... at which point Microsoft will pay off another failing company to be its next litigation suicide-bomber? They've got the cash to keep it up for years...
At the moment, it's either live under the tyranny, or leave the country.
Bad as things may seem, we do still live in a democracy. Why not vote the bastards out of office next year? This time around we even have some decent replacements for them.
Conversly, WIPO can be counted on to act against Intellectual Property rights that do not result in profits for WIPO's member state corporations.
Except, of course, that open source products help everyone, including WIPO members, by allowing them to leverage open source to produce their products more cheaply. See the recent TiVo article for an example. The problem is that they haven't pulled their heads sufficiently out of their asses yet to realize this.
"Get into the habit of pre-fixing your increments and decrements (i.e. ++i, --i, as opposed to i++ and i--) because it will make your transition easier to C++"
As a C++ programmer, this doesn't make sense to me. C++ supports both prefix and postfix operators. Any idea what the author was talking about?
In other words, adding printf()'s and observing the resulting behaviour change allowed you narrow down what was going on and eventually fix the bug. Or to put it another way, the printf() debugging worked. So your "doesn't always work" claim isn't supported by this example.
Maybe what we really need is an OS that supports an easy-to-configure "sandbox" for each app to run in. That way if you are worried about Application X sending out network packets on the sly, you can just tell the OS to disallow network connections from that app.
If you can't trust the applications you are running not to spy on you, but you still have to run those applications, it's the only way...
Regarding the "IRV is harmful", the flaw in that argument is here:
But what if the Republican is eliminated before the Libertarian? Unless all the Republican votes transfer to the Libertarian, which is extremely unlikely, the Democrat might then beat the Libertarian.
There are two problems here. First, if the Republican and Libertarian candidate are similar, then most of the Republican votes probably will transfer from one to the other. If, on the other hand, they're not similar, then they aren't really splitting the vote anyway. Or to put it another way, if the Democrat was the second choice of many people, then electing the Democrat is the correct and democratic thing to do.
In any case, I don't content that IRV is a perfect system, but it is a great improvement over plurality voting and it is a reform that's easy for people to understand. That, and the fact that it has considerable momentum behind it, give it a good chance of being adopted, which is much better than the alternative (i.e. the status quo).
Also, from what I've heard, only half the industry was deregulated.
Yes, that's correct. Perhaps a fully deregulated market wouldn't have caused California such pain. We'll probably never know now.
The guy is an absolute idiot. I'll never forgive him for signing those absolutely stupid power contracts.
Would you have forgiven him if he hadn't signed those contracts and the blackouts had continued indefinitely? The fact is, deregulation allowed the energy companies to put a gun to California's collective head. By signing the contracts, Davis was able to at least make it so that energy prices were stable and predictable, not increasing exponentially every week with intentional rolling blackouts (arguably a form of domestic terrorism) driving the "point" home.
The fact is California was mugged, and Davis bought us our freedom back. Sure, it was and is expensive, and there might have been better solutions (if you know any, please let me know what he should have done instead). Otherwise, wouldn't it be more logical to save your rage for the Republicans who set up the mugging, rather than the people who had to deal with the results?
There's a reason why Apple publishes UI guidelines. One of those reasons is to avoid the nightmare of having to explain to a user why there's a difference between a left-drag and a right-drag.
My program is used to control audio consoles for live theater sound systems. In that scenario, the difference between a UI where it takes a quarter-second to change a control and one that where it takes 2 seconds is the difference between success and failure. My users need to be able to do things very quickly, and assigning different actions to different mouse buttons is one way to make that possible.
If your code depends on doing drags with different buttons, then you need to seriously re-think your UI. Maybe that crap will fly on linux, where people are willing to put up with all kinds of X-windows cruft, but mac users will throw it back in your face, and rightfully so!
If I were to dumb down my GUI and make it slower to use, my users would not be able to use it anymore. The UI guidelines are just that -- guidelines. They don't apply to every scenario, and this is one that they don't apply to.
