No, now it all gets mixed up. The 100 Euro are the maximum charge for the warning letter. We have a new law in Germany that limits these charges to 100 Euro in minor cases. He has not been convicted to pay any compensation, because he was just the one who's WLAN was used ("Störer" in German law), not the one who commited the copyright infringement. And the decision clearly states that "Störer" do not have to pay any compensation.
I don't think that just calling the well known spin-vortices lurid "magnetic tornados" make this a new idea. Gimme one penny for every magnetic or two level or... system that physicist (I am one of them...) proposed to be a candidate for groundbreaking new storage systems and I'd be a rich man.
At least to my knowledge these spin-vortices are hard to control and often appear as an unwanted effect in domain wall based storage devices in developmen, like IBMs race track RAM.
We'll see if we hear more of that idea, but the silly name "magnetic tornados" makes me skeptical that this is just getting public attention for getting research grants.
Although that's offtopic: The KDE developers changed their naming scheme for KDE 4. The "K" is now considered mostly silly, new concepts and programs feature the "K" just very little: Solid, Plasma, Phonon, Oxygen,... also the silly capitalizations are gone: amaroK is renamed officially to Amarok. See
http://commit-digest.org/issues/2006-06-11/
So, sorry, but all the silly joKes about KDE on slashdot need a new issue.
I wonder why nobody disusses the neccessarity of more and more energy. Take a look around your room and see all the glowing "standby" LEDs. Take a look inside your computer and ask yourself if you really need that 2 GHz processor whithout any power saving technonogy. Esp. if you're American, ask yourself why your country doesn't subscribe to the Kyoto protocoll, or why you all drive these SUVs when oil is a decreasing, limited resource. Could it be that this whole discussion is just about "We don't want to save energy, so nuclear power has to be clean and riskless!"
I'm a physicist. I know about radioactivty. I know the difference between theory and real life. Don't tell me nucelar power is save. Tell that to the people in Chernobyl, Harrisburg, Sellafield,...
If you're still not convinced, ask yourself why you get a bad feeling if Iran or North Korea fight for thier rights for peacefull(?) use of nuclear energy. If that energy is save, why could one build nuclear/dirty bombs using nearly the same techniques? I never heard of a wind/solar bomb.
Ask yourself how you would guarantee that all the processing of nuclear material is done in a safe way.
Now wouldn't it be easier to simply say: Let's concentrate on saving energy instead of keeping it cheap at any consequence?
Read for yourself:
http://lists.osdl.org/pipermail/desktop_architects /2005-December/000629.html
According to Nat himself there was obviously no need to close the devlopment: "For the first 10 or 12 months of development, there was no material outside contribution to Xgl."
But: "We'd like to make a splash with something that is largely functional." That's maybe OK for a company and it's marketing needs, but not how open source development works. Although Novell sposored a lot of work on XGL it's not "thier" project. Everyone would have also appreciated Daves work if he'ld submitted to the open repository.
I think esp. the Ximian crew behave in my opinion quite reckless und unfair. Remember all that Qt license bashing in the beginning, then all these "standards" for all desktops defined by gnome developers like tango, the fluffed gnome coup some weeks ago, Linus rant against gnome (a few days befor was that desktop meeting at OSDL in Portland, take a look at Nats blog, where just he says something like need to says something about that later in a short blog...) and the general "WE are the corporate desktop" attitude of the Gnome Marketing. And all this with a gnome that has serious problems with unmaintainable libraries which are full of double implemented technoligies and remains of wrong descions mage earlier like Corba, bonobo,... Sun already dropped thier gnome based Java desktop, Slackware did so because of the unmaintanable librarie dependencies.
So with all that background I would say developing XGL behind closed doors is not a "conspiracy" and the link to the discussion above is not a flamewar, but another Nat Friedman stupidity.
And surprise, surprise, a few days after that discussion it looks like Dave accepted that this was silly thing to do and released his work on the mailing list:
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xorg/2006-Ja nuary/011922.html
but it looks like it's to late and some people also started to work beside Dave on XGL and it seems like we most likely now will have a fork.
So, Thank you, Novell, well done:(
Beside all the discussion in other threads about high Tc supraconductors, the article is wrong in whats causing the loss of current: It's the resitance of the conductor, not the loss of charge. Beside some exotic phenomenas in high energy physics (CPT conservation) the charge is always conserved. But the electrons give loose thier momentum by collisions with impurities in the conductor and therefore cannot contribute fully to the current after the collision. That's one of the effects causing the finite resitance on non supraconducting materials, but none of the electrons lose it's charge during the passage.
And even if, the conspiracy idiots will find some new "mistakes" in the pictures. It's not that they don't believe. They simply ignore all facts because they prefer to belive in conspiracy, that's why all discussions with them are and will be fruitless.
Simply believing that hundreds or thousands of people can keep a secret for so long is ridicoulus. If I want some news to be spread all over the town, I know some people to wich I just have to tell that as a "secret"...
