They can indeed enforce it if they can prove the camera it was shot on originally encodced the video in an MPEG-LA codec.
They would have to also prove that you did not have a license to convert it in the first place. I encourage you to read the (unfortunately rather lengthy) post I referenced in my previous comment where you can see that they have no rights after the video has been encoded.
This is not correct. I am not defending MPEG-LA, but I think it's important that we get the facts straight. Once video has been converted from H.264 to another format, MPEG-LA cannot assert anything over it. This e-mail exchange which I archived on Libre Video explains this point using their own, documented words.
Here's my e-mail to them (this is because I support Free Software, not Democrats [or Republicans or anything else political]):
Subject: Unable to view videos on website
I was unable to use the DNC website to view the live videos from the convention. I was shown this error message:
We're sorry, but the Democratic Convention video web site isn't compatible with your operating system and/or browser. Please try again on a computer with the following:
Compatible operating systems:
Windows XP SP2, Windows Vista, or a Mac with Tiger (OS 10.4) or Leopard (OS 10.5).
Compatible browsers:
Internet Explorer (version 6 or later), Firefox (version 2), or, if you are on a Mac, Safari (version 3.1) also works.
You can also keep up with us in Denver on our main web site, www.demconvention.com
I have also attached a screenshot showing the exact error page I get using Firefox 3, the latest version of the most popular free browser.
I run the Fedora distribution of the GNU/Linux operation system, version 9, which is very modern and supports all the latest open technologies. However, it seems that the DNC website is using proprietary technology that excludes users of free, noncommercial software. This would make it impossible for a large number of people to access the website. In fact, I discovered that a lot of people are suffering the same problem at the popular technology blog, Slashdot, here:
http://news.slashdot.org/news/08/08/25/229210.shtml
I hope that the DNC will take steps to provide a more open & accessible technology platform for those interested in following these developments.
Thank you in advance!
Disclaimer: I replaced their x2019 apostrophes with the one on the keyboard [']. Easier than trying to figure out how to get it to display here...
Extremism, by its very definition, is that which is on the fringes. The Qur'aan has over 6000 verses in it, and the disparagers of Islam can only find 20 or so verses that they use to do so (out of context), and feel vindicated and think not twice of ignoring the rest. Who would think it sufficient to summarize an entire book with just a few excerpts and commen...okay, the irony of that statement on this site just sunk in. But the issue here is serious, as at a minimum is affects 1+ billion people, and at the most it affects the entire world - namely, the religion of Islam.
Now, back to "bound to defend" statement. Why is it that you are choosing, in your assumption, the most violent, and in this context (the discussion), worst interpretation for what I had said (i.e., attacking), when the choice of words I used is ambiguous and can mean so many things? I said, "bound to defend". I'm not trying to make an example of you, but I'm just trying to show you how absurd the situation has become that an IT professional born, raised, and living in the US has to explain that he is not trying to attack someone just because he disagrees with them.
It is your levelheadedness that I was expressing appreciation for, and so this post was just a response to what I thought was incongruent with your previous post. I really don't know you beyond, say, three messages on Slashdot, so maybe I'm exerting too much effort here, but I felt it deserved recognition.
You're bringing-up a lot of points that need further elaboration, and I'd love to discuss them more. Feel free to contact me directly (and this goes for anyone else, as well), if you'd like to, otherwise, we can continue it here; I just don't feel Slashdot is the best venue for it.
Shakrai, though I don't agree with some of what you say, I just wanted to express my gratitude for confronting the boldfaced lies of this other user. As a Muslim, I'm bound to defend my religion, the Messenger (may Allaah's peace be upon him), and anyone else whose rights are violated (I wonder what he'll say to that), but I don't even know where to begin with someone that doesn't know the first thing about Islam. So, the best I can do is thank you for at least not letting his lies stand unopposed.
