"if the insurance companies (or the ISPs in the net neutrality case) cannot charge some people more and some people less depending upon the amount and type of services used then everyone will have to pay the average amount of the cost of those services spread out evenly over the pool of subscribers."
And the problem with this (specially on basic services like health care) is?
"If this drives the price up enough then it might squeeze out some people near the margins who cannot afford to pay the higher "average" price."
You forget that by the very market forces averages are waaaay below the top percentiles (to be precise, the curve curtosis is very low and mode is quite assimetric) so in order to cover for the top users on a system where users don't choose their expendings average costs grow less than peanuts. In other words: in order to be able to cover the one out of a ten hundred thousand cancer case that costs a million you need to increment one dollar a year the average costs of your bill, which is quite an affordable increment, the alternate is paying a dollar less and being completly screwed when you "win" the lotto of an expensive treatment. By the numbers of familiar bankruptcy due to health issues in the USA not quite an unthinkable case. Don't believe on the numbers of those taking advantage on segregating the market (i.e.: the health insurance companies) specially when you see their profit margins at the end of the year and you envvy them.
"Does this law mandate that telco's peer with everybody ? Or does it simply prohibit a few types of Qos ?"
It seems neither of those. By the letter of the news, "Internet service providers will not be able to 'block, interfere with, discriminate against, impair, or degrade' access to any lawful content from any lawful application or device" they simply need to declare illegal anything they don't like and then ban it from their networks. So, "it's illegal to pass traffic produced on one network to another without explicit consent" seems to be a law we won't have to wait too much to see approved.
"The number of molecules in Cmdr Taco's nacho-warrior farts !! This can range from a few thousand on a mild day, to say 4 BILLION on a down and dirty day."
Sorry to point that out but you are understimating Cmdr Taco's farts by some orders of magnitude: it's more TRILLIONS (10^12) on a mild day up to a TRILLION OF TRILLIONS OF TRILLIONS (in the order of 10^24) on a funny day.
"I know, I know, and you don't want to know how I know."
I can sware I learn it on a book and nowhere else.
"Not really. One of the main drivers for businesses to upgrade Office is to maintain interoperability with their customers."
So "it's time to do it". I never entered on the "why it's time to do it" issue, did I?
"Arguing over whichever is better or worse misses rather misses the point that OpenOffice creates a ongoing compatibility issue"
Not at all. It is those that say that migrating *off* of Ms Office it's a point the ones the miss *the* point: that migrating from Ms Office version to Ms Office version is not less painful than migrating off Ms Office (and they still will have to pay for the new usage licenses).
"It's popular to hate Microsoft but in all honesty MS Word is excellent software."
That might be true but when I find somebody telling something like this I usually ask two questions: 1) What is it Ms Word excellent for? 2) How many word processors do you know at least as plentiful as Ms Word?
I'll leave as an exercise to the reader to imagine what kind of answers I get (hint: they are not so usually a good indication that Ms Word is such a good software after all).
"In a business environment 99.9999% compatible isn't good enough. If a program can't open one file then there is no reason to switch."
That's plain bullshit as facts themselves demonstrate once and again. Companies have gone through the Microsoft Office upgrade mill once and again since the days of Office 4 onwards (about 1994) and you can bet those upgrades were far away from 99.9999% compatible and even 99.999%, 99.99%, 99.9%, 99% or even 90% (you haven't gone through the Word/Excel/Access macros/apps upgrade nightmare, have you?) and still companies did it just because "it's time to do it".
"Source? I believe the mortality rate of AIDS is 100%"
Well, it isn't. In fact, AIDS direct mortality rate is about 0% since you die from other oportunistic diseases. On the other hand even considering what you meant instead of what you effectively wrote, 100% would be *without treatment* and even then mortality is not that of a black mamba: without treament AIDS will kill you *eventually* not in five minutes or tomorrow. So I think, yes, you can make some sensible comparation between AIDS and Ms Word.
"Claiming that whatever that Microsoft does is in any way "open" is sort of old hat with those guys."
Gates claiming whatever he feels will strengh his bussiness is an old story (not that any other company owner wouldn't do the same): remember when Gates was strongly against patents? He didn't own a large patent portfolio back then.
"The better way to look at it is to look at what a distro gives to the upstream: bug reports and feedback. If different distros featurefreeze on different versions, then upstream is getting said feedback from multiple distros regarding multiple old versions. Obviously, the more different old versions that people are using, the more confusing and less useful this feedback will be."
