I hate buying hardware for my PC because if I get the wrong thing, it can be a nightmare to get it working properly. If there's something that's in some way Linux-approved, Linux-certified or just Linux-friendly, I'll always buy it. Even if it costs me $100 more, I'll buy it. I have spent DAYS messing around with a printer, or a card of some kind, trying to get it working properly under Linux. It's not worth it. I'll pay extra to know that I won't have any hassles: plug it in, it works. I have hardware sitting around that I'm going to try when Suse 9.2 comes out, but that isn't working now. It's terrible. Currently I use Nvidia cards but that isn't a good solution either; I have to spend half an hour messing around to get it to work. I would rather just buy the card that is supported 100% during the plain old installation. The only way that can happen is with a fully open specification.
So please do it. I know some Linux users take pride in their amazing ability to get some piece of not-really-supported hardware to function, and in fact there are whole companies which provide installation of Linux on unsupported laptops as their business, but this is not fun and is a waste of time.
Of course, no answer to my question re: the strong connections between Stephenson's work and Pynchon's. Let's do a quick comparison chart:
Mason & Dixon
Pawns of the Royal Society are dispatched on perilous ocean voyages around the world that they don't really understand
Powerful people are attempting to use science and technology extend their control of the world.
Slavery is the major theme
The language is 18th-century, but with some modern puns thrown in
The book involves an huge number of sub-plots and minor characters
The Baroque Cycle
Pawns of the Royal Society are working for powerful people they don't really understand, and one of them in particular gets dispatched on ocean voyages
Powerful people are attempting to use science and technology extend their control of the world.
Slavery is the major theme
The language is 18th-century, but with some modern puns thrown in
The book involves an huge number of sub-plots and minor characters
I think I could write up a similar chart about Gravity's Rainbow and Cryptonomicon.
I wish Stephenson had answered some questions about this. This isn't intended as trolling, it's just that very few people have read the Pynchon books so most people may not be aware of the strong connections between these two authors.
This does not mean that part of the DMCA is shot down, and it is not set in stone. Those provisions of the DMCA are alive and well. It only means that within one particular federal circuit those parts of the DMCA are shot down. Great, let's try another circuit. Federal circuits can and sometimes do disagree with eachother. The time when SCOTUS steps in is when there is a serious disagreement among the federal courts, usually over a constitutional issue, and SCOTUS must resolve it.
So let's not celebrate yet. For these things to be truly dead and gone, it must be either a Supreme Court ruling, or it must be done legislatively. Let's hope that our legislature will take some steps to reset the balance between protecting creative authors and protecting the free flow of information. Disney wouldn't be where it is today without the public domain (expired copyright) contributions of the Brothers Grim and many others. This means vote!
I have enjoyed reading the first two books in the Baroque Cycle and I am now starting on the last in the series. My question for you is, how do your works relate to Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon? There are commonalities of style and theme in both of them: they follow pawns from the Royal Society involved in events that they don't fully understand, they are set in the same time period, they both use the same linguistic style, they both take us all over the world at the time, they are both heavy on retro-science, and finally they are both about individual freedom and the role of the state and science in freedom.
I love it... from the "not-really dept". Of course, I agree. Time to leave coal and all other fossil fuels behind, and under ground, and move on to something else: nuclear or renewable. All else should be abandoned, the sooner the better.
He says: For Republicans, the Greens offer true conservatism, which means keeping the government out of your personal business, out of your bedroom and out of your library.
Great, by doing that they will have plenty of time to stay in our financial affairs, bank accounts, financial transactions, and gun safes. They talk about things like having not just a minimum wage, but also a maximum wage. Basically, to enforce their financial plans will require law enforcement powers that may be even worse than what they say they want to get rid of. I sympathize strongly with their ideals but it ultimately sounds like they want to create their own police state, like somehow having a police state will protect workers and minorities. They tried that once. It was called a "dictatorship of the proletariat". It sounded like a great idea but pretty soon there were mountains of bodies of people they "saved". It's the old logic of "we had to burn the village in order to save it."
I'm basically happy with my Vonage service. Only a few minor complaints:
I can't listen to my favorite Internet stations while I'm making a call. Ok, this has nothing to do with Vonage; I just need a faster DSL connection.
