The Constitution grants no rights. Our rights are granted by our Creator, or, if you prefer, by the fact of our humanity.
That isn't wild theorizing. It is solid constitutional law.
For instance, the Constitution provides no right of procreation. Most of us would concede it a right of people. So did the Court when the question arose.
The Consitution does prohibit government from infringing on some of our rights, and it gives Congress some powers to protect others, but it grants no rights by itself.
Habeas corpus additionally is not a "right". It is a procedure to enforce a fundamental right --not to be unjustly imprisoned.
As a procedure it is not self effectuating,. It requires statutory implementation. Over the years Congress has both limited and expanded the procedures governing granting a writ of habeas corpus. So have the courts.
Gonzales could have phrased his answer in a form more pleasing to the public. But he is not just "technically right". He is fundamentally right, and the principle underlying his answer is a greater defense of our liberty than a position that the Constitution is the fount of our rights.
I'm sorry, but this is simply not true. It is all because of humans. =============== So, if it is all caused by humans what caused the last end of the ice ages? Cavemen building overenthusiastic campfires? Belching too much after overindulging in mammoth steaks?
You mean this sucker is important evidence of evolution, has been missing for who knows how long, they found it, and now they tell us about it? Where was all the hoopla when it was missing?
Before they found it. I don't recall any scientists saying "This theory of evoution might be convincing if we could find a fish with toes, but until then...."
Nor do I recall anyone saying "Well we had this link, but Mortimer apparently slipped it into his pants and took it out of the Smithsonian, and since then it has been missing..."
What else are they missing and not telling us about?
Whole thing just deepens my suspicion. I want an accounting of all the links they claim to have, but for all we know have also gone missing.
Efficiency generally increases with scale. So does the ability to apply environemntal measures.
Natural gas works well for heating homes because it is clean and does not require extensive environmental processes.
If we use natural gas in power plants, its cost will increase, and home owners will start to switch to alternate fuels -- oil, coal, and wood -- all of which are "filthy" fuels when burned in a small home heating plant.
It makes more sense to use these dirty fuels in large central plants where they can be burned with greater efficiency, and environmental measures better applied.
5% of what looks like 180,000 on the graph is about 9,000 active servers.
A merger or two in hosting companies with the major company requiring one OS, a decision to switch by one large company, whatever, would cause that 5% figure.
Moroever we do not know how many might have switched the other way.
I am sending the following letter by registered mail to SCO:
**** Gentlemen:
A press report advises me that you seek a license fee for commercial use of Linux that has code in it that you claim the rights to.
I do not desire a license, nor do I desire to infringe on any rights that you have. Please advise me of the specific sections of code that you claim rights to so that I may remove them.
Regards,
******
I suspect that if they fail to respond, I will be adequately protected from an action.
It is pretty easy to protect yourself right now from SCO.
Just send SCO a registered letter asking them to precisely identfy any material in Linux whose use they claim violates their ip ip rights so that you can remove it.
They won't respond.
No court is going to award them damages when they failed on request to provide you with the information needed to avoid violating their ip.
I served in the sixties on DD-630, the Braine, a WWII destroyer.
Gunnery fire control was handled by a big grey box that housed an analog, gear driven computer. Quite a piece of sophisticated machinery.
In WWII the Braine was stationed on picket duty for Okinawa. She was hit by two kamikazes: http://www.navsource.org/archives/05/0 563007.jpg http://www.navsource.org/archives/05/0 563010.jpg
Though her fire control was badly compromised by loss of automatic communications to the gun mounts (not to mention loss of gun mounts), and loss of crew, she continued to defend herself, using men to pass fire control information to the functioning mounts.
When I served we had a damage control drill in which the CO threw catastrophe after catastrophe at the crew. At one point we had a simulated fire in a stern compartment (under the depth charges), no water pressure, no CO2, no breathing apparatus, and no portable pumps.
The resolute damage control crew had a bucket brigade organized with wet towels wrapped around their faces.
The point of all this is simple. On warships one ought not strive solely for efficiency. Redundancy, simplicity,robustness, and general utility are substantial virtues.
This has been an intensive issue in my firm (law firm, 120 users, two locations).