I'd say that's because most upstreamers don't give proper engineering a damn. Since they usually only deal with their own little portion of the software landscape they usually don't pay attention to those "little" issues as segregating delivering bugfixes from new features, feature and bug regressions or simply making clear what they are going to support with regards of stable vs on-development versions.
Distributions, on the other hand, are all about integrating thousands or even tens of thousands of software packages so they simply can't go with "bleeding edge" if only because "bleeding edge" means different things to different software projects. I'd bet that if there's a solid commitment from software project foo about saying "version X.Y is our stable release and so it will be supported at least for X months/years" distributions would gladly use X.Y instead of X.Z on their stable launches; but since there's no "blessed versions" each and every distribution publishes "whatever is current now" which ends up with different distributions using different versions.
Even then, I don't see so many bugs against old versions being managed as they should be: they usually are not accepted or not analysed on the grounds of "use our bleeding edge version bar and see if the bug is still there". They forget that on one hand more obscure bugs will only show on special circumnstances and they are a treasure and on the other that even if it's an old release the bug is still there; they could have a case if they could say: yessir; your bug #12345 affects version 1.2.3 but it's corrected on 1.2.5; as you know, extraversion number means that exclusively bugs are corrected but functionality is unchanged so you can easily drop it out on your environment without worries. Maybe then distributions like Debian wouldn't be so hard on not upgrading programs within the same distribution versions and doing locally their backporting (and probably reinventing the wheel, and probably not by the best fitted individuals).
"Having less feature freezes to worry about should free up the devs."
That's a lost battle and upstreamers wouldn't need to worry about destribution freeze times *at all*: it's neither their bussiness nor anything they can control. What they can do is making the commitment of publishing a stable and supported version of their software and then distributions could use it on their products. It might happen that their glarining new version slips by days to the freeze date of distibution X but that won't worry neither the upstreamers (well, they'll use it on their next release) nor the distribution (am I choosing the "proper" version of this software or will it be a transtional one that will go unsupported in few months or even weeks?).
"I recommend Mark Shuttleworth's blog. He has been talking about this issue, and he brings up allot of interesting points."
I don't follow his blog but from time to time to give it a fast look but on my opinion, while not saying he has not some good ideas, they're not ideas I didn't read before anywhere else and they all seem just a bit too much as those end user "magic recipies" the like of "that many Linux distributions only spread efforts instead of concentrating them; there should be only one distribution". Well, which one then? "The one I happen to use, of course".
"You know, I read the paragraph you quoted and even after repeated readings never came to the conclusion that you did. In other words, nowhere does it say your data is protected by encryption."
You know, I read the paragraph you quoted and even after repeated readings never came to the conclusion you did. In other words, nowhere does it say he implied the data was protected by *encryption* but just that the data was protected from undesired eyes due to a feature called "Remote Wipe".
Well, it happens that "Remote Wipe" doesn't protect your data from undesired eyes not even for two minutes as it happens that "Remote Wipe" doesn't even have the chance to work if the burglar happens to take out the SIM card or else acting on a place with no signal, both of which don't avoid the burglar to gain access to "your important and personal information -- information you probably don't want in the hands of a stranger".
In other words: "Remote Wipe" doesn't stand against the claimed functionality from its vendor by a far margin.
"Most people really don't want real security. It would be a support nightmare"
It wouldn't.
"the common person is an idiot and will forget their password or whatever. Then all they want is their data back and they expect Apple to give it to them. If the device was really truly secure then their data would be permanently gone."
And that's exaclty why it wouldn't be a support nightmare: -Hello, I forgot my password. -Then you are f*ed. Next call!
See? About five seconds and the incident is properly closed.
It can be a marketing nightmare (and that's the whole point, of course) but certainly not a support nightmare.
"Fortunately there are third party products that provide real security for people who really need it. Too bad it's not always well integrated into the system though."
*That* is a support nightmare, not the previous case.
"Did you miss the GP's "then only update those packages on the DoD's list."?"
No. As I didn't miss the (my remark) "*extensive* guidance on minimum software versions" and the "etc" part.
"Unless that DoD list constitutes the bulk of a Linux system (100+ packages? - TFA only mentions 4!), then you still won't be "updating all the time", so your point is?"
TFA mentions *explicitly* four packages, and then an "etc" and an "extensive guidance": I take this for the list to be quite longer than just the four packages explicitly mentioned so my point is exactly what it was: "updating all the time to stay up to the list", not to talk about the constant flux of bugs due to integration problems that such a practice would arise.
