. But he was working for Gates. Did he take a bullet for his boss by pleaing guilty?
Bruce
I found enough interesting things to talk for 50 minutes :-)
Thanks
Bruce
Thanks
Bruce
I agree that lots of people still use Java for server-side development. My employer supports them. But I've always felt that a VM on the server does not make very much sense. At this point, I would find it difficult to justify basing a new web project on Java. It's just too slow to develop. And Rails scalability doesn't seem to be an issue. Technocrat.net, which is built on Rails - by me alone - and uses a lot of caching, can service 850 pages per second with just one dispatcher process. Disabling the cache, we still get around 150 pages per second. We should be so lucky as to need to scale above that.
Thanks
Bruce