Add this to the fact that a lot of people still don't think of Novell as an open source company, but rather a company that has some open source products.
Ironically, from a business perspective, that's a selling point! Most businesses don't want to be in the zealot cross fire. So finding a low cost solution from a credible company which just received a major cash infusion from a well known company, which is not just some open source company, is nothing but goodness. A lot of people still remember the.com crash and still don't want their infrastructure investiment to follow.
From your perspective that may sound like a reason to open the cannon ports but for most businesses, this is at least a supporting reason to open their wallets.
The problem is that I believe that this perception hurts them a lot more in the open source community then it helps them in the business community.
I had pretty much decided that SUSE would be the distribution we would base all our new web/db/mail servers on owing to its combination of corporate support and ease of use.....
Now I'm back on the fence considering Red Hat or another distro.
So how did the corporate support and ease of use change? If you don't feel any FUD, then SUSE should be just as viable as before. Or is this just FUD of a different color?
Actually I don't believe him turning away from SUSE would be FUD. Even if you ignore the fact that the current form of this deal means Novell won't be able to use GPLv3 when it comes out (this fact alone could mean the end of SUSE), Novell has alienated a LOT of the Linux community. Even more important much of the strongest critisism has come from the leaders of the community such as RMS and in this case Groklaw. Add this to the fact that a lot of people still don't think of Novell as an open source company, but rather a company that has some open source products. This deal only adds to the perception that Novell just doesn't get it.
Novell's reputation with the community has taken a huge hit with this deal, and an open source companies biggest asset isn't their customers, it's their community. And the fact that a lot of Linux distros are pretty generic from an average users point of view means the reputation is critical to building a community. This will show up immediatly with a few people switching to other distros (probably not many). But I think the real impact will become felt a couple years down the road. The number of new Linux users choosing SUSE will be significantly smaller, and the number of experience Linux/*nix users (an extremely valuable part of the community) switching to SUSE will be a small fraction of what it is now.
As to the corporate support and ease of use? With a weaker community there is less testing, fewer fixes from the community, less support from projects (both open source and proprietary). I'm not saying that this deal will be a death blow to SUSE but it will have serious repercussions to the community. Even if Novell does find a way to back out of the deal there is going to be a lot of mistrust until Novell does some serious PR and finds a way to convince the community that they understand and are willing to fight for open source.
I'm not surprised that a test such as this would have resulted in a shift towards the extremes. Major politics parties are the result of a concensus of a large subsection of society, as a result they must be fairly moderate since extreme views would alienate large portions of their base who do not share those views.
But individual people, who don't have to appease a lot of people or make well thought out defences of their views, will have a set of views that would be considered quite outside the mainstream. Normally they still vote for a mainstream moderate party due to advertising and popular support, but when something like this test actually confronts them with the fact that a party does exist that holds close to their views then they're more likely to shift support.
Also note that the test didn't cover things such as experience or credibility.
Overall I think tests like this will be a good thing for politics, it exposes the fact that most people are extremists/outside the mainstream and it forces society to confront these ideas. Some will turn out to be good, others will be exposed to be poorly thought out and lose credibility.
What's up with all the sheeple standing around watching? It's shameful that such a large crowd was too timid to stop the police from doing something so obviously wrong. What exactly would it take to get the crowd to intervene?
I see your motivation and I had the same thoughts watching the video but that's not how civilized society operates.
Ordinary North Americans are very respectful of authority, particularly authorities such as police. But because we give them so much power we hold them to a high standard to use that power responsibly. When they violate this social contract you see what happened here, we still obey their instructions but we express our dissaproval that they are violating that contract, if the violations continue we don't seek immediate action we continue to express our disapproval and once the incident is concluded we leave it to society to resolve the situation.
Now not taking action until afterwards may seem like we're cowardly sheep but such actions are integral to the proper functioning of society. We trust the stability of our society so much that we're willing to endure a temorary injustice in the belief that corrective actions will be taken afterwards, and that the benefits of any direct action against the police will be offset by the destabalizing effect on society.
What should they do? Push the police away, perhaps merely stand between the police and the victim. Even an action as passive as standing between the police and the victim is signaling that your resistance to their actions now has a physical component to it. If others join in, say the whole crowd passivly puts themselves between the victim and the police, you've now sent the message that if police are doing something wrong the citizen has a right to make an immediate intervention.
