Well, it appeared you didn't have enough foes so I thought I'll balance out things a bit. Note, though, that it wasn't based on the post I replied to -- it was just a post I disagreed with, nothing more.
Status change was a (knee-jerk, maybe) reaction to some of your other writings.
As to socialism -- my impression was that you were using the word the way US politicians since mr. Bush sr. have (ab)used it.
Since liberals (and liberal parties) are generally central/moderate parties in other parts of the world, it seemed unlikely you would feel strongly against moderate views, ergo assumption above.
Uh that's certified bullshit; liberalism and liberals have NEVER been equal to socialism and socialist... for good reason, too; socialists generally favour strong big brother governments that dictate many aspects of individual's lifes.
I suggest you read up more about politics, and especially about classic liberalism... you might be surprised to find that many of economic icons that conservatives adore were true liberals.
I'll agree that we all have our biases, but the degree of the bias varies. And especially WHY someone strongly believes in some aspect of the world. In case of, say, an atheist scientist (or just agnostic), it may well be that the person just considers the lack of evidence to mean evidence of lack... but given new evidence, would be ready to change his/her position. This last point seems to be the differentiating factor -- many (most?) fundamentalists are almost defined by their inability (or unwillingness) to change their position, no matter the evidence. They seem to deliberately paint themselves in the corner.
I guess I could also argue that the "scientist" who has cemented view (ie. is not willing to reconsider new empirical data that contradicts his/her assumptions/theories) is actually violating basic principles of scientific thinking, and not really much of a scientits.
And if good old Noah's flood did happen it might have screwed up the climate something rotton so there goes the basis for carbon dating (carbon ratios in the atmopshere).
Doh. "might have screwed up"? I'll counter with "no it wouldn't". Care to explain why exactly that would have made it invalid, or skew results significantly enough to produce multiple magnitudes of order discrepancies?
And your "Adam and Eve" angle was truly bizarre: are you claiming they lived in there for eons before that supposed 6000 year period started? Or that unlike the bible says, there was a specific, gasp, l
Granted, similar excuses are rather common with fundamentals, but I'd expect more from someone who truly tries to convince crowd (Slashdot readers) that supposedly has stronger natural science background than the average US population.
Your comment is either fundamentalists sly take on abusing the (too) common relativist attitude of too many people (even educated ones have), or part of that apathic relativist agenda. "In fairness' sake, let's consider unfounded claims of one non-open minded party, no matter how easily debunkable they are" (as in trying to claim evolution a "controversial" subject when it's not one at all). That's not fairness, that's being gullible and letting fanatic minority abuse the good nature of people (well, plus bad self esteem less educated folks have WRT anything smelling of "science").
The debates between fundamentalists with their cemented views (having painted themselves in corner with fundamentalist interpretation of their holy book, be it bible, quran or whatever) and scientists (or people with strong natural science background) are uneven battles of wits, one side generally being unarmed. The end result is that "intelligent design" proponents end up pointing ostensible contradictions in tiny details, and trying to convince those completely derail whatever theory are railing against.
Finally, note that while I do consider fundamentalist believers bunch of ignorant cuckoos, I have no problem with normal pragmatic religious people. Most christians do NOT believe in literal interpretation of the bible; only the vocal minority in US of A tries to present different picture.
That you don't see the irony doesn't necessarily mean it's not there... Plus, based on how you seem to use word "liberal" (making the same mistake you are accusing someone of; using this rather new americanism of equating it to socialism), I think your post had some irony of its own.
... And in 20 years, which is a ridiculously short time on a history scale...
Sure, if people lived 500 hundreds years or so. As it is, 20 years is close to the number of prime professionally active years that, say, most programmers have? So, maybe a blink from historical perspective, but literally a lifetime for individuals. And wasn't it the concept of the Noble Individual Inventor that was meant to be protected via patents?
And your claim of "no one invents anything" is an absurd patently false urban legend for practically ALL software(-related) patents. They generally would always get invented -- it's just that business opportunity wouldn't be licensing but actually making money out of usefulness of implementing the said invention.
You seriously think Amazon wouldn't have "invented" concept of one-click shopping without patent system? "Gee, no let's not bother create convenient system our business depends -- let's just remain unknown poor slobs that we are instead "
just look at what people in tech companies deal with. For instance, if you work for Apple, and you create a program when you are away from the office, Apple still owns whatever you create during your tenure at the company.
This really depends on your employment contract. Make sure that your contract explicitly excludes things that you do:
On your own time
Using your own equiment
Not related to your work (this is hardest to scope)
from being in "all your creations are belong to us" category that company can freely claim as theirs. In general, companies HQ'ed in California seem to often include such clauses, while many mid-western companies are more fascist.
