The controversy with Corby is because a lot of people here believe she is innocent, not because they think she should be allowed to have or use marajuana.
This is in NSW, Australia's most populated state which includes Sydney Australia's biggest city which has the reputation as being the most crime-ridden too.
Interesting to note that the murder rate, which is typically affected most by the availability or not of guns, is the lowest on record at 1.0 per 100,000.
Interesting but it gives no evidence about guns either way.
Another point is that the US still has 5.6 homicide per 100,000 people to Australia's 1.8. Homicide is the most likely of those crimes to involve a gun. Shooting someone is not put down as 'assault' or 'rape' or 'robbery' - it'd most likely be included in homicide figures (or attempted homicide if they didn't die).
Anyway the site you link to is obviously trying to push a point-of-view. They've presented a select few stats which appear to support their POV.
I live in Australia's largest city (Sydney) and this is absolute bullshit. We do have plenty of crime, like any other city, but there's no evidence that its increased since they made it harder to get guns (after the massacre of 35 people by one man at a tourist spot in Tasmania).
I challenge you to provide any real evidence whatsoever that crime has 1) increased since the new gun laws and 2) that this increase can be linked to the increased difficulty of getting guns.
When I go out in Sydney I shudder to think what would happen if all the participants in the fist-fights and stuff I see where armed with guns instead.
FWIW I totally agree that any censorship of the internet is bad. But its totally illogical to associate freedoms like freedom of speech, movement and so on with the right (or privelege more like) to own a gun. The fact that gun ownership is in your US constitution alongside those freedoms is purely an accident of history - the constitution was written at a time that you guys were fearing an invasion from the poms.
Isn't this MacAfee thing just like all the other 'linux desktop' virus scanners from companies like Fprot - ie. just designed to scan for Windows viruses to stop you passing viruses to users of that OS.
Are there any tests or proof done against any Linux viruses that show that these scanners actually pick them up and stop the infection? Have there ever been any Linux viruses that have actually spread in a virulent way? Have there been any cases of Linux virus infection anywhere in the last 5 years?
I'm asking this because although I think that Linux is protected enough from viruses without needing windows-style desktop scanning software, but I want a good answer for the people who will start saying "OMFG now I need to get MacAfee for my Linux box too, its no better than Windows".
The thing is, the Flahs player is FREE. So the only reason to write this one is political, not technical
There are some practical reasons as well as political: 1) Distros can't package flash into a nice-easy-to-install package. Newbie users often find it extremely difficult to download, unpack and then run the installer. Also having it in the package management system means it can be easily updated when fixes come out and it can be used as a dependency in other packages.
2) Have to rely on Macromedia for bugs and security fixes - ie. no control of how quickly things get fixed. Also bugs which only affect Linux may get much lower priority than others because they only affect a small proportion of the userbase, this is double so for other platforms like solaris.
3) Have to rely on Macromedia deciding to continue supporting it - they may decide its not worth doing this for solaris, how many solaris machines are used for web browsing?
4) The only Linux distros they list as supported (http://www.macromedia.com/software/flash/producti nfo/systemreqs/) is RH9 and RHEL3. The fact that it works on other distros is a matter of luck and if it stopped working there would be nothing we could do to change it.
success of drink-driving laws (enacted on the basis of previously mentioned data & reasoning)
I never said that drink driving laws aren't successful I'm saying that lower ones for younger drivers aren't necessary because all they do is criminalise something that's judged safe for the rest of the population. Where's this previously mentioned data? You've provided none - just your own arguments. Is there any data showing that its lowered crashes involving drunk young people? Even lowered the number found drink driving?
that's why we have courts, judges and juries.
That's the problem - you have to rely on the leniency of the magistrate. You can be fined $1100 and be disqualified for 3-6 months for 0.019 or less (see the link in my last post). In fact that page says that 3 months is a minimum disqualification, implying that even if the magistrate is lenient that's what you'll get, although IANAL.
There's a great deal of prior judgements that say "zero" != 0.00
You keep arguing this without providing any examples.
