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Slashback: IceWeasel, Online Gambling, GPU Folding, Evolution
from the playing-poker@home-or-folding@home dept.
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."
F@H (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:F@H (Score:4, Interesting)
Since, AFAIHBT, ATI is funding the port, a generalized GPU client might not happen for a while.
Most of the claims in TFA hinge on beleiving that the GPU client is (as Stanford has claimed) 20 to 40 times faster than the CPU client. It would be nice, and certainly beneficial to ATI, if the FAH team would allow the same work units to be processed by both the GPU and CPU versions. As it is, there is no way to test their claims, and it seems they've gone out of their way to be sure there is no way to test their claims.
Call me skeptical.
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Something they forgot (Score:4, Informative)
International law? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:International law? (Score:5, Funny)
When is "never", Alex?
I'll take "Obvious Questions for $1,000.
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Fault is being shortsighted. (Score:5, Interesting)
Being law abiding, whether on the individual or national level, is not self-sacrificial behavior. There are good and rational reasons for doing so. It only looks disadvantageous when you're using a very short or narrow perspective. I would argue that the main problem with U.S. foreign policy is that it sacrifices long-term goals for short-term advantages or gains. We probably have more to gain from a strong World Trade Organization than anyone; if we make it irrelevant, we hurt ourselves in the long run.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Theory [wikipedia.org]
Re:International law? (Score:5, Insightful)
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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.
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There's a little more to it (Score:5, Insightful)
This is true, and no offense, but frankly I'm impressed that you are aware of this. It's a welcome relief from the overwhelmingly ignorant "globalization this" and "free trade that" rants that I often read on Slashdot. What you might not know, however, is that allowing the nation who petitioned the Dispute Settlement Body to choose the way in which they are to be compensated has had an unexpected political side-effect, at least in the U.S. It turns out that one of the best ways of putting pressure on lawmakers and even the President of the United States is to impose tariffs on goods that are made in certain politically volatile states.
For instance, let's say it's 3 years ago and you're, I dunno...Germany. You just won your DSB case because you successfully demonstrated that you were harmed because of let's say, an economic initiative by George Bush that involved giving domestic steel producers in the northeast an unfair subsidy. As Germany, you turn around and impose a heavy tariff against all oranges coming from the United States, knowing full well many of those oranges come from Florida. Then, the pressure is ramped up on Bush, because he must then explain to Florida orange growers (who have a powerful lobby, by the way) why it is that they're having trouble selling their oranges in certain European markets.
That's the theory, anyway.
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Re:International law? (Score:5, Insightful)
When it's convienent.
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Re:International law? (Score:4, Funny)
Hey, that's Vice President Harper to you, buddy.
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Nonsense (Score:3, Insightful)
The WTO does not have the power to strike down any US law.
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.
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Re:Nonsense (Score:5, Insightful)
The US federal government cannot regulate gambling transactions that don't cross state lines, due to the Commerce Clause in the US Constitution.
Oh c'mon. The Commerce Clause hasn't been taken seriously (by the Supreme Court) in decades. See Gonzales v. Raich for one of the most recent examples. If the federal government can regulate the cultivation of marijuana in a home garden, they can regulate gambling within one state.
The US federal government shouldn't be allowed to regulate gambling transactions that don't cross state lines, but they sure as hell can.
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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.
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If the sweet comes with bitter, you've lost. (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd argue that a similar situation now exists with abortion and other reproductive and personal rights. Lots of things that many people take for granted rest on a series of court decisions -- Roe v. Wade chief among them -- which are rather delicate logical and jurisprudential constructs. Had Roe not been decided the way it was, political will might have developed in the 1970s to codify an actual right to privacy, rather than relying on the flawed concept of a "pneumbra." Unfortunately, the latter path was taken, and now a whole host of rights ride on a this concept. As soon as people began to take those rights for granted, the opportunity of actually having enough momentum to get an actual codified right disappeared. Today, if a handful of legal scholars can be convinced of the wrongness of Roe and the pneumbra concept, then not only abortion but the whole "right" to privacy could disappear.
