Note that Sun requires joint copyright assignment (JCA), whereby both the original author(s) and Sun jointly hold copyright. This allows Sun to relicense the OpenOffice.org code as needed (e.g., GPLv3).
IANAL, but the end user license agreements for the Adobe AIR SDK and Flex 3 SDK contain clauses that are rather frightening, which puts a serious crimp on how useful an IDE for those SDKs are.
From the Adobe AIR SDK EULA:
4. Development Restrictions. You will not use the SDK Components to create, develop or use any program, software or service that (a) contains any viruses, Trojan horses, worms, time bombs, cancelbots or other computer programming routines that are intended to damage, detrimentally interfere with, surreptitiously intercept or expropriate any system, data or personal information, (b) when used in the manner in which it is intended or marketed, violates any law, statute, ordinance, regulation or rights (including without limitation any laws, regulations or rights respecting intellectual property, computer spyware, privacy, export control, unfair competition, antidiscrimination or advertising), or (c) interferes with the operability of Adobe or third-party programs or software.
and from the Flex 3 SDK EULA:
(b) Development Restrictions. Licensee agrees that Licensee will not use the SDK Components to create, develop or use any program, software or service which (1) contains any viruses, Trojan horses, worms, time bombs, cancelbots or other computer programming routines that are intended to damage, detrimentally interfere with, surreptitiously intercept or expropriate any system, data or personal information; (2) when used in the manner in which it is intended, violates any material law, statute, ordinance or regulation (including without limitation the laws and regulations governing export control, unfair competition, antidiscrimination or false advertising); or (3) interferes with the operability of other Adobe or third-party programs or software.
These are very similar, differing mostly in the second set of restrictions.
While the whole clause is disconcerting (e.g., how the #$#@@#@$ can I warrant that my application and its AIR/Flex dependency doesn't interfere with the operability of arbitrary third-party programs?), what really scares me is the second set of restrictions:
when used in the manner in which it is intended or marketed, violates any law, statute, ordinance, regulation or rights (including without limitation any laws, regulations or rights respecting intellectual property, computer spyware, privacy, export control, unfair competition, antidiscrimination or advertising)
Suppose a small village in Upper Mongolia enacts a statute that says push-buttons in GUIs are illegal. Why they would do that, I have no idea. But, once they do, if I have a AIR/Flex program that uses a push-button (say, an [OK] button), I'm in violation of the Adobe EULA, even if my program isn't used in that village. The Adobe EULA clause has no restrictions on relevant jurisdictions, or even timeframe (maybe you can't use the program on Sundays due to long-since-abandoned "blue laws", because the EULA doesn't constrain matters to only being laws, etc. currently in force).
Again, IANAL, and it may be that IAPBROTSI (I Am Paranoid Beyond Rationality On This Specific Issue). It's eminently possible that I could take these EULAs to a qualified attorney and be told that either I'm misunderstanding them or, while my interpretation is conceivable, they are unenforceable due to such-and-so restrictions on what you can have in a EULA. Let alone the whole question of the enforceability of EULAs and whatnot.
But I can't risk going to trial to defend my use of Adobe AIR or Flex, if I happen to do something that pisses Adobe off. Given sufficiently high-priced attorneys, Adobe could quite possibly convince a judge or jury that my paranoid interpretation is correct, and I'm stuck hoping that sanity would prevail on appeal or something.
Flex and AIR are really slick, but they ain't worth the headache to figure out my odds of prevailing should Adobe sue.
But to make new companies it takes experience and a business plan. Enter the bean counters. And the bean counters now control the playing field.
Speaking as a two-time — soon to be three-time — entrepreneur, there's a mix of internal and external factors at play here.
External factors, like America's sue-happy society and mountains of regulation, can't readily be addressed by any individual firm or college program. We can only hope that enough individual firms and college programs take root that, over time, society's attitudes can change and these problems will shrink.
Internally, though, engineering entrepreneurs can readily avoid bean counters (or attorneys) interfering with business operations...if the entrepreneurs are willing to set some limits. Some of those limits will be for the bean counters and attorneys: hire ones with the proper attitude, give them marching orders for how to best support an innovative firm in their roles, reward those who follow through, and fire the sorry asses of those who don't. Some of those limits will be for the entrepreneur itself, such as not taking on financing (e.g., venture capital) that come with un-controlled bean counters and attorneys attached. While that latter limitation will seem to some to be a show-stopper, understand that an engineering entrepreneur needs to not only engineer technical solutions to meet their vision, but also engineer business models and structures to meet that same vision. For an example, read The Great Game of Business and A Stake in the Outcome by Jack Stack and Bo Burlingham.