I really think this statement is inaccurate. First of all, I will be the first to acknowledge (well, maybe the 2nd, 3rd...well, millionth-ish anyway) PHP's history of insecure default settings and exploits. However, to make a claim that the PHP team doesn't care about security is really incorrect, because in their latest versions, including PHP 5 and up, they have addressed the majority of complaints regarding insecure design. But you simply cannot claim it is PHP's fault that someone has the power to run exec($_GET['shell_command']). Would you prefer that PHP parses everything that is submitted? This is impractical and not a real solution, because it cannot possibly get every exploit, because new ways to attack will be discovered.
If you want to attack PHP's response to security, fine, but by it's nature, it allows people to do things. People are capable of doing things well and doing things poorly. This is not the fault of the language, because that is what it is designed to do. If you think, then, that PHP is too powerful of a language (???), fine, but the fact that it can allow people to muck up a system is also the reason that it can generate amazingly dynamic websites. This same logic would come down on the C language as well, because it allows (*gasp!*) direct access to memory and suffers from buffer overflow errors! Run for the hills!
One performance enhancement that Lerdorf suggested based on code analysis was to use MySQL instead of PostgreSQL for the database.
"If you can fit your problem into what MySQL can handle it's very fast," Lerdorf said. "You can gain quite a bit of performance."
For the items that MySQL doesn't handle as well as PostgreSQL, Lerdorf noted that some features can be emulated in PHP itself, and you still end up with a net performance boost.
There's your "slam". Hardly a revelation, really. MySQL & PostgreSQL are two excellent databases that have different target audiences that overlap somewhat. I guess there are different kinds of extremists out there as well...
You make the common mistake of assuming that people care about other cultures & languages. That's something that happens quite frequently outside of the "civilized world" - i.e., America. At least, this is what I pick up from Lou Dobbs on CNN every night...
This sort of heavy-handed behavior in the name of "the War on Terror" just reinforces the idea that this is not just a war on terrorism, but a war between cultures, a holy crusade. This is the sort of rhetoric that these terrorist organizations use to recruit new members, it hardly does us any good to give them evidence to support their case that the West is conducting an all-out war on Islam.
The more we marginalize Arabs (and sometimes people that just look sort of Arab) and Muslims, the more likely they are to align themselves with terrorist organizations out of desperation or righteous indignation. We need to fight terrorist cells based on real intelligence, not knee-jerk reactions.
I think you're hitting on an outstanding point here, but from the wrong angle. In all the news reports, FUD, and "released" audios, rarely, if ever, has the treatment of Muslims or Arabs in the West been cited as a reason nor justification for their actions. Rather, it has been the treatment of Muslims and their territories in the East by foreign forces - along with the partnering of Western forces with the corrupt dictators of the Eastern nations (mostly in the Middle East) that is mentioned in their demands. They are far too busy with their own local problems to worry about the Muslims and Arabs in the far away & wealthy Western nations.
I'm sorry, you must not be living in the US. Americans have clearly demonstrated that they are far more like a rubber ball than they are silly-putty (sorry, it's the only analogy I could think of to apply to the "...slip through the fingers..." metaphor). The current "in-thing" to do is to test how far those in power can stretch the limits - US goverment has been trying, and succeeding, at establishing new boundaries for its rights over its citizens, while corporations, as always, are trying their hardest to stretch their powers over their customers.
High fructose corn-syrup, television, and sedentary lifestyles have all contributed to making Americans far more passive when it comes to issues about which normal people in other nations would raise hell.
I'd like to disagree with this comment (it is Slashdot, afterall). IE7 fixes a lot of rendering bugs that IE6 had - just view the css/edge site with IE6 & IE7 to see some of the fixes in action. My own test XML-page renders properly, with CSS, on IE7 where it didn't on IE6. IE 7 is noticeably faster than IE6. These are all my personal observations, and I'm sure a more professional analysis will yield a lot more improvements.
Having said that, IE7 is still far off from where the rest of the world is at, and it can be argued that Microsoft is not working as hard as it should be on implementing standards, but a quick read over the IEBlog will show that that the developers of IE really are trying to implement feature requests, and IE7 brings with it more than just a bunch of fluff. It brings IE up to Y2K CSS compliance. : -D
It's kind of ironic. I must be part of the audience for which this senator is attempted to advocate. I was working on a Word document for a coworker that was a glorifed form. She couldn't get it to not bullet her paragraphs as individual list items. After struggling with it for a while, I was able to overcome this amazing "feature" by randomly deleting text until it stopped auto-formatting the paragraph (I achieved this by pasting the text into Notepad, removing some funny characters, clearing out the form field, and re-pasting the text back in).
