Given that the USA were quite involved in writing Germany's new constitution after WW2, why is that?
Because the US didn't quite trust Germany after WWII, and for good reason: many Germans had been, after all, Nazis just a few years earlier. Right after WWII, it made sense to place restrictions on free speech; today, it doesn't--in fact, these restrictions are probably more dangerous than helpful now.
You're right to point out that Germany's not a democracy, but it's important to realise that this is a direct result of the allies' decisions after WW2.
Well, I think Germany is a democracy, and a fairly good one at that. But I think it's also time for Germany to overcome its past, and that means dealing with free speech like a mature and free democracy, instead of continuing to repress anything that's inconvenient.
German law is full of such bizarre restrictions on freedom.
For example, in addition to the usual laws against slander and libel (which have some justification), Germany has laws and penalties for insulting someone, even in private and even if you don't state anything factually wrong.
Germany also has laws against any speech which might "disturb the public peace" or offend. What's the point of having free speech if you can't offend anybody? Didn't opposition to the monarchy or Hitler offend someone? Didn't Luther's 100 theses nailed to the Catholic church door offend the church?
There is essentially no anonymous speech, since all communications ports need to be registered and all electronic communications are tracked and logged. Registration, tracking, and surveillance of citizens in Germany seems to be so widespread that people don't even care anymore and just think it's the same way everywhere. People have the attitude that "as long as the government does it, it's OK, at least we aren't like the US, where Google tracks everybody", which is a bizarre view given Germany's history.
And it's not just the government that does it: some of Germany's biggest corporations have been illegally listening in on employees and customers and even forged communications.
It has to be said that Germany's government currently appears to be using its powers for benign purposes: policing, anti-terrorism, etc. But if parts of the government were abusing those powers, say to blackmail political opponents, who would know? And you only need to look at the 1930's to see how a progressive and liberal German government can turn into a genocidal regime bent on world conquest.
Somehow, the idea of "free speech" seems to have gotten lost in the translation after the Western allies laid the foundations for German democracy after WWII.
These people have not been convicted of anything; many of them were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Would you want them driving your taxi cab? Flipping your burgers? Digging up your main sewer line?
Why wouldn't I?
You fucking bleading heart liberal socialists need a quick lesson in The World in the 21st Century. It is US against them.
"F*cking fascists" (to use your own words) like you need a quick lesson of The World in the 20th Century, because attitudes like yours brought us two world wars and genocide.
On the other hand, Islamic terrorism is insignificant; for all its fireworks, 9/11 simply wasn't a significant contributor to mortality in the US even in 2001. People (like you) who try to create irrational fear because of 9/11 are helping the terrorists, both by destroying our liberties and by ascribing more power to terrorists than they actually have.
The US will not win the war on terrorism by force or jailing people. The only way we can win is through justice and compassion.
There is no reason to switch to BSD just to get this functionality; Linux has plenty of choices for isolating software, allowing all sorts of tradeoffs between performance and isolation.
If you want something more lightweight than VMware/VirtualBox, you have plenty of choices on Linux: KVM, AppArmor, vserver, OpenVZ, LSM, SELinux, or even the BSD jails patch.
Operators usually justify throttling by saying that unlimited usage degrades service for everybody on the same cable. That justification makes sense.
There is no reason why "backhaul bandwidth" should be a problem. If it really were a problem, they could fix it by increasing upload bandwidth (rather than decreasing download bandwidth).
You're confusing the shell's control library with the stack used to access it. On Windows when you write a.NET, WTL, MFC or plain Win32 application, you're still targeting the Windows shell native controls.
You make it sound like these toolkits are merely bindings to a common set of widgets, but that's not true. There are some common Win32 APIs that all of these call, but there is also a lot of functionality that each of them implements separately. As a result, a developer on Windows faces the same problem as a developer on Linux: they have a bunch of different APIs with all sort of tradeoffs between them.
And the Chrome developers apparently couldn't find a single suitable Windows API that gave them reasonable widget layout, which is why they re-wrote part of the toolkit. And that's what's causing all their problems.
