The conclusion? It's not that OSS developers need to change the way they dress. Rather, it's that the people demanding suit and tie must be kicked out. Decision makers need to start making decisions based on the quality of the product, not on the clothing style of the people developing it.
Some of the OpenSSH freeloaders, like Apple Computer and The SCO Group, are notorious for reaping financial rewards from selling open source software bundled with their proprietary products.
What part of the BSD license does Theo not understand? Apple and SCO aren't "freeloaders", they are using the software under the intended license.
Furthermore, what makes Theo think that people want to run OpenSSH? At this point, it's as entrenched as Windows--nobody has a choice.
For our work on OpenSSH, companies using OpenSSH have never given us a cent. What about companies that incorporate OpenSSH directly into their products, saving themselves millions of dollars?
No, they haven't been saving themselves "millions of dollars". If OpenSSH didn't exist, people would implement some other free ssh client or switch to a different standard.
If you release something under a FOSS license, figure out your business model beforehand. Of course, Theo actually did: his work on BSD has given him plenty of exposure and celebrity status, which many would consider ample reward for his work, and something he wouldn't have gotten if he had founded a small software company instead. And I'm sure he could (or could have) translated this into consulting opportunities and other business, without even changing the license on anything. But, like many celebrities, it's just never enough.
* The presence of antibodies is not a determinant of virus load (and in the case of newborns of mothers with HIV, is not even an indication of the presence of the virus).
I fail to see your point. In scientific studies, people measure the presence of the virus directly. Clinical practice isn't concerned with proving any scientific theories, it's concerned with helping the patient effectively and cheaply, and an HIV antibody test is sufficient for that in many patients, at least initially. That's the same in many other viral diseases: clinically, people usually test for antibodies, but not for viruses.
* Kashala, et al, published in the Journal of Infectious Diseases that the 'African' variety of AIDS (which as your sibling post points out is epidemiologically quite distinct from the North American / European disease, though labelling them by location is increasingly misleading as the clusters spread) can be linked more conclusively to leprosy and TB than to viral transmission.
The viruses in Africa and the US are somewhat different. Even if they weren't differences in epidemiology are common: many diseases are transmitted differently and follow a different course in the US, Africa, and other regions.
* One cluster study (one!!!) has linked sexual contact to symptomatic disease transmission in one North American population -- with symptomatic presentations wildly different from those called AIDS in the developing world. No other studies along this line have been published that I can find.
You're looking in the wrong place. There are numerous reports and studies following individuals from exposure (such as needlesticks or monogamous sex with an infected partner) to seroconversion all the way through death. There have also been studies comparing in detail the sequences of the virus in the contacts and relating them to disease progression and drug resistance.
* There are several different (and even conflicting) sets of criteria for the clinical diagnosis of AIDS: WHO, CDC, WHO-NEW, etc. not all of them require any test for HIV (as I mentioned, in most African clinics the simple presentation of pneumonia is sufficient to be diagnosed as AIDS). We don't even know if this is one disease.
AIDS isn't one disease, it is caused by multiple, different, known, related viruses. The fact that researchers have discovered this already tells you that (1) they are looking and (2) they find multiple causative agents when they exist. What they haven't found is other causes of a transmissible immune deficiency. Furthermore, they have found no environmental causes of immune deficiency (beyond the rare ones that have been known for a long time). The environment influences transmission and progression, but HIV remains the common factor.
What the clinical diagnostic criteria are is pretty much irrelevant. Just because some poor third world nation picks cheap diagnostic criteria that result in misdiagnosing a significant number of people as having AIDS doesn't change the scientific facts. If you're a patient in that nation, you may want to think about your situation, but if you're in the US or Europe, with state of the art diagnostic techniques, you can be sure that if you're diagnosed with AIDS, you have AIDS and are HIV infected.