If it weren't for Microsoft's helpfulness and amazing features, a task like that would have only taken a minute, and I would have been able to get back to my own tasks much more quickly. This is something that Open Source Software doesn't understand about government contracts - one of the purposes of government employment is to create jobs. If you start making software more efficient & easy to use, instead of bloated & intimidating, things like certification, overtime, & over-employment become relics of the past.
OSS needs to take a page from Microsoft's book - they've been doing this for a long time...they know what they're doing. Heck, Microsoft has gotten so good at getting money from large, wealthy entities that Warren Buffett felt left out of the action, and decided to go ahead and give Bill Gates all his money too.
God forbid that Microsoft's gains could have been through some kind of effort on their part to increase their market share (though some have already implied that this whole debacle is part of that effort). Linux is very strong & lively, and every project, platform, effort, or struggle goes through times of ease & times of difficulty. I highly doubt CFOs, CIOs, & IT managers even know about the GPL, much less what it means other than "hmm, this software is free for me to use"...however misguided that may be.
I'm not intended to flame or start an argument, but do you have anything to actually back up those statements? It goes against my own assessment of the situation, and it sounds to me just like a lot of FUD.
I think you're right on the money here. OSS & Free software can't really do much more to make it easier for Microsoft. MS wants to have their cake and eat it to. Allow me to translate how I understood this move: "I (Microsoft) acknowledge that I have a lot to benefit from OSS. However, in my best interests, I would like to have those funny clauses in the GPL modified for me specifically. This will be mutually beneficial in that I will get all the benefit and you won't get anything from it. In fact, if I have my way, I'll probably end up taking code that was once free and make it proprietary, so only I can use it. I really think this is for the best."
I find this comment to be rather naïve - how could this merger, if it happens, be a bad thing for the Linux market? AMD is well-supported under Linux and supports Linux rather well (though I imagine it's more on one side than the other). Developing drivers for Linux has always been an issue of balancing available resources, and the resources AMD could potentially provide for this purpose would be invaluable.
If anything, a merger like this should really push the Linux desktop forward and challenge the Wintel trap we've been in for so long. This is just one more factor that is continuing the push for greater Linux penetration. A good example to cite would be Dell's acquisition of Alienware. If AMD & ATI merge, what kind of hardware do you think would be best optimize? Taking the Dell example further, as their sales of Linux servers increase, they undoubtedly are going to explore Linux on the desktop (after overcoming the obviously hurdle that Microsoft would present to them in terms of OEM Windows pricing). Just add up all these trends, and it can only be an optimistic outlook, in my opinion.
I imagine that the recently-released respin is more intended for new users & new installations rather than for upgrading/updating an existing installation. For that, yum update should be more than sufficient. As I've just finished installing FC5 to my laptop, a fresher installation ISO would have been very welcome rather than rather large out-of-the-box updates required.
Always keep in mind, as well, that Fedora Core is a distribution prone to more package migration than others. It makes no mystery of this. This is just part of the nature of FC - it's mostly for cutting-edge releases that have not entered into other distros' stable branches.
Microsoft has real competition, forcing them to develop better, more competitive software. Downside?
The same disappointment we always feel whenever MSFT finally exceeds their competition - stagnation, insecurity, & lack of motivation for improvement (e.g., IE). MSFT is always seeking to just barely exceed their competition for a market advantage, and then they have little to no impetus to improve after that.
No doubt that competition benefits open-source projects as well as proprietary, commercial products; however, open-source projects tend to have more motivation to improve themselves when there is no money to be made in doing so. Proprietary, commercial shops have no motivation to improve a product if it is not going to translate into increased revenue.