Having read many of the posts here I understand why so many.coms went bust. The geeks running them didn't have the faintest concept of accounting.
I oppose the expensing of options because there is often no good way to value them, particularly in the case of a startup offering them in lieu of cash
Ummm... Due to your extensive knowledge in the realm of economics, you should know that for most startups this wouldn't be much of an issue, as they are not publicly traded companies. That is, changes would have little or no effect, during time they are actual startups. Interestingly, the change would thus somewhat favour startups, compared to big fossiles that use options (which IMO is a stupid thing to do, for big corps; I'd prefer straight cash or equity bonuses) as compensation method.
Other than that, as both a shareholder and options grantee, I'd prefer big companies actually got rid of current style of options package; even though that would mean losing part of my compensation package.
Whether they are disclosed only as footnotes, or via inexact and potentially unfair addendums to earning statements is kind of secondary concern.
Yeah, and even the site seemed to have some conflicting information... I _think_ that even the first V1 attack was launched as late as in summer of -44, not earlier, but there were some conflicting comments (implying V1 was used in -43 or something). V2s definitely didn't get into actual use before Normandy, which sounds like it was a very good thing for the D-day.
What? and what of the thousands of V-2's targeted specifically for London?
Let's not rewrite history here: what made saturation bombing in Germany of military objectives in heavily populated civilian areas was the unmitigated attacks by Nazis for years on population centers in England with NO military value!
While it's true that V2s were obviously Hitler's "revenge" on England, you are being revisionist here. It's silly to claim V2 was justification for much anything -- planners of Dresden (and other) mass bombings would have had to be clairvoyant as V2s were first used in -44 (their predecessors, V1s, being used bit earlier). Google found
this link if you want to know exact statistics of V1/V2 statistics and dates.
Also, while it's not very relevant whether significant german bomber attacks continued for just months (like they did) or for years (like you claim), for factual accuracy you may want to check duration of London blitz (which was the real reason for Allied anger, and caused more damage than V1/V2 combined), and contrast that to allied bombing raids from early -42 to late -45.
When you put your bomb factories and tank factories in city's like Dresden and London and Osaka,
If there were such factories remaining, that would be true. But you may want to read bit more about Dresden -- it truly was NOT a military target at the time of the barbeque party that it received.:-/
There's also the question of bombing accuracy, which was lousy back then; this obviously caused higher civilian casualties. But if that was the only thing, there wouldn't have been that much complaints specifically about Dresden (or Nagasaki, Hiroshima) bombings.
On the other hand, german objective with bombing London was hardly only military industry... especially with V2s. It's just that they (fortunately) lacked the firepower to do as bad damage as allies did. Both sides considered an important objective to be "breaking the will of the enemy", which supposedly justified such bombings.
A little-known fact is that Germans briefly also tried to bomb Moscow to rubble (late -41). Why briefly? Because the defense (flak, fighters) was intense enough that had they continued, they'd have lost all their eastern front bombers in few weeks max.
Let the generals run the combat. AFAIK there were several opportunities to either retreat and regroup or to give up ground to assist other units that could have actually won the Eastern Front.
In all fairness, many of the things that german generals claimed were big mistakes Hitler made on the eastern front, are either monday morning quarterbacking, or just completely wrong. There was strong tendency for generals to blame everything on "that austrian corporal" after the war. In many cases there were significant disagreements at german high command during the war, and choices Hitler made were usually backed by some, disagreed with by others.
For example, the decision in winter of -41 to not retreat was probably the right thing to do -- even though it caused heavy casualties (due to bad/non-existing planning for wintertime war), many war historians think the army would have been pretty much destroyed had they tried to retreat: army could barely hold their own, and organized retreat is more difficult thing to do than to stand your ground.
Napoleon, for example, didn't lose against russian s in the battlefield; he lost by war of attrition when he retreated from Russia.
This is not to say Hitler didn't make mistakes (obviously he did his share), or that generals didn't often have better understanding of the situation. This was especially evident later on; after D-day many of Hitler's decisions were too ambitious, putting too much faith in his army's offensive capabilities (for example; about 2 months after D-day allies got their real breakthrough mostly thanks to Hitler ordering an attack by all his troops, on west flank of US troops... allowing brits to finally capture Caen, leading to collapse of german front).
But not everything that was claimed to be his (and only his) military mistake was one, and many of generals would have made equally bad (if not the same) mistakes.
Yes, no doubt. I think sugar especially is pretty much an underrated problem... at least salt has been advertised as a health hazard for a while now. And definitely it's the amount that's the problem -- human body needs sodium as an essential nutrient, it'd be dangerous not to consume any.
