Um, last I heard, the Catholic Church officially endorses evolution. The Church that once imprisoned Galileo and burned people at the stake is no more.
AFAIK, Matlab deals mostly in ordinary floats, and does none of the esoteric things you mention to develop perfectly exact numbers. That's mainly the province of symbolic mathematics packages such as Mathematica, Maple, and (for something just as powerful that's actually Free Software) Maxima. These programs are actually capable of performing exact arithmetic even on irrational and transcendental numbers, by using rational numbers where this is possible, and by representing irrational/transcendental numbers as functions involving only rational numbers that can be used calculate the number to arbitrary precision, e.g. they might represent pi by using one of the many available power series expansions for it, and use their symbolic mathematics system to take care of the manipulations. Needless to say, this is very expensive, and massive overkill for almost everything but mathematics research and some specialized work in theoretical physics.
All of that would certainly be possible here as well. Change to *suit* the viewer, perhaps not, but probably better if it would react in certain ways to the viewer's emotions, taking the viewer's emotions elsewhere, which in turn would cause it to change again to take the user's emotions somewhere else, in what essentially amounts to a feedback loop. But then again, I believe that genre of art already exists. It's called a video game, although most people engaged in that art form don't think quite in those terms.
So PJ got married to some Mr. Harbour and went from noted paralegal blogger to FTC commissioner in one fell swoop? And now she's writing opinions on Rambus... Interesting.
Maybe the database is ChoicePoint. What Mr. Rambam is mentioning sounds suspiciously a lot like a couple of recent articles (here and here) by Greg Palast where he makes the case that ChoicePoint and companies like them have provided an outsourced service for the structure of a police state, where government oversight cannot go, and has gone so far as to call them "the private KGB".
You're missing a lot. I suggest you at least try to see the movie. The whole premise behind the story is a reaction against a society increasingly dominated by materialism and specifically today's consumerist culture. Fight Club was never about trying to "prove your manliness", it was about rebellion against a society where they are left as "God's middle children, with no special place in history and no special attention." And so the response becomes increasingly violent nihilism and the creation of mayhem and chaos... Read (or watch) and understand...
I remember at least five: 1. Evenflow, 2. Alive, 3. Jeremy, 4. Animal, 5. Daughter. All 1992-1993 thereabouts, before MTV started becoming totally wussy. Damn I'm old.:(
Basically, if I'm reading this correctly, the virus' correct operation depended on system calls to the Linux kernel keeping values of registers unchanged, which is the correct behavior. 2.6.16 broke this behavior, but since very little other code actually assumes this as well, we didn't get serious lossage, but we *might* for other code, and were the virus rewritten to not assume that register values were preserved by system calls, it might also work properly. At any rate, this virus would still have far less teeth on GNU/Linux than it would on Windows, unless someone was stupid enough to execute it as root. And well, if you're actually foolish enough to do something like that on GNU/Linux, then you're probably also foolish enough to enter rm -rf / or something equivalent as root at some point.
Well, there is only one space character in English. There are more than 2000 kanji. If that's the main reason for their existence, I believe anyone would consider that crazy. There are certainly many trivial and far easier ways of breaking up text into something more intelligible than peppering the text with thousands of distinct characters that are a pain to study and learn. If you want to argue that the kanji are useful to distinguish the many homonyms of Japanese, I believe that it has been cogently argued that Japanese (and moreso Chinese) has so many homonyms mainly because their use of Kanji/Hanzi has allowed them to get away with it.
Don't get me wrong; I'm studying Japanese now and I find the study of kanji absolutely fascinating. In the same way I suppose that a crack addict would find that smoking it makes him feel better. They're paying a very, very high price for sticking to tradition, methinks, when they've had a simple way out available for many centuries.
