If he had just said, "yes, I blew it, now let's get on with running the country. What's it to you any way?" the news media would have ignored the whole issue in a week. That's not to say it would have upped his integrity level, just his credibility level. He lost his integrity by cheating in the first place.
"Personal" integrity is a myth. Integrity is integrity. You either have it or you don't.
Hatch lacks it beacuase he doesn't know that a patently stupid idea like destroying someone's computer before you knew if they were guilty or not is illegal, unconstitutional, and asking for trouble.
Clinton lacks it for more reasons than that he got caught... in the oval office... with an intern... lied about it... tried to redefine the word "IS"... etc...
Running a country is no small thing. We are trusting these guys to keep the most powerful country on Earth out of harms way. If they can't be trusted on the small things then they need to be thrown out! It doesn't matter their party affiliation or what policies they back. Lack of integrity can get us all killed.
How soon until someone makes a virus to blow up PCs? The virus will run, replicate and torch your PC while you look at a Barney cartoon:)
If a "Barney cartoon" comes up on my monitor, they won't have to destroy my PC. I will have thrown it out the window before I realized what was happening!
Are you an ideas person? Go sell that skill to a company that needs ideas, that's what the rest of us do, you don't need patents to make a buck.
Without a patent, there is nothing to stop that big company you just showed your idea from taking it and running with it, leaving you in the dust.
Patents are intended, much like copyrights, to protect the thinkers so that they can have a reasonably protected profit so that they are free to think up more ideas. Patent lifespans are short intentionally.
That is not to say, however, that a patent length is reasonable for software. In an industry that considers 1 year way out of date and irrelevent, 6 months would be a fair bargain.
If we could strike such a deal, I would be all for software patents. It gives the originator a fair enough time to profit before the innovation is public domain.
Darl accidentally played his hand (or on purpose, who can tell with him) in an interview where he admitted that a buyout from IBM is "an option."
Is it just me, or does this sound like a clear cut case of extortion to you too? If I were IBM, I'd think real hard about getting the DOJ to launch a criminal investigation first. Then sue ol' Darl and SCO into oblivion.
Is it a intrusion on privacy? Hard to say. Driving is a privilidge, not a right.
In the US, we are free to do what we choose unless it has been specifically made illegal. Even this has exceptions. For instance, if the law is unconstitutional, it is the law, not the lawbreaker that is at fault.
Basically, anything not declared illegal (in a constitutional framework) is our specific right!
The minute we lose track of this and think that the government has "granted us" these rights, we have lost them. In the US, the people have granted the government the authority to govern OUR concerns in a limited fashion. They answer to us, not the other way around!
Every basic founding document for the US reaffirms our right to replace any government that strays from this directive. And I'm not talking about electing new politicians to replace bad ones either.
So, is driving my right? You had better believe it. It is only when I abuse this right that I lose it. As it should be (but is not) with all laws.
You may disagree with me, but what you are disagreeing with is not me, but our history, our constitution, and our laws. Freedom is our heritage and with that comes the right to do what we please within the confines of decency and propriety. With that also comes the responsibility to act within the confines of reasonable laws.
This is not the case in other countries. What makes the difference is that our founding fathers recognised (and unequivocably said) that God has already granted us those rights and that the (US) government was simply going to recognise and bow to the higher power.
In the US, don't say "it's a privalidge, not a right" again! The more we give away our rights, the more they will disappear.
It looks like some people should have a black box for their laptop so that the accident investigators can see if they were compiling the latest kernel or rebooting from a kernel panic while making that left turn into the river.
How about the offending paper, magazine, or web site having to submit to the o' "rolled up newspaper accross the snout" routine. Just make sure you "roll" the appropriate media.
Jim: So what are you in the hospital for?
Bubba: Somebody hit me accross the nose with a CPU... It looked like they tried to roll it up first...
In the US, we almost take for granted the rights that have been recognized in the our constitution. I say "recognized" because they refer to a "law" higher than that of any man's government, constitution, treaty, or law. Having these rights spelled out in the constitution has protected the rights, safety, and property many people through the years.
Unfortunately, the source for those God given rights, has been ignored. This will cause a slide away from stable "rights mandated by God" to sliding "rights allowed by the government or a fickle society."
