If the United States had civilian courts then the 'people' might stand a chance, but there are no civilian courst in the United States. They all fly the Federal military flag and Federal staff, and are military courts.
Have you ever *been* to the United States? The majority of criminal cases are tried in state or county courts. Them having the US flag in the courtroom is more a matter of tradition than anything else, and I'm not sure if any Federal law requires it. You think that the Federal government actually has the money to try each and every case?
Eliminating US money and US developers who aren't willing to move overseas is going to do a lot of damage, even if people in more progressive countries are unfazed.
It wouldn't eliminate all US developers. A lot of Linux code is written by people as a hobby anyway, and it's not going to make a bit of difference to the hobbyists.
As far as the 3rd-world countries following US rules: keep in mind that a lot of time and effort has been put into developing Linux as an educational OS for poorer schools (Ubuntu and friends) as well as a de facto government standard in some places (see: Red Flag Linux and whatever projects are on in India). I don't thuink that anyone will let this work go to waste.
Add this to the fact that Linux is just one of several common UNIX-type OS's out there these days. There's Solaris, the *BSD systems, even OS X, all of which have the backing of large companies and are commonly used by universities (again with money) and, I suspect, government research establishments.
The M$ deal was stupid of SuSE you, I grant, but it's not the end of the world nor is it the path to Microsoft's domination of the world as many readers here are making it out to be. Microsoft is a large entrenched company, and history has shown that companies like that generally end up getting pimpslapped into oblivion by a nimbler and more innovative competition. Empires always fall.
In the North huge amounts of energy go to heat up places. But putting up more efficient solar panels help a bit.
Not even solar panels are needed. Just design houses with appropriately-positioned areas of glass combined with thermal mass like masonry that stores heat overnight. It wouldn't heat a house completely, but passive solar heat does reduce the need for heating in winter significantly.
It's poor and inept countries that are the problem, though I have no idea why they have so many children in China.
It's not birth rates per se that are the problem. It's industrialization. This planet is currently sustaining six billion people (whether this can be continued long-term is debatable). But what if all of those six billion people will have the same standard of living as the average American or even the average Russian today. Energy and resource use will skyrocket.
Actually, New York State does have the death penalty (reinstated around 1995 IIRC)
The law was ruled unconstitutional some time around 2002-3, though. It have yet to be rewritten. And 2001 would fall under the old law, which is no longer applicable, so the maximum punishment would be life in prison. Fine with me - no need to make martyrs...
As far as trying him under Federal law - in an ideal world, that wouldn't happen. Bin Laden should be held to account in the most direct manner possible under the law by the people whom he hurt. Try him in PA and VA, too, for all I care. But let the state of NY try him, too, because he's fundamentally a common murderer and his actions shouldn't even be glorified with the words "terrorism", "sabotage", etc. Try him exactly that way you'd try any other murdering felon.
He may be speaking his piece in an offensive, vulgar manner, but that doesn't mean that what he's saying won't be the truth unless we change our worldview drastically.
What I find to be self evident is that the real issue is simply to many people, not enough planet.
Which is why we need to develop technology like space elevators and cost-effective nuclear and/or solar sail space propulsion. Ultimately, we'll have to colonize other planets in order for mankind to survive. Not to mention that having mankind spread out through the solar system and maybe in other solar systems as well gives us insurance in case something happens to the Earth like a nuclear war, asteroid strike, or simply the depletion of resources.
For thousands of years, the driver for population growth was wealth as you can feed more kids with more wealth. The introduction of contraceptives has changed this insofar as the responsible reduced their family sizes while the irresponsible continue to breed like there is no tomorrow.
Not exactly. The driver for families having 10 kids or so was that before modern medicine (even in the West, before 1900 or 1920) about five of them would survive. Of those five, two would probably leave the family farm to go seek their fortunes elsewhere. Three would remain as warm bodies to help run the farm when Mom and Dad got old.
Having a lot of kids is fundamentally a *peasant* tradition. And the fact is that infant mortality rates were until recently (or still are) high in the developing world, and it takes a time of a few decades at least to change an entire culture.
Populations are declining in a large portion of the world.
Yeah, but as third-world nations develop, the average energy and resource use of their citizens shoots up. We may have "only" ten billion people after the next century, but right now not all of our six billion are driving cars, playing with plasticky toys, using computers, and talking on cell phones. A lot of the current population of the world doesn't even have electricity. What if all of the future Earth's ten billion people will have (say) on average half the disposable income of the average American today?
