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The Mozilla development team released Firefox 3.6, codenamed Namoroka, on 21 January 2010 after some anticipation; Firefox 3.5 was a step forward in features but two steps backward in performance. As a minor update, Namoroka was a chance to optimize the last release.

So, now that it's out, did it alleviate some of these problems? Well, let's find out by looking at what 3.6 offers over 3.5.

First and most visible is support for skins, called personas. Firefox developers have been tinkering with the XUL format and they cite its power. They also claim that it has been under-utilized, so personas were a "natural addition."

TraceMonkey received a performance boost, caching more bytecode in RAM using the new "Stored History Integration Table" system which dynamically stores each JavaScript routine as an object in memory in order to more quickly access it during execution.

Firefox's plugin system also received an overhaul, and now lets the user know when a plugin is incompatible. Mozilla also included support for full-screen Theora and WOFF, the Web Open Font File format, as well as additional but otherwise unspecified performance and security enhancements.

Overall, it's a nice list of bullet points for the bump from 3.5 to Nakamora, but the fact that performance wasn't a priority already points away from optimization and to new features. And the features are actually not new at all, but fixes for issues that should have been taken care of during the initial design stages or other numerous upgrades.

For instance, Firefox has been skinnable for years using XUL, and personas are just a hack to this system that allows the user to use bitmapped images as toolbar backgrounds. You are not mistaken if you just had a flashback to Internet Explorer 3.

These personas also slow the browser down, negating any advantage from the TraceMonkey JavaScript engine. One writer on the web even suggests that the TraceMonkey enhancements were done in anticipation of new-feature bloat. Talk about the tail wagging the fox!

Plugin incompatibility usually occurs when a plugin was written for an older version of the plugin system, which demands a question about the wisdom of upgrading the plugin system for Nakamoru the first place. But that's just how Firefox developers roll.

Now, if you're running an incompatible plugin, Firefox alerts you at startup and launches the plugin manager, a JavaScript-based app that contacts Firefox's plugin server and swaps all kinds of metadata in a frantic attempt to update your third party add-ons.

Several of the changes are plainly just developmental masturbation. For example, Theora is the least-used web video codec, with the penetration that the newer QuickTime X has. And WOFF is an open standard that Mozilla wants to support for political reasons that isn't actually in use anywhere.

So what exactly are Mozilla development managers doing?

If a private company with an opaque development model like Apple can apply the breaks and optimize an entire operating system, à la Leopard to Snow Leopard, why can't a public, transparent development team be bothered to do the same for something much less complex like a web browser?

http://bit.ly/9AvjLc:

The Mozilla development team released Firefox 3.6, codenamed Namoroka, on 21 January 2010 after some anticipation; Firefox 3.5 was a step forward in features but two steps backward in performance. As a minor update, Namoroka was a chance to optimize the last release.

So, now that it's out, did it alleviate some of these problems? Well, let's find out by looking at what 3.6 offers over 3.5.

First and most visible is support for skins, called personas. Firefox developers have been tinkering with the XUL format and they cite its power. They also claim that it has been under-utilized, so personas were a "natural addition."

TraceMonkey received a performance boost, caching more bytecode in RAM using the new "Stored History Integration Table" system which dynamically stores each JavaScript routine as an object in memory in order to more quickly access it during execution.

Firefox's plugin system also received an overhaul, and now lets the user know when a plugin is incompatible. Mozilla also included support for full-screen Theora and WOFF, the Web Open Font File format, as well as additional but otherwise unspecified performance and security enhancements.

Overall, it's a nice list of bullet points for the bump from 3.5 to Nakamora, but the fact that performance wasn't a priority already points away from optimization and to new features. And the features are actually not new at all, but fixes for issues that should have been taken care of during the initial design stages or other numerous upgrades.

For instance, Firefox has been skinnable for years using XUL, and personas are just a hack to this system that allows the user to use bitmapped images as toolbar backgrounds. You are not mistaken if you just had a flashback to Internet Explorer 3.

These personas also slow the browser down, negating any advantage from the TraceMonkey JavaScript engine. One writer on the web even suggests that the TraceMonkey enhancements were done in anticipation of new-feature bloat. Talk about the tail wagging the fox!

Plugin incompatibility usually occurs when a plugin was written for an older version of the plugin system, which demands a question about the wisdom of upgrading the plugin system for Nakamoru the first place. But that's just how Firefox developers roll.

Now, if you're running an incompatible plugin, Firefox alerts you at startup and launches the plugin manager, a JavaScript-based app that contacts Firefox's plugin server and swaps all kinds of metadata in a frantic attempt to update your third party add-ons.

Several of the changes are plainly just developmental masturbation. For example, Theora is the least-used web video codec, with the penetration that the newer QuickTime X has. And WOFF is an open standard that Mozilla wants to support for political reasons that isn't actually in use anywhere.

So what exactly are Mozilla development managers doing?

If a private company with an opaque development model like Apple can apply the breaks and optimize an entire operating system, à la Leopard to Snow Leopard, why can't a public, transparent development team be bothered to do the same for something much less complex like a web

I have to say that Firefox is getting a lot worse lately. The user experience is in serious need of improvement and development is the pits. I installed the latest "big deal" Firefox update on June 30th. (For some reason they skipped a full four secondary updates, but whatever.) Upon restarting, which took several minutes, I began using Firefox 3.5.

At first, Firefox seemed strangely familiar. I thought they had changed very little unnecessarily until I visited the Acid3 test. Lo and behold, I was still using Firefox 3.0.0.11. What the fuck? I manually invoked Check for Updates and repeated my first attempt only to find, upon restarting, the same thing.

Finally in desperation I downloaded the installer manually from Mozilla. The install ran surprisingly quickly and, after a few minutes, I was launched with the new version. I had to check, though, because again I thought it looked like very little had changed.

In fact, did Mozilla bother changing anything beside the JavaScript? The new SpiderMonkey is great and all, but they could have at least made it look like they were working on something else. When the most noticeable improvement is the "Know Your Rights" button (which everyone ignores) one really starts to wonder what the fuss was all about.

Well, after the three tries it took to upgrade, I found my profile wouldn't migrate. This was a mess, but I was able to eventually retrieve my bookmarks from a long, arcane file path in a hidden directory. But then upon visiting my bookmarked sites I found that almost none of my add-ons are compatible with it. Therefore my browser is almost entirely functionless.

The bookmark tool itself could use a polishing. It's a mess and has been since version 1.0. If a browser is meant to render and organize content, Firefox surely falls down in this area. Why does it take me several minutes to slosh through the GUI just to make a new folder and alphabetize some bookmarks in it? Not to mention the damned Bookmarks toolbar, which takes up too much damn space and can't be turned off.