Without a doubt, I try to make every webpage I design that is more than just a quick test script comply, at the very least, with one of the X/HTML doctypes - whether it's transitional or strict. I do this at work & at home, on my own personal projects. Naturally, you're limited with what you can do when you have to design for IE, but that's called the "Real World". I'm blessed at work to have co-workers that agree with this, for the most part. Sadly, our working code base is not compliant, but you do what you can.
The best point I saw mentioned above was that compliance is the best bet that what you make work on a website now will also work in the future. If you design for one particular platform or agent, then you'll be out of luck if that changes. This is really only a discussion for someone who is shortsighted - along the same lines of reasoning as the ones that think 1GB of RAM is more than you'll even need & you'll never fill up those new 750GB hard drives. Sadly, human beings are far better at seeing what they've already passed than what is coming up, and don't seem to be able to extrapolate from that.
Standards-compliance is one of those good design practices that carries with it the lessons learned from the past. Coupling it with separation of presentation & content (e.g., XHTML & CSS), a standards-compliant website ends up being really nice.
But, the vast majority of otherwise intelligent developers will probably succumb to the ideology of instant gratification & short-term gains - "I did it in five minutes!" - "It works on 90% of people's computers". This is the same flock that doesn't leave comments in their code & think no one else needs to understand it after it's done - including themselves!
Who are the wahhaabis and who are the moderates? By what standard and whose brush? I understand what you're saying, and I realize the truth of the matter, but is that really the fundamental problem?
I'd like to ask someone to actually tell me what they think a wahhaabi is (seriously, no jokes), and what they think a moderate Muslim is.
The point I am trying to make is that these are all very arbitrary distinctions, and they miss the point completely. When people paint with this brush, they are trying to find the easy way out. "We don't have to deal with the wahhaabis because they are extremist and unreasonable. They're not even worth dealing with." And then follow that up with, "But the moderates...you know, the ones that agree with us...they are more reasonable. Let's deal with them."
Without actually trying to understand the dynamics of the people, the same alienation that exists today will continue. This attitude will actually perpetuate the same problems that exist today.
My whole purpose of posting on this topic is get my fellow Slashdotters to approach this whole issue rationally...of course, this is the same group that will erupt into a flame-war if someone mentions the words innovation, security, and Bill Gates in the same sentence...perhaps I'm asking too much?
A kaafir, very simply put, is a disbeliever. Not a "nigger" as you have so kindly put forward. A disbeliever is defined as someone who does not believe that there is none worthy of worship but Allah, and that Muhammad is His Messenger. Let's at least be precise.
The Christians and Jews are permitted to live under Muslim rule similarly to how you've described, by default. They can practice their religion, and even conduct their own courts. The jizyah is exactly what you've called it - a tax. It's amazing, though, how you've made it seem like something unique to the Muslims only, though. The Muslims are obligated to pay 2 1/2 percent of their wealth in charity, and pretty much the same is due from the non-Muslims, except it is a tax. But, of course, the 20 - 30% we pay annually to the IRS is something completely different, right?;) In exchange for the jizyah, the Islamic Government is obligated to protect the wealth, property, and rights of these citizens, and the jizyah must be returned if these conditions are not met.
Those that are not Christian or Jew, however, would be allowed to live under Muslim rule, under these conditions, under the circumstances you have described. If there was no threat or danger in having to do so.
Definitely, under an Islamic government, non-Islamic laws cannot supercede Islamic ones. How this is even an issue doesn't make sense. I surely cannot force Islamic laws in this non-Islamic government, right?
In fact, during a time of war in the generation after the Prophet Muhammad (may Allah's peace be upon him), the Muslim ruler at the time informed a non-Muslim village that they could no longer offer military protection to them, so he removed from them the obligation of the jizyah. You'd be surprised, in fact, how frequently the Muslim Caliphate, back when Islam was actually practiced, was at peace, and fought transgressors and oppressors. But the exploits of other empires and nations are not comparable, because they were never "theocracies", and the Islamic ones are always seen in contempt a little more than the empires of Napoleon, Charlemagne, Alexander the Great, and so on. I never understood this, even though these former empires were never divorced from being fundamentally religious as well.
