The full version of the quote, if you fill in the ellipsis, is:
Justice Department has launched an official inquiry into possible price fixing in the online music industry.
It is thought the probe will investigate allegations that music labels have colluded to fix the wholesale prices they charge online retailers such as Apple, which sells digital music through its iTunes website.
"The antitrust division is looking at the possibility of anti-competitive practices in the music download industry," a spokeswoman for the department said.
Last year, Steve Jobs, Apple's chief executive, accused the music industry of being "greedy" for wanting to raise digital download prices.
Mr Jobs suggested such a move would drive owners of Apple's iPod, the hugely popular digital music player, to piracy, a problem that has cost the music industry billions in revenues in recent years.
The way the slashdot article quotes this-- jumping right from talking about the justice department "launching a probe" to talking about Jobs complaining about "such a move"-- makes it sound like Jobs is objecting to the investigation.
In fact Jobs is complaining about the behavior being investigated, I.E., Jobs is objecting to price fixing.
Jobs has been vocal for a long time against attempts by the labels to try to forcibly raise online music sales.
That's a good gesture on their part, but I have to wonder, couldn't the Chinese government just snoop on data going into and out of google and collect that same search data themselves?
The thing that is interesting to me here is this: For the last year, people have been repeating the factoid that the PS3 will apparently cost $500 to produce. If you spend a little bit of time digging, though, you'll find that all such claims ultimately stem from a single oft paraphrased-and-then-meta-paraphrased report by Merrill Lynch about halfway through last year.
Now Merrill Lynch says the PS3 will cost $900 to produce.
I can only conclude that the amount Merrill Lynch believes the PS3 will cost to produce approximately doubles every nine months. At this rate, by the end of 2006 Merrill Lynch will believe the PS3 costs $2000 to produce, and by the end of the PS3's lifespan Sony will be paying a full $4,551,111 per unit to manufacture the PS3.
If someone spends hours and hours and hours a day online, they're "addicted".
If someone spends hours and hours and hours a day watching television, they're just normal Americans.
Does ABC NEWS (you know, the television channel) make note of this odd double standard? Hard to tell, since Slashdot didn't bother to actually provide us the story to read. I guess this is actually a pretty smart move on Slashdot's part. Nobody reads the stories anyway, so now to save on bandwidth they're just omitting the links.
sued for intellectual property infringement as a result of licensing Microsoft code
In your scenario, the company is not being sued for intellectual property infringement as a result of licensing Microsoft code; they're being sued for intellectual property infringement as a result of their own code.
As I understand it, Microsoft's protections for licensees only extend to intellectual property infringements in Windows. The idea is that if Microsoft accidentally violates some patent when building Windows, and you license Windows, and the people who own the patent come and sue you, Microsoft will cover some costs. If however Windows is patent-clean and the patent infringement was a result of your own actions and not Microsoft's fault, you get nothing. You lose. Good day sir.
...but that doesn't stop it (or radiation, rather) from being the most powerful tool we have in fighting cancer.
It doesn't matter if the AIDS drug is harmful. Like the radiation therapy that we treat cancer with, it just has to be less harmful than the disease it treats.
And existing HIV drugs are already pretty harmful, even though they just contain rather than cure the disease. They're used anyway, because despite the negative effects they're vastly preferable to an uncontained case of AIDS.
Maybe I am missing something, but OS X already comes with perl, python, php, ruby, and tclsh. To what end is ActiveState porting their packaging of such things to OS X?
Is this just for compatibility purposes, for software already written to target ActiveState's packages?
By the time this sensor figures out that someone has a WMD strapped to their chest, the WMD is obviously already there at the stadium (or relatively close, depending on where they set it up) and everyone there is already in danger.
Or, more likely, the sensor never figures out that someone has a WMD strapped to their chest, because
1. Nobody has any and 2. The people who actually might want to do harm to America could just as easily pull this off with totally ordianary weapons of non-mass destruction-- and are much more likely to
and so while you're spending all this time staring at the WMD detector, whatever actual threats may or may not actually exist just walk right past you undetected.