And speaking of the GUI, it's slow as Hell! Get rid of the proprietary XUL and just hardcode the damned interface already!

I also have to mention memory use. On my system, Firefox was swallowing an incredible 400 MB with only a simple HTML 5 page open. 400 MB?! I blame this on the Firefox team's use of C++, where memory management is about as easy as herding cats. Likewise Firefox is a slow, bloated nightmare. (For a contrast, there's Safari, which is written in Objective C and is very small and efficient.)

Most of the time I have heavy JavaScript sites open. I shudder to think how much Firefox eats then, and I'll be sure to check in the future. No wonder my system tends to slow down when I've left Firefox open for days on end with dynamically updating pages and RSS feeds. Clearly, Firefox leaks memory like a cracked sieve in a waterfall.

With Firefox smelling more and more like crapware, I started to dig a little, first on Wikipedia and then on the Mozilla Development Forums. It turns out that my observations are part of a larger pattern of Firefox quality issues and development customs. The Mozilla developers are a bunch of arrogant, abusive shitheads.

For starters, they're still running all tabs in the same process. This is something IE7 and Safari 3 have had right for years. S

I have to say that Firefox is getting a lot worse lately. The user experience is in serious need of improvement and development is the pits. I installed the latest "big deal" Firefox update on June 30th. (For some reason they skipped a full four secondary updates, but whatever.) Upon restarting, which took several minutes, I began using Firefox 3.5.

At first, Firefox seemed strangely familiar. I thought they had changed very little unnecessarily until I visited the Acid3 test. Lo and behold, I was still using Firefox 3.0.0.11. What the fuck? I manually invoked Check for Updates and repeated my first attempt only to find, upon restarting, the same thing.

Finally in desperation I downloaded the installer manually from Mozilla. The install ran surprisingly quickly and, after a few minutes, I was launched with the new version. I had to check, though, because again I thought it looked like very little had changed.

In fact, did Mozilla bother changing anything beside the JavaScript? The new SpiderMonkey is great and all, but they could have at least made it look like they were working on something else. When the most noticeable improvement is the "Know Your Rights" button (which everyone ignores) one really starts to wonder what the fuss was all about.

Well, after the three tries it took to upgrade, I found my profile wouldn't migrate. This was a mess, but I was able to eventually retrieve my bookmarks from a long, arcane file path in a hidden directory. But then upon visiting my bookmarked sites I found that almost none of my add-ons are compatible with it. Therefore my browser is almost entirely functionless.

The bookmark tool itself could use a polishing. It's a mess and has been since version 1.0. If a browser is meant to render and organize content, Firefox surely falls down in this area. Why does it take me several minutes to slosh through the GUI just to make a new folder and alphabetize some bookmarks in it? Not to mention the damned Bookmarks toolbar, which takes up too much damn space and can't be turned off.

And speaking of the GUI, it's slow as Hell slowget rid of the proprietary XUL and just hardcode the damned interface already!

I also have to mention memory use. On my system, Firefox was swallowing an incredible 400 MB with only a simple HTML 5 page open. 400 MB?! I blame this on the Firefox team's use of C++, where memory management is about as easy as herding cats. Likewise Firefox is a slow, bloated nightmare. (For a contrast, there's Safari, which is written in Objective C and is very small and efficient.)

Most of the time I have heavy JavaScript sites open. I shudder to think how much Firefox eats then, and I'll be sure to check in the future. No wonder my system tends to slow down when I've left Firefox open for days on end with dynamically updating pages and RSS feeds. Clearly, Firefox leaks memory like a cracked sieve in a waterfall.

With Firefox smelling more and more like crapware, I started to dig a little, first on Wikipedia and then on the Mozilla Development Forums. It turns out that my observations are part of a larger pattern of Firefox quality issues and development customs. The Mozilla developers are a bunch of arrogant, abusive shitheads.

For starters, they're still running all tabs in the same process. This is something IE7 and Safari 3 have had right for years

Congratulations, you've just discovered why ignorance of the law is considered to be no excuse. Because if it was, suddenly there'd be an awful lot of ignorant people running around, if you get my drift.

If you're the kind of person who likes to just randomly wander around, it is your responsibility to know how to be in compliance with the law. It is neither the law's responsibility nor the law-abiding property owner's responsibility to mark the property in such a way that every conceivable person can't help but notice the private property label.

(I am the first in line to argue that the principle could use some modification in this age of near-infinite law... but the general principle still holds for the reasons you just outlined. Private property is one of the "common sense" things I reference. It needs to be modified, not discarded.)

You speak as if the politicians are creating the divisions, rather than being the manifestation of them.

Countries are divided. That's how it is. If voting one way creates a relatively peaceful union where differences are worked out politely and within the system, and voting the other way creates a fractured country full of acrimony and bad feelings, then one side is clearly a bad loser (and that's more dangerous to democracy than you might think, as the essense of democracy is to have the losers accept their loss, not crown the winners).

And if that is the case, the side that is being the poor losers and choosing to tear apart the democracy rather than accept loss is the side that, when they win, produces the relatively peaceful government. The side that, when they win, produces "polarization" is the more democratic side. (Being in a Democracy means your side loses sometimes. That's life.)

Take that as you will. I've deliberately not name names. For one thing, it's never a choice between total chaos or total harmony, but I'd be confident that taken as trends, this point stands.

The definition of a compiler seems to differ from person to person, but the best one is something that reads a stream of input, converts it into a richer internal representation (usually a tree but it doesn't have to be), and writes out a different stream based on this internal representation.

Even here in 2007, some people still seem to think the only thing that can be called a compiler is something that takes source code and emits binary code, but that's just one specific special case. The same basic principles that GCC uses will be used by PovRAY to compile its scene language into an image, ignoring the raytracing part. (That is, setting up the internal representation of the scene is just like a compiler.) Compiling C# into IL uses the same basic techniques. Defining anything that uses standard compiler techniques as a compiler is the motivation for my preferred definition.

Given the long history of compilers, and the sheer profusion of them, I really don't think that compilers ought to be patentable anymore. Compiling Java into Javascript isn't a novel idea, it's "just" some engineering by somebody who understands compilers. (Which the recent "Wasabi" uproar over Joel on Software's posting proved is not all that many people, but still, it's simple once you see the tricks.) The only even remotely tricky part of such a compilation is if there's no easy way to get the syntax tree directly from the language parser, and that's still just engineering. There's definitely plenty of copyrightable stuff in such a compiler, but it'd take something very, very novel for it to be patentable.

(Note I'm writing this message as if I weren't entirely against software patents, which I am, at length. This is written from the putative point of view of the patent system; even then, compilers generally aren't that novel an idea. Saying "with a compiler!" is up there with "on the internet!" for novelty.)

