Informants are a sign of totalitarianism. Left and right wing regimes, secular and religious regimes have all produced totalitarianism (and informants). Marxism has been strongly associated with informants, but so has Christianity, and for far longer. Even the US had informants during the McCarthy era.
Yeah, and a trip to the west coast after the Lewis and Clark expedition would only have been for historical reasons and maybe bring back a few more notes.
Those expeditions were useful because people had the technology to actually take advantage of the results.
The proper comparison for manned missions to the moon and Mars are the half dozen or so trips to the Americas from Europe over the previous millennium, none of which had any impact on history, as well as many other human expeditions throughout history that had no effect on anything.
We should send manned missions to the moon and Mars once we have the technology to settle them; until then, robotic exploration is a far faster and more cost-effective way of advancing space technologies, both manned and unmanned.
It costs enormous amounts of money to get the solar collectors or mirrors up there, and the gain in efficiency relative to terrestrial collectors is small. In addition, space solar power is extremely vulnerable to attack from China and Russia.
I think space solar power is just a smokescreen for putting beam weapons into space.
That's a tradeoff that's at the start of every software development project: you pick the tools that allow you to get the job done with overall minimum cost. That's why so many projects are written in Perl, Python, etc.
Unfortunately, many people make the wrong tradeoffs and then don't even follow through. In particular, they pick languages that in theory permit high performance implementations (e.g., C, C++), but then actually fail to write high performance code. A lot of desktop applications written in C and C++ fall into this category.
and the jury thinks defendant had reason to forsee the suicide by reason of a knowledge of the victim's susceptibility, then the defendant can be found liable in the jury's discretion. (IAAL)
So, on every E-mail and discussion contribution, I now have to try to diagnose the mental state of my reader? Whether they are a suicide risk?
Sorry, that's a bad verdict. What Lori Drew did was mean, but you couldn't expect her to diagnose Megan as suicidal. If anybody should have known that Megan was suicidal and done something about it, it's her mother.
Suicidal people, by the very nature of being suicidal, aren't really in a position to make rational judgements
Society also shouldn't try to make itself safe for suicidal people. If people want to off themselves, it really is up to them and the people who care about them, nobody else. In fact, if I want to commit suicide myself, I have my reasons and I don't want you or anybody else interfering.
If suicidal people are underage, then their parents should keep them safe. In this case, Megan's mother didn't, which means she is to blame.
Here's a hint... parental consent to statutory rape does not make it any less illegal.
Legally, perhaps. The logic behind that is bizarre, though. In some states, kids as young as 14 (perhaps even younger) can be married off by their parents, but they can't have sex even with parental consent, let alone without it.
Seems to me that anybody old enough to marry is old enough to have sex, with or without parental consent.
Normal 14 year old girls don't kill themselves when they receive nasty break-up letters from their boyfriends, real or imagined; quite to the contrary: it's part of growing up. What Lori Drew did was mean, but mean shouldn't be illegal. The fact that she faked an identity didn't change anything: if Josh had been real, Megan would still have committed suicide.
Megan was likely because she was depressed, on anti-depressants and ADHD medication, and possibly because she was fighting with her mother. That's the mother's responsibility, nobody else's.
So, I'd say the way this verdict is dangerous is even more immediate: it lets the mother off the hook and tries to shift the blame to others. Of course, that's nothing new. Keeping kids away from pornography, drugs, guns, violence, etc. is the responsibility of the parents, but they are so technically incompetent and have so little time for their children that they want to shift the burden on everybody else.
I'm both a Mac and a Linux user. I used to use the Mac quite a bit, but I'm using it less and less now. An ext3 implementation would be nice, but I basically don't care much anymore.
Every 15 years, there's another touch fad. It's probably because touch devices are often intuitive and easy to use. However, they just don't work all that well for general purpose computing. Mice are by far the best pointing device available.
I think it's more likely that within a couple of years, you're going to see an iPhone with a keyboard (with some face-saving mumbo jumbo, like Apple did with their not-so-one-button mouse).
As someone who has been a C++ developer for 20 years, I have to say: C++ is a language disaster. It's hard to teach, it's hard to manage, it's hard to debug, and it's hard to optimize. Stroustrup has done more to hurt progress in computer science than almost any other computer scientists. Even Java, for all its faults and limitations, isn't as bad as C++.
"Nowhere" seems like an odd statement for a phone OS that has ramped up to 1.5M units sold much faster than iPhone, and that in terms of architecture, license, security, and usability runs rings around iPhone and Symbian.