I also have this invention called fire, which produces heat which kills bacteria
... which is pretty much irrelevant, as bacteria do not kill you, it's nasty poisons they (esp. botulinum) create that do. Same goes for nasty strains of mold one may find in, say, pistachio nuts. It is common misconception that pasteurization is an all mighty cure... if only it was. Same goes for clean drinking water; boiling water doesn't suddenly clean it of all nasty stuff.
Incidentally, I didn't really defend artificial sweeteners, although I do think they are trade-offs people can do for themselves. For those like you who prefer sugars over, say, nutrasweet, fine, drink sugared water; for others, they can have nutrasweet. I don't like its taste, but at the same time, I might be more concerned with type II diabetes than with sweetener's unproven potential health risks. But to each his/her own.
Not to mention all the preservatives and other crap that's likely not very good for you.
While I agree with the sentiment that people should really not consider food just as "whatever fills my stomach attitude" (and I wouldn't consider taste less important than nutritional value, actually), this I have beef with.
Your statement is plain old FUD. "Hey, they are, like, chemicals, and thus they are BAD unless proven not to be, and even then they may be".
I'm not biggest fan of all the techniques industry uses to shortchange us (injecting water, faking taste with MSG, garlic, salt, adding too much sugar [high-glucose corn syrup] in places it doesn't belong to), but many of additives -- especially preservatives -- are GOOD for us. Why?
Without preservatives (including ones with some unfortunate problematic effects like nitrates), thousands of people would die in food poisoning each year in US alone. Without preservatives, much more food would be lost, meaning that current world population could not be fed (at this point it's more about distribution and economics; not a hard physical limitation). Likewise, many chemical compounds that help create or maintain proper food texture allow reducing amount of salt used (more salt is otherwise needed to preserve moisture etc.), as well as extend lifespan of products. As nice as it is to get truly fresh products, that's not always possible, esp. if you don't want your local super-dooper walmart to be the only store in town (they can have freshest produce due to huge turnover), and preservation techniques help in getting decent balance between low spoilage and fresh products.
There's balance between being tin-foil food paranoid, and being ignoramus that blindly accepts all additives industry comes up with. It's good to know basic food microbiology and chemisty to know essential additives that make world a better place (when appropriately used) from the ones that only enrichen corporations and allow sub-standard food to be sold.
Re:Maps are not copyrighted
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Open Maps?
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· Score: 1
Also, if you take a map to a copy shop here in the UK -- let's say, because you need to give your dad (who lives some way away) directions how to find your street -- many of them will tell you that they will not copy it for you (bah, just like when someone in your band needs another copy of some sheet music).
I have a feeling that the "Times' Atlas of the World" is also likely to a copyrighted work..!
I would guess distinction is between copying physical presentation of fact(s), ie. paper map, mapbook, and copying facts themselves. Thus (as an example), if it was possible to automatically scan information from the map (OCR, vectors), resulting data would not be copyright infringment. But then again, exact distinction between making a copy, and making your interpretation is bit murky area, esp. these days.
Re:Hardcore? Or dumb?
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Hardcore Java
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Uh? Where did he say "hardcore" equals "the right way"? I definitely think examples he mentions are pretty hard-core, as in doing things most developers aren't even aware can be done, and wouldn't dream of doing.
My personal favourite of hard-core java things, though, is replacing default Object class that comes with JDK with your own. It was presented in the best java performance tuning available, and was rather interesting thing to do. Author just added bit more debugging, and overriding things in Object may be useful for that... you can be sure you get to debug ALL constructors your app ever invokes, even system classes' constructors.
And I'm not saying replacing java.lang.Object is a generally useful practice, or even too smart, most of the time. Yet it's definitely hard core.
However; the USA has substantial advantages in the Ownership of Property, rights to political dissent and the rights to defend ones rights.
The only entities in USA that have significantly better rights of ownership are corporations -- they are not considered first-class entities (as citizens are) in most european countries. But as to "defend ones rights", I assume you refer to gun ownership. Most europeans would consider these dubious "rights" indeed; not something that add to general well-being, or overall liberties of population. But due to vastly different culture, many Americans do think it is. Just like most europeans think death penalty and extensive health-care are serious "rights" issues, whereas most americans do not (that is, everyone is entitled to complete health-care, independent of their financial status; likewise, that government has no right to kill its citizens that are in its custody).
In the USA most people take for granted that the Police and Courts actually will deal with problems and redress without bribery.
This is just plain wrong: to claim that (western) european countries are all (significantly) more corrupt than USA. Check out latest evaluations by economic organizations (OECD), and you will find out that some european countries (scandinavian, especially) are even less corrupt than USA (which is fairly clean, overall, compared to most world countries), whereas some (southern europe, France), are somewhat more corrupt (somewhat debatable; some cultural things may or may not be considered related to corruption).
