I think the real change they are making is not replacing a language with another new, they are replacing a basic VM with a more powerful and proved one: Java VM
If that was their intent, they could just replace Ruby with JRuby.
I think their problem is not the language is the current state of the Ruby VM.
I think that's one of their problems, but not the main one.
I hope Twitter developers can publish why they choose Scala instead of JRuby (Ruby on the Java VM)
They have. For one component, its because one of the developers threw together a replacement in Scala, they tested alternatives to their existing component including that one, and the one their own developer had written in Scala happened to be best. For some other things, its because they've found that they are, for whatever reasons, doing lots of type tests in their Ruby code (which is, certainly, a code smell and probably symptomatic of basic design problems, but its a fact of where they are) and that they think it makes sense to avoid the problems those have been put into place to address by using static typing.
It finally provides an "enterprise-friendly" functional language:
In what way is Erlang not an "'enterprise-friendly' functional language"?
But it gives the power of ML and functional languages, all the libraries written for Java, and the lightweight syntax of Ruby or Python (with a much better performance).
I won't comment on the first part, but it certainly doesn't have "the lightweight syntax of Ruby or Python". It does, OTOH, have a somewhat lighter syntax than Java or C++.
Finally, Scala matters because this is the Free alternative to F#, which is basically Ocaml for.NET.
Certainly, its a Free alternative to F#, but its hardly the free alternative, as there are others. Scala's probably, of those targetting.NET or the JVM, the one getting the most attention at the moment, though.
Kidding aside, is this a 'nail' in the coffin of scalable Ruby?
No. Its not even the 'nail' in the coffin of scalable Rails, and Ruby isn't Rails.
Twitter was supposed to be the poster child of how awesome Ruby and RoR was.
Since when? When the point-to-an-example site method of arguing for scalability is used with respect to Rails, the site held up is, IME, usually yellowpages.com.
With that sort of nitpicking, the BSD license is incompatible with *everything*, including the MS-PL.
Not really true. Lots of open source licenses (including, of course, the BSD license itself) don't exclude additional terms, they only require that specific terms be included. As long as those terms don't conflict (and requirements to include clauses with similar, but different, terms often don't conflict, though they may interact in interesting ways) licenses are compatible. Because the way the GPL v2 is written, almost no license that requires specific downstream terms is compatible with it, but that's a particular feature of the GPL v2, not something general to open source licenses.
The GPL does not require a specific disclaimer. The preamble recommends one however.
Sections 11 & 12 of the GPL v2 (the version I have been referring to; the GPL v3 allows additional terms and thus doesn't have the problems with regard to BSD-licensed code that v2 has) are specific disclaimers (GPL v3 has similar provisions in Sections 16 and 17), and are not optional. And the preamble doesn't recommend anything in this regard, have you even read it?
Have you ever worked in a real Agile shop? If you had, you would know that management specifies goals, developers decide how they are going to implement those goals.
My understanding of Agile is that customers specify goals, and that (whether an internal IT unit or on IT firm with external customers) management is rarely the customer (there are, of course, situations in which the firms management as such, rather than a different business unit, is the customer), but instead is more concerned with high-level resource allocation above the project level. There is usually someone in management responsible for oversight of the project as a whole (whether internal or external), but they should mostly be resolving any issues that bubble up from below and making sure the project is aligned with broader goals of the organization, not controlling the project on any kind of a detailed level.
If management was keeping you in the dark (or you, as management, are keeping your coders in the dark), then it isn't a real Agile shop. It is a Waterfall shop with a pretense of Agile.
Management keeping coders (or anyone else involved in a project) in the dark isn't part of any methodology I've ever heard of (it is, of course, astonishingly common, regardless of notional methodology.) If that's what is going on, its a dysfunctional shop on a level which transcends the notional development methodology in use.
Of course, the requirement that the copyright notice remain in the source code (the 2-clause BSD license) is not an additional restriction, as it is part of the GPL as well. So your argument is bogus.
False.
First, the copyright notice clause is only one clause of the two clause BSD license, so even if one could comply with that clause (sadly, impossible) when distributing a work derivative of both BSD and GPL v2 sources, one would still have the problem of the disclaimer clause.
