Business have the same choice. They can choose not to buy a product. It is a lot easier for business to organize through one of the organizations that they belong to, to not support a product than it is to get enough consumers to do the same to be effective.
Most companies will be a member of some industry group. That industry group could very easily put enough pressure on a company selling a Tivoized product and get that company to ease up the restrictions.
I think it would be pretty easy to prove in court who the target audience is. So just because someone with some money to blow buys some major hardware wouldn't mean the target audience has changed.
There had to be some "give" for corporate products. Think corporate security. There is a clear difference between consumer and corporate products. If I buy a Tivo, I buy it for my OWN use and should have the freedom to modify the Free code that is used in the product.
In contrast, a COMPANY buys a product not for any one individual employee. So as am admin, it would not be _your_ mainframe. As far as mainframes go, a company would lease it, just like leasing a car.
I think the GPLv3 could have limited both segments. However, corporations generally buy products with limitations to try to increase security. On the other hand, a consumer would go out of his way to buy a product that put arbitrary restrictions on what he can do with his property.
EFI is a great replacement for a crappy old BIOS, any day of the week. With that said..
I am a new Apple convert. I bought an Intel iMac with the Core 2 duo, and a MacBook with the Core Duo this year. I was a heavy Linux geek and I have been a programmer on MS systems for the past 12 years. I have to say that I love OS X. It is really great.
Seeing things about DRM and Apple makes me a little nervous though. I will quickly sell both my Intel Macs and jump back to Linux if I think Apple is trying to push DRM crap on me. However, so far, that doesn't seem to be the case. For example, there is no crappy MS "activation" crap with OS X. I could use my OS X install DVD's and install OS X on any number of Macs, no questions asked, and most importantly, no crappy "activation". So as of now, it seems that Apple is trusting its users to buy the right number of licenses to install their OS. That is a far cry from what MS does with their activation junk.
Even though I love OS X, I do have some problems with iTMS and iTunes. Out of the box, iTunes doesn't play many non-Apple or non-proprietary formats. Thanks to projects like Perian that can be taken care of, though I personally just use VLC which blows away Quicktime. The biggest problem I have had is that all the TV shows I have bought from iTMS has been trapped in a DRM-only format. I wish Apple would provide a way to transcode to a DVD MPEG-2 format so I can watch the shows on my TV. No, I don't want to have to buy an AppleTV to watch my iTMS-only content. If AppleTV allowed me to watch the Divx/Xvid rips I made of the DVD's that I own, then hell yeah, I would buy it.
So to sum up and get off my soap-box, I love OS X, I am just very weary about where Apple may go in the future WRT DRM. I really hope they do not take the Microsoft path. If so, I will get rid of all my Mac's and switch back to two PC's. One with Ubuntu Linux and one with WinXP. Though I hope I don't have to do that. After 6 months with OS X, I really don't want any other OS. Though, my freedoms are worth more than any OS to me.:-)
Well, to be fair, not everyone that has excelled in life had gone to a university. Heck, Billy G. and Steve J. both dropped out of university and both are worth billions (USD)!
There is also the problem of which university you go to. Not all CompSci courses are made equal.
Oh, and there are also those that are very smart that get very bored by some of the universities curriculum. I remember when I was in college, I had to take all kinds of crap course for a CompSci. degree. Those course had nothing to do with my major. They were a waste of time and most importantly, a waste of my money.
I would love to see discipline specific courses at universities. Why the hell should I spend my money on American history, when I am an EE major?
The US education system needs a major revamp. The beginning of 11th or 12th grade, students should learn about specific job functions. Find out what each students wants to do, and get them on a "fast track" to that career. Why spend 4 years in college when not all of those 4 years are spent learing about the job function you want to do with your life?
Not to sound like a Troll, however, I have been a programmer for more than 12 years. I have worked with many different languages. I can say for certain that this article should be required by every VB and COBOL programmer in the world.