In the last 20 years the only successful major terrorist attacks against the United States were pulled off with boxcutters, fertilizer, and pickup trucks, and yet we're focusing on expensive, high-tech gadgetry that you practically need the support of the U.S. government to get hold of anyway.
To promote a positive game environment for everyone and help prevent such harassment from taking place as best we can, we prohibit mention of topics related to sensitive real-world subjects in open chat within the game, and we do our best to take action whenever we see such topics being broadcast. This includes openly advertising a guild friendly to players based on a particular political, sexual, or religious preference, to list a few examples. For guilds that wish to use such topics as part of their recruiting efforts, our Guild Recruitment forum, located at our community Web site, serves as one open avenue for doing so.
I don't play WoW, so I don't have any way to know: Is this actually Blizzard's policy? Or is this just a selectively enforced rule that's getting brought down in this one particular case? What does happen to political/religious guilds when they advert? For example, I'm pretty sure there existed at least one time a Christian guild on WoW; did Blizzard treat them this way?
If this really is the policy that applies to everyone and Blizzard's just saying "keep to the guild recruitment forum", that's really just kind of reasonable and I can't really get upset about this. But if the GLBT guild is getting slammed with rules that no one else is obligated to follow, that's unconsciable and I'm amazed Blizzard would act in a way that's such an overt slap in the face to a nontrivial portion of their members.
My (extremely limited, so please correct me where necessary here) understanding of RSS is that the "ungoverned by a standards body" thing doesn't mean "you're free to do whatever you want, go hog wild", it means "you may extend this standard as you see fit". Moreover, as far as I know, the method by which RSS is to be extended is very specific. The impression I had was that there is a base standard, and you could define specific extensions for your nonstandard features.
When you actually listen to what the guy's saying, though, it's very vague. It almost appears that all Apple did was define an extension and fail to document it. If so, that's not so bad.
However the article also says Apple gets things wrong "about XML". What does who now? If they're actually producing malformed XML that's entirely unacceptable behavior. Similarly if they are using existing features or extensions of RSS in a nonstandard or incorrect way, that's also quite bad because existing readers can't just add an "iphoto" module or whatever, they have to change more basic things.
So I guess if it just comes down to what it was Apple did. If all they did though was define an extension, fail to document it, and fail to put their extensions in some kind of "apple-proprietary" namespace... well, my response is pretty much just "stop complaining on slashdot and start reverse engineering, silly".
Whatever reason they're doing this for, they don't seem to have clearly thought either their policies or their media responses on this matter out. Perhaps someone should point out to Apple that a more helpful response would be to update their privacy policy to explicitly cover what is done with that information.
I wouldn't necessarily say I expect less corruption. However I do expect that systems with many parties would be advantageous over systems with one or two parties for the reason that it would increase the diversity of views with real representation within the democratic process. And this, I think, is the most serious problem facing the American political system. We can worry about corruption once we're done with that.
Or maybe it would be called the Libertarian party, because they support the reduction of government influence (in the form of intellectual property laws) in the free movement of information and commerce, and an increase in emphasis on the rights of the individual?
One would think so, at least. Or not? If we look at the actual american libertarian party platform we find that they are strongly in support of privacy rights, like the swedish piracy party. However, their approach to privacy rights seems to be to remove the government from any form of personal identification and tracking-- I.E. from the language in their platform, they only seem interested in protecting people from privacy violations by the government. This means that they would strongly support one of the piracy party's planks-- repeal of data retention laws. However they would would most likely reject the other privacy-related plank (passing laws to protect privacy), because while such laws are intended to protect the individual, it would be a government and thus probably seen by libertarianism as detrimental to the individual in the large. Aside from this the American libertarian party has, as far as I can tell, no opinion on intellectual property law at all.