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No, now it all gets mixed up. The 100 Euro are the maximum charge for the warning letter. We have a new law in Germany that limits these charges to 100 Euro in minor cases. He has not been convicted to pay any compensation, because he was just the one who's WLAN was used ("Störer" in German law), not the one who commited the copyright infringement. And the decision clearly states that "Störer" do not have to pay any compensation.
I don't think that just calling the well known spin-vortices lurid "magnetic tornados" make this a new idea. Gimme one penny for every magnetic or two level or ... system that physicist (I am one of them ...) proposed to be a candidate for groundbreaking new storage systems and I'd be a rich man.
At least to my knowledge these spin-vortices are hard to control and often appear as an unwanted effect in domain wall based storage devices in developmen, like IBMs race track RAM.
We'll see if we hear more of that idea, but the silly name "magnetic tornados" makes me skeptical that this is just getting public attention for getting research grants.
Although that's offtopic: The KDE developers changed their naming scheme for KDE 4. The "K" is now considered mostly silly, new concepts and programs feature the "K" just very little: Solid, Plasma, Phonon, Oxygen, ... also the silly capitalizations are gone: amaroK is renamed officially to Amarok. See
http://commit-digest.org/issues/2006-06-11/
So, sorry, but all the silly joKes about KDE on slashdot need a new issue.
I wonder why nobody disusses the neccessarity of more and more energy. Take a look around your room and see all the glowing "standby" LEDs. Take a look inside your computer and ask yourself if you really need that 2 GHz processor whithout any power saving technonogy. Esp. if you're American, ask yourself why your country doesn't subscribe to the Kyoto protocoll, or why you all drive these SUVs when oil is a decreasing, limited resource. Could it be that this whole discussion is just about "We don't want to save energy, so nuclear power has to be clean and riskless!" I'm a physicist. I know about radioactivty. I know the difference between theory and real life. Don't tell me nucelar power is save. Tell that to the people in Chernobyl, Harrisburg, Sellafield, ...
If you're still not convinced, ask yourself why you get a bad feeling if Iran or North Korea fight for thier rights for peacefull(?) use of nuclear energy. If that energy is save, why could one build nuclear/dirty bombs using nearly the same techniques? I never heard of a wind/solar bomb.
Ask yourself how you would guarantee that all the processing of nuclear material is done in a safe way.
Now wouldn't it be easier to simply say: Let's concentrate on saving energy instead of keeping it cheap at any consequence?
Read for yourself: http://lists.osdl.org/pipermail/desktop_architects /2005-December/000629.html
According to Nat himself there was obviously no need to close the devlopment: "For the first 10 or 12 months of development, there was no material outside contribution to Xgl."
But: "We'd like to make a splash with something that is largely functional." That's maybe OK for a company and it's marketing needs, but not how open source development works. Although Novell sposored a lot of work on XGL it's not "thier" project. Everyone would have also appreciated Daves work if he'ld submitted to the open repository.
I think esp. the Ximian crew behave in my opinion quite reckless und unfair. Remember all that Qt license bashing in the beginning, then all these "standards" for all desktops defined by gnome developers like tango, the fluffed gnome coup some weeks ago, Linus rant against gnome (a few days befor was that desktop meeting at OSDL in Portland, take a look at Nats blog, where just he says something like need to says something about that later in a short blog...) and the general "WE are the corporate desktop" attitude of the Gnome Marketing. And all this with a gnome that has serious problems with unmaintainable libraries which are full of double implemented technoligies and remains of wrong descions mage earlier like Corba, bonobo, ... Sun already dropped thier gnome based Java desktop, Slackware did so because of the unmaintanable librarie dependencies.
So with all that background I would say developing XGL behind closed doors is not a "conspiracy" and the link to the discussion above is not a flamewar, but another Nat Friedman stupidity.
And surprise, surprise, a few days after that discussion it looks like Dave accepted that this was silly thing to do and released his work on the mailing list:
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xorg/2006-Ja nuary/011922.html
but it looks like it's to late and some people also started to work beside Dave on XGL and it seems like we most likely now will have a fork.
So, Thank you, Novell, well done :(
Beside all the discussion in other threads about high Tc supraconductors, the article is wrong in whats causing the loss of current: It's the resitance of the conductor, not the loss of charge. Beside some exotic phenomenas in high energy physics (CPT conservation) the charge is always conserved. But the electrons give loose thier momentum by collisions with impurities in the conductor and therefore cannot contribute fully to the current after the collision. That's one of the effects causing the finite resitance on non supraconducting materials, but none of the electrons lose it's charge during the passage.
And even if, the conspiracy idiots will find some new "mistakes" in the pictures. It's not that they don't believe. They simply ignore all facts because they prefer to belive in conspiracy, that's why all discussions with them are and will be fruitless. Simply believing that hundreds or thousands of people can keep a secret for so long is ridicoulus. If I want some news to be spread all over the town, I know some people to wich I just have to tell that as a "secret" ...