This may not seem like a problem, is may even seem like a good idea, but society has given the police the responsibility to maintain order and it's up to society to control them. By overriding the police during a situation such as this you've just moved the responsibility to maintain order from society and given it to individuals who have not been granted that authority by society as a whole. It is in effect a step towards anarchy, not a large one but it is a definitive transfer of authority from society to individuals.
On a side note dealing with crowds I think it's also worthwhile to mention the bystander effect.
Next time try reading the ENTIRE story. You'll find out why he was shocked repeatedly. If he hadn't been such a jackass in the first place the cops would have never even been involved. You idiots seem to think that cops go around randomly tazoring foreign-looking people.
Maybe he was in the wrong. Maybe he was looking for an excuse to feel persecuted. Maybe he was looking for a fight. But the last thing the police should be looking to do is to give him that fight.
The job of police is to maintain order and diffuse tense situations, force is something that should be used as a last resort and not something to be applied at the earliest opportunity.
p.s. The reaction of the crowd told me that not only did none of them consider him a threat but that the police actions were only serving to increase the risk of violence by driving the crowd of students to physically intervene to stop the police.
Which would be a decent point if I was making a hydro to coal comparison. But I was making a hydro to nuclear comparison.
Sorry, my mistake
And while your point about hydro being neutral CO2 is valid, forests do sequester carbon (slowly) over many years. Plants and animals die, some of them rot (carbon release), some of them get sequestered into sediment layers/peat bogs/etc (carbon removal). And what about the other environmental impacts of hydro schemes? What about the fact that most good sites in the West are already in use?
There is some carbon trapped but I don't know what proportion (I'm guessing it's not much). Either way I believe nuclear is probably the best overall for the environment.
Some people think that hydro power winds up dumping almost as much greenhouse gas into the air (mainly methane) as a coal plant does. Why? Decaying vegetation in the reservoirs.
The big difference is that those greenhouse gases are already in circulation while burning fossil fuels takes carbon that has been locked up for millions of years and adds it back into the carbon cycle.
Decaying vegitation, burning trees, growing trees, none of these things actually change the amount of carbon in the environment, they just move around the carbon that's already there.
The summary is poorly worded, when I first read it I thought there was some bizarre bug that meant the reason his vote wasn't counted was that he voted for himself. As it turns out the significance of him voting for himself is that he became aware of the problem because the knew there should be at least one vote for him, the one he cast himself.
About the article itself, it's comforting that there are paper ballots to check the record but I'm curious about the description: " "It's our understanding from talking with the secretary of state's office that a court order would have to be obtained in order to open the machine and check the totals," Payne said. "The votes were cast on an electronic voting machine, but paper ballots were available." " I assume these paper ballots were easily viewable by the voters, otherwise they're next to useless.
The samba team is talking about moral rights, not legal rights. Legally they MIGHT be in the clear depending on whether a judge considers this "covenant not to sue" to be the patent license that is it. Ethically they're on ground shakier than the deck of the Titanic.
None of those patents have to do with.NET (and hence Mono, which is the main focus of the patent issue here). Microsoft still owns lots of.NET patents. The OIN patent pool is useless in this case.
The patents don't need to have anything to do with.NET, and it wouldn't make any difference if they did, they need to have something to do with Microsoft, which they do.
Microsoft uses XML, which means they are in violation of OIN's patents, if they sue someone over Mono than OIN sues them over XML.
Maybe we need to start training our boys as diplomats instead of as just gun wielding meat heads.
On behalf of soldiers, sailors, and veterans everywhere: go fuck yourself. I did a much more technical job with cooler toys and better results than anything you've probably seen in your cushy civilian job, then came out and breezed through college. For every 1 stereotypical jackass I knew in the military, there were at least 5 experts in difficult tech fields.
Screw you and your misperceptions. The military hasn't been the way you described it in decades.
He stated it poorly but I don't believe he was talking about intellect or technical ability but rather interactions with civilians.
One interesting thing I heard in the early goings of the war was that British troop found that they were more likely to be shot at if an American patrol had been through the area perviously (as opposed to British). Now some of this could just be anti-american sentiment but I also believe the US army at the end of the day is a machine designed to kill enemy soldiers, when you try to use that machine to create peace in an unstable country than it's not going to work nearly as well as a machine that was designed with peace in mind.
