The fact that apple says "we don't verify the license" doesn't mean that's suddenly OK or the law or whatever. It's not as is Applidium lied about the license, so Apple can't claim to be innocent of the issue - they just choose to ignore it; that's their responsibility, even if they don't want it.
They want to avoid vendor lock in, of which Apple's control-freak behavior is a perfect example. The app-store is the very anti-thesis of free software: a world in which you cannot run any program you wrote unless The Man approves.
Apple, not (merely) Applidium violated the license. They're distributing the software, after all. Even with the most positive spin possible you could merely argue they're just a bulk-distributor and not liable as long as they honor take-downs, but even that argument is dubious: after all, they manually approve apps, so it's hard to argue they don't control what "users" (such as Applidium) post.
Whatever his literal argument, he's right that you cannot distribute meaningfully free software via the app-store. You cannot, after all freely *modify* and redistribute it. It completely undermines the whole point of free software, which is not that it can't cost money, but that it may be improved by others.
I don't know what you're smoking, but you're obviously completely immune from reality if you think none of the documents released by wikileaks demonstrate unethical behaviour on the part variour parties involved. It's hardly "acceptable" to do medical experiments on africans without their consent (pfizer IIRC), nor to boast of bribing officials in all levels of government (shell), nor to any of a host of things the US government owns up to doing.
And you're either lying or badly misinformed if you think the "collateral murder" video was "misleadingly edited". Did you watch the movie - you know, the almost 40 minute long hardly edited at all video? Or did you watch some specially shortened version? I can't tell, but the long version pretty clearly demonstrates human error - perhaps an honest error, but not one that permits the dishonest, unethical cover up that followed.
Another issue here is the escalation of violence. It may seem like a great thing to have the right to do *anything* in self-defense, but if people actually start defending themselves dangerously, criminals are more likely to shoot first and ask questions later. Or, for a particularly sad case I remember, where a swat team executed a search and the victim of the search got frightened by the masked men storming into his house, pulled his gun from under his pillow (or whereever)... and got shot by the police. In effect, the police murdered an (as it turns out) innocent man, destroyed lots of property - and all because they didn't want to risk their own skin, a risk that only existed because the guns in self defense are not uncommon.
Make no mistake, if a burglar breaks into your house, he's taking a risk, and will arm himself to the level he thinks necessary to deal with it. He'll be prepared and will probably have done this before, and you probably won't. So unless you think you're going to win in a fight and he thinks that too, you're better off not escalating the situation.
It matters. People don't like being in prison for even small amounts of time; and being a registered offender means you're more likely to be identified the next time 'round. Then there's the social pressure: for those in not-entirely dysfunctional families and peer groups, exposure is a nasty penalty in itself. All in all, if you know you've been caught once, you're not as likely to risk it again - even if the penalty isn't harsh. A small penalty with a high chance of punishment that follows quickly is generally more effective than a high penalty and a small chance of punishment that isn't executed for years.
You don't lock up kids for years when they do something wrong either - right? And yet, they still seem to learn. And while adults may not change their ways quite so easily, there's no point in overdoing it either: that's just wasting state resources and wasting the time of a member of the public who despite the minor infraction can still be an otherwise productive, social member of the public.
Using more punishment than necessary isn't just immoral, it's plain stupid: it wastes both the state's and convicts resources and can invite police fraud. Even fines (which aren't as inefficent as prison time) have a huge overhead, and can be pointlessly small or overly harsh depending on the convicts resources. Better to invest in prevention.
So, *if* CCTV's would actually enable higher probability lower severity punishments that'd be great. Unfortunately, the article doesn't actually quite go that far. I wouldn't quite trust the officer in charge of the camera's (who's job or prestige might make him a vested intrest) to make a completely unbiased report; and that's who the BBC is quoting. And what he's saying doesn't quite mean the CCTV's *improved* policing, just that they were *part* of policing in those 2500 cases. Perhaps spending the police resources elsewhere rather than on CCTV's would have been even more effective; and perhaps some of those 2500 cases would have been solved anyway and the CCTV's were merely incidental. In any case, the article doesn't demonstrate they were actually useful.
As the article notes,.ogm isn't actually a normal ogg container, so the author isn't disputing issues with ogm (he calls it an ugly windows specific hack). And in any case, if you use a codec set to use few keyframes, you'll get poor seek performance in *any* container format - it's quite likely the issues you saw had everything to do with the encoding choices made and little with the (deprecated) ogm container.
