I agree that we need to seriously reform the patent system in the United States. But the Pirate Party isn't going to do this. In fact, one might argue that all it will successfully accomplish is marginalizing the issue and its supporters. There are dozens (if not more) third parties in the US. It is very hard (and in this day and age almost impossible) for a third party to have any electoral success (it does happen on a community level in certain places around the country). There are key differences between the electoral systems of most European countries and the US. In the US, we have a single-member district system that is winner take all. It makes our system functionally a two-party system. Most of Europe has a proporational representation system. Voters in Europe vote for the party, not the candidate. All that is needed for a small party to gain seats in a parliamentary body is to get over the threshold (whatever that threshold may be). Sometimes, that threshold is as low as 5%. Here in the US, you need a plurality of the vote at least (in some parts of the country, you need an outright majority). The pirate party getting 50.1% of the vote? I don't think so. Even 40-45%, not likely. To insist on something like this, just because it works in Sweden is to deny the reality of the electoral constraints place upon the US system.
Not to knock ubuntu, fedora, freespire, and opensuse, but the Debian community has been around since 1993. It is a highly evolved community with established processes for handling the politics, policy, and code developed for it. It is interesting that Debian isn't even mentioned by the OP. The Debian community, IMHO, is the model for everything else.
I'm curious if this proposed legislation might affect greylisting and/or RBLs implemented at the ISP level? Both of these pieces of technology could be construed as limiting or delaying access to content, or at least favoring some content over others -- based largely in part on the origin of the content. Anybody have any ideas about this?
It seems unfortunate that an open-source organization is getting caught doing something possible shady. It is really unfortunate because there are people out there that will hold F/OSS projects to a higher standard.
I have never used Wordpress and so do really know much first hand about it as a program. But it does seem to fill a certain niche in the blog software arena. For myself, I will continue to use Blosxom.
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There are plenty of good mp3 players that will work beautifully with linux and sources for mp3s other than Apple's Itunes.
I agree that we need to seriously reform the patent system in the United States. But the Pirate Party isn't going to do this. In fact, one might argue that all it will successfully accomplish is marginalizing the issue and its supporters. There are dozens (if not more) third parties in the US. It is very hard (and in this day and age almost impossible) for a third party to have any electoral success (it does happen on a community level in certain places around the country). There are key differences between the electoral systems of most European countries and the US. In the US, we have a single-member district system that is winner take all. It makes our system functionally a two-party system. Most of Europe has a proporational representation system. Voters in Europe vote for the party, not the candidate. All that is needed for a small party to gain seats in a parliamentary body is to get over the threshold (whatever that threshold may be). Sometimes, that threshold is as low as 5%. Here in the US, you need a plurality of the vote at least (in some parts of the country, you need an outright majority). The pirate party getting 50.1% of the vote? I don't think so. Even 40-45%, not likely. To insist on something like this, just because it works in Sweden is to deny the reality of the electoral constraints place upon the US system.
Not to knock ubuntu, fedora, freespire, and opensuse, but the Debian community has been around since 1993. It is a highly evolved community with established processes for handling the politics, policy, and code developed for it. It is interesting that Debian isn't even mentioned by the OP. The Debian community, IMHO, is the model for everything else.
If I recall correctly, isn't there some security hole in 1.3.33 that was fixed in 1.3.34?
I'm curious if this proposed legislation might affect greylisting and/or RBLs implemented at the ISP level? Both of these pieces of technology could be construed as limiting or delaying access to content, or at least favoring some content over others -- based largely in part on the origin of the content. Anybody have any ideas about this?
It seems unfortunate that an open-source organization is getting caught doing something possible shady. It is really unfortunate because there are people out there that will hold F/OSS projects to a higher standard.
I have never used Wordpress and so do really know much first hand about it as a program. But it does seem to fill a certain niche in the blog software arena. For myself, I will continue to use Blosxom.