* Lederman published a study showing a stronger link between Factor VII and VIII use in haemopheliacs and symptomatic presentation than between HIV antibody presence and symptomatic presentation -- and at any rate, haemopheliacs almost never developed the sarcoma associated with other AIDS populations.
AIDS symptoms vary greatly depending on a lot of factors; some people deteriorate quickly, others are resistant to disease progression (and some are even resistant to infection). And Karposi's sarcoma is caused by a different virus; it's an opportunistic infection that only expresses itself when the immune system is weakened. You see similar effects in just about every viral and bacterial disease. They don't alter the fact that there is a single underlying causative agent.
Does anybody have a recommendation for a CMS similar to Joomla or Drupal that doesn't require a separate database server? Something that gets by with either the file system or SQLite? WYSIWYG content creation is a must in this application, so Wikis aren't an option.
what if one of the various "environmental factors" models is right rather than the "single pathogen" model?
That's just not a serious possibility anymore; here are just some basic observations:
While clinical diagnosis relies on symptoms, HIV infection has been followed in minute detail from initial transmission to death numerous times, in the presence and absence of treatment, in individuals with completely different histories, at the molecular level, at the tissue level, and at the clinical level.
The epidemiology of HIV has been studied extensively: the disease is clearly transmissible and no other factor than an existing HIV infection is associated with transmission.
Drugs specifically targeted at HIV have increased survival rates tremendously, while changes in lifestyle have had limited effect.
The molecular mechanisms of resistance to HIV infection (found in a few percent of the population) are well understood.
Single pathogens are sexy for epidemiologists.
Yes, and they are also the rule for infectious diseases. While susceptibility and severity of a disease may vary with environmental factors, for infectious diseases, there is usually a well-defined, clearly characterizable pathogen responsible.
Groovy. So I can again have promiscuous sex with many anonymous partners without protection, while at the same time experimenting with mind-expanding drugs in a consequence-free environment. It's shagadelic, baby.
I have a Powerbook and I have to say: OS X is pretty sluggish as well; that dreaded color wheel cursor sometimes hangs around for a long time for something as simple as switching applications. And it's not surprising: Mach and Apple's display architecture are not exactly low overhead.
I dual-boot a lot, so I get to compare Linux with other operating systems on the same hardware; in my experience, Linux with Gnome, KDE, or XFCE is considerably more responsive and efficient than either OS X or Windows. Also, in terms of innovation, I don't see much difference between the three systems: they have similar architectures, similar toolkits, and similar window systems at this point.
Despite all your useless verbiage, it still comes down to the fact that Carleson's theorem is not relevant to the design of audio coders. Sampling theory was worked out by people like Nyquist and Shannon 30 years before Carleson's theorem. In fact, all the math needed to make MP3 work was well known by the time Carleson proved his theorem; the technical advance in MP3 was not mathematical, it was primarily psychoacoustics.
The reference to iPod in the article was the usual journalistic overreach; it's silly that you're defending it.
As for the "big words", they aren't big for me, but apparently, you consider them big, otherwise you wouldn't be trying to name-drop. You illustrate the saying "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing" well.
For all the Euro-elitism, American SF has always been of uniform high quality, if only because there was so much of it.
You're contradicting yourself. "Of uniform[ly] high quality" means "there hasn't been any bad American SF". But you just said that there has been (and there obviously has been).
What you probably meant is that there is a lot of good American SciFi, which is true. Nevertheless, I can't think of a US author that I would rate more highly than Lem: Lem combined technical insight with humor and good storytelling.
Which US SciFi author would you put up there with Lem?
There is a Platonic dilemma dealing with the necessity of proof for a mathematical idea to "exist," which is all well and philosophical, but that's not to say proof shouldn't matter for engineers.
There is no "dilemma"; knowing a mathematical proof is neither necessary nor sufficient to determine that an engineered system works.
Proclaimed the engineer after one successful run of his simulation/program, before he ran it again with a different set of initial conditions/parameters only to see it fail because he didn't understand the math behind what he was doing.