Eric S. Raymond (ESR) commented on Microsoft's OOXML tactics as they relate to their proposed open source licenses in a OSI blog entry.
I agree pretty much with his position. If the playing field were anything near to level, I would have no issue in evaluating Microsoft's license submissions purely on their merits, just like any other license. However, I have difficulty in reconciling Microsoft wanting to be treated fairly by OSI with Microsoft's tactics in their attempts to ram OOXML through ISO. If Microsoft can game the ISO approval process, shouldn't it be fair for us to game the OSI approval process?
Which one you pick depends on two factors. One is who you perceive to be to blame for everything. If you blame governments (or read too much Heinlein), you tend to go libertarian. If you blame corporations (or read too much cyberpunk), you tend to go progressive.
And what if you blame both (i.e., big governments and big corporations)? Y'know, the whole "absolute power corrupts absolutely" thing?
I'm not trying to be snide. It's just that the choice between progressive vs. libertarian seems to be a choice based upon tactics for mitigating power, not a choice between the source of the power.
Maybe I need to invent a "smallitarian" movement...:-)
Incidentally, any true monopoly must be government granted. Without the government's force to keep competition away, it's merely a really effective competitor in an open market, like Wal-Mart.
Read up on Standard Oil or other classic antitrust cases sometime.
In other words, another means besides government grant to have a monopoly is to achieve the end through illegal means.
I'm all for using YouTube as a source of questions for presidential debates. This, however, is one question that I'm not sure you really want asked in that setting.
When you get down to it, debates are a serious of candidate sound bites strung together. On any expected question — and evolution is likely to be expected — they'll have their pat answer. In this case, I'd expect at least one to say something like this:
The science of the present is not always looked upon as correct in the future. We once thought the universe revolved around the Earth. Science improved over the centuries to our current perspective that the Earth revolves around the Sun. Knowledge of the existence of DNA is barely a half-century old, and our understanding of biology and genetics has itself been, well, evolving rapidly for the past century. It is foolish for us to claim that science presently has the final answer for the origin of man. All we ask is that you give science more time, and those of us with faith are sure that, in the end, our perspective is the correct one.
This is a nice sound bite. Given time — say, an hour-long one-on-one or two-on-two debate on the topic — this sound bite can probably be ripped to shreds. In the format of the classic presidential debate, though, this is all you'll get.
Now, candidates have different skill levels and comfort with this sort of thing. So, I can easily see a few candidates coming across as complete firebrands, scoring points with some evangelical Christians and (I'm guessing) losing points with the general populace. But there's going to be one or two who can nail a debate question on evolution, and it's exactly this sort of "policy by sound bite" that has us in our current evolution vs. intelligent design morass.
If you want to use YouTube to skewer a viewpoint, you need to phrase your question as a fait accompli, where there is no good answer, only bad and less-bad. For example, on a different topic, you could ask "how can you justify US-led and US-backed forces killing, torturing, and displacing hundreds of thousands of people, from guerrilla actions in Central America in the 1980's to today's Iraq, in the name of 'enhancing democracy'?". Here, they either admit the US is killing, torturing, and displacing people (while trying to defend 'enhancing democracy') or they try to deny that anything of the sort is happening (which I don't think the public would believe). I'm not sure how you would craft a YouTube question on evolution that gives you that same certainty of embarrassment.
While the series is enjoyable overall, there were some major problems that ruined my enjoyment of the books.
I kinda agree. In some ways, the whole series is a bit like some of Potter's behavior in some of the individual books: wait until April, realize that The Big Bad hasn't been defeated yet, take care of that in a short span of calendar time, then toddle back to Privet Drive.
