Oh, puhleeeze, can we please be done with that one now? Do you think if nVidia or ATI were forced to open source their chip designs
Who says anything about "forcing"? All I'm saying is: don't use closed source drivers. In fact, most people get ATI or nVidia cards and don't even use the 3D features.
we'd get anything like the rate of progress we've seen over the last three years?
Open sourcing their drivers would not slow down the development of their current Direct3D or OpenGL implementations. But it would enable and encourage the development of alternative graphics systems, as well as other applications for those cards. You have fallen into the Microsoft trap of thinking that "innovation" just means doing the same old stuff a little better. Sorry, but there are other kinds of innovation.
C'mon. The drivers have a lot of intellectual property in them, nVidia ones in particular (ironically, considering how much better they run under Linux).
What's your point? Bell Labs UNIX or Solaris also had a lot of intellectual property in them, and that didn't keep people from creating open source equivalents that work better than the original. There is nothing that makes graphics drivers any different.
Besides, the graphics cards manufacturers don't need to open source their drivers; a full documentation of the hardware and GPU would be sufficient. Open source developers can and will do the rest, probably better than the original proprietary drivers.
True, but they are not general purpose computers. They are designed to do one thing only - perform operations relevant to rendering 3D scenes.
I didn't say that they were "general purpose" computers. But there are plenty of operations that occur in scientific computing that they can speed up. And people may well want to try building alternative 3D graphics systems.
Other than that, while I sympathise with your sentiments, and to some extent agree with them, we don't really have much choice. The only fully working Linux drivers for modern graphics cards are closed source. By "fully working", I mean with complete, stable, fast suppot for all of the card's features.
Sure, we do. Not everything needs the absolute latest features.
Finally, you seem not to realise that it isn't always up to the card/chipset manufacturers to open their driver source. NVidia, for example, is under NDA with several third parties over technology used in their cards and drivers. That means that they can't open the source to their drivers.
It is completely irrelevant what the reason is for keeping the driver source closed, the consequences of it being closed remain the same.
This is one of the many reasons you shouldn't buy cards with closed source drivers:
Except their Linux drivers. For reasons unknown, the recently
released drivers do an explicit check to see that they are running on
"built by" hardware, and exit if they find a "powered by" card.
What are some of the other reasons?
Closed source drivers inhibit innovation. 3D graphics cards are really powerful computers--if the software to drive them were open, people could modify it to do other interesting things, not just one particular model of 3D graphics.
Closed source drivers won't work with non-mainstream open source operating systems. I want people to be able to experiment with new GUIs and new kernels, not just keep building on top of a handful "mainstream" systems.
Binary-only drivers tend to stop working sooner or later. You end up having to upgrade a perfectly working piece of hardware just because it isn't supported with the latest Linux/X11 versions.
If you keep buying cards with binary-only drivers, you remove the incentive for people to ship cards with open source drivers.
Well, there are differences. Most importantly, open source advocates usually are users or developers of open source, not sellers. For example, MITRE makes no more money by advocating open source than by advocating Microsoft. But Microsoft makes enormous amounts of money by selling software. Therefore, Microsoft has big financial incentives to mislead and lie about the security and cost of their software. With open source, however, if another open source user saves money using open source software and tells me about it, they may tell me about it because my participation in open source further lowers their cost, but their gain is my gain: I'm in the same boat.
For a simple analogy, ask yourself: all things being equal, who do you trust more: the used car salesman making a pitch (Microsoft) or the common views of a dozen of his ex-customers (other open source users)?
Also, this isn't like the Coke-vs.-Pepsi debate--two more-or-less equivalent products, where one can debate endlessly which one is better. Open source and closed source software are profoundly different development models. I think open source really is better for most users, in a clearcut economic sense. I have concluded that, in contrast to many economic arguments for open source, Microsoft's arguments are mostly logically and economically unsound. You may reach different conclusions, but the point is that this is something one can think about and determine the truth of logically. Therefore, it is not a question of advocacy and bias but putting forward logical arguments and empirical proof.
It used to be good to pick a catchy, pronounceable, real-world name for a product. On the Internet, on the other hand, it's good to pick something unique and distinctive: "Phoenix" has 6.1 million hits on Google, something like "MicroZilla" has 10. Microsoft and Sun made similarly stupid choices with "C#" and Java ("C#" occurs in music, and the special character makes it difficult to search for). So, check Google before picking a product or project name.