My suggestion is this:
First, study your history. It is rich with the very religeous and political thought upon which we based our "Bill of Rights".
Second, study the US Constitution, its history, its slide into decay, and the increasing difficulty that we are having relying on it for protection.
Third, force these basic, and some that were missed, into your new constitution.
Fourth, fight like hell to keep your rights!
Last, Teach you children these rights, their basis, and to continue the fight so that their children will not become slaves to some dictator or "social order" that places the state over the individual.
Make no mistake, maintaining or obtaining freedom is a constant fight and many, many, many have literaly laid down their lives to keep it. Don't forget the last two world wars. Any great society that has grown complacent in their vigilance for freedom has crumbled. Most have done so in a very short amount of time.
Freedom of Speech means no interference unless the speech amounts to libel. Forcing "the press", which includes anyone able to post publically, to post rebutals is the flip side of censorship.
The very reason that the original opinion was posted may be because the speaker considers the target's opinion to be damaging or harmful. Allowing such a law opens the door for the curtailing of many freedoms, including the freedom of religion.
Whether you agree or not, a religeous organization has the right to speak out against activities that it views as bad from their own pulpits without the government forcing access to that same pulpit to the opposition. For instance, imagine the outcome if the government forced a mosque to allow a Jew to respond to Islamic accusations made in that mosque.
A newspaper, radio show, web log, or other online site should have the equivalent respect. The site belongs to the owner. They should be able to post what they want, without intervention, as long as it does not spread intentional lies about someone or state secrets that pose a national threat. These types of things are handled via damages through the courts, not via censorship legislation.
As long as the public is free to access the opinion of the oposing side, there should be no such law.
'nuff said...
Re:Let's solve the last mile!
on
150 Mbit/s DSL.
·
· Score: 1
There's always a way!
For neighborhoods with Associations, the trick is to get into some meetings, send information to the residents/members, sell the individuals on the idea. Then, with their help (they do know the neighborhood best) lay out a plan and trade right-of-way for some of the setup fees. The monthly income (say $50 per month) would, after a time, pay for the installation.
For lower income or remote areas, apply for grants or subsidies on a case-by-case basis. It won;t work everywhere, but it will work.
The ROI is not fast. This is an investment of tenacity to build a large sustainable corporation. There comes a point where critical mass is reached and it begins paying back nicely. Somewhat like loaning money for real estate; if you make enough loans, eventually your monthly income outstrips your outlay. In the same way, building the last mile infrastructure will put in our hands a monthly base income plus the ability to offer added services.
To get it going takes a lot of people believing in the vision and investing. For instance, a $10 per month "association" of 100,000 people would provide $1,000,000 per month to work with. TADA...
Also remember that the typical college campus (staff anyway) is far left of the president. The fact that he likes it could have been a small stimulous to probe the possible downside.
From a pragmatic point of view:
The downside sould be addressed so that it can be dealt with, not to slam the idea. (a sensational report such as this does no good to anyone.)
Big oil companies could profit from this as much as from fossil fuel. They already have the delivery system.
Prople don't like change, it's the visionaries that drive the future.
Gosh I hate politics. We all have to look at the future and its possibilities with hope and a "can do" attitude. It won't take much, if we all commit to work together, to leave fossil fuels in the dust it came from within 50 years.
If we keep reserving the right to petty arguments based on political, social, or economic camps we will never get out of our hole and our economy will continue to suffer.
The current economic woes are in no small part added to by the rising oil/gas prices. Everything is effected by transportation prices (fuel) and all people are effected by heating/cooling prices. There is very little that is done without electricity. All of these things are currently effected by fossil fuel prices. The more money we spend on energy, the less we have to grow the economy. (works that way with taxes too.)
'nuff said.
Let's solve the last mile!
on
150 Mbit/s DSL.
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Hey!
Let's stop the whining about lack of high-speed coverage! I have another idea.
Anybody up for pitching in together to build a company to force the last mile. We'll simply bypass the telco and cable companies, put in higher bandwidth than this, charge reasonable fees, and have on-demand video and VOIP as built in services. We'll start with dense neighborhoods and then acquire grants for poor neighborhoods and rural areas. We'll use a shared bandwidth scheme with a minimum speed gurantee. If only 1 user is active, he gets the whole pipe.