In this case, I think JKR knew generally how she wanted the series to end, but after Order of the Phoenix, she realized she had a lot of work to do in order to get from Point A (open fighting between Death Eaters/He-Who-Is-Now-Mouldy and the Order) and Point B (and now...Mouldiness). Hence, the heavy use of pensives and the mental link between Potter and He-Who-Once-Should-Not-Have-Been-Named to fill in a veritable ton of backstory necessary to set up a few devices (e.g., horcruxes). On the one hand, it really felt like the informational equivalent of deus ex machina. On the other hand, I don't know how you'd achieve the particular way the series ended with Potter learning all this stuff in some other way that, while perhaps more in line with previous books' style, would have taken Potter and JKR a ton of time in their own ways. It's conceivable there'd be some other way for Potter to defeat He-Who-Is-Still-Dead-After-Nineteen-Years that wouldn't have required all that backstory, though I haven't the foggiest idea what it might have looked like.
I can't really fault her. I can't quite imagine writing that much fiction and having it all hang together.
Though I'm glad to see I'm not the only one struggling to figure out how in blazes the sword got to Hogwarts...
While the subtitle for Karl Fogel's _Producing Open Source Software_ is "How to Run a Successful Free Software Project", the reviews on Amazon suggest it is good for participants as well. It's available for free at http://producingoss.com/ and is fairly inexpensive if you want it in paper form. I worked with Mr. Fogel at CollabNet and he's first-rate at this, so while I haven't read the book (it's on my to-be-read pile...), I suspect it may prove useful to you.
Please tell me this is the work of a deranged spokesperson and not really the thoughts of an elected chief of state.
Small climate changes do not demand far-reaching restrictive measures
He seems to equate "climate changes" to "temperature". There are other aspects to climate change (e.g., CO2 levels) that, if the data is to be believed, have been far from "small" over the past several million years.
Any suppression of freedom and democracy should be avoided
Those concerned about this issue are pursuing political means in democracies to have the issue addressed. How exactly is this "suppression"? Or do you prefer governments where citizens have no say?
Instead of organising people from above, let us allow everyone to live as he wants
Even libertarians, who are big on "everyone to live as he wants", recognize that one individual's rights end at the point where they infringe upon the rights of others (e.g., survival).
Let us resist the politicisation of science and oppose the term "scientific consensus", which is always achieved only by a loud minority, never by a silent majority
"Never". I do not believe that word means what he thinks it does.
Instead of speaking about "the environment", let us be attentive to it in our personal behaviour
By, um, not talking about it? Uh, OK. You go first.
Let us be humble but confident in the spontaneous evolution of human society. Let us trust its rationality and not try to slow it down or divert it in any direction
I have no problem with the first sentence. In the abstract, I have no problem with the second sentence either, so long as he agrees that if society decides to take steps to deal with the perceived problem of global warming, that is society's prerogative (in democracies) and therefore does not represent an attempt to "slow...down" or "divert" human society.
Let us not scare ourselves with catastrophic forecasts, or use them to defend and promote irrational interventions in human lives.
I have this vision of him with fingers in his ears, saying loudly, "I CAN'T HEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAR YOU!"...
I mean, c'mon. The Wikipedia article on global warming has 66 citations, mostly scientific journals and reports, mostly in agreement with the "consensus", and the Wikipedia article on those in opposition
to the "consensus" has 53 citations. All the President of the Czech Republic can do is one professor from MIT and...Michael Crichton? Even if the FT.com article isn't the place for such citations, couldn't he have gotten StopStoppingGlobalWarming.cz or something and put better arguments up there?
I'm all for debate on global warming. I'm opposed to mindless drivel from politicians.
Just because third-party apps are pre-installed by Palm doesn't mean it's an open system, at least in my parlance. An open system would be if Jane Q. Programmer could write an app and install it on the device.
A 2.5-pound notebook running Linux with WiFi and Bluetooth sounds sweet...but one report says it's a closed system, which means until somebody hacks past that limitation, it's a dead-end. For about $500, I'm expecting at least a mostly-open system (like Maemo with the Nokia N800).
So Toyota will sell no all-electric or other "zero emissions" cars in 2020?
TFA says plug-in hybrids are "years away", but I would imagine they'd have at least that level of technology going by 2020. The Prius is a PZEV, which, while not a ZEV, is as close as a mainstream car gets AFAIK.
No H2 or fuelcell vehicles?
