And Palm has been suppressing wifi on Treo for years now to suck up to Cingular and Sprint - go read about the shit that's happened and the repeated broken promises from Palm in some of the wifi threads on TreoCentral if you don't think this is really happening.
There's no doubt that there are *some* phones that have wifi. There are also *some* phones that let you run arbitrary third party apps. And there are some phones that do both - namely Windows Mobile devices.
Microsoft has just bulldozed the carriers on this stuff, but other companies can't afford to do that.
The whole point is that by blocking that channel, Palm and now Apple have achieved full carrier suck-up status to get distribution deals. Neither of these companies are Microsoft, and they can't just tell Cingular, Sprint, and Verizon to stuff it and put it any features they want to a handset.
So I reiterate: this is about more than just Jobs' control issues. It's also about the carriers and their fears and desires, and making concessions to get key distribution deals in place.
This is only partly about Jobs' control issues. It's also about Cingular's control issues. The wireless carriers are all scared shitless of a device like this - it could actually run a VoIP wifi app, several of which already exist for OS X, and thus leave them on the bad side of convergence. Also ringtones - again a carrier revenue stream.
So I'd attribute this more to carrier paranoia than to Jobs' control issues.
In any case, for me this is a deal-breaker. I was in love with this device yesterday. With no third party apps, I'm entirely uninterested until somebody hacks it.
Agreed. I could easily look past the plot issues if the acting were good. I think most of the actors are competent, if not brilliant, at their craft, and could have delivered much, much more impressive performances with the right director.
Lucas, unfortunately, is just not a great director.
Episode II is the only one of the prequels that I found anything I really liked about. Ep III was tolerable in parts, and just bad in others. I will watch it if it's on HBO HD.
Episode I, I'll never watch again. It just sucked.
You gotta respect a brand name actor who stars in something called "Snakes on a Plane" and says fuck it, I'm going to be in this movie even if everyone thinks I'm nuts for doing it.
I don't buy it. There is no doubt that big pharma has not been as cooperative as they could have been in the past, but in the present, the biggest roadblock is not getting pills at a low marginal cost, it's the fact that many countries don't have the basic health infrastructure to manage the use of anti-retrovirals in real HIV treatment programs.
Brazil managed to wrangle deals on antiretroviral drugs by threatening complete patent revocation and compulsory licensing. They now have cheap antiretroviral drugs that the government makes available for free to everyone.
Read some articles like this. It seems like many people think sub-Saharan African countries could have access to cheap antitretrovirals through the programs drug companies run, or through compulsory licensing and big Indian generic companies.
The issue is a lack of political will and interest by governments in supporting these programs, and the lack of a modern health infrastructure to distribute, monitor and manage usage of these drugs (although even countries like South Africa that have a reasonable health infrastructure seem to not have the interest in pushing these programs through).
While I agree that the multinational drug companies were terrible about this, everything I see indicates that the roadblocks in place now to comprehensive HIV/AIDS treatment in the developing world are more nuanced than you suggest.
Re:How much is that in square furlongs?
on
Giant Ice Shelf Snaps
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· Score: 0, Redundant
I'm sorry, but how big is that in Library of Congresses?
If you want the latest, greatest "Vista" from Microsoft, then you do need to worry when they keep delaying it. Likewise for Debian - if you want the latest, greatest "Etch" release, you need to worry about delays too.
If you don't care about that stuff, then just use the version that's available right now.
I fail to see how this is any different between MS and Linux? With Linux the process is more transparent, so when you go to a site that bills itself as "news for nerds", you can read about all the gory details if you want.
There's nothing provocative about the word hooker. But I found that tag to be particularly not funny as well - it carries the clear implication that the life of a prostitute is worth less than that of other people. I'm all for laughing at particularly dark humor, but the "deadhooker" tag isn't amusing, it's just a sad comment on how society views these people at its fringes.
Which is a large part of the reason they are so often the victim of brutal violence of this sort.
You seem to have a rather naive view of scientific research yourself: "They'll test the drugs on animals and that will guarantee that the drugs will be 100% safe and effective."