I have never met a group of programmers less competent than some of the "VB only" "programmers" I have had to work with. If the topic doesn't deal with kiddie stuff like connecting to a DB and grabbing a few rows of data, most VB-only people I have personally worked with are totally lost. Sure, most VB-only dudes can throw together a cheesy "click button, do X" type of program. Call me when VB is a real dev. language. No, VB.Net doesn't cut it IMO. It is still too juvenile and overly verbose of a language IMO. C# was made for.Net. If you cannot understand and program in C#, well IMO, you should be on some assembly line or something, certainly not a "programmer".
Now cue all the VB-only dorks that want to support their position. Hey, here is a question, why not learn to program in more than just VB? I have never met a real programmer that know languages like C, C++, Java, C#, etc that would "rather program in VB". It just isn't the case. So any VB "programmer" that says they can program in other languages is just talking out their @ss.
Once someone learns to be proficient in any language other than VB, I am willing to bet they wouldn't want to touch VB again.
Cue the VB-only "programmers" that now say, "I can program in x, y and z. However, I think VB is the bestest ever!!!". Yeah, your type won't be hired by the programming group I work for. Thank God.!!!!
The GPL is about user rights, not developer rights. I think the GPLv3 is doing what it has to to protect end-users from DRM and other patent crap. Don't think of the GPLv3 as trying to control what developers can and can't do. Think of it as trying to make sure that end users get to have rights to the software. That should help put it in the right perspective.
For current versions of software yes. However, if the software has one copyright holder, such as GNU tools, the next versions can say "GPL v3 or later". Which I am sure it will. Also, any new development can also only say "GPL v3 or later". Doing this over time will slowly make GPL v2 go away for a lot of Free software. Though, I doubt everyone will jump on board of the GPL v3. Last I heard, the kernel might stay at GPL v2 or later.
No, you don't. If you release any code under the GPL, any user is granted rights to that code. Regardless of what crap you think. If you release "your" code under the GPL, I have full rights to modify, distribute or sell the code I got from you.
See there's the exact problem. People think working with corporations are a bad thing and a contradiction. And that's why Linux will die.
This is just silly. Linux will never "die". It may never be mainstream, however it won't die. It is a robust OS with tons of devs interested in developing for it. Sure, it might not come in a pretty box like Vista; it might not have 7 different versions like vista and it probably won't be priced anything like vista, but it will never die.
Working with Corps. WRT Free software can be a little hard. At the end of the day, any for-profit corp. only cares about one thing. Profits. If making more profits means taking away users rights to the software, well so be it. Some exec will make that choice and sign the papers. That right there would kill the Free software to corp. relationship. So exactly how can Free software (not "open source") have a trusting relationship with a corp. (which is just a legal entity that is separate from its owners), if at every opportunity the corp. would drop the ideals of Free software for profit?
I see so many people stuck on this idea that Free software is about competition. No it is not. It is about giving end-users far more rights to the work than they get with copyright alone, and especially with proprietary license agreements.
I believe Free software and corps can exist just fine, as long as each entity knows the limit of the other. Corps. can put a bunch of cash into a project generally not available to most Free software projects. That cash can really help a project go from some "kiddy fun-toy" to something like tomcat or Apache or KDE or Gnome or...
Free software can give the corps a very great swath of code to use to differentiate their products and not have to "reinvent the wheel". By using Free software, a corp can expand its products and lower dev costs by not having to rewrite libraries that have been done and debugged and proven to be stable. This is where the LGPL is really great IMO. If a company wants to write a closed source proprietary app that handles CD/DVD burners, they can. They can get a head start by using Free software libs. Heck, even Microsoft uses GPL covered software in its Windows Services for UNIX product.
There is a lot of potential for both sides to co-exist. However, most people on either side seems to want it to be one or the other to "win". To me, that is not a real-world-solution. I think the best solution is to meet in the middle and for each "side" to see the limitations of the other.