It's time to stop the whining about how bad the high bandwidth coverage is and just start making money changing it!
There are enough of us out there (and I'm talking just/.ers) who can cover the technical, financial, and regulatory bases and make this thing happen. Why wait for the bloated telcos and cable companies to build (and own) the new infrastructure. Let's build it ourselves.
In general, taking down a running, working system in order to replace it with something else is always a risky move. It is never something to be taken lightly.
And yet every time M$ changes the standard and a corporation has to change, the project is huge, the old apps don't run properly, and a careful, staged approach is absolutely necessary.
I've been through many "technology upgrades" through the years as a consultant. Switching either servers or user workstations to a new M$ offering is no more difficult than switching to Linux. The difference in look and feel is an easy change for most users because it is close anyway.
There will always be people who hate to change. These are the same ones who refused to go from 95 to 98, from 98 to NT, or from NT to 2K. Moving to Linux will make absolutely no difference in their acceptance of change.
Linux is NOT a perfect beast, and it should surprise no rational person that it is, at this time, treated as "the devil you don't know".
The concept of Linux being an unknown doesn't wash anymore. Even if it is not installed in your shop a very large percentage of the techs out there have been running Linux for years at home.
With M$'s push to the "software as a service" model, they are trying to force corporations to upgrade at M$'s pace, not at the pace needed by the company to clear every hurdle. Because of this, switching to Linux can be done slower than the forced shift to the newest, untested M$ offering.
When the general populace begins to realize that the "emperor" really has no clothes, M$ will cease to exist. I can assure you that the $40 Billion "war chest" will not last very long when people stop buying their products and paying their extortion fees. Salaries alone will eat that up in less than a year! M$ knows this. That is why they are desperately trying to buy up every company out there with a patent and corner every market they can.
In the US we are already implementing a national Do-No-Call list and fax-bombing is illegal. A good anti-spam law would be welcome as well. A Civil suit, however, reaches beyond "what is lawfull" and moves to the territory of "personal harm". Civil lawsuits of this nature are not necessarily restricted to the US but can go cross borders.
A well organized suit (individual or class action) that is also delivered well and well funded has a good chance of success, especially if it involves harm to minors. This type of suit, in particular, would be a good thing for the internet community. It would help put the brakes on the massive amount of spam out there.
Think of it this way. Freedom means that you can go out and get something for yourself, even if it is a bad thing. It doesn't mean that someone else has the right to throw it in my face. Post on your own site, not in my mailbox. If I want to refinance my house, I'll do a search. I'm paying for my internet bandwidth, not you. If you use up my bandwidth with things that I didn't ask for, then you are definitely stealing from me.
SPAM is to email what "active content" is to programming. It lets in things that shouldn't be there.
Wonderful programs like SpamAssasin are great but too cumbersome for most people to figure out and web blocker services aren't Linux compatable. Both content providers and spammers are as responsible for the damage that they do as a bartender who keeps feeding someone drinks way past the safe level. You can drink yourself to death alone, but not at the bar.
Being and x509 buff, I'm appalled at the non-flexible logical structure built in to (and expected of) 'nix operating systems and their numerous filesystems.
I'm looking at a project to pull together a good unified directory for security, ACLs, configuration, networking, etc... The onerous task of converting utilities and user-land apps will come after a solid and fast system is built.
OpenLDAP is decidedly out of the question, along with NDS, ADS, and the other also-ran and proprietery directory solutions.
With your unified name space concept and database style file system, has anyone proposed a ReiserFS-based solution to this?
If so (or not), what approach would you recommend to bring such a task to fruition?
With this transaction-based system, has anyone suggested or pursued a replication and tree partitioning scheme?
Photovoltaics can easily produce plenty of power. The electricity can be used to split H2O dwn to (H2)x2 and O2 for portable fuel cell storage. The drawback of cloudy days and nighttime are mitigated by large scale power storage (battery, fuel cell, etc...)
The only remaining drawback is the ratio of dollars per killoWatt hour production. A good PV gets around 8% to 15% in effective solar to electric production, depending on location, condition, age, materials, etc... Also, material costs are still too high. Pump a few hundred million into solid, steady research and we can get efficiency up and cost down.
