I doubt there's much to stop the police from searching through a bookstore's sales reciepts -- heck, Judge Starr apparently got the records for Monica Lewinsky's purchase of Whitman's Leaves of Grass (or some book -- I can't actually remember which one), as evidence that she was giving gifts to the President. Heck -- that entire boondogle made a mockery of the constitution's protection against self incrimination and the protection from random "fishing" expeditions by prosecutors.
The drug war is not the only war against individual responsibility that is happening in this country, and its not the only means by which our rights are being eroded. I have moral reservations about doing it, but I'm afraid we have to put anti-gun, anti-prostitution, anti-sex, anti-porn, anti-drug, anti-gay, and all other anti-personal-responsibility laws into the the same category, and fight them away together. I realize that there may be only a few people on earth that can swallow every thing I listed there... well, tough. I can't either. But as soon as you, or I, or anyone starts to think we can pick and choose which responsibilities we can take away from other people, then we've made it too easy for the people who really don't want us to have any responsibilities at all.
But the same thing is true if you read a lot of "real" books, or join the marines, or climb mt. Everest, or were lucky enough to go to the moon on Apollo. Everything you do is going to change the way you look at the world. Admitedly, some drugs (esp. LSD) are going to change the way you look at the more than other experiences, but the effect is more a matter of degree than anything else.
What you seem to be advocating is the idea that is somehow "good" to not ever change your perceptions of the world -- never question the status quo, never question your place in the world, and never question your basic beliefs. I guess if you want to live that way, there's little I can do to help you. But I'm begging you not to try to make the rest of the world like you. It's not going to be a pretty country if you guys continue getting your way...
why should we have internet-based polls? i'm not seeing any phone-based polls, and i can't imagine what would make the internet "better" at this than the phone is...
i think internet-based registration would be cool. using the internet to publicize poll locations, provide registration forms, and even to allow the user to order an absentee ballot are all good ideas. but internet-based polls seem bone-headed to me, on so many levels...
I'd love to know what the "correct" way to do this is. If you say "HTTP redirect", you'll have to explain how the server knows if javascript is turned on in the browser.
Of course, as many people have pointed out, the line 'window.location="url"' might have been 'window.location.replace("url")', and that would have solved much of the problem -- but not all of it.
The HTML "meta refresh" tag with a time of 0 is an ugly kludge, because it pollutes the browser history. Unfortunately, I am not aware of any "correct" way to do a redirect from HTML without polluting the browser history. This has little to do with malicious scripters, and more to do with browser designer's apparent failure to implement something that seems pretty basic.
(Of course, the entire subject seems like a troll -- I didn't have any trouble getting out of any of the sites listed on top9, and I'm pretty sure that the crappy redirects are due to developer negligence rather than malice.)
And [companies] provide jobs to people like me and you. And [companies] provide goods for consumers like me and you.
In case you haven't noticed, companies are as much a part of the economy as you are. They are therefore entitled to get some tax spending for their benefit. If they go down due to some French spy, so will you!
I have such an underdeveloped sense of humor -- I can never tell when someone is kidding, and when they're clueless.
But, just in case you're not kidding, and are instead some kind of moron with an underdeveloped sense of ethics (and no understanding of capitalism to boot), I'll try to explain why taxpayers should not be subsidize corporate espionage.
The idea is that we all benefit from properly regulated capitalism -- when several companies compete fairly, on a level playing field, we all benefit from competition. We benefit through lower prices and a greater variety of goods available. However, when the government chooses to elevate certain companies off that playing field, and instead gives those firms special favors unavailable to others, then we all are hurt from the damaged competition. We are hurt through increased prices, and a smaller variety of goods available.
Understand that governments are not, by nature, capitalists. When the government interferes with a bussiness transaction, it nearly always does so to constrain the firm with the lowest prices or best product. Think about it -- if the firm didn't have the best product or the lowest prices, it wouldn't need to be constrained; it would be self-constraining.
There are clearly cases where some form of regulation are nescessary. Anti-trust cases are one reason -- monopolies that don't continue having the best product or the lowest prices through constant innovation, but rather by abusing their market power to destroy innovative competitors, are good targets for government constraint.
But situations like this -- where one large U.S. Military-Industrial company (Boeing) is "competing" with a Quasi-Socialist state-supported company (Airbus) -- makes it very difficult to decide what is the "right" thing to do. Given the ugly nature of this type of thing, no-one can honestly claim that any path will actually benefit the citizens any country. But what is very clear is that the best path does not include subverting tools for international espionage to use them for corporate espionage instead (unless, of course, you feel that governments should go out of their way to decrease competition and support monopolies).
The users? most users use their computer at work or at home and that's about it. I doubt people need to write letters in the bus or in their car
Yes, but I do want to read e-mail in the airport. And I want to read the NY Times when I'm on the bus. And it sure would be nice if I didn't have to go searching for where I left off every time I take my "book on tape" into another rental car.
Think of how many people put up with the bullshit of toting a laptop around with them all the time -- everyone laughs about the old fashioned "sneaker net", where we were forced to cart around data and applications on floppy disks. Now, we have "oxford net", where dumb-asses cart around the whole damned computer!
