The great thing about Perl is that it seems carefully crafted to allow you to do a specific set of tasks-- text proccessing & CGI scripts mostly-- and to do those tasks with a minimum of effort by the coders. After attempting to do this sort of thing in c, Perl was a giant relief. Operations that can take a dozen lines of c can be done with a single Perl command. And the scalar datatypes, string interpolation, built in regular expressions, and lots of syntactic sugar saves the hassles normally asociate with a simple task like reading a line of text, parsing it, and writing it out to a file. For what it does, Perl is awesome!
The benefits are that you can have many browsing windows open without cluttering up, for instance, the taskbar in KDE, or simply without running numerous processes, which can be difficult to switch between.
The best way to do this is using an application-centric rather than window-centric GUI model a la Mac OS. In Windows, (and most other GUI's) you can have many copies of the same program open in different windows. Under the Mac OS, all of a given application's windows are handled by the same process. You *can't* spawn multiple copies of the same app unless you make multiple copies on disk. And all of an application's windows are in the same "layer" on the desktop. They are all brought to the front when you select one of them.
The advantage of this is that you get all the advantages you name above, without the confusing, obnoxious, and kludgy downsides that come with a window-in-window approach.
For example, the Mac OS finder creates a new window for every folder. This would be an annoyance, except that I can go to the application menu and select "hide finder" and all the finder's windows disappear. I don't have to minimize them one by one. I can do the same thing with other apps. If I have five web browser windows open, I click on one of them and select "hide Netscape" and they all disappear.
The Mac OS also has window shade behavior, so that you can collapse individual windows as well as hiding entire apps.
Why do half a dozen people have to point it out every time an article is a repeat. Yes, it's a repeat. Who cares? If you've seen it before, just ignore it. And if you haven't seen it before, then it's not a problem.
If you must point it out, send email to Rob or Hemos. That way you know they'll actually see the message. But posting a message about it is just a waste of everyone's time. Rob and Hemos don't have time to read every post on every story, but a lot of the rest of us will waste time reading it. We don't need to be impressed by how good your memory is.
Right, that should have been "with minor modification." Carbon is a subset of the existing Mac OS API's, and Apple provides a tool called the Carbon Dater that checks your code and tells you which API calls are no longer supported. In theory, the deprecated APIs are seldom used, so developers should be able to "tune up" theis apps in days rather than months. But this allows Apple to eliminate enough of the incompatible OS calls to allow apps to run in the preemptive multitasking, protected memory environment.
I believe Adobe managed to tune up Photoshop in a matter of weeks, so it seems to work. If everything goes as planned, it'll be a nearly painless transition, and developers will be able to switch over very quickly. It's gonna be very cool.
Mac OS X Server is just that--a server OS. It is little more than a modified version of the Next OS with some network apps like Apache and WebObjects bundled in. It is not suitable as a consumer OS.
OS X Client is the future of the mainstream Mac OS, and it will feature a dramatically improved feature set for non-technical users, including...
-Carbon, which will allow existing Mac apps to run in a preemptive environment without modification
-Quartz, which is a PDF-based graphics model, supporting high-end graphics rendering abilities built into the OS
-First-class java support built into the default install
-Better hiding of the BSD internals so that new users don't have to know Unix to use their Macs.
-Ports of all the functionality of the current OS so that existing users will be able to interact with the OS in a predicatble way.
-A revamped finder
-Updated internals. They are switching to a new version of the BSD kernal (3.0 comes to mind)
-Gobs of other cool stuff I can't think of offhand.
And there probably will be a command line buried in the OS somewhere, but users will not be required to use it under any circumstances. Power users will be able to use it if they wish, however. Target release date is early 2000. They've already seeded a developer release, with a second due in a matter of weeks.
: PowerPC won't ever drop to the prices you see in x86 land. Why? 10x as many users. AMD motherboards are projected to be MUCH more expensive than BX boards for that same reason, until the volume comes. At least AMD remains compatible with Intel...
It is certainly true that there are a lot more x86 users than Mac users, but all those iMacs and iBooks give IBM and Motorolla decent volume. If Apple keeps gaining market share and a substantial number of Linux and Be users switch, you could see 15-20% market share for the PPC in a couple of years. Given that the x86 market is split several ways, that's probably enough to bring the cost down into competitive territory, especially if the G4 is as fast as it looks like it will be.
One particularly attractive option would be LinuxPPC labtops. Apple already has 400 MHz Powerbooks for about $3000. The PPC is a much smaller and cooler chip, and so you could see gigahertz G4 labtops by the middle of next year. That would leave Intel's anemic pertable Pentiums in the dust.
As for the Alpha, the Mac gives the PPC a much larger market share than the Alpha, so no matter how impressive the Alpha is in theory, it's not going to come down in price unless a consumer OS becomes available for it. The only hope of higher volumes on the Alpha is Linux users, and I doubt enough will switch to make it worthwhile.
