Are you saying that every place but the United States has dropped politics as a function of science, subset ecology? Which place is that? Where is this "other place" that has no politics associated with science/ecology? Name it if you can.
I don't see it, albeit just looking on the web. It appears to be a universal phenomenon that science/money/politics has always been an intertwined mega endeavor, looking back in history, looking at todays events, and then extrapolating, i don'tthink politics is being removed from ecology any time soon. Anyplace.
I don't think you even could separate it, humans being human.
Cultural jingoism sometimes makes random selected human/tribe/nation think their "way" is perfect, yet from another's viewpoint it isn't. The old expression that fits is "you can't see the forest for the trees".
Here's the obvious example, even the assertion that other nation "x" has separated "science" from "politics" is a political assertion from just the way humans use language. Because once you make something an absolute, a statement, a declarative, you are implying that every possible variable has been accounted for, and there are no exceptions.
In some small matters,extremely small,say very basic maths, probably there is little to no debate,but once you get beyond the trivially obvious, I think you will find there's still debate, and hence politics will enter. In fact I'd say the "scientific" community is one of the more highly politicised communities, in all nations.If it's not, I'd like to see the nation that doesn't have any legislation in their written/coded laws that pertain to "ecology". If they have laws, then that's political, it hasn'tbeen separated, it's been politicised.
To get back to ecology, this is such a broad subject, and the modeling required to actually finalise some conclusions is so hugely complex, that I would think it's safe to say there will be debate and therefore poltics involved for quite some time to come. The reason why-perhaps- it might seem like the US has more, is merely from the fact that the US is very large in many diverse ways and the center of the worlds attention all the time in the news. The US currently controls and influences so very many things because of our actions it's just easier to look at and point at, that's all. Say for instance one day we decided to just end our political involvement with "science" and become totally insular. that would mandate our dropping of support for any other nations or exteernal treaties or collaborative effort in 'ecology". We could just 'declare" a carved in stone group think policy and say "debate has ended, this is so, it is scientific fact, and no other viewpoints are valid, our science has determined such and such and that's it".
That in itself would be a rad political move, yet it would fit the requirement of removing politics from the discussion-at least as regards any other nation, and they would be left to their own endeavors in their "perfectness".
Anyway, to get back to basics, I'd like to know by actual names which nation or group of nations have no politics associated with the loosely defined groupings of scientific explorations that might fall under an "ecology" heading.
Slightly different. Opera distributes-at their cost- a free version that is ad supported, no cost to the end user other than a small bar at the top with some ads, and the end user also has a couple of choices on how to deal with the ads,it's up to them. Microsoft does not offer a similar set of choices, they have paid for versions, and paid for versions, either the end user directly buys their software, or indirectly as part of a bundle when they purchase a computer. Either way the end users pay money for it.
Picky point, sure it is, but it's still there. Yes, both companies want to make money, just one is willing to cut their customers serious slack on how that happens, and in many cases the end users never transfer funds to Opera, yet still get the product.
..that's a good point and any group who wanted to countersue for using their image as part of the artisitic expression should sue him all the way into bankruptcy. The "art" is most definetly using other folks images once they are reflected in it. Mexican standoff then, I hope it happens. I do landscaping sometimes, I should copyright all the work I do, photo it and document it, then charge people a fee to drive by and look at it. either turn their heads or pay a copyright "license to view" fee.
This is ridiculous, absurd, insane. It's not even the least bit humorous or logical. To infringe the copyright, one would have to make a copy of the sculpture. That's what "copy" means, to make a "copy", an exact duplicate. A photo is not a copy of a sculpture, it's a reference to it at best.
Anyone's computer can do this, if they try to do it. You can build a kitcar too, yet most people don't,they spend the extra x-thousands to have it done for them.
Deal is, Intel has the money to get all of that on the shelf and then the most important thing *market it* with TV ads and whatnot, a lot of whatnot.
Say what ya want, I have yet to see....
"Joe's do it all absolutely no hassle turbomedia linux distro deluxe complete with new shiny kikbooty ultraXteme rad bitchin' computar! Get yours today, and remember kids, it has INTEL inside! The Bestus!....advertised on the TV.
Heck, look how easy it is to download and install a different browser, yet some hundreds of millions or so people have NOT even done that.
If it ain't on the shelf and not advertised on TV it will remain a niche market, and it is quite possible to just keep rebranding the same old stuff and sell it, you just need a huge advertising budget and half way competent marketers.
This is why crap keeps getting sold all the time, crap is cheaper than quality, advertising is cheaper than engineering, and bribing off legislators is cheaper than offering really good warranties and customer service. So you will see marginally functional computers guaranteed to break soon after the joke warranty expires, running so-so media apps that more or less sorta kinda function, that will be chock full of delicious DRM goodness.
quote "What does Oracle's stubbornness imply for the industry as a whole, with multicore chips coming to the fore so strongly?" It means that there's a huge amount of cash to be made developing open source alternatives. The potential is there. The business model is there to be used. Note, I said used not abused. The huge gravy train days of uber profits with software are coming to a close,you can see that train coming around the bend, but every day meat and potatoes level money will always be there. You actually can sell and service open source. Even if it is freely given away you can still sell service to it and customizatise it and get paid to do that. Some companies are doing that now. That's what it means. If oracle wants to be dinks about it, or any other big company, someone else will step up to the plate. It won't happen overnight but it WILL happen. Software is no longer all that exotic, and we've gone from a few hundred people coding some decades ago to millions now, so industries have to adapt and adopt new business practices or go the way of the dodo. And I say let them.
...I alway find that is one of the funner things with linux from day one after my first install, even if I haven't a clue what the hell is going on. I just sit there hyp-mo-tized -> LOOKATHERGO! DANGTHASCOOL!
kinda fun in an admittedly strange way, it's also cool to see how your leet speed reading is, if you can keep up.
if they started to cruise on just savings, they would almost be forced to buy up hurredly dumped shares so as to try and keep some sort of worth to them. That would drastically increase what they had to spend out of savings.
I am guessing though, but isn't that more usual?
I understand yours is just a strict accounting, I just wanted to throw in a variable that might have to occur.
