I stand by my assertion that commoditization had more to do with PC growth than adaptation of mature manufacturing technologies (which have matured far more since).
In fact, if the PC industry borrowed from such subsidized innovation, it certainly repaid the loan many times over with further innovation in those areas spurred by the consumer market demand for PCs.
No, a few people with a lot of time, money, and technical expertise were able to get broadband. This "solution" does not work for the average consumer.
Well, yes, early adopters, er, adopt early. And, with some expense, and difficulty. This is true of all new technologies. It was true of dial-up internet access. Few people had it in the late 80s. Then, it spread like wildfire once the average Joe and Jane saw what their fortunate tech-savy friends had. But the key point was that earlier attempts at such networks for non-tech savvy people failed, generally because of their closed design.
Would you also call for taxes so that GNU/Linux be made ready for the desktop? Or, worse, made free/open source development illegal unless it was with the express purpose of dumbing it down for the desktop?
I'd consider the PC such a radical departure from mainframe computers, that it's fair to discount subsidization of development of the latter.
About the only area where your argument has weight is in recent adaptation of mainframe and supercomputer architectures (piplelines, vector processors, banked memory) to PCs. My focus was on the commoditization of the PC industry, leading to standards that brought about mass production and interoperability. These standards generally came about with little government intervention, other than official standards recognition where appropriate.
I'm not choosing anything for you, I'm choosing for me. I couldn't care less what you want - far as I know, you're free to do as you like, as well.
I've bolded the quote to reflect the tone of the post.
Notice that when faced with the immorality of majority-sanctioned theft, the statist has to resort to bluster. Let's pick this apart, bit by bit:
I'm not choosing anything for you,...
Ah, but you are. And you're chosing for all who disagree with you, to boot. Asking a government to regulate something that meets with your dissatisfaction, is asking that government to take my hard-earned money, and spend it to effect the outcome you desire, and furthermore inflict that outcome on me to the extent that free-market alternatives that might satisfy my desires can't compete with the state-sanctioned monopolist, whether legally, or economically (due to tax-funded state subsidies).
Democracies euphemize away the theft aspect of this practice by virtue of mob support, however taking from one against their will, so that they are without is theft, pure and simple. It is surprising that democracies don't degrade faster than they do, given that the few checks against outright mob rule are codified on flimsy sheets of paper in the form of a constitution.
I'm choosing for me.
Well, yes, but at the expense of others' freedom to chose for themselves as well. If you wish to form a cooperative to build out the kind of infrastructure you seek, and exclude me if I don't contribute to your cause, then more power to you. But, you and your supporters, can't muster the money to do this, so you use force to take the extra you need from others, often offering them a piece of the spoils. A forced exchange is neither fair nor free.
I couldn't care less what you want...
I doubt this since you take such a vocal, ardent, and venomous stance against my libertarian beliefs. This suggests that you very much do care that I oppose your intrusion into my life and indirectly into my wallet. Perhaps my calling you a thief brought this on, but I call a spade a spade, and you certainly have the attributes that I would associate with a thief, or at least a would-be thief. All statists share this attribute, so don't take it too personally. You have plenty of company.
...you're free to do as you like,...
Well, no I'm not. There are things I can not do, like send my child to a better school, contribute more to worthwhile charities and organizations like the EFF, etc., because of my tax burden. If the government wants to offer me a service, fine -- send me a bill. If economy of scale arguments are so compelling that the government can offer services to me cheaper than any private organization, this leaves room to raise the price, while still remaining competitive, so as to subsidize the poor.
downing government-regulated Jagermeister (pretty much a zero percent chance of permanent blindness, thank goodness)
Oh! A swipe at an unregulated alcohol industry. If the government wants to certify distilleries as "safe", then let it, and sell me a list of the safe ones. Or, offer a certification program, with fancy little seals and certificates (though that is so ripe for corruption)..
...enjoying our at least semi-functional infrastructure...
