The idea of having all of the drop targets appear when you start a drag operation is actually pretty cool. In standard Windows and Linux, they don't. It doesn't make any sense for that to happen because, well, everything would pop up because you can drag just about anywhere. Still, it's not really discoverable for end users and it would be kinda neat if Windows (or Linux), for that matter, lit things up a bit.
However, this patent wouldn't actually cover such an application, because, under Windows, there's no way for a drag source to actually tell all of the drag targets to light up. You would need a new interface on COM (which Windows shell is all written around), that a drop target could get a message to light up with. I highly doubt Yahoo could do -that-, and that's really only something Microsoft can do. At best, Yahoo's patent only really covers drag and drop within the same application, and, here, we have to ask ourself if it is so novel to have an application that lights up all the options that go with something when you select a certain item.
Borrowing money is not the same thing as paying for a good or service, it is a special case.
Nah, its a service. That's why they call the sector "Financial Services", and why the excuse for the destruction of our economy is called a "move towards the services industries". Really, all we've done for the last decade is trade that which provides real wealth - manufacturing, for an economy based on lending to each other, and now we've reached a breaking point, and the whole thing is collapsing.
If you do not keep your promise to pay back, whether that be to a person or a company, then don't be surprised when others, whether they be people or companies, are reluctant to loan money to you again in the future. If you want access to credit in the future then you have to pay your dues, it is really that simple.
I have no intention of borrowing again in the future. So, again, where's the problem. I really don't care if my credit score is 800 or if it is 8. Point of fact is that I haven't borrowed a nickle in over two years, and have just been paying down debt. Once I sell my house, I'll basically be debt free. From there, I'll be able to save up for a house cash over about a period of two to three years, and I'll have no debt, a house, and two cars that are paid for. After that, I'll either buy used cars or save up for one.
Indeed, nobody is stopping you. You may spend your own money however you wish. My only objection is when other people come to me with the power of government (i.e. the power of the sword) and demand a "donation" to their just cause in the form of more taxes.
And indeed, I have a problem with the government that subsidies mega corporations through limited liabilities at the expense of family owned businesses and local stores. In essence, corporations are a government subsidy to destroy communities.
I have sometimes had to renegotiate the contracts periodically, but you would be surprised how willing most companies are to negotiate.
Why should anyone have to do this? Again, you argue that we should all be so weak willed, and honestly, to me, at this point, I see the whole system as a giant joke, and if there is to be any negotiating, it should be that companies should be making concessions to me in order to have my vote to retain their legal existence.
Perhaps, but have you ever NOT been paid for work that you have already done? Even if you are laid off or fired you still received a final check for any work outstanding for which you have not yet been paid.
Actually, companies routinely try to push back on work orders after work has commenced and work has been completed.
Do you know what it means to have credit? What is credit? Credit is your promise to repay in the future, possibly with interest, what you have borrowed today. Credit is your word of honor or your promise. Do you break promises that you make simply because you may not like the person to whom you made the promise? If you don't want to bear that burden then don't make the promise in the first place (i.e. don't use the credit card to borrow money).
No its not. It's a contractual obligation for a service provided. Companies can renegotiate or impose by fiat their terms of service, and so too consumers can do the same for payment. If companies did not want to assume the risks of consumer negotiation, they should not have engaged in the contract to begin with. The onus is on companies, not consumers.
Arguing that we should equate a business relationship with a corporation as a personal promise is utterly ridiculous. Companies break every promise they ever make. Products do not live up to advertised promises, services do not live up to promises, and companies routinely say in nearly every contract that they make that they reserve the right to change its terms simply because they do not feel like keeping up with their so-called promises. Companies and corporations were created, originally, to benefit society in general and it is debatable at this point whether or not they have lived up to that very fundamental promise!
So, my argument to you is, surely, if you believe in promises so much, then really, why should what you say to any company even matter, when, at the end of the day, no company will keep its word with you.
You may not like the idea that shareholders are protected from being personally taken to the cleaners (it may interest you to know that if you have a 401k
No, I don't have a 401k, so it doesn't bother me at all. Really, I'm watching the stock market crash, the mortgage sector tank, and the only negative effect that has happened to me is more difficulty in selling my house.
That is a good thing. Who would take the risk of sticking their neck out with an investment if they thought that the lawyers would strip them of their personal assets when the venture went south? Probably not many people and they would certainly demand a very high rate for their level of perceived risk
The moral of the story is simple. You argue against government intervention as a moral wrong, yet, the very society that you exist in could not exist without the twin government supports of corporation and lending enforcement. In other words, a company has legal recourse to collect a debt under caveat emptor because of the government, and a company shields its investors from liability becuase of the government. So, for you to say that government is evil and private sector is good, is simply disingenous, as you cannot have today's private sector without the government!
It's a government intervention, which is my point. Sure, you can argue that it is a "good government" intervention, but, what you are advocating is a government intervention none-the-less based upon your personal social preferences. With that said, anyone else's ideas of government interventions are certainly welcome. If you can have the mere existence of your financial frankenstein called a corporation, certainly, others can have their wishes to ensure these institutions are made to work in the public interest, unless of course, you maintain a pathologically selfish interest in disregarding the wishes and wills of others. This is a democracy after all!
