Anyone who votes for a bill that would allow this is in violation of his or her constitutional duties. There's a word for that, and it's the only crime defined by the constitution itself. Well, we're constantly being told we're at war, and guess what? In wartime, treason is a capital crime. I'm deadly serious: any congressman or senator who voted for this should be immediately tried for treason, convicted automatically, and executed. It's time to quit fucking around and take back control of the government. Do you hear me, Congress? You deserve to be punished for this crime. You deserve to DIE. Voting you out is not enough; history has shown that people are stupid enough to vote for whoever puts his face on TV. Sending you to jail is not enough; that example has been made again and again to no effect. I'm sick of it. You'll have your due process, you'll have your day in court, and then you'll get a needle in the arm, which is exactly what you deserve for your profoundly unamerican, illegal, and immoral actions. You are beneath contempt. You are beneath hatred. You have forfeited the right to life by your infringements on the just, guaranteed rights of those you are sworn to serve. There can be no lower scum, no more pathetic, miserable human refuse. Only the Law, which unlike you I am compelled to respect, will save you from the cruel, hideous torture you've so richly earned.
Think I'm extreme? What have your moderate views and voting choices done for us? They've gotten us here, that's what. Time for a change. Turn off the TV, forget about "compromise," and quit worrying about "wasting your vote." If what we have now isn't the result of wasted votes, I don't know what would be. Vote Libertarian. Vote independent. Run for office yourself. Ask your state to call for a constitutional convention. Won't do it? Ask yourself this: What would make you change the way you think, vote, and live if not the things you've seen, read, and heard about our government from reliable sources in the past 5 years? WHAT IS IT GOING TO TAKE FOR YOU TO UNDERSTAND THAT THE PEOPLE YOU'RE VOTING FOR DO NOT SERVE YOUR INTERESTS?
Asking for your identification before boarding a plane is no more unreasonable than asking for your ID when making a credit card transaction, if for nothing else to ensure you are not stealing somebody else's ticket (notwithstanding the security issues).
You're ignoring the real issue. Let's suppose I hand a ticket agent $200 in cash for a ticket on the next flight. It doesn't need to have my name on it at all to prevent theft (consider bearer bonds, tickets to a concert, or good old cash - those don't have your name on them either) but a secret rule forces not just the airlines but also the now government-employed screeners to check your identity. Why? If it were really about verifying the identity of e-ticket holders, the airlines would have justification, and they'd be the ones making the rules. Since they don't, and they're not, this is a legitimate legal problem. A private airline can impose whatever conditions it wants when offering me its services; the government doesn't have that right. That's the price it must pay for its monopoly on power.
For informal research, Wikipedia is an invaluable resource.
Sure, it's fine for informal research, idle curiosity, and perhaps even settling bar bets although I wouldn't recommend it for that. It's completely inappropriate for scholarly work, which is what this particular thread is about. Note also that wikipedia is only a little worse for scholarly work than any other encyclopedia, and that has nothing to do with the accuracy of any particular article or even the collection as a whole. I'm not suggesting that wikipedia is a cesspool of lies. I'm suggesting that to an uninformed researcher there's no way to know whether a particular article is accurate (to say nothing of complete), who wrote it, or - most importantly - how the conclusions in it were arrived at.
Agreed. The only value wikipedia could have is as a starting point to look for material, or perhaps to select a topic of interest. It's unusable as a source; the format, anonymous nature, and lack of qualified peer review are fatal. The concept is right but the rigor and accountability necessary to give an article credibility are absent. Worse still, encyclopedias (not just wikipedia) don't normally describe the process of arriving at facts, only the facts themselves, and without the background and process the articles have little credibility no matter who's writing them. I have to wonder what a student would need Wikipedia for if he's already working on his thesis. Uncyclopedia is a much better way to waste time while you're supposed to be writing.
Maybe. He certainly seems to have intended to do so.
Think of his "fellow students" as zombies
No. This is where your reasoning (and in fact the entire line of reasoning behind 'incitement' laws) collapses: humans are not zombies. Each person is free to exercise his or her own independent judgment at all times. That independent judgment should include considerations such as whether the suggested act constitutes a crime. If you tell me to kill my dog, and I do it, I am the dog-killing bastard, not you. That's because, unlike a "zombie [computer]," I have the ability to exercise independent judgment. That's one of the key characteristics of intelligent life.
This is akin to willfull destruction of property
How so? What property was destroyed? At worst perhaps a few people were unable to access a public resource; this would constitute being a nuisance, a minor misdemeanor. Destruction of property is permanent. Denial of access to a resource is temporary.
saying he's only guilt of refreshing a browser is like saying a car thief is only guilt of moving your car.
Not true. There are important differences. First, many car thieves' intent is to retain permanent control of your car. Second, cars are usually damaged by theft. Even those not damaged in the theft itself are worn out faster when being driven than when sitting idle. Computers are on all the time and are not physically damaged or consumed simply through greater use. Finally, stealing a car deprives its owner of an asset. A DoS attack against a web server denies some others of the use of that public resource, but does not deprive the owner of the computer of anything: he still has the computer and all its contents (both physical and virtual) and is free to use it as he sees fit.
A felony is a bit harsh though.
No kidding.
Perhaps there were significant damages involved.
No. This was a rarely-used, largely useless site with only static content. We're not talking about eBay here.
Or the cops are out of control.
Now you've got it. The right thing to do here is have him plead to a slight misdemeanor, pay a $200 fine, and tell him not to do it again. He's unquestionably guilty, but not of anything that would justify this kind of heavy assault.
What irritates me about these sort of articles is that they seem to indicate that language and platform choice ought to be chosen on how "hip" or "kewl" they are, rather than on the strengths they may offer a project.
Between IT directors who make their choices based on what they read about $BIGSHOT_CIO's latest success story in Business 2.0 and foreign outsourced code grunts who learned a single tool at a trade school that updates its curriculum every year to "stay current", this is as good a description as any. Do you really think a group of senior engineers with knowledge of many old and new languages gets together to discuss the project and choose a language? Hell, no. Most companies have so few such individuals on staff, and work them so hard fixing other people's errors, that any kind of technically-directed planning is impossible. Even more importantly, the typical company's IT shop will only have on-staff knowledge of 2 or at most 3 languages, and a given team will consist mainly of junior people hired because their single skill is plentiful and, therefore, cheap. Not coincidentally that'll be a hip and popular language at that time, thanks to mutual reinforcement between trade school curricula and IT management wankfests. Whether that language is technically suited to the problem space would be the last of all possible considerations, and frankly in most cases I would be surprised if it's ever considered at all.