You have put your finger on one efficient way of testing an engineered system: you simulate it and test with many different initial conditions.
knowing something about the assumptions that are made, which in turn means you know precisely what will BREAK it.
Just because the assumptions of a proof are violated doesn't mean that the system will break--it only means that the proof doesn't work.
Saying that Fourier analysis becomes, when you go to the discrete domain, "simple linear algebra" shows very clearly that you do not understand the complexities of discrete fourier analysis.
Wow, you know a lot of big words, but you are apparently incapable of reading even two paragraphs carefully. I didn't say that "Fourier analysis [...] becomes simple linear algebra", I said that the theorems mentioned in the article do. Also, you seem to have trouble understanding the meaning of the word "domain"; you're talking about functions with a discrete range, I'm talking about the kinds of objects engineers deal with: real-valued functions over the integers, representing regularly sampled values.
The result he proved is nice mathematics, but you don't need it for iPods or audio coding. First of all, for many engineering purposes, it only matters that it works, not that you can prove that it works theoretically. Secondly, audio coding is done over discretely sampled signals, and most of those theorems become simple linear algebra in that case.
All of the reactions I listed occur commonly in nature (D+D->T+p is 50% of D+D fusion, D+p->3He+g is one of the main steps in solar fusion, and 4 p -> 4He + 2g + 2e+ is the overall reaction in solar fusion). So, your argument that these reactions don't occur is simply wrong.
As for your other arguments, by your kind of reasoning, superconductivity and superfluidity shouldn't exist either, because, hey, we all know, currents are little particles that keep bumping into things, right? You're right to the degree that if the phenomenon is real, it can't be due to two deuterium nuclei fusing in splendid isolation; but there are many other possibilities.
First of all, try to learn a bit of history before making claims about it. Because it is in fact not true that the nazi "only gradually" imposed restriction. Shortly after poland was anexed, jews were being executed by taking them into the forest and shooting them.
Those were conquered territories; it didn't matter what the Nazis did there because they didn't have to appease anybody. At home, it was a gradual process. (And it's typical that you focus on Jews, rather than on the totality of the people the Nazis harmed and killed for being different.)
One might agree or disagree with these arguments, but one cannot claim that there is a significant resemblance the the current german culture and the nazi regime.
No, but one can claim that the current culture is related to the culture that enabled the Nazi regime to take over. Superimposed on top of that is an intellectual awareness of fascism and a genuine desire not to repeat those mistakes. I don't think that German SS will march across Europe again, but at the same time, there is still an unsettling undercurrent in German culture that I don't see in many other nations.
Yes, and that's why Linux kernel release dates keep slipping, while Linux distributions just keep shipping new releases and improvements like a Swiss watch.
Turns out, while modularity in the kernel would be nice, it is nowhere near as important as modularity in user-land.
Programs are written by programmers, they aren't willed into existence by Gantt charts, no matter what PMs think.
Contrary to what you may think, what managers do actually matters for the quality and timeliness of a project; bad management results in much longer development times and much lower quality than good management. Of course, even if the management was perfect, the managers still estimated the wrong release dates, which is also their fault. Vista has an additional problem in that it's not only delayed again and again, it also keeps losing features compared to what was announced.
And there is little excuse for any of that at Microsoft; both OS X and Linux already ship right now pretty much all the features that were originally announced for Vista (and then some!), those features were developed in less time than Microsoft had and with far less resources.
I think for many years, many Microsoft employees have assumed that they are walking on water because, after all, how could they not be, given the financial success of the company.
But I think reality is catching up with the company: Microsoft doesn't walk on water technically, they are producing roughly the same kind of software today as other big software vendors (and that's actually an improvement over where they were a few years ago).
Microsoft is turning more and more into the IBM of 20 years ago, and that means that they are getting technically better than they used to be, and financially less successful. Welcome to reality.