Unfortunately what they told the US they wanted and what they would do to establish democracy hasn't happened, that has been totally unexpected.
I'm sorry, but I believe anyone who did their homework on Iraq before the war and thought that democracy would just fall into place was seriously decieving themselves.
I've heard it said that you can't impose democracy on a people, I used to think that was just some kind of principle thing (since they should choose democracy on their own accord), now I believe it's more of a practical rule. Democracy is HARD. You need a populace who not only understands the system but is strongly committed to it's practice. Even in the US where democracy has been in practice for hundreds of years you still get people attempting to subvert the system with disenfranchisement and voter suppression tactics. The only places where it does seem practical to impose democracy are countries such as post-WWII Japan with a strong national identity (Afghanistan might also fit the bill though their implementation of Islam might be problematic). How practical is it that you go into a country like Iraq, with a history of sectarian violence and no experience with democracy, and they'll suddenly just get along under a democractic framework?
Of course that doesn't mean the Iraq war shouldn't of gone a lot better than it has. One of my biggest irritations with the Bush administration has been the neverending stream of mistakes wrt Iraq. Destabalizing the government by removing every member of the Baath party, firing the army. Not to mention the Abu Ghraib* scandal. These are all major mistakes by the Rumsfeld and the Bush administration that have made the situation much worse, if nothing else I hope that the next person will simply stop making stupid errors.
* When you have the president publically giving tactic approval to some level of torture it's common sense that those on the ground will take it a few steps further.
It turns out that the crown jewels of OIN's collection, the Commerce One patents (covering a bunch of XML stuff), were contributed by Novell.
Again, I don't think that Novell can withdraw those patents or that the patents would be covered by Novell's agreement with MS but it is still an interesting twist.
Novell is a member of the Open Invention Network. A patent collective that is used to defend certain open source projects (if you sue project X or used of project X for patent infringement than they sue you). Afiak OIN is the reason that mono was included in fedora, because they were able to use it to defend against Microsoft patents.
Thus if Microsoft sues someone for using one of those protected open source projects than OIN sues back.
This brings up two interesting questions. First, since Novell is a member of OIN would they be considered partial owners of these patents and thus in violation of this agreement if OIN sues MS? (I suspect not).
Second. What are the state of OIN's current patents? From the site it looks like OIN itself owns the patents (so they shouldn't lose any defensive power) but my strong suspicion is that Novell wouldn't be allowed to transfer any new patents to OIN since they could be potentially be used to sue MS (and thus in violation of this agreement).
Does anyone know more about these issues and how this agreement might affect OIN?
I know that the sea ice at the poles changes pretty drastically with the seasons.
So you're saying glaciers don't do the same?
Icebergs have a basically unlimited supply of water to make ice during the winter and during the summer water causes a lot more heat transfer than just air and thus wears them down a lot faster. I should note being an Albertan I don't have a lot of experience with icebergs:)
On land I can't see differences that dramatic occuring seasonally if for no other reason than there wouldn't be nearly enough precipitation over the winter to replenish the ice lost over the summer if the changes in the two pictures were merely seasonal differences.
Having never been to Alaska, I'll take your word for it.
Alberta, I'm Canadian and not quite that far north:) That being said I probably haven't seen many more glaciers than you but I know how long it takes snow and ice to form/melt between seasons.
I'll grant the writer this much, I'm more doubtful of these specific studies than I would have been if I had heard of them before, but that's all. This article is aimed specifically at us, scientific thinkers who haven't studied global warming (and for the most part aren't researchers). The hope is that we'll read this article, see what looks like an effort to exaggerate the underlying science, and then start telling other people (who perhaps rely on us to interpret all the science related stuff in the news) that global warming is overhyped since we now have these nice little debunking arguments.
But lets look at what this article actually does. It attempts to debunk some specific studies and aproaches about global warming and shows that some of those may have been deliberatly exaggerated. Granted, those studies are UN studies but are they the only UN studies? Are they the major studies that are used to support the global warming argument? Are these critical parts of these UN reports? What kind of rebuttles do the report authors have to these alleged flaws?
This article very well may be accurate in its characterization of the science around global warming but at least for the time being I'm going to trust the majority of scientists when it comes to the critiquing of scientific studies.