I'll give you an example of what I'd like to be able to do someday. Burn your computer and your telephone. Set them on fire. Don't enjoy that plastic smell too much, of course. Now, call up the ITS department, and ask for replacements. How long is it going to take to get your computer up and running like before? A day? A week? Is it still going to impact your productivity for a month? Now, how long before your phone is up and running again? A half hour?
Or, go spend a weekend in hawaii. Don't pack or plan -- just go, with nothing but your wallet and some spare socks (my feet always sweat on planes). At the hotel, ask to have a computer brought up to your room, and some more towels. Use the computer to finish a project from work -- write some code, or proof read a report, or respond to some e-mail. How long will it take you to set up this new machine to do those things? A half hour? An hour? A week? Or would it take a month to be productive on the new machine?
In an era when a computer costs the same as a good telephone or a VCR, it has reached the point where every time I get a new machine, I easily spend far more money/time setting up the machine than I spent on the machine itself. Some people like this -- but thats ok, because some morons enjoyed dicking around with autoexec.bat and config.sys files, too. Other people don't have that problem, apparently because they haven't discovered that their machines are configurable. I, personally, can't stand it, and I definately look forward to the day when I can sit down at a computer in an airport terminal, and have it work exactly like the computer I'm using right now.
(Of course, I can't imagine what Bill Gates thinks he's going to do to solve the problem. I'd love to have my data on a central server, but I sure don't want it on his server...
I'm glad the above article was moderated up, but why did it got moderated "funny"?
Jeez, the author of the IT article was painfully confused -- if anyone took the time to read it, you'd discover that "C.G.I. programs are easily exploited by network attackers", and are "invasive of users privacy". Criminy -- since its impossible for the client to know if the server just served up a CGI or a static page, the only solution would be to ban HTTP entirely too. Oh my god! It's The Death of The Internet as We Know It!!! (tm). Think of the Children!!!!! (tm).
The original author demonstrated painful cluelessness in the article, and it's impossible for me to guess what Simson L. Garfinkel had in mind from the misunderstood snippets the article's author has presented us. Why are any of us spending any time on this?
BTW -- do any of us remember Simson Garfinkel, the guy from salon who told us about Mattel Spyware just two weeks ago? Does anyone read or think about these articles?
IANAUKL (I am not a UK lawyer), but in the States you can be sued for pretty much anything. I could sue Taco for bad grammar, claiming that his awful prose has caused me to misunderstand technical issues that are important to my job, and hence Taco is responsible for damaging my wage earning ability.
But remember, filling a lawsuit is significantly different than bringing a succsessful lawsuit in front of a judge.
I can see three possible outcomes from this lawsuit:
Nike is unable to find a competent judge, and quietly gives Mr. Greg Lloyd Smith some money, just to make him go away, hence saving a lot of bother for the Nike lawyers,
Nike gets this in front of a competent judge as quickly as possible, and the judge just throws the whole thing out laughing,
Or, Nike finds a judge that willing to bitchslap Mr. Greg Lloyd Smith very, very hard, making Mr. Smith pay Nike's legal bills (at a minimum). My (limited) understanding is that it is considerably easier for judges in the UK to do this than it is in the States.
Things that will not happen include:
Mr. Smith will not win this lawsuit. Not one article I've read about this episode has had a single nice thing to say about Mr. Smith -- Wired magazine clearly wanted to call Mr. Smith a slimey little worm who probably engineered the hijacking himself (and Wired decided not to say that because there's no concrete evidence, and Mr. Smith is happy to sue anyone he can find). Judges and Juries don't like slimey little worms who bring frivolous lawsuits without any demonstrable damages.
Nike will not use this lawsuit to change intellectual property laws, or make NETSOL legally responsible for hijacking. No-one involved is going to want this to drag out for years, to eventually get a ruling in UK court that will probably be ignored by the rest of the world courts and lawmakers anyhow (regulations on e-commerce and e-property is probably an area for international treaties, akin to international intellectual property laws. This case doesn't is too bogus to influence anything, even if Nike wanted the questionable publicity of pushing it through the courts).
I suspect we won't hear about this case again. If this was happening in the States, I'd expect to see Mr. Smith's name on the front pages in a few years, when he walks into an office building somewhere and starts shoot ing people. Since its the UK, I expect he'll just become a school teacher or some other profession where he can inflict damage on people with immunity. Or, perhaps he'll just continue being a totally irresponsible and technically incompetent system administrator for his own ISP, and just continue inflicting damages on his clueless customers.
No. Templates in C++ offer way more power than inheritance does. First of all, they're type safe, as TummyX pointed out. Secondly, they provide compile-time polymorphism, whereas inheritance only provides runtime polymorphism.
Generics are good,
C++ implements generics using compile-time polymorphism,
therefore, compile-time polymorphism is good!
Allowing generic functions and classes to treat Objects and Primitives the same is good,
C++ doesn't allow methods to be defined for primitives, but it does allow the limited syntax of a few pre-defined operators to be defined Objects,
therefore, allowing the limited syntax of a few pre-defined operators to be defined for Ojects is good!
