It goes roughly like: "I can't imagine how biological feature X could have evolved; therefore it couldn't have evolved." The only novelty is that it's now being advanced by people who aren't ignorant of biology, so we get examples like flagella where it is harder to find surviving intermediate forms, instead of examples like the eyeball where you can simply look at smaller and simpler creatures to see viable intermediate stages.
In this particular case, apparantly there is a large subset of the flagellum that is homologous to a secretory system in other bacteria. Of course, this isn't a problem for creationists (oops - I mean "Intelligent Design Advocates") who can simply switch their arguments from "The flagellum is irreduceably complex!" to "The flagellum is made of two parts each of which is irreduceably complex!" without batting an eyelash, but hopefully if you're still on the fence you'll be able to see the logical flaws.
AT&T is like Sauron: they created The One Ring (Unix), tried to use it to exert a hold over thousands of licensees, but lost it inadvertently (to the public domain and the valiant Berkeley).
SCO is more like Gollum: they got a hold of the Ring, they're convinced it's "My Preciousss..." and will make their lives wonderful, yet they are essentially unable to do anything powerful with it. They are also schizophrenic, having one happy Caldera personality that wants to be friends with Linux users and one evil The SCO Group personality that wants to kill them all.
The first thing the public saw was their stupid slide show, which included proof that:
SCO doesn't know the difference between what they once called "Ancient Unix" (which the AT&T vs. Berkeley judge said AT&T lost to the public domain) and the System V code they actually own some rights to, despite the fact that they rereleased that code themselves under the old BSD license.
SCO doesn't know the difference between original BSD code (like the packet filter code they claimed as their own) and their System V code, despite the fact that they are legally required to retain the copyright notices on the BSD parts.
SCO can't tell the difference between a legal, original reimplementation of a detailed published standard (like that BPF example, and probably like much of the POSIX, Unix9x, BSD, etc. compatibility in Linux) and an obfuscated copy of the original implementation.
More recently, SCO has "responded" to IBM's interrogatories not with specific claims of wrongdoing, but with the output of "egrep -il (smp|rcu|numa)" and a disclaimer that they're not stating that the output includes some infringement.
If they have an actual case, why are they pubishing these embarrassments instead, still keeping their case secret in court where they might piss off a judge instead of just a bunch of Linux users?
Because Windows contains some of that infringing code?
SCO can't even find any real infringements in code they're allowed to read. How on earth would they have found an infringement in code they aren't allowed to read?
The GPL exists explicitly because some people writing OSS code do care about their existance and relevance. They want to ensure that their name stays on their software, and that nobody tries to use it without giving them credit (for all the world to see).
If that was all they wanted, then the BSD license (which also requires copyright notices be preserved, even with redistributed binaries) would be sufficient. The reasons for choosing GPL over BSD aren't to promote ego; they're usually to promote idealism (e.g. RMS thinks all software should be free, so wants to assist other free software development without assisting proprietary development) or remuneration (e.g. by encouraging free publication of source code modifications, authors get more source code to add to their projects). instead.
When you cheat an ATM machine, the ATM machine owner loses money. When you cheat an electronic voting machine, the machine owner may have no stake in the results or may even be benefitted by your action.
When an ATM machine cheats you, you know it, often immediately. When a voting machine cheats you, in a secret ballot system with the simplistic unauditable voting machines we use now, you never find out.
They can't deny that, because over 8 million of the funding (which purchased unspecified SCO "licensing" that they suddenly needed for some reason) is a matter of public record, in their own press releases and in SCO's SEC filings. The only thing the conspiracy theorists are speculating about is whether some of the BayStar or RBC money is laundered Microsoft cash as well.
What's unbelievable is that they might burn the same company twice. I know IBM is a huge company, but don't any of their PowerPC managers ever chat with their ex-OS/2 managers?
Something like "He's got a nano-sized radio transmitter in his brain", "His willpower left a residual image inside the matrix to carry out his desires", or "We're all still inside a meta-matrix, and he's the only one who knows" would qualify as an explanation. "He's powerful enough" doesn't.
Count your blessings. If they'd actually given a scientific explanation, it could have been another "They're using humans as batteries!" sidesplitter.
(That is why, for example, the first movie didn't say humans provided electricity for machines. That was a line used by a character with no supporting evidence given. And the speaker had a huge motivation to lie.)
