It was a highly protectionist measure designed to save American jobs that ended up making the Great Depression even worse and dramatically slowing international trade. Thankfully after World War II the trend towards protectionism was reversed in favor of more international cooperation.
Excuse me but zero jobs should be lost to overseas workers. You know why? Because companies that do this should be taxed to hell and back for doing it. Make it so fucking unattractive that the companies will NEVER even consider a foreign worker cheaper than a US native. I have a feeling that the person currently running the show wouldn't ever think of THAT. Remember he's optimistic about furthering his "base" of the "have mores".
Yes! Let's do exactly that!
While we're at it, let's ensure that no policy that would cost American jobs is ever passed. We should tax the hell out of any company that attempts to hurt American workers by doing things that increase efficiency, automate labor, or make products and services cheaper. Sure, we'll all have to pay $50000 for a computer assembled by hand, but at least we'll have all those good-paying jobs right here in America.
All this regressive protectionism is a throwback to the nativist movement and the failed policies of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff. You can't take the benefits of global trade and then complain about how terrible it is that people are getting their jobs replaced by cheaper workers. We all benefit from products and services that would be prohibitively expensive if it weren't made in a distributed fashion.
The best way of saving American jobs isn't by shutting our borders and going back to the 1920's, it's by reducing the cost of health care and enacting tort reform to prevent frivolous lawsuits, both of which would decrease the regulator burdens that make it very hard to add new employees and be able to pay them well.
Of course, why bother with a nuanced solution when we can react in a kneejerk fashion and makde a cheap ad hominem against the President?
Unfortunately not. The MacOS X theme benefits from the native Mac toolkit, which can't be ported over to Windows without making Firefox an ungodly size and involving a large amount of very proprietary Apple code. It might be possible to get a close replica of the theme, but it wouldn't be exact.
I took an interest in Java for desktop work a few years ago, but quickly realized that Java on the desktop is even worse than Java applets were. (And at the time they were both incredibly atrocious.)
Even with the increases in processor power, storage, and memory, Java is still atrocious, even compared to interpreted languages like Perl or Python. Even the simplest applications leave even powerful systems swapping like mad. Java consumes memory like the unholy offspring of Rush Limbaugh and Courtney Love would consume drugs at a pharmacy warehouse. Java brings in a large memory footprint that makes it completely unsuitable for many applications.
And don't get me started about Swing and the other Java UI classes. The last thing we need is another UI toolkit. Had Java used native widgets, it might fit in better. Had Java used widgets that didn't look like a throwback to Motif it might have been slightly better. Instead Java UIs tend to be a usability nightmare. Even Eclipse, which is far and away the best app I've seen in Java has nowhere near the visual polish as its GNOME, KDE, Aqua, or Win32 equivalents.
The fact is that if Java is to succeed in the desktop it needs to be made much faster, memory footprint needs to be reduced, and it needs to get a consistant and usable set of Human Interface Guidelines. Unfortunately for Sun, I tend to think that the Java developers would be better suited to inventing a time machine and traveling back to 1996 when such improvements may have made a difference.
Java has a nice niche as an enterprise-level web applications language, but as a desktop programming language Java isn't neither well-regarded nor particularly useful. Now that you have other languages like Python (which beats Java for RAD tasks hands down) or.NET (which has the advantage of both Windows.Forms and Gtk# as well as an extensive class library), whatever Sun does to make Java a desktop programming language is probably too little, too late.
Don't knock having a batchelors in political science! It could be worse, it could be a B.A. in philosophy (AKA the "would you like fries with that?" degree)
This from someone with a degree in political philosophy...
Re:Developers, Developers, Developers
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Mono Beta 2 Released
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Granted, specifications do change, but:
In order to break Mono, Microsoft would have to break many apps using the current MS.NET implementations as well.
This would require every.NET application to be rewritten to the new spec.
If people are going to rewrite their applications they're going to be far more likely to switch to a new platform, especially if they've already migrated to an open platform with.NET.
Legacy applications are a fact of life. There are tons of applications build for Win95 that are still used every day. Windows 98 still has considerable marketshare in the business world.
Breaking legacy applications is a good way to go out of business, which is why Microsoft bends over backwards for compatibility wherever they can.