Everyone loves to throw around the words "Nazi" and yet this pales in comparison to what the Nazis did. Insane and harsh, yes, nazi, No.
The term "Nazi" is often used to describe particularly harsh punishment; I didn't use it that way.
I pointed out that this kind of law, passed without any significant debate by a coalition of parties representing the great majority of the German people, is indicative of submission to authority and an unquestioning acceptance of the state. The Nazis didn't start out putting people into concentration camps, they started out by dividing the population into "good Germans" and "deviants" and only very gradually imposing restrictions on the deviants.
I can see why the Germans don't want anything to do with their past. They're sick of people making stupid analogies in regards to their society.
I used to think that one could overhaul a society--democratize them, modernize them, etc. Hey, it only takes a generation or two to educate the children, right? But I've come to the conclusion that culture is much more persistent than that, in both its good and its bad aspects.
Genius. They can't detect any excess neutrons so obviously there's a new, radiation free, type of D-D fusion going on.
Your sarcasm derives from the point of view of hot fusion; but hot fusion is limited strongly by a set of constraints that applies when you do fusion by smashing nuclei together at high temperatures. For cold fusions, we have no reason to believe that those mechanistic constraints apply; the only thing that we expect to be true is overall conservation laws: energy, charge, momentum, etc. That means that mechanisms like pure D+D->T+p, D+p->3He+g, and 4 p -> 4He + 2g + 2e+ might very well be at work if cold fusion is a real phenomenon.
Whether cold fusion occurs or not is an experimental question; we all have our prejudices how likely it is to be true. But although I share your scepticism that P&F cold fusion occurs at all, your specific line of reasoning is bogus--you are extrapolating previous results to a domain where they simply don't apply.
Germany isn't proposing torture and medieval style executions for offenders.
Two years in prison for downloading a movie seems pretty severe.
Laws exist to specifically FORBID these kinds of speech yet I do not see you or anyone else here speaking out about those on a regular basis.
It's debatable whether those laws are reasonable; but they just don't concern me very much either way. They are limited, specific, and there are historical reasons for it. In any case, those laws are not particularly indicative of a German national characteristic, but this uncritical acceptance of "it's bad, therefore we are justified in punishing it severely" seems to be.
In increasingly technocratic societies, you will find that (for better or worse) that more laws are needed. As a result, the legal system becomes insanely complex and it becomes so to such an extent that its hard not to break a law doing something in everyday life. Richard Nixon used the IRS and its insanely complex tax code to scrutinize his political enemies. And, as long as laws exist, its pretty hard to stop selective enforcement.
I see no "inevitability"; we don't "need" copyright or patent law--our society would function just fine without it. No, the problem is rather that this sort of power grab happens in aging societies. We may well be heading for techno-feudalism, and the future may look more like Blade Runner than Star Trek.
Everyhing works best when other nations do not diddle in the affairs of others, regardless of their domestic policies. I really don't see how German law affects law elsewhere.
Germany is part of the EU, and this sort of thing in one of the largest member states makes it much easier to push it through in other European nations.
3D-based face recognition has been tried before, and you can buy 3D scanners that use projected light patterns commercially. So, there isn't really anything particularly new about this.
Suppose you find another Earth... but your body isn't capable of living and being happy on it.
Why wouldn't it? The kinds of changes I was talking about don't prevent you from living on a planet, they just keep you from deteriorating in space.
Also, even if you had to give something up for those extra functions, there is plenty of stuff in the human genome that simply isn't relevant anymore, stuff related to surviving in a world of poisonous plants, parasitically infested meat, and prowling carnivores.
So I always wonder... why do people want to leave Earth?
Well, I don't mind people exploring as long as they don't see it as a way of fixing things back home. Because, as we have seen in the US, moving to another place, you just take your problems with you. The US is even more "Old Europe" these days than Old Europe.