Ah, I see now: the producers really understand the laws of thermodynamics perfectly, they just decided for some reason that none of Morpheus' crew should understand. Don't feel bad, I'm still in denial about that one too - my trick is to start humming when that part of the monologue starts, and imagine something about human brains being used as coprocessors instead.
If I hacked into Belkin's corporate computers (even if I sold them the computers to begin with) and started redirecting traffic for my financial gain, I'd expect to find myself serving prison time shortly.
So, you are suggesting that the SEC should make an administrative decision while the matter is pending in federal court?
Nope. But after SCO's case is dropped and SCO's remains are divided up between the IBM and Red Hat countersuits, then it might be a good time to take another look at the millions of dollars of SCO stock that it's executives and majority owners have been selling, at prices which have been inflated thousands of percent by their own hype. The SCO/Canopy plan, "Fraudulently squeeze as much money out of investors as possible while destroying the company's long term viability" shouldn't even be legal, much less encouraged financially like it has been so far.
SCO will of course be sued by their stockholders.
Or their major investors, if RBC and Deutsch aren't smart enough to get out before the bubble pops, and if the "they're front men for Microsoft!" conspiracy theories are baseless (which I think they are - Microsoft has already been pumping millions of dollars into SCO publically, so apparantly they don't feel they need to keep such funding a secret).
Everything that SCO has done, they announced to the public months ago.
SCO announces a lot of things to the public. It doesn't make any of them true. Ever heard directly from any of the MIT mathematicians who found all those millions of lines of infringing code?
Have you received your invoice yet, and paid your $699 into the program that SCO said got an "adequate" response?
Do you think any investors are still waiting for SCO to bring up it's copyright claims in court, since it hasn't been able to shut up about them in the media? For some reason SCO has decided to make it's IBM lawsuit entirely about contracts and "methods and ways of doing things" instead, and to claim in it's Red Hat defense that the only controversy between them and Linux will be settled by the IBM suit.
Wouldn't it be nice to take a look at that "copied" code, too, especially if you decided to buy SCO stock based on those NDA'd reports and made your purchase before it turned out they were just hyping up public domain Unix32V and independently cloned BSD code?
There are a lot of things that SCO has said in public that are outright lies, and just because you or I can do enough research to determine that doesn't mean every stockholder should be forced to.
I always recall that old demonstration in my physics class, consisting of a bike wheel mounted on an axle with handles. You spin up the wheel, then try to turn it, and you HAVE TO DO SIGNIFICANT WORK to change the axis of rotation.
You emphasized the wrong words there. I would have said that YOU have to do significant work. The bike wheel, on the other hand, keeps on spinning quite rapidly even with no further work input.
Looking at my post, it's apparant that I've simply responded to Cally's unsubstantiated arrogance by adding my own sarcastic arrogance. That wasn't very helpful of me, and thank you for not continuing the trend.
What I'd like to see instead, is some evidence on the topic. In particular, I've run into the theory that solar variability changes the Earth's temperature, which changes the CO2 solubility in the oceans, which causes the striking correlation we see between prehistoric temperatures and CO2 levels. I like this theory because it gives a possible explanation not only for our recent 1 degree/century warming, but also for the fact that the planet has been, even in geologically recent times, much warmer and much cooler than it is today despite the lack of any anthropogenic causes for that variation.
So is there strong evidence contradicting this theory that I don't know about?
Please, save your fingers and don't bother posting your standard unsupported, pseudo-authoritative guff about climate change being due to solar flares.
Crazy nuts, thinking that a million mile wide ball of quazistable ultrahot plasma might have something to do with temperatures on the Earth. Why, I'm sure you've got solid proof that our current temperature changes are unrelated to solar variability, you just don't want to post it because... um... your fingers cramped?
The last I heard, SuSE wasn't making YaST publically available. I suppose I should have checked their current license before opening my mouth, though - this one isn't technically open source (since it only allows you to redistribute free of charge), but it's pretty close.
It's a shame you can't moderate your own posts down. I still think the other half of my point (that it's hardly an "evil empire" activity for Red Hat to reduce the amount of free support they give to the older versions of free software) stands, at least.
The second cool thing is that all of a sudden there is a viable alternative to the Red Hat evil empire.
Suggested activities for while you wait for the alternative:
1. Go download free Red Hat.ISOs, which include all the software Red Hat develops under an open source license.
2. Go figure out why you can't download free SuSE.ISOs including YaST.
3. Find some more appropriate "evil empire" (I'm afraid the world sucks enough that neither Red Hat nor SuSE should be very high on your list) to redirect your indignation towards.