...the firefox users then go on to add dozens of extensions/plugins whatever, bringing you right back where you started from, more or less, most generally speaking. It's the same deal then, just duplicating effort with the suite in a way. I still use moz suite because it renders better, works better and is faster and less buggy. I keep trying firefox and every time I go back to the suite. When that changes and FF is actually faster and better I'll switch, but until then I use a browser and email all the time anyway, handy to just have them both be there from mashing one button. I count both FF and tbird together as an actual legit comparison with the suite if you want to be fair about it really, at a minimum, and that's leaving out irc chat and the composer web page editor. Run four very similar programs at the same time and compare it to just turning moz's 4 programs on, that's an honest test then. I would think moz would still do better over all, combined cpu and memory. Just a guess though and absolutely no biggee. Not dissin FF but for a lot of people moz is still better.
And I just might switch to opera if the talking features ever make it to the linux builds and it actually works, I like that idea immensely and I like some of the other features in opera as well, along with some of the features in Konq. They are all good enough, just depends on what you want to do. I see good stuff and bad stuff in all of them really.
And to get even more pedantic, the mac mini has re opened up Apple as a contender, I dropped out of using them when they just absolutely refused to release any entry level priced desktop that was even close to what you could get in the pc world, but now that has changed. I put up with higher priced apples for more than a decade, but when it got to the point you were still paying more than double, I just gave up and went to cheap components and linux, but linux still is sorta lacking useability wise. It's good enough for command line tweakers, but not if you want a 100% GUI that actually works, at least none of the distros I have tried so far. They get close, but have been stuck at that "close" level for too long now, IMO.
blah blah blah, just an opinion, means nothing really.
...every election for the past several decades now I have heard that you shouldn't "waste your vote" and vote any independent or third party. They, this "the public" guy, have been taught that, it is now carved in stealth-stone that only the combined criminal cartel of the Democrat and Republican parties are the legitimate government, and will remain so forever. Forever.
Anything else, any other strongly held belief, makes you a fringe extremist whacko kook cult member or something, and who wants that label?
They are taught as a religious belief starting in grade school by public school teachers paid by public tax money that we have a TWO PARTY "system". Third parties are mentioned briefly as "fringe" parties, with the snicker under the breath. this religious belief is so well brainwashed into them that once they reach adulthood it has "stuck" and is part of their personality, even though intellectually they know it is false, realistically they know that that is the way things are now.
Any abuses or criminal actions in the syndicates cash and power generator corporation called "government" by any so called "elected" persons or hired on or appointed personel inside this "two party" political system are investigated by- drum roll-the two party system, or like I prefer, the cartel, or you can even call it a syndicate. On the street it would be a gang, once they get large enough like the international drug dealers they get to be called a cartel, when they are involved in all the rackets it's called a crime syndicate, so that really fits the best.
All the "judges" are part of this syndicate.
All the cops just follow orders from this criminal syndicate.
The military follows orders from this criminal syndicate.
These latter two are points to rember, because it's important for your physical safety, and we have all learned this. We are well educated on it.
They, the syndicate crime bosses, will rig reality all the way to the point of "very harsh measures" if you do much more than talk about it, and there's no way any so called "elections" will occur that even have a chance of unseating any significant part of this syndicates complete control. None. They love running those little political melodramas, more for a chance to let people think they have any influence than for anything else, because they can't just one day just suspend it, that would give the game away just a little to much, *at this point in time* anyway. Sometime in the not so far distant future I think they might though.
The crime syndicate decides who will be in the public "national debates" and therefore in the "elections" and it has been decided only the syndicates "candidates" or back room appointees as is closer to the truth participate in this process. Because of scares they have gotten in the past, they decided on a technique to insure their continual "success" in the sham polls, this is via use of electronic voting and counting, which is 100% owned operated and run by-the crime syndicate.
The controlled mass media is owned and ordered around from the top levels by people whom are all members of this crime syndicate as well, so the news functions primarily as a way to keep the propoganda efforts in check and on track.
The other top economic powerhouses and "leaders" in this nation are members of this syndicate and contribute overt and covert funding and support in order to keep the syndicate in power. These economic "leaders" frequently rotate in and out of "poltical office" as well, or are members of high military "rank" and are rewarded on exiting the military with very very lucrative and powerful positions and extreme sums of very easy money. They know this so they go along with the crime syndicates orders.
This "combination" of factors is an old design but well proven and successful in the past, the descriptive term for it was dubbed by Mussolini as the state of "Corporatism" and is the most accurate way to describe our combined econom
...will load and run entirely in RAM. Really fun, wicked fast, even on an old clunker as long as you have enough ram. And the ability to roll your own application-specific distro is a plus 1 bonus. Get what you want, not what a consortium wants. Want a utility tools specific distro? Make one easy, installed and up in minutes. Want a media heavy distro? Ya got that. Want an office appllications distro, there ya go. Want a simple joe surfer and chat one, there ya go. Games mostly, there ya go. Spiffy and safer on the net as well.
On sybaris site they claim that MS has been using it internally for several months now.They are just now buying the company, so they must actually like what it does, and it's got to be cheaper than them trying to buy symantec or something.
I also think they might be grasping at straws about now, realising there's not a thing to do to actually make what's out there even reasonably safe. Everyone (practically) who has run windows for the past buncha years has at least one horror story that leads to cusswords quickly. This is not great advertising. They have tried to pass it off, that flew for a few years, but now even the dullest of the non sharp realise there's something...seriously broken there.
I could see that, some sort of popup warning dialog box saying this or that app is unknown and not supported and it is dangerous to proceed. It might even bork any sort of fix for the user if there are *any* non approved programs installed that don't pass corporate muster with a paid off seal of approval. The virus scanner would just refuse to say the computer was "safe" or something. All in the name of security and they would have half a public point right there. You can see the PR person now... "How can we protect our valued customers machines? They depend on us and our advanced technological breakthroughs with security software and systems monitoring and yada yada. We have to be able to verify the programs, remember "malware"? If it's not verified we at least have to warn them"...and etc. Very slick if they do that..and they could...
....whitebox shops around here that do "computer fixin'" which is usually just cleaning up borked windows installs from bad internet mojo, they are getting around (all similar, close enough) 60 dollars an hour for that service. No flat rate I have seen unless it's just a complete wipe and reinstall. If the customer wants all or most of their data intact, they tote the freight for at least an hour or no fixy for cheap. So there's an answer from bubbaland.