3) You know Al Gore's movie, where they show the glacier photos, before and after? Are the before and after both from the same season? Because the glaciers change size seasonally. Did Al Gore show winter 1980 vs. summer 2005?
Ok, I don't find Images of a specific glacier to be convincing from a scientific perspective but I take issue with your point.
Do you have any idea how much ice is in a glacier and how long it would take to melt???
I live in Northern Alberta and we spend at least half of the year well above 0 (in the summer 20-30 C). The massive piles of snow that the city ploughs from the street can survive through the summer, in fact I've even seen snow drifts survive into the early summer by being under a pile of grass in the shade. The changes shown in the movie COULD NOT occur over the course of a season. It takes years for that much snow and ice to accumulate and well over a year for it to melt.
The man has already been stripped of his wealth and power, and imprisoned. Will killing him bring back the 148 dead Shiites?
I oppose the death penalty though in this case I think it might be a valid tool.
Not for any reasons of whether or not Saddam deserves it, as far as I'm concerned in the grander sceme I'd be just as happy if he were executed as if allowed to live out his days on a beach in Tahiti. What's important is what will be the result of a death sentance on the violence in Iraq, the correct verdict could easily save in excess thousands of lives. If that verdict is death than just like any soldier that was a risk that Saddam knowingly took when he assumed power.
Of course, this depends on the death sentance being the right one when just about every other decision the Bush administration had made has turned out to be the wrong one.
While he makes a valid point about how we remember the deliberate attacks more vivedly I'm not sure it's a fair example considering that in this case the name of the event IS the date:)
"Between last week and this one, it is clear that the two largest software vendors in the world perceive Linux to be at least on the same plane as them. They have got to respect what we have done."
So Linux is good, and it's *all* thanks to RedHat? No one else deserves credit.
I think I parse that answer differently than you do, here's my interpretation " Has Linux won?
Mark Webbink: Between last week and this one, it is clear that the two largest software vendors in the world perceive Linux to be at least on the same plane as them. They have got to respect what we [the Linux community] have done.
Having said that, does Red Hat think either of them has taken the right approach, now that Microsoft and Novell have made 'Microvell'? They've gone off the road a bit, we [Red Hat] think, but we [Red Hat] are feeling good about the attention that has been brought to Linux. "
"We still believe that we will be the dominant player in the Linux market, because by that time there won't be any other Linux players."
Do they have to take it to the point of saying 'there can be only one'? I mean that is the whole problem with MSOFT, a homogeneous market. If he stopped before the because, that would have been sufficient and appropriate, but that last bit fuels the flames of those who proclaim RH wants to be the MS of Linux. Whether or not they can is another matter, but it sounds like for this person, this is a confirmed desired path for RH's future.
I agree that his quote there seems a bit off though it might be somewhat accurate. I take "players" to mean major players in the enterprize which is the only thing Red Hat is really concerned about. Currently those players consist of Red Hat and Novell, Oracle claims they want in but that's still vaporware and Canonical (guys behind Ubuntu) seems to be looking for a way in but afaik they haven't really made any headway there.
All that quote really says is that in a year Novell will be gone from the market or completely insignificant, if Oracle has something it will still be too new to get any real following, and Canonical still won't have made much progress.
That being said while his quote does sound pretty aggressive I don't think he wants Red Hat to be the MS of Linux if for no other reason than he realizes it's impossible and all they could accomplish by trying to monopolize the Linux market is antagonizing the community and allowing a new player to challenge them in the enterprize. I consider that one of the advantages with Open Source based businesses, they have a very strong motivation not to abuse their users since they don't have real lock-in. Of course he probably wouldn't mind if the other players just went away:)
The thing about AllOfMP3 that the recording industry hates is that it shows the what cost of distributing digital music is. Even if they don't pay anything to the artist, they do cover their own costs. I would happily pay 2-3 times the AllOfMP3 cost for DRM-free music, and now (because of AllOfMP3) I know that if the music industry wanted to they could do so and still make a profit.
P2p already shows the cost of distributing digital music can be essentially free when you exclude the costs of creating the media. The only thing AllOfMP3 adds is the information people are willing to pay a small amount for DRM-free music which is pretty obvious since people are already paying a much larger amount for DRMed music with iTunes.
As for being a viable business model for the music industry as a whole I'd say not paying for any part of the creation of the music is a pretty damn big hole in your business model.
