After all, aren't there better ways to use our monies and technical talents than trying to find something that's only posited to exist: sentient beings in the dark depths of space?
All science is an attempt to confirm (or deny) things that are "only posited" to be true. SETI expenditures at their peak have maybe been a few million USD per year, and since the early 1990s, that's almost all been private funding from people that are interested -- unless you are voluntarily involved in the project, it there isn't much of your money or your talent being used. Compared to the hundreds of billions of public funds spent on outright destructive uses, its hardly worth talking about.
However, what if I leave a ship for a swim in international waters, and someone from another ship (registered in another country) does the same, and then he steals something from me? Which law would apply there?
Robbery on the high seas (more commonly known as "piracy") is, like torture, genocide, etc., the subject of a peremptory norm in international law, and the perpetrator is held to be the common enemy of all humanity, subject to the jurisdiction of any and every nation (and, indeed, a positive obligation of any and every nation to pursue the perpetrator.)
Flex-ATX actually, I think. They say micro, but the size quoted is smaller than micro.
Good point. What is it with mbs that are marketted as a different form factor than the most accurate one? I mean, sure, you can use a flex-ATX mb in a micro-ATX (or plain ATX) case, but why wouldn't you make sure that all your marketing material emphasized flex-ATX, since that gives the buyer more, well, flexibility than micro-ATX.
The $60 you can spend buying this overstock holdover from 2004 can get your a better motherboard + CPU.
Most of the alternatives people have posted that are similar in price have some advantages and some disadvantages. None seem to be clearly and unquestionably "better" in every way, just different and in the same general ballpark. So perhaps its not outstanding, just another low-cost option that's well supported in Linux. Which, unsurprisingly enough, is somewhat interesting to a substantial part of the Slashdot crowd.
It's just a slow-ass VIA-based Mini-ITX motherboad.
Micro-ATX, actually.
The fact that Walmart is selling something based on it should already be a warning sign.
I suppose that we should be suspicious of Linux, too, then...
The form factor is to big to fit in the really small cases (mini-atx) and too small to expand in a big case.
The really small cases are, for instance, mini-ITX. Mini-ATX is almost exactly the same size (area) as Micro-ATX, but a different arrangement (8.2x11.2cm instead of 9.6x9.6cm), so its true that this Micro-ATX MB won't fit in a Mini-ATX case, and is too big in one dimension. But, just the same, a Mini-ATX MB wouldn't fit a Micro-ATX case, for exactly the same reason. Micro-ATX cases are IMO reasonably small, and (but maybe I just look at the wrong places) it seems that there is a greater variety of Micro-ATX cases available.
As for free internet elsewhere, I know that OLPC was at one point making an effort to develop a peer-to-peer system where if there was only one connection available and a lot of XO PC's in an area, they would form a network p2p cluster to share the bandwidth.
That's the OLPC's Mesh Networking feature. Also, the project, IIRC, received donations of satellite time from a company that was providing low-cost satellite uplink stations so that remote villages with school servers could connect to the internet. With that and the mesh networking capability, you've got a link from the laptop to the internet, at least in the immediate surroundings of the school server.
Lots of the networking "activities" of the OLPC are designed around working with a local ad hoc network without relying on connecting to the internet, too.
With 10's of thousands of these being ordered and shipped to third world countries, has anyone actually thought about how they are going to be distributed?
Hundreds of thousands, actually.
It's kind of like the food programs for poor countries...
Actually, its not at all like that. Unlike food programs, these aren't being distributed by well-meaning foreign governments or NGOs with no local involvement, they are being, for the most part, purchased by the recipient governments, and delivered (along with associated content, etc.) through their school systems. As has been the vision of the OLPC program from the outset.
Presumably, the national ministries of education that have decided to spend tens of millions of dollars purchasing computers have put some thought in how they are actually going to deliver them to schools.
I envision thousands of these laptops sitting in warehouses across the global, with only a handful of "showcase" schools actually receiving and using the laptops.
Any reason, aside from your prejudices, supporting this image, or is it just your fantasy?
Maybe I'm just cynical, but I don't think real problem here is technology or the cost of it.
So, prior to the release of the XO, there was a widely available, low-cost, computer designed for the needs of the education systems in the developing world, but the problem was just the logistics of delivering the systems to end users? I think not. Clearly, whatever other real problems there might have been, the availability of appropriate technology was a real problem.
