Is it Googles intention to establish that Windows is indeed the better option for the computing world?
It think its Google's intention to establish that Google is indeed the better option for the computing world. I don't think they have a whole lot of interest in getting too deeply into OS wars, except inasmuch as that may become relevant to their search war with Microsoft.
The port was done using Wine and in the process over 200 patches were contributed back to the Wine project.
This is impossible. Steve Ballmer just told me that if a company touches something open source, like Wine, then all their software must be open source. Thats the way The License works, he said.
But really, if you've got a photo of a kid smoking pot (or drinking beer) along with admission of him doing it, and reports from other students witnessing it, do we really need "due process" before kicking him out of the school?
Yeah, because if you don't have due process, all you've got is someone claiming that the photo showed that, that there was a real confession, and that there were real witnesses who confirmed the event in the understanding that the questioning was serious.
Yes. Fact is that if a child is doing something illegal, it's still illegal wherever it happens to be.
Yes, exactly. And whoever thinks they have information about such activity ought to call the appropriate law enforcement agency to investigate it. And whatever public agency recieves a report outside the scope of their mission about such activity ought to refer the reporter to the appropriate law enforcement agency, rather than trying to expand their mission into an area they are neither trained or equipped to do.
Schools are not funded, and their officials are not trained, to act as general law enforcement agencies. They endanger the public when they try to pretend they are and try to do the investigation that should be passed at the first instance to a real law enforcement agency. In addition, when they divert their resources into these activities that they are not funded or equipped to deal with, they also compromise their educational mission.
And if that activity is further endangering the lives of others (drunk driving, selling drugs, violence, etc) it's absolutely their responsibility to curb it.
Who "their"? If you mean the person doing it, sure. If you mean the parents, sure. If you mean the school -- well, no, its not the schools responsibility to curb it, nor is the school competent to do it. The responsibility for curbing dangerous criminal activity not connected to the school environment is that of the regular police force, the schools only activity is that of anyone else who learns of crime -- to report it immediately to and cooperate with the police. And if the schools information is second-hand, they ought to be referring the original reporter to the police. It is not the schools job to investigate crimes unrelated to the school, or to punish them.
They are not putting people in jail, they are restricting them from extracirricular activities or suspending them for illegal activites. Then they're reporting them to the police.
How is this bad?
Well, first, the school district is not equipped to determine general "illegal activities". It has some need to do a first-blush pass at that when those activities are directly related to school, of course, but when they are completely unrelated to school (even if they happen to involve people with some connection to the school), they have no more need, and ought have no more authority, to do so than any random person on the street.
Even investigating and reporting to police isn't their job -- they should refer the original reporter to the appropriate law enforcement agency.
And if the activity is not in fact illegal, and has no rational bearing on the extracurricular activity in question or the pedagogical mission of the school, then suspending the student raises other legal issues, as well as violating fundamental fairness.
It is a policy that offers nothing but a diversion of resources from the job the school district needs to be doing into one that it is not equipped to do, and that duplicates the function of other agencies that are better equipped for the role.
For, well, any of a number of possible things. The school is a public actor, and even for voluntary, extra-curricular activities it can't engage in arbitrary discrimination without exposing itself to potential liabilities. The farther the matter on which they base their decision on gets from their central legal mandate of pedagogy, the less ability they will have to defend it.
And its not all that unlikely that there will be charges that such "blog-policing" is being used as a pretext to cover discrimination on the basis of sex, race, etc.
Its a whole can of legal nastiness than the district is needlessly jumping into headfirst.
...they have increased the likelihood that people will try to hold them responsible, and more likely that they will be succesful in doing so. Stupid move. Maybe they should spend more effort dealing with the things they are already, by law, clearly responsible for, and tell people that won't to report apparently illegal things that have nothing to do with the school that they infer from someone's blog postings to call the appropriate law enforcement agency.
Because school districts aren't equipped or funded to act as general law enforcement agencies, and have more than enough demands on their resources doing what they are supposed to do, without their staff trying to live out their "Internet cop" fantasies.
There's considerable evidence that so-called "free trade" (which is highly selectively "free", anyway) benefits wealthy holders of capital and hurts labor, both in the richer and poorer partners (trade within the EU, rather than between the EU and other countries, may not quite fit this model, though, since it has, IIRC, a lot of compensatory features that international "free trade" generally lacks -- its more like real free-and-fair trade.)
