There are many other OS licenses besides the GPL. If you run on Linux, likely the minimum you are doing is connecting to the kernel via system calls (either you rolled your own routines, or linked with libc). Linus has stated that this not covered by the GPL on the kernel and glibc is available under an LGPL license that explicitly allows such linking. Apache and PostgreSQL are not covered by the GPL, but by a BSD style license. Connect away...
The most interesting grey area for me is when you have a protocol where the GPL'd software acts as a server and the proprietary stuff is a client connecting via the protocol. If I write a driver that, on one side, uses whatever wire protocol MySQL handles, and on the other provides a standards compliant ODBC implementation, where is (or should be) the boundry between what must be released under the GPL and what can remain proprietary. Everything? Just the driver? Nothing? I assume my driver does not link with any MySQL GPL'd libs, but that I reverse engineered or maybe just read the code and provided my own implementation of the wire protocol. If I have linked the driver against a GPL'd lib that provides the wire protocol, then it might seem more clear cut.
Except that similar cases might arise out of CORBA style distributed code. If the IDL and the server implementation is GPL'd, then does the act of running an IDL compiler on the GPL'd IDL to create client stubs force me to release my proprietary client code that is linked with those stubs? Is this different from providing a GPL'd.so style lib that one links against just to access the wire protocol?
But what I don't understand is why so many people know so little about Iraq.
Especially yourself.
If there is a democracy in Iraq the ones who will be elected will be shiites leader... And the first thing they will do is transform Iraq into an islamic state like Iran.
You haven't been paying attention. Most of the Shi'ite leaders in Iraq have said that they do not want a theocracy dominated Islamic Republic like the one in Iran. The theocracy in Iran is despised by most Iranians at present. The Ayatollas spend too much time worrying about Islamic morality and not enough time figuring out how to provide jobs for the unemployed. The Islamic leadership in Iraq can read the handwriting and don't want to get caught in the same trap as the Iranian leadership. Iraq is also a nation with some very significant minorities (Kurds, Sunni Arab, Chaldean Christians). The Shi'ite leadership in Iraq wants to preserve Iraq as a whole nation. They recognize that if they impose an Iranian style Islamic Republic, they will likely have a civil war on their hands.
OK, two caveats. First, there are minority views in the Shi'ite community who do want an Islamic Republic, but they seem to be just that: a minority. Second, the majority also seems to want some kind of nod toward Islam in the Constitution. But before you get too bent out of shape, several West European nations have official churches (IIRC, Norway has the Lutherans and England the Church of England), so would an official acknowledgement that Islam is the religion of Iraq be that different from official practice in the West?
Next paper I publish I'm gonna use this as the disclaimer:
The author would like to thank Dr. X, Dr. Y, and 2 anonymous referees for several helpful suggestions. But while the author is delighted to share credit for any useful ideas in the present paper, he selfishly insists on retaining full blame for any errors or ommisions.
Just compare the planning for the NATO interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo with the near total lack of planning for the intervention in Iraq. One example is to compare the large number of civilian police that were lined up and waiting to move into Kosovo immediately after the conflict. There were no pre-war efforts made to recruit international civilian police for post-conflict Iraq.
And no, this isn't a case of 20/20 hindsight. I spent 6 years in a U.S. Army Reserve Civil Affairs Bn. The professionals in the Army who know how to plan for and handle post-conflict problems were simply ignored by Rumsfeld. The outcome was frightningly obvious to those of us who have done this sort of work professionally. The Bush Administration is paying the price for their hubris.
And just in time for this argument is an article in today's NYT about the Chinese company making the Etch-A-Sketch. Some telling quotes:
Today the same toy is made not just for lower wages, but also under significantly harsher working conditions. Kin Ki's workers, in fact, are struggling to obtain rights that their American predecessors at Ohio Art won early in the last century, though the workers are without the aid of independent unions, which remain illegal in China.
Kin Ki stays competitive, workers say, by paying them 24 cents an hour in Shenzhen, where the legal minimum wage is 33 cents. When the Etch A Sketch line shut down in Ohio just after the Christmas rush in 2000, wages for the unionized work force there had reached $9 an hour.