I'm a smaller shareholder of Redhat stock - owning enough stock that the losses I took (from a purchase at $22/share) could have paid for a lifetime of Redhat commercial licenses (and yes, I've even suggested this - even a free lifetime maintenance subscription as an apology for the loss - not even an email reply from a marketing weasel).
What, Red Hat forced you to buy their stock? Instead of asking for an apology, you should thank them for having the integrity to price their stock IPO at an honest $7 (relative to your purchase after the stock split once) a share during the height of dot-com mania. If you'd waited until after it dipped down to $7 again, and bought it at the price they suggested it was worth, you could have sold it today and doubled your money.
The last time Red Hat offered a stock-related freebie to their supporters (the IPO offer to everyone who'd ever given them so much as a bugzilla report, not to mention code), they took a lot of flak from the confusion of it. Imagine how much fun they'd have sorting out a "everyone who claims to have bought RHAT during the dot com bubble gets a free subscription" policy!
However, I experienced enough frustrations to have doubts as to whether Fedora Core is really as ready as it needs to be to take over from Red Hat 9.
Think of Fedora Core 1 as if it were Red Hat 5.0 or 6.0, which each burned lots of people who installed them right away (rather than after the first few weeks of major updates came out). It's the equivalent of a Red Hat x.0 release, and I don't have any higher expectations.
The question is whether we'll ever see the equivalent of a Red Hat x.1 release, when instead of spending 6 months hunting down every subtle bug they can find in their current software, the distro developers will be upgrading everything to brand new versions and ditching the "ancient" stuff by the time it's 9 months old. Red Hat (again, assuming you waited before installing x.0 versions) always struck me as a happy medium between having the most brand-spanking new software versions for features and having time-tested old software versions for stability. Now I worry that Red Hat users are going to have to choose between an unstable Fedora version and an outdated Enterprise version. I used to feel bad for the Debian users who had to make a similar choice between "Debian unstable" and "Debian stable" versions of that distro; now IIRC Debian users have a more moderate choice available ("Debian testing"), and Red Hat users may be losing ours.
I mean, if all the redhat linux hackers out there switch to a different flavor
I think they're hoping that the flavor switched to will be Fedora; they would then take the best versions of software from Fedora (which will update frequently enough to keep the hackers happy), and stick them into Enterprise (which will update infrequently enough to keep the companies happy). Whether that strategy will work or not, we'll find out.
Some random strangers on Slashdot?;-) I installed Red Hat 4.1 before Mandrake existed (and before I knew that Debian existed), and never found any reason to switch since. Helping out at Linux installfests gave me some incentive not to switch: Mandrake 7.1 surprised us with some serious problems (of course, so did every x.0 version of Red Hat, but at least they were consistent about their numbering so you knew which versions to avoid), and the Debian installer was atrocious.
I may be switching to Debian depending on how Fedora turns out, though. I just got bitten by my second major RPM bug yesterday (you can see people with similar problems here and here), and I'm not happy about it. This time it's a bleeding-edge version of rpm that got me, but the last time it was the stock rpm that was distributed with Red Hat 8! (for which there were a few workable rawhide updates but no official fix) I'm starting to fear that Red Hat 8 (and to some extent 9) were the start of a transition from their prior "get all the bugs worked out in x.0, then release solid updates and a solid x.1" habits to a new "get all the bugs worked out in Fedora, then release a solid Enterprise Linux" policy. If that turns out to be the case, I guess I could keep Fedora on my home computer, but there's no way I'd recommend a bleeding-edge distribution to others. Right now I can recommend Red Hat to friends and family, then run apt-rpm myself to keep a bleeding-edge system that's extremely similar to their stable systems; if Fedora isn't solid enough then the only other pairing I know that would work that way is Debian unstable/testing and Debian stable.
All posts are valid XHTML to the point that I can control...
Isn't that sort of like sterilizing your toilet before you flush? Slashdot's solution to the problem of "valid XHTML" is serving up 403 Forbidden responses to validator.w3.org.
Hmmm... I could have sworn I wrote "the Fox article stands up for itself" there. Instead it sounds like I'm anthropomorphizing (or caninopomorphizing?) the corporation...
