So much anger, and not just on "their" part ("they" apparently referring here to muslims in general and not just Al-Qaeda or even Iraqis). Yet so little trying to really understand why "they" are upset. Obviously one can not try turning the tables and imagine what it would be like to be one of "them" without understanding why they're so angry and "fucked up".
Don't keep shooting the messengers with this totalitarian "either you're with us or you're against us" war cry. Read a few books about the history (up to current times) of islamic countries, preferably those without obvious political bias, and a pattern emerges. Over the last few hundred years and in particular in the 1900s most islamic countries were occupied and humiliated by the western superpowers of the period. Since oil became the strategic commodity, Middle-East (where all the holiest sites of islam are located) has been under extreme manipulation by the US and UK in particular.
Try imagining god-fearing Americans experiencing such occupation, control and manipulation of the United States, its culture and resources, by some islamic superpower and you might find a few Americans starting to hate their new overlords. Some might even take up arms as a last resort.
Countries cherishing peaceful coexistance and without imperial urges tend not to be hated by anyone. Democracy does not mean one country imposing its values upon other nations with very different culture and history.
Btw, nowhere have I advocated hate or violence, on the contrary. I simply understand the reasons for such anger and frustration which very sadly manifests itself in violent struggle. I also find it interesting and strangely appropriate that you would rename "Death" in the title into "Complete Freakin' Ignorance".
After 091101 I've kept wondering when and if americans might eventually begin asking themselves "why are they so angry at us".
So far there's only been jingoistic kneejerk reaction a la "let's kill every last one of 'em".
What comes to those nukes "they" don't have, we're barely half a century into the nuclear Weapons of Mass Destruction era. The US has an arsenal of some 7,000 nuclear warheads - all far more powerful than those deployed against the two japanese cities - capable of hitting any and all targets around the world in just minutes. In addition to the US, Russia, China and even UK are all either occupying their neighbours or invading some distant foreign country "pre-emptively". All these security council seat holding nuclear states are acting against basic humanitarian principles, simply because they currently can. On a mutual "wink & nod" basis. All that matters is business, acquisition of foreign resources and plain old generating of patriotic fever. In none of these four aggressive states (although the UK isn't yet a lost cause) are the people actively organizing themselves to stop these practises which are the root cause of "terrorism" (aka "fight for freedom").
50-60 years is a very short time in the timescale of human civilization. In another generation or two the people fighting foreign invasions and occupations may well be capable of building true WMDs and delivering them to capital cities, along with ultimatums to pull out or else... Will the political leaders of that time be capable of realizing and correcting the root causes of such desperate measures, or will they still be stuck to the current "nuclear superpowers can do anything they wish" doctrine of today?
In my opinion, all actions, including those against foreign people, should pass the simple test of "would I mind someone else doing that to me?".
"What I found particularly amazing, was that the culture has taught people not to question things."
I'm not sure we can chalk that up to Chinese culture per se as much as decades of brutal repression of dissidents who dared question authority.
Are you saying that acquiescence to state control isn't a major charasteristic of the "modern" Chinese culture? Just as it has been under basically every emperor even before Confucius gave his name for that relationship between the individual and the state? The brief era of the republic in 1911-1949 provided the mainland chinese intellectuals a brief opportunity to debate about the state of their state (no real changes could be implemented thanks to warlordism, the civil war against Mao's communist and the Japanese invasion), but the masses have never been taught or even allowed to "question things" regarding the existing hierarchies. Even the village level "democratic" elections of today are strictly supervised and controlled by the Party.
Interestingly the (confucian?) tendency towards civil obedience (incl. family and community hierarchies) remains strong even in the Chinese communities outside the mainland China, like in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore.
The oppression by the communist party since 1949 has clearly strengthened the cultural trait of acquiescence - the Tiananmen massacre in 1989 was one such showcase event to remind the chinese populace not to get too cocky about their civil rights - but it has been part of the culture nevertheless.
All Chinese are taught about their history that as long as there are no uprisings against the single ruler, however bad that ruler may be, there won't be a civil war which could be even worse. The communists never saw the irony in adopting this same mantra after their own use of the civil war to seize power from the republic. Of course, since simply discussing about a civil war is dangerous territory, the Party tends to resort to xenophobia which suits their purposes much better.
Finally, I do realize that there is increasing interest in liberal thinking and self-expression in certain corners of urban China and especially among the young, but all that is kept far from the cultural mainstream and these efforts by the state at tightening the control of the internet is just natural since the Party intends to keep things that way. There will be crackdown after crackdown until the Party will eventually implode, and that will most likely happen because of rampant corruption and be driven by the desperately poor peasant masses watching the merchants and their Party cronies getting obscenely rich. That's another irony taught by the more recent chinese history that the current class of looting party cadres seem to have forgotten.
Actually Red Hat renamed RPM as recursive "RPMPackage Manager" many dozens of moons ago after the RPM format became more widely adopted by other distros, apparently to address potential trademark concerns as well.
Of course your point about RPM being a contribution by Red Hat remains valid.
There are serious legal implications for MS if a investigation shows they directly or even indirectly funded this.