Chinese workers say the company also denies them legally required nonsalary benefits and compels them to work 84 hours a week, far more than the legal maximum, without required overtime pay.
High walls surround Kin Ki's production lines and warehouses. Dormitory windows are covered in chicken wire. Workers must enter and leave through the guarded front gate.
The factory, workers say, operates with the intensity of a military campaign. Production starts at 7:30 a.m., and, breaking only for lunch and dinner, continues until 10 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays are treated as normal workdays, so a work week consists of seven 12-hour days.
"Most of us would work long hours willingly if we were paid according to the law," said one employee. "The way things are now, we can shut up or leave."
Some workers took action against the factory last June and July, refusing to work unless the company raised wages. They also demanded that the daily diet of boiled vegetables, beans and rice be improved and supplemented more often with pork, fish or some other meat, which they say is served just twice a month.
The company responded by raising wages by a few cents a day, workers said. The canteen allotted each worker an extra dish each day, though no more meat.
But managers made "fried squid" of two workers they singled out as strike leaders, workers said, using a popular term for dismissals.
The company acknowledged having significant labor problems. "I know that I need to increase wages and to comply with the law," Mr. Tao said. "I have the intention of doing this and will raise all wages in 2004."
He also acknowledged that workers had gone on strike. But he denied that Kin Ki had dismissed the two ringleaders. He said they "were well known troublemakers" who left the factory of their own accord.
<sarcasm>Yeah right, Mr. Tao. Of course they left on their own accord.</sarcasm> This is a prime example of why independent unions are a necessity in both developed and developing countries. It also shows exactly why unions make it so hard for an employer to fire workers. This is one of the problems that unions in developed countries are trying to address by insisting that free trade and globalization include safeguards to protect both the rights of workers and the environment.
I have read US history, you arrogant little shit... If people want to unionize, fine. Does the company have the right to put workers in the bullpen or under lockdown like in the 1930s? Hell no! Does it have the right to fire the workers if they can't perform? Hell yes.
No, you pathetic pile of parrot droppings, you have NOT read US history or at the very least you did not learn anything from what little you did read. Just who will decide that those workers are not performing? The employer? That is just another way of letting the employer fire anyone who is trying to organize a union. All the employer has to say is that the employee wasn't working up to standard and no one is allowed to argue. This is why union rules make it tough to fire someone.
This is the government we're talking about, not a robber baron corporation. If I want a government employee to be paid more, I'll vote for it. If you really believe in democracy, I'm sure you'll love that notion.
An employer is an employer is an employer whether private or public. They do not care about their employees. They will pay as little as they can get away with, refuse to provide benefits, and ignore worker safety and health issues whenever they can. Off hand, I can think of several recent examples. The US Gov't refused to do anything about soldiers who contracted Gulf War Syndrome, or earlier, those who were dosed with Agent Orange in Vietnam. They ignored complaints from workers at DOE weapons facilities who were exposed to all kinds of nasty chemicals in order to make sure that we had a large stockpile of bombs. The Air Traffic Controllers who were fired by Reagan when they struck because they were concerned that unsafe working conditions could lead to an airplane disaster. There have been several recent incidents of cafeteria and secretarial workers at public universities who have gone on strike seeking a living wage. Teachers often have to go on strike in order to obtain decent wages and reasonable limits on the ratio of students to teachers. The list of public transgressions against their employees is quite lengthy.
A lot of the union issues today are totally different from what happened 70 frigging years ago.
No, they are not. They are most often the very same issues: worker health and safety and the right to a living wage.
In the past things may have been much worse for manual laborers, but in part due to unionization things have changed. The unions though, have changed as well and as you stated are using their power to perpeptuate itself well past the time when they were still necessary.
Tell that to all of the IT and manufacturing workers who have lost their jobs due to outsourcing to low cost labor mkts. Today unions are working hard to make sure that globalization includes safeguards against sweatshops in underdeveloped countries. Nothing has changed. The folks with capital are doing the very same things in underdeveloped countries they did in the US 50-100 years ago and thereby causing the very same problems in both the developed and the underdeveloped countries for folks without access to capital. Unions are still very necessary.
