Or maybe they will simply port their apps to BSD and use that on the tivo boxes. Or maybe they will license some other OS that will allow them to keep everything closed source.
Or maybe they could start playing by the rules of the community they took Linux from, saving millions in development cost and time-to-market. Or maybe the could purchase a closed-source license for another OS. Or maybe they could write their own code instead of taking someone else's, so they can do what they want with it.
No you didn't. To begin with I do not think you (singular) served in both WWI and WWII, so stop bragging about "We".
In WWI the US had hardly a modern army to speak of. The US entered the war late and did little. It may be debated whether they tipped the balance, but it is a fact that Germany and Austria-Hungary were already at the brink of collapse in 1917. And anyway, Germany in WWI was just any nation at war, no better or worse than the other ones. They had not even started the war (Austria-Hungary did), so what's the point in talking of "liberation"? From what? In any case, the US sacrificed very little compared to the British, yet I don't hear the British whine so much about the French being ungrateful.
In WWII, most of the work to win the war was done by the Soviets. On any reasonable scale (soldiers dead, enemy soldiers killed, land lost, land gained, overall number of dead,...), the Soviet Union sacrificed much more than the US, even counting in the Pacific theatre where only the US were active. The eastern front saw the two most bloody battles in human history at the same time (Leningrad and Stalingrad), each three times larger than the one in third place (battle of Wuhan). Had the US stayed out, France would have been liberated by the USSR instead of the USA, or it would simply have risen up and taken back sovereignty when Berlin would eventually have fallen to the Red Army.
So cut the "we saved the world"-crap. The reason the US emerged as a superpower after WWII was that they had gone through two world wars without a single enemy soldier on their terrain, and had entered only when the outcome was almost guaranteed. Just like Switzerland, the US found out that not having armies marching through your country is beneficial to the economy.
[...] the largest fraud in world history.
According to Transparency International, the most corrupt politician ever was Suharto, dictator of Indonesia. Do I have to tell you who installed the guy, let him carry genocidal policies including but not limited to the invasion of East Timor?
You don't think this hatred is idealogical or that these countries don't spy on their own citizens, do you?
I don't "hate America", I think people (Americans, French, Congolese, Tikopians) who refuse to hear criticism of their own country, stick by the motto "good or bad it's my country", or trust the government (any government) are stupid and a threat to democracy.
Or the other way round... In Norway, denying services due to e.g. nationality is illegal.
In fact, a similar situation occurred at one of the hotels of the Scandic chain, that had been recently bought by Hilton. They refused to host a Cuban commercial delegation to Norway, with the dubious claim that, whereas Norwegian law prohibits to discriminate people based on nationality or ethnicity, they were not "people" but a "delegation".
According to thesetwo articles, there were quite a few protests and authorities stated the behaviour was not acceptable. Furthermore, in another article (sorry, this one in Norwegian), it is stated that Hilton in Sweden follows the same discriminatory practice against Cubans, whereas in Denmark there is no such policy, even in hotels directly owned by Hilton.
Given that this baby [wiretap law] was steamrolled through the Congress two weeks ago, the outage seems coincidental.
Interesting point, but Skype is based in Luxembourg and has no obligation to US law. Then again, they are owned by eBay, but just because they are owned by a US company does not mean much: they do not have to follow every shareholder's local law.
I've never seen a paid individual make a stupid mistake like this. [...] The Challenger and Columbia were piloted by kids from space camp.
I wholeheartedly agree with your point, but do not blame the Challenger's (or for that sake the Columbia's) crew. The Challenger disaster was basically caused by launching the shuttle in too cold weather, so that one of the elastomer O-rings snapped.
I had a PhD-level course in presentation technique a few years ago, and our two professors spent two whole lectures on "how not to present results" using both the communication that was sent to NASA by a concerned scientist the day before the launch (which lacked name, credentials, abstract, clarity and so on) and the investigation commission report, which incredibly also lacked the single, stupidest piece of presentation that was required: a simple failure rate vs. temperature plot of NASA data, that clearly predicted disaster.
It's: the apostrophe indicates something is missing: he's (he is), she's (she is), it's (it is).
Its: this is the possessive, since possessive do not have apostrophes: his, her(s), its.