And that's why you won't see windows leave the market anytime soon, because this is the LEAST money being made by IT "professionals" off of windows being on almost everyones computer. The LEAST amount. "They" -any random windows IT professional, may claim publically they want excellent products, reality is that windows being as goobered up as it is is a hundred billion dollar (some large @55 number) make-work phony baloney business now,it is designed to perpetuate a near functional but never quite finished by design and intent highly lucrative perpetual cash cow, with thousands of people (or millions no idea really)now grown dependent and complacent on that easy money income. It's not a legit business anymore, it's a crime racket as far as I am concerned, a silent cartel of cooperating profiteers, large,medium and small sizes. From MS itself to the local computer herdsman, it's moo baby moo gimmee the money. Ha!
There's little to no profit in selling computers that work and don't break. Just like cars to beat that old dead analogy horse one more time. The hardware NEEDS to crap out soon after warranty and the software has to be in a perpetual state of beta ware, although it's all "licensed to use for your economic and sanity inconvenience" as a finished product. And that's why there is NO warranty with consumer software as well.
So, sock it to those folks who absolutely insist on using windows, that's exactly what it's designed for, to make you money. It's secondary reason is to function as software, but primarily, it's a cash cow, milk it. Charge em.
Yes I am cynical, no I don't use windows on the intarweb, never. I use linux or mac. I have a few old boxes and a laptop that have windows on them, but there's a decent airgap between them and the WWW, not that it isn't possible, it's that I simply don't care about trying to make windows function on the web, it's like bolting a wing on your yugo and applying flame stickers. Waste of time, IMO. I have never had any desire to even much "learn" windows because it became obvious as all get out with win95 what the scam was going to be, perpetual beta ware that you will be charged for.
if you are being funny, the USA fits, if you are being more specific, either mexico or cuba come to mind, with mexico getting the edge for having a traditional neo royal oligarchy controller class. It's also the prime reason their economy and society are so lame, and must needs export 1/3 of their population to keep from going under, despite the fact of them being on paper/geographically "wealthy" as to resources, water, farmland, access to oceans, mineral wealth, energy wealth etc, a well-off country. Cuba comes close but they are resource poor compared to mexico and bing an island it's very difficult for their populations to vote with their feet.
I would imagine there are publicity and props seeking blackhats, then those who go way out of their way to make sure no one finds out, and are after intelligence, financial records, insider business decsions useful in the "investor" community,etc,etc, things that can be sold for big bucks on the blackmarket or used by competeting governments or corporations. Large crime rings and their handmaidens governmental approved hackers would probably seek to not garner any notice or brag about it on irc channels, etc. Witness the latest FBI email hack, allegedly went unnoticed for months, and publicaly at least they have no clue who did it, why they did it, etc. and I would bet right this second there are any number of sensitive web sites/pages compromised by well beyond normal skilled people, precisely to just get intel of various sorts. And I would also bet quite a few are inside jobs. When you have the ability to really really and skillfully hack, plus the combination of the incentive to do so through bribery and blackmail or some sort of brainwashed in political extremism, then, given human nature, it will happen.
So in essence what I am saying is, I wouldn't be surprised if there are a number of apache and iis exploits out there that aren't noticed now, no one but the originator of the exploit knows about them precisely, although his customers know he gets good stuff, and they are being used to make some serious profit, either financial or political or both. Or web browsers being exploited for that matter, including the latest Firefox, IE, Opera whatever.
Yes, it's speculation, but I learned long ago never to bet against human nature. If there's an illegal buck to be made, it's being made, not that it's just maybe theoretically possible.
I can think of a lot of other examples of successful sharing in meatspace. Just a random off the top of my head list, not extensive:
Food banks, share surplus food around, everything from surplus garden produce to hunters harvested game meat to "normal" food so it gets used and not wasted
Seed banks, many gardeners share seeds with each other, helps to maintain long term biodiversity and a hedge against catstrophic failures with bioengineered seeds possibly in the future
Volunteer fire departments, obvious good advantages there
Not for profit "thrift" stores, allow folks to donate useful but surplus items so they can be reused by other people cheaply instead of contributing to landfill mess
Orgs that do work like Habitat for Humanity, besides sharing labor to help folks out immediately by providing affordable to them shelter, down the road it's psychologically good to have children raised in decent homes and not in slumlord run cheap no win rental housing. hard to put an exact economic price on that, but I would bet it's pretty useful for society as a whole
Normal neighborly collaborative work, the concept of the "barn raising" is still there all over. Everything from Joe down the block is a good mechanic and helps his neighbors out to neighbors helping neighbors with community watch or shared child care, etc. Still alive and well all over.
Community free concerts, still a phenomenon practiced all over, most any weekend across the US you can go find free music and art that is "shared"
and etc etc
I would imagine there are way more examples of "sharing" that go on voluntarily that don't make it into the raw economic figures but contribute to the basic over all health of the economy and society.
examples? Not yet, just from similar large cartels like the xxAAs starting to nail IP infringers at the personal user level. A few years ago during the original Napster times I remember writing it would happen and had any number of people tell me it would never happen, there were too many people doing it, etc. I said, "Just watch". And it happened. and even more onerous laws passed.
Like I said, I don't think the patent wars have even gotten off the ground yet, it's barely even started. But I predict they will. There has to be a tipping point where eventually about all types of conceivable code will have been written so that anything new will "infringe" on them. We do have patent software disputes already, I just don't think they are ramped up to the level that we'll see sometime within a few years or so. and it won'tmake any difference if large corp A has just as many as B, they will wind up cross licensing, what will happen is the small and medium places will get gobbled up. That's my prediction at this point.
Side issue but, are you aware of any other business that can get a patent on a product, profit from it immensely, then use an EULA to avoid even the most minimal of a normal consumer warranty? That's the issue that really fries my grits over the entire IP patent dispute. They want every conceivable legal protection for their products,and have gotten it, yet will take zero responsibility for it. And the law allows it. Truly amazing.