On the copyright clause, the GPL v2 does not require the inclusion of the *original* copyright notice in derivative works, it requires an "appropriate" copyright notice. The BSD license requires that the exact copyright notice of the original work be included. Since a derivative work is, by definition, a new work of authorship by the creator of the derivative work, including only the derivative work's author's copyright notice satisfies the GPL v2 requirement, but clearly does not satisfy the BSD requirement. Now, including the original copyright notice is not forbidden under the GPL v2, but imposing the downstream requirement that the original copyright notice be retained would be an additional term, which the GPL v2 does not allow. But the BSD license requires not just that the original copyright be retained, but the list of conditions (including the condition that the original copyright be retained) itself be retained. So the copyright clause (combined with the requirement for the retention of conditions) makes the BSD license incompatible with the GPL v2.
On the disclaimer clause, the two-clause BSD license requires a specifically-worded disclaimer, which is broadly similar in intent but different in wording from the disclaimer that must be preserved in GPL v2 covered works. Again, including the disclaimer required by the BSD license along with that required by the GPL v2 would not violate the GPL v2, but imposing the downstream requirement to preserve that disclaimer would be an additional term, which the GPL v2 does not allow. But the BSD license requires not just that the disclaimer be retained, but the list of conditions (including the condition that the disclaimer be retained) itself be retained. So the disclaimer clause (combined with the requirement for the retention of conditions) makes the BSD license incompatible with the GPL v2.
Since the GPL v2 does not allow a licensee to redistribute a work under the GPL v2 with additional terms added, you cannot create a work that is a derivative work of two or more different works where one or more is licensed under the GPL v2 and one or more is licensed under even the two-clause version of the BSD license without violating the express terms of one of the two licenses.
It's impossible to be compatible with the BSD license and not be compatible with the GPL, because BSD is compatible with the GPL.
Neither the 4-clause, 3-clause, nor 2-clause version of the BSD license is, read strictly, compatible with the GPL v2 -- since each requires terms that the GPL v2 does not, and the GPL v2 does not permit additional terms -- but, I think, the 2- and 3-clause BSD licenses are compatible with the GPL v3, which specifically allows additional terms in a way which can fit the terms of those licenses, but not the advertising clause in the 4-clause version.
(I believe that the FSF, which has a vested interest in software being relicensed under the GPL, characterized the BSD licenses, other than the 4-clause version, as compatible with the GPL even before the release of the GPL v3, but that doesn't make it true.)
you'd never have run Java or.net on a computer just a few years ago unless it was an 'enterprise' app running on a cluster.
I've been running Java on desktop computers for close to a decade. Sure, its slower than hand-crafted assembly, so was C when it took over the world -- the gap has closed largely with better compilers, just as the Java -> C gap has closed in most practical domains for similar reasons, and just like the JavaScript -> (pick your lower level language) gap has with increasingly performant JavaScript engines. Having a mix of expressiveness and even minimal performance that allows developer productivity (even at the cost of comparatively slow applications) often saves costs and enables apps that are more robust, which drives popularity, focusses resources on improving the implementation, and, eventually, drives performance to improve.
Now just think what you could do with something more efficient, even if it meant developers had to have more skill than they currently do.
Computers have always gotten faster much more reliably than people, in general, have gotten more skilled. Approaches which leverage improving technology and take humans as they are will continue to be more successful than ones which expect humans to become radically different. Otherwise, the IT world would be populated entirely by hyper-efficient programmers implementing systems directly in machine code.
Amazing... you managed to get it EXACTLY backward..NET compiles to native immediately before execution, so it actually runs as fast as any other binary that makes lots of calls to a binary runtime.
The JVM does the same thing, and has for some time (as in, before.NET existed), so "the speed of Java", from GP, is a perfect description of this, rather than being "EXACTLY backward".
The Queen is Commander in Chief of the UK military..
And it is the monarch, not the Parliament, of the UK that declares war (there was note, at the time, of the unusualness of Tony Blair's move in even calling for an advisory vote in Parliament on the Iraq war.)