I stopped downloading music via P2P when I found AllofMP3, and I now pay for it happily. Save me the bullshit about it still being "theft" ad nasuem. The fact is, I am willing to pay for music at a reasonable price in a format I want. I am not willing to pay for music any other way. As such, if I am not able to pay for my music in the format I want, I won't buy it. There is absolutely NO loss of sale either way. I won't buy it if I can't get it the way I want it, period. End of story. This is not a negotiable point. The sooner the RIAA and the rest of the music industry gets this through their heads, the sooner they'll be raking in cash again as people flock to "legitimate" quality online music distribution.
Sorry, I don't have a problem with people getting music via p2p, it's clearly non-commercial and there is a strong ethical argument that permits filesharing, but AllofMP3 is creating nothing original, there are merely profiting off of these works and giving no compensation to the authors (at least those in the west). As far as I'm concerned AllofMP3 deserves everything is has comming to it.
If you really want to buy DRM free music and support our culture via the creative commons than there are options http://magnatune.com/.
Slashdot Mirror
But even so when I read your post I got a sudden mental image of a gecko hopping around with its tounge stuck to its foot
The problem is that I believe that this perception hurts them a lot more in the open source community then it helps them in the business community.
Actually I don't believe him turning away from SUSE would be FUD. Even if you ignore the fact that the current form of this deal means Novell won't be able to use GPLv3 when it comes out (this fact alone could mean the end of SUSE), Novell has alienated a LOT of the Linux community. Even more important much of the strongest critisism has come from the leaders of the community such as RMS and in this case Groklaw. Add this to the fact that a lot of people still don't think of Novell as an open source company, but rather a company that has some open source products. This deal only adds to the perception that Novell just doesn't get it.
Novell's reputation with the community has taken a huge hit with this deal, and an open source companies biggest asset isn't their customers, it's their community. And the fact that a lot of Linux distros are pretty generic from an average users point of view means the reputation is critical to building a community. This will show up immediatly with a few people switching to other distros (probably not many). But I think the real impact will become felt a couple years down the road. The number of new Linux users choosing SUSE will be significantly smaller, and the number of experience Linux/*nix users (an extremely valuable part of the community) switching to SUSE will be a small fraction of what it is now.
As to the corporate support and ease of use? With a weaker community there is less testing, fewer fixes from the community, less support from projects (both open source and proprietary). I'm not saying that this deal will be a death blow to SUSE but it will have serious repercussions to the community. Even if Novell does find a way to back out of the deal there is going to be a lot of mistrust until Novell does some serious PR and finds a way to convince the community that they understand and are willing to fight for open source.
I'm not surprised that a test such as this would have resulted in a shift towards the extremes. Major politics parties are the result of a concensus of a large subsection of society, as a result they must be fairly moderate since extreme views would alienate large portions of their base who do not share those views.
But individual people, who don't have to appease a lot of people or make well thought out defences of their views, will have a set of views that would be considered quite outside the mainstream. Normally they still vote for a mainstream moderate party due to advertising and popular support, but when something like this test actually confronts them with the fact that a party does exist that holds close to their views then they're more likely to shift support.
Also note that the test didn't cover things such as experience or credibility.
Overall I think tests like this will be a good thing for politics, it exposes the fact that most people are extremists/outside the mainstream and it forces society to confront these ideas. Some will turn out to be good, others will be exposed to be poorly thought out and lose credibility.
I'm running 1.5 and the exploit worked for me.
What's up with all the sheeple standing around watching? It's shameful that such a large crowd was too timid to stop the police from doing something so obviously wrong. What exactly would it take to get the crowd to intervene?
I see your motivation and I had the same thoughts watching the video but that's not how civilized society operates.
Ordinary North Americans are very respectful of authority, particularly authorities such as police. But because we give them so much power we hold them to a high standard to use that power responsibly. When they violate this social contract you see what happened here, we still obey their instructions but we express our dissaproval that they are violating that contract, if the violations continue we don't seek immediate action we continue to express our disapproval and once the incident is concluded we leave it to society to resolve the situation.
Now not taking action until afterwards may seem like we're cowardly sheep but such actions are integral to the proper functioning of society. We trust the stability of our society so much that we're willing to endure a temorary injustice in the belief that corrective actions will be taken afterwards, and that the benefits of any direct action against the police will be offset by the destabalizing effect on society.