"am considering scrapping the distro I currently use and replacing it will a personally-rolled one."
Probably because you never did so. It's an homungous work amount but certainly you can try: either LFS, Slackware or Gentoo would probably be proper starting points.
"It may take me longer to apply updates, and it will certainly be harder work"
For any production environment that alone is quite an operative definition for "worse".
"They cannot rely on a given distro using up-to-date sources, and in fact know that distros routinely won't."
The point being that they are doing so for quite valid and strong reasons.
"Since you will NEVER convince people to move away from package managers in those environments, an internal distro is the only way to go [...] Scientific Linux is precisely this sort of internal distro, with the sole difference that it was eventually released for others to use. So it has been done, and has been done Very Well. Thus, it is provably not necessarily "for the worse"."
There's only one little obstacle to overcome (well, three indeed): time, effort... money.
And about Scientific Linux, I think it proves my point much more than yours: it is not an internally develop distro but a heavily based on Red Hat one with a bunch of packages with local value... not even the CERN (which certainly has the ability, the money and probably would take advantage to do it) feel that to be such a great idea. The very first FAQ from their page states this: Q. What is Scientific Linux? A. Scientific Linux is in essence, a commercial enterprise linux distribution, recompiled. What we have done is taken the source code from Enterprise (in srpm form) and recompiled them. The resulting binaries (now in rpm form) are then ours to do with as we desire as long as we follow the license from that original source code, which we are doing. We then bundle all these binaries into a linux distribution that is as close to the commercial enterprise distribution as we can get it. The goal is to ensure that if a program runs and is certified on the commercial enterprise linux distribution, then it will run on the corresponding Scientific release.
See? "a linux distribution that is as close to the commercial enterprise distribution as we can get it" They are doing this for licensing/redistributing, not for using different versions, thus taking away the burden of integrating latest version from upstream and then dealing with its bugs and integration problems.
You said you found Debian Unstable "seriously broken", with problems regarding linking to uncompatible ABIs (or APIs) -of course, nothing else should be expected from an integration/development version: why do you think you won't find those very problems on your own rolled system? Are they going to disappear just because it was you the one that compiled it? Ask the Gentoo people then. It's only that now it will be *you* the one to deal with all that problems instead of spreading on others (while your help will certainly be welcomed) the burden to produce a polished system... after a while.
Of course it's doable: Debian does it with the strengh of about 1000 pairs of hands to the task. It can be even done on a "solo show" fashion as Patrick Volkerding can ascertain but then you must ask yourself: "will I be up to the task?" and specially, "will it be worth the effort or are there any good enough alternatives economically more sensible?"
"Why on earth would you need to update all the time? If it were me, I would install gentoo once, then only update those packages on the DoD's list."
You don't think they came up with a list saying "kernel 2.6.30" a year ago, do you? That list basically ends up saying "use the latest published releases" so, yes, you need updating all the time to stay up to the list.
"The most logical thing, surely, is to have a script that grabs the latest source, build suitable binary RPMs and a binary DEB, and then move these files to the correct directory for a repository manager."
Which, more or less, is exactly what it's done at the distribution level... and then you find that it takes about two years to stabilize the compatibility problems that arises with such a practice.
Then you look elsewhere and find that's what Debian does (to name an example) and that's why it takes Debian about two years to produce a new Stable release (I mention Debian, but Red Hat is more or less about the same, as it is SUSE or Slackware or anyone else). And then you recognize that you are just reinventing the wheel -for the worse, and that you are much better backporting security fixes just like Debian does or else recognizing that by your original procedure (grabbing latests sources, compiling them and pushing them to your computers) you are no better than using Debian Unstable (which it's obviously not so great for a production environment) and that even then, redoing their work is again just reinventing the wheel for the worse.
""The moral rights regime differs greatly between countries, but typically includes the right to be identified as the author of the work and the right to object to any distortion or mutilation of the work which would be prejudicial to his or her honour or reputation"
In short, societies don't recognise author's rights."