Really, I have never lived in an English-speaking country, but I am amazed at how bad supposedly native people spell. An orthographic reform will never be too early, IMHO.
Yeah, yeah, you can mod down the grammar Nazi now.
It was one data set that contained an error, and a fairly marginal one at that. At the cost of repeating myself, go take the corrected data, plot it, and see that not much has changed. Of course, saying "the hottest year is no longer 1998, it's 1934! Its teh climate illuminati!" makes more of a headline.
You conveniently seem to forget that:
This error is of no significant consequence to global warming theory. 1934 was a spike, 1998 is part of a trend.
There are bunches of other data sets, by NASA and other authorities. This is just one data set that happened to contain an error. Big deal.
The corrupted data set was valid for the USA only, not the world. It is not a determining data set for global warming.
That's the main point that slashdotters do not seem to be getting right now, it's not like all the global warming theory went bananas.
All you guys, do yourself a favour and plot NASA's corrected data in your favourite plotting program and then compare to other data (be mindful of the Y scale). The years around 1940 were unusually warm in the US, but the year with the highest 5-year average temperature is 2000.
And the best quote from that episode was seconds before that, when Carter asked whether it was possible to transport them directly from the inside of the fighter:
My other usability pet peeve with KDE is its heavy reliance on toolbars with dozens of nondescript blue icons. Even for experienced users, it's a bit daunting.
Aside from the fact that I've never been "daunted" by a KDE app even when I was a newbie, you may like the way KDE4 is actually dealing with the issue. If you look for example at this screeshot of Okular, you will notice that now icons will be presented by default with text. This means a much bigger overall icon area, which makes the icon much easier to hit and forces the developer to separate wheat from chaff when creating toolbars.
"Hooray for Germany" is ok, "Deutschland über alles" not so much.
...and why not exactly? It is part of their national anthem and has no Nazi-party origins or connections. Contrary to what WW1 British propaganda said about the Hun, "Deutschland über alles" is not a claim of racial or national superiority, since "alles" means "everything", not "everybody". It was originally meant as "uniting the country is more important than petty state interest" when the country was united in the second half of the 19th century; it is basically a federalist motto.
Then again, it's in German, and everything in German looks scary... including Geschwindigkeitbegrenzung and Streichholzschächtelchen.
Think cars have been around in Norway for quite some time. They have a number of supporting measures from the government, such as lower taxes (taxes on a new car are about as much as the car itself over here), they can use reserved lanes and are exempt from city toll rings (fairly common, even if they removed the one where I live).
A thing you will have to get used is not to rely on your ears when crossing a road. These cars are very silent, once I almost got run over by one because it was so silent that I thought there couldn't possibly be any car around; in fact it was just a meter or two behind me. Luckily it was just the university campus and the car was driving very slow...
Even if hydrogen fuel cells have been touted as clean energy sources, current fuel cells have to run at high temperatures of up to 1,000 C.
... and this is contradictory how exactly? Just because it's hot does not mean it is inefficient. Indeed, high-temperature FCs have the highest efficiencies, ranging up to 70% with combined cycles.
This new technology will allow fuel cells to run at much lower temperatures, between 50 and 100 C.
The researchers have applied for a patent for their technology, but don't tell when fuel cells based on their work are about to appear.
As a fuel-cell researcher (yes I have a damn PhD in the field) I am very skeptical of anything surfacing on news releases and containing the "patent" word—It just makes my bullshit detector go crazy.
This technology is still very experimental, there is no working prototype, and if I had a penny for every new fuel-cell design that appeared any year I would have Bill Gates cleaning my toilet with his tongue. Besides, the article is quite badly written: it confuses high-temperature SOFC, assumed when the high temperature range is given, with low-temperature FCs that need platinum, which SOFCs do not need at all. It's like confusing an internal-combustion engine with a steam engine.
I am not saying it is complete vaporware, but it certainly seems overblown. People find new ways to design FCs and their components all the time.
I'm paricularly against the "Tivoization" clause and cannot for the life of me see what benefits it gives to the copyright holder or user of the code.