Normally I am against lawsuits, but I sincerely hope some time a group of software consumers, both corporate and private,just say ENOUGH,and initiate a class action to try and get no responsibility eulas tossed out and force all these companies to respect a warranty. I am dumbfounded it hasn't happened yet with all the financial losses suffered by people with being on the web with insecure and buggy products.
...obvious and trivial patents is way more than enough to bankrupt just about any small or medium developer out there who gets accused of a patent violation by Microsofts teams of lawyers.(or some other large concern to be fair)
It doesn't matter if it's obviously bogus on a casual review, the fact remains that they have the most money to burn, and can drag almost anyone through the "justice" system until they are quivering whimpering paupers. It wouldn't take too many public and loud examples of this nature to throw quite the chill into independent development of the overt and above board kind. This is a company that successfully fought off the US government and pretty much got away with it. Their technical legal "loss" wasn't a loss,not to them anyway, when they are allowed to print up their own "money" to use to pay the fines, and that "money" went to brainwash the next generation into still using their products. How many other folks get to do that in this justice system? The only other example I can think of readily and off hand is the music industry folks getting busted for price fixing, and then forced to distribute copies of their songs as the fine. Same deal, IP, trivially cheap to mass produce, being used as money to pay off a court fine. Sweet deal for them, and it's not a loss, and not even close to being any inducement for them to "change their tune" on anything really. From one day to the next day, business as usual..
Then there's the question and observation that a construct such as "linux" isn't really owned by anyone, except the copyright Linus owns of course for the kernel. The groupings of softwares combined make a distro, various companies and orgs of both profit and not for profit status distribute these, along with individual files or groups of files called applications. Once the patent wars begin, which they will eventually (it is still in the scouting and skirmishing phase now, along with accumulating patent-ammunition stockpiles to use then), you'll see most of those dry up, be made illegal to distribute,be forced to either pay just scads of bewildering royalty licenses because of these thousands of trivial but still legal patents, or be forced into this dubious ephemeral "underground" existence at least to the point of a similarity to what the P2P networks are enjoying now,complete with take downs, raids, lawsuits, actual loss after loss in the court system, now even affecting joe and jane small fry when they choose to do it, and increasingly they are choosing to do it.
It is quite conceivable that software patenting per se will result in just a small number of "legal" (I am only speaking inside the US for now), operating systems and application vendors in the not too far away future.
They are not accumulating all these patents as a hobby.
I'm about ready to switch back to apple from linux. I went to linux when my employment situation changed radically and I could no longer afford newer apple hardware and their switch to OSX made it impossible for me to use it on my machine. Last apple I bought was a 1400 PB, but osx won't run on it.. Now that they have apparently seen the light on offering at least something in the ballpark dollars-wise of an entry level machine, I'm giving it serious consideration, although I don't really want a mini, just a normal tower or desktop that is apple branded and certified and runs osx adequately, and inside that 500 dollar new price range. No longer will a thousand dollars or more be an acceptable price for any sort of entry level desktop, so 500 is a lot closer to "the other guys" now. And I don't want used either, not for that kinda loot, I want new with a full warranty.
I like the entire FOSS idea and philosophy, but I also as joe consumer like the idea of my hardware and software actually working without jumping through so many hoops. I have yet to run across a distro that is as close to 100% as I used to get running macs. I know for a lot of folks it works OK, but the best I can hit with my non leet skills is 90% or so, and it's been like that from day one for me with linux. It's like it "almost" works all the way. I use it all the time now, but I also realise it's a compromise on my part, I detest windows and always have, apples got to be too expensive, linux hit a middle ground that worked well enough for most purposes and would run on cheaper hardware. That's changed now completely with apples moves, and it's about time.
If you aren't a programmer or a command line guy of near guru status, linux is just still too hard to deal with. Maybe if some of the really big vendors start offering it right on the shelves in all the retail outlets with a distro they actually stand behind, then maybe, but until then it's still not quite ready for a lot of purposes. It is tantalizingly close, but every release it remains 'tantalizingly close", just more shiny buttons and whatnot, and after a couple/few years, well, it's gotten old.
That is just one guys opinion, not meant to be an indictment of every users experience or opinions or anything or even linux, other than the obvious problems that still exist with it for a lot of people. I have by no means tried every distro out there, and that's a significant part of the problem, even doing that has gotten old. I no longer believe "switching to xyz distro" will work, not with the various hardware it will be attemtpted to run on, there's too much of a variable there. I think long run the linux companies who are providing a distro pre installed and configed on hardware they also sell so that all of everything works right out of the box will take linux mindshare and mass market share. And that unfortunately will mean dell or whomever of the very large size will actually have to do that.
that just sucks man, really does. I hope you are documenting any abuses in case of future run ins with the authorities so you don't get screwed.
Here's a thought, whatever business this guy is in, he must have competition. It would probably follow then that those competitors need similar skills to what you have, so that might be a place to look for work.
As another thought, it would be nice if slashdot had a work offered/work desired posting section. And maybe even a mini eBay type thing.
google crawls and indexes spammers ultimate websites, don't they? Porn, phony rolex watches, cheap mortgages, viagra and other pharmecuticals, normal spam, all found off of google search as well.
honda makes airplanes now too, business jets, and has plans for a very cheap (compared to the competition) personal jet. link
I would say one day we'll see a variety of privately manufactured space travelling vehicles,at least intra solar system/near space variety, and probably sooner than most folks think, if they can keep production of fuels up at a reasonable cost over the next several decades, along with just general manufacturing, seeing as how that is so closely tied to oil as well. That is going to be the largest technological challenge that we all face really, peak oil and what to do about it. Well, that's my opinion, put it that way. I think that there already exists enough tech right now to make a Model A generic rocket good enough for some limited space travel, just not a lot of call for it, but it's getting closer. You get dudes like branson combined with rutan and mass production and Q and A out of asia and combine all that sort of interest and you'll see private space travel, at least to limited short term orbital flights, probably within a couple of decades, maybe even sooner. That nut has been cracked, just needs oil to stabilise and more research on alternative fuels and on replacing oil "stuff" here on the ground with other forms of alternative enerrgy so that oil can be used for the more energy dense and expensive applications such as "flight" in general speaking terms.
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Are you saying that every place but the United States has dropped politics as a function of science, subset ecology? Which place is that? Where is this "other place" that has no politics associated with science/ecology? Name it if you can.