There are half a dozen versions of Windows in common use, more if you count the different editions. Microsoft alone has several major and radically different GUI APIs, and there are several common third party ones in addition to that. The notion that Windows is more "consistent" or simpler to target is a joke.
My Mac currently has several apps in three different toolkits open; several apps written by Apple itself don't follow standard UI conventions. The Windows situation is even worse: there are several native toolkits there (Win32, MFC,.NET,...), plus dozens of third party ones. And UI conventions are violated constantly.
The real problem Windows programmers have with Linux is... that it isn't Windows. They start writing some big, ugly, messy Windows application (hello, Firefox), and then they moan and groan when porting it to Linux and usually do a piss-poor job at it too.
Most of us are justifiably afraid of real terrorism. That's why it's called terrorism.
It's not "justifiable". We could have a 9/11 once a month, and you'd still be more likely to die from the flu. Or a car accident. Or any of a number of other preventable causes of death.
What you should be afraid of is obesity, stress, lack of sleep. Those will kill you.
Sounds just like greasemonkey. Maybe greasemonkey + platypus?
The differences are in the user interface and the JS libraries that come with it. Those are huge differences from a practical point of view. So, it doesn't really matter whether it is similar to GM in some high level sense.
It's about it being a long-term thing that keeps going, with enough severity to affect your life.
It's only a mental disorder if it is not normal to be unhappy in his circumstances. Even long term unhappiness is not a disorder if there are good reasons for it.
The guy was diagnosed with Asperger's; that's his medical problem. That this causes him problems that make him unhappy is not a medical problem, it's an expected and normal consequence. He hasn't been diagnosed with depression, paranoia, or anything other mental disorder.
His doctor can give him a pill that will make him happy and not worry, but that's not a good thing, because unhappiness serves a purpose, namely to get people to change their circumstances. People with Asperger's have a good shot at being happy, just like everybody else, but just like everybody else, there are no guarantees.
Aha, but he _can't_ get used to it, no matter how hard he tries. That's when a doctor starts saying, "Hmm, maybe this is a real problem."
If my bank account is empty, that's a real problem, and its not something that one starts overlooking at some point. But it's not a problem that a doctor can help with.
Probably easily treatable with a $300 bottle of pills from the big pharma's right?
That's the US solution. The European solution is six weeks in a health spa, courtesy of public health insurance. I suspect that the European solution works better and costs less in the long run...
This would explain a lot of the "delusions of inadequacy" side of my personality. I work so hard at some stuff that I'm just incapable of, like having a real career where I'm not exploited.
Look around you in the world; do you seriously think everybody but you lives perfect, happy, well-adjusted lives? Paris Hilton? Cher? Donald Trump? Ted Haggard? Bill Gates? President Obama?
Everybody has problems. Everybody gets exploited by someone sometimes. Everybody has hangups and issues. Everybody has disappointments, in people, in things, and in themselves. Everybody is paranoid about something sometimes. It's part of the human condition. Get used to it and deal with it positively.
Suspend and hibernate work for men. nVidia and ATI cards work on all my laptops and desktops.
I think Ubuntu currently has some of the best hardware support around. They're doing as well as one can, given that they have little support from manufacturers. I don't think more effort in this area would even make much of a difference.
I'm sorry it doesn't matter to you what Ubuntu does, but it does matter to me and probably many other geek-Ubuntu-users. That's probably why it keeps appearing on Slashdot.
And whether and how Ubuntu's app store works is big news; if they unify Android and Ubuntu's application stores, that really gives them a big leg up in the market. That matters to everybody.
It's uninteresting whether you can, in principle, write something that is as fast or faster.
The interesting metric in many situations is whether, given the same amount of development time, you can produce something that is faster while being as reliable and functional.
The popularity of Python is essentially about having a LISP that has a more familiar syntax and interfaces well with C programs. Python isn't LISP but it's not very far off.
It's not that simple. Python is like early Lisp: simple, powerful, doesn't get in your way, but also really inefficient and dumb. Like early Lisp, it has numerous limitations: poor performance of the compiler and garbage collector, lack of multithreading, and lack of a clear language definition and standard.