In the case of your software (i.e. a Sudoku for mobile phones), the GPLv3 guarantees the user the four freedoms (use, modify, distribute, improve), making it impossible to circumvent the GPLv2 with hardware devices. What could happen in your specific case is that a telco takes your code and starts offering it as for-pay download to their user's mobile phones—only that users cannot share it because there is some sort of hardware lock in place.
If you do not like the GPLv3, chances are you never liked the GPLv2 either. The GPLv3 is not a revolution of the GPL concept, it is just exactly the same ideas adapted to a world where it has become possible to circumvent version 2 by methods unforeseen when it was written. If you are alright with people taking your code and not contributing back, by all means use BSD instead.
The only way something like this could happen is if low level employees (ie the engineers) were complicit.
Upper management can and usually do ask their engineers for such things. They have to bring home some bucks. Management simply has to select some programmers who are ideologically aligned, but most importantly need the job or can be blackmailed otherwise. As every employee knows, no one wants to hire a whistleblower anyway.
Do you think upper management *ordered* the engineers to make the code favor Bush, in which case, don't you think word would have gotten out?
What about NDA's? Keeping secrecy on such a project is fairly easy, you simply threaten everybody who knows with lawsuits and call it "trade secret". By the way, coding the whole program may require a large team, but making a simple back door takes only one programmer. You simply have to change an int, after all.
This would be the biggest story in the history of the country.
On one hand, English has the word "conspiracy theorist". There should be another word, the "it-can-happen-here"-ists, for those who simply refuse to consider alternative explanations than the official one.
There would be fame and fortune in it for any engineer who came forward exposing the truth.
Yeah right. More likely a ton of lawsuits, threats (of the legal and illegal type), unemployement for life, libel&defamation, dirt-digging in his/her private life, physical harm (either directly or as a consequence of mob-summoning libel) and all that happens to a whistleblower.
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
I do have a problem with this one. Vote for Gore: ++votes["gore"]. Vote for Bush: ++votes["bush"]. How can you exactly get it wrong when the machine has the sole and only purpose to sum up int's? It is a trivial task that any idiot can perform. That's why many countries still draft random people for the job, we are not talking rocket science here.
United States: 80 people per square mile.
South Korea: 1,274 people per square mile.
This is an old, tired argument. Sure, North Korea is more densely populated. The Netherlands too. But the density does not really say it all, it's just an average. My dad got top marks in his course in statistics, and he went on all his life pontificating about the "chicken average": I eat two chickens, you eat none, on average we ate one each". There are surely immense areas of the US without broadband (like Yellowstone park, say), but what about areas as dense as NYC?
The question is better put as: how many Americans live in high-density areas? Quite a few. The overall density is low because there is a damn half of the country that is uninhabited, and that's before counting in Alaska.
Also, what is the "threshold value" beyond which population density can sustain broadband, and how many Americans live in areas beyond this density?
America's broadband problem is not just less density (granted, that plays a role): the problem is that US culture refuses governmental intervention in infrastructure. South Korea's government, instead, invested heavily in Internet connectivity, and their lead position is the result. If you want your government out of your business, fair enough, but don't think anyone else is going to come in and build infrastructure if they cannot turn a profit in less that 24 months. The argument that society as a whole will benefit from broadband does not really appeal to private actors: they want money, not to benefit society.
What about going back to the olden glory days, where instead of "watch[ing] with glee as [the album] becomes popular", musicians were actually required to perform to get their money? I mean, that's how I work. I go to my job, work, then get paid. It never ceases to amaze me how a system that allows people to work once and then get profits forever and even after their death is supposed to keep them working.
Every interview with the NVIDIA "developers" they repeat the company line (see summary) but fail to state WHY this is the company line.
NVidia is headquartered in Santa Clara, CA, USA. This means they are under a software patent legislation. They are either in breach of patents and they know it, or they are and they do not know it, but suspect they are. They have a competitor, ATI, which has likely a bunch of patents they are infringing (and they are probably doing the same to NVidia). Opening the source would be inviting ATI to dispose of its main competitor by lawsuit.
NVidia could relocate to a software-patent free legislation (Europe? South America?), but expecting them to move a whole company of over 3,000 people for open source is kind of utopistic. NVidia is not Canonical. Also, they are a hardware company, and just publishing their specs (not the driver source, just the card specs) may expose them to patent lawsuits if some spec reveals certain implementation details (and this time there is no free zone from hardware patents).