Quite on the contrary! Look at the very definition you pasted: When has been the time when any society hasn't recognized authorship and the moral right of the author to any modification of his work, at least as long as it retains his name? There's no need for a law anywhere to have people feeling that me telling I wrote "Romeo and Juliet" or "Don Quixote" is wrong. The point is that you made an unstated implicit: "The basic concept that creators retain some sort of moral (and therefore legal and economic) rights over their creations"; there's no such "therefore": moral rights are a different beast to legal and economic rights. We, people, feel this as well as companies do ("therefore" neither people nor companies feel any pain when author "X" passes legal and economic rights for his works to company "Y" but we know that doesn't mean that they have the right to say they are "works of Y" instead fo "works of X"). And we are quite good at managing it: there's no problem to see where one aportating to an artwork starts or ends: nobody is confused about the meaning of "Vivaldi's Four seasons" (the opus) against "von Karajan's Four Seasons" (the director's interpretation of Vivaldi's work) nor we feel any problem if it's Deutches Grammophon instead of Karajan the one that gets the money from "von Karajan's Four Seasons" recording, as long as it is not said to be "Deutches Grammophon's Four Seasons" but von Karajan's.
"In practical terms, this means that creators should look more closely at contract law and other means of asserting clear terms and conditions on the use of their creations on a case by case basis."
Big YES! But there's no novelty on this: that's the way for any artisan-like proffesion. Some "artists" feel entitled for an 'a priori' recognition of his works: they "deserve" something because they produced something. That hasn't ever worked, or else I'd feel entitled to be rewarded for my farts. The problem with my farts is that nobody asked me to produce them, or else I'd make sure a proper contract is in place and then it wouldn't be that I "deserve" something for my farts but that someone would be contractually tied to pay me for them. But that's exactly what they want to work just because they are "artists" instead of carpenters, lawyers or plumbers: they produce something nobody asked for, and then they feel entitled to some reward. Hey, Michellangelo didn't took a big piece of marble, produced the Moses and then expected someone to pay for it but the other way around: he found somebody to pay for his work and *then* he produced the Moses. Quite a more sensible approach on my opinion.
"How does one place a cost of production on an artistic work? A book, for example, is more than paper and ink"
But it isn't, production-wise much more than paper, ink and man's effort at competitive wages. The fact that not every man can produce a given book doesn't change that (neither a burger-flipping boy can do the job of a senior engineer).
"should we count time spent as part of the cost of production as well?"
Of course. Don't we do that with everything else?
"And if so, who sets the rate?"
Free market. Who else?
"In addition, each creation is unique"
As it's each fart. So what?
"and that, too, is part of their value."
Yes. But we are here talking about cost, not value. The production side is about costs, the marketing one about value.
"how does one create a competitive market in that same way for "books written by Isaac Asimov", when there is only one Isaac Asimov?"
On one hand, the strong part of market competition is not about "books written by Isaac Asimov" but about, i.e. "Sci-Fi books". On the other hand, even on the "books written by Isaac Asimov" there *is* competition, or do you think "Murder at the ABA" sells as easy as "I, robot"? And reality shows how market forces drives competition even within Isaac Asimov's works: why do you think Asimov has produced a ton of robot books but just one detectivesque but because the former sells much better than the latter?
"You're attempting to treat such creations as though they are "goods and services""
Hell, no! It is industry itself the one that wants to treat them as "goods and services"! Why do you think all they go around is about controlling the monetarizing part? Laws about plagiarism have been almost untouched for ages, it's when money goes into the equation when copyright-management companies scratch and squeeze.
"So if speciation has occured (according to the article) when the two populations no longer mate"
Re-read the article: it doesn't say so. It says that since those two populations no longer mate, the door is open for speciation to happen, not that it already has happened.
"does that mean if white people and black people stopped mating they would be different species?"
Change it for "they may end up eventually as different species" and you are right.
"if it's genuine, what does that tell of this "vinland"? maybe i've got it wrong, but it's written as if it's in the middle of the ocean."
Well, with our current geographical knowledge, what's west of Iceland? I'd say it's a mass of land in the middle of the ocean. Certainly it's a bit bigger than how it's depicted in that map (it might be that vikings didn't have the time to visit it all around, you know, America is quite big), but it *is* a landmass in the middle of the ocean.
Slashdot Mirror
"if the insurance companies (or the ISPs in the net neutrality case) cannot charge some people more and some people less depending upon the amount and type of services used then everyone will have to pay the average amount of the cost of those services spread out evenly over the pool of subscribers."
And the problem with this (specially on basic services like health care) is?
"If this drives the price up enough then it might squeeze out some people near the margins who cannot afford to pay the higher "average" price."