EU types have been raised under a system where they delt with a thousand years of entrenched bureaucracy with its systematic and embedded corruption at a level beyond any American Imagination.
Uh, no. Do NOT lump all EU countries along with the ones with most Byzantine and corruption-prone bureaucracies. You are probably thinking worst side of French bureaucratic system. But that's as far from protestantic countries (anglo-saxons, scandinavians), if not more, than from US standards. And even then it's insulting (intellectually and otherwise) to imply there's systematic full-scale corruption in even most problematic of countries.
EU itself, as an organization, is bureaucratic; and has potential to become significantly (more) corrupt. But it has no powers comparable to US federal government, and hopefully never will.
Finally, a minor nitpicking:
Imagine you not being able to quit your job today unless you want to pay your employer.
This would never happen in any european country I know of. True, employee is to give advance notice, just as employer, albeit with much shorter advance (in general, 1 month). However, employer has no means to prevent you from leaving the same day. You will just obviously burn the bridges there, and won't be paid salary for the remaining time you were supposed to be working. That's hardly any different from US standards. Same is not true for employers; depending on country and your employment status, they have to give 1 to 6 months notice for non-temporary workers.
AMD and Apple really should take advantage of this and do a little "we were right all along" ad.
Hardly. That'd only be relevant for part of geek population, or Apple loyalists, because:
General populations attention span (half a Friends episode or so) prevents them from even remembering Intel's earlier claims
People never heard anyone claiming Mhz thing was a myth (it was only used by non-Intel companies, minor players for many computer illiterates); for them "Intel inside" and "this goes to eleven" sales speeches were all the "facts" needed.
Intel wouldn't have to explain lower clock frequencies, just wait few months for new designs to catch up. It's not like they stopped speeding up frequencies, just that M design _currently_ uses lower than what 4 series was currently designed to use
Any decent marketing department should be able to fairly easily sell change like this. If they anticipated significant trouble, this decision wasn't announced at this point, rest assured.
It's not like design decisions for longer-running production lines didn't radically change fairly often. That's their job, to explain and spin it appropriately. And in this case there's enough positive spin to go around. Just imply these are the "wireless chips" (idiotic term, for sure, but only for people who spend few seconds to think about it), and extend from there.
Don't be an ass. What he is saying that degradation is less irritating: just like in general analog mobile phone signal sounds "better", even with sub-optimal physical quality, than digital signal; this because artifacts sound so unlike 'normal' degradation. Even if physically measured, square distance (or whatever measure is usually used) from signal might be the same (or even 'better' for digital transmission)
To put it another way: same amount of physical distortion corresponds to different amounts of subjective distortion. In general, "natural" distortion is more pleasing to human eye and ear (well, brains, eventually) than "non-natural" ones. And blocky MPEG artifacts are worse than wavelet-generated non-symmetric degradation.
Yesterday I was helping my friend get set up with a Java application she needs. She's a fairly experienced Windows user. She needed to install the Sun JRE 1.4 to get this thing to work.
Realistically, though, while it is bit of problem for Sun, it's not truly their responsibility. Application developers have many good options for making installation as easy (or easier) as for native apps, from specific commercial installers (InstallAnywhere), to free Sun-provided system (Java Webstart) to writing-your-own-scripts installers that include and install JRE.
So, while it's not optimal, there are plenty of ways application developers could have solved the problem. And while Sun's web site could obviously be improved, anytime user HAS to log in there, it's already lost cause: users shouldn't have to install anything more than the app itself (or, with Java webstart, just browse to page and click 'yes' few times).
Other than that I obviously agree with other points. There's lots more Sun could do. But keep in mind that main thing is financial motivation. Sun doesn't make any money from J2SE, so main benefit is the vague thing called mindshare... and right now, it's not high on shareholders list.
Sun Java Desktop is for the walmart shopper and not the Linux/OSS initiate.
That to some degree, but more importantly, it's desktop for that office appliance (vanilla PC, thin client) that govt workers and corporate peons are to use, to do basic tasks like read their email, create spreadsheets and write simple text documents and presentations. For corporations selling point is supposedly better maintenance of unix systems, with Sun's branding and support, with lower price (and/or TCO, depends on who you ask) than Windows. You can't buy MacOS for commodity PCs; there's no incentive for Apple to even try that.
I've never understood why the Open Source community is so quick to praise Sun,
You must be new here... Go back and read previous stories about Sun: there are many more Sun-spectic Slashdot readers out there than those that praise Sun. Really, see how much positive commentary there is about other big linux corporate players (IBM, Novell especially), and then check how little there is for Sun (no comments on whether should or should not be).
