It's important to remember that most Iranians are not Arabs. There is a small but significant Arab minority in Iran, notably in the Khuzestan region, but they make up only about 3% of Iran's population. This isn't meant to be pedantic: it makes a big difference to the ethnic politics of the Middle East.
Christian Marillat has been offering this for several weeks now, in his Debian repository.
I just upgraded to Acroread 7.03 from there. And there are all sort of other fine goodies in there too: mplayer, codecs, etc., not available in the main repositories.
Mandrake is still an EU company though, and doing rather well lately. Any reduction of the MS presence in Europe would be a very welcome development for them.
There are downsides to using native compilers though, including a) the need to maintain separate platform versions of your app, and b) the loss of the ability to decompile back to Java source. But some developers don't mind a), and the more proprietary ones positively love b).:)
Kaffe, on the other hand, isn't a native compiler in the sense that the compilers above actually cough up an executable for you at the command line. But it has a just-in-time (JIT) compilation system which translates the bytecode to native machine code on a method-by-method basis as the application is executed. This really boosts Java app performance a lot.
In related news, Microsoft today announced the language that will be replacing Visual Basic:
"Our new, hybrid, sixth-generation language combines all the raw power and scalability of Visual Basic with the elegance and usability of Visual C++. It's called Visual Seasick, and we plan to ship it by end of year."
As with software, there's ambiguity in the meaning of the English word "free". Most of the discussion here is focussing on "free as in beer". Price is important to many, natually enough, not least because of the intrusion required online to make sure you've paid.
But I suspect a lot of/.ers are more concerned with "free as in speech". This is often, but not always, connected to the pricing. "Free" newspapers are owned by businesses whose reason for publishing is to make money: if you're not paying upfront for the paper, then all their revenue is coming from ads, and they thererefore have even more need to keep their editorial policy in line with their advertisers. It's already been pointed out above that supposedly "independent" news media like the BBC aren't all that independent: running a news site really well costs money, and the BBC is still reliant on an increasingly pushy and spin-loving UK government to pay its bills.
Having a no-charge business model also puts pressure on costs, and makes getting cheap or "free" (i.e. no-cost) content all the more attractive. The independence of the reporting can suffer as a result. The NYT has coincidentally just run a story about how the White House is pushing pro-government "news" stories to the networks, paid for by the taxpayer, which don't always clue the viewer who produced them. This isn't necessarily a conspiracy, it's just "good business". The same conflict of interest exists in a corporate-owned newspaper, online or hardcopy.
I think many people attribute a sense of mission to their news provider. Some people think FOX tells it "fair and balanced", and watch it for that reason. Good for them. I personally would rather watch Bullwinkle re-runs than FOX News, but that's beside the point. Consciously or unconsciously, a lot of people believe that their favorite news provider is mostly "telling the truth" about what's going on in the world, and are unable or unwilling to see conflicts of interest, especially when they're unaware of how their favorite news provider's business model works. I simply don't believe that a GE-owned news business is always going to tell the truth about what GE gets up to.
The one large-scale attempt that I'm aware of to build a global news network which is free both of corporate and government control is Indymedia. Their quality varies anywhere from excellent first-hand reporting, to the truly awful. Freedom is like that: you have the freedom to write something which some people really want to hear, and other people really hate. The US and some European govts have been cracking down on Indymedia lately, which doesn't bode well for freedom of speech. This is true even if you don't like Indymedia's anarchist/left-wing editorial policy: people have the right to report the news as they see it. You equally have a right to redress if lies are told about you.
So the Indymedia model is far from perfect. How then can an international news network operate which is free of both corporate and government interference? If 100% free-as-in-freedom news isn't possible without a regular revenue stream, then how do you at least maximize the freedom AND the quality of the content?
PS: BugMeNot helps you skirt around that "free" registration with the NYT.
Adobe are bundling the Yahoo Toolbar with the new Acrobat Reader 7 for Windows, along with Photoshop Album SE and 7.2 MB of extra plugins. The Yahoo Toolbar then installs not only to IE, but also to the Reader itself. To hide it in Adobe Reader, you need to right-click its toolbar and untick "Search the Internet".