Huh? Even if MS gave away their code with a purchase of MS Windows, you couldn't change the code and distribute it. With GPL, I could download your code that you charge for, and then give it to everyone I want without fee. You cannot do that with proprietary code. Heck, end-users are not even allowed to OWN the code/software they buy from a proprietary vendor. They just get to use/license it.
Everyone keeps thinking the GPL is about developers. However it is not. The GPL is about users and their freedom with the software. Say it over and over in your heads people... The GPL is about users.
BSD-style licenses basically say I don't care about what you do and I don't care if you restrict users of derivatives works of this code.
GPL-style licenses basically say you can create derivative works, you can distribute those works. However, you cannot restrict the rights of the users of this work from doing the same. BSD does NOT provide for that when it comes to derivative works.
So, in a nut shell, if you don't care who does what with the code, BSD or (even better IMO) LGPL can help you there. However, if you care about the users of your work the GPL is a good bet.
Me personally, I write code for users not developers. I enjoy writing code and having someone say that it came in handy and helped them. Those are the people I want to see have rights that copyright just doesn't provide.
Seriously, there are a lot of Christians out there (like me) that almost fell out of a chair when reading this crap.
Yes, I believe is some spiritual life. However, if someone tells me the Earth is only 6,000 years old, well, I think that person should be committed. It is sad, IMO, that a few wacho "christian" sects get to totally destroy the reputation of Christians with most most people. To me it is no different than people who think all Muslims want to strap a bomb to themselves and blow up kids or something. Or that all Jews "own the world's wealth".
I am glad I do not live in that crappy state. I am a card-carrying-member of the ACLU and I donate every month (they have a monthly plan). I hope that this kind of crap can be stopped.
A lot of people I know don't think you can be a Christian and support an organization like the ACLU. Why, because the ACLU supports RIGHTS that some so called "Christians" don't agree with. Well, I am not one of them. While I do not support abortion (I have 3 kids and I am working on #4:-), I do not think it should be "illegal". Abortion is a personal choice and should be a freedom that ever women has. Granted, my personal opinion is that no one should ever have an abortion unless there is a medical reason. However, I have no right to force my own opinion on any other HUMAN!
Oh, well, let me get off my soap-box:-)
I just want to leave my fellow geeks with the knowledge that not all Christians are sick-freaks like the ones in the article. Seriously, what intelligent human would think the Earth is only 6,000 y/o? We have tons of scientific evidence showing how old the Earth is.
Every time I read a story like this, I cringe! It makes me sad about the fact that so many Christians are mislead and uninformed:-(
I guess you don't know anything about an embedded DB? SQLite makes "sacrafices" for the sake of low footprint/performance. For example, SQLite, treats all fields the same. Where a normal RDBMS would do checks to insure data type, SQLite, skips those things for speed/footprint.
Before you "cry wolf" over some technology being put into Firefox, why don't you read up on it? Hell, SQLite has been around for a long time. The feature-set is well known. Oh, and if you are using Firefox 2.x, well, guess what, SQLite, is a part of Firefox 2.x.
And you whole "point" about using a relational DB to store "flat data" is just silly. Firefox keeps a lot of info about a bookmark. That has to be stored somewhere.
Since SQLite is already a part of Firefox 2.x and since there have been no problems with the SQLite in Firefox 2.x, it seems safe to say that Firefox 3.x should keep SQLite and actually take advantage of the great SQL support.
I would love to be able to sort my Firefox bookmarks with no hassle. However, that is not currently the case.
Bitching about some technology that you do not understand is pretty chee-see IMO.
SQLite usually beats out MySQL and PostgreSQL for many things. However, it really depends on what you are using it for. SQLite was not made to be a full-blown RDMS. Here is a speed test.
I have never had my profile corrupted with Firefox. I use Firefox on WinXP, OS X and Linux and keep my profile in sync with Google Browser Sync. However, if your profile does get corrupted, the bookmarks file should be fine since SQLite supports standard RDBMS constructs to keep the file from being corrupted. Since SQLite uses a regular file (like Access, but much, much better), you can just copy it to where ever you want as a backup.