Well, this brings up back to the original complaint. Perhaps it isn't improving because of the government-sanctioned monopolies that remove any incentive to improve. Perhaps most people are too stupid to realize how bad things are. Perhaps someone jumped the gun on trying to deploy DSL on 50 year old loaded copper pairs in an attempt to make a fast buck. Yeah, it would be nice for the future to be here already. But, to spend other peoples' money in an attempt to fix things is plain wrong. It is even wronger to give this money to the organization that likely fucked things up in the first place with their policies.
No, I might have that, and you'd be free to continue to subscribe to the present tax'n'burn state, just count me out.
The trouble is, this is not what you want. To achieve the rapid infrastructure buildout you desire requires taking from others, who may not agree with what you desire, by force.
In my book, that is theft, pure and simple. Your subscription to a mob-rule ethos does not make it moral. I count you, and your ilk, among the biggots, racists, petty thieves, religious zealots, and Nazis of the world. Chose what you will for yourself, but please do not presume to chose for me.
The problem with your analysis is that it empowers the state to overcome "activation energy" at the taxpayer's expense so that a desirable steady-state is achieved sooner, rather than later.
Armed with this power, the state can then extend a monopoly status quo beyond the point where it has short-term bebefits.
Libertarians generally say that this is a poor trade. In those cases where many agree that the short-term expense would be worth the immediate benefit, you wouldn't need government intervention.
There are many industries where economies of scale are enormous. The PC industry is one: it costs an enormous amount of money to make the "first" new-fangled CPU. After that, they're cheap as dirt, almost literally. No government intervention was required for this industry to take off. And, while I would have liked to see cheaper PCs sooner, it would be wrong to tax my fellows to achieve this.
The record on government intervention to "jump-start" infrastructure is generally poor, the odd success notwithstanding extended scrutiny of the track record.
We're all about 500 feet farther than the phone company will allow for any DSL service.
Sucks to be you. And I mean that in the kindest possible way: I was in the same boat.
...I opted for an IDSL connection.
That strikes me as expensive. If your're willing to pay that kind of $$$, perhaps you can arrange what I did to get 768kbps x 384kbps ADSL at 15.6 kft from the C.O....
I got a dedicated pair for the DSL, and didn't piggyback it on the existing POTS line. True, this cost an extra $15/month (I pay a total of $81.18/month with tax, in Allen, TX), but it was worth it -- Internet America was the only ISP willing to do this, and they do this as a matter of course for people at the end of long loops. The only catch is, they can't guarantee any particular rate when the service is ordered, but they will qualify the line, and offer the best service they can up to what you desire. If they can't meet your requirements, all bets are off. Struck me as fair.
It also required that I pay for "professional installation" ($150, IIRC), which I didn't need as I ran all outside pairs to my voice/data/video headend myself (ISP guy showed up, looked at my head-end, mutterred "Damn, better than I would have done," checked my up/download speeds, and left. I found out later that about half that fee covered the cost of the telco (SWB) to drop the pair to the demarc (literally connect two wires inside the demarc box that were already there) and connect it to the DSLAM at the CO, so IA wasn't exactly getting rich on that fee (and seeing their installer's expression at my headend was worth it:-).
So, sorry for the ramble, but this might be an option if your ISP is willing to play ball (like alarm companies, they can generally get dry pairs cheap, IIRC).
To all of you anti-government people, I say "get a clue!" The current system is not working and the free market is, by and large, not solving the problem.
The free market IS solving the problem (see the article that spawned this thread) when it is permited to do so.
The problem here stems from monopolies propped up by the government in the first place, leaving you with no legal alternatives. In fact, about the only thing that justifies government regulation to any extent (and not enough, in my book), is the existance of a government-enforced monopoly.
Of course, if you seek government "regulation", to provide taxpayer funded subsidies for your net-access, then I say MOVE!
Can you imagine that? Illegal to speak up about an important issue 60 days before an election, when it might do the most good?
Standard fare in places like Canada, except elections generally run far less than a month. Only official agents of political candidates may authorize advertising.
And, yes, this sucks: it means the public at large can't expose candidate's previous records during an election.
No worse than a C interpreter in C. Of course, at some point you have to either compile to machine code, or to something interpreted by a program in a non- or different-interpreted language.
While a Java Java interpreter might make little sense, a Java compiler in Java, would be an interesting thing.