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The conclusion? It's not that OSS developers need to change the way they dress. Rather, it's that the people demanding suit and tie must be kicked out. Decision makers need to start making decisions based on the quality of the product, not on the clothing style of the people developing it.
Some of the OpenSSH freeloaders, like Apple Computer and The SCO Group, are notorious for reaping financial rewards from selling open source software bundled with their proprietary products.
What part of the BSD license does Theo not understand? Apple and SCO aren't "freeloaders", they are using the software under the intended license.
Furthermore, what makes Theo think that people want to run OpenSSH? At this point, it's as entrenched as Windows--nobody has a choice.
For our work on OpenSSH, companies using OpenSSH have never given us a cent. What about companies that incorporate OpenSSH directly into their products, saving themselves millions of dollars?
No, they haven't been saving themselves "millions of dollars". If OpenSSH didn't exist, people would implement some other free ssh client or switch to a different standard.
If you release something under a FOSS license, figure out your business model beforehand. Of course, Theo actually did: his work on BSD has given him plenty of exposure and celebrity status, which many would consider ample reward for his work, and something he wouldn't have gotten if he had founded a small software company instead. And I'm sure he could (or could have) translated this into consulting opportunities and other business, without even changing the license on anything. But, like many celebrities, it's just never enough.
* The presence of antibodies is not a determinant of virus load (and in the case of newborns of mothers with HIV, is not even an indication of the presence of the virus).
I fail to see your point. In scientific studies, people measure the presence of the virus directly. Clinical practice isn't concerned with proving any scientific theories, it's concerned with helping the patient effectively and cheaply, and an HIV antibody test is sufficient for that in many patients, at least initially. That's the same in many other viral diseases: clinically, people usually test for antibodies, but not for viruses.
* Kashala, et al, published in the Journal of Infectious Diseases that the 'African' variety of AIDS (which as your sibling post points out is epidemiologically quite distinct from the North American / European disease, though labelling them by location is increasingly misleading as the clusters spread) can be linked more conclusively to leprosy and TB than to viral transmission.
The viruses in Africa and the US are somewhat different. Even if they weren't differences in epidemiology are common: many diseases are transmitted differently and follow a different course in the US, Africa, and other regions.
* One cluster study (one!!!) has linked sexual contact to symptomatic disease transmission in one North American population -- with symptomatic presentations wildly different from those called AIDS in the developing world. No other studies along this line have been published that I can find.
You're looking in the wrong place. There are numerous reports and studies following individuals from exposure (such as needlesticks or monogamous sex with an infected partner) to seroconversion all the way through death. There have also been studies comparing in detail the sequences of the virus in the contacts and relating them to disease progression and drug resistance.
* There are several different (and even conflicting) sets of criteria for the clinical diagnosis of AIDS: WHO, CDC, WHO-NEW, etc. not all of them require any test for HIV (as I mentioned, in most African clinics the simple presentation of pneumonia is sufficient to be diagnosed as AIDS). We don't even know if this is one disease.
AIDS isn't one disease, it is caused by multiple, different, known, related viruses. The fact that researchers have discovered this already tells you that (1) they are looking and (2) they find multiple causative agents when they exist. What they haven't found is other causes of a transmissible immune deficiency. Furthermore, they have found no environmental causes of immune deficiency (beyond the rare ones that have been known for a long time). The environment influences transmission and progression, but HIV remains the common factor.
What the clinical diagnostic criteria are is pretty much irrelevant. Just because some poor third world nation picks cheap diagnostic criteria that result in misdiagnosing a significant number of people as having AIDS doesn't change the scientific facts. If you're a patient in that nation, you may want to think about your situation, but if you're in the US or Europe, with state of the art diagnostic techniques, you can be sure that if you're diagnosed with AIDS, you have AIDS and are HIV infected.
* Lederman published a study showing a stronger link between Factor VII and VIII use in haemopheliacs and symptomatic presentation than between HIV antibody presence and symptomatic presentation -- and at any rate, haemopheliacs almost never developed the sarcoma associated with other AIDS populations.