See, for instance, Amy Chua's World on Fire, though that work mostly focusses on the less-developed partners in trade, and on places where the pre-existing class divide also corresponds to an ethnic divide.
There is a difference between conscious recognition that something is "just pretend" and actually not having it effect you, and the fact that someone that is 5, or a teen, or whatever can say "its just pretend" doesn't imply that it is not having a bigger effect on their thinking and behavior than it might on a person with a more mature brain. And there are plenty of studies that support that this is, in fact, generally the case.
Note: I'm not saying I agree with the mindset that the state should regulate; I believe that parents are the best regulators, and that the role of the state should be to empower parents while not constraining the free flow of content, which is a tough balance to strike. And, further, I think that sheltering kids from "mature" content isn't really the best response. Sure, there needs to be some control, but more important is to prepare them for increasingly mature content and helping them develope the mental facilities to deal with it. All I'm saying is that its a bit naive to say that kids are generally safe because they consciously recognize the distinction between "pretend" and "reality".
Because sooner or later they are going to run into sex, violence, etc., in art and/or reality, and they ought to be prepared to deal with exposure to it when they do.
You really think it's a good idea to have big government barging and telling people what they can and can't do on the internet?
I think its good for government (whether its otherwise "big" or "small") to tell people what they can do with infrastructure for which it is impractical have competition, like telephone wires, power lines, etc. Particularly, to prevent them from leveraging their control over these inherently limited infrastructure resources to stifly competition in other markets. Like, in the case of phone or internet infrastructure providers, content delivered through those channels.
Er, #1 and #2 are two different ways of wording the exact same thing.
The "amounts to a 'leased line'" connection in #2 is the result of the charges in #1. In either case, you get a comparatively degraded connection unless your content provider has paid a negotiated surcharge to the pipes between their service provider and you to guarantee premium access, and you can guarantee that if they are providing a service that your ISP wants to provide (or anyone else in between!), those fees are not going to be reasonable.
I don't think you understand the issue with net neutrality here:
Its not what Google's ISP charges them. Its what Your ISP -- or anyone providing any of the pipes in between Google and you -- charges Google to guarantee that Google's packets get to you on a timely basis (which also means "reliably", or possibly "at all"). Right now, Google's ISP(s) could negotiate a special deal with them (and, given that I doubt anyone has a standard scale that covers the level of service Google requires, I'm sure that each of Google's service providers has.)
Google can choose their ISP, as you note, so competition (so long as there are competing providers) would handle that problem. But they can't choose every intermediary out to the end user, so without net neutrality, content providers will be at the mercy of predatory Information Superhighwaymen erecting toll-booths that can't be avoided by packets -- unless they pony up to build their own fiber network from their servers directly to each of the end-users.
Cost is probably a bad argument. The better argument is competition. We don't really want thousands of different competing firms providing cable to the home, its not practical. The physical infrastructure is going to be narrowly "controlled" and its better for everyone that it is. Just as its better that we don't have multiple road systems set up in "parallel" (over and under eachother, perhaps), with different "road service providers" competing to get us to pay for connections from our home (or business) to their road.
But we do want robust competition among providers of services delivered across that physical infrastructure. But if the controllers of the physical infrastructure are allowed to selectively discriminate among different content streams, and favor the ones that they are getting an extra payment for (or which originate with them), then we won't have that robust competition. We'll have control of the infrastructure equating to control of content.
The theoretical limitations of Turing machines might affect the ability to detect bugs (then again, the halting problem -- one of the most common "limitations" referred to and the one brought up repeatedly in this thread -- is only intractable for a universal Turing machine; for real machines with finite memory, which, unfortunately, real comptuers tend to be, halting is decidable, so that particular limitation is no excuse for software bugs on real machines), but the practical difficulty of establishing correctness are substantial, though.
And those practical difficulties are, as I understand things, affected significantly by language features, which is why some languages (like Oz) are designed with ease of reasoning about code as a priority.
(And, of course, a major practical limitation of proving correctness is that proving code is correct doesn't help if the environment it runs on isn't also proven.)
My HS, back in the mid to late 90's when I was in HS, had a policy of disciplining students for fighting even if they were not on school grounds at the time.