You miss the point of the discussion, my Cowardly Anonymous friend. This isn't a "my language is better than your language" slugfest.
The problem with languages like C++, which can hide memory management behind things like smart pointers, is that there is no means to force the compiler to prohibit the use of things other than smart pointers in a particular piece of code. Thus, there's no way to tell where particularly knarly memory leaks and wild pointers are likely to lurk in a large body of source code. Java solves this problem by prohibiting access to raw memory, but this comes at the price of not being able to directly manage memory in Java (compiler and language extention hacks aside). Sometimes you want memory managed for you and sometimes you don't.
My lament is that while this protection is a nice attribute of Java, it's implementation, via what I call a non-complete language, well, sucks. The same protection should be available in complete languages (i.e. those that can self-bootstrap) via compiler pragmas. This would offer the benefits of Java to the C++ programmer, without the awkwardness (and Java, with an up-to-date run-time environment, has some nice benefits, not the least of which is signed code).
Well, Java isn't SUPPOSED to be complete by your definition.
Right. And that makes it inelegant as a general purpose programming language. As an "easy to use" language geared toward virtual machine interpretation in various "safe" (in the sandbox sense) environments, it's fine, but it's lack of completeness means that VM implementations (or the compilers that compile them) have to be written in a different language.
The point to not having an "I know what I'm doing" flag for unsafe operation is that a) it's not really necessary, except for implementing a tiny tiny bit of the way-down-low-guts of the runtime and b) it makes security a lot simpler.
Perhaps, but security and programmers' safety nets should not be provided by making a language less complete, IMHO, but rather by controlling the use of unsafe language features, and building an appropriate run-time sandbox (which recent Java incarnations do surprisingly well, if in a complex way: signed code is a nice concept).
These are separate issues: a VM can trap ill-behaved programs, so overly restricting programmers from writing them shouldn't be necessary (if you're willing to put up with the equivalent of a run-time segfault, for example)
So, it is possible to permit poorly-written code (by the programmer who should have been content with the safety nets that automatic GC provides, for example, but wasn't), and still retain security.
What I want is to be able to write the low-level, tricky, blow-up-in-your-face stuff in the same language as the higher-level stuff, and be able to tell the compiler, "Don't let me do this -- it's easy to make a mistake, and the power is not needed."
Ah! Now I see, they made Java complete by redefining the language (the Magic class, as you describe it, is now "special"), and building an appropriate compiler.
This still strikes me as cheating: they changed the language to make it complete. Furthermore, the "complete" language is available only when compiling the JVM, and not when a general "I know what I'm doing" flag is set (though that's probably trivial to change). Finally, effecting language completeness via reserved words instead of symbols which are syntactically "more sugary" strikes me as clumsy, though I've not looked at their GC implementations using this technique.
There are two problems here: language completeness, and restriction of complete languages to particular subsets. IBM appears to have clumsy solutions to both issues w.r.t. Java, with the latter easier to clean up. I doubt that there would be an elegant solution to the original problem of language completeness vis a vis Java that they face, so I can't be too critical of their "Magic" class hack.
Then, the internal Jalapeno VM compiler would recognize calls to the Magic class, verify that what they are compiling is a valid part of the JVM and inline appropriate machine code where these calls occur.
At first glance, this looks like cheating: the Java GC requires VM support. Is the VM written in Java? If not, the language is not complete, as I've defined complete.
C++ certainly gives one many ways to shoot one's self in the foot. But, with power comes responsibility. Some are up to the task, and others aren't. Attempts to simplify the language just shift the problem elsewhere: Java, lacking a proper pointer type in an attempt to ease memory management burdens, foists automatic garbage collection on one.
Now, this wouldn't be bad, if the skilled programmer had, at his disposal, the means to tweak the garbage collector implementation to suit a particular application -- presuming that there is one and and only one universally "best" garbage collector is arrogant and short-sighted. The trouble is, even though it may be possible to replace the Java garbage collector, one can't do it with a Java implementation: the language is not closed with regard to it's run-time requirements -- garbage collectors need to manage raw memory via, ta da, pointers! This lack of closure, preventing a language's run-time library from being expressed in the language itself, is most inelegant.