I know what you mean, however there are some children's storybooks I have that make minimal use of kanji, roughly less than a dozen in each book, all with furigana, and they are not hard at all. As a parallel example, the Koreans have actually managed to almost completely do away with Hanja, and now nearly everything they write is in the Hangul syllabary. I find it hard to believe that there are truly insurmountable technical difficulties for the Japanese to do something similar and abandon Kanji in favor of exclusive use of the Kana. But certainly, and cultural or social obstacles to such a move abound. I read about what happened (PDF link to the introduction of Remembering the Kanji III) when the Occupation Government attempted to curtail the number of officially used kanji to only 1850 and how well that went over with the public, with people growing up legally nameless rather than abandoning the kanji they had been using. I imagine a move to totally abandon the Kanji would be greeted with even more disdain.
Good advice from an anonymous coward, but hey, I really must object to the reasoning behind #4. If Japanese grammar were comparable to some programming languages in complexity then it must be very easy indeed. I used to learn how to program in one language and write nontrivial programs in many of them in a matter of weeks. I learned Java in less than a week. Scheme took a little longer, maybe a month, but at the end of it I was writing a simple expert system of sorts, and after that, Common Lisp, Haskell, and OCaml were a piece of cake. I don't think of myself as being an exceptionally gifted computer scientist, and I know more than a few people who learn programming languages at such a similar rate. All of this is completely unsupervised learning, with only reference books and web sites to explain things, no formal classes.
In contrast, a Japanese language school here in my country is offering a ten-month full-time course of study that brings you from knowing absolutely no Japanese to being able to confidently take and pass the JLPT Level 2 Exam, but that's five days a week for ten months for nine hours a day. I know of no programming language that has such a steep learning curve, that you would need to study it for almost a year before you become proficient enough to write a nontrivial program.
By the way, I wouldn't characterize Japanese grammar as being crazy compared to English, which has just as many special cases and odd constructions, if not more. It's just different from English, and in many ways, it's actually simpler. It is the Japanese writing system that is crazy. The Occupation government at the end of the war should have abolished the use of Kanji, and then maybe they'd have stuck to using only the Kana syllabaries...
You need a grammar guide because Japanese grammar is obviously different from English, and for no other reason.
The total number of Kanji in wide use for Japanese is something closer to 2500 rather than 7000 (even Chinese only regularly uses some 3000 or so), and it appears to be necessary to know something like 1800 to 2000 characters to be able to read a typical Japanese newspaper like the Nihon Keizai Shimbun. The Japanese also make use of syllabaries known as kana, of which there are only some 40 characters, which easily fit on a normal keyboard. The way most Japanese keyboards work is they type a word in kana, which they then use an extra key to select among the possible kanji that may represent the kana. It is also possible to type Japanese text using a normal US keyboard, using what are known as input methods. I use anthy to do this, and basically you type a romanized version of the word you want, which comes out as kana, and you can then use the spacebar to select among the possible kanji.
To be more precise, Gates added fuel to the fire that made Open Source / Free Software the force to be reckoned with. Many years before Microsoft became an important force in the world of computing, Richard Stallman at the MIT AI lab experienced that now famous spat with proprietary printer software from Xerox, which is similar to your own experiences with Microsoft software, that eventually led to the creation of the GNU Project. Gates basically, with his heavy handed attitude, made this an issue that affected everyone.
Well, while it was a common punishment, by the time of Jesus the Romans reserved crucifixion almost exclusively for one crime: treason. Jesus would have hardly been considered an ordinary criminal, except for the fact that Judaea was already a hotbed of rebellion and insurrection against Rome at the time. The Romans considered him a pretender to the throne of David, and inspiring Jewish secession from the Empire, hence the motto Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum over his head. The two guys crucified along with him would doubtless have also been what the Romans would have called Sicarii, rebels, not thieves as tradition would name them.