Generics are good. Eliminating the annoying duality of Primitives and Objects is good, especially when combined with the power of generics. Strong type checking is good. But C++'s limited solutions are not good. I'll admit that they're suprisingly elegant, given the constraints the C++ designers put on the language. But its important to understand the constraints the designers put on the language, and its important to ask yourself if those constraints apply to your situation when you code. (BTW: why is double dispatch esoteric? Perhaps, in a language like C++ where even single dispatch is the exception, rather than the rule, it must seem esoteric...)
As time goes on, I believe you'll see more and more intelligence being downloaded to the client. I don't believe downright pathetic state of Java Applets in current web browsers should be your guide here -- instead, think of the successful "intelligent client" apps out there: apps such as quicktime, real player, the macromedia suite of plugins, the ILoveYou virii, the DVD controller language that won't let you fast forward over ads, and even JavaScript to some degree are all successful client scripting technologies.
I believe we'll see many more successful examples of the "intelligent client" model. It was just a shame that Java Applets weren't that example. (Java could'a been so damn cool in browsers, too...).
But the "bytecode" deal really was a red herring. Bytecode makes doing most of the things Java does quite a bit easier to implement. But it was marketed as the "cool thing", instead of the "thin g that made a lot of cool things possible", and I think that was a shame, too.
Dynamic binding is not part of java because of the Java VM. It was just a great deal easier to implement in Java because of the VM.
Of all the ways that Java is different from C++, I rank the language's built-in support for dynamic binding as the most important (yes, I believe its even more important than GC). In fact, my biggest complaint about Java is that the dynamic binding doesn't go far enough, and the VM is built in a way that makes implementing better dynamic binding difficult.
I simply cannot imagine that C# won't have powerful dynamic binding capabilities -- in a language targeted towards the.NET paradigm, where everything is a COM object, there will be either be a powerful dynamic binding ability, or the language will simply fail.
All of our revenues, projected to be 1.2 billion dollars in fiscal year 2001, are paid as fees by the knowledge-based high-tech leaders and individual entrepeneurs who rely on us to help them flourish in this economy."
Holy Cow! 1.2 billion dollars per year is probably enough cash to keep somewhere between 6,000 - 8,000 or so competent people on staff, with money left over for nice offices and plenty of well-paid outside consultants.
How many patent applications do these guys get every year, anyhow? How much work does it take to process a patent application?
You seem to understand the problem exactly. As long as someone has taken the time and trouble to install exactly the same batch of software on both machines, and as all the configuration files generated by the sys-admin are compatible, and as long as someone has installed any of the network-centric login schemes, I can transfer a "profile" between machines fairly easily.
Who cares. I can do that with windows, too.
I seriously doubt the ".net" stuff is going to do anything to address any of the real difficulties with transfering profiles between machines -- Windows X and it's suite of applications are far too brittle to be truly "network centric", and repairing them would involve destroying one of Microsofts few trump cards -- backwards compatibility.
I don't know why the XML angle is being pushed so much; this could all be done with any structured data format, be it text or binary.
Of course it could be -- XML is just a Data Definition Language. The "industry" could have just as easily decided on any other DDL -- an extended BNF grammer, or SGML, or something based on Lisp S-Expressions. But we haven't standardized on any of those other DDL's -- we've pretty much decided, instead, to use XML.
So, if you have a need for a Data Definition Language to describe an extensible, heirarchical, and portable lexical structure for your data, then you should consider XML. Alternatively, if you have an unethical marketing department, and you want to pretend to have an extensible, portable, well-defined lexical structure for your data, then you should definately use XML. If you don't have either of those things, then perhaps you should just keep doing what you're doing...
XML (and its Big Cousin, SGML) is not even a standard file format, any more than ASCII is a standard file format. But it's a very useful part of your toolbox if you want define a standard file format.
If you plan to create a new open, non-proprietary, portable, and extensible file format, seriously consider basing it on XML -- it's been designed to help you do exactly this, and it does it quite successfully. There's an every increasing number of tools to manipulate XML-based file formats, every time you blink another developer or end user learns how to use one of those tools, and its much easier to get both management and outside developers to buy into any new XML-based file format. Not suprisingly, HTML has helped immensely in this respect -- there probably isn't a web developer alive who isn't aware of the extensibility and interoperability of the HTML standard, and it's the 800-pound gorilla example of what to do (and not do) when you design and implement a new XML (or SGML) based file format.
But XML based file formats are not intrinsically open, non-proprietary, portable, or extensible. If you're careful, smart, and lucky, you can create exactly such a format. Sadly, though, if you're carful, smart, and devious, you can create exactyl the opposite -- a closed, proprietary, non-portable, and brittle file format. If your marketing department is evil, you can probably even convince many, many people that your new proprietary, closed, brittle, non-portable file format isn't any of those things, simple by hyping out those the three little letters: "X-M-L".
XML is a great new technology for universal file exchange, in exactly the same way that ASCII or Morse Code where great new technologies for universal file exchange. It's a reasonable, useful standard, where no reasonable, useful standard existed before, and its a standard with a great deal of industry buy-in. But, of course, it will not bring about universal file exchange by itself, and of course you should be very leery of anyone that claims that it will. XML does not intrinsically create openness and interoperability, but its extremely useful technology bringing us down that path.
Cool! I'm running Solaris x86 on my machine at home. If I walk into a random Sun office, how do I go about calling up my profile?