If we look at the American Communist party we find they are too busy waxing their moustaches and trying to kill pesky moose and squirrel to really tell us much here. The American Socialist Party meanwhile doesn't seem to have explicit positions on either privacy or intellectual property that I can see.
I guess basically the thing to take away here is that there's this old dichonomy between "communism" and "private property rights" ("libertarianism"?), and it's completely bunk. It is a false choice, a straw man constructed by extremists of both positions. The two alternatives here may be fairly contradictory, but if you try to split the world between them things get confusing awfully fast. This is nowhere more clear than in the case of "intellectual property", because intellectual property is a form of property created by the government. Think about that for a moment. This cuts directly across the boundary of state control versus individual property rights-- it's something that wasn't a form of property until the government chose to interfere in the economy.
Of course, even that's a little complicated, because of the question of whether intellectual property is even property now. The head of the RIAA apparently thinks it is. I for one don't really think it is, and language of the the U.S. constitution (which frames IP "rights" as government-granted priviliges, state-issued monopolies), seems to agree. Ah well.
With programming, the correct cliche would be "evolve or die". Yes, it's true that "good enough" systems can stay around forever and ever and ever in programming, but it's also true that this only tends to happen if the system gets established. Apple is not established, they are still in a position of attempting to sell Cocoa to others. Worse, Apple is competing directly against one clearly-thus-inspired platform which attempts to replicate Apple's functionality (Java), and against another clearly-thus-inspired platform which attempts to replicate Java's functionality (.NET)..NET and Java have not learned from the greatest of Cocoa's triumphs. But they have both learned from Cocoa's mistakes, and each offer interesting new triumphs of their own.
And there are definitely mistakes in Cocoa, things that are broken and need fixing. Many things in Objective C feel like they're from a 20 year old language-- because they are. The new features in Java 1.5 (generics, real generics not this C++ template crap, and foreach/iterator support) make the cast-filled use of collections in even a simple Objective C program simply painful to contemplate, and objective c could stand to incorporate a few more of C++'s modern features without requiring you to go whole-hog to objective-c++. "Fix and run" or whatever it's called is a neat nod to dynamism, but ultimately is just part of a tendency within the Objective C language and Cocoa tools to go halfway to a state of perfect python-like dynamism but stop halfway. Cocoa is in some ways even more dynamic than Java, but it must be compiled, which offers a sort of dynamism gap which the tools need to bridge. Right now they don't. The tools, amazing as they were compared to the alternatives two or five years ago, really, really need work. The work you must go through to use a language other than Objective C in a Cocoa program is, frankly, bullshit. PyObjc and Camel Bones are clumsy add-ons; they should be built into the developer tools from the moment I install it. In general XCode is too prone to freaking out if I do something unexpected as opposed to just using the expected interface paths, and after you run into this problem where you're afraid to do anything unpredictable in XCode in case everything stops working. In general meanwhile XCode consistently engages in behavior that I can only describe as "mysterious". The great and interesting features XCode offers-- features which are truly necessary to get the most out of Cocoa-- cease to be of use, because XCode's general unreliability prevents you from making use of them. The worst thing about Cocoa comes in when you have to use any library which is written by one of Apple's Carbon-centric groups instead of one of the Cocoa-centric groups. Leave the little cloystered world of cocoa classes and try to work with, say, Quicktime, or CoreAudio, and suddenly you are in a strange and incoherent land, suddenly needing a crash course in new and interesting types of strings and something called the Component Manager, and suddenly devoid of the high documentation standards common in the Cocoa classes. Spend a few weeks using one of these "alien" APIs, and suddenly you won't care how great the core Cocoa APIs are, you'll be simply yearning for an operating system where the GUI library and the sound library are based on OS APIs which vaguely resemble one another.