So, until a small upstart from Germany or Mexico fills the niche by selling 3D cards with available specs or maybe even FOSS drivers, we are pretty much stuck with this situation. Alternatively, wait for Nouveau, but its development is based on reverse engineering and will be inherently inefficient compared to simply implementing a spec. Thankfully it is just 3D acceleration, think of the mess if we had this situation in something more important like ethernet interfaces.
You mean, didn't renew the license of the station that assisted in the coup of April 2002.
This point is so important, and it is not getting across the propaganda layer in the US. Chávez is the bad guy who actually wants Venezuela to control its oil reserves. There are bunches of other televisions supporting the opposition, such as Globovisión and Venevisión.
While obviously politically motivated, Chávez' move is fully legal by Venezuelan, US or any other nation's standards, and far from a "shutdown". They had a licence, they tried to bring democracy down and install a dictatorship that would have acted as the puppet of a foreign power, and, guess what, the government says "Sorry, we don't really trust you with informing the public, you kind of got us shot to install your dictatorial figurehead, nothing personal". What would have happened if CNN had supported a failed coup by, say, Noam Chomsky against George Bush?
RCTV's factual record is that they deliberately manipulated the news to destabilise a democratically elected government and supported a coup. I mean, this is called high treason.
Essentially, what we find is that those who scream the loudest about giving freedom often are actually the biggest proponents of limiting it.
Of course at some point you have to limit freedom. Otherwise, you have plain anarchy—not the idealistic, V-for-vendetta-style world were all live in respect of each other's freedom, but the general rioting and civil war caused by power vacuums. In most countries, people do not have the freedom to kill, steal, rape, and there are stacks of thick books (so-called "law codes") that state what you can and what you cannot do. The argument that these countries are not free is patently ludicrous, unless your idea of freedom is the condition Somalia has been in the past decade.
Meanwhile, those who use licenses like the BSD license or the MIT license tend to be more focused on technical excellency.
This is an old, tired argument made by lazy closed-source developers who want to have someone else doing their job. I am a closed-source developer myself, and I used public-domain SQLite in my projects. I know there is a drive for developers to prefer BSD-style licences because money can be made out of it without giving anything back, kind of a natural freeloader instinct. Note that the study was funded by Microsoft, who did take BSD's IP stack into Windows: how much did they give back to BSD?
The point is, the licence is the authors' and only the authors' business: asking someone whom you never paid to do your work for free-as-in-beer is plain arrogant. If they give you code you can use in any way you want, be thankful. If they give code you cannot use, shut up and write your own.
It would be interesting to hear the opinion of a Russian who is old enough to remember the Soviet eighties, still lives in Russia, and can compare the two conditions. My impression is that the current regime is more violent than Gorbachev's Soviet Union. Maybe not as pervasive, since the state apparatus is not as extensive; but mafia "solves problems" so much faster.
As for the GULAG system you allude to, which was officially shut down in 1960 in Kruschev's destalinisation wave, it was a long way in the past in the eighties.
a) these journalists weren't shot/sent to Lefortovo and shot/sent to cut down trees in Siberia until they didn't need to be shot,
You are naïvely assuming that just because you heard about these, there are no others. Actual censorship is a very silent business, otherwise it would defy its purpose.
There is this great book I have been reading, "Manufacturing Consent". The main lesson is, wherever you live the information you get from the media will be biased in favour of the elite to which the newsmakers have to relate to. Not because there is a shadowy secret police, but simply because of social equilibria, cowardice, greed, and survival of the fittest. In Italy we have a saying, "being more royalist than the king himself": that's a good way to be liked by a king.
Being aware of this propaganda filter helps understanding which news are likely to be biased. News of the Pitcairn sex-abuse trials is not likely to be forged (except possibly for sensationalism), because it is hardly something that jeopardises any elite's interest. News on hot political topics is very commonly biased. In the case of Putin's Russia, I feel that the situation is not especially worsening—it was bad all along, only now Putin is no longer the good lap dog of Washington, flooding the oil market to keep 10 dollars a barrel: now he's trying to get Russia back as a major power. That's why the bad news from Russia keep flowing, they paint the painting the elites want to see.