Swallowing bad jurisprudence simply because it produces social good in the short term is almost always a bad idea, and it leads to less stability in the long run. It forces you to either run the risk of losing the social gains in order to overturn bad law (as in Roe), or in keeping the bad precedent and subsequent bad judgements in order to keep the social good (as with your example of Raich and civil rights).
"Rights" won on questionable legal arguments can hardly said to be 'won' at all -- they're the social-freedom versions of stock-market bubbles. Pleasant, ephemeral, but apt to cause chaos one way or another whether they burst or remain. Slow growth based on actual legislative action is far better in the long run, painful as it may be in the present. Sometimes extreme pain is what's required to motivate both the people and the Legislative branch into action.
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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.
Wickard v. Filburn (Score:3, Insightful)
O RLY? The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that Congress can regulate wheat and marijuana production that does not cross state lines because they compete with products that do cross state lines. Wickard v. Filburn [wikipedia.org]; Gonzales v. Raich [wikipedia.org].
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They have set up a back door to get around this. Congress just has to state they want to stop or regulate interstate gambling, and also state that intrastate gambling is a part of that market. At that poin
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Congress responded to the WTO by stating, "If you strike us down now, we'll become more powerful than you could possibly imagine."
My Own Followup to David Brin's Article (Score:3, Informative)
http://akaimbatman.intelligentblogger.com/wordpre
Re:My Own Followup to David Brin's Article (Score:5, Funny)
"Someone's about to get some edumacation!"
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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:The World Trade Organization can strike down a (Score:4, Interesting)
The only power that anyone ever really has is military power. The only way that the US government can enforce any law on its citizens is to threaten them with force. The only way to actually "strike down" any American law would be to use force against the US government. Or at least threaten to use force.
Because the WTO has no military force, the only thing they can do is put sanctions against the US. It is the same thing that the UN is planning on doing to North Korea. It could still work if they can work up the guts, and I hope they do.
Im an American, but these gambling laws are rediculous. If it takes crippling our own economy to show our rulers that they are out of line then its a small price to pay. If I lose my job I could always become a professional gambler
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In other words, the WTO has real teeth in terms of overruling actions of the U.S. Congress.
About the only thing that the WTO can't do is to override the U.S. Constitution, which in theory trumps even treaties (and a prime factor to consider with copyright treaties, for ex
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
AFAIK, the WTO is there to act as a Judge.
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:Thy shall not steal (Score:5, Insightful)
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Or I can go a different route and argue that you're not stealing something tangible such as a pattern of bits that is a song, but you are stealing a potential customer from the artist to whom they'd be able to sell their song. Let's go to the extreme.
If we decided to pass a law that it is not a crime to copy songs if you haven't bought them, and I can copy music without
Re:Thy shall not steal (Score:5, Insightful)
The issue here is that the RIAA/MPAA would like to have you believe that copyright infringement and stealing are the same thing when they are not. What they're trying to do is pound into the public that copyright infringement is stealing because, quite frankly, which term sounds worse? Stealing or copyright infringement?
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Re:Thy shall not steal (Score:5, Insightful)
Ok, so the abolition of copyright has lead to destruction of the music industry. Only the very few art-for-art's sake type musicians still release music.
Is there still a demand for music? Yes? Then there is the potential for a market. Obviously the market won't operate on the basis of selling a single song many times cheaply due to copyright. What would the artist do? Demand money up-front. Instead of working "on-spec", the artist works on commission. Either a rich guy commissions a song/album, or a coalition of moderately wealthy people (fans) pool their money to commission an album. End result: artist gets paid, music gets made.
Such a scheme wouldn't work know - why would any consumer go to that length of trouble when they can go to the CD store and just buy an album for $25? But if the current distribution method died, the commission-based system would become attractive as the only way to get new music. That sort of shift would also have a noticable effect on the end product. In the current model, artists must write to please studios, so they can get in to the global distribution and publicity network the studios offer. In the commission-based model, artists must write to please their fans, or they're not going to get another commission after the first. It would probably also put commercial radio out of business.
As long as there is significant demand for music - and there has been throughout all recorded history - then music will be made. What changes is how, why and how much.