All of the significant features of OS/2 have already been duplicated in Linux.
a) Workplace Shell. Workplace shell was cool, but Linux already has two object oriented desktops in KDE and Gnome that both do more than WPS did, and without the aweful MS lock that sank the whole desktop.
b) Graphics layer. OS/2 had an early version of Windows GDI, while Linux has several ways to use a graphics surface. Cairo comes to mind, but there are others. And, Linux has a good implementation of hardware accelerated OpenGL to go with.
c) OS Core. Yeah, OS/2 was a pioneering in threading, but Linux threading has gotten pretty good as of late. And a lot of OS/2's other features - such as a driver architecture, DLLs, and so on, are all there in the OS. OS/2 supported multiple file systems, but so does Linux, and Linux has better file systems than HPFS.
d) Other devices. Long a liability for Linux, Linux now supports a fairly broad array of devices in its own right - from custom monitor specifications to USB storage to graphics, sound, and networking cards.
c) Finally, I have to have the obligatory quote - Linux does the right thing with CTRL-ALT-DEL. OS/2 does not.
I'm thinking that a good CS Degree should give you the background in compilers, machine architecture and structures, languages (in the theoretical sense), so that, you could write your own cheesy VM + byte code compiler for a senior project.
Patents, copyright, and to some extent insider contracts exist because of government interventions not because people are free to buy from and sell to whomever they please. One cannot make good the effects of government interventions with even more interventions. That too has been tried and failed. The fact that these impediments exist in our system today is not a failing of capitalism per se but rather the result of an attempt to create a mixed system
So, would we also throw limited liability onto that plate as well? The entire notion of a corporation and a securities market is merely a legal creation by the government. We could get rid of corporations as a federal invention in the marketplace, don't you think?
Think about how you would feel if they didn't cut your paycheck because they didn't feel like paying you what you were owed and you will see your answer. A responsible adult pays her bills period. Any attempt to rationalize not paying ones bills is going to be met with unsympathetic ears by the vast majority of hard working people everywhere.
1) Companies DO cut your paycheck when they don't feel like paying you any more. Go ahead, please make that argument to any contractor whose gone through rate reviews or December freezes or any employee whose had their pension cuts, benefits cut, raises frozen or salaries cut. All of that is rather common in the USA today. So yeah, companies do not pay their bills, and they only pay people when they want to. Why shouldn't I act like they do?
2) Corporate america has limited liability. If Enron goes belly up, or if other companies do not pay their bills, the people who own the company, ie, the shareholders, do not have to pay any of the debts. That's patently a right that I as an individual do not have. I do not have a way to magically gamble my assets the same way that corporations can gamble. I just don't.
Please, tell me what moral code requires me to pay a credit card company? Islamic countries don't, not even to this day. Charging interest is a -sin-. Even under catholicism until a few hundred years ago, charging of interest was a sin. Is there a commandment that God wrote, that says, Thou Shalt Pay Chase Manhattan on Time? I don't think so. Equating the payment of a credit card bill to a bunch of shareholders that are already legally shielded from not losing anything on the deal to some sort of a moral or religious code is about the most assanine thing that I've ever heard of.
Yarr, it be an average, I'm sure you've heard of them. Oh yes, and 0.2mm is a pretty big number, rather easy to measure
Um, where's the ocean going to be smooth enough to measure.2mm? The best I think you'd be able to get would be some sort of a weighted average, but an exact.2mm measurement? Come on. It strains the credibility. For all we know, a few fish swimming underneath the ocean would displace the surface that much. It's just an absurd figure.
I have to say that this is an experiment actually worth doing, but I would like to see them do it with a bigger paper airplane than a few inches long. That way, if it does land on a continent, it would be easier to find (assuming that it remained intact). But, still, the thought of a paper airplane landing somewhere from orbit is just, cool.
What is capitalism but freedom? Freedom to buy from and sell to whomever you want, the freedom to spend or save your own money as you see fit and the freedom to choose your own destiny and succeed or fail based upon your own merits, luck, efforts, and hard work. Why should we seek to limit the freedom of the individual to live his life as he chooses?
I agree with that completely. Now, my question to you though, is, in today's economy, where's the freedom? You can't say that they you are free to choose your own destiny and succeed and fail on your merits when any established player uses a deep layer of patent, copyright, insider contracts and market force to crush you? I mean, if we were as free as you suggest, then, should I not just be able to develop a word processor, a car, or a CPU? The fact is, its difficult to do so because there are so many patents out there that stifle innovation and competition.
Social stability matters, and there is none, when at any given moment you might find yourself without a job because they just yanked your business to India or some other third world country. Yes, it is radical to say to shoot a ruling class, but, really, the basic purpose of a class being allowed to rule is that we expect that class to bring home the bacon for the rest of us. If they aren't holding up that end of the bargain, more loyal to their foreign investors than they are to Americans, then, why have them? That's what I'm saying.
Seriously, why pay your bills, if, at the end of the day, your mortgage is held by a foreign country or a credit card is issued by a foreign bank, and the interest really is so much imaginary money designed to pad the pockets of someone whose already far richer than you'll ever be?
I mean, the whole country is locked in the hands of an investment class that frowns upon any enterprise that even smacks of productivity. They would rather rake the poor over the coals with high interest just because it has a higher return. They seek to restrict and restrain any trade that offers meaningful competition. They seek to make the people believe that their subjugation is moral, and they seek to use cultural preferences to divide the nation and hide any real agenda.