Businesses tend not to be early adopters. I still use Office 2000 at work. My boss uses Windows ME (ugh, I know...). Our apps are designed around ASP.NET 1.1 on the server side. If Microsoft started forcing us to upgrade everything, we'd have to tell them to kiss off. Our IT budget doesn't support forced upgrades. Believe me, we're not alone in that, and that's why Microsoft can't suddenly start breaking widely-used libraries to kill Mono - it would be shooting themselves in the foot.
Developers, Developers, Developers
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Mono Beta 2 Released
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· Score: 4, Insightful
This seems like a legitimate set of concerns, but I think the ability of Microsoft to change the game at this point is severely limited.
The reason why Microsoft can't radically alter.NET is because of the existance of legacy apps. The company I work for has thousands of man-hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars into our ASP.NET applications. Microsoft can't break these applications. The.NET API has to remain consistant or they'll lose that legacy application support and lose customers. The fastest way to piss off an IT department is to make a change that breaks their apps. Believe me, I know...
So, if Mono can get the.NET 1.1 standards done, they can support all those legacy apps with few changes. Even if/when Microsoft introduces some spiffy new libraries with.NET 2.0, businesses can still say "it's cheaper for us to get off the forced upgrade wagon and move to Mono as a platform for.NET and we can keep our legacy applications." Unless.NET 2.0 comes up with some massively useful new system, there isn't that strong a reason to upgrade.
Granted, Microsoft can still pull out a patent and try to shut Mono down, which remains a threat, but I don't see them as doing that. All Mono has to do is use that as a talking point - don't develop for.NET because of patent issues. This hurts Microsoft by slowing the adoption of.NET. The worst that happens is that Mono has to fall back on its own libraries, and given that things like Gtk# are useful on their own they still have something to show for their work.
The more I think about it, the more I think Mono is in a strong position. I'd be more worried about Microsoft unleashing a patent infringement case than I would about them changing the APIs to shut out Mono. If they did that, they'd be shooting themselves in the foot.
It's as if Linux were able to run all Win95 applications just as Windows 2000 was coming around. Yes, Windows 2000 was infinitely better than 95, but if you're a PHB and you have a choice of moving your legacy apps to an expensive proprietary system or a free open one, you're going to be more inclined to do the latter as it makes your bottom line better. Legacy app support is absolutely crucial and right now Mono can do something that not even Linux can do - support Microsoft-based legacy apps with a minimum of changes. That gives Mono a big advantage in the marketplace, and while it helps Microsoft move developers to.NET it also helps make Linux a more attractive platform for enterprise development, especially on the backend.
In all seriousness, we need to have some sort of crackdown on spam. The levels of pure crap are increasing faster than even a combination of SpamAssassin and Thunderbird's Bayesian filtering can catch up with.
Throwing slimebags like Carmak and Alan Ralsky in jail for a few years might help reduce the spam levels. While the servers may be in China, the ones running these large spam operations are right here in the US. It won't stop spam, but it will at least reduce the flow.
You try manually managing 4,000 entries without going completely bonkers - including permalinks, comments, and extended entries. The whole point of blog software is that you have a system that manages permalinks, organizes information, allows for open exchange, etc. Those are all things that require some kind of infrastructure. Blogging software is really just a specialized form of CMS, and anyone who argues that sites consisting of thousands of pages doesn't need some form of content management and control is quite frankly a complete and utter lunatic.
Or to take your logic, who needs a computer? What is a computer? A device that just does mathematical calculations. If you can't figure out insanely complex matrix operations and vector math, then your're probably not very smart anyway. All those super-elite people can use a slide rule to handle all the intense computation for them. If you pay for computers, you're a sucker...
I've had a site running on MT for the past two years, with nearly a year's worth of Blogger entries before that. About 4,000 individual entries and over 6,000 comments dating back over three years. One would think that migrating a site of that size would be a royal pain in the ass.
WordPress imported the whole thing in a matter of minutes. It's easier to upgrade from MT2.6 to WordPress than it is from MT 2.6 to MT 3.0.