Of course, the C and C++ affecionados will point to this closure as the very beauty of their preferred language. Let's call such languages "complete". Alas, the linguistic power necessary to make a language complete has now been put into the hands of the neophyte programmer (was that delete or delete[], and when does it matter?).
It doesn't take much inspiration to see that subsets of a complete language, while not complete themselves, may still be powerful enough to write useful programs. With abstractions, disciplined programers try to fake this: the C++ "smart pointer" exercise is classic. Unfortunately, for all the effort put into smart-pointers and per-class address-of operator definitions, you can still get a real pointer to an object which does not implement such a monadic operator. What you really want is the compiler to say, "Bad programmer: using a real pointer!" either as a warning or as a fatal error (well, maybe not so harshly, but you get the idea).
Thanks for the correction and references. "Eskimo" as "eater of raw meat" was taught as fact to school children in 1970s Quebec. I should probably have verified my sources better.
Why in God's name do Americans still refer to the Inuit as 'Eskimos'? It shows all the social sensitivity of 'negro' or 'indian'.
As a Canadian living (legally) in the U.S.A., I've asked a few people that when they used the term "Eskimo". I explained, that it essentially means "eater of raw meat", and while true to an extent, is regarded as an insult (heck, I like steak tartare too). Canadians have used the more politically correct term "Inuit" for quite some time now. The response I get is usually one of shock and ignorance: "Really? I didn't know that!" suggesting that any offence is unintentional. I usually explain the difference and let people chose what terms to use in the future. (I'm not about to be the political correctness police).
IIRC, it is possible for programming to be tagged so that it is not output on component ports in an analog format. If this is true, then it may be possible for a STB to downconvert the resolution of such HD programming to SD and output it on the component ports.
Of course, there may be YAB (yet another bit) that determines if even this is permitted.
As for consumers not taking this kind of abuse, I doubt there will be an uprising: the fraction of HD set owners is tiny, so our voices don't matter. Most people will probably be happy with the crappy ubiquitious CH 3/4 RF connections for VCR time-shifting. As long as they can time-shift SOMETHING, the higher definition for live broadcasts will be perceived as added-value that makes the whole proposition worth it (once HD set prices drop to say, a 50% premium over analog sets).
Personally, I don't mind DRM, per se., as long as traditional fair use rights are preserved. We know this isn't the case with the DMCA, or SSSCA (er, renamed the phbbbt-CA, or whatever), and that's my biggest beef with these laws. I have no objection to DRM per se., as a means to fight copyright infringement, and, given a decent PK trust infrastructure, you can have DRM and fair use. Implemented properly, and with reasonable limits on copyright terms (something we don't have), the equipment could automatically even release exipring copyright material to the public domain (Lessig's "Code is Law" mantra can work beneficially as well as restrictively).
The difficulty stems from a rejection of any form of DRM by technophiles because of the pushing of a particular (bad) form of DRM by Hollings, and his media cronies. However, like all technologies, DRM is not inherently evil -- how it is deployed and used makes all the difference. As much as I am opposed to insanely long copyright protections, I do not object to the notion of copyright per se. to permit creators of artistic works to control their creations for a sufficient period to provide an incentive to create them in the first place. With reasonable copyright terms, and DRM that enforces them, with due deference to fair use, I'd be a very happy hacker.
I believe that you would have to be a monster to be willing to conceive a baby that way
While I am a big fan of science and technology, and see no ethical reasons not to pursue human cloning technology, it does strike me as horribly immature at the moment, and not appropriate to apply, given the expected problems the clone will face. So, I agree with you sentiment.
However, people bring children into the world who will undoubtedly suffer: they either live in poverty (the parents can't afford to effectively house/cloth/feed the child), or turmoil (there's a war going on!). While these situations are subject to interpretation (what's poverty for me might be acceptable for you) of course, as a general rule it's a bad idea to make your children suffer more than you do (another mouth to feed, known defects, etc.). Yet, people have kids anyway. So, it should not be surprising that the selfish desire for a child, even if the child will suffer, is a strong one.