It's a matter of priorities. The politicians support what they think the people will go for. The old saying goes like this: "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush." We "have" nukes now. In reality, the development costs for taking PV to the level that will trounce NUCUL... (whatever) and fossil fuels is within reach. It will probably cost less (wild, but semi-educated guess) to bring PVs to the more cost effective level than the HTNGs.
There is a logic involved in exposure (excessive copies) bringing more profit.
It has been proven in the software industry with the popularity of such programs as Lotus 1-2-3, dBase III, and others becoming, at least for a time, defacto standards because everyone was using them.
This use leads to more legal sales. In the music industry, mp3 downloads have helped artist popularity. Just ask Eminem. Unfortunately, paying later, in the case of music, doesn't help much. The artists typically don't see much anyway. Just ask Courtney Love.
I'm not saying don't pay. It is still the right thing to do. The point is that until the upside down music industry is turned rightside up, the "starving artists" out there are going to stay that way. The RIAA has enslaved the musician and is threatening the listener.
There is a better way. I have the business plan and I'm looking for funding! (aren't we all...) When it rolls out, Apple, MS, Real, and the "big 4" producers will be eating dust! Not mine, the artists' !!!
Furthermore, tax laws are a good place to start translating fuzzy legal language into clear mathematical and programmatic rules, and those rules should not be coded up by a bunch of private companies, they should be supplied by the IRS.
The IRS IS a private company granted monopolistic rights to collect taxes for the federal government. That's why the IRS, whose legality has been heatedly debated since its inception, has gotten in so much trouble for its heavy-handed collections tactics.
Thought for the day: No Federal income tax = no IRS. No Income tax at all = no intrusion into our private lives by the government. No property taxas = no robbing the house out from under the elderly or infirm. Solution = 20% sales tax (10% state+local, 10% federal) with NO tax on food (any food), labor, or shelter (include all real estate, which has been taxed to a gillion times its worth already).
Last year I did my taxes via software (TaxCut) and it took about 3 hours of hacking through the "help files" and HOPING that my returns were correct. This year (due to extreme financial constraints) I filled out the forms manually. It took about an hour. My taxes were no less complicated. It was just simpler to read the silly manual and fill in the forms. I did, however, use an OpenOffice spreadsheet to build the basic formulas and check my math. I am now sure of my returns (I did, after all, use the IRS's own explanations) and am swearing off the bloatware. On a political note: I still want to get rid of ALL income and property taxes and go with a constitutionally fixed sales tax, but that's another issue.
Randy
The ideal is to kick out all M$ proprietary licenses and go with strictly OSS applications. The reality is that most corporations cannot stomach the instant switchover. Sure, OpenOffice (and others) do a pretty good job of pulling up office docs. The're just not perfect, especially on a heavily scripted M$ environment. So, what's the answer?
Bring out Linux desktops that can run the native Linux apps and connect to the Crossover Server to get to the old proprietary apps. This puts Linux on the desktop immediately but allows them to go through the slow migration that is necessary to keep their businesses in operation!
Idealism takes time. The only way to be a true idealist is to first be a pragmatist. Patients and good innovation will win the day!
Slashdot Mirror
Can I barrow it?
If he had just said, "yes, I blew it, now let's get on with running the country. What's it to you any way?" the news media would have ignored the whole issue in a week. That's not to say it would have upped his integrity level, just his credibility level. He lost his integrity by cheating in the first place.
Hatch lacks it beacuase he doesn't know that a patently stupid idea like destroying someone's computer before you knew if they were guilty or not is illegal, unconstitutional, and asking for trouble.
Clinton lacks it for more reasons than that he got caught... in the oval office... with an intern... lied about it... tried to redefine the word "IS"... etc...
Running a country is no small thing. We are trusting these guys to keep the most powerful country on Earth out of harms way. If they can't be trusted on the small things then they need to be thrown out! It doesn't matter their party affiliation or what policies they back. Lack of integrity can get us all killed.
'nuff said...
If a "Barney cartoon" comes up on my monitor, they won't have to destroy my PC. I will have thrown it out the window before I realized what was happening!
Oh the humanity...
We reelected Clinton, didn't we?!
Are you an ideas person? Go sell that skill to a company that needs ideas, that's what the rest of us do, you don't need patents to make a buck.