You forget that by the very market forces averages are waaaay below the top percentiles (to be precise, the curve curtosis is very low and mode is quite assimetric) so in order to cover for the top users on a system where users don't choose their expendings average costs grow less than peanuts. In other words: in order to be able to cover the one out of a ten hundred thousand cancer case that costs a million you need to increment one dollar a year the average costs of your bill, which is quite an affordable increment, the alternate is paying a dollar less and being completly screwed when you "win" the lotto of an expensive treatment. By the numbers of familiar bankruptcy due to health issues in the USA not quite an unthinkable case. Don't believe on the numbers of those taking advantage on segregating the market (i.e.: the health insurance companies) specially when you see their profit margins at the end of the year and you envvy them.
"Broadband is sold for speeds "up to" a certain level, it's not guaranteed."
Hence the "the cable companies have to guarantee a certain "net neutral" bandwidth" part.
"Does this law mandate that telco's peer with everybody ? Or does it simply prohibit a few types of Qos ?"
It seems neither of those. By the letter of the news, "Internet service providers will not be able to 'block, interfere with, discriminate against, impair, or degrade' access to any lawful content from any lawful application or device" they simply need to declare illegal anything they don't like and then ban it from their networks. So, "it's illegal to pass traffic produced on one network to another without explicit consent" seems to be a law we won't have to wait too much to see approved.
"and it's easy to generate a 5"
And you can generate it at any random point in time too.
But somehow, being as random as anyone else, I prefer 42.
"The number of molecules in Cmdr Taco's nacho-warrior farts !! This can range from a few thousand on a mild day, to say 4 BILLION on a down and dirty day."
Sorry to point that out but you are understimating Cmdr Taco's farts by some orders of magnitude: it's more TRILLIONS (10^12) on a mild day up to a TRILLION OF TRILLIONS OF TRILLIONS (in the order of 10^24) on a funny day.
"I know, I know, and you don't want to know how I know."
I can sware I learn it on a book and nowhere else.
"Not really. One of the main drivers for businesses to upgrade Office is to maintain interoperability with their customers."
So "it's time to do it". I never entered on the "why it's time to do it" issue, did I?
"Arguing over whichever is better or worse misses rather misses the point that OpenOffice creates a ongoing compatibility issue"
Not at all. It is those that say that migrating *off* of Ms Office it's a point the ones the miss *the* point: that migrating from Ms Office version to Ms Office version is not less painful than migrating off Ms Office (and they still will have to pay for the new usage licenses).
"It's popular to hate Microsoft but in all honesty MS Word is excellent software."
That might be true but when I find somebody telling something like this I usually ask two questions:
1) What is it Ms Word excellent for?
2) How many word processors do you know at least as plentiful as Ms Word?
I'll leave as an exercise to the reader to imagine what kind of answers I get (hint: they are not so usually a good indication that Ms Word is such a good software after all).
"Like any tool, you use it for what you need it for."
Like any tool, you use it for what somebody else convinced you you need it for. There: corrected for you.
"In a business environment 99.9999% compatible isn't good enough. If a program can't open one file then there is no reason to switch."
That's plain bullshit as facts themselves demonstrate once and again. Companies have gone through the Microsoft Office upgrade mill once and again since the days of Office 4 onwards (about 1994) and you can bet those upgrades were far away from 99.9999% compatible and even 99.999%, 99.99%, 99.9%, 99% or even 90% (you haven't gone through the Word/Excel/Access macros/apps upgrade nightmare, have you?) and still companies did it just because "it's time to do it".
"Source? I believe the mortality rate of AIDS is 100%"
Well, it isn't. In fact, AIDS direct mortality rate is about 0% since you die from other oportunistic diseases. On the other hand even considering what you meant instead of what you effectively wrote, 100% would be *without treatment* and even then mortality is not that of a black mamba: without treament AIDS will kill you *eventually* not in five minutes or tomorrow. So I think, yes, you can make some sensible comparation between AIDS and Ms Word.
"Claiming that whatever that Microsoft does is in any way "open" is sort of old hat with those guys."
Gates claiming whatever he feels will strengh his bussiness is an old story (not that any other company owner wouldn't do the same): remember when Gates was strongly against patents? He didn't own a large patent portfolio back then.
"But in the end, they'll meet the same fate as the dinos."
Don't be so sure: dinos didn't have corporate lawyers.
"The better way to look at it is to look at what a distro gives to the upstream: bug reports and feedback. If different distros featurefreeze on different versions, then upstream is getting said feedback from multiple distros regarding multiple old versions. Obviously, the more different old versions that people are using, the more confusing and less useful this feedback will be."