I'm running Redhat 6.1 at work. My boss is running Mandrake 7.1. How do I go about calling up my work profile every time I sit down at his machine to show him something?
How do I call up the profile from either machine on the Windows PC in the airport lounge when I travel?
I am not aware of any existing standard for transfering profiles and applications between machines -- not even between machines running the operating system. There are some pretty hacks that exist in closed windows, unixen, and linuxen clusters, but there's nothing that exists in any type of worldwide application.
It scares me if people think any of the existing technologies for doing this are adequate -- it is currently a major pain in the ass to sit down at an unfamiliar computer and to try to do any productive work. There are some obvious things that could make this much, much better. Smart people can probably find unobvious was to make this even better than that.
Now, my daughter and her new husband live right next door to my widowed wife -- who took up with Mr. King until he dumped her for telling him that she was pregnant. Personally, I think that she should have just had an abortion and kept on bonking him. In any case, I guess that that's as close to a happy ending as I could have hoped for.
Huh? Did we watch the same movie? His daughter and her boyfried are either going to prison for the rest of their lives without possibility of parole, or are going to the death chamber, depending on the state they live in. There's a video tape of the daughter and her violent, psychotic, drug dealer boyfriend conspiring with each other to kill Spacey, then Spacey ends up getting killed with a gun from the boyfriend's house. Meanwhile, the boyfriend is in Spacey's house with a gym bag full of thousand of dollars and plans to run off to N.Y. Not only that, but try to imagine what Lolita is going to tell the first homocide detective on the scene, and what she's going to say during the trial. The movie couldn't have made it much clearer that those two are going to fry. What makes you think the Ex-marine would have even been a suspect in the crime?
The last two animated movies I've enjoyed were The Iron Giant and Princess Mononoke. Both were far better than Titan.
Don't misunderstand -- Titan was a perfectly good excuse to sit in a dark room for an hour with my boo, while stuffing my head with popcorn. But it is a dull movie. The graphics are good in places, but flat and lifeless far too often. The plot is predictable, and the ending was just plain boring.
Perhaps the real problem is that I expect too much from animation -- I don't generally like the hollywood cookie cutter movies, and the non-disneylike animated stuff often aren't cookie cutter movies. Unfortunately, I walked out of Titan feeling like I had just watched a boring, uninspired $45 mil movie starring Matt Damon and Drew Barrymore. Yuck.
PDF may include internal compression, so they can be smaller than the equivilant HTML or plain text.
PDF also may include the document's fonts, along with any images, along with (optionally) the location of each and every letter on the page, down to a few hundreths of an inch.
So, a PDF may be suprisingly small or suprisingly large, depending entirely on the program that generates the document. A well crafted program should be able to take HTML plus images and produce PDFs of roughly equivilant filesize (actually, probably smaller). Just printing from your browswer, through the default printer driver, to Adobe Acrobat is probably going to result in a huge file.
Unfortunately, HTML completely ignores printed output. If you're at all interested in paper, then PDF is the way to go.
PDF might also have some value if you want to preserve the formatting of an existing paper document.
I agree, though, that there are many superior formats for reading documents online. Arguably, HTML might even be one.
Re:spying on children too... risky indeed
on
Mattel Spyware
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· Score: 1
I bet something much more serious than COPPA is at work here -- if brodcast really used PGP, then Mr. Garfinkel was smuggling munitions across the Atlantic on a Commercial Airline.
Mr. Garfikel probably broke several laws when he unknowingly brought those munitions through the Airport security and onto a commercial airline. But he admits in the article that he discovered those munitions once he was in the air, and makes no mention of warning the flight crew of these dangerous materials, or letting customs know what type of criminal smuggling he was involved in once he landed.
The man shouldn't be writing for Salon. He should be in jail for a long, long, long time.
No. The plan 9 license is nothing like the GPL license. The plan 9 license gives you few, if any rights to the software -- you may look at, change, and distribute the software, but only until Lucent decides otherwise. Lucent is pretty explicit about the right to take the software back, while the GPL is pretty explicit that the software cannot be taken back. They're two entirely different license, with two entirely different intents.
It's free software, but only in the free beer sense. It's open source, but only in the sense that you can see the source. Its not fee in the GNU sense at all.
The legal mumbo-jumbo thats sets it apart from the GNU Public License is the bit that says that none of the software included (except for the UW Postscript fonts) is covered by the GPL.
IANAL, and CSINL (common sense is not law), but this license seems very different from the GPL in intent. The GPL attempts to give both the copyright holder and the licensee a great deal of rights to software. For example, the GPL doesn't prevent the copyright holder from distributing the GPL'd software under any other license -- If I write and distribute GNU Plan 2000A under the GPL, I'm allowed to distribute Plan 2000B under any other license I may choose. However, the GPL tries very hard to make certain I can't take away the rights of anyone that has the GPL'd GNU Plan 2000A -- once someone has GNU Plan 2000A, I can't retroactively change their license to the Plan 2000B license, even if its exactly the same software. Once someone has GPL'd software, they enjoy a great deal of rights to that software, and those rights are intended to be both transferable and non-removable.