I can't seem to find a client for it that runs on Linux so I can connect straight from my computer or laptop, without having to use any of their hardware. I know it uses plain old SIP so this should be possible, and I have tried some of the web pages that have instructions on how to do this, but I can't get it to work. Skype has a Linux version ready for download and it works well. I wish Vonage had the same level of Linux support.
I wish it had better security. I think it uses plain old unencrypted SIP. It should be encrypted at the IP layer. Eventually we need to have end-to-end voice encryption for call security. Again, Skype already has this, albeit without published sourcecode.
If Skype had a service that gives me a phone number and lets me receive calls I might switch to that. I also think that Skype has better sound quality, in my experience.
The country is going metric in every way that counts. When Ford acquires control of Mazda, do you think they told all the Mazda engineers to switch to the English system? No, of course not. Ford is switching to metric. Same for all the big auto manufacturers. Same for everyone in various technical fields. Basically anything that technical or engineering related has already switched, due to the results of globalization (multinational companies), and NATO (and thus the US DoD) being metric.
Sure, road signs are still English, and you still buy a gallon of milk. Those are cultural things that will stick around forever. They also don't really matter. Everything that matters is now metric.
The reason NASA has such a hard time doing this is because it's NASA. We know of a simple, cheap technology that can get big things into space: kerosene rockets. You just make a big one and it lifts stuff up. We know of a very complicated, expensive, dangerous technology that gets things into space (and back, in one piece) about 49 out of 50 times: the Space Shuttle. The Space Shuttle has hijacked America's manned space program since it got started in the early 80s and has been holding it back all that time.
Really, the things holding us back from manned space exploration is lack of a reason to do it. If someone found out that you could manufacture CPUs that are twice as fast by doing it in zero-G, I'm sure Intel would have a space station within the decade. If you could make toothpaste that would get your teeth extra white while giving fresh breath that lasts for twelve hours by doing it in zero-G, P&G would have a space station within the decade. But none of these things are true. All the reasons for sending men into space mostly come down to "humans have an innate drive to explore", etc. It's true but that doesn't motivate investors to put together the many millions of dollars needed to do this. That's why governments do it: taxpayers have such low expectations of getting something in return for their tax dollars that governments can build space shuttles, the Big Dig, etc.
Of course, pretty soon we will have to have more manned missions to Mars to figure out what's going on over at Union Aerospace's secret research facility.
Badnarik didn't resort to such non-answers in his Slashdot interview, but I'm pretty sure both Kerry and Bush will. It's not worth reading. I have written letters to them about various issues and I always get responses that don't answer questions but instead talk about "making America stronger", "safer", "whatever" without directly addressing the issue.
"Do you support education?" "Yes, education is essential to America's future!" Why do Americans tolerate such non-answers from national level politicians? That's really my question.
Java 5 has something somewhat like this. It has "precompiled" java.* classes which are ready to map into memory and run (ok, that's not a very precise description, but it's close). Apparently this has quite a good impact on start-up times. They are also working on memory footprint issues. It's true, Java is bulky but it is getting better. Actually it would be awesome if they could integrate it with the OS somehow so that the JVM is always running, and you don't need a separate JVM for each Java application. There was a project to do this called KaffeOS. I would like to see more things in this direction.
Strangely enough, the media player is great, and Icesoft's browser is just ok. It seems like parts of the browser get swapped out and every once in a while it can take it a while to swap them in, or maybe that's the GC running. I don't know. Icesoft's browser is definitely not as smooth as Konqueror, for example. But then again, Konqueror is a much more mature product.
I personally would rather have something a hair slower but a lot more secure. Also, if more desktop apps got ported to Java and Java got more real-world desktop use, the JVM would get tuned and adapted. There's no reason why it should be slow.
Maybe Slashdot should have a separate section for this? As I've said again and again, we will keep having these types of vulnerabilities until we start using languages with safe pointers and safe memory operations. NX bits, library loading location randomization help too.
I was just using the Icesoft Java web browser and the Fluendo media player. These are both big applications written in 100% pure Java. They both don't have buffer overflows because Java doesn't have buffers (in the C sense). How many security holes do we need to see every week?
As I said in an earlier thread, we will get burned again and again and again, and then we will get burned some more, until we stop processing unsafe data (data from the net or untrusted sources) using code written in unsafe languages. By unsafe language I mean any language that allows unsafe memory access. By unsafe memory access I mean any language that lets your code manipulate arbitrary memory locations in arbitrary ways, and then jump to arbitrary locations.