I'd say that's because most upstreamers don't give proper engineering a damn. Since they usually only deal with their own little portion of the software landscape they usually don't pay attention to those "little" issues as segregating delivering bugfixes from new features, feature and bug regressions or simply making clear what they are going to support with regards of stable vs on-development versions.
Distributions, on the other hand, are all about integrating thousands or even tens of thousands of software packages so they simply can't go with "bleeding edge" if only because "bleeding edge" means different things to different software projects. I'd bet that if there's a solid commitment from software project foo about saying "version X.Y is our stable release and so it will be supported at least for X months/years" distributions would gladly use X.Y instead of X.Z on their stable launches; but since there's no "blessed versions" each and every distribution publishes "whatever is current now" which ends up with different distributions using different versions.
Even then, I don't see so many bugs against old versions being managed as they should be: they usually are not accepted or not analysed on the grounds of "use our bleeding edge version bar and see if the bug is still there". They forget that on one hand more obscure bugs will only show on special circumnstances and they are a treasure and on the other that even if it's an old release the bug is still there; they could have a case if they could say: yessir; your bug #12345 affects version 1.2.3 but it's corrected on 1.2.5; as you know, extraversion number means that exclusively bugs are corrected but functionality is unchanged so you can easily drop it out on your environment without worries. Maybe then distributions like Debian wouldn't be so hard on not upgrading programs within the same distribution versions and doing locally their backporting (and probably reinventing the wheel, and probably not by the best fitted individuals).
"Having less feature freezes to worry about should free up the devs."
That's a lost battle and upstreamers wouldn't need to worry about destribution freeze times *at all*: it's neither their bussiness nor anything they can control. What they can do is making the commitment of publishing a stable and supported version of their software and then distributions could use it on their products. It might happen that their glarining new version slips by days to the freeze date of distibution X but that won't worry neither the upstreamers (well, they'll use it on their next release) nor the distribution (am I choosing the "proper" version of this software or will it be a transtional one that will go unsupported in few months or even weeks?).
"I recommend Mark Shuttleworth's blog. He has been talking about this issue, and he brings up allot of interesting points."
I don't follow his blog but from time to time to give it a fast look but on my opinion, while not saying he has not some good ideas, they're not ideas I didn't read before anywhere else and they all seem just a bit too much as those end user "magic recipies" the like of "that many Linux distributions only spread efforts instead of concentrating them; there should be only one distribution". Well, which one then? "The one I happen to use, of course".
"You know, I read the paragraph you quoted and even after repeated readings never came to the conclusion that you did. In other words, nowhere does it say your data is protected by encryption."
You know, I read the paragraph you quoted and even after repeated readings never came to the conclusion you did. In other words, nowhere does it say he implied the data was protected by *encryption* but just that the data was protected from undesired eyes due to a feature called "Remote Wipe".
Well, it happens that "Remote Wipe" doesn't protect your data from undesired eyes not even for two minutes as it happens that "Remote Wipe" doesn't even have the chance to work if the burglar happens to take out the SIM card or else acting on a place with no signal, both of which don't avoid the burglar to gain access to "your important and personal information -- information you probably don't want in the hands of a stranger".
In other words: "Remote Wipe" doesn't stand against the claimed functionality from its vendor by a far margin.
"Most people really don't want real security. It would be a support nightmare"
It wouldn't.
"the common person is an idiot and will forget their password or whatever. Then all they want is their data back and they expect Apple to give it to them. If the device was really truly secure then their data would be permanently gone."
And that's exaclty why it wouldn't be a support nightmare:
-Hello, I forgot my password.
-Then you are f*ed. Next call!
See? About five seconds and the incident is properly closed.
It can be a marketing nightmare (and that's the whole point, of course) but certainly not a support nightmare.
"Fortunately there are third party products that provide real security for people who really need it. Too bad it's not always well integrated into the system though."
*That* is a support nightmare, not the previous case.
"Did you miss the GP's "then only update those packages on the DoD's list."?"
No. As I didn't miss the (my remark) "*extensive* guidance on minimum software versions" and the "etc" part.
"Unless that DoD list constitutes the bulk of a Linux system (100+ packages? - TFA only mentions 4!), then you still won't be "updating all the time", so your point is?"
TFA mentions *explicitly* four packages, and then an "etc" and an "extensive guidance": I take this for the list to be quite longer than just the four packages explicitly mentioned so my point is exactly what it was: "updating all the time to stay up to the list", not to talk about the constant flux of bugs due to integration problems that such a practice would arise.