Implications would imply at least a minimal level of enforcement. MS are totally immune under the Bush regime (... Look, a mother rabbit!!!). MS manipulated Corel's privatization both directly and indirectly and all the regulators did was a concerted yawn.
Unfortunately the USA doesn't have a healthy multi-party democracy which would offer their citizens a far greater choice of parties or even individual independent candidates that more closely match the voter's mix of values and priorities.
The two parties you have are both in big corporations' pocket and pass laws at the convenience of the very wealthy, both are extremely militaristic and jingoistic (compared to most any other democracy; authoritarian states like China and Russia are in USA's class though) and a lot of energy is wasted on undermining the other party since unlike in a multi-party system there will never exist the will or need to consider the other party as a potential partner in building a coalition government.
To make voting in the USA more reflective of people's opinions you'd first need to change your voting arrangements to allow smaller parties and independent candidates an opportunity to actually represent anyone.
In addition, since the media in the USA is unusually concentrated in few hands some sort of revamping of the broadcasting industry would also be desirable.
Oh, and some restrictions on campaign financing would be needed as well.
If you'd accomplish all that, and did away with the omnipresent religious rhetoric as well, you'd be a lot like Europeans!!! C'mon, just surrender and start monkeying our time-tested cheese-eating habits. Dealing with Microsoft the European way would be a bonus for you.
The Linux-Tiny Tree patch homepage
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Kernel 2.4.26 Out
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Since their information page is also so tiny yet interesting, here it is copied in whole:
The Linux-Tiny Tree
The -tiny tree is a series of patches against the 2.6 mainline Linux
kernel to reduce its memory and disk footprint, as well as to add
features to aid working on small systems. Target users are developers
of embedded system and users of small or legacy machines such as 386s
and handhelds.
At this writing (Mar '04), the -tiny tree contains over 150
patches, almost all of which are configurable. Some highlights
include:
configurable removal of printk, BUG, panic(), etc.
configurable HZ, swap partition, IDE interfaces, line
disciplines...
SLOB: a simple and space-efficient replacement for the SLAB allocator
optional support for aio, sysfs, sysenter, ptrace, dnotify, vm86, core dumps
/proc/kmalloc for detailed tracking of memory usage
choice between 4k or 8k kernel stacks
a tool for finding largest stack users
a tool for counting uses of inline functions
a tool for comparing function sizes between kernel builds
netconsole for logging kernel messages via network
kgdb for full symbolic kernel debugging
kgdb-over-ethernet for debugging without serial ports
Just about all features are option via the kernel configuration
system and are available as separate patches. Linux-tiny by default
will build a kernel practically identical to mainline, but custom
configurations with full console, disk, and network support can be
booted on standard hardware with as little as 2MB of RAM.
Code contributions and suggestions encouraged, contact mpm at
selenic.com. I would prefer that all new features be configurable in
Kconfig and be relatively non-intrusive if possible.
I fail to see what the point is though, especially after Microsoft used their devious October 2000 investment in Corel to turn the then-Linux powerhouse into a submissive.NET supporter and last year Microsoft engineered the even more devious privatization of Corel using Paul Allen's money and a motley crew of former Microsoft executives, "joint Corel and Microsoft consultants", all apparently planned by Microsoft's investment and business development unit (which makes MS money work for MS business strategy), made infamous by the recent SCO funding revelations.
Is the Corel management perhaps finally under some kind of investigation and this "proof-of-concept" WordPerfect (wordprocessor only?) dealie is supposed to prove the new MS-leaning owners' credentials as "genuine independents"?
Will Microsoft be soon promoting a new Gartner study claiming that Linux productivity app market is dead because nobody is buying a recompiled and nearly 10 years old WP8?
It takes a long time for the customer service rep to walk down the hall from India to Texas to see why it hasn't shipped.
Surely you mean a walk to the pseudo-democratic Taiwan or the communist party-controlled China (located north-east of Tibet) where the things are actually built? That walk should take considerably less time.
But the fact is that USSR was instrumental at defeating Germany. Denying that fact because Stalin was an asshole and because actions of USSR left alot to be desired, is simply revisionism.
Fair enough, I wasn't denying Soviets' crucial role in defeating the Nazis but just thought that the categorical statement was a bit too simplified. Firstly, the Soviet dictatorship's rising threat to Europe played a crucial role in creating the Nazi movement in the first place, and secondly Stalin's eventual military victory over Hitler was gained in no small part due to the extremely unforgiving nature of "Mother Russia" itself.
Of course, as is sadly customary, the hapless russian people bore the brunt of the bloody carnage created by their lunatic leaders, but when all is put in context I find it hard to credit the russians with simply defeating the Nazis. That is still the official liturgy within Putin's ultra-nationalistic Russia -- I believe Russia has yet to acknowledge, let alone apologize, over any of their own criminal invasions, some of which continue to this day -- and that is in my opinion the most dangerous kind of revisionism. The whole nation continues to be indoctrinated not to feel sorry for the crimes they committed, both internationally and domestically, in total contrast to post-war Germany.