To me there seems to be interesting love-hate relationship between many open source proponents, and companies like Red Hat and Sun. Both companies are known to have contributed important things to open source community (Sun basically buying StarOffice and open sourcing it... fairly valuable gift I would say; Red Hat doing even more than that, but in smaller packages)... yet there is still this uneasy sometimes semi-hostile stance towards them.
And as to people thinking Java is Free... hello?! Every single time someone says something positive about Java, there are n+1 people pointing out its non-Free status (just as with Qt, for that matter, although Qt has less licensing restrictions in many ways). I really don't think many people think it is Free.
It's a [i]Linux User's Group[/i], bozo, not a political activist's group out to change American military policy.
That is true, and maybe his reaction/handling/publicizing of events should be criticized. But politics are not (and should not!) be monopoly of political parties/organizations, handled in parlaments, by politicians. And I'm not talking about corporate politics, but various grassroots efforts; media coverage (indirectly or directly affecting politics); individuals standing up to their principles in political issues. Thus, I would claim that while it's definitely not main agenda for LUGs, you can argue that it's not completely out of question members, or even groups themselves, could and should participate in politics, in appropriate ways. Say, demonstrating against DMCA, petitioning 'your' candiate to get it changed or something else that really does relate to core interests of LUGs.
It all depends on what really happened. If LUG offered help for army, and person who stepped down strongly objects army's war on Iraq, are you claiming he should just suck it up? What if it was RIAA that asked help in creating spyware? It'd still be wrong to get politically motivated and make a stink about it?
Main problem I usually see, WRT to voicing one's opinion, in context of groups, is that it's usually impossible to get consensus on what is their common opinion. In this case I'd guess most members (admins, whatever) weren't agreeing with the guy, and that being part of the reason he stepped down. And in those cases, it'd be wrong to imply LUG (for example) is, say, against war in Iraq; or even implying it should necessarily be.
Slashdot Mirror
As to socialism -- my impression was that you were using the word the way US politicians since mr. Bush sr. have (ab)used it. Since liberals (and liberal parties) are generally central/moderate parties in other parts of the world, it seemed unlikely you would feel strongly against moderate views, ergo assumption above.
And you are welcome.
I suggest you read up more about politics, and especially about classic liberalism... you might be surprised to find that many of economic icons that conservatives adore were true liberals.
I guess I could also argue that the "scientist" who has cemented view (ie. is not willing to reconsider new empirical data that contradicts his/her assumptions/theories) is actually violating basic principles of scientific thinking, and not really much of a scientits.
Doh. "might have screwed up"? I'll counter with "no it wouldn't". Care to explain why exactly that would have made it invalid, or skew results significantly enough to produce multiple magnitudes of order discrepancies? And your "Adam and Eve" angle was truly bizarre: are you claiming they lived in there for eons before that supposed 6000 year period started? Or that unlike the bible says, there was a specific, gasp, l Granted, similar excuses are rather common with fundamentals, but I'd expect more from someone who truly tries to convince crowd (Slashdot readers) that supposedly has stronger natural science background than the average US population.
Your comment is either fundamentalists sly take on abusing the (too) common relativist attitude of too many people (even educated ones have), or part of that apathic relativist agenda. "In fairness' sake, let's consider unfounded claims of one non-open minded party, no matter how easily debunkable they are" (as in trying to claim evolution a "controversial" subject when it's not one at all). That's not fairness, that's being gullible and letting fanatic minority abuse the good nature of people (well, plus bad self esteem less educated folks have WRT anything smelling of "science").
The debates between fundamentalists with their cemented views (having painted themselves in corner with fundamentalist interpretation of their holy book, be it bible, quran or whatever) and scientists (or people with strong natural science background) are uneven battles of wits, one side generally being unarmed. The end result is that "intelligent design" proponents end up pointing ostensible contradictions in tiny details, and trying to convince those completely derail whatever theory are railing against.
Finally, note that while I do consider fundamentalist believers bunch of ignorant cuckoos, I have no problem with normal pragmatic religious people. Most christians do NOT believe in literal interpretation of the bible; only the vocal minority in US of A tries to present different picture.
That you don't see the irony doesn't necessarily mean it's not there... Plus, based on how you seem to use word "liberal" (making the same mistake you are accusing someone of; using this rather new americanism of equating it to socialism), I think your post had some irony of its own.
Sure, if people lived 500 hundreds years or so. As it is, 20 years is close to the number of prime professionally active years that, say, most programmers have? So, maybe a blink from historical perspective, but literally a lifetime for individuals. And wasn't it the concept of the Noble Individual Inventor that was meant to be protected via patents?