I don't see it, albeit just looking on the web. It appears to be a universal phenomenon that science/money/politics has always been an intertwined mega endeavor, looking back in history, looking at todays events, and then extrapolating, i don'tthink politics is being removed from ecology any time soon. Anyplace.
I don't think you even could separate it, humans being human.
Cultural jingoism sometimes makes random selected human/tribe/nation think their "way" is perfect, yet from another's viewpoint it isn't. The old expression that fits is "you can't see the forest for the trees".
Here's the obvious example, even the assertion that other nation "x" has separated "science" from "politics" is a political assertion from just the way humans use language. Because once you make something an absolute, a statement, a declarative, you are implying that every possible variable has been accounted for, and there are no exceptions.
In some small matters,extremely small,say very basic maths, probably there is little to no debate,but once you get beyond the trivially obvious, I think you will find there's still debate, and hence politics will enter. In fact I'd say the "scientific" community is one of the more highly politicised communities, in all nations.If it's not, I'd like to see the nation that doesn't have any legislation in their written/coded laws that pertain to "ecology". If they have laws, then that's political, it hasn'tbeen separated, it's been politicised.
To get back to ecology, this is such a broad subject, and the modeling required to actually finalise some conclusions is so hugely complex, that I would think it's safe to say there will be debate and therefore poltics involved for quite some time to come. The reason why-perhaps- it might seem like the US has more, is merely from the fact that the US is very large in many diverse ways and the center of the worlds attention all the time in the news. The US currently controls and influences so very many things because of our actions it's just easier to look at and point at, that's all. Say for instance one day we decided to just end our political involvement with "science" and become totally insular. that would mandate our dropping of support for any other nations or exteernal treaties or collaborative effort in 'ecology". We could just 'declare" a carved in stone group think policy and say "debate has ended, this is so, it is scientific fact, and no other viewpoints are valid, our science has determined such and such and that's it".
That in itself would be a rad political move, yet it would fit the requirement of removing politics from the discussion-at least as regards any other nation, and they would be left to their own endeavors in their "perfectness".
Anyway, to get back to basics, I'd like to know by actual names which nation or group of nations have no politics associated with the loosely defined groupings of scientific explorations that might fall under an "ecology" heading.
Slightly different. Opera distributes-at their cost- a free version that is ad supported, no cost to the end user other than a small bar at the top with some ads, and the end user also has a couple of choices on how to deal with the ads,it's up to them. Microsoft does not offer a similar set of choices, they have paid for versions, and paid for versions, either the end user directly buys their software, or indirectly as part of a bundle when they purchase a computer. Either way the end users pay money for it.
Picky point, sure it is, but it's still there. Yes, both companies want to make money, just one is willing to cut their customers serious slack on how that happens, and in many cases the end users never transfer funds to Opera, yet still get the product.
..that's a good point and any group who wanted to countersue for using their image as part of the artisitic expression should sue him all the way into bankruptcy. The "art" is most definetly using other folks images once they are reflected in it. Mexican standoff then, I hope it happens. I do landscaping sometimes, I should copyright all the work I do, photo it and document it, then charge people a fee to drive by and look at it. either turn their heads or pay a copyright "license to view" fee.
This is ridiculous, absurd, insane. It's not even the least bit humorous or logical. To infringe the copyright, one would have to make a copy of the sculpture. That's what "copy" means, to make a "copy", an exact duplicate. A photo is not a copy of a sculpture, it's a reference to it at best.
Anyone's computer can do this, if they try to do it. You can build a kitcar too, yet most people don't,they spend the extra x-thousands to have it done for them.
....advertised on the TV.
Deal is, Intel has the money to get all of that on the shelf and then the most important thing *market it* with TV ads and whatnot, a lot of whatnot.
Say what ya want, I have yet to see....
"Joe's do it all absolutely no hassle turbomedia linux distro deluxe complete with new shiny kikbooty ultraXteme rad bitchin' computar! Get yours today, and remember kids, it has INTEL inside! The Bestus!
Heck, look how easy it is to download and install a different browser, yet some hundreds of millions or so people have NOT even done that.
If it ain't on the shelf and not advertised on TV it will remain a niche market, and it is quite possible to just keep rebranding the same old stuff and sell it, you just need a huge advertising budget and half way competent marketers.
This is why crap keeps getting sold all the time, crap is cheaper than quality, advertising is cheaper than engineering, and bribing off legislators is cheaper than offering really good warranties and customer service. So you will see marginally functional computers guaranteed to break soon after the joke warranty expires, running so-so media apps that more or less sorta kinda function, that will be chock full of delicious DRM goodness.
And people will gobble that up and ask for more.
quote "What does Oracle's stubbornness imply for the industry as a whole, with multicore chips coming to the fore so strongly?" It means that there's a huge amount of cash to be made developing open source alternatives. The potential is there. The business model is there to be used. Note, I said used not abused. The huge gravy train days of uber profits with software are coming to a close,you can see that train coming around the bend, but every day meat and potatoes level money will always be there. You actually can sell and service open source. Even if it is freely given away you can still sell service to it and customizatise it and get paid to do that. Some companies are doing that now. That's what it means. If oracle wants to be dinks about it, or any other big company, someone else will step up to the plate. It won't happen overnight but it WILL happen. Software is no longer all that exotic, and we've gone from a few hundred people coding some decades ago to millions now, so industries have to adapt and adopt new business practices or go the way of the dodo. And I say let them.
...I alway find that is one of the funner things with linux from day one after my first install, even if I haven't a clue what the hell is going on. I just sit there hyp-mo-tized -> LOOKATHERGO! DANGTHASCOOL!
kinda fun in an admittedly strange way, it's also cool to see how your leet speed reading is, if you can keep up.
if they started to cruise on just savings, they would almost be forced to buy up hurredly dumped shares so as to try and keep some sort of worth to them. That would drastically increase what they had to spend out of savings.
I am guessing though, but isn't that more usual?
I understand yours is just a strict accounting, I just wanted to throw in a variable that might have to occur.