Basically, Cocoa was without a doubt the best available developer system five years ago. But that was five years ago. The APIs have received new and interesting additions (KVM and coredata come to mind), but some things have not improved at all, for example the base language (in fact if anything the base language has devolved, thanks to the recent removal of Java as a future-proof coding option), the documentation, in many ways the tools, and the cross-language compatibility. Objective C and Cocoa are in many ways standing still while Java and.NET are constantly on the move, in some ways surpassi
Unless you mean that in ObjC the possible methods for an object are not available at link time,
Correct.
in which case type safety is not available. I don't know enough about ObjC; perhaps you can explain it to me succinctly?
You are actually almost right. The way to put it should be that type safety is available but not required. Method type safety is a compile-time warning, not a compile-time error, because while a program which passes the type safety checks is guaranteed to function without type errors at runtime, a program which fails the type safety checks is not guaranteed to encounter type errors at runtime.
If this sounds "bad", consider it in context of what happens when a type safety violation does occur at runtime-- the object is given a chance to deal with the "method not found" error itself, in the form of a forwardInvocation: method call basically saying "hey, I tried to execute the method named 'blah' on you and it didn't work"; if that fails, an exception occurs. The penalty for a type error is not all that bad, especially compared to what happens in this point in C++ (you get a messy crash). Also consider that while compile-time type safety is not totally accurate, there is also run-time type safety available which is much more accurate. All objects accept a respondsToSelector: (methodSelector) method which basically ask, "do you accept this method?", and this method has the ability to determine side-effects of dynamic dispatch that the compiler could not.
These are somewhat advanced techniques within Objective C, and one should not be running programs which emit type safety warnings unless you really know what you're doing. However, when used correctly these things are quite powerful. Performing type safety checks at runtime instead of compile-time allow objective c libraries to leverage the Delegate pattern in a way most languages can only dream of; an objective c object can accept any other object as a delegate, and then simply say "do you accept this method? if so, run it. if not, never mind". In Java, the analogous construct would require a potentially very messy use of interfaces and probably a lot of blank methods to satisfy those interfaces. ForwardInvocation: allows even stranger and more interesting constructs, for example "proxy objects"-- Objective C offers a concept called "distributed objects" which are much like Java RMI, except that distributed objects lack any of the stub hassle and are in fact entirely transparent to any code interacting with the distributed object in question.
(Full disclosure: Absolutely everything I describe above as an advantage in Objective C can be fully implemented in Java by use of the reflection classes. However, people rarely take advantage of this, perhaps partly because the reflection classes are not very fun to use, and perhaps partly because the Java reflection functionality is quite slow.)
Slashdot Mirror
In fact Jobs is complaining about the behavior being investigated, I.E., Jobs is objecting to price fixing.
Jobs has been vocal for a long time against attempts by the labels to try to forcibly raise online music sales.
That's a good gesture on their part, but I have to wonder, couldn't the Chinese government just snoop on data going into and out of google and collect that same search data themselves?
that the earth is one giant magnetic field
The thing that is interesting to me here is this: For the last year, people have been repeating the factoid that the PS3 will apparently cost $500 to produce. If you spend a little bit of time digging, though, you'll find that all such claims ultimately stem from a single oft paraphrased-and-then-meta-paraphrased report by Merrill Lynch about halfway through last year.
Now Merrill Lynch says the PS3 will cost $900 to produce.
I can only conclude that the amount Merrill Lynch believes the PS3 will cost to produce approximately doubles every nine months. At this rate, by the end of 2006 Merrill Lynch will believe the PS3 costs $2000 to produce, and by the end of the PS3's lifespan Sony will be paying a full $4,551,111 per unit to manufacture the PS3.
Clearly, Sony has a serious problem here.
it's true
the entire world is americans now
welcome to planet texas
Hyperspatial machine elves.
If someone spends hours and hours and hours a day online, they're "addicted".
If someone spends hours and hours and hours a day watching television, they're just normal Americans.
Does ABC NEWS (you know, the television channel) make note of this odd double standard? Hard to tell, since Slashdot didn't bother to actually provide us the story to read. I guess this is actually a pretty smart move on Slashdot's part. Nobody reads the stories anyway, so now to save on bandwidth they're just omitting the links.
sued for intellectual property infringement as a result of licensing Microsoft code
In your scenario, the company is not being sued for intellectual property infringement as a result of licensing Microsoft code; they're being sued for intellectual property infringement as a result of their own code.
