You're mixing up two issues. The first is lessons other nations have learned from the holocaust. Let them worry about that, it's none of your business if you're German. The second is that you correctly perceive that Germans are not treated quite equally yet and that people keep bringing up Nazi Germany.
People don't keep bringing up Nazi Germany to accuse Germans, they keep bringing it up because nobody knows whether one can really trust Germany again. Has whatever caused German democracy to go off the rails last time really been eliminated from German culture? Is German culture intrinsically proto-fascist, even if the current government is democratic?
If you want other people to stop bringing up the Nazi era, you need to convince them that German culture itself has changed. Let me tell you that vehemently asserting that the German basic law is perfect and superior to the US Constitution, and that it trumps US first amendment rights is not the way to do that. Actually, that kind of unfounded belief in German superiority probably contributed to the rise of the Nazis in the first place.
You're completely missing the point. The point is that dealing honestly with its past was the correct thing to do for Germany as a nation, and it is the correct thing to do for individual murderers.
The question is whether the subjects have to right to request said information to be removed from public records
They clearly have that right in Germany. The question is what that says about German democracy.
To most people in functioning democracies, it is absolutely unthinkable for a democratic government to alter the contents of historical archives or libraries, for any reason whatsoever. If Germans (or you) think this is OK, there is something wrong with you and the rest of the world cannot trust you or your democracy.
And no matter what you or other Germans think about it, rest assured that the US will not permit having Germany's views prevail in this matter in international law.
(As for your other comments, you don't even know what a "public record" is, so don't talk about people being "uninformed".)
only the non-civilised would contemplate reciprocal killing.
Capital punishment is not "reciprocal killing" since you can get executed from crimes other than murder.
Capital punishment is intended as a deterrent and as a way of removing people from society who cannot be rehabilitated. I think it's overused and less effective than people think, but many advanced civilizations have practiced it and, as such, is, by definition, "civilized".
Since when is it Germany's job to tell other countries how to apply their laws? Publishing the names of these murderers is legal in Austria and the US. If you think that's wrong, move to Austria and the US and change their laws, but don't advocate just ignoring their laws.
Prison is a matter of necessity in SOME cases-- its purpose is to prevent the anti-social members of society from breaking the rules of society.
Exactly. And someone who, with deliberation and malice, stabs a person to death for monetary gain has demonstrated that there is something so fundamentally wrong with their sense of decency and compassion that I see no reason to ever trust them again. Therefore, they should be removed from human society for life. That's not revenge, it's not punishment, it's common sense when it comes to protecting society.
I have no ethical dilemma with accomplishing that via the death penalty, except that I don't trust the state to administer the death penalty. So, I think they should be locked away until they can't pose a threat to anyone anymore, i.e., until they are either dead or are demonstrably incapable of harming anybody else. Unlike lesser criminals, in such cases the goal of imprisonment is not rehabilitation, it is to protect society. On the other hand, I do think this should be done compassionately and humanely (unlike our current prison system). The only way for them to re-enter society should be if new evidence proves their innocence, or under truly extraordinary circumstances via a pardon.
Your name, address, social security number, bank account balance, credit card transactions, passwords, medical history, and so on are simple facts. Should those who have access to that information be allowed to state those simple facts? In public, on the internet, where anyone and everyone can see it?
They are private facts. The people who hold that information have always been, and will always be, contractually and legally obliged to keep those facts private.
This is an issue about freedom of speech versus the right to privacy. The murder is a simple fact, but it's something that happened almost 20 years ago.
The identity of the murderers isn't just a fact, it's a public fact, part of the public record, established in a public trial.
But I just wanted to point out that just because something is a simple fact, does not mean that it's OK to publish it on the public Internet.
The question is not whether this fact may or may not be published; it has been published and is part of the public record. The question is whether government has the right to retroactively rewrite public databases, public records, and public facts.
The only possible answer is a resounding "no". Fascist states, dictatorships, and communist states rewrite history; democracies do not.
This deficiency is being adressed, though. See, for example, "hate crime" laws.