For instance, churches are already tax exempt. (Apparent First Amendment violation number one.)
You could maybe (in the abstract; the direct case law, of course, would be against you) make a case that the tax deductibility of donations to churches (not their tax exempt status) is an Establishment Clause violation.
But that's a very different thing than tax exemption, though the two things are often conflated).
Fixed that for you. Bias doesn't just swing to the right.
Then how come all of the things you "fixed" the GPs statement to include are biased to support the existing empowered elites (the exact same elites, in the first three instances) in the environment in which they operate, which is, by definition, conservative bias?
I think this is a really great idea. It forces them to be a little less biased, and it keeps well-written articles available.
Well, except that the restrictions on direct political activity proposed (about equivalent to those for existing charities, much more restrictive than apply to nonprofits in general) do not do anything to reduce the degree of bias, they just limit direct explicit advocacy, which is the easiest expression of bias to filter out, and, even more importantly, provide a good clue to what the organizations biases are when reading nominally "news" articles.
And, beside that, that it doesn't actually do much to keep well-written articles available, since daily newspapers aren't the best place to find well-written, thoroughly researched writing, since that's expensive, and doesn't do much to increase ad sales which are the primary source of revenue.
Indivuduals should be equal in the eyes of the law. No special groups, no nonprofits.
Tax-exempt non-profits exist principally to allow people to work together for common interests without taxation on the step between the transfer of funds from the individual parties to the common organizations. (Well, that and to support instrumentalities of government which are corporations, but are not private in the usual sense.) [Looked at a different way, corporate taxes in general are a way of preventing corporations from being used as income tax dodges by the persons for whose benefit they are operated, and tax-exempt non-profit status is a way of recognizing places where the fundamental assumption that underlies that is invalid.]
Charities, to which donations are tax-deductible for the donor as well as the organization being tax-exempt, are a bit of a different story, and amount to direct government subsidies. One might well argue that churches being treated as charities under the tax code is inappropriate, from that perspective, and that they make sense as tax-exempt organizations but not ones to which donations are tax deductible.
It removes them from the control of vested interests who would have them drum up artificial hysteria about trivial things rather than report the news.
Uh, no.
Not unless, beyond mere tax-exemption, the government is also going to outright fund newspapers, so they aren't dependent on big corporate advertisers, who are the interests that newspapers are beholden to now. And even then, the newspapers would then become dependent on the continued support of politicians, who more often than not have the same interests, directly and/or through their own dependence on funds from the same kind of major corporate interests that the media is currently dependent on.
Oh is that why the Catholic Church hasn't swung the ban hammer on some of the politicians, who lie about some of the church's stances?
The bigger reason for that is that the Catholic Church contains about the same distribution of political perspectives as the public at large, and even the Catholic heirarchy is only slightly less diverse.
Plus, the Catholic Church isn't, in the last couple centuries, quite as vigorous about the public use of the "ban hammer" as it once was, perhaps having learned, through several centuries of experience, that influence is not always enhanced by indiscriminate use of extreme sanction.
Its the dailies, which have largely lost their local character by merging into giant national media empires, slashed local staffs, and turned into nothing but outlets for (1) wire stories that are available in every news outlet, on the web, and through TV news, (2) syndicated content that, again, is available equally everywhere, including often on the web for free, etc. Surprisingly enough, with most of their content that is of interest to the readers available elsewhere faster and cheaper, and with, at worst, no more advertisement, and often better targetted (which, for the advertiser means more effective, but also means, for the reader, less unwelcome) advertisements, and with better reliability than newspaper delivery, it should be unsurprising than newspapers can't find readers.
The press won't have to censor itself any more than other nonprofits who deal with government issues.
Most tax-exempt nonprofits that deal with government issues don't have to censor themselves at all, only charities (to which donations are tax-deductible for the donor) have to do that. Most tax-exempt nonprofits aren't prohibited from endorsing candidates, and many are quite active in doing so (e.g., the Sierra Club and the NRA, among many others, as nonprofits organizations that are tax-exempt under 26 U.S.C. sec. 501(c)(4); most labor unions, as nonprofit organizations that are tax-exempt under 26 U.S.C. sec. 501(c)(5), etc.)