If they purpose of unions is to lobby for a small group of workers at the expense of the people who pay them (taxpayers in this case) then HELL YES, people will be against them.
Another idiot who has never studied US history. Go read up on working conditions and pay rates for workers in the mining, steel, auto, and other industries from the start of the industrial revolution until the 1930s when much of the union legislation was finally passed. The industrial barons behaved like feudal lords and treated their employees like serfs. It wasn't unusual for the capitalists to convince the Govt to send in soldiers when the employees tried to form unions to do exactly what you say we would be against: lobby for better working conditions and pay rates.
If you can't do the government's work on the government's terms, you don't get the government's pay. And yes, this is a democratic notion.
"Yeah," says the employer, "here are our terms: You will work 18 hour days and will be paid $1 per day. And since the unemployment rate is so high, if you don't like those terms, we can always find someone else who will do the work for those terms." Sounds real democratic to me.
Unions are a democratic institution that provide an important check on the otherwise overwhelming power of those with access to capital to impose inhumane working conditions on those without access to capital. And history shows that the powerful will always try and impose their will on those without power in order to perpetuate that power. In this sense, governments as employers are no different than private employers.
Too labor intensive. Columbus, OH where I live often has problems finding enough poll workers. Ballots can be very large when you have races for municpal, state, and federal offices (judges, county engineer, auditor, dog catcher, council, reps, executives - its a long list) plus ballot isues to deal with.
To elaborate, I always thought that a democracy was a government system where every eligible citizen voted on every issue, while a republic was a system where the individual citizens chose representatives to do the work of government for them.
My parents were heavily involved in politics in Oak Ridge, Tennessee from the late 1960s. From roughly the 1920s until Estes Kefauver and Al Gore, Sr. broke their back in the 1950s, the Crump Machine ran TN politics the way the Daley Machine ran Chicago. The bizarre thing about the Crumps was that they were a Democratic machine in West and Middle TN and a Republican machine in East TN (goes back to the Civil War, East TN was pro Union). The remnants of this bunch still ran Roane County until 1970. The end of the local bunch came when my parents helped build a county wide coalition to oppose the machine in the local elections of 1970 (IIRC). The coalition had left wing McGovern types, Segregationist George Wallace American Party members, and right wing Republicans who thought Richard Nixon could do no wrong. The one thing this disparate group had in common was a desire for honest elections and honest local government. Although nowhere near as dramatic as the Battle for McMinn County, Tennessee, winning did require the coalition to liberate some of the ballot boxes from machine clutches in order to have a fair accounting of votes.
Having personally witnessed what can be required to prevent election shenanigans by dishonest politicians, I want open voting systems with auditable paper trails.
Maybe you should re-read The Fedora(TM) Project's press release...
There is substantial evidence for prior use of the name Fedora(TM) by the Cornell and Virginia teams starting in 1998. This includes published papers, web sites, software releases, and public presentations.
You can deduce an awful lot about classified matters if you can gather enough sensitive but unclassified data. Much as I despise Admiral Poindexter of Iran-Contra and DODs Total Information Awareness Program, he has quite rightly pointed out this problem in the past. But his proposed cure, which involves stopping the publication of some scientific research among other things, is likely worse than the disease.
... but it is by far not the idea to become a Superpower, at least not in the sense people see the US.
The US did not start out to become a Superpower, at least not in the sense people see the US today. But power has a way of becoming a means to its own end. Do you really think France and Germany want power to do good works throughout the world? If so, you are naive. They want power in order to persue their own national interests. Interests like selling goods and services to some of the worst dictators around the world. Remember, it was the Europeans who created many of the messes in the Middle East, Africa, and much of Asia in the first place. Why do you think they have changed?
It was more complex than just physics vs. physics. Biology and NASA were also competitors for the funding. Bio sciences got the human genome sequencing and NASA got the ISS. If we had funded the SSC in addition, then you can bet that there would have been large cutbacks in most other areas of pure research. Even if these big projects were funded with special appropriations, they still all come out of the same pie.
