Slashback: IceWeasel, Online Gambling, GPU Folding, Evolution 214
The facts about Debian Iceweasel. john-da-luthrun writes, "Debian Firefox/XULrunner maintainer Mike Hommey reports on the Firefox/Iceweasel wrangle, correcting various assertions that have been made in the assorted trollfests/flamewars currently raging over the proposed Firefox rename. Hommey confirms that Firefox in Etch will be renamed 'Iceweasel,' but this will only be a renamed version of the vanilla Firefox, not the GNU Iceweasel fork — though the Debian and GNU Iceweasel teams may work together in future."
A closer look at Folding@home's GPU client. TheRaindog writes, "Slashdot recently covered some impressive client statistics for Stanford's Folding@home project, but they don't tell the whole story. The Tech Report has taken a closer look at the GPU client, running it on a Radeon X1900 XTX against the CPU client on a dual-core Opteron. The results are enlightening, especially considering how Stanford has chosen to award points GPU client work units. Power consumption is more interesting, with the GPU client apparently far more power-efficient than folding with a CPU."
David Brin need not lament — KidBasic. sproketboy writes, "I was thinking about the recent slashdot story David Brin Laments Absence of Programming For Kids, and after looking around I found KidBasic. KidBasic is quite good and teaches all the basics of programming. My 4 year old nephew and I have been able to get a few simple games programmed with it."
Online gambling ban may violate international law. An anonymous reader writes, "As Slashdot noted earlier, Congress has passed an effective ban on online gambling in the U.S. This may not be the end of the story, however. The law may be struck down by the World Trade Organization on the grounds that it violates the United States' international obligation not to discriminate in favor of domestic casinos. If the WTO strikes down this U.S. gambling ban, it would not be the first time. In November of 2004, the WTO struck down a U.S. anti-gambling law as illegally discriminating against the nation of Antigua."
Human species may do whatnow?. jamie writes, "'I might have believed this nonsense could come from some late 19th century eugenicist, but now? Is there any evidence...?' That's biologist PZ Myers's comment on the BBC story that claims the human species may split in two. It was posted on Slashdot as humor, but Myers's comments are a much-needed sober appraisal of this kind of pseudoscientific claim."
Another RIAA lawsuit dropped. skelator2821 writes, "Another RIAA lawsuit has been dropped against a defendant who had been accused of illegally sharing songs online, according to Ars Technica. Looks like the Mob tactics are not paying off for our good friends at the RIAA anymore."
Something they forgot (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Nonsense (Score:5, Informative)
There may be one interesting consequence of the WTO opposing this law, though. The US federal government cannot regulate gambling transactions that don't cross state lines, due to the Commerce Clause [wikipedia.org] in the US Constitution. This means that any federal law restricting online gambling must exempt, at least implicitly, online gambling transactions that take place all in one state. One of the grounds of complaint that other WTO members apparently have with this law is that it treats intrastate gambling transactions differently from international ones, and if the WTO rules that this part of the complaint is valid, then the US would never be able to restrict online gambling in any way, and still remain in compliance with treaty obligations, without a Constitutional amendment or without all 50 states imposing the same regulations on intrastate gambling.
My Own Followup to David Brin's Article (Score:3, Informative)
http://akaimbatman.intelligentblogger.com/wordpre
Hey Idiots (Score:1, Informative)
In any event, anybody who thinks the concept of international law exists must believe in Santa Claus and the Tooth fairy.
Re:Crapweasel (Score:5, Informative)
1. Submit all patches to mozilla.com for approval. This includes security patches.
2. Debian's policy is to stick with a version of a given package for a release and backport security and stability fixes only. Mozilla.com would rather have everyone running the latest version at all times.
Basically, the codebase ceases to be Open Source if any product compiled from it is to be called Firefox. Very few other projects engage in this sort of control freakery and branding. If all Open Source projects behaved as Mozilla does, we'd have a real problem on our hands.
To pin ALL blame for this on Debian shows no understanding of what the issues are.
The World Trade Organization can strike down a law (Score:3, Informative)
As much as I'd appreciate giving the WTO such a power in this particular case, I'm afraid the ability to strike down laws of sovereign nations is far too extreme to allow this organization.
Fortunately, it seems the WTO doesn't actually have this power. They can declare a law in violation of the WTO. They can convince the member nations to implement sanctions against countries which remain in violation. But they don't seem to have the power to "strike down" any laws.
Re:Nonsense (Score:5, Informative)
In the wake of the Supreme Court's recent decision in Gonzales v. Raich, I doubt this is true. Raich essentially held that the government could ban all trade & production of cannabis in California, even that activity which involved entirely homegrown plants which never crossed state lines, on the theory that if local growers could introduce cannabis to a local marketplace, it would impact the nationwide cannabis market, and thus have a substantial cross-state effect.
(As a side note, I don't like the government banning medical marijuana, but there is no question that Raich was correctly decided. The same theory is also why landmark civil rights legislation, such as the act which forbids whites-only lunch counters, also applies to lunch counters which only serve local clients. One of the unfortunate things about constitutional law is that you often have to take the bitter with the sweet.)
The case for allowing interstate gambling to be banned is bolstered by the WTO. As has been correctly noted above, the WTO does not have the power to "strike down" laws, per se. It does, however, have the power to allow trade sanctions so onerous that any reasonable government would repeal the offending law on their own initiative. Given this framework (which is an international framework largely outside of U.S. hands), the federal government could likely defend an intrastate gambling ban on the grounds that, by banning intrastate gambling, the government avoids onerous trade sanctions, which itself has a substantial effect on interstate commerce.