The real solution is so simple, it may be beyond the grasp of marketers: make advertisements worth watching.
You're approaching this from the wrong direction: making advertisements worth watching is an action to be undertaken by the advertisers and their customers. This presumes they are the people with the problem. They aren't; they're making plenty of money already; PVRs and other changes in the market are crimping their ability to make more money, but they're doing fine as it is. Being greedy isn't a "problem" for the greedy individual but rather a never-ending series of opportunities to make more money at your expense. Your comment assumes that finding one way to solidify or increase the revenue stream is sufficient but in fact the media companies are satisfied only when they exhaust all possible such schemes. So in fact the viewer is the one with the problem; without a PVR you have to watch more ads today than ever before, and even with a PVR you get less content than ever before. Either way, you're going to get more product placement as well, because even if the advertisers made "advertisements worth watching" and no one ever edited them out, you can bet that to sustain their revenue growth the advertising agencies and media companies will continue to increase the number of impressions they can sell per 30 minutes of airtime; having more effective advertisements just allows them to charge more, which is great, but they aren't getting their money's worth until every possible second of airtime is sold somehow to someone. The content is the worm, the ads are the hook, and you are the fish. No fisherman cares how good the worm is as long as it covers the hook well enough to tempt the fish. Fish seem willing to overlook a giant, flaming-orange hook so long as it contains the tiniest fragment of long-dead worm or worm substitute, and TV viewers, who live longer than fish and seem to develop a tolerance to "hooks", are no different. The media companies know this and that, as a fish, er, viewer, sucks.
So there are actually two solutions, one which is realistic and one which is not. The unrealistic solution calls for a contract made between viewers and content producers for a certain amount of ad-free content in exchange for a certain amount of money - the way cable TV was originally set up, in fact. This is unrealistic because, as happened with cable TV, the media companies, never satisfied with merely making a tidy profit, realised that you'll pay just as much for TV with ads as without, so they can actually make money both ways. So much for that. We're left with the REAL SOLUTION that actually works and is guaranteed not to require watching any kind of TV ad, ever, and as a side bonus penalises the greedy bastards who are forcing the issue: DON'T WATCH TELEVISION AT ALL. There's no law (yet) requiring you to consume what the media companies produce. The worm fragments are small, not especially tasty nor healthy, and in virtually all cases unattainable without being hooked anyway. You'll find after a few weeks of altered evening routine that you don't even miss them, and you'll do a boon for your own mind, the economy, and our civilisation's collective future just by not doing something. Why wait? You can solve your problem right now, without any help from anyone, and all you have to do is not do something that seems to be causing you a lot of grief anyway. It's easy, it's free, and it takes no time at all. What better solution could you seek?
The trajectory of such items usually involves:
1) Slowing down
2) Dropping (literally) like a rock
Perhaps this is how they satisfy the SEC truth-in-advertising requirements. "We told you our trajectory is ballistic; what, you didn't know that meant halfway through we'd start moving rapidly toward the ground before making an enormous crater? That's your problem, then!"
The open solaris license looks like a nice open source license but there seem to be some conflicts when you go to download Solaris 10 binary CDs or the DVD and must agree to additional licensing terms
Well, Solaris 10 is a proprietary Sun product. It's no surprise that there are additional or conflicting terms for it. There are plenty of analogues to use; for many years, BSDI sold (without source, and under very restrictive terms) various derivatives of the open source BSD operating system. Perfectly acceptable, and when Solaris 11 comes out I'm sure it will have terms different from those of the OpenSolaris technology too. The license allows this, and you shouldn't be surprised by it.
If the Solaris license makes you unhappy, don't use Solaris. Use one of the other OpenSolaris-based distributions instead; each distributor is free to offer you any terms he or she likes, provided that the source files they use that come from OpenSolaris are made available to you. You really should go read the license.
I guess I have to actually download the disks to know for certain what I can or can't do as the information from their website seems contradictory.
Actually this term exists partly because a lot of the software included in Solaris is open source, and you have additional rights to that software that aren't specified on that page. Do you really want to read 500 pages detailing all the licenses and what they cover? Especially since many of them are familiar licenses you probably know and love, like BSD and GPL? I sure don't want to.
Wow, thats not very open, and what is the point if the source is available?
You've answered your own question...the parts of Solaris that are open don't need to be reverse-engineered. The parts that aren't, well, Sun can license those under whatever terms they like. Again, if you don't like the Solaris license, you have a choice of distributions, just like you have with other open source operating systems.
My, a bit touchy about how people may talk about us, are we?
If you look at the Solaris Express (for Solaris 11) license terms, you'll notice that this has been removed. Again, Solaris 10 predates OpenSolaris and is not an open source operating system. Of course the benchmarking term does not apply to source or binaries you receive via OpenSolaris, either, only to the official Sun distribution.
I still wonder how supportive Sun is of open source. Do they only support it if they have little choice and then only if you use it in a way that will not benefit anyone else?
Check out the otherdistributionsavailable already and other projects people are starting to work on. Sun gets nothing directly from these - neither revenue, nor opportunity to sell services or other software. Of course Sun does benefit, too; it gets increased mindshare for Solaris and perhaps a larger installed base of Solaris-compatible operating systems. But to say that these uses don't benefit anyone other than Sun is just wrong.
As far as I can tell if this is a true requirement, someone will have to start from scratch, ( OS and all )
Exactly. And that's a great requirement. The application in question is so sensitive, so important, and so specialised that I'm happy, as a taxpayer, to pay 2 or 5 or 10 times what it would cost to develop an off-the-shelf solution. The software in most military hardware is (or at least was until very recently) all purpose-built by contractors operating under some restrictions very similar to these: security clearances for all employees involved, which means names and background checks, code escrow, and even multiple independent implementations from different contractors used together in failsafe configurations. All of these safeguards and any others we can think of are appropriate for voting machines as well. I can't imagine that our nation is imperiled any more by a defective Tomahawk than it is by crooked voting machines. Death and slavery are, from the perspective of a democratic state, indistinguishable.