I think Android is going to be the darling of Chinese hardware manufacturers. It's a great OS to power all those hardware look-alike phones that come out of China, and people are going to discover quickly that an iPhone hardware clone running Android is the best phone you can buy--at half the price of an iPhone.
My toaster is embedded C; that doesn't mean I can program it.
Isn't OSX BSD?
No. OS X uses some parts of BSD for BSD UNIX compatibility, and then OS X adds a lot of proprietary stuff on top of that. Windows, incidentally, does the same.
BSD is open.
That it is. It's nice that OS X offers some limited BSD compatibility out of the box. But OS X nevertheless is proprietary.
"because if the last 5 years have been any indication, Apple is clearly using a failing business model..."
As a lot of companies are discovering, the last 5 years are not any indication. Furthermore, Apple has won and lost many markets. They are a hit-and-run company that identifies lucrative market niches, milks them, and then changes strategy.
As for the iPhone, like all Apple products, the iPhone can never capture more than 15-20% of the market because it can't: its design is too limited and too targeted at one market.
When people say that they want to learn "functional programming", they usually mean some functional programming language. Common functional programming languages (OCAML, SML, Haskell, Lisp, Scheme, etc.) are duds when it comes to performance: in principle, they encourage parallel-friendly programming, in practice, they get many basic language design and performance issues wrong.
It's also silly to rewrite large amounts of code when usually only a small percentage of the code is performance critical. If you need to speed up C code to run fast on a multicore machine, optimize the inner loops. All the "functional programming" you need for that is available right within C in the form of OpenMP. You'll understand OpenMP a little better if you have used a "real" functional programming language, but the concepts aren't rocket science and you can do just fine as a C programmer.
Symbian is a mature smart phone OS: it works pretty well, but it has a decade of accumulated crud, making it hard to use, ugly, and hard to program. Symbian is obsolete.
But, then, AT&T wants an OS for their obsolete business model: the reason they want to pick an OS is because they want to create a custom OS that ties their customers to their services.
AT&T should focus on giving people fast, cheap access and forget about offering services. And Nokia should dump Symbian and move to Android. Those may be painful choices, but they are still less painful than the messy business failure these companies will experience if they continue on their current paths.
Ethically, I see no problem with copying it in whatever form you like if it's out of print or if it's older than 10-15 years. I consider copyrights lasting longer than 15 years and copyrights on out-of-print books to be unethical, but that's just me.
Legally, you are certainly completely in the clear if you buy a used copy and read it in paper form. You're probably in the clear if you scan the used copy yourself.
It's not clear what happens if you download a copy. The legality of that may depend more of who you copy from and where you live than whether you own a copy. Another possibility is that you borrow a copy and scan it yourself, or that you buy a copy, scan it, and then sell it again. I don't think any of those have been tested in court, and the legal situation may not agree with intuition.
The Ares 1 and Orion commit a lot of funds to manned space flight using old, expensive technologies. We learn little from those efforts, they clearly are not a sustainable direction for space travel, and they only take time and money away from the efforts that actually matter.
If they cancel those programs and redirect even a fraction of that money into new launch technologies, robotic space exploration, and basic technologies, both manned and unmanned space flight will progress faster overall.
Are we going to get a separate Slashdot story every time some iPhone developer or Apple clones an application that people on other platforms have been using for years?
That's how the free market is supposed to work: roughly, in an efficient market, profit goes to zero on a particular product over time. Since, after you have recovered your salary, you don't need to pay to produce additional copies of the software, it stands to reason that you shouldn't earn any money from it either. Open source is simply a mechanism; if we didn't have open source, you'd be complaining about legal Chinese cloning.
And that's no different for most other products. How much money do you think the manufacturer of a $30 Chinese DVD player is making on each unit?
You can avoid this only by getting a monopoly. For open source projects, there are some "natural monopolies": your company has a big advantage in custom programming, teaching, and consulting related to the project. Those should be your real products.
The reason why something like this hasn't caught on before on UNIX (Emacs had this in the mid 90's and it wasn't the first) is because there are better ways of doing it: UNIX users use concurrent version control and wikis for collaborative editing. For pair programming, shared screen sessions via VNC are good (during pair programming, only one person should edit at a time, the other person should watch). In those few cases where real-time collaboration on within the same buffer is needed, Google Docs is a reasonable choice.
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Informants are a sign of totalitarianism. Left and right wing regimes, secular and religious regimes have all produced totalitarianism (and informants). Marxism has been strongly associated with informants, but so has Christianity, and for far longer. Even the US had informants during the McCarthy era.
Yeah, and a trip to the west coast after the Lewis and Clark expedition would only have been for historical reasons and maybe bring back a few more notes.
