Could this be the difference between people crafting systems for research/scientific purposes vs. corps crafting them for money?
Oh, I very much think so. And, in fact, it is profitable not to get it "right": it gets you to market faster and it lets you sell upgrades later.
Good technology and good business often don't align at all. That's just a fact about market economies. You can't blame any individual company for putting out bad products if it makes them money. Microsoft, for example, is behaving rationally. If there is blame to be placed at all, it's with customers, who end up supporting bad products by making uninformed and short-sighted choices.
Shoot, if you want to go by the criteria, the computing industry has been stagnant since the mid 80's.
Yes, that is exactly my point.
We have spent the last 20 years following Microsoft's journey of self-discovery, as Gates and Microsoft employees have slowly come up to speed on computer technology, starting from a state of nearly complete ignorance. The reason why they have been so successful in the market is because their ignorance was a perfect match to the ignorance of the public. That meant that Microsoft's "discoveries" always was a pretty good match for what the public was ready for.
Now, in 2003, Microsoft is finally beginning to approach the state of the art in a few areas.
Now, Linux, instead of one office suite and one photoshop work-alike has two of each. That kind of shell game is also how Windows gets a lot of its books and software: slight variations and repackaging of some core software and functionality.
As long as those people don't come back and claim that they own the free software, it really doesn't do much harm and it exposes more people to it. That doesn't make it right, of course, but perhaps one shouldn't be so uptight about it.
eBay is removing the listings. Maybe if you complain more vigorously, they will inform the buyer and let him know that he doesn't have to go through with the transaction.
Beyond that, it's a copyright violation, and you have the same rights as anybody else with copyright (I don't see any relationship to the DMCA). That is to say, in practice, not a whole lot of rights unless you are really big.
I don't see a moral dilemma with using every law available to enforce your license. It is perfectly consistent and rational to take advantage of a particular law while at the same time arguing that the existence of the law is detrimental to society.
It will make me doubt all those "save the rain forest" tree-huggers.
Those "tree-huggers" are trying to save forests up north as well.
And in both cases, the reason for saving forests is not that one or the other is the world champion at fixing carbon dioxide, it's that they are large, complex, and irreplaceable eco-systems.
If I understand the pictures correctly, it's amazing to see how much carbon is converted in the northern hemisphere...
No, you don't understand those pictures correctly. You should be looking at "net primary productivity", not the June snapshot.
Check your older Slashdot science stories. Experiments have already shown that neutrinos oscillate, and that means that they have mass (or we really have to change physics). Also, see here.
However, neutrinos are not sufficient to account for dark matter, and dark matter itself is not sufficient to account for the observed deviations of the shapes of galaxies from what is expected.
This is a HUGE advantage that a lot of OSS people simply don't have;
Quite to the contrary: open source software that has a user community actually keeps going and going and going.
whoever's coding NiftyApp gets bored around version 0.64 and drops it, and meanwhile, some other guys is making GniftyApp 0.4
That's because NiftyApps is not where the meat of open source is happening. The meat is happening with the kernel, the servers, and the libraries. Those have large user communities, and large developer communities, and they don't just disappear. End user apps, on the other hand, are mostly trivial hacks on top of that (and if they aren't, they should be). End user apps are driven by fashion--they should change every few years.
On the other side of the pond, Microsoft will let something fail, and fail, and fail, tweak, twist, fix, and then they have something worth having.
If you compare the 20+ year history of Microsoft to the much younger open source movement,
Open source software has a much longer history than 20 years. Software, in a sense, started out open source as hardware companies didn't view it as being very valuable.
I think it may be fair to say that there's been more technical innovation from Microsoft.
And what would that "technical innovation" be? Just about every single product category, UI idea, feature, or technology Microsoft is using and touting was invented elsewhere: the GUI, the spreadsheet, WYSIWYG word processing, speech recognition, handwriting recognition, databases, networking, web browsing, etc.