So if it's the implementation, why can't a clean-room implementation escape patent restrictions? Real up, it's the idea (or at least the algorithm, which is much the same).
Because a patent protects not just the implementation, but the idea itself. If all you want to do is protect programmers from having their implementations copied, just give them copyright protections and they can keep their source closed. What software patents do is to set up a minefield for coders. Every time he comes up with a clever way of doing something, he must look it up at the patent office, and make sure that no one has thought of it before. If someone has, then he can be effectively blackmailed into either paying outrageous fees or rewriting major sections of his software. And if he doesn't catch the patent in time, then he will release his product, and can then be ruined by a lawsuit.
The basic problem is that "inventions" in the computer field are different from those in other fields. Algorithms get rediscovered and reimplemented dozens of times by different programmers working independently. We get paid to "invent" better ways of getting a given task done. And while an inventor in another field might become rich off a single invention, programmers discover dozens of new algorithms in the course of a given project. Therefore it simply is not reasonable to give out patents to such "discoveries."
This is compounded by the lack of technical knowledge in the patent office. Most patent officials don't have a clue about our industry. Thus a clever lawyer can get a patent for a technique that any competent CS grad could tell you was common knowledge for years. That no one wrote about the technique is often simpy a result of the fact that it seemed too trivial to bother documenting. Yet if you know little about how programming works, it might seem to you that it is a new discovery. Thus unscrupulous folks can obtain patents for things that a talented high school student could dream up in an afternoon.
That's why many programmers oppose software patents. Copyrights are sufficient to pretect against piracy. Patents simply make life miserable for coders, with no real benefits.
Right now all the robots are remote controlled. There should be a category for autonomous AI robots. The controller would have only three buttons: attack, move, and stop. This would lead to less emphasis on big blades and harpoons and more on nimble robots that could outsmart their competition. Of course this would require considerably more expertise and more complex rules, since you could probably confuse such a robot pretty easily.
Big Business is a much bigger threat than the government. You can vote the government out, You can't vote Bill Gates out.
Baloney. Bill Gates does not have an guarunteed income of 2 trillion dollars a year whether his "customers" like it or not. Bill Gates cannot write laws. He cannot throw people in jail.
In some cases businesses do these things, but always with the help of the government. If the government weren't so big, it wouldn't have so many favors to give out to businesses. So it remains true that only the government can pose a real threat to our freedom. Corporations cannot coerce you without government help.
The problem with this is that most of the bandwidth I use is for things like Starcraft. I send a hell of a lot more data through my ISP for Starcraft than for email or other important uses. So if they taxed us based on traffic, I'd be forced to stop playing Starcraft. It would simply shift internet use from high-bandwidth uses to low-bandwidth ones, and would unnecessarily and artificially limit some uses.
Also, how would you define "ISP"? If I'm in a computer lab, and I do FTP between two different computers in the lab, is that internet traffic? How about if they are in different rooms? Different buildings on the same campus? The decentralized nature of the 'net would make it difficult to determine which transactions should be taxed. And unless they come up with a clear standard as to who has to meter usage, it would be relatively easy to fall through the cracks. The attempts to solve this kind of problem would do a lot of damage to the net, and would result in stagnation and rising costs. This is a very bad idea.
Building on changes that started 18 months ago, SGI today announces a series of initiatives and partnerships that will enhance the company's position as the leader in high-performance and visual computing. These actions will accelerate SGI's transition from a vertically integrated company to one committed to broadening its market reach by leveraging its technology through new partnerships with industry leaders.
I realize that's the opening paragraph of the press release, so we'd expect it to be vague. But if you replace the "SGI" with another name, it could be used to describe the re-org of any high-tech company. I'm in awe of the ability of marketroids to come up with completely meaningless fluff like this.
But that's not a country without a government. That's a country with a government of drug-impaired teenagers. Surely you don't believe that all advocates of smaller government will lead to this sort of society, do you?
Microsoft's profits depend on government enforcement of its "intellectual property rights." Modern capitalism in general depends on a strong government defense of property.
True enough. And that's a good thing. Microsoft deserves every penny people voluntarily pay for its products.
On a separate point, does the writer really "fear" a democratic government that offers constitutional protections to liberty and dissent? More than he fears living in anarchy? He might try living in some place without a working government, like Sierra Leone, before deciding that government is so bad.
Perhaps "fear" is too strong a word, but I certainly think that most of the things the government does are bad. I am not an advocate of anarchy. A strictly limited government is necessary. I'm not familiar with Sierra Leone, but I doubt it has anything resembling my ideal social system, or i would have heard of it and gone there.
It means that I oppose corporations deciding which laws they will obey and which they will not.