Does that make it right? I don't think so, but it doesn't surprise me that it will happen.
Storage of the physical media isn't too much of a problem: there are rather dense shelving arrangements available. The real problem, IMHO, is online access and indexing.
I would suggest getting rid of any jukebox style approach: they require you to commit your storage of your precious media to them, and can be somewhat rough in handling. Instead, consider ripping them (uncompressed, if you're a purist, to a hard disk). 100 Gb drives are reasonably priced, and will store about 120 CDs, uncompressed. I'm told that the lossless compression shorten (.shn) format is half decent, compression-wise, and will give you a bit more space.
As for indexing, I tend to use an Artist/Album/track scheme, with permutations of symlink trees thus: Artists/Artist/Album/track, Albums/Album/Artist/track, Genre/Artist/Album/track, etc.
I vaguely remember a Ninja movie where over a hundred people die (one by one, or in pairs), before the opening credits end. It slows down a bit after hat, but not much.
I don't remember the title, but it involves the Ninja's spirit taking over some 20ish woman (insert ObNudity scenes).
I found it rather funny in a "yeah, right" sort of way.
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Yes, Americans had some pretty good ideas in that constitution of theirs. It's a real pity that these days, they let it be treated like toilet paper.
In fact, if the PC industry borrowed from such subsidized innovation, it certainly repaid the loan many times over with further innovation in those areas spurred by the consumer market demand for PCs.
Well, yes, early adopters, er, adopt early. And, with some expense, and difficulty. This is true of all new technologies. It was true of dial-up internet access. Few people had it in the late 80s. Then, it spread like wildfire once the average Joe and Jane saw what their fortunate tech-savy friends had. But the key point was that earlier attempts at such networks for non-tech savvy people failed, generally because of their closed design.
Would you also call for taxes so that GNU/Linux be made ready for the desktop? Or, worse, made free/open source development illegal unless it was with the express purpose of dumbing it down for the desktop?
About the only area where your argument has weight is in recent adaptation of mainframe and supercomputer architectures (piplelines, vector processors, banked memory) to PCs. My focus was on the commoditization of the PC industry, leading to standards that brought about mass production and interoperability. These standards generally came about with little government intervention, other than official standards recognition where appropriate.
I've bolded the quote to reflect the tone of the post.
Notice that when faced with the immorality of majority-sanctioned theft, the statist has to resort to bluster. Let's pick this apart, bit by bit:
I'm not choosing anything for you,...
Ah, but you are. And you're chosing for all who disagree with you, to boot. Asking a government to regulate something that meets with your dissatisfaction, is asking that government to take my hard-earned money, and spend it to effect the outcome you desire, and furthermore inflict that outcome on me to the extent that free-market alternatives that might satisfy my desires can't compete with the state-sanctioned monopolist, whether legally, or economically (due to tax-funded state subsidies).
Democracies euphemize away the theft aspect of this practice by virtue of mob support, however taking from one against their will, so that they are without is theft, pure and simple. It is surprising that democracies don't degrade faster than they do, given that the few checks against outright mob rule are codified on flimsy sheets of paper in the form of a constitution.
I'm choosing for me.
Well, yes, but at the expense of others' freedom to chose for themselves as well. If you wish to form a cooperative to build out the kind of infrastructure you seek, and exclude me if I don't contribute to your cause, then more power to you. But, you and your supporters, can't muster the money to do this, so you use force to take the extra you need from others, often offering them a piece of the spoils. A forced exchange is neither fair nor free.
I couldn't care less what you want...
I doubt this since you take such a vocal, ardent, and venomous stance against my libertarian beliefs. This suggests that you very much do care that I oppose your intrusion into my life and indirectly into my wallet. Perhaps my calling you a thief brought this on, but I call a spade a spade, and you certainly have the attributes that I would associate with a thief, or at least a would-be thief. All statists share this attribute, so don't take it too personally. You have plenty of company.