CommonLisp's problem was that its developers spent way too much time trying to get things "right" (for some definition of "right"), and they missed the boat on many things that actually matter. So, CommonLisp implementations tend to have excellent garbage collectors and good compilers, but then ther are often also have really weak parts of the implementation anyway (floating point, arrays, etc.). And CommonLisp designers also didn't like the way UNIX did things, so they rather came up with their own better abstraction, which basically killed their use in most real-world projects.
As with all languages, once a language heads down a particular track, people whose needs it doesn't meet just leave quietly and pick something else.
A revised CommonLisp with some of the rough edges smoothed, obsolete packages removed, Unicode through and through, byte-oriented I/O, and standardized threads, C interfaces, and I/O would be a good and competitive language, but it doesn't have any buzz. But I suppose stranger things have come back from the dead, so it's possible.
Why, I'm glad that you asked. By furthering the drug hysteria, these kinds of actions will ensure that organizations that benefit from the war on drugs and drug crime (police, politicians, jails, etc.) will get even more tax dollars and public support, and that obviously benefits the public!
It means the police no longer have to hope that they randomly pull over [criminal] or that someone calls a tip line.
I don't think either of those is how regular police investigations work.
You put these cameras in high traffice areas and criminals will walk past them and get flagged. Or at least that's how it works in ideal situations.
It's a question of false positives vs false negatives. If this has any false positives, it's nearly useless because it will effectively end up being a denial of service attack on police investigations.
Slashdot Mirror
Given that the USA were quite involved in writing Germany's new constitution after WW2, why is that?
Because the US didn't quite trust Germany after WWII, and for good reason: many Germans had been, after all, Nazis just a few years earlier. Right after WWII, it made sense to place restrictions on free speech; today, it doesn't--in fact, these restrictions are probably more dangerous than helpful now.
You're right to point out that Germany's not a democracy, but it's important to realise that this is a direct result of the allies' decisions after WW2.
Well, I think Germany is a democracy, and a fairly good one at that. But I think it's also time for Germany to overcome its past, and that means dealing with free speech like a mature and free democracy, instead of continuing to repress anything that's inconvenient.
German law is full of such bizarre restrictions on freedom.
For example, in addition to the usual laws against slander and libel (which have some justification), Germany has laws and penalties for insulting someone, even in private and even if you don't state anything factually wrong.
Germany also has laws against any speech which might "disturb the public peace" or offend. What's the point of having free speech if you can't offend anybody? Didn't opposition to the monarchy or Hitler offend someone? Didn't Luther's 100 theses nailed to the Catholic church door offend the church?
There is essentially no anonymous speech, since all communications ports need to be registered and all electronic communications are tracked and logged. Registration, tracking, and surveillance of citizens in Germany seems to be so widespread that people don't even care anymore and just think it's the same way everywhere. People have the attitude that "as long as the government does it, it's OK, at least we aren't like the US, where Google tracks everybody", which is a bizarre view given Germany's history.
And it's not just the government that does it: some of Germany's biggest corporations have been illegally listening in on employees and customers and even forged communications.
It has to be said that Germany's government currently appears to be using its powers for benign purposes: policing, anti-terrorism, etc. But if parts of the government were abusing those powers, say to blackmail political opponents, who would know? And you only need to look at the 1930's to see how a progressive and liberal German government can turn into a genocidal regime bent on world conquest.
Somehow, the idea of "free speech" seems to have gotten lost in the translation after the Western allies laid the foundations for German democracy after WWII.
These ARE FUCKING TERRORISTS what don't you get?
These people have not been convicted of anything; many of them were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Would you want them driving your taxi cab? Flipping your burgers? Digging up your main sewer line?
Why wouldn't I?
You fucking bleading heart liberal socialists need a quick lesson in The World in the 21st Century. It is US against them.
"F*cking fascists" (to use your own words) like you need a quick lesson of The World in the 20th Century, because attitudes like yours brought us two world wars and genocide.