Well, the government should of course enforce the laws on the books, but I don't think that anti-trust law should be on the books. It is vague, overreaching, and intrusive. It gives anti-trust lawyers to harrass literally any successful business.
By the terms of the per-processor clause MS would have had a prima facie case against any OEM that did not fork over a license fee for every PC sold, whether it actually had Windows on it or not.
And any PC manufacturer is free to forego selling Windows and thereby avoid this liscence. They can't survive without Windows, you say? Well, that's their choice. If Libux is so great, they can start an all-Linux company, and then they don't have to pay the MS tax.
Since you morons think you can live without that, I suggest you check yourself in where "laws" are whatever the powerful say they are, and corporations are hard to distinguish from the state, and do indeed sometimes come to people's houses with guns.
OK, that doesn't make a lot of sense, but you seem to be saying that the alternative to anti-trust law is corporate fascism. That's not what I'm advocating and it's not clear where you got that idea.
Um... no, the law you broke was the government's law. The government has a law that says you cannot make unliscenced copies of someone's software without his/her permission. It's pretty strange to argue the corporation is given "legislative power" since the only "law" they have the power to make is "you will be punished if you copy our product. That's hardly a threat to abyone's liberty. Just don't use MS products, and you don't have to worry about it.
And it is simply not true that only large corporations can have their copyrights protected. The reason you are allowed to copy Debian is that its authors have (I assume) GPL'ed it, thereby giving others the right to use it. In fact, if you were to take Debian, make some changes, and then sell a closed-source version, you *could* be prosecuted for violation of the GPL. It cuts both ways. The evil microsoft can make software licsences, but so can the Open Source movement. Are you afraid that Red Hat is going to take over the world?
I'm adamant about government by government, as opposed to government by large powerful companies and dictators
What's that supposed to mean? Are you seriously saying that Macrosoft is on the verge of becoming a government? That your freedoms are in jeopardy because they make crappy products and use aggressive tactics to market those products? When's the last time Microsoft arresyed someone? Or taxed or regulated someone? They never have. They're not a government. Not even close.
A government by definition is an agency with the power to force people to obey its edicts. If you break the law, men with guns come to your house and arrest you. That's what governments do. Private corporations cannot do that.
So unless you can point to examples of Microsoft arresting Mac users or Linux users, or throwing people in jail or otherwise behaving like a government, stop making overreaching and innacrurate generalizations. No matter what Microsoft does, it will never be anywhere near as threatening to our freedoms as the government.
I'd be curious as to the details of why this is a good idea. Sure it's cool, but for pretty much every serious job I can think of, a third dimension would just get in the way. The reason is simple: monitors are two dimensional. The trick is to use that space efficiently, and I don't see how adding a third dimension would help any.
There are also control issues. How do I deal with these windows? Do you seriously want to have to do FPS-style moving around to move to a different app? Frankly, this would just be confusing. Please eleaborate as to where this would be useful.
Uhm, NO. Bad free schools beat ANY form of basic education that has to be paid for. I mean, isn't it somewhere in the UN Declaration of Human Rights, the right to free basic education?
Actually, private schools are typically cheaper *and* higher quality than their govt. counterparts. This is the free market in action. Monopoly schools have guarunteed funding, so they have no incentive to please their customers. A private education market would be a lot better than what we have now.
As for those who can't afford it, there would be a lot less of them if people weren't forced to pay twice, once for the public school and once for the private. And I'm not necessarily against a limited voucher program to help pay for the education of those who really cant' afford it. But this should be done at the state and local levels, not the federal.
Please, why does this always come up? Do yourself a favor, read up on Waco. The FBI weren't the only evil idiots on site there. The IR footage shows, during the fire, Waco members firing INTO their own structure, killing their own people.
I suggest you watch the documentary "Waco: Rules of Engagement." They have extremely well documented evidence on several fronts that the government used excessive force, lied about what happened, and ended up murdering the Davidians. This includes video footage of them shooting into the compound.
IT WORKS. Look to Canada. We have a system that functions. One of the best free systems around. Sadly, the US keeps stealing our doctors cuz they get paid better elsewhere.
Doesn't that tell you something? Doctors are probably well-paid enough in Canada that they don't really need the money. I suspect a large part of it is the ridiculous beaurocracy that acompanies an government program.
In any event, I know too much about economics to believe that government health care is a good idea. The US has the best medical care in the world for a reason: they have the closest thing in the world to a free market.
Buddy, there's more to the world then just the US. Militaries can be effective internationally. Peacekeepnig is a Good Thing(tm), although a mass unsolicited air campaign isn't really.