Truly heirarchical in nature, the data is also of varying sizes, full of binary blobs, and generally unsuitable for your average SQL system.

So, if you compare the ideal case for commercial software against the worst case for open source software, commercial software wins.

Big surprise there.

Neither your caricature of commercial software, nor your caricature of open source software, has much to do with reality.

And I've been involved in buying many closed-source libraries, and your happy-happy portrayal of closed-source software doesn't really remind me of any of those experiences.

By far I have more trouble with the closed-source stuff just being unsupported, and sometimes it's the big vendors (as in Microsoft, Oracle, etc.) who are the worst!

Bad open source basically doesn't exist for a commercial company, because they most likely won't even encounter it, and it certainly won't last long in their selection system unless it's completely broken

Everything you mention works instantaneously, and wiretapping was hacked into the law as this utterly separate and novel activity. The original conceptions weren't changed, they were just left in their own little domain.

Now the domains are crossing, and all the old rules are breaking. Is an email more like a telegraph message or a letter? Neither; it isn't enough like either to reason about them based on telegraph messages or letters.

(This is a summary of a much more filled out point behind that link, although I notice just now the diagrams are broken.)

This is just a specific instantiation of a general problem with computers.

With old-style non-electronic messages, there is no distinction between the contents of the letter and the physical letter itself. Hundreds of years of laws and general ethical principles were written based on the assumption this will always be true. Now it's not, and it's all breaking down, but most people don't even notice this is the root of the problem because the assumption is so deeply ingrained. Instead, they want to just hack around the problem, not noticing you really need to rethink the whole system.

Copyright has the exact same problem.

The internet privacy advocates mentioned in the article, which the general /. populace will probably view with more sympathy than the government, by claiming that email should be treated just like physical mail are really committing the same error as the government, who are basically acting as if they do have a place where they could grab a physical letter and therefore they can, just as if it were physically sitting somewhere.

The reality is that we need to sit down and really re-think the entire situation. The old model is broken.

This ruling now makes companies accountable for maintaining IM traffic (and possibly other similar data) as well. THAT will be of grave issue.

The "correct" answer depends on what exactly it is you want to do.

The tricky thing about answering this question is that it is easy to end up with an answer that already exists.

"I want to run arbitrary apps on the client as if they are on a server": Do it. Terminal services, VNC, whatever.

"I want to be able to write a chat client that runs in the browser": All you really need here is real socket support instead of hacked up AJAX running on HTTP, which is an excellent protocol for many things, but not a continuous, small-scale back-and-forth. (Chat's a great example; the headers may well cost you a factor of 100x on the byte count.) But why not run a proper chat app? A browser by design can't integrate with the system tray or KNotify or whatever, and loading a second server with a connection to the actual IM server is silly.

"I want to write little applications that anybody can pick up and use, but I really need feature X": If you add in everybody's feature X, then before you know it, "nobody" wants to use the no-longer-simple web browser any more.

I think what it boils down to is that the very reason "mere mortals" like interacting with web "applications" is in fact a direct result of the simplicity that results from the limited palette web designers have. I've been developing on the web since 1996 and I could reel off a long list of things I'd like to see if I don't think about it, but if I think about it I start to see that for each feature I want, it would almost inevitably complicate the web and drive away the charm it has for so many "mere mortals". (I am explicitly talking about "your grandmother" here, not a Slashdot user.)

By way of evidence I offer up the long list of things that have tried to "improve" the web: Flash. Java. ActiveX. Any number of other solutions based on those. By market share, all have failed; all that has survived is the web browser and its basic standards.

Personally, if I had to choose, I'd say, maybe a few more widgets standard, certainly some tuning and tweaking, a raw socket might not hurt, but I'd rather see improvement come from the other direction: Make better desktop apps that focus on simplicity and connectivity, that don't bloat the user's desktop or act like they own it, and have better connections with the internet.

If you really nailed me down, give me some kind of standardized XBL that works across browsers. I've done what I can with that and other libraries have some entries on that front too, but there are certain last little bits that really need some browser help to make them slick. For the love of Knuth, don't embed this in XML, XBL and my experience prove it to be an extremely poor fit to the job of specifying widgets. (The sad thing is that it is poor in ways you can't see until you step out of the confines of the actual XBL Mozilla implements.) This really helps clean up the spaghetti code that Javascript development tends to turn into.

(In fact each browser has a poor, hacky, over-specialized implementation of the idea, but they are totally incompatible with each other and both extremely poorly known.)

The "correct" answer depends on what exactly it is you want to do.

The tricky thing about answering this question is that it is easy to end up with an answer that already exists.

"I want to run arbitrary apps on the client as if they are on a server": Do it. Terminal services, VNC, whatever.

"I want to be able to write a chat client that runs in the browser": All you really need here is real socket support instead of hacked up AJAX running on HTTP, which is an excellent protocol for many things, but not a continuous, small-scale back-and-forth. (Chat's a great example; the headers may well cost you a factor of 100x on the byte count.) But why not run a proper chat app? A browser by design can't integrate with the system tray or KNotify or whatever, and loading a second server with a connection to the actual IM server is silly.

"I want to write little applications that anybody can pick up and use, but I really need feature X": If you add in everybody's feature X, then before you know it, "nobody" wants to use the no-longer-simple web browser any more.

I think what it boils down to is that the very reason "mere mortals" like interacting with web "applications" is in fact a direct result of the simplicity that results from the limited palette web designers have. I've been developing on the web since 1996 and I could reel off a long list of things I'd like to see if I don't think about it, but if I think about it I start to see that for each feature I want, it would almost inevitably complicate the web and drive away the charm it has for so many "mere mortals". (I am explicitly talking about "your grandmother" here, not a Slashdot user.)

By way of evidence I offer up the long list of things that have tried to "improve" the web: Flash. Java. ActiveX. Any number of other solutions based on those. By market share, all have failed; all that has survived is the web browser and its basic standards.

Personally, if I had to choose, I'd say, maybe a few more widgets standard, certainly some tuning and tweaking, a raw socket might not hurt, but I'd rather see improvement come from the other direction: Make better desktop apps that focus on simplicity and connectivity, that don't bloat the user's desktop or act like they own it, and have better connections with the internet.

If you really nailed me down, give me some kind of standardized XBL that works across browsers. I've done what I can with that and other libraries have some entries on that front too, but there are certain last little bits that really need some browser help to make them slick. For the love of Knuth, don't embed this in XML, XBL and my experience prove it to be an extremely poor fit to the job of specifying widgets. (The sad thing is that it is poor in ways you can't see until you step out of the confines of the actual XBL Mozilla implements.) This really helps clean up the spaghetti code that Javascript development tends to turn into.

(In fact each browser has a poor, hacky, over-specialized implementation of the idea, but they are totally incompatible with each other and both extremely poorly known.)