I don't follow you here. How do hate crime laws contradict the notion that "truth is an absolute defense" in the US?
Hate crime laws apply when someone has committed a serious crime. They set enhanced minimum penalties when the crime was committed out of hatred against one of the enumerated minorities. The reason for that is that juries have traditionally been softer on criminals who hurt minorities.
So, how do hate crime laws at all relate to the German law? How is truth being suppressed by hate crime laws?
Yet it's pretty much in the same ballpark as the laws against discrimination based on race, gender, sexual orientation...
If Germany wants to pass a non-discrimination law for ex-murderers, that's fine. But non-discrimination laws only protect against discrimination by government, employers, housing, and businesses. Privately, people can choose their friends as they like. I can put up a sign on my front door saying "Catholics, Homosexuals, and Vietnamese Not Welcome".
But that's not what's happening here. Germany is trying to alter the historical record and established facts in order to trick people into associating with these murderers even though they otherwise wouldn't. That goes far beyond non-discrimination. It is Orwellian, and it is unacceptable.
No I think the idea here is that if you have done the time in jail then you should have the right to a normal life.
That's a seriously wrong understanding of a "normal life". After they come out of jail, the government has an obligation to treat these people no differently than anybody else. Everybody else (employers, private citizens), however, are under no obligation to forgive and forget.
There is something seriously wrong with you if you think that it is the government's job to revise historical facts for the purpose of tricking me into associating with people I would otherwise not want anything to do with.
This is the premise of our entire justice system.
If rewriting historical facts is a recognized function of the German justice system, then Germany is already careening out of control towards fascism again.
Ask yourself if you were introduced to a person and you found out that they were murderers would you think of them the same way?
Of course not. They are murderers. They have to live with the consequences of their past actions, just like everybody else.
and the whole package isn't as nicely integrated as TFS.
Look, I didn't say that you should never use TFS. If you're running a Windows-only shop, knock yourself out and use TFS; like all Microsoft solutions, it's "nicely integrated".
I'm saying that once you need something like Teamprise, you're probably better off just moving to a non-Windows team development server.
(Keep in mind that TFS is really a me-too product, after both open source and other vendors had demonstrated the value of such systems.)
So, is there an open source integrated solution or combo which will meet the following requirements?
Shelving, configurable policies, and branching based on metadata are standard parts of most major distributed version control systems. They're all integrated into Eclipse and other IDEs.
Integrated work items, issue tracking, dashboard, unit testing, code coverage, continuous integration, are provided by several front-ends and additional tools. That's not a one-size-fits-all thing, since different languages, tools, team compositions, and team sizes are best served by different tools (the fact that TFS is a one-size-fits-all solution is a net minus). Many provide good web interfaces and IDE integration.
I won't name specific ones, because there are so many, but since you mention Subversion--it is obsolete.
Linux distributions let you mix and match those tools very easily: you just pick whatever components you need (version control, bug tracking, etc.). For common configurations, you can get virtual images or commercial hosting as well.
TFS may be the best choice if you run a Windows-only, VisualStudio-only shop because it "knows" a lot about that environment. Once other platforms are involved, you're better off using a non-Microsoft team development server.
There isn't any open source equivalents though... unless you take a load of pieces that do parts of your requirements, eg subversion for version control, hudson for continuous integration, mantis for bug tracking, etc. All the pieces are out there, but you'll have to do the work integrating them yourself.
You don't have to do the work, you just install a Linux distribution that packages it all up. Or you get a turnkey "virtual appliance".
This is software for accessing repositories stored in Microsoft's "Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server " from Linux and Eclipse. I have never seen a usable Microsoft POSIX or Linux product; even if they don't deliberately sabotage it, they apparently don't have the expertise to produce such a thing. Teamprise may have some capable Linux developers now, but how long do you think those are going to stay?
You're much better off throwing out Microsoft's crappy server software and replacing it with a nice, high quality open source solution. Not only do you get better version control and team software, you're also assured that the Linux and Eclipse clients will keep working.
Linux is the only choice as far as I'm concerned. It's because installing and updating it is so much easier, and because it's hard to screw up.