...the firefox users then go on to add dozens of extensions/plugins whatever, bringing you right back where you started from, more or less, most generally speaking. It's the same deal then, just duplicating effort with the suite in a way. I still use moz suite because it renders better, works better and is faster and less buggy. I keep trying firefox and every time I go back to the suite. When that changes and FF is actually faster and better I'll switch, but until then I use a browser and email all the time anyway, handy to just have them both be there from mashing one button. I count both FF and tbird together as an actual legit comparison with the suite if you want to be fair about it really, at a minimum, and that's leaving out irc chat and the composer web page editor. Run four very similar programs at the same time and compare it to just turning moz's 4 programs on, that's an honest test then. I would think moz would still do better over all, combined cpu and memory. Just a guess though and absolutely no biggee. Not dissin FF but for a lot of people moz is still better.
And I just might switch to opera if the talking features ever make it to the linux builds and it actually works, I like that idea immensely and I like some of the other features in opera as well, along with some of the features in Konq. They are all good enough, just depends on what you want to do. I see good stuff and bad stuff in all of them really.
And to get even more pedantic, the mac mini has re opened up Apple as a contender, I dropped out of using them when they just absolutely refused to release any entry level priced desktop that was even close to what you could get in the pc world, but now that has changed. I put up with higher priced apples for more than a decade, but when it got to the point you were still paying more than double, I just gave up and went to cheap components and linux, but linux still is sorta lacking useability wise. It's good enough for command line tweakers, but not if you want a 100% GUI that actually works, at least none of the distros I have tried so far. They get close, but have been stuck at that "close" level for too long now, IMO.
blah blah blah, just an opinion, means nothing really.
links-hacked is pretty good with images now. Several micro distros include it.
...every election for the past several decades now I have heard that you shouldn't "waste your vote" and vote any independent or third party. They, this "the public" guy, have been taught that, it is now carved in stealth-stone that only the combined criminal cartel of the Democrat and Republican parties are the legitimate government, and will remain so forever. Forever.
Anything else, any other strongly held belief, makes you a fringe extremist whacko kook cult member or something, and who wants that label?
They are taught as a religious belief starting in grade school by public school teachers paid by public tax money that we have a TWO PARTY "system". Third parties are mentioned briefly as "fringe" parties, with the snicker under the breath. this religious belief is so well brainwashed into them that once they reach adulthood it has "stuck" and is part of their personality, even though intellectually they know it is false, realistically they know that that is the way things are now.
Any abuses or criminal actions in the syndicates cash and power generator corporation called "government" by any so called "elected" persons or hired on or appointed personel inside this "two party" political system are investigated by- drum roll-the two party system, or like I prefer, the cartel, or you can even call it a syndicate. On the street it would be a gang, once they get large enough like the international drug dealers they get to be called a cartel, when they are involved in all the rackets it's called a crime syndicate, so that really fits the best.
All the "judges" are part of this syndicate.
All the cops just follow orders from this criminal syndicate.
The military follows orders from this criminal syndicate.
These latter two are points to rember, because it's important for your physical safety, and we have all learned this. We are well educated on it.
They, the syndicate crime bosses, will rig reality all the way to the point of "very harsh measures" if you do much more than talk about it, and there's no way any so called "elections" will occur that even have a chance of unseating any significant part of this syndicates complete control. None. They love running those little political melodramas, more for a chance to let people think they have any influence than for anything else, because they can't just one day just suspend it, that would give the game away just a little to much, *at this point in time* anyway. Sometime in the not so far distant future I think they might though.
The crime syndicate decides who will be in the public "national debates" and therefore in the "elections" and it has been decided only the syndicates "candidates" or back room appointees as is closer to the truth participate in this process. Because of scares they have gotten in the past, they decided on a technique to insure their continual "success" in the sham polls, this is via use of electronic voting and counting, which is 100% owned operated and run by-the crime syndicate.
The controlled mass media is owned and ordered around from the top levels by people whom are all members of this crime syndicate as well, so the news functions primarily as a way to keep the propoganda efforts in check and on track.
The other top economic powerhouses and "leaders" in this nation are members of this syndicate and contribute overt and covert funding and support in order to keep the syndicate in power. These economic "leaders" frequently rotate in and out of "poltical office" as well, or are members of high military "rank" and are rewarded on exiting the military with very very lucrative and powerful positions and extreme sums of very easy money. They know this so they go along with the crime syndicates orders.
This "combination" of factors is an old design but well proven and successful in the past, the descriptive term for it was dubbed by Mussolini as the state of "Corporatism" and is the most accurate way to describe our combined econom
...will load and run entirely in RAM. Really fun, wicked fast, even on an old clunker as long as you have enough ram. And the ability to roll your own application-specific distro is a plus 1 bonus. Get what you want, not what a consortium wants. Want a utility tools specific distro? Make one easy, installed and up in minutes. Want a media heavy distro? Ya got that. Want an office appllications distro, there ya go. Want a simple joe surfer and chat one, there ya go. Games mostly, there ya go. Spiffy and safer on the net as well.
On sybaris site they claim that MS has been using it internally for several months now.They are just now buying the company, so they must actually like what it does, and it's got to be cheaper than them trying to buy symantec or something.
I also think they might be grasping at straws about now, realising there's not a thing to do to actually make what's out there even reasonably safe. Everyone (practically) who has run windows for the past buncha years has at least one horror story that leads to cusswords quickly. This is not great advertising. They have tried to pass it off, that flew for a few years, but now even the dullest of the non sharp realise there's something...seriously broken there.
I could see that, some sort of popup warning dialog box saying this or that app is unknown and not supported and it is dangerous to proceed. It might even bork any sort of fix for the user if there are *any* non approved programs installed that don't pass corporate muster with a paid off seal of approval. The virus scanner would just refuse to say the computer was "safe" or something. All in the name of security and they would have half a public point right there. You can see the PR person now... "How can we protect our valued customers machines? They depend on us and our advanced technological breakthroughs with security software and systems monitoring and yada yada. We have to be able to verify the programs, remember "malware"? If it's not verified we at least have to warn them"...and etc. Very slick if they do that..and they could...
....whitebox shops around here that do "computer fixin'" which is usually just cleaning up borked windows installs from bad internet mojo, they are getting around (all similar, close enough) 60 dollars an hour for that service. No flat rate I have seen unless it's just a complete wipe and reinstall. If the customer wants all or most of their data intact, they tote the freight for at least an hour or no fixy for cheap. So there's an answer from bubbaland.