The requirements are entirely reasonable. If they can't be met by Diebold's current designs, Diebold can either design something that can meet the requirements (and increase their bids accordingly) or decline to bid on the project. Undercutting the competition by deciding not to honour some of the constraints isn't fair to the competition and it doesn't serve the needs of the buyer. Since the bidding process in NC is long since over, the only options at this point are altering the software to meet the constraints and eating the cost, or withdrawing from the contract. I don't really care which they do but simply refusing to perfom is not an option.
Many of them have seen drastic changes in sea ice cover over the past few years....For someone to deny the existance of global warming seems ludicrous.
I deny the existence of global warming. Not because it's impossible for the entire world to become uniformly warmer, but because there's no reasonable evidence that it's actually happening. It would, of course, be ludicrous to deny the existence of arctic maritime warming, which is what your post was really about. At least, as far as I could tell - you mentioned an arctic research institute, sea ice, and the Inupiat. You offered no evidence that would support a conclusion of inland warming in the arctic, nor any concerning the antarctic, equatorial, subtropical, or temperate regions, neither maritime nor continental. Even significant overall warming would not be uniform or even universal, and therefore some regions may warm while others cool, some become wetter while others become deserts, and perhaps most intriguingly of all, some which currently receive most precipitation in winter will receive it in summer and vice versa. Because predicting accurately which changes will occur in which regions is beyond the current state of the art in climatology, most reasonable people have deprecated the vastly oversimplified "global warming" in favour of the more general - and more accurate - "climate change." This is a rare instance in which the Bushies actually have the terminology right; the mere fact that an idiot calls an apple an apple does not sanction your erroneous and spiteful choice to call it an orange.
So, then, would it be "ludicrous" to deny the existence of climate change? Indeed it would; the historical record is rife with evidence for far more dramatic shifts in climate than have occurred during recorded history, and even minor regional climate changes are important and worthy of careful study. Such a regional change, even an isolated one, could have devastating effects elsewhere - such as the oft-mentioned antarctic thaw. No sensible person denies that climate change has occurred in the past, is occurring today, and will continue to occur in the future, nor that its effects on humanity have been and will continue to be substantial and universal.
Unfortunately the really interesting questions about climate change - how, why, and where it happens - have become entangled in policy questions before they're usefully answered. It's equally dangerous and unfortunate that entities like the Union of Concerned Scientists are using woefully incomplete data in an attempt to influence public opinion in favour of their proposed policy changes as at is that other entities like the Bush administration ignore completely what little information there is in favour of policies that benefit themselves and their fellow plutocrats. Instead of gathering the kind of solid evidence and understanding on which sound policy decisions could eventually be made, the UCE and others of their ilk have only damaged their own credibility and given fodder to those determined to make a buck at the expense of the lives of others. You, sir or madam, appear to be falling into exactly that same trap. Your assertion that "global warming" is a real phenomenon, based on regional evidence - and anecdotal evidence at that, compelling though it is - and that those who deny it are "ludicrous" only harms any case you or others might make for narrower and more well-reasoned conclusions. Those are the conclusions science can reasonably hope to draw, and those on which the very policy changes suggested by advocates of the "global warming" theory might be based.
I shouldnt really. Unless its going to be THAT much of a fabulous product. For that matter , got a copy of Java Desktop running at home, wasnt too pleased with it, so should OpenSol be any better?
Was anyone overly pleased with JDS? Most of the opinions Ive read were to the negative.
Solaris and JDS aren't the same thing. I'll be the first to admit that Sun's not always clear about the difference, but if you examine the system at a technical level you'll see that there's nothing confusing about it. JDS is a set of userland applications and libraries built with GNOME (from a non-marketing perspective, it *is* GNOME). It has at various times been implemented on top of both GNU/Linux and Solaris. It's included with Solaris 10, but of course you don't have to use it. You can use CDE, which is still included, or you can use any other window manager and widget sets that support X11, just like you could on Solaris 9 and 8 and any GNU/Linux or Unix system with an X installation. Solaris is a Unix system, optionally including an X11 environment. This platform offers administrators and users the exact same choices and flexibility that any other Unix or Unix-like system offers. Why assume Solaris is different just because the marketing folks want to push Java? If you don't like JDS, don't use it. I'm sure Ubuntu had some default when you installed it - maybe GNOME, maybe KDE, maybe twm, maybe no X at all. Did you use the defaults there? Many people don't, and there's no reason you should feel you must on Solaris.
You want a copy of Solaris, go out and buy one. You want a free copy of Solaris, wait.
I guess you mean 'You want a copy of Solaris, go get one today, free of charge. You want an open source copy of Solaris, wait for OpenSolaris.' See, Solaris 10 doesn't cost money unless you want support, which is entirely optional. See for yourself.
Dude, his whole point is that the KERNEL should be called Linux and a system built on it should be called GNU/Linux. So, no, it's not too funny.
And doesn't it make it much easier when people actually do this? In fact you could say "Linux distribution" or "GNU/Linux distribution" or even "Linux-based operating system" and it would be just as useful. RMS's rationale is proper credit to the GNU project, which is a fine goal and certainly not one I oppose. But the greater value in making the distinction is technical and rhetorical: it becomes possible to state precisely the origins of features and bugs, and to comment with clarity on both technology and politics.
So when I'm talking a source base containing a set of technologies that implement a Unix-like but Unix-incompatible operating system, I say "Linux." When I'm talking about, for example, SuSE's product containing a modified version of Linux plus the GNU C library and a userland built with a wide array of free and non-free software, I say "SuSE's GNU/Linux distribution." The added typing takes about 500ms, and the added precision either avoids a needless fight or ensures I've picked the one I meant to pick. Clarity and precision are skills to be honed and prized; these make communication practical.
Systems like Unix that are architected properly will only need to change their zoneinfo files to reflect the new start and end dates. The code already handles daylight savings times that start and end at arbitrary times and dates - for example, most of Europe has a different DST than the US. Changing and testing this should not be burdensome or especially costly.
Systems which are misdesigned such that they store local time in hardware or system clocks should be fixed, although using local time implies that the user of the system isn't very interested in its accuracy anyway, so perhaps it doesn't even need to be fixed. In any case, replacing one brittle hard-coded rule with another only serves to perpetuate the problem.