Talk about putting words in my mouth! I said nothing even remotely of that sort.
Apparently it was, at one time, used by French speakers in North Africa to refer to blacks. That is a truly obscure racial epithet. I just checked Wikipedia, and the entry for this word didn't exist until after the story broke. Now, I'm not saying that Allen isn't a racist. I don't know much of anything about the guy. But I find it bizarre that, first, he actually was aware of this slur, and that second, a seasoned politician would use intentionally use a racial slur against someone pointing a video camera directly at him.
Allen says he just made up the word, and was maybe inspired by the guy's mohawk-like haircut. That seems far more likely to me, anyway.
Apparently you missed the part about where Senator Allen's mother was a French speaker who grew up in Tunisia? Perhaps that makes it more clear why one might reasonably think he had been exposed to that word growing up.
Claiming otherwise would be like me claiming I don't know what "shvarze" means (mildly derogatory Yiddish slang for a black person, though it just means "black" and it's not clear where the derogatory associations came from). Point is, you might not know what the word means, but given my family's background, somebody could reasonably assume I know what that word means and it'd be pretty hard for me to use the word and then claim I just made it up.
That's possibly the most absurd thing I've ever read. If animal studies reveal nothing, why do they get performed? It's not like some evil corporate entity is forcing animal studies on scientists who secretly wish they could just stick these compounds in humans without bothering to test them out on animals first. No ethical scientist would ever want to do that and risk killing or injuring somebody without animal safety data, or getting somebody's hopes up without any efficacy testing in an animal model first.
Specific animals are usually chosen for studies because certain biological systems function in a very similar way to the relevant human biological system. Heck, plenty of drugs that work on humans work on cats and dogs and probably lots of mammals. Certain NSAIDs, antibiotics, steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, benzodiazepenes (anti-anxiety drugs like valium), and some chemotherapy agents developed for use in humans, just to name a few drugs commonly used with cats and dogs off the top of my head.
Your suggestion then that the results of animal trials bear "no relation" to how they will perform in humans is simply nonsensical. Many drugs may seem to be active in animals, but in humans turn out to be no better than other drugs on the market in terms of efficacy and worse in terms of side effects, which commonly leads to dropping them from commercialization. Differential comparisons of drug efficacy in animal models aren't necessarily useful to determining which drugs will be the most effective in humans, and side effects are not always equivalent, but that's not the point of animal trials - the point is to establish that the basic biological mechanism works in vivo and to get a vague concept of possible safe dosing in an animal model before moving to initial human safety tests.
I fail to see how you and the other animal rights loonies can have such a poor grasp of how scientific research works and yet feel qualified to comment so authoritatively on it.
While you are right that slippage of the dollar relative to other currencies will lead to increases in base metal prices in dollar terms, this clearly cannot be the only factor or the primary factor moving those prices, given what we've observed in the last few years. While the value of copper in some abstract sense may not have changed, clearly its price in real terms did (not to mention nominal terms), and that will apply in basically ever currency.
Due to the profound side effects or lack of efficacy when delivered through more common routes, such as orally or intravenously, ziconotide must be administered intrathecally (directly into the spine). As this is by far the most expensive and invasive method of drug delivery and involves additional risks of its own,[3] ziconotide therapy is generally considered appropriate (as evidenced by the range of use approved by the FDA in US) only for "management of severe chronic pain in patients for whom intrathecal (IT) therapy is warranted and who are intolerant of or refractory to other treatment, such as systemic analgesics, adjunctive therapies or IT morphine".[4]
However, this must be weighed against the high level of pain management, both in terms of degree and length, and the apparent lack of tolerance and other signs of addiction even after extended treatment along with the need for alternatives to other therapies that have not worked for the patient. Ziconotide is also contraindicated for patients with certain preexisting mental disorders (e.g. psychosis) due to evidence that they are more susceptible to certain severe side effects.[5]
So imagine if you had severe, long-term, opioid resistant pain. The common side effects of "dizziness, nausea, confusion, and headache" might not seem quite so severe given the benefits.