I think this notion that Sun, Microsoft, Nortel, or Cisco have any particularly distinguished technology is silly. If the Chinese want filtering technology, they have the skill to build it themselves. Of the bunch, only Cisco has anything that is somwhat difficult to reproduce: dedicated networking hardware that lets them handle greater traffic volumes, but they can substitute more off-the-shelf hardware running free or homegrown software for that.
Trying to influence other countries by restricting technology is a losing proposition--it just forces them to become more independent. If we wanted to get the attention of the Chinese, restricting imports of their low-cost products would do much more. But we aren't principled enough for that--instead we give the Chinese MFN status.
I think Microsoft's efforts ultimately are futile. But, nevertheless, they are trying hard: Palladium, proprietary media formats, proprietary document formats, exclusive distribution agreements, non-PC hardware (X-box, Mira, TabletPC, PocketPC, etc.) are all attempts at excluding open source. Add to that some heavy political lobbying, PR, monopolistic practices, campaign contributions, and who knows what other sleazy efforts. With that, they have had some modest short term successes.
Yes, and companies contributing to open source try to kill Microsoft's market and drive Microsoft's profits to zero. That is part of a free market, too. Neither has any moral upper hand. In particulary, Microsoft has no intrinsic right to charge for things that some cooperative effort can provide for free. Whichever model will serve the needs of customers/users better and for less money will win. And I have no doubt that Microsoft will lose this one.
Linux will be ready for the desktop when Gnome or KDE drop dead (I can't wait) and some consistency settles in.
You are comparing apples and oranges. It makes no sense to compare Microsoft Windows and "Linux". Linux is just a kernel. You have to compare Microsoft Windows to a specific distribution with a specific desktop. "Mandrake Linux running KDE" is as consistent as Microsoft Windows (and easier to use and more robust, IMO).
Is Windows inconsistent because there are plenty of Delphi and Windows 3.1 applications? Is Windows inconsistent because MS Office breaks many of the UI guidelines for Windows and uses a lot of widgets that are not available to regular developers? Is Macintosh OS X "inconsistent" because MS Office violates many OS X GUI guidelines? Because it runs X11 applications? Because it runs OS9 applications? Because there are Darwin-based distributions that only have X11? Does running Opera on Macintosh or Windows make those platforms inconsistent? Does the flood of poorly written, inconsistent, and ugly shareware and commercial software on Windows and Macintosh make those platforms inconsistent or bad?
Consistency isn't a technical attribute, it's about packaging and your personal choice of software. If you value consistency, pick a Linux distribution that offers it and don't use inconsistent applications. That's all the consistency you'll ever get, on Linux or any other platform.
I had the day off today so I installed Redhat 8.0 (SURPRISE!) and tried to get Mozilla 1.2 up and running with anti-aliased fonts. I wasted the whole day and I am glad to be back on Win2K (call me stupid or whatever... half the font stuff made me feel like a criminal - why isn't it *on* by default? I'll pay big bucks for that...). Linux is shooting itself in the foot with that respect. Everybody hears so much about Linux so they install it only to be disappointed to such an extreme that they'd never want to bother again (I know that I do not).
Mozilla has its own quirky GUI. Mozilla is inconsistent with the rest of the GUI on every platform, including Windows and Macintosh, why shouldn't it be inconsistent on Linux? If you run Konqueror, the KDE browser, under KDE you get font anti-aliasing plus a completely consistent GUI.
It's a historical quirk that Mozilla anti-aliasing is more difficult to configure for Mozilla on RedHat 8.0 than it is on Windows. On other distributions, it just works.
If you like Windows, stick with it, but don't whine about other platforms. You, after all, have a choice. The only people who have reason to complain are those who are forced to use platforms they don't like.
I just don't agree with those who want everything to be GPLed (those I call GPL-purists). I understand companies' hesitation to release their source code, especially under something as irrevocable as the GPL.
When people say "Apple's license is bad", they aren't saying "Apple has an obligation to change their license", they are saying "users shouldn't rely software with that license because it is disadvantageous for them". That has nothing to do with philosophy or purism, it's a simple, legal warning, not much different from a product safety warning someone might release for a stroller or toy.
but that's not what drives companies in a capitalist environment.