Hybrid technology is not incompatible with H2/fuelcell. I interpret "hybrid" as "bank of batteries, a drivetrain that can use multiple sources of locomotive force, and regenerative braking". If you have a fuel cell providing electricity, it's basically charging the batteries and the regenerative braking still is a benefit. And, to top it off, TFA is a whopping four paragraphs, so who knows what else was said that didn't get reported.
When I was a wee tot, I remember seeing a single-panel _Dennis The Menace_ cartoon. The cartoon itself had Dennis' father at a boardroom-type table with a few other people, his briefcase open, and various parts spilling out. The caption was something like "Gentlemen, our new bathroom scale did not pass the 'Dennis test'. We cannot refer to it as 'unbreakable'".
Since then, whenever I've heard about something claiming to be unbreakable, I picture a very broken bathroom scale...
Mike Masnick covers all this quite nicely in his attempt to explain how Old Media "should encourage people to get their content for free". Old Media does not have to die at the hands of the "whiners", as you eloquently put it, though some may choose (business) suicide rather than change. To quote from Mr. Masnick's summary:
It's not about defending unauthorized downloads. It's not even about getting rid of copyright -- just recognizing that copyright holders can actually be better off ignoring their own copyrights. It's very much about showing the key trends that are impacting all infinite goods -- and pointing out a clear path to benefiting from it (while making life more difficult on those who refuse to give up their old business models).
The "politically incorrect" answer is that society should work on fixing the root causes. Anonymity in elections is primarily an issue because of potential retaliation if somebody doesn't vote as they "should" (e.g., loses job, loses limb). The cost of anonymity in elections is in the social aspects of public participation — without visible social pressure from peers to participate in elections, you're left with only broad-brush social norms to try to fend off a "tragedy of the commons"-style shirking of participation. This can be seen in the US in the form of generally falling voter turnout, among other symptoms. Society needs to consider whether the cure (anonymity) is worse than the disease (some percentage of "vote buying" in one form or fashion).
I'm not saying that voter coercion is a good thing, but I think society needs a deeper discussion as to whether anonymous voting is all happiness and puppies. I only ever hear the negative consequences of attributable voting, never any positives. I'm no expert, but I'd sure like the experts to ponder the issue...
In the FLOSS arena, I've long been a fan of joint copyright assignment, such as the one used by Sun and OpenOffice.org [pdf]. I'm not sure if there are any potential pitfalls for doing this in the client-freelancer scenario. But, in theory, it gives both parties carte blanche to do what they want.
I do not see a point in a shared calendar if it does not tie up straight into project management and work time allocation.
I'll get to business use of shared calendars later. Bear in mind that there are many other scenarios, outside of businesses, where shared calendars can be useful, such as:
Municipalities publishing their board meeting schedules plus other events of note
Sports leagues (e.g., Little League(R) baseball) publishing their league schedules
Churches (and synagogues and mosques and...) publishing their scheduled services, including the extra services held in conjunction with religious holidays
None of those require "project management and work time allocation". Particularly since the OP didn't say these were corporate shared calendars, it's not safe for you to assume that's the only place they'd be used.
As a result any shared calendar deployment usually descends into meetingitus: a well known corporate debilitating disease where people spend more time in meetings about meetings about meetings instead of doing work.
Agreed, but not all businesses are created equal. I suspect there's some sort of heuristic where the odds of "meetingitus" increases with the square of the number of employees per office, or some such. In other words, all else being equal, smaller businesses don't necessarily over-meeting themselves (though PHBs can increase meeting frequency in businesses of any size, etc.). While having a shared calendar that tied into project management would be nice, I wouldn't "throw out the baby with the bath water" and eschew shared calendars outright without corporate-wide project management tools.
Personally, if I was the admin, I would have tried to QoS P2P down (and net neutrality be damned) to the point where the campus is made equivalent to the rest of the world.
Applying QoS across the board on all known P2P applications would not be a violation of net neutrality. Arguably, neither would applying QoS for a single standard (de facto or de jure) protocol, like BitTorrent.
What would be a violation of net neutrality would be if they applied QoS to BitTorrent, except to certain sites that paid the university a fee.
I'm beginning to think we're going to have to work up a check-off-the-problems sheet for these new authentication schemes like we pass around for anti-spam "solutions".