Of course, if somebody could make a conotoxin based pain medication with a lower side-effect profile, and that was easier to administer, it would be much wore widely applicable and could be quite the blockbuster drug.
i think there's little argument that the 2nd amendment was articulated to guarantee the ability of a free people to defend themselves against and even overthrow an unjust aggressor or ruling entity.
I agree, but does that give the right to an *individual* to decide when his mayor, Governor, President, or police chief needs to be "overthrown"? Or does it mean that collectively, a people should have the right to decide that they are being treated unjustly and to collectively decide to go to war with an unjust aggressor or ruling entity?
I would argue the latter. I don't think carrying around a piece wherever you go relates at all to the right of the people to overthrow an unjust government. That just invites somebody to decide after a few drinks that somebody else is an "unjust aggressor" or that the local police are an "unjust ruling entity".
So I'm not sure why the right to "keep and carry arms wherever they go" helps us create a more just society, or what that has to do with the goals you mention. I know I wouldn't want to live in the frontier West or any society where people carry guns with them all the time.
And if you write a line of code that doesn't do what it's supposed to and it costs your employer $2M by the loss of a big client who's system crashes unexpectedly on them, you're going to pay that out of your pocket, right? Because it would only be fair.
Face it, that's not the way the world works. Corporations are a limited liability entity to shield individuals from this kind of financial ruin.
If you screw up and it costs your employer millions of dollars, you should expect to be out of a job and to have trouble getting a new job.
I know, people will point to big screw ups like Carly Fiorina who was basically paid off to leave after screwing up her company completely (which just happens to be HP) as an example of how top execs don't have to play by the same rules. But the point is nobody will take a job with compensation that is completely contingent - i.e. you have to return us the last 3 years of your salary if you screw up at some point. As it is, a substantial portion of a top exec's comp is usually performance-contingent, i.e options, performance bonus, etc. And it's often hard to attribute blame for bad outcomes entirely to a CEO, vs. external, economic, competitive and other factors, which is what leads to the inevitable lawsuits and settlement payments.
What most students want is job skills. Few students have the inclination (or spare funds) to learn for the sake of learning for four years, and then spend another two or three at a trade/professional school, before they can get a real position.
Fine, then be my guest to go to trade school and learn to write code. Or whatever you want to learn there. I know that I like the software developers who work for me to know how to think about algorithms, to understand concepts of computational complexity, to know when a problem they've been given is more-or-less impossible (write a polynomial time algorithm to solve this NP-hard problem).
I guess if I just need a grunt to bang out simple code and that's all I'll ever want from them, then I guess a trade school grad will do just fine.
But realistically, I prefer to have flexible, adaptable learners working for me, who've been exposed to the theoretical underpinnings of their field and have a sufficiently broad-based education in other topics that we can engage in interest conversation about a wide array of liberal arts topics.
In any case, nobody is "making" these motivated young people waste their time in college. But a lot of employers want to hire college grads. I've certainly hired a few autodidacts who didn't finish college - but these were people who were so smart it didn't matter. And these are a tiny fraction of the people out there in the market.
And STILL these people would have greatly benefited in terms of social skills and teamwork skills from a college experience even if they were able to learn all the relevant academic material on their own.
Yes, I realize that. The "not supposed to make money" thing was partially in jest, I didn't realize how seriously everybody would take it. My point was that a non-profit generally has a set of non profit-oriented goals and engage in a variety of means to raise funds to support expenses incurred in reaching that goal.
See my other reply. I thought that was so obvious it wasn't worth saying. In any case, my post was a half-jest. And my point about it being a non-profit was really in response to all those whining about how Open Source companies have no business model - a non-profit doesn't generally have a profit-driven business model, they usually have some non-profit-driven goals and seek funding through any number of means (grants, donations or business activities) to further those goals.