Without a patent, there is nothing to stop that big company you just showed your idea from taking it and running with it, leaving you in the dust.
Patents are intended, much like copyrights, to protect the thinkers so that they can have a reasonably protected profit so that they are free to think up more ideas. Patent lifespans are short intentionally.
That is not to say, however, that a patent length is reasonable for software. In an industry that considers 1 year way out of date and irrelevent, 6 months would be a fair bargain.
If we could strike such a deal, I would be all for software patents. It gives the originator a fair enough time to profit before the innovation is public domain.
'nuff said...
Is it just me, or does this sound like a clear cut case of extortion to you too? If I were IBM, I'd think real hard about getting the DOJ to launch a criminal investigation first. Then sue ol' Darl and SCO into oblivion.
just a thought...
In the US, we are free to do what we choose unless it has been specifically made illegal. Even this has exceptions. For instance, if the law is unconstitutional, it is the law, not the lawbreaker that is at fault.
Basically, anything not declared illegal (in a constitutional framework) is our specific right!
The minute we lose track of this and think that the government has "granted us" these rights, we have lost them. In the US, the people have granted the government the authority to govern OUR concerns in a limited fashion. They answer to us, not the other way around!
Every basic founding document for the US reaffirms our right to replace any government that strays from this directive. And I'm not talking about electing new politicians to replace bad ones either.
So, is driving my right? You had better believe it. It is only when I abuse this right that I lose it. As it should be (but is not) with all laws.
You may disagree with me, but what you are disagreeing with is not me, but our history, our constitution, and our laws. Freedom is our heritage and with that comes the right to do what we please within the confines of decency and propriety. With that also comes the responsibility to act within the confines of reasonable laws.
This is not the case in other countries. What makes the difference is that our founding fathers recognised (and unequivocably said) that God has already granted us those rights and that the (US) government was simply going to recognise and bow to the higher power.
In the US, don't say "it's a privalidge, not a right" again! The more we give away our rights, the more they will disappear.
'nuff said...
PS: And Yes, I am from Texas. Why do you ask? ;->
It looks like some people should have a black box for their laptop so that the accident investigators can see if they were compiling the latest kernel or rebooting from a kernel panic while making that left turn into the river.
Jim: So what are you in the hospital for?
Bubba: Somebody hit me accross the nose with a CPU... It looked like they tried to roll it up first...
Unfortunately, the source for those God given rights, has been ignored. This will cause a slide away from stable "rights mandated by God" to sliding "rights allowed by the government or a fickle society."
My suggestion is this:
Make no mistake, maintaining or obtaining freedom is a constant fight and many, many, many have literaly laid down their lives to keep it. Don't forget the last two world wars. Any great society that has grown complacent in their vigilance for freedom has crumbled. Most have done so in a very short amount of time.
'nuff said...
Stealing via copyright violation is different than freedom of speech.
The very reason that the original opinion was posted may be because the speaker considers the target's opinion to be damaging or harmful. Allowing such a law opens the door for the curtailing of many freedoms, including the freedom of religion.
Whether you agree or not, a religeous organization has the right to speak out against activities that it views as bad from their own pulpits without the government forcing access to that same pulpit to the opposition. For instance, imagine the outcome if the government forced a mosque to allow a Jew to respond to Islamic accusations made in that mosque.
A newspaper, radio show, web log, or other online site should have the equivalent respect. The site belongs to the owner. They should be able to post what they want, without intervention, as long as it does not spread intentional lies about someone or state secrets that pose a national threat. These types of things are handled via damages through the courts, not via censorship legislation.
As long as the public is free to access the opinion of the oposing side, there should be no such law.
'nuff said...
For neighborhoods with Associations, the trick is to get into some meetings, send information to the residents/members, sell the individuals on the idea. Then, with their help (they do know the neighborhood best) lay out a plan and trade right-of-way for some of the setup fees. The monthly income (say $50 per month) would, after a time, pay for the installation.
For lower income or remote areas, apply for grants or subsidies on a case-by-case basis. It won;t work everywhere, but it will work.
The ROI is not fast. This is an investment of tenacity to build a large sustainable corporation. There comes a point where critical mass is reached and it begins paying back nicely. Somewhat like loaning money for real estate; if you make enough loans, eventually your monthly income outstrips your outlay. In the same way, building the last mile infrastructure will put in our hands a monthly base income plus the ability to offer added services.