The safest and best thing is to use a real VM, like the JVM. Another alternative is to use something like Cyclone which also doesn't allow unsafe memory operations.
To all the ditto-heads who keep on saying "if it's not in C, it's too slow", wasn't there just an article on Slashdot a few days ago about full-motion video players written in pure Java? Surely a jpeg here and there shouldn't be too much of a problem?
We're going to get burned over and over and over and then we will get burned some more by processing untrusted data (stuff off the net) using any language that has unsafe memory operations. This isn't just a Microsoft problem; we've seen the same problems in zlib (PNG), resulting in vulnerabilities in almost all Linux/Unix apps that handle graphics. We're going to keep seeing these problems until we start handling all unsafe data as if it's got a contagious disease, which means handling it in an isolated environment like a VM.
Remember back to the days of MS-DOS? Everything was very minimal and non-bloated, but still, things were slow. As computers got faster, software didn't get faster. It just got more bloated to take advantage of all that new speed and memory available. Today I have dozens of windows open, a media player, and IDE, mail reader, etc, and you need 256mb to run Linux or Windows XP. That's bloat. But, they do a lot more than they used to. Much much more.
And it's the same with worms. Rather than hand-coding them in assembly to get them in under 1000 bytes (or whatever) they can now be developed with good tools, useful libraries, and they can have all kinds of extra functionality built in. So expect worms with more features as we go along.
It's time to really start thinking about security-by-design. VM systems like Java, or capability-based systems like EROS are the way we are going to finally squish these worms. I'm so tired of helping relatives with anti-virus software. There shouldn't be anti-virus software. Operating systems shouldn't allow viruses and worms to exist. Security problems like this are not an inherent part of software.
None of the current hybrids on the market have this. I think it would violate some kind of auto-industry tabboo. If people start getting used to plugging in their cars, then they would be more open to buying a 100% electric car for their next vehicle. And if that happens... the auto industry is in a lot of trouble.
Why are all-electric cars a huge threat to the auto industry? Because the barrier to entry to creating electric vehicles is vastly lower than the barrier to entry to creating ICE cars. The barrier to entry for ICE cars is in turn lower than the barrier for hybrids and hydrogen cars. I'm sure that's a lot of why the auto industry is so excited about hybrids and hydrogen. It protects them.
With 100% electric cars, anyone can buy the components (batteries, motors) and start building cars. That's a big problem for the existing manufacturers.
I realize that some of the big manufacturers have produced 100% electric cars (EV-1, RV4ev, etc) but they were all on lease programs. It just didn't seem like the manufacturers wanted people to switch to these.
Hybrid cars are pointless from an economic point of view. You won't save money. That includes if you buy a ready-made hybrid car, which was built that way at the factory. It is cheaper in every way (time and money) to get a hybrid built that way at the factory. If a factory-built hybrid is pointless, a home-made hybrid is even more pointless.
If you want to really save money and do something cool, go for an all-electric car. With lithium battery chemistries, the range is good. There are plenty of companies that offer help in retrofitting old ICE cars to be electric. The big problem here is that automotive-scale lithium batteries are not in mass-production yet so they are very expensive. The battery pack on a lithium-powered electric could cost in the tens of thousands. This is not because the materials that make up a lithium battery are inherently expensive; they just aren't mass-produced in large enough sizes and quantities yet.
As a further advantage, all-electric cars have much less maintenance. Hybrid cars should have more maintenance than regular ICE cars because hybrids have everything a regular ICE car has, plus all the electric stuff, plus a complicated way to interface the two of them.
Maybe if you do almost all stop-and-go city driving, hybrids have some advantage, but I think they are just a boondoggle. If you don't want to buy gas, then go 100% electric, but don't think that bolting on a bunch of electric parts to your current ICE is going to do much more than have you pay a hefty up-front fee to save a trickle of gas over the next decade.
Re:Seems risky for the bookie...
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Odds-on Science
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· Score: 1
Still, scientists working in these fields may have a very good idea of the results, months before announcements or publications. Just doing the experiments and getting the data is only a small part of the process of publishing. It takes months to write the paper, format everything, submit it to journals, have it peer reviewed, edit, resubmit, etc. All those things contribute to the accuracy of the finished thing, but the results are usually pretty obvious long before. And on the fusion question... let's say that there is some small company working on a totally break-through way of doing fusion (it's very possible). They wouldn't be announcing anything until they have patents filed, etc. But they could still bet.