I am not saying that the premise behind the legal infrastructure behind copyrights and patents is wrong, far from it. Please read what I have said a bit more carefully and refrain from putting words into my mouth. My stance is that copyrights, patents, and similar legally-granted monopolies are not there for the sake of the innovators, which is what treating copyright/patent reform as striking a balance between the "rights" of the innovator (which, as you have agreed, don't even exist to begin with) and the rights of the public implies. These legal constructions exist solely for the sake of the public interest. The public sacrifices some of its rights and liberties for its own benefit, because that is supposed to encourage potential innovators to innovate. This is certainly true, but I have argued that even without these legal structures in place people will continue to innovate (albeit the progress of science and art will doubtless be slower than it would have been had governments decided to give them incentives based on legal monopolies). While totally rescinding copyright would indeed be foolishness in spite of that fact, it would be even more foolish to turn a free society into a police state in a misguided attempt to maximize the production of creative works, for reasons that I don't think need extensive explanation. That is of course the direction the DMCA is taking us, and that is why it should be repealed or at the very least reformed. Any further copyright or patent reform must have the interests of the public as its primary concern, as it is for the public that these things exist, and for no one else.
"...the balance we strike between the interests of those who innovate and those who would benefit from innovation."
If I understand "promoting the progress of Science and the Useful Arts" correctly, that's not the reason why the edifice of copyrights, patents, and all that exist at all. It should be, rather, the balance we strike between the interest of the public to have many innovations, and the interest of the public to be able to use these innovations as we see fit. Increase copyright restrictions, so the theory goes, we should get more and varied works because that gives incentive to the creators of these works, but then the public cannot make use of these works as they see fit right away. That results in the citizenry making a temporary trade of some of its rights and liberties (yes, copyright is a restriction on freedom of speech, and patents are even stronger restrictions on yet more freedoms) in order to increase innovation in the sciences and arts. Of course, it's nowhere close to being a linear relationship, as people will continue to be creative and the progress of science and the useful arts will continue to progress whether or not copyrights or patents are granted, and when one sets the balance too far in the other direction it rapidly hits the point of diminishing returns, as we see today.
The implicit idea behind this balance between innovators and the beneficiaries of innovation is that the innovator has some kind of natural right to her innovation. That simply isn't true, although many groups wish it were. The rights an innovator possesses to her innovation are solely created by law, ostensibly to motivate her to develop more innovations. For the simple reason that no innovation ever stands in a vacuum, but depends heavily upon the society that fostered it, it is foolishness to believe that such a natural right should exist.
The only reason why any particular DRM instance will not get cracked is there is no economic incentive to do so. It is not a question of being good enough technologically--it is a question whether it is worth it for the people involved to circumvent the DRM. If the DRM is relatively non-intrusive, if the DRMed files are available for a reasonable price/quality ratio, and/or if there are easier DRM schemes out there (as someone else noted), then perhaps no one will bother cracking it because it's not worth the effort to do so. It's economics, not technological considerations, that will make a DRM scheme "uncrackable". Technologically, all DRM schemes can be feasibly cracked if someone is willing to put in the effort, but it may not be worth a reverse engineer's time and money to make it happen.
The more intrusive you make the DRM scheme (which lowers its value from the point of view of the consumer who needs to put up with it), the more expensively you price the DRM files (which are already less valuable to the consumer because of the restrictions that are being imposed), all of these give incentive for people to crack DRM. I'm sure there is a magic point of pricing and restrictions that the majority of people will be willing to accept. Only trouble is, the music industry seems to have a hard time believing this simple fact of economics, because it means that one of their most cherished beliefs: that they have absolute control of their music, is no longer true.
Since in most places you're billed by the kilobyte, even modest usage could run up a significant bill. NTT DoCoMo in Japan has data download rates that range from JPY 0.84 to 1.26 per kilobyte. A yen is approximately 0.8 US cents, so downloading a megabyte goes to about US$7. Downloading a copy of the Linux kernel at those rates would cost you JPY 33,000 (US$280), which is insane. This might work in other countries where mobile carriers provide flat rates for 3G data, but it would very rapidly become unworkable if you get charged by the kilobyte, and that appears to be a far more common scenario.
Have you tried downloading five gigabytes on typical consumer broadband? That's the size of a typical DVD-quality movie nowadays. With a 1 mbps broadband connection, it would take me nearly half a day to download five gigs, and I'd have my Internet connection saturated to the point of unusability that whole time. Doesn't sound like such a good idea now, does it, thanks to the pathetic state of American broadband. It would be far more convenient to go to the corner store, get the movie straight in, and in less than fifteen minutes be home and watching the movie. Maybe in Japan it might make sense, where 100 mbps is typical and relatively ubiquitous (it would take only slightly over seven minutes then), but in places where such high consumer bandwidth is unheard of, the sneaker net looks like it could work very well indeed.