I can do a control click with no problem. But try explaining to my grandmother what a "control key" is, and why you need to hold down that key while clicking... no fun.
I care, because my Qt-based program that works great under Linux and Windows has to be hacked up and redesigned to work properly using only one mouse button under OS/X. Even telling all of my users to buy multi-button-mice isn't enough yet, since Apple's drag-and-drop functionality is broken -- you can only drag and drop with the primary mouse button.
If Apple thinks it's acceptable to revert to brain-dead three-letter-extensions for file typing "because that's how Windows does it", then surely they can take off their ideological blinders long enough to include multi-button-mice as well.
The above is a false choice. The real choice users face isn't between "learn two buttons" and "learn one button", it's between "learn two buttons" and "learn how to press one button while optionally pressing some obscure meta-key at the same time".
In other words, by leaving out the easiest way to obtain different click-semantics, Apple forces everyone to learn how to get the same functionality a much harder way.
People didn't evolve multiple fingers for nothing, ya know.
This guy can be turned directly into the scion of leftist antiwar evil with a few carefully placed TV ads.
By "war", you are referring to the unprecedented, unjustified, trumped-up, "pre-emptive" invasion of a non-threatening foreign country that is now costing the USA about a billion dollars and 3-5 American soldiers' lives every week, with no end in sight? Unless Bush pulls some Iraqi miracle out of his ass during the next year, I think ads showing that Dean is antiwar would be the best publicity Dean could ask for.
Is this the future we want? Two insanely powerful groups of people more or less able to stay in power indefinitely? Are we so inherently weak that going with the "winning" team is the only choice left to us?
At the moment, yes, we are that weak. That is not a moral failing on our part, it's simply an inevitable outcome of a winner-take-all electoral system.
Now we are so fat and lazy that only federalized health care (Democrats) or waging war on the world (Republicans) is the only way we will survive? We just sit back into our cushy sofa, watch CNN, and suck of the US Government propery milk bottle provided to each and every American each morning?
We aren't fat and lazy (well, not all of us anyway;^)). As you observe, our two-party political system is failing us badly, and it needs to be changed. But in order to change the system, we need to get control of the system, and barring some miracle that almost certainly won't happen, third parties are not the means by which that change is going to come about. I'm a dues-paying member of the Green Party myself, and as much as I like the Greens, I'm not blind to how the system works. So that leaves us two choices -- change by ballot initiative (a possibility in California, but not nationwide), or change by means of electing change-friendly major-party candidates. Admittedly, change-friendly major party candidates are rare, almost by definition, but Howard Dean is one of them -- he's in favor of both Instant Runoff Voting and Public Campaign Financing -- two reforms that would each improve our level of Democracy drastically. He's also on the right side of many other issues, and is an intelligent, outspoken, and charismatic candidate to boot.
So if you want to bitch about how bad our political system is and play the rebel without actually changing anything, then maybe a third party candidate is the choice for you. If, on the other hand, you actually want to see some positive changes occur, Dean is your man in 2004.
It's a very simple black & white issue... Being able to hide your major failings until after an election should not give you a free pass
What major failings of Davis were kept secret until after the election? AFAIK everybody knew Davis sucked well before the election... he had been governor already for four years, after all. We re-elected him anyway (because the Republican guy was even worse).
Vote for a third party in 2004! Isn't it time to stir the pot a bit? Isn't it time to set the status quo on edge?
After the 2000 election, I don't think third parties are going to get much traction in 2004. People see them only having a spoiling effect -- voting third party has the same effect as staying home, as far as the results are concerned.
So rich people do not need to buy food, clothes, or other things that they need?
For all practical purposes, they don't. Calculate what percentage of his salary Bill Gates spends on food and clothing, and then calculate what percentage the average Joe does.