I'm no Microsoft fan, but they *have* introduced some real innovations. Cheap, shared-SCSI-bus clustering comes to mind,
I'm sorry, I don't get it. People have been sharing disks via disk interfaces since the 1960's. Microsoft puts a feature into their system that allows this to be done over one specific disk interface (which, not coincidentally, was actually designed to support this). Where is the innovation here? Sounds like engineering to me, driven by marketing ("hey, guys, we need to compete with the mini computers and mainframes on this disk thing").
as does Active Directory (although AD is certainly inspired by NDS).
Again, where is the innovation? We had Kerberos, YP, and NIS, and before that, we had generations of directory services on mainframes.
While Microsoft certainly followed Apple into the era of the GUI, they've made notable improvements to the GUI.
Like what?
There are others, of course;
Please keep going--you haven't named one yet.
only the most rabid anti-MS zealot could claim that they've *never* done *anything* innovative.
Oh, I'm sure they must have done something "innovative", but whatever it was doesn't seem to be related to their bottom line or have had much of an impact on their products.
NT is NOT "based" on VMS. David Cutler lead the design of both and they are sure to share similarities because of it, but one is not BASED on the other and to say that NT is some "clone" of VMS is flat wrong.
NT is "based on" VMS in roughly the same way that Linux is "based on" UNIX: each share a philosophy and feel with their ancestor, but they are actually completely different pieces of software.
But to choose to stop your own logic with this one. POSIX is based on trying to unite SystemV with BSD! Not only that but POSIX itself was started up around 1985, still almost 20 years ago.
The difference is that the people who originally designed the UNIX APIs really did a great job and that their design still holds up after 30 years. Microsoft and Apple throw out their stuff every few years and start over. That's not "innovation", it's just "doing a poor job". And, what do you know, each time they throw things out and start over, they get closer to UNIX.
Name an application, or a feature of the operating system, that is truly innovative?
Name an application or feature on Windows that is "truly innovative".
he other large areas of development (KDE, GNOME, Mozilla, the kernel) are simply trying to catch up to existing commercial software (Windows, IE, Solaris/BSD).
Much of Solaris and BSD are based on open source. Windows uses a lot of open source code (networking, etc.). IE was based on open source software. Commercial software keeps copying original research, often released in open source form. Then, a generation later, open source software takes some tweaks from the commercial software and is accused of "catching up".
Of course, commercial entities can throw huge amounts of money at software development and push out stuff really fast when they have to. Open source development can be very slow in comparison. But with very few exceptions, the commercial software companies are not where the innovation happens. Neither Microsoft nor, for that matter, Apple, have invented much of anything in their corporate history. They have mostly been good at taking research results and turning them into products, sometimes well (Apple), sometimes not so well (Microsoft).
Go find a 12-16 year old girl, put Redhat on her box and then listen to the never ending bitching.
That's what 12-16 year old girls have 12-16 year old boyfriends for, who have ulterior motives for putting up with the bitching.
Write down the issues and you have what Linux needs to own the world:)
Well, more mature nerds do that for wives and parents. From my own personal experience, I have to say that the differences in bitching about Windows, OS X, and Linux from those sources are small compared to the absolute levels of complaints--all of those systems have serious usability problems, and it doesn't look like anybody knows how to fix them.
The raw meritocracy of the Olympics will segregate against GM humans,
Yes, and the way to fix that is to eliminate the "raw meritocracy". The Olympics should be games--a friendly meeting of cultures at which the competition is incidental and for entertainment. Instead, it has become a commercial circus in which a genetic lottery creates a few famous millionaires. The issue of doping and GM humans just exposes the idiocy.
Fortunately, this will take care of itself. When genetically modifying humans allows parents to satisfy the demand of fast runners, big-breasted daughters, and brainy nerds, those attributes will be less valued and less valuable, reducing the incentive for parents to produce them. Also, parents will face some engineering tradeoffs. For example, I suspect that Dolly Parton probably wouldn't have made a good sprinter--at some point, one attribute gets into the way of another.
Human history is rife with aristocide and mob attacks on perceived elites.
<sarcasm>Oh, those poor aristocrats. They were just so superior that all the inferior humans hated them and did them in. Why didn't those stupid peasants eat cake, fight wars, and otherwise leave the clearly superior aristocracy alone?</sarcasm>
Today lawmakers and regulators are eager to ban the technologies that would be needed to create a new breed of intellectually and physically superior people.