Those expeditions were useful because people had the technology to actually take advantage of the results.
The proper comparison for manned missions to the moon and Mars are the half dozen or so trips to the Americas from Europe over the previous millennium, none of which had any impact on history, as well as many other human expeditions throughout history that had no effect on anything.
We should send manned missions to the moon and Mars once we have the technology to settle them; until then, robotic exploration is a far faster and more cost-effective way of advancing space technologies, both manned and unmanned.
It costs enormous amounts of money to get the solar collectors or mirrors up there, and the gain in efficiency relative to terrestrial collectors is small. In addition, space solar power is extremely vulnerable to attack from China and Russia.
I think space solar power is just a smokescreen for putting beam weapons into space.
Anybody who is serious about working with 3D data learns to view 3D images by crossing their eyes. And, no, you don't need an iPhone to do it.
The beauty of the jury system is that some members of the jury might view matters exactly as you do.
No, that's not "the beauty". The problem is that the uncertainty that this creates results in prior restraint on free speech, and that's a bad thing.
This verdict should be clearly and unambiguously struck down.
That's a tradeoff that's at the start of every software development project: you pick the tools that allow you to get the job done with overall minimum cost. That's why so many projects are written in Perl, Python, etc.
Unfortunately, many people make the wrong tradeoffs and then don't even follow through. In particular, they pick languages that in theory permit high performance implementations (e.g., C, C++), but then actually fail to write high performance code. A lot of desktop applications written in C and C++ fall into this category.
That's animal cruelty. Stop it. It's bad enough people have to suffer through this, but at least people have iPods.
and the jury thinks defendant had reason to forsee the suicide by reason of a knowledge of the victim's susceptibility, then the defendant can be found liable in the jury's discretion. (IAAL)
So, on every E-mail and discussion contribution, I now have to try to diagnose the mental state of my reader? Whether they are a suicide risk?
Sorry, that's a bad verdict. What Lori Drew did was mean, but you couldn't expect her to diagnose Megan as suicidal. If anybody should have known that Megan was suicidal and done something about it, it's her mother.
Suicidal people, by the very nature of being suicidal, aren't really in a position to make rational judgements
Society also shouldn't try to make itself safe for suicidal people. If people want to off themselves, it really is up to them and the people who care about them, nobody else. In fact, if I want to commit suicide myself, I have my reasons and I don't want you or anybody else interfering.
If suicidal people are underage, then their parents should keep them safe. In this case, Megan's mother didn't, which means she is to blame.
Here's a hint... parental consent to statutory rape does not make it any less illegal.
Legally, perhaps. The logic behind that is bizarre, though. In some states, kids as young as 14 (perhaps even younger) can be married off by their parents, but they can't have sex even with parental consent, let alone without it.
Seems to me that anybody old enough to marry is old enough to have sex, with or without parental consent.
I think we need a uniform age of consent.
Normal 14 year old girls don't kill themselves when they receive nasty break-up letters from their boyfriends, real or imagined; quite to the contrary: it's part of growing up. What Lori Drew did was mean, but mean shouldn't be illegal. The fact that she faked an identity didn't change anything: if Josh had been real, Megan would still have committed suicide.
Megan was likely because she was depressed, on anti-depressants and ADHD medication, and possibly because she was fighting with her mother. That's the mother's responsibility, nobody else's.
So, I'd say the way this verdict is dangerous is even more immediate: it lets the mother off the hook and tries to shift the blame to others. Of course, that's nothing new. Keeping kids away from pornography, drugs, guns, violence, etc. is the responsibility of the parents, but they are so technically incompetent and have so little time for their children that they want to shift the burden on everybody else.
I don't want to live in a kid-safe society.
I'm both a Mac and a Linux user. I used to use the Mac quite a bit, but I'm using it less and less now. An ext3 implementation would be nice, but I basically don't care much anymore.
Every 15 years, there's another touch fad. It's probably because touch devices are often intuitive and easy to use. However, they just don't work all that well for general purpose computing. Mice are by far the best pointing device available.
I think it's more likely that within a couple of years, you're going to see an iPhone with a keyboard (with some face-saving mumbo jumbo, like Apple did with their not-so-one-button mouse).
Those copyright extensions are not just immoral, they are obscene.
As someone who has been a C++ developer for 20 years, I have to say: C++ is a language disaster. It's hard to teach, it's hard to manage, it's hard to debug, and it's hard to optimize. Stroustrup has done more to hurt progress in computer science than almost any other computer scientists. Even Java, for all its faults and limitations, isn't as bad as C++.