This isn't really astroturfing. Astroturfing is putting individuals out front, without revealing your manipulation, to advocate for your corporate goals as if they personally believed in them. This is an industry association whose membership is public knowledge. Its statements would be expected to represent the views of its membership; there's nothing secret or deceptive about it.
Sun: Forked everything in Linux except the kernel for themselves
How elegant. Linux is the kernel, so claiming that Sun forked "everything in Linux but the kernel" reduces to "Sun forked everything in Linux but Linux" and thus "Sun forked nothing." This is entirely true, but it still manages to perpetuate the myth that Sun is damaging Linux. Simply masterful. I think you have a future, perhaps in the PR department of a major political party.
Now the positions are reversed. Solaris has to scale to 128 processers to compete with the competitions 32 processor systems. With the next generation of Opteron chips Linux only needs to scale to 16 processors to compete with 128 processor Solaris/Sparc system.
Opteron is great. We all love Opteron. But Opteron only supports 8 CPUs per system (3 HT ports per chip) without some really serious hackery, and even if that limitation were removed, a 16-Opteron (I assume you mean 16 cores) system wouldn't be faster than a 144-core F25K. Sun sells Opteron machines alongside SPARC, so if you think SPARC is too slow and/or expensive, just choose another machine.
Scalability, whether horizontal or vertical, has to be a property of all the components of a system or it's not really present at all. If a 16-CPU XXX machine were as fast as a 144-core starcat (Hitachi might be able to say that, but I doubt it), why wouldn't manufacturer XXX want to make a machine with 72 or 128 or 144 of those CPUs, and be 5 or 6 times as fast as the starcat? They would, of course. And when they figure out hardware scalability, they'll need an OS that will scale up with them.
But really, what's any of this got to do with Solaris? It runs on Opteron machines too, whether made by Sun or not, and 32-bit x86 machines if you're stuck in the 90s. For that matter, Linux will run on SPARC machines. x86 boxes - even 64-bit ones - aren't the competition for the starcats, regardless of what OS they run. The lesson here is that scaling up allows you to take advantage of more CPUs in any kind of machine. Sooner or later it will become practically impossible to clock CPUs any higher, and if you'd examined your argument at all - and its basis on multicore Opterons - you'd realize that we're pretty much there now, which is why every CPU manufacturer, not just Sun, is looking at CMT and multicore as the paths to increased performance in the future. This is not a fringe technology - every vendor including Intel and AMD clearly thinks it's important. If that turns out to be true, OS scalability and workload parallelism will be the limiting performance factors for nearly all computers. Not CPU clock rate. Regardless of what you think of SPARC, considering your implicit admission that even Opteron clocks won't increase without bound, you ought to recognize that Solaris is probably in a good position to take advantage of an important ongoing cross-market trend in hardware design.
And I'm waiting for the day that a processor has more cache than my first comp had disk space.
We're pretty close, really. My actual first computer was a TI-99/4A, which could store a few hundred KB on an audio casette. So in that sense, we're there now. My first computer with a fixed disk had 10MB of storage, and there are plenty of chips sold now with 8MB secondary cache.
I think that any software that resists removal by the end user should be outlawed.
You mean like Internet Explorer? The EU at least agreed in the case of Windows Media Player, but the US courts sort-of-agreed about IE and then showed that they don't really care by doing nothing about it. If you want to argue this, you have to account for IE somehow. Would it be banned too? What about antivirus programs? Should they be allowed to prevent user-initiated trojans from uninstalling them? What, exactly, constitutes permission from the user to remove something (or to install it, for that matter)? How can you be sure this permission wasn't forged by some other piece of malware?
Twice now I've picked up hosting plans for myself or others that claim they come with RHEL (aka, a subscription to redhat's network of up2date servers, and redhat software).
In these two cases when I actually run up2date I've noticed they are picking up packages from centOS. My complaint is simply that I want to be the one to deceide between centOS and RHEL, and am capable of evaluatiing their similarities and differences.
And this is CentOS's fault how exactly? I could go buy 1000 CompUSA brand monitors and sell them on eBay as Sonys. Should Sony sue CompUSA for that?
The logo must not exploit or offend a person's sex, race,
religion, morality, culture , nor be salacious or
pornographic.
The only permissible submission under these requirements is a square with color #808080. And even then, I'm not sure; someone somewhere might find squares or grayness offensive, after all.
The right way to say this is "must not be patently offensive to any large number of reasonable individuals." and leave it at that. But the way it's written, it's basically impossible to do anything. Even the null logo will be offensive to some people who will insist that there should be something there. You can't simultaneously avoid offending every single human being on the planet. Why try? Beastie's been good enough for 20 years; why change now?
False. FSF License page clearly states that the CDDL is a GPL-incompatible free software license. And I quote: "This is a free software license which is not a strong copyleft; it has some complex restrictions that make it incompatible with the GNU GPL."
Fair enough, I stand corrected (though I'll stand by the Free versus free distinction). However, this actually furthers my original argument: if even the ideologically pure Free Software Foundation agrees with the OSI that the CDDL is a free license, why doesn't the parent poster?
With the OSI approving Sun's non-free licenses; it sure seems like they're little more than a shill of businesses trying to divide and conqer the open source community.
What exactly is non-free about the CDDL? That you can't relicense the code as you see fit? Well, you can't do that with GPL code either. Is it because you can link files licensed under CDDL with files subject to other licenses? Well, you can do that with MPL and BSD licensed code too. Is it that you're explicitly granted rights to use any patented methods embodied in the code? Perhaps you'd rather negotiate your own licenses to those patents or risk getting sued by the owner, even if that owner put the code there in the first place. Is it that Sun started with the MPL, and then removed their freedom to change the license on your software with no warning?
Or is it really that you're just looking for something to complain about? The CDDL meets every requirement established by the OSI and others (let's not forget that OSI is an offshoot of the original Debian Free Software Guidelines) for software rights. True enough, it's not Free Software as defined by the Free Software Foundation - because they have defined Free Software to mean GPL/LGPL and nothing else. But you said non-free as a generic pejorative, not a reference to the FSF's definition, so the challenge remains:
And OpenSolaris is the anti-Linux. OpenSolaris is a professional open source operating system centrally controlled and run by a corporation, rather than anti-capitlists and anarchists who's only goal is chaos and hacking.