Show me the candidate that wants to ban credit cards, reduce the terms of patents, or do any structural thing designed to break up the current moneyed class. There isn't one. There's no political party seeking to benefit the American people, merely, a set of dueling soulless juggernaughts, jousting, half drunk with power, over whose lords will crush the masses the most.
If as far back as you can remember watching a new movie is Star Wars
Ok, you made me rethink my whole argument. I have to start assembling a golden era DVD collection and restate my position. I don't think I'd ever buy a "new" movie because I think they are all crap compared to the way I remember films from growing up.
I think it all started when I used to stay up watching Sherlock Holmes (the original 1940s with Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce). Yes it was watered down and Sherlock wasn't shooting up, but, for a kid, it was great stuff.
From there, it was onto Superhost. Ah, you do not understand what it was to grow up in northern Ohio in the 1970s. They had a guy on Saturday afternoon called Superhost, and he showed -all the coolest stuff-. I grew up on a steady diet of golden era Universal Films, 1950's sci-fi, the works. I loved, of course, all of the monster movies, like the original Frankenstein, Dracula, and of course, the original King Kong. I also really liked the 1950's cold war era stuff - Them, the Forbin Project, Earth vs the Flying Saucers, the 50 foot woman, all of that. And I liked the Flash Gordon serials.
I used to pour over special effects guys and movie magazines - I used to read every interview Ray Harryhausen had to say and my friends and I would make stop motion animated flip books. I love the craft of stop motion photography and I still do, and the whole process of blue screen matte printing. Can you imagine a kid seeing the skeleton scene in Jason and the Argonauts for the first time? How much better does it get than that?
And the thing was, about Star Wars, the original one, Episode 4, was that, it had all of that in it in one kick ass movie. And they did things with special effects that had never been done before, but, really, in the same sort of mechanical way. They used bigger models, bigger So yeah, there was, life before Star Wars, and life after.
Now, as for watching more adult films made from the golden era - I did a film series of classes in college, and while yes, Casablanca is one outstanding film. "Of all the gin joints she had to walk into this place." "You played it for her, play it for me." You are right, it doesn't get any better than that!
Writing in today's movies is not as good as it was in the golden era, and I think historians will make the convincing argument that the high point of American culture was in fact during that era.
Really, that's what that boils down to. There's so much content out there now, and a lot of it is actually good, that you really don't need to watch anything twice. I remember watching Star Wars in the movie theater a bunch of times when it was the only good thing to watch, but now, if I want some sort of spaceships, I can always turn on some channel that has something about space on, or I can just shift gears and read as much as I could possibly read about spaceships, propulsion, imaginary universes and more on the Internet.
No, but when someone says "When Apple was young" to mean when they bought their first Mac five years ago, you can bet that they're gonna hear about it.
The internet was a second rate network until around 1995, if not later. The web browser and server made the internet what it is today. Before that it was boring. If you wanted to have the benefits of what the internet is today, you would use a commercial service like CompuServe or gasp, America Online or do you remember, the old MSN?
I read the FAC, and once again we are reminded that graph theory, so fundamental to computer science, is not about making charts. But man, its a terrible word, because, one does want to think about graph as in graphic, when its really about the data. I think instead of graphs, we should call them something different, like:
Not at all. I was using the internet before then, as a way to move around university computers, but, honestly, I thought it sucked compared to online services such as Compuserve. Compuserve forums were great, and in a lot of ways, you had a much better crowd then the general internet.
It was the world wide web that made the internet. Before that, it was crap. TCP/IP is a big fat heavy protocol for if you just wanted to dial up via a dumb terminal application and send email and upload a few files.
What lady are you talking about? There's no lady? You must be making it up. You are obviously not telling the truth! Besides, Shakespeare has been dead for more than a few hundred years. Completely irrelevant!
Never mind the fact that you've redefined your definition of "when the Internet was young" to 1998-2000
When someone says, "that's as old as the hills.", do you rock autistically back and forth with your little helmet on, saying, "well, they didn't even have transistors 200 million years ago" ? I mean to be critical, but what's laughable is that you completely missed a whole romantic tone of an article and have so locked yourself into an assumption that "internet new == 1980" that you disregard everything else. You missed that whole "new == youth, innocence, wonder" thing that the whole planet had going on. Yeah, ssh didn't exist in 1998, so what. It was 10 years ago and I might be off a year. I got ssh sometime during the life of the project and before that we did everything in the plain over a different port that we snuck and opened up in the main corp firewall so we could work from home. It was a completely different time back then, as I said, back when the internet was new...
Never mind the fact that you've redefined your definition of "when the Internet was young" to 1998-2000 which is, in itself, laughable,
No, you are the one that read when the internet was young into 1980's or something like that, and you are too stubborn to admit that you completely misread the original post, where it was an obvious metaphorical reference. I mean, when you read someone talking about youth as if "the world was new", do you go and automatically assume that they are lying because they couldn't possibly have been alive 4.5 billion years ago.
In fact, I was doing this over a dialup connection. Oh I remember that. I PPP'd to my local provider, and I rejoiced when I finally got my 128K DSL line.
I'd believe you but what you actually said was "spiffy new Sun boxes via telnet over ssh" which is just such an impossible combination that you're obviously making it up.