I can't figure out whether you are trolling or just plain stupid. Did the whole "master race" thing that happened in the 20th century pass you by? Do you seriously believe that someone with big muscles or the ability to solve puzzles quickly is "superior"? Has it occurred to you that there is probably a reason why the person you consider a weak-minded weakling made it as far in evolution as you? Why bunny rabbits survive and thrive while saber tooth tigers and mammoths died out?
But who's willing to stand up for the rights of this future generation?
Probably the same people who stand up for the rights of people like Einstein, Hawkins, Woods, or Jordan. I mean, those poor people, everybody is discriminating against them.
Until recently, recording times on digital cameras were limited to at most a few minutes by the size of an internal buffer, no matter how big your memory stick or CF card was. That restriction has now been removed on several models.
Sounds to me like you're severely limited by the size of the memory stick, no?
A 1G memory stick holds about six hours of MPEG4 video, about 1h of regular quality video, and about 1/2 h of DVD quality video. Doesn't sound that limited to me.
I liked the way I had my Gnome desktop set up, I liked KDE, I liked a lot of the applications. But then you had the dependency chasing to deal with, fucking with fonts to get thinks looking decent,
If you are having dependency problems on Linux, maybe you are just using the wrong distribution. Gnome and KDE just installed and update automatically for me. At some point (once they were ready), FreeType and antialiased fonts just appeared as an option after doing a software update on my Linux box.
And, of course, while installing Gnome or KDE may have been cutting edge on some old version of RedHat, I suspect that the latest versions just ship with everything ready and enabled (I think RH9 has Gnome2 and antialiased fonts out of the box).
So, if "dependency problems" and "lack of anti-aliased fonts" are the major issues why you think Linux isn't ready for the desktop, those seem to have been overcome by at least some major distributions.
the inability to copy and paste between some apps, little things like that.
I dunno--in that regard OS X doesn't seem much better. Applications like IE, Mozilla, the i* stuff, and the OS 9 stuff all works differently. For example, a lot of apps ignore my OS X keyboard mappings (presumably because they go through older APIs) and Mozilla gets confused by some some OS X pathnames because it's still using some OS 9 APIs. A lot of stuff I would expect to be able to drag and drop I can't drag and drop on MacOS (Safari is particularly limited in that regard, but so are other apps).
Every desktop has its own historical baggage. On Linux/X11, the three different cut-and-paste mechanisms are a minor nuisance, on OS X, it's the three different APIs (emulated, Cocoa, Carbon). On Windows, well, let's not even go there. Pick your poison.
Several of the new Sony digital cameras allow unlimited recording onto solid-state memory (MemoryStick Pro) at 640x480. That's camcorder quality, and as memory sticks are getting better, you will be able to record longer and longer. And as Flash memory bandwidth gets larger, you will probably also be able to record at higher resolutions.
So, while Panasonic may be trying to create a niche for themselves in the high-end video camera market, solid state video recording has already been happening quietly.
For those of us wanting to get away from Windows, but feel Linux is still not ready for the desktop yet, this might make Apple a more viable alternative.
Come on, don't hide behind "not ready yet". Just spit it out: "I don't like the Linux desktops". Now, that wasn't too hard, was it?
That's fine, I don't like the OS X or Windows desktops either. That's why they make so many different kinds. But let's not pretend that there is a single desktop that is oh-so-much-better for everybody than any of the others.
Your statement makes about as much sense as saying that "vanilla ice cream isn't ready yet for the kids of America, but strawberry, which is clearly so much better, is too expensive".
We already know that earth, at times, was much hotter than it is now, and at other times, was much colder. But just because it may have been hotter during the middle ages doesn't mean that climate change was or is harmless or unavoidable. Even the natural climate changes over the last few millennia have caused empires to crumble, diseases to spread, and cultures to disappear. If we are already on a warming trend, all the more reason not to contribute to it further through human activity.