And clearly if uses of funds are greater than sources and there's no large pool of assets you're sitting on, you have a problem.:)
You took my post too seriously and apparently missed the obvious tongue-in-cheekiness of it. I realize that a non-profit still has to cover their costs, whether through grants, donations, or business revenues - I didn't think this should need to be explained explicitly, but your suggestion that I said something "wrong" is laughable and makes you look like an idiot.
The point is that people in this thread kept harping about Open Source business models. A non-profit organization doesn't have a profit-driven "business model"; rather, they generally seek to raise money by any means possible and spend or distribute it to support worthy causes. In this case developing the Linux kernel.
I really shouldn't have to explain all of this, it should be obvious.
To quote from their website: "OSDL is a nonprofit organization that provides state-of-the-art computing and test facilities to developers around the world."
So OSDL doesn't really have much of a business model other than "our members give us some money, and we use it to pay Linus Torvalds a salary".
The fact that they aren't making lots of money is therefore not a failure of a business model, but the fact that they are a non-profit, with perhaps a poorly defined mission, that as a result has difficulty attracting lots of sponsorship money and would probably be dead by now if it weren't for the fact that Linus works there.
Correct, but they aren't supposed to make money. To quote from their website: "OSDL is a nonprofit organization that provides state-of-the-art computing and test facilities to developers around the world."
Yes, but the difference is those conspiracy theories are mostly false, so the US government doesn't worry too much about the quacks spreading them around. If they were true, you'd imagine the government might get a bit more ruffled about it.
The fact that this guy was killed indicates pretty strongly to me that he was correct and truthful about the Russian government, and that they silenced him permanently, as they seem to have been doing with many critics recently.
Either that, or Putin thinks that by doing something that people wouldn't think he would do, he can maintain an element of plausible deniability.
It's really rather hard to know whether he ordered it and wanted to make it look like a renegade group did it, or whether a renegade group actually did it.
Using the word "liberal" like a dirty word, and ranting about "foundation-running elites" and Air America makes you sound a bit crazy and detracts from an otherwise valid point.
You might want to seek counseling about that anger problem you have.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow... maybe it's time for your company to hire a new Director of IT for Asia.
And Palm has been suppressing wifi on Treo for years now to suck up to Cingular and Sprint - go read about the shit that's happened and the repeated broken promises from Palm in some of the wifi threads on TreoCentral if you don't think this is really happening.
There's no doubt that there are *some* phones that have wifi. There are also *some* phones that let you run arbitrary third party apps. And there are some phones that do both - namely Windows Mobile devices.
Microsoft has just bulldozed the carriers on this stuff, but other companies can't afford to do that.
The whole point is that by blocking that channel, Palm and now Apple have achieved full carrier suck-up status to get distribution deals. Neither of these companies are Microsoft, and they can't just tell Cingular, Sprint, and Verizon to stuff it and put it any features they want to a handset.
So I reiterate: this is about more than just Jobs' control issues. It's also about the carriers and their fears and desires, and making concessions to get key distribution deals in place.
This is only partly about Jobs' control issues. It's also about Cingular's control issues. The wireless carriers are all scared shitless of a device like this - it could actually run a VoIP wifi app, several of which already exist for OS X, and thus leave them on the bad side of convergence. Also ringtones - again a carrier revenue stream.
So I'd attribute this more to carrier paranoia than to Jobs' control issues.
In any case, for me this is a deal-breaker. I was in love with this device yesterday. With no third party apps, I'm entirely uninterested until somebody hacks it.
Agreed. I could easily look past the plot issues if the acting were good. I think most of the actors are competent, if not brilliant, at their craft, and could have delivered much, much more impressive performances with the right director.
Lucas, unfortunately, is just not a great director.
Episode II is the only one of the prequels that I found anything I really liked about. Ep III was tolerable in parts, and just bad in others. I will watch it if it's on HBO HD.
Episode I, I'll never watch again. It just sucked.
You gotta respect a brand name actor who stars in something called "Snakes on a Plane" and says fuck it, I'm going to be in this movie even if everyone thinks I'm nuts for doing it.