Who cares? As a consumer, I don't have an obligation to make Apple rich by using their software under unfavorable licensing terms. Free software also is subject to market forces, and if Apple can't create a free software license that is attractive enough, then Apple's free software will not catch on. And that's exactly what's happening.
Those discounts are, of course, temporary: Microsoft hopes to kill open source competition (like they killed everybody else), and then they'll go back to charging more.
The other issue is that free software is not about getting the software itself for free, it's about the freedom to inspect, use, and improve the software as you like. That lowers TCO and reduces business risks; even if MIcrosoft gives away Windows for free, they can't compete with that.
And Darwin is Mach based? So what's that other GNU/Mach system again? Ehmm...GNU/Hurd,
They are very different systems (personally, I think all of the current crop
of kernels, including Darwin, have serious design problems).
GPL-purists might argue that the APSL is not a Free license.
The phrase "purism" suggests that you think that this is some irrelevant ideological
issue. It isn't. Working with software that has the wrong licensing
terms can be very harmful. The KDE project found this out the hard
way. And it isn't that the GPL is always the right license. But
APSL may have serious problems.
Installing a 40gig hard drive is supposed to be less work than installing GNU Darwin from an installer CD? The only thing that suggests to me is that the GNU Darwin installer CD needs work.
There is some use for disk-based OS distributions: eventually, external USB2.0/FireWire drives may become a reasonable choice. You plug them in and boot from them, and you get your complete environment. However, unfortunately, most BIOSes don't support that yet, so the best you could do right now is to use a DOS or Windows chain loader.
You can map voxel and density rendering onto modern graphics hardware to get real-time volume rendering without too many problems. Furthermore, medical applications require high fidelity: you don't want doctors to miss some detail, and these kinds of stippling techniques greatly reduce the resolution.
There are silver bullets in software development. Problems that used to be very hard can be solved safely, efficiently, and quickly using better tools and languages. Imagine how much longer your average Perl or Python script would have taken you to implement 30 years ago using Fortran. And there are much better and more modern languages than Perl or Python.
I think people like Brooks have done a grave disservice to the community by claiming, without solid evidence, that languages don't matter. Some language differences don't matter--Pascal and C are almost equally cumbersome and error prone. But in general, languages do matter enormously: runtime safety makes it easier to compose programs out of large numbers of components, dynamic typing and reflection help with configurability and I/O, static type safety and garbage collection reduce the probability of bugs, etc.
A disregard for the importance of languages is why projects like Mozilla, Gnome, and KDE keep lumbering on in languages like C and C++, producing software that crashes with regularity, consumes enormous amounts of memory, and takes forever to get finished. It's why software like Apache, IIE, and IIS keep shipping with bogus and avoidable buffer overflow errors.
Programming technology has improved enormously over the last three decades. It's just that most programmers don't use the improvements and still stick with three decade old technology for their jobs.
... when the profiling section of Bush's homeland security security department
incorrectly decides that someone is a fundamentalist Muslim terrorist and
will be held indefinitely. Or when the profiling software that your health
insurance uses incorrectly decides, based on your supermarket purchase records,
that you are a health risk and raises your premiums.
You see, like the TiVo, these institutions deal with huge numbers of people
and they won't spend the time or resources to verify each individual decision
by hand, at least not right away.
The second evidence was from growths observed from using potato dextrose
agar as medium and the microorganism could be identified as staphylococcus
pasteuri. Rod-like bacillus and fungus (engyodontium albus de Hoog) were
also found.
I have no problem with the idea that microorganisms can travel through space,
if we find evidence for it.
However, these claims strike me as dubious: these are organisms adapted to
earth environments. Staphylococcus pasteuri is grown at body temperature
and isolated from human vomit, and Engyodontium album is a eucaryote. Neither
of them seems like a good candidate for a space bug, and both of them seem
like somthing you would easily get if someone doesn't handle sterile samples
carefully. You'd also expect big differences in sequence data.
If space is full of spores for organisms highly adapted to earth environments,
that's a much, much stronger claim than merely claiming that space is full
of spores. If they are extraterrestrial, where are these supposed to
be coming from?
The most plausible explanation for these particular results is terrestrial
contamination. If they want to prove anything more, the experiment
really needs to be repeated many times and under different conditions. And
they really should find some differences in the DNA sequences.
