The idea is more like this: OSS developers working on Novell/SUSE stop being cautious about MS patents (after all, MS has agreed not to sue, right?). Therefore some patent-violating code slips in which would not have slipped in otherwise. Then the no-sue period ends, and MS sues (AFAIU it is not a patent license, but only an agreement not to sue during the contract period).
Of course, if Novell has software it has received under the GPL from some outside authors, and puts into it code that Microsoft patents make not freely redistributable by the recipients and then redistributes it, its already violating the GPL and liable to suit for breach by everyone who supplied code that got mingled with the patent-infected code, and they don't have to wait for the Microsoft no-sue period to end, either.
Novell can make any deal that they want, as long as they don't try to pass any restrictions along with GPL code to their customers.
Either the agreement with Microsoft on patents is vacuous (because there is nothing violating Microsoft patents in the code Novell is redistributing), or Novell is not free to distribute that code under the GPL in the first place. (Now, its also possible that the patent covenant applies to non-GPL software Novell bundles with its commercial linux systems, in which case it is likely entirely irrelevant to most of the rest of the Linux universe.)
The problem is the threat of Microsoft launching patent attacks against ANYONE over anything in SuSE. The public statements say that Microsoft won't launch a patent suit against noncommercial distributors or against Novell - that still leaves commercial distributors open to a patent lawsuit.
No more than they were prior to the announcement.
Of course, its already a violation of the GPL to distribute a program under the GPL if it is encumbered by patents that would prevent recipients from redistributing it freely.
While I'll be voting Libertarian come next presidential election, I always find that particular quiz a bit unfair...
The WSPQ is a rather well-known Libertarian propaganda tool; really, the whole two-axis spectrum it and similar devices (like the Political Compass) propose is also, I think, largely a Libertarian fantasy. Actual empirical studies of salient issue axes in the US that I've seen don't support that kind of two-axis decomposition (the one I recall show a strong economic/class axis that approximates the traditional left/right axis and a weaker race-related axes.)
Separate counting seems superfluous. So long as the paper document is printed and stored separately, the system is auditable. A separate counting system doesn't get you anything; sure, compromising the "voting" system doesn't matter anymore, but the goal then becomes to compromise the counting system, so you don't gain anything but changing which system is the target of any efforts to compromise it.
What you need is voter-verified paper receipts that are stored separately from the counting system, combined with an audit process.
What language/runtime combination are other PHP users looking to switch to?
I'm not really much of a PHP user, though I've toyed with it, and I'm not really looking to switch, but you may want to look at REBOL, though its not F/OSS (there are "free-as-in-beer" versions, and the commercial versions are rather inexpensive.)
The world is ready for Open Source, Free Software and Computing Freedoms.
If by "is ready for" you mean "mostly doesn't care at all about, and certainly isn't willing to suffer any inconvenience for", you'd be pretty much right, at least about the consumer market, and have a perfect explanation for Linux's limited penetration.
If you want to try playing your favourite game, try to run it, if it doesn't work, file a bug report, and help to make it work.
While that's a nice approach for people whose primary concern is Linux evangelism, many people don't like the idea of buying a game and then spending lots of effort (and relying on other people to maybe fix bugs) to get it to work.
And if I can't play a game that I bought, how do I know its my favourite? Linux increases the expected cost—because the time and effort of delays caused by incapability is a cost—for lots of applications. Now, for some people that's not important (because they don't care about those applications) or worthwhile, but for lots of people its not. Berating people for not being willing to not have the software or hardware they've paid for work, and not being willing to file bug reports and hope someone gets around to fixing it, isn't going to change that.
Review and collection of existing research BY KNOWN SCHOLARS is research.
First, the question wasn't what is "research" but what is "scholarship". But, no, scholarship is about what you do, not who you are. Apparently, you missed the enlightment; your idea that membership in some closed priesthood rather than your methods determines whether your work is scholarship is rather dated.
Wikipedia falls at the first hurdle because most scholars, academics and experts refuse to have anything to do with Wikipedia.
Even if your first standard were accepted, this wouldn't make wikipedia fail, since most of those people choosing not to be associated with Wikipedia would not mean that the people involved in Wikipedia did not contain the requisite number from the remainder of that group to meet the standard.