The big deal is that, when the ~$200 system was announced in its full-size case here, people commented that they'd like to have the same thing, but in a smaller form factor, since the board is, after all, a Micro-ATX board. Now they can.
They might be the first people able to claim multinationality
Actually, lots of people are able to claim more than one nationality as a result of birth; for instance, anyone born of a parent from one country that makes children of its citizens citizens by birth, that also: 1) has their other parent a citizen of another country that does that, or 2) is born in a country different than their parents country of citizenship, that makes people born in the country citizens by birth, Can claim birthright citizenship in more than one country. IIRC, some countries force such a person to make a choice of one or the other at adulthood or give up the claim. I don't really think the ISS, despite having bits of many countries in close proximity, really adds anything new in this regard.
Also in one whitespace has meaning and in the other it doesn't.
Whitespace has meaning in both -- if you don't believe that, try compiling any Java file after removing all the whitespace. Its just that in Java, any contiguous block of whitespace outside of a string literal usually has the same meaning as any other contiguous block of whitespace would in the same place, though there are some exceptions.
There's probably an okay explanation for it, but I don't know why Stackless isn't just a Python module and why it has to be a full-blown patch.
As I understand it, the GIL and the things that make it necessary are fairly central to the (pre-3.0 -- I don't know if this has changed in the 3.0 alpha, though it was certainly talked about for Py3K; I suppose if I wasn't incredibly lazy today I could just check) CPython implementation, so Stackless needs to reimplement the core of the Python interpreter, so it really wouldn't work well as a module; its not a reimplementation of the threading libraries, its a reimplementation of the core of the interpreter to make better threading possible.
It should not rely on some central database that can be a central point of failure if it gets corrupted.
You can't avoid some kind of repository. Even if the repository is just a directory in a regular filesystem that stores, for each version, the whole directory tree and with copies of any files that have changed, and special files somewhere in the structure identifying the relationship between versions and listing files that have been deleted, that is still a central "database" that, if corrupted, is a source of failure.
(Incidentally, I think something like that is the obvious structure to use to implement what is practical out of what you are describing; it has all the features you want other than the absence of a central repository that can be damaged, and its repository is no more subject to damage than any other part of the local filesystem. And it seems to me -- off the top of my head -- that it should be pretty easy to implement mostly as a usermode filesystem with maybe a handful of management utilities.)
Trivialising the technical underpinnings of Time Machine is unwise, and plays right into the hands of those who say Apple is all about show and lacks substance.
Emphasizing that the main work of a project is in developing the UI is not the same as trivializing its technical underpinnings (the two may or may not go together), and, even when it does involve trivializing the technological underpinnings, isn't the same as saying that it lacks substance. What people with a technical focus (hi, Slashdot) sometimes forget is that the substance of a product isn't just the theoretical capabilities of the engine, but what it delivers to the user. Ease of use and intuitive interface that make the underlying engine usable to non-specialists are not "show", they are substance of a kind that is just as important as good technical underpinnings.
I was thinking about this before, and Python would be totally doable. The reason I want it is because it already has a single implementation.
Single Implementation? No, it has several: CPython, Stackless Python, IronPython, and Jython, off the top of my head. OTOH, while not externally standardized, the various implementations are fairly consistent/compatible, unlike some other languages that might be considered.
First, let's define the problem: Facebook is winning the social network wars.
That's not the problem, IMO, that Google is trying to address with OpenSocial. It may be the problem that MySpace is trying to address with its participation in OpenSocial.
As more people join Facebook, switching costs get lower, leading to a cascade effect. In terms of the diffusion of innovations curve, Facebook is now being heavily adopted by the "Early Majority", indicating they've got a good one or two years left of substantial growth. In Google's eyes, this is a major problem because it can't really afford to "lose" at social networks for the next two years.
Why? Google isn't even a serious player in that area (Orkut is trivial compared to any of the big networks). Insofar as Google is interested in social networking at all, it seems to be mostly interested in nontraditional applications (i.e., social networking within enterprises), where any technology lead an existing player has might be important, but the dominance of its existing network in the traditional social networking market is less significant.
Of course, if OpenSocial, once the rest of it (the server-side bits) is released, allows easy federation, the entire idea of a massive single-site based network and the entire traditional social networking model may become passe, anyhow. And, frankly, if OpenSocial doesn't do that, I suspect someone else will.
Facebook to my knowledge has the largest number of social application developers, being the industry leader in the "social web platform" space.