What should they do? Push the police away, perhaps merely stand between the police and the victim. Even an action as passive as standing between the police and the victim is signaling that your resistance to their actions now has a physical component to it. If others join in, say the whole crowd passivly puts themselves between the victim and the police, you've now sent the message that if police are doing something wrong the citizen has a right to make an immediate intervention.
This may not seem like a problem, is may even seem like a good idea, but society has given the police the responsibility to maintain order and it's up to society to control them. By overriding the police during a situation such as this you've just moved the responsibility to maintain order from society and given it to individuals who have not been granted that authority by society as a whole. It is in effect a step towards anarchy, not a large one but it is a definitive transfer of authority from society to individuals.
On a side note dealing with crowds I think it's also worthwhile to mention the bystander effect.
Next time try reading the ENTIRE story. You'll find out why he was shocked repeatedly. If he hadn't been such a jackass in the first place the cops would have never even been involved. You idiots seem to think that cops go around randomly tazoring foreign-looking people.
Maybe he was in the wrong. Maybe he was looking for an excuse to feel persecuted. Maybe he was looking for a fight. But the last thing the police should be looking to do is to give him that fight.
The job of police is to maintain order and diffuse tense situations, force is something that should be used as a last resort and not something to be applied at the earliest opportunity.
p.s. The reaction of the crowd told me that not only did none of them consider him a threat but that the police actions were only serving to increase the risk of violence by driving the crowd of students to physically intervene to stop the police.
Sorry, my mistake
There is some carbon trapped but I don't know what proportion (I'm guessing it's not much). Either way I believe nuclear is probably the best overall for the environment.
The big difference is that those greenhouse gases are already in circulation while burning fossil fuels takes carbon that has been locked up for millions of years and adds it back into the carbon cycle.
Decaying vegitation, burning trees, growing trees, none of these things actually change the amount of carbon in the environment, they just move around the carbon that's already there.
Vive le Java libre!
The summary is poorly worded, when I first read it I thought there was some bizarre bug that meant the reason his vote wasn't counted was that he voted for himself. As it turns out the significance of him voting for himself is that he became aware of the problem because the knew there should be at least one vote for him, the one he cast himself.
About the article itself, it's comforting that there are paper ballots to check the record but I'm curious about the description:
"
"It's our understanding from talking with the secretary of state's office that a court order would have to be obtained in order to open the machine and check the totals," Payne said. "The votes were cast on an electronic voting machine, but paper ballots were available."
"
I assume these paper ballots were easily viewable by the voters, otherwise they're next to useless.
The samba team is talking about moral rights, not legal rights. Legally they MIGHT be in the clear depending on whether a judge considers this "covenant not to sue" to be the patent license that is it. Ethically they're on ground shakier than the deck of the Titanic.
The patents don't need to have anything to do with
Microsoft uses XML, which means they are in violation of OIN's patents, if they sue someone over Mono than OIN sues them over XML.
He stated it poorly but I don't believe he was talking about intellect or technical ability but rather interactions with civilians.
One interesting thing I heard in the early goings of the war was that British troop found that they were more likely to be shot at if an American patrol had been through the area perviously (as opposed to British). Now some of this could just be anti-american sentiment but I also believe the US army at the end of the day is a machine designed to kill enemy soldiers, when you try to use that machine to create peace in an unstable country than it's not going to work nearly as well as a machine that was designed with peace in mind.
Unfortunately what they told the US they wanted and what they would do to establish democracy hasn't happened, that has been totally unexpected.
I'm sorry, but I believe anyone who did their homework on Iraq before the war and thought that democracy would just fall into place was seriously decieving themselves.
I've heard it said that you can't impose democracy on a people, I used to think that was just some kind of principle thing (since they should choose democracy on their own accord), now I believe it's more of a practical rule. Democracy is HARD. You need a populace who not only understands the system but is strongly committed to it's practice. Even in the US where democracy has been in practice for hundreds of years you still get people attempting to subvert the system with disenfranchisement and voter suppression tactics. The only places where it does seem practical to impose democracy are countries such as post-WWII Japan with a strong national identity (Afghanistan might also fit the bill though their implementation of Islam might be problematic). How practical is it that you go into a country like Iraq, with a history of sectarian violence and no experience with democracy, and they'll suddenly just get along under a democractic framework?