AIDS symptoms vary greatly depending on a lot of factors; some people deteriorate quickly, others are resistant to disease progression (and some are even resistant to infection). And Karposi's sarcoma is caused by a different virus; it's an opportunistic infection that only expresses itself when the immune system is weakened. You see similar effects in just about every viral and bacterial disease. They don't alter the fact that there is a single underlying causative agent.
Does anybody have a recommendation for a CMS similar to Joomla or Drupal that doesn't require a separate database server? Something that gets by with either the file system or SQLite? WYSIWYG content creation is a must in this application, so Wikis aren't an option.
That's just not a serious possibility anymore; here are just some basic observations:
Single pathogens are sexy for epidemiologists.
Yes, and they are also the rule for infectious diseases. While susceptibility and severity of a disease may vary with environmental factors, for infectious diseases, there is usually a well-defined, clearly characterizable pathogen responsible.
Groovy. So I can again have promiscuous sex with many anonymous partners without protection, while at the same time experimenting with mind-expanding drugs in a consequence-free environment. It's shagadelic, baby.
I have a Powerbook and I have to say: OS X is pretty sluggish as well; that dreaded color wheel cursor sometimes hangs around for a long time for something as simple as switching applications. And it's not surprising: Mach and Apple's display architecture are not exactly low overhead.
I dual-boot a lot, so I get to compare Linux with other operating systems on the same hardware; in my experience, Linux with Gnome, KDE, or XFCE is considerably more responsive and efficient than either OS X or Windows. Also, in terms of innovation, I don't see much difference between the three systems: they have similar architectures, similar toolkits, and similar window systems at this point.
It's not like almost every major engineering disaster in history has been caused by ignorance to the assumptions of their design.
Actually, most engineering disasters in history have probably been caused by unexpected violations of known assumptions.
Sure. Let's just blindly test all of the conditions. Since we're not going to bother with proof, we might as well abandon all of the analysis.
Well, with that attidue, you'll never be an engineer. But the rest of your comments have to lead us to that conclusion anyway.
Sure, you can simply observe - "it works". For now.
No, you simulate and test. It's the mainstay of engineering and reliability. As I was saying: proofs are neither necessary nor sufficient in general.
Despite all your useless verbiage, it still comes down to the fact that Carleson's theorem is not relevant to the design of audio coders. Sampling theory was worked out by people like Nyquist and Shannon 30 years before Carleson's theorem. In fact, all the math needed to make MP3 work was well known by the time Carleson proved his theorem; the technical advance in MP3 was not mathematical, it was primarily psychoacoustics.
The reference to iPod in the article was the usual journalistic overreach; it's silly that you're defending it.
As for the "big words", they aren't big for me, but apparently, you consider them big, otherwise you wouldn't be trying to name-drop. You illustrate the saying "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing" well.
For all the Euro-elitism, American SF has always been of uniform high quality, if only because there was so much of it.
You're contradicting yourself. "Of uniform[ly] high quality" means "there hasn't been any bad American SF". But you just said that there has been (and there obviously has been).
What you probably meant is that there is a lot of good American SciFi, which is true. Nevertheless, I can't think of a US author that I would rate more highly than Lem: Lem combined technical insight with humor and good storytelling.
Which US SciFi author would you put up there with Lem?
There is a Platonic dilemma dealing with the necessity of proof for a mathematical idea to "exist," which is all well and philosophical, but that's not to say proof shouldn't matter for engineers.
There is no "dilemma"; knowing a mathematical proof is neither necessary nor sufficient to determine that an engineered system works.
Proclaimed the engineer after one successful run of his simulation/program, before he ran it again with a different set of initial conditions/parameters only to see it fail because he didn't understand the math behind what he was doing.