The Plan 9 license doesn't provide any of the rights to the user that the GPL does. The Plan 9 license is explicitely both non-transferable and removable. The license says that Lucent owns this software. We may look at the source, and change it, and distribute it, but Lucent has absolute rights (including patent rights!!!) to any changes anyone makes to the software (whether those changes are distributed or not), and the absolute right to remove your rights at any time. If Lucent doesn't like what you're doing with plan 9, they can make you stop. If you make a cool addition to plan 9, they can sell it, and make you stop using it. They own anything you do with the software.
This is an open source license, in the sense that we can see the source. This is a free license, in the free beer sense. This is not free software, in the GNU sense.
Can someone comment on what it means for the license to be "non-transferable" but allow "sub-license?":
Subject to the terms of this Agreement and to third party intellectual property claims, Lucent grants to Licensee, a royalty-free, nonexclusive, non-transferable, worldwide license to use, reproduce, modify, execute, display, perform, distribute and sublicense, the Original Software (with or without Modifications) in Source Code form and/or Object Code form for commercial and/or non-commercial purposes.
What type of restrictions does this put on redistributing the software? Are there "common law" differences between the rights that I can give a party if I "sub-license" something, as opposed to "transfering" a license? I may be reading the sub-license thing incorrectly, but Lucent seems to go to a great deal of trouble to make sure that this is not a "free software" type of license at all. It's "free beer" software we can see and modify the source of. The license seems to indicate that Lucent owns all rights to the software and any modifications to the software. Further, Lucent will always own the software, and any rights to the software or any modifications may withdrawn by Lucent at any time. I really can't imagine why they decided to put a copy of the GPL at the end of their License. The GPL applies only to some fonts distributed with the software, and not to the rest of the OS in any way -- neither in text nor in spirit, it seems.
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I doubt there's much to stop the police from searching through a bookstore's sales reciepts -- heck, Judge Starr apparently got the records for Monica Lewinsky's purchase of Whitman's Leaves of Grass (or some book -- I can't actually remember which one), as evidence that she was giving gifts to the President. Heck -- that entire boondogle made a mockery of the constitution's protection against self incrimination and the protection from random "fishing" expeditions by prosecutors.
The drug war is not the only war against individual responsibility that is happening in this country, and its not the only means by which our rights are being eroded. I have moral reservations about doing it, but I'm afraid we have to put anti-gun, anti-prostitution, anti-sex, anti-porn, anti-drug, anti-gay, and all other anti-personal-responsibility laws into the the same category, and fight them away together. I realize that there may be only a few people on earth that can swallow every thing I listed there... well, tough. I can't either. But as soon as you, or I, or anyone starts to think we can pick and choose which responsibilities we can take away from other people, then we've made it too easy for the people who really don't want us to have any responsibilities at all.
But the same thing is true if you read a lot of "real" books, or join the marines, or climb mt. Everest, or were lucky enough to go to the moon on Apollo. Everything you do is going to change the way you look at the world. Admitedly, some drugs (esp. LSD) are going to change the way you look at the more than other experiences, but the effect is more a matter of degree than anything else.
What you seem to be advocating is the idea that is somehow "good" to not ever change your perceptions of the world -- never question the status quo, never question your place in the world, and never question your basic beliefs. I guess if you want to live that way, there's little I can do to help you. But I'm begging you not to try to make the rest of the world like you. It's not going to be a pretty country if you guys continue getting your way...
why should we have internet-based polls? i'm not seeing any phone-based polls, and i can't imagine what would make the internet "better" at this than the phone is...
i think internet-based registration would be cool. using the internet to publicize poll locations, provide registration forms, and even to allow the user to order an absentee ballot are all good ideas. but internet-based polls seem bone-headed to me, on so many levels...
Here is the Home Depot home page, copied word for word:
<html>
<HEAD>
<script language=javascript>
window.location = "index1.html"
</script>
<noscript>
<META HTTP-EQUIV = "refresh" content = "0; url=noscript.html">
</noscript>
</HEAD>
</html>
I'd love to know what the "correct" way to do this is. If you say "HTTP redirect", you'll have to explain how the server knows if javascript is turned on in the browser.
Of course, as many people have pointed out, the line 'window.location="url"' might have been 'window.location.replace("url")', and that would have solved much of the problem -- but not all of it.
The HTML "meta refresh" tag with a time of 0 is an ugly kludge, because it pollutes the browser history. Unfortunately, I am not aware of any "correct" way to do a redirect from HTML without polluting the browser history. This has little to do with malicious scripters, and more to do with browser designer's apparent failure to implement something that seems pretty basic.
(Of course, the entire subject seems like a troll -- I didn't have any trouble getting out of any of the sites listed on top9, and I'm pretty sure that the crappy redirects are due to developer negligence rather than malice.)
And [companies] provide jobs to people like me and you.
And [companies] provide goods for consumers like me and you.
In case you haven't noticed, companies are as much a part of the economy as you are. They are therefore entitled to get some tax spending for their benefit. If they go down due to some French spy, so will you!
I have such an underdeveloped sense of humor -- I can never tell when someone is kidding, and when they're clueless.
But, just in case you're not kidding, and are instead some kind of moron with an underdeveloped sense of ethics (and no understanding of capitalism to boot), I'll try to explain why taxpayers should not be subsidize corporate espionage.
