I'm all for the EU constitution, because I'm all for the EU, because I'm all for mind-numbing bureaucracy instead of continuous warfare with industrial technology. But the charge that there's something fishy about any document which begins, "HIS MAJESTY THE KING OF THE BELGIANS" is hard to refute.

Skim past the preamble, though, and it only gets better.

Article I-1: Establishment of the Union

1. Reflecting the will of the citizens and States of Europe to build a common future, this Constitution establishes the European Union, on which the Member States confer competences to attain objectives they have in common. The Union shall coordinate the policies by which the Member States aim to achieve these objectives, and shall exercise in the Community way the competences they confer on it.

Still and all, I think the US constitution holds up pretty well:

Article. I. Section 1. All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.

Larry McVoy is a software developer who has had a mixed relationship with the open-source world. Here he's interviewed by Forbes magazine, and the fallacies are fast and furious. What's especially amusing is that it's hard to differentiate McVoy's fallacies from Forbes'. Which of these two statements is a quote from McVoy, and which is prose by journalist Daniel Lyons?

One problem with the services model is that it is based on the idea that you are giving customers crap--because if you give them software that works, what is the point of service?

Open source products typically are distributed free, since it's pretty much impossible to charge money for something that anyone can copy.

The first fallacy in the first quote is that the only role of software service is to compensate for quality flaws in the original product. This ignores, primarily, customization, but also training, installation, upgrading, and other services. The second fallacy is to imply that good software should not require any service; in other words, it should be completely bug-free, not have any security errors, not rely on any other software that may in turn have bugs or security flaws, be automatically and risklessly upgradeable, be so usable as to not require any training, etc etc.

The first fallacy in the second quote is that open source software is distributed free because it's impossible to charge for it. In my experience in a number of OS projects, the software is open-sourced because the authors want to give it away for free. This is precisely opposite causality to the quote. The second fallacy is that it's impossible to charge money for open source. Even though you can get exactly the same code for free, Red Hat still sold US$151 million worth of free software in 2004. That's distinct from the $45 million in services revenue for the same year.

The first quote is McVoy, the second is the article's author. It surely doesn't reflect well on Forbes that I can read financial statements better than they can.

In 2004, London was easily the world's commercial passenger capital. New York, Tokyo, and Chicago tied for second.

• Heathrow + Gatwick + Stansted + Luton + London: 125,555,483
• O'Hare + Midway: 95,254,359
• Kennedy + Newark + LaGuardia: 93,644,909
• Narita + Hanneda: 93,427,232

Los Angeles, with five different commercial jet airports, has a mere 84 million passengers per year.

The Apology t-shirt appears in this week's East Bay Express. See 2003 in:
http://www.eastbayexpress.com/art/media/2005-05-04/2.pdf

-Jon

So they've gone and killed "Star Trek." And it's about time.

They tried it before, remember. ...

So out of the ashes the series rose again. Here's the question: Why?

The original "Star Trek," created by Gene Roddenberry, was, with a few exceptions, bad in every way that a science fiction television show could be bad.

...

As science fiction, the series was trapped in the 1930s — a throwback to spaceship adventure stories with little regard for science or deeper ideas. ...

The later spinoffs were much better performed, but the content continued to be stuck in Roddenberry's rut. So why did the Trekkies throw themselves into this poorly imagined, weakly written, badly acted television series with such commitment and dedication? Why did it last so long?

Here's what I think: Most people weren't reading all that brilliant science fiction. Most people weren't reading at all. So when they saw "Star Trek," primitive as it was, it was their first glimpse of science fiction. It was grade school for those who had let the whole science fiction revolution pass them by. Now we finally have first-rate science fiction film and television that are every bit as good as anything going on in print. "Being John Malkovich" and "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind." ... "Lost," the finest television science fiction series of all time … so far. ... series like Joss Whedon's "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and Alfred Gough's and Miles Millar's "Smallville" have raised our expectations of what episodic sci-fi and fantasy ought to be. Whedon's "Firefly" showed us that even 1930s sci-fi can be well acted and tell a compelling long-term story.

Screen sci-fi has finally caught up with written science fiction. We're in college now. High school is over. There's just no need for "Star Trek" anymore.

—Orson Scott Card