On a related and equally off-topic note, "People's Republic" of China is similarly in state-imposed denial over their continuing military invasion of Tibet. Such ultra-nationalistic colonialism won't end until there is change from within, but the West isn't helping by brushing these issues under the carpet in favour of their commercial interest, or by actually helping these colonialists oppress the occupied people even further under the misguided catch-all "war on terror". China and Russia have long ago learned to play the western countries against one another and only a united political and commercial (but not militaristic obviously) stance by the US, EU and other freedom-loving nations could help instigate a positive change. It makes me cringe every time when the Bush and Blair regimes use the excuse of not "appeasing evil dictators" in support of their invasion of Iraq while they're busy closing business deals with the Chinas and Russias of this world who're besides invading their neighbours on a permanent basis also armed to the teeth with genuine WMDs. Sorry for the general rant, but these issues are intimately linked with the understanding of history and learning from it.
Well they always loose when the US gets involved anyhow. WW1 and WWII would have been TOTAL losses for all of europe if not for the US military and materials.
yeah, because Russians had NOTHING to do with defeating the Nazis! They just fought the longest, caused the most losses, fought the biggest battles, tied up bulk of the Wehrmacht (even after Normandy, something like 70-80% of German troops were in the Eastern Front) etc. etc.
It is an unfortunate fact that many people still hold the extremely simplistic view of history that the Nazis rose to power simply because of the "evil desire of German people to kill all the Jewish people". Although Europe wasn't aware of the full horrific extent of Stalin's "domestic" (i.e. Russia and its neighbours) death programmes, the Soviet plans of a global communist revolution were known around Europe and the Nazis took over Germany by manipulating those fears, and famously finishing off the coup through non-democratic means. Without the genuine and rising threat from Soviet Union Hitler would probably have ended up as just another failed nationalist firebrand.
When one also remembers that years before the war broke out between Stalin and Hitler these two dictators secretly divvied up Europe (the Molotov-Ribbentropp pact) and Russia aggressively invaded their neighbours, one must dig pretty deep to muster sympathy for the role of Soviet Russia as a supposed unfortunate victim of WWII. It is also alarming that today's Russia is still in complete denial over their role as an aggressor in WWII, and that they're still to this day holding on to the Finnish provinces that Stalin demanded from Finland, besides massive war reparations, as an "Allied victor" after the war.
To sum this up, depicting Stalin's Russia simply as heroic Nazi-defeaters on par with western nations battling totalitarianism, just with greater sacrifices, may suit Putin's nationalistic agenda in today's Russia but it hardly gives a correct idea of Russia's role before and during WWII.
Autodesk appears to be a Red Hat customer. Since Red Hat announced their indemnification program a few weeks ago, maybe the SCOunks could have saved everyone a little time and money by sending their extortion demand directly to Red Hat instead.
Anyways, now that the Caldera SCOunks have attacked completely uninvolved parties the finishing off of that rabid animal can't be far away.
Just when I thought that MS couldn't engage in any more despicable acts than they already have in their resume (aka cheatsheet), they are found to have bribed United Nations personnel in an attempt to subvert "common good" communication standards. Oh well, they're simply doing what the Bush regime is preaching through their example, i.e. "use 'em or ignore 'em but fsck all moral considerations".
Let's see if IBM will leave MS high 'n dry now that the coyote is outta bag. Other IBM-related thoughts would be: "...and keep your enemies even closer" and "MS-Office dependency syndrome".
Before we know it Billy G. III is demanding that Linus must show him his communistic secret sauce, and gets an injunction against Mr T. courtesy of too many friends in high places!
Or perhaps some astroserfs have been working undercover for months impersonating genuine geeks and inserting unflattering comments into Linus' communistic secret sauce and now with these leaks out in the wilderness someone not in on it can take care of the discovery!
Or maybe this is just a seemingly innocuous plot to scare laggard Weenies to do their duty and play another round of planned obsoletion and fork out some cash to Billy for another upgrade!?
Or maybe MS realized that their upside-down financial pyramid is about to tilt if they must keep giving heavy discounts to their customers to fend off Linus' communistic plot for world domination and decided that it's time to play the piracy card to at least hold on to their market share a little longer
Or maybe... just maybe there is no spoon here for neowin to win and this is a win-win situation somehow?
Oh Canada...? The details of this "possible" deal are scant, but something here reminds me of the Corel "takeover" last year when a venture capital firm Vector manned by former microserfs and financed by Paul Allen manoeuvered Corel's downfall by using MS's minority stake in Corel and a lot of help from Corel management, turning the former Linux supporter into a private MS-only joint.
Although this "potential" sale wouldn't be as criminal as stealing a public company from the shareholders through inside dealings and voting fraud, the end results could be the same for end users if this is indeed another attempt by an MS-affiliated investment firm to prevent an ISV from supporting Linux. I hope I'm totally wrong here and Microsoft's business practises are not an issue here, although their success with neutralizing Corel might have encouraged them to take on companies and products that dare to support competing platforms, in this current climate of total lack of monopoly controls by US Department of (John Ashcroft's) Justice. MS did strike a deal with Disney just recently though...
Interesting to note how "Pravda" (the infamous Soviet state mouthpiece which actually means "the truth" in russian!) now seems to have replaced every historical reference to Soviet Union with the simple and romantically innocent "Russia". The more evil achievements OTOH, like Russia's continuing occupation of eastern Finland, a result of Josef Stalin's expansionist attack during WWII, still don't see much sunlight in today's "Soviet Russia".