I mean, surely Pakistan is in worse condition than Russia. How often do you hear about democracy issues in Pakistan, a dictatorship, original home of many of the Taliban, and a nuclear power? That's because Pakistan is, for the time being, an ally. Just like Saddam's crimes were unworthy of noticed when they were committed (roughly the same time Rumsfeld shook hands with him), because he was an ally, and were later unearthed when it was convenient (when Rumsfeld got him bombed). Just like the Shah's Persia, Suharto's Indonesia invading East Timor, and bunches of other "rogue states" that did not elicit any words of condemnation from the "leaders of the free world".
That's because all Scandinavian languages are mutually intelligible, and even though Icelandic is strictly speaking Scandinavian it is also very different from the other four (yes, four: Norwegian comes in two flavours, Norwegian and New-Norwegian. Norwegians, you can start flaming now.). Finnish is a completely unrelated language altogether.
(However, Linus is a Swedish-speaking Finn. Not sure whether that counts for Terra Scania.
Slashdot Mirror
Or maybe they could start playing by the rules of the community they took Linux from, saving millions in development cost and time-to-market. Or maybe the could purchase a closed-source license for another OS. Or maybe they could write their own code instead of taking someone else's, so they can do what they want with it.
No you didn't. To begin with I do not think you (singular) served in both WWI and WWII, so stop bragging about "We".
In WWI the US had hardly a modern army to speak of. The US entered the war late and did little. It may be debated whether they tipped the balance, but it is a fact that Germany and Austria-Hungary were already at the brink of collapse in 1917. And anyway, Germany in WWI was just any nation at war, no better or worse than the other ones. They had not even started the war (Austria-Hungary did), so what's the point in talking of "liberation"? From what? In any case, the US sacrificed very little compared to the British, yet I don't hear the British whine so much about the French being ungrateful.
In WWII, most of the work to win the war was done by the Soviets. On any reasonable scale (soldiers dead, enemy soldiers killed, land lost, land gained, overall number of dead, ...), the Soviet Union sacrificed much more than the US, even counting in the Pacific theatre where only the US were active. The eastern front saw the two most bloody battles in human history at the same time (Leningrad and Stalingrad), each three times larger than the one in third place (battle of Wuhan). Had the US stayed out, France would have been liberated by the USSR instead of the USA, or it would simply have risen up and taken back sovereignty when Berlin would eventually have fallen to the Red Army.
So cut the "we saved the world"-crap. The reason the US emerged as a superpower after WWII was that they had gone through two world wars without a single enemy soldier on their terrain, and had entered only when the outcome was almost guaranteed. Just like Switzerland, the US found out that not having armies marching through your country is beneficial to the economy.
According to Transparency International, the most corrupt politician ever was Suharto, dictator of Indonesia. Do I have to tell you who installed the guy, let him carry genocidal policies including but not limited to the invasion of East Timor?
I don't "hate America", I think people (Americans, French, Congolese, Tikopians) who refuse to hear criticism of their own country, stick by the motto "good or bad it's my country", or trust the government (any government) are stupid and a threat to democracy.
In fact, a similar situation occurred at one of the hotels of the Scandic chain, that had been recently bought by Hilton. They refused to host a Cuban commercial delegation to Norway, with the dubious claim that, whereas Norwegian law prohibits to discriminate people based on nationality or ethnicity, they were not "people" but a "delegation".
According to these two articles, there were quite a few protests and authorities stated the behaviour was not acceptable. Furthermore, in another article (sorry, this one in Norwegian), it is stated that Hilton in Sweden follows the same discriminatory practice against Cubans, whereas in Denmark there is no such policy, even in hotels directly owned by Hilton.
Interesting point, but Skype is based in Luxembourg and has no obligation to US law. Then again, they are owned by eBay, but just because they are owned by a US company does not mean much: they do not have to follow every shareholder's local law.
I wholeheartedly agree with your point, but do not blame the Challenger's (or for that sake the Columbia's) crew. The Challenger disaster was basically caused by launching the shuttle in too cold weather, so that one of the elastomer O-rings snapped.