I don't buy it. There is no doubt that big pharma has not been as cooperative as they could have been in the past, but in the present, the biggest roadblock is not getting pills at a low marginal cost, it's the fact that many countries don't have the basic health infrastructure to manage the use of anti-retrovirals in real HIV treatment programs.
Brazil managed to wrangle deals on antiretroviral drugs by threatening complete patent revocation and compulsory licensing. They now have cheap antiretroviral drugs that the government makes available for free to everyone.
Read some articles like this. It seems like many people think sub-Saharan African countries could have access to cheap antitretrovirals through the programs drug companies run, or through compulsory licensing and big Indian generic companies.
The issue is a lack of political will and interest by governments in supporting these programs, and the lack of a modern health infrastructure to distribute, monitor and manage usage of these drugs (although even countries like South Africa that have a reasonable health infrastructure seem to not have the interest in pushing these programs through).
While I agree that the multinational drug companies were terrible about this, everything I see indicates that the roadblocks in place now to comprehensive HIV/AIDS treatment in the developing world are more nuanced than you suggest.
I'm sorry, but how big is that in Library of Congresses?
If you want the latest, greatest "Vista" from Microsoft, then you do need to worry when they keep delaying it. Likewise for Debian - if you want the latest, greatest "Etch" release, you need to worry about delays too.
If you don't care about that stuff, then just use the version that's available right now.
I fail to see how this is any different between MS and Linux? With Linux the process is more transparent, so when you go to a site that bills itself as "news for nerds", you can read about all the gory details if you want.
There's nothing provocative about the word hooker. But I found that tag to be particularly not funny as well - it carries the clear implication that the life of a prostitute is worth less than that of other people. I'm all for laughing at particularly dark humor, but the "deadhooker" tag isn't amusing, it's just a sad comment on how society views these people at its fringes.
Which is a large part of the reason they are so often the victim of brutal violence of this sort.
You seem to have a rather naive view of scientific research yourself: "They'll test the drugs on animals and that will guarantee that the drugs will be 100% safe and effective."
Talk about putting words in my mouth! I said nothing even remotely of that sort.
Apparently it was, at one time, used by French speakers in North Africa to refer to blacks. That is a truly obscure racial epithet. I just checked Wikipedia, and the entry for this word didn't exist until after the story broke. Now, I'm not saying that Allen isn't a racist. I don't know much of anything about the guy. But I find it bizarre that, first, he actually was aware of this slur, and that second, a seasoned politician would use intentionally use a racial slur against someone pointing a video camera directly at him.
Allen says he just made up the word, and was maybe inspired by the guy's mohawk-like haircut. That seems far more likely to me, anyway.
Apparently you missed the part about where Senator Allen's mother was a French speaker who grew up in Tunisia? Perhaps that makes it more clear why one might reasonably think he had been exposed to that word growing up.
Claiming otherwise would be like me claiming I don't know what "shvarze" means (mildly derogatory Yiddish slang for a black person, though it just means "black" and it's not clear where the derogatory associations came from). Point is, you might not know what the word means, but given my family's background, somebody could reasonably assume I know what that word means and it'd be pretty hard for me to use the word and then claim I just made it up.
That's possibly the most absurd thing I've ever read. If animal studies reveal nothing, why do they get performed? It's not like some evil corporate entity is forcing animal studies on scientists who secretly wish they could just stick these compounds in humans without bothering to test them out on animals first. No ethical scientist would ever want to do that and risk killing or injuring somebody without animal safety data, or getting somebody's hopes up without any efficacy testing in an animal model first.
Specific animals are usually chosen for studies because certain biological systems function in a very similar way to the relevant human biological system. Heck, plenty of drugs that work on humans work on cats and dogs and probably lots of mammals. Certain NSAIDs, antibiotics, steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, benzodiazepenes (anti-anxiety drugs like valium), and some chemotherapy agents developed for use in humans, just to name a few drugs commonly used with cats and dogs off the top of my head.