And your claim of "no one invents anything" is an absurd patently false urban legend for practically ALL software(-related) patents. They generally would always get invented -- it's just that business opportunity wouldn't be licensing but actually making money out of usefulness of implementing the said invention.
You seriously think Amazon wouldn't have "invented" concept of one-click shopping without patent system? "Gee, no let's not bother create convenient system our business depends -- let's just remain unknown poor slobs that we are instead "
This really depends on your employment contract. Make sure that your contract explicitly excludes things that you do:
from being in "all your creations are belong to us" category that company can freely claim as theirs. In general, companies HQ'ed in California seem to often include such clauses, while many mid-western companies are more fascist.
I oppose the expensing of options because there is often no good way to value them, particularly in the case of a startup offering them in lieu of cash
Ummm... Due to your extensive knowledge in the realm of economics, you should know that for most startups this wouldn't be much of an issue, as they are not publicly traded companies. That is, changes would have little or no effect, during time they are actual startups. Interestingly, the change would thus somewhat favour startups, compared to big fossiles that use options (which IMO is a stupid thing to do, for big corps; I'd prefer straight cash or equity bonuses) as compensation method.
Other than that, as both a shareholder and options grantee, I'd prefer big companies actually got rid of current style of options package; even though that would mean losing part of my compensation package. Whether they are disclosed only as footnotes, or via inexact and potentially unfair addendums to earning statements is kind of secondary concern.
Yeah, and even the site seemed to have some conflicting information... I _think_ that even the first V1 attack was launched as late as in summer of -44, not earlier, but there were some conflicting comments (implying V1 was used in -43 or something). V2s definitely didn't get into actual use before Normandy, which sounds like it was a very good thing for the D-day.
Let's not rewrite history here: what made saturation bombing in Germany of military objectives in heavily populated civilian areas was the unmitigated attacks by Nazis for years on population centers in England with NO military value!
While it's true that V2s were obviously Hitler's "revenge" on England, you are being revisionist here. It's silly to claim V2 was justification for much anything -- planners of Dresden (and other) mass bombings would have had to be clairvoyant as V2s were first used in -44 (their predecessors, V1s, being used bit earlier). Google found this link if you want to know exact statistics of V1/V2 statistics and dates.
Also, while it's not very relevant whether significant german bomber attacks continued for just months (like they did) or for years (like you claim), for factual accuracy you may want to check duration of London blitz (which was the real reason for Allied anger, and caused more damage than V1/V2 combined), and contrast that to allied bombing raids from early -42 to late -45.
If there were such factories remaining, that would be true. But you may want to read bit more about Dresden -- it truly was NOT a military target at the time of the barbeque party that it received. :-/
There's also the question of bombing accuracy, which was lousy back then; this obviously caused higher civilian casualties. But if that was the only thing, there wouldn't have been that much complaints specifically about Dresden (or Nagasaki, Hiroshima) bombings.
On the other hand, german objective with bombing London was hardly only military industry... especially with V2s. It's just that they (fortunately) lacked the firepower to do as bad damage as allies did. Both sides considered an important objective to be "breaking the will of the enemy", which supposedly justified such bombings.
A little-known fact is that Germans briefly also tried to bomb Moscow to rubble (late -41). Why briefly? Because the defense (flak, fighters) was intense enough that had they continued, they'd have lost all their eastern front bombers in few weeks max.
In all fairness, many of the things that german generals claimed were big mistakes Hitler made on the eastern front, are either monday morning quarterbacking, or just completely wrong. There was strong tendency for generals to blame everything on "that austrian corporal" after the war. In many cases there were significant disagreements at german high command during the war, and choices Hitler made were usually backed by some, disagreed with by others.
For example, the decision in winter of -41 to not retreat was probably the right thing to do -- even though it caused heavy casualties (due to bad/non-existing planning for wintertime war), many war historians think the army would have been pretty much destroyed had they tried to retreat: army could barely hold their own, and organized retreat is more difficult thing to do than to stand your ground. Napoleon, for example, didn't lose against russian s in the battlefield; he lost by war of attrition when he retreated from Russia.
This is not to say Hitler didn't make mistakes (obviously he did his share), or that generals didn't often have better understanding of the situation. This was especially evident later on; after D-day many of Hitler's decisions were too ambitious, putting too much faith in his army's offensive capabilities (for example; about 2 months after D-day allies got their real breakthrough mostly thanks to Hitler ordering an attack by all his troops, on west flank of US troops... allowing brits to finally capture Caen, leading to collapse of german front). But not everything that was claimed to be his (and only his) military mistake was one, and many of generals would have made equally bad (if not the same) mistakes.