I skipped the third one. Maybe I should watch it. Everything in the first two hours could have been said in ten minutes:
There are the 4 forces of the apoclypse and everyone thinks that they are probably related, but since no one could figure out how gravity fit in with the other three, unification became a backwater of physics and Einstein was past his prime anyway. Then string theory came along based on Euler's equation and maybe it can unify all 4 forces. Of course string theory is philosophy and not really physics at all since it doesn't have any observable consequenses.
Works fine. The only HW specific tweaks IIRC are those you choose for your kernel. So build all the modules and write a script that lets you choose which ones you really want when you boot your CD. Et voila, your own distro.
You might be making an apples to oranges comparison. Most of the PBS programs seem to be produced by a particular local PBS affiliate while most commercial broadcasting is produced (or bought from independent studios) by the network, not by the local affiliate. A proper comparison would add the local affiliate budgets to the network budget for both PBS and the networks. I'll bet PBS as a whole looks pathetic in comparison to NBC, ABC, CBS, or Fox.
Think harder. Many new and very legitimate companies use telemarketing and SPAM. I'm not saying this is a good thing, only that there are deeper issues. This guy makes a pretty good argument.
This discriminates against new companies seeking to get the word out about their hot new products. Old companies with established business relationships would be given a permanent edge over new upstart competitors.
Actually, the ruling was quite reasonable. What the ruling specified was that the Gov't could not block one kind of speech (commercial) and leave other types (charity, political, polsters, etc.) alone without a compelling reason. The ruling is based on a Cincinnati, OH court case where the city tried to force free commercial advertisement-only papers to remove their distribution racks from city streets in order to reduce litter without making real newspapers remove theirs. There was no proof that the advertisement-only papers created any more litter than did the newspapers and thus no compelling reason to single out the commercial speech for special restrictions.
Slashdot Mirror
There are many other OS licenses besides the GPL. If you run on Linux, likely the minimum you are doing is connecting to the kernel via system calls (either you rolled your own routines, or linked with libc). Linus has stated that this not covered by the GPL on the kernel and glibc is available under an LGPL license that explicitly allows such linking. Apache and PostgreSQL are not covered by the GPL, but by a BSD style license. Connect away...
.so style lib that one links against just to access the wire protocol?
The most interesting grey area for me is when you have a protocol where the GPL'd software acts as a server and the proprietary stuff is a client connecting via the protocol. If I write a driver that, on one side, uses whatever wire protocol MySQL handles, and on the other provides a standards compliant ODBC implementation, where is (or should be) the boundry between what must be released under the GPL and what can remain proprietary. Everything? Just the driver? Nothing? I assume my driver does not link with any MySQL GPL'd libs, but that I reverse engineered or maybe just read the code and provided my own implementation of the wire protocol. If I have linked the driver against a GPL'd lib that provides the wire protocol, then it might seem more clear cut.
Except that similar cases might arise out of CORBA style distributed code. If the IDL and the server implementation is GPL'd, then does the act of running an IDL compiler on the GPL'd IDL to create client stubs force me to release my proprietary client code that is linked with those stubs? Is this different from providing a GPL'd
But what I don't understand is why so many people know so little about Iraq.
Especially yourself.
If there is a democracy in Iraq the ones who will be elected will be shiites leader... And the first thing they will do is transform Iraq into an islamic state like Iran.
You haven't been paying attention. Most of the Shi'ite leaders in Iraq have said that they do not want a theocracy dominated Islamic Republic like the one in Iran. The theocracy in Iran is despised by most Iranians at present. The Ayatollas spend too much time worrying about Islamic morality and not enough time figuring out how to provide jobs for the unemployed. The Islamic leadership in Iraq can read the handwriting and don't want to get caught in the same trap as the Iranian leadership. Iraq is also a nation with some very significant minorities (Kurds, Sunni Arab, Chaldean Christians). The Shi'ite leadership in Iraq wants to preserve Iraq as a whole nation. They recognize that if they impose an Iranian style Islamic Republic, they will likely have a civil war on their hands.