I can agree with military spending too, but only for self-defense. If you look at the history of US foreign policy, most of our imperialistic actions since WWII have fallen flat, causing more misery than they caused. You might be able to make the case for occasional intervention, but 90% of the dozens of places we have gone are worse off for it. That includes Korea, Vietnam, Iran, Iraq, Yugoslavia, Haiti, Somalia, and many others. In all of these places, we came in with some feel-good idealistic goal, and came out with body bags, a nation that hates our guts, and a local government in shambles. Not much of a track record.
The world would be better off had the US been "isolationist" for the last 50 years.
If the Federal government doesn't fund schools, what's the Department of Education there for? Actually, the Federal government does provide funding for schools. Heard of Clinton's "100,000 teachers" program? Or the "Goal 2000" program, which is a federally-mandated set of educational standards? The Fed's don't run the schools directly, but they do have a lot of indirect control, but attaching strings to grant money and making the districts jump through hoops to get the money.
Besides, since when does anyone pay attention to constitutional limits on Federal power? 2/3 of the things the Federal government does are never mentioned in the costitution. But the Supreme Court has made up nonsense about the Constitution being a "living document," which means that if the plain meaning of the text doesn't suit them, they can make up a new meaning. The fact that Federal education spending is unconstitutional doesn't slow them down a bit.
His brilliant economic policy also gave us 21% inflation
21% inflation? I don't think so. If I remember right, we had "stagflation" throughout the 70s, with an average inflation rate of about 10%. It's possible the inflation rate was up there in 81 or 82-- but that's more Carter's fault than Reagan's By the late-80's, inflation was down to just a few percent. And it's been all but non-existent since the middle of Bush's term. Remember that Alan Greenspan was originally appointed by Reagan (or maybe bush, don't remember exactly) so Reagan should get at least some credit for the lack of inflation we have today. To blame Reagan for inflation that had existed for a decade before he came to office and which he helped reduce is ridiculous.
The notion you express (in a carefree flowing way), that military spending is necessary but education spending is not, is disturbing. Many of us would argue that both are important areas where our government (translation- us, or those we choose to represent us) has a place.
But the difference is that education can be privately funded, while the military cannot. A private educational system would do a lot better job at educating our children, at lower cost, and with more parental control.
The choice is not: government education or no education. It's: governemtn education versus private education. I'm opposed to government schools because I know how important education is, and I'm not willing to leave it to the government, which manages to screw up pretty much everything it touches.
do you REALLY want to live in a county with no public schools
The public school system does a lousy job, so yes, I'd like to see them privatized. But even if we are going to have government schools, why should they be funded at the federal level? The Feds just take a cut and send it right back where it came from, with some strings attached. I don't see the point.
no law enforcement
Like the NSA's "counter-terrorism" activities? Or the FBI's murder of a peaceful religious cult in Waco, Texas? Or their sniping women, children, and dogs at Ruby Ridge? Or their locking up hundreds of thousands of non-violent pot smokers? Or the FDA's harrassing of alternative medical pracititioners?
The list goes on practically forever. I'll agree that we need some law enforcement services, but the Feds have too much power as it is. I'd be happy to see The ATF, FBI, NSA, and most of the other alphabet soup agencies disbanded.
public healthcare
The government is responsible for the skyrocketing costs and lousy services of our health care system. I don't want them to get more control over it.
social services
Like the pyramid scheme called social security? I'll pass, thanks. I'd rather put my money into a private system that has a shot at giving me something back when I retire.
no military defence.
The US has been attacked once in the last 100 years. I don't think that we need the ridicuously large government to protect us from invasion. What our military has done is not protect us from harm, but gone around the world bombing innocent civilians, propping up petty dictators, subsidizing the militaries of Europe and Japan, and generally wasting our money while simultaneously makeing the entire third world hate our guts. You wanna know why we are always getting attacked by terrorists? because our government has screwed over some ethnic group in almost every country in the world. If we didn't undertake to get involved in every petty conflict, we wouldn't be the target of every single terrorist group.
So no, I don't think I'm getting my money's worth, and I don't think that more taxes are going to do any good.
Everyone seems to be forgetting that Cyber Patrol only blocks access to its own customers. I'm not familiar with the details of the service, but if someone wants them to block access to certain sites, what's wrong with that? If the user of Ctber Patrol doesn't like their choices, they can use a different service.
This is not "censorship" any more than the/. moderation system is censorship. Censorship is when the government forcibly blocks your access to information. In this case, the users *chose* to block the information. It is voluntary. Therefore it is not censorship. I don't think that kids have a constitutional right to view porn behind their parents' back.
So I don't think anyone deserves to be sued here. If you want to avoid being blocked, switch to an ISP that doesn't have adult content. Or encourage your users to switch to a different filtering program. A lawsuit would be ounterproductive and would cost all parties unnecessary legal fees.