I've done quite a few programming competitions and am organising one in two months; I agree with the parent: Use C++ or python. I've used C#, Java, C++, C and Haskell in the past, but often decent data structure support is critical. I'm particularly shoked that C# lacked a priority queue, for instance. C++ Just Works: and modern C++ isn't as nasty as it was a decade ago: error messages have gotten better, and RAII memory containers (and the fact that memory "leaks" are fine so long as they aren't looped) mean that for programming competition style programs you often never need see a delete keyword... Finally, the static typing nature helps; you generally don't get the time or the sample inputs to really test very well, so a decent compiler and liberally applied warnings can matter.
Having said that, python might be better (certainly the syntax is). You'd need to look at the class library to make sure it's complete. C# is a fine language but it really doesn't offer any advantages over C++ for this purpose and is missing critical data structures. Java used to too, but IIRC the class library is fairly decent by now. Still, what's the point? You'll be dealing with small puzzels; being forced to write classes is at best merely a waste of time and at worst a distraction. The only advantage I can think of is the GC - which isn't a big one in small short-running programs.
You do realize that despite the internals, a zipped pdf may be quite a bit smaller than the raw pdf?
Perhaps you'd prefer a smarter more time intensive approach (tweaking the pdf itself), but there's no question that if you're just out to reduce size in a simple easy-to-understand and perform manner, this is a perfectly reasonable action.
I use both Xaml and Xhtml+Css. In fact, I write more Xaml than Xhtml+Css at the moment - but there's no doubt in my mind that in particular Css is a very very well designed abstraction, it's much easier than Xaml styling.
Xaml's more powerful; granted - but xaml's styling is inherently imperative, and that means that it exposes way more odd corner cases, exceptions, etc.
By contrast, I like xaml's semantic structure more than Xhtml; but Xaml styling is too fragile (and too slow) for my tastes.
The author probably confused the browser service - which is for lan filesharing - with a webbrowser. Not that that confusion gives me much faith in the rest of the article; what other "details" are equally mangled?
From the article:
"Instead, the company suggested users block TCP ports 139 and 445 at the firewall. Doing so, however, would disable browsers as well as a host of critical services, including network file-sharing and IT group policies."
Good to know that blocking ports 139 and 445 will block browsers, we wouldn't want people actually doing that, after all!
So your argument against the fact that a plugin replicating IE-specific tech for firefox doesn't matter in intranet environments is...... that it's windows specific?
In real life usage, I've almost never seen FF (3.1 - 3.5) exceed 500MB of usage. I've got 21 tabs open now, playing 4 videos simultaneously on sites using silverlight, flash, and windows media player (different plugins just to make sure), and a few popups open, and the private working set is 245 MB (Virtual size is well and truly not relevant to OS memory consumption), private +unshared but shareable is 269, +shared mem is 285MB. In short, it's using 270MB of ram.
That's pretty typical in my eyes.
Just for the heck, if I open a few more windows for about 100 tabs total, I see 340MB private+unshared.
Concerning libel laws, this is untrue: although British libel laws are extreme, generally speaking libel is a far more serious legal threat in the US than in most of the EU. These laws should be tuned down everywhere; they prevent criticism by those unwilling or unable to afford costly legal battles.
Particularly in the US the danger to free speech is high due to libel since court cases are more risky in the US than elsewhere, and secondly due to general public intolerance of criticism of the US - witness the reaction of passersby to the protesters calling for the release of the incriminating Abu Ghraib: people felt the need to proclaim their patriotism, rather than to defend the very essence of free speech: transparency with regards to abuses of power.
American society pays free speech lip service - no more (which is bad), but also no less (and simply awareness of the virtues of transparency is worth a lot).
So, while I don't believe it's necessary to transfer DNS control to an international body, you're kidding yourself if you believe the US is doing a fine job, and in particular kidding yourself if you believe that freedom of the speech is particularly high in the US: it's not.
It's also a research OS - the aim isn't to make minix the next best thing, the aim is to research self-healing OS software by using minix as a test platform.
Most good production software takes a good look at similar software to imitate the best features of each - this isn't a competition between minix and linux, it's testing a feature is a simpler (and thus cheaper) fashion.
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The fact that apple says "we don't verify the license" doesn't mean that's suddenly OK or the law or whatever. It's not as is Applidium lied about the license, so Apple can't claim to be innocent of the issue - they just choose to ignore it; that's their responsibility, even if they don't want it.
They want to avoid vendor lock in, of which Apple's control-freak behavior is a perfect example. The app-store is the very anti-thesis of free software: a world in which you cannot run any program you wrote unless The Man approves.