"Nowhere" seems like an odd statement for a phone OS that has ramped up to 1.5M units sold much faster than iPhone, and that in terms of architecture, license, security, and usability runs rings around iPhone and Symbian.
I think Android is going to be the darling of Chinese hardware manufacturers. It's a great OS to power all those hardware look-alike phones that come out of China, and people are going to discover quickly that an iPhone hardware clone running Android is the best phone you can buy--at half the price of an iPhone.
What do you mean? Isn't it embedded OSX?
My toaster is embedded C; that doesn't mean I can program it.
Isn't OSX BSD?
No. OS X uses some parts of BSD for BSD UNIX compatibility, and then OS X adds a lot of proprietary stuff on top of that. Windows, incidentally, does the same.
BSD is open.
That it is. It's nice that OS X offers some limited BSD compatibility out of the box. But OS X nevertheless is proprietary.
"because if the last 5 years have been any indication, Apple is clearly using a failing business model..."
As a lot of companies are discovering, the last 5 years are not any indication. Furthermore, Apple has won and lost many markets. They are a hit-and-run company that identifies lucrative market niches, milks them, and then changes strategy.
As for the iPhone, like all Apple products, the iPhone can never capture more than 15-20% of the market because it can't: its design is too limited and too targeted at one market.
When people say that they want to learn "functional programming", they usually mean some functional programming language. Common functional programming languages (OCAML, SML, Haskell, Lisp, Scheme, etc.) are duds when it comes to performance: in principle, they encourage parallel-friendly programming, in practice, they get many basic language design and performance issues wrong.
It's also silly to rewrite large amounts of code when usually only a small percentage of the code is performance critical. If you need to speed up C code to run fast on a multicore machine, optimize the inner loops. All the "functional programming" you need for that is available right within C in the form of OpenMP. You'll understand OpenMP a little better if you have used a "real" functional programming language, but the concepts aren't rocket science and you can do just fine as a C programmer.
Symbian is a mature smart phone OS: it works pretty well, but it has a decade of accumulated crud, making it hard to use, ugly, and hard to program. Symbian is obsolete.
But, then, AT&T wants an OS for their obsolete business model: the reason they want to pick an OS is because they want to create a custom OS that ties their customers to their services.
AT&T should focus on giving people fast, cheap access and forget about offering services. And Nokia should dump Symbian and move to Android. Those may be painful choices, but they are still less painful than the messy business failure these companies will experience if they continue on their current paths.
Ethically, I see no problem with copying it in whatever form you like if it's out of print or if it's older than 10-15 years. I consider copyrights lasting longer than 15 years and copyrights on out-of-print books to be unethical, but that's just me.
Legally, you are certainly completely in the clear if you buy a used copy and read it in paper form. You're probably in the clear if you scan the used copy yourself.
It's not clear what happens if you download a copy. The legality of that may depend more of who you copy from and where you live than whether you own a copy. Another possibility is that you borrow a copy and scan it yourself, or that you buy a copy, scan it, and then sell it again. I don't think any of those have been tested in court, and the legal situation may not agree with intuition.
The Ares 1 and Orion commit a lot of funds to manned space flight using old, expensive technologies. We learn little from those efforts, they clearly are not a sustainable direction for space travel, and they only take time and money away from the efforts that actually matter.
If they cancel those programs and redirect even a fraction of that money into new launch technologies, robotic space exploration, and basic technologies, both manned and unmanned space flight will progress faster overall.
Are we going to get a separate Slashdot story every time some iPhone developer or Apple clones an application that people on other platforms have been using for years?
That's how the free market is supposed to work: roughly, in an efficient market, profit goes to zero on a particular product over time. Since, after you have recovered your salary, you don't need to pay to produce additional copies of the software, it stands to reason that you shouldn't earn any money from it either. Open source is simply a mechanism; if we didn't have open source, you'd be complaining about legal Chinese cloning.
And that's no different for most other products. How much money do you think the manufacturer of a $30 Chinese DVD player is making on each unit?
You can avoid this only by getting a monopoly. For open source projects, there are some "natural monopolies": your company has a big advantage in custom programming, teaching, and consulting related to the project. Those should be your real products.
The reason why something like this hasn't caught on before on UNIX (Emacs had this in the mid 90's and it wasn't the first) is because there are better ways of doing it: UNIX users use concurrent version control and wikis for collaborative editing. For pair programming, shared screen sessions via VNC are good (during pair programming, only one person should edit at a time, the other person should watch). In those few cases where real-time collaboration on within the same buffer is needed, Google Docs is a reasonable choice.