Why cant they just do this in Texas?

They can and do, the issue here is that a group of ignorant religious nutjobs is attempting to convert the United States from a secular nation where there is a clear distinction between church and state into a theocracy where there is a separation between church and state except when it is Christianity. This is the western version of the Taliban, they occasionally resort to violence but for now they restrict their actions mostly to politics and media.

Anyone who is so rabidly and psychotically devoted to their pseudo science religious doctrine is free to send their children to a private school or even home school, they just can't expect the secular state to pay for their religious indoctrination. Nobody is forced to send their children to a public school where real science is taught.

Hey there are teachers at universities that teach that the 9/11 attacks where a plot by the US government and they get defended on the grounds of Academic freedom.

Try reading the article you linked again. The Geosciences professor is not teaching the 9/11 conspiracy theory, she is exercising her freedom to publicly speech her opinion.

So do you want the government to tell teachers what they can and can not teach?

Short answer, yes. Long answer, the government does not need to micro-manage public education down to every minute detail but they do need to set some type of standard.

K-12 is only a primary education and the students, and often even the educators, almost certainly lack the time, knowledge, or materials to effectively question or critique generally accepted scientific theories. Once the exit K-12 should should have the necessary foundation to enter a university where they can then effectively engage in serious research and critique.

Evolution is generally accepted as is gravity. Newton's laws of gravity are known to be inaccurate but the theory is generally accepted, accurate enough to be useful and easily taught in the K-12 program. You don't throw out Newton's lessons and insert Einstein's relativity theories as the math required exceeds the ability of most K-12 students and educators. And relativity is not perfect either, but you would not expect K-12 students to spend their class time trying to develop an accurate theory when they don't even know what a theory is, how science works, or have virtually any of the tools necessary to perform such a task.

Standards are necessary, teaching the controversy serves no purpose in K-12, and lets be honest, everyone knows the purpose and intent is to replace science with religion which would be damaging. God done it is not an acceptable answer from a student who completes K-12.

*sigh* This rhetoric is so tired. Pretending that every Christians subscribes to this one interpretation of the creation story in Genesis is ridiculous. I knew this post would be here even before I entered the comments section.

Yes, for as long as the battle has been raging with Christians electing government officials with the intent of forcing Christianity on every citizen who is governed you would think that those who do not follow the faith would have given up by now. Yet they continue to struggle and publish articles, make comments, and launch legal defences against this continual encroachment of the ecclesiastical upon the governed.

But fret not, if you are weary of the battle then do not read articles and their comments that are obviously related to the struggle and if you really want to end the struggle then the next time you vote make sure you select a candidate that has the mental and moral strength to restrain themselves from injecting their religious struggles into the laws of the people.

In TFA he doesn't actually state what the risk is with copyrights but I assume the risk is that developers who contribute code to a project may be angered by the choice of licensing used by the project and will no longer contribute to the project. The only example provided in the article mentions some vagueness in the Ubuntu project licensing terms that suggest Canonical may license contributed resources under a license of their choice.

It doesn't seem like much of a risk, it's not as if Ubuntu is the only game in town for open source contributors.

The other issue, software patents, are a risk for all businesses whether they develop or just use closed source or open source software.

when you ran out of fuel in the other cars, you took a few minutes to fill up and could go back out. The Tesla, on the other hand, was done for the day as it took something like 12 hours to recharge

An issue, yes, an insurmountable issue, no, and an issue that was only in the minds of the Top Gear hosts rather than reality.

Running out of charge and pushing the car to the shop was a stunt, a hoax, it was fake, neither car ran out of charge.

I like watching most of the Top Gear shows but I expect them to flog cars not their egos and stubborn pride.

You might think a 60+ mile per gallon Kawasaki Ninja 250 with a 4.8 gallon fuel tank will have a range of over 200 miles but it seems if I drive around in circles in my driveway it only has a range of a few hundred feet.

I am tired of people complaining that a free product that saves them $2500.00 a pop every time they use it on a server is not being completed fast enough for their liking.

Just ignore them, keep up the good work, and thanks.

LOL, those guys at Microsoft are quite the jokers.

So they cover their ass with an exception that says it is okay if their copyrighted material is packaged over seas by a company that pirates software so nobody can sue Microsoft under this law and then they block open source software from the same protection under the law even though the most popular open source software in use is protected by copyright.

Yep, scum bags will be scum bags, never fails.

they might even start hiring US work force again and get the economy better

Their will be no jobs.