Of course that doesn't mean the Iraq war shouldn't of gone a lot better than it has. One of my biggest irritations with the Bush administration has been the neverending stream of mistakes wrt Iraq. Destabalizing the government by removing every member of the Baath party, firing the army. Not to mention the Abu Ghraib* scandal. These are all major mistakes by the Rumsfeld and the Bush administration that have made the situation much worse, if nothing else I hope that the next person will simply stop making stupid errors.
* When you have the president publically giving tactic approval to some level of torture it's common sense that those on the ground will take it a few steps further.
It turns out that the crown jewels of OIN's collection, the Commerce One patents (covering a bunch of XML stuff), were contributed by Novell.
Again, I don't think that Novell can withdraw those patents or that the patents would be covered by Novell's agreement with MS but it is still an interesting twist.
Novell is a member of the Open Invention Network. A patent collective that is used to defend certain open source projects (if you sue project X or used of project X for patent infringement than they sue you). Afiak OIN is the reason that mono was included in fedora, because they were able to use it to defend against Microsoft patents.
Thus if Microsoft sues someone for using one of those protected open source projects than OIN sues back.
This brings up two interesting questions. First, since Novell is a member of OIN would they be considered partial owners of these patents and thus in violation of this agreement if OIN sues MS? (I suspect not).
Second. What are the state of OIN's current patents? From the site it looks like OIN itself owns the patents (so they shouldn't lose any defensive power) but my strong suspicion is that Novell wouldn't be allowed to transfer any new patents to OIN since they could be potentially be used to sue MS (and thus in violation of this agreement).
Does anyone know more about these issues and how this agreement might affect OIN?
I know that the sea ice at the poles changes pretty drastically with the seasons.
:)
:)
So you're saying glaciers don't do the same?
Icebergs have a basically unlimited supply of water to make ice during the winter and during the summer water causes a lot more heat transfer than just air and thus wears them down a lot faster. I should note being an Albertan I don't have a lot of experience with icebergs
On land I can't see differences that dramatic occuring seasonally if for no other reason than there wouldn't be nearly enough precipitation over the winter to replenish the ice lost over the summer if the changes in the two pictures were merely seasonal differences.
Having never been to Alaska, I'll take your word for it.
Alberta, I'm Canadian and not quite that far north
That being said I probably haven't seen many more glaciers than you but I know how long it takes snow and ice to form/melt between seasons.
I'll grant the writer this much, I'm more doubtful of these specific studies than I would have been if I had heard of them before, but that's all. This article is aimed specifically at us, scientific thinkers who haven't studied global warming (and for the most part aren't researchers). The hope is that we'll read this article, see what looks like an effort to exaggerate the underlying science, and then start telling other people (who perhaps rely on us to interpret all the science related stuff in the news) that global warming is overhyped since we now have these nice little debunking arguments.
But lets look at what this article actually does. It attempts to debunk some specific studies and aproaches about global warming and shows that some of those may have been deliberatly exaggerated. Granted, those studies are UN studies but are they the only UN studies? Are they the major studies that are used to support the global warming argument? Are these critical parts of these UN reports? What kind of rebuttles do the report authors have to these alleged flaws?
This article very well may be accurate in its characterization of the science around global warming but at least for the time being I'm going to trust the majority of scientists when it comes to the critiquing of scientific studies.
3) You know Al Gore's movie, where they show the glacier photos, before and after?
Are the before and after both from the same season?
Because the glaciers change size seasonally.
Did Al Gore show winter 1980 vs. summer 2005?
Ok, I don't find Images of a specific glacier to be convincing from a scientific perspective but I take issue with your point.
Do you have any idea how much ice is in a glacier and how long it would take to melt???
I live in Northern Alberta and we spend at least half of the year well above 0 (in the summer 20-30 C). The massive piles of snow that the city ploughs from the street can survive through the summer, in fact I've even seen snow drifts survive into the early summer by being under a pile of grass in the shade. The changes shown in the movie COULD NOT occur over the course of a season. It takes years for that much snow and ice to accumulate and well over a year for it to melt.
The man has already been stripped of his wealth and power, and imprisoned. Will killing him bring back the 148 dead Shiites?
I oppose the death penalty though in this case I think it might be a valid tool.