Why is open source software more likely to contain stolen code than any product from Microsoft or Oracle or any other proprietary vendor?

Technological sustainability is one of the pressing issues of our time. Should we continue to use our natural resources with wild abandon, or should we try to be more careful with them so we don't lose them?

Since the answer to that question is basically a foregone conclusion when stated that way, how should we be more careful? What's the optimal strategy?

The two basic extremes are:

* Legislate sustainability, right now. The situation is so dire that we must deliberately bend as many resources as possible to the problem.
* Let the market take its course. As resources become rare, the price of that resource will rise, creating economic incentive to create alternatives. Eventually the Invisible Hand will sort things out.

My own thoughts on the subject are probably extreme enough in their own ways to guarantee that nearly everybody will find something to object to, but I think if you think about them they start to make more sense then most of what constitutes "debate" on this topic today.

First, there is much truth on both sides. Running out of resources is an issue, the more so because there are some resources for which a suitable replacement may never truly exist. (Petrochemicals come to mind as the big one here. Helium, oddly enough, is another, and it's even more fundamental then petrochemicals because it's actually an element and therefore can't be replenished with anything less then large-scale fusion (which may never happen) or cheap and easy space travel (ditto).)

On the other hand, the "Big Resource Crisis" that wacko environmentalists secretly (or not-so-secretly) hope will "teach us a lesson" is never going to happen because there are effectively no resources that have a big step function in them. There will never be a day where we wake up and the top news story of the day will be "There Is No More Oil". Instead, as the argument says, the price of resources will indeed increase over time, and we will seek out alternatives, possibly including simply going without (with all the attendant misery and death that statement euphemistically obscures).

How to harmonize these two points of view? The easiest way to think of it is with an overarching metaphor. (Yes, I've often spoken out against using metaphors, but this is the good kind: I use it to communicate an idea, not to reason with.)

Basically, we are in a race. In lane one, we have ever-increasing technological efficiency, and as we learn more we can more effectively place the upper bounds on how far that technology can go. The bad news is that a lot of science fiction is looking impossible: No teleportation, no faster-then-light travel, no magic propulsion. The good news is that the upper limits of nanotechnology are most likely higher then any 1960's science fiction author would have dared write about. I'd summarize it as "the ultimate limitation of technology's ability to manipulate matter will be limited solely by the minimum chemical energy required to do the manipulations". If our technology reaches its endgame, constructing petrochemicals will mostly be a matter of sticking in the right chemicals on one end, and applying the proper energy. (Of course, it's more likely that you will just go straight to the final product like plastic.)

In the other lane, we have ever-depleting supplies of resources that are currently unreplaceable, and without which we can not power the society we need to reach this technology level. If we run out of resources first, we lose.

Literally, the fate of the planet is at stake. Some people like to say that an entire other technological civilization like ours could have existed in the distan

soulless internet replacing good ol' natural hobbies.

What are the limits on the owner's right to use a machine to decode their copy of the work? For instance, it is apparently perfectly legal for CD players to read ahead several seconds or even minutes and store a copy of the CD data in memory so that CD player skips will not impact playback. In this case, the owner seems to have the right to make a copy of the work for personal use, but where does this right come from?

Resource consumption. To have a technological civilization, you will consume resources. Resources which are still there; many mineral resources we've exploited are older than the dinosaurs. Therefore, nobody has beaten us to them.

Is it impossible that an intelligent civilization preceded us? Not entirely. But "they didn't use the resource because they had a pure-biological technology" is pretty unlikely (and might well also manifest itself in obvious ways in the genetic record) by very simple economic arguments (the same that explain why we are exploiting those resources), and "they replaced them for us" also involves some pretty unlikely assumptions.

About the only one that works, IMHO, is to believe the "ascension" scenario, that the reason why we don't see a lot of life in the universe is that intelligent live inevitably evolves to some sort of transcendent state that we still have no idea what it might be, and that such life might care enough to leave behind machines to harness centuries/millenia of solar power and careful set the planet back to the "original" state before destroying themselves with no trace. The latter part is theoretically possible, but the former is a pretty big assumption right now. On the one hand, it seems unlikely. On the other hand, right now all of the answers to the Fermi Paradox seem pretty unlikely, and at least one of them is true.

I know it's popular to say we'd never know, but I think we would know. We wouldn't have any artifacts, but there is other evidence of our existence that will survive millions or billions of years.

(On a similar note, I like to say this is Mother Earth's one crack at a fast-moving technological civilization, expanded on at that link. If we die, it will be immensely harder for anything to ever reach the levels we've reached, because we've taken all of the easy resources, and there's a time limit for resources to be re-created before the sun renders the planet uninhabitable. You might have time to have fresh oil reserves, but there's not much time for fresh mineral reserves.)

Let's say I write a program that incorporates some GPL code and I release it under the public domain. Have I violated the GPL?

Or, lets say I release it under the GPL, but then I refuse to pursue any litigation over violation of the license of my code.

Let's say I write a program that incorporates some GPL code and I release it under the public domain. Have I violated the GPL?

Or, lets say I release it under the GPL, but then I refuse to pursue any litigation over violation of the license of my code.

There's a massive difference between "filmmaker's view shining through" and "film created to make a point".

And what exactly would that massive difference be?

It's impossible to create an "unbiased" work; I think this is mathematical fact, in the highest sense of the term, not a mere rhetorical point.

Given this impossibility, the only difference between "filmmaker's view shining through" and "film to make a [presumably different] point" is how honest the filmmaker is being about their own point of view.

I'd honestly rather see a documentary that accurately reflects the maker's viewpoint, because anything else is likely to be dishonest and probably sub-par, because if they don't believe what they are saying that, too, tends to come through.

The key point here is that it is possible to hold a nuanced opinion, or to believe that the situation is very complicated and you just want to give up, or that the situation is pretty complicated, here's what I think the facts are, here's my call, your call may differ based on the same facts. I know this because I have many opinions of my own of that nature. This is only bad if you assume that everybody always has firm opinions about every question, which I think is something that only someone naive enough to have firm opinions about every question can believe. (Many other people don't think this explicitly, but clearly reason with it as an implicit point.)

All documentaries "make a point". The better people may make documentaries with more nuanced points, but points nonetheless. The only question is whether the filmmaker is lying about their viewpoint to appear "unbiased", and whether they are lying about the facts.

"Unbiased" is actually itself a social construct that prescribes certain beliefs and viewpoints, and is definitely a bias itself; for instance, the "unbiased" social construct states that if there are two opposing sides, and that both sides have the slightest fact in their favor, than we are obligated to throw up our hands and say "We can't decide who's right, the situation is complicated." It doesn't matter how overwhelming the evidence may be, if we are to be "unbiased" we must not make a call. Without speaking to the truth or falsehood of this view, that itself constitutes a "bias" in both the mathematical and human sense (which overlap more than it may appear upon casual inspection of the mathematical definition(s)), a "bias" against making firm decisions about who is right and wrong. This is merely one part of the "unbiased" myth; ultimately the very word is an oxymoron.