The most likely reason that the hardware situation is better on Windows is because MS got its OS dominance by tight relationships to the major hardware supplier (and extended it by building similar relationships with other hardware suppliers) back in the DOS era, then once its dominance was established, hardware vendors had a strong incentive to make their systems work with Microsoft's main operating system of the time (DOS, then Windows.)
Linux is always going to be at something of a disadvantage there as long as hardware vendors aren't attached enough to it to provide just-works, out-of-the-box functionality, community efforts are likely to always lag behind—they may eventually be better, but they won't be ready when the product is brand new, and by the time they are up to speed, the product may be replaced.
What might help in Linux—and seems increasingly plausible now with the wide array of quality application software available covering many of the most important uses—is if a consumer-oriented hardware vendor decided to adopt Linux as the OS for a complete consumer-oriented computer solution, taking the time to do get the hardware support for the core configuration down. If they could get these out at a budget price with an attractive software and hardware set for the budget market, they might get enough of installed user base that it would provide third-party hardware vendors enough of an incentive to make Linux support a priority.
(If it doesn't happen from someone else sooner, this could be a long-term side-effect of the OLPC project if it is successful.)
The difference is that the Library of Alexandria contained knowledge, facts and scholarship from learned people. Wikipedia contains second, third or fourth hand facts, half-truths, quarter truths and out-and-out lies.
Well, that's true in that you had to be learned to even write at the time, but the "learned people" of the time were often reporting second, third, and fourth hand facts (though often they were the first to report them in writing rather than orally), and freely mixing half-truths, quarter-truths, and out-and-out lies into material that was supposedly factual.
its incredible to me how many Slashdotters can blithely tell us that Wikipedia can be compared to real scholarship, when its not allowed to have any scholarship - it's called WP:OR in Wikispeak.
Er, no "scholarship" is not the same thing as "original research". Review and collection of existing research is scholarship, and not WP:OR, and is exactly what the purpose of any encyclopedia, including Wikipedia, is.
Where do you liberals learn to speak like this? I am proud of our military's performance in Iraq. The lightning attack, the shock and awe, prying Saddam out of a hole. You can't blame them for the civil war.
I don't blame our military.
I blame the civilian leadership over our military, since its quite clear that plenty of people in the military told Bush and Rumsfeld (and Congress) before the war what was necessary to have any reasonable chance of maintaining order and preventing the kind of civili strife that has now occurred, and the only response Bush and Rumsfeld had was sidelining and publicly contradicting those who had told the truth about what was needed.
That's all stuff that Allen's opponent, Jim Webb, said while running the DoD?
Which would be pretty hard, even if he in fact said those things, since Jim Webb never ran the DoD.
(The Secretary of Defense runs the Department of Defense. The Assistant Secretary of Defense for Reserve Affairs does not. Neither does the Secretary of the Navy.)
Why is Wikipedia a better anthropological resource than Britannica? Because it's more comprehensive?
No, because its more inclusive in its contributors, and thus (the idea seems to be) better reflects how the people in general living in society view eachother and the subject matter. Particularly if you look beyond the articles to the discussion pages, there's probably quite a bit to that.
But I don't think its going to replace archeology for people studying our time (first of all, because its rather optimistic to think that on an archeologically significant time-scale—several hundred to several thousand years—the complete current contents of the Wikipedia will be preserved and readily accessible.) Nor will it replace completely other sources of information about society. It'll be one of many parts of the mix in studying our time, and it may well only be accessed through the work of archeologists recovering media.
Except for people making "time capsules", no one plans their work to be the subject of archeology, and yet much of it ends up being studied that way down the line.
Yeah, because that's all just a bizarre modern quirk. No one in the future will post profane things, just as no one before the 20th century ever placed profane messages anywhere, right?
When Social "science" becomes a science it might be possible to talk about web "science" as a cross discipline. Unfortunately, social science isn't a science.
Social science may not be a single science, but its certainly a broad category of empirical science.
Is there bad, nonscientific work going on the social sciences? Yes, as there is in other sciences. Is work in the social sciences hard because it relies very often on statistical controls rather than laboratory-style absolute control? Sure. Is that further complicated by the fact that lots of people have vested interests in spreading ideas about the subject matter of social science, and try to disguise propaganda and social science? Sure.
But does any of that stop the social sciences from being real sciences? No. It just means that the reader of material in the social sciences is forced to read more critically. But that's what people reading in the sciences generally should be doing, not simply taking claims on faith and personal authority.