Microsoft will not hire any more people to reproduce and package software. Reproduction costs are virtually $0, this is why software piracy is so rampant, and even if they did need to expand their factory that produces CDs and shrink wrapped boxes its likely they'll open a factory over seas where they can pay dirt wages and avoid paying any U.S. taxes.

State side companies hit by this new Microsoft law will have two choices, bring the manufacturing to the states and pay for Microsoft software licenses and employee wages here in the states or pay for the Microsoft software licenses in the Chinese factory and keep paying the dirt wages. Now which do you think they are going to choose? Yeah, I know, duh, no brainer.

In reality there will be no jobs and if enforced the only thing this will do is increase local retail prices for goods in the States so that local companies can pay off Microsoft to leave their dirt cheap Chinese manufacturing alone. It wont be feasible for many local companies to audit the various Chinese suppliers to verify if Microsoft's thugs are telling the truth about piracy and how much a Chinese manufacturer should be paying to Microsoft so they'll just bite the bullet, take a cut from their profits and hand it over to Microsoft. No jobs created, just a bit of inflation here in the States to boost Microsoft's bottom line.

You can go WinPhone and be indemnified by MSFT

Unfortunately that indemnification that you paid for does not cover nobody wanting to buy your product. I am pretty sure the smartphone manufacturers could not care less which OS is running on the phone as long as they sell like crazy.

When Asus was working on the first netbooks they tried to get Windows XP from Microsoft because they already knew from their research that nobody was going to pay a premium price for a low power laptop running Windows 7. Highly portable laptops were not a new concept, dirt cheap highly portable laptops were. Microsoft refused because obviously there was a risk of the Windows XP licenses cannibalizing their recently released, very expensive, super high profit margin Windows 7 product.

Given the choice of trying to sell a low power highly portable laptop with an OS that costs about as much as the hardware itself which was doomed to failure and risking Microsoft and all the paid FUDsters boogie man stories about the patent issues in linux they still released the first netbooks with linux and there was no Windows option.

Yes there is a cheap version of Windows 7 on netbooks now and at least in the U.S. they almost exclusive sell with Windows, but this was the goal of the netbooks in the first place, Microsoft had to capitulate or face losing out on market share. Since most people want a familiar OS on their laptops it only made sense for Microsoft to give in and put together a cheap version of Windows 7 fo the netbook market.

Smartphones are a different story. Nobody wants a WinPhone, there is no opportunity for capitulation because the phone makers know nobody wants a WinPhone, its a dead end. So given the choice of making phones that nobody wants versus making the phones that sell like crazy and taking on the companies that hate competition it is a no brainer, you make the product people will buy and go to court.

> One has to wonder...

Actually, no, there is no need to wonder. The only innovation in the iPhone is taking ideas and technology from other people and companies and putting it on a smart phone.

The multi-touch you seem to think everyone stole from Apple, guess what... Multitouch Overview.

Apple is not even close to being the inventor of multi-touch and it is not even that difficult to discover this fact if one simply does a quick google search before making false assumptions and writing a paragraph based on those false assumptions.

The iPhone is a pretty cool device but lets not get carried away and start making suggestions that other manufacturers and developers are lifting ideas from Apple without first checking to see if the ideas actually came from Apple in the first place.

Canonical is developing patches but they are now making only the complete Kernel as a tar ball available

I think there is some confusion here. Red Hat is no longer providing separate patches in the Red Hat kernel package. I am pretty sure Red Hat will continue to provide patches back to the kernel development community. I don't think the kernel developer community are downloading the Red Hat source RPM for the kernel and extracting the patches to include in the tree.

Ah, okay, that makes sense.

The problems arise if you try to take RedHat's patches and apply them in other distributions (Attems is in the Debian kernel team, so he is among the most affected people), or if you are among the breed of people still patching and rolling their own kernels.

Is this factual? From what I've read this change is distribution affects Red Hat's kernel source used in the Red Hat distro, this does not mean that Red Hat's kernel patches are not fed back into the kernel development process as individual patches.

I'm not a kernel dev so I don't know the exact process but it sounds like your saying the only way Red Hat contributions make it back into the kernel is by somebody outside of Red Hat extracting patches from the Red Hat distribution kernel source and putting them into the vanilla kernel development tree. Perhaps this is the way it works but I'm skeptical.

It effects the kernel devs and other distros that may want to incorporate some of Red Hats changes.

I doubt this is true, they are only changing how they package the Red Hat kernel source, I am sure they are still submitting changes to the community. It seems the difference here is if you want to use the Red Hat kernel but don't want certain patches, but if you just want to use Red Hat changes in a vanilla kernel I am sure the Red Hat developed patches will still be available.