I had a PhD-level course in presentation technique a few years ago, and our two professors spent two whole lectures on "how not to present results" using both the communication that was sent to NASA by a concerned scientist the day before the launch (which lacked name, credentials, abstract, clarity and so on) and the investigation commission report, which incredibly also lacked the single, stupidest piece of presentation that was required: a simple failure rate vs. temperature plot of NASA data, that clearly predicted disaster.
Why is it so difficult to get?
Really, I have never lived in an English-speaking country, but I am amazed at how bad supposedly native people spell. An orthographic reform will never be too early, IMHO.
Yeah, yeah, you can mod down the grammar Nazi now.
It was one data set that contained an error, and a fairly marginal one at that. At the cost of repeating myself, go take the corrected data, plot it, and see that not much has changed. Of course, saying "the hottest year is no longer 1998, it's 1934! Its teh climate illuminati!" makes more of a headline.
You conveniently seem to forget that:
That's the main point that slashdotters do not seem to be getting right now, it's not like all the global warming theory went bananas.
All you guys, do yourself a favour and plot NASA's corrected data in your favourite plotting program and then compare to other data (be mindful of the Y scale). The years around 1940 were unusually warm in the US, but the year with the highest 5-year average temperature is 2000.
And the best quote from that episode was seconds before that, when Carter asked whether it was possible to transport them directly from the inside of the fighter:
Carter Dad, can you beam them up?
Jacob/Selmak Who am I, Scotty?
Aside from the fact that I've never been "daunted" by a KDE app even when I was a newbie, you may like the way KDE4 is actually dealing with the issue. If you look for example at this screeshot of Okular, you will notice that now icons will be presented by default with text. This means a much bigger overall icon area, which makes the icon much easier to hit and forces the developer to separate wheat from chaff when creating toolbars.
...and why not exactly? It is part of their national anthem and has no Nazi-party origins or connections. Contrary to what WW1 British propaganda said about the Hun, "Deutschland über alles" is not a claim of racial or national superiority, since "alles" means "everything", not "everybody". It was originally meant as "uniting the country is more important than petty state interest" when the country was united in the second half of the 19th century; it is basically a federalist motto.
Then again, it's in German, and everything in German looks scary... including Geschwindigkeitbegrenzung and Streichholzschächtelchen.
Think cars have been around in Norway for quite some time. They have a number of supporting measures from the government, such as lower taxes (taxes on a new car are about as much as the car itself over here), they can use reserved lanes and are exempt from city toll rings (fairly common, even if they removed the one where I live).
A thing you will have to get used is not to rely on your ears when crossing a road. These cars are very silent, once I almost got run over by one because it was so silent that I thought there couldn't possibly be any car around; in fact it was just a meter or two behind me. Luckily it was just the university campus and the car was driving very slow...
... and this is contradictory how exactly? Just because it's hot does not mean it is inefficient. Indeed, high-temperature FCs have the highest efficiencies, ranging up to 70% with combined cycles.
They already do. Have been for decades. See PEM fuel cells. The point is that there are bunches of possible FC designs around, TFA probably meant the SOFCs, the only ones to reach 1000 degrees.
As a fuel-cell researcher (yes I have a damn PhD in the field) I am very skeptical of anything surfacing on news releases and containing the "patent" word—It just makes my bullshit detector go crazy.
This technology is still very experimental, there is no working prototype, and if I had a penny for every new fuel-cell design that appeared any year I would have Bill Gates cleaning my toilet with his tongue. Besides, the article is quite badly written: it confuses high-temperature SOFC, assumed when the high temperature range is given, with low-temperature FCs that need platinum, which SOFCs do not need at all. It's like confusing an internal-combustion engine with a steam engine.
I am not saying it is complete vaporware, but it certainly seems overblown. People find new ways to design FCs and their components all the time.
In the case of your software (i.e. a Sudoku for mobile phones), the GPLv3 guarantees the user the four freedoms (use, modify, distribute, improve), making it impossible to circumvent the GPLv2 with hardware devices. What could happen in your specific case is that a telco takes your code and starts offering it as for-pay download to their user's mobile phones—only that users cannot share it because there is some sort of hardware lock in place.
If you do not like the GPLv3, chances are you never liked the GPLv2 either. The GPLv3 is not a revolution of the GPL concept, it is just exactly the same ideas adapted to a world where it has become possible to circumvent version 2 by methods unforeseen when it was written. If you are alright with people taking your code and not contributing back, by all means use BSD instead.