Today, archaeologists are doing digs to understand how people lived only 150 years ago, making guesses based on the random bits and pieces of peoples' lives that they find In the future, that won't be necessary, as archaeologists are replaced by anthropologists that mine this treasure trove for data.
Or, maybe, 150 years from now, the present content of wikipedia won't be still online, and archeologists will be digging old hardrives out of current landfills and reconstructing bits of the content for those anthropologists to analyze.
I mean, sure, we like to think of some of the online material we have now as permanent, a way to prevent information from being lost and having to be painfully dug up. But then, so probably did the founders of the Library at Alexandria.
Does the PS3 or the XBox360 work with a current TV?
Yes, in both cases.
I guess because of the lower resolution the Games will run faster than on PS3 and XBox360, right?
Probably not: in addition to less resolution the Wii has less processing power. I wouldn't expect the lower resolution to result in faster speed than the more powerful consoles for similar games in most cases.
Yes it does; the difference being if the programmer is physically here in the US, it *should* be easier to find the person if there is a problem.
Buying software from US firms with programmers living in the US is no guarantee that, when a problem occurs, the programmer will still be in the US. Particularly if the programmer was planting malicious software on behalf of a foreign power, where it is quite likely they will seek to not be in the country by the time the sabotage becomes evident.
So unless you propose not merely buying software from US firms, but actively preventing anyone who works on military software from ever leaving the country, you haven't really addressed the problem you raised.
At least China doesn't persecute and mass-murder muslims.
That's, at best, disputed. They have an ongoing problem in the western parts of China with Islamic separatists who point to persecution and mass murder by China. Of course, China calls them terrorists when it refers to them at all, and exercises considerable control over the flow of information which makes it difficult to get to the truth.
Besides, what part of it being a high-priority download forces people to use it,
Well, another poster over in another subthread of this thread mentioned that it silently grabs a variety of file associations, which is one thing that can force (or at least trick) people into using it when they had no intention of doing so.
...there has never been anyone located in the United States that has worked on a sensitive project and worked to compromise its success and otherwise betray the US to enemies. So, obviously, offshoring is the only concern, not the complete inadequacy of the testing and verification procedures at the Pentagon.
Why should the federal government do what is the purview of the local government?
I didn't say it should, I just said the US wasn't excluded from participating on the same basis as any other country.
(And, really, I'm sure if a state government wanted to place an order, though it would require a slight variation from OLPCs stated policy, OLPC would be fine with that. It's unlikely a particular school district could justify a large enough order for OLPC to be interested -- they seem to be looking at orders of around 1 million units as the floor.)
OTOH, I suspect that the commercial version OLPC is looking into for sale in the developed world will probably have a feature set more appropriate to first-world needs and not require orders as large.
One thing I wonder about OLPC's product, what educational programs do these laptops have installed?
It will likely vary from country to country, and there aren't final lists. Some information about what is being done and considered in that regard can be found on the OLPC wiki, particularly in the "content" and "software" sections.
PledgeBank was always involved, and it was never connected with the OLPC project. The OLPC project has been looking into a commercial variant which would be sold in the developed world and subsidize the main OLPC project, but no decision on that has been made, and its unlikely to be much influenced by the PledgeBank efforts (either the original one or the new one some people have mentioned on this thread), which seem incredibly pointless.
"More realistic"? I don't think so. What makes it any more likely that OLPC will change their policy for this pledge than the other? I mean, they've made it pretty clear that (1) they aren't soliciting cash, and (2) they aren't interested in selling the 2B1 to anyone other than national governments in enormous (1 million+) lots.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, if Novell has software it has received under the GPL from some outside authors, and puts into it code that Microsoft patents make not freely redistributable by the recipients and then redistributes it, its already violating the GPL and liable to suit for breach by everyone who supplied code that got mingled with the patent-infected code, and they don't have to wait for the Microsoft no-sue period to end, either.
Either the agreement with Microsoft on patents is vacuous (because there is nothing violating Microsoft patents in the code Novell is redistributing), or Novell is not free to distribute that code under the GPL in the first place. (Now, its also possible that the patent covenant applies to non-GPL software Novell bundles with its commercial linux systems, in which case it is likely entirely irrelevant to most of the rest of the Linux universe.)
No more than they were prior to the announcement.