As for fighting the kuffaar (plural of kaafir) wherever you may find them, this is during war. If a people were peaceable to the Muslim kingdoms, allowed Muslims to worship freely in their nations, and were not transgressing against the Muslim nation or people, there was seldom any conflict, because the message of Islam was allowed to spread freely.
I'd like to point out, also, that infidel is NOT an Arabic word. Disbeliever is a far more accurate term for kaafir. The connotation for infidel is different than that of kaafir.
This is all extremely pragmatic, and the conditions of the non-Muslims under the proper Muslim government was far superior to even the conditions of the Americans now. The people lived much safer lives, there was far less impropriety, and business boomed. Islam, as an empire, flourished for over 1000 years and spread out from the Arabian Penninsula all the way to Spain to the West and China to the East. Did unpleasant things happen at some point during this time? Yes, I'm sure they did, and it was a direct result of leaving the actual practice of the religion and turning towards Imperialism and material gains. But compare the history of the Islamic Empire to that of any nation preceding it or that came after it, and you'll find that nothing can compare. But these are points that are usually glossed over and people just focus on Muslims as "the Other" and remain content with that.
Slashdot Mirror
They can indeed enforce it if they can prove the camera it was shot on originally encodced the video in an MPEG-LA codec.
They would have to also prove that you did not have a license to convert it in the first place. I encourage you to read the (unfortunately rather lengthy) post I referenced in my previous comment where you can see that they have no rights after the video has been encoded.
The homepage for the Apertus project is cinema.elphel.com.
Details about the JP4 codec can be found here: http://wiki.elphel.com/index.php?title=JP4
This is not correct. I am not defending MPEG-LA, but I think it's important that we get the facts straight. Once video has been converted from H.264 to another format, MPEG-LA cannot assert anything over it. This e-mail exchange which I archived on Libre Video explains this point using their own, documented words.
Disclaimer: I replaced their x2019 apostrophes with the one on the keyboard [']. Easier than trying to figure out how to get it to display here...
Extremism, by its very definition, is that which is on the fringes. The Qur'aan has over 6000 verses in it, and the disparagers of Islam can only find 20 or so verses that they use to do so (out of context), and feel vindicated and think not twice of ignoring the rest. Who would think it sufficient to summarize an entire book with just a few excerpts and commen...okay, the irony of that statement on this site just sunk in. But the issue here is serious, as at a minimum is affects 1+ billion people, and at the most it affects the entire world - namely, the religion of Islam.
Now, back to "bound to defend" statement. Why is it that you are choosing, in your assumption, the most violent, and in this context (the discussion), worst interpretation for what I had said (i.e., attacking), when the choice of words I used is ambiguous and can mean so many things? I said, "bound to defend". I'm not trying to make an example of you, but I'm just trying to show you how absurd the situation has become that an IT professional born, raised, and living in the US has to explain that he is not trying to attack someone just because he disagrees with them.
It is your levelheadedness that I was expressing appreciation for, and so this post was just a response to what I thought was incongruent with your previous post. I really don't know you beyond, say, three messages on Slashdot, so maybe I'm exerting too much effort here, but I felt it deserved recognition.
You're bringing-up a lot of points that need further elaboration, and I'd love to discuss them more. Feel free to contact me directly (and this goes for anyone else, as well), if you'd like to, otherwise, we can continue it here; I just don't feel Slashdot is the best venue for it.
[citation needed]
Shakrai, though I don't agree with some of what you say, I just wanted to express my gratitude for confronting the boldfaced lies of this other user. As a Muslim, I'm bound to defend my religion, the Messenger (may Allaah's peace be upon him), and anyone else whose rights are violated (I wonder what he'll say to that), but I don't even know where to begin with someone that doesn't know the first thing about Islam. So, the best I can do is thank you for at least not letting his lies stand unopposed.
I believe the correct term is now "Benefactors".
I really think this statement is inaccurate. First of all, I will be the first to acknowledge (well, maybe the 2nd, 3rd...well, millionth-ish anyway) PHP's history of insecure default settings and exploits. However, to make a claim that the PHP team doesn't care about security is really incorrect, because in their latest versions, including PHP 5 and up, they have addressed the majority of complaints regarding insecure design. But you simply cannot claim it is PHP's fault that someone has the power to run exec($_GET['shell_command']). Would you prefer that PHP parses everything that is submitted? This is impractical and not a real solution, because it cannot possibly get every exploit, because new ways to attack will be discovered.