PS. Also quite, umm, funny was the slogan at the top of Pravda's homepage, saying "Say what you want! PRAVDA.Ru will hear you!" I'm afraid they might be serious about that threat! Is there any independent media left outside the new dear leader Putin's state controls?
Re:BBC let SCO vent Linux FUD unchallenged
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More MyDoom Gloom
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An update if anyone's still interested: 24h after I first heard the BBC interview with SCO's Sonntag "regarding" the mydoom virus attack, the program segment was run again, but this time Sonntag's rant against Linux was significantly shorter and that was followed by an interview of at least equal length with an OSDL spokesperson. The BBC host specifically mentioned significant feedback from listeners as a reason for bringing up the views of the open source community in response to SCO's claims. Thanks to the BBC for their fair and positive reaction and to everyone who helped counter-balance the SCO FUD.
Re:BBC let SCO vent Linux FUD unchallenged
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More MyDoom Gloom
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The SCO interview/rant never showed up on the BBC (Technology) website, which only had a reasonably factual story about mydoom (to the unusual extent of mentioning that the virus affected MS Windows only!), so I chose to go to their "Have your say" page and the feedback link at the bottom, selected "Complaint" in the web form and simply gave details of the radio broadcast and the illogical and one-sided nature of its contents. Some seven hours after submitting it I received a second notification that the complaint had been forwarded to the BBC World Service staff.
BBC World Service offers a live feed in realaudio format and they generally rerun programming several times a day so people might still be able to catch that feature, unless this SCO interview piece has (hopefully) been scrapped already.
BBC let SCO vent Linux FUD unchallenged
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More MyDoom Gloom
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A while ago I was listening to the BBC World Service radio when they suddenly broadcast a story about the SCO virus attacks, with the "exciting" issue of newsworthiness apparently being their US$250,000 reward for the head(s) of the script kiddies involved. Knowing SCO I smelled rat and sure enough, SCO's Sonntag was allowed to turn the radio interview into an extended rant against Linux and the whole open-source model while "reaffirming" their ownership of the platform!
I immediately clicked on the feedback link on the BBC website and let the editors know how lopsided and unreasonable their reporting actually was, pointing them to the groklaw.net website as well.
I have considerable experience in attempting to correct misrepresented facts in the media and know that it is often quite hopeless, but if enough people do it and give some proper backing to their arguments perhaps some of the damage can still be repaired.
Imagine what the life would be like today if printing presses, typewriters and even the lowly sheets of paper had been incredulously controlled by some mediaval robber baron!?
Yes, instead we should be looking towards the GOVERNMENT to establish standards that all printing presses, typewriters, and sheets of paper must conform to!
It was an anti-monopoly argument, not a pro-government one. Renaissance allowed Europe to take a huge leap forward because "IT" of that era became far less artificially controlled (by the church mainly). Business and innovation boomed. Of course in the confucian China controlled by a single control-freak (emperor) and his proteges the mandarin-class (the government) these tools of information (insemination and distribution) were intentionally kept out of ordinary people's reach and subsequently their previously thriving culture and society stagnated.
However I believe we can agree that the needs of the modern societies, and the forms of exchange of information, are vastly more complex and that modern democracies have mature mechanisms for organizing the ground rules for the exchange of data both nationally and internationally. Anybody is welcome to build a better printer or a complex software system for massaging data as long as the data remains under the control of the users themselves and not under some profit-thirsty corporation's whims.
That type of governmental oversight may be popular in the nations of the European Union, but it's anathema to a long-standing tradition of United States laissez-faire industrial policy.
It appears to be a commonly believed myth among US citizens that their government is genuinely "laissez-faire" and it has become some kind of a liturgy, especially among the more conservative people. However the main difference between the US and European (industrial) policies is that the former is far more geared towards protecting the industrialists from the people while the latter is geared towards protecting the people from the industrialists. When you really think about it you'll realize that the latter does indeed require greater resources (which the US conservatives like to call a "big" government, implying it's "bad"). In the US the massively bloated "lawyer class" tends to be the second biggest beneficiary of the "laissez-faire", after the industrialists themselves. US politicians supporting the "industrial laissez faire" are also much better remunerated (or "buttered") than their European counterparts.
Wouldn't that indicate illegal subsidies and unfair trade? Surely MSFT could then push the US government in to taking action via the WTO. If the EU were to do this, all we'd hear would be the sound of Americans whining like they do about Boeing and Airbus.
Only in the same disingenuous way that outlawing slavery infringed upon the slaveowners' "god-given" right to profit from their "property". Should the catering for basic human needs (incl. the right to acquire and exchange information) be criminalized unless US corporations are allowed to bid for contracts on such "deals"? IT as part of the basic modern infrastructure is a resource, a tool, that should not be owned or controlled by non-public entities and neither should IT as an academic science. Entrepreneurs are still fully able (probably even more so than under the current monopolistic system) to innovate and build solutions upon such an open foundation. However abusing those resouces will become much more difficult when the ground rules have been established. US may be teetering on the edge, in the confusion of having religion and ultra-nationalism/ultra-patriotism misguidedly mixed with the increasingly "holy" notion of ultra-capitalism, but the vast majority of the world has adopted capitalism in a far more moderate form, with various levels of "social democracy" in the mix. Most people seem to agree that vital resources of the society such as education, health-care and basic transport, communication and information infrastructures need overseeing by the people's representatives (i.e. government). In the standard mixed economies like those in the EU private companies compete for contracts in many of these fields, but ultimately they must follow the rules set by the government and they must also be "compatible" with the rest of the infrastructure.