From my understanding, once you change a couple of "riffs" in the song, it becomes a different song and therefore is not subject to copyright.

XUL, if you are speaking of XUL proper, just isn't that useful to make it worth toasting 90% of your audience. XUL is basically just some more widgets than what you get in HTML, highly focused on writing a browser. Anything you see in Mozilla or Firefox is XUL, so you can see a lot of the extra widgets just by poking around in the "preferences" dialog or looking at the browser's basic interface (menus, location bar, etc).

Mind what I'm saying; I'm not saying real menus or a real tree widget isn't useful; I'm saying they haven't made it worth cutting out the IE chunk of your audience. I'd love to see the W3C standardize a tree widget into (X)HTML, but that seems unlikely right now.

The behavior of XUL is specified with Javascript, and that's indistinguishable from how conventional HTML pages already have the full power of Javascript.

So, the only part of the traditional XUL platform left is XBL, which A: doesn't appeal to your average "cowboy" coder anyhow because they can fully understand the costs of using XBL but can't see the benefits and B: Has basically missed the window where it could impact anything because it's been buggy as all hell for a long time, to the point where even if they fix it a lot of us wouldn't notice. Basically, it works for writing a browser but my experience is that the minute you step outside of that domain, all hell breaks loose. Granted, that experience is from 2005, but it didn't materially differ from my experience in 2000 (no typo).

If you get down to the real causes, I think the basic problem with XUL/XBL etc. is that while it had promise in theory, it brought a lot of baggage into developing even simple applications (you need to understand XML, because XUL and XBL are based on it, plus you need to understand XUL and XBL itself, then you have to understand Javascript, DOM, and to really use XUL/XBL you also need RDF which is another can of worms entirely, and finally it was buggy and implemented just enough to write Mozilla in it and not much more), but it really doesn't offer a significant advantage over, well, much of anything else, really. Having tried to make XUL actually do something several times now, I'd rather develop in Visual Basic. Pre-dot-Net. And I say that as someone who really doesn't like Visual Basic. Basically, six+ years after starting to develop this stack and the advantages are still theoretical; the only existing apps, as near as I can tell, require full-time teams to fix up the Mozilla core in conjunction with the team actually writing the app, and that's just stupid when you've got so many great choices already available to you, from Visual Basic all the way to my preferred Python+wxWidgets (or PyGTK, or PyQt, or heck, even the Tk interface). By the time you get to the point where you are skilled enough programmer to master the stack of Mozilla technologies, you are aware of better choices.

Including just sucking it up and going pure HTML, which is what I ended up doing, writing my own XBL-esque technology to help me. And I've noticed a number of the Javascript libraries like Dojo share the same basic Widget design as my library, so even the majority of advantages of XBL are available in conventional HTML now with readily available open-source libraries, again, leaving what's left not worth it. (Especially if you count the XBL bugs.)

So, the basic problem with XUL, considered as a whole stack, is that the costs are staggering and the benefits very, very marginal. As a result, it's basically dead; there's never a case where XUL is a better solution than either pure HTML or a real app.

Its a remarkable stupid situation where one company can't do something that other companies have done every day.

There is a world of difference between WalMart asking the movie companies to produce a sanitized version for them, and the movie/music companies agreeing, and people chopping up the movie despite the movie studios objection.

You may think that this shouldn't matter, or you may (correctly) observe there's some low levels of hypocrisy here on the movie studios part. (I'm personally still at a loss as to why these sanitizers can't seem to get a license to do what they are doing, as it seems to me that would basically be free money for the studios. But it's not for me to decide what contracts they choose to enter into.) But the fact remains that there is a big difference between WalMart censorship and the story that might just have some sort of effect on the outcome.

(I side with the movie studios on this one because this is a clear integrity issue; we all have the right to insist that people not slice and dice our copyrighted works, which include everything like political pamphlets and even this comment, against our will. Movies are just a special case of that, and we shouldn't be blinded by hatred in deciding whether or not this is a good idea. If I want a right to integrity, that means the movie studios get it too, even if I don't agree with them on many other issues.)

If I take all of their textures and pick-and-choose-and-cut-and-paste until I have something that looks like a boobie, did the software "ship" with that boobie?

Information theory to the rescue. In order to do that, your instructions will either be quite lengthy, or your search time will be long. Either way, the very instructions themselves constitute additional content; they are not themselves free of meaning or implication, as that would mean by definition they would have no effect.

You're still adding the "boobie" information to a product that did not previously contain it.

There is still a philosophical conundrum along the lines of "what, ultimately, does this long series of numbers really mean?", but this answer is sufficient to cover everything I've been able to think of from a legal standpoint. In my terms, no matter how tricky you get in the encoding, you're still adding the concrete part of the boobie.

I love all the "this isn't cencorship" comments. Typical Liberal strategy of redefining "is".

From (ironically found by searching Google for defintion cencorship):

http://www.jerf.org/iriSupp/gloss/censorship.html

censorship
        1 a the institution, system, or practice of censoring and censor (verb) as

        censor
                to examine in order to suppress or delete anything considered objectionable

How to read reviews. The short version of an already short point is "just read the negatives and see if you agree that they are negatives".

Even with a 10/10 "review", you can often glean useful information this way. So far the only real negative I wish I'd see more reviewers mention is when you have unskippable cut scenes, which royally piss me off. (I've heard FFXII finally gets this right... arrogant jackasses took long enough... but I digress.)

Would you, in repsonse to a single argument from a stranger? Would anyone you know?

It is extremely unlikely that I would; generally I've heard all the arguments before. (People often mistake that for "arrogance" or "close-mindedness", but it is neither to hear all arguments and make a decision; after that, if you want to change someone's mind you'd better improve the arguments somehow, either by making them better or making news ones, or you're not going to get far.)

However, many people don't think issues through at all, for many reasons, some good, some bad, and for them one solid logical argument could make them change their mind. To take one common example, it is possible to hold a set of core beliefs that result in you having one opinion about abortion, and the opposite about capital punishment. It isn't automatically "hypocrisy" if you've got good reasons for both. But if you haven't thought it through and just have emotional feelings about the two topics, somebody might sway you one way or the other by pointing out that if you're against abortion you ought to be against the death penalty, because "pro-life". (Or the complementary argument.) So one little argument might make them change their mind, although in this case the direction is unpredictable and you might just make them all the more firmly disagree with you...