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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.
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I find it hard to believe that this is a problem. Red Hat has been using the same policy for quite some time:
Yeah
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Not really. Trademark enforcement is separate issue than whether something is open-sourced. See, many open-sourced products have trademarks that they don't want other people using. You think the Debian people would like it if someon
It sounds like they had already forked earlier (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Crapweasel (Score:5, Insightful)
If you don't want to allow distributions to make changes to software they redistribute to enhance system integration, user experience, and conform to distribution policies, perhaps you should instead spend your time petitioning the Mozilla project to consider going closed source.
And what is your problem with the DFSGs? They were influential in shaping what the very term Open Source means today.
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Re: (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
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.
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Re: (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:The rules of evolution... (Score:4, Interesting)
The parallels with humans are amusing, but TBH I think we're in a slightly different boat. First off, in my experience (take that for what it's worth), "beauty" in humans is more strongly related to nurturing rather than nature. I seem to run into absolutely beautiful women in every walk of life, and which are often enough the offspring of unattractive parents. With the advent of cosmetic surgery, genes become even less of a factor.
More importantly, I don't think the concept of beauty in humans is quite as uniform as the media might have us believe. I'm constantly shocked by the rift between what any two men find attractive... and for women, I think matters of physical attraction are even more variable. If we factor in women's sexual preferences, which add more weight to behavior and socio-economic factors, the speciation of "beautiful people" starts to sound really unlikely. Instead, I think we'll tend to see the average human become more "beautiful" as times goes on. Maybe that's just me.
Last, and I may be off base in this, but I think humans tend toward exogamy by nature. Most people I've talked to find "exotic" to be a beauty all its own, and that strikes me as a powerful mechanism working in the favor of species solidarity. Unlike those butterflies, most people seem to prefer a mate that's from a visibly dissimilar tribe, or at least think the idea's exciting.
Anyway, that's enough of my hobbyist-biology blabbering. Thanks again for the interesting article. Now when I seduce bonobos, I can claim that it's a scientific experiment.
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I see your point, but I don't completely agr
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.
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Re:Stolen name; nice one. (Score:4, Insightful)
I basically agree with everything you say until the last line. This is not 100% Mozilla's problem and this is demonstrated by the willingness of other distributions to jump through Mozilla's hoops to have Firefox in their distro.
Note that I am not addressing who has the right approach, just that the problem is in part created by the DFSG (the very core rules for debian and the thing that ensures it remains more Free then virtually any other distribution). I don't actually think Mozilla is being unreasonable, they don't want the Firefox name tarnished so they want to control what is called Firefox, but they are taking an approach which means that their flagship product is not Free Software (as by definition it must include non-free parts and derivatives cannot be freely distributed without a patch sign-off).
Of course as IceWeasel demonstrates, while Firefox may not be Free, it's source code is, so if you want to distribute your own Free version of Firefox you are free to do so as long as you change the name and remove the logo. What this really highlights, to those who can think beyond "you suck", is that the co-operation implicit in good Free software license's allows diverse needs to still work together past fundamental differences in their approach.
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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]Parent
Re:Stolen name; nice one. (Score:5, Interesting)
Debian comes up with a name, GNU applies that name to a browser, Ubuntu takes the name and makes spiffy logos for it, Debian takes the name and the browser and probably the logos and goes in a totally different direction from the other two.
Stop looking at me like I'm crazy.
What does this mean? This means that no one person or organization can have a trademark on the word IceWeasel. This Firefox mess has been because Debian is not able to do what it wants to do with Firefox because Mozilla has final say because they have the trademark. Mozilla's been demanding they break their own guidelines by including a non-free image with their distro and demanding that all patches be approved by them, even though they don't support the old versions that Debian does. The last thing anyone wants would be for the same thing to happen to IceWeasel. Happily, that looks like that's impossible, and IceWeasel will be the free Firefox.
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Re:Stolen name; nice one. (Score:4, Insightful)
"So they forked a project, then decided they didn't want to use the fork" is absolute rubbish. Try reading the article.
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