I'd say it's about trying to make it so that everyone shares the pain of taxation more equally. If you're rich, you can afford to pay taxes at a higher rate, because your basic necessities are taken care of no matter what -- the extra tax bite comes out of your luxury spending. Whereas for a poor person, extra tax bills eat into his ability to buy necessities, and so causes him much more pain than they would cause the rich guy.
Davis wasn't responsible for creating the energy crisis mess, but he sure didn't handle the situation well when it came up (and signing those overpriced long term contracts in a panic 2 years ago didnt help either).
So, what would you have done if you were in his position, then?
But answer this question, if the majority of the state wants him out, why should he be allowed back on the ballot? What about that isn't completely insane?
A majority of the state wants Davis out, yes... but not at any cost. In particular, they want him replaced with someone who they prefer. Obviously, people wouldn't want Davis replaced by someone they hate even more!
Finally, I think you'd find officials getting elected with 10% (or whatever) of the vote in MOST elections (recall or otherwise) without a primary system.
True, if the voting system only allows the voters to vote for a single candidate. Such voting systems are woefully inadequate for races with more than two or three serious candidates. More sophisticated voting systems (IRV, Borda count, approval voting, etc) that allow voters to rank candidates are able to handle large candidate pools without such problems.
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Bad as things may seem, we do still live in a democracy. Why not vote the bastards out of office next year? This time around we even have some decent replacements for them.
Except, of course, that open source products help everyone, including WIPO members, by allowing them to leverage open source to produce their products more cheaply. See the recent TiVo article for an example. The problem is that they haven't pulled their heads sufficiently out of their asses yet to realize this.
As a C++ programmer, this doesn't make sense to me. C++ supports both prefix and postfix operators. Any idea what the author was talking about?
This always indicates...
In other words, adding printf()'s and observing the resulting behaviour change allowed you narrow down what was going on and eventually fix the bug. Or to put it another way, the printf() debugging worked. So your "doesn't always work" claim isn't supported by this example.
Don't buy it, either.
If you can't trust the applications you are running not to spy on you, but you still have to run those applications, it's the only way...
But what if the Republican is eliminated before the Libertarian? Unless all the Republican votes transfer to the Libertarian, which is extremely unlikely, the Democrat might then beat the Libertarian.
There are two problems here. First, if the Republican and Libertarian candidate are similar, then most of the Republican votes probably will transfer from one to the other. If, on the other hand, they're not similar, then they aren't really splitting the vote anyway. Or to put it another way, if the Democrat was the second choice of many people, then electing the Democrat is the correct and democratic thing to do.
In any case, I don't content that IRV is a perfect system, but it is a great improvement over plurality voting and it is a reform that's easy for people to understand. That, and the fact that it has considerable momentum behind it, give it a good chance of being adopted, which is much better than the alternative (i.e. the status quo).
Also, from what I've heard, only half the industry was deregulated.
Yes, that's correct. Perhaps a fully deregulated market wouldn't have caused California such pain. We'll probably never know now.
Would you have forgiven him if he hadn't signed those contracts and the blackouts had continued indefinitely? The fact is, deregulation allowed the energy companies to put a gun to California's collective head. By signing the contracts, Davis was able to at least make it so that energy prices were stable and predictable, not increasing exponentially every week with intentional rolling blackouts (arguably a form of domestic terrorism) driving the "point" home.
The fact is California was mugged, and Davis bought us our freedom back. Sure, it was and is expensive, and there might have been better solutions (if you know any, please let me know what he should have done instead). Otherwise, wouldn't it be more logical to save your rage for the Republicans who set up the mugging, rather than the people who had to deal with the results?
My program is used to control audio consoles for live theater sound systems. In that scenario, the difference between a UI where it takes a quarter-second to change a control and one that where it takes 2 seconds is the difference between success and failure. My users need to be able to do things very quickly, and assigning different actions to different mouse buttons is one way to make that possible.
If your code depends on doing drags with different buttons, then you need to seriously re-think your UI. Maybe that crap will fly on linux, where people are willing to put up with all kinds of X-windows cruft, but mac users will throw it back in your face, and rightfully so!