The idea is that we all benefit from properly regulated capitalism -- when several companies compete fairly, on a level playing field, we all benefit from competition. We benefit through lower prices and a greater variety of goods available. However, when the government chooses to elevate certain companies off that playing field, and instead gives those firms special favors unavailable to others, then we all are hurt from the damaged competition. We are hurt through increased prices, and a smaller variety of goods available.
Understand that governments are not, by nature, capitalists. When the government interferes with a bussiness transaction, it nearly always does so to constrain the firm with the lowest prices or best product. Think about it -- if the firm didn't have the best product or the lowest prices, it wouldn't need to be constrained; it would be self-constraining.
There are clearly cases where some form of regulation are nescessary. Anti-trust cases are one reason -- monopolies that don't continue having the best product or the lowest prices through constant innovation, but rather by abusing their market power to destroy innovative competitors, are good targets for government constraint.
But situations like this -- where one large U.S. Military-Industrial company (Boeing) is "competing" with a Quasi-Socialist state-supported company (Airbus) -- makes it very difficult to decide what is the "right" thing to do. Given the ugly nature of this type of thing, no-one can honestly claim that any path will actually benefit the citizens any country. But what is very clear is that the best path does not include subverting tools for international espionage to use them for corporate espionage instead (unless, of course, you feel that governments should go out of their way to decrease competition and support monopolies).
Because you don't have the encryption key? That'd make it quite hard wouldn't it?
Well, of course I don't have the encryption key -- my computer has it. I doubt I'd have any use for 128 bits of gobbeldy gook even if I did have it.
Or are you saying that my computer can somehow decrypt the source and compile the program without having a key to decrypt the source with?
You should get a patent on that. Then, you should get a patent on that perpetual motion machine you have out in the garage, too.
The users? most users use their computer at work or at home and that's about it. I doubt people need to write letters in the bus or in their car
Yes, but I do want to read e-mail in the airport. And I want to read the NY Times when I'm on the bus. And it sure would be nice if I didn't have to go searching for where I left off every time I take my "book on tape" into another rental car.
Think of how many people put up with the bullshit of toting a laptop around with them all the time -- everyone laughs about the old fashioned "sneaker net", where we were forced to cart around data and applications on floppy disks. Now, we have "oxford net", where dumb-asses cart around the whole damned computer!
I'll give you an example of what I'd like to be able to do someday. Burn your computer and your telephone. Set them on fire. Don't enjoy that plastic smell too much, of course. Now, call up the ITS department, and ask for replacements. How long is it going to take to get your computer up and running like before? A day? A week? Is it still going to impact your productivity for a month? Now, how long before your phone is up and running again? A half hour?
Or, go spend a weekend in hawaii. Don't pack or plan -- just go, with nothing but your wallet and some spare socks (my feet always sweat on planes). At the hotel, ask to have a computer brought up to your room, and some more towels. Use the computer to finish a project from work -- write some code, or proof read a report, or respond to some e-mail. How long will it take you to set up this new machine to do those things? A half hour? An hour? A week? Or would it take a month to be productive on the new machine?
In an era when a computer costs the same as a good telephone or a VCR, it has reached the point where every time I get a new machine, I easily spend far more money/time setting up the machine than I spent on the machine itself. Some people like this -- but thats ok, because some morons enjoyed dicking around with autoexec.bat and config.sys files, too. Other people don't have that problem, apparently because they haven't discovered that their machines are configurable. I, personally, can't stand it, and I definately look forward to the day when I can sit down at a computer in an airport terminal, and have it work exactly like the computer I'm using right now.
(Of course, I can't imagine what Bill Gates thinks he's going to do to solve the problem. I'd love to have my data on a central server, but I sure don't want it on his server...
I'm glad the above article was moderated up, but why did it got moderated "funny"?
Jeez, the author of the IT article was painfully confused -- if anyone took the time to read it, you'd discover that "C.G.I. programs are easily exploited by network attackers", and are "invasive of users privacy". Criminy -- since its impossible for the client to know if the server just served up a CGI or a static page, the only solution would be to ban HTTP entirely too. Oh my god! It's The Death of The Internet as We Know It!!! (tm). Think of the Children!!!!! (tm).
The original author demonstrated painful cluelessness in the article, and it's impossible for me to guess what Simson L. Garfinkel had in mind from the misunderstood snippets the article's author has presented us. Why are any of us spending any time on this?
BTW -- do any of us remember Simson Garfinkel, the guy from salon who told us about Mattel Spyware just two weeks ago? Does anyone read or think about these articles?
IANAUKL (I am not a UK lawyer), but in the States you can be sued for pretty much anything. I could sue Taco for bad grammar, claiming that his awful prose has caused me to misunderstand technical issues that are important to my job, and hence Taco is responsible for damaging my wage earning ability.
But remember, filling a lawsuit is significantly different than bringing a succsessful lawsuit in front of a judge.