I am not 100% sure on this, but don't churches and other nonprofits have to avoid explicit endorsements too to retain their nonprofit status?
Nonprofit isn't a single status. Certain nonprofits to which donations are tax-deductible for the donor have to avoid "substantial involvement" in politics, including explicit endorsements, to retain that particular status (Particularly, 501(c)(3) organizations, so called because their tax exemption is established in 26 U.S.C. sec. 501(c)(3)). When the group of people who make up a 501(c)(3) want to act collectively politically, they typically set up separate organizations which are also tax-exempt nonprofits, but to which donations are not tax-deductible for the donor, which can be substantially involved in politics.
Most tax-exempt nonprofits are not restricted in their political involvement at all. See, generally, 26 U.S.C. sec. 501 [excluding 501(c)(3)].
Furthermore, with regard to newspapers, any newspaper which chose to become a nonprofit (i.e., not to be operated for the benefit of private owners/shareholders) could do so now and become a 501(c)(3) now with the restrictions that would be imposed by this bill. So I don't see how this really provides any new options.
The most eco-friendly car you can buy is a 20 year old Geo Metro.
Not even close. A newer (but still used) Honda Insight is, as well as being safer, far more fuel efficient for similar capacity. A Prius (which you can also get used) is slightly more fuel efficient, with much greater capacity. Either is "greener" than the Geo Metro (equally green on the "used cars don't have to be built" aspect, greener on most other aspects).
I'm going to have nightmares about being attacked by thousands of hyphens, each talking like a John Wayne impersonator on methamphetamines.
Shouldn't that nightmare be about thousands of em-dashes rather than hyphens? There aren't any hyphens in the review, except those in the last paragraph (which, incidentally, should be either em-dashes set closed or en-dashes set open, not pairs of hyphens.)
Also, anyone who sets em-dashes open, as is done in most of the review, shouldn't be allowed to use them at all.
Erm shouldn't fancy stuff like 3d acceleration be handled by plug-ins not browsers?
3D acceleration can be handled anywhere; what I don't see is why a "web standard" is needed for it. You need a web standard for description and behavior of particular content (e.g., things like HTML, or more relevant to 3D content, VRML or X3D), acceleration shouldn't need to be part of the standard at all, it should be part of the implementation tailored to the hardware and software (OS, etc.) environment of the implementation. You might have a standard API for 3D acceleration (OpenGL for instance), and certainly, because you are dealing with closely related content, the object model for a web standard might be similar to parts of the object model around which an acceleration API is based, but still ought to be separate standards, and if you bind them too tightly you are going to mix concerns that don't belong together.
Pedantic is one thing, just plain wrong is another.
You can't have 3D content on a 2D surface.
"Content" is logical, not physical, and therefore this statement is wrong. And the web isn't a 2d surface (or any other kind of surface), so even if the statement was true so far as it goes, it would still be irrelevant to whether there can be 3D content on the Web. And since the human visual system uses a pair of 2D sensors to synthesize a 3-dimensional model of the portion of the universe seen, its pretty clear that you can present as good of a presentation of 3D content as humans can deal with using via 2D images, provided you do it just right. And, of course, you can do 2D projections from a 3D model even with one 2D surface, with quite useful results (and, if you deliver the 3D model to the user agent, which then performs whatever requested manipulations the user wants, with a whole lot less latency than if the server had to generate 2D images from a 3D object model and send them over the wire in response to queries for different views of the same model from the same user agent.)
When we get holographic displays we'll have 3D content, but until then it's perspective, not 3D.
Slashdot Mirror
If that was their intent, they could just replace Ruby with JRuby.
I think that's one of their problems, but not the main one.
They have. For one component, its because one of the developers threw together a replacement in Scala, they tested alternatives to their existing component including that one, and the one their own developer had written in Scala happened to be best. For some other things, its because they've found that they are, for whatever reasons, doing lots of type tests in their Ruby code (which is, certainly, a code smell and probably symptomatic of basic design problems, but its a fact of where they are) and that they think it makes sense to avoid the problems those have been put into place to address by using static typing.
