let's look past the question of whether Badnarik should be allowed into the final debate. Let's ask ourselves what would happen if he were.
The final debate was, by the original agreement, to be on the subject of domestic and economic policy. This is so far a subject which has gone mostly uncovered in the debates. Only the first debate was meant to be explicitly on foreign policy, but both the vice presidential and townhall debates were dominated by discussion of foreign policy, and more specifically discussion of Iraq. Both of these debates began with discussion of Iraq, and all the most firey and attention-grabbing portions were during the Iraq portions. The domestic halves of these two debates were a bit more cursory and did not delve into the details of economic policy.
Meanwhile, economic policy is where the Kerry campaign's true strength is. It is easier to make the Bush campaign look bad over Iraq, but it is not in any way easy to make the Kerry campaign look good over Iraq. Economic policy, however, is an area where the Kerry campaign has a chance to make itself look actually good. Kerry can point to distinct policy differences and make a legitimate argument that these differences would result in real improvement. He just needs to grab the public's attention somehow. Since the last few weeks have been utterly dominated by discussion of Iraq both inside and outside Kerry's campaign, however, there has not been a chance for this to happen.
Kerry has a chance to swing the national debate over to domestic and economic policy at least for a little while in this debate. Since Kerry did not begin to heavily harp on Iraq until shortly before the foreign policy debate, it is likely Kerry will take this opportunity. The debate also offers Kerry a chance to convince the country to briefly sit down and listen to his economic views. Meanwhile, the domestic policy debate offers no positive opportunities to the Bush campaign. The best Bush can hope for is to ramble about marriage and small business owners enough that he can distract viewers from what Kerry is saying; he has no points of his own to score. The question is not whether Bush or Kerry will benefit from wednesday's debate. The question is how much of Kerry's benefit from Wednesday's debate Bush will be able to blunt.
If Badnarik gets his order granted, this becomes moot. The final debate will suddenly have an unplanned random factor plunged into it enough to totally disrupt the debate. Not only would Badnarik's mere presence in the debate be a distraction from the two candidates there, but his input and any obligation on the part of the major-party candidates to respond to it would effectively prevent discussion on the subject of which of the two major-party candidates would offer a better economic policy. Kerry could still attempt to outline his economic policy. Viewers would not pick up on it. It would be lost in the chaos.
My conclusion: Allowing Badnarik into the debate would be a serious impairment to the Kerry campaign, and have little to no effect on the Bush campaign. The Kerry campaign would lose its one given opportunity to outline to the nation a major plank of its platform. The Bush campaign would neatly get to opt-out of a potentially embarrassing debate. This would be a disastrous result for Kerry's chances of winning and an extremely positive result for Bush's.
These arguments get made a lot, but the fact of the matter is that they actually do own the copyrights on the materials, and legally should be allowed to dictate what happens to them.
Not necessarily. Copyright owners don't actually have any "rights". What they have are privileges, granted by congress based on a mandate to "promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries".
It may be some of the privileges granted to copyright owners may be in the best interests of promoting the useful arts and sciences; but if we begin to fall into the misconception that the copyright system exists for the copyright owners' benefit, we are making a big mistake.
I'd say artists have to a certain degree a right to be compensated for use of their work, but I'd say saying copyright owners get complete and total control over exactly how copyrighted material is used is something which benefits no one at all except the owners of the RIAA and MPAA corporations.
I'm curious, why do we still get buffer overflows in C++ code? I mean, the C++ string type and the vector container have been around for the better part of a decade now, and a standard part of the language for, what, six years? Seven years? And you can grab smart pointers from boost.
Widespread support for the STL-- meaning standard support, meaning your code's portable, not meaning "it works sort of similar as with the other compilers"-- was really, really slow in coming, and didn't really become universal until, well.. after Java.
Meanwhile very, very little of the associated literature for C++ really covers the STL. Many introductory C++ texts don't even indicate the STL's existence outside of cout, and I've never, ever seen any sort of teaching institution use a text for learning C++ that introduced things like STL strings and vectors immediately as something that coders should be using as soon as they know what strings and arrays are. If the STL is introduced by C++ textbooks at all it's introduced very late, as an "oh you can do this as well" sort of thing, after the reader's already become accustomed to using C strings and arrays.
As a result the "standard" C++ classes never really caught on as such. When people use C++ generally either they're locked entirely in to some vendor's APIs, or they're just doing C programming with classes. Most C++ libraries you'll come across will expect data passed to them as a C string or a C array or some kind of library-specifc homerolled string/vector class-- which doesn't particularly encourage developers to use the STL container classes since they'll just have to convert them to some other format in order to interoperate with anyone else.
I think basically the problem here is that even after all these years C++ just doesn't have a standard class library. It does have a class library that's endorsed by the C++ standards body, and you can claim that's the same thing if you like. But I'm not sure I'd agree.
I've really heard a LOT of people expressing the sentiment that they liked gnome better than kde at one time, but really feel like the recent GNOME releases are moving in the wrong direction while not making the changes that need to be made.
With this sort of sentiment so incredibly widespread, do you think the time might be right for a fork to take place emphasizing the things that people care about instead of these dumbing-down tendencies and mono?