Of course, on the other side, it often happens that scientists doing the experiments delude themselves and see things that aren't there (cf, cold fusion, not the web scripting language for you slashdot types). These scientists could place some big and foolish bets. The scientific method and the peer review process are designed to weed these things out and they usually do a good job, but that doesn't necessary free the researchers themselves from their own delusions.
Seems risky for the bookie...
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Odds-on Science
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· Score: 5, Interesting
All bookies are at risk from "wise guys" who basically have insider knowledge of the bet in question. Betting on science makes this risk extreme. If I were an exobiologist at NASA and we found good evidence of life on Titan, the lag to publishing or even announcing it would be days, weeks or even months. Plenty of time to put down a $10k bet and then try to collect $100m after the announcement.
The stock markets are obviously subject to the same risk of illegal insider trading, but they are somewhat protected by stringent rules and enforcement (cf. Martha). An inside trader is basically equivalent to a wise guy, except that being an inside trader is illegal but being a wise guy isn't.
Even if their betting contract says "NASA employees and their families may not participate in the Titan bet" or whatever, scientific information (unlike business information) is generally not under any kind of non-disclosure, so Joe Astrobiologist at NASA can freely tell his buddies about the squirmy things they dug up in the ice and his buddy can freely log on and bet wildly if he wants to.
I just installed it, and it is the buggiest Linux release I have used in a long, long time. I love the features, like automatic spell-checking as I type this in Konqueror, cool eye-candy stuff in KDE, Linux 2.6.4, etc, etc, but it is truly full of bugs. YaST doesn't start up the user admin module. I created a user using adduser, and that user can't log in because of some IPC bug. During installation, I installed it in just the plain old way and it gave error messages. This is truly beta-test software; it should never have made it through the release processes. I would have rather waited a couple more months for something that isn't full of bugs. I think I'm going to have to re-install it now just to figure out how to get basic stuff like adding users to work. It's a mess.
From reading the follow-up comments I can see that people are not completely clear on what "fork" means. Making a new type of JVM with a totally different network layer, but the same APIs (ie, the same java.*) would be a fork. Doing such a thing would not in any change the language or cause any bytecode compatibility problems and it would have no impact on the "write once, run everywhere" idea! It would just be a fork in the codebase. If someone has some innovative idea for how to enhance the performance of the JVM, or implement in other ways or for other OSes or architectures, that's a fork, but it doesn't change the bytecode. For example, let's say someone has a great new garbage collection idea or a new JIT idea, and wants to implement it without having to go through and also create a new JVM/compiler/java.*. Neither garbage collection or JIT or many other JVM implementation details need to have any user-land/bytecode impact at all. That's the beauty of bytecode and having a JVM spec. You can implement it anyway you want. Unfortunately right now, if you don't like Sun's implementation, or even if you just want to experiment with some changes to it, tough luck, unless you have the resources to write you own system from scratch, which no one in the Open Source community currently has.
Get it through your head: A fork does not necessarily mean changes to the bytecode or java.*. People who don't realize that don't have imagination...
One caveat here is that there is an Open Source JVM called Kaffe, and guess what, there are a lot of Kaffe forks and it is used in all kinds of innovative research projects. The problem with Kaffe is that it isn't a full implementation of Java 1.4 so its use is somewhat limited in real production environments. It is also not as mature as Sun's Java. I wish it would catch up, but implementing Swing, etc, is a huge amount of work. This just makes the case for Open Source java even stronger.
Forks are good! Forks mean difference and diversity. Difference and diversity means exploration of new ways of doing things. Maybe someone will fork Java and add in a totally new way of doing graphics rendering, or disk access, or network access, or maybe someone will make the JVM into a Linux kernel module or something that runs directly on hardware without an OS, or it will run on other OSes (OpenBSD for example). There are so many possiblities including possibilities that no one has thought of right now. All of these are forks to some degree and who knows what the result of them will be.
The reason why forks are not dangerous is because people will still want to write "standard" Java code, no matter how many different strange Java-esque things there are.