Yes it is, really.
In what way is Erlang not an "'enterprise-friendly' functional language"?
I won't comment on the first part, but it certainly doesn't have "the lightweight syntax of Ruby or Python". It does, OTOH, have a somewhat lighter syntax than Java or C++.
Certainly, its a Free alternative to F#, but its hardly the free alternative, as there are others. Scala's probably, of those targetting .NET or the JVM, the one getting the most attention at the moment, though.
No. Its not even the 'nail' in the coffin of scalable Rails, and Ruby isn't Rails.
Since when? When the point-to-an-example site method of arguing for scalability is used with respect to Rails, the site held up is, IME, usually yellowpages.com.
Not really true. Lots of open source licenses (including, of course, the BSD license itself) don't exclude additional terms, they only require that specific terms be included. As long as those terms don't conflict (and requirements to include clauses with similar, but different, terms often don't conflict, though they may interact in interesting ways) licenses are compatible. Because the way the GPL v2 is written, almost no license that requires specific downstream terms is compatible with it, but that's a particular feature of the GPL v2, not something general to open source licenses.
Sections 11 & 12 of the GPL v2 (the version I have been referring to; the GPL v3 allows additional terms and thus doesn't have the problems with regard to BSD-licensed code that v2 has) are specific disclaimers (GPL v3 has similar provisions in Sections 16 and 17), and are not optional. And the preamble doesn't recommend anything in this regard, have you even read it?
My understanding of Agile is that customers specify goals, and that (whether an internal IT unit or on IT firm with external customers) management is rarely the customer (there are, of course, situations in which the firms management as such, rather than a different business unit, is the customer), but instead is more concerned with high-level resource allocation above the project level. There is usually someone in management responsible for oversight of the project as a whole (whether internal or external), but they should mostly be resolving any issues that bubble up from below and making sure the project is aligned with broader goals of the organization, not controlling the project on any kind of a detailed level.
Management keeping coders (or anyone else involved in a project) in the dark isn't part of any methodology I've ever heard of (it is, of course, astonishingly common, regardless of notional methodology.) If that's what is going on, its a dysfunctional shop on a level which transcends the notional development methodology in use.
False.
First, the copyright notice clause is only one clause of the two clause BSD license, so even if one could comply with that clause (sadly, impossible) when distributing a work derivative of both BSD and GPL v2 sources, one would still have the problem of the disclaimer clause.
On the copyright clause, the GPL v2 does not require the inclusion of the *original* copyright notice in derivative works, it requires an "appropriate" copyright notice. The BSD license requires that the exact copyright notice of the original work be included. Since a derivative work is, by definition, a new work of authorship by the creator of the derivative work, including only the derivative work's author's copyright notice satisfies the GPL v2 requirement, but clearly does not satisfy the BSD requirement. Now, including the original copyright notice is not forbidden under the GPL v2, but imposing the downstream requirement that the original copyright notice be retained would be an additional term, which the GPL v2 does not allow. But the BSD license requires not just that the original copyright be retained, but the list of conditions (including the condition that the original copyright be retained) itself be retained. So the copyright clause (combined with the requirement for the retention of conditions) makes the BSD license incompatible with the GPL v2.
On the disclaimer clause, the two-clause BSD license requires a specifically-worded disclaimer, which is broadly similar in intent but different in wording from the disclaimer that must be preserved in GPL v2 covered works. Again, including the disclaimer required by the BSD license along with that required by the GPL v2 would not violate the GPL v2, but imposing the downstream requirement to preserve that disclaimer would be an additional term, which the GPL v2 does not allow. But the BSD license requires not just that the disclaimer be retained, but the list of conditions (including the condition that the disclaimer be retained) itself be retained. So the disclaimer clause (combined with the requirement for the retention of conditions) makes the BSD license incompatible with the GPL v2.