You have put your finger on one efficient way of testing an engineered system: you simulate it and test with many different initial conditions.
knowing something about the assumptions that are made, which in turn means you know precisely what will BREAK it.
Just because the assumptions of a proof are violated doesn't mean that the system will break--it only means that the proof doesn't work.
Saying that Fourier analysis becomes, when you go to the discrete domain, "simple linear algebra" shows very clearly that you do not understand the complexities of discrete fourier analysis.
Wow, you know a lot of big words, but you are apparently incapable of reading even two paragraphs carefully. I didn't say that "Fourier analysis [...] becomes simple linear algebra", I said that the theorems mentioned in the article do. Also, you seem to have trouble understanding the meaning of the word "domain"; you're talking about functions with a discrete range, I'm talking about the kinds of objects engineers deal with: real-valued functions over the integers, representing regularly sampled values.
The result he proved is nice mathematics, but you don't need it for iPods or audio coding. First of all, for many engineering purposes, it only matters that it works, not that you can prove that it works theoretically. Secondly, audio coding is done over discretely sampled signals, and most of those theorems become simple linear algebra in that case.
All of the reactions I listed occur commonly in nature (D+D->T+p is 50% of D+D fusion, D+p->3He+g is one of the main steps in solar fusion, and 4 p -> 4He + 2g + 2e+ is the overall reaction in solar fusion). So, your argument that these reactions don't occur is simply wrong.
As for your other arguments, by your kind of reasoning, superconductivity and superfluidity shouldn't exist either, because, hey, we all know, currents are little particles that keep bumping into things, right? You're right to the degree that if the phenomenon is real, it can't be due to two deuterium nuclei fusing in splendid isolation; but there are many other possibilities.
First of all, try to learn a bit of history before making claims about it. Because it is in fact not true that the nazi "only gradually" imposed restriction. Shortly after poland was anexed, jews were being executed by taking them into the forest and shooting them.
Those were conquered territories; it didn't matter what the Nazis did there because they didn't have to appease anybody. At home, it was a gradual process. (And it's typical that you focus on Jews, rather than on the totality of the people the Nazis harmed and killed for being different.)
One might agree or disagree with these arguments, but one cannot claim that there is a significant resemblance the the current german culture and the nazi regime.
No, but one can claim that the current culture is related to the culture that enabled the Nazi regime to take over. Superimposed on top of that is an intellectual awareness of fascism and a genuine desire not to repeat those mistakes. I don't think that German SS will march across Europe again, but at the same time, there is still an unsettling undercurrent in German culture that I don't see in many other nations.
Yes, and that's why Linux kernel release dates keep slipping, while Linux distributions just keep shipping new releases and improvements like a Swiss watch.
Turns out, while modularity in the kernel would be nice, it is nowhere near as important as modularity in user-land.
Programs are written by programmers, they aren't willed into existence by Gantt charts, no matter what PMs think.
Contrary to what you may think, what managers do actually matters for the quality and timeliness of a project; bad management results in much longer development times and much lower quality than good management. Of course, even if the management was perfect, the managers still estimated the wrong release dates, which is also their fault. Vista has an additional problem in that it's not only delayed again and again, it also keeps losing features compared to what was announced.
And there is little excuse for any of that at Microsoft; both OS X and Linux already ship right now pretty much all the features that were originally announced for Vista (and then some!), those features were developed in less time than Microsoft had and with far less resources.
Sick from what ?
Radiation.
The expensive part is getting stuff to the orbit.
Yes, indeed, you got it.
I think for many years, many Microsoft employees have assumed that they are walking on water because, after all, how could they not be, given the financial success of the company.
But I think reality is catching up with the company: Microsoft doesn't walk on water technically, they are producing roughly the same kind of software today as other big software vendors (and that's actually an improvement over where they were a few years ago).
Microsoft is turning more and more into the IBM of 20 years ago, and that means that they are getting technically better than they used to be, and financially less successful. Welcome to reality.