Slashdot Mirror
The great thing about Perl is that it seems carefully crafted to allow you to do a specific set of tasks-- text proccessing & CGI scripts mostly-- and to do those tasks with a minimum of effort by the coders. After attempting to do this sort of thing in c, Perl was a giant relief. Operations that can take a dozen lines of c can be done with a single Perl command. And the scalar datatypes, string interpolation, built in regular expressions, and lots of syntactic sugar saves the hassles normally asociate with a simple task like reading a line of text, parsing it, and writing it out to a file. For what it does, Perl is awesome!
The benefits are that you can have many browsing windows open without cluttering up, for instance, the taskbar in KDE, or simply without running numerous processes, which can be difficult to switch between.
:)
The best way to do this is using an application-centric rather than window-centric GUI model a la Mac OS. In Windows, (and most other GUI's) you can have many copies of the same program open in different windows. Under the Mac OS, all of a given application's windows are handled by the same process. You *can't* spawn multiple copies of the same app unless you make multiple copies on disk. And all of an application's windows are in the same "layer" on the desktop. They are all brought to the front when you select one of them.
The advantage of this is that you get all the advantages you name above, without the confusing, obnoxious, and kludgy downsides that come with a window-in-window approach.
For example, the Mac OS finder creates a new window for every folder. This would be an annoyance, except that I can go to the application menu and select "hide finder" and all the finder's windows disappear. I don't have to minimize them one by one. I can do the same thing with other apps. If I have five web browser windows open, I click on one of them and select "hide Netscape" and they all disappear.
The Mac OS also has window shade behavior, so that you can collapse individual windows as well as hiding entire apps.
Yet another reason to get a Mac.
Why do half a dozen people have to point it out every time an article is a repeat. Yes, it's a repeat. Who cares? If you've seen it before, just ignore it. And if you haven't seen it before, then it's not a problem.
If you must point it out, send email to Rob or Hemos. That way you know they'll actually see the message. But posting a message about it is just a waste of everyone's time. Rob and Hemos don't have time to read every post on every story, but a lot of the rest of us will waste time reading it. We don't need to be impressed by how good your memory is.
Right, that should have been "with minor modification." Carbon is a subset of the existing Mac OS API's, and Apple provides a tool called the Carbon Dater that checks your code and tells you which API calls are no longer supported. In theory, the deprecated APIs are seldom used, so developers should be able to "tune up" theis apps in days rather than months. But this allows Apple to eliminate enough of the incompatible OS calls to allow apps to run in the preemptive multitasking, protected memory environment.
I believe Adobe managed to tune up Photoshop in a matter of weeks, so it seems to work. If everything goes as planned, it'll be a nearly painless transition, and developers will be able to switch over very quickly. It's gonna be very cool.
Mac OS X Server is just that--a server OS. It is little more than a modified version of the Next OS with some network apps like Apache and WebObjects bundled in. It is not suitable as a consumer OS.
OS X Client is the future of the mainstream Mac OS, and it will feature a dramatically improved feature set for non-technical users, including...
-Carbon, which will allow existing Mac apps to run in a preemptive environment without modification
-Quartz, which is a PDF-based graphics model, supporting high-end graphics rendering abilities built into the OS
-First-class java support built into the default install
-Better hiding of the BSD internals so that new users don't have to know Unix to use their Macs.
-Ports of all the functionality of the current OS so that existing users will be able to interact with the OS in a predicatble way.
-A revamped finder
-Updated internals. They are switching to a new version of the BSD kernal (3.0 comes to mind)
-Gobs of other cool stuff I can't think of offhand.
And there probably will be a command line buried in the OS somewhere, but users will not be required to use it under any circumstances. Power users will be able to use it if they wish, however. Target release date is early 2000. They've already seeded a developer release, with a second due in a matter of weeks.
: PowerPC won't ever drop to the prices you see in x86 land. Why? 10x as many users. AMD motherboards are projected to be MUCH more expensive than BX boards for that same reason, until the volume comes. At least AMD remains compatible with Intel...
It is certainly true that there are a lot more x86 users than Mac users, but all those iMacs and iBooks give IBM and Motorolla decent volume. If Apple keeps gaining market share and a substantial number of Linux and Be users switch, you could see 15-20% market share for the PPC in a couple of years. Given that the x86 market is split several ways, that's probably enough to bring the cost down into competitive territory, especially if the G4 is as fast as it looks like it will be.
One particularly attractive option would be LinuxPPC labtops. Apple already has 400 MHz Powerbooks for about $3000. The PPC is a much smaller and cooler chip, and so you could see gigahertz G4 labtops by the middle of next year. That would leave Intel's anemic pertable Pentiums in the dust.
As for the Alpha, the Mac gives the PPC a much larger market share than the Alpha, so no matter how impressive the Alpha is in theory, it's not going to come down in price unless a consumer OS becomes available for it. The only hope of higher volumes on the Alpha is Linux users, and I doubt enough will switch to make it worthwhile.