Well, no I'm not. There are things I can not do, like send my child to a better school, contribute more to worthwhile charities and organizations like the EFF, etc., because of my tax burden. If the government wants to offer me a service, fine -- send me a bill. If economy of scale arguments are so compelling that the government can offer services to me cheaper than any private organization, this leaves room to raise the price, while still remaining competitive, so as to subsidize the poor.
downing government-regulated Jagermeister (pretty much a zero percent chance of permanent blindness, thank goodness)
Oh! A swipe at an unregulated alcohol industry. If the government wants to certify distilleries as "safe", then let it, and sell me a list of the safe ones. Or, offer a certification program, with fancy little seals and certificates (though that is so ripe for corruption)..
Well, this brings up back to the original complaint. Perhaps it isn't improving because of the government-sanctioned monopolies that remove any incentive to improve. Perhaps most people are too stupid to realize how bad things are. Perhaps someone jumped the gun on trying to deploy DSL on 50 year old loaded copper pairs in an attempt to make a fast buck. Yeah, it would be nice for the future to be here already. But, to spend other peoples' money in an attempt to fix things is plain wrong. It is even wronger to give this money to the organization that likely fucked things up in the first place with their policies.
No, I might have that, and you'd be free to continue to subscribe to the present tax'n'burn state, just count me out.
The trouble is, this is not what you want. To achieve the rapid infrastructure buildout you desire requires taking from others, who may not agree with what you desire, by force.
In my book, that is theft, pure and simple. Your subscription to a mob-rule ethos does not make it moral. I count you, and your ilk, among the biggots, racists, petty thieves, religious zealots, and Nazis of the world. Chose what you will for yourself, but please do not presume to chose for me.
Armed with this power, the state can then extend a monopoly status quo beyond the point where it has short-term bebefits.
Libertarians generally say that this is a poor trade. In those cases where many agree that the short-term expense would be worth the immediate benefit, you wouldn't need government intervention.
There are many industries where economies of scale are enormous. The PC industry is one: it costs an enormous amount of money to make the "first" new-fangled CPU. After that, they're cheap as dirt, almost literally. No government intervention was required for this industry to take off. And, while I would have liked to see cheaper PCs sooner, it would be wrong to tax my fellows to achieve this.
The record on government intervention to "jump-start" infrastructure is generally poor, the odd success notwithstanding extended scrutiny of the track record.
Sucks to be you. And I mean that in the kindest possible way: I was in the same boat.
That strikes me as expensive. If your're willing to pay that kind of $$$, perhaps you can arrange what I did to get 768kbps x 384kbps ADSL at 15.6 kft from the C.O....
I got a dedicated pair for the DSL, and didn't piggyback it on the existing POTS line. True, this cost an extra $15/month (I pay a total of $81.18/month with tax, in Allen, TX), but it was worth it -- Internet America was the only ISP willing to do this, and they do this as a matter of course for people at the end of long loops. The only catch is, they can't guarantee any particular rate when the service is ordered, but they will qualify the line, and offer the best service they can up to what you desire. If they can't meet your requirements, all bets are off. Struck me as fair.
It also required that I pay for "professional installation" ($150, IIRC), which I didn't need as I ran all outside pairs to my voice/data/video headend myself (ISP guy showed up, looked at my head-end, mutterred "Damn, better than I would have done," checked my up/download speeds, and left. I found out later that about half that fee covered the cost of the telco (SWB) to drop the pair to the demarc (literally connect two wires inside the demarc box that were already there) and connect it to the DSLAM at the CO, so IA wasn't exactly getting rich on that fee (and seeing their installer's expression at my headend was worth it :-).
So, sorry for the ramble, but this might be an option if your ISP is willing to play ball (like alarm companies, they can generally get dry pairs cheap, IIRC).
The free market IS solving the problem (see the article that spawned this thread) when it is permited to do so.
The problem here stems from monopolies propped up by the government in the first place, leaving you with no legal alternatives. In fact, about the only thing that justifies government regulation to any extent (and not enough, in my book), is the existance of a government-enforced monopoly.
Of course, if you seek government "regulation", to provide taxpayer funded subsidies for your net-access, then I say MOVE!
Standard fare in places like Canada, except elections generally run far less than a month. Only official agents of political candidates may authorize advertising.