What's impossible? I have ssh client.. on my Windows PC at home and at work. It had a copy of some giganto key. Then, I also had a telnet client on my Windows PC. I did some port fowarding thingamajig on the ssh, so that telnet ran through it to a Sun workstation.
I have to call bullshit on this. Ssh did not exist when everything on the internet was new. You're off by decades there, dude.
My god, am I the only geek able to think poetically? "Everything on the internet was new" was meant to describe the open ended and optimistic spirit that characterized the last great computer boom of 1997 - 2000. It's not a description of a chronology, but of the spirit of the times.
Sure, some technologies were out there, but in that latter part of the 1990s was when a lot of things fell into place. You had working browsers, working web servers, perl was mature and C++ was usable. G++ was a decent enough C++ compiler. The basic infrastructure worked. But, there weren't that many cool applications for it and the whole world felt wide open.
Say what? I do not think you typed what you meant to type, 'cause man, if you did... you're doing it wrong and I feel sorry for those poor, poor sun boxes.
There were a lot of complicated reasons for this. Oh, the only X client for my windows box cost a bunch of money, then, I was a long time Windows programmer on my first go around with Unix and I honestly was unimpressed with what I'd seen in Unix GUIs.
But above all, honestly, the whole "primitive" thing just appealed to me immensely, and, I was already used to TTY style from before. I saw Unix command line as a sort of a -super DOS- and I really loved it, and still do. I really came to love bash. Super network guy set up bash on my account. Originally I was doing C++ on Windows and crossing over to Unix, just ftping stuff up, but over time I found myself doing as much in vi as I would for quick changes in Visual Studio.
You're so right, you've called the bastard. SSH was so damn rare all the way up until OpenSSH became a reality in 1999
You have to understand that our network admin, and also the project designer for the initial releases, designed an entire phone network for his primary job. He was the best infrastructure guy I'd ever seen, ever. So in terms of *nix stuff, a lot of what we did was pretty cutting edge. Hell, original back end database was MSQL (if you remember that prior to MySQL). We found MySQL and switched to that, and I think that was their version 3.22. From there, we went to Oracle 8.
The period that I discussed was from 1998 - 2000, and for a big chunk of that time, yes, I was using ssh. Our network guy used hummingbird x-clients, but I was already 10 years of Windows under my belt and I wanted to see how things in the unix world worked from the command line.
No you don't. Socialism is about distributing decision-making to the community, rather than concentrating it in the hands of the wealthy or powerful. It's capitalism and communism that are about central planning and ownership.
And who does this "community" decision making? Who sets that agenda? Who makes the rules? Who organizes "everyone"? Really, this is how socialists do their theft. They say they are acting on behalf of everyone, but really, in the end, it becomes another corrupt, inefficient, amoral and unresponsive bureacracy.
Capitalism is about investment, nothing more or less. There's nothing in capitalism that requires central planning, and very little that requires government.
the Republican canditates are almost always the most evil possible
Based on what cartoons have you been watching?
And they put on a "I'm a good, God-fearing person" mask
And Democrats put on a "I'm a good, environmentally sound person", while they go and enslave everyone to their socialist borgian nightmare. They say they are working for the public good, but they steal from everyone that has something in the name of those that don't, and in the meantime, the poor people get even poorer. Ever notice how your most Democratic cities and states have the poorest of the people? Really, these sorts of ideological games are boring and we can go in circles for years. Sure, go ahead and bring up the war in Iraq as proof of penultimate Republican evil, and I'll see your war in Iraq with your Democratic VietNam. Then I'll raise you all the injustice caused by the Great Society.
You say "no", but then go on to say that actually, plenty of Republicans are for it. If Republicans are against spying as you say, then why has there been a massive increase in it under a Republican administration?
There really hasn't been a massive increase. I do recall that Bill Clinton argued quite passionately for a CLIPPER chip that would give the government access to all encryption. And, by the way, it was the Democrats that gave us the Internal Revenue Service.
When did I ever mention Democrats? your entire argument seems to be "Republicans aren't bad, because Democrats do the same thing." not a compelling argument for the goodness of Republicans
Now you misrepresent what you were talking about. My original thesis was that both political parties are doing crummy things, and you said that, oh no, Republicans, are, "the most evil possible." But we can discuss the nonsense of other political parties, if you like. Socialists are arguably the most evil because they promote a program that has caused nothing but misery whereever it has been adopted.
Isolationism? Yeah, that's going to work. Can you explain why you think isolationism would be a good thing, especially in a world that is inextricably global?
Isolationism would be a good thing because it is the pressures of a global society that are imposing enormous change and thus stress on local communities. We have to ask, is it so good to destroy so many local cultures simply in the name of greater efficiency?
in a world that is inextricably global?
Nothing is inextricable and no trends are permanent. The world was connected via the Roman Empire and that collapsed. If the USA wanted to pull the plug somewhat on trade, I'd say, why not, and probably the rest of the world would rejoice as well. Certainly, the question has to be asked, why does Kenya grow Tea for export when it doesn't have enough food to feed itself? Why do only certain countries have to be producers of manufactured goods?
Do you want to turn the internet off while you're at it?
Well, actually, I'm working on a better algorithm for factoring integers into primes. If I am successful, then, the most popular algorithm for public key cryptography would be made far less safe, and most other combinatorial encryption schemes would be suspect. So, we would probably have to c
Slashdot Mirror
The idea of having all of the drop targets appear when you start a drag operation is actually pretty cool. In standard Windows and Linux, they don't. It doesn't make any sense for that to happen because, well, everything would pop up because you can drag just about anywhere. Still, it's not really discoverable for end users and it would be kinda neat if Windows (or Linux), for that matter, lit things up a bit.