If you want to attack PHP's response to security, fine, but by it's nature, it allows people to do things. People are capable of doing things well and doing things poorly. This is not the fault of the language, because that is what it is designed to do. If you think, then, that PHP is too powerful of a language (???), fine, but the fact that it can allow people to muck up a system is also the reason that it can generate amazingly dynamic websites. This same logic would come down on the C language as well, because it allows (*gasp!*) direct access to memory and suffers from buffer overflow errors! Run for the hills!
Yes, he did. When he first wrote PHP/FI as a series of Perl scripts back in the middle to late 90s.
You make the common mistake of assuming that people care about other cultures & languages. That's something that happens quite frequently outside of the "civilized world" - i.e., America. At least, this is what I pick up from Lou Dobbs on CNN every night...
I think you're hitting on an outstanding point here, but from the wrong angle. In all the news reports, FUD, and "released" audios, rarely, if ever, has the treatment of Muslims or Arabs in the West been cited as a reason nor justification for their actions. Rather, it has been the treatment of Muslims and their territories in the East by foreign forces - along with the partnering of Western forces with the corrupt dictators of the Eastern nations (mostly in the Middle East) that is mentioned in their demands. They are far too busy with their own local problems to worry about the Muslims and Arabs in the far away & wealthy Western nations.
I'm sorry, you must not be living in the US. Americans have clearly demonstrated that they are far more like a rubber ball than they are silly-putty (sorry, it's the only analogy I could think of to apply to the "...slip through the fingers..." metaphor). The current "in-thing" to do is to test how far those in power can stretch the limits - US goverment has been trying, and succeeding, at establishing new boundaries for its rights over its citizens, while corporations, as always, are trying their hardest to stretch their powers over their customers.
High fructose corn-syrup, television, and sedentary lifestyles have all contributed to making Americans far more passive when it comes to issues about which normal people in other nations would raise hell.
I'd like to disagree with this comment (it is Slashdot, afterall). IE7 fixes a lot of rendering bugs that IE6 had - just view the css/edge site with IE6 & IE7 to see some of the fixes in action. My own test XML-page renders properly, with CSS, on IE7 where it didn't on IE6. IE 7 is noticeably faster than IE6. These are all my personal observations, and I'm sure a more professional analysis will yield a lot more improvements.
Having said that, IE7 is still far off from where the rest of the world is at, and it can be argued that Microsoft is not working as hard as it should be on implementing standards, but a quick read over the IEBlog will show that that the developers of IE really are trying to implement feature requests, and IE7 brings with it more than just a bunch of fluff. It brings IE up to Y2K CSS compliance. : -D
It's kind of ironic. I must be part of the audience for which this senator is attempted to advocate. I was working on a Word document for a coworker that was a glorifed form. She couldn't get it to not bullet her paragraphs as individual list items. After struggling with it for a while, I was able to overcome this amazing "feature" by randomly deleting text until it stopped auto-formatting the paragraph (I achieved this by pasting the text into Notepad, removing some funny characters, clearing out the form field, and re-pasting the text back in).
If it weren't for Microsoft's helpfulness and amazing features, a task like that would have only taken a minute, and I would have been able to get back to my own tasks much more quickly. This is something that Open Source Software doesn't understand about government contracts - one of the purposes of government employment is to create jobs. If you start making software more efficient & easy to use, instead of bloated & intimidating, things like certification, overtime, & over-employment become relics of the past.
OSS needs to take a page from Microsoft's book - they've been doing this for a long time...they know what they're doing. Heck, Microsoft has gotten so good at getting money from large, wealthy entities that Warren Buffett felt left out of the action, and decided to go ahead and give Bill Gates all his money too.