Part of this is going powermad with authority combined with laziness in making relevant distinctions (particularly, treating all parties the same in fights), but part of it is the fact that schools have been held liable for actions that occurred off school grounds, as well -- including fights that either (1) occurred off-campus during school hours between students, (2) occurred between the time students left school and the time they got home, (3) were "arranged" at school and then occurred off campus".
Further, there have, I believe, been cases where the school was held liable for not protecting students proactively from threats that the school should have known about because of events that school officials were aware of that occurred off campus, even if the school was not strictly responsible for those off-campus occurrences.
So while "common sense" might say schools should only care about events that happen on-campus, that "common sense" would be wrong from the perspective of any responsible administrator.
Open source is not available to commercial companies. The way the license is written, if you use any open-source software, you have to make the rest of your software open source.
This is stupid -- or, rather, dishonest -- on a number of levels. First, no open-source license requires you to make the rest of your software open-source. Second "the license" pretends there is one open source license -- which is laughable. The GPL is the closest license I know of to what Ballmer describes, and while it is a little sticky, plenty of "commercial companies" have done just fine, using GPL software and still producing software under traditional licenses as well.
But plenty of open-source licenses are far less sticky than the GPL, anyway -- including the LGPL.
Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches.
Yeah, I mean, since I set up a dual-boot on my formerly windows-only box, Linux has been touching my Windows partitions, and last time I booted to Windows, the "About..." screen for XP noted that Windows was now under the GPL.
If there were Academy Awards for spreading FUD, Ballmer would get a Lifetime Achievement Award.
Wow. That's one of the most overreaching claims I've ever seen.
I mean, why don't they take it one step further and just say "By existing on the same planet as these materials, you agree to the license agreement filed away in sub-basement C of Microsoft HQ."
How do they imagine that there footer is enforceable?
Why does everyone overlook the possibility of charging to write it in the first place? Software that doesn't yet exist is not free.
That's a good point. I was, really, referring to ways that (like license sales of non-free software) capitalize on the post-release popularity and success of the software rather than pre-release expectations (though that wasn't spelled out), and I didn't intend, in any case, for the list to be exhaustive. But that does often get overlooked, so its good that you point it out.
The point raised is that Google had in fact chosen these particular sources as news and then rescinded that choice because of alleged "hate speech". This is an editorial decision based on content.
They don't claim not to make editorial decisions based on content, they claim not to make them based on "political viewpoint or ideology", which is a narrow subset of content. "Hate speech" is not simply a politically viewpoint or ideology, it is particular way of promoting such an ideology. And there is nothing unusual about seeing that kind of promotion as distinct from news.
Google News clearly makes editorial decisions based on content -- deciding what source is and is not a "news" source is inherently an "editorial decision", and there is no rational basis for it except content. And, if the way a site acts changes, there is no reason to expect that that decision would not also change.
There is nothing contrary to Google News' claims going on here.
"Defense firms" does not mean that they were sued. When someone hires a lawyer and the lawyer contacts you to complain about something you've done, that's a red flag warning that you are likely to be sued. People that can afford to that think legal action is likely or even possible often preemptively hire appropriate counsel (for example, as I recall, President Bush hired a personal criminal defense attorney very early in the Plame leak investigation -- this doesn't mean criminal charges had been filed against him.)
And "defense law firms" are not incapable of preemptively suing, either.
Biggest problem-- fathers will lose face if they don't have a laptop but their kids do.
As I understand the OLPC program, they are looking for governments to buy in bulk and provide them universally to children -- but I don't think they are concerned that they are distributed exclusively to children. So, if a government wants to provide them to everyone, OLPC probably won't object. Plus, since a major concern seems to be getting big enough orders, it would probably be a positive thing.
Is it feasible to have kids using and carrying things equivalent to two months wages? Big incentive to thieves.
The more universally distributed they are, the less attractive they'll be to thieves. If virtually everyone has one anyway, there may not be a lot of resale market for black market ones. Well, except to third-world/.ers looking to build beowulf clusters of the cute little beasts.
How to get a network connection in suburban Dar Es Salaam?