Slashdot Mirror
It goes roughly like: "I can't imagine how biological feature X could have evolved; therefore it couldn't have evolved." The only novelty is that it's now being advanced by people who aren't ignorant of biology, so we get examples like flagella where it is harder to find surviving intermediate forms, instead of examples like the eyeball where you can simply look at smaller and simpler creatures to see viable intermediate stages.
In this particular case, apparantly there is a large subset of the flagellum that is homologous to a secretory system in other bacteria. Of course, this isn't a problem for creationists (oops - I mean "Intelligent Design Advocates") who can simply switch their arguments from "The flagellum is irreduceably complex!" to "The flagellum is made of two parts each of which is irreduceably complex!" without batting an eyelash, but hopefully if you're still on the fence you'll be able to see the logical flaws.
AT&T is like Sauron: they created The One Ring (Unix), tried to use it to exert a hold over thousands of licensees, but lost it inadvertently (to the public domain and the valiant Berkeley).
SCO is more like Gollum: they got a hold of the Ring, they're convinced it's "My Preciousss..." and will make their lives wonderful, yet they are essentially unable to do anything powerful with it. They are also schizophrenic, having one happy Caldera personality that wants to be friends with Linux users and one evil The SCO Group personality that wants to kill them all.
The first thing the public saw was their stupid slide show, which included proof that:
SCO doesn't know the difference between what they once called "Ancient Unix" (which the AT&T vs. Berkeley judge said AT&T lost to the public domain) and the System V code they actually own some rights to, despite the fact that they rereleased that code themselves under the old BSD license.
SCO doesn't know the difference between original BSD code (like the packet filter code they claimed as their own) and their System V code, despite the fact that they are legally required to retain the copyright notices on the BSD parts.
SCO can't tell the difference between a legal, original reimplementation of a detailed published standard (like that BPF example, and probably like much of the POSIX, Unix9x, BSD, etc. compatibility in Linux) and an obfuscated copy of the original implementation.
More recently, SCO has "responded" to IBM's interrogatories not with specific claims of wrongdoing, but with the output of "egrep -il (smp|rcu|numa)" and a disclaimer that they're not stating that the output includes some infringement.
If they have an actual case, why are they pubishing these embarrassments instead, still keeping their case secret in court where they might piss off a judge instead of just a bunch of Linux users?
Because Windows contains some of that infringing code?
SCO can't even find any real infringements in code they're allowed to read. How on earth would they have found an infringement in code they aren't allowed to read?
The GPL exists explicitly because some people writing OSS code do care about their existance and relevance. They want to ensure that their name stays on their software, and that nobody tries to use it without giving them credit (for all the world to see).
If that was all they wanted, then the BSD license (which also requires copyright notices be preserved, even with redistributed binaries) would be sufficient. The reasons for choosing GPL over BSD aren't to promote ego; they're usually to promote idealism (e.g. RMS thinks all software should be free, so wants to assist other free software development without assisting proprietary development) or remuneration (e.g. by encouraging free publication of source code modifications, authors get more source code to add to their projects). instead.
When you cheat an ATM machine, the ATM machine owner loses money. When you cheat an electronic voting machine, the machine owner may have no stake in the results or may even be benefitted by your action.
When an ATM machine cheats you, you know it, often immediately. When a voting machine cheats you, in a secret ballot system with the simplistic unauditable voting machines we use now, you never find out.
When the software is open source you cannot enter "crunch mode" and make the scattered developers put in long hours.
It's possible to have paid developers working on open source software, you know.
They can't deny that, because over 8 million of the funding (which purchased unspecified SCO "licensing" that they suddenly needed for some reason) is a matter of public record, in their own press releases and in SCO's SEC filings. The only thing the conspiracy theorists are speculating about is whether some of the BayStar or RBC money is laundered Microsoft cash as well.
Because they decided something else would sell more magazines.
They're going to sell more copies of their March 2, 1998 issue now, you say?
What's unbelievable is that they might burn the same company twice. I know IBM is a huge company, but don't any of their PowerPC managers ever chat with their ex-OS/2 managers?
Something like "He's got a nano-sized radio transmitter in his brain", "His willpower left a residual image inside the matrix to carry out his desires", or "We're all still inside a meta-matrix, and he's the only one who knows" would qualify as an explanation. "He's powerful enough" doesn't.
Count your blessings. If they'd actually given a scientific explanation, it could have been another "They're using humans as batteries!" sidesplitter.
(That is why, for example, the first movie didn't say humans provided electricity for machines. That was a line used by a character with no supporting evidence given. And the speaker had a huge motivation to lie.)