In any case, the argument against greenhouse gas emissions has little to do with the past; it's a concern about plausible (but uncertain) events in the future. At the rate at which carbon dioxide emissions are growing, we will change the climate some time this or next century; that is simple physics. Furthermore, it takes a long time for the levels to come down again, so we will have to live with the consequences of our actions. The only discussion is when exactly that change will occur, how big it will be, and how much warning we will get. Since there are plausible models that say that change will happen pretty soon and will have serious consequences, it seems prudent to take precautions.
The real question is why some people are so eager to engage in an experiment with our climate on a global scale by continuing to emit huge quantities of greenhouse gases. Oddly enough, it is many self-proclaimed "conservatives" that advocate engaging in this kind of completely unprecedented behavior.
The thing that is "off base" is simply to drag historical records into this discussion at all--they are largely irrelevant to whether we should or should not reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Just have the nat gateway reset the TTL to 255, and forward the packet. End of story.
My point is that there may be other differences like that. Instead of fixing them one by one to make kernel-based NAT look like packets coming from a user process, you can simply have a user process send out the packets. That way, a NAT packet will not look any different (at the TCP/IP level) from a packet coming from IE or any other user process.
There is no system that I can think of that will properly detect a NAT gateway.
That's because there isn't any: a NAT can be made indistinguishable from any other user process. It's just an ill-defined problem.
NAT devices or gateways decrement the TTL on packets that they forward.
Well, they happen to do that right now, mostly because of historical accident. If bogus "NAT detectors" like this proliferate, people will simply move to user-mode NAT. That is, packets from network A are redirected to a user-mode process which then looks at them and sends out a request on network B, and the same in reverse. In that case, the packets sent from the NAT process onto network B are indistinguishable from the packets coming from any other user mode process because they were generated by a user mode process.
The only thing ISPs can do to detect NAT is to look at traffic patterns and accusing you of, say, browsing too many web sites per second. That eventually just amounts to volume-based (or traffic-pattern-based) charges. Sure, they can do that, and they probably should, but at current prices, that's not going to affect you browsing the web from two machines.
Then the remedy is that the offending code will get removed and the person that put it there may get their fingers slapped. That's pretty much all that can be done realistically, even though lawyers may have pipe dreams of sueing millions of Linux users for millions of dollars each.
With several million lines of code, a core team of developers, and hundreds of eyes looking at it, it seems pretty unlikely that there is any "substantial" amount of proprietary code in Linux. And, frankly, SCO or AT&T style would stick out.
All the sudden you want to inject foreign countries into this. That changes things a lot.
Your assertion is wrong even as far as the US is concerned:
There is no way to justify spending anything on a disease that is obtained only (except those few tiny rare cases, literally probably under 100 a year) through frivulous behavior.
Prison rape alone accounts for more cases than that. And you said nothing about not including foreign countries--US medical research is there for the rest of the world, not just the US. You see, that's another aspect of compassion and responsibility: our compassion and responsibility for the rest of the world.
The tradeoff shouldnt be between helping two needy people, but is there. Let me put it to you like this: $XBillion is allocated to research, medical research, etc.
We live in a democracy. We make our tradeoffs and moral choices when we go to the ballot box and elect someone like Bush, who cuts research and taxes and increases defense spending, over some other politician that wants to increase spending on research and education. That is the real tradeoff we make, and it is between lower taxes, defense spending, and more research, not between individual diseases.
Wrong. Already much of the AIDS research done has been invalidated because it targets only a single "strain" of HIV/AIDS. The research being done with HIV/AIDS is massively specific. It tests a single treatement against a single strain/version of the virus.
No, you are wrong. AIDS research has given us tremendous insight into how the immune system works, in how viruses interact with the body, and created whole new classes of anti-viral drugs. Every specific drug success and every specific drug failure for AIDS teaches us a lot more general principles.
The vast majority are not "single moments" of weakness, but rather, the result of a lifestyle of high-risk behaviour.
Yes, and society should try to educate people to keep them from engaging in self-destructive behavior (which includes all sorts of behaviors other than unprotected sex). It's the "get tough" and "no mercy" methods that you advocate that are where your reasoning breaks down, because they simply do not work. We have had that sort of libertarian society in which everybody was responsible for themselves before, and deadly STDs were widespread back then, as well as many other social ills.