But they do at least offer you a choice: you can choose not to download any or all of these extras, by unticking a few boxes on the download page, which appear after you've chose Windows as the target OS. And they're not pushing this junk with their SVG viewer. Yet.:)
As noted above, this only affects users of MS Underpants Exploder for now. But I wonder if Adobe, Macromedia or other vendors will start offering Yahoo Toolbar for Firefox soon, and on other OSes? Linux and Mac versions of the Firefox Toolbar are reportedly on the way.
It's just one more good reason to use Free and OSS software whenever possible, like GPLFlash, Ghostscript and PDFcreator: no clueless marketing droids "adding value" unasked.
Here's an alternative to the idea of "MS-Linux": how about "MS-BSD"? Consider: 1) MS have been bashing the GPL in general, and Linux in particular, for a long time. It would be too much of a U-turn for them to suddenly embrace it. 2) MS have borrowed code from BSD before, e.g. for the Windows TCP/IP stack. Look at how many MS Knowledge Base articles reference BSD sockets. In fact, MS have interbred with BSD at least twice. Not only did they use BSD as a source for their TCP/IP code, they bought Interix a while back, which is where Windows Services For Unix (SFU) comes from: Interix had a pretty well-defined porting route from BSD, and as a result the Windows Posix subsystem is mostly BSD tools ported to Interix. 3) MS bought the VM vendor Connectix in 2003. Most analysts concentrated on VM sales opportunities in server rooms, but it's worth nothing that in addition to the "PC on PC" version of Virtual PC, there's version 7 of the Virtual PC product for MacOS X. MacOS X is BSD with a Mach kernel plus a very non-Win32 graphical layer. But porting VirtualPC for Windows to another BSD would give them an emulation layer for "legacy" Win32 apps on BSD. 4) The.Net "Shared Source" CLI is available from Microsoft for XP, FreeBSD and MacOS X. 5) Microsoft have never publicly bashed BSD, in fact they've even said nicethings about it in public.
Dvorak is humorously suggesting that MS should port the Windows driver layer to Linux, but suppose they ported it to a BSD instead?
Then they'd have: 1) a rock-solid stable and secure OS, which is IMHO more secure out of the box than most Linux distros. I'm still a Linux user, because I know how to secure it and I prefer the GPL license. But then, they're not selling to me. 2) the prestige of becoming the world's largest Unix vendor overnight, with the ability to have pious pissing contests with Sun and IBM over whose OS is the most open 3) an emulation layer for Win32, allowing practically all existing Win32 apps to run unchanged, which they could bundle with the new OS 4) the BSD license, which they could proclaim is "more American!" and "less cancerous!" than the UnAmerican and Cancerous GPL 5) no legal hassles whatsoever from developing locked-up code on an Open Source base.
The name BSD is trademarked by U of C, so they'd need a new name.
The famous Lloyd's of London insurance group started out in Lloyd's coffee house in the late 1600s. This bodes well for Delicious Monster.:)
Excerpts from the book "Against the Gods" by Peter Bernstein: "One afternoon in 1637 * a Cretan scholar named Canopius sat down in his chambers at Balliol College, Oxford, and made himself a cup of strong coffee. Canopius's brew is believed to mark the first time coffee was drunk in England; it proved so popular when it was offered to the public that hundreds of coffee houses were soon in operation all over London.
What does Canopius's coffee have to do with * the concept of risk? Simply that a coffee house was the birthplace of Lloyd's of London, which for more than two centuries was the most famous of all insurance company's. *
The second half of the seventeenth century was also an era of burgeoning trade. The Dutch were the predominant commercial power of the time, and England was their main rival. Ships arrived daily from colonies and suppliers around the globe to unload a profusion of products that had once been scarce or unknown luxuries-sugar and spice, coffee and tea, raw cotton and fine porcelain. * Information from remote areas of the world was now of crucial importance to the domestic economy. With the volume of shipping constantly expanding, there was a lively demand for current information with which to estimate sailing times between destinations, weather patterns, and the risks lurking in unfamiliar seas.