Your suggestion then that the results of animal trials bear "no relation" to how they will perform in humans is simply nonsensical. Many drugs may seem to be active in animals, but in humans turn out to be no better than other drugs on the market in terms of efficacy and worse in terms of side effects, which commonly leads to dropping them from commercialization. Differential comparisons of drug efficacy in animal models aren't necessarily useful to determining which drugs will be the most effective in humans, and side effects are not always equivalent, but that's not the point of animal trials - the point is to establish that the basic biological mechanism works in vivo and to get a vague concept of possible safe dosing in an animal model before moving to initial human safety tests.
I fail to see how you and the other animal rights loonies can have such a poor grasp of how scientific research works and yet feel qualified to comment so authoritatively on it.
Are you claiming the value of a dollar has decreased by a factor of 4 in the last three years the value of copper to increase by a factor of 4?
While you are right that slippage of the dollar relative to other currencies will lead to increases in base metal prices in dollar terms, this clearly cannot be the only factor or the primary factor moving those prices, given what we've observed in the last few years. While the value of copper in some abstract sense may not have changed, clearly its price in real terms did (not to mention nominal terms), and that will apply in basically ever currency.
The Wikipedia article on Ziconotide gives a slightly more balanced view. To quote:
Due to the profound side effects or lack of efficacy when delivered through more common routes, such as orally or intravenously, ziconotide must be administered intrathecally (directly into the spine). As this is by far the most expensive and invasive method of drug delivery and involves additional risks of its own,[3] ziconotide therapy is generally considered appropriate (as evidenced by the range of use approved by the FDA in US) only for "management of severe chronic pain in patients for whom intrathecal (IT) therapy is warranted and who are intolerant of or refractory to other treatment, such as systemic analgesics, adjunctive therapies or IT morphine".[4]
However, this must be weighed against the high level of pain management, both in terms of degree and length, and the apparent lack of tolerance and other signs of addiction even after extended treatment along with the need for alternatives to other therapies that have not worked for the patient. Ziconotide is also contraindicated for patients with certain preexisting mental disorders (e.g. psychosis) due to evidence that they are more susceptible to certain severe side effects.[5]
So imagine if you had severe, long-term, opioid resistant pain. The common side effects of "dizziness, nausea, confusion, and headache" might not seem quite so severe given the benefits.
Of course, if somebody could make a conotoxin based pain medication with a lower side-effect profile, and that was easier to administer, it would be much wore widely applicable and could be quite the blockbuster drug.
i think there's little argument that the 2nd amendment was articulated to guarantee the ability of a free people to defend themselves against and even overthrow an unjust aggressor or ruling entity.
I agree, but does that give the right to an *individual* to decide when his mayor, Governor, President, or police chief needs to be "overthrown"? Or does it mean that collectively, a people should have the right to decide that they are being treated unjustly and to collectively decide to go to war with an unjust aggressor or ruling entity?
I would argue the latter. I don't think carrying around a piece wherever you go relates at all to the right of the people to overthrow an unjust government. That just invites somebody to decide after a few drinks that somebody else is an "unjust aggressor" or that the local police are an "unjust ruling entity".
So I'm not sure why the right to "keep and carry arms wherever they go" helps us create a more just society, or what that has to do with the goals you mention. I know I wouldn't want to live in the frontier West or any society where people carry guns with them all the time.
And if you write a line of code that doesn't do what it's supposed to and it costs your employer $2M by the loss of a big client who's system crashes unexpectedly on them, you're going to pay that out of your pocket, right? Because it would only be fair.
Face it, that's not the way the world works. Corporations are a limited liability entity to shield individuals from this kind of financial ruin.
If you screw up and it costs your employer millions of dollars, you should expect to be out of a job and to have trouble getting a new job.
I know, people will point to big screw ups like Carly Fiorina who was basically paid off to leave after screwing up her company completely (which just happens to be HP) as an example of how top execs don't have to play by the same rules. But the point is nobody will take a job with compensation that is completely contingent - i.e. you have to return us the last 3 years of your salary if you screw up at some point. As it is, a substantial portion of a top exec's comp is usually performance-contingent, i.e options, performance bonus, etc. And it's often hard to attribute blame for bad outcomes entirely to a CEO, vs. external, economic, competitive and other factors, which is what leads to the inevitable lawsuits and settlement payments.