But even if people engage in a lifestyle of high-risk behavior, so what? People don't stop being members of society because they engage in unprotected sex, sky-dive, ride motorcycles, or, for that matter, go into combat. People don't stop being deserving of compassion and help because they have been stupid over prolonged periods of time.
We can spend millions and billions of todays finite resources attempting to treat an untreatable disease because it is trendy, or we can divert those funds to treat people who are in the same type of pain, the same life or death circumstance but through no fault of their own.
Well, now you switch over to the question of medical care. There, the answer is actually really simple: every American should receive standard, quality medical care, and we are already spending twice as much money as is necessary for achieving that. The reason medical care is so haphazard in the US is not because of tradeoff between diseases, it's because the medical insurance system is broken.
Even if you fully reallocated the around $2b on AIDS research funding and the (I would guess) around $2b on AIDS treatments to other diseases and let AIDS sufferers die in the gutter, it wouldn't make any significant difference to the problems we have with medical coverage in the US. (Of course, many of the people who actually get HIV/AIDS treatments are in private insurance plans anyway, where the insurance company itself, often based on market forces and choice, is covering HIV/AIDS-related treatments. I assure you, m
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, I very much think so. And, in fact, it is profitable not to get it "right": it gets you to market faster and it lets you sell upgrades later.
Good technology and good business often don't align at all. That's just a fact about market economies. You can't blame any individual company for putting out bad products if it makes them money. Microsoft, for example, is behaving rationally. If there is blame to be placed at all, it's with customers, who end up supporting bad products by making uninformed and short-sighted choices.
Yes, that is exactly my point.
We have spent the last 20 years following Microsoft's journey of self-discovery, as Gates and Microsoft employees have slowly come up to speed on computer technology, starting from a state of nearly complete ignorance. The reason why they have been so successful in the market is because their ignorance was a perfect match to the ignorance of the public. That meant that Microsoft's "discoveries" always was a pretty good match for what the public was ready for.
Now, in 2003, Microsoft is finally beginning to approach the state of the art in a few areas.
As long as those people don't come back and claim that they own the free software, it really doesn't do much harm and it exposes more people to it. That doesn't make it right, of course, but perhaps one shouldn't be so uptight about it.
Beyond that, it's a copyright violation, and you have the same rights as anybody else with copyright (I don't see any relationship to the DMCA). That is to say, in practice, not a whole lot of rights unless you are really big.
I don't see a moral dilemma with using every law available to enforce your license. It is perfectly consistent and rational to take advantage of a particular law while at the same time arguing that the existence of the law is detrimental to society.
Those "tree-huggers" are trying to save forests up north as well.
And in both cases, the reason for saving forests is not that one or the other is the world champion at fixing carbon dioxide, it's that they are large, complex, and irreplaceable eco-systems.
If I understand the pictures correctly, it's amazing to see how much carbon is converted in the northern hemisphere...
No, you don't understand those pictures correctly. You should be looking at "net primary productivity", not the June snapshot.
However, neutrinos are not sufficient to account for dark matter, and dark matter itself is not sufficient to account for the observed deviations of the shapes of galaxies from what is expected.
Quite to the contrary: open source software that has a user community actually keeps going and going and going.
whoever's coding NiftyApp gets bored around version 0.64 and drops it, and meanwhile, some other guys is making GniftyApp 0.4
That's because NiftyApps is not where the meat of open source is happening. The meat is happening with the kernel, the servers, and the libraries. Those have large user communities, and large developer communities, and they don't just disappear. End user apps, on the other hand, are mostly trivial hacks on top of that (and if they aren't, they should be). End user apps are driven by fashion--they should change every few years.
On the other side of the pond, Microsoft will let something fail, and fail, and fail, tweak, twist, fix, and then they have something worth having.
Oh?
Open source software has a much longer history than 20 years. Software, in a sense, started out open source as hardware companies didn't view it as being very valuable.
I think it may be fair to say that there's been more technical innovation from Microsoft.