They are designed to create mesh networks. Now, you make a good point that getting a connection to the broader internet may be a problem, and may require a trek to an access point. Then again, there is a lot of stuff you can do without a persistent, or even more than very-occasional, internet connection that would be useful, though us spoiled first-worlders may have forgotten about it.
Persistent internet connectivity for the masses is a fairly recent development in the first world. (Heck, internet connectivity for the first-world masses at all is mostly a feature of the last decade and change.)
With these, with the right software and education, even a remote village without power or phone lines could receive and send e-mail and get some other benefits of the internet, just by having someone bike into town with the village "mail server", make a wireless connection with a system persistently connected, and bike back and mesh with other servers in the village.
Sure, exploiting the potential will take an educational effort along with the delivery of hardware and software, plus will take people thinking about using the system outside of the context of expectations framed by first-world patterns of development and computer use, but, heck, the thinking outside the box that will require will probably have unexpected benefits even in the developed world.
White plastic around the keyboard? Do you know how that's going to look after one day of not-so-clean hands resting on it?
Well, yeah, that's a valid aesthetic issue, though not a major substantive drawback.
Java is not "open source" or "free software", as those terms are generally used in the open source or free software communities -- open source is more than "available source".
Now, "available source" is a good thing (it means, for one thing, that you aren't relying on security through obscurity.), but its a different thing than "open source".
The trademark and compatibility certification Sun does now don't rely on Sun's implementation being closed (even if available) source, and it is that certification and control of the Java name as a trademark, not control of a closed-source reference implementation (though control of a reference implementation -- independent of source licensing model -- is an essential component to the credibility of Sun's certification effort) that safeguards, inasmuch as anything can, against fragmentation of the standard for the VM and the language and assorted related technologies. Its the specification and certification program -- and the fact that users, developers, etc. continue to find value in the standards it enforces, that keeps Java Java, not the fact that Sun happens to have a proprietary implementation.
Which is probably why they've said that they plan to open-source it, and that its a matter of how, not whether, that will happen. But there are choices of open source license to make, and different pieces of the implementation may need different licenses.
That's still an editorial decision about what is or isn't news, and it's clear to me that Google is making some pretty questionable decisions on that front.
Of course its an editorial decision. If you want no editorial decisions about what is or is not news, maybe you shouldn't use Google's product that is overtly specialized to news, and instead use their more general search engine, and decide what is news for yourself.
With Google Co-op, you can even set yourself up as an authority and tag what is or isn't news for others, if they are willing to subscribe to your ratings.
And, yeah, determining what is or is not appropriate for the news aggregator is a subjective determination, and whatever they decide, some people will disagree.
For example, the Bisexual Resource Center news page was turned down for inclusion in Google News. Why? It looks clearly like news and not comment to me, and it has a pagerank of 7 so it's not as if it's some obscure blog. They include sites with lower pagerank, like pinknews.co.uk which has a pagerank of 4, so frankly the decision is highly questionable.
That its not based on "page rank" and that one excluded site "looks like news...to me" isn't really a strong argument that Google is doing anything wrong. Again, sure, its "questionable" in that its subjective and people will disagree. If you don't like it, you are free to set up your own index of what is and isn't news on the net -- Google will even let you use their infrastructure to do so and connect to interested users.
Right up until Microsoft drudges up a patent for WinForms or some other technology not covered by ECMA standard. The funny thing about patents is that they don't lose their potency with time or popularity.
Yeah, actually, they do lose potency with time -- a lot faster than, say, copyrights.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, because if you don't have due process, all you've got is someone claiming that the photo showed that, that there was a real confession, and that there were real witnesses who confirmed the event in the understanding that the questioning was serious.
Yes, exactly. And whoever thinks they have information about such activity ought to call the appropriate law enforcement agency to investigate it. And whatever public agency recieves a report outside the scope of their mission about such activity ought to refer the reporter to the appropriate law enforcement agency, rather than trying to expand their mission into an area they are neither trained or equipped to do.
Schools are not funded, and their officials are not trained, to act as general law enforcement agencies. They endanger the public when they try to pretend they are and try to do the investigation that should be passed at the first instance to a real law enforcement agency. In addition, when they divert their resources into these activities that they are not funded or equipped to deal with, they also compromise their educational mission.