I think it was also a StrongARM based system. It was running at 160 MHz at a time when desktop systems were in the same speed range.
So if it's the implementation, why can't a clean-room implementation escape patent restrictions? Real up, it's the idea (or at least the algorithm, which is much the same).
Because a patent protects not just the implementation, but the idea itself. If all you want to do is protect programmers from having their implementations copied, just give them copyright protections and they can keep their source closed. What software patents do is to set up a minefield for coders. Every time he comes up with a clever way of doing something, he must look it up at the patent office, and make sure that no one has thought of it before. If someone has, then he can be effectively blackmailed into either paying outrageous fees or rewriting major sections of his software. And if he doesn't catch the patent in time, then he will release his product, and can then be ruined by a lawsuit.
The basic problem is that "inventions" in the computer field are different from those in other fields. Algorithms get rediscovered and reimplemented dozens of times by different programmers working independently. We get paid to "invent" better ways of getting a given task done. And while an inventor in another field might become rich off a single invention, programmers discover dozens of new algorithms in the course of a given project. Therefore it simply is not reasonable to give out patents to such "discoveries."
This is compounded by the lack of technical knowledge in the patent office. Most patent officials don't have a clue about our industry. Thus a clever lawyer can get a patent for a technique that any competent CS grad could tell you was common knowledge for years. That no one wrote about the technique is often simpy a result of the fact that it seemed too trivial to bother documenting. Yet if you know little about how programming works, it might seem to you that it is a new discovery. Thus unscrupulous folks can obtain patents for things that a talented high school student could dream up in an afternoon.
That's why many programmers oppose software patents. Copyrights are sufficient to pretect against piracy. Patents simply make life miserable for coders, with no real benefits.
Right now all the robots are remote controlled. There should be a category for autonomous AI robots. The controller would have only three buttons: attack, move, and stop. This would lead to less emphasis on big blades and harpoons and more on nimble robots that could outsmart their competition. Of course this would require considerably more expertise and more complex rules, since you could probably confuse such a robot pretty easily.
Big Business is a much bigger threat than the government. You can vote the government out, You can't vote Bill Gates out.
Baloney. Bill Gates does not have an guarunteed income of 2 trillion dollars a year whether his "customers" like it or not. Bill Gates cannot write laws. He cannot throw people in jail.
In some cases businesses do these things, but always with the help of the government. If the government weren't so big, it wouldn't have so many favors to give out to businesses. So it remains true that only the government can pose a real threat to our freedom. Corporations cannot coerce you without government help.
The problem with this is that most of the bandwidth I use is for things like Starcraft. I send a hell of a lot more data through my ISP for Starcraft than for email or other important uses. So if they taxed us based on traffic, I'd be forced to stop playing Starcraft. It would simply shift internet use from high-bandwidth uses to low-bandwidth ones, and would unnecessarily and artificially limit some uses.
Also, how would you define "ISP"? If I'm in a computer lab, and I do FTP between two different computers in the lab, is that internet traffic? How about if they are in different rooms? Different buildings on the same campus? The decentralized nature of the 'net would make it difficult to determine which transactions should be taxed. And unless they come up with a clear standard as to who has to meter usage, it would be relatively easy to fall through the cracks. The attempts to solve this kind of problem would do a lot of damage to the net, and would result in stagnation and rising costs. This is a very bad idea.
Building on changes that started 18 months ago, SGI today announces a series of initiatives and partnerships that will enhance the company's position as the leader in high-performance and visual computing. These actions will accelerate SGI's transition from a vertically integrated company to one committed to broadening its market reach by leveraging its technology through new partnerships with industry leaders.
I realize that's the opening paragraph of the press release, so we'd expect it to be vague. But if you replace the "SGI" with another name, it could be used to describe the re-org of any high-tech company. I'm in awe of the ability of marketroids to come up with completely meaningless fluff like this.
But that's not a country without a government. That's a country with a government of drug-impaired teenagers. Surely you don't believe that all advocates of smaller government will lead to this sort of society, do you?
I'm not "in favor" of any of it, but I think that most guns, mostexplosives and all controlled and prescription drugs should be legal.
Fraud and child porn are bad, but I'm not sure the federal government needs to be any more involved.
Microsoft's profits depend on government enforcement of its "intellectual property rights." Modern capitalism in general depends on a strong government defense of property.
True enough. And that's a good thing. Microsoft deserves every penny people voluntarily pay for its products.
On a separate point, does the writer really "fear" a democratic government that offers constitutional protections to liberty and dissent? More than he fears living in anarchy? He might try living in some place without a working government, like Sierra Leone, before deciding that government is so bad.
Perhaps "fear" is too strong a word, but I certainly think that most of the things the government does are bad. I am not an advocate of anarchy. A strictly limited government is necessary. I'm not familiar with Sierra Leone, but I doubt it has anything resembling my ideal social system, or i would have heard of it and gone there.