And that's why you won't see windows leave the market anytime soon, because this is the LEAST money being made by IT "professionals" off of windows being on almost everyones computer. The LEAST amount. "They" -any random windows IT professional, may claim publically they want excellent products, reality is that windows being as goobered up as it is is a hundred billion dollar (some large @55 number) make-work phony baloney business now,it is designed to perpetuate a near functional but never quite finished by design and intent highly lucrative perpetual cash cow, with thousands of people (or millions no idea really)now grown dependent and complacent on that easy money income. It's not a legit business anymore, it's a crime racket as far as I am concerned, a silent cartel of cooperating profiteers, large,medium and small sizes. From MS itself to the local computer herdsman, it's moo baby moo gimmee the money. Ha!
There's little to no profit in selling computers that work and don't break. Just like cars to beat that old dead analogy horse one more time. The hardware NEEDS to crap out soon after warranty and the software has to be in a perpetual state of beta ware, although it's all "licensed to use for your economic and sanity inconvenience" as a finished product. And that's why there is NO warranty with consumer software as well.
So, sock it to those folks who absolutely insist on using windows, that's exactly what it's designed for, to make you money. It's secondary reason is to function as software, but primarily, it's a cash cow, milk it. Charge em.
Yes I am cynical, no I don't use windows on the intarweb, never. I use linux or mac. I have a few old boxes and a laptop that have windows on them, but there's a decent airgap between them and the WWW, not that it isn't possible, it's that I simply don't care about trying to make windows function on the web, it's like bolting a wing on your yugo and applying flame stickers. Waste of time, IMO. I have never had any desire to even much "learn" windows because it became obvious as all get out with win95 what the scam was going to be, perpetual beta ware that you will be charged for.
if you are being funny, the USA fits, if you are being more specific, either mexico or cuba come to mind, with mexico getting the edge for having a traditional neo royal oligarchy controller class. It's also the prime reason their economy and society are so lame, and must needs export 1/3 of their population to keep from going under, despite the fact of them being on paper/geographically "wealthy" as to resources, water, farmland, access to oceans, mineral wealth, energy wealth etc, a well-off country. Cuba comes close but they are resource poor compared to mexico and bing an island it's very difficult for their populations to vote with their feet.
I would imagine there are publicity and props seeking blackhats, then those who go way out of their way to make sure no one finds out, and are after intelligence, financial records, insider business decsions useful in the "investor" community,etc,etc, things that can be sold for big bucks on the blackmarket or used by competeting governments or corporations. Large crime rings and their handmaidens governmental approved hackers would probably seek to not garner any notice or brag about it on irc channels, etc. Witness the latest FBI email hack, allegedly went unnoticed for months, and publicaly at least they have no clue who did it, why they did it, etc. and I would bet right this second there are any number of sensitive web sites/pages compromised by well beyond normal skilled people, precisely to just get intel of various sorts. And I would also bet quite a few are inside jobs. When you have the ability to really really and skillfully hack, plus the combination of the incentive to do so through bribery and blackmail or some sort of brainwashed in political extremism, then, given human nature, it will happen.
So in essence what I am saying is, I wouldn't be surprised if there are a number of apache and iis exploits out there that aren't noticed now, no one but the originator of the exploit knows about them precisely, although his customers know he gets good stuff, and they are being used to make some serious profit, either financial or political or both. Or web browsers being exploited for that matter, including the latest Firefox, IE, Opera whatever.
Yes, it's speculation, but I learned long ago never to bet against human nature. If there's an illegal buck to be made, it's being made, not that it's just maybe theoretically possible.
Of course, Ferengi social constructs as to clothing and wimmyn.... hmmmmm maybe we can work out some sort of compromise here.....
I can think of a lot of other examples of successful sharing in meatspace. Just a random off the top of my head list, not extensive:
Food banks, share surplus food around, everything from surplus garden produce to hunters harvested game meat to "normal" food so it gets used and not wasted
Seed banks, many gardeners share seeds with each other, helps to maintain long term biodiversity and a hedge against catstrophic failures with bioengineered seeds possibly in the future
Volunteer fire departments, obvious good advantages there
Not for profit "thrift" stores, allow folks to donate useful but surplus items so they can be reused by other people cheaply instead of contributing to landfill mess
Orgs that do work like Habitat for Humanity, besides sharing labor to help folks out immediately by providing affordable to them shelter, down the road it's psychologically good to have children raised in decent homes and not in slumlord run cheap no win rental housing. hard to put an exact economic price on that, but I would bet it's pretty useful for society as a whole
Normal neighborly collaborative work, the concept of the "barn raising" is still there all over. Everything from Joe down the block is a good mechanic and helps his neighbors out to neighbors helping neighbors with community watch or shared child care, etc. Still alive and well all over.
Community free concerts, still a phenomenon practiced all over, most any weekend across the US you can go find free music and art that is "shared"
and etc etc
I would imagine there are way more examples of "sharing" that go on voluntarily that don't make it into the raw economic figures but contribute to the basic over all health of the economy and society.
examples? Not yet, just from similar large cartels like the xxAAs starting to nail IP infringers at the personal user level. A few years ago during the original Napster times I remember writing it would happen and had any number of people tell me it would never happen, there were too many people doing it, etc. I said, "Just watch". And it happened. and even more onerous laws passed.
Like I said, I don't think the patent wars have even gotten off the ground yet, it's barely even started. But I predict they will. There has to be a tipping point where eventually about all types of conceivable code will have been written so that anything new will "infringe" on them. We do have patent software disputes already, I just don't think they are ramped up to the level that we'll see sometime within a few years or so. and it won'tmake any difference if large corp A has just as many as B, they will wind up cross licensing, what will happen is the small and medium places will get gobbled up. That's my prediction at this point.
Side issue but, are you aware of any other business that can get a patent on a product, profit from it immensely, then use an EULA to avoid even the most minimal of a normal consumer warranty? That's the issue that really fries my grits over the entire IP patent dispute. They want every conceivable legal protection for their products,and have gotten it, yet will take zero responsibility for it. And the law allows it. Truly amazing.