Most of the economies of the WTO member states are indeed of the mixed form and for the USA to try pushing the agenda of their home-grown monopolies (of global scale) will not only burn more bridges but it will also be futile in the end, unless the rest of the world magically decides to adopt US-style ultra-capitalism and all that it would entail.
WRT. Boeing vs Airbus and the issue of subsidies, some might argue that the massive, lucrative and seemingly never-ending contracts between Boeing and (ironically) the tax-payer funded US military bear certain resemblance to subsidies in wolf's clothing but I suppose it's alright as long as there are honest-to-god (military-)industrialists within that chain of transactions.
Simply snapping at the tails of an entrenched monopoly isn't going to solve the real problem, which (as most people here know) is based on Microsoft's sole and profit-maximizing control of the essential standards and protocols at both operating system and productivity application levels. Fining MS a few percents of their massive profits isn't even beginning to address the problem; that is also common knowledge for anyone who's followed the behaviour of the Gates gang over the last couple of decades.
The obvious long-term solution in this "war on IT terror" is for the EU and other nations to rebuild their IT infrastructures cooperatively and relatively inexpensively upon open source foundation. By removing the bottleneck that is at Microsoft Way One, Redmond, countries (incl. the US of A) can launch a renaissaince of innovation and information sharing between countries and individuals while nurturing a more balanced distribution of local employment across the world.
Governments are fundamentally responsible for establishing the basic infrastructure upon which the people can build their lives and business without artificial impediments. Imagine what the life would be like today if printing presses, typewriters and even the lowly sheets of paper had been incredulously controlled by some mediaval robber baron!? Why should one provenly immoral corporation be allowed to "own" the formats in which data (incl. writing itself!) is excanged, recorded and backed up!? It's insane.
The EU is fully capable of first introducing a set of recommendations and later (after the OSS-based support and development structures have been established) requirements for publically-owned and open IT systems that can also be easily adopted by other countries across the globe. Microsoft is fully welcome to participate in this "New Deal" but they must remove their foot from the oxygen tubes or risk becoming totally irrelevant.
If Novell forces SuSE to use Gnome and therefore become yet another "like Redhat" distribution, it will die.
Well, if practically all other *commercial* distros are KDE-centric and Red Hat has also decided to stay away from desktop-user market, wouldn't supporting Gnome alongside KDE provide SuSe an additional good sales argument? Also, for some reason the large corporate Linux "supporters" seem to prefer Gnome so why should supporting it result in a painful death? Wouldn't any distro company with serious world-conquering plans want to support both of the major desktop environments at this stage to "be there" if/when one of them makes a serious breakthrough? Can you elaborate a little on your arguments for Gnome equalling death?
Slashdot Mirror
Don't keep shooting the messengers with this totalitarian "either you're with us or you're against us" war cry. Read a few books about the history (up to current times) of islamic countries, preferably those without obvious political bias, and a pattern emerges. Over the last few hundred years and in particular in the 1900s most islamic countries were occupied and humiliated by the western superpowers of the period. Since oil became the strategic commodity, Middle-East (where all the holiest sites of islam are located) has been under extreme manipulation by the US and UK in particular.
Try imagining god-fearing Americans experiencing such occupation, control and manipulation of the United States, its culture and resources, by some islamic superpower and you might find a few Americans starting to hate their new overlords. Some might even take up arms as a last resort.
Countries cherishing peaceful coexistance and without imperial urges tend not to be hated by anyone. Democracy does not mean one country imposing its values upon other nations with very different culture and history.
Btw, nowhere have I advocated hate or violence, on the contrary. I simply understand the reasons for such anger and frustration which very sadly manifests itself in violent struggle. I also find it interesting and strangely appropriate that you would rename "Death" in the title into "Complete Freakin' Ignorance".
So far there's only been jingoistic kneejerk reaction a la "let's kill every last one of 'em".
What comes to those nukes "they" don't have, we're barely half a century into the nuclear Weapons of Mass Destruction era. The US has an arsenal of some 7,000 nuclear warheads - all far more powerful than those deployed against the two japanese cities - capable of hitting any and all targets around the world in just minutes. In addition to the US, Russia, China and even UK are all either occupying their neighbours or invading some distant foreign country "pre-emptively". All these security council seat holding nuclear states are acting against basic humanitarian principles, simply because they currently can. On a mutual "wink & nod" basis. All that matters is business, acquisition of foreign resources and plain old generating of patriotic fever. In none of these four aggressive states (although the UK isn't yet a lost cause) are the people actively organizing themselves to stop these practises which are the root cause of "terrorism" (aka "fight for freedom").