The main problem with the Bush II administration and science is that it has been cherry-picking scientific results to suit its political agendas. They seem to be a bunch of people hell-bent on denying reality even as it is staring them in the face. The true pillar, the true foundation stone of science is the search for truth by observation of the universe. Denying that makes them more anti-science than anything. They're just like a bunch of dishonest scientists who fake experimental data just so they can publish papers that agree with their own hypotheses, no matter that that their hypotheses are totally contradicted by the true experimental data. It is in global warming and evolution that they've decided that their own pet hypotheses (erm... their ideology) must trump all experimental data today, but who's to say they won't do the same for other inconvenient discoveries in the future? The Soviet Union made that same mistake with Lysenkoism in the past, with disastrous results. Looks like you guys are all set up to walk in those same footprints if you really believe that Bush and his troop are not really so anti-science, and/or are too bovinely complacent to care.
Well, I believe you are incorrect, at least about the part where GNUstep aims compatibility only with the old OpenStep standard. According to this FAQ entry:
GNUstep aims to be compatible with both the OpenStep specification and with Mac OS X. It should be easy to write an application that compiles cleanly under both GNUstep and Cocoa.
Yeah, I suppose it's true that Cocoa's a moving target, but I don't think they can make it move as much as you seem to fear: doing so would make it an impossible platform to develop for. I believe the goal would be to make it possible to easily use autoconf or something like it to smooth out the differences between platforms, making porting apps (and writing cleanly portable ones too) a lot easier.
Well, for Cocoa anyway, there's GNUstep, as, if I'm not mistaken, it's an implementation of the OpenStep specification that was created for NeXT and is still used today for MacOS X as Cocoa. Once GNUstep is reasonably completed, it would in theory be possible to have a certain amount of source-compatibility between any platform with GNUstep and Cocoa. Carbon, now that's a different story...
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Um, last I heard, the Catholic Church officially endorses evolution. The Church that once imprisoned Galileo and burned people at the stake is no more.
AFAIK, Matlab deals mostly in ordinary floats, and does none of the esoteric things you mention to develop perfectly exact numbers. That's mainly the province of symbolic mathematics packages such as Mathematica, Maple, and (for something just as powerful that's actually Free Software) Maxima. These programs are actually capable of performing exact arithmetic even on irrational and transcendental numbers, by using rational numbers where this is possible, and by representing irrational/transcendental numbers as functions involving only rational numbers that can be used calculate the number to arbitrary precision, e.g. they might represent pi by using one of the many available power series expansions for it, and use their symbolic mathematics system to take care of the manipulations. Needless to say, this is very expensive, and massive overkill for almost everything but mathematics research and some specialized work in theoretical physics.
Power Series huh? But does it actually converge?
All of that would certainly be possible here as well. Change to *suit* the viewer, perhaps not, but probably better if it would react in certain ways to the viewer's emotions, taking the viewer's emotions elsewhere, which in turn would cause it to change again to take the user's emotions somewhere else, in what essentially amounts to a feedback loop. But then again, I believe that genre of art already exists. It's called a video game, although most people engaged in that art form don't think quite in those terms.
So PJ got married to some Mr. Harbour and went from noted paralegal blogger to FTC commissioner in one fell swoop? And now she's writing opinions on Rambus... Interesting.
Strange I didn't hear a thing...
Maybe the database is ChoicePoint. What Mr. Rambam is mentioning sounds suspiciously a lot like a couple of recent articles (here and here) by Greg Palast where he makes the case that ChoicePoint and companies like them have provided an outsourced service for the structure of a police state, where government oversight cannot go, and has gone so far as to call them "the private KGB".