Redistribution with modifications is not possible in the app-store.
Apple, not (merely) Applidium violated the license. They're distributing the software, after all. Even with the most positive spin possible you could merely argue they're just a bulk-distributor and not liable as long as they honor take-downs, but even that argument is dubious: after all, they manually approve apps, so it's hard to argue they don't control what "users" (such as Applidium) post.
Whatever his literal argument, he's right that you cannot distribute meaningfully free software via the app-store. You cannot, after all freely *modify* and redistribute it. It completely undermines the whole point of free software, which is not that it can't cost money, but that it may be improved by others.
Apple *definitely* makes that impossible.
"misleadingly edited" isn't what this eyewitness claims either: http://www.disclose.tv/action/viewvideo/52113/WikiLeaks__Collateral_Murder__U_S__Soldier_Ethan_M/
I don't know what you're smoking, but you're obviously completely immune from reality if you think none of the documents released by wikileaks demonstrate unethical behaviour on the part variour parties involved. It's hardly "acceptable" to do medical experiments on africans without their consent (pfizer IIRC), nor to boast of bribing officials in all levels of government (shell), nor to any of a host of things the US government owns up to doing.
And you're either lying or badly misinformed if you think the "collateral murder" video was "misleadingly edited". Did you watch the movie - you know, the almost 40 minute long hardly edited at all video? Or did you watch some specially shortened version? I can't tell, but the long version pretty clearly demonstrates human error - perhaps an honest error, but not one that permits the dishonest, unethical cover up that followed.
Another issue here is the escalation of violence. It may seem like a great thing to have the right to do *anything* in self-defense, but if people actually start defending themselves dangerously, criminals are more likely to shoot first and ask questions later. Or, for a particularly sad case I remember, where a swat team executed a search and the victim of the search got frightened by the masked men storming into his house, pulled his gun from under his pillow (or whereever)... and got shot by the police. In effect, the police murdered an (as it turns out) innocent man, destroyed lots of property - and all because they didn't want to risk their own skin, a risk that only existed because the guns in self defense are not uncommon.
Make no mistake, if a burglar breaks into your house, he's taking a risk, and will arm himself to the level he thinks necessary to deal with it. He'll be prepared and will probably have done this before, and you probably won't. So unless you think you're going to win in a fight and he thinks that too, you're better off not escalating the situation.
It matters. People don't like being in prison for even small amounts of time; and being a registered offender means you're more likely to be identified the next time 'round. Then there's the social pressure: for those in not-entirely dysfunctional families and peer groups, exposure is a nasty penalty in itself. All in all, if you know you've been caught once, you're not as likely to risk it again - even if the penalty isn't harsh. A small penalty with a high chance of punishment that follows quickly is generally more effective than a high penalty and a small chance of punishment that isn't executed for years.
You don't lock up kids for years when they do something wrong either - right? And yet, they still seem to learn. And while adults may not change their ways quite so easily, there's no point in overdoing it either: that's just wasting state resources and wasting the time of a member of the public who despite the minor infraction can still be an otherwise productive, social member of the public.
Using more punishment than necessary isn't just immoral, it's plain stupid: it wastes both the state's and convicts resources and can invite police fraud. Even fines (which aren't as inefficent as prison time) have a huge overhead, and can be pointlessly small or overly harsh depending on the convicts resources. Better to invest in prevention.
So, *if* CCTV's would actually enable higher probability lower severity punishments that'd be great. Unfortunately, the article doesn't actually quite go that far. I wouldn't quite trust the officer in charge of the camera's (who's job or prestige might make him a vested intrest) to make a completely unbiased report; and that's who the BBC is quoting. And what he's saying doesn't quite mean the CCTV's *improved* policing, just that they were *part* of policing in those 2500 cases. Perhaps spending the police resources elsewhere rather than on CCTV's would have been even more effective; and perhaps some of those 2500 cases would have been solved anyway and the CCTV's were merely incidental. In any case, the article doesn't demonstrate they were actually useful.
* citation needed.
AFAIK bittorrent has better-than-normal conjestion management, not "very crappy congestion management".
It uses either TCP (almost the definition of bog-standard) or uTP (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Transport_Protocol); designed for the express purpose to improve upon TCP traffic management.
Perhaps the uTP devs failed; but there's no evidence for that that I can see.
So - this isn't a bug, and the article is just attention-grabbing. It's a fundamental limitation of links.
Right - is any of that a browser bug or is that merely people failing at phishing detection?