For those reasons, Sun has released OpenSolaris. It is a direct effort to take the best open source developers off of disorganized projects like Linux and onto a more corporate-friendly project that will in time become the de-facto operating system for all Unix deployments.
Wow. Talk about paranoia. It's anti-Linux? No, it's unrelated to Linux. Open source development is not a zero-sum game; both can grow and develop independently from one another (if the existence of KDE and GNOME is good because "it's all about choice," then so too is the existence of multiple open source operating systems). OpenSolaris is about Solaris, not about Linux. It's controlled by a corporation? Not really. Only the first tidbits about "control" have been released, and community (read: non-Sun) participation is an integral part of that. As for "anti-capitlists [sic] and anarchists" I can only assume you're being sarcastic. I hacked Linux for years and never had any interest in chaos. Neither do I see much evidence that Sun engineers think Linux developers' goal is the creation of chaos. We pretty much think their goal is the creation of Linux, which is fine.
Again, the goal is not to get anyone to stop developing Linux. Even if that were the goal, there's no way to accomplish it; developers will work on the projects that interest them most. If Linux developers want to work on OpenSolaris, they're welcome to do so. If not, that's fine too. The goal is to work with and grow the existing Solaris community and provide additional value to customers and developers. Do you see "Linux" anywhere in that statement of goals?
Your paranoia is amusing but not constructive. Sun is not Microsoft and the goal is not to crush out and destroy Linux, a product that Sun also sells.
Actually, Sun has been toying around a lot with licensing costs lately. The current round I believe for Solaris 9 was free (maybe with conditions) for a single-CPU machine, and something like $250 for dual-cpu. (going up from there, but bigger machines usually cost enough that it isn't really that much relative to machine price)
Instead of guessing, why not just go look at the Solaris 10 pricing and licensing information? To be fair, you're right; pricing has changed a lot lately. But the fact is that anyone can use Solaris for zero licensing costs. Support is optional and is supposed to be cheaper than for competing products.
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Think I'm extreme? What have your moderate views and voting choices done for us? They've gotten us here, that's what. Time for a change. Turn off the TV, forget about "compromise," and quit worrying about "wasting your vote." If what we have now isn't the result of wasted votes, I don't know what would be. Vote Libertarian. Vote independent. Run for office yourself. Ask your state to call for a constitutional convention. Won't do it? Ask yourself this: What would make you change the way you think, vote, and live if not the things you've seen, read, and heard about our government from reliable sources in the past 5 years? WHAT IS IT GOING TO TAKE FOR YOU TO UNDERSTAND THAT THE PEOPLE YOU'RE VOTING FOR DO NOT SERVE YOUR INTERESTS?
You're ignoring the real issue. Let's suppose I hand a ticket agent $200 in cash for a ticket on the next flight. It doesn't need to have my name on it at all to prevent theft (consider bearer bonds, tickets to a concert, or good old cash - those don't have your name on them either) but a secret rule forces not just the airlines but also the now government-employed screeners to check your identity. Why? If it were really about verifying the identity of e-ticket holders, the airlines would have justification, and they'd be the ones making the rules. Since they don't, and they're not, this is a legitimate legal problem. A private airline can impose whatever conditions it wants when offering me its services; the government doesn't have that right. That's the price it must pay for its monopoly on power.
Sure, it's fine for informal research, idle curiosity, and perhaps even settling bar bets although I wouldn't recommend it for that. It's completely inappropriate for scholarly work, which is what this particular thread is about. Note also that wikipedia is only a little worse for scholarly work than any other encyclopedia, and that has nothing to do with the accuracy of any particular article or even the collection as a whole. I'm not suggesting that wikipedia is a cesspool of lies. I'm suggesting that to an uninformed researcher there's no way to know whether a particular article is accurate (to say nothing of complete), who wrote it, or - most importantly - how the conclusions in it were arrived at.
Agreed. The only value wikipedia could have is as a starting point to look for material, or perhaps to select a topic of interest. It's unusable as a source; the format, anonymous nature, and lack of qualified peer review are fatal. The concept is right but the rigor and accountability necessary to give an article credibility are absent. Worse still, encyclopedias (not just wikipedia) don't normally describe the process of arriving at facts, only the facts themselves, and without the background and process the articles have little credibility no matter who's writing them. I have to wonder what a student would need Wikipedia for if he's already working on his thesis. Uncyclopedia is a much better way to waste time while you're supposed to be writing.
Maybe. He certainly seems to have intended to do so.
Think of his "fellow students" as zombies
No. This is where your reasoning (and in fact the entire line of reasoning behind 'incitement' laws) collapses: humans are not zombies. Each person is free to exercise his or her own independent judgment at all times. That independent judgment should include considerations such as whether the suggested act constitutes a crime. If you tell me to kill my dog, and I do it, I am the dog-killing bastard, not you. That's because, unlike a "zombie [computer]," I have the ability to exercise independent judgment. That's one of the key characteristics of intelligent life.
This is akin to willfull destruction of property
How so? What property was destroyed? At worst perhaps a few people were unable to access a public resource; this would constitute being a nuisance, a minor misdemeanor. Destruction of property is permanent. Denial of access to a resource is temporary.
saying he's only guilt of refreshing a browser is like saying a car thief is only guilt of moving your car.
Not true. There are important differences. First, many car thieves' intent is to retain permanent control of your car. Second, cars are usually damaged by theft. Even those not damaged in the theft itself are worn out faster when being driven than when sitting idle. Computers are on all the time and are not physically damaged or consumed simply through greater use. Finally, stealing a car deprives its owner of an asset. A DoS attack against a web server denies some others of the use of that public resource, but does not deprive the owner of the computer of anything: he still has the computer and all its contents (both physical and virtual) and is free to use it as he sees fit.
A felony is a bit harsh though.
No kidding.
Perhaps there were significant damages involved.
No. This was a rarely-used, largely useless site with only static content. We're not talking about eBay here.
Or the cops are out of control.
Now you've got it. The right thing to do here is have him plead to a slight misdemeanor, pay a $200 fine, and tell him not to do it again. He's unquestionably guilty, but not of anything that would justify this kind of heavy assault.