Upper management can and usually do ask their engineers for such things. They have to bring home some bucks. Management simply has to select some programmers who are ideologically aligned, but most importantly need the job or can be blackmailed otherwise. As every employee knows, no one wants to hire a whistleblower anyway.
What about NDA's? Keeping secrecy on such a project is fairly easy, you simply threaten everybody who knows with lawsuits and call it "trade secret". By the way, coding the whole program may require a large team, but making a simple back door takes only one programmer. You simply have to change an int, after all.
On one hand, English has the word "conspiracy theorist". There should be another word, the "it-can-happen-here"-ists, for those who simply refuse to consider alternative explanations than the official one.
Yeah right. More likely a ton of lawsuits, threats (of the legal and illegal type), unemployement for life, libel&defamation, dirt-digging in his/her private life, physical harm (either directly or as a consequence of mob-summoning libel) and all that happens to a whistleblower.
I do have a problem with this one. Vote for Gore: ++votes["gore"]. Vote for Bush: ++votes["bush"]. How can you exactly get it wrong when the machine has the sole and only purpose to sum up int's? It is a trivial task that any idiot can perform. That's why many countries still draft random people for the job, we are not talking rocket science here.
...the opposition censors the government!!
This is an old, tired argument. Sure, North Korea is more densely populated. The Netherlands too. But the density does not really say it all, it's just an average. My dad got top marks in his course in statistics, and he went on all his life pontificating about the "chicken average": I eat two chickens, you eat none, on average we ate one each". There are surely immense areas of the US without broadband (like Yellowstone park, say), but what about areas as dense as NYC?
The question is better put as: how many Americans live in high-density areas? Quite a few. The overall density is low because there is a damn half of the country that is uninhabited, and that's before counting in Alaska.
Also, what is the "threshold value" beyond which population density can sustain broadband, and how many Americans live in areas beyond this density?
America's broadband problem is not just less density (granted, that plays a role): the problem is that US culture refuses governmental intervention in infrastructure. South Korea's government, instead, invested heavily in Internet connectivity, and their lead position is the result. If you want your government out of your business, fair enough, but don't think anyone else is going to come in and build infrastructure if they cannot turn a profit in less that 24 months. The argument that society as a whole will benefit from broadband does not really appeal to private actors: they want money, not to benefit society.
What about going back to the olden glory days, where instead of "watch[ing] with glee as [the album] becomes popular", musicians were actually required to perform to get their money? I mean, that's how I work. I go to my job, work, then get paid. It never ceases to amaze me how a system that allows people to work once and then get profits forever and even after their death is supposed to keep them working.
NVidia is headquartered in Santa Clara, CA, USA. This means they are under a software patent legislation. They are either in breach of patents and they know it, or they are and they do not know it, but suspect they are. They have a competitor, ATI, which has likely a bunch of patents they are infringing (and they are probably doing the same to NVidia). Opening the source would be inviting ATI to dispose of its main competitor by lawsuit.
NVidia could relocate to a software-patent free legislation (Europe? South America?), but expecting them to move a whole company of over 3,000 people for open source is kind of utopistic. NVidia is not Canonical. Also, they are a hardware company, and just publishing their specs (not the driver source, just the card specs) may expose them to patent lawsuits if some spec reveals certain implementation details (and this time there is no free zone from hardware patents).
So, until a small upstart from Germany or Mexico fills the niche by selling 3D cards with available specs or maybe even FOSS drivers, we are pretty much stuck with this situation. Alternatively, wait for Nouveau, but its development is based on reverse engineering and will be inherently inefficient compared to simply implementing a spec. Thankfully it is just 3D acceleration, think of the mess if we had this situation in something more important like ethernet interfaces.
This point is so important, and it is not getting across the propaganda layer in the US. Chávez is the bad guy who actually wants Venezuela to control its oil reserves. There are bunches of other televisions supporting the opposition, such as Globovisión and Venevisión.