As I understand it, Microsoft's protections for licensees only extend to intellectual property infringements in Windows. The idea is that if Microsoft accidentally violates some patent when building Windows, and you license Windows, and the people who own the patent come and sue you, Microsoft will cover some costs. If however Windows is patent-clean and the patent infringement was a result of your own actions and not Microsoft's fault, you get nothing. You lose. Good day sir.
...but that doesn't stop it (or radiation, rather) from being the most powerful tool we have in fighting cancer.
It doesn't matter if the AIDS drug is harmful. Like the radiation therapy that we treat cancer with, it just has to be less harmful than the disease it treats.
And existing HIV drugs are already pretty harmful, even though they just contain rather than cure the disease. They're used anyway, because despite the negative effects they're vastly preferable to an uncontained case of AIDS.
Maybe I am missing something, but OS X already comes with perl, python, php, ruby, and tclsh. To what end is ActiveState porting their packaging of such things to OS X?
Is this just for compatibility purposes, for software already written to target ActiveState's packages?
By the time this sensor figures out that someone has a WMD strapped to their chest, the WMD is obviously already there at the stadium (or relatively close, depending on where they set it up) and everyone there is already in danger.
Or, more likely, the sensor never figures out that someone has a WMD strapped to their chest, because
1. Nobody has any and
2. The people who actually might want to do harm to America could just as easily pull this off with totally ordianary weapons of non-mass destruction-- and are much more likely to
and so while you're spending all this time staring at the WMD detector, whatever actual threats may or may not actually exist just walk right past you undetected.
In the last 20 years the only successful major terrorist attacks against the United States were pulled off with boxcutters, fertilizer, and pickup trucks, and yet we're focusing on expensive, high-tech gadgetry that you practically need the support of the U.S. government to get hold of anyway.
If this really is the policy that applies to everyone and Blizzard's just saying "keep to the guild recruitment forum", that's really just kind of reasonable and I can't really get upset about this. But if the GLBT guild is getting slammed with rules that no one else is obligated to follow, that's unconsciable and I'm amazed Blizzard would act in a way that's such an overt slap in the face to a nontrivial portion of their members.
My (extremely limited, so please correct me where necessary here) understanding of RSS is that the "ungoverned by a standards body" thing doesn't mean "you're free to do whatever you want, go hog wild", it means "you may extend this standard as you see fit". Moreover, as far as I know, the method by which RSS is to be extended is very specific. The impression I had was that there is a base standard, and you could define specific extensions for your nonstandard features.
When you actually listen to what the guy's saying, though, it's very vague. It almost appears that all Apple did was define an extension and fail to document it. If so, that's not so bad.
However the article also says Apple gets things wrong "about XML". What does who now? If they're actually producing malformed XML that's entirely unacceptable behavior. Similarly if they are using existing features or extensions of RSS in a nonstandard or incorrect way, that's also quite bad because existing readers can't just add an "iphoto" module or whatever, they have to change more basic things.
So I guess if it just comes down to what it was Apple did. If all they did though was define an extension, fail to document it, and fail to put their extensions in some kind of "apple-proprietary" namespace... well, my response is pretty much just "stop complaining on slashdot and start reverse engineering, silly".
What kind of resources does this take? Like, in terms of RAM, CPU, how much space the whole package takes up.
I'm basically asking because I'm wondering whether the next step could be to port this same emulator to the Nintendo DS.
Whatever reason they're doing this for, they don't seem to have clearly thought either their policies or their media responses on this matter out. Perhaps someone should point out to Apple that a more helpful response would be to update their privacy policy to explicitly cover what is done with that information.
"Welcome to iFruit. Hug me."
Wow.