But the number of developers doesn't make it the leader, the number of users does. Every social networking site is a social web platform, even if all the developers are internal to the site provider, and the important metric is the size of the audience, not the number of people currently trying to produce apps for that audience.
I was never meaning to imply Myspace doesn't have the most traffic, and more to your point, they are only participating, not governing.
That is not to my point at all.
My critism still remains that in not inviting Facebook (or Myspace, or anyone) to help *govern* the API, they clearly had not intended it to be "open".
This is a very strange definition of "open". Now, until the SPI and other server-side pieces are out, its hard to evaluate, but if it is possible to implement, with neither legal nor practical impediments, end-to-end independently of Google other than the use of freely-available code from Google, then it will clearly be "open" in any reasonable sense. If it falls short of that, it may or may not be "open" in some meaningful sense. Having other participants in governing a project doesn't make it open, and having one participant governing doesn't stop it from being open.
Standards organizations exist for a reason
One rather orthogonal, in most cases, to openness, and many standards-organization-recognized standards are proprietary solutions encumbered by patents, etc. Some standards organizations prohibit this, but standardization and openness are very different things that sometimes overlap.
That isn't how I read the block -- the whole problem is the "an ES4 implementation...must be told which dialect--ES3 or ES4--it is looking at". That says to me that old pages will need to be changed to specify their (older) dialect.
But the later makes clear that ES4 used on a web page must be explicitly tagged ("In a web browser the information comes from the MIME type of the script or from a version parameter on the SCRIPT tag in the document. New web pages that choose to use ES4 will have to specify the dialect.")
I read the whole thing as saying the JavaScript implementation (which is logically kind of a "standalone" thing separate from a host application, though it will often be embedded in one) must always be told (usually, presumably, by the host application, e.g., the web browser) whether ES3 or ES4 is being used, but the standard treatment of web pages by browsers is to assume ES3 when no information is given, and only treat code as ES4 if it is explicitly tagged. That is, the browser as host application will assume ES3 if the page embedding/linking the script doesn't say anything.
The whole OpenSocial idea just reminds me of something Microsoft would do. Facebook is out there, it's great, people love it, and now Google is making their own version (well I guess they already have Orkut, but yeah) that will most likely be universally ignored.
MySpace already exists, too, has more users than Facebook, and is one of the sites initially committed to OpenSocial. Orkut may be Google's version of "Facebook", i.e., a social networking service, and it may continue to be a relatively small player in the social networking space. OTOH, OpenSocial is not a version of Facebook. It may play a similar role to the Facebook APIs, but its not tied to anyone social networking service. Already, many other social networking services, including MySpace, have committed to it. It is not being ignored now, and the commitment by major social networking services makes it unlikely that it will be ignored by developers interested in making applications that leverage existing social networks.
Of course, but those applications as an aggregate require interest for any of them to be worthwhile.
No, they really don't, but because the fact that a social networking service supports the OpenSocial APIs does not mean that it can only be used via those APIs.
All it requires for the OpenSocial apps to be useful is for them to connect to networks whose applications, in aggregate, including OpenSocial applications and all other means of using the underlying social data, are interesting to large numbers of users.
Uhhh.... What? Sure, if you can find 50 million users outside of Facebook who are interested in OpenSocial, it might work.
You don't need any users to be "interested in", or even aware of OpenSocial for it to work. You need users to be interested in the applications using the social networks the OpenSocial APIs can be used to access. And you need developers to be interested in building applications with it, running agains the social networks it can access. Then again, given developer interest in the Facebook API, and the fact that the social networking sites that have committed to supporting OpenSocial have, combined, several times the total userbase as Facebook (and one of them, MySpace, alone has more users than Facebook), I don't think that's going to be a problem.
But I think it's pretty obvious that if 50 million Facebook users aren't going to switch over, there's not much of a market share left for OpenSocial
There are, IIRC, about ~150 million users of the sites that have committed to OpenSocial, and about 400 million total estimated users of social networking sites. At 50 million, Facebook isn't a majority of the current social networking market, isn't even the biggest single site in the current social networking market, and certainly isn't consuming all the potential market for social networking such that OpenSocial has no room to maneuver.
My point is, social networking applications are most useful to connect with those you don't associate with the most on a normal basis. If I need a social networking application to keep track of what my best friends are up to, it really is a sad state of affairs for me.