We avoided Exchange (there are all kinds of plusses and minuses there).
For email we use iPlanet's messaging server but are in the middle of switching over to Cyrus+postfix.
Our email clients are mostly netscape with some mozilla/outlook/outlook express/eudora. We plan wholesale conversion to Mozilla.
Many users prefer to use a web interface for email. Inital feedback on IMP has been good.
For a global addressbook we use Rolodap http://rolodap.sourceforge.net which is LDAP based. Rolodap has a web interface for searching, word processor use, data entry, etc. and also provides integrated autocompletion services to all the emailers we use. We also can extend its searches to include the local University (also LDAP) and Bigfoot if the sought address is not in our own database.
We use a central employee LDAP server (not the same one we use for Rolodap--rolodap has 35000 contacts in it) to manage email/mailboxes,web access, etc from a single interface. Though we are a touch "broken" now because of the conversion to Cyrus we will shortly be back to the goal of adding, changing, delting users, forwarding email, etc. through a single central interface. LDAP is our vehicle for that.
We like LDAP. A good open standard has all kinds of collateral benefits.
We use Steltor as our calendar -- calendaring is an important app for us and we are worried about its purchase by Oracle. LDAP controls Steltor as well.
Our documents are organized by client so the client network directories are what we use for shared files. We are about to add a means to email documents to the client file using Postfix and a little home grown app. Sharing files outside the client directories would cause us some concerns about whether we would meet our professional needs of maintaining a coherent client file.
A few observations:
First, we do not necessarily want a "one server does it all" solution. In our experience that compromises security, reliability, and redundancy. It kills flexibility, if for instance, to chnage your calendar you have to change your email server and addressbook. We much prefer to keep functions separate so long as we can have a rational presentation to the user.
Second, our users largely prefer web based interfaces if they have high performance. They find them simpler to use and more understandable. We find it simple to do "cheap" superficial integration by just giving them a master web page. Web based also provides an easy way for us to do remote access.
So for us, the key to replacing Steltor, if the Oracle acquisition doesn't work out, is a shared calendar that offers the same features, has good performance, integrates via LDAP. I do not know of an OSS app that does this.
I think both we and the original enquirer are looking for the same thing. A shared OSS calendaring server. We have email, contacts/addressbook, shared files, covered. We don't, outside of Steltor, have calendaring covered.
The original enquirer wanted calendaring that worked in Outlook. Browser based would be OK with us.
yes, I have looked at phpGroupware and its ilk and at SUSE Mail Server. All of them however provide me with too much integrated together or have deficiencies in the features/performance side of things.
"Microsoft said it would license the technology on a 1:1 basis, in return for intellectual property from OpenGL licensees, but this could carry its own pitfalls."
We have a little saying around our firm "It's not the technology that is hard, it is the people". It seems to fit 90% of the problems.
Good managers are able to get more out of a group of people than the people knew they had and they love it. Bad managers achieve the opposite in both regards.
The problem is that when you have a good manager, there nearly always is someone above him who is bad and just itching to get involved.
Thanks!
"Usually, the reason for this is that Sun pays to license third party code to include in StarOffice..."
Before we bash Sun too much, is it reasonable to expect them to pay others for features in StarOffice and offer it for free? I know for instance that the StarOffice filter for Wordperfect costs Sun $$ which is why it was not provided with the code turned over to OpenOffice.
So I read this as "if I am happy with the stuff that is free, I use OpenOffice. If I want some of the extras that Sun has to pay for, I pay Sun, or start programming for OpenOffice"
I can't complain about that (but I need the Wordperfect filter so I will gripe if it is >$50)
Seems to me the issue really isn't whether there is a GUI or not. A new user might be perfectly happy with a form he fills out with what he wants. The form could then generate a script that changes all the config files, etc. The problem is that the setup is spread all over the place and is not consistent. Throw in a few arcane terms and uninformative abbreviations, and the new user (or moderatley old user) must perforce resort to HowTo's and other resources to try to figure out what needs to be done.
I think something got out of whack on this discussion. Graphon is irrelevant to WINE. It is a possible replacement for Citrix or PcAnywhere type solutions, is cross platform, and saves big money on license fees from Microsoft.