Linux is horribly forked. There are dozens of different distros, on dozens of different hardware platforms. There are many different kernels, and the different distros often have their own kernels with their own patches and changes. And here is a perfect example of a fork in Linux which has come back to help all of Linux: Because Linux was forkable, the NSA chose Linux to be the basis of its secure operating system, SELinux. SELinux is so strange and different from regular Linux that it wasn't compatible. It was a true fork, creating a different set of APIs that were mutually incompatible in many ways. The openness of Linux allowed this innovation to occur. It was something that Linus hadn't thought of years before it happened (I'm guessing). And yet it happened. And now, guess what, the work that was done in SELinux has been rolled into 2.6!
So, we had open source software, which allowed a fork, which allowed for totally innovative, off-the-wall creative development, which turned out to be cooler than people would have expected, which then ended up getting un-forked back into the main codebase!
If Sun open sources Java in the right way, that is exactly the kind of thing that will happen with Java, too. It's hard to prove this argument, because I can't say exactly what those innovative forks are going to be, becase they're things that people haven't thought of, but that's what will happen.
The publishing business is rough. You have to do what you have to do. I read Maxim magazine. They have a huge circulation, are very popular, they get plenty of advertisers, and yet they have to run cigarette ads because they buy some of the most expensive ad slots. What can you do? Ads ultimately are just offering consumers a choice. And these aren't tobacco ads; MS just uses some very agressive/slightly illegal marketing tactics. This isn't selling a product which is known to be addictive and cause cancer.
What's wrong with Microsoft? They make some truly great software (Office) which runs fine on Linux. I'm a 100% Linux desktop user, and guess what, I buy Microsoft software to run on my Linux box! I don't have a Windows partition either.
We're all techies here, right? We all believe that technology products should be evaluated on their merits. Does that somehow not apply to Microsoft products? If Microsoft ____ is the best solution for a given application, shouldn't we acknowledge that? Again, this is from a 100% Linux desktop user, who has been a 100% Linux desktop user for years, even back in the old painful days when the best browser was Netscape 4.something. Now I have Mozilla, IE and Konqueror to choose from, all on one desktop, and I chose based on their merits.
Everyone is so afraid of forks. I think a fork would be great. How about KDE-Java, which is a Java distro for writing KDE apps? Why shouldn't I be able to write Qt apps in a safe, easy-to-use language like Java? Sure, it's a fork and that QtJava app won't work on any other Java, but that exists already. I'm told that a bunch of OSX apps are actually written in Java and the system has good support for that. What would be bad is tampering with the java.* packages, but there is no need to. Just make a Jaav distro with a trolltech.* tree built in and ship that with KDE... that would be great. Another option would be a Java fork that implements Swing using Qt for its rendering, instead of using X calls directly. That would also be a fork, because it would introduce a dependency on the Qt libraries into Java, but Java apps wouldn't change.
These are just some examples of what Open Source Java could bring, and why forking is good.
Slashdot Mirror
So please do it. I know some Linux users take pride in their amazing ability to get some piece of not-really-supported hardware to function, and in fact there are whole companies which provide installation of Linux on unsupported laptops as their business, but this is not fun and is a waste of time.
When can I buy it?
Of course, no answer to my question re: the strong connections between Stephenson's work and Pynchon's. Let's do a quick comparison chart:
Mason & Dixon
The Baroque Cycle
I think I could write up a similar chart about Gravity's Rainbow and Cryptonomicon.
I wish Stephenson had answered some questions about this. This isn't intended as trolling, it's just that very few people have read the Pynchon books so most people may not be aware of the strong connections between these two authors.
So let's not celebrate yet. For these things to be truly dead and gone, it must be either a Supreme Court ruling, or it must be done legislatively. Let's hope that our legislature will take some steps to reset the balance between protecting creative authors and protecting the free flow of information. Disney wouldn't be where it is today without the public domain (expired copyright) contributions of the Brothers Grim and many others. This means vote!
I have enjoyed reading the first two books in the Baroque Cycle and I am now starting on the last in the series. My question for you is, how do your works relate to Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon? There are commonalities of style and theme in both of them: they follow pawns from the Royal Society involved in events that they don't fully understand, they are set in the same time period, they both use the same linguistic style, they both take us all over the world at the time, they are both heavy on retro-science, and finally they are both about individual freedom and the role of the state and science in freedom.
Thank you
I love it... from the "not-really dept". Of course, I agree. Time to leave coal and all other fossil fuels behind, and under ground, and move on to something else: nuclear or renewable. All else should be abandoned, the sooner the better.