50-60 years is a very short time in the timescale of human civilization. In another generation or two the people fighting foreign invasions and occupations may well be capable of building true WMDs and delivering them to capital cities, along with ultimatums to pull out or else... Will the political leaders of that time be capable of realizing and correcting the root causes of such desperate measures, or will they still be stuck to the current "nuclear superpowers can do anything they wish" doctrine of today?
In my opinion, all actions, including those against foreign people, should pass the simple test of "would I mind someone else doing that to me?".
I'm not sure we can chalk that up to Chinese culture per se as much as decades of brutal repression of dissidents who dared question authority.
Are you saying that acquiescence to state control isn't a major charasteristic of the "modern" Chinese culture? Just as it has been under basically every emperor even before Confucius gave his name for that relationship between the individual and the state? The brief era of the republic in 1911-1949 provided the mainland chinese intellectuals a brief opportunity to debate about the state of their state (no real changes could be implemented thanks to warlordism, the civil war against Mao's communist and the Japanese invasion), but the masses have never been taught or even allowed to "question things" regarding the existing hierarchies. Even the village level "democratic" elections of today are strictly supervised and controlled by the Party.
Interestingly the (confucian?) tendency towards civil obedience (incl. family and community hierarchies) remains strong even in the Chinese communities outside the mainland China, like in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore.
The oppression by the communist party since 1949 has clearly strengthened the cultural trait of acquiescence - the Tiananmen massacre in 1989 was one such showcase event to remind the chinese populace not to get too cocky about their civil rights - but it has been part of the culture nevertheless.
All Chinese are taught about their history that as long as there are no uprisings against the single ruler, however bad that ruler may be, there won't be a civil war which could be even worse. The communists never saw the irony in adopting this same mantra after their own use of the civil war to seize power from the republic. Of course, since simply discussing about a civil war is dangerous territory, the Party tends to resort to xenophobia which suits their purposes much better.
Finally, I do realize that there is increasing interest in liberal thinking and self-expression in certain corners of urban China and especially among the young, but all that is kept far from the cultural mainstream and these efforts by the state at tightening the control of the internet is just natural since the Party intends to keep things that way. There will be crackdown after crackdown until the Party will eventually implode, and that will most likely happen because of rampant corruption and be driven by the desperately poor peasant masses watching the merchants and their Party cronies getting obscenely rich. That's another irony taught by the more recent chinese history that the current class of looting party cadres seem to have forgotten.
Of course your point about RPM being a contribution by Red Hat remains valid.
Implications would imply at least a minimal level of enforcement. MS are totally immune under the Bush regime (... Look, a mother rabbit!!!). MS manipulated Corel's privatization both directly and indirectly and all the regulators did was a concerted yawn.
So who's running the Bush & Blair Show then? They're singing the same exact tune: "Everything's fine, la la la..."
Well, at least they seem to stick to the same spin ABI(*) compatibility which guarantees that also their PR stooges are interchangable.
*America, Britain, Iraq
Unfortunately the USA doesn't have a healthy multi-party democracy which would offer their citizens a far greater choice of parties or even individual independent candidates that more closely match the voter's mix of values and priorities.
The two parties you have are both in big corporations' pocket and pass laws at the convenience of the very wealthy, both are extremely militaristic and jingoistic (compared to most any other democracy; authoritarian states like China and Russia are in USA's class though) and a lot of energy is wasted on undermining the other party since unlike in a multi-party system there will never exist the will or need to consider the other party as a potential partner in building a coalition government.
To make voting in the USA more reflective of people's opinions you'd first need to change your voting arrangements to allow smaller parties and independent candidates an opportunity to actually represent anyone.
In addition, since the media in the USA is unusually concentrated in few hands some sort of revamping of the broadcasting industry would also be desirable.
Oh, and some restrictions on campaign financing would be needed as well.
If you'd accomplish all that, and did away with the omnipresent religious rhetoric as well, you'd be a lot like Europeans!!! C'mon, just surrender and start monkeying our time-tested cheese-eating habits. Dealing with Microsoft the European way would be a bonus for you.
I fail to see what the point is though, especially after Microsoft used their devious October 2000 investment in Corel to turn the then-Linux powerhouse into a submissive .NET supporter and last year Microsoft engineered the even more devious privatization of Corel using Paul Allen's money and a motley crew of former Microsoft executives, "joint Corel and Microsoft consultants", all apparently planned by Microsoft's investment and business development unit (which makes MS money work for MS business strategy), made infamous by the recent SCO funding revelations.
Is the Corel management perhaps finally under some kind of investigation and this "proof-of-concept" WordPerfect (wordprocessor only?) dealie is supposed to prove the new MS-leaning owners' credentials as "genuine independents"?
Will Microsoft be soon promoting a new Gartner study claiming that Linux productivity app market is dead because nobody is buying a recompiled and nearly 10 years old WP8?
Surely you mean a walk to the pseudo-democratic Taiwan or the communist party-controlled China (located north-east of Tibet) where the things are actually built? That walk should take considerably less time.
Fair enough, I wasn't denying Soviets' crucial role in defeating the Nazis but just thought that the categorical statement was a bit too simplified. Firstly, the Soviet dictatorship's rising threat to Europe played a crucial role in creating the Nazi movement in the first place, and secondly Stalin's eventual military victory over Hitler was gained in no small part due to the extremely unforgiving nature of "Mother Russia" itself.