OK, two caveats. First, there are minority views in the Shi'ite community who do want an Islamic Republic, but they seem to be just that: a minority. Second, the majority also seems to want some kind of nod toward Islam in the Constitution. But before you get too bent out of shape, several West European nations have official churches (IIRC, Norway has the Lutherans and England the Church of England), so would an official acknowledgement that Islam is the religion of Iraq be that different from official practice in the West?
Next paper I publish I'm gonna use this as the disclaimer:
The author would like to thank Dr. X, Dr. Y, and 2 anonymous referees for several helpful suggestions. But while the author is delighted to share credit for any useful ideas in the present paper, he selfishly insists on retaining full blame for any errors or ommisions.
Just compare the planning for the NATO interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo with the near total lack of planning for the intervention in Iraq. One example is to compare the large number of civilian police that were lined up and waiting to move into Kosovo immediately after the conflict. There were no pre-war efforts made to recruit international civilian police for post-conflict Iraq.
And no, this isn't a case of 20/20 hindsight. I spent 6 years in a U.S. Army Reserve Civil Affairs Bn. The professionals in the Army who know how to plan for and handle post-conflict problems were simply ignored by Rumsfeld. The outcome was frightningly obvious to those of us who have done this sort of work professionally. The Bush Administration is paying the price for their hubris.
And just in time for this argument is an article in today's NYT about the Chinese company making the Etch-A-Sketch. Some telling quotes:
Today the same toy is made not just for lower wages, but also under significantly harsher working conditions. Kin Ki's workers, in fact, are struggling to obtain rights that their American predecessors at Ohio Art won early in the last century, though the workers are without the aid of independent unions, which remain illegal in China.
Kin Ki stays competitive, workers say, by paying them 24 cents an hour in Shenzhen, where the legal minimum wage is 33 cents. When the Etch A Sketch line shut down in Ohio just after the Christmas rush in 2000, wages for the unionized work force there had reached $9 an hour.
Chinese workers say the company also denies them legally required nonsalary benefits and compels them to work 84 hours a week, far more than the legal maximum, without required overtime pay.
High walls surround Kin Ki's production lines and warehouses. Dormitory windows are covered in chicken wire. Workers must enter and leave through the guarded front gate.
The factory, workers say, operates with the intensity of a military campaign. Production starts at 7:30 a.m., and, breaking only for lunch and dinner, continues until 10 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays are treated as normal workdays, so a work week consists of seven 12-hour days.
"Most of us would work long hours willingly if we were paid according to the law," said one employee. "The way things are now, we can shut up or leave."
Some workers took action against the factory last June and July, refusing to work unless the company raised wages. They also demanded that the daily diet of boiled vegetables, beans and rice be improved and supplemented more often with pork, fish or some other meat, which they say is served just twice a month.
The company responded by raising wages by a few cents a day, workers said. The canteen allotted each worker an extra dish each day, though no more meat.
But managers made "fried squid" of two workers they singled out as strike leaders, workers said, using a popular term for dismissals.
The company acknowledged having significant labor problems. "I know that I need to increase wages and to comply with the law," Mr. Tao said. "I have the intention of doing this and will raise all wages in 2004."
He also acknowledged that workers had gone on strike. But he denied that Kin Ki had dismissed the two ringleaders. He said they "were well known troublemakers" who left the factory of their own accord.
<sarcasm>Yeah right, Mr. Tao. Of course they left on their own accord.</sarcasm> This is a prime example of why independent unions are a necessity in both developed and developing countries. It also shows exactly why unions make it so hard for an employer to fire workers. This is one of the problems that unions in developed countries are trying to address by insisting that free trade and globalization include safeguards to protect both the rights of workers and the environment.
I have read US history, you arrogant little shit. .. If people want to unionize, fine. Does the company have the right to put workers in the bullpen or under lockdown like in the 1930s? Hell no! Does it have the right to fire the workers if they can't perform? Hell yes.
No, you pathetic pile of parrot droppings, you have NOT read US history or at the very least you did not learn anything from what little you did read. Just who will decide that those workers are not performing? The employer? That is just another way of letting the employer fire anyone who is trying to organize a union. All the employer has to say is that the employee wasn't working up to standard and no one is allowed to argue. This is why union rules make it tough to fire someone.