However, this patent wouldn't actually cover such an application, because, under Windows, there's no way for a drag source to actually tell all of the drag targets to light up. You would need a new interface on COM (which Windows shell is all written around), that a drop target could get a message to light up with. I highly doubt Yahoo could do -that-, and that's really only something Microsoft can do. At best, Yahoo's patent only really covers drag and drop within the same application, and, here, we have to ask ourself if it is so novel to have an application that lights up all the options that go with something when you select a certain item.
Borrowing money is not the same thing as paying for a good or service, it is a special case.
Nah, its a service. That's why they call the sector "Financial Services", and why the excuse for the destruction of our economy is called a "move towards the services industries". Really, all we've done for the last decade is trade that which provides real wealth - manufacturing, for an economy based on lending to each other, and now we've reached a breaking point, and the whole thing is collapsing.
If you do not keep your promise to pay back, whether that be to a person or a company, then don't be surprised when others, whether they be people or companies, are reluctant to loan money to you again in the future. If you want access to credit in the future then you have to pay your dues, it is really that simple.
I have no intention of borrowing again in the future. So, again, where's the problem. I really don't care if my credit score is 800 or if it is 8. Point of fact is that I haven't borrowed a nickle in over two years, and have just been paying down debt. Once I sell my house, I'll basically be debt free. From there, I'll be able to save up for a house cash over about a period of two to three years, and I'll have no debt, a house, and two cars that are paid for. After that, I'll either buy used cars or save up for one.
Indeed, nobody is stopping you. You may spend your own money however you wish. My only objection is when other people come to me with the power of government (i.e. the power of the sword) and demand a "donation" to their just cause in the form of more taxes.
And indeed, I have a problem with the government that subsidies mega corporations through limited liabilities at the expense of family owned businesses and local stores. In essence, corporations are a government subsidy to destroy communities.
I have sometimes had to renegotiate the contracts periodically, but you would be surprised how willing most companies are to negotiate.
Why should anyone have to do this? Again, you argue that we should all be so weak willed, and honestly, to me, at this point, I see the whole system as a giant joke, and if there is to be any negotiating, it should be that companies should be making concessions to me in order to have my vote to retain their legal existence.
Perhaps, but have you ever NOT been paid for work that you have already done? Even if you are laid off or fired you still received a final check for any work outstanding for which you have not yet been paid.
Actually, companies routinely try to push back on work orders after work has commenced and work has been completed.
Do you know what it means to have credit? What is credit? Credit is your promise to repay in the future, possibly with interest, what you have borrowed today. Credit is your word of honor or your promise. Do you break promises that you make simply because you may not like the person to whom you made the promise? If you don't want to bear that burden then don't make the promise in the first place (i.e. don't use the credit card to borrow money).
No its not. It's a contractual obligation for a service provided. Companies can renegotiate or impose by fiat their terms of service, and so too consumers can do the same for payment. If companies did not want to assume the risks of consumer negotiation, they should not have engaged in the contract to begin with. The onus is on companies, not consumers.
Arguing that we should equate a business relationship with a corporation as a personal promise is utterly ridiculous. Companies break every promise they ever make. Products do not live up to advertised promises, services do not live up to promises, and companies routinely say in nearly every contract that they make that they reserve the right to change its terms simply because they do not feel like keeping up with their so-called promises. Companies and corporations were created, originally, to benefit society in general and it is debatable at this point whether or not they have lived up to that very fundamental promise!
So, my argument to you is, surely, if you believe in promises so much, then really, why should what you say to any company even matter, when, at the end of the day, no company will keep its word with you.
You may not like the idea that shareholders are protected from being personally taken to the cleaners (it may interest you to know that if you have a 401k
No, I don't have a 401k, so it doesn't bother me at all. Really, I'm watching the stock market crash, the mortgage sector tank, and the only negative effect that has happened to me is more difficulty in selling my house.
That is a good thing. Who would take the risk of sticking their neck out with an investment if they thought that the lawyers would strip them of their personal assets when the venture went south? Probably not many people and they would certainly demand a very high rate for their level of perceived risk
The moral of the story is simple. You argue against government intervention as a moral wrong, yet, the very society that you exist in could not exist without the twin government supports of corporation and lending enforcement. In other words, a company has legal recourse to collect a debt under caveat emptor because of the government, and a company shields its investors from liability becuase of the government. So, for you to say that government is evil and private sector is good, is simply disingenous, as you cannot have today's private sector without the government!
It's a government intervention, which is my point. Sure, you can argue that it is a "good government" intervention, but, what you are advocating is a government intervention none-the-less based upon your personal social preferences. With that said, anyone else's ideas of government interventions are certainly welcome. If you can have the mere existence of your financial frankenstein called a corporation, certainly, others can have their wishes to ensure these institutions are made to work in the public interest, unless of course, you maintain a pathologically selfish interest in disregarding the wishes and wills of others. This is a democracy after all!