Between IT directors who make their choices based on what they read about $BIGSHOT_CIO's latest success story in Business 2.0 and foreign outsourced code grunts who learned a single tool at a trade school that updates its curriculum every year to "stay current", this is as good a description as any. Do you really think a group of senior engineers with knowledge of many old and new languages gets together to discuss the project and choose a language? Hell, no. Most companies have so few such individuals on staff, and work them so hard fixing other people's errors, that any kind of technically-directed planning is impossible. Even more importantly, the typical company's IT shop will only have on-staff knowledge of 2 or at most 3 languages, and a given team will consist mainly of junior people hired because their single skill is plentiful and, therefore, cheap. Not coincidentally that'll be a hip and popular language at that time, thanks to mutual reinforcement between trade school curricula and IT management wankfests. Whether that language is technically suited to the problem space would be the last of all possible considerations, and frankly in most cases I would be surprised if it's ever considered at all.
You're approaching this from the wrong direction: making advertisements worth watching is an action to be undertaken by the advertisers and their customers. This presumes they are the people with the problem. They aren't; they're making plenty of money already; PVRs and other changes in the market are crimping their ability to make more money, but they're doing fine as it is. Being greedy isn't a "problem" for the greedy individual but rather a never-ending series of opportunities to make more money at your expense. Your comment assumes that finding one way to solidify or increase the revenue stream is sufficient but in fact the media companies are satisfied only when they exhaust all possible such schemes. So in fact the viewer is the one with the problem; without a PVR you have to watch more ads today than ever before, and even with a PVR you get less content than ever before. Either way, you're going to get more product placement as well, because even if the advertisers made "advertisements worth watching" and no one ever edited them out, you can bet that to sustain their revenue growth the advertising agencies and media companies will continue to increase the number of impressions they can sell per 30 minutes of airtime; having more effective advertisements just allows them to charge more, which is great, but they aren't getting their money's worth until every possible second of airtime is sold somehow to someone. The content is the worm, the ads are the hook, and you are the fish. No fisherman cares how good the worm is as long as it covers the hook well enough to tempt the fish. Fish seem willing to overlook a giant, flaming-orange hook so long as it contains the tiniest fragment of long-dead worm or worm substitute, and TV viewers, who live longer than fish and seem to develop a tolerance to "hooks", are no different. The media companies know this and that, as a fish, er, viewer, sucks.
So there are actually two solutions, one which is realistic and one which is not. The unrealistic solution calls for a contract made between viewers and content producers for a certain amount of ad-free content in exchange for a certain amount of money - the way cable TV was originally set up, in fact. This is unrealistic because, as happened with cable TV, the media companies, never satisfied with merely making a tidy profit, realised that you'll pay just as much for TV with ads as without, so they can actually make money both ways. So much for that. We're left with the REAL SOLUTION that actually works and is guaranteed not to require watching any kind of TV ad, ever, and as a side bonus penalises the greedy bastards who are forcing the issue: DON'T WATCH TELEVISION AT ALL. There's no law (yet) requiring you to consume what the media companies produce. The worm fragments are small, not especially tasty nor healthy, and in virtually all cases unattainable without being hooked anyway. You'll find after a few weeks of altered evening routine that you don't even miss them, and you'll do a boon for your own mind, the economy, and our civilisation's collective future just by not doing something. Why wait? You can solve your problem right now, without any help from anyone, and all you have to do is not do something that seems to be causing you a lot of grief anyway. It's easy, it's free, and it takes no time at all. What better solution could you seek?
1) Slowing down
2) Dropping (literally) like a rock
Perhaps this is how they satisfy the SEC truth-in-advertising requirements. "We told you our trajectory is ballistic; what, you didn't know that meant halfway through we'd start moving rapidly toward the ground before making an enormous crater? That's your problem, then!"
Well, Solaris 10 is a proprietary Sun product. It's no surprise that there are additional or conflicting terms for it. There are plenty of analogues to use; for many years, BSDI sold (without source, and under very restrictive terms) various derivatives of the open source BSD operating system. Perfectly acceptable, and when Solaris 11 comes out I'm sure it will have terms different from those of the OpenSolaris technology too. The license allows this, and you shouldn't be surprised by it.
If the Solaris license makes you unhappy, don't use Solaris. Use one of the other OpenSolaris-based distributions instead; each distributor is free to offer you any terms he or she likes, provided that the source files they use that come from OpenSolaris are made available to you. You really should go read the license.
I guess I have to actually download the disks to know for certain what I can or can't do as the information from their website seems contradictory.
Actually this term exists partly because a lot of the software included in Solaris is open source, and you have additional rights to that software that aren't specified on that page. Do you really want to read 500 pages detailing all the licenses and what they cover? Especially since many of them are familiar licenses you probably know and love, like BSD and GPL? I sure don't want to.
Wow, thats not very open, and what is the point if the source is available?
You've answered your own question...the parts of Solaris that are open don't need to be reverse-engineered. The parts that aren't, well, Sun can license those under whatever terms they like. Again, if you don't like the Solaris license, you have a choice of distributions, just like you have with other open source operating systems.
My, a bit touchy about how people may talk about us, are we?
If you look at the Solaris Express (for Solaris 11) license terms, you'll notice that this has been removed. Again, Solaris 10 predates OpenSolaris and is not an open source operating system. Of course the benchmarking term does not apply to source or binaries you receive via OpenSolaris, either, only to the official Sun distribution.
I still wonder how supportive Sun is of open source. Do they only support it if they have little choice and then only if you use it in a way that will not benefit anyone else?
Check out the other distributions available already and other projects people are starting to work on. Sun gets nothing directly from these - neither revenue, nor opportunity to sell services or other software. Of course Sun does benefit, too; it gets increased mindshare for Solaris and perhaps a larger installed base of Solaris-compatible operating systems. But to say that these uses don't benefit anyone other than Sun is just wrong.