You get spam mail be ordinary mail too and you pay for the delivery too (your tax money makes the USPS go!). So why don't you complain about it, too?
The USPS has not received tax money for operating expenses since 1982 (see here). Furthermore, people who send real-world junk-mail pay for the postage and the mailing. It's probably one of the bigger money makers for the USPS. If they didn't, it would have been stopped long ago.
E-mail spam is theft of service, pure and simple: the people sending the spam aren't paying the full cost.
I hate government intervention in the markets and involving the FBI should be an absolute nightmare to anyone with even a bit of libertarian in his heart.
So, libertarians now endorse theft because stopping it would restrict the liberty of the thief? I guess that sums up the internal contradictions of libertarianism as well as anything.
I have no doubt we landed on the moon, based on the wealth of scientific
data that has been published after the moon landings. But I also think it's
reasonable for non-scientists to ask. NASA receives billions of dollars
in funding, and people have a right to have explained to them in clear and
certain terms what happened to that money, and to see proof that it was spent
correctly. Sites like this that debunk the
"moon hoax" claims are the kind of clear, simple explanations NASA should
have published widely decades ago.
More generally, yes, there is a strong current of non-scientific and anti-scientific
thought in modern US society. The right answer to that is to patiently explain
scientific facts so that people can make up their own minds, and to start
at whatever level people need. Science is something that doesn't have
to rely on faith, it's something that reasonable people can spend time on
and figure out, and make up their own mind about. And if a scientific
project (be it the moon landing or some solid state physics experiment) cannot
provide enough evidence for its results, well, then people are justified
in doubting its validity until the evidence is forthcoming.
On the other hand, telling people that it must be true because they have
seen it on TV is the wrong approach. We want people to question things they
see in the mass media, because while the moon landing is not a hoax, a lot
of other stuff in the mass media is completely fabricated, from television
commercials for superior toothpaste to the validity of presidential elections.
I think the problem is people using the fully featured website while trying
to suvert the very means that makes the website stay online.
I don't see a problem. If they don't want to put a full featured web
site on-line for free, they don't have to. Nobody is forcing them.
If there existed a way to automatically reformat a printed newspaper into
a non-ads newspaper, they'd have to charge everyone more and due to reduced
audience they'd also have to cut jobs and lower the quality of the articles.
Tough cookies. Technology makes some good business models go bad and
eliminates certain categories of jobs. It happened for farming, it
happened for manufacturing, why should newspapers or content providers be
exempt?
So, the bottom line is it's ok for you to try to block adds, as long as
you can recognize that when your favourite site closes you are part of the
reason.
The fewer sites that are created with commercial motives in mind, the
better, as far as I'm concerned. Companies and advertising already
dominate newspapers, television, and radio. I think it would be great
if such business models simply didn't work on the Web. So, please,
go ahead: block all you can.
My follow-up Not in Sun's and others self interest to backslide [slashdot.org]
- covers your first question.
It's not a question. I have probably been in this business a little
longer than you and corporate policies can change in an instant, whether you
think it's in their interest or not. In fact, Sun has built almost their
entire software strategy on taking free software and making it proprietary--why
would they stop now?
Opens source development often follows the successful strategy of finding
a standard that works and re-implementing it and building upon it.
Java was a mediocre technical compromise when it started out, and instead
of improving it, as Sun has promised, they have essentially frozen it. What
they have spent their time on is chasing one pipe dream after another of enterprise
infrastructure world domination. Sorry, the technology isn't even up
to that.
If it comes to a choice between one of the dominant webservice standards,Java
or .NET, who should open source developers choose?
Neither. Both are technically poor, bloated, proprietary, and they
are not even well-defined "standards". We can do better in the open
source community.
Slashdot Mirror
Who says anything about "forcing"? All I'm saying is: don't use closed source drivers. In fact, most people get ATI or nVidia cards and don't even use the 3D features.
we'd get anything like the rate of progress we've seen over the last three years?
Open sourcing their drivers would not slow down the development of their current Direct3D or OpenGL implementations. But it would enable and encourage the development of alternative graphics systems, as well as other applications for those cards. You have fallen into the Microsoft trap of thinking that "innovation" just means doing the same old stuff a little better. Sorry, but there are other kinds of innovation.