In the absence of mass media, the coffee houses emerged as the primary source of news and rumour. In 1675, Charles II, suspicious as many rulers are of places where the public trades information, shut the coffee houses down, but the uproar was so great that he had to reverse himself sixteen days later. Samuel Pepys frequented a coffee house to get news of the arrival of ships he was interested in; he deemed the news he received there to be more reliable than what he learned at his job at the Admiralty.
The coffee house that Edward Lloyd opened in 1687 near the Thames on Tower Street was a favourite haunt of men from the ships that moored at London's docks. The house was "spacious, well built and inhabited by able tradesmen" according to a contemporary publication. It grew so popular that in 1691 Lloyd moved it to much larger and more luxurious quarters on Lombard Street. Nat Ward, a publican whom Alexander Pope accused of trading vile rhymes for tobacco, reported that the tables in the new house were "very neat and shined with rubbing." A staff of five served tea and sherbet as well as coffee.
Lloyd had grown up under Oliver Cromwell and he had lived through plague, fire, the Dutch invasion up the Thames in 1667, and the Glorious Revolution of 1688. He was a lot more than a skilled coffeehouse host. Recognizing the value of his customer base and responding to the insistent demand for information, he launched "Lloyd's List" in 1696 and filled it with information on the arrivals and departures of ships and intelligence on conditions abroad and at sea. That information was provided by a network of correspondents in major ports on the Continent and in England. Ship auctions took place regularly on the premises, and Lloyd obligingly furnished the paper and ink needed to record the transactions. One corner was reserved for ships' captains where they could compare notes on the hazards of all the new routes that were opening up - routes that led them farther east, farther south, and farther west than ever before. Lloyd's establishment was open almost around the clock and was always crowded.
Then as now, anyone who was seeking insurance would go to a broker, who would then hawk the risk to the individual risk-takers who gathered in the coffee houses or in the precincts of the Royal Exchange. When a deal was closed, the risk-taker would confirm his agreement to cover the loss in return for a specified premium by writing his name
Being alumni of the ivy... You mean "alumnus". "Alumni" is plural, but "alumnus" is singular.
...I can say I have had no real advantage in the direct job market because of my school but the network that I was able to develop while at school is second to none. You're missing some commas there.
There is a idiom of ivy arrogance that the only difference between the education you get at Harvard vs other schools is that at other schools you learn about history at Harvard you are taught by the people that made history and sitting in a room with others that will make history. Gosh, where to start: "a idiom", missing commas, missing "while" before "at Harvard", no capitalization of "Ivy". They would have thrown me out of CMU for writing like that. Is that another key difference between Harvard and non-Harvard education?:)
That's only true until that "freeware" stops being free-of-charge, then they suddenly start to care a lot. There's nothing like a little six-figure bombshell landing on a PHB's desk, it seems to concentrate the mind wonderfully.
As an example, the closed-source app PowerArchiver was once "free", til enough people started using it and depending on it, then its owner's started charging for it. Luckily, the LGPL'd 7-zip was there to step into the breach. 7-zip's also used in the installer for FireFox, and it's a good thing the Moz project never relied on a free-of-charge closed-source tool for the installer.
The morality of Free vs. OSS licensing means a lot more to me personally than just precision. But even all those users who think they don't care about licenses can eventually see that closed and semi-closed licenses are a bad deal for them in the long run, once you point out to them that GPL'd software can never go bankrupt, never get bought out, never get canned by marketing droids, never raise its rent, etc.
As long as someone's willing to maintain the code, it can remain free of charge to all those users who don't care about code, but care deeply about cash.
The BBC however is hardly free of self-censorship, and its news is presented very much from the point of view of the cliques that run it.
The best news IMHO is dominated neither by governments nor corporations, but there's not a lot of that around these days, at least not on television or in dailies.