Yes, no doubt. I think sugar especially is pretty much an underrated problem... at least salt has been advertised as a health hazard for a while now. And definitely it's the amount that's the problem -- human body needs sodium as an essential nutrient, it'd be dangerous not to consume any.
Incidentally, I didn't really defend artificial sweeteners, although I do think they are trade-offs people can do for themselves. For those like you who prefer sugars over, say, nutrasweet, fine, drink sugared water; for others, they can have nutrasweet. I don't like its taste, but at the same time, I might be more concerned with type II diabetes than with sweetener's unproven potential health risks. But to each his/her own.
While I agree with the sentiment that people should really not consider food just as "whatever fills my stomach attitude" (and I wouldn't consider taste less important than nutritional value, actually), this I have beef with.
Your statement is plain old FUD. "Hey, they are, like, chemicals, and thus they are BAD unless proven not to be, and even then they may be". I'm not biggest fan of all the techniques industry uses to shortchange us (injecting water, faking taste with MSG, garlic, salt, adding too much sugar [high-glucose corn syrup] in places it doesn't belong to), but many of additives -- especially preservatives -- are GOOD for us. Why?
Without preservatives (including ones with some unfortunate problematic effects like nitrates), thousands of people would die in food poisoning each year in US alone. Without preservatives, much more food would be lost, meaning that current world population could not be fed (at this point it's more about distribution and economics; not a hard physical limitation). Likewise, many chemical compounds that help create or maintain proper food texture allow reducing amount of salt used (more salt is otherwise needed to preserve moisture etc.), as well as extend lifespan of products. As nice as it is to get truly fresh products, that's not always possible, esp. if you don't want your local super-dooper walmart to be the only store in town (they can have freshest produce due to huge turnover), and preservation techniques help in getting decent balance between low spoilage and fresh products.
There's balance between being tin-foil food paranoid, and being ignoramus that blindly accepts all additives industry comes up with. It's good to know basic food microbiology and chemisty to know essential additives that make world a better place (when appropriately used) from the ones that only enrichen corporations and allow sub-standard food to be sold.
I have a feeling that the "Times' Atlas of the World" is also likely to a copyrighted work..!
I would guess distinction is between copying physical presentation of fact(s), ie. paper map, mapbook, and copying facts themselves. Thus (as an example), if it was possible to automatically scan information from the map (OCR, vectors), resulting data would not be copyright infringment. But then again, exact distinction between making a copy, and making your interpretation is bit murky area, esp. these days.
My personal favourite of hard-core java things, though, is replacing default Object class that comes with JDK with your own. It was presented in the best java performance tuning available, and was rather interesting thing to do. Author just added bit more debugging, and overriding things in Object may be useful for that... you can be sure you get to debug ALL constructors your app ever invokes, even system classes' constructors.
And I'm not saying replacing java.lang.Object is a generally useful practice, or even too smart, most of the time. Yet it's definitely hard core.
The only entities in USA that have significantly better rights of ownership are corporations -- they are not considered first-class entities (as citizens are) in most european countries. But as to "defend ones rights", I assume you refer to gun ownership. Most europeans would consider these dubious "rights" indeed; not something that add to general well-being, or overall liberties of population. But due to vastly different culture, many Americans do think it is. Just like most europeans think death penalty and extensive health-care are serious "rights" issues, whereas most americans do not (that is, everyone is entitled to complete health-care, independent of their financial status; likewise, that government has no right to kill its citizens that are in its custody).
In the USA most people take for granted that the Police and Courts actually will deal with problems and redress without bribery.
This is just plain wrong: to claim that (western) european countries are all (significantly) more corrupt than USA. Check out latest evaluations by economic organizations (OECD), and you will find out that some european countries (scandinavian, especially) are even less corrupt than USA (which is fairly clean, overall, compared to most world countries), whereas some (southern europe, France), are somewhat more corrupt (somewhat debatable; some cultural things may or may not be considered related to corruption).
EU types have been raised under a system where they delt with a thousand years of entrenched bureaucracy with its systematic and embedded corruption at a level beyond any American Imagination.
Uh, no. Do NOT lump all EU countries along with the ones with most Byzantine and corruption-prone bureaucracies. You are probably thinking worst side of French bureaucratic system. But that's as far from protestantic countries (anglo-saxons, scandinavians), if not more, than from US standards. And even then it's insulting (intellectually and otherwise) to imply there's systematic full-scale corruption in even most problematic of countries.
EU itself, as an organization, is bureaucratic; and has potential to become significantly (more) corrupt. But it has no powers comparable to US federal government, and hopefully never will.