This is the government we're talking about, not a robber baron corporation. If I want a government employee to be paid more, I'll vote for it. If you really believe in democracy, I'm sure you'll love that notion.
An employer is an employer is an employer whether private or public. They do not care about their employees. They will pay as little as they can get away with, refuse to provide benefits, and ignore worker safety and health issues whenever they can. Off hand, I can think of several recent examples. The US Gov't refused to do anything about soldiers who contracted Gulf War Syndrome, or earlier, those who were dosed with Agent Orange in Vietnam. They ignored complaints from workers at DOE weapons facilities who were exposed to all kinds of nasty chemicals in order to make sure that we had a large stockpile of bombs. The Air Traffic Controllers who were fired by Reagan when they struck because they were concerned that unsafe working conditions could lead to an airplane disaster. There have been several recent incidents of cafeteria and secretarial workers at public universities who have gone on strike seeking a living wage. Teachers often have to go on strike in order to obtain decent wages and reasonable limits on the ratio of students to teachers. The list of public transgressions against their employees is quite lengthy.
A lot of the union issues today are totally different from what happened 70 frigging years ago.
No, they are not. They are most often the very same issues: worker health and safety and the right to a living wage.
In the past things may have been much worse for manual laborers, but in part due to unionization things have changed. The unions though, have changed as well and as you stated are using their power to perpeptuate itself well past the time when they were still necessary.
Tell that to all of the IT and manufacturing workers who have lost their jobs due to outsourcing to low cost labor mkts. Today unions are working hard to make sure that globalization includes safeguards against sweatshops in underdeveloped countries. Nothing has changed. The folks with capital are doing the very same things in underdeveloped countries they did in the US 50-100 years ago and thereby causing the very same problems in both the developed and the underdeveloped countries for folks without access to capital. Unions are still very necessary.
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss...
If they purpose of unions is to lobby for a small group of workers at the expense of the people who pay them (taxpayers in this case) then HELL YES, people will be against them.
Another idiot who has never studied US history. Go read up on working conditions and pay rates for workers in the mining, steel, auto, and other industries from the start of the industrial revolution until the 1930s when much of the union legislation was finally passed. The industrial barons behaved like feudal lords and treated their employees like serfs. It wasn't unusual for the capitalists to convince the Govt to send in soldiers when the employees tried to form unions to do exactly what you say we would be against: lobby for better working conditions and pay rates.
If you can't do the government's work on the government's terms, you don't get the government's pay. And yes, this is a democratic notion.
"Yeah," says the employer, "here are our terms: You will work 18 hour days and will be paid $1 per day. And since the unemployment rate is so high, if you don't like those terms, we can always find someone else who will do the work for those terms." Sounds real democratic to me.
Unions are a democratic institution that provide an important check on the otherwise overwhelming power of those with access to capital to impose inhumane working conditions on those without access to capital. And history shows that the powerful will always try and impose their will on those without power in order to perpetuate that power. In this sense, governments as employers are no different than private employers.
Too labor intensive. Columbus, OH where I live often has problems finding enough poll workers. Ballots can be very large when you have races for municpal, state, and federal offices (judges, county engineer, auditor, dog catcher, council, reps, executives - its a long list) plus ballot isues to deal with.
To elaborate, I always thought that a democracy was a government system where every eligible citizen voted on every issue, while a republic was a system where the individual citizens chose representatives to do the work of government for them.
My parents were heavily involved in politics in Oak Ridge, Tennessee from the late 1960s. From roughly the 1920s until Estes Kefauver and Al Gore, Sr. broke their back in the 1950s, the Crump Machine ran TN politics the way the Daley Machine ran Chicago. The bizarre thing about the Crumps was that they were a Democratic machine in West and Middle TN and a Republican machine in East TN (goes back to the Civil War, East TN was pro Union). The remnants of this bunch still ran Roane County until 1970. The end of the local bunch came when my parents helped build a county wide coalition to oppose the machine in the local elections of 1970 (IIRC). The coalition had left wing McGovern types, Segregationist George Wallace American Party members, and right wing Republicans who thought Richard Nixon could do no wrong. The one thing this disparate group had in common was a desire for honest elections and honest local government. Although nowhere near as dramatic as the Battle for McMinn County, Tennessee, winning did require the coalition to liberate some of the ballot boxes from machine clutches in order to have a fair accounting of votes.