-b.
Re:Evil is limited trick-or-treat times...
on
Halloween Roundup
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· Score: 1
So, since (virtually) every house is "open" to trick or treaters, this concerns everyone in the town. Why shouldn't this be a law, then?
If you don't want to give candy to trick-or-treaters, don't open the door when they knock. Or don't leave the front light on or make other signs that they're welcome. Grumpy old farts like you are the reason why this country is mired in stupid regulations while ignoring what's important (the environment, real improvements in education, etc).
Hello american dumbass; justice means obeying the rule of law, not allowing prisoners to be attacked just because you think that's a good idea.
I'm not saying we should allow him to be attacked (or not). I'm saying that life in an American jail isn't exactly pleasant, and special military tribunals aren't needed nor desirable to mete out punishment to those who deserve it.
*Those* are the distros that M$ should be shitting their pants about, since they actually are competitive to Windows on the *desktop.* If anything, an Ubuntu installation is easier than a comparable Windows and MS Office install. No licensing/key crap to worry about, and (if anything) a larger selection of built-in drivers is available. My last install of Ubuntu (on my dad's computer) took about 30 min tops, start to finish. The only slightly tricky part was installing the wlan card driver - had to use ndiswrapper. But the wlan card actually works better than under Windows now - it seemed to drop connections periodically under Windows and take 30 sec. to reconnect.
If a patent which Novell licenses or manages jointly with Microsoft is infringed on, they might plausibly be able to obtain injunctions against rivals commercially distriubuting their enterprise products, or forcing them to withdraw support or disable functionality related to the patent.
Remove the functionality, then make sure that the code and packages "leak" out for free and are easily available on sites hosted in friendly countries i.e. those that don't have the same level of patent stupidity as the US.
As someone whose parents had to cross the Jugoslav border to Italy in the trunk of an old Fiat because the Polish government wouldn't grant them a passport to leave the communist bloc, I resent this and find it disgusting. If someone's accused of charges that they can fight in a civilian court, then I can understand temporarily taking their passport away. But a civilian court offers the accused a clear means to fight the charges.
Military tribunals and secret decision-making like this are horrible ideas because there's no accountability involved. But what about hard-core terrorists like Osama, those responsible for WTC I and WTC II among other things? If anything, this applies more. I want to see the bastards on trial in a New York courtroom, in public, accountable to the very populace whom they injured and whose families they murdered. Then, since New York has no death penalty, a nice long term in Sing Sing in the same cellblock with the Aryan Brotherhood. Justice doesn't have to be meted out by military courts to be tough or fair.
The difference is that Linux was innocent of SCO's charges, but is clearly guilty of the patent charges.
Right, so's basically *any* operating system company, including Microsoft, Apple, and Sun. To use the often-overused car analogy, a lot of those patents are like patenting the location of a shift lever or the number of cylinders in a car. Such very general patents have been ruled to be void time and again.
Besides, does the developing world/non-US/EU countries really give a flying fuck about software patents in the US? Or will they shake their heads in disgust and keep developing Linux and other innovative systems? I don't think that Ubuntu's signing on to M$'s protection racket, nor are the hundreds of other small Linux creators and companies. And with torrents and improved p2p tech, the distribution of Linux won't cease, even in the US.
Except that the developing world will keep developing non-M$ OS's, just because they (a) won't be able to afford the ever-increasing hardware demands of Micro$hit, (b) don't particularly like the US oftentimes, and (c) want to keep their hardware free of US control.
Besides, Micro$oft tried to pull a cute trick liek that in 2000/2001 with SCO. Guess how far that got them. SuSE is one distro out of several hundred (at least!) The strength of Linux is its decentralization.
The other possibility is much less "evil" - that MS is actually conceding that they may need help for their next generation of OS.
But, worryingly, Microsoft owns a LOT more patents, and has the resources to fight such a court battle.
Let them. The source code is already out there. Nothing short of the Earth exploding can unpublish it. Are they going to have the resources to sue every Linux developer and every person and/or company that puts out a distro? In countries that are unfriendly to US corporate interests? I think not.
Plus, to do so would further antagonize various governments and organizations that are just itching to press antitrust suits against MS. This bodes ill for Novell, certainly. However, this *may* also mean that MS is getting out of the "NT" based server market and is shopping around for a suitable replacement platform - maybe they're learning from their mistakes.