WordPress is fortunate to have hit its stride just as the MT licensing brewhaha was hitting. WP 1.2 has all the features of MT, runs faster, and is completely open source and GPL licensed. It's a bit of a paradigm shift from MT - you have to get used to a dynamically-run system rather than static templates, but once you grasp the power it brings it offers a lot of new potential for blog development. Plus, there are a lot of talented hackers who have been turned off by MT licensing and will be developing WP plugins instead. WP even has features that MT doesn't - for instance automated link management. That alone makes it worth the upgrade.
Plus, future versions will support multiple blogs under one interface, some more commenting controls, and other features. I'd expect as WordPress captures marketshare the development of new core features and plugins will increase as well.
That's a big selling point - even if the WP developers wanted to pull the rug out under free users like Six Apart did, they couldn't. WordPress is GPL software, meaning freedom is but a fork away. Mark Pilgrim's piece does an excellent job of detailing why that freedom is so important. It's another reminder of why open source software is better than proprietary software in terms of flexibility and licensing.
Although the studio may be in serious legal trouble, the fifth season of Andromeda is still a go - the casting sheets have already been sent out, and the preproduction process has been on for about a week now.
I've no idea how (or why) it was saved, as the show was never that good to begin with and went downhill from there, but the reports of its death have been greatly exagerrated.
That's all well and good except for the fact that the PRC is fascist and totalitarian. Remember that little incident in Tiannamen Square? Try asking a Tibetan exile if they agree with Bradbury's statement.
That being said, the Chinese have been steadily getting better as they realize that being a global economic powerhouse isn't compatible with a communist command economy and China stopped being truly communist the second Deng Xioping said "to get rich is glorious" - but still, Bradbury's comments aren't jingoistic, they're fairly accurate.
The problem is that our educational system doesn't teach basic critical thinking skills - those aren't developed until college (if then). The problem is that our educational system is a garbage-in, garbage-out system with a watered-down politically correct curriculum that warps context and is rife with inaccuracies and some outright lies. They're designed to increase "self-esteem" for some, at the expense of actually being able to be a productive and informed citizen.
There is an excellent article that was online a while back called Sesame Street, Epistemology, and Freedom that gives a good background into some of the problems, causes, and solutions in terms of our educational system's woeful lack of critical thinking skill-building. Thankfully the Internet Archive still has a copy since I've not been able to find it online. A sample:
It is simply assumed, pedagogically, in both public and private schools, that after about the grade 5 level, the student's abilities to abstract, and then to think about the abstractions, will take care of themselves, as some collateral result of all the other teaching and learning that goes on in math, language, social studies, science, and so on. Attention is never paid to abstraction as such, even though it wouldn't have been put on a toddler's educational TV show (as in this game), if it were not understood to be a foundation skill.
In other words, "philosophy" (i.e., "thinking about thinking"), which is to say, the most abstract, complex and comprehensive task any human being has to learn, is not expressly taught at all in the, let us say, rather significant educational interval between Grover on Sesame Street, and Graduate Study Seminar. From my point of view as an educational professional, I find this, to put it mildly, to be mind-boggling, in several senses of that expression.
If we can't teach children to think abstractly and learning how to quantify and qualify the streams of information that blast them every day, we can't expect to maintain an informed and reasonable democracy. Unfortunately we have an education system build by people like Horace Mann that were designed for the Industrial Age and are wholly inadequate for the intellectual demands of the Information Age.
I have little consideration for these kinds of arguments, mainly because they're unduly paranoid, but also because they don't take into account the reality of the market.
The fact is, replacing every router on the Internet would be a gargantuan task. Furthermore, $BIGCORP doesn't want mandatory Longhorn adoption - they'd have to pay to update their own systems. Upgrading a 100 seat network is a pain... 5000 seats is damn near impossible without a lot of money, time, and headaches.
Imagine replacing every sysem on the Internet and rebuilding all that infrastructure - we're talking about tens of billions of dollars and millions upon millions of man-hours of labor.
In other words, it's not going to happen, except in the minds of the paranoid.
If these specs are correct, Microsoft is making a major tactical mistake. The computer market is driven by early adopters, but the bread-and-butter is still in the business market. The average business still has P3s running around, or even older. Even with the average upgrade cycle, but 2006 what's cutting edge now will be the average. Even with Moore's law Longhorn will require far more resources than the average business machine.