Another example on the flip side, albeit harmless, I have no firm opinions regarding the style and fashion problems and trends of today. I simply haven't thought about it, and it would take very little to convince me that today's trend utterly sucks, or that something considered awful is really nice looking. (Granted, this isn't as important to us, but the things I consider important I think about so I don't have a ready example. And some people do consider this important...)

Yes, I think there are many people out there who could be swayed by one logical argument. I consider it sad that it's so easy to not get even one logical argument on a topic. You have to go looking for them. Of course, it's so much easier to just yell, scream, call people names, and firmly ignore any evidence to the contrary of whatever you believe that what do you expect? Logical arguments are hard. I set out to make my arguments about free speech and copyright issues logical and rigorous, and it took me three years and turned out book length. (Totally serious.) Logic is hard.

Arrow doesn't disprove that your vote matters, which would be a very silly result.

What he proves is that there is no universal definition of fair .

An awful lot of people define "my vote mattering" as "my vote determines the outcome", and that's just not how it works. Your vote matters, assuming a reasonably fair voting system (i.e., no secret "negative" weighting, and appropriate weighting, which in the case of politics is equal for all), but it does not matter more than anybody else's.

Even in the case where an election comes up 1,000,000 vs 1,000,001, it wasn't your vote that "made the difference"... it was equally all 1,000,001 of them. Even then, your vote wasn't any more "special" than anybody elses, and that's most people's very definition of "their vote mattering".

(This is just my same point, re-expressed.)

Actually, there is a good distinction you can draw between software patents and conventional patents that is strong enough that you can't automatically infer that being against software patents means you are against all patents: Software patents are the only things I know of where the patented objects are also covered under copyright law.

I go more into depth about this elsewhere, but the short answer is that we shouldn't be surprised that patents, balanced for one type of use, and copyrights, balanced for another, make no sense when both are covering the same thing, since they were never designed to do that.

Obviousness is a real problem too, of course, but that's more a practical problem, one that could be corrected by more aggressive denials by the PTO. This is a fundamental conflict.

No, it wouldn't. This is the Big Number Fallacy. Nukes are big. Planets are big. But the two are not equally big. Planets are many orders of magnitude bigger. Your average volcano releases more energy that one of those nukes, and the amount of energy released on an ongoing basis due to tectonic plates shifting is so much vaster than that that your nukes aren't even worth measuring.

You want numbers? In order to disintegrate the Earth, you have to counter gravity. This is equivalent (if I can trust my figures) to about 1x10^16 megatonnes. The largest hydrogen bomb ever detonated was at Bikini Atoll in 1954, and was 13.6 megatonnes, which is rather smaller than 10'000'000'000'000'000.

You say that the bombs' shock waves merely liberate energy already inherent in the Earth's core? Well, if it could happen, it would have --- Earth has been struck with a lot of very big asteroids in its history, and it's still intact. As are all the other planets in the solar system: the asteroid belt always was debris, there's not enough there to form a real planet. It's worth mentioning that on the scales we're talking about, rock flows like liquid. Any big impact will cause a splash, and the result will very quickly reform into a sphere again.

Sorry if I'm seeming rude, but this is something that I've seen a lot and it always irritates me --- I think it stems from people wanting to believe that humankind is a lot more influential that it actually is. On a planetary scale, we have no power whatsoever. We're barely at the stage of being able to affect ecosystems, and that is, quite literally, only just scratching the surface.

The problem appears to be that the whole minority voice, blabla thing doesn't work out.

For a long time I echoed the "Two parties are bad" party line. But the more I think about it, the more it actually doesn't seem half-bad.

Our system tends to actively split down the middle. It's not coincidence, it's structural. While the minority party (today the Democrats) may be largely disenfranchised, by the very way our system works they will extremely rarely be in a huge minority. In the Senate, for instance, it's currently 55/44/1 (R/D/I), which means that only 6 seats have to change to change the controlling party, something that can definately happen. Due to Democratic structural failures (IMHO, and note that I am strictly speaking of the organizational structure of the party, not anything else), that's actually higher than it probably should be, it's often even closer.

This leaves the Democrats overall in a better position than they would be if it were 70/29/1, and because of the way our two party system tends to work, it's extremely unlikely to come to that disparity, as any such disparity would prompt the Democrats to co-opt the triggering issues out of self-preservation. (At least for more than one election in a row.)

The system isn't half-bad. Minorities of course are still minorities and by definiton can't expect parity with the majority, but our system tends to keep them much better balanced than many other systems. The Democrats still have a significant voice in our system, even in the minority. It's not the Republican's fault they haven't been able to use it well lately.

I've changed my mind about the two-party system. It's actually pretty good. Most of the problems laid at the feet of the two-party system would not be solved by any other system, since most of them come from the people themselves. (And of course there's a lot of wishful thinking when people imagine other systems... of course if there was a strong third party it would be the People-That-Agree-With-You party that will magically set everything right. In reality, no such party is likely to arise, and you may well end up with the People-That-Largely-Disagree-With-You party. Everybody assumes they are the true majority and it's The System keeping them down, but, frankly, the evidence is that the minority is the minority, and no amount of fiddling with the election system can change that.)

The problem appears to be that the whole minority voice, blabla thing doesn't work out.

For a long time I echoed the "Two parties are bad" party line. But the more I think about it, the more it actually doesn't seem half-bad.

Our system tends to actively split down the middle. It's not coincidence, it's structural. While the minority party (today the Democrats) may be largely disenfranchised, by the very way our system works they will extremely rarely be in a huge minority. In the Senate, for instance, it's currently 55/44/1 (R/D/I), which means that only 6 seats have to change to change the controlling party, something that can definately happen. Due to Democratic structural failures (IMHO, and note that I am strictly speaking of the organizational structure of the party, not anything else), that's actually higher than it probably should be, it's often even closer.

This leaves the Democrats overall in a better position than they would be if it were 70/29/1, and because of the way our two party system tends to work, it's extremely unlikely to come to that disparity, as any such disparity would prompt the Democrats to co-opt the triggering issues out of self-preservation. (At least for more than one election in a row.)

The system isn't half-bad. Minorities of course are still minorities and by definiton can't expect parity with the majority, but our system tends to keep them much better balanced than many other systems. The Democrats still have a significant voice in our system, even in the minority. It's not the Republican's fault they haven't been able to use it well lately.

I've changed my mind about the two-party system. It's actually pretty good. Most of the problems laid at the feet of the two-party system would not be solved by any other system, since most of them come from the people themselves. (And of course there's a lot of wishful thinking when people imagine other systems... of course if there was a strong third party it would be the People-That-Agree-With-You party that will magically set everything right. In reality, no such party is likely to arise, and you may well end up with the People-That-Largely-Disagree-With-You party. Everybody assumes they are the true majority and it's The System keeping them down, but, frankly, the evidence is that the minority is the minority, and no amount of fiddling with the election system can change that.)