It means that I oppose corporations deciding which laws they will obey and which they will not.
Well, the government should of course enforce the laws on the books, but I don't think that anti-trust law should be on the books. It is vague, overreaching, and intrusive. It gives anti-trust lawyers to harrass literally any successful business.
By the terms of the per-processor clause MS would have had a prima facie case against any OEM that did not fork over a license fee for every PC sold, whether it actually had Windows on it or not.
And any PC manufacturer is free to forego selling Windows and thereby avoid this liscence. They can't survive without Windows, you say? Well, that's their choice. If Libux is so great, they can start an all-Linux company, and then they don't have to pay the MS tax.
Since you morons think you can live without that, I suggest you check yourself in where "laws" are whatever the powerful say they are, and corporations are hard to distinguish from the state, and do indeed sometimes come to people's houses with guns.
OK, that doesn't make a lot of sense, but you seem to be saying that the alternative to anti-trust law is corporate fascism. That's not what I'm advocating and it's not clear where you got that idea.
Um... no, the law you broke was the government's law. The government has a law that says you cannot make unliscenced copies of someone's software without his/her permission. It's pretty strange to argue the corporation is given "legislative power" since the only "law" they have the power to make is "you will be punished if you copy our product. That's hardly a threat to abyone's liberty. Just don't use MS products, and you don't have to worry about it.
And it is simply not true that only large corporations can have their copyrights protected. The reason you are allowed to copy Debian is that its authors have (I assume) GPL'ed it, thereby giving others the right to use it. In fact, if you were to take Debian, make some changes, and then sell a closed-source version, you *could* be prosecuted for violation of the GPL. It cuts both ways. The evil microsoft can make software licsences, but so can the Open Source movement. Are you afraid that Red Hat is going to take over the world?
I'm adamant about government by government, as opposed to government by large powerful companies and dictators
What's that supposed to mean? Are you seriously saying that Macrosoft is on the verge of becoming a government? That your freedoms are in jeopardy because they make crappy products and use aggressive tactics to market those products? When's the last time Microsoft arresyed someone? Or taxed or regulated someone? They never have. They're not a government. Not even close.
A government by definition is an agency with the power to force people to obey its edicts. If you break the law, men with guns come to your house and arrest you. That's what governments do. Private corporations cannot do that.
So unless you can point to examples of Microsoft arresting Mac users or Linux users, or throwing people in jail or otherwise behaving like a government, stop making overreaching and innacrurate generalizations. No matter what Microsoft does, it will never be anywhere near as threatening to our freedoms as the government.
I'd be curious as to the details of why this is a good idea. Sure it's cool, but for pretty much every serious job I can think of, a third dimension would just get in the way. The reason is simple: monitors are two dimensional. The trick is to use that space efficiently, and I don't see how adding a third dimension would help any.
There are also control issues. How do I deal with these windows? Do you seriously want to have to do FPS-style moving around to move to a different app? Frankly, this would just be confusing. Please eleaborate as to where this would be useful.
Uhm, NO. Bad free schools beat ANY form of basic education that has to be paid for. I mean, isn't it somewhere in the UN Declaration of Human Rights, the right to free basic education?
Actually, private schools are typically cheaper *and* higher quality than their govt. counterparts. This is the free market in action. Monopoly schools have guarunteed funding, so they have no incentive to please their customers. A private education market would be a lot better than what we have now.
As for those who can't afford it, there would be a lot less of them if people weren't forced to pay twice, once for the public school and once for the private. And I'm not necessarily against a limited voucher program to help pay for the education of those who really cant' afford it. But this should be done at the state and local levels, not the federal.
Please, why does this always come up? Do yourself a favor, read up on Waco. The FBI weren't the only evil idiots on site there. The IR footage shows, during the fire, Waco members firing INTO their own structure, killing their own people.
I suggest you watch the documentary "Waco: Rules of Engagement." They have extremely well documented evidence on several fronts that the government used excessive force, lied about what happened, and ended up murdering the Davidians. This includes video footage of them shooting into the compound.
IT WORKS. Look to Canada. We have a system that functions. One of the best free systems around. Sadly, the US keeps stealing our doctors cuz they get paid better elsewhere.
Doesn't that tell you something? Doctors are probably well-paid enough in Canada that they don't really need the money. I suspect a large part of it is the ridiculous beaurocracy that acompanies an government program.
In any event, I know too much about economics to believe that government health care is a good idea. The US has the best medical care in the world for a reason: they have the closest thing in the world to a free market.
Buddy, there's more to the world then just the US. Militaries can be effective internationally. Peacekeepnig is a Good Thing(tm), although a mass unsolicited air campaign isn't really.