If Microsoft ships with those specs as a baseline, 2/3rds of their business customers will say now. If Microsoft demands they switch or lose support, they'll end up switching to Linux (which by then will have made significant inroads as a business desktop OS).
I can't imagine this story being true. As much as I dislike Microsoft, they're not that foolish to release an OS that most businesses can't afford to buy. Even XP can run (albeit slowly) on a two or three year old machine. If Longhorn can't run on today's machines it needs to be streamlined until it does.
However, if you were unwillingly sharing your service, you would not be liable. If someone taps into your cable without your knowledge, you can't be held liable for theft of service.
Because of threats from BayTSP against my ISP on chillingeffects.org. I blocked BayTSP from my router, and sent a registered letter to the company informing them that any attempt to gain access to my machine would be considered by a violation of the DMCA (attempting to counteract my router's defenses), and also since I have well more than $10,000 worth of data on my network, I would consider a further attempt to be a crack attempt, which is my state was a felony offense. (Under my state's law we have some very strict computer crime legislation.)
Since then, they've left me alone, so I assume that such an approach would work, although IANAL.
You mean the report that revealed the BBC's entrenched institutional bias, willingness to distort information for political purposes, and arrogant management? You mean the Hutton Inquiry that led to the resignation of BBC chairman Gavyn Davies and "reporter" Andrew Gilligan?
While I applaud the BBC for contributing an interesting and valuable Open Source project to the world, it is hardly an unbiased source of news. The BBC is an agency that exists by taking money from the public and using it to advance a political agenda - it's as if everyone in America were forced to get FoxNews when they bought a TV set.
Of course, this also presents an interesting conundrum. My current computer has had every single part replaced since I bought the first iteration way back in 1998. Of course, not everything was replaced at the same time, but rather a gradual process of upgrades over the years.
So, is it really the same computer I started with? Or is it really some kind of sinister imposter only pretending to be my computer?
Let's see, Hamas blew up an American student at a Tel Aviv university, as well as group of officials in Gaza that were there to find Palestinian Fulbright scholars, not to mention hundreds of Israel civilians including infants, women, and children.
And don't respond that "Israel kills Palestinians too" - the difference being that Israel doesn't intentionally target civilians while Hamas, Hizb'allah, the al-Aqsa Martyr's Brigade, and the other Palestinian terrorist organizations do.
If I were Apple, I'd be embracing this technology - make the iTunes Music Store a ubitquitous web service like Google search. Allow users to point links to iTunes content on any page, allow them to post sound snippets and then link to download with iTunes. After all, Amazon does much the same thing with their Associates program.
Rather than a threat, I see this as an excellent way for Apple to get the iTMS even more exposure, make it easier to use, and still drive sales through iTunes - after all, there are a lot of people who won't download a new application until they see what benefits it offers.
Assuming that this group uses a Proton launcher (the heavy Russian launcher currently used to lift ISS sections and Soyuz spacecraft) they would only be able to lift 44,000 lbs into LEO per launch.
The likely weight for a fully-fueled Mars base would be in the neighborhood of 1 million pounds - and that's being conservative. You not only need the habitation modules, but the garden modules, consumables for three years, and propellant. 2 million might be closer.
That's about 23 launches to just to get all the material in LEO.
A Proton launch costs about $35-$70 million dollars.
That's $1.14 billion, just to get everything into LEO. Even then, that's a conservative estimate. The real costs, depending on weight could be close to $3 billion.
That doesn't include the hundreds of millions in R&D needed to develop a working spacecraft, training for astronauts, keeping a working command and control center for 3 years, insurance, legal fees, or any of the other costs.
In short, this doesn't even pass the smell test.
The Hidden Secret Of Life On Mars
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Methane on Mars?
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· Score: 4, Funny
Since we now know that once Mars had liquid water in significant amounts, and now we've found evidence of methane gas, there can only be one conclusion:
There were cows on Mars.
But what happened to the cows on Mars, you say?