Windows is the worst, being both a hassle to install apps on and keeping everything updated. But the Mac isn't much better: you have to manually install all the apps, they keep popping up confusing "there's a new version available" dialogs, and then users screw up the system by doing something stupid anyway.
It seems like a variant of aleph, a Plan 9 language.
It's not bad, and I think it's a worthy replacement for C.
They really need to work on their installs. Having different compiler names for different target platforms is silly. And having a build process that requires the user to set environment variables is equally silly.
If this language becomes as popular as Perl, then 120,000 lines will soon become 1,200,000 lines. That is exactly what happened to the Perl interpreter and compiler.
I doubt it. The Perl-community is enamored with features and bloat. The people behind Go are hostile to it.
And, as I recall, never in their history were Perl or Java quick to compile.
Also, just like Java, the new Go language (due to the immense respect for Google's scientific prowess) will likely receive accolades
Who cares? The world is full of idiots. Hey, you just made an idiotic argument yourself, to paraphrase "Because Java is bad and Java received accolades, Go will be bad if it receives accolades too."
This sort of stuff is far older; it goes back to mainframe days and supercomputing.
Furthermore, the idea of running two machines in lockstep and failing over shouldn't be patentable at all. Specific, particularly clever implementations of it might be, but those shouldn't preclude from others being able to create other implementations of the same functionality.
DataDraw is released under the GNU Library General Public License, Version 2. It costs you nothing to use, and does not restrict your application in any way. Only the DataDraw program itself is covered by the license.
Slashdot Mirror
You're mixing up two issues. The first is lessons other nations have learned from the holocaust. Let them worry about that, it's none of your business if you're German. The second is that you correctly perceive that Germans are not treated quite equally yet and that people keep bringing up Nazi Germany.
People don't keep bringing up Nazi Germany to accuse Germans, they keep bringing it up because nobody knows whether one can really trust Germany again. Has whatever caused German democracy to go off the rails last time really been eliminated from German culture? Is German culture intrinsically proto-fascist, even if the current government is democratic?
If you want other people to stop bringing up the Nazi era, you need to convince them that German culture itself has changed. Let me tell you that vehemently asserting that the German basic law is perfect and superior to the US Constitution, and that it trumps US first amendment rights is not the way to do that. Actually, that kind of unfounded belief in German superiority probably contributed to the rise of the Nazis in the first place.
You're completely missing the point. The point is that dealing honestly with its past was the correct thing to do for Germany as a nation, and it is the correct thing to do for individual murderers.
This is not about public archives. The newspaper archives have do not need to be altered or anything.
What do you call it if public archives that used to return these names now are not permitted to return them anymore?
The question is whether the subjects have to right to request said information to be removed from public records
They clearly have that right in Germany. The question is what that says about German democracy.
To most people in functioning democracies, it is absolutely unthinkable for a democratic government to alter the contents of historical archives or libraries, for any reason whatsoever. If Germans (or you) think this is OK, there is something wrong with you and the rest of the world cannot trust you or your democracy.
And no matter what you or other Germans think about it, rest assured that the US will not permit having Germany's views prevail in this matter in international law.
(As for your other comments, you don't even know what a "public record" is, so don't talk about people being "uninformed".)
only the non-civilised would contemplate reciprocal killing.
Capital punishment is not "reciprocal killing" since you can get executed from crimes other than murder.
Capital punishment is intended as a deterrent and as a way of removing people from society who cannot be rehabilitated. I think it's overused and less effective than people think, but many advanced civilizations have practiced it and, as such, is, by definition, "civilized".
Since when is it Germany's job to tell other countries how to apply their laws? Publishing the names of these murderers is legal in Austria and the US. If you think that's wrong, move to Austria and the US and change their laws, but don't advocate just ignoring their laws.
Prison is a matter of necessity in SOME cases-- its purpose is to prevent the anti-social members of society from breaking the rules of society.
