Somewhere in between reading it wrong and it being written wrong. AFAIK OpenBTS has nothing to do with Burning Man except that Burning Man is using their software.

What part of "iPhone 4 has resolution that matches the resolution of the human eye when held at arm's length" did you miss? I'm guessing the part in bold. I for one would absolutely love to have a pair of glasses that met or exceeded the resolution my eyes could perceive. And frankly, even if the display is "wasting pixels" in a given scenario, the obvious solution is to cut back on processing somehow, perhaps by lowering the resolution of image rendering to what is needed instead of the native resolution of the display. Sure the device will need beefier hardware for the situations where it actually needs to render at native resolution, but nothing is forcing the system to actually use all of those resources at all times.

Actually you do. When you are in public, you give up some of your privacy rights. If you have a picture of you taken in a public place that will embarrass or harm you in some way, you have no legal recourse to avoid having that picture published as far as I know.

Repeat after me, "I have no expectation of privacy when in a public place.". It is an extremely simple principle, and I don't understand why people think that it doesn't apply to them.

There are laws against posting defamatory information of most kinds, but if it is a legitimate picture then there is no recourse.

I feel the same way, like about people telling photographers that it is illegal for them to take pictures in public. It isn't illegal for private citizens to claim rights that they don't actually have as far as I know, but it isn't right to do so.

Fair enough question. .Net is basically just the latest incarnation of MS's long history of writing (pretty good) programming platforms that they then use to generate lock-in for their platform. As you note, VB was outstandingly successful at this, locking huge swaths of the business market to MS technologies. They have actually done this a lot more than you would be aware of as a non-programmer with their extensions to C and C++, which were engineered better such that they weren't in the user's faces all the time.

As to the popularity, or lack thereof of .Net, we don't really have the luxury of only opposing popular platforms, because by the time they're popular, it's pretty much too late to effectively oppose them. We also don't have the luxury of only dealing with whatever is the most pressing threat to our freedom.

If you're already a Windows user, why would they need to "get" you? You're already captured. This kind of thing isn't about doing anything to the users, it's about locking in the software developers. You may notice people saying things like, "Linux will never take off unless people can use (insert some app here)". Well providing proprietary development environments is a big part of why it's difficult to just take (insert some app here) and run it on Linux.

As for MS's "promise", it's pretty worthless because as usual it only covers *part* of the specification. Much like Java, it's *possible* to write a portable application, but if you just write for Windows, it's generally going to use at least one (probably many) of the MS-only "extras" that are helpfully not labeled in any way as non-portable, and will therefore not be able to run on anything except Windows. The people working on Mono seem to think that if they provide enough cross-platform applications, that they can end up making a difference, but I'm pretty skeptical about that approach.

Sorry for the rather late reply, I don't tend to hit /. all that much on the weekends.

My understanding (not a ridiculously well-founded one, so I'd advise looking around some more as well) is that C, C++, Perl, PHP, Python, Lua, TCL... in other words pretty much every major language with the exception of Java and the .Net family, are substantially* free of this kind of problem. Personally I recommend C and Python, but I keep trying to grok lisp because of how awesome people keep saying it is ;)

*I say substantially because I do know that there are fully proprietary implementations of some of these languages, there are many compiler writers with a long history of "Embrace, Extend, ..., Profit!" in the C and C++ family, and some of the others may be subject to this as well, but the languages I listed, unlike Java/.Net have standard compilers and/or interpreters that ARE fully open.

I disagree, Sun made a promise.(full stop)
The industry believed them, and as a result is stuck with a proprietary and badly designed language.

NEVER take action based on a companies "promises". Either it's a legally binding agreement, or it doesn't even belong in your decision-making process.

tl;dr summary since I got pretty long-winded: The problem is that Java was never open in the first place. Users of FOSS need to learn to decide for themselves when technologies aren't really open, and avoid using them.

Does this really matter? It would have been good for PR, but is anyone really under the illusion that Oracle wants to play nice with anyone? Personally I'd rather companies make it clear when they intend to swing around the "government-sanctioned monopolist hammer" instead of pretending that they're really quite reasonable, but that you do owe them quite a bit of money for using that technology they insisted was really open. Regarding PR, this kind of activity does put companies in my, "prone to dangerous legal demands" category, but frankly, Sun and Oracle were already both in that category.

Valid and important question, but as a non-Android and non-Java developer, I'm not interested in the answer.

I wouldn't say Java is "less" open than C#. I do and always have put them in the same boat, which is "IP minefield, never develop in these environments." Also, this action changed NOTHING. Java has ALWAYS been an IP minefield just as much as C#, it's just that Sun managed to fool quite a few more people about it than Microsoft could. The only good patents are patents that are effectively neutered by PERMISSIVE patent grants. Sun's patent grant has always been a joke.