God forbid that Microsoft's gains could have been through some kind of effort on their part to increase their market share (though some have already implied that this whole debacle is part of that effort). Linux is very strong & lively, and every project, platform, effort, or struggle goes through times of ease & times of difficulty. I highly doubt CFOs, CIOs, & IT managers even know about the GPL, much less what it means other than "hmm, this software is free for me to use"...however misguided that may be.
I'm not intended to flame or start an argument, but do you have anything to actually back up those statements? It goes against my own assessment of the situation, and it sounds to me just like a lot of FUD.
I think you're right on the money here. OSS & Free software can't really do much more to make it easier for Microsoft. MS wants to have their cake and eat it to. Allow me to translate how I understood this move: "I (Microsoft) acknowledge that I have a lot to benefit from OSS. However, in my best interests, I would like to have those funny clauses in the GPL modified for me specifically. This will be mutually beneficial in that I will get all the benefit and you won't get anything from it. In fact, if I have my way, I'll probably end up taking code that was once free and make it proprietary, so only I can use it. I really think this is for the best."
I find this comment to be rather naïve - how could this merger, if it happens, be a bad thing for the Linux market? AMD is well-supported under Linux and supports Linux rather well (though I imagine it's more on one side than the other). Developing drivers for Linux has always been an issue of balancing available resources, and the resources AMD could potentially provide for this purpose would be invaluable.
If anything, a merger like this should really push the Linux desktop forward and challenge the Wintel trap we've been in for so long. This is just one more factor that is continuing the push for greater Linux penetration. A good example to cite would be Dell's acquisition of Alienware. If AMD & ATI merge, what kind of hardware do you think would be best optimize? Taking the Dell example further, as their sales of Linux servers increase, they undoubtedly are going to explore Linux on the desktop (after overcoming the obviously hurdle that Microsoft would present to them in terms of OEM Windows pricing). Just add up all these trends, and it can only be an optimistic outlook, in my opinion.
I imagine that the recently-released respin is more intended for new users & new installations rather than for upgrading/updating an existing installation. For that, yum update should be more than sufficient. As I've just finished installing FC5 to my laptop, a fresher installation ISO would have been very welcome rather than rather large out-of-the-box updates required.
Always keep in mind, as well, that Fedora Core is a distribution prone to more package migration than others. It makes no mystery of this. This is just part of the nature of FC - it's mostly for cutting-edge releases that have not entered into other distros' stable branches.
The same disappointment we always feel whenever MSFT finally exceeds their competition - stagnation, insecurity, & lack of motivation for improvement (e.g., IE). MSFT is always seeking to just barely exceed their competition for a market advantage, and then they have little to no impetus to improve after that.
No doubt that competition benefits open-source projects as well as proprietary, commercial products; however, open-source projects tend to have more motivation to improve themselves when there is no money to be made in doing so. Proprietary, commercial shops have no motivation to improve a product if it is not going to translate into increased revenue.
Please, think of the stockholders!
Without a doubt, I try to make every webpage I design that is more than just a quick test script comply, at the very least, with one of the X/HTML doctypes - whether it's transitional or strict. I do this at work & at home, on my own personal projects. Naturally, you're limited with what you can do when you have to design for IE, but that's called the "Real World". I'm blessed at work to have co-workers that agree with this, for the most part. Sadly, our working code base is not compliant, but you do what you can.
The best point I saw mentioned above was that compliance is the best bet that what you make work on a website now will also work in the future. If you design for one particular platform or agent, then you'll be out of luck if that changes. This is really only a discussion for someone who is shortsighted - along the same lines of reasoning as the ones that think 1GB of RAM is more than you'll even need & you'll never fill up those new 750GB hard drives. Sadly, human beings are far better at seeing what they've already passed than what is coming up, and don't seem to be able to extrapolate from that.
Standards-compliance is one of those good design practices that carries with it the lessons learned from the past. Coupling it with separation of presentation & content (e.g., XHTML & CSS), a standards-compliant website ends up being really nice.
But, the vast majority of otherwise intelligent developers will probably succumb to the ideology of instant gratification & short-term gains - "I did it in five minutes!" - "It works on 90% of people's computers". This is the same flock that doesn't leave comments in their code & think no one else needs to understand it after it's done - including themselves!