Of course, its already a violation of the GPL to distribute a program under the GPL if it is encumbered by patents that would prevent recipients from redistributing it freely.
The WSPQ is a rather well-known Libertarian propaganda tool; really, the whole two-axis spectrum it and similar devices (like the Political Compass) propose is also, I think, largely a Libertarian fantasy. Actual empirical studies of salient issue axes in the US that I've seen don't support that kind of two-axis decomposition (the one I recall show a strong economic/class axis that approximates the traditional left/right axis and a weaker race-related axes.)
Separate counting seems superfluous. So long as the paper document is printed and stored separately, the system is auditable. A separate counting system doesn't get you anything; sure, compromising the "voting" system doesn't matter anymore, but the goal then becomes to compromise the counting system, so you don't gain anything but changing which system is the target of any efforts to compromise it.
What you need is voter-verified paper receipts that are stored separately from the counting system, combined with an audit process.
I'm not really much of a PHP user, though I've toyed with it, and I'm not really looking to switch, but you may want to look at REBOL, though its not F/OSS (there are "free-as-in-beer" versions, and the commercial versions are rather inexpensive.)
If by "is ready for" you mean "mostly doesn't care at all about, and certainly isn't willing to suffer any inconvenience for", you'd be pretty much right, at least about the consumer market, and have a perfect explanation for Linux's limited penetration.
While that's a nice approach for people whose primary concern is Linux evangelism, many people don't like the idea of buying a game and then spending lots of effort (and relying on other people to maybe fix bugs) to get it to work.
And if I can't play a game that I bought, how do I know its my favourite? Linux increases the expected cost—because the time and effort of delays caused by incapability is a cost—for lots of applications. Now, for some people that's not important (because they don't care about those applications) or worthwhile, but for lots of people its not. Berating people for not being willing to not have the software or hardware they've paid for work, and not being willing to file bug reports and hope someone gets around to fixing it, isn't going to change that.
First, the question wasn't what is "research" but what is "scholarship". But, no, scholarship is about what you do, not who you are. Apparently, you missed the enlightment; your idea that membership in some closed priesthood rather than your methods determines whether your work is scholarship is rather dated.
Even if your first standard were accepted, this wouldn't make wikipedia fail, since most of those people choosing not to be associated with Wikipedia would not mean that the people involved in Wikipedia did not contain the requisite number from the remainder of that group to meet the standard.
The most likely reason that the hardware situation is better on Windows is because MS got its OS dominance by tight relationships to the major hardware supplier (and extended it by building similar relationships with other hardware suppliers) back in the DOS era, then once its dominance was established, hardware vendors had a strong incentive to make their systems work with Microsoft's main operating system of the time (DOS, then Windows.)
Linux is always going to be at something of a disadvantage there as long as hardware vendors aren't attached enough to it to provide just-works, out-of-the-box functionality, community efforts are likely to always lag behind—they may eventually be better, but they won't be ready when the product is brand new, and by the time they are up to speed, the product may be replaced.
What might help in Linux—and seems increasingly plausible now with the wide array of quality application software available covering many of the most important uses—is if a consumer-oriented hardware vendor decided to adopt Linux as the OS for a complete consumer-oriented computer solution, taking the time to do get the hardware support for the core configuration down. If they could get these out at a budget price with an attractive software and hardware set for the budget market, they might get enough of installed user base that it would provide third-party hardware vendors enough of an incentive to make Linux support a priority.
(If it doesn't happen from someone else sooner, this could be a long-term side-effect of the OLPC project if it is successful.)
Well, that's true in that you had to be learned to even write at the time, but the "learned people" of the time were often reporting second, third, and fourth hand facts (though often they were the first to report them in writing rather than orally), and freely mixing half-truths, quarter-truths, and out-and-out lies into material that was supposedly factual.
Er, no "scholarship" is not the same thing as "original research". Review and collection of existing research is scholarship, and not WP:OR, and is exactly what the purpose of any encyclopedia, including Wikipedia, is.
I don't blame our military.
I blame the civilian leadership over our military, since its quite clear that plenty of people in the military told Bush and Rumsfeld (and Congress) before the war what was necessary to have any reasonable chance of maintaining order and preventing the kind of civili strife that has now occurred, and the only response Bush and Rumsfeld had was sidelining and publicly contradicting those who had told the truth about what was needed.