Who "their"? If you mean the person doing it, sure. If you mean the parents, sure. If you mean the school -- well, no, its not the schools responsibility to curb it, nor is the school competent to do it. The responsibility for curbing dangerous criminal activity not connected to the school environment is that of the regular police force, the schools only activity is that of anyone else who learns of crime -- to report it immediately to and cooperate with the police. And if the schools information is second-hand, they ought to be referring the original reporter to the police. It is not the schools job to investigate crimes unrelated to the school, or to punish them.
Well, first, the school district is not equipped to determine general "illegal activities". It has some need to do a first-blush pass at that when those activities are directly related to school, of course, but when they are completely unrelated to school (even if they happen to involve people with some connection to the school), they have no more need, and ought have no more authority, to do so than any random person on the street.
Even investigating and reporting to police isn't their job -- they should refer the original reporter to the appropriate law enforcement agency.
And if the activity is not in fact illegal, and has no rational bearing on the extracurricular activity in question or the pedagogical mission of the school, then suspending the student raises other legal issues, as well as violating fundamental fairness.
It is a policy that offers nothing but a diversion of resources from the job the school district needs to be doing into one that it is not equipped to do, and that duplicates the function of other agencies that are better equipped for the role.
For, well, any of a number of possible things. The school is a public actor, and even for voluntary, extra-curricular activities it can't engage in arbitrary discrimination without exposing itself to potential liabilities. The farther the matter on which they base their decision on gets from their central legal mandate of pedagogy, the less ability they will have to defend it.
And its not all that unlikely that there will be charges that such "blog-policing" is being used as a pretext to cover discrimination on the basis of sex, race, etc.
Its a whole can of legal nastiness than the district is needlessly jumping into headfirst.
...they have increased the likelihood that people will try to hold them responsible, and more likely that they will be succesful in doing so. Stupid move. Maybe they should spend more effort dealing with the things they are already, by law, clearly responsible for, and tell people that won't to report apparently illegal things that have nothing to do with the school that they infer from someone's blog postings to call the appropriate law enforcement agency.
Because school districts aren't equipped or funded to act as general law enforcement agencies, and have more than enough demands on their resources doing what they are supposed to do, without their staff trying to live out their "Internet cop" fantasies.
There's considerable evidence that so-called "free trade" (which is highly selectively "free", anyway) benefits wealthy holders of capital and hurts labor, both in the richer and poorer partners (trade within the EU, rather than between the EU and other countries, may not quite fit this model, though, since it has, IIRC, a lot of compensatory features that international "free trade" generally lacks -- its more like real free-and-fair trade.)
See, for instance, Amy Chua's World on Fire, though that work mostly focusses on the less-developed partners in trade, and on places where the pre-existing class divide also corresponds to an ethnic divide.
There is a difference between conscious recognition that something is "just pretend" and actually not having it effect you, and the fact that someone that is 5, or a teen, or whatever can say "its just pretend" doesn't imply that it is not having a bigger effect on their thinking and behavior than it might on a person with a more mature brain. And there are plenty of studies that support that this is, in fact, generally the case.
Note: I'm not saying I agree with the mindset that the state should regulate; I believe that parents are the best regulators, and that the role of the state should be to empower parents while not constraining the free flow of content, which is a tough balance to strike. And, further, I think that sheltering kids from "mature" content isn't really the best response. Sure, there needs to be some control, but more important is to prepare them for increasingly mature content and helping them develope the mental facilities to deal with it. All I'm saying is that its a bit naive to say that kids are generally safe because they consciously recognize the distinction between "pretend" and "reality".
Because sooner or later they are going to run into sex, violence, etc., in art and/or reality, and they ought to be prepared to deal with exposure to it when they do.
I think its good for government (whether its otherwise "big" or "small") to tell people what they can do with infrastructure for which it is impractical have competition, like telephone wires, power lines, etc. Particularly, to prevent them from leveraging their control over these inherently limited infrastructure resources to stifly competition in other markets. Like, in the case of phone or internet infrastructure providers, content delivered through those channels.
Er, #1 and #2 are two different ways of wording the exact same thing.
The "amounts to a 'leased line'" connection in #2 is the result of the charges in #1. In either case, you get a comparatively degraded connection unless your content provider has paid a negotiated surcharge to the pipes between their service provider and you to guarantee premium access, and you can guarantee that if they are providing a service that your ISP wants to provide (or anyone else in between!), those fees are not going to be reasonable.