I can see three possible outcomes from this lawsuit:
Things that will not happen include:
I suspect we won't hear about this case again. If this was happening in the States, I'd expect to see Mr. Smith's name on the front pages in a few years, when he walks into an office building somewhere and starts shoot ing people. Since its the UK, I expect he'll just become a school teacher or some other profession where he can inflict damage on people with immunity. Or, perhaps he'll just continue being a totally irresponsible and technically incompetent system administrator for his own ISP, and just continue inflicting damages on his clueless customers.
- Allowing generic functions and classes to treat Objects and Primitives the same is good,
- C++ doesn't allow methods to be defined for primitives, but it does allow the limited syntax of a few pre-defined operators to be defined Objects,
- therefore, allowing the limited syntax of a few pre-defined operators to be defined for Ojects is good!
Generics are good. Eliminating the annoying duality of Primitives and Objects is good, especially when combined with the power of generics. Strong type checking is good. But C++'s limited solutions are not good. I'll admit that they're suprisingly elegant, given the constraints the C++ designers put on the language. But its important to understand the constraints the designers put on the language, and its important to ask yourself if those constraints apply to your situation when you code. (BTW: why is double dispatch esoteric? Perhaps, in a language like C++ where even single dispatch is the exception, rather than the rule, it must seem esoteric...)As time goes on, I believe you'll see more and more intelligence being downloaded to the client. I don't believe downright pathetic state of Java Applets in current web browsers should be your guide here -- instead, think of the successful "intelligent client" apps out there: apps such as quicktime, real player, the macromedia suite of plugins, the ILoveYou virii, the DVD controller language that won't let you fast forward over ads, and even JavaScript to some degree are all successful client scripting technologies.
I believe we'll see many more successful examples of the "intelligent client" model. It was just a shame that Java Applets weren't that example. (Java could'a been so damn cool in browsers, too...).
But the "bytecode" deal really was a red herring. Bytecode makes doing most of the things Java does quite a bit easier to implement. But it was marketed as the "cool thing", instead of the "thin g that made a lot of cool things possible", and I think that was a shame, too.
Dynamic binding is not part of java because of the Java VM. It was just a great deal easier to implement in Java because of the VM.
.NET paradigm, where everything is a COM object, there will be either be a powerful dynamic binding ability, or the language will simply fail.
Of all the ways that Java is different from C++, I rank the language's built-in support for dynamic binding as the most important (yes, I believe its even more important than GC). In fact, my biggest complaint about Java is that the dynamic binding doesn't go far enough, and the VM is built in a way that makes implementing better dynamic binding difficult.
I simply cannot imagine that C# won't have powerful dynamic binding capabilities -- in a language targeted towards the
Holy Cow! 1.2 billion dollars per year is probably enough cash to keep somewhere between 6,000 - 8,000 or so competent people on staff, with money left over for nice offices and plenty of well-paid outside consultants.
How many patent applications do these guys get every year, anyhow? How much work does it take to process a patent application?
You seem to understand the problem exactly. As long as someone has taken the time and trouble to install exactly the same batch of software on both machines, and as all the configuration files generated by the sys-admin are compatible, and as long as someone has installed any of the network-centric login schemes, I can transfer a "profile" between machines fairly easily.
Who cares. I can do that with windows, too.
I seriously doubt the ".net" stuff is going to do anything to address any of the real difficulties with transfering profiles between machines -- Windows X and it's suite of applications are far too brittle to be truly "network centric", and repairing them would involve destroying one of Microsofts few trump cards -- backwards compatibility.
Of course it could be -- XML is just a Data Definition Language. The "industry" could have just as easily decided on any other DDL -- an extended BNF grammer, or SGML, or something based on Lisp S-Expressions. But we haven't standardized on any of those other DDL's -- we've pretty much decided, instead, to use XML.
So, if you have a need for a Data Definition Language to describe an extensible, heirarchical, and portable lexical structure for your data, then you should consider XML. Alternatively, if you have an unethical marketing department, and you want to pretend to have an extensible, portable, well-defined lexical structure for your data, then you should definately use XML. If you don't have either of those things, then perhaps you should just keep doing what you're doing...
XML (and its Big Cousin, SGML) is not even a standard file format, any more than ASCII is a standard file format. But it's a very useful part of your toolbox if you want define a standard file format.
If you plan to create a new open, non-proprietary, portable, and extensible file format, seriously consider basing it on XML -- it's been designed to help you do exactly this, and it does it quite successfully. There's an every increasing number of tools to manipulate XML-based file formats, every time you blink another developer or end user learns how to use one of those tools, and its much easier to get both management and outside developers to buy into any new XML-based file format. Not suprisingly, HTML has helped immensely in this respect -- there probably isn't a web developer alive who isn't aware of the extensibility and interoperability of the HTML standard, and it's the 800-pound gorilla example of what to do (and not do) when you design and implement a new XML (or SGML) based file format.
But XML based file formats are not intrinsically open, non-proprietary, portable, or extensible. If you're careful, smart, and lucky, you can create exactly such a format. Sadly, though, if you're carful, smart, and devious, you can create exactyl the opposite -- a closed, proprietary, non-portable, and brittle file format. If your marketing department is evil, you can probably even convince many, many people that your new proprietary, closed, brittle, non-portable file format isn't any of those things, simple by hyping out those the three little letters: "X-M-L".