All of the significant features of OS/2 have already been duplicated in Linux.
a) Workplace Shell. Workplace shell was cool, but Linux already has two object oriented desktops in KDE and Gnome that both do more than WPS did, and without the aweful MS lock that sank the whole desktop.
b) Graphics layer. OS/2 had an early version of Windows GDI, while Linux has several ways to use a graphics surface. Cairo comes to mind, but there are others. And, Linux has a good implementation of hardware accelerated OpenGL to go with.
c) OS Core. Yeah, OS/2 was a pioneering in threading, but Linux threading has gotten pretty good as of late. And a lot of OS/2's other features - such as a driver architecture, DLLs, and so on, are all there in the OS. OS/2 supported multiple file systems, but so does Linux, and Linux has better file systems than HPFS.
d) Other devices. Long a liability for Linux, Linux now supports a fairly broad array of devices in its own right - from custom monitor specifications to USB storage to graphics, sound, and networking cards.
c) Finally, I have to have the obligatory quote - Linux does the right thing with CTRL-ALT-DEL. OS/2 does not.
I'm thinking that a good CS Degree should give you the background in compilers, machine architecture and structures, languages (in the theoretical sense), so that, you could write your own cheesy VM + byte code compiler for a senior project.
Patents, copyright, and to some extent insider contracts exist because of government interventions not because people are free to buy from and sell to whomever they please. One cannot make good the effects of government interventions with even more interventions. That too has been tried and failed. The fact that these impediments exist in our system today is not a failing of capitalism per se but rather the result of an attempt to create a mixed system
So, would we also throw limited liability onto that plate as well? The entire notion of a corporation and a securities market is merely a legal creation by the government. We could get rid of corporations as a federal invention in the marketplace, don't you think?
Think about how you would feel if they didn't cut your paycheck because they didn't feel like paying you what you were owed and you will see your answer. A responsible adult pays her bills period. Any attempt to rationalize not paying ones bills is going to be met with unsympathetic ears by the vast majority of hard working people everywhere.
1) Companies DO cut your paycheck when they don't feel like paying you any more. Go ahead, please make that argument to any contractor whose gone through rate reviews or December freezes or any employee whose had their pension cuts, benefits cut, raises frozen or salaries cut. All of that is rather common in the USA today. So yeah, companies do not pay their bills, and they only pay people when they want to. Why shouldn't I act like they do?
2) Corporate america has limited liability. If Enron goes belly up, or if other companies do not pay their bills, the people who own the company, ie, the shareholders, do not have to pay any of the debts. That's patently a right that I as an individual do not have. I do not have a way to magically gamble my assets the same way that corporations can gamble. I just don't.
Please, tell me what moral code requires me to pay a credit card company? Islamic countries don't, not even to this day. Charging interest is a -sin-. Even under catholicism until a few hundred years ago, charging of interest was a sin. Is there a commandment that God wrote, that says, Thou Shalt Pay Chase Manhattan on Time? I don't think so. Equating the payment of a credit card bill to a bunch of shareholders that are already legally shielded from not losing anything on the deal to some sort of a moral or religious code is about the most assanine thing that I've ever heard of.
Yarr, it be an average, I'm sure you've heard of them. Oh yes, and 0.2mm is a pretty big number, rather easy to measure
.2mm? The best I think you'd be able to get would be some sort of a weighted average, but an exact .2mm measurement? Come on. It strains the credibility. For all we know, a few fish swimming underneath the ocean would displace the surface that much. It's just an absurd figure.
Um, where's the ocean going to be smooth enough to measure
I have to say that this is an experiment actually worth doing, but I would like to see them do it with a bigger paper airplane than a few inches long. That way, if it does land on a continent, it would be easier to find (assuming that it remained intact). But, still, the thought of a paper airplane landing somewhere from orbit is just, cool.
What is capitalism but freedom? Freedom to buy from and sell to whomever you want, the freedom to spend or save your own money as you see fit and the freedom to choose your own destiny and succeed or fail based upon your own merits, luck, efforts, and hard work. Why should we seek to limit the freedom of the individual to live his life as he chooses?
I agree with that completely. Now, my question to you though, is, in today's economy, where's the freedom? You can't say that they you are free to choose your own destiny and succeed and fail on your merits when any established player uses a deep layer of patent, copyright, insider contracts and market force to crush you? I mean, if we were as free as you suggest, then, should I not just be able to develop a word processor, a car, or a CPU? The fact is, its difficult to do so because there are so many patents out there that stifle innovation and competition.
Social stability matters, and there is none, when at any given moment you might find yourself without a job because they just yanked your business to India or some other third world country. Yes, it is radical to say to shoot a ruling class, but, really, the basic purpose of a class being allowed to rule is that we expect that class to bring home the bacon for the rest of us. If they aren't holding up that end of the bargain, more loyal to their foreign investors than they are to Americans, then, why have them? That's what I'm saying.
Seriously, why pay your bills, if, at the end of the day, your mortgage is held by a foreign country or a credit card is issued by a foreign bank, and the interest really is so much imaginary money designed to pad the pockets of someone whose already far richer than you'll ever be?
I mean, the whole country is locked in the hands of an investment class that frowns upon any enterprise that even smacks of productivity. They would rather rake the poor over the coals with high interest just because it has a higher return. They seek to restrict and restrain any trade that offers meaningful competition. They seek to make the people believe that their subjugation is moral, and they seek to use cultural preferences to divide the nation and hide any real agenda.