Here, I see two problems off the cuff:
If it thinks you're not typing the password the same way, "it will ask some additional security questions". Hence, this is not significantly different than the cookie-based or IP-address based solutions used by some banks, where you need only a password if you're coming from a familiar PC and need to answer more questions if you're not. Phishers can just let the password-typing fail and fall back to collecting the answers to the security questions and break in that way.
It'll only be reliable for people who use the same keyboard all the time. I know I type differently when I'm on my home PC (natural keyboard) vs. an office PC (flat keyboard) vs. my PDA (thumbboard). Particularly the way I type with two thumbs bears little resemblance to the way I touch-type. Now, it's possible they'll track different typing profiles, but eventually the profiles will grow to cover just about any typing pattern...
Color me unimpressed. Is it an incremental improvement over plain passwords? Yes, but not enough to go with a $34,000 plus $1.15/user fee structure, as cited in the article.
I'm speaking from experience - over 10 years in I.T.
Match you, raise you a decade.
Part of the regulations in the financial sector is to secure all data, including laptops.
Your commentary regarding the "financial sector" seems accurate based on my experience in that industry. Please understand that the "financial sector", on a pure population basis, is miniscule, so what may be necessary for that particular niche may not be necessary for the wide array of other niches that make up the Big Wide World.
A CEO of an S&P 500, S&P MidCap, S&P SmallCap, etc. corporation is not going to risk his publicly traded corporation's entire infrastructure (the "heart" of the communications between all co-workers) to a 5 year old company (is Ubuntu even a corporation?) that also has many, many competitors.
By that token, a "CEO of an S&P 500, S&P MidCap, S&P SmallCap, etc. corporation is not going to risk his publicly traded corporation's entire" physical infrastructure (the "skeleton" of the organization, if you will) to steel girders, which have only been around for a handful of decades. Real people use mud brick!
In other words, firms large and small make countless infrastructure selections. Age of the firm is one small criterion. Availability of substitutes is another. There are many more criteria that get taken into account. Age isn't the one-and-only criterion. If it were, major firms wouldn't ever write their own software, since by definition that software hasn't been tested nearly as much as whatever process the software is replacing.
In your situation, Tucows is closer to eNom, with domainsnare.net serving in the RegisterFly role. Apparently, RegisterFly used to be an eNom reseller, got dumped by eNom, then went through various gyrations en route to being canned by ICANN.
From your description, it sounds like Tucows doesn't handle deadbeat resellers as well as eNom (which apparently contacted RegisterFly's customers and gave them transfer options). However, I don't think the actions of a single deadbeat reseller should cause the "death penalty" from ICANN against Tucows. If this is a pattern, and Tucows has lots of deadbeat sellers, I'd be interested in pointers to them -- I'm thinking of becoming a reseller myself and had been leaning towards Tucows over eNom based on other reviews.
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Note that Sun requires joint copyright assignment (JCA), whereby both the original author(s) and Sun jointly hold copyright. This allows Sun to relicense the OpenOffice.org code as needed (e.g., GPLv3).
If I were to continue to use the product in violation of the EULA, Adobe would have to take me to court to force an injunction against such use.
IANAL, but the end user license agreements for the Adobe AIR SDK and Flex 3 SDK contain clauses that are rather frightening, which puts a serious crimp on how useful an IDE for those SDKs are.
From the Adobe AIR SDK EULA:
and from the Flex 3 SDK EULA:
These are very similar, differing mostly in the second set of restrictions.
While the whole clause is disconcerting (e.g., how the #$#@@#@$ can I warrant that my application and its AIR/Flex dependency doesn't interfere with the operability of arbitrary third-party programs?), what really scares me is the second set of restrictions:
Suppose a small village in Upper Mongolia enacts a statute that says push-buttons in GUIs are illegal. Why they would do that, I have no idea. But, once they do, if I have a AIR/Flex program that uses a push-button (say, an [OK] button), I'm in violation of the Adobe EULA, even if my program isn't used in that village. The Adobe EULA clause has no restrictions on relevant jurisdictions, or even timeframe (maybe you can't use the program on Sundays due to long-since-abandoned "blue laws", because the EULA doesn't constrain matters to only being laws, etc. currently in force).