Ah, I see now: the producers really understand the laws of thermodynamics perfectly, they just decided for some reason that none of Morpheus' crew should understand. Don't feel bad, I'm still in denial about that one too - my trick is to start humming when that part of the monologue starts, and imagine something about human brains being used as coprocessors instead.
If I hacked into Belkin's corporate computers (even if I sold them the computers to begin with) and started redirecting traffic for my financial gain, I'd expect to find myself serving prison time shortly.
So, you are suggesting that the SEC should make an administrative decision while the matter is pending in federal court?
Nope. But after SCO's case is dropped and SCO's remains are divided up between the IBM and Red Hat countersuits, then it might be a good time to take another look at the millions of dollars of SCO stock that it's executives and majority owners have been selling, at prices which have been inflated thousands of percent by their own hype. The SCO/Canopy plan, "Fraudulently squeeze as much money out of investors as possible while destroying the company's long term viability" shouldn't even be legal, much less encouraged financially like it has been so far.
SCO will of course be sued by their stockholders.
Or their major investors, if RBC and Deutsch aren't smart enough to get out before the bubble pops, and if the "they're front men for Microsoft!" conspiracy theories are baseless (which I think they are - Microsoft has already been pumping millions of dollars into SCO publically, so apparantly they don't feel they need to keep such funding a secret).
Everything that SCO has done, they announced to the public months ago.
SCO announces a lot of things to the public. It doesn't make any of them true. Ever heard directly from any of the MIT mathematicians who found all those millions of lines of infringing code?
Have you received your invoice yet, and paid your $699 into the program that SCO said got an "adequate" response?
Do you think any investors are still waiting for SCO to bring up it's copyright claims in court, since it hasn't been able to shut up about them in the media? For some reason SCO has decided to make it's IBM lawsuit entirely about contracts and "methods and ways of doing things" instead, and to claim in it's Red Hat defense that the only controversy between them and Linux will be settled by the IBM suit.
Wouldn't it be nice to take a look at that "copied" code, too, especially if you decided to buy SCO stock based on those NDA'd reports and made your purchase before it turned out they were just hyping up public domain Unix32V and independently cloned BSD code?
There are a lot of things that SCO has said in public that are outright lies, and just because you or I can do enough research to determine that doesn't mean every stockholder should be forced to.
I always recall that old demonstration in my physics class, consisting of a bike wheel mounted on an axle with handles. You spin up the wheel, then try to turn it, and you HAVE TO DO SIGNIFICANT WORK to change the axis of rotation.
You emphasized the wrong words there. I would have said that YOU have to do significant work. The bike wheel, on the other hand, keeps on spinning quite rapidly even with no further work input.
Looking at my post, it's apparant that I've simply responded to Cally's unsubstantiated arrogance by adding my own sarcastic arrogance. That wasn't very helpful of me, and thank you for not continuing the trend.
What I'd like to see instead, is some evidence on the topic. In particular, I've run into the theory that solar variability changes the Earth's temperature, which changes the CO2 solubility in the oceans, which causes the striking correlation we see between prehistoric temperatures and CO2 levels. I like this theory because it gives a possible explanation not only for our recent 1 degree/century warming, but also for the fact that the planet has been, even in geologically recent times, much warmer and much cooler than it is today despite the lack of any anthropogenic causes for that variation.
So is there strong evidence contradicting this theory that I don't know about?
Please, save your fingers and don't bother posting your standard unsupported, pseudo-authoritative guff about climate change being due to solar flares.
Crazy nuts, thinking that a million mile wide ball of quazistable ultrahot plasma might have something to do with temperatures on the Earth. Why, I'm sure you've got solid proof that our current temperature changes are unrelated to solar variability, you just don't want to post it because... um... your fingers cramped?
The last I heard, SuSE wasn't making YaST publically available. I suppose I should have checked their current license before opening my mouth, though - this one isn't technically open source (since it only allows you to redistribute free of charge), but it's pretty close.
It's a shame you can't moderate your own posts down. I still think the other half of my point (that it's hardly an "evil empire" activity for Red Hat to reduce the amount of free support they give to the older versions of free software) stands, at least.
The second cool thing is that all of a sudden there is a viable alternative to the Red Hat evil empire.
.ISOs, which include all the software Red Hat develops under an open source license.
.ISOs including YaST.