Show me the candidate that wants to ban credit cards, reduce the terms of patents, or do any structural thing designed to break up the current moneyed class. There isn't one. There's no political party seeking to benefit the American people, merely, a set of dueling soulless juggernaughts, jousting, half drunk with power, over whose lords will crush the masses the most.
If as far back as you can remember watching a new movie is Star Wars
Ok, you made me rethink my whole argument. I have to start assembling a golden era DVD collection and restate my position. I don't think I'd ever buy a "new" movie because I think they are all crap compared to the way I remember films from growing up.
I think it all started when I used to stay up watching Sherlock Holmes (the original 1940s with Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce). Yes it was watered down and Sherlock wasn't shooting up, but, for a kid, it was great stuff.
From there, it was onto Superhost. Ah, you do not understand what it was to grow up in northern Ohio in the 1970s. They had a guy on Saturday afternoon called Superhost, and he showed -all the coolest stuff-. I grew up on a steady diet of golden era Universal Films, 1950's sci-fi, the works. I loved, of course, all of the monster movies, like the original Frankenstein, Dracula, and of course, the original King Kong. I also really liked the 1950's cold war era stuff - Them, the Forbin Project, Earth vs the Flying Saucers, the 50 foot woman, all of that. And I liked the Flash Gordon serials.
I used to pour over special effects guys and movie magazines - I used to read every interview Ray Harryhausen had to say and my friends and I would make stop motion animated flip books. I love the craft of stop motion photography and I still do, and the whole process of blue screen matte printing. Can you imagine a kid seeing the skeleton scene in Jason and the Argonauts for the first time? How much better does it get than that?
And the thing was, about Star Wars, the original one, Episode 4, was that, it had all of that in it in one kick ass movie. And they did things with special effects that had never been done before, but, really, in the same sort of mechanical way. They used bigger models, bigger So yeah, there was, life before Star Wars, and life after.
Now, as for watching more adult films made from the golden era - I did a film series of classes in college, and while yes, Casablanca is one outstanding film. "Of all the gin joints she had to walk into this place." "You played it for her, play it for me." You are right, it doesn't get any better than that!
Writing in today's movies is not as good as it was in the golden era, and I think historians will make the convincing argument that the high point of American culture was in fact during that era.
Really, that's what that boils down to. There's so much content out there now, and a lot of it is actually good, that you really don't need to watch anything twice. I remember watching Star Wars in the movie theater a bunch of times when it was the only good thing to watch, but now, if I want some sort of spaceships, I can always turn on some channel that has something about space on, or I can just shift gears and read as much as I could possibly read about spaceships, propulsion, imaginary universes and more on the Internet.
No, but when someone says "When Apple was young" to mean when they bought their first Mac five years ago, you can bet that they're gonna hear about it.
The internet was a second rate network until around 1995, if not later. The web browser and server made the internet what it is today. Before that it was boring. If you wanted to have the benefits of what the internet is today, you would use a commercial service like CompuServe or gasp, America Online or do you remember, the old MSN?
I read the FAC, and once again we are reminded that graph theory, so fundamental to computer science, is not about making charts. But man, its a terrible word, because, one does want to think about graph as in graphic, when its really about the data. I think instead of graphs, we should call them something different, like:
schmoo
zenny
budka
dango
chumpy
or something. anything but graph.
i'm just wondering whose pumping money into them? google, ibm?
Not at all. I was using the internet before then, as a way to move around university computers, but, honestly, I thought it sucked compared to online services such as Compuserve. Compuserve forums were great, and in a lot of ways, you had a much better crowd then the general internet.
It was the world wide web that made the internet. Before that, it was crap. TCP/IP is a big fat heavy protocol for if you just wanted to dial up via a dumb terminal application and send email and upload a few files.
I think the lady doth protest too much
What lady are you talking about? There's no lady? You must be making it up. You are obviously not telling the truth! Besides, Shakespeare has been dead for more than a few hundred years. Completely irrelevant!
Never mind the fact that you've redefined your definition of "when the Internet was young" to 1998-2000
When someone says, "that's as old as the hills.", do you rock autistically back and forth with your little helmet on, saying, "well, they didn't even have transistors 200 million years ago" ? I mean to be critical, but what's laughable is that you completely missed a whole romantic tone of an article and have so locked yourself into an assumption that "internet new == 1980" that you disregard everything else. You missed that whole "new == youth, innocence, wonder" thing that the whole planet had going on. Yeah, ssh didn't exist in 1998, so what. It was 10 years ago and I might be off a year. I got ssh sometime during the life of the project and before that we did everything in the plain over a different port that we snuck and opened up in the main corp firewall so we could work from home. It was a completely different time back then, as I said, back when the internet was new...
Never mind the fact that you've redefined your definition of "when the Internet was young" to 1998-2000 which is, in itself, laughable,
No, you are the one that read when the internet was young into 1980's or something like that, and you are too stubborn to admit that you completely misread the original post, where it was an obvious metaphorical reference. I mean, when you read someone talking about youth as if "the world was new", do you go and automatically assume that they are lying because they couldn't possibly have been alive 4.5 billion years ago.
In fact, I was doing this over a dialup connection. Oh I remember that. I PPP'd to my local provider, and I rejoiced when I finally got my 128K DSL line.
I'd believe you but what you actually said was "spiffy new Sun boxes via telnet over ssh" which is just such an impossible combination that you're obviously making it up.