Telcos in France, Germany, Britain and Belgium have been quicker off the mark than the USA in developing and rolling out "triple-play" services over DSL though.
The WSJ has a "solid conservative editorial page", but the NYT has a "predictably liberal editorial page"?
Since you're a libertarian and not a conservative, then was it accidental that you didn't write that as "predictably conservative" and "solid liberal"?:)
Well I'm not a liberal either, and both papers are conservative corporate propaganda sheets IMHO.
I used to be on the networks team at a very large corporation, where we implemented SecurID and PIN for offsite dial-in.
We did everything right, got the clock sync working, got all the managers to buy lots of pricey SecurID cards, found and forcibly removed insecure dial-in boxes scattered around, did all the right audit and test of firewalls, etc.
But the sales group had a bunch of pooled laptops, which sales people used to take out to customer sites. So they would store a SecurID card in the bag, along with a yellow PostIt note showing the PIN code for that SecurID.
That way, not only was the SecurID compromised, but since they were effectively using shared SecurIDs and PINs, we wouldn't even know which idjit sales droid had compromised it. Doooo, ya stupid idjit rabbit!
State-of-the art tech is no match for the apparently limitless stupidity of users.
In the end, we did the only sensible thing, and revoked offsite dial-in for that group.
Slashdot Mirror
Matter of fact, the Americans allowed IRA fundraising (they eventually outlawed them because their criminal activity was becoming an inconvenience).
Congress may have passed some sort of law against it for P.R. purposes, but the fundraising is still going on in the US.
It's important to remember that most Iranians are not Arabs. There is a small but significant Arab minority in Iran, notably in the Khuzestan region, but they make up only about 3% of Iran's population.
This isn't meant to be pedantic: it makes a big difference to the ethnic politics of the Middle East.
Yeah, I've got a 333 Celeron with 128 MB too, and you wouldn't believe the trouble I had trying to get OS X to run on it!
I gave up in the end.
So with an air popper, I get fewer bad kernels, just over three times the amount of corn, and I can control the salt and butter amounts.
I don't understand why people use microwaves rather than a cheap air popper.
Agreed.
But some people prefer the swiss army knife approach, while others prefer to select the right tool for the job.
Christian Marillat has been offering this for several weeks now, in his Debian repository.
I just upgraded to Acroread 7.03 from there.
And there are all sort of other fine goodies in there too: mplayer, codecs, etc., not available in the main repositories.
Thanks, Christian!
Mandrake is still an EU company though, and doing rather well lately. Any reduction of the MS presence in Europe would be a very welcome development for them.
...and it is not a native programming language...
:)
Actually there are native compilers available for Java: Gcj, J2exe,
Excelsior JET and Manta.
There are downsides to using native compilers though, including a) the need to maintain separate platform versions of your app, and b) the loss of the ability to decompile back to Java source. But some developers don't mind a), and the more proprietary ones positively love b).
Kaffe, on the other hand, isn't a native compiler in the sense that the compilers above actually cough up an executable for you at the command line. But it has a just-in-time (JIT) compilation system which translates the bytecode to native machine code on a method-by-method basis as the application is executed. This really boosts Java app performance a lot.
In related news, Microsoft today announced the language that will be replacing Visual Basic:
"Our new, hybrid, sixth-generation language combines all the raw power and scalability of Visual Basic with the elegance and usability of Visual C++.
It's called Visual Seasick, and we plan to ship it by end of year."
As with software, there's ambiguity in the meaning of the English word "free". Most of the discussion here is focussing on "free as in beer". Price is important to many, natually enough, not least because of the intrusion required online to make sure you've paid.
/.ers are more concerned with "free as in speech". This is often, but not always, connected to the pricing. "Free" newspapers are owned by businesses whose reason for publishing is to make money: if you're not paying upfront for the paper, then all their revenue is coming from ads, and they thererefore have even more need to keep their editorial policy in line with their advertisers. It's already been pointed out above that supposedly "independent" news media like the BBC aren't all that independent: running a news site really well costs money, and the BBC is still reliant on an increasingly pushy and spin-loving UK government to pay its bills.