Also, many of the Windows desktop features emulated in KDE/Gnome could be patented by Microsoft...like old Apple/MS lawsuits over the GUI in the first place.
Could be, except that those features are themselves descended from MacOS, NeXTSTEP, PARC's GUI, OS/2, CDE, etc. The whole concept of "prior art" applies here. M$ just aggregated a lot of the features into a package that's relatively easy for the average schmuck to use and install.
Besides, the Linux code is out there and available. With the proliferation of file sharing on the 'net, nothing is going to unpublish it. And going after every single Linux developer and distro is going to be a Sisyphian task for MS and will earn them the ill will of a lot of techies, governments, and pundits.
I'm not happy about this, and Novell might lose out in the end, but I don't see it as terribly significant to the future of Linux.
In could not have been in response to Oracle and Red Hat. This has been planned out for years (Novell bought SuSE nearly 3 years ago), and the Microsoft-Novell discussions started in April 2006, well before Oracle made their announcement.
How long have Oracle (no great saint either, witness Larry Ellison's pushing of a national ID schem^Wscam upon the American people) and RedHat been in talks? Probably also 6 or 8 months before their deal became public. And such news has a way of leaking to the competition before it becomes public.
Microsoft just got one of the major Linux vendors to roll over and be Microsoft's personal patent bitch and endorse the idea publicly that Linux is infringing on Microsoft IP and therefore inherently unsafe for business use...
This was tried with SCO/Caldera/Corel/Whatever Linux, and worked oh so well. 6 years later, there are Linux distros galore to be had. And it's not as if MS actually owns Novell or SuSE either.
Things are quite a bit more tricky even if you have material; the "detonate with appropriate explosives" step you mention requires rediculous timing accuracy. Failure to detonate the exposives pefectly results in a non-nuclear blast.
Or a lower-yield nuclear blast. Modern nukes are designed so that failure to achieve perfect detonation results in little or no nuclear yield (for safety reasons, in the event of a bomber crash, for example). Older bombs, with a core closer to critical mass for its size were less particular. A lot of nuclear testing, believe it or not, was dedicated to making nukes that were less prone to accidental or unintentional detonation.
Of course, with a sufficient quantity of reasonably pure U-235, you could just build a gun-type device, in which case there's only one explosive charge, and accurate timing of detonations becomes a non-issue. Scary.
Any country/party that wants to build nukes is going to have a much harder time getting the riht fissile material pulled together than they're going to have setting the thing off.
Who knows: the plans could be for working and economical uranium enrichment technologies, not the nukes themselves. As has been repeated ad nauseum, working nukes aren't that hard to build. More difficult problems are: (a) enriching uranium or extracting plutonium (b) making the nukes reasonably efficient. However, with a sufficient quantity of fissile material, (b) becomes somewhat irrelevant especially because terrorist organizations probably wouldn't use missiles or bombers to deliver their nukes. They'd send them to the US in shipping containers or drive them across the Mexican border in an 18-wheelers false fuel tank.
Plus, actually obtaining the materials to do so isn't easy either.
Right - maybe the plans weren't for a bomb itself - it's easy enough to build a gun-type bomb with sizable yield. Maybe they were for working calutrons or other uranium enrichment technology that allows a nation to gain access to pure fissile material in sufficient quantities to build a nuke.
A few years ago there was a mass panic in some state because a kid did his science project on how to build an atomic bomb.
I think that there was a senior undergrad physics project in Princeton that came close to a working prototype (without the fissile component). That ended up classified.
You're speaking of the "radioactive boy scout," where some high schooler ended up building a powerful neutron source or reactor (depending on your sources) out of the americium sources from several thousand discarded smoke alarms. Apparently, he wasn't too careful about his handling of radioisotopes and his garage required a Hazmat team. Then again, this was in California, IIRC, and they be paranoid over there...
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Have you ever *been* to the United States? The majority of criminal cases are tried in state or county courts. Them having the US flag in the courtroom is more a matter of tradition than anything else, and I'm not sure if any Federal law requires it. You think that the Federal government actually has the money to try each and every case?
-b.
It wouldn't eliminate all US developers. A lot of Linux code is written by people as a hobby anyway, and it's not going to make a bit of difference to the hobbyists.
As far as the 3rd-world countries following US rules: keep in mind that a lot of time and effort has been put into developing Linux as an educational OS for poorer schools (Ubuntu and friends) as well as a de facto government standard in some places (see: Red Flag Linux and whatever projects are on in India). I don't thuink that anyone will let this work go to waste.