Whether or not I agree with that value judgement, I know plenty of twenty-somethings who do use that as their main use of social networking sites. That you perceive of something as "sad" doesn't mean its not a real part of the way people use a product.
First of all, I can care less about developers. It is the users who make the applications important, and honestly, Facebook would be better off without "developers."
But users don't have to be interested in, or even know or care about, underlying technology (which is what OpenSocial is) for that technology to be successful. How many users are interested in TCP/IP? How many successful applications rely on it?
And yes, my friends do have to be in the OpenSocial data store in order to be part of my network
There is no "OpenSocial data store".
There are the various data stores of particular social networking services that support the OpenSocial APIs. And, again, users of the particular services that have committed to supporting OpenSocial far exceed users of Facebook.
Well, I think TFA made a pretty good case that the OpenSocial API is functionally the equivalent of the Facebook API.
That's not really in dispute.
Maybe OpenSocial is simply a standard (or whatever), but realistically it is nothing more than another networking service that is consumed by multiple web applications, rather than a networking service that is consumed by a single web application.
Sentencing guidelines are a mistake, and that's the whole problem. What sentencing guidelines do is move the judiciary power into the federal power, and as a result, you have a race to ever more ridiculous sentences for political reasons.
No, they don't. First, "sentencing guidelines" may or may not be adopted by a power outside of the judicial power, and where they are adopted by another power, its the legislative power, not the "federal" power distinct from the judicial power, which is an incoherent concept -- the federal judiciary is part of the the "federal power", not separate from it.
Second, where sentencing guidelines exist and are adopted by the legislature rather than judicial bodies, they are no different in kind from basic criminal laws that specify limits of punishment, just more detailed. The power to set the conditions under which various punishments may be applied is part of the legislative power, discretion may be given to the courts by the legislature.
Slashdot Mirror
All science is an attempt to confirm (or deny) things that are "only posited" to be true. SETI expenditures at their peak have maybe been a few million USD per year, and since the early 1990s, that's almost all been private funding from people that are interested -- unless you are voluntarily involved in the project, it there isn't much of your money or your talent being used. Compared to the hundreds of billions of public funds spent on outright destructive uses, its hardly worth talking about.
Robbery on the high seas (more commonly known as "piracy") is, like torture, genocide, etc., the subject of a peremptory norm in international law, and the perpetrator is held to be the common enemy of all humanity, subject to the jurisdiction of any and every nation (and, indeed, a positive obligation of any and every nation to pursue the perpetrator.)
Good point. What is it with mbs that are marketted as a different form factor than the most accurate one? I mean, sure, you can use a flex-ATX mb in a micro-ATX (or plain ATX) case, but why wouldn't you make sure that all your marketing material emphasized flex-ATX, since that gives the buyer more, well, flexibility than micro-ATX.
Most of the alternatives people have posted that are similar in price have some advantages and some disadvantages. None seem to be clearly and unquestionably "better" in every way, just different and in the same general ballpark. So perhaps its not outstanding, just another low-cost option that's well supported in Linux. Which, unsurprisingly enough, is somewhat interesting to a substantial part of the Slashdot crowd.
Micro-ATX, actually.
I suppose that we should be suspicious of Linux, too, then...
The really small cases are, for instance, mini-ITX. Mini-ATX is almost exactly the same size (area) as Micro-ATX, but a different arrangement (8.2x11.2cm instead of 9.6x9.6cm), so its true that this Micro-ATX MB won't fit in a Mini-ATX case, and is too big in one dimension. But, just the same, a Mini-ATX MB wouldn't fit a Micro-ATX case, for exactly the same reason. Micro-ATX cases are IMO reasonably small, and (but maybe I just look at the wrong places) it seems that there is a greater variety of Micro-ATX cases available.
That's the OLPC's Mesh Networking feature. Also, the project, IIRC, received donations of satellite time from a company that was providing low-cost satellite uplink stations so that remote villages with school servers could connect to the internet. With that and the mesh networking capability, you've got a link from the laptop to the internet, at least in the immediate surroundings of the school server.
Lots of the networking "activities" of the OLPC are designed around working with a local ad hoc network without relying on connecting to the internet, too.
Hundreds of thousands, actually.
Actually, its not at all like that. Unlike food programs, these aren't being distributed by well-meaning foreign governments or NGOs with no local involvement, they are being, for the most part, purchased by the recipient governments, and delivered (along with associated content, etc.) through their school systems. As has been the vision of the OLPC program from the outset.