Wether or not young people drink more than older people or even are more likely to drink drive it doesn't prove that lower BAC limits work for them. If young people are as ready to drink drive and do it dangerously as you say they are then wether the limit is 0.00 or 0.05 they'll drink drive.
"If you drink, you don't drive" means exactly that"
You're the one who's missed the point. The question is 'how long after I drink can I drive'. What if I get the taxi home after dinner can I then drive out to pick up some milk from the shops a couple of hours later? Will I be ok then? Should I just risk it anyway even if I'm not sure? How much did I actually drink at dinner - hmm I wasn't counting etc. Unless I never drink again in my life then at some point I will have to ask these questions. If its the next day or something then I'm sure everythings fine, but this would be the case with 0.05 too so its irrelevant here.
This is the same numbers game as if the limit was 0.05. It adds absoulutely no more certainty to have the limit at 0.00 unless you are a teetotaler - and in that case drink driving laws are irrelevant to you.
"I can't imagine that would stand up against a legal challenge" You can imagine what you like but the law is quite clear. You might be lucky and get a lenient magistrate for something like that of course, but thats a matter of luck. http://www.legalaid.nsw.gov.au/asp/index.asp?pgid= 76 See section on penalties.
Of course more young people do this because young people go out and socialise more in pubs and clubs. It doesn't necessarily mean that they are more likely to drink drive and it doesn't mean that they need different drink driving rules to older people.
Actually there is - tolerance build-up over time This is only in people who drink regularly, and it fades if you stop drinking. It doesn't mean that older people will necessarily have a higher tolerance - a good proportion of the population will have lower tolerance than most young people simply because they rarely drink.
If you drink, you don't drive - simple.
That's no simpler than the 0.05 system. Asking yourself 'if I had a beer an hour ago when will I be at zero again?' is the same as 'if I had a beer an hour ago how near to 0.05 am I'. Its all just numbers - amount of alcohol consumed minus time passed. It doesn't make it anymore certain trying to estimate when you'll be at zero than when you'll be at 0.05. At least with 0.05 the responsible person (which by all accounts is still the vast majority of people old and young) has a reasonable buffer to protect themselves.
I'm pretty sure you'll find the legal definition of "zero" is 0.02
Then I hope to god you're not a lawyer! I'll say it again - the NSW govt. reduced the limit for p-platers from 0.02 to 0.00. 0.00 is no more 0.02 than 0.07 is 0.05. http://www.parliament.nsw.gov.au/prod/parlment/han sart.nsf/V3Key/LA20030902015 " zero blood alcohol limit for L-plate and P-plate drivers. That is a reduction from the current limit of 0.02"
This is because the typical teenager has absolutely NFI how to a) gauge how much they've had to drink, b) know when to stop and c) objectively assess the impact alcohol has had on them
I doubt most adults can do this either, that's why we have a set limit - 0.05. There's no medical reason why being older than a p-plater would make your driving less affected by alcohol.
Personally I'm a supporter of a zero BAC for *everyone*
This'd be an unfair infringement on the lifestyles of the vast majority of people who obey the rules. Besides, I don't think this'd have significant impact because the problem is one of enforcement of the existing rules - if people don't obey 0.05 they sure as hell won't obey zero.
it limits the way rich and/or famous people can get off
I hate it when rich and famous ppl get let off for things like this too but it doesn't happen all that often. That d***head high court judge (Jeff Shaw I think) even managed to steal his blood sample but they still got him for drink drive in the end (and found the blood sample). Also there's apparently a lot of difference in the penalties for drink drive handed out by different magistrates in different areas - some will not even suspend the licences for most of the cases brought before them, some will. Anyway we shouldn't have to give up our priveleges just to get a few rich people for harsher drink drive penalties.
the legal definition of "zero" is 0.02 or under
In NSW it *used* to be 0.02 for p-platers before they dropped it to zero. IANAL but I doubt they'd drop it to zero and then say 'oh well its actually zero up to 0.02 that's OK, even though we just changed it from 0.02'. This is probably different in QLD.
These figures have been used in ads here Australia for years and years - as long as I can remember. And they haven't changed the 0.05 limit for as long as I can remember either.
However some wowsers managed to push the government into a zero limit for 'provisional' (ie. 17-20 year old) drivers. As if criminalising harmless trace amounts of alcohol is going to solve the drink driving problem. I've heard that people have been booked, gone to court, been fined and had their licence suspended for as little as 0.01 under these stupid laws.
This would be good if it was installed in the cars of drink driving offenders, like the current programs which install breath testers linked to the ignition.
But why should the vast majority of law-abiding people pay $600 to install something in their cars which will mostly be little more than a nuisance. Even worse breath testers of all types are notoriously unreliable unless calibrated regularly, which simply won't happen - how often do people get their speedo's calibrated?
I can't imagine anything more frustrating than a car that won't start because of some stupid fault in what is a very complex but unnecessary device. I can only shudder at the cost of getting something like that fixed - anybody who owns a car will know that even the simplest maintainance costs shit loads of $$$, let alone something this complex. Worse still will be when I'm sitting in front of the TV in the evening and hear of some drink driver who bribed a passer-by to start his car and then went on to kill someone at a pedestrian crossing. Or a drunk driver who had his mate-who-knows-about-cars bypass the system and then went on to kill someone etc.
Even worse would be a system that stops the car in mid-drive if it decides that you are drunk. Even if you're not on a freeway or in a tunnel it can be very dangerous to kill the engine of a modern car due to the sudden drastic change in the steering and braking systems due to the loss of power. I know of someone who sideswiped a guard rail in a car that was known to have engine problems for no other reason than it lost power at a point where the road was curving.
One shot of hard alcohol = one wineglass of wine = one bottle of beer = one FULL hour not driving.
In Australia we call that a standard drink and the (government sponsored) adverts have always said that you can drink '2 standard drinks in the first hour and one for each hour after that' and you'll be under the 0.05 limit we have here.
There's another poster I've seen in pubs about beer drinking that says you should only drink 2 full-strength beers in 2 hours to keep under 0.05. In NSW beer is sold in schooner (~375ml) glasses which for local beers is 1.5 standard drinks.
Just to give you an idea of some officialy sanctioned figures.
Sounds good, I assume you've enlightened the Mozilla developers on how this should be done? Ie. what you would cut out or streamline to acheive this?
While your cutting things in half how about taking your axe to that ~70MB Internet Explorer download size? Also its memory usage could do with a bit of a chop too - except its hard to accurately measure since its so tightly integrated into the OS.
The idea of Firefox was to make a simple, lightweight and as secure as possible browser, not to try and reinvent the web browser. If you want innovation go and look at all the extensions available for firefox.
Need I point out that file sharing was pioneered by Napster? So Napster was a decentralised, distributed network was it? And before you say 'Kazaa got their first' have a look at Gnutella. And bittorrent is different from both of those.
OpenOffice? Aha so the OpenDocument Standard is not an innovation? And I hate to burst your bubble but MS Office was mostly a clone of the applications that came before it - Visicalc, Wordperfect etc.
PHP? Wrong PHP existed before ASP. Also Perl had been around for years by the time ASP was realsed and was frequently used to create dynamic web sites. You don't think MS may have gotten a tinkle of an idea from that?
MySQL? Creating a simple, easy to setup, lightweight, highly scalable database is not an innovation? MySQL was created to fill the market for a simpler non-heavyweight client/server relational database, a market it basically invented, if that's not innovation I don't know what is. And by the way SQL is a standard that is 'copied' and 'cloned' in every proprietary database system out there.
Everything I can think of is either a blatant clone of a closed source product You obviously don't think very much then. Both proprietary and open products have a long history of both re-using existing ideas (what you mistake as 'cloning') while simultaneously adding their own new ideas, innovations and a different take on how to do things. There's absolutely no evidence that this traffic is all one way and you certainly haven't made the case in this post.
how many of those do make a revenue from support? Redhat, Novell, Mandraiva, MySQL AB... etc etc
Exactly what neat profit does Sun make from supporting Open Office? None since they don't sell or support it. They make money selling their proprietary Star Office, which has support from them plus a few features not in OpenOffice. Star Office is based off the OpenOffice code base, that's why its a worthwhile investment for Sun to sponsor OpenOffice development. They must be making some worthwhile money off it since they've been doing it for years now and show no sign of withdrawing.
This is the exact definition of what a Linux distribution does.
Some do it for free as a labour-of-love project, eg. Gentoo, Debian; some do it as a business activity under some kind of business model (which may or may not involve charging for the software itself) eg. Mandriva, Redhat, Novell etc.
Either way both your argument about no one to QA and package OSS and McEvoy's about no viable business models in OSS are debunked.
Optus here in Australia blocked port 25 a while back like this. At first you had to ring them to get it undone but then they put a thing on the web page so you could just click to unblock it permantently for your account. It said something scary about you accepting all responsibility for any spam that comes from your computers.
Personally I think this is the right approach since most people who want to access externeal SMTP servers are cluey enough to get it unblocked. Whereas it still targets the rest of the customers who wouldn't notice or take action if their computer grew devil horns and started glowing an evil red as an indication that it had been zombied by a spammer.
But back on point, you would need a separate staff to offer support to those laptops. Anything from configuring Xorg, to trying to get the wireless card to work, to actually joining a network.
Configuring xorg and joining a network is as simple as Windows, if not more so, on modern distros like Mandriva or Suse these days. There's no evidence that it would take more tech support to do this with Linux and with Windows.
But back on point, how is any of this different from companies that have Linux servers and Windows desktops? Windows is only 50% of the server market, yet if say 95% of business use Windows desktops then 45% of businesses will be running Linux or *BSD or MacOS or something else as well as windows.
We do this at my company - all Linux servers and all Windows desktops (except for my workstation:)) and there's no need for a seperate staff - there's me full-time doing both Linux server admin and Win desktop support and there's a consultant 1-day a week who helps with Linux server admin. We have about 25 windows users in total and 10 servers at each of 2 sites (some are just router/firewall boxes).
7 years for RHEL. Mandrake appears to support their corporate server for up to 5 years (http://www.mandriva.com/business/corporate-server ). Suse for 5 years also (http://www.novell.com/products/linuxenterpriseser ver/maintenance/lifecycle.html).
True, you have to 'subscribe' (ie pay) for all these long release cylce distros.
I don't think you were very clear with that point in your 1st post - it sounded like you were saying that Linux couldn't 'patch itself' and that the only way to get updates was by subscriptions.
Yeah right, and the first time there's a power outage and the Windows system corrupts its hard drive who's going to bring it back up? What's that "well it's never happened on my Windows systems" well I've got news for you - it almost never happens on Linux systems either. You're trying to use an extremely rare problem that could happen in either OS to compare the 2.
" How long will that Linux distro be able to (if it even can) patch itself. 12 months? 18 months?"
Try a few hours at most. Maybe you need to actually install modern Linux distro and see the update mechanisms available before you attempt to criticise it.
"how much money do you have to pay for access to the automatic patching"
Depends on your distro, almost all, including commercial ones (eg. Mandrake, Suse) allow free access to updates. RHEL is about the only one that wants to charge a 'subscription' but if you don't like that then just get a RHEL rebuild such as Centos.
"Sure the "freeness" of Linux is a good bonus from the get go, but that alone doesn't guarantee any kind of long term cost savings"
Agreed, but you don't appear to have much knowledge of Linux and therefore would be in no position to evaluate 'long term cost savings'.
Slashdot Mirror
The controversy with Corby is because a lot of people here believe she is innocent, not because they think she should be allowed to have or use marajuana.
crime plunges to lowest level in years:- to-lowest-level-in-years/2005/04/18/1113676704326. html?oneclick=true
http://www.smh.com.au/news/National/Crime-plunges
This is in NSW, Australia's most populated state which includes Sydney Australia's biggest city which has the reputation as being the most crime-ridden too.
Interesting to note that the murder rate, which is typically affected most by the availability or not of guns, is the lowest on record at 1.0 per 100,000.
Interesting but it gives no evidence about guns either way.
Another point is that the US still has 5.6 homicide per 100,000 people to Australia's 1.8. Homicide is the most likely of those crimes to involve a gun. Shooting someone is not put down as 'assault' or 'rape' or 'robbery' - it'd most likely be included in homicide figures (or attempted homicide if they didn't die).
Anyway the site you link to is obviously trying to push a point-of-view. They've presented a select few stats which appear to support their POV.
FYI, Australia now has insanely high crime rates.
I live in Australia's largest city (Sydney) and this is absolute bullshit. We do have plenty of crime, like any other city, but there's no evidence that its increased since they made it harder to get guns (after the massacre of 35 people by one man at a tourist spot in Tasmania).
I challenge you to provide any real evidence whatsoever that crime has 1) increased since the new gun laws and 2) that this increase can be linked to the increased difficulty of getting guns.
When I go out in Sydney I shudder to think what would happen if all the participants in the fist-fights and stuff I see where armed with guns instead.
FWIW I totally agree that any censorship of the internet is bad. But its totally illogical to associate freedoms like freedom of speech, movement and so on with the right (or privelege more like) to own a gun. The fact that gun ownership is in your US constitution alongside those freedoms is purely an accident of history - the constitution was written at a time that you guys were fearing an invasion from the poms.
Isn't this MacAfee thing just like all the other 'linux desktop' virus scanners from companies like Fprot - ie. just designed to scan for Windows viruses to stop you passing viruses to users of that OS.
Are there any tests or proof done against any Linux viruses that show that these scanners actually pick them up and stop the infection? Have there ever been any Linux viruses that have actually spread in a virulent way? Have there been any cases of Linux virus infection anywhere in the last 5 years?
I'm asking this because although I think that Linux is protected enough from viruses without needing windows-style desktop scanning software, but I want a good answer for the people who will start saying "OMFG now I need to get MacAfee for my Linux box too, its no better than Windows".
Hummer can only make it 163.5 miles on a single tank of gas Surely that's a typo - 1.6 miles a tank seems right for the hummer.
The thing is, the Flahs player is FREE. So the only reason to write this one is political, not technical
i nfo/systemreqs/) is RH9 and RHEL3. The fact that it works on other distros is a matter of luck and if it stopped working there would be nothing we could do to change it.
There are some practical reasons as well as political:
1) Distros can't package flash into a nice-easy-to-install package. Newbie users often find it extremely difficult to download, unpack and then run the installer. Also having it in the package management system means it can be easily updated when fixes come out and it can be used as a dependency in other packages.
2) Have to rely on Macromedia for bugs and security fixes - ie. no control of how quickly things get fixed. Also bugs which only affect Linux may get much lower priority than others because they only affect a small proportion of the userbase, this is double so for other platforms like solaris.
3) Have to rely on Macromedia deciding to continue supporting it - they may decide its not worth doing this for solaris, how many solaris machines are used for web browsing?
4) The only Linux distros they list as supported (http://www.macromedia.com/software/flash/product
success of drink-driving laws (enacted on the basis of previously mentioned data & reasoning)
I never said that drink driving laws aren't successful I'm saying that lower ones for younger drivers aren't necessary because all they do is criminalise something that's judged safe for the rest of the population. Where's this previously mentioned data? You've provided none - just your own arguments. Is there any data showing that its lowered crashes involving drunk young people? Even lowered the number found drink driving?
that's why we have courts, judges and juries.
That's the problem - you have to rely on the leniency of the magistrate. You can be fined $1100 and be disqualified for 3-6 months for 0.019 or less (see the link in my last post). In fact that page says that 3 months is a minimum disqualification, implying that even if the magistrate is lenient that's what you'll get, although IANAL.
There's a great deal of prior judgements that say "zero" != 0.00
You keep arguing this without providing any examples.
Maybe its time KDE changed it to Dokuments :-)
Seriously though is really puts the lie to all those arguments about how KDE and GNOME are just clones of the Windows desktop.
Global warming will speed to extenction of many creatures, but it will also aid evoltion of many more
It sure will. The problem is that by the time that has happened human civilization could be as dead as the dodo.
Wether or not young people drink more than older people or even are more likely to drink drive it doesn't prove that lower BAC limits work for them. If young people are as ready to drink drive and do it dangerously as you say they are then wether the limit is 0.00 or 0.05 they'll drink drive.
= 76
"If you drink, you don't drive" means exactly that"
You're the one who's missed the point. The question is 'how long after I drink can I drive'. What if I get the taxi home after dinner can I then drive out to pick up some milk from the shops a couple of hours later? Will I be ok then? Should I just risk it anyway even if I'm not sure? How much did I actually drink at dinner - hmm I wasn't counting etc. Unless I never drink again in my life then at some point I will have to ask these questions. If its the next day or something then I'm sure everythings fine, but this would be the case with 0.05 too so its irrelevant here.
This is the same numbers game as if the limit was 0.05. It adds absoulutely no more certainty to have the limit at 0.00 unless you are a teetotaler - and in that case drink driving laws are irrelevant to you.
"I can't imagine that would stand up against a legal challenge"
You can imagine what you like but the law is quite clear. You might be lucky and get a lenient magistrate for something like that of course, but thats a matter of luck.
http://www.legalaid.nsw.gov.au/asp/index.asp?pgid
See section on penalties.
The percentage of young binge drinkers is a lot higher than percentage of old binge drinkers
i nking
n sart.nsf/V3Key/LA20030902015
If you're binge drinking then by definition you're going to be over the limit whatever its set at. http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=binge+dr
Of course more young people do this because young people go out and socialise more in pubs and clubs. It doesn't necessarily mean that they are more likely to drink drive and it doesn't mean that they need different drink driving rules to older people.
Actually there is - tolerance build-up over time
This is only in people who drink regularly, and it fades if you stop drinking. It doesn't mean that older people will necessarily have a higher tolerance - a good proportion of the population will have lower tolerance than most young people simply because they rarely drink.
If you drink, you don't drive - simple.
That's no simpler than the 0.05 system. Asking yourself 'if I had a beer an hour ago when will I be at zero again?' is the same as 'if I had a beer an hour ago how near to 0.05 am I'. Its all just numbers - amount of alcohol consumed minus time passed. It doesn't make it anymore certain trying to estimate when you'll be at zero than when you'll be at 0.05. At least with 0.05 the responsible person (which by all accounts is still the vast majority of people old and young) has a reasonable buffer to protect themselves.
I'm pretty sure you'll find the legal definition of "zero" is 0.02
Then I hope to god you're not a lawyer! I'll say it again - the NSW govt. reduced the limit for p-platers from 0.02 to 0.00. 0.00 is no more 0.02 than 0.07 is 0.05.
http://www.parliament.nsw.gov.au/prod/parlment/ha
" zero blood alcohol limit for L-plate and P-plate drivers. That is a reduction from the current limit of 0.02"
This is because the typical teenager has absolutely NFI how to a) gauge how much they've had to drink, b) know when to stop and c) objectively assess the impact alcohol has had on them
I doubt most adults can do this either, that's why we have a set limit - 0.05. There's no medical reason why being older than a p-plater would make your driving less affected by alcohol.
Personally I'm a supporter of a zero BAC for *everyone*
This'd be an unfair infringement on the lifestyles of the vast majority of people who obey the rules. Besides, I don't think this'd have significant impact because the problem is one of enforcement of the existing rules - if people don't obey 0.05 they sure as hell won't obey zero.
it limits the way rich and/or famous people can get off
I hate it when rich and famous ppl get let off for things like this too but it doesn't happen all that often. That d***head high court judge (Jeff Shaw I think) even managed to steal his blood sample but they still got him for drink drive in the end (and found the blood sample). Also there's apparently a lot of difference in the penalties for drink drive handed out by different magistrates in different areas - some will not even suspend the licences for most of the cases brought before them, some will. Anyway we shouldn't have to give up our priveleges just to get a few rich people for harsher drink drive penalties.
the legal definition of "zero" is 0.02 or under
In NSW it *used* to be 0.02 for p-platers before they dropped it to zero. IANAL but I doubt they'd drop it to zero and then say 'oh well its actually zero up to 0.02 that's OK, even though we just changed it from 0.02'. This is probably different in QLD.
If only the same were true for trolls you might have another way of getting attention besides posting flamebait on slashdot
These figures have been used in ads here Australia for years and years - as long as I can remember. And they haven't changed the 0.05 limit for as long as I can remember either.
However some wowsers managed to push the government into a zero limit for 'provisional' (ie. 17-20 year old) drivers. As if criminalising harmless trace amounts of alcohol is going to solve the drink driving problem. I've heard that people have been booked, gone to court, been fined and had their licence suspended for as little as 0.01 under these stupid laws.
This would be good if it was installed in the cars of drink driving offenders, like the current programs which install breath testers linked to the ignition.
But why should the vast majority of law-abiding people pay $600 to install something in their cars which will mostly be little more than a nuisance. Even worse breath testers of all types are notoriously unreliable unless calibrated regularly, which simply won't happen - how often do people get their speedo's calibrated?
I can't imagine anything more frustrating than a car that won't start because of some stupid fault in what is a very complex but unnecessary device. I can only shudder at the cost of getting something like that fixed - anybody who owns a car will know that even the simplest maintainance costs shit loads of $$$, let alone something this complex. Worse still will be when I'm sitting in front of the TV in the evening and hear of some drink driver who bribed a passer-by to start his car and then went on to kill someone at a pedestrian crossing. Or a drunk driver who had his mate-who-knows-about-cars bypass the system and then went on to kill someone etc.
Even worse would be a system that stops the car in mid-drive if it decides that you are drunk. Even if you're not on a freeway or in a tunnel it can be very dangerous to kill the engine of a modern car due to the sudden drastic change in the steering and braking systems due to the loss of power. I know of someone who sideswiped a guard rail in a car that was known to have engine problems for no other reason than it lost power at a point where the road was curving.
In Australia we call that a standard drink and the (government sponsored) adverts have always said that you can drink '2 standard drinks in the first hour and one for each hour after that' and you'll be under the 0.05 limit we have here.
There's another poster I've seen in pubs about beer drinking that says you should only drink 2 full-strength beers in 2 hours to keep under 0.05. In NSW beer is sold in schooner (~375ml) glasses which for local beers is 1.5 standard drinks.
Just to give you an idea of some officialy sanctioned figures.
Sounds good, I assume you've enlightened the Mozilla developers on how this should be done? Ie. what you would cut out or streamline to acheive this?
While your cutting things in half how about taking your axe to that ~70MB Internet Explorer download size? Also its memory usage could do with a bit of a chop too - except its hard to accurately measure since its so tightly integrated into the OS.
The idea of Firefox was to make a simple, lightweight and as secure as possible browser, not to try and reinvent the web browser. If you want innovation go and look at all the extensions available for firefox.
Need I point out that file sharing was pioneered by Napster?
So Napster was a decentralised, distributed network was it? And before you say 'Kazaa got their first' have a look at Gnutella. And bittorrent is different from both of those.
OpenOffice?
Aha so the OpenDocument Standard is not an innovation? And I hate to burst your bubble but MS Office was mostly a clone of the applications that came before it - Visicalc, Wordperfect etc.
PHP?
Wrong PHP existed before ASP. Also Perl had been around for years by the time ASP was realsed and was frequently used to create dynamic web sites. You don't think MS may have gotten a tinkle of an idea from that?
MySQL?