Big number fallacy; a nuke is big, sure, but let's be amazingly optimistic and assume it can completely physically clear a 10-mile radius of space junk, while not adding anything itself.

The average radius of the Earth is 3,959 miles, call it 4000. The definition of LEO orbit is from 400 to 1600 miles above the Earth. Sphere volume (close enough) is defined as (4/3)*pi*r^3.

To cover LEO, we need to cover a volume of (4.0/3)*pi*((4000+1600)**3 - (4000+400)**3) miles, which is 378,000,000,000 cubic miles (378 American billion). Our incredible optimistic nuke can "clean" (4.0/3)*pi*(10 **3) cubic miles, or 4,200 cubic miles. Dividing the (unrounded) numbers reveals that we need to set off 90,449,062 (~90 million) miracle nukes to clean the orbit.

(If you start python and type as your first line "from math import pi", those expressions will slide right into Python so you can verify them. Insignificant figures have been trimmed for presentation.)

And it's even harder than that, since the objects are moving at different speeds, and it's quite easy for objects to slip between the cracks if we don't light up the entire orbit at once.

Clearly, this is absurd, because we don't even have that many pieces of space trash in orbit, by many orders of magnitude. Because of the difference, we don't even need to do any sort of statistics to safely conclude that there are no "concentrations" of space trash that could be nuked, and we are in fact going to have to address the situation one piece of trash at a time.

where are all the gadflies who normally come out of the woodwork with dire warnings about passing off rank theory as fact?

All over the place. They just aren't connected to religion (or at least not major religions), so they don't get the microphone of a major religious organization.

Hang out on one of Usenet's science groups, or look through the archive, and you'll find all sorts of kooks with all sorts of theories "proving" QM, or General Relativity (link to examples), or Gravitation, or the accepted theories of Cosmology, wrong.

The thought has crossed my mind that more people would be more upset about physics if they realized how thorougly it contradicts their ideas about how the universe works, and really, that statement isn't just limited to the religious, either. But most people live in varying states of blissful ignorance, and ultimately, that's probably just fine.

I've never heard of these services before. It's a fairly safe assumption a lot of other people haven't either.

If you want to use one of these services, I'd recommend doing it sooner rather than later. The lawsuit, based on the my.mp3.com precedent is inevitable, and I'd expect the ripping services to lose. I don't think the courts are going to fail to see this as distribution, if what my.mp3.com was doing was "distribution". The only difference is really transmission method.

Especially as it's a safe bet at least one of them doesn't really rip each time, but instead pulls it from the "cache" whenever possible, removing the last difference from my.mp3.com other than transmission method.

Note, I'm not saying I want them shut down; I think my.mp3.com was perfectly ethical, though the legality is at best dubious. Personally, I don't think you can "distribute" something to somebody who already has it, but I can see how reasonable people differ. (Though I think my opinion is more rational going forward.) I just think that based on the precedent, the ripping services would lose, especially as it will be easy to paint every dollar these services make as something the copyright holder should have gotten (even though they don't offer this service; copyright law doesn't care), which is the Big No-No of copyright law, the whole reason it exists.

We need a new form of IP, "Privacy-sensitive information". (Full explanation at that link, too complex to put here.)

The odds of this happening any time soon are of course nearly zero.

Does anyone have thoughts on what can be done to improve the security of XP Home?

Ask Microsoft for licenses for Pro. Remember, it costs them nearly nothing and they might use it for PR or something. Remind them how fun the news stories will be when the system gets hacked and all the Poor Africans (TM) are being betrayed by the White Imperialist Multinational Corporation (TM). The story practically writes itself (even though I personally do not subscribe to that narrative).

dam i hate microsoft apologists like you...

"That wrath should be directed at the people who made that decision, not those that made that functionality possible."

no. Our wrath should be directed as much towards microsoft as towards those who made the decision to restrict our rights.

What you're saying is that just because Microsoft created a DRM system, doesn't make them evil. Well...I'm saying no. A DRM system can be used for only one thing: limiting your rights. So because Microsoft created one, they are guilty of at the very least corporate greed for creating the system so they could license it to others.

Read Human justice for human beings for a lot of great insights about why DRM (and other forms of automatic policing) are such bad things.

The thing is we should be teaching reasoning skills and critical thinking.... Advanced abstract mathematics -- sorry guys, I and 99% of the people who took trig and calc will never need it in life. Accounting and statistics I could actually use in my life.

"Advanced abstract meathematics" is the best place to learn abstract reasoning skills and critical thinking; that is the best reason to learn it. (Link goes to elaboration and explanation, but the one-sentence summary is fairly accurate.)

I've thought about this; it's a nifty idea but no current protection works.

You can't copyright facts about yourself, which is what biometrics is based on, and for that matter most of what your privacy-sensitive information is.

You can't copyright the collection, because other people will independently collect it, and they can (and do!) claim their own copyright on the new collection.

Trademarks don't work, because they are mostly concerned with preventing other people from fraudulently passing themselves off as your business concern. Even if you could trademark your fingerprint, which is highly unlikely for a variety of reasons, it wouldn't stop people from storing and using it for almost anything they want.

Patents are obviously not a good fit.

Trade secret law is actually the closest IP protection of interest (the forgotten IP protection class here on slashdot), but your privacy-sensitive information suffers from being neither directly related to trade in the sense the name of the law implies (i.e., yes I know your ID at a business is related to trade but that's not what the law means, summaries always drop data), nor is it a secret anymore.

The bad news is, you need new law. The good news is, no aspect of the requisite law is new; you can get there with pieces of the trade secret law, added to copyright, and topped off with some of the protections in trademark. But there is no feasible way to do that under current law, not even with a highly experimental suit.

It's good thinking, though.

(This is a shortened version of the analysis at that first link. If you have some objection, you might want to try that link before replying; it may make your objection go away, it may make it worse, but it's worth checking :-) )

I've thought about this; it's a nifty idea but no current protection works.

You can't copyright facts about yourself, which is what biometrics is based on, and for that matter most of what your privacy-sensitive information is.

You can't copyright the collection, because other people will independently collect it, and they can (and do!) claim their own copyright on the new collection.

Trademarks don't work, because they are mostly concerned with preventing other people from fraudulently passing themselves off as your business concern. Even if you could trademark your fingerprint, which is highly unlikely for a variety of reasons, it wouldn't stop people from storing and using it for almost anything they want.

Patents are obviously not a good fit.

Trade secret law is actually the closest IP protection of interest (the forgotten IP protection class here on slashdot), but your privacy-sensitive information suffers from being neither directly related to trade in the sense the name of the law implies (i.e., yes I know your ID at a business is related to trade but that's not what the law means, summaries always drop data), nor is it a secret anymore.