Graphon and VNC do the same thing. We have been using VNC for a year --linux to windows and windows to Linux. It works well over a 100Mbs network, but is a dismal failure at 56K
. Graphon seems much more efficient-- at least on their demo it makes it feasible to run an application like Wordperfect reotely over 56K. That is pretty good and better than much of the competition.
If the products stay as they are more or less, we would use VNC in house, but use Graphon for our remote dial up users (who currently use PcAnyhwere as a windows to windows solution).
I could see a real potential for VNC to gain speed which would hurt Graphon. I can also see a potential for Graphon's patent to be a problem for VNC-- as I understand it Graphon bought a formerly existing patent that predated VNC.
I think Graphon has enough interest in the Linux community that patent problems could probably be worked out, if any exist.
There is a case pending now that argues that the present copyright scheme is unconstitutional because Congress has in effect made copyright terms perpetual by continually extending them when they are about to expire. I agree with the direction of argument, but I don't think Congress has quite abused copyright enough yet for the courts to act. Give them a few more years and few more outrageous expansions of the law.....
I can appreciate your personal situation. However, there were a lot of small companies that were knocked out of business by Microsft as well.
I think it likely that without Microsoft's monopoly efforts we would ahve seen many more small innovative companies than we saw with Microsoft's monopoly efforts.
Microsft has, on occasion seemed to buy the occasional small company simply for the purpose of killing their idea.
Interestingly this used to be the law (Robinson Patman Act). The courts sort of killed the staute by imposing new requirements on what harm there had to be.
Surprisingly, the Microsoft case met those requirements. The DOJ should have made it a cause of action in the complaint.
Robinson Patman required you to sell like goods for the same price and terms to customers who competed with one another. The only variations permitted were for advertising costs, saleman cost etc.
One of my personal frustrations has been the inability or unwillingness of the government to use the executive power (what software do we buy) to promote open standards.
Slashdot Mirror
The Constitution grants no rights. Our rights are granted by our Creator, or, if you prefer, by the fact of our humanity.
That isn't wild theorizing. It is solid constitutional law.
For instance, the Constitution provides no right of procreation. Most of us would concede it a right of people. So did the Court when the question arose.
The Consitution does prohibit government from infringing on some of our rights, and it gives Congress some powers to protect others, but it grants no rights by itself.
Habeas corpus additionally is not a "right". It is a procedure to enforce a fundamental right --not to be unjustly imprisoned.
As a procedure it is not self effectuating,. It requires statutory implementation. Over the years Congress has both limited and expanded the procedures governing granting a writ of habeas corpus. So have the courts.
Gonzales could have phrased his answer in a form more pleasing to the public. But he is not just "technically right". He is fundamentally right, and the principle underlying his answer is a greater defense of our liberty than a position that the Constitution is the fount of our rights.
"A Republican controlled committee has defeated a bill... "
Aren't all congressional committees Republican controlled these days whether they do good or bad?
"Help! Help! I am being repressed"
I'm sorry, but this is simply not true. It is all because of humans.
===============
So, if it is all caused by humans what caused the last end of the ice ages? Cavemen building overenthusiastic campfires? Belching too much after overindulging in mammoth steaks?
You mean this sucker is important evidence of evolution, has been missing for who knows how long, they found it, and now they tell us about it? Where was all the hoopla when it was missing?
Before they found it. I don't recall any scientists saying "This theory of evoution might be convincing if we could find a fish with toes, but until then...."
Nor do I recall anyone saying "Well we had this link, but Mortimer apparently slipped it into his pants and took it out of the Smithsonian, and since then it has been missing..."
What else are they missing and not telling us about?
Whole thing just deepens my suspicion. I want an accounting of all the links they claim to have, but for all we know have also gone missing.
Efficiency generally increases with scale. So does the ability to apply environemntal measures.
Natural gas works well for heating homes because it is clean and does not require extensive environmental processes.
If we use natural gas in power plants, its cost will increase, and home owners will start to switch to alternate fuels -- oil, coal, and wood -- all of which are "filthy" fuels when burned in a small home heating plant.
It makes more sense to use these dirty fuels in large central plants where they can be burned with greater efficiency, and environmental measures better applied.