"am considering scrapping the distro I currently use and replacing it will a personally-rolled one."
Probably because you never did so. It's an homungous work amount but certainly you can try: either LFS, Slackware or Gentoo would probably be proper starting points.
"It may take me longer to apply updates, and it will certainly be harder work"
For any production environment that alone is quite an operative definition for "worse".
"They cannot rely on a given distro using up-to-date sources, and in fact know that distros routinely won't."
The point being that they are doing so for quite valid and strong reasons.
"Since you will NEVER convince people to move away from package managers in those environments, an internal distro is the only way to go [...] Scientific Linux is precisely this sort of internal distro, with the sole difference that it was eventually released for others to use. So it has been done, and has been done Very Well. Thus, it is provably not necessarily "for the worse"."
There's only one little obstacle to overcome (well, three indeed): time, effort... money.
And about Scientific Linux, I think it proves my point much more than yours: it is not an internally develop distro but a heavily based on Red Hat one with a bunch of packages with local value... not even the CERN (which certainly has the ability, the money and probably would take advantage to do it) feel that to be such a great idea. The very first FAQ from their page states this:
Q. What is Scientific Linux?
A. Scientific Linux is in essence, a commercial enterprise linux distribution, recompiled.
What we have done is taken the source code from Enterprise (in srpm form) and recompiled them. The resulting binaries (now in rpm form) are then ours to do with as we desire as long as we follow the license from that original source code, which we are doing.
We then bundle all these binaries into a linux distribution that is as close to the commercial enterprise distribution as we can get it. The goal is to ensure that if a program runs and is certified on the commercial enterprise linux distribution, then it will run on the corresponding Scientific release.
See? "a linux distribution that is as close to the commercial enterprise distribution as we can get it" They are doing this for licensing/redistributing, not for using different versions, thus taking away the burden of integrating latest version from upstream and then dealing with its bugs and integration problems.
You said you found Debian Unstable "seriously broken", with problems regarding linking to uncompatible ABIs (or APIs) -of course, nothing else should be expected from an integration/development version: why do you think you won't find those very problems on your own rolled system? Are they going to disappear just because it was you the one that compiled it? Ask the Gentoo people then. It's only that now it will be *you* the one to deal with all that problems instead of spreading on others (while your help will certainly be welcomed) the burden to produce a polished system... after a while.
Of course it's doable: Debian does it with the strengh of about 1000 pairs of hands to the task. It can be even done on a "solo show" fashion as Patrick Volkerding can ascertain but then you must ask yourself: "will I be up to the task?" and specially, "will it be worth the effort or are there any good enough alternatives economically more sensible?"
"Why on earth would you need to update all the time? If it were me, I would install gentoo once, then only update those packages on the DoD's list."
You don't think they came up with a list saying "kernel 2.6.30" a year ago, do you? That list basically ends up saying "use the latest published releases" so, yes, you need updating all the time to stay up to the list.
"The most logical thing, surely, is to have a script that grabs the latest source, build suitable binary RPMs and a binary DEB, and then move these files to the correct directory for a repository manager."
Which, more or less, is exactly what it's done at the distribution level... and then you find that it takes about two years to stabilize the compatibility problems that arises with such a practice.
Then you look elsewhere and find that's what Debian does (to name an example) and that's why it takes Debian about two years to produce a new Stable release (I mention Debian, but Red Hat is more or less about the same, as it is SUSE or Slackware or anyone else). And then you recognize that you are just reinventing the wheel -for the worse, and that you are much better backporting security fixes just like Debian does or else recognizing that by your original procedure (grabbing latests sources, compiling them and pushing them to your computers) you are no better than using Debian Unstable (which it's obviously not so great for a production environment) and that even then, redoing their work is again just reinventing the wheel for the worse.
"You guys are all about bashing copyright law... ...except in a GPL article."
Well, I for one am all about thrashing away the GPL as long as you thrash away copyright laws, and I'm sure I'm not the only one.
"Without copyright, the GPL has no power"
Yes. It's a planned obsolescense within the GPL I think all GPL supporters want to see in action.
""The moral rights regime differs greatly between countries, but typically includes the right to be identified as the author of the work and the right to object to any distortion or mutilation of the work which would be prejudicial to his or her honour or reputation"
In short, societies don't recognise author's rights."