Of course, as is sadly customary, the hapless russian people bore the brunt of the bloody carnage created by their lunatic leaders, but when all is put in context I find it hard to credit the russians with simply defeating the Nazis. That is still the official liturgy within Putin's ultra-nationalistic Russia -- I believe Russia has yet to acknowledge, let alone apologize, over any of their own criminal invasions, some of which continue to this day -- and that is in my opinion the most dangerous kind of revisionism. The whole nation continues to be indoctrinated not to feel sorry for the crimes they committed, both internationally and domestically, in total contrast to post-war Germany.
On a related and equally off-topic note, "People's Republic" of China is similarly in state-imposed denial over their continuing military invasion of Tibet. Such ultra-nationalistic colonialism won't end until there is change from within, but the West isn't helping by brushing these issues under the carpet in favour of their commercial interest, or by actually helping these colonialists oppress the occupied people even further under the misguided catch-all "war on terror". China and Russia have long ago learned to play the western countries against one another and only a united political and commercial (but not militaristic obviously) stance by the US, EU and other freedom-loving nations could help instigate a positive change. It makes me cringe every time when the Bush and Blair regimes use the excuse of not "appeasing evil dictators" in support of their invasion of Iraq while they're busy closing business deals with the Chinas and Russias of this world who're besides invading their neighbours on a permanent basis also armed to the teeth with genuine WMDs. Sorry for the general rant, but these issues are intimately linked with the understanding of history and learning from it.
It is an unfortunate fact that many people still hold the extremely simplistic view of history that the Nazis rose to power simply because of the "evil desire of German people to kill all the Jewish people". Although Europe wasn't aware of the full horrific extent of Stalin's "domestic" (i.e. Russia and its neighbours) death programmes, the Soviet plans of a global communist revolution were known around Europe and the Nazis took over Germany by manipulating those fears, and famously finishing off the coup through non-democratic means. Without the genuine and rising threat from Soviet Union Hitler would probably have ended up as just another failed nationalist firebrand.
When one also remembers that years before the war broke out between Stalin and Hitler these two dictators secretly divvied up Europe (the Molotov-Ribbentropp pact) and Russia aggressively invaded their neighbours, one must dig pretty deep to muster sympathy for the role of Soviet Russia as a supposed unfortunate victim of WWII. It is also alarming that today's Russia is still in complete denial over their role as an aggressor in WWII, and that they're still to this day holding on to the Finnish provinces that Stalin demanded from Finland, besides massive war reparations, as an "Allied victor" after the war.
To sum this up, depicting Stalin's Russia simply as heroic Nazi-defeaters on par with western nations battling totalitarianism, just with greater sacrifices, may suit Putin's nationalistic agenda in today's Russia but it hardly gives a correct idea of Russia's role before and during WWII.
That shall explain this latest of my brainfarts. (crawls under my "zone"...)
Anyways, now that the Caldera SCOunks have attacked completely uninvolved parties the finishing off of that rabid animal can't be far away.
Let's see if IBM will leave MS high 'n dry now that the coyote is outta bag. Other IBM-related thoughts would be: "...and keep your enemies even closer" and "MS-Office dependency syndrome".
Or perhaps some astroserfs have been working undercover for months impersonating genuine geeks and inserting unflattering comments into Linus' communistic secret sauce and now with these leaks out in the wilderness someone not in on it can take care of the discovery!
Or maybe this is just a seemingly innocuous plot to scare laggard Weenies to do their duty and play another round of planned obsoletion and fork out some cash to Billy for another upgrade!?
Or maybe MS realized that their upside-down financial pyramid is about to tilt if they must keep giving heavy discounts to their customers to fend off Linus' communistic plot for world domination and decided that it's time to play the piracy card to at least hold on to their market share a little longer
Or maybe... just maybe there is no spoon here for neowin to win and this is a win-win situation somehow?
Although this "potential" sale wouldn't be as criminal as stealing a public company from the shareholders through inside dealings and voting fraud, the end results could be the same for end users if this is indeed another attempt by an MS-affiliated investment firm to prevent an ISV from supporting Linux. I hope I'm totally wrong here and Microsoft's business practises are not an issue here, although their success with neutralizing Corel might have encouraged them to take on companies and products that dare to support competing platforms, in this current climate of total lack of monopoly controls by US Department of (John Ashcroft's) Justice. MS did strike a deal with Disney just recently though...
PS. Also quite, umm, funny was the slogan at the top of Pravda's homepage, saying "Say what you want! PRAVDA.Ru will hear you!" I'm afraid they might be serious about that threat! Is there any independent media left outside the new dear leader Putin's state controls?
An update if anyone's still interested: 24h after I first heard the BBC interview with SCO's Sonntag "regarding" the mydoom virus attack, the program segment was run again, but this time Sonntag's rant against Linux was significantly shorter and that was followed by an interview of at least equal length with an OSDL spokesperson. The BBC host specifically mentioned significant feedback from listeners as a reason for bringing up the views of the open source community in response to SCO's claims. Thanks to the BBC for their fair and positive reaction and to everyone who helped counter-balance the SCO FUD.