On the other hand, Islamic terrorism is insignificant; for all its fireworks, 9/11 simply wasn't a significant contributor to mortality in the US even in 2001. People (like you) who try to create irrational fear because of 9/11 are helping the terrorists, both by destroying our liberties and by ascribing more power to terrorists than they actually have.
The US will not win the war on terrorism by force or jailing people. The only way we can win is through justice and compassion.
There is no reason to switch to BSD just to get this functionality; Linux has plenty of choices for isolating software, allowing all sorts of tradeoffs between performance and isolation.
If you want something more lightweight than VMware/VirtualBox, you have plenty of choices on Linux: KVM, AppArmor, vserver, OpenVZ, LSM, SELinux, or even the BSD jails patch.
Operators usually justify throttling by saying that unlimited usage degrades service for everybody on the same cable. That justification makes sense.
There is no reason why "backhaul bandwidth" should be a problem. If it really were a problem, they could fix it by increasing upload bandwidth (rather than decreasing download bandwidth).
Firefox is Phoenix, which has always been cross-platform, being a stripped-down version of Mozilla.
Yes, and that so-called "cross-platform GUI" is primarily oriented towards Windows, with a low quality adaptation to Linux.
(Java is the same way: nominally, it's cross-platform, but the GUI is poor quality on Linux and OS X.)
And the best thing about it--nobody can prove it wrong.
Hence there's still one standard: the Windows API. Everything else just builds on top of it.
Hey, there is only one standard on Linux then: the Linux and X11 APIs. Everything else just builds on top of them.
You're confusing the shell's control library with the stack used to access it. On Windows when you write a .NET, WTL, MFC or plain Win32 application, you're still targeting the Windows shell native controls.
You make it sound like these toolkits are merely bindings to a common set of widgets, but that's not true. There are some common Win32 APIs that all of these call, but there is also a lot of functionality that each of them implements separately. As a result, a developer on Windows faces the same problem as a developer on Linux: they have a bunch of different APIs with all sort of tradeoffs between them.
And the Chrome developers apparently couldn't find a single suitable Windows API that gave them reasonable widget layout, which is why they re-wrote part of the toolkit. And that's what's causing all their problems.
It's been cross platform for a very, very long time, and it definitely didn't start as a "big, ugly, messy Windows application".
Firefox has always had Windows as its primary GUI and target platform, with Linux added as an afterthought.
The fact that Mosaic had a different GUI at some point is pretty much irrelevant since that was ripped out long before Firefox.
There are half a dozen versions of Windows in common use, more if you count the different editions. Microsoft alone has several major and radically different GUI APIs, and there are several common third party ones in addition to that. The notion that Windows is more "consistent" or simpler to target is a joke.
My Mac currently has several apps in three different toolkits open; several apps written by Apple itself don't follow standard UI conventions. The Windows situation is even worse: there are several native toolkits there (Win32, MFC, .NET, ...), plus dozens of third party ones. And UI conventions are violated constantly.
The real problem Windows programmers have with Linux is... that it isn't Windows. They start writing some big, ugly, messy Windows application (hello, Firefox), and then they moan and groan when porting it to Linux and usually do a piss-poor job at it too.
Most of us are justifiably afraid of real terrorism. That's why it's called terrorism.
It's not "justifiable". We could have a 9/11 once a month, and you'd still be more likely to die from the flu. Or a car accident. Or any of a number of other preventable causes of death.
What you should be afraid of is obesity, stress, lack of sleep. Those will kill you.
Sounds just like greasemonkey. Maybe greasemonkey + platypus?
The differences are in the user interface and the JS libraries that come with it. Those are huge differences from a practical point of view. So, it doesn't really matter whether it is similar to GM in some high level sense.
It's about it being a long-term thing that keeps going, with enough severity to affect your life.
It's only a mental disorder if it is not normal to be unhappy in his circumstances. Even long term unhappiness is not a disorder if there are good reasons for it.
The guy was diagnosed with Asperger's; that's his medical problem. That this causes him problems that make him unhappy is not a medical problem, it's an expected and normal consequence. He hasn't been diagnosed with depression, paranoia, or anything other mental disorder.