But I suspect a lot of
Having a no-charge business model also puts pressure on costs, and makes getting cheap or "free" (i.e. no-cost) content all the more attractive. The independence of the reporting can suffer as a result. The NYT has coincidentally just run a story about how the White House is pushing pro-government "news" stories to the networks, paid for by the taxpayer, which don't always clue the viewer who produced them. This isn't necessarily a conspiracy, it's just "good business". The same conflict of interest exists in a corporate-owned newspaper, online or hardcopy.
I think many people attribute a sense of mission to their news provider. Some people think FOX tells it "fair and balanced", and watch it for that reason. Good for them. I personally would rather watch Bullwinkle re-runs than FOX News, but that's beside the point. Consciously or unconsciously, a lot of people believe that their favorite news provider is mostly "telling the truth" about what's going on in the world, and are unable or unwilling to see conflicts of interest, especially when they're unaware of how their favorite news provider's business model works. I simply don't believe that a GE-owned news business is always going to tell the truth about what GE gets up to.
The one large-scale attempt that I'm aware of to build a global news network which is free both of corporate and government control is Indymedia. Their quality varies anywhere from excellent first-hand reporting, to the truly awful. Freedom is like that: you have the freedom to write something which some people really want to hear, and other people really hate. The US and some European govts have been cracking down on Indymedia lately, which doesn't bode well for freedom of speech. This is true even if you don't like Indymedia's anarchist/left-wing editorial policy: people have the right to report the news as they see it. You equally have a right to redress if lies are told about you.
So the Indymedia model is far from perfect. How then can an international news network operate which is free of both corporate and government interference? If 100% free-as-in-freedom news isn't possible without a regular revenue stream, then how do you at least maximize the freedom AND the quality of the content?
PS: BugMeNot helps you skirt around that "free" registration with the NYT.
"there's no such thing as international law"
Adobe are bundling the Yahoo Toolbar with the new Acrobat Reader 7 for Windows, along with Photoshop Album SE and 7.2 MB of extra plugins. The Yahoo Toolbar then installs not only to IE, but also to the Reader itself. To hide it in Adobe Reader, you need to right-click its toolbar and untick "Search the Internet".
:)
But they do at least offer you a choice: you can choose not to download any or all of these extras, by unticking a few boxes on the download page, which appear after you've chose Windows as the target OS. And they're not pushing this junk with their SVG viewer. Yet.
As noted above, this only affects users of MS Underpants Exploder for now. But I wonder if Adobe, Macromedia or other vendors will start offering Yahoo Toolbar for Firefox soon, and on other OSes? Linux and Mac versions of the Firefox Toolbar are reportedly on the way.
It's just one more good reason to use Free and OSS software whenever possible, like GPLFlash, Ghostscript and PDFcreator: no clueless marketing droids "adding value" unasked.
Minor typo in the first 3): "it's worth nothing" should have read "it's worth noting". :)
But you can choose to believe either one, of course.
Here's an alternative to the idea of "MS-Linux": how about "MS-BSD"? .Net "Shared Source" CLI is available from Microsoft for XP, FreeBSD and MacOS X.
:)
Consider:
1) MS have been bashing the GPL in general, and Linux in particular, for a long time. It would be too much of a U-turn for them to suddenly embrace it.
2) MS have borrowed code from BSD before, e.g. for the Windows TCP/IP stack. Look at how many MS Knowledge Base articles reference BSD sockets.
In fact, MS have interbred with BSD at least twice. Not only did they use BSD as a source for their TCP/IP code, they bought Interix a while back, which is where Windows Services For Unix (SFU) comes from: Interix had a pretty well-defined porting route from BSD, and as a result the Windows Posix subsystem is mostly BSD tools ported to Interix.