BBC World Service offers a live feed in realaudio format and they generally rerun programming several times a day so people might still be able to catch that feature, unless this SCO interview piece has (hopefully) been scrapped already.
I immediately clicked on the feedback link on the BBC website and let the editors know how lopsided and unreasonable their reporting actually was, pointing them to the groklaw.net website as well.
I have considerable experience in attempting to correct misrepresented facts in the media and know that it is often quite hopeless, but if enough people do it and give some proper backing to their arguments perhaps some of the damage can still be repaired.
It was an anti-monopoly argument, not a pro-government one. Renaissance allowed Europe to take a huge leap forward because "IT" of that era became far less artificially controlled (by the church mainly). Business and innovation boomed. Of course in the confucian China controlled by a single control-freak (emperor) and his proteges the mandarin-class (the government) these tools of information (insemination and distribution) were intentionally kept out of ordinary people's reach and subsequently their previously thriving culture and society stagnated.
However I believe we can agree that the needs of the modern societies, and the forms of exchange of information, are vastly more complex and that modern democracies have mature mechanisms for organizing the ground rules for the exchange of data both nationally and internationally. Anybody is welcome to build a better printer or a complex software system for massaging data as long as the data remains under the control of the users themselves and not under some profit-thirsty corporation's whims.
It appears to be a commonly believed myth among US citizens that their government is genuinely "laissez-faire" and it has become some kind of a liturgy, especially among the more conservative people. However the main difference between the US and European (industrial) policies is that the former is far more geared towards protecting the industrialists from the people while the latter is geared towards protecting the people from the industrialists. When you really think about it you'll realize that the latter does indeed require greater resources (which the US conservatives like to call a "big" government, implying it's "bad"). In the US the massively bloated "lawyer class" tends to be the second biggest beneficiary of the "laissez-faire", after the industrialists themselves. US politicians supporting the "industrial laissez faire" are also much better remunerated (or "buttered") than their European counterparts.
Only in the same disingenuous way that outlawing slavery infringed upon the slaveowners' "god-given" right to profit from their "property". Should the catering for basic human needs (incl. the right to acquire and exchange information) be criminalized unless US corporations are allowed to bid for contracts on such "deals"? IT as part of the basic modern infrastructure is a resource, a tool, that should not be owned or controlled by non-public entities and neither should IT as an academic science. Entrepreneurs are still fully able (probably even more so than under the current monopolistic system) to innovate and build solutions upon such an open foundation. However abusing those resouces will become much more difficult when the ground rules have been established. US may be teetering on the edge, in the confusion of having religion and ultra-nationalism/ultra-patriotism misguidedly mixed with the increasingly "holy" notion of ultra-capitalism, but the vast majority of the world has adopted capitalism in a far more moderate form, with various levels of "social democracy" in the mix. Most people seem to agree that vital resources of the society such as education, health-care and basic transport, communication and information infrastructures need overseeing by the people's representatives (i.e. government). In the standard mixed economies like those in the EU private companies compete for contracts in many of these fields, but ultimately they must follow the rules set by the government and they must also be "compatible" with the rest of the infrastructure.
Most of the economies of the WTO member states are indeed of the mixed form and for the USA to try pushing the agenda of their home-grown monopolies (of global scale) will not only burn more bridges but it will also be futile in the end, unless the rest of the world magically decides to adopt US-style ultra-capitalism and all that it would entail.
WRT. Boeing vs Airbus and the issue of subsidies, some might argue that the massive, lucrative and seemingly never-ending contracts between Boeing and (ironically) the tax-payer funded US military bear certain resemblance to subsidies in wolf's clothing but I suppose it's alright as long as there are honest-to-god (military-)industrialists within that chain of transactions.
The obvious long-term solution in this "war on IT terror" is for the EU and other nations to rebuild their IT infrastructures cooperatively and relatively inexpensively upon open source foundation. By removing the bottleneck that is at Microsoft Way One, Redmond, countries (incl. the US of A) can launch a renaissaince of innovation and information sharing between countries and individuals while nurturing a more balanced distribution of local employment across the world.
Governments are fundamentally responsible for establishing the basic infrastructure upon which the people can build their lives and business without artificial impediments. Imagine what the life would be like today if printing presses, typewriters and even the lowly sheets of paper had been incredulously controlled by some mediaval robber baron!? Why should one provenly immoral corporation be allowed to "own" the formats in which data (incl. writing itself!) is excanged, recorded and backed up!? It's insane.
The EU is fully capable of first introducing a set of recommendations and later (after the OSS-based support and development structures have been established) requirements for publically-owned and open IT systems that can also be easily adopted by other countries across the globe. Microsoft is fully welcome to participate in this "New Deal" but they must remove their foot from the oxygen tubes or risk becoming totally irrelevant.
Well, if practically all other *commercial* distros are KDE-centric and Red Hat has also decided to stay away from desktop-user market, wouldn't supporting Gnome alongside KDE provide SuSe an additional good sales argument? Also, for some reason the large corporate Linux "supporters" seem to prefer Gnome so why should supporting it result in a painful death? Wouldn't any distro company with serious world-conquering plans want to support both of the major desktop environments at this stage to "be there" if/when one of them makes a serious breakthrough? Can you elaborate a little on your arguments for Gnome equalling death?