Add this to the fact that Linux is just one of several common UNIX-type OS's out there these days. There's Solaris, the *BSD systems, even OS X, all of which have the backing of large companies and are commonly used by universities (again with money) and, I suspect, government research establishments.
The M$ deal was stupid of SuSE you, I grant, but it's not the end of the world nor is it the path to Microsoft's domination of the world as many readers here are making it out to be. Microsoft is a large entrenched company, and history has shown that companies like that generally end up getting pimpslapped into oblivion by a nimbler and more innovative competition. Empires always fall.
-b.
US judge: pay up.
Linux company in country with unfriendly patent laws: kiss my hairy....
-b.
Not even solar panels are needed. Just design houses with appropriately-positioned areas of glass combined with thermal mass like masonry that stores heat overnight. It wouldn't heat a house completely, but passive solar heat does reduce the need for heating in winter significantly.
-b.
It's not birth rates per se that are the problem. It's industrialization. This planet is currently sustaining six billion people (whether this can be continued long-term is debatable). But what if all of those six billion people will have the same standard of living as the average American or even the average Russian today. Energy and resource use will skyrocket.
-b.
The law was ruled unconstitutional some time around 2002-3, though. It have yet to be rewritten. And 2001 would fall under the old law, which is no longer applicable, so the maximum punishment would be life in prison. Fine with me - no need to make martyrs...
As far as trying him under Federal law - in an ideal world, that wouldn't happen. Bin Laden should be held to account in the most direct manner possible under the law by the people whom he hurt. Try him in PA and VA, too, for all I care. But let the state of NY try him, too, because he's fundamentally a common murderer and his actions shouldn't even be glorified with the words "terrorism", "sabotage", etc. Try him exactly that way you'd try any other murdering felon.
-b.
-b.
Which is why we need to develop technology like space elevators and cost-effective nuclear and/or solar sail space propulsion. Ultimately, we'll have to colonize other planets in order for mankind to survive. Not to mention that having mankind spread out through the solar system and maybe in other solar systems as well gives us insurance in case something happens to the Earth like a nuclear war, asteroid strike, or simply the depletion of resources.
-b.
Not exactly. The driver for families having 10 kids or so was that before modern medicine (even in the West, before 1900 or 1920) about five of them would survive. Of those five, two would probably leave the family farm to go seek their fortunes elsewhere. Three would remain as warm bodies to help run the farm when Mom and Dad got old.
Having a lot of kids is fundamentally a *peasant* tradition. And the fact is that infant mortality rates were until recently (or still are) high in the developing world, and it takes a time of a few decades at least to change an entire culture.
-b.
Yeah, but as third-world nations develop, the average energy and resource use of their citizens shoots up. We may have "only" ten billion people after the next century, but right now not all of our six billion are driving cars, playing with plasticky toys, using computers, and talking on cell phones. A lot of the current population of the world doesn't even have electricity. What if all of the future Earth's ten billion people will have (say) on average half the disposable income of the average American today?
-b.
If you don't want to give candy to trick-or-treaters, don't open the door when they knock. Or don't leave the front light on or make other signs that they're welcome. Grumpy old farts like you are the reason why this country is mired in stupid regulations while ignoring what's important (the environment, real improvements in education, etc).
-b.
I'm not saying we should allow him to be attacked (or not). I'm saying that life in an American jail isn't exactly pleasant, and special military tribunals aren't needed nor desirable to mete out punishment to those who deserve it.
-b.
-b.
Remove the functionality, then make sure that the code and packages "leak" out for free and are easily available on sites hosted in friendly countries i.e. those that don't have the same level of patent stupidity as the US.
-b.
Military tribunals and secret decision-making like this are horrible ideas because there's no accountability involved. But what about hard-core terrorists like Osama, those responsible for WTC I and WTC II among other things? If anything, this applies more. I want to see the bastards on trial in a New York courtroom, in public, accountable to the very populace whom they injured and whose families they murdered. Then, since New York has no death penalty, a nice long term in Sing Sing in the same cellblock with the Aryan Brotherhood. Justice doesn't have to be meted out by military courts to be tough or fair.
-b.
Right, so's basically *any* operating system company, including Microsoft, Apple, and Sun. To use the often-overused car analogy, a lot of those patents are like patenting the location of a shift lever or the number of cylinders in a car. Such very general patents have been ruled to be void time and again.