I don't think you understand the issue with net neutrality here: Its not what Google's ISP charges them. Its what Your ISP -- or anyone providing any of the pipes in between Google and you -- charges Google to guarantee that Google's packets get to you on a timely basis (which also means "reliably", or possibly "at all"). Right now, Google's ISP(s) could negotiate a special deal with them (and, given that I doubt anyone has a standard scale that covers the level of service Google requires, I'm sure that each of Google's service providers has.) Google can choose their ISP, as you note, so competition (so long as there are competing providers) would handle that problem. But they can't choose every intermediary out to the end user, so without net neutrality, content providers will be at the mercy of predatory Information Superhighwaymen erecting toll-booths that can't be avoided by packets -- unless they pony up to build their own fiber network from their servers directly to each of the end-users.
Cost is probably a bad argument. The better argument is competition. We don't really want thousands of different competing firms providing cable to the home, its not practical. The physical infrastructure is going to be narrowly "controlled" and its better for everyone that it is. Just as its better that we don't have multiple road systems set up in "parallel" (over and under eachother, perhaps), with different "road service providers" competing to get us to pay for connections from our home (or business) to their road.
But we do want robust competition among providers of services delivered across that physical infrastructure. But if the controllers of the physical infrastructure are allowed to selectively discriminate among different content streams, and favor the ones that they are getting an extra payment for (or which originate with them), then we won't have that robust competition. We'll have control of the infrastructure equating to control of content.
The theoretical limitations of Turing machines might affect the ability to detect bugs (then again, the halting problem -- one of the most common "limitations" referred to and the one brought up repeatedly in this thread -- is only intractable for a universal Turing machine; for real machines with finite memory, which, unfortunately, real comptuers tend to be, halting is decidable, so that particular limitation is no excuse for software bugs on real machines), but the practical difficulty of establishing correctness are substantial, though.
And those practical difficulties are, as I understand things, affected significantly by language features, which is why some languages (like Oz) are designed with ease of reasoning about code as a priority.
(And, of course, a major practical limitation of proving correctness is that proving code is correct doesn't help if the environment it runs on isn't also proven.)
Part of this is going powermad with authority combined with laziness in making relevant distinctions (particularly, treating all parties the same in fights), but part of it is the fact that schools have been held liable for actions that occurred off school grounds, as well -- including fights that either (1) occurred off-campus during school hours between students, (2) occurred between the time students left school and the time they got home, (3) were "arranged" at school and then occurred off campus".
Further, there have, I believe, been cases where the school was held liable for not protecting students proactively from threats that the school should have known about because of events that school officials were aware of that occurred off campus, even if the school was not strictly responsible for those off-campus occurrences.
So while "common sense" might say schools should only care about events that happen on-campus, that "common sense" would be wrong from the perspective of any responsible administrator.
This is stupid -- or, rather, dishonest -- on a number of levels. First, no open-source license requires you to make the rest of your software open-source. Second "the license" pretends there is one open source license -- which is laughable. The GPL is the closest license I know of to what Ballmer describes, and while it is a little sticky, plenty of "commercial companies" have done just fine, using GPL software and still producing software under traditional licenses as well.
But plenty of open-source licenses are far less sticky than the GPL, anyway -- including the LGPL.
Yeah, I mean, since I set up a dual-boot on my formerly windows-only box, Linux has been touching my Windows partitions, and last time I booted to Windows, the "About..." screen for XP noted that Windows was now under the GPL.
If there were Academy Awards for spreading FUD, Ballmer would get a Lifetime Achievement Award.
Wow. That's one of the most overreaching claims I've ever seen.
I mean, why don't they take it one step further and just say "By existing on the same planet as these materials, you agree to the license agreement filed away in sub-basement C of Microsoft HQ."
How do they imagine that there footer is enforceable?
That's a good point. I was, really, referring to ways that (like license sales of non-free software) capitalize on the post-release popularity and success of the software rather than pre-release expectations (though that wasn't spelled out), and I didn't intend, in any case, for the list to be exhaustive. But that does often get overlooked, so its good that you point it out.