Since the GPL v2 does not allow a licensee to redistribute a work under the GPL v2 with additional terms added, you cannot create a work that is a derivative work of two or more different works where one or more is licensed under the GPL v2 and one or more is licensed under even the two-clause version of the BSD license without violating the express terms of one of the two licenses.
Neither the 4-clause, 3-clause, nor 2-clause version of the BSD license is, read strictly, compatible with the GPL v2 -- since each requires terms that the GPL v2 does not, and the GPL v2 does not permit additional terms -- but, I think, the 2- and 3-clause BSD licenses are compatible with the GPL v3, which specifically allows additional terms in a way which can fit the terms of those licenses, but not the advertising clause in the 4-clause version.
(I believe that the FSF, which has a vested interest in software being relicensed under the GPL, characterized the BSD licenses, other than the 4-clause version, as compatible with the GPL even before the release of the GPL v3, but that doesn't make it true.)
I've been running Java on desktop computers for close to a decade. Sure, its slower than hand-crafted assembly, so was C when it took over the world -- the gap has closed largely with better compilers, just as the Java -> C gap has closed in most practical domains for similar reasons, and just like the JavaScript -> (pick your lower level language) gap has with increasingly performant JavaScript engines. Having a mix of expressiveness and even minimal performance that allows developer productivity (even at the cost of comparatively slow applications) often saves costs and enables apps that are more robust, which drives popularity, focusses resources on improving the implementation, and, eventually, drives performance to improve.
Computers have always gotten faster much more reliably than people, in general, have gotten more skilled. Approaches which leverage improving technology and take humans as they are will continue to be more successful than ones which expect humans to become radically different. Otherwise, the IT world would be populated entirely by hyper-efficient programmers implementing systems directly in machine code.
The JVM does the same thing, and has for some time (as in, before .NET existed), so "the speed of Java", from GP, is a perfect description of this, rather than being "EXACTLY backward".
And it is the monarch, not the Parliament, of the UK that declares war (there was note, at the time, of the unusualness of Tony Blair's move in even calling for an advisory vote in Parliament on the Iraq war.)
Yeah, but that's just because of the defiance.
You could maybe (in the abstract; the direct case law, of course, would be against you) make a case that the tax deductibility of donations to churches (not their tax exempt status) is an Establishment Clause violation.
But that's a very different thing than tax exemption, though the two things are often conflated).
Then how come all of the things you "fixed" the GPs statement to include are biased to support the existing empowered elites (the exact same elites, in the first three instances) in the environment in which they operate, which is, by definition, conservative bias?
Well, except that the restrictions on direct political activity proposed (about equivalent to those for existing charities, much more restrictive than apply to nonprofits in general) do not do anything to reduce the degree of bias, they just limit direct explicit advocacy, which is the easiest expression of bias to filter out, and, even more importantly, provide a good clue to what the organizations biases are when reading nominally "news" articles.
And, beside that, that it doesn't actually do much to keep well-written articles available, since daily newspapers aren't the best place to find well-written, thoroughly researched writing, since that's expensive, and doesn't do much to increase ad sales which are the primary source of revenue.
Which makes purchasing a used one even more green, since it keeps them in use and out of the scrap yard.
Tax-exempt non-profits exist principally to allow people to work together for common interests without taxation on the step between the transfer of funds from the individual parties to the common organizations. (Well, that and to support instrumentalities of government which are corporations, but are not private in the usual sense.) [Looked at a different way, corporate taxes in general are a way of preventing corporations from being used as income tax dodges by the persons for whose benefit they are operated, and tax-exempt non-profit status is a way of recognizing places where the fundamental assumption that underlies that is invalid.]
Charities, to which donations are tax-deductible for the donor as well as the organization being tax-exempt, are a bit of a different story, and amount to direct government subsidies. One might well argue that churches being treated as charities under the tax code is inappropriate, from that perspective, and that they make sense as tax-exempt organizations but not ones to which donations are tax deductible.
Uh, no.
Not unless, beyond mere tax-exemption, the government is also going to outright fund newspapers, so they aren't dependent on big corporate advertisers, who are the interests that newspapers are beholden to now. And even then, the newspapers would then become dependent on the continued support of politicians, who more often than not have the same interests, directly and/or through their own dependence on funds from the same kind of major corporate interests that the media is currently dependent on.