Quite on the contrary! Look at the very definition you pasted: When has been the time when any society hasn't recognized authorship and the moral right of the author to any modification of his work, at least as long as it retains his name? There's no need for a law anywhere to have people feeling that me telling I wrote "Romeo and Juliet" or "Don Quixote" is wrong. The point is that you made an unstated implicit: "The basic concept that creators retain some sort of moral (and therefore legal and economic) rights over their creations"; there's no such "therefore": moral rights are a different beast to legal and economic rights. We, people, feel this as well as companies do ("therefore" neither people nor companies feel any pain when author "X" passes legal and economic rights for his works to company "Y" but we know that doesn't mean that they have the right to say they are "works of Y" instead fo "works of X"). And we are quite good at managing it: there's no problem to see where one aportating to an artwork starts or ends: nobody is confused about the meaning of "Vivaldi's Four seasons" (the opus) against "von Karajan's Four Seasons" (the director's interpretation of Vivaldi's work) nor we feel any problem if it's Deutches Grammophon instead of Karajan the one that gets the money from "von Karajan's Four Seasons" recording, as long as it is not said to be "Deutches Grammophon's Four Seasons" but von Karajan's.
"In practical terms, this means that creators should look more closely at contract law and other means of asserting clear terms and conditions on the use of their creations on a case by case basis."
Big YES! But there's no novelty on this: that's the way for any artisan-like proffesion. Some "artists" feel entitled for an 'a priori' recognition of his works: they "deserve" something because they produced something. That hasn't ever worked, or else I'd feel entitled to be rewarded for my farts. The problem with my farts is that nobody asked me to produce them, or else I'd make sure a proper contract is in place and then it wouldn't be that I "deserve" something for my farts but that someone would be contractually tied to pay me for them. But that's exactly what they want to work just because they are "artists" instead of carpenters, lawyers or plumbers: they produce something nobody asked for, and then they feel entitled to some reward. Hey, Michellangelo didn't took a big piece of marble, produced the Moses and then expected someone to pay for it but the other way around: he found somebody to pay for his work and *then* he produced the Moses. Quite a more sensible approach on my opinion.
"How does one place a cost of production on an artistic work? A book, for example, is more than paper and ink"
But it isn't, production-wise much more than paper, ink and man's effort at competitive wages. The fact that not every man can produce a given book doesn't change that (neither a burger-flipping boy can do the job of a senior engineer).
"should we count time spent as part of the cost of production as well?"
Of course. Don't we do that with everything else?
"And if so, who sets the rate?"
Free market. Who else?
"In addition, each creation is unique"
As it's each fart. So what?
"and that, too, is part of their value."
Yes. But we are here talking about cost, not value. The production side is about costs, the marketing one about value.
"how does one create a competitive market in that same way for "books written by Isaac Asimov", when there is only one Isaac Asimov?"
On one hand, the strong part of market competition is not about "books written by Isaac Asimov" but about, i.e. "Sci-Fi books". On the other hand, even on the "books written by Isaac Asimov" there *is* competition, or do you think "Murder at the ABA" sells as easy as "I, robot"? And reality shows how market forces drives competition even within Isaac Asimov's works: why do you think Asimov has produced a ton of robot books but just one detectivesque but because the former sells much better than the latter?
"You're attempting to treat such creations as though they are "goods and services""
Hell, no! It is industry itself the one that wants to treat them as "goods and services"! Why do you think all they go around is about controlling the monetarizing part? Laws about plagiarism have been almost untouched for ages, it's when money goes into the equation when copyright-management companies scratch and squeeze.
"So if speciation has occured (according to the article) when the two populations no longer mate"
Re-read the article: it doesn't say so. It says that since those two populations no longer mate, the door is open for speciation to happen, not that it already has happened.
"does that mean if white people and black people stopped mating they would be different species?"
Change it for "they may end up eventually as different species" and you are right.
"if it's genuine, what does that tell of this "vinland"? maybe i've got it wrong, but it's written as if it's in the middle of the ocean."
Well, with our current geographical knowledge, what's west of Iceland? I'd say it's a mass of land in the middle of the ocean. Certainly it's a bit bigger than how it's depicted in that map (it might be that vikings didn't have the time to visit it all around, you know, America is quite big), but it *is* a landmass in the middle of the ocean.
"You can't exactly hop on your friend's XP box and run an X application from a remote server, unless he happens to have Exceed installed (for $$$)."
Well, at least you can install the Cygwin environment for free, don't you?