Presumably, the national ministries of education that have decided to spend tens of millions of dollars purchasing computers have put some thought in how they are actually going to deliver them to schools.
Any reason, aside from your prejudices, supporting this image, or is it just your fantasy?
So, prior to the release of the XO, there was a widely available, low-cost, computer designed for the needs of the education systems in the developing world, but the problem was just the logistics of delivering the systems to end users? I think not. Clearly, whatever other real problems there might have been, the availability of appropriate technology was a real problem.
The big deal is that, when the ~$200 system was announced in its full-size case here, people commented that they'd like to have the same thing, but in a smaller form factor, since the board is, after all, a Micro-ATX board. Now they can.
Actually, lots of people are able to claim more than one nationality as a result of birth; for instance, anyone born of a parent from one country that makes children of its citizens citizens by birth, that also:
1) has their other parent a citizen of another country that does that, or
2) is born in a country different than their parents country of citizenship, that makes people born in the country citizens by birth,
Can claim birthright citizenship in more than one country. IIRC, some countries force such a person to make a choice of one or the other at adulthood or give up the claim. I don't really think the ISS, despite having bits of many countries in close proximity, really adds anything new in this regard.
Whitespace has meaning in both -- if you don't believe that, try compiling any Java file after removing all the whitespace. Its just that in Java, any contiguous block of whitespace outside of a string literal usually has the same meaning as any other contiguous block of whitespace would in the same place, though there are some exceptions.
As I understand it, the GIL and the things that make it necessary are fairly central to the (pre-3.0 -- I don't know if this has changed in the 3.0 alpha, though it was certainly talked about for Py3K; I suppose if I wasn't incredibly lazy today I could just check) CPython implementation, so Stackless needs to reimplement the core of the Python interpreter, so it really wouldn't work well as a module; its not a reimplementation of the threading libraries, its a reimplementation of the core of the interpreter to make better threading possible.
You can't avoid some kind of repository. Even if the repository is just a directory in a regular filesystem that stores, for each version, the whole directory tree and with copies of any files that have changed, and special files somewhere in the structure identifying the relationship between versions and listing files that have been deleted, that is still a central "database" that, if corrupted, is a source of failure.
(Incidentally, I think something like that is the obvious structure to use to implement what is practical out of what you are describing; it has all the features you want other than the absence of a central repository that can be damaged, and its repository is no more subject to damage than any other part of the local filesystem. And it seems to me -- off the top of my head -- that it should be pretty easy to implement mostly as a usermode filesystem with maybe a handful of management utilities.)
Emphasizing that the main work of a project is in developing the UI is not the same as trivializing its technical underpinnings (the two may or may not go together), and, even when it does involve trivializing the technological underpinnings, isn't the same as saying that it lacks substance. What people with a technical focus (hi, Slashdot) sometimes forget is that the substance of a product isn't just the theoretical capabilities of the engine, but what it delivers to the user. Ease of use and intuitive interface that make the underlying engine usable to non-specialists are not "show", they are substance of a kind that is just as important as good technical underpinnings.
Just curious, is there any really good reason not to serve everything over HTTPS?
Single Implementation? No, it has several: CPython, Stackless Python, IronPython, and Jython, off the top of my head. OTOH, while not externally standardized, the various implementations are fairly consistent/compatible, unlike some other languages that might be considered.
That's not the problem, IMO, that Google is trying to address with OpenSocial. It may be the problem that MySpace is trying to address with its participation in OpenSocial.
Why? Google isn't even a serious player in that area (Orkut is trivial compared to any of the big networks). Insofar as Google is interested in social networking at all, it seems to be mostly interested in nontraditional applications (i.e., social networking within enterprises), where any technology lead an existing player has might be important, but the dominance of its existing network in the traditional social networking market is less significant.
Of course, if OpenSocial, once the rest of it (the server-side bits) is released, allows easy federation, the entire idea of a massive single-site based network and the entire traditional social networking model may become passe, anyhow. And, frankly, if OpenSocial doesn't do that, I suspect someone else will.
No, no one is legally liable for doing so before that happens.
But things actually happen before a court of law finds that they happen.
But the number of developers doesn't make it the leader, the number of users does. Every social networking site is a social web platform, even if all the developers are internal to the site provider, and the important metric is the size of the audience, not the number of people currently trying to produce apps for that audience.
That is not to my point at all.