Finally, a minor nitpicking:
Imagine you not being able to quit your job today unless you want to pay your employer.
This would never happen in any european country I know of. True, employee is to give advance notice, just as employer, albeit with much shorter advance (in general, 1 month). However, employer has no means to prevent you from leaving the same day. You will just obviously burn the bridges there, and won't be paid salary for the remaining time you were supposed to be working. That's hardly any different from US standards. Same is not true for employers; depending on country and your employment status, they have to give 1 to 6 months notice for non-temporary workers.
Hardly. That'd only be relevant for part of geek population, or Apple loyalists, because:
Any decent marketing department should be able to fairly easily sell change like this. If they anticipated significant trouble, this decision wasn't announced at this point, rest assured. It's not like design decisions for longer-running production lines didn't radically change fairly often. That's their job, to explain and spin it appropriately. And in this case there's enough positive spin to go around. Just imply these are the "wireless chips" (idiotic term, for sure, but only for people who spend few seconds to think about it), and extend from there.
To put it another way: same amount of physical distortion corresponds to different amounts of subjective distortion. In general, "natural" distortion is more pleasing to human eye and ear (well, brains, eventually) than "non-natural" ones. And blocky MPEG artifacts are worse than wavelet-generated non-symmetric degradation.
Realistically, though, while it is bit of problem for Sun, it's not truly their responsibility. Application developers have many good options for making installation as easy (or easier) as for native apps, from specific commercial installers (InstallAnywhere), to free Sun-provided system (Java Webstart) to writing-your-own-scripts installers that include and install JRE.
So, while it's not optimal, there are plenty of ways application developers could have solved the problem. And while Sun's web site could obviously be improved, anytime user HAS to log in there, it's already lost cause: users shouldn't have to install anything more than the app itself (or, with Java webstart, just browse to page and click 'yes' few times).
Other than that I obviously agree with other points. There's lots more Sun could do. But keep in mind that main thing is financial motivation. Sun doesn't make any money from J2SE, so main benefit is the vague thing called mindshare... and right now, it's not high on shareholders list.
That to some degree, but more importantly, it's desktop for that office appliance (vanilla PC, thin client) that govt workers and corporate peons are to use, to do basic tasks like read their email, create spreadsheets and write simple text documents and presentations. For corporations selling point is supposedly better maintenance of unix systems, with Sun's branding and support, with lower price (and/or TCO, depends on who you ask) than Windows. You can't buy MacOS for commodity PCs; there's no incentive for Apple to even try that.
Yeah? But how about them AMIGA zealots? :-)
We ain't that bad now are we?
You must be new here... Go back and read previous stories about Sun: there are many more Sun-spectic Slashdot readers out there than those that praise Sun. Really, see how much positive commentary there is about other big linux corporate players (IBM, Novell especially), and then check how little there is for Sun (no comments on whether should or should not be).
To me there seems to be interesting love-hate relationship between many open source proponents, and companies like Red Hat and Sun. Both companies are known to have contributed important things to open source community (Sun basically buying StarOffice and open sourcing it... fairly valuable gift I would say; Red Hat doing even more than that, but in smaller packages)... yet there is still this uneasy sometimes semi-hostile stance towards them.
And as to people thinking Java is Free... hello?! Every single time someone says something positive about Java, there are n+1 people pointing out its non-Free status (just as with Qt, for that matter, although Qt has less licensing restrictions in many ways). I really don't think many people think it is Free.
That is true, and maybe his reaction/handling/publicizing of events should be criticized. But politics are not (and should not!) be monopoly of political parties/organizations, handled in parlaments, by politicians. And I'm not talking about corporate politics, but various grassroots efforts; media coverage (indirectly or directly affecting politics); individuals standing up to their principles in political issues. Thus, I would claim that while it's definitely not main agenda for LUGs, you can argue that it's not completely out of question members, or even groups themselves, could and should participate in politics, in appropriate ways. Say, demonstrating against DMCA, petitioning 'your' candiate to get it changed or something else that really does relate to core interests of LUGs.
It all depends on what really happened. If LUG offered help for army, and person who stepped down strongly objects army's war on Iraq, are you claiming he should just suck it up? What if it was RIAA that asked help in creating spyware? It'd still be wrong to get politically motivated and make a stink about it?
Main problem I usually see, WRT to voicing one's opinion, in context of groups, is that it's usually impossible to get consensus on what is their common opinion. In this case I'd guess most members (admins, whatever) weren't agreeing with the guy, and that being part of the reason he stepped down. And in those cases, it'd be wrong to imply LUG (for example) is, say, against war in Iraq; or even implying it should necessarily be.