I wouldn't necessarily say I expect less corruption. However I do expect that systems with many parties would be advantageous over systems with one or two parties for the reason that it would increase the diversity of views with real representation within the democratic process. And this, I think, is the most serious problem facing the American political system. We can worry about corruption once we're done with that.
Or maybe it would be called the Libertarian party, because they support the reduction of government influence (in the form of intellectual property laws) in the free movement of information and commerce, and an increase in emphasis on the rights of the individual?
One would think so, at least. Or not? If we look at the actual american libertarian party platform we find that they are strongly in support of privacy rights, like the swedish piracy party. However, their approach to privacy rights seems to be to remove the government from any form of personal identification and tracking-- I.E. from the language in their platform, they only seem interested in protecting people from privacy violations by the government. This means that they would strongly support one of the piracy party's planks-- repeal of data retention laws. However they would would most likely reject the other privacy-related plank (passing laws to protect privacy), because while such laws are intended to protect the individual, it would be a government and thus probably seen by libertarianism as detrimental to the individual in the large. Aside from this the American libertarian party has, as far as I can tell, no opinion on intellectual property law at all.
If we look at the American Communist party we find they are too busy waxing their moustaches and trying to kill pesky moose and squirrel to really tell us much here. The American Socialist Party meanwhile doesn't seem to have explicit positions on either privacy or intellectual property that I can see.
I guess basically the thing to take away here is that there's this old dichonomy between "communism" and "private property rights" ("libertarianism"?), and it's completely bunk. It is a false choice, a straw man constructed by extremists of both positions. The two alternatives here may be fairly contradictory, but if you try to split the world between them things get confusing awfully fast. This is nowhere more clear than in the case of "intellectual property", because intellectual property is a form of property created by the government. Think about that for a moment. This cuts directly across the boundary of state control versus individual property rights-- it's something that wasn't a form of property until the government chose to interfere in the economy.
Of course, even that's a little complicated, because of the question of whether intellectual property is even property now. The head of the RIAA apparently thinks it is. I for one don't really think it is, and language of the the U.S. constitution (which frames IP "rights" as government-granted priviliges, state-issued monopolies), seems to agree.
Ah well.
That's great. It must be absolutely awesome to live in a country where there's more than two political parties.
Err, wait a minute.
*thinks*
...
I mean, it must be absolutely awesome to live in a country where there's more than one political party.
With programming, the correct cliche would be "evolve or die". Yes, it's true that "good enough" systems can stay around forever and ever and ever in programming, but it's also true that this only tends to happen if the system gets established. Apple is not established, they are still in a position of attempting to sell Cocoa to others. Worse, Apple is competing directly against one clearly-thus-inspired platform which attempts to replicate Apple's functionality (Java), and against another clearly-thus-inspired platform which attempts to replicate Java's functionality (.NET). .NET and Java have not learned from the greatest of Cocoa's triumphs. But they have both learned from Cocoa's mistakes, and each offer interesting new triumphs of their own.