While obviously politically motivated, Chávez' move is fully legal by Venezuelan, US or any other nation's standards, and far from a "shutdown". They had a licence, they tried to bring democracy down and install a dictatorship that would have acted as the puppet of a foreign power, and, guess what, the government says "Sorry, we don't really trust you with informing the public, you kind of got us shot to install your dictatorial figurehead, nothing personal". What would have happened if CNN had supported a failed coup by, say, Noam Chomsky against George Bush?
RCTV's factual record is that they deliberately manipulated the news to destabilise a democratically elected government and supported a coup. I mean, this is called high treason.
I am from a country that freed itself from Nazi Germany through guerrilla, you insensitive clod!
Of course at some point you have to limit freedom. Otherwise, you have plain anarchy—not the idealistic, V-for-vendetta-style world were all live in respect of each other's freedom, but the general rioting and civil war caused by power vacuums. In most countries, people do not have the freedom to kill, steal, rape, and there are stacks of thick books (so-called "law codes") that state what you can and what you cannot do. The argument that these countries are not free is patently ludicrous, unless your idea of freedom is the condition Somalia has been in the past decade.
This is an old, tired argument made by lazy closed-source developers who want to have someone else doing their job. I am a closed-source developer myself, and I used public-domain SQLite in my projects. I know there is a drive for developers to prefer BSD-style licences because money can be made out of it without giving anything back, kind of a natural freeloader instinct. Note that the study was funded by Microsoft, who did take BSD's IP stack into Windows: how much did they give back to BSD?
The point is, the licence is the authors' and only the authors' business: asking someone whom you never paid to do your work for free-as-in-beer is plain arrogant. If they give you code you can use in any way you want, be thankful. If they give code you cannot use, shut up and write your own.
It would be interesting to hear the opinion of a Russian who is old enough to remember the Soviet eighties, still lives in Russia, and can compare the two conditions. My impression is that the current regime is more violent than Gorbachev's Soviet Union. Maybe not as pervasive, since the state apparatus is not as extensive; but mafia "solves problems" so much faster.
As for the GULAG system you allude to, which was officially shut down in 1960 in Kruschev's destalinisation wave, it was a long way in the past in the eighties.
Ever heard of Anna Politkovskaya?
You are naïvely assuming that just because you heard about these, there are no others. Actual censorship is a very silent business, otherwise it would defy its purpose.
There is this great book I have been reading, "Manufacturing Consent". The main lesson is, wherever you live the information you get from the media will be biased in favour of the elite to which the newsmakers have to relate to. Not because there is a shadowy secret police, but simply because of social equilibria, cowardice, greed, and survival of the fittest. In Italy we have a saying, "being more royalist than the king himself": that's a good way to be liked by a king.
Being aware of this propaganda filter helps understanding which news are likely to be biased. News of the Pitcairn sex-abuse trials is not likely to be forged (except possibly for sensationalism), because it is hardly something that jeopardises any elite's interest. News on hot political topics is very commonly biased. In the case of Putin's Russia, I feel that the situation is not especially worsening—it was bad all along, only now Putin is no longer the good lap dog of Washington, flooding the oil market to keep 10 dollars a barrel: now he's trying to get Russia back as a major power. That's why the bad news from Russia keep flowing, they paint the painting the elites want to see.
I mean, surely Pakistan is in worse condition than Russia. How often do you hear about democracy issues in Pakistan, a dictatorship, original home of many of the Taliban, and a nuclear power? That's because Pakistan is, for the time being, an ally. Just like Saddam's crimes were unworthy of noticed when they were committed (roughly the same time Rumsfeld shook hands with him), because he was an ally, and were later unearthed when it was convenient (when Rumsfeld got him bombed). Just like the Shah's Persia, Suharto's Indonesia invading East Timor, and bunches of other "rogue states" that did not elicit any words of condemnation from the "leaders of the free world".
Scandinavia = Denmark+Sweden+Norway. Scandinavia+Iceland+Finland = Nordic countries.
That's because all Scandinavian languages are mutually intelligible, and even though Icelandic is strictly speaking Scandinavian it is also very different from the other four (yes, four: Norwegian comes in two flavours, Norwegian and New-Norwegian. Norwegians, you can start flaming now.). Finnish is a completely unrelated language altogether.
(However, Linus is a Swedish-speaking Finn. Not sure whether that counts for Terra Scania.