C'mon. The drivers have a lot of intellectual property in them, nVidia ones in particular (ironically, considering how much better they run under Linux).
What's your point? Bell Labs UNIX or Solaris also had a lot of intellectual property in them, and that didn't keep people from creating open source equivalents that work better than the original. There is nothing that makes graphics drivers any different.
Besides, the graphics cards manufacturers don't need to open source their drivers; a full documentation of the hardware and GPU would be sufficient. Open source developers can and will do the rest, probably better than the original proprietary drivers.
I didn't say that they were "general purpose" computers. But there are plenty of operations that occur in scientific computing that they can speed up. And people may well want to try building alternative 3D graphics systems.
Other than that, while I sympathise with your sentiments, and to some extent agree with them, we don't really have much choice. The only fully working Linux drivers for modern graphics cards are closed source. By "fully working", I mean with complete, stable, fast suppot for all of the card's features.
Sure, we do. Not everything needs the absolute latest features.
Finally, you seem not to realise that it isn't always up to the card/chipset manufacturers to open their driver source. NVidia, for example, is under NDA with several third parties over technology used in their cards and drivers. That means that they can't open the source to their drivers.
It is completely irrelevant what the reason is for keeping the driver source closed, the consequences of it being closed remain the same.
What are some of the other reasons?
For a simple analogy, ask yourself: all things being equal, who do you trust more: the used car salesman making a pitch (Microsoft) or the common views of a dozen of his ex-customers (other open source users)?
Also, this isn't like the Coke-vs.-Pepsi debate--two more-or-less equivalent products, where one can debate endlessly which one is better. Open source and closed source software are profoundly different development models. I think open source really is better for most users, in a clearcut economic sense. I have concluded that, in contrast to many economic arguments for open source, Microsoft's arguments are mostly logically and economically unsound. You may reach different conclusions, but the point is that this is something one can think about and determine the truth of logically. Therefore, it is not a question of advocacy and bias but putting forward logical arguments and empirical proof.
It used to be good to pick a catchy, pronounceable, real-world name for a product. On the Internet, on the other hand, it's good to pick something unique and distinctive: "Phoenix" has 6.1 million hits on Google, something like "MicroZilla" has 10. Microsoft and Sun made similarly stupid choices with "C#" and Java ("C#" occurs in music, and the special character makes it difficult to search for). So, check Google before picking a product or project name.
Trying to influence other countries by restricting technology is a losing proposition--it just forces them to become more independent. If we wanted to get the attention of the Chinese, restricting imports of their low-cost products would do much more. But we aren't principled enough for that--instead we give the Chinese MFN status.
I think Microsoft's efforts ultimately are futile. But, nevertheless, they are trying hard: Palladium, proprietary media formats, proprietary document formats, exclusive distribution agreements, non-PC hardware (X-box, Mira, TabletPC, PocketPC, etc.) are all attempts at excluding open source. Add to that some heavy political lobbying, PR, monopolistic practices, campaign contributions, and who knows what other sleazy efforts. With that, they have had some modest short term successes.
Yes, and companies contributing to open source try to kill Microsoft's market and drive Microsoft's profits to zero. That is part of a free market, too. Neither has any moral upper hand. In particulary, Microsoft has no intrinsic right to charge for things that some cooperative effort can provide for free. Whichever model will serve the needs of customers/users better and for less money will win. And I have no doubt that Microsoft will lose this one.
You are comparing apples and oranges. It makes no sense to compare Microsoft Windows and "Linux". Linux is just a kernel. You have to compare Microsoft Windows to a specific distribution with a specific desktop. "Mandrake Linux running KDE" is as consistent as Microsoft Windows (and easier to use and more robust, IMO).
Is Windows inconsistent because there are plenty of Delphi and Windows 3.1 applications? Is Windows inconsistent because MS Office breaks many of the UI guidelines for Windows and uses a lot of widgets that are not available to regular developers? Is Macintosh OS X "inconsistent" because MS Office violates many OS X GUI guidelines? Because it runs X11 applications? Because it runs OS9 applications? Because there are Darwin-based distributions that only have X11? Does running Opera on Macintosh or Windows make those platforms inconsistent? Does the flood of poorly written, inconsistent, and ugly shareware and commercial software on Windows and Macintosh make those platforms inconsistent or bad?