What most students want is job skills. Few students have the inclination (or spare funds) to learn for the sake of learning for four years, and then spend another two or three at a trade/professional school, before they can get a real position.
Fine, then be my guest to go to trade school and learn to write code. Or whatever you want to learn there. I know that I like the software developers who work for me to know how to think about algorithms, to understand concepts of computational complexity, to know when a problem they've been given is more-or-less impossible (write a polynomial time algorithm to solve this NP-hard problem).
I guess if I just need a grunt to bang out simple code and that's all I'll ever want from them, then I guess a trade school grad will do just fine.
But realistically, I prefer to have flexible, adaptable learners working for me, who've been exposed to the theoretical underpinnings of their field and have a sufficiently broad-based education in other topics that we can engage in interest conversation about a wide array of liberal arts topics.
In any case, nobody is "making" these motivated young people waste their time in college. But a lot of employers want to hire college grads. I've certainly hired a few autodidacts who didn't finish college - but these were people who were so smart it didn't matter. And these are a tiny fraction of the people out there in the market.
And STILL these people would have greatly benefited in terms of social skills and teamwork skills from a college experience even if they were able to learn all the relevant academic material on their own.
Yes, I realize that. The "not supposed to make money" thing was partially in jest, I didn't realize how seriously everybody would take it. My point was that a non-profit generally has a set of non profit-oriented goals and engage in a variety of means to raise funds to support expenses incurred in reaching that goal.
See my other reply. I thought that was so obvious it wasn't worth saying. In any case, my post was a half-jest. And my point about it being a non-profit was really in response to all those whining about how Open Source companies have no business model - a non-profit doesn't generally have a profit-driven business model, they usually have some non-profit-driven goals and seek funding through any number of means (grants, donations or business activities) to further those goals.
:)
And clearly if uses of funds are greater than sources and there's no large pool of assets you're sitting on, you have a problem.
You took my post too seriously and apparently missed the obvious tongue-in-cheekiness of it. I realize that a non-profit still has to cover their costs, whether through grants, donations, or business revenues - I didn't think this should need to be explained explicitly, but your suggestion that I said something "wrong" is laughable and makes you look like an idiot.
The point is that people in this thread kept harping about Open Source business models. A non-profit organization doesn't have a profit-driven "business model"; rather, they generally seek to raise money by any means possible and spend or distribute it to support worthy causes. In this case developing the Linux kernel.
I really shouldn't have to explain all of this, it should be obvious.
To quote from their website: "OSDL is a nonprofit organization that provides state-of-the-art computing and test facilities to developers around the world."
So OSDL doesn't really have much of a business model other than "our members give us some money, and we use it to pay Linus Torvalds a salary".
The fact that they aren't making lots of money is therefore not a failure of a business model, but the fact that they are a non-profit, with perhaps a poorly defined mission, that as a result has difficulty attracting lots of sponsorship money and would probably be dead by now if it weren't for the fact that Linus works there.
Correct, but they aren't supposed to make money. To quote from their website: "OSDL is a nonprofit organization that provides state-of-the-art computing and test facilities to developers around the world."
Non-profit, ya see?
Yes, but the difference is those conspiracy theories are mostly false, so the US government doesn't worry too much about the quacks spreading them around. If they were true, you'd imagine the government might get a bit more ruffled about it.
The fact that this guy was killed indicates pretty strongly to me that he was correct and truthful about the Russian government, and that they silenced him permanently, as they seem to have been doing with many critics recently.
Either that, or Putin thinks that by doing something that people wouldn't think he would do, he can maintain an element of plausible deniability.
It's really rather hard to know whether he ordered it and wanted to make it look like a renegade group did it, or whether a renegade group actually did it.
Using the word "liberal" like a dirty word, and ranting about "foundation-running elites" and Air America makes you sound a bit crazy and detracts from an otherwise valid point.
You might want to seek counseling about that anger problem you have.