Normally I am against lawsuits, but I sincerely hope some time a group of software consumers, both corporate and private,just say ENOUGH,and initiate a class action to try and get no responsibility eulas tossed out and force all these companies to respect a warranty. I am dumbfounded it hasn't happened yet with all the financial losses suffered by people with being on the web with insecure and buggy products.
funny sig BTW
...obvious and trivial patents is way more than enough to bankrupt just about any small or medium developer out there who gets accused of a patent violation by Microsofts teams of lawyers.(or some other large concern to be fair)
It doesn't matter if it's obviously bogus on a casual review, the fact remains that they have the most money to burn, and can drag almost anyone through the "justice" system until they are quivering whimpering paupers. It wouldn't take too many public and loud examples of this nature to throw quite the chill into independent development of the overt and above board kind. This is a company that successfully fought off the US government and pretty much got away with it. Their technical legal "loss" wasn't a loss,not to them anyway, when they are allowed to print up their own "money" to use to pay the fines, and that "money" went to brainwash the next generation into still using their products. How many other folks get to do that in this justice system? The only other example I can think of readily and off hand is the music industry folks getting busted for price fixing, and then forced to distribute copies of their songs as the fine. Same deal, IP, trivially cheap to mass produce, being used as money to pay off a court fine. Sweet deal for them, and it's not a loss, and not even close to being any inducement for them to "change their tune" on anything really. From one day to the next day, business as usual..
Then there's the question and observation that a construct such as "linux" isn't really owned by anyone, except the copyright Linus owns of course for the kernel. The groupings of softwares combined make a distro, various companies and orgs of both profit and not for profit status distribute these, along with individual files or groups of files called applications. Once the patent wars begin, which they will eventually (it is still in the scouting and skirmishing phase now, along with accumulating patent-ammunition stockpiles to use then), you'll see most of those dry up, be made illegal to distribute,be forced to either pay just scads of bewildering royalty licenses because of these thousands of trivial but still legal patents, or be forced into this dubious ephemeral "underground" existence at least to the point of a similarity to what the P2P networks are enjoying now,complete with take downs, raids, lawsuits, actual loss after loss in the court system, now even affecting joe and jane small fry when they choose to do it, and increasingly they are choosing to do it.
It is quite conceivable that software patenting per se will result in just a small number of "legal" (I am only speaking inside the US for now), operating systems and application vendors in the not too far away future.
They are not accumulating all these patents as a hobby.
I'm about ready to switch back to apple from linux. I went to linux when my employment situation changed radically and I could no longer afford newer apple hardware and their switch to OSX made it impossible for me to use it on my machine. Last apple I bought was a 1400 PB, but osx won't run on it.. Now that they have apparently seen the light on offering at least something in the ballpark dollars-wise of an entry level machine, I'm giving it serious consideration, although I don't really want a mini, just a normal tower or desktop that is apple branded and certified and runs osx adequately, and inside that 500 dollar new price range. No longer will a thousand dollars or more be an acceptable price for any sort of entry level desktop, so 500 is a lot closer to "the other guys" now. And I don't want used either, not for that kinda loot, I want new with a full warranty.
I like the entire FOSS idea and philosophy, but I also as joe consumer like the idea of my hardware and software actually working without jumping through so many hoops. I have yet to run across a distro that is as close to 100% as I used to get running macs. I know for a lot of folks it works OK, but the best I can hit with my non leet skills is 90% or so, and it's been like that from day one for me with linux. It's like it "almost" works all the way. I use it all the time now, but I also realise it's a compromise on my part, I detest windows and always have, apples got to be too expensive, linux hit a middle ground that worked well enough for most purposes and would run on cheaper hardware. That's changed now completely with apples moves, and it's about time.
If you aren't a programmer or a command line guy of near guru status, linux is just still too hard to deal with. Maybe if some of the really big vendors start offering it right on the shelves in all the retail outlets with a distro they actually stand behind, then maybe, but until then it's still not quite ready for a lot of purposes. It is tantalizingly close, but every release it remains 'tantalizingly close", just more shiny buttons and whatnot, and after a couple/few years, well, it's gotten old.
That is just one guys opinion, not meant to be an indictment of every users experience or opinions or anything or even linux, other than the obvious problems that still exist with it for a lot of people. I have by no means tried every distro out there, and that's a significant part of the problem, even doing that has gotten old. I no longer believe "switching to xyz distro" will work, not with the various hardware it will be attemtpted to run on, there's too much of a variable there. I think long run the linux companies who are providing a distro pre installed and configed on hardware they also sell so that all of everything works right out of the box will take linux mindshare and mass market share. And that unfortunately will mean dell or whomever of the very large size will actually have to do that.
that just sucks man, really does. I hope you are documenting any abuses in case of future run ins with the authorities so you don't get screwed.
Here's a thought, whatever business this guy is in, he must have competition. It would probably follow then that those competitors need similar skills to what you have, so that might be a place to look for work.
As another thought, it would be nice if slashdot had a work offered/work desired posting section. And maybe even a mini eBay type thing.
google crawls and indexes spammers ultimate websites, don't they? Porn, phony rolex watches, cheap mortgages, viagra and other pharmecuticals, normal spam, all found off of google search as well.
or ITs for that double secret acronymed version...
honda makes airplanes now too, business jets, and has plans for a very cheap (compared to the competition) personal jet. link
I would say one day we'll see a variety of privately manufactured space travelling vehicles,at least intra solar system/near space variety, and probably sooner than most folks think, if they can keep production of fuels up at a reasonable cost over the next several decades, along with just general manufacturing, seeing as how that is so closely tied to oil as well. That is going to be the largest technological challenge that we all face really, peak oil and what to do about it. Well, that's my opinion, put it that way. I think that there already exists enough tech right now to make a Model A generic rocket good enough for some limited space travel, just not a lot of call for it, but it's getting closer. You get dudes like branson combined with rutan and mass production and Q and A out of asia and combine all that sort of interest and you'll see private space travel, at least to limited short term orbital flights, probably within a couple of decades, maybe even sooner. That nut has been cracked, just needs oil to stabilise and more research on alternative fuels and on replacing oil "stuff" here on the ground with other forms of alternative enerrgy so that oil can be used for the more energy dense and expensive applications such as "flight" in general speaking terms.