Consistency isn't a technical attribute, it's about packaging and your personal choice of software. If you value consistency, pick a Linux distribution that offers it and don't use inconsistent applications. That's all the consistency you'll ever get, on Linux or any other platform.
I had the day off today so I installed Redhat 8.0 (SURPRISE!) and tried to get Mozilla 1.2 up and running with anti-aliased fonts. I wasted the whole day and I am glad to be back on Win2K (call me stupid or whatever... half the font stuff made me feel like a criminal - why isn't it *on* by default? I'll pay big bucks for that...). Linux is shooting itself in the foot with that respect. Everybody hears so much about Linux so they install it only to be disappointed to such an extreme that they'd never want to bother again (I know that I do not).
Mozilla has its own quirky GUI. Mozilla is inconsistent with the rest of the GUI on every platform, including Windows and Macintosh, why shouldn't it be inconsistent on Linux? If you run Konqueror, the KDE browser, under KDE you get font anti-aliasing plus a completely consistent GUI.
It's a historical quirk that Mozilla anti-aliasing is more difficult to configure for Mozilla on RedHat 8.0 than it is on Windows. On other distributions, it just works.
If you like Windows, stick with it, but don't whine about other platforms. You, after all, have a choice. The only people who have reason to complain are those who are forced to use platforms they don't like.
When people say "Apple's license is bad", they aren't saying "Apple has an obligation to change their license", they are saying "users shouldn't rely software with that license because it is disadvantageous for them". That has nothing to do with philosophy or purism, it's a simple, legal warning, not much different from a product safety warning someone might release for a stroller or toy.
but that's not what drives companies in a capitalist environment.
Who cares? As a consumer, I don't have an obligation to make Apple rich by using their software under unfavorable licensing terms. Free software also is subject to market forces, and if Apple can't create a free software license that is attractive enough, then Apple's free software will not catch on. And that's exactly what's happening.
The other issue is that free software is not about getting the software itself for free, it's about the freedom to inspect, use, and improve the software as you like. That lowers TCO and reduces business risks; even if MIcrosoft gives away Windows for free, they can't compete with that.
And Darwin is Mach based? So what's that other GNU/Mach system again? Ehmm...GNU/Hurd,
They are very different systems (personally, I think all of the current crop of kernels, including Darwin, have serious design problems).
GPL-purists might argue that the APSL is not a Free license.
The phrase "purism" suggests that you think that this is some irrelevant ideological issue. It isn't. Working with software that has the wrong licensing terms can be very harmful. The KDE project found this out the hard way. And it isn't that the GPL is always the right license. But APSL may have serious problems.
There is some use for disk-based OS distributions: eventually, external USB2.0/FireWire drives may become a reasonable choice. You plug them in and boot from them, and you get your complete environment. However, unfortunately, most BIOSes don't support that yet, so the best you could do right now is to use a DOS or Windows chain loader.
You can map voxel and density rendering onto modern graphics hardware to get real-time volume rendering without too many problems. Furthermore, medical applications require high fidelity: you don't want doctors to miss some detail, and these kinds of stippling techniques greatly reduce the resolution.
I think people like Brooks have done a grave disservice to the community by claiming, without solid evidence, that languages don't matter. Some language differences don't matter--Pascal and C are almost equally cumbersome and error prone. But in general, languages do matter enormously: runtime safety makes it easier to compose programs out of large numbers of components, dynamic typing and reflection help with configurability and I/O, static type safety and garbage collection reduce the probability of bugs, etc.
A disregard for the importance of languages is why projects like Mozilla, Gnome, and KDE keep lumbering on in languages like C and C++, producing software that crashes with regularity, consumes enormous amounts of memory, and takes forever to get finished. It's why software like Apache, IIE, and IIS keep shipping with bogus and avoidable buffer overflow errors.
Programming technology has improved enormously over the last three decades. It's just that most programmers don't use the improvements and still stick with three decade old technology for their jobs.
OCAML is a very practical functional programming language with excellent compilers. A number of Linux utilities are written in it.
You see, like the TiVo, these institutions deal with huge numbers of people and they won't spend the time or resources to verify each individual decision by hand, at least not right away.
Granted, paper junk mail is still a nuisance, but because the paper spammer pays most of the costs, it is self-limiting.