As the article notes, .ogm isn't actually a normal ogg container, so the author isn't disputing issues with ogm (he calls it an ugly windows specific hack). And in any case, if you use a codec set to use few keyframes, you'll get poor seek performance in *any* container format - it's quite likely the issues you saw had everything to do with the encoding choices made and little with the (deprecated) ogm container.
I've done quite a few programming competitions and am organising one in two months; I agree with the parent: Use C++ or python. I've used C#, Java, C++, C and Haskell in the past, but often decent data structure support is critical. I'm particularly shoked that C# lacked a priority queue, for instance. C++ Just Works: and modern C++ isn't as nasty as it was a decade ago: error messages have gotten better, and RAII memory containers (and the fact that memory "leaks" are fine so long as they aren't looped) mean that for programming competition style programs you often never need see a delete keyword... Finally, the static typing nature helps; you generally don't get the time or the sample inputs to really test very well, so a decent compiler and liberally applied warnings can matter.
Having said that, python might be better (certainly the syntax is). You'd need to look at the class library to make sure it's complete. C# is a fine language but it really doesn't offer any advantages over C++ for this purpose and is missing critical data structures. Java used to too, but IIRC the class library is fairly decent by now. Still, what's the point? You'll be dealing with small puzzels; being forced to write classes is at best merely a waste of time and at worst a distraction. The only advantage I can think of is the GC - which isn't a big one in small short-running programs.
Locations, not processes; not all processes are open to such taping.
You do realize that despite the internals, a zipped pdf may be quite a bit smaller than the raw pdf?
Perhaps you'd prefer a smarter more time intensive approach (tweaking the pdf itself), but there's no question that if you're just out to reduce size in a simple easy-to-understand and perform manner, this is a perfectly reasonable action.
I use both Xaml and Xhtml+Css. In fact, I write more Xaml than Xhtml+Css at the moment - but there's no doubt in my mind that in particular Css is a very very well designed abstraction, it's much easier than Xaml styling.
Xaml's more powerful; granted - but xaml's styling is inherently imperative, and that means that it exposes way more odd corner cases, exceptions, etc.
By contrast, I like xaml's semantic structure more than Xhtml; but Xaml styling is too fragile (and too slow) for my tastes.
The author probably confused the browser service - which is for lan filesharing - with a webbrowser. Not that that confusion gives me much faith in the rest of the article; what other "details" are equally mangled?
From the article:
"Instead, the company suggested users block TCP ports 139 and 445 at the firewall. Doing so, however, would disable browsers as well as a host of critical services, including network file-sharing and IT group policies."
Good to know that blocking ports 139 and 445 will block browsers, we wouldn't want people actually doing that, after all!
So your argument against the fact that a plugin replicating IE-specific tech for firefox doesn't matter in intranet environments is... ... that it's windows specific?
Are you kidding?
Ah, so Prolog is kind of like most modern Regex engines?
In real life usage, I've almost never seen FF (3.1 - 3.5) exceed 500MB of usage. I've got 21 tabs open now, playing 4 videos simultaneously on sites using silverlight, flash, and windows media player (different plugins just to make sure), and a few popups open, and the private working set is 245 MB (Virtual size is well and truly not relevant to OS memory consumption), private +unshared but shareable is 269, +shared mem is 285MB. In short, it's using 270MB of ram.
That's pretty typical in my eyes.
Just for the heck, if I open a few more windows for about 100 tabs total, I see 340MB private+unshared.
Concerning libel laws, this is untrue: although British libel laws are extreme, generally speaking libel is a far more serious legal threat in the US than in most of the EU. These laws should be tuned down everywhere; they prevent criticism by those unwilling or unable to afford costly legal battles.
Particularly in the US the danger to free speech is high due to libel since court cases are more risky in the US than elsewhere, and secondly due to general public intolerance of criticism of the US - witness the reaction of passersby to the protesters calling for the release of the incriminating Abu Ghraib: people felt the need to proclaim their patriotism, rather than to defend the very essence of free speech: transparency with regards to abuses of power.
American society pays free speech lip service - no more (which is bad), but also no less (and simply awareness of the virtues of transparency is worth a lot).
So, while I don't believe it's necessary to transfer DNS control to an international body, you're kidding yourself if you believe the US is doing a fine job, and in particular kidding yourself if you believe that freedom of the speech is particularly high in the US: it's not.
It's also a research OS - the aim isn't to make minix the next best thing, the aim is to research self-healing OS software by using minix as a test platform.
Most good production software takes a good look at similar software to imitate the best features of each - this isn't a competition between minix and linux, it's testing a feature is a simpler (and thus cheaper) fashion.