Which would be pretty hard, even if he in fact said those things, since Jim Webb never ran the DoD.
(The Secretary of Defense runs the Department of Defense. The Assistant Secretary of Defense for Reserve Affairs does not. Neither does the Secretary of the Navy.)
No, because its more inclusive in its contributors, and thus (the idea seems to be) better reflects how the people in general living in society view eachother and the subject matter. Particularly if you look beyond the articles to the discussion pages, there's probably quite a bit to that.
But I don't think its going to replace archeology for people studying our time (first of all, because its rather optimistic to think that on an archeologically significant time-scale—several hundred to several thousand years—the complete current contents of the Wikipedia will be preserved and readily accessible.) Nor will it replace completely other sources of information about society. It'll be one of many parts of the mix in studying our time, and it may well only be accessed through the work of archeologists recovering media.
Except for people making "time capsules", no one plans their work to be the subject of archeology, and yet much of it ends up being studied that way down the line.
Yeah, because that's all just a bizarre modern quirk. No one in the future will post profane things, just as no one before the 20th century ever placed profane messages anywhere, right?
Social science may not be a single science, but its certainly a broad category of empirical science.
Is there bad, nonscientific work going on the social sciences? Yes, as there is in other sciences. Is work in the social sciences hard because it relies very often on statistical controls rather than laboratory-style absolute control? Sure. Is that further complicated by the fact that lots of people have vested interests in spreading ideas about the subject matter of social science, and try to disguise propaganda and social science? Sure.
But does any of that stop the social sciences from being real sciences? No. It just means that the reader of material in the social sciences is forced to read more critically. But that's what people reading in the sciences generally should be doing, not simply taking claims on faith and personal authority.
Or, maybe, 150 years from now, the present content of wikipedia won't be still online, and archeologists will be digging old hardrives out of current landfills and reconstructing bits of the content for those anthropologists to analyze.
I mean, sure, we like to think of some of the online material we have now as permanent, a way to prevent information from being lost and having to be painfully dug up. But then, so probably did the founders of the Library at Alexandria.
Yes, in both cases.
Probably not: in addition to less resolution the Wii has less processing power. I wouldn't expect the lower resolution to result in faster speed than the more powerful consoles for similar games in most cases.
Buying software from US firms with programmers living in the US is no guarantee that, when a problem occurs, the programmer will still be in the US. Particularly if the programmer was planting malicious software on behalf of a foreign power, where it is quite likely they will seek to not be in the country by the time the sabotage becomes evident.
So unless you propose not merely buying software from US firms, but actively preventing anyone who works on military software from ever leaving the country, you haven't really addressed the problem you raised.
Well, another poster over in another subthread of this thread mentioned that it silently grabs a variety of file associations, which is one thing that can force (or at least trick) people into using it when they had no intention of doing so.
...there has never been anyone located in the United States that has worked on a sensitive project and worked to compromise its success and otherwise betray the US to enemies. So, obviously, offshoring is the only concern, not the complete inadequacy of the testing and verification procedures at the Pentagon.
I didn't say it should, I just said the US wasn't excluded from participating on the same basis as any other country.
(And, really, I'm sure if a state government wanted to place an order, though it would require a slight variation from OLPCs stated policy, OLPC would be fine with that. It's unlikely a particular school district could justify a large enough order for OLPC to be interested -- they seem to be looking at orders of around 1 million units as the floor.)
OTOH, I suspect that the commercial version OLPC is looking into for sale in the developed world will probably have a feature set more appropriate to first-world needs and not require orders as large.
It will likely vary from country to country, and there aren't final lists. Some information about what is being done and considered in that regard can be found on the OLPC wiki, particularly in the "content" and "software" sections.
PledgeBank was always involved, and it was never connected with the OLPC project. The OLPC project has been looking into a commercial variant which would be sold in the developed world and subsidize the main OLPC project, but no decision on that has been made, and its unlikely to be much influenced by the PledgeBank efforts (either the original one or the new one some people have mentioned on this thread), which seem incredibly pointless.
"More realistic"? I don't think so. What makes it any more likely that OLPC will change their policy for this pledge than the other? I mean, they've made it pretty clear that (1) they aren't soliciting cash, and (2) they aren't interested in selling the 2B1 to anyone other than national governments in enormous (1 million+) lots.