What's impossible? I have ssh client.. on my Windows PC at home and at work. It had a copy of some giganto key. Then, I also had a telnet client on my Windows PC. I did some port fowarding thingamajig on the ssh, so that telnet ran through it to a Sun workstation.
I have to call bullshit on this. Ssh did not exist when everything on the internet was new. You're off by decades there, dude.
My god, am I the only geek able to think poetically? "Everything on the internet was new" was meant to describe the open ended and optimistic spirit that characterized the last great computer boom of 1997 - 2000. It's not a description of a chronology, but of the spirit of the times.
Sure, some technologies were out there, but in that latter part of the 1990s was when a lot of things fell into place. You had working browsers, working web servers, perl was mature and C++ was usable. G++ was a decent enough C++ compiler. The basic infrastructure worked. But, there weren't that many cool applications for it and the whole world felt wide open.
Say what? I do not think you typed what you meant to type, 'cause man, if you did... you're doing it wrong and I feel sorry for those poor, poor sun boxes.
There were a lot of complicated reasons for this. Oh, the only X client for my windows box cost a bunch of money, then, I was a long time Windows programmer on my first go around with Unix and I honestly was unimpressed with what I'd seen in Unix GUIs.
But above all, honestly, the whole "primitive" thing just appealed to me immensely, and, I was already used to TTY style from before. I saw Unix command line as a sort of a -super DOS- and I really loved it, and still do. I really came to love bash. Super network guy set up bash on my account. Originally I was doing C++ on Windows and crossing over to Unix, just ftping stuff up, but over time I found myself doing as much in vi as I would for quick changes in Visual Studio.
You're so right, you've called the bastard. SSH was so damn rare all the way up until OpenSSH became a reality in 1999
You have to understand that our network admin, and also the project designer for the initial releases, designed an entire phone network for his primary job. He was the best infrastructure guy I'd ever seen, ever. So in terms of *nix stuff, a lot of what we did was pretty cutting edge. Hell, original back end database was MSQL (if you remember that prior to MySQL). We found MySQL and switched to that, and I think that was their version 3.22. From there, we went to Oracle 8.
The period that I discussed was from 1998 - 2000, and for a big chunk of that time, yes, I was using ssh. Our network guy used hummingbird x-clients, but I was already 10 years of Windows under my belt and I wanted to see how things in the unix world worked from the command line.
No you don't. Socialism is about distributing decision-making to the community, rather than concentrating it in the hands of the wealthy or powerful. It's capitalism and communism that are about central planning and ownership.
And who does this "community" decision making? Who sets that agenda? Who makes the rules? Who organizes "everyone"? Really, this is how socialists do their theft. They say they are acting on behalf of everyone, but really, in the end, it becomes another corrupt, inefficient, amoral and unresponsive bureacracy.
Capitalism is about investment, nothing more or less. There's nothing in capitalism that requires central planning, and very little that requires government.
the Republican canditates are almost always the most evil possible
Based on what cartoons have you been watching?
And they put on a "I'm a good, God-fearing person" mask
And Democrats put on a "I'm a good, environmentally sound person", while they go and enslave everyone to their socialist borgian nightmare. They say they are working for the public good, but they steal from everyone that has something in the name of those that don't, and in the meantime, the poor people get even poorer. Ever notice how your most Democratic cities and states have the poorest of the people? Really, these sorts of ideological games are boring and we can go in circles for years. Sure, go ahead and bring up the war in Iraq as proof of penultimate Republican evil, and I'll see your war in Iraq with your Democratic VietNam. Then I'll raise you all the injustice caused by the Great Society.
You say "no", but then go on to say that actually, plenty of Republicans are for it. If Republicans are against spying as you say, then why has there been a massive increase in it under a Republican administration?
There really hasn't been a massive increase. I do recall that Bill Clinton argued quite passionately for a CLIPPER chip that would give the government access to all encryption. And, by the way, it was the Democrats that gave us the Internal Revenue Service.
When did I ever mention Democrats? your entire argument seems to be "Republicans aren't bad, because Democrats do the same thing." not a compelling argument for the goodness of Republicans
Now you misrepresent what you were talking about. My original thesis was that both political parties are doing crummy things, and you said that, oh no, Republicans, are, "the most evil possible." But we can discuss the nonsense of other political parties, if you like. Socialists are arguably the most evil because they promote a program that has caused nothing but misery whereever it has been adopted.
Isolationism? Yeah, that's going to work. Can you explain why you think isolationism would be a good thing, especially in a world that is inextricably global?
Isolationism would be a good thing because it is the pressures of a global society that are imposing enormous change and thus stress on local communities. We have to ask, is it so good to destroy so many local cultures simply in the name of greater efficiency?
in a world that is inextricably global?
Nothing is inextricable and no trends are permanent. The world was connected via the Roman Empire and that collapsed. If the USA wanted to pull the plug somewhat on trade, I'd say, why not, and probably the rest of the world would rejoice as well. Certainly, the question has to be asked, why does Kenya grow Tea for export when it doesn't have enough food to feed itself? Why do only certain countries have to be producers of manufactured goods?
Do you want to turn the internet off while you're at it?
Well, actually, I'm working on a better algorithm for factoring integers into primes. If I am successful, then, the most popular algorithm for public key cryptography would be made far less safe, and most other combinatorial encryption schemes would be suspect. So, we would probably have to c