Well, that's simple. As any reputably zoology dragon will tell you cows have infinite density. As Dr. Joel and Alex Veitch discovered in the Jaunuary 2004 issue of The Annals of Completely Fraudulent Research:
Cows have a very high surface tension. Surface tension can be seen in water, in the way pond-skaters are able to skim across the surface of a body of liquid without sinking, and also in the way drops of water always tend towards spherical shape. In cows (and meat in general) the surface tension forces them to tend toward the shape of a cube. The forces at work in the cow are finely balanced, just allowing it to maintain cow-shape. However, if 2 cows should be allowed to touch each other, the surface tension will immediately force them to merge. This larger body of meat is unable to maintain its cow form against the surface tension forces now at work, and so will form a Cow Cube, or Cowube, pronounced "COWUUUUBE" with the mass of 2 cows.
The seriousness of the implications of this phenomenon for the dairy industry, and the future of humanity, should not be underestimated. This Cowube, with its 2-cow mass, exerts enough gravitational force to suck in nearby cows of lower mass. As they touch the Cowube, they merge immediately with it, forming a Cowube of ever-increasing mass, exerting ever-increasing gravitational force on cows.
Eventually, this vast and ever-growing cube of meat will implode under its own gravitational force, forming a singularity. This is why, as every astronomer knows, the surface of every black hole is always a cow.
Obviously this means that all of Mars' water was not evaporated by a thinning atmosphere, but carried off by a massive cow-based singularity.
In order to prevent such a catastrophe from occuring on this planet it is clear that we must begin a systematic effort to minimize the cow population. Preferably using barbeque sauce...
Glade2 development has stopped, and there's a full rewrite of Glade going on. The Glade3 code is currently in CVS, and will feature badly-needed features like redo/undo.
My guess is that Glade3 will support the new GTK 2.4 widgets.
Slashdot Mirror
As always, WikiPedia comes to the rescue...
It was a highly protectionist measure designed to save American jobs that ended up making the Great Depression even worse and dramatically slowing international trade. Thankfully after World War II the trend towards protectionism was reversed in favor of more international cooperation.
Yes! Let's do exactly that!
While we're at it, let's ensure that no policy that would cost American jobs is ever passed. We should tax the hell out of any company that attempts to hurt American workers by doing things that increase efficiency, automate labor, or make products and services cheaper. Sure, we'll all have to pay $50000 for a computer assembled by hand, but at least we'll have all those good-paying jobs right here in America.
All this regressive protectionism is a throwback to the nativist movement and the failed policies of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff. You can't take the benefits of global trade and then complain about how terrible it is that people are getting their jobs replaced by cheaper workers. We all benefit from products and services that would be prohibitively expensive if it weren't made in a distributed fashion.
The best way of saving American jobs isn't by shutting our borders and going back to the 1920's, it's by reducing the cost of health care and enacting tort reform to prevent frivolous lawsuits, both of which would decrease the regulator burdens that make it very hard to add new employees and be able to pay them well.
Of course, why bother with a nuanced solution when we can react in a kneejerk fashion and makde a cheap ad hominem against the President?
Unfortunately not. The MacOS X theme benefits from the native Mac toolkit, which can't be ported over to Windows without making Firefox an ungodly size and involving a large amount of very proprietary Apple code. It might be possible to get a close replica of the theme, but it wouldn't be exact.
I took an interest in Java for desktop work a few years ago, but quickly realized that Java on the desktop is even worse than Java applets were. (And at the time they were both incredibly atrocious.)
Even with the increases in processor power, storage, and memory, Java is still atrocious, even compared to interpreted languages like Perl or Python. Even the simplest applications leave even powerful systems swapping like mad. Java consumes memory like the unholy offspring of Rush Limbaugh and Courtney Love would consume drugs at a pharmacy warehouse. Java brings in a large memory footprint that makes it completely unsuitable for many applications.
And don't get me started about Swing and the other Java UI classes. The last thing we need is another UI toolkit. Had Java used native widgets, it might fit in better. Had Java used widgets that didn't look like a throwback to Motif it might have been slightly better. Instead Java UIs tend to be a usability nightmare. Even Eclipse, which is far and away the best app I've seen in Java has nowhere near the visual polish as its GNOME, KDE, Aqua, or Win32 equivalents.
The fact is that if Java is to succeed in the desktop it needs to be made much faster, memory footprint needs to be reduced, and it needs to get a consistant and usable set of Human Interface Guidelines. Unfortunately for Sun, I tend to think that the Java developers would be better suited to inventing a time machine and traveling back to 1996 when such improvements may have made a difference.