You think a SQL db that only takes up 250K is significant? Geez, what do you have like 4MB of memory? The SQLite DB is already in FF 2. So it will not add anything to FF 3. However, the bookmarks will now just take advantage of SQLite, which they currently do not. This will give you plenty of ways to sort your bookmarks and store more info for each bookmark. For example, in FF 2 you can give a bookmark a keyword. This way you can just type that keyword and go to that URL. I use can type "/." and press enter and get to/. with no clicks. I have a lot of keywords setup for my most used bookmarks. Bookmarks in FF are more than just list of strings. They have a URL, name, keyword and description. One big problem with bookmarks in FF 2 is the inability to sort properly. FF 3 should fix that now that FF 3 will be able to use Order By to sort how the user likes.
SQLite has this name because it is... lite! It has a very, very small footprint. By your comment, I can tell you have never used it. I have. It is designed to be small and easy to embed into an app with out requiring a bunch of resources.
The whole "representative democracy" just doesn't work any more. It was good a few hundred years ago when generally the most educated in society became members of the government. However, that is not close to the case today. Our "representatives" don't come close to being the most educated in anything.
We need a real democracy where we the people get to vote on everything. Some people would say that is "mob rule". However that is better than "those with the most money rule" IMO.
There would be plenty of ways to make a real democracy work where we the people vote on issues. For example, instead of 51% of the votes to pass a law, make it higher, say 75% or so.
Or, if we are to stay with a "representative democracy", strict laws should be passed to prevent a representative from getting any money in relation to their job other than their salary. Our "representatives" get a pretty nice salary, great health benefits. Oh, and their salary/benefits continues for life if they retire. They also continue to get raises during retirement. Though that is really not needed since most of our "representatives" that retire from the government retire as millionaires.
If that what the evidence/questioning shows, then no charges. Period. If I go to a club where I think everyone is 21+ and some 16 y/o gets in with a fake ID, we meet, and do-it; well, my actions were all led by the assumption that it was with an adult and it was consensual.
Slashdot Mirror
Business have the same choice. They can choose not to buy a product. It is a lot easier for business to organize through one of the organizations that they belong to, to not support a product than it is to get enough consumers to do the same to be effective.
Most companies will be a member of some industry group. That industry group could very easily put enough pressure on a company selling a Tivoized product and get that company to ease up the restrictions.
I think it would be pretty easy to prove in court who the target audience is. So just because someone with some money to blow buys some major hardware wouldn't mean the target audience has changed.
There had to be some "give" for corporate products. Think corporate security. There is a clear difference between consumer and corporate products. If I buy a Tivo, I buy it for my OWN use and should have the freedom to modify the Free code that is used in the product.
In contrast, a COMPANY buys a product not for any one individual employee. So as am admin, it would not be _your_ mainframe. As far as mainframes go, a company would lease it, just like leasing a car.
I think the GPLv3 could have limited both segments. However, corporations generally buy products with limitations to try to increase security. On the other hand, a consumer would go out of his way to buy a product that put arbitrary restrictions on what he can do with his property.
EFI is a great replacement for a crappy old BIOS, any day of the week. With that said..
:-)
I am a new Apple convert. I bought an Intel iMac with the Core 2 duo, and a MacBook with the Core Duo this year. I was a heavy Linux geek and I have been a programmer on MS systems for the past 12 years. I have to say that I love OS X. It is really great.
Seeing things about DRM and Apple makes me a little nervous though. I will quickly sell both my Intel Macs and jump back to Linux if I think Apple is trying to push DRM crap on me. However, so far, that doesn't seem to be the case. For example, there is no crappy MS "activation" crap with OS X. I could use my OS X install DVD's and install OS X on any number of Macs, no questions asked, and most importantly, no crappy "activation". So as of now, it seems that Apple is trusting its users to buy the right number of licenses to install their OS. That is a far cry from what MS does with their activation junk.