Not for any reasons of whether or not Saddam deserves it, as far as I'm concerned in the grander sceme I'd be just as happy if he were executed as if allowed to live out his days on a beach in Tahiti. What's important is what will be the result of a death sentance on the violence in Iraq, the correct verdict could easily save in excess thousands of lives. If that verdict is death than just like any soldier that was a risk that Saddam knowingly took when he assumed power.
Of course, this depends on the death sentance being the right one when just about every other decision the Bush administration had made has turned out to be the wrong one.
While he makes a valid point about how we remember the deliberate attacks more vivedly I'm not sure it's a fair example considering that in this case the name of the event IS the date :)
"Between last week and this one, it is clear that the two largest software vendors in the world perceive Linux to be at least on the same plane as them. They have got to respect what we have done."
:)
So Linux is good, and it's *all* thanks to RedHat? No one else deserves credit.
I think I parse that answer differently than you do, here's my interpretation
"
Has Linux won?
Mark Webbink: Between last week and this one, it is clear that the two largest software vendors in the world perceive Linux to be at least on the same plane as them. They have got to respect what we [the Linux community] have done.
Having said that, does Red Hat think either of them has taken the right approach, now that Microsoft and Novell have made 'Microvell'? They've gone off the road a bit, we [Red Hat] think, but we [Red Hat] are feeling good about the attention that has been brought to Linux.
"
"We still believe that we will be the dominant player in the Linux market, because by that time there won't be any other Linux players."
Do they have to take it to the point of saying 'there can be only one'? I mean that is the whole problem with MSOFT, a homogeneous market. If he stopped before the because, that would have been sufficient and appropriate, but that last bit fuels the flames of those who proclaim RH wants to be the MS of Linux. Whether or not they can is another matter, but it sounds like for this person, this is a confirmed desired path for RH's future.
I agree that his quote there seems a bit off though it might be somewhat accurate. I take "players" to mean major players in the enterprize which is the only thing Red Hat is really concerned about. Currently those players consist of Red Hat and Novell, Oracle claims they want in but that's still vaporware and Canonical (guys behind Ubuntu) seems to be looking for a way in but afaik they haven't really made any headway there.
All that quote really says is that in a year Novell will be gone from the market or completely insignificant, if Oracle has something it will still be too new to get any real following, and Canonical still won't have made much progress.
That being said while his quote does sound pretty aggressive I don't think he wants Red Hat to be the MS of Linux if for no other reason than he realizes it's impossible and all they could accomplish by trying to monopolize the Linux market is antagonizing the community and allowing a new player to challenge them in the enterprize. I consider that one of the advantages with Open Source based businesses, they have a very strong motivation not to abuse their users since they don't have real lock-in. Of course he probably wouldn't mind if the other players just went away
The thing about AllOfMP3 that the recording industry hates is that it shows the what cost of distributing digital music is. Even if they don't pay anything to the artist, they do cover their own costs. I would happily pay 2-3 times the AllOfMP3 cost for DRM-free music, and now (because of AllOfMP3) I know that if the music industry wanted to they could do so and still make a profit.
P2p already shows the cost of distributing digital music can be essentially free when you exclude the costs of creating the media. The only thing AllOfMP3 adds is the information people are willing to pay a small amount for DRM-free music which is pretty obvious since people are already paying a much larger amount for DRMed music with iTunes.
As for being a viable business model for the music industry as a whole I'd say not paying for any part of the creation of the music is a pretty damn big hole in your business model.
I stopped downloading music via P2P when I found AllofMP3, and I now pay for it happily. Save me the bullshit about it still being "theft" ad nasuem. The fact is, I am willing to pay for music at a reasonable price in a format I want. I am not willing to pay for music any other way. As such, if I am not able to pay for my music in the format I want, I won't buy it. There is absolutely NO loss of sale either way. I won't buy it if I can't get it the way I want it, period. End of story. This is not a negotiable point. The sooner the RIAA and the rest of the music industry gets this through their heads, the sooner they'll be raking in cash again as people flock to "legitimate" quality online music distribution.
Sorry, I don't have a problem with people getting music via p2p, it's clearly non-commercial and there is a strong ethical argument that permits filesharing, but AllofMP3 is creating nothing original, there are merely profiting off of these works and giving no compensation to the authors (at least those in the west). As far as I'm concerned AllofMP3 deserves everything is has comming to it.
If you really want to buy DRM free music and support our culture via the creative commons than there are options http://magnatune.com/.