Java has a nice niche as an enterprise-level web applications language, but as a desktop programming language Java isn't neither well-regarded nor particularly useful. Now that you have other languages like Python (which beats Java for RAD tasks hands down) or .NET (which has the advantage of both Windows.Forms and Gtk# as well as an extensive class library), whatever Sun does to make Java a desktop programming language is probably too little, too late.
Don't knock having a batchelors in political science! It could be worse, it could be a B.A. in philosophy (AKA the "would you like fries with that?" degree)
This from someone with a degree in political philosophy...
Granted, specifications do change, but:
Businesses tend not to be early adopters. I still use Office 2000 at work. My boss uses Windows ME (ugh, I know...). Our apps are designed around ASP.NET 1.1 on the server side. If Microsoft started forcing us to upgrade everything, we'd have to tell them to kiss off. Our IT budget doesn't support forced upgrades. Believe me, we're not alone in that, and that's why Microsoft can't suddenly start breaking widely-used libraries to kill Mono - it would be shooting themselves in the foot.
This seems like a legitimate set of concerns, but I think the ability of Microsoft to change the game at this point is severely limited.
The reason why Microsoft can't radically alter .NET is because of the existance of legacy apps. The company I work for has thousands of man-hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars into our ASP.NET applications. Microsoft can't break these applications. The .NET API has to remain consistant or they'll lose that legacy application support and lose customers. The fastest way to piss off an IT department is to make a change that breaks their apps. Believe me, I know...
So, if Mono can get the .NET 1.1 standards done, they can support all those legacy apps with few changes. Even if/when Microsoft introduces some spiffy new libraries with .NET 2.0, businesses can still say "it's cheaper for us to get off the forced upgrade wagon and move to Mono as a platform for .NET and we can keep our legacy applications." Unless .NET 2.0 comes up with some massively useful new system, there isn't that strong a reason to upgrade.
Granted, Microsoft can still pull out a patent and try to shut Mono down, which remains a threat, but I don't see them as doing that. All Mono has to do is use that as a talking point - don't develop for .NET because of patent issues. This hurts Microsoft by slowing the adoption of .NET. The worst that happens is that Mono has to fall back on its own libraries, and given that things like Gtk# are useful on their own they still have something to show for their work.
The more I think about it, the more I think Mono is in a strong position. I'd be more worried about Microsoft unleashing a patent infringement case than I would about them changing the APIs to shut out Mono. If they did that, they'd be shooting themselves in the foot.
It's as if Linux were able to run all Win95 applications just as Windows 2000 was coming around. Yes, Windows 2000 was infinitely better than 95, but if you're a PHB and you have a choice of moving your legacy apps to an expensive proprietary system or a free open one, you're going to be more inclined to do the latter as it makes your bottom line better. Legacy app support is absolutely crucial and right now Mono can do something that not even Linux can do - support Microsoft-based legacy apps with a minimum of changes. That gives Mono a big advantage in the marketplace, and while it helps Microsoft move developers to .NET it also helps make Linux a more attractive platform for enterprise development, especially on the backend.
Can we please execute him too?
In all seriousness, we need to have some sort of crackdown on spam. The levels of pure crap are increasing faster than even a combination of SpamAssassin and Thunderbird's Bayesian filtering can catch up with.
Throwing slimebags like Carmak and Alan Ralsky in jail for a few years might help reduce the spam levels. While the servers may be in China, the ones running these large spam operations are right here in the US. It won't stop spam, but it will at least reduce the flow.
Are you nuts?
You try manually managing 4,000 entries without going completely bonkers - including permalinks, comments, and extended entries. The whole point of blog software is that you have a system that manages permalinks, organizes information, allows for open exchange, etc. Those are all things that require some kind of infrastructure. Blogging software is really just a specialized form of CMS, and anyone who argues that sites consisting of thousands of pages doesn't need some form of content management and control is quite frankly a complete and utter lunatic.
Or to take your logic, who needs a computer? What is a computer? A device that just does mathematical calculations. If you can't figure out insanely complex matrix operations and vector math, then your're probably not very smart anyway. All those super-elite people can use a slide rule to handle all the intense computation for them. If you pay for computers, you're a sucker...