This is a very strange definition of "open". Now, until the SPI and other server-side pieces are out, its hard to evaluate, but if it is possible to implement, with neither legal nor practical impediments, end-to-end independently of Google other than the use of freely-available code from Google, then it will clearly be "open" in any reasonable sense. If it falls short of that, it may or may not be "open" in some meaningful sense. Having other participants in governing a project doesn't make it open, and having one participant governing doesn't stop it from being open.
One rather orthogonal, in most cases, to openness, and many standards-organization-recognized standards are proprietary solutions encumbered by patents, etc. Some standards organizations prohibit this, but standardization and openness are very different things that sometimes overlap.
But the later makes clear that ES4 used on a web page must be explicitly tagged ("In a web browser the information comes from the MIME type of the script or from a version parameter on the SCRIPT tag in the document. New web pages that choose to use ES4 will have to specify the dialect.")
I read the whole thing as saying the JavaScript implementation (which is logically kind of a "standalone" thing separate from a host application, though it will often be embedded in one) must always be told (usually, presumably, by the host application, e.g., the web browser) whether ES3 or ES4 is being used, but the standard treatment of web pages by browsers is to assume ES3 when no information is given, and only treat code as ES4 if it is explicitly tagged. That is, the browser as host application will assume ES3 if the page embedding/linking the script doesn't say anything.
"Ultimately flexible"? Hardly. Its not as bad as some people say it is, but its nothing all that special, either.
Remarkable? Compared to...what? Scheme? Lisp? Ruby? I don't think so.
MySpace already exists, too, has more users than Facebook, and is one of the sites initially committed to OpenSocial. Orkut may be Google's version of "Facebook", i.e., a social networking service, and it may continue to be a relatively small player in the social networking space. OTOH, OpenSocial is not a version of Facebook. It may play a similar role to the Facebook APIs, but its not tied to anyone social networking service. Already, many other social networking services, including MySpace, have committed to it. It is not being ignored now, and the commitment by major social networking services makes it unlikely that it will be ignored by developers interested in making applications that leverage existing social networks.
MySpace was not only invited, they signed on, and by every account I've seen they are at least twice as big as any other social networking site.
So I think your criticism is misplaced.
No, they really don't, but because the fact that a social networking service supports the OpenSocial APIs does not mean that it can only be used via those APIs.
All it requires for the OpenSocial apps to be useful is for them to connect to networks whose applications, in aggregate, including OpenSocial applications and all other means of using the underlying social data, are interesting to large numbers of users.
You don't need any users to be "interested in", or even aware of OpenSocial for it to work. You need users to be interested in the applications using the social networks the OpenSocial APIs can be used to access. And you need developers to be interested in building applications with it, running agains the social networks it can access. Then again, given developer interest in the Facebook API, and the fact that the social networking sites that have committed to supporting OpenSocial have, combined, several times the total userbase as Facebook (and one of them, MySpace, alone has more users than Facebook), I don't think that's going to be a problem.
There are, IIRC, about ~150 million users of the sites that have committed to OpenSocial, and about 400 million total estimated users of social networking sites. At 50 million, Facebook isn't a majority of the current social networking market, isn't even the biggest single site in the current social networking market, and certainly isn't consuming all the potential market for social networking such that OpenSocial has no room to maneuver.
Whether or not I agree with that value judgement, I know plenty of twenty-somethings who do use that as their main use of social networking sites. That you perceive of something as "sad" doesn't mean its not a real part of the way people use a product.
But users don't have to be interested in, or even know or care about, underlying technology (which is what OpenSocial is) for that technology to be successful. How many users are interested in TCP/IP? How many successful applications rely on it?
There is no "OpenSocial data store".
There are the various data stores of particular social networking services that support the OpenSocial APIs. And, again, users of the particular services that have committed to supporting OpenSocial far exceed users of Facebook.
That's not really in dispute.
How is it a "networking service" at all?
No, they don't. First, "sentencing guidelines" may or may not be adopted by a power outside of the judicial power, and where they are adopted by another power, its the legislative power, not the "federal" power distinct from the judicial power, which is an incoherent concept -- the federal judiciary is part of the the "federal power", not separate from it.
Second, where sentencing guidelines exist and are adopted by the legislature rather than judicial bodies, they are no different in kind from basic criminal laws that specify limits of punishment, just more detailed. The power to set the conditions under which various punishments may be applied is part of the legislative power, discretion may be given to the courts by the legislature.