Again, IANAL, and it may be that IAPBROTSI (I Am Paranoid Beyond Rationality On This Specific Issue). It's eminently possible that I could take these EULAs to a qualified attorney and be told that either I'm misunderstanding them or, while my interpretation is conceivable, they are unenforceable due to such-and-so restrictions on what you can have in a EULA. Let alone the whole question of the enforceability of EULAs and whatnot.
But I can't risk going to trial to defend my use of Adobe AIR or Flex, if I happen to do something that pisses Adobe off. Given sufficiently high-priced attorneys, Adobe could quite possibly convince a judge or jury that my paranoid interpretation is correct, and I'm stuck hoping that sanity would prevail on appeal or something.
Flex and AIR are really slick, but they ain't worth the headache to figure out my odds of prevailing should Adobe sue.
Speaking as a two-time — soon to be three-time — entrepreneur, there's a mix of internal and external factors at play here.
External factors, like America's sue-happy society and mountains of regulation, can't readily be addressed by any individual firm or college program. We can only hope that enough individual firms and college programs take root that, over time, society's attitudes can change and these problems will shrink.
Internally, though, engineering entrepreneurs can readily avoid bean counters (or attorneys) interfering with business operations...if the entrepreneurs are willing to set some limits. Some of those limits will be for the bean counters and attorneys: hire ones with the proper attitude, give them marching orders for how to best support an innovative firm in their roles, reward those who follow through, and fire the sorry asses of those who don't. Some of those limits will be for the entrepreneur itself, such as not taking on financing (e.g., venture capital) that come with un-controlled bean counters and attorneys attached. While that latter limitation will seem to some to be a show-stopper, understand that an engineering entrepreneur needs to not only engineer technical solutions to meet their vision, but also engineer business models and structures to meet that same vision. For an example, read The Great Game of Business and A Stake in the Outcome by Jack Stack and Bo Burlingham.
Eric S. Raymond (ESR) commented on Microsoft's OOXML tactics as they relate to their proposed open source licenses in a OSI blog entry.
I agree pretty much with his position. If the playing field were anything near to level, I would have no issue in evaluating Microsoft's license submissions purely on their merits, just like any other license. However, I have difficulty in reconciling Microsoft wanting to be treated fairly by OSI with Microsoft's tactics in their attempts to ram OOXML through ISO. If Microsoft can game the ISO approval process, shouldn't it be fair for us to game the OSI approval process?
And what if you blame both (i.e., big governments and big corporations)? Y'know, the whole "absolute power corrupts absolutely" thing?
I'm not trying to be snide. It's just that the choice between progressive vs. libertarian seems to be a choice based upon tactics for mitigating power, not a choice between the source of the power.
Maybe I need to invent a "smallitarian" movement... :-)
Read up on Standard Oil or other classic antitrust cases sometime.
In other words, another means besides government grant to have a monopoly is to achieve the end through illegal means.
I'm all for using YouTube as a source of questions for presidential debates. This, however, is one question that I'm not sure you really want asked in that setting.
When you get down to it, debates are a serious of candidate sound bites strung together. On any expected question — and evolution is likely to be expected — they'll have their pat answer. In this case, I'd expect at least one to say something like this:
This is a nice sound bite. Given time — say, an hour-long one-on-one or two-on-two debate on the topic — this sound bite can probably be ripped to shreds. In the format of the classic presidential debate, though, this is all you'll get.
Now, candidates have different skill levels and comfort with this sort of thing. So, I can easily see a few candidates coming across as complete firebrands, scoring points with some evangelical Christians and (I'm guessing) losing points with the general populace. But there's going to be one or two who can nail a debate question on evolution, and it's exactly this sort of "policy by sound bite" that has us in our current evolution vs. intelligent design morass.
If you want to use YouTube to skewer a viewpoint, you need to phrase your question as a fait accompli, where there is no good answer, only bad and less-bad. For example, on a different topic, you could ask "how can you justify US-led and US-backed forces killing, torturing, and displacing hundreds of thousands of people, from guerrilla actions in Central America in the 1980's to today's Iraq, in the name of 'enhancing democracy'?". Here, they either admit the US is killing, torturing, and displacing people (while trying to defend 'enhancing democracy') or they try to deny that anything of the sort is happening (which I don't think the public would believe). I'm not sure how you would craft a YouTube question on evolution that gives you that same certainty of embarrassment.