The bad news is, you need new law. The good news is, no aspect of the requisite law is new; you can get there with pieces of the trade secret law, added to copyright, and topped off with some of the protections in trademark. But there is no feasible way to do that under current law, not even with a highly experimental suit.

It's good thinking, though.

(This is a shortened version of the analysis at that first link. If you have some objection, you might want to try that link before replying; it may make your objection go away, it may make it worse, but it's worth checking :-) )

Yes, but once that quick hack is deployed, even to beta testers who then build on it (if the testers are large enough), Microsoft supports them in perpetuity.

Example: COM, DCOM, ActiveX, now the various .NET protocols, and remember "COM" covers several iterations itself and has several variants. Windows supports them all.

I am increasingly convinced of two things: One, this is why Windows is so bloated; once a feature gets in, it never gets out. I suspect this is the sole reason; if anything, Microsoft programmers are above average so most other explanations don't fly. Two, this is why open source-style development, realizing you can't have backwards compatibility forever and ever and depending on source code and its recompilation, will eventually win; reverse compatibility becomes too expensive. (This is not to say OSS will win, though OSS gets a big foot in the door when source is distributed, but that the style is inevitable. Shipping binary code to run directly on the processor is just too low-level to be shipping programs around in 2005. The JVM has this right, as do a number of open source projects, shipping the code to a virtual machine around.)

This also explains my assertion that Microsoft programmers are above average with the observed code quality coming out of Redmond; they get increasing amounts of the "above-averaged-ness" frittered away in backwards compatibility support. If Microsoft could truly just start 100% fresh, which they can't (destroy-the-business kind of can't), they'd probably produce a fearsome OS. We'll never know.

(The eye candy of Longhorn may take all the processor they've spec'ed out, but, most likely, the reason it needs so much memory is all the garbage hanging around, being backwards compatible. The OSS equivalent of Longhorn eyecandy will fit in much less memory, even if it needs the same or more processor, as a result, and the memory advantage is only going to grow on the OSS side, because by and large, it doesn't implement every half-assed idea from 1988 on in itself. It tries to constrain the half-assed ideas to the last year or so, and goodness knows there are plenty to go around.)

If 10 billion light years worth of protons travelling from a galaxy had a mass, does it's own emitted energy pull it away from the bang? and do other stars' emitted energy push away at the accellerating galaxies?

You're suffering from what I call the Big Number Fallacy; while the number of photons may be large, the amount of matter is so much larger it completely swamps it.

More to the point, conservation of energy and mass<->energy equivalency says that when a star emits a photon, it loses that energy in mass. Obviously, stars are not routinely boiling away due to photon energy losses, or indeed, energy losses at all. Not enough mass-energy is floating around as photons to affect anything.

What was that experiment confirming Earth's 'tearing' effect of gravity the sattelite?

I think you're referring to the "frame dragging" experiment, which is almost completely unrelated, except inasmuch as they are both related to relativity.

I know it's fun to play word games with the shiny Physics and Cosmology terms, but if you really care, you need to learn the real stuff, not merely keywords. I rather liked this; the fact that it's seriously tough shit is a good sign, if you get my drift. If it's easy, you're just playing word games.

It would not work at the moment, because your personal data does not meet the creativity criterion of copyright. It is simply a fact.

It isn't a bad idea, even out of the domain of the techno-geek libertarian; I write somewhat more extensively about this here and some of the followup consequences, but the short version relevant to your post is that the necessary legal machinery can be built out of existing components that already exist; no truly novel law needs to be written, but no currently existing laws or protections work this way, nor can they feasibly be hacked (to name the ones I know, neither copyright, trademark, trade secret, nor (obviously) patent law can be twisted to work like this). Thus, I don't think it is hopeless that we'll end up with this someday.

Like this? (Except you start in Javascript... why throw away the value of a perfectly good programming language?)

Note that it currently works only in Mozilla, but I think that's just because I use some array methods that IE doesn't have. As it happens I'll be fixing that today. Look for a .3 release later this week.

(Also, I don't do anything to address the async XML retrieval, but that's because so far, unless you're willing to commit to a server backend as other projects have, there just isn't much more you can do to help the developer. But we can get started writing rich widgets with no server dependence pretty easily.)

Raising the price you pay at the pump is not noted for its power to make people buy more gasoline, and giving this extra money to the government is not noted for improving the bottom line of oil companies, either. A little less conspiracy and a little more thought, please. (Theories based on supposed integration between the two I dismiss as outright absurd... the oil companies are obviously not spending the California budget, nor deriving any particular benefit from the California spending proportionate to the "take"; if they were going to benefit significantly from this money it'd have to show up on their bottom line, not California's.)

(You may also find this relevant; as a motivation to get people to buy more gas, this is an atrocious plan.)

remove politics

I was with you, right up until you suggested that we remove humans from science.

What, you don't think that's what you said? Well, you'll understand eventually. Either that, or show me a group bigger than 100 people that has "no politics" in which case I'll concede I might be wrong.... but even if you show me such a group it'll still remain the more probable outcome that you are simply blind to the politics. (Evidence: If you really think it's only "Republicans" bending science, it's probably because the bending done by "Democrats" is invisible to you. Caveat: The terms Republican and Democrat are not really meaningful in this context anyhow; I'm borrowing your particular meanings.)

(When people say "remove politics from the system", what they are really saying, even if they don't realize it, is that the system should align with their politics, which are of course not politics, but merely and quite obviously the truth. Were it only so simple...)

This is not to say the diagnosis is inaccurate... oh, you've oversimplified to the point of effective absurdity but that's just what happens in a short Slashdot post, I have too but at least I labelled some of it. I'm just saying that you might as well phrase your "solution" as "Booga booga, grunt, wallabie wallabie smooger!" in terms of the useful, implementable solution content it contains.

American "parties" and European "parties" aren't the same thing, and should not be directly compared; the word "party" refers to something fundamentally dissimilar.

In Europe, party change is accomplished by changing what party is in charge. In America, it is accomplished by transforming the party. If a party breaks, it is replaced; it happened once to the Whigs (->Republicans), and a lot of us think we might be seeing it happend to the Democrats, despite your post.

The Republicans of, say, the 1950s are not particularly related to the Republicans of today. (When I see a party claim some historical figure to prove a modern point, I have to just laugh. So Lincoln was a "Republican"... so what? Like modern Democrats are going to run on a Pro-Slavery ticket?) In fact, there are noticable differences between the Republicans of today and of the early 90s.

For more info, consult the link. Which is better? Depends on what you want out of your system. Personally, I prefer the American overall, but I wouldn't cry if I was under the European system.

(At least, the theoretical system. The EU scares me. But that's another post.)