And what would that "technical innovation" be? Just about every single product category, UI idea, feature, or technology Microsoft is using and touting was invented elsewhere: the GUI, the spreadsheet, WYSIWYG word processing, speech recognition, handwriting recognition, databases, networking, web browsing, etc.
I'm no Microsoft fan, but they *have* introduced some real innovations. Cheap, shared-SCSI-bus clustering comes to mind,
I'm sorry, I don't get it. People have been sharing disks via disk interfaces since the 1960's. Microsoft puts a feature into their system that allows this to be done over one specific disk interface (which, not coincidentally, was actually designed to support this). Where is the innovation here? Sounds like engineering to me, driven by marketing ("hey, guys, we need to compete with the mini computers and mainframes on this disk thing").
as does Active Directory (although AD is certainly inspired by NDS).
Again, where is the innovation? We had Kerberos, YP, and NIS, and before that, we had generations of directory services on mainframes.
While Microsoft certainly followed Apple into the era of the GUI, they've made notable improvements to the GUI.
Like what?
There are others, of course;
Please keep going--you haven't named one yet.
only the most rabid anti-MS zealot could claim that they've *never* done *anything* innovative.
Oh, I'm sure they must have done something "innovative", but whatever it was doesn't seem to be related to their bottom line or have had much of an impact on their products.
NT is "based on" VMS in roughly the same way that Linux is "based on" UNIX: each share a philosophy and feel with their ancestor, but they are actually completely different pieces of software.
But to choose to stop your own logic with this one. POSIX is based on trying to unite SystemV with BSD! Not only that but POSIX itself was started up around 1985, still almost 20 years ago.
The difference is that the people who originally designed the UNIX APIs really did a great job and that their design still holds up after 30 years. Microsoft and Apple throw out their stuff every few years and start over. That's not "innovation", it's just "doing a poor job". And, what do you know, each time they throw things out and start over, they get closer to UNIX.
Name an application or feature on Windows that is "truly innovative".
he other large areas of development (KDE, GNOME, Mozilla, the kernel) are simply trying to catch up to existing commercial software (Windows, IE, Solaris/BSD).
Much of Solaris and BSD are based on open source. Windows uses a lot of open source code (networking, etc.). IE was based on open source software. Commercial software keeps copying original research, often released in open source form. Then, a generation later, open source software takes some tweaks from the commercial software and is accused of "catching up".
Of course, commercial entities can throw huge amounts of money at software development and push out stuff really fast when they have to. Open source development can be very slow in comparison. But with very few exceptions, the commercial software companies are not where the innovation happens. Neither Microsoft nor, for that matter, Apple, have invented much of anything in their corporate history. They have mostly been good at taking research results and turning them into products, sometimes well (Apple), sometimes not so well (Microsoft).
That's what 12-16 year old girls have 12-16 year old boyfriends for, who have ulterior motives for putting up with the bitching.
Write down the issues and you have what Linux needs to own the world:)
Well, more mature nerds do that for wives and parents. From my own personal experience, I have to say that the differences in bitching about Windows, OS X, and Linux from those sources are small compared to the absolute levels of complaints--all of those systems have serious usability problems, and it doesn't look like anybody knows how to fix them.
Yes, and the way to fix that is to eliminate the "raw meritocracy". The Olympics should be games--a friendly meeting of cultures at which the competition is incidental and for entertainment. Instead, it has become a commercial circus in which a genetic lottery creates a few famous millionaires. The issue of doping and GM humans just exposes the idiocy.
Fortunately, this will take care of itself. When genetically modifying humans allows parents to satisfy the demand of fast runners, big-breasted daughters, and brainy nerds, those attributes will be less valued and less valuable, reducing the incentive for parents to produce them. Also, parents will face some engineering tradeoffs. For example, I suspect that Dolly Parton probably wouldn't have made a good sprinter--at some point, one attribute gets into the way of another.
<sarcasm>Oh, those poor aristocrats. They were just so superior that all the inferior humans hated them and did them in. Why didn't those stupid peasants eat cake, fight wars, and otherwise leave the clearly superior aristocracy alone?</sarcasm>
Today lawmakers and regulators are eager to ban the technologies that would be needed to create a new breed of intellectually and physically superior people.