They don't claim not to make editorial decisions based on content, they claim not to make them based on "political viewpoint or ideology", which is a narrow subset of content. "Hate speech" is not simply a politically viewpoint or ideology, it is particular way of promoting such an ideology. And there is nothing unusual about seeing that kind of promotion as distinct from news.
Google News clearly makes editorial decisions based on content -- deciding what source is and is not a "news" source is inherently an "editorial decision", and there is no rational basis for it except content. And, if the way a site acts changes, there is no reason to expect that that decision would not also change.
There is nothing contrary to Google News' claims going on here.
"Defense firms" does not mean that they were sued. When someone hires a lawyer and the lawyer contacts you to complain about something you've done, that's a red flag warning that you are likely to be sued. People that can afford to that think legal action is likely or even possible often preemptively hire appropriate counsel (for example, as I recall, President Bush hired a personal criminal defense attorney very early in the Plame leak investigation -- this doesn't mean criminal charges had been filed against him.)
And "defense law firms" are not incapable of preemptively suing, either.
As I understand the OLPC program, they are looking for governments to buy in bulk and provide them universally to children -- but I don't think they are concerned that they are distributed exclusively to children. So, if a government wants to provide them to everyone, OLPC probably won't object. Plus, since a major concern seems to be getting big enough orders, it would probably be a positive thing.
The more universally distributed they are, the less attractive they'll be to thieves. If virtually everyone has one anyway, there may not be a lot of resale market for black market ones. Well, except to third-world
They are designed to create mesh networks. Now, you make a good point that getting a connection to the broader internet may be a problem, and may require a trek to an access point. Then again, there is a lot of stuff you can do without a persistent, or even more than very-occasional, internet connection that would be useful, though us spoiled first-worlders may have forgotten about it.
Persistent internet connectivity for the masses is a fairly recent development in the first world. (Heck, internet connectivity for the first-world masses at all is mostly a feature of the last decade and change.)
With these, with the right software and education, even a remote village without power or phone lines could receive and send e-mail and get some other benefits of the internet, just by having someone bike into town with the village "mail server", make a wireless connection with a system persistently connected, and bike back and mesh with other servers in the village.
Sure, exploiting the potential will take an educational effort along with the delivery of hardware and software, plus will take people thinking about using the system outside of the context of expectations framed by first-world patterns of development and computer use, but, heck, the thinking outside the box that will require will probably have unexpected benefits even in the developed world.
Well, yeah, that's a valid aesthetic issue, though not a major substantive drawback.
Java is not "open source" or "free software", as those terms are generally used in the open source or free software communities -- open source is more than "available source".
Now, "available source" is a good thing (it means, for one thing, that you aren't relying on security through obscurity.), but its a different thing than "open source".
The trademark and compatibility certification Sun does now don't rely on Sun's implementation being closed (even if available) source, and it is that certification and control of the Java name as a trademark, not control of a closed-source reference implementation (though control of a reference implementation -- independent of source licensing model -- is an essential component to the credibility of Sun's certification effort) that safeguards, inasmuch as anything can, against fragmentation of the standard for the VM and the language and assorted related technologies. Its the specification and certification program -- and the fact that users, developers, etc. continue to find value in the standards it enforces, that keeps Java Java, not the fact that Sun happens to have a proprietary implementation.
Which is probably why they've said that they plan to open-source it, and that its a matter of how, not whether, that will happen. But there are choices of open source license to make, and different pieces of the implementation may need different licenses.
Libel is committed in republishing libels, not only in originating them.
Of course its an editorial decision. If you want no editorial decisions about what is or is not news, maybe you shouldn't use Google's product that is overtly specialized to news, and instead use their more general search engine, and decide what is news for yourself.
With Google Co-op, you can even set yourself up as an authority and tag what is or isn't news for others, if they are willing to subscribe to your ratings.
And, yeah, determining what is or is not appropriate for the news aggregator is a subjective determination, and whatever they decide, some people will disagree.
That its not based on "page rank" and that one excluded site "looks like news...to me" isn't really a strong argument that Google is doing anything wrong. Again, sure, its "questionable" in that its subjective and people will disagree. If you don't like it, you are free to set up your own index of what is and isn't news on the net -- Google will even let you use their infrastructure to do so and connect to interested users.
Yeah, actually, they do lose potency with time -- a lot faster than, say, copyrights.