Even though I love OS X, I do have some problems with iTMS and iTunes. Out of the box, iTunes doesn't play many non-Apple or non-proprietary formats. Thanks to projects like Perian that can be taken care of, though I personally just use VLC which blows away Quicktime. The biggest problem I have had is that all the TV shows I have bought from iTMS has been trapped in a DRM-only format. I wish Apple would provide a way to transcode to a DVD MPEG-2 format so I can watch the shows on my TV. No, I don't want to have to buy an AppleTV to watch my iTMS-only content. If AppleTV allowed me to watch the Divx/Xvid rips I made of the DVD's that I own, then hell yeah, I would buy it.
So to sum up and get off my soap-box, I love OS X, I am just very weary about where Apple may go in the future WRT DRM. I really hope they do not take the Microsoft path. If so, I will get rid of all my Mac's and switch back to two PC's. One with Ubuntu Linux and one with WinXP. Though I hope I don't have to do that. After 6 months with OS X, I really don't want any other OS. Though, my freedoms are worth more than any OS to me.
Have you never heard the term Robber baron? Read the article. The current software market is not much different.
Well, to be fair, not everyone that has excelled in life had gone to a university. Heck, Billy G. and Steve J. both dropped out of university and both are worth billions (USD)!
:-)
There is also the problem of which university you go to. Not all CompSci courses are made equal.
Oh, and there are also those that are very smart that get very bored by some of the universities curriculum. I remember when I was in college, I had to take all kinds of crap course for a CompSci. degree. Those course had nothing to do with my major. They were a waste of time and most importantly, a waste of my money.
I would love to see discipline specific courses at universities. Why the hell should I spend my money on American history, when I am an EE major?
The US education system needs a major revamp. The beginning of 11th or 12th grade, students should learn about specific job functions. Find out what each students wants to do, and get them on a "fast track" to that career. Why spend 4 years in college when not all of those 4 years are spent learing about the job function you want to do with your life?
OK, I am off my soap-box now
Not to sound like a Troll, however, I have been a programmer for more than 12 years. I have worked with many different languages. I can say for certain that this article should be required by every VB and COBOL programmer in the world.
.Net. If you cannot understand and program in C#, well IMO, you should be on some assembly line or something, certainly not a "programmer".
I have never met a group of programmers less competent than some of the "VB only" "programmers" I have had to work with. If the topic doesn't deal with kiddie stuff like connecting to a DB and grabbing a few rows of data, most VB-only people I have personally worked with are totally lost. Sure, most VB-only dudes can throw together a cheesy "click button, do X" type of program. Call me when VB is a real dev. language. No, VB.Net doesn't cut it IMO. It is still too juvenile and overly verbose of a language IMO. C# was made for
Now cue all the VB-only dorks that want to support their position. Hey, here is a question, why not learn to program in more than just VB? I have never met a real programmer that know languages like C, C++, Java, C#, etc that would "rather program in VB". It just isn't the case. So any VB "programmer" that says they can program in other languages is just talking out their @ss.
Once someone learns to be proficient in any language other than VB, I am willing to bet they wouldn't want to touch VB again.
Cue the VB-only "programmers" that now say, "I can program in x, y and z. However, I think VB is the bestest ever!!!". Yeah, your type won't be hired by the programming group I work for. Thank God.!!!!
The GPL is about user rights, not developer rights. I think the GPLv3 is doing what it has to to protect end-users from DRM and other patent crap. Don't think of the GPLv3 as trying to control what developers can and can't do. Think of it as trying to make sure that end users get to have rights to the software. That should help put it in the right perspective.
Are all parts of the kernel GPLv2 only? There are tons of contributors, are they all required to do GPLv2 only?
Basically Novell went over to Goatse's house with a big jar of vaseline and now they are wondering why they came out sore.
Whoa there champ. Is this in Klingon or something? Can some Trekkie translate for us? :-)
For current versions of software yes. However, if the software has one copyright holder, such as GNU tools, the next versions can say "GPL v3 or later". Which I am sure it will. Also, any new development can also only say "GPL v3 or later". Doing this over time will slowly make GPL v2 go away for a lot of Free software. Though, I doubt everyone will jump on board of the GPL v3. Last I heard, the kernel might stay at GPL v2 or later.