I've had a site running on MT for the past two years, with nearly a year's worth of Blogger entries before that. About 4,000 individual entries and over 6,000 comments dating back over three years. One would think that migrating a site of that size would be a royal pain in the ass.
WordPress imported the whole thing in a matter of minutes. It's easier to upgrade from MT2.6 to WordPress than it is from MT 2.6 to MT 3.0.
WordPress is fortunate to have hit its stride just as the MT licensing brewhaha was hitting. WP 1.2 has all the features of MT, runs faster, and is completely open source and GPL licensed. It's a bit of a paradigm shift from MT - you have to get used to a dynamically-run system rather than static templates, but once you grasp the power it brings it offers a lot of new potential for blog development. Plus, there are a lot of talented hackers who have been turned off by MT licensing and will be developing WP plugins instead. WP even has features that MT doesn't - for instance automated link management. That alone makes it worth the upgrade.
Plus, future versions will support multiple blogs under one interface, some more commenting controls, and other features. I'd expect as WordPress captures marketshare the development of new core features and plugins will increase as well.
That's a big selling point - even if the WP developers wanted to pull the rug out under free users like Six Apart did, they couldn't. WordPress is GPL software, meaning freedom is but a fork away. Mark Pilgrim's piece does an excellent job of detailing why that freedom is so important. It's another reminder of why open source software is better than proprietary software in terms of flexibility and licensing.
Although the studio may be in serious legal trouble, the fifth season of Andromeda is still a go - the casting sheets have already been sent out, and the preproduction process has been on for about a week now.
I've no idea how (or why) it was saved, as the show was never that good to begin with and went downhill from there, but the reports of its death have been greatly exagerrated.
That's all well and good except for the fact that the PRC is fascist and totalitarian. Remember that little incident in Tiannamen Square? Try asking a Tibetan exile if they agree with Bradbury's statement.
That being said, the Chinese have been steadily getting better as they realize that being a global economic powerhouse isn't compatible with a communist command economy and China stopped being truly communist the second Deng Xioping said "to get rich is glorious" - but still, Bradbury's comments aren't jingoistic, they're fairly accurate.
The problem is that our educational system doesn't teach basic critical thinking skills - those aren't developed until college (if then). The problem is that our educational system is a garbage-in, garbage-out system with a watered-down politically correct curriculum that warps context and is rife with inaccuracies and some outright lies. They're designed to increase "self-esteem" for some, at the expense of actually being able to be a productive and informed citizen.
There is an excellent article that was online a while back called Sesame Street, Epistemology, and Freedom that gives a good background into some of the problems, causes, and solutions in terms of our educational system's woeful lack of critical thinking skill-building. Thankfully the Internet Archive still has a copy since I've not been able to find it online. A sample:
If we can't teach children to think abstractly and learning how to quantify and qualify the streams of information that blast them every day, we can't expect to maintain an informed and reasonable democracy. Unfortunately we have an education system build by people like Horace Mann that were designed for the Industrial Age and are wholly inadequate for the intellectual demands of the Information Age.
I have little consideration for these kinds of arguments, mainly because they're unduly paranoid, but also because they don't take into account the reality of the market.
The fact is, replacing every router on the Internet would be a gargantuan task. Furthermore, $BIGCORP doesn't want mandatory Longhorn adoption - they'd have to pay to update their own systems. Upgrading a 100 seat network is a pain... 5000 seats is damn near impossible without a lot of money, time, and headaches.
Imagine replacing every sysem on the Internet and rebuilding all that infrastructure - we're talking about tens of billions of dollars and millions upon millions of man-hours of labor.
In other words, it's not going to happen, except in the minds of the paranoid.
If these specs are correct, Microsoft is making a major tactical mistake. The computer market is driven by early adopters, but the bread-and-butter is still in the business market. The average business still has P3s running around, or even older. Even with the average upgrade cycle, but 2006 what's cutting edge now will be the average. Even with Moore's law Longhorn will require far more resources than the average business machine.
If Microsoft ships with those specs as a baseline, 2/3rds of their business customers will say now. If Microsoft demands they switch or lose support, they'll end up switching to Linux (which by then will have made significant inroads as a business desktop OS).