Exactly. And that's a great requirement. The application in question is so sensitive, so important, and so specialised that I'm happy, as a taxpayer, to pay 2 or 5 or 10 times what it would cost to develop an off-the-shelf solution. The software in most military hardware is (or at least was until very recently) all purpose-built by contractors operating under some restrictions very similar to these: security clearances for all employees involved, which means names and background checks, code escrow, and even multiple independent implementations from different contractors used together in failsafe configurations. All of these safeguards and any others we can think of are appropriate for voting machines as well. I can't imagine that our nation is imperiled any more by a defective Tomahawk than it is by crooked voting machines. Death and slavery are, from the perspective of a democratic state, indistinguishable.
The requirements are entirely reasonable. If they can't be met by Diebold's current designs, Diebold can either design something that can meet the requirements (and increase their bids accordingly) or decline to bid on the project. Undercutting the competition by deciding not to honour some of the constraints isn't fair to the competition and it doesn't serve the needs of the buyer. Since the bidding process in NC is long since over, the only options at this point are altering the software to meet the constraints and eating the cost, or withdrawing from the contract. I don't really care which they do but simply refusing to perfom is not an option.
I deny the existence of global warming. Not because it's impossible for the entire world to become uniformly warmer, but because there's no reasonable evidence that it's actually happening. It would, of course, be ludicrous to deny the existence of arctic maritime warming, which is what your post was really about. At least, as far as I could tell - you mentioned an arctic research institute, sea ice, and the Inupiat. You offered no evidence that would support a conclusion of inland warming in the arctic, nor any concerning the antarctic, equatorial, subtropical, or temperate regions, neither maritime nor continental. Even significant overall warming would not be uniform or even universal, and therefore some regions may warm while others cool, some become wetter while others become deserts, and perhaps most intriguingly of all, some which currently receive most precipitation in winter will receive it in summer and vice versa. Because predicting accurately which changes will occur in which regions is beyond the current state of the art in climatology, most reasonable people have deprecated the vastly oversimplified "global warming" in favour of the more general - and more accurate - "climate change." This is a rare instance in which the Bushies actually have the terminology right; the mere fact that an idiot calls an apple an apple does not sanction your erroneous and spiteful choice to call it an orange.
So, then, would it be "ludicrous" to deny the existence of climate change? Indeed it would; the historical record is rife with evidence for far more dramatic shifts in climate than have occurred during recorded history, and even minor regional climate changes are important and worthy of careful study. Such a regional change, even an isolated one, could have devastating effects elsewhere - such as the oft-mentioned antarctic thaw. No sensible person denies that climate change has occurred in the past, is occurring today, and will continue to occur in the future, nor that its effects on humanity have been and will continue to be substantial and universal.
Unfortunately the really interesting questions about climate change - how, why, and where it happens - have become entangled in policy questions before they're usefully answered. It's equally dangerous and unfortunate that entities like the Union of Concerned Scientists are using woefully incomplete data in an attempt to influence public opinion in favour of their proposed policy changes as at is that other entities like the Bush administration ignore completely what little information there is in favour of policies that benefit themselves and their fellow plutocrats. Instead of gathering the kind of solid evidence and understanding on which sound policy decisions could eventually be made, the UCE and others of their ilk have only damaged their own credibility and given fodder to those determined to make a buck at the expense of the lives of others. You, sir or madam, appear to be falling into exactly that same trap. Your assertion that "global warming" is a real phenomenon, based on regional evidence - and anecdotal evidence at that, compelling though it is - and that those who deny it are "ludicrous" only harms any case you or others might make for narrower and more well-reasoned conclusions. Those are the conclusions science can reasonably hope to draw, and those on which the very policy changes suggested by advocates of the "global warming" theory might be based.
Solaris and JDS aren't the same thing. I'll be the first to admit that Sun's not always clear about the difference, but if you examine the system at a technical level you'll see that there's nothing confusing about it. JDS is a set of userland applications and libraries built with GNOME (from a non-marketing perspective, it *is* GNOME). It has at various times been implemented on top of both GNU/Linux and Solaris. It's included with Solaris 10, but of course you don't have to use it. You can use CDE, which is still included, or you can use any other window manager and widget sets that support X11, just like you could on Solaris 9 and 8 and any GNU/Linux or Unix system with an X installation. Solaris is a Unix system, optionally including an X11 environment. This platform offers administrators and users the exact same choices and flexibility that any other Unix or Unix-like system offers. Why assume Solaris is different just because the marketing folks want to push Java? If you don't like JDS, don't use it. I'm sure Ubuntu had some default when you installed it - maybe GNOME, maybe KDE, maybe twm, maybe no X at all. Did you use the defaults there? Many people don't, and there's no reason you should feel you must on Solaris.
You want a copy of Solaris, go out and buy one. You want a free copy of Solaris, wait.
I guess you mean 'You want a copy of Solaris, go get one today, free of charge. You want an open source copy of Solaris, wait for OpenSolaris.' See, Solaris 10 doesn't cost money unless you want support, which is entirely optional. See for yourself.
And doesn't it make it much easier when people actually do this? In fact you could say "Linux distribution" or "GNU/Linux distribution" or even "Linux-based operating system" and it would be just as useful. RMS's rationale is proper credit to the GNU project, which is a fine goal and certainly not one I oppose. But the greater value in making the distinction is technical and rhetorical: it becomes possible to state precisely the origins of features and bugs, and to comment with clarity on both technology and politics.
So when I'm talking a source base containing a set of technologies that implement a Unix-like but Unix-incompatible operating system, I say "Linux." When I'm talking about, for example, SuSE's product containing a modified version of Linux plus the GNU C library and a userland built with a wide array of free and non-free software, I say "SuSE's GNU/Linux distribution." The added typing takes about 500ms, and the added precision either avoids a needless fight or ensures I've picked the one I meant to pick. Clarity and precision are skills to be honed and prized; these make communication practical.
Systems which are misdesigned such that they store local time in hardware or system clocks should be fixed, although using local time implies that the user of the system isn't very interested in its accuracy anyway, so perhaps it doesn't even need to be fixed. In any case, replacing one brittle hard-coded rule with another only serves to perpetuate the problem.
This isn't really astroturfing. Astroturfing is putting individuals out front, without revealing your manipulation, to advocate for your corporate goals as if they personally believed in them. This is an industry association whose membership is public knowledge. Its statements would be expected to represent the views of its membership; there's nothing secret or deceptive about it.
