Sun just couldn't compete with Linux and Intel. Open sourcing wasn't the problem. It probably helped, just not enough.

I'm not suggesting the Russians would be stupid enough to assassinate when the US wouldn't, it's just that an un-redacted release of these secret US documents probably wouldn't reveal many, if any Russian confidential informants.

Russia killing wikileakers for releasing these sorts of things may be an effective deterrent to future wikileakers releasing Russian secrets because there is less need to stick your neck out to expose Russia since their tyranny is fairly open. On the other hand, leaking the bad deeds of the US could contribute significantly to convincing or enlightening those who support the US or its leaders.

The US better not kill Assange because then future leaks probably wouldn't be redacted and past leaks would probably be re-released unredacted. The names of confidential informants would be released directly into the open. Future leaks would still happen because this stuff wasn't leaked by Wikileaks, it was leaked by the army guy that stole them. He could have just emailed the documents to a thousand random email addresses and every newspaper in the world, including our enemies. He could have posted a torrent link on Slashdot and had it downloaded 10,000 times before the gov noticed it, by people here that have the expertise to distribute it reliably. Wikileaks is just publicizing and making convenient what would be out there anyway. The guy who actually leaked these things couldn't possibly have redacted them himself, and he couldn't have asked for help from the govt. So governments should encourage leaks to go through Wikileaks.

I don't know if Russia will kill him. He might be making himself hard to find.

I can't say that Muslims in general want to use force to take over the world. Some Muslims surely do, particularly terrorists, but most Muslims might only advocate for a voluntary conversion of the world.

The British knew the Irish were not going to take over all of Great Britain, whereas the Muslims have expressed their intent to make the whole world an Islamic republic. They will do it by force if they can.

Even just putting the terrorist to work at a low wage job and taking the excess income would probably make a terrorist life worth at least tens of thousands over a lifetime. The pantie bomber was the son of a wealthy person. The pantie bomber could have contributed many thousands more by working his dad for money than the small amount of money spent on his attack.

Besides, it's not quite correct to equate lives to any dollar amount. To paraphrase General Patton: You don't win a war by dying for your country. You win a war by making some other dumb bastard die for his country.

A lot of tyrannical governments seem to think the effort to limit speech is worth the trouble. They apparently disagree with you and think that it does do something.

That was probably Saudi Arabia surrendering rather than the US. That and/or the US was probably planning to pull out of there anyway.

No, the terrorists really do want to enslave us. They support laws prohibiting criticism of their religion, for example. That's anti-freedom and anti-truth.

You wouldn't be allowed to publicly make comments like that if your government was enslaving you.

publiclurker wrote:

Except we are the ones doing the enslaving, assuming that their governments don't just roll over so that your corporate bosses can take advantage of them.

It cost the terrorists way more than $4200 to pull this off. Many of them died trying to pull off attacks like this. Same with the 9/11 attacks. Many of them paid for the attacks with their lives, either killed or captured.

On the other hand, at least some of the trillions we've spent are an inevitable part of defending ourselves in a world where there are always people trying to enslave you.

LMI claims to have introduced the Bod Pod body fat measurement pod in 1994. You sit inside the egg shaped bod pod while a loudspeaker increases and decreases the volume of the pod. The change in pressure inside the pod as the volume of the pod is changed, determines the airspace remaining inside the pod after your body fills the pod up part way. The less airspace left inside the pod, the faster the pressure will rise as the loudspeaker pushes into the pod. The airspace remaining in the pod minus the volume of the pod gives the volume of your body. A scale determines your weight. Your weight and volume determine your density, and that is used to estimate your body fat. Fudge factors have to be used to account for the varying characteristics of the air in your lungs and the layer of warm air near your skin and especially trapped between your clothes or bathing suit or hair. This system is less trouble than the traditional method of determining body density by weighing a person while under water. See bodpod.com

Last time I checked, even if you didn't install ntpd, Ubuntu would use ntpdate to set your clock at every boot from the ubuntu ntp server. Setting your clock to a GPS receiver using the serial NMEA data gives pathetic accuracy. For good accuracy your GPS should have a pulse per second output. The problem is that even if your $40 GPS has a pulse per second pin on the circuit board, it won't have any way to get it into your system. You can get much better accuracy from the ntp pool servers than from the NMEA output of a GPS. Using stratum 2 pool servers carefully selected for stability appears to give me accuracy within 2 milliseconds. The large majority of the pool servers drift up and down several milliseconds over time. Even if you take whatever mediocre pool servers you're offered, you'll probably stay within 10 milliseconds.

I'm surprised they needed this given that Ubuntu already contacts the Ubuntu Network Time Protocol server and the security updates server regularly. Though I suppose both might have been redirected to local servers in some cases.

In many fields of science you can just go check the results in your own lab. But in climate science, that is often impractical. And even when it is practical, there may be nobody interested in going to do it. Oil companies and climate skeptics probably won't bother to go out and get tree rings because they're not worried about global warming. If climate scientists want people to listen, then they have to have credibility. We don't have to prove them wrong. They have to prove their case. The default if they don't prove their case is that we will just continue using the cheapest energy available as we have been doing. I suspect that as more and more people find out about Mike's Nature trick, and climate science's defense of it, there will be less and less support for spending a lot of money on global warming. Mike's Nature trick will continue to destroy climate science until climate science disclaims it.

To spite my pointed and repeated challenge for you to disclaim or defend Mike's Nature trick, you still will not. Your refusal only hurts the credibility of your side. It makes it look like you know there is no defense.