If I were to dumb down my GUI and make it slower to use, my users would not be able to use it anymore. The UI guidelines are just that -- guidelines. They don't apply to every scenario, and this is one that they don't apply to.
I can do a control click with no problem. But try explaining to my grandmother what a "control key" is, and why you need to hold down that key while clicking... no fun.
Sontag said these include NUMA (non uniform memory access), Read Copyright Update (RCU), Journal File System and schedulers.
Is "Read Copyright Update" SCO's new business model then?
If Apple thinks it's acceptable to revert to brain-dead three-letter-extensions for file typing "because that's how Windows does it", then surely they can take off their ideological blinders long enough to include multi-button-mice as well.
In other words, by leaving out the easiest way to obtain different click-semantics, Apple forces everyone to learn how to get the same functionality a much harder way.
People didn't evolve multiple fingers for nothing, ya know.
As an ex-BeOS user, I can tell you that software developers, when deciding whether or not to port their software, care very much about market share...
The guy has no plan, he just likes to attack.
Just in case anyone was about to believe that baseless allegation:
Dean's Plan for Ensuring Civil Rights
Dean's Plan for the Economy
Dean's Plan for the Environment
Dean's Plan for Health Care
Dean's Plan for Education
No, it's both. It's the Dean campaigns' fault, they are responsible, AND it was an honest mistake. The two aren't mutually exclusive.
By "war", you are referring to the unprecedented, unjustified, trumped-up, "pre-emptive" invasion of a non-threatening foreign country that is now costing the USA about a billion dollars and 3-5 American soldiers' lives every week, with no end in sight? Unless Bush pulls some Iraqi miracle out of his ass during the next year, I think ads showing that Dean is antiwar would be the best publicity Dean could ask for.
At the moment, yes, we are that weak. That is not a moral failing on our part, it's simply an inevitable outcome of a winner-take-all electoral system.
Now we are so fat and lazy that only federalized health care (Democrats) or waging war on the world (Republicans) is the only way we will survive? We just sit back into our cushy sofa, watch CNN, and suck of the US Government propery milk bottle provided to each and every American each morning?
We aren't fat and lazy (well, not all of us anyway
So if you want to bitch about how bad our political system is and play the rebel without actually changing anything, then maybe a third party candidate is the choice for you. If, on the other hand, you actually want to see some positive changes occur, Dean is your man in 2004.
What major failings of Davis were kept secret until after the election? AFAIK everybody knew Davis sucked well before the election
After the 2000 election, I don't think third parties are going to get much traction in 2004. People see them only having a spoiling effect -- voting third party has the same effect as staying home, as far as the results are concerned.
But all is not lost... the Democrats have a very impressive candidate in the running this time.
For all practical purposes, they don't. Calculate what percentage of his salary Bill Gates spends on food and clothing, and then calculate what percentage the average Joe does.
I'd say it's about trying to make it so that everyone shares the pain of taxation more equally. If you're rich, you can afford to pay taxes at a higher rate, because your basic necessities are taken care of no matter what -- the extra tax bite comes out of your luxury spending. Whereas for a poor person, extra tax bills eat into his ability to buy necessities, and so causes him much more pain than they would cause the rich guy.
So, what would you have done if you were in his position, then?
A majority of the state wants Davis out, yes... but not at any cost. In particular, they want him replaced with someone who they prefer. Obviously, people wouldn't want Davis replaced by someone they hate even more!
Finally, I think you'd find officials getting elected with 10% (or whatever) of the vote in MOST elections (recall or otherwise) without a primary system.
True, if the voting system only allows the voters to vote for a single candidate. Such voting systems are woefully inadequate for races with more than two or three serious candidates. More sophisticated voting systems (IRV, Borda count, approval voting, etc) that allow voters to rank candidates are able to handle large candidate pools without such problems.