5% of what looks like 180,000 on the graph is about 9,000 active servers.
A merger or two in hosting companies with the major company requiring one OS, a decision to switch by one large company, whatever, would cause that 5% figure.
Moroever we do not know how many might have switched the other way.
Much ado about little in my opinion.
I am sending the following letter by registered mail to SCO:
****
Gentlemen:
A press report advises me that you seek a license fee for commercial use of Linux that has code in it that you claim the rights to.
I do not desire a license, nor do I desire to infringe on any rights that you have. Please advise me of the specific sections of code that you claim rights to so that I may remove them.
Regards,
******
I suspect that if they fail to respond, I will be adequately protected from an action.
It is pretty easy to protect yourself right now from SCO.
Just send SCO a registered letter asking them to precisely identfy any material in Linux whose use they claim violates their ip ip rights so that you can remove it.
They won't respond.
No court is going to award them damages when they failed on request to provide you with the information needed to avoid violating their ip.
Seems to me the problem is this:
Alternative A costs 10,000,000 but the vendor will pay 100,000 to have the solution tested for compliance.
Alternative B costs $0 but the vendor will not pay the 100,000.
Government decision : Go with A because we require the tests.
Missing is any appreciation that the taxpayers might be better if the government paid for the tests.
I served in the sixties on DD-630, the Braine, a WWII destroyer.
0 563007.jpg0 563010.jpg
Gunnery fire control was handled by a big grey box that housed an analog, gear driven computer. Quite a piece of sophisticated machinery.
In WWII the Braine was stationed on picket duty for Okinawa. She was hit by two kamikazes:
http://www.navsource.org/archives/05/
http://www.navsource.org/archives/05/
Though her fire control was badly compromised by loss of automatic communications to the gun mounts (not to mention loss of gun mounts), and loss of crew, she continued to defend herself, using men to pass fire control information to the functioning mounts.
When I served we had a damage control drill in which the CO threw catastrophe after catastrophe at the crew. At one point we had a simulated fire in a stern compartment (under the depth charges), no water pressure, no CO2, no breathing apparatus, and no portable pumps.
The resolute damage control crew had a bucket brigade organized with wet towels wrapped around their faces.
The point of all this is simple. On warships one ought not strive solely for efficiency. Redundancy, simplicity,robustness, and general utility are substantial virtues.
A lot of men is often a way to obtain these.
This has been an intensive issue in my firm (law firm, 120 users, two locations).
We avoided Exchange (there are all kinds of plusses and minuses there).
For email we use iPlanet's messaging server but are in the middle of switching over to Cyrus+postfix.
Our email clients are mostly netscape with some mozilla/outlook/outlook express/eudora. We plan wholesale conversion to Mozilla.
Many users prefer to use a web interface for email. Inital feedback on IMP has been good.
For a global addressbook we use Rolodap http://rolodap.sourceforge.net which is LDAP based. Rolodap has a web interface for searching, word processor use, data entry, etc. and also provides integrated autocompletion services to all the emailers we use. We also can extend its searches to include the local University (also LDAP) and Bigfoot if the sought address is not in our own database.
We use a central employee LDAP server (not the same one we use for Rolodap--rolodap has 35000 contacts in it) to manage email/mailboxes,web access, etc from a single interface. Though we are a touch "broken" now because of the conversion to Cyrus we will shortly be back to the goal of adding, changing, delting users, forwarding email, etc. through a single central interface. LDAP is our vehicle for that.
We like LDAP. A good open standard has all kinds of collateral benefits.
We use Steltor as our calendar -- calendaring is an important app for us and we are worried about its purchase by Oracle. LDAP controls Steltor as well.
Our documents are organized by client so the client network directories are what we use for shared files. We are about to add a means to email documents to the client file using Postfix and a little home grown app. Sharing files outside the client directories would cause us some concerns about whether we would meet our professional needs of maintaining a coherent client file.
A few observations:
First, we do not necessarily want a "one server does it all" solution. In our experience that compromises security, reliability, and redundancy. It kills flexibility, if for instance, to chnage your calendar you have to change your email server and addressbook. We much prefer to keep functions separate so long as we can have a rational presentation to the user.