To get it going takes a lot of people believing in the vision and investing. For instance, a $10 per month "association" of 100,000 people would provide $1,000,000 per month to work with. TADA...
From a pragmatic point of view:
-
The downside sould be addressed so that it can be dealt with, not to slam the idea. (a sensational report such as this does no good to anyone.)
-
Big oil companies could profit from this as much as from fossil fuel. They already have the delivery system.
-
Prople don't like change, it's the visionaries that drive the future.
Gosh I hate politics. We all have to look at the future and its possibilities with hope and a "can do" attitude. It won't take much, if we all commit to work together, to leave fossil fuels in the dust it came from within 50 years.If we keep reserving the right to petty arguments based on political, social, or economic camps we will never get out of our hole and our economy will continue to suffer.
The current economic woes are in no small part added to by the rising oil/gas prices. Everything is effected by transportation prices (fuel) and all people are effected by heating/cooling prices. There is very little that is done without electricity. All of these things are currently effected by fossil fuel prices. The more money we spend on energy, the less we have to grow the economy. (works that way with taxes too.)
'nuff said.
Let's stop the whining about lack of high-speed coverage! I have another idea.
Anybody up for pitching in together to build a company to force the last mile. We'll simply bypass the telco and cable companies, put in higher bandwidth than this, charge reasonable fees, and have on-demand video and VOIP as built in services. We'll start with dense neighborhoods and then acquire grants for poor neighborhoods and rural areas. We'll use a shared bandwidth scheme with a minimum speed gurantee. If only 1 user is active, he gets the whole pipe.
It's time to stop the whining about how bad the high bandwidth coverage is and just start making money changing it!
There are enough of us out there (and I'm talking just /.ers) who can cover the technical, financial, and regulatory bases and make this thing happen. Why wait for the bloated telcos and cable companies to build (and own) the new infrastructure. Let's build it ourselves.
New Motto: No more dark fiber! No more dialups!
And yet every time M$ changes the standard and a corporation has to change, the project is huge, the old apps don't run properly, and a careful, staged approach is absolutely necessary.
I've been through many "technology upgrades" through the years as a consultant. Switching either servers or user workstations to a new M$ offering is no more difficult than switching to Linux. The difference in look and feel is an easy change for most users because it is close anyway.
There will always be people who hate to change. These are the same ones who refused to go from 95 to 98, from 98 to NT, or from NT to 2K. Moving to Linux will make absolutely no difference in their acceptance of change.
Linux is NOT a perfect beast, and it should surprise no rational person that it is, at this time, treated as "the devil you don't know".
The concept of Linux being an unknown doesn't wash anymore. Even if it is not installed in your shop a very large percentage of the techs out there have been running Linux for years at home.
With M$'s push to the "software as a service" model, they are trying to force corporations to upgrade at M$'s pace, not at the pace needed by the company to clear every hurdle. Because of this, switching to Linux can be done slower than the forced shift to the newest, untested M$ offering.
When the general populace begins to realize that the "emperor" really has no clothes, M$ will cease to exist. I can assure you that the $40 Billion "war chest" will not last very long when people stop buying their products and paying their extortion fees. Salaries alone will eat that up in less than a year! M$ knows this. That is why they are desperately trying to buy up every company out there with a patent and corner every market they can.
'nuff said.
A well organized suit (individual or class action) that is also delivered well and well funded has a good chance of success, especially if it involves harm to minors. This type of suit, in particular, would be a good thing for the internet community. It would help put the brakes on the massive amount of spam out there.
Think of it this way. Freedom means that you can go out and get something for yourself, even if it is a bad thing. It doesn't mean that someone else has the right to throw it in my face. Post on your own site, not in my mailbox. If I want to refinance my house, I'll do a search. I'm paying for my internet bandwidth, not you. If you use up my bandwidth with things that I didn't ask for, then you are definitely stealing from me.
SPAM is to email what "active content" is to programming. It lets in things that shouldn't be there.
Wonderful programs like SpamAssasin are great but too cumbersome for most people to figure out and web blocker services aren't Linux compatable. Both content providers and spammers are as responsible for the damage that they do as a bartender who keeps feeding someone drinks way past the safe level. You can drink yourself to death alone, but not at the bar.