The bigger reason for that is that the Catholic Church contains about the same distribution of political perspectives as the public at large, and even the Catholic heirarchy is only slightly less diverse.
Plus, the Catholic Church isn't, in the last couple centuries, quite as vigorous about the public use of the "ban hammer" as it once was, perhaps having learned, through several centuries of experience, that influence is not always enhanced by indiscriminate use of extreme sanction.
Which is where all the problem is, really.
Its the dailies, which have largely lost their local character by merging into giant national media empires, slashed local staffs, and turned into nothing but outlets for (1) wire stories that are available in every news outlet, on the web, and through TV news, (2) syndicated content that, again, is available equally everywhere, including often on the web for free, etc. Surprisingly enough, with most of their content that is of interest to the readers available elsewhere faster and cheaper, and with, at worst, no more advertisement, and often better targetted (which, for the advertiser means more effective, but also means, for the reader, less unwelcome) advertisements, and with better reliability than newspaper delivery, it should be unsurprising than newspapers can't find readers.
Most tax-exempt nonprofits that deal with government issues don't have to censor themselves at all, only charities (to which donations are tax-deductible for the donor) have to do that. Most tax-exempt nonprofits aren't prohibited from endorsing candidates, and many are quite active in doing so (e.g., the Sierra Club and the NRA, among many others, as nonprofits organizations that are tax-exempt under 26 U.S.C. sec. 501(c)(4); most labor unions, as nonprofit organizations that are tax-exempt under 26 U.S.C. sec. 501(c)(5), etc.)
Nonprofit isn't a single status. Certain nonprofits to which donations are tax-deductible for the donor have to avoid "substantial involvement" in politics, including explicit endorsements, to retain that particular status (Particularly, 501(c)(3) organizations, so called because their tax exemption is established in 26 U.S.C. sec. 501(c)(3)). When the group of people who make up a 501(c)(3) want to act collectively politically, they typically set up separate organizations which are also tax-exempt nonprofits, but to which donations are not tax-deductible for the donor, which can be substantially involved in politics.
Most tax-exempt nonprofits are not restricted in their political involvement at all. See, generally, 26 U.S.C. sec. 501 [excluding 501(c)(3)].
Furthermore, with regard to newspapers, any newspaper which chose to become a nonprofit (i.e., not to be operated for the benefit of private owners/shareholders) could do so now and become a 501(c)(3) now with the restrictions that would be imposed by this bill. So I don't see how this really provides any new options.
Not even close. A newer (but still used) Honda Insight is, as well as being safer, far more fuel efficient for similar capacity. A Prius (which you can also get used) is slightly more fuel efficient, with much greater capacity. Either is "greener" than the Geo Metro (equally green on the "used cars don't have to be built" aspect, greener on most other aspects).
Shouldn't that nightmare be about thousands of em-dashes rather than hyphens? There aren't any hyphens in the review, except those in the last paragraph (which, incidentally, should be either em-dashes set closed or en-dashes set open, not pairs of hyphens.)
Also, anyone who sets em-dashes open, as is done in most of the review, shouldn't be allowed to use them at all.
Pedantic is one thing, just plain wrong is another.
"Content" is logical, not physical, and therefore this statement is wrong. And the web isn't a 2d surface (or any other kind of surface), so even if the statement was true so far as it goes, it would still be irrelevant to whether there can be 3D content on the Web. And since the human visual system uses a pair of 2D sensors to synthesize a 3-dimensional model of the portion of the universe seen, its pretty clear that you can present as good of a presentation of 3D content as humans can deal with using via 2D images, provided you do it just right. And, of course, you can do 2D projections from a 3D model even with one 2D surface, with quite useful results (and, if you deliver the 3D model to the user agent, which then performs whatever requested manipulations the user wants, with a whole lot less latency than if the server had to generate 2D images from a 3D object model and send them over the wire in response to queries for different views of the same model from the same user agent.)
You confuse presentation mechanisms with content.