Well, my point is that for the libertarian I was responding to, libertarian principles do seem to be a justification for theft.
The second evidence was from growths observed from using potato dextrose agar as medium and the microorganism could be identified as staphylococcus pasteuri. Rod-like bacillus and fungus (engyodontium albus de Hoog) were also found.
I have no problem with the idea that microorganisms can travel through space, if we find evidence for it.
However, these claims strike me as dubious: these are organisms adapted to earth environments. Staphylococcus pasteuri is grown at body temperature and isolated from human vomit, and Engyodontium album is a eucaryote. Neither of them seems like a good candidate for a space bug, and both of them seem like somthing you would easily get if someone doesn't handle sterile samples carefully. You'd also expect big differences in sequence data.
If space is full of spores for organisms highly adapted to earth environments, that's a much, much stronger claim than merely claiming that space is full of spores. If they are extraterrestrial, where are these supposed to be coming from?
The most plausible explanation for these particular results is terrestrial contamination. If they want to prove anything more, the experiment really needs to be repeated many times and under different conditions. And they really should find some differences in the DNA sequences.
The USPS has not received tax money for operating expenses since 1982 (see here). Furthermore, people who send real-world junk-mail pay for the postage and the mailing. It's probably one of the bigger money makers for the USPS. If they didn't, it would have been stopped long ago.
E-mail spam is theft of service, pure and simple: the people sending the spam aren't paying the full cost.
I hate government intervention in the markets and involving the FBI should be an absolute nightmare to anyone with even a bit of libertarian in his heart.
So, libertarians now endorse theft because stopping it would restrict the liberty of the thief? I guess that sums up the internal contradictions of libertarianism as well as anything.
Well, obviously, THEY got the robotics from the UFO that landed in Roswell in the 50's, but THEY have been keeping this technology from us :-)
More generally, yes, there is a strong current of non-scientific and anti-scientific thought in modern US society. The right answer to that is to patiently explain scientific facts so that people can make up their own minds, and to start at whatever level people need. Science is something that doesn't have to rely on faith, it's something that reasonable people can spend time on and figure out, and make up their own mind about. And if a scientific project (be it the moon landing or some solid state physics experiment) cannot provide enough evidence for its results, well, then people are justified in doubting its validity until the evidence is forthcoming.
On the other hand, telling people that it must be true because they have seen it on TV is the wrong approach. We want people to question things they see in the mass media, because while the moon landing is not a hoax, a lot of other stuff in the mass media is completely fabricated, from television commercials for superior toothpaste to the validity of presidential elections.
I think the problem is people using the fully featured website while trying to suvert the very means that makes the website stay online.
I don't see a problem. If they don't want to put a full featured web site on-line for free, they don't have to. Nobody is forcing them.
If there existed a way to automatically reformat a printed newspaper into a non-ads newspaper, they'd have to charge everyone more and due to reduced audience they'd also have to cut jobs and lower the quality of the articles.
Tough cookies. Technology makes some good business models go bad and eliminates certain categories of jobs. It happened for farming, it happened for manufacturing, why should newspapers or content providers be exempt?
So, the bottom line is it's ok for you to try to block adds, as long as you can recognize that when your favourite site closes you are part of the reason.
The fewer sites that are created with commercial motives in mind, the better, as far as I'm concerned. Companies and advertising already dominate newspapers, television, and radio. I think it would be great if such business models simply didn't work on the Web. So, please, go ahead: block all you can.
My follow-up Not in Sun's and others self interest to backslide [slashdot.org] - covers your first question.
.NET, who should open source developers choose?
Neither. Both are technically poor, bloated, proprietary, and they
are not even well-defined "standards". We can do better in the open
source community.
It's not a question. I have probably been in this business a little longer than you and corporate policies can change in an instant, whether you think it's in their interest or not. In fact, Sun has built almost their entire software strategy on taking free software and making it proprietary--why would they stop now?
Opens source development often follows the successful strategy of finding a standard that works and re-implementing it and building upon it.
Java was a mediocre technical compromise when it started out, and instead of improving it, as Sun has promised, they have essentially frozen it. What they have spent their time on is chasing one pipe dream after another of enterprise infrastructure world domination. Sorry, the technology isn't even up to that.
If it comes to a choice between one of the dominant webservice standards,Java or