Suggested activities for while you wait for the alternative:
1. Go download free Red Hat
2. Go figure out why you can't download free SuSE
3. Find some more appropriate "evil empire" (I'm afraid the world sucks enough that neither Red Hat nor SuSE should be very high on your list) to redirect your indignation towards.
I'm a smaller shareholder of Redhat stock - owning enough stock that the losses I took (from a purchase at $22/share) could have paid for a lifetime of Redhat commercial licenses (and yes, I've even suggested this - even a free lifetime maintenance subscription as an apology for the loss - not even an email reply from a marketing weasel).
What, Red Hat forced you to buy their stock? Instead of asking for an apology, you should thank them for having the integrity to price their stock IPO at an honest $7 (relative to your purchase after the stock split once) a share during the height of dot-com mania. If you'd waited until after it dipped down to $7 again, and bought it at the price they suggested it was worth, you could have sold it today and doubled your money.
The last time Red Hat offered a stock-related freebie to their supporters (the IPO offer to everyone who'd ever given them so much as a bugzilla report, not to mention code), they took a lot of flak from the confusion of it. Imagine how much fun they'd have sorting out a "everyone who claims to have bought RHAT during the dot com bubble gets a free subscription" policy!
However, I experienced enough frustrations to have doubts as to whether Fedora Core is really as ready as it needs to be to take over from Red Hat 9.
Think of Fedora Core 1 as if it were Red Hat 5.0 or 6.0, which each burned lots of people who installed them right away (rather than after the first few weeks of major updates came out). It's the equivalent of a Red Hat x.0 release, and I don't have any higher expectations.
The question is whether we'll ever see the equivalent of a Red Hat x.1 release, when instead of spending 6 months hunting down every subtle bug they can find in their current software, the distro developers will be upgrading everything to brand new versions and ditching the "ancient" stuff by the time it's 9 months old. Red Hat (again, assuming you waited before installing x.0 versions) always struck me as a happy medium between having the most brand-spanking new software versions for features and having time-tested old software versions for stability. Now I worry that Red Hat users are going to have to choose between an unstable Fedora version and an outdated Enterprise version. I used to feel bad for the Debian users who had to make a similar choice between "Debian unstable" and "Debian stable" versions of that distro; now IIRC Debian users have a more moderate choice available ("Debian testing"), and Red Hat users may be losing ours.
I mean, if all the redhat linux hackers out there switch to a different flavor
I think they're hoping that the flavor switched to will be Fedora; they would then take the best versions of software from Fedora (which will update frequently enough to keep the hackers happy), and stick them into Enterprise (which will update infrequently enough to keep the companies happy). Whether that strategy will work or not, we'll find out.
Who do I know that uses Redhat?
;-) I installed Red Hat 4.1 before Mandrake existed (and before I knew that Debian existed), and never found any reason to switch since. Helping out at Linux installfests gave me some incentive not to switch: Mandrake 7.1 surprised us with some serious problems (of course, so did every x.0 version of Red Hat, but at least they were consistent about their numbering so you knew which versions to avoid), and the Debian installer was atrocious.
Some random strangers on Slashdot?
I may be switching to Debian depending on how Fedora turns out, though. I just got bitten by my second major RPM bug yesterday (you can see people with similar problems here and here), and I'm not happy about it. This time it's a bleeding-edge version of rpm that got me, but the last time it was the stock rpm that was distributed with Red Hat 8! (for which there were a few workable rawhide updates but no official fix) I'm starting to fear that Red Hat 8 (and to some extent 9) were the start of a transition from their prior "get all the bugs worked out in x.0, then release solid updates and a solid x.1" habits to a new "get all the bugs worked out in Fedora, then release a solid Enterprise Linux" policy. If that turns out to be the case, I guess I could keep Fedora on my home computer, but there's no way I'd recommend a bleeding-edge distribution to others. Right now I can recommend Red Hat to friends and family, then run apt-rpm myself to keep a bleeding-edge system that's extremely similar to their stable systems; if Fedora isn't solid enough then the only other pairing I know that would work that way is Debian unstable/testing and Debian stable.
All posts are valid XHTML to the point that I can control...
Isn't that sort of like sterilizing your toilet before you flush? Slashdot's solution to the problem of "valid XHTML" is serving up 403 Forbidden responses to validator.w3.org.
The Fox stands up for itself pretty well
Hmmm... I could have sworn I wrote "the Fox article stands up for itself" there. Instead it sounds like I'm anthropomorphizing (or caninopomorphizing?) the corporation...