Exactly. And someone who, with deliberation and malice, stabs a person to death for monetary gain has demonstrated that there is something so fundamentally wrong with their sense of decency and compassion that I see no reason to ever trust them again. Therefore, they should be removed from human society for life. That's not revenge, it's not punishment, it's common sense when it comes to protecting society.
I have no ethical dilemma with accomplishing that via the death penalty, except that I don't trust the state to administer the death penalty. So, I think they should be locked away until they can't pose a threat to anyone anymore, i.e., until they are either dead or are demonstrably incapable of harming anybody else. Unlike lesser criminals, in such cases the goal of imprisonment is not rehabilitation, it is to protect society. On the other hand, I do think this should be done compassionately and humanely (unlike our current prison system). The only way for them to re-enter society should be if new evidence proves their innocence, or under truly extraordinary circumstances via a pardon.
Between 1939 and 1945, the nation of G. (*) was responsible for the systematic extermination of an estimated 11-17 million Jews and other minorities.
(*) Name withheld by request of G. to make re-integration of G. into the global community of nations easier.
Your name, address, social security number, bank account balance, credit card transactions, passwords, medical history, and so on are simple facts. Should those who have access to that information be allowed to state those simple facts? In public, on the internet, where anyone and everyone can see it?
They are private facts. The people who hold that information have always been, and will always be, contractually and legally obliged to keep those facts private.
This is an issue about freedom of speech versus the right to privacy. The murder is a simple fact, but it's something that happened almost 20 years ago.
The identity of the murderers isn't just a fact, it's a public fact, part of the public record, established in a public trial.
But I just wanted to point out that just because something is a simple fact, does not mean that it's OK to publish it on the public Internet.
The question is not whether this fact may or may not be published; it has been published and is part of the public record. The question is whether government has the right to retroactively rewrite public databases, public records, and public facts.
The only possible answer is a resounding "no". Fascist states, dictatorships, and communist states rewrite history; democracies do not.
This is a tough question.
No, it really isn't.
This deficiency is being adressed, though. See, for example, "hate crime" laws.
I don't follow you here. How do hate crime laws contradict the notion that "truth is an absolute defense" in the US?
Hate crime laws apply when someone has committed a serious crime. They set enhanced minimum penalties when the crime was committed out of hatred against one of the enumerated minorities. The reason for that is that juries have traditionally been softer on criminals who hurt minorities.
So, how do hate crime laws at all relate to the German law? How is truth being suppressed by hate crime laws?
They did the crime, they served their time. What's so hard to understand about that?
They committed a vicious, bloody murder. It's legitimate to ask whether 16 years in prison is enough time for that.
Yet it's pretty much in the same ballpark as the laws against discrimination based on race, gender, sexual orientation...
If Germany wants to pass a non-discrimination law for ex-murderers, that's fine. But non-discrimination laws only protect against discrimination by government, employers, housing, and businesses. Privately, people can choose their friends as they like. I can put up a sign on my front door saying "Catholics, Homosexuals, and Vietnamese Not Welcome".
But that's not what's happening here. Germany is trying to alter the historical record and established facts in order to trick people into associating with these murderers even though they otherwise wouldn't. That goes far beyond non-discrimination. It is Orwellian, and it is unacceptable.
No I think the idea here is that if you have done the time in jail then you should have the right to a normal life.
That's a seriously wrong understanding of a "normal life". After they come out of jail, the government has an obligation to treat these people no differently than anybody else. Everybody else (employers, private citizens), however, are under no obligation to forgive and forget.
There is something seriously wrong with you if you think that it is the government's job to revise historical facts for the purpose of tricking me into associating with people I would otherwise not want anything to do with.
This is the premise of our entire justice system.
If rewriting historical facts is a recognized function of the German justice system, then Germany is already careening out of control towards fascism again.
Ask yourself if you were introduced to a person and you found out that they were murderers would you think of them the same way?
Of course not. They are murderers. They have to live with the consequences of their past actions, just like everybody else.
Yes, but in modern Germany, even historical facts can be suppressed as a matter of law. If that sounds scary, it should.