XML is a great new technology for universal file exchange, in exactly the same way that ASCII or Morse Code where great new technologies for universal file exchange. It's a reasonable, useful standard, where no reasonable, useful standard existed before, and its a standard with a great deal of industry buy-in. But, of course, it will not bring about universal file exchange by itself, and of course you should be very leery of anyone that claims that it will. XML does not intrinsically create openness and interoperability, but its extremely useful technology bringing us down that path.
Cool! I'm running Solaris x86 on my machine at home. If I walk into a random Sun office, how do I go about calling up my profile?
I'm running Redhat 6.1 at work. My boss is running Mandrake 7.1. How do I go about calling up my work profile every time I sit down at his machine to show him something?
How do I call up the profile from either machine on the Windows PC in the airport lounge when I travel?
I am not aware of any existing standard for transfering profiles and applications between machines -- not even between machines running the operating system. There are some pretty hacks that exist in closed windows, unixen, and linuxen clusters, but there's nothing that exists in any type of worldwide application.
It scares me if people think any of the existing technologies for doing this are adequate -- it is currently a major pain in the ass to sit down at an unfamiliar computer and to try to do any productive work. There are some obvious things that could make this much, much better. Smart people can probably find unobvious was to make this even better than that.
The last two animated movies I've enjoyed were The Iron Giant and Princess Mononoke. Both were far better than Titan.
Don't misunderstand -- Titan was a perfectly good excuse to sit in a dark room for an hour with my boo, while stuffing my head with popcorn. But it is a dull movie. The graphics are good in places, but flat and lifeless far too often. The plot is predictable, and the ending was just plain boring.
Perhaps the real problem is that I expect too much from animation -- I don't generally like the hollywood cookie cutter movies, and the non-disneylike animated stuff often aren't cookie cutter movies. Unfortunately, I walked out of Titan feeling like I had just watched a boring, uninspired $45 mil movie starring Matt Damon and Drew Barrymore. Yuck.
PDF may include internal compression, so they can be smaller than the equivilant HTML or plain text.
PDF also may include the document's fonts, along with any images, along with (optionally) the location of each and every letter on the page, down to a few hundreths of an inch.
So, a PDF may be suprisingly small or suprisingly large, depending entirely on the program that generates the document. A well crafted program should be able to take HTML plus images and produce PDFs of roughly equivilant filesize (actually, probably smaller). Just printing from your browswer, through the default printer driver, to Adobe Acrobat is probably going to result in a huge file.
Unfortunately, HTML completely ignores printed output. If you're at all interested in paper, then PDF is the way to go.
PDF might also have some value if you want to preserve the formatting of an existing paper document.
I agree, though, that there are many superior formats for reading documents online. Arguably, HTML might even be one.
I bet something much more serious than COPPA is at work here -- if brodcast really used PGP, then Mr. Garfinkel was smuggling munitions across the Atlantic on a Commercial Airline.
Mr. Garfikel probably broke several laws when he unknowingly brought those munitions through the Airport security and onto a commercial airline. But he admits in the article that he discovered those munitions once he was in the air, and makes no mention of warning the flight crew of these dangerous materials, or letting customs know what type of criminal smuggling he was involved in once he landed.
The man shouldn't be writing for Salon. He should be in jail for a long, long, long time.
No. The plan 9 license is nothing like the GPL license. The plan 9 license gives you few, if any rights to the software -- you may look at, change, and distribute the software, but only until Lucent decides otherwise. Lucent is pretty explicit about the right to take the software back, while the GPL is pretty explicit that the software cannot be taken back. They're two entirely different license, with two entirely different intents.
It's free software, but only in the free beer sense. It's open source, but only in the sense that you can see the source. Its not fee in the GNU sense at all.
The legal mumbo-jumbo thats sets it apart from the GNU Public License is the bit that says that none of the software included (except for the UW Postscript fonts) is covered by the GPL.
IANAL, and CSINL (common sense is not law), but this license seems very different from the GPL in intent. The GPL attempts to give both the copyright holder and the licensee a great deal of rights to software. For example, the GPL doesn't prevent the copyright holder from distributing the GPL'd software under any other license -- If I write and distribute GNU Plan 2000A under the GPL, I'm allowed to distribute Plan 2000B under any other license I may choose. However, the GPL tries very hard to make certain I can't take away the rights of anyone that has the GPL'd GNU Plan 2000A -- once someone has GNU Plan 2000A, I can't retroactively change their license to the Plan 2000B license, even if its exactly the same software. Once someone has GPL'd software, they enjoy a great deal of rights to that software, and those rights are intended to be both transferable and non-removable.
The Plan 9 license doesn't provide any of the rights to the user that the GPL does. The Plan 9 license is explicitely both non-transferable and removable. The license says that Lucent owns this software. We may look at the source, and change it, and distribute it, but Lucent has absolute rights (including patent rights!!!) to any changes anyone makes to the software (whether those changes are distributed or not), and the absolute right to remove your rights at any time. If Lucent doesn't like what you're doing with plan 9, they can make you stop. If you make a cool addition to plan 9, they can sell it, and make you stop using it. They own anything you do with the software.
This is an open source license, in the sense that we can see the source. This is a free license, in the free beer sense. This is not free software, in the GNU sense.