I kinda agree. In some ways, the whole series is a bit like some of Potter's behavior in some of the individual books: wait until April, realize that The Big Bad hasn't been defeated yet, take care of that in a short span of calendar time, then toddle back to Privet Drive.
In this case, I think JKR knew generally how she wanted the series to end, but after Order of the Phoenix, she realized she had a lot of work to do in order to get from Point A (open fighting between Death Eaters/He-Who-Is-Now-Mouldy and the Order) and Point B (and now...Mouldiness). Hence, the heavy use of pensives and the mental link between Potter and He-Who-Once-Should-Not-Have-Been-Named to fill in a veritable ton of backstory necessary to set up a few devices (e.g., horcruxes). On the one hand, it really felt like the informational equivalent of deus ex machina. On the other hand, I don't know how you'd achieve the particular way the series ended with Potter learning all this stuff in some other way that, while perhaps more in line with previous books' style, would have taken Potter and JKR a ton of time in their own ways. It's conceivable there'd be some other way for Potter to defeat He-Who-Is-Still-Dead-After-Nineteen-Years that wouldn't have required all that backstory, though I haven't the foggiest idea what it might have looked like.
I can't really fault her. I can't quite imagine writing that much fiction and having it all hang together.
Though I'm glad to see I'm not the only one struggling to figure out how in blazes the sword got to Hogwarts...
While the subtitle for Karl Fogel's _Producing Open Source Software_ is "How to Run a Successful Free Software Project", the reviews on Amazon suggest it is good for participants as well. It's available for free at http://producingoss.com/ and is fairly inexpensive if you want it in paper form. I worked with Mr. Fogel at CollabNet and he's first-rate at this, so while I haven't read the book (it's on my to-be-read pile...), I suspect it may prove useful to you.
Please tell me this is the work of a deranged spokesperson and not really the thoughts of an elected chief of state.
He seems to equate "climate changes" to "temperature". There are other aspects to climate change (e.g., CO2 levels) that, if the data is to be believed, have been far from "small" over the past several million years.
Those concerned about this issue are pursuing political means in democracies to have the issue addressed. How exactly is this "suppression"? Or do you prefer governments where citizens have no say?
Even libertarians, who are big on "everyone to live as he wants", recognize that one individual's rights end at the point where they infringe upon the rights of others (e.g., survival).
"Never". I do not believe that word means what he thinks it does.
By, um, not talking about it? Uh, OK. You go first.
I have no problem with the first sentence. In the abstract, I have no problem with the second sentence either, so long as he agrees that if society decides to take steps to deal with the perceived problem of global warming, that is society's prerogative (in democracies) and therefore does not represent an attempt to "slow...down" or "divert" human society.
I have this vision of him with fingers in his ears, saying loudly, "I CAN'T HEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAR YOU!"...
I mean, c'mon. The Wikipedia article on global warming has 66 citations, mostly scientific journals and reports, mostly in agreement with the "consensus", and the Wikipedia article on those in opposition to the "consensus" has 53 citations. All the President of the Czech Republic can do is one professor from MIT and...Michael Crichton? Even if the FT.com article isn't the place for such citations, couldn't he have gotten StopStoppingGlobalWarming.cz or something and put better arguments up there?
I'm all for debate on global warming. I'm opposed to mindless drivel from politicians.
Just because third-party apps are pre-installed by Palm doesn't mean it's an open system, at least in my parlance. An open system would be if Jane Q. Programmer could write an app and install it on the device.
A 2.5-pound notebook running Linux with WiFi and Bluetooth sounds sweet...but one report says it's a closed system, which means until somebody hacks past that limitation, it's a dead-end. For about $500, I'm expecting at least a mostly-open system (like Maemo with the Nokia N800).
TFA says plug-in hybrids are "years away", but I would imagine they'd have at least that level of technology going by 2020. The Prius is a PZEV, which, while not a ZEV, is as close as a mainstream car gets AFAIK.
Hybrid technology is not incompatible with H2/fuelcell. I interpret "hybrid" as "bank of batteries, a drivetrain that can use multiple sources of locomotive force, and regenerative braking". If you have a fuel cell providing electricity, it's basically charging the batteries and the regenerative braking still is a benefit. And, to top it off, TFA is a whopping four paragraphs, so who knows what else was said that didn't get reported.