.NET are constantly on the move, in some ways surpassi
And there are definitely mistakes in Cocoa, things that are broken and need fixing. Many things in Objective C feel like they're from a 20 year old language-- because they are. The new features in Java 1.5 (generics, real generics not this C++ template crap, and foreach/iterator support) make the cast-filled use of collections in even a simple Objective C program simply painful to contemplate, and objective c could stand to incorporate a few more of C++'s modern features without requiring you to go whole-hog to objective-c++. "Fix and run" or whatever it's called is a neat nod to dynamism, but ultimately is just part of a tendency within the Objective C language and Cocoa tools to go halfway to a state of perfect python-like dynamism but stop halfway. Cocoa is in some ways even more dynamic than Java, but it must be compiled, which offers a sort of dynamism gap which the tools need to bridge. Right now they don't. The tools, amazing as they were compared to the alternatives two or five years ago, really, really need work. The work you must go through to use a language other than Objective C in a Cocoa program is, frankly, bullshit. PyObjc and Camel Bones are clumsy add-ons; they should be built into the developer tools from the moment I install it. In general XCode is too prone to freaking out if I do something unexpected as opposed to just using the expected interface paths, and after you run into this problem where you're afraid to do anything unpredictable in XCode in case everything stops working. In general meanwhile XCode consistently engages in behavior that I can only describe as "mysterious". The great and interesting features XCode offers-- features which are truly necessary to get the most out of Cocoa-- cease to be of use, because XCode's general unreliability prevents you from making use of them. The worst thing about Cocoa comes in when you have to use any library which is written by one of Apple's Carbon-centric groups instead of one of the Cocoa-centric groups. Leave the little cloystered world of cocoa classes and try to work with, say, Quicktime, or CoreAudio, and suddenly you are in a strange and incoherent land, suddenly needing a crash course in new and interesting types of strings and something called the Component Manager, and suddenly devoid of the high documentation standards common in the Cocoa classes. Spend a few weeks using one of these "alien" APIs, and suddenly you won't care how great the core Cocoa APIs are, you'll be simply yearning for an operating system where the GUI library and the sound library are based on OS APIs which vaguely resemble one another.
Basically, Cocoa was without a doubt the best available developer system five years ago. But that was five years ago. The APIs have received new and interesting additions (KVM and coredata come to mind), but some things have not improved at all, for example the base language (in fact if anything the base language has devolved, thanks to the recent removal of Java as a future-proof coding option), the documentation, in many ways the tools, and the cross-language compatibility. Objective C and Cocoa are in many ways standing still while Java and
Unless you mean that in ObjC the possible methods for an object are not available at link time,
Correct.
in which case type safety is not available. I don't know enough about ObjC; perhaps you can explain it to me succinctly?
You are actually almost right. The way to put it should be that type safety is available but not required. Method type safety is a compile-time warning, not a compile-time error, because while a program which passes the type safety checks is guaranteed to function without type errors at runtime, a program which fails the type safety checks is not guaranteed to encounter type errors at runtime.
If this sounds "bad", consider it in context of what happens when a type safety violation does occur at runtime-- the object is given a chance to deal with the "method not found" error itself, in the form of a forwardInvocation: method call basically saying "hey, I tried to execute the method named 'blah' on you and it didn't work"; if that fails, an exception occurs. The penalty for a type error is not all that bad, especially compared to what happens in this point in C++ (you get a messy crash). Also consider that while compile-time type safety is not totally accurate, there is also run-time type safety available which is much more accurate. All objects accept a respondsToSelector: (methodSelector) method which basically ask, "do you accept this method?", and this method has the ability to determine side-effects of dynamic dispatch that the compiler could not.
These are somewhat advanced techniques within Objective C, and one should not be running programs which emit type safety warnings unless you really know what you're doing. However, when used correctly these things are quite powerful. Performing type safety checks at runtime instead of compile-time allow objective c libraries to leverage the Delegate pattern in a way most languages can only dream of; an objective c object can accept any other object as a delegate, and then simply say "do you accept this method? if so, run it. if not, never mind". In Java, the analogous construct would require a potentially very messy use of interfaces and probably a lot of blank methods to satisfy those interfaces. ForwardInvocation: allows even stranger and more interesting constructs, for example "proxy objects"-- Objective C offers a concept called "distributed objects" which are much like Java RMI, except that distributed objects lack any of the stub hassle and are in fact entirely transparent to any code interacting with the distributed object in question.
(Full disclosure: Absolutely everything I describe above as an advantage in Objective C can be fully implemented in Java by use of the reflection classes. However, people rarely take advantage of this, perhaps partly because the reflection classes are not very fun to use, and perhaps partly because the Java reflection functionality is quite slow.)
Start to tax software as property just as significant chunks of the software industry are starting to move to a leasing model anyway.
Then there's the open source world's "service model" pricing... how does open source software get taxed under this plan?
Evolution is true, and one day you'll find this out the hard way
the ascreen you read is an analog hole for information, y'know.
Not anymore