There's a whole slew of mathematical theorems, conjectures, hypotheses, et. al. that sound like Robert Ludlum novels:
You're missing a lot. I suggest you at least try to see the movie. The whole premise behind the story is a reaction against a society increasingly dominated by materialism and specifically today's consumerist culture. Fight Club was never about trying to "prove your manliness", it was about rebellion against a society where they are left as "God's middle children, with no special place in history and no special attention." And so the response becomes increasingly violent nihilism and the creation of mayhem and chaos... Read (or watch) and understand...
I remember at least five: 1. Evenflow, 2. Alive, 3. Jeremy, 4. Animal, 5. Daughter. All 1992-1993 thereabouts, before MTV started becoming totally wussy. Damn I'm old. :(
Basically, if I'm reading this correctly, the virus' correct operation depended on system calls to the Linux kernel keeping values of registers unchanged, which is the correct behavior. 2.6.16 broke this behavior, but since very little other code actually assumes this as well, we didn't get serious lossage, but we *might* for other code, and were the virus rewritten to not assume that register values were preserved by system calls, it might also work properly. At any rate, this virus would still have far less teeth on GNU/Linux than it would on Windows, unless someone was stupid enough to execute it as root. And well, if you're actually foolish enough to do something like that on GNU/Linux, then you're probably also foolish enough to enter rm -rf / or something equivalent as root at some point.
Well, there is only one space character in English. There are more than 2000 kanji. If that's the main reason for their existence, I believe anyone would consider that crazy. There are certainly many trivial and far easier ways of breaking up text into something more intelligible than peppering the text with thousands of distinct characters that are a pain to study and learn. If you want to argue that the kanji are useful to distinguish the many homonyms of Japanese, I believe that it has been cogently argued that Japanese (and moreso Chinese) has so many homonyms mainly because their use of Kanji/Hanzi has allowed them to get away with it.
Don't get me wrong; I'm studying Japanese now and I find the study of kanji absolutely fascinating. In the same way I suppose that a crack addict would find that smoking it makes him feel better. They're paying a very, very high price for sticking to tradition, methinks, when they've had a simple way out available for many centuries.
I know what you mean, however there are some children's storybooks I have that make minimal use of kanji, roughly less than a dozen in each book, all with furigana, and they are not hard at all. As a parallel example, the Koreans have actually managed to almost completely do away with Hanja, and now nearly everything they write is in the Hangul syllabary. I find it hard to believe that there are truly insurmountable technical difficulties for the Japanese to do something similar and abandon Kanji in favor of exclusive use of the Kana. But certainly, and cultural or social obstacles to such a move abound. I read about what happened (PDF link to the introduction of Remembering the Kanji III) when the Occupation Government attempted to curtail the number of officially used kanji to only 1850 and how well that went over with the public, with people growing up legally nameless rather than abandoning the kanji they had been using. I imagine a move to totally abandon the Kanji would be greeted with even more disdain.
Good advice from an anonymous coward, but hey, I really must object to the reasoning behind #4. If Japanese grammar were comparable to some programming languages in complexity then it must be very easy indeed. I used to learn how to program in one language and write nontrivial programs in many of them in a matter of weeks. I learned Java in less than a week. Scheme took a little longer, maybe a month, but at the end of it I was writing a simple expert system of sorts, and after that, Common Lisp, Haskell, and OCaml were a piece of cake. I don't think of myself as being an exceptionally gifted computer scientist, and I know more than a few people who learn programming languages at such a similar rate. All of this is completely unsupervised learning, with only reference books and web sites to explain things, no formal classes.
In contrast, a Japanese language school here in my country is offering a ten-month full-time course of study that brings you from knowing absolutely no Japanese to being able to confidently take and pass the JLPT Level 2 Exam, but that's five days a week for ten months for nine hours a day. I know of no programming language that has such a steep learning curve, that you would need to study it for almost a year before you become proficient enough to write a nontrivial program.
By the way, I wouldn't characterize Japanese grammar as being crazy compared to English, which has just as many special cases and odd constructions, if not more. It's just different from English, and in many ways, it's actually simpler. It is the Japanese writing system that is crazy. The Occupation government at the end of the war should have abolished the use of Kanji, and then maybe they'd have stuck to using only the Kana syllabaries...