You know the post you are replying to is meant as sarcasm. :-)
Working with Corps. WRT Free software can be a little hard. At the end of the day, any for-profit corp. only cares about one thing. Profits. If making more profits means taking away users rights to the software, well so be it. Some exec will make that choice and sign the papers. That right there would kill the Free software to corp. relationship. So exactly how can Free software (not "open source") have a trusting relationship with a corp. (which is just a legal entity that is separate from its owners), if at every opportunity the corp. would drop the ideals of Free software for profit?
I see so many people stuck on this idea that Free software is about competition. No it is not. It is about giving end-users far more rights to the work than they get with copyright alone, and especially with proprietary license agreements.
I believe Free software and corps can exist just fine, as long as each entity knows the limit of the other. Corps. can put a bunch of cash into a project generally not available to most Free software projects. That cash can really help a project go from some "kiddy fun-toy" to something like tomcat or Apache or KDE or Gnome or
Free software can give the corps a very great swath of code to use to differentiate their products and not have to "reinvent the wheel". By using Free software, a corp can expand its products and lower dev costs by not having to rewrite libraries that have been done and debugged and proven to be stable. This is where the LGPL is really great IMO. If a company wants to write a closed source proprietary app that handles CD/DVD burners, they can. They can get a head start by using Free software libs. Heck, even Microsoft uses GPL covered software in its Windows Services for UNIX product.
There is a lot of potential for both sides to co-exist. However, most people on either side seems to want it to be one or the other to "win". To me, that is not a real-world-solution. I think the best solution is to meet in the middle and for each "side" to see the limitations of the other.
Huh? Even if MS gave away their code with a purchase of MS Windows, you couldn't change the code and distribute it. With GPL, I could download your code that you charge for, and then give it to everyone I want without fee. You cannot do that with proprietary code. Heck, end-users are not even allowed to OWN the code/software they buy from a proprietary vendor. They just get to use/license it.
Everyone keeps thinking the GPL is about developers. However it is not. The GPL is about users and their freedom with the software. Say it over and over in your heads people... The GPL is about users.
BSD-style licenses basically say I don't care about what you do and I don't care if you restrict users of derivatives works of this code.
GPL-style licenses basically say you can create derivative works, you can distribute those works. However, you cannot restrict the rights of the users of this work from doing the same. BSD does NOT provide for that when it comes to derivative works.
So, in a nut shell, if you don't care who does what with the code, BSD or (even better IMO) LGPL can help you there. However, if you care about the users of your work the GPL is a good bet.
Me personally, I write code for users not developers. I enjoy writing code and having someone say that it came in handy and helped them. Those are the people I want to see have rights that copyright just doesn't provide.
Seriously, there are a lot of Christians out there (like me) that almost fell out of a chair when reading this crap.
:-), I do not think it should be "illegal". Abortion is a personal choice and should be a freedom that ever women has. Granted, my personal opinion is that no one should ever have an abortion unless there is a medical reason. However, I have no right to force my own opinion on any other HUMAN!
:-)
:-(
Yes, I believe is some spiritual life. However, if someone tells me the Earth is only 6,000 years old, well, I think that person should be committed. It is sad, IMO, that a few wacho "christian" sects get to totally destroy the reputation of Christians with most most people. To me it is no different than people who think all Muslims want to strap a bomb to themselves and blow up kids or something. Or that all Jews "own the world's wealth".
I am glad I do not live in that crappy state. I am a card-carrying-member of the ACLU and I donate every month (they have a monthly plan). I hope that this kind of crap can be stopped.