When I was a wee tot, I remember seeing a single-panel _Dennis The Menace_ cartoon. The cartoon itself had Dennis' father at a boardroom-type table with a few other people, his briefcase open, and various parts spilling out. The caption was something like "Gentlemen, our new bathroom scale did not pass the 'Dennis test'. We cannot refer to it as 'unbreakable'".
Since then, whenever I've heard about something claiming to be unbreakable, I picture a very broken bathroom scale...
Mike Masnick covers all this quite nicely in his attempt to explain how Old Media "should encourage people to get their content for free". Old Media does not have to die at the hands of the "whiners", as you eloquently put it, though some may choose (business) suicide rather than change. To quote from Mr. Masnick's summary:
To quote from the xDebate wiki:
I'm not saying that voter coercion is a good thing, but I think society needs a deeper discussion as to whether anonymous voting is all happiness and puppies. I only ever hear the negative consequences of attributable voting, never any positives. I'm no expert, but I'd sure like the experts to ponder the issue...
In the FLOSS arena, I've long been a fan of joint copyright assignment, such as the one used by Sun and OpenOffice.org [pdf]. I'm not sure if there are any potential pitfalls for doing this in the client-freelancer scenario. But, in theory, it gives both parties carte blanche to do what they want.
I'll get to business use of shared calendars later. Bear in mind that there are many other scenarios, outside of businesses, where shared calendars can be useful, such as:
None of those require "project management and work time allocation". Particularly since the OP didn't say these were corporate shared calendars, it's not safe for you to assume that's the only place they'd be used.
Agreed, but not all businesses are created equal. I suspect there's some sort of heuristic where the odds of "meetingitus" increases with the square of the number of employees per office, or some such. In other words, all else being equal, smaller businesses don't necessarily over-meeting themselves (though PHBs can increase meeting frequency in businesses of any size, etc.). While having a shared calendar that tied into project management would be nice, I wouldn't "throw out the baby with the bath water" and eschew shared calendars outright without corporate-wide project management tools.
Applying QoS across the board on all known P2P applications would not be a violation of net neutrality. Arguably, neither would applying QoS for a single standard (de facto or de jure) protocol, like BitTorrent.
What would be a violation of net neutrality would be if they applied QoS to BitTorrent, except to certain sites that paid the university a fee.
Obligatory Wikipedia link.
It's a fine example of the Streisand Effect in action.
I'm beginning to think we're going to have to work up a check-off-the-problems sheet for these new authentication schemes like we pass around for anti-spam "solutions".
Here, I see two problems off the cuff:
Color me unimpressed. Is it an incremental improvement over plain passwords? Yes, but not enough to go with a $34,000 plus $1.15/user fee structure, as cited in the article.
Match you, raise you a decade.
Your commentary regarding the "financial sector" seems accurate based on my experience in that industry. Please understand that the "financial sector", on a pure population basis, is miniscule, so what may be necessary for that particular niche may not be necessary for the wide array of other niches that make up the Big Wide World.
By that token, a "CEO of an S&P 500, S&P MidCap, S&P SmallCap, etc. corporation is not going to risk his publicly traded corporation's entire" physical infrastructure (the "skeleton" of the organization, if you will) to steel girders, which have only been around for a handful of decades. Real people use mud brick!
In other words, firms large and small make countless infrastructure selections. Age of the firm is one small criterion. Availability of substitutes is another. There are many more criteria that get taken into account. Age isn't the one-and-only criterion. If it were, major firms wouldn't ever write their own software, since by definition that software hasn't been tested nearly as much as whatever process the software is replacing.
In your situation, Tucows is closer to eNom, with domainsnare.net serving in the RegisterFly role. Apparently, RegisterFly used to be an eNom reseller, got dumped by eNom, then went through various gyrations en route to being canned by ICANN.
From your description, it sounds like Tucows doesn't handle deadbeat resellers as well as eNom (which apparently contacted RegisterFly's customers and gave them transfer options). However, I don't think the actions of a single deadbeat reseller should cause the "death penalty" from ICANN against Tucows. If this is a pattern, and Tucows has lots of deadbeat sellers, I'd be interested in pointers to them -- I'm thinking of becoming a reseller myself and had been leaning towards Tucows over eNom based on other reviews.