And, yes, this sucks: it means the public at large can't expose candidate's previous records during an election.
How the names Pons and Fleischmann got so perverted is beyond me.
While a Java Java interpreter might make little sense, a Java compiler in Java, would be an interesting thing.
The problem with languages like C++, which can hide memory management behind things like smart pointers, is that there is no means to force the compiler to prohibit the use of things other than smart pointers in a particular piece of code. Thus, there's no way to tell where particularly knarly memory leaks and wild pointers are likely to lurk in a large body of source code. Java solves this problem by prohibiting access to raw memory, but this comes at the price of not being able to directly manage memory in Java (compiler and language extention hacks aside). Sometimes you want memory managed for you and sometimes you don't.
My lament is that while this protection is a nice attribute of Java, it's implementation, via what I call a non-complete language, well, sucks. The same protection should be available in complete languages (i.e. those that can self-bootstrap) via compiler pragmas. This would offer the benefits of Java to the C++ programmer, without the awkwardness (and Java, with an up-to-date run-time environment, has some nice benefits, not the least of which is signed code).
Right. And that makes it inelegant as a general purpose programming language. As an "easy to use" language geared toward virtual machine interpretation in various "safe" (in the sandbox sense) environments, it's fine, but it's lack of completeness means that VM implementations (or the compilers that compile them) have to be written in a different language.
The point to not having an "I know what I'm doing" flag for unsafe operation is that a) it's not really necessary, except for implementing a tiny tiny bit of the way-down-low-guts of the runtime and b) it makes security a lot simpler.
Perhaps, but security and programmers' safety nets should not be provided by making a language less complete, IMHO, but rather by controlling the use of unsafe language features, and building an appropriate run-time sandbox (which recent Java incarnations do surprisingly well, if in a complex way: signed code is a nice concept). These are separate issues: a VM can trap ill-behaved programs, so overly restricting programmers from writing them shouldn't be necessary (if you're willing to put up with the equivalent of a run-time segfault, for example)
So, it is possible to permit poorly-written code (by the programmer who should have been content with the safety nets that automatic GC provides, for example, but wasn't), and still retain security.
What I want is to be able to write the low-level, tricky, blow-up-in-your-face stuff in the same language as the higher-level stuff, and be able to tell the compiler, "Don't let me do this -- it's easy to make a mistake, and the power is not needed."
This still strikes me as cheating: they changed the language to make it complete. Furthermore, the "complete" language is available only when compiling the JVM, and not when a general "I know what I'm doing" flag is set (though that's probably trivial to change). Finally, effecting language completeness via reserved words instead of symbols which are syntactically "more sugary" strikes me as clumsy, though I've not looked at their GC implementations using this technique.
There are two problems here: language completeness, and restriction of complete languages to particular subsets. IBM appears to have clumsy solutions to both issues w.r.t. Java, with the latter easier to clean up. I doubt that there would be an elegant solution to the original problem of language completeness vis a vis Java that they face, so I can't be too critical of their "Magic" class hack.
At first glance, this looks like cheating: the Java GC requires VM support. Is the VM written in Java? If not, the language is not complete, as I've defined complete.
Now, this wouldn't be bad, if the skilled programmer had, at his disposal, the means to tweak the garbage collector implementation to suit a particular application -- presuming that there is one and and only one universally "best" garbage collector is arrogant and short-sighted. The trouble is, even though it may be possible to replace the Java garbage collector, one can't do it with a Java implementation: the language is not closed with regard to it's run-time requirements -- garbage collectors need to manage raw memory via, ta da, pointers! This lack of closure, preventing a language's run-time library from being expressed in the language itself, is most inelegant.
Of course, the C and C++ affecionados will point to this closure as the very beauty of their preferred language. Let's call such languages "complete". Alas, the linguistic power necessary to make a language complete has now been put into the hands of the neophyte programmer (was that delete or delete[], and when does it matter?).
It doesn't take much inspiration to see that subsets of a complete language, while not complete themselves, may still be powerful enough to write useful programs. With abstractions, disciplined programers try to fake this: the C++ "smart pointer" exercise is classic. Unfortunately, for all the effort put into smart-pointers and per-class address-of operator definitions, you can still get a real pointer to an object which does not implement such a monadic operator. What you really want is the compiler to say, "Bad programmer: using a real pointer!" either as a warning or as a fatal error (well, maybe not so harshly, but you get the idea).