The funny thing here is that the sort of "everyone is judged by the standards of the least free country" treaties that turn out to have resulted in this shutdown are the exact sort of thing that the Indymedia crowd has been trying to oppose with their "anti-globalization" tirades all along.
Now it turns out they're the first to be targetted by these treaties.
And this is exactly why law which holds service carriers such as ISP responsible for the actions of their owners is both invalid and dangerous. ISPs can't and shouldn't be expected to police their customers, and laws or copyright treaties such as the DMCA which place them into the position of having to do so must be changed...
The company that came out the worst was iFast, who forwarded all the personal details of the site owner to the sender of the fake takedown notice without even being asked to do so."
I can't help but wonder, is this consistent with iFast's user privacy policy? I can't tell, I don't speak Dutch...
Knowing how to develop stuff like this is not a skill everyone has.
Yes, it is. This is very basic javascript sort of stuff and it is commonly seen used by 12-year olds on crappy geocities pages so that right-clicking to "save as" pops up an "OMG DONT STEAL MY PICTURES OF EMINEM!!!" error box.
The slashdot blurb implies that the article is about rumors of the PSP being delayed until 2004. Many people seem to be assuming this is, in fact, what it says.
Actually the PSP was never intended to come out in 2004. The currently widely reported U.S. release date for the PSP has been march 2005 since E3. This article theorizes that the PSP will not actually be ready until november 2005.
So you pull some never-begun sourceforge project no one's ever heard of, and compare it to AtheOS/Syllable, a very serious development project that's been making news for years and is currently available for sale.
That's about as useful as saying "Just because Perl is aimed at being a web programming tool doesn't mean it will ever get there, just look at what happened to the interpreter for this crappy basic derivative that someone uploaded began a sourceforge project for four years ago".
Wait, this is a pretty big deal, isn't it? This is basically the fabled iTunes Music Store for Video.
I mean, yeah, there have been net video stores before, but none of them seemed terribly serious, all of them lacked a focus on appealing to traditional consumer rather than (well) people like us, and none of them possessed any pleasant sort of integration with more traditional video technology not based entirely on a computer-- all very much, interestingly, like the net music stores that existed before the iTunes Music Store...
This has the potential to become a big deal and resecure the position as "the PVR" Tivo once had...
You should ignore the memos, slap upside the head anyone who still claimed they were legitimate once the Microsoft Word and Selectric typewriter recreations were available, and be aware of the large body of valid circumstantial evidence of irregularities in Bush's National Guard service record.
You should also be aware of what it means when a political leader supposedly chosen to be autonomous is literally acting as a spokesperson of the group that put him in power.
You should also never take on faith the words of either 60 minutes or the Bush Administration, but that should have been clear before this latest incident.
Seriously? I thought the Netscape Enterprise product line fizzled out back when people thought selling pet food on the internet was a good idea.
Do you mind if I ask, how worthwhile are these products to Redhat? What kind of state are they in? How recently have they been updated, are they still in active development or just maitenence mode? Does anyone still use them? And do they offer any worthwhile features or functionality not already available in free products?
Objective C lacks closures as well. Meanwhile Java's anonymous inner classes when used properly allow you to partially regain the convenience of closures, a convenience Objective C lacks.
True dynamic binding for method dispatch would certainly be a lovely feature, but Java is dynamic enough that much of the functionality lost can be regained by use of the (admittedly clumsy) reflection features.
Admittedly the list of non-superficial differences between Java and C++ is somewhat short. However these differences are fundamental enough that in practice Java programmers wind up far more likely to use Smalltalk-like principles of coding; it does not have to the same extent C++'s problem of becoming "C with classes" in practice. Java, like Objective C, is legtimately an attempt at a balance between Smalltalk and C, whereas C++ is just a better C. Objective C and Java attain this balance in different ways but overall I do not really think either one is really closer to Smalltalk than the other.
It is a bit funny, though, that this evolution takes the form of borrowing stuff from an ancient language. Maybe C just got things right in the first place, huh?
Um, why is this surprising? From the very beginning Java was mostly geared to be a variant of Smalltalk (1978) with C-like syntax.
Java is less important for its new concepts than it is for the fact that it takes a whole lot of very good ideas from mostly painful languages and puts it all together in a coherent, usable package...
Slashdot Mirror
Who or what are you responding to?
let's look past the question of whether Badnarik should be allowed into the final debate. Let's ask ourselves what would happen if he were.
The final debate was, by the original agreement, to be on the subject of domestic and economic policy. This is so far a subject which has gone mostly uncovered in the debates. Only the first debate was meant to be explicitly on foreign policy, but both the vice presidential and townhall debates were dominated by discussion of foreign policy, and more specifically discussion of Iraq. Both of these debates began with discussion of Iraq, and all the most firey and attention-grabbing portions were during the Iraq portions. The domestic halves of these two debates were a bit more cursory and did not delve into the details of economic policy.
Meanwhile, economic policy is where the Kerry campaign's true strength is. It is easier to make the Bush campaign look bad over Iraq, but it is not in any way easy to make the Kerry campaign look good over Iraq. Economic policy, however, is an area where the Kerry campaign has a chance to make itself look actually good. Kerry can point to distinct policy differences and make a legitimate argument that these differences would result in real improvement. He just needs to grