The dichotomy I think they were exploiting (misleadingly in my view) is that you can add hardware features with the express intent of supporting DRM, without them being DRM themselves.
It's like the "Trusted Computing" stuff... you absolutely can use some of that hardware support to implement an ultra-secure network of Linux machines doing whatever it is *you* want them to do. It's not really DRM if you use it that way. But applied differently it can be used to provide a completely locked-down system that serves the wishes of media companies, not those of the system's owner.
At a more basic level, a crypto accelerator can be used for all sorts of purposes on the user's behalf; or it can be used to enhance some kind of annoying DRM system that serves outside interests.
Intel's take seems to be that they've added something that isn't *in itself* DRM. But they're "selling it" with a load of content-related advantages that are explicitly DRM-based, so it's no mystery which side they think their bread's buttered. DRM has apparently become a dirty word, which is good, but I don't like their semantic games over this new feature, which seem to be designed to mislead not inform.
From reading Intel's blog post, it sounds like they're defining DRM to be a software component and pointing out that Insider is a hardware feature, so not DRM. I think they're probably even right. But it sounds like Intel Insider is a hardware feature that's intended for implementing DRM (although maybe it has other uses) and that they're marketing it as being an improvement for DRM. It seems a little bit misleading to say "It's not DRM but it has these benefits ". But that's just my take on the blog post, maybe more technical information would change the picture.
Yes! I can imagine that better haptics might actually replace physical keyboards for general consumption just like membrane / scissor keyboards replaced mechanical keyswitches.
But the real enthusiasts, heavy typers and power users are still going to want real mechanical switches like they alway have done.
[Typing this on a Maltron 3D keyboard with Cherry MX black keys; my IBM Model M is at work, my Model F (like the M - but even more so) is sitting handily next to me.]
Ceph is a really cool bit of technology. It distributes storage redundantly across multiple machines, so you can store lots and lots of data and not lose any if one of the hard drives explodes. It should distribute the load of serving that data too. You can have a network filesystem based on this already, now they've added support for virtual block devices (i.e. remote disks) over it.
If you combine that with virtualisation (the Kernel Newbies changelog mentions that there's a patch for Qemu to directly use a Ceph-based block device) then you can do magic stuff. e.g. run all your services in virtual machines with their storage hosted by Ceph. Provide a cluster of virtualisation hosts to run those VMs. If a physical box needs maintenance, live-migrate your VMs off it without stopping them, then just yoink it from the cluster - the storage will failover magically. If a physical box explodes, just boot the VMs it was running on other nodes (or, combined with some of the hot-standby features that Xen, VMware, etc have started to offer, the VMs are already running seamlessly elsewhere as soon as the primary dies). If you need more storage or more processing, add more machines to the cluster, get Ceph to balance the storage and move some VMs around.
Not everyone is going to want to run Ceph on their home network but if you have a need for any of this sort of functionality (or even just an enthusiasm for it) then it's super cool. Oh yes and Ceph can do snapshotting as well, I believe. Ace.
Admittedly slightly tangential to your discussion of virtual machines... but part of the point of Intel's IA64 instruction set was to address this kind of thing. The compiler's job was to specify groups of instructions that could be executed safely in parallel, then the CPU would execute these according to its capabilities.
But a higher-level virtual instruction set with just-in-time compilation is admittedly more insulated against future technology and more amenable to the code being run on a variety of add-in components, such as GPUs.
I think they ought to have used dynamic recompilation for the IA32 compatibility, it might even have given them better performance.
Possibly - but the government (are supposed to) work *for* us, so wanting to know what they're doing in that job is quite different to wanting all information to be free. It's not unreasonable that the government might genuinely need to keep some information classified for practical reasons. But the level of classification that's actually operating in practice is too far - the citizenry, imperfect as they are, grant powers to the government. The government should reciprocate by explaining as far as reasonably possible what they're doing with those powers. Regardless of whether the previous Wikileaks releases have been conducted responsibly, the fact appears to be that material that didn't *need* to be hidden was actually classified - that's pretty worrying to me.
In fact, on PPC it's normal to run a 32-bit userspace on a 64 kernel simply because there's no benefit (and some cost) to having lots of 32-bit userspace code lying around. For the kernel it makes more sense to use 64-bit addressing, I think, since it avoids the need to keep mapping and unmapping userspace data when it needs to be accessed.
This isn't a nasty hack like some userspace bodges round kernel problems can be. The functionality to schedule the CPU in controlled ways to different groups of processes has been in the kernel for some time now and simply needs configuring from userspace. The 200 line patch adds some default configuration of this mechanism to the kernel; this alternative uses the existing functionality to do the same thing. The same kernel mechanism should end up handling it.
It's good if the kernel can do more stuff so that the user doesn't have to - where it makes sense. But this is actually a reasonably neat solution if you want the same behaviour without upgrading your kernel.
My understanding of the original kernel patch is that it just puts stuff from different ttys into different groups for scheduling purposes so that they're less able to hog each other's resources. This alternative just makes your shell sort it out itself when it starts i.e. when you're running a new terminal. So this should basically be equivalent.
The comment here is very important to remember though: http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1870628&cid=34241622 another comment on that article (which I can't now find - anybody know where it is?) basically said that the patch suits Linus's own use of compiling kernels whilst surfing the web. Sounds like a reasonably accurate assessment really so for now it's far from the magical boost to general interactivity some may have hoped for. In some sense there's no such thing anyhow.
Nonetheless the comment linked above also has Linus talking about increasing the scope of the automatic grouping heuristics in the future so hopefully the "just works" nature of this should become available to more people eventually.
The original kernel patch (and this alternative) aren't magically making everything respond better, they just improve certain usecases.
My university department didn't want to produce example questions so typically assigned work would be past exam questions. For this reason, postgraduates performing teaching duties were allowed access to the answers on past questions in order to help them in marking their students answers. They were also allowed to give out those answers but only to students who'd first attempted the questions - they refused to publish those answers for general access.
The result, of course, is that all the students get different quality information on the questions they'd attempted, according to how helpful their postgrad tutor was. Some of them with access to a tame postgrad got all of the answers to previous questions - it wasn't strictly cheating but it made the playing field uneven. It saved the department some work and resulted in relatively minor (and probably unpunishable) unethical behaviour conferring a real advantage.
Presumably this was considered to be a fairly minor problem, if it was one at all. But it's not a minor problem to you when other students in your class with better connections are able to get better revision materials. And as a bonus, the department graded your answers on the basis of how well you'd done relative to your peers, not on your absolute score - so any advantage to someone else was a direct disadvantage to you. Quite frustrating.
It's a nice timeline of some key milestones but it's worth noting that they're advertising something, it'd be nice if that had been clearer from the article.
Also, I was disappointed not to see GNU arch / tla get a mention as I think they might have been first to decentralised operation. They were most certainly one of the first and as such I suspect they had a certain amount of influence on those that followed, even though the user experience was reputed to be lacking from what I heard (actually, I thought that bzr evolved out of it too, so it may also have a more direct connection with the modern-day main players)
I know someone working at the NHS who at some point had a manager who managed her and nobody else, who in turn had a manager who managed that manager and nobody else, and who in turn had a manager managing that manager and nobody else. So she was outnumbered by management three-to-one and was the only one doing any actual useful work. So I'd say there is quite a bit of cost saving possible without reducing the quality at all.
I suspect that's true in the health service and also in education (Universities are hives of inefficiency as far as I can tell). The trouble, in a glib soundbite, is that if you reduce their budgets those managers are not going to sack themselves in preference to the people beneath them. More generally, I'd say the trouble is that the path of least resistance is going to be to scale back operations in response to budgetary cuts, in preference to painfully restructuring the system to be more efficient. If it's properly managed then this is doable, I'm just not big on faith that that'll happen (partly due to human nature, partly because the government has its own axes to grind here).
I've seen a lot of articles about how new and cool UEFI is going to be recently, they must be pushing some publicity to the media who are presumably publishing it on the grounds it sounds clever.
I had a dispute with some GB airport security (actually with Group 4 staff, a company the govt ofter outsources essential state duties to, like guarding prisoners, and at which G4 have got a pretty poor record of actually succeeding). As a result I ended up repeatedly leaving the secure area and having to be searched again on entry - I did remark to the guy doing it "We're getting to know each other quite well, aren't we?" but he didn't seem to see the funny side. I suspect the OP's comment about humiliation was pretty close to the mark on that one...
That's a fairly strong conclusion to make: what about increased use of texting in the market, increasing numbers of licensed drivers having grown up with text messaging, increasing number of mobile phone owners?
And also - the laws aren't making people hide their texting whilst driving, the fact that they're worried about penalties is. Surely most of these places have a "driving without due care and attention" law anyhow? In which case, the problem isn't that there's a specific law but the threat that police might crack down on drivers who aren't concentrating for some reason - including but not limited to texting. Targetting drivers who aren't paying attention is surely not something we'd want to give up... ?
It's sad when Sony reduce the featureset on newer releases of consoles; they also did that with PS2-on-PS3 compatibility. But with the OtherOS option they reached out to previously purchased, working PS3s and disabled the OtherOS part of the featureset, which I think is a good bit more worrying. They can get away with this because it's a feature only geeks want currently but I expect to see more remote deactivations of features in consumer goods in future. Amazon removed 1984 and Animal Farm from people's Kindle's and, yes, they apologised after a while and tried to make amends.
But the fact is that these companies are maintaining the technical capability and terms-of-service right to take away things people have bought and, even if everyone is acting in good faith, if it's *possible* to do this there are always going to be "good" reasons to do it. Someone's going to feel they're justified in doing it for whatever reason and people are going to lose out - maybe not always enough to cause an outcry but they'll still be people who reasonably expected that things they'd bought would keep working. As long as the capability to remotely modify functionality remains we're going to see things disabled after purchase - unless / until we get some more definitive legal protection over this sort of thing (e.g. case law or new legislation).
I think that (basic) tools for generating ksplice patches are available as Open Source, it's just that you probably don't want to actually have to generate them yourself (and you ought to have someone qualified look over them). It probably makes most sense for a distro to generate them but as that's not happening yet these guys have their niche.
I ran ksplice on an Ubuntu box for a while without problems.
I agree that a detailed "residents-level" knowledge of the US states involves quite a large volume of geographic knowledge, partly because it's a big country. But I think it is worth noting that European countries are more densely populated than much of the US, so the "residents-level" knowledge is not proportionally lower by area. A European state a tenth the size of the USA has more than a tenth of the number of regions (with different terrain, climate and culture) that citizens would typically be expected to remember by heart.
But, to be honest, we're not great at Geography, I'm awful at it personally both within my country and across the world. I suspect that a big part of the problem with US "geographical knowledge" is less a question of actually knowing where places are (I'm bad at that myself, most people probably are) and more a question of general awareness of the large number of other countries in the world - and I think that comes from the mainstream American media, which I understand is typically rather inward-looking. We probably don't have as strong / balanced international coverage as we should have in the UK either but I understand that it's still significantly more outward-looking. Mind you, the main reason that Western countries having poor international coverage is a major problem is that they do tend to be very active internationally - not just militarily but diplomatically, industrially, financially.
MeeGo also has the advantage of not reinventing the entire userspace, thus remaining closer to what we generally consider a GNU/Linux system. Android is quite slick in practice but it does upset me that it's so non-standard in every possible way:-(
I've been using Python + SciPy / NumPy / matplotlib / IPython at work recently and it's awesome. I don't have a MATLAB license, so whereas some of my colleagues are using MATLAB, I've been doing my plotting and analysis work with just Open Source tools. I played with Octave (albeit the Cygwin port) and SciLab but in the end, the Python-based solution gave me access to a core programming language that's very neat and that I like, plus it's really fast and proficient at dealing with large datasets. It's not perfect but it's made life a lot simpler for me.
Yeah, I thought that. But then I thought a bit more and - is it that hard to believe the idea that politicians might sell a massive investment in cabling to the taxpayers by saying "Oh, it's for a brand new green energy thingy" and then let their friendly lobbying oil companies use the link when the green power plans "happen" to fall through? I'm not accusing the politicians of trying to pull the wool over our eyes in this instance, just asserting that it's generally in their nature. If someone doesn't keep asking the right questions (along the lines of "How can we guarantee this is a good thing, not a subtly different thing that'll make lots of money?") then it's not surprising when we get nasty surprises.
That said, I do think some environmentalist groups are just being obstructive about relatively promising technologies, given that they're not going to be able to convert the whole world to a different way of life that doesn't require them!
Whilst Pioneer One isn't an Open Source project in itself, it'd be nice if they offered the download in Theora and / or WebM. If they're going to do free distribution / direct donation funding it surely makes sense to use some relevant free-as-in-beer-and-freedom tech.
On the one hand, they tried to remove an employee in a critical job who had been linked - via a Facebook comment - to drugs. On the other hand, they tried to remove an experienced employee working in a critical job who had submitted to and passed their drug tests. Who would they replace her with? A less experienced dispatcher who talks about drug addiction in bars and at home but not on Facebook?
Slashdot Mirror
The dichotomy I think they were exploiting (misleadingly in my view) is that you can add hardware features with the express intent of supporting DRM, without them being DRM themselves.
It's like the "Trusted Computing" stuff... you absolutely can use some of that hardware support to implement an ultra-secure network of Linux machines doing whatever it is *you* want them to do. It's not really DRM if you use it that way. But applied differently it can be used to provide a completely locked-down system that serves the wishes of media companies, not those of the system's owner.
At a more basic level, a crypto accelerator can be used for all sorts of purposes on the user's behalf; or it can be used to enhance some kind of annoying DRM system that serves outside interests.
Intel's take seems to be that they've added something that isn't *in itself* DRM. But they're "selling it" with a load of content-related advantages that are explicitly DRM-based, so it's no mystery which side they think their bread's buttered. DRM has apparently become a dirty word, which is good, but I don't like their semantic games over this new feature, which seem to be designed to mislead not inform.
From reading Intel's blog post, it sounds like they're defining DRM to be a software component and pointing out that Insider is a hardware feature, so not DRM. I think they're probably even right. But it sounds like Intel Insider is a hardware feature that's intended for implementing DRM (although maybe it has other uses) and that they're marketing it as being an improvement for DRM. It seems a little bit misleading to say "It's not DRM but it has these benefits ". But that's just my take on the blog post, maybe more technical information would change the picture.
Yes! I can imagine that better haptics might actually replace physical keyboards for general consumption just like membrane / scissor keyboards replaced mechanical keyswitches.
But the real enthusiasts, heavy typers and power users are still going to want real mechanical switches like they alway have done.
[Typing this on a Maltron 3D keyboard with Cherry MX black keys; my IBM Model M is at work, my Model F (like the M - but even more so) is sitting handily next to me.]
Ceph is a really cool bit of technology. It distributes storage redundantly across multiple machines, so you can store lots and lots of data and not lose any if one of the hard drives explodes. It should distribute the load of serving that data too. You can have a network filesystem based on this already, now they've added support for virtual block devices (i.e. remote disks) over it.
If you combine that with virtualisation (the Kernel Newbies changelog mentions that there's a patch for Qemu to directly use a Ceph-based block device) then you can do magic stuff. e.g. run all your services in virtual machines with their storage hosted by Ceph. Provide a cluster of virtualisation hosts to run those VMs. If a physical box needs maintenance, live-migrate your VMs off it without stopping them, then just yoink it from the cluster - the storage will failover magically. If a physical box explodes, just boot the VMs it was running on other nodes (or, combined with some of the hot-standby features that Xen, VMware, etc have started to offer, the VMs are already running seamlessly elsewhere as soon as the primary dies). If you need more storage or more processing, add more machines to the cluster, get Ceph to balance the storage and move some VMs around.
Not everyone is going to want to run Ceph on their home network but if you have a need for any of this sort of functionality (or even just an enthusiasm for it) then it's super cool. Oh yes and Ceph can do snapshotting as well, I believe. Ace.
Admittedly slightly tangential to your discussion of virtual machines ... but part of the point of Intel's IA64 instruction set was to address this kind of thing. The compiler's job was to specify groups of instructions that could be executed safely in parallel, then the CPU would execute these according to its capabilities.
But a higher-level virtual instruction set with just-in-time compilation is admittedly more insulated against future technology and more amenable to the code being run on a variety of add-in components, such as GPUs.
I think they ought to have used dynamic recompilation for the IA32 compatibility, it might even have given them better performance.
Possibly - but the government (are supposed to) work *for* us, so wanting to know what they're doing in that job is quite different to wanting all information to be free. It's not unreasonable that the government might genuinely need to keep some information classified for practical reasons. But the level of classification that's actually operating in practice is too far - the citizenry, imperfect as they are, grant powers to the government. The government should reciprocate by explaining as far as reasonably possible what they're doing with those powers. Regardless of whether the previous Wikileaks releases have been conducted responsibly, the fact appears to be that material that didn't *need* to be hidden was actually classified - that's pretty worrying to me.
In fact, on PPC it's normal to run a 32-bit userspace on a 64 kernel simply because there's no benefit (and some cost) to having lots of 32-bit userspace code lying around. For the kernel it makes more sense to use 64-bit addressing, I think, since it avoids the need to keep mapping and unmapping userspace data when it needs to be accessed.
This isn't a nasty hack like some userspace bodges round kernel problems can be. The functionality to schedule the CPU in controlled ways to different groups of processes has been in the kernel for some time now and simply needs configuring from userspace. The 200 line patch adds some default configuration of this mechanism to the kernel; this alternative uses the existing functionality to do the same thing. The same kernel mechanism should end up handling it.
It's good if the kernel can do more stuff so that the user doesn't have to - where it makes sense. But this is actually a reasonably neat solution if you want the same behaviour without upgrading your kernel.
My understanding of the original kernel patch is that it just puts stuff from different ttys into different groups for scheduling purposes so that they're less able to hog each other's resources. This alternative just makes your shell sort it out itself when it starts i.e. when you're running a new terminal. So this should basically be equivalent.
See this comment from the latest article for Linus' take on putting this stuff in-kernel:
http://www.webupd8.org/2010/11/alternative-to-200-lines-kernel-patch.html#comment-98834842
The comment here is very important to remember though:
http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1870628&cid=34241622
another comment on that article (which I can't now find - anybody know where it is?) basically said that the patch suits Linus's own use of compiling kernels whilst surfing the web. Sounds like a reasonably accurate assessment really so for now it's far from the magical boost to general interactivity some may have hoped for. In some sense there's no such thing anyhow.
Nonetheless the comment linked above also has Linus talking about increasing the scope of the automatic grouping heuristics in the future so hopefully the "just works" nature of this should become available to more people eventually.
The original kernel patch (and this alternative) aren't magically making everything respond better, they just improve certain usecases.
My university department didn't want to produce example questions so typically assigned work would be past exam questions. For this reason, postgraduates performing teaching duties were allowed access to the answers on past questions in order to help them in marking their students answers. They were also allowed to give out those answers but only to students who'd first attempted the questions - they refused to publish those answers for general access.
The result, of course, is that all the students get different quality information on the questions they'd attempted, according to how helpful their postgrad tutor was. Some of them with access to a tame postgrad got all of the answers to previous questions - it wasn't strictly cheating but it made the playing field uneven. It saved the department some work and resulted in relatively minor (and probably unpunishable) unethical behaviour conferring a real advantage.
Presumably this was considered to be a fairly minor problem, if it was one at all. But it's not a minor problem to you when other students in your class with better connections are able to get better revision materials. And as a bonus, the department graded your answers on the basis of how well you'd done relative to your peers, not on your absolute score - so any advantage to someone else was a direct disadvantage to you. Quite frustrating.
It's a nice timeline of some key milestones but it's worth noting that they're advertising something, it'd be nice if that had been clearer from the article.
Also, I was disappointed not to see GNU arch / tla get a mention as I think they might have been first to decentralised operation. They were most certainly one of the first and as such I suspect they had a certain amount of influence on those that followed, even though the user experience was reputed to be lacking from what I heard (actually, I thought that bzr evolved out of it too, so it may also have a more direct connection with the modern-day main players)
I know someone working at the NHS who at some point had a manager who managed her and nobody else, who in turn had a manager who managed that manager and nobody else, and who in turn had a manager managing that manager and nobody else. So she was outnumbered by management three-to-one and was the only one doing any actual useful work. So I'd say there is quite a bit of cost saving possible without reducing the quality at all.
I suspect that's true in the health service and also in education (Universities are hives of inefficiency as far as I can tell). The trouble, in a glib soundbite, is that if you reduce their budgets those managers are not going to sack themselves in preference to the people beneath them. More generally, I'd say the trouble is that the path of least resistance is going to be to scale back operations in response to budgetary cuts, in preference to painfully restructuring the system to be more efficient. If it's properly managed then this is doable, I'm just not big on faith that that'll happen (partly due to human nature, partly because the government has its own axes to grind here).
I've seen a lot of articles about how new and cool UEFI is going to be recently, they must be pushing some publicity to the media who are presumably publishing it on the grounds it sounds clever.
I had a dispute with some GB airport security (actually with Group 4 staff, a company the govt ofter outsources essential state duties to, like guarding prisoners, and at which G4 have got a pretty poor record of actually succeeding). As a result I ended up repeatedly leaving the secure area and having to be searched again on entry - I did remark to the guy doing it "We're getting to know each other quite well, aren't we?" but he didn't seem to see the funny side. I suspect the OP's comment about humiliation was pretty close to the mark on that one...
Hear hear.
That's a fairly strong conclusion to make: what about increased use of texting in the market, increasing numbers of licensed drivers having grown up with text messaging, increasing number of mobile phone owners?
And also - the laws aren't making people hide their texting whilst driving, the fact that they're worried about penalties is. Surely most of these places have a "driving without due care and attention" law anyhow? In which case, the problem isn't that there's a specific law but the threat that police might crack down on drivers who aren't concentrating for some reason - including but not limited to texting. Targetting drivers who aren't paying attention is surely not something we'd want to give up ... ?
It's sad when Sony reduce the featureset on newer releases of consoles; they also did that with PS2-on-PS3 compatibility. But with the OtherOS option they reached out to previously purchased, working PS3s and disabled the OtherOS part of the featureset, which I think is a good bit more worrying. They can get away with this because it's a feature only geeks want currently but I expect to see more remote deactivations of features in consumer goods in future. Amazon removed 1984 and Animal Farm from people's Kindle's and, yes, they apologised after a while and tried to make amends.
But the fact is that these companies are maintaining the technical capability and terms-of-service right to take away things people have bought and, even if everyone is acting in good faith, if it's *possible* to do this there are always going to be "good" reasons to do it. Someone's going to feel they're justified in doing it for whatever reason and people are going to lose out - maybe not always enough to cause an outcry but they'll still be people who reasonably expected that things they'd bought would keep working. As long as the capability to remotely modify functionality remains we're going to see things disabled after purchase - unless / until we get some more definitive legal protection over this sort of thing (e.g. case law or new legislation).
I think that (basic) tools for generating ksplice patches are available as Open Source, it's just that you probably don't want to actually have to generate them yourself (and you ought to have someone qualified look over them). It probably makes most sense for a distro to generate them but as that's not happening yet these guys have their niche.
I ran ksplice on an Ubuntu box for a while without problems.
I agree that a detailed "residents-level" knowledge of the US states involves quite a large volume of geographic knowledge, partly because it's a big country. But I think it is worth noting that European countries are more densely populated than much of the US, so the "residents-level" knowledge is not proportionally lower by area. A European state a tenth the size of the USA has more than a tenth of the number of regions (with different terrain, climate and culture) that citizens would typically be expected to remember by heart.
But, to be honest, we're not great at Geography, I'm awful at it personally both within my country and across the world. I suspect that a big part of the problem with US "geographical knowledge" is less a question of actually knowing where places are (I'm bad at that myself, most people probably are) and more a question of general awareness of the large number of other countries in the world - and I think that comes from the mainstream American media, which I understand is typically rather inward-looking. We probably don't have as strong / balanced international coverage as we should have in the UK either but I understand that it's still significantly more outward-looking. Mind you, the main reason that Western countries having poor international coverage is a major problem is that they do tend to be very active internationally - not just militarily but diplomatically, industrially, financially.
Bravo, thank you for posting this.
MeeGo also has the advantage of not reinventing the entire userspace, thus remaining closer to what we generally consider a GNU/Linux system. Android is quite slick in practice but it does upset me that it's so non-standard in every possible way :-(
I've been using Python + SciPy / NumPy / matplotlib / IPython at work recently and it's awesome. I don't have a MATLAB license, so whereas some of my colleagues are using MATLAB, I've been doing my plotting and analysis work with just Open Source tools. I played with Octave (albeit the Cygwin port) and SciLab but in the end, the Python-based solution gave me access to a core programming language that's very neat and that I like, plus it's really fast and proficient at dealing with large datasets. It's not perfect but it's made life a lot simpler for me.
Yeah, I thought that. But then I thought a bit more and - is it that hard to believe the idea that politicians might sell a massive investment in cabling to the taxpayers by saying "Oh, it's for a brand new green energy thingy" and then let their friendly lobbying oil companies use the link when the green power plans "happen" to fall through? I'm not accusing the politicians of trying to pull the wool over our eyes in this instance, just asserting that it's generally in their nature. If someone doesn't keep asking the right questions (along the lines of "How can we guarantee this is a good thing, not a subtly different thing that'll make lots of money?") then it's not surprising when we get nasty surprises.
That said, I do think some environmentalist groups are just being obstructive about relatively promising technologies, given that they're not going to be able to convert the whole world to a different way of life that doesn't require them!
Whilst Pioneer One isn't an Open Source project in itself, it'd be nice if they offered the download in Theora and / or WebM. If they're going to do free distribution / direct donation funding it surely makes sense to use some relevant free-as-in-beer-and-freedom tech.
On the one hand, they tried to remove an employee in a critical job who had been linked - via a Facebook comment - to drugs. On the other hand, they tried to remove an experienced employee working in a critical job who had submitted to and passed their drug tests. Who would they replace her with? A less experienced dispatcher who talks about drug addiction in bars and at home but not on Facebook?