Creating a simple, easy to setup, lightweight, highly scalable database is not an innovation? MySQL was created to fill the market for a simpler non-heavyweight client/server relational database, a market it basically invented, if that's not innovation I don't know what is. And by the way SQL is a standard that is 'copied' and 'cloned' in every proprietary database system out there.
Everything I can think of is either a blatant clone of a closed source product
You obviously don't think very much then. Both proprietary and open products have a long history of both re-using existing ideas (what you mistake as 'cloning') while simultaneously adding their own new ideas, innovations and a different take on how to do things. There's absolutely no evidence that this traffic is all one way and you certainly haven't made the case in this post.
how many of those do make a revenue from support?
Redhat, Novell, Mandraiva, MySQL AB... etc etc
Exactly what neat profit does Sun make from supporting Open Office?
None since they don't sell or support it. They make money selling their proprietary Star Office, which has support from them plus a few features not in OpenOffice. Star Office is based off the OpenOffice code base, that's why its a worthwhile investment for Sun to sponsor OpenOffice development. They must be making some worthwhile money off it since they've been doing it for years now and show no sign of withdrawing.
... getting it polished, fully QAed and packaged
This is the exact definition of what a Linux distribution does.
Some do it for free as a labour-of-love project, eg. Gentoo, Debian; some do it as a business activity under some kind of business model (which may or may not involve charging for the software itself) eg. Mandriva, Redhat, Novell etc.
Either way both your argument about no one to QA and package OSS and McEvoy's about no viable business models in OSS are debunked.
Optus here in Australia blocked port 25 a while back like this. At first you had to ring them to get it undone but then they put a thing on the web page so you could just click to unblock it permantently for your account. It said something scary about you accepting all responsibility for any spam that comes from your computers.
Personally I think this is the right approach since most people who want to access externeal SMTP servers are cluey enough to get it unblocked. Whereas it still targets the rest of the customers who wouldn't notice or take action if their computer grew devil horns and started glowing an evil red as an indication that it had been zombied by a spammer.
Configuring xorg and joining a network is as simple as Windows, if not more so, on modern distros like Mandriva or Suse these days. There's no evidence that it would take more tech support to do this with Linux and with Windows.
But back on point, how is any of this different from companies that have Linux servers and Windows desktops? Windows is only 50% of the server market, yet if say 95% of business use Windows desktops then 45% of businesses will be running Linux or *BSD or MacOS or something else as well as windows.
We do this at my company - all Linux servers and all Windows desktops (except for my workstation
"1 year, 18 months, 2.5 years?"
r ). Suse for 5 years also (http://www.novell.com/products/linuxenterpriseser ver/maintenance/lifecycle.html).
7 years for RHEL. Mandrake appears to support their corporate server for up to 5 years (http://www.mandriva.com/business/corporate-serve
True, you have to 'subscribe' (ie pay) for all these long release cylce distros.
I don't think you were very clear with that point in your 1st post - it sounded like you were saying that Linux couldn't 'patch itself' and that the only way to get updates was by subscriptions.
"Linux server won't come back up without a fsck"
Yeah right, and the first time there's a power outage and the Windows system corrupts its hard drive who's going to bring it back up? What's that "well it's never happened on my Windows systems" well I've got news for you - it almost never happens on Linux systems either. You're trying to use an extremely rare problem that could happen in either OS to compare the 2.
" How long will that Linux distro be able to (if it even can) patch itself. 12 months? 18 months?"
Try a few hours at most. Maybe you need to actually install modern Linux distro and see the update mechanisms available before you attempt to criticise it.
"how much money do you have to pay for access to the automatic patching"
Depends on your distro, almost all, including commercial ones (eg. Mandrake, Suse) allow free access to updates. RHEL is about the only one that wants to charge a 'subscription' but if you don't like that then just get a RHEL rebuild such as Centos.
"Sure the "freeness" of Linux is a good bonus from the get go, but that alone doesn't guarantee any kind of long term cost savings"
Agreed, but you don't appear to have much knowledge of Linux and therefore would be in no position to evaluate 'long term cost savings'.
Mandrake is i586 and has been almost since the beggining.