Everyone loves to throw around the words "Nazi" and yet this pales in comparison to what the Nazis did. Insane and harsh, yes, nazi, No.
The term "Nazi" is often used to describe particularly harsh punishment; I didn't use it that way.
I pointed out that this kind of law, passed without any significant debate by a coalition of parties representing the great majority of the German people, is indicative of submission to authority and an unquestioning acceptance of the state. The Nazis didn't start out putting people into concentration camps, they started out by dividing the population into "good Germans" and "deviants" and only very gradually imposing restrictions on the deviants.
I can see why the Germans don't want anything to do with their past. They're sick of people making stupid analogies in regards to their society.
I used to think that one could overhaul a society--democratize them, modernize them, etc. Hey, it only takes a generation or two to educate the children, right? But I've come to the conclusion that culture is much more persistent than that, in both its good and its bad aspects.
Genius. They can't detect any excess neutrons so obviously there's a new, radiation free, type of D-D fusion going on.
Your sarcasm derives from the point of view of hot fusion; but hot fusion is limited strongly by a set of constraints that applies when you do fusion by smashing nuclei together at high temperatures. For cold fusions, we have no reason to believe that those mechanistic constraints apply; the only thing that we expect to be true is overall conservation laws: energy, charge, momentum, etc. That means that mechanisms like pure D+D->T+p, D+p->3He+g, and 4 p -> 4He + 2g + 2e+ might very well be at work if cold fusion is a real phenomenon.
Whether cold fusion occurs or not is an experimental question; we all have our prejudices how likely it is to be true. But although I share your scepticism that P&F cold fusion occurs at all, your specific line of reasoning is bogus--you are extrapolating previous results to a domain where they simply don't apply.
And 120 years of jail time per second in metric units.
Germany isn't proposing torture and medieval style executions for offenders.
Two years in prison for downloading a movie seems pretty severe.
Laws exist to specifically FORBID these kinds of speech yet I do not see you or anyone else here speaking out about those on a regular basis.
It's debatable whether those laws are reasonable; but they just don't concern me very much either way. They are limited, specific, and there are historical reasons for it. In any case, those laws are not particularly indicative of a German national characteristic, but this uncritical acceptance of "it's bad, therefore we are justified in punishing it severely" seems to be.
In increasingly technocratic societies, you will find that (for better or worse) that more laws are needed. As a result, the legal system becomes insanely complex and it becomes so to such an extent that its hard not to break a law doing something in everyday life. Richard Nixon used the IRS and its insanely complex tax code to scrutinize his political enemies. And, as long as laws exist, its pretty hard to stop selective enforcement.
I see no "inevitability"; we don't "need" copyright or patent law--our society would function just fine without it. No, the problem is rather that this sort of power grab happens in aging societies. We may well be heading for techno-feudalism, and the future may look more like Blade Runner than Star Trek.
Everyhing works best when other nations do not diddle in the affairs of others, regardless of their domestic policies. I really don't see how German law affects law elsewhere.
Germany is part of the EU, and this sort of thing in one of the largest member states makes it much easier to push it through in other European nations.
3D-based face recognition has been tried before, and you can buy 3D scanners that use projected light patterns commercially. So, there isn't really anything particularly new about this.
Suppose you find another Earth... but your body isn't capable of living and being happy on it.
Why wouldn't it? The kinds of changes I was talking about don't prevent you from living on a planet, they just keep you from deteriorating in space.
Also, even if you had to give something up for those extra functions, there is plenty of stuff in the human genome that simply isn't relevant anymore, stuff related to surviving in a world of poisonous plants, parasitically infested meat, and prowling carnivores.
So I always wonder... why do people want to leave Earth?
Well, I don't mind people exploring as long as they don't see it as a way of fixing things back home. Because, as we have seen in the US, moving to another place, you just take your problems with you. The US is even more "Old Europe" these days than Old Europe.