Thanks for the correction and references. "Eskimo" as "eater of raw meat" was taught as fact to school children in 1970s Quebec. I should probably have verified my sources better.
As a Canadian living (legally) in the U.S.A., I've asked a few people that when they used the term "Eskimo". I explained, that it essentially means "eater of raw meat", and while true to an extent, is regarded as an insult (heck, I like steak tartare too). Canadians have used the more politically correct term "Inuit" for quite some time now. The response I get is usually one of shock and ignorance: "Really? I didn't know that!" suggesting that any offence is unintentional. I usually explain the difference and let people chose what terms to use in the future. (I'm not about to be the political correctness police).
Of course, there may be YAB (yet another bit) that determines if even this is permitted.
As for consumers not taking this kind of abuse, I doubt there will be an uprising: the fraction of HD set owners is tiny, so our voices don't matter. Most people will probably be happy with the crappy ubiquitious CH 3/4 RF connections for VCR time-shifting. As long as they can time-shift SOMETHING, the higher definition for live broadcasts will be perceived as added-value that makes the whole proposition worth it (once HD set prices drop to say, a 50% premium over analog sets).
Personally, I don't mind DRM, per se., as long as traditional fair use rights are preserved. We know this isn't the case with the DMCA, or SSSCA (er, renamed the phbbbt-CA, or whatever), and that's my biggest beef with these laws. I have no objection to DRM per se., as a means to fight copyright infringement, and, given a decent PK trust infrastructure, you can have DRM and fair use. Implemented properly, and with reasonable limits on copyright terms (something we don't have), the equipment could automatically even release exipring copyright material to the public domain (Lessig's "Code is Law" mantra can work beneficially as well as restrictively).
The difficulty stems from a rejection of any form of DRM by technophiles because of the pushing of a particular (bad) form of DRM by Hollings, and his media cronies. However, like all technologies, DRM is not inherently evil -- how it is deployed and used makes all the difference. As much as I am opposed to insanely long copyright protections, I do not object to the notion of copyright per se. to permit creators of artistic works to control their creations for a sufficient period to provide an incentive to create them in the first place. With reasonable copyright terms, and DRM that enforces them, with due deference to fair use, I'd be a very happy hacker.
While I am a big fan of science and technology, and see no ethical reasons not to pursue human cloning technology, it does strike me as horribly immature at the moment, and not appropriate to apply, given the expected problems the clone will face. So, I agree with you sentiment.
However, people bring children into the world who will undoubtedly suffer: they either live in poverty (the parents can't afford to effectively house/cloth/feed the child), or turmoil (there's a war going on!). While these situations are subject to interpretation (what's poverty for me might be acceptable for you) of course, as a general rule it's a bad idea to make your children suffer more than you do (another mouth to feed, known defects, etc.). Yet, people have kids anyway. So, it should not be surprising that the selfish desire for a child, even if the child will suffer, is a strong one.
Does that make it right? I don't think so, but it doesn't surprise me that it will happen.
If it is prohibited, then this is because it is illegal, or, ultimately, unconstitutional.
Since when has THAT stopped the U.S. government?
I would suggest getting rid of any jukebox style approach: they require you to commit your storage of your precious media to them, and can be somewhat rough in handling. Instead, consider ripping them (uncompressed, if you're a purist, to a hard disk). 100 Gb drives are reasonably priced, and will store about 120 CDs, uncompressed. I'm told that the lossless compression shorten (.shn) format is half decent, compression-wise, and will give you a bit more space.
As for indexing, I tend to use an Artist/Album/track scheme, with permutations of symlink trees thus: Artists/Artist/Album/track, Albums/Album/Artist/track, Genre/Artist/Album/track, etc.
I don't remember the title, but it involves the Ninja's spirit taking over some 20ish woman (insert ObNudity scenes).
I found it rather funny in a "yeah, right" sort of way.
I'd barf.