Another interesting question, OIN's license only grants acces to patents specifically related to the Linux System as defined by OIN. After a quick look through the listing, the Java SDK itself doesn't seem to be there. There are several components that rely on Java (ant, an eclipse java compiler, a gcc Java runtime), but if those packages don't exercise the patents in question, then Oracle is acting exactly as the OIN is designed to allow them to act.

I don't see this as a failing of OIN. The way I see it, the fact that the Java SDK isn't considered a part of the "Linux System" by OIN means that Oracle doesn't consider Java to be open, which means to me that I don't want to use or rely on Java. It's nice for PR to say things like, "OIN protects licensees from patent threats related to Linux", but if you're going to be doing business based on that assurance, you should definitely be checking the definitions and making sure that what you think is covered is actually covered.

After putting in a bit more thought before posting, I have to say that while my previous comments are valid, your point is also valid. The "Linux Ecosystem", a more broadly defined set of software than the quite narrowly-defined "Linux System" according to OIN, is not at all fully covered by OIN. This goes back to things RMS has been saying for years, the Open Source ecosystem is entirely too permissive for it's own good sometimes, letting Trojan horses like Java, Mono (c'mon, it has the same name as a common highly contagious disease! Can't you read the signs?!), and fully-closed firmware in left and right. On the other hand, while issues like this will keep cropping up, I'm confident that the Open Source ecosystem as a whole will be able to just slough off the corrupted parts and keep moving. The lesson for individual developers and users though, is don't use those corrupted parts!

I'm substantially in agreement with you on these points. In my opinion, the only way that Oracle owning these patents will be a good thing for FOSS is if it "immanentizes the patent eschaton" somehow, by either causing a patent meltdown, or by making people realize that many supposedly "open" technologies aren't really open, and that FOSS has some housecleaning to do in order to be on more solid footing.

As I alluded to earlier, I don't believe Java is open source, so I don't think this particular action is a case of Oracle agression against open source. There are possibly other cases where that is the case, but I don't think this is an example.

Agreed, but I probably think so for different reasons than you do.

Have you been following the whole software patents thing?

That's the whole problem, that Sun acquired a monopoly on certain programming techniques from the government, and regardless of whether Dalvik pulls directly from Sun code, if it happens to use those techniques, then it falls afoul of patent law.

My takeaway from all of this is that it reaffirms my opinion of Java, that it's poison.

Not really, cremation is the traditional method of corpse disposal in Japan. This would be a step back for them.

Seriously? Your point is that Gentoo doesn't do enough hand-holding? This is a distribution that has built its reputation around NOT doing excessive hand-holding.

That having been said, Gentoo does leave services that have security implications unconfigured, but I'm having trouble understanding how memcached is such a service. This isn't a system configuration issue, but a network layout issue.

Finally, there is this:

Huh? You're administering an internet-facing server, and installing an internet-facing service, and you haven't checked that it is in fact intended to be internet-facing? If you're that oblivious, how the hell is making you fill out a config file going to help you? Captain McBlivious is still going to just blindly add configuration to the system until it starts doing what he expected, which is providing caching services.

I was amused by this aside:

What? It seems pretty obvious that they could see exactly what happened when the two sides touched, "The friction of the two sides moving in different directions sent the rubber bands flying out of the drum".

One idea I've seen floated is making the charging station + car act as a local battery for the power company. The user would have a set of preferences set up letting the charging station know the desired charge level for the car, and the station would charge when power is cheap and discharge when power is expensive within those limits.

So a typical usage scenario might actually be "Driver arrives at home and plugs in car during peak power usage time, car discharges further (down to some limit to cover things like "crap, I need X for dinner") until peak power usage ends, then trickle charges back up to some nominal level, and fully tops off at some low power usage point during the night."

Obviously the system needs to be adjustable on the fly for things like "I'm planning on going out tonight"

You generally wouldn't do fast charging at home, you'd do slow charging at normal household power levels (though probably from a large appliance-type socket rather than a regular outlet) It's cheaper for the power company and causes less wear on the battery.
If this really becomes an issue more power companies might move to load-based pricing of power to further discourage power usage spikes that aren't necessary.

No, there isn't a difference between, "I want something for free", and "I want something for free because it's really really important.". The problem with this reasoning is that for some people, the barrier for really, really important is set really, really low.

I agree that the GP shouldn't have been modded troll though, not because it's true, but because it looks like a heartfelt sentiment.

This reminds me of an article I ran across a while back (too lazy for link) about a Chinese school for calculators (that's right, people who do arithmetic) who used the abacus as a teaching tool.

The first step is to learn to perform calculations on the abacus very rapidly. Once a certain level of proficiency is achieved, the abacus is removed and the student is able to perform the calculations without the help of the abacus. Generally they make flicking motions with their fingers while performing calculations, but with further training the hand motions are also eliminated and the computation is purely mental.

Practically useful? Probably not, but interesting. Personally I fire up a python interpreter when I need to do arithmetic on numbers too large to do in my head.