The water may just be stored in rock hydrates. In that case, you wouldn't even be able to tell that it's there, it would look just like rocks.
and the whole package isn't as nicely integrated as TFS.
Look, I didn't say that you should never use TFS. If you're running a Windows-only shop, knock yourself out and use TFS; like all Microsoft solutions, it's "nicely integrated".
I'm saying that once you need something like Teamprise, you're probably better off just moving to a non-Windows team development server.
(Keep in mind that TFS is really a me-too product, after both open source and other vendors had demonstrated the value of such systems.)
So, is there an open source integrated solution or combo which will meet the following requirements?
Shelving, configurable policies, and branching based on metadata are standard parts of most major distributed version control systems. They're all integrated into Eclipse and other IDEs.
Integrated work items, issue tracking, dashboard, unit testing, code coverage, continuous integration, are provided by several front-ends and additional tools. That's not a one-size-fits-all thing, since different languages, tools, team compositions, and team sizes are best served by different tools (the fact that TFS is a one-size-fits-all solution is a net minus). Many provide good web interfaces and IDE integration.
I won't name specific ones, because there are so many, but since you mention Subversion--it is obsolete.
Linux distributions let you mix and match those tools very easily: you just pick whatever components you need (version control, bug tracking, etc.). For common configurations, you can get virtual images or commercial hosting as well.
TFS may be the best choice if you run a Windows-only, VisualStudio-only shop because it "knows" a lot about that environment. Once other platforms are involved, you're better off using a non-Microsoft team development server.
There isn't any open source equivalents though... unless you take a load of pieces that do parts of your requirements, eg subversion for version control, hudson for continuous integration, mantis for bug tracking, etc. All the pieces are out there, but you'll have to do the work integrating them yourself.
You don't have to do the work, you just install a Linux distribution that packages it all up. Or you get a turnkey "virtual appliance".
This is software for accessing repositories stored in Microsoft's "Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server " from Linux and Eclipse. I have never seen a usable Microsoft POSIX or Linux product; even if they don't deliberately sabotage it, they apparently don't have the expertise to produce such a thing. Teamprise may have some capable Linux developers now, but how long do you think those are going to stay?
You're much better off throwing out Microsoft's crappy server software and replacing it with a nice, high quality open source solution. Not only do you get better version control and team software, you're also assured that the Linux and Eclipse clients will keep working.
Linux is the only choice as far as I'm concerned. It's because installing and updating it is so much easier, and because it's hard to screw up.
Windows is the worst, being both a hassle to install apps on and keeping everything updated. But the Mac isn't much better: you have to manually install all the apps, they keep popping up confusing "there's a new version available" dialogs, and then users screw up the system by doing something stupid anyway.
Simply using the name in a commercial capacity is enough to get an unregistered trademark.
You should mark it with the unregistered trademark symbol, "TM"; without that, you'll have a hard time enforcing it.
It seems like a variant of aleph, a Plan 9 language.
It's not bad, and I think it's a worthy replacement for C.
They really need to work on their installs. Having different compiler names for different target platforms is silly. And having a build process that requires the user to set environment variables is equally silly.
If this language becomes as popular as Perl, then 120,000 lines will soon become 1,200,000 lines. That is exactly what happened to the Perl interpreter and compiler.
I doubt it. The Perl-community is enamored with features and bloat. The people behind Go are hostile to it.
And, as I recall, never in their history were Perl or Java quick to compile.
Also, just like Java, the new Go language (due to the immense respect for Google's scientific prowess) will likely receive accolades
Who cares? The world is full of idiots. Hey, you just made an idiotic argument yourself, to paraphrase "Because Java is bad and Java received accolades, Go will be bad if it receives accolades too."
This sort of stuff is far older; it goes back to mainframe days and supercomputing.
Furthermore, the idea of running two machines in lockstep and failing over shouldn't be patentable at all. Specific, particularly clever implementations of it might be, but those shouldn't preclude from others being able to create other implementations of the same functionality.
Actually, neither of us is right.
It's actually released under LGPL. I just misread it on the web page http://datadraw.sourceforge.net/