Great, by doing that they will have plenty of time to stay in our financial affairs, bank accounts, financial transactions, and gun safes. They talk about things like having not just a minimum wage, but also a maximum wage. Basically, to enforce their financial plans will require law enforcement powers that may be even worse than what they say they want to get rid of. I sympathize strongly with their ideals but it ultimately sounds like they want to create their own police state, like somehow having a police state will protect workers and minorities. They tried that once. It was called a "dictatorship of the proletariat". It sounded like a great idea but pretty soon there were mountains of bodies of people they "saved". It's the old logic of "we had to burn the village in order to save it."
I'm basically happy with my Vonage service. Only a few minor complaints:
If Skype had a service that gives me a phone number and lets me receive calls I might switch to that. I also think that Skype has better sound quality, in my experience.
Sure, road signs are still English, and you still buy a gallon of milk. Those are cultural things that will stick around forever. They also don't really matter. Everything that matters is now metric.
Really, the things holding us back from manned space exploration is lack of a reason to do it. If someone found out that you could manufacture CPUs that are twice as fast by doing it in zero-G, I'm sure Intel would have a space station within the decade. If you could make toothpaste that would get your teeth extra white while giving fresh breath that lasts for twelve hours by doing it in zero-G, P&G would have a space station within the decade. But none of these things are true. All the reasons for sending men into space mostly come down to "humans have an innate drive to explore", etc. It's true but that doesn't motivate investors to put together the many millions of dollars needed to do this. That's why governments do it: taxpayers have such low expectations of getting something in return for their tax dollars that governments can build space shuttles, the Big Dig, etc.
Of course, pretty soon we will have to have more manned missions to Mars to figure out what's going on over at Union Aerospace's secret research facility.
Badnarik didn't resort to such non-answers in his Slashdot interview, but I'm pretty sure both Kerry and Bush will. It's not worth reading. I have written letters to them about various issues and I always get responses that don't answer questions but instead talk about "making America stronger", "safer", "whatever" without directly addressing the issue.
"Do you support education?" "Yes, education is essential to America's future!" Why do Americans tolerate such non-answers from national level politicians? That's really my question.
Java 5 has something somewhat like this. It has "precompiled" java.* classes which are ready to map into memory and run (ok, that's not a very precise description, but it's close). Apparently this has quite a good impact on start-up times. They are also working on memory footprint issues. It's true, Java is bulky but it is getting better. Actually it would be awesome if they could integrate it with the OS somehow so that the JVM is always running, and you don't need a separate JVM for each Java application. There was a project to do this called KaffeOS. I would like to see more things in this direction.
I personally would rather have something a hair slower but a lot more secure. Also, if more desktop apps got ported to Java and Java got more real-world desktop use, the JVM would get tuned and adapted. There's no reason why it should be slow.
I was just using the Icesoft Java web browser and the Fluendo media player. These are both big applications written in 100% pure Java. They both don't have buffer overflows because Java doesn't have buffers (in the C sense). How many security holes do we need to see every week?
The safest and best thing is to use a real VM, like the JVM. Another alternative is to use something like Cyclone which also doesn't allow unsafe memory operations.
To all the ditto-heads who keep on saying "if it's not in C, it's too slow", wasn't there just an article on Slashdot a few days ago about full-motion video players written in pure Java? Surely a jpeg here and there shouldn't be too much of a problem?
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WAP software
And it's the same with worms. Rather than hand-coding them in assembly to get them in under 1000 bytes (or whatever) they can now be developed with good tools, useful libraries, and they can have all kinds of extra functionality built in. So expect worms with more features as we go along.
It's time to really start thinking about security-by-design. VM systems like Java, or capability-based systems like EROS are the way we are going to finally squish these worms. I'm so tired of helping relatives with anti-virus software. There shouldn't be anti-virus software. Operating systems shouldn't allow viruses and worms to exist. Security problems like this are not an inherent part of software.
Why are all-electric cars a huge threat to the auto industry? Because the barrier to entry to creating electric vehicles is vastly lower than the barrier to entry to creating ICE cars. The barrier to entry for ICE cars is in turn lower than the barrier for hybrids and hydrogen cars. I'm sure that's a lot of why the auto industry is so excited about hybrids and hydrogen. It protects them.
With 100% electric cars, anyone can buy the components (batteries, motors) and start building cars. That's a big problem for the existing manufacturers.
I realize that some of the big manufacturers have produced 100% electric cars (EV-1, RV4ev, etc) but they were all on lease programs. It just didn't seem like the manufacturers wanted people to switch to these.