Besides, does the developing world/non-US/EU countries really give a flying fuck about software patents in the US? Or will they shake their heads in disgust and keep developing Linux and other innovative systems? I don't think that Ubuntu's signing on to M$'s protection racket, nor are the hundreds of other small Linux creators and companies. And with torrents and improved p2p tech, the distribution of Linux won't cease, even in the US.
-b.
Except that the developing world will keep developing non-M$ OS's, just because they (a) won't be able to afford the ever-increasing hardware demands of Micro$hit, (b) don't particularly like the US oftentimes, and (c) want to keep their hardware free of US control.
Besides, Micro$oft tried to pull a cute trick liek that in 2000/2001 with SCO. Guess how far that got them. SuSE is one distro out of several hundred (at least!) The strength of Linux is its decentralization.
The other possibility is much less "evil" - that MS is actually conceding that they may need help for their next generation of OS.
-b.
Let them. The source code is already out there. Nothing short of the Earth exploding can unpublish it. Are they going to have the resources to sue every Linux developer and every person and/or company that puts out a distro? In countries that are unfriendly to US corporate interests? I think not.
Plus, to do so would further antagonize various governments and organizations that are just itching to press antitrust suits against MS. This bodes ill for Novell, certainly. However, this *may* also mean that MS is getting out of the "NT" based server market and is shopping around for a suitable replacement platform - maybe they're learning from their mistakes.
-b.
Could be, except that those features are themselves descended from MacOS, NeXTSTEP, PARC's GUI, OS/2, CDE, etc. The whole concept of "prior art" applies here. M$ just aggregated a lot of the features into a package that's relatively easy for the average schmuck to use and install.
Besides, the Linux code is out there and available. With the proliferation of file sharing on the 'net, nothing is going to unpublish it. And going after every single Linux developer and distro is going to be a Sisyphian task for MS and will earn them the ill will of a lot of techies, governments, and pundits.
I'm not happy about this, and Novell might lose out in the end, but I don't see it as terribly significant to the future of Linux.
-b.
How long have Oracle (no great saint either, witness Larry Ellison's pushing of a national ID schem^Wscam upon the American people) and RedHat been in talks? Probably also 6 or 8 months before their deal became public. And such news has a way of leaking to the competition before it becomes public.
-b.
This was tried with SCO/Caldera/Corel/Whatever Linux, and worked oh so well. 6 years later, there are Linux distros galore to be had. And it's not as if MS actually owns Novell or SuSE either.
-b.
Or a lower-yield nuclear blast. Modern nukes are designed so that failure to achieve perfect detonation results in little or no nuclear yield (for safety reasons, in the event of a bomber crash, for example). Older bombs, with a core closer to critical mass for its size were less particular. A lot of nuclear testing, believe it or not, was dedicated to making nukes that were less prone to accidental or unintentional detonation.
Of course, with a sufficient quantity of reasonably pure U-235, you could just build a gun-type device, in which case there's only one explosive charge, and accurate timing of detonations becomes a non-issue. Scary.
-b.
Who knows: the plans could be for working and economical uranium enrichment technologies, not the nukes themselves. As has been repeated ad nauseum, working nukes aren't that hard to build. More difficult problems are: (a) enriching uranium or extracting plutonium (b) making the nukes reasonably efficient. However, with a sufficient quantity of fissile material, (b) becomes somewhat irrelevant especially because terrorist organizations probably wouldn't use missiles or bombers to deliver their nukes. They'd send them to the US in shipping containers or drive them across the Mexican border in an 18-wheelers false fuel tank.
-b.
Right - maybe the plans weren't for a bomb itself - it's easy enough to build a gun-type bomb with sizable yield. Maybe they were for working calutrons or other uranium enrichment technology that allows a nation to gain access to pure fissile material in sufficient quantities to build a nuke.
A few years ago there was a mass panic in some state because a kid did his science project on how to build an atomic bomb.
I think that there was a senior undergrad physics project in Princeton that came close to a working prototype (without the fissile component). That ended up classified.
You're speaking of the "radioactive boy scout," where some high schooler ended up building a powerful neutron source or reactor (depending on your sources) out of the americium sources from several thousand discarded smoke alarms. Apparently, he wasn't too careful about his handling of radioisotopes and his garage required a Hazmat team. Then again, this was in California, IIRC, and they be paranoid over there...
-b.
-b.