I can't figure out whether you are trolling or just plain stupid. Did the whole "master race" thing that happened in the 20th century pass you by? Do you seriously believe that someone with big muscles or the ability to solve puzzles quickly is "superior"? Has it occurred to you that there is probably a reason why the person you consider a weak-minded weakling made it as far in evolution as you? Why bunny rabbits survive and thrive while saber tooth tigers and mammoths died out?
But who's willing to stand up for the rights of this future generation?
Probably the same people who stand up for the rights of people like Einstein, Hawkins, Woods, or Jordan. I mean, those poor people, everybody is discriminating against them.
But those cameras actually use MJPEG or MPEG compression, and the quality is actually quite good.
Until recently, recording times on digital cameras were limited to at most a few minutes by the size of an internal buffer, no matter how big your memory stick or CF card was. That restriction has now been removed on several models.
Sounds to me like you're severely limited by the size of the memory stick, no?
A 1G memory stick holds about six hours of MPEG4 video, about 1h of regular quality video, and about 1/2 h of DVD quality video. Doesn't sound that limited to me.
If you are having dependency problems on Linux, maybe you are just using the wrong distribution. Gnome and KDE just installed and update automatically for me. At some point (once they were ready), FreeType and antialiased fonts just appeared as an option after doing a software update on my Linux box.
And, of course, while installing Gnome or KDE may have been cutting edge on some old version of RedHat, I suspect that the latest versions just ship with everything ready and enabled (I think RH9 has Gnome2 and antialiased fonts out of the box).
So, if "dependency problems" and "lack of anti-aliased fonts" are the major issues why you think Linux isn't ready for the desktop, those seem to have been overcome by at least some major distributions.
the inability to copy and paste between some apps, little things like that.
I dunno--in that regard OS X doesn't seem much better. Applications like IE, Mozilla, the i* stuff, and the OS 9 stuff all works differently. For example, a lot of apps ignore my OS X keyboard mappings (presumably because they go through older APIs) and Mozilla gets confused by some some OS X pathnames because it's still using some OS 9 APIs. A lot of stuff I would expect to be able to drag and drop I can't drag and drop on MacOS (Safari is particularly limited in that regard, but so are other apps).
Every desktop has its own historical baggage. On Linux/X11, the three different cut-and-paste mechanisms are a minor nuisance, on OS X, it's the three different APIs (emulated, Cocoa, Carbon). On Windows, well, let's not even go there. Pick your poison.
So, while Panasonic may be trying to create a niche for themselves in the high-end video camera market, solid state video recording has already been happening quietly.
If you want something smaller, Olympus has a new series that is water resistant (forget the name, but they are everywhere).
Come on, don't hide behind "not ready yet". Just spit it out: "I don't like the Linux desktops". Now, that wasn't too hard, was it?
That's fine, I don't like the OS X or Windows desktops either. That's why they make so many different kinds. But let's not pretend that there is a single desktop that is oh-so-much-better for everybody than any of the others.
Your statement makes about as much sense as saying that "vanilla ice cream isn't ready yet for the kids of America, but strawberry, which is clearly so much better, is too expensive".
In any case, the argument against greenhouse gas emissions has little to do with the past; it's a concern about plausible (but uncertain) events in the future. At the rate at which carbon dioxide emissions are growing, we will change the climate some time this or next century; that is simple physics. Furthermore, it takes a long time for the levels to come down again, so we will have to live with the consequences of our actions. The only discussion is when exactly that change will occur, how big it will be, and how much warning we will get. Since there are plausible models that say that change will happen pretty soon and will have serious consequences, it seems prudent to take precautions.
The real question is why some people are so eager to engage in an experiment with our climate on a global scale by continuing to emit huge quantities of greenhouse gases. Oddly enough, it is many self-proclaimed "conservatives" that advocate engaging in this kind of completely unprecedented behavior.
The thing that is "off base" is simply to drag historical records into this discussion at all--they are largely irrelevant to whether we should or should not reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
My point is that there may be other differences like that. Instead of fixing them one by one to make kernel-based NAT look like packets coming from a user process, you can simply have a user process send out the packets. That way, a NAT packet will not look any different (at the TCP/IP level) from a packet coming from IE or any other user process.