You need a grammar guide because Japanese grammar is obviously different from English, and for no other reason.
The total number of Kanji in wide use for Japanese is something closer to 2500 rather than 7000 (even Chinese only regularly uses some 3000 or so), and it appears to be necessary to know something like 1800 to 2000 characters to be able to read a typical Japanese newspaper like the Nihon Keizai Shimbun. The Japanese also make use of syllabaries known as kana, of which there are only some 40 characters, which easily fit on a normal keyboard. The way most Japanese keyboards work is they type a word in kana, which they then use an extra key to select among the possible kanji that may represent the kana. It is also possible to type Japanese text using a normal US keyboard, using what are known as input methods. I use anthy to do this, and basically you type a romanized version of the word you want, which comes out as kana, and you can then use the spacebar to select among the possible kanji.
To be more precise, Gates added fuel to the fire that made Open Source / Free Software the force to be reckoned with. Many years before Microsoft became an important force in the world of computing, Richard Stallman at the MIT AI lab experienced that now famous spat with proprietary printer software from Xerox, which is similar to your own experiences with Microsoft software, that eventually led to the creation of the GNU Project. Gates basically, with his heavy handed attitude, made this an issue that affected everyone.
Well, while it was a common punishment, by the time of Jesus the Romans reserved crucifixion almost exclusively for one crime: treason. Jesus would have hardly been considered an ordinary criminal, except for the fact that Judaea was already a hotbed of rebellion and insurrection against Rome at the time. The Romans considered him a pretender to the throne of David, and inspiring Jewish secession from the Empire, hence the motto Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum over his head. The two guys crucified along with him would doubtless have also been what the Romans would have called Sicarii, rebels, not thieves as tradition would name them.
I am not saying that the premise behind the legal infrastructure behind copyrights and patents is wrong, far from it. Please read what I have said a bit more carefully and refrain from putting words into my mouth. My stance is that copyrights, patents, and similar legally-granted monopolies are not there for the sake of the innovators, which is what treating copyright/patent reform as striking a balance between the "rights" of the innovator (which, as you have agreed, don't even exist to begin with) and the rights of the public implies. These legal constructions exist solely for the sake of the public interest. The public sacrifices some of its rights and liberties for its own benefit, because that is supposed to encourage potential innovators to innovate. This is certainly true, but I have argued that even without these legal structures in place people will continue to innovate (albeit the progress of science and art will doubtless be slower than it would have been had governments decided to give them incentives based on legal monopolies). While totally rescinding copyright would indeed be foolishness in spite of that fact, it would be even more foolish to turn a free society into a police state in a misguided attempt to maximize the production of creative works, for reasons that I don't think need extensive explanation. That is of course the direction the DMCA is taking us, and that is why it should be repealed or at the very least reformed. Any further copyright or patent reform must have the interests of the public as its primary concern, as it is for the public that these things exist, and for no one else.
If I understand "promoting the progress of Science and the Useful Arts" correctly, that's not the reason why the edifice of copyrights, patents, and all that exist at all. It should be, rather, the balance we strike between the interest of the public to have many innovations, and the interest of the public to be able to use these innovations as we see fit. Increase copyright restrictions, so the theory goes, we should get more and varied works because that gives incentive to the creators of these works, but then the public cannot make use of these works as they see fit right away. That results in the citizenry making a temporary trade of some of its rights and liberties (yes, copyright is a restriction on freedom of speech, and patents are even stronger restrictions on yet more freedoms) in order to increase innovation in the sciences and arts. Of course, it's nowhere close to being a linear relationship, as people will continue to be creative and the progress of science and the useful arts will continue to progress whether or not copyrights or patents are granted, and when one sets the balance too far in the other direction it rapidly hits the point of diminishing returns, as we see today.
The implicit idea behind this balance between innovators and the beneficiaries of innovation is that the innovator has some kind of natural right to her innovation. That simply isn't true, although many groups wish it were. The rights an innovator possesses to her innovation are solely created by law, ostensibly to motivate her to develop more innovations. For the simple reason that no innovation ever stands in a vacuum, but depends heavily upon the society that fostered it, it is foolishness to believe that such a natural right should exist.