Who are the wahhaabis and who are the moderates? By what standard and whose brush? I understand what you're saying, and I realize the truth of the matter, but is that really the fundamental problem?
I'd like to ask someone to actually tell me what they think a wahhaabi is (seriously, no jokes), and what they think a moderate Muslim is.
The point I am trying to make is that these are all very arbitrary distinctions, and they miss the point completely. When people paint with this brush, they are trying to find the easy way out. "We don't have to deal with the wahhaabis because they are extremist and unreasonable. They're not even worth dealing with." And then follow that up with, "But the moderates...you know, the ones that agree with us...they are more reasonable. Let's deal with them."
Without actually trying to understand the dynamics of the people, the same alienation that exists today will continue. This attitude will actually perpetuate the same problems that exist today.
My whole purpose of posting on this topic is get my fellow Slashdotters to approach this whole issue rationally...of course, this is the same group that will erupt into a flame-war if someone mentions the words innovation, security, and Bill Gates in the same sentence...perhaps I'm asking too much?
P.S. What if I said I was typing this on vi?
P.S.S. Which I was running through emacs?
A kaafir, very simply put, is a disbeliever. Not a "nigger" as you have so kindly put forward. A disbeliever is defined as someone who does not believe that there is none worthy of worship but Allah, and that Muhammad is His Messenger. Let's at least be precise.
The Christians and Jews are permitted to live under Muslim rule similarly to how you've described, by default. They can practice their religion, and even conduct their own courts. The jizyah is exactly what you've called it - a tax. It's amazing, though, how you've made it seem like something unique to the Muslims only, though. The Muslims are obligated to pay 2 1/2 percent of their wealth in charity, and pretty much the same is due from the non-Muslims, except it is a tax. But, of course, the 20 - 30% we pay annually to the IRS is something completely different, right? ;) In exchange for the jizyah, the Islamic Government is obligated to protect the wealth, property, and rights of these citizens, and the jizyah must be returned if these conditions are not met.
Those that are not Christian or Jew, however, would be allowed to live under Muslim rule, under these conditions, under the circumstances you have described. If there was no threat or danger in having to do so.
Definitely, under an Islamic government, non-Islamic laws cannot supercede Islamic ones. How this is even an issue doesn't make sense. I surely cannot force Islamic laws in this non-Islamic government, right?
In fact, during a time of war in the generation after the Prophet Muhammad (may Allah's peace be upon him), the Muslim ruler at the time informed a non-Muslim village that they could no longer offer military protection to them, so he removed from them the obligation of the jizyah. You'd be surprised, in fact, how frequently the Muslim Caliphate, back when Islam was actually practiced, was at peace, and fought transgressors and oppressors. But the exploits of other empires and nations are not comparable, because they were never "theocracies", and the Islamic ones are always seen in contempt a little more than the empires of Napoleon, Charlemagne, Alexander the Great, and so on. I never understood this, even though these former empires were never divorced from being fundamentally religious as well.
As for fighting the kuffaar (plural of kaafir) wherever you may find them, this is during war. If a people were peaceable to the Muslim kingdoms, allowed Muslims to worship freely in their nations, and were not transgressing against the Muslim nation or people, there was seldom any conflict, because the message of Islam was allowed to spread freely.
I'd like to point out, also, that infidel is NOT an Arabic word. Disbeliever is a far more accurate term for kaafir. The connotation for infidel is different than that of kaafir.
This is all extremely pragmatic, and the conditions of the non-Muslims under the proper Muslim government was far superior to even the conditions of the Americans now. The people lived much safer lives, there was far less impropriety, and business boomed. Islam, as an empire, flourished for over 1000 years and spread out from the Arabian Penninsula all the way to Spain to the West and China to the East. Did unpleasant things happen at some point during this time? Yes, I'm sure they did, and it was a direct result of leaving the actual practice of the religion and turning towards Imperialism and material gains. But compare the history of the Islamic Empire to that of any nation preceding it or that came after it, and you'll find that nothing can compare. But these are points that are usually glossed over and people just focus on Muslims as "the Other" and remain content with that.