Having personally witnessed what can be required to prevent election shenanigans by dishonest politicians, I want open voting systems with auditable paper trails.
Maybe you should re-read The Fedora(TM) Project's press release...
There is substantial evidence for prior use of the name Fedora(TM) by the Cornell and Virginia teams starting in 1998. This includes published papers, web sites, software releases, and public presentations.
You can deduce an awful lot about classified matters if you can gather enough sensitive but unclassified data. Much as I despise Admiral Poindexter of Iran-Contra and DODs Total Information Awareness Program, he has quite rightly pointed out this problem in the past. But his proposed cure, which involves stopping the publication of some scientific research among other things, is likely worse than the disease.
... but it is by far not the idea to become a Superpower, at least not in the sense people see the US.
The US did not start out to become a Superpower, at least not in the sense people see the US today. But power has a way of becoming a means to its own end. Do you really think France and Germany want power to do good works throughout the world? If so, you are naive. They want power in order to persue their own national interests. Interests like selling goods and services to some of the worst dictators around the world. Remember, it was the Europeans who created many of the messes in the Middle East, Africa, and much of Asia in the first place. Why do you think they have changed?
It was more complex than just physics vs. physics. Biology and NASA were also competitors for the funding. Bio sciences got the human genome sequencing and NASA got the ISS. If we had funded the SSC in addition, then you can bet that there would have been large cutbacks in most other areas of pure research. Even if these big projects were funded with special appropriations, they still all come out of the same pie.
I skipped the third one. Maybe I should watch it. Everything in the first two hours could have been said in ten minutes:
There are the 4 forces of the apoclypse and everyone thinks that they are probably related, but since no one could figure out how gravity fit in with the other three, unification became a backwater of physics and Einstein was past his prime anyway. Then string theory came along based on Euler's equation and maybe it can unify all 4 forces. Of course string theory is philosophy and not really physics at all since it doesn't have any observable consequenses.
Did I leave anything out?
Works fine. The only HW specific tweaks IIRC are those you choose for your kernel. So build all the modules and write a script that lets you choose which ones you really want when you boot your CD. Et voila, your own distro.
The books are nearly 60 years old and he's [PJ] read them a zillion times
Tht's the problem. He only read them. The movies should have been directed by someone who fell in love with the books.
Not if they use Tomcat as a template.
This is why the Matrix will always be just SciFi. Everyone is too busy writing clocks to write AI bots.
You might be making an apples to oranges comparison. Most of the PBS programs seem to be produced by a particular local PBS affiliate while most commercial broadcasting is produced (or bought from independent studios) by the network, not by the local affiliate. A proper comparison would add the local affiliate budgets to the network budget for both PBS and the networks. I'll bet PBS as a whole looks pathetic in comparison to NBC, ABC, CBS, or Fox.
No, on average, half of us are only half as smart as we should like, and half of us are only half as dumb as we deserve.
Think harder. Many new and very legitimate companies use telemarketing and SPAM. I'm not saying this is a good thing, only that there are deeper issues. This guy makes a pretty good argument.
This discriminates against new companies seeking to get the word out about their hot new products. Old companies with established business relationships would be given a permanent edge over new upstart competitors.
Actually, the ruling was quite reasonable. What the ruling specified was that the Gov't could not block one kind of speech (commercial) and leave other types (charity, political, polsters, etc.) alone without a compelling reason. The ruling is based on a Cincinnati, OH court case where the city tried to force free commercial advertisement-only papers to remove their distribution racks from city streets in order to reduce litter without making real newspapers remove theirs. There was no proof that the advertisement-only papers created any more litter than did the newspapers and thus no compelling reason to single out the commercial speech for special restrictions.