I can agree with military spending too, but only for self-defense. If you look at the history of US foreign policy, most of our imperialistic actions since WWII have fallen flat, causing more misery than they caused. You might be able to make the case for occasional intervention, but 90% of the dozens of places we have gone are worse off for it. That includes Korea, Vietnam, Iran, Iraq, Yugoslavia, Haiti, Somalia, and many others. In all of these places, we came in with some feel-good idealistic goal, and came out with body bags, a nation that hates our guts, and a local government in shambles. Not much of a track record.
The world would be better off had the US been "isolationist" for the last 50 years.
If the Federal government doesn't fund schools, what's the Department of Education there for? Actually, the Federal government does provide funding for schools. Heard of Clinton's "100,000 teachers" program? Or the "Goal 2000" program, which is a federally-mandated set of educational standards? The Fed's don't run the schools directly, but they do have a lot of indirect control, but attaching strings to grant money and making the districts jump through hoops to get the money.
Besides, since when does anyone pay attention to constitutional limits on Federal power? 2/3 of the things the Federal government does are never mentioned in the costitution. But the Supreme Court has made up nonsense about the Constitution being a "living document," which means that if the plain meaning of the text doesn't suit them, they can make up a new meaning. The fact that Federal education spending is unconstitutional doesn't slow them down a bit.
His brilliant economic policy also gave us 21% inflation
21% inflation? I don't think so. If I remember right, we had "stagflation" throughout the 70s, with an average inflation rate of about 10%. It's possible the inflation rate was up there in 81 or 82-- but that's more Carter's fault than Reagan's By the late-80's, inflation was down to just a few percent. And it's been all but non-existent since the middle of Bush's term. Remember that Alan Greenspan was originally appointed by Reagan (or maybe bush, don't remember exactly) so Reagan should get at least some credit for the lack of inflation we have today. To blame Reagan for inflation that had existed for a decade before he came to office and which he helped reduce is ridiculous.
The notion you express (in a carefree flowing way), that military spending is necessary but education spending is not, is disturbing. Many of us would argue that both are important areas where our government (translation- us, or those we choose to represent us) has a place.
But the difference is that education can be privately funded, while the military cannot. A private educational system would do a lot better job at educating our children, at lower cost, and with more parental control.
The choice is not: government education or no education. It's: governemtn education versus private education. I'm opposed to government schools because I know how important education is, and I'm not willing to leave it to the government, which manages to screw up pretty much everything it touches.
do you REALLY want to live in a county with no public schools
The public school system does a lousy job, so yes, I'd like to see them privatized. But even if we are going to have government schools, why should they be funded at the federal level? The Feds just take a cut and send it right back where it came from, with some strings attached. I don't see the point.
no law enforcement
Like the NSA's "counter-terrorism" activities? Or the FBI's murder of a peaceful religious cult in Waco, Texas? Or their sniping women, children, and dogs at Ruby Ridge? Or their locking up hundreds of thousands of non-violent pot smokers? Or the FDA's harrassing of alternative medical pracititioners?
The list goes on practically forever. I'll agree that we need some law enforcement services, but the Feds have too much power as it is. I'd be happy to see The ATF, FBI, NSA, and most of the other alphabet soup agencies disbanded.
public healthcare
The government is responsible for the skyrocketing costs and lousy services of our health care system. I don't want them to get more control over it.
social services
Like the pyramid scheme called social security? I'll pass, thanks. I'd rather put my money into a private system that has a shot at giving me something back when I retire.
no military defence.
The US has been attacked once in the last 100 years. I don't think that we need the ridicuously large government to protect us from invasion. What our military has done is not protect us from harm, but gone around the world bombing innocent civilians, propping up petty dictators, subsidizing the militaries of Europe and Japan, and generally wasting our money while simultaneously makeing the entire third world hate our guts. You wanna know why we are always getting attacked by terrorists? because our government has screwed over some ethnic group in almost every country in the world. If we didn't undertake to get involved in every petty conflict, we wouldn't be the target of every single terrorist group.
So no, I don't think I'm getting my money's worth, and I don't think that more taxes are going to do any good.
Everyone seems to be forgetting that Cyber Patrol only blocks access to its own customers. I'm not familiar with the details of the service, but if someone wants them to block access to certain sites, what's wrong with that? If the user of Ctber Patrol doesn't like their choices, they can use a different service.
/. moderation system is censorship. Censorship is when the government forcibly blocks your access to information. In this case, the users *chose* to block the information. It is voluntary. Therefore it is not censorship. I don't think that kids have a constitutional right to view porn behind their parents' back.
This is not "censorship" any more than the
So I don't think anyone deserves to be sued here. If you want to avoid being blocked, switch to an ISP that doesn't have adult content. Or encourage your users to switch to a different filtering program. A lawsuit would be ounterproductive and would cost all parties unnecessary legal fees.