A lot of people I know don't think you can be a Christian and support an organization like the ACLU. Why, because the ACLU supports RIGHTS that some so called "Christians" don't agree with. Well, I am not one of them. While I do not support abortion (I have 3 kids and I am working on #4
Oh, well, let me get off my soap-box
I just want to leave my fellow geeks with the knowledge that not all Christians are sick-freaks like the ones in the article. Seriously, what intelligent human would think the Earth is only 6,000 y/o? We have tons of scientific evidence showing how old the Earth is.
Every time I read a story like this, I cringe! It makes me sad about the fact that so many Christians are mislead and uninformed
I guess you don't know anything about an embedded DB? SQLite makes "sacrafices" for the sake of low footprint/performance. For example, SQLite, treats all fields the same. Where a normal RDBMS would do checks to insure data type, SQLite, skips those things for speed/footprint.
Before you "cry wolf" over some technology being put into Firefox, why don't you read up on it? Hell, SQLite has been around for a long time. The feature-set is well known. Oh, and if you are using Firefox 2.x, well, guess what, SQLite, is a part of Firefox 2.x.
And you whole "point" about using a relational DB to store "flat data" is just silly. Firefox keeps a lot of info about a bookmark. That has to be stored somewhere.
Since SQLite is already a part of Firefox 2.x and since there have been no problems with the SQLite in Firefox 2.x, it seems safe to say that Firefox 3.x should keep SQLite and actually take advantage of the great SQL support.
I would love to be able to sort my Firefox bookmarks with no hassle. However, that is not currently the case.
Bitching about some technology that you do not understand is pretty chee-see IMO.
With that said
SQLite usually beats out MySQL and PostgreSQL for many things. However, it really depends on what you are using it for. SQLite was not made to be a full-blown RDMS. Here is a speed test.
I have never had my profile corrupted with Firefox. I use Firefox on WinXP, OS X and Linux and keep my profile in sync with Google Browser Sync. However, if your profile does get corrupted, the bookmarks file should be fine since SQLite supports standard RDBMS constructs to keep the file from being corrupted. Since SQLite uses a regular file (like Access, but much, much better), you can just copy it to where ever you want as a backup.
You think a SQL db that only takes up 250K is significant? Geez, what do you have like 4MB of memory? The SQLite DB is already in FF 2. So it will not add anything to FF 3. However, the bookmarks will now just take advantage of SQLite, which they currently do not. This will give you plenty of ways to sort your bookmarks and store more info for each bookmark. For example, in FF 2 you can give a bookmark a keyword. This way you can just type that keyword and go to that URL. I use can type "/." and press enter and get to /. with no clicks. I have a lot of keywords setup for my most used bookmarks. Bookmarks in FF are more than just list of strings. They have a URL, name, keyword and description. One big problem with bookmarks in FF 2 is the inability to sort properly. FF 3 should fix that now that FF 3 will be able to use Order By to sort how the user likes.
SQLite has this name because it is... lite! It has a very, very small footprint. By your comment, I can tell you have never used it. I have. It is designed to be small and easy to embed into an app with out requiring a bunch of resources.
The whole "representative democracy" just doesn't work any more. It was good a few hundred years ago when generally the most educated in society became members of the government. However, that is not close to the case today. Our "representatives" don't come close to being the most educated in anything.
We need a real democracy where we the people get to vote on everything. Some people would say that is "mob rule". However that is better than "those with the most money rule" IMO.
There would be plenty of ways to make a real democracy work where we the people vote on issues. For example, instead of 51% of the votes to pass a law, make it higher, say 75% or so.
Or, if we are to stay with a "representative democracy", strict laws should be passed to prevent a representative from getting any money in relation to their job other than their salary. Our "representatives" get a pretty nice salary, great health benefits. Oh, and their salary/benefits continues for life if they retire. They also continue to get raises during retirement. Though that is really not needed since most of our "representatives" that retire from the government retire as millionaires.
If that what the evidence/questioning shows, then no charges. Period. If I go to a club where I think everyone is 21+ and some 16 y/o gets in with a fake ID, we meet, and do-it; well, my actions were all led by the assumption that it was with an adult and it was consensual.