3) MS bought the VM vendor Connectix in 2003. Most analysts concentrated on VM sales opportunities in server rooms, but it's worth nothing that in addition to the "PC on PC" version of Virtual PC, there's version 7 of the Virtual PC product for MacOS X. MacOS X is BSD with a Mach kernel plus a very non-Win32 graphical layer. But porting VirtualPC for Windows to another BSD would give them an emulation layer for "legacy" Win32 apps on BSD.
4) The
5) Microsoft have never publicly bashed BSD, in fact they've even said nice things about it in public.
Dvorak is humorously suggesting that MS should port the Windows driver layer to Linux, but suppose they ported it to a BSD instead?
Then they'd have:
1) a rock-solid stable and secure OS, which is IMHO more secure out of the box than most Linux distros. I'm still a Linux user, because I know how to secure it and I prefer the GPL license. But then, they're not selling to me.
2) the prestige of becoming the world's largest Unix vendor overnight, with the ability to have pious pissing contests with Sun and IBM over whose OS is the most open
3) an emulation layer for Win32, allowing practically all existing Win32 apps to run unchanged, which they could bundle with the new OS
4) the BSD license, which they could proclaim is "more American!" and "less cancerous!" than the UnAmerican and Cancerous GPL
5) no legal hassles whatsoever from developing locked-up code on an Open Source base.
The name BSD is trademarked by U of C, so they'd need a new name.
How about "BSOD"? That's "O" for "Open".
I was only kidding: the real obstacle to my getting admitted to The Women's College in Sydney is that I'm a guy. :)
The famous Lloyd's of London insurance group started out in Lloyd's coffee house in the late 1600s. This bodes well for Delicious Monster. :)
Excerpts from the book "Against the Gods" by Peter Bernstein:
"One afternoon in 1637 * a Cretan scholar named Canopius sat down in his chambers at Balliol College, Oxford, and made himself a cup of strong coffee. Canopius's brew is believed to mark the first time coffee was drunk in England; it proved so popular when it was offered to the public that hundreds of coffee houses were soon in operation all over London.
What does Canopius's coffee have to do with * the concept of risk? Simply that a coffee house was the birthplace of Lloyd's of London, which for more than two centuries was the most famous of all insurance company's. *
The second half of the seventeenth century was also an era of burgeoning trade. The Dutch were the predominant commercial power of the time, and England was their main rival. Ships arrived daily from colonies and suppliers around the globe to unload a profusion of products that had once been scarce or unknown luxuries-sugar and spice, coffee and tea, raw cotton and fine porcelain. * Information from remote areas of the world was now of crucial importance to the domestic economy. With the volume of shipping constantly expanding, there was a lively demand for current information with which to estimate sailing times between destinations, weather patterns, and the risks lurking in unfamiliar seas.
In the absence of mass media, the coffee houses emerged as the primary source of news and rumour. In 1675, Charles II,
suspicious as many rulers are of places where the public trades information, shut the coffee houses down, but the uproar was so great that he had to reverse himself sixteen days later. Samuel Pepys frequented a coffee house to get news of the arrival of ships he was interested in; he deemed the news he received there to be more reliable than what he learned at his job at the Admiralty.
The coffee house that Edward Lloyd opened in 1687 near the Thames on Tower Street was a favourite haunt of men from the ships that moored at London's docks. The house was "spacious, well built and inhabited by able tradesmen" according to a contemporary publication. It grew so popular that in 1691 Lloyd moved it to much larger and more luxurious quarters on Lombard Street. Nat Ward, a publican whom Alexander Pope accused of trading vile rhymes for tobacco, reported that the tables in the new house were "very neat and shined with rubbing." A staff of five served tea and sherbet as well as coffee.
Lloyd had grown up under Oliver Cromwell and he had lived through plague, fire, the Dutch invasion up the Thames in 1667, and the Glorious Revolution of 1688. He was a lot more than a skilled coffeehouse host. Recognizing the value of his customer base and responding to the insistent demand for information, he launched "Lloyd's List" in 1696 and filled it with information on the arrivals and departures of ships and intelligence on conditions abroad and at sea. That information was provided by a network of correspondents in major ports on the Continent and in England. Ship auctions took place regularly on the premises, and Lloyd obligingly furnished the paper and ink needed to record the transactions. One corner was reserved for ships' captains where they could compare notes on the hazards of all the new routes that were opening up - routes that led them farther east, farther south, and farther west than ever before. Lloyd's establishment was open almost around the clock and was always crowded.