'nuff said.
Being and x509 buff, I'm appalled at the non-flexible logical structure built in to (and expected of) 'nix operating systems and their numerous filesystems.
I'm looking at a project to pull together a good unified directory for security, ACLs, configuration, networking, etc... The onerous task of converting utilities and user-land apps will come after a solid and fast system is built.
OpenLDAP is decidedly out of the question, along with NDS, ADS, and the other also-ran and proprietery directory solutions.
Photovoltaics can easily produce plenty of power. The electricity can be used to split H2O dwn to (H2)x2 and O2 for portable fuel cell storage. The drawback of cloudy days and nighttime are mitigated by large scale power storage (battery, fuel cell, etc...)
The only remaining drawback is the ratio of dollars per killoWatt hour production. A good PV gets around 8% to 15% in effective solar to electric production, depending on location, condition, age, materials, etc... Also, material costs are still too high. Pump a few hundred million into solid, steady research and we can get efficiency up and cost down.
It's a matter of priorities. The politicians support what they think the people will go for. The old saying goes like this: "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush." We "have" nukes now. In reality, the development costs for taking PV to the level that will trounce NUCUL... (whatever) and fossil fuels is within reach. It will probably cost less (wild, but semi-educated guess) to bring PVs to the more cost effective level than the HTNGs.
Think about it...
Sure but I'm not going to hand code the kernel and gcc translation. Lead clothing gives me the hives...
It has been proven in the software industry with the popularity of such programs as Lotus 1-2-3, dBase III, and others becoming, at least for a time, defacto standards because everyone was using them.
This use leads to more legal sales. In the music industry, mp3 downloads have helped artist popularity. Just ask Eminem. Unfortunately, paying later, in the case of music, doesn't help much. The artists typically don't see much anyway. Just ask Courtney Love.
I'm not saying don't pay. It is still the right thing to do. The point is that until the upside down music industry is turned rightside up, the "starving artists" out there are going to stay that way. The RIAA has enslaved the musician and is threatening the listener.
There is a better way. I have the business plan and I'm looking for funding! (aren't we all...) When it rolls out, Apple, MS, Real, and the "big 4" producers will be eating dust! Not mine, the artists' !!!
Furthermore, tax laws are a good place to start translating fuzzy legal language into clear mathematical and programmatic rules, and those rules should not be coded up by a bunch of private companies, they should be supplied by the IRS.
The IRS IS a private company granted monopolistic rights to collect taxes for the federal government. That's why the IRS, whose legality has been heatedly debated since its inception, has gotten in so much trouble for its heavy-handed collections tactics.
Thought for the day: No Federal income tax = no IRS. No Income tax at all = no intrusion into our private lives by the government. No property taxas = no robbing the house out from under the elderly or infirm. Solution = 20% sales tax (10% state+local, 10% federal) with NO tax on food (any food), labor, or shelter (include all real estate, which has been taxed to a gillion times its worth already).
Last year I did my taxes via software (TaxCut) and it took about 3 hours of hacking through the "help files" and HOPING that my returns were correct. This year (due to extreme financial constraints) I filled out the forms manually. It took about an hour. My taxes were no less complicated. It was just simpler to read the silly manual and fill in the forms. I did, however, use an OpenOffice spreadsheet to build the basic formulas and check my math. I am now sure of my returns (I did, after all, use the IRS's own explanations) and am swearing off the bloatware. On a political note: I still want to get rid of ALL income and property taxes and go with a constitutionally fixed sales tax, but that's another issue. Randy
The ideal is to kick out all M$ proprietary licenses and go with strictly OSS applications. The reality is that most corporations cannot stomach the instant switchover. Sure, OpenOffice (and others) do a pretty good job of pulling up office docs. The're just not perfect, especially on a heavily scripted M$ environment. So, what's the answer?
Bring out Linux desktops that can run the native Linux apps and connect to the Crossover Server to get to the old proprietary apps. This puts Linux on the desktop immediately but allows them to go through the slow migration that is necessary to keep their businesses in operation!
Idealism takes time. The only way to be a true idealist is to first be a pragmatist. Patients and good innovation will win the day!