How elegant. Linux is the kernel, so claiming that Sun forked "everything in Linux but the kernel" reduces to "Sun forked everything in Linux but Linux" and thus "Sun forked nothing." This is entirely true, but it still manages to perpetuate the myth that Sun is damaging Linux. Simply masterful. I think you have a future, perhaps in the PR department of a major political party.
Opteron is great. We all love Opteron. But Opteron only supports 8 CPUs per system (3 HT ports per chip) without some really serious hackery, and even if that limitation were removed, a 16-Opteron (I assume you mean 16 cores) system wouldn't be faster than a 144-core F25K. Sun sells Opteron machines alongside SPARC, so if you think SPARC is too slow and/or expensive, just choose another machine.
Scalability, whether horizontal or vertical, has to be a property of all the components of a system or it's not really present at all. If a 16-CPU XXX machine were as fast as a 144-core starcat (Hitachi might be able to say that, but I doubt it), why wouldn't manufacturer XXX want to make a machine with 72 or 128 or 144 of those CPUs, and be 5 or 6 times as fast as the starcat? They would, of course. And when they figure out hardware scalability, they'll need an OS that will scale up with them.
But really, what's any of this got to do with Solaris? It runs on Opteron machines too, whether made by Sun or not, and 32-bit x86 machines if you're stuck in the 90s. For that matter, Linux will run on SPARC machines. x86 boxes - even 64-bit ones - aren't the competition for the starcats, regardless of what OS they run. The lesson here is that scaling up allows you to take advantage of more CPUs in any kind of machine. Sooner or later it will become practically impossible to clock CPUs any higher, and if you'd examined your argument at all - and its basis on multicore Opterons - you'd realize that we're pretty much there now, which is why every CPU manufacturer, not just Sun, is looking at CMT and multicore as the paths to increased performance in the future. This is not a fringe technology - every vendor including Intel and AMD clearly thinks it's important. If that turns out to be true, OS scalability and workload parallelism will be the limiting performance factors for nearly all computers. Not CPU clock rate. Regardless of what you think of SPARC, considering your implicit admission that even Opteron clocks won't increase without bound, you ought to recognize that Solaris is probably in a good position to take advantage of an important ongoing cross-market trend in hardware design.
We're pretty close, really. My actual first computer was a TI-99/4A, which could store a few hundred KB on an audio casette. So in that sense, we're there now. My first computer with a fixed disk had 10MB of storage, and there are plenty of chips sold now with 8MB secondary cache.
You mean like Internet Explorer? The EU at least agreed in the case of Windows Media Player, but the US courts sort-of-agreed about IE and then showed that they don't really care by doing nothing about it. If you want to argue this, you have to account for IE somehow. Would it be banned too? What about antivirus programs? Should they be allowed to prevent user-initiated trojans from uninstalling them? What, exactly, constitutes permission from the user to remove something (or to install it, for that matter)? How can you be sure this permission wasn't forged by some other piece of malware?
In these two cases when I actually run up2date I've noticed they are picking up packages from centOS. My complaint is simply that I want to be the one to deceide between centOS and RHEL, and am capable of evaluatiing their similarities and differences.
And this is CentOS's fault how exactly? I could go buy 1000 CompUSA brand monitors and sell them on eBay as Sonys. Should Sony sue CompUSA for that?
The only permissible submission under these requirements is a square with color #808080. And even then, I'm not sure; someone somewhere might find squares or grayness offensive, after all.
The right way to say this is "must not be patently offensive to any large number of reasonable individuals." and leave it at that. But the way it's written, it's basically impossible to do anything. Even the null logo will be offensive to some people who will insist that there should be something there. You can't simultaneously avoid offending every single human being on the planet. Why try? Beastie's been good enough for 20 years; why change now?
Fair enough, I stand corrected (though I'll stand by the Free versus free distinction). However, this actually furthers my original argument: if even the ideologically pure Free Software Foundation agrees with the OSI that the CDDL is a free license, why doesn't the parent poster?
What exactly is non-free about the CDDL? That you can't relicense the code as you see fit? Well, you can't do that with GPL code either. Is it because you can link files licensed under CDDL with files subject to other licenses? Well, you can do that with MPL and BSD licensed code too. Is it that you're explicitly granted rights to use any patented methods embodied in the code? Perhaps you'd rather negotiate your own licenses to those patents or risk getting sued by the owner, even if that owner put the code there in the first place. Is it that Sun started with the MPL, and then removed their freedom to change the license on your software with no warning?
Or is it really that you're just looking for something to complain about? The CDDL meets every requirement established by the OSI and others (let's not forget that OSI is an offshoot of the original Debian Free Software Guidelines) for software rights. True enough, it's not Free Software as defined by the Free Software Foundation - because they have defined Free Software to mean GPL/LGPL and nothing else. But you said non-free as a generic pejorative, not a reference to the FSF's definition, so the challenge remains:
So please tell us what's not free about the CDDL.
Wow. Talk about paranoia. It's anti-Linux? No, it's unrelated to Linux. Open source development is not a zero-sum game; both can grow and develop independently from one another (if the existence of KDE and GNOME is good because "it's all about choice," then so too is the existence of multiple open source operating systems). OpenSolaris is about Solaris, not about Linux. It's controlled by a corporation? Not really. Only the first tidbits about "control" have been released, and community (read: non-Sun) participation is an integral part of that. As for "anti-capitlists [sic] and anarchists" I can only assume you're being sarcastic. I hacked Linux for years and never had any interest in chaos. Neither do I see much evidence that Sun engineers think Linux developers' goal is the creation of chaos. We pretty much think their goal is the creation of Linux, which is fine.
Again, the goal is not to get anyone to stop developing Linux. Even if that were the goal, there's no way to accomplish it; developers will work on the projects that interest them most. If Linux developers want to work on OpenSolaris, they're welcome to do so. If not, that's fine too. The goal is to work with and grow the existing Solaris community and provide additional value to customers and developers. Do you see "Linux" anywhere in that statement of goals?
Your paranoia is amusing but not constructive. Sun is not Microsoft and the goal is not to crush out and destroy Linux, a product that Sun also sells.
Instead of guessing, why not just go look at the Solaris 10 pricing and licensing information? To be fair, you're right; pricing has changed a lot lately. But the fact is that anyone can use Solaris for zero licensing costs. Support is optional and is supposed to be cheaper than for competing products.