Then as now, anyone who was seeking insurance would go to a broker, who would then hawk the risk to the individual risk-takers who gathered in the coffee houses or in the precincts of the Royal Exchange. When a deal was closed, the risk-taker would confirm his agreement to cover the loss in return for a specified premium by writing his name
I really wanted to go to the Women's College in Sydney, but since they didn't offer Electrical Engineering, I had to settle for CMU.
:)
You mean "alumnus". "Alumni" is plural, but "alumnus" is singular.
You're missing some commas there.
There is a idiom of ivy arrogance that the only difference between the education you get at Harvard vs other schools is that at other schools you learn about history at Harvard you are taught by the people that made history and sitting in a room with others that will make history.
Gosh, where to start: "a idiom", missing commas, missing "while" before "at Harvard", no capitalization of "Ivy".
They would have thrown me out of CMU for writing like that. Is that another key difference between Harvard and non-Harvard education?
That's only true until that "freeware" stops being free-of-charge, then they suddenly start to care a lot. There's nothing like a little six-figure bombshell landing on a PHB's desk, it seems to concentrate the mind wonderfully.
As an example, the closed-source app PowerArchiver was once "free", til enough people started using it and depending on it, then its owner's started charging for it. Luckily, the LGPL'd 7-zip was there to step into the breach. 7-zip's also used in the installer for FireFox, and it's a good thing the Moz project never relied on a free-of-charge closed-source tool for the installer.
The morality of Free vs. OSS licensing means a lot more to me personally than just precision. But even all those users who think they don't care about licenses can eventually see that closed and semi-closed licenses are a bad deal for them in the long run, once you point out to them that GPL'd software can never go bankrupt, never get bought out, never get canned by marketing droids, never raise its rent, etc.
As long as someone's willing to maintain the code, it can remain free of charge to all those users who don't care about code, but care deeply about cash.
Sorry, I can't find any of the articles from the Project Censored list for 2004 or the new 2005 list on Newsmax.com.
Or have I misunderstood you?
...since the corporate media refuse to report on them.
The BBC however is hardly free of self-censorship, and its news is presented very much from the point of view of the cliques that run it.
The best news IMHO is dominated neither by governments nor corporations, but there's not a lot of that around these days, at least not on television or in dailies.
Actually, according to France Telecom, DSL was invented in BellCore Labs in 1987. :)
Telcos in France, Germany, Britain and Belgium have been quicker off the mark than the USA in developing and rolling out "triple-play" services over DSL though.
"...with the word 'dog' crossed out and 'cat' written in, in crayon."
The WSJ has a "solid conservative editorial page", but the NYT has a "predictably liberal editorial page"?
:)
Since you're a libertarian and not a conservative, then was it accidental that you didn't write that as "predictably conservative" and "solid liberal"?
Well I'm not a liberal either, and both papers are conservative corporate propaganda sheets IMHO.
I used to be on the networks team at a very large corporation, where we implemented SecurID and PIN for offsite dial-in.
We did everything right, got the clock sync working, got all the managers to buy lots of pricey SecurID cards, found and forcibly removed insecure dial-in boxes scattered around, did all the right audit and test of firewalls, etc.
But the sales group had a bunch of pooled laptops, which sales people used to take out to customer sites. So they would store a SecurID card in the bag, along with a yellow PostIt note showing the PIN code for that SecurID.
That way, not only was the SecurID compromised, but since they were effectively using shared SecurIDs and PINs, we wouldn't even know which idjit sales droid had compromised it.
Doooo, ya stupid idjit rabbit!
State-of-the art tech is no match for the apparently limitless stupidity of users.
In the end, we did the only sensible thing, and revoked offsite dial-in for that group.