Second, our users largely prefer web based interfaces if they have high performance. They find them simpler to use and more understandable. We find it simple to do "cheap" superficial integration by just giving them a master web page. Web based also provides an easy way for us to do remote access.
So for us, the key to replacing Steltor, if the Oracle acquisition doesn't work out, is a shared calendar that offers the same features, has good performance, integrates via LDAP. I do not know of an OSS app that does this.
I think both we and the original enquirer are looking for the same thing. A shared OSS calendaring server. We have email, contacts/addressbook, shared files, covered. We don't, outside of Steltor, have calendaring covered.
The original enquirer wanted calendaring that worked in Outlook. Browser based would be OK with us.
yes, I have looked at phpGroupware and its ilk and at SUSE Mail Server. All of them however provide me with too much integrated together or have deficiencies in the features/performance side of things.
Steltor's calendar web interface will not work with Mozilla as the browser.
Otherwise it is an excellent product....but we'll reject it if we have to use oracle's mail server as a result of the merger.
"Microsoft said it would license the technology on a 1:1 basis, in return for intellectual property from OpenGL licensees, but this could carry its own pitfalls."
OK. Let's give them the right to use GPL code.
We have a little saying around our firm "It's not the technology that is hard, it is the people". It seems to fit 90% of the problems.
Good managers are able to get more out of a group of people than the people knew they had and they love it. Bad managers achieve the opposite in both regards.
The problem is that when you have a good manager, there nearly always is someone above him who is bad and just itching to get involved.
"Usually, the reason for this is that Sun pays to license third party code to include in StarOffice..."
Before we bash Sun too much, is it reasonable to expect them to pay others for features in StarOffice and offer it for free? I know for instance that the StarOffice filter for Wordperfect costs Sun $$ which is why it was not provided with the code turned over to OpenOffice.
So I read this as "if I am happy with the stuff that is free, I use OpenOffice. If I want some of the extras that Sun has to pay for, I pay Sun, or start programming for OpenOffice"
I can't complain about that (but I need the Wordperfect filter so I will gripe if it is >$50)
Aren't I correct in remembering that the new XP license gives Microsoft the right to inspect your computer over the Internet?
Put that with this and...GADS!
Seems to me the issue really isn't whether there is a GUI or not. A new user might be perfectly happy with a form he fills out with what he wants. The form could then generate a script that changes all the config files, etc. The problem is that the setup is spread all over the place and is not consistent. Throw in a few arcane terms and uninformative abbreviations, and the new user (or moderatley old user) must perforce resort to HowTo's and other resources to try to figure out what needs to be done.
Graphon and VNC do the same thing. We have been using VNC for a year --linux to windows and windows to Linux. It works well over a 100Mbs network, but is a dismal failure at 56K
. Graphon seems much more efficient-- at least on their demo it makes it feasible to run an application like Wordperfect reotely over 56K. That is pretty good and better than much of the competition.
If the products stay as they are more or less, we would use VNC in house, but use Graphon for our remote dial up users (who currently use PcAnyhwere as a windows to windows solution).
I could see a real potential for VNC to gain speed which would hurt Graphon. I can also see a potential for Graphon's patent to be a problem for VNC-- as I understand it Graphon bought a formerly existing patent that predated VNC.
I think Graphon has enough interest in the Linux community that patent problems could probably be worked out, if any exist.
There is a case pending now that argues that the present copyright scheme is unconstitutional because Congress has in effect made copyright terms perpetual by continually extending them when they are about to expire. I agree with the direction of argument, but I don't think Congress has quite abused copyright enough yet for the courts to act. Give them a few more years and few more outrageous expansions of the law.....
I think it likely that without Microsoft's monopoly efforts we would ahve seen many more small innovative companies than we saw with Microsoft's monopoly efforts.
Microsft has, on occasion seemed to buy the occasional small company simply for the purpose of killing their idea.
Surprisingly, the Microsoft case met those requirements. The DOJ should have made it a cause of action in the complaint.
Robinson Patman required you to sell like goods for the same price and terms to customers who competed with one another. The only variations permitted were for advertising costs, saleman cost etc.
They talk right, but they don't buy right.
John Lederer