I can't imagine this story being true. As much as I dislike Microsoft, they're not that foolish to release an OS that most businesses can't afford to buy. Even XP can run (albeit slowly) on a two or three year old machine. If Longhorn can't run on today's machines it needs to be streamlined until it does.
However, if you were unwillingly sharing your service, you would not be liable. If someone taps into your cable without your knowledge, you can't be held liable for theft of service.
Because of threats from BayTSP against my ISP on chillingeffects.org. I blocked BayTSP from my router, and sent a registered letter to the company informing them that any attempt to gain access to my machine would be considered by a violation of the DMCA (attempting to counteract my router's defenses), and also since I have well more than $10,000 worth of data on my network, I would consider a further attempt to be a crack attempt, which is my state was a felony offense. (Under my state's law we have some very strict computer crime legislation.)
Since then, they've left me alone, so I assume that such an approach would work, although IANAL.
While I applaud the BBC for contributing an interesting and valuable Open Source project to the world, it is hardly an unbiased source of news. The BBC is an agency that exists by taking money from the public and using it to advance a political agenda - it's as if everyone in America were forced to get FoxNews when they bought a TV set.
Of course, this also presents an interesting conundrum. My current computer has had every single part replaced since I bought the first iteration way back in 1998. Of course, not everything was replaced at the same time, but rather a gradual process of upgrades over the years.
So, is it really the same computer I started with? Or is it really some kind of sinister imposter only pretending to be my computer?
Let's see, Hamas blew up an American student at a Tel Aviv university, as well as group of officials in Gaza that were there to find Palestinian Fulbright scholars, not to mention hundreds of Israel civilians including infants, women, and children.
And don't respond that "Israel kills Palestinians too" - the difference being that Israel doesn't intentionally target civilians while Hamas, Hizb'allah, the al-Aqsa Martyr's Brigade, and the other Palestinian terrorist organizations do.
Well, they did base MacOS X on a UNIX-like kernel...
If I were Apple, I'd be embracing this technology - make the iTunes Music Store a ubitquitous web service like Google search. Allow users to point links to iTunes content on any page, allow them to post sound snippets and then link to download with iTunes. After all, Amazon does much the same thing with their Associates program.
Rather than a threat, I see this as an excellent way for Apple to get the iTMS even more exposure, make it easier to use, and still drive sales through iTunes - after all, there are a lot of people who won't download a new application until they see what benefits it offers.
Assuming that this group uses a Proton launcher (the heavy Russian launcher currently used to lift ISS sections and Soyuz spacecraft) they would only be able to lift 44,000 lbs into LEO per launch.
The likely weight for a fully-fueled Mars base would be in the neighborhood of 1 million pounds - and that's being conservative. You not only need the habitation modules, but the garden modules, consumables for three years, and propellant. 2 million might be closer.
That's about 23 launches to just to get all the material in LEO.
A Proton launch costs about $35-$70 million dollars.
That's $1.14 billion, just to get everything into LEO. Even then, that's a conservative estimate. The real costs, depending on weight could be close to $3 billion.
That doesn't include the hundreds of millions in R&D needed to develop a working spacecraft, training for astronauts, keeping a working command and control center for 3 years, insurance, legal fees, or any of the other costs.
In short, this doesn't even pass the smell test.
Since we now know that once Mars had liquid water in significant amounts, and now we've found evidence of methane gas, there can only be one conclusion:
There were cows on Mars.
But what happened to the cows on Mars, you say?
Well, that's simple. As any reputably zoology dragon will tell you cows have infinite density. As Dr. Joel and Alex Veitch discovered in the Jaunuary 2004 issue of The Annals of Completely Fraudulent Research:
Obviously this means that all of Mars' water was not evaporated by a thinning atmosphere, but carried off by a massive cow-based singularity.
In order to prevent such a catastrophe from occuring on this planet it is clear that we must begin a systematic effort to minimize the cow population. Preferably using barbeque sauce...
We still do - it's why we were able to know that the Iranians were lying about not creating weapons-grade material.
Glade2 development has stopped, and there's a full rewrite of Glade going on. The Glade3 code is currently in CVS, and will feature badly-needed features like redo/undo.
My guess is that Glade3 will support the new GTK 2.4 widgets.