If you want to really save money and do something cool, go for an all-electric car. With lithium battery chemistries, the range is good. There are plenty of companies that offer help in retrofitting old ICE cars to be electric. The big problem here is that automotive-scale lithium batteries are not in mass-production yet so they are very expensive. The battery pack on a lithium-powered electric could cost in the tens of thousands. This is not because the materials that make up a lithium battery are inherently expensive; they just aren't mass-produced in large enough sizes and quantities yet.
As a further advantage, all-electric cars have much less maintenance. Hybrid cars should have more maintenance than regular ICE cars because hybrids have everything a regular ICE car has, plus all the electric stuff, plus a complicated way to interface the two of them.
Maybe if you do almost all stop-and-go city driving, hybrids have some advantage, but I think they are just a boondoggle. If you don't want to buy gas, then go 100% electric, but don't think that bolting on a bunch of electric parts to your current ICE is going to do much more than have you pay a hefty up-front fee to save a trickle of gas over the next decade.
Of course, on the other side, it often happens that scientists doing the experiments delude themselves and see things that aren't there (cf, cold fusion, not the web scripting language for you slashdot types). These scientists could place some big and foolish bets. The scientific method and the peer review process are designed to weed these things out and they usually do a good job, but that doesn't necessary free the researchers themselves from their own delusions.
The stock markets are obviously subject to the same risk of illegal insider trading, but they are somewhat protected by stringent rules and enforcement (cf. Martha). An inside trader is basically equivalent to a wise guy, except that being an inside trader is illegal but being a wise guy isn't.
Even if their betting contract says "NASA employees and their families may not participate in the Titan bet" or whatever, scientific information (unlike business information) is generally not under any kind of non-disclosure, so Joe Astrobiologist at NASA can freely tell his buddies about the squirmy things they dug up in the ice and his buddy can freely log on and bet wildly if he wants to.
I just installed it, and it is the buggiest Linux release I have used in a long, long time. I love the features, like automatic spell-checking as I type this in Konqueror, cool eye-candy stuff in KDE, Linux 2.6.4, etc, etc, but it is truly full of bugs. YaST doesn't start up the user admin module. I created a user using adduser, and that user can't log in because of some IPC bug. During installation, I installed it in just the plain old way and it gave error messages. This is truly beta-test software; it should never have made it through the release processes. I would have rather waited a couple more months for something that isn't full of bugs. I think I'm going to have to re-install it now just to figure out how to get basic stuff like adding users to work. It's a mess.
Get it through your head: A fork does not necessarily mean changes to the bytecode or java.*. People who don't realize that don't have imagination...
One caveat here is that there is an Open Source JVM called Kaffe, and guess what, there are a lot of Kaffe forks and it is used in all kinds of innovative research projects. The problem with Kaffe is that it isn't a full implementation of Java 1.4 so its use is somewhat limited in real production environments. It is also not as mature as Sun's Java. I wish it would catch up, but implementing Swing, etc, is a huge amount of work. This just makes the case for Open Source java even stronger.
The reason why forks are not dangerous is because people will still want to write "standard" Java code, no matter how many different strange Java-esque things there are.
Linux is horribly forked. There are dozens of different distros, on dozens of different hardware platforms. There are many different kernels, and the different distros often have their own kernels with their own patches and changes. And here is a perfect example of a fork in Linux which has come back to help all of Linux: Because Linux was forkable, the NSA chose Linux to be the basis of its secure operating system, SELinux. SELinux is so strange and different from regular Linux that it wasn't compatible. It was a true fork, creating a different set of APIs that were mutually incompatible in many ways. The openness of Linux allowed this innovation to occur. It was something that Linus hadn't thought of years before it happened (I'm guessing). And yet it happened. And now, guess what, the work that was done in SELinux has been rolled into 2.6!
So, we had open source software, which allowed a fork, which allowed for totally innovative, off-the-wall creative development, which turned out to be cooler than people would have expected, which then ended up getting un-forked back into the main codebase!
If Sun open sources Java in the right way, that is exactly the kind of thing that will happen with Java, too. It's hard to prove this argument, because I can't say exactly what those innovative forks are going to be, becase they're things that people haven't thought of, but that's what will happen.
So do it Sun!
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These are just some examples of what Open Source Java could bring, and why forking is good.
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