Re:The rules of evolution... (Score:3, Informative)
Huh? Nope. You need some reason for speciation to occur, some form of genetic isolation (which may or may not mean geographical isolation, either is possible) as well as environmental or lifestyle differences large enough to actually push the groups in different directions, for long enough time for the groups not to be able to merge again.
There is nothing inevitable about those conditions arising, and there is nothing that says this will result in two daughter species rather than one surviving group and another that just goes extinct (most niches anywhere are already fully populated after all; if "you" as a group is pushed into a new niche, you're competing with species already very well adapted to exploiting it).
Re:The rules of evolution... (Score:5, Informative)
Where'd you get that idea?
Darwin's theory was beautiful because it was simple - Those specimens most fit to live in a given environment will prevale over specimens that are less fit for that environment. That's its only claim about the future of a species. We can infer that a species will, through natural selection, become more and more fit for its environment, but that's an inferrence. Mutation is a fickle mistress, and the vast majority of her works fail to produce viable specimens, let alone ones that are more fit than their predecessors.
Splitting isn't a necessity, but it is likely when (and only when) a population is isolated. In the absence of isolation, no speciation occurs since any viable mutations are folded back into the common gene pool. That's one of the many wonders of sexual reproduction. I believe you'll agree that if anything, isolation among human populations has nearly vanished in the past hundred years, and this trend looks (quite) likely to continue as we move into the future.
I'll grant that branching of our species is possible, but for the foreseeable future I think it's unlikely, and it's certainly not a foregone conclusion. If Darwin said otherwise, I'd love to hear about it.
Re:International law? (Score:5, Informative)
They up the ante by having the ability to allow penalties on almost any of the violating country's exports.
The WTO does this by allowing the people making the complaints to place some decided amount of import tariffs on any of the [violating country]'s export goods. The country(s) making the complaint can decide the products they want to place tariffs on.
The net result is that you may get away with breaking the rules... but only until the complaint works its way through the WTO system. Even the U.S. has been forced to play along.
Re:The World Trade Organization can strike down a (Score:3, Informative)
They can only respond to complaints about unfair trading practices, ie they cannot go out & 'declare a law in violation' unless someone comes to them first.
Since that person came to them, the WTO doesn't have to convince anyone. The complaint wouldn't be made if the complainer wasn't seeking relief.
Re:Crapweasel (Score:3, Informative)
Cheers,
Dave
Wait a minute... (Score:2, Informative)
(no link, you can click over on your own)
Re:The rules of evolution... (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-06/st
Wacky stuff. The parallels between butterfly attraction and pretty people are at least amusing.
Re:Stolen name; nice one. (Score:5, Informative)
Then, about a year ago, Mozilla® decided that this was not enough. That in order to use the name Firefox®, Debian would either have to submit all patches through Mozilla® and get them approved (thereby greatly delaying critical security patches) or not call the browser Firefox®.
Mozilla® has always been a primarily Windows-based program. It's architected around Windows and ported to UNIX and other systems almost as an after-thought. This has forced every single Linux distribution to apply patches to make Firefox® a well-behaved program. Some distributions are willing to go through what should be, for an "open source" project, a completely unnecessary patch approval process.
However, that goes completely against the point of Free software. So Debian has no choice - if they want to continue distributing a secure Firefox® that works within a Linux environment, they're forced to call it something else. So they're calling it by the name they came up with when the issue came up originally: Iceweasel.
This entire issue is 100% Mozilla®'s problem. None of the blame can possibly be placed on Debian, Mozilla® is being 100% unreasonable.
Re:Fault is being shortsighted. (Score:3, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Theory [wikipedia.org]
Civil Rights Legislation (Score:3, Informative)
Civil rights legislation is justified by Amendment XIV [cornell.edu], which provides for equal protection under the law. It gives Congress the authority to enforce civil rights laws, trumping states' rights.
Civil rights laws aren't based on the interstate commerce clause. All sorts of discrimination were legal before Amendment XIV was passed.
Re:Thy shall not steal (Score:1, Informative)
IIRC, it's actually the Vi or Emacs command structure to replace one string with the other. on a new line you'd type the s and the / then what it to be replaced, then another / and then what to replace it with with a closing /. This is also shorthand in IRC and forums (fora!) for correcting a typo in a previous statement.
[joe] hey kids, did you see the typo on Spashdot?[joe] s/Spashdot/Slashdot/
[frank] was that an accident or do you just have a keenly developed sense of irnoy?
[joe] s/irnoy/irony/ and no, Alanis, I wasn't being ironic.
Re:Thy shall not steal (Score:3, Informative)
Yes it would [origami.as].
Re:Thy shall not steal (Score:2, Informative)
http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/docs/ActivePerl/
Re:Stolen name; nice one. (Score:3, Informative)
KidBasic (Score:3, Informative)
Aaaanyway, what I'd recommend for his kid is IBOL: Icon Based Operation Language. Never heard of it? Try googling for 'ChipWits'
(Yes, this time I'm involved: am re-creating a freeware version of it for - gasp! shudder! - Windoze)
Ciao,
Klaus
Re:Stolen name; nice one. (Score:5, Informative)
Didn't Debian (TM) force people to stop using the word Debian (TM) ?
Another shining example of Debian (TM) pettiness.
Oh, that's why you need cygwin to build it -From Mozilla [mozilla.org]Re:Folding GPU not friendly (Score:1, Informative)
Just go to the FCF http://forum.folding-community.org/forum54,gpu-cl
Re:Stolen name; nice one. (Score:1, Informative)
The build system requires UNIX tools. However the application it builds is undeniably aimed towards Windows. The Firefox® UI fits in very well to Windows. It fits in poorly with with GNOME, and it doesn't fits in at all with Mac OS X.
(And on the ® symbol, neither Microsoft nor Apple use it for their OS name on their homepage. Mozilla® does use it on their homepage, so I'm just following their example.)