His doctor can give him a pill that will make him happy and not worry, but that's not a good thing, because unhappiness serves a purpose, namely to get people to change their circumstances. People with Asperger's have a good shot at being happy, just like everybody else, but just like everybody else, there are no guarantees.
Aha, but he _can't_ get used to it, no matter how hard he tries. That's when a doctor starts saying, "Hmm, maybe this is a real problem."
If my bank account is empty, that's a real problem, and its not something that one starts overlooking at some point. But it's not a problem that a doctor can help with.
Probably easily treatable with a $300 bottle of pills from the big pharma's right?
That's the US solution. The European solution is six weeks in a health spa, courtesy of public health insurance. I suspect that the European solution works better and costs less in the long run...
This would explain a lot of the "delusions of inadequacy" side of my personality. I work so hard at some stuff that I'm just incapable of, like having a real career where I'm not exploited.
Look around you in the world; do you seriously think everybody but you lives perfect, happy, well-adjusted lives? Paris Hilton? Cher? Donald Trump? Ted Haggard? Bill Gates? President Obama?
Everybody has problems. Everybody gets exploited by someone sometimes. Everybody has hangups and issues. Everybody has disappointments, in people, in things, and in themselves. Everybody is paranoid about something sometimes. It's part of the human condition. Get used to it and deal with it positively.
Suspend and hibernate work for men. nVidia and ATI cards work on all my laptops and desktops.
I think Ubuntu currently has some of the best hardware support around. They're doing as well as one can, given that they have little support from manufacturers. I don't think more effort in this area would even make much of a difference.
I'm sorry it doesn't matter to you what Ubuntu does, but it does matter to me and probably many other geek-Ubuntu-users. That's probably why it keeps appearing on Slashdot.
And whether and how Ubuntu's app store works is big news; if they unify Android and Ubuntu's application stores, that really gives them a big leg up in the market. That matters to everybody.
It's uninteresting whether you can, in principle, write something that is as fast or faster.
The interesting metric in many situations is whether, given the same amount of development time, you can produce something that is faster while being as reliable and functional.
The popularity of Python is essentially about having a LISP that has a more familiar syntax and interfaces well with C programs. Python isn't LISP but it's not very far off.
It's not that simple. Python is like early Lisp: simple, powerful, doesn't get in your way, but also really inefficient and dumb. Like early Lisp, it has numerous limitations: poor performance of the compiler and garbage collector, lack of multithreading, and lack of a clear language definition and standard.
CommonLisp's problem was that its developers spent way too much time trying to get things "right" (for some definition of "right"), and they missed the boat on many things that actually matter. So, CommonLisp implementations tend to have excellent garbage collectors and good compilers, but then ther are often also have really weak parts of the implementation anyway (floating point, arrays, etc.). And CommonLisp designers also didn't like the way UNIX did things, so they rather came up with their own better abstraction, which basically killed their use in most real-world projects.
As with all languages, once a language heads down a particular track, people whose needs it doesn't meet just leave quietly and pick something else.
A revised CommonLisp with some of the rough edges smoothed, obsolete packages removed, Unicode through and through, byte-oriented I/O, and standardized threads, C interfaces, and I/O would be a good and competitive language, but it doesn't have any buzz. But I suppose stranger things have come back from the dead, so it's possible.
Why, I'm glad that you asked. By furthering the drug hysteria, these kinds of actions will ensure that organizations that benefit from the war on drugs and drug crime (police, politicians, jails, etc.) will get even more tax dollars and public support, and that obviously benefits the public!
It means the police no longer have to hope that they randomly pull over [criminal] or that someone calls a tip line.
I don't think either of those is how regular police investigations work.
You put these cameras in high traffice areas and criminals will walk past them and get flagged. Or at least that's how it works in ideal situations.
It's a question of false positives vs false negatives. If this has any false positives, it's nearly useless because it will effectively end up being a denial of service attack on police investigations.
Despite what a lot of the morons in Slashdot think, Microsoft does listen to people's complaints.
And it only took... 20 years. And they don't listen to "people", they listen to bad press.