There is no system that I can think of that will properly detect a NAT gateway.
That's because there isn't any: a NAT can be made indistinguishable from any other user process. It's just an ill-defined problem.
Well, they happen to do that right now, mostly because of historical accident. If bogus "NAT detectors" like this proliferate, people will simply move to user-mode NAT. That is, packets from network A are redirected to a user-mode process which then looks at them and sends out a request on network B, and the same in reverse. In that case, the packets sent from the NAT process onto network B are indistinguishable from the packets coming from any other user mode process because they were generated by a user mode process.
The only thing ISPs can do to detect NAT is to look at traffic patterns and accusing you of, say, browsing too many web sites per second. That eventually just amounts to volume-based (or traffic-pattern-based) charges. Sure, they can do that, and they probably should, but at current prices, that's not going to affect you browsing the web from two machines.
Microsoft will have an easy time arguing that they have "not much" of a command line interface, and they'll be able to remove it with no problems :-)
With several million lines of code, a core team of developers, and hundreds of eyes looking at it, it seems pretty unlikely that there is any "substantial" amount of proprietary code in Linux. And, frankly, SCO or AT&T style would stick out.
Your assertion is wrong even as far as the US is concerned:
Prison rape alone accounts for more cases than that. And you said nothing about not including foreign countries--US medical research is there for the rest of the world, not just the US. You see, that's another aspect of compassion and responsibility: our compassion and responsibility for the rest of the world.
The tradeoff shouldnt be between helping two needy people, but is there. Let me put it to you like this: $XBillion is allocated to research, medical research, etc.
We live in a democracy. We make our tradeoffs and moral choices when we go to the ballot box and elect someone like Bush, who cuts research and taxes and increases defense spending, over some other politician that wants to increase spending on research and education. That is the real tradeoff we make, and it is between lower taxes, defense spending, and more research, not between individual diseases.
Wrong. Already much of the AIDS research done has been invalidated because it targets only a single "strain" of HIV/AIDS. The research being done with HIV/AIDS is massively specific. It tests a single treatement against a single strain/version of the virus.
No, you are wrong. AIDS research has given us tremendous insight into how the immune system works, in how viruses interact with the body, and created whole new classes of anti-viral drugs. Every specific drug success and every specific drug failure for AIDS teaches us a lot more general principles.
The vast majority are not "single moments" of weakness, but rather, the result of a lifestyle of high-risk behaviour.
Yes, and society should try to educate people to keep them from engaging in self-destructive behavior (which includes all sorts of behaviors other than unprotected sex). It's the "get tough" and "no mercy" methods that you advocate that are where your reasoning breaks down, because they simply do not work. We have had that sort of libertarian society in which everybody was responsible for themselves before, and deadly STDs were widespread back then, as well as many other social ills.
But even if people engage in a lifestyle of high-risk behavior, so what? People don't stop being members of society because they engage in unprotected sex, sky-dive, ride motorcycles, or, for that matter, go into combat. People don't stop being deserving of compassion and help because they have been stupid over prolonged periods of time.
We can spend millions and billions of todays finite resources attempting to treat an untreatable disease because it is trendy, or we can divert those funds to treat people who are in the same type of pain, the same life or death circumstance but through no fault of their own.
Well, now you switch over to the question of medical care. There, the answer is actually really simple: every American should receive standard, quality medical care, and we are already spending twice as much money as is necessary for achieving that. The reason medical care is so haphazard in the US is not because of tradeoff between diseases, it's because the medical insurance system is broken.
Even if you fully reallocated the around $2b on AIDS research funding and the (I would guess) around $2b on AIDS treatments to other diseases and let AIDS sufferers die in the gutter, it wouldn't make any significant difference to the problems we have with medical coverage in the US. (Of course, many of the people who actually get HIV/AIDS treatments are in private insurance plans anyway, where the insurance company itself, often based on market forces and choice, is covering HIV/AIDS-related treatments. I assure you, m