The only reason why any particular DRM instance will not get cracked is there is no economic incentive to do so. It is not a question of being good enough technologically--it is a question whether it is worth it for the people involved to circumvent the DRM. If the DRM is relatively non-intrusive, if the DRMed files are available for a reasonable price/quality ratio, and/or if there are easier DRM schemes out there (as someone else noted), then perhaps no one will bother cracking it because it's not worth the effort to do so. It's economics, not technological considerations, that will make a DRM scheme "uncrackable". Technologically, all DRM schemes can be feasibly cracked if someone is willing to put in the effort, but it may not be worth a reverse engineer's time and money to make it happen.
The more intrusive you make the DRM scheme (which lowers its value from the point of view of the consumer who needs to put up with it), the more expensively you price the DRM files (which are already less valuable to the consumer because of the restrictions that are being imposed), all of these give incentive for people to crack DRM. I'm sure there is a magic point of pricing and restrictions that the majority of people will be willing to accept. Only trouble is, the music industry seems to have a hard time believing this simple fact of economics, because it means that one of their most cherished beliefs: that they have absolute control of their music, is no longer true.
Since in most places you're billed by the kilobyte, even modest usage could run up a significant bill. NTT DoCoMo in Japan has data download rates that range from JPY 0.84 to 1.26 per kilobyte. A yen is approximately 0.8 US cents, so downloading a megabyte goes to about US$7. Downloading a copy of the Linux kernel at those rates would cost you JPY 33,000 (US$280), which is insane. This might work in other countries where mobile carriers provide flat rates for 3G data, but it would very rapidly become unworkable if you get charged by the kilobyte, and that appears to be a far more common scenario.
Have you tried downloading five gigabytes on typical consumer broadband? That's the size of a typical DVD-quality movie nowadays. With a 1 mbps broadband connection, it would take me nearly half a day to download five gigs, and I'd have my Internet connection saturated to the point of unusability that whole time. Doesn't sound like such a good idea now, does it, thanks to the pathetic state of American broadband. It would be far more convenient to go to the corner store, get the movie straight in, and in less than fifteen minutes be home and watching the movie. Maybe in Japan it might make sense, where 100 mbps is typical and relatively ubiquitous (it would take only slightly over seven minutes then), but in places where such high consumer bandwidth is unheard of, the sneaker net looks like it could work very well indeed.
The main problem with the Bush II administration and science is that it has been cherry-picking scientific results to suit its political agendas. They seem to be a bunch of people hell-bent on denying reality even as it is staring them in the face. The true pillar, the true foundation stone of science is the search for truth by observation of the universe. Denying that makes them more anti-science than anything. They're just like a bunch of dishonest scientists who fake experimental data just so they can publish papers that agree with their own hypotheses, no matter that that their hypotheses are totally contradicted by the true experimental data. It is in global warming and evolution that they've decided that their own pet hypotheses (erm... their ideology) must trump all experimental data today, but who's to say they won't do the same for other inconvenient discoveries in the future? The Soviet Union made that same mistake with Lysenkoism in the past, with disastrous results. Looks like you guys are all set up to walk in those same footprints if you really believe that Bush and his troop are not really so anti-science, and/or are too bovinely complacent to care.
Well, I believe you are incorrect, at least about the part where GNUstep aims compatibility only with the old OpenStep standard. According to this FAQ entry:
Yeah, I suppose it's true that Cocoa's a moving target, but I don't think they can make it move as much as you seem to fear: doing so would make it an impossible platform to develop for. I believe the goal would be to make it possible to easily use autoconf or something like it to smooth out the differences between platforms, making porting apps (and writing cleanly portable ones too) a lot easier.
Well, for Cocoa anyway, there's GNUstep, as, if I'm not mistaken, it's an implementation of the OpenStep specification that was created for NeXT and is still used today for MacOS X as Cocoa. Once GNUstep is reasonably completed, it would in theory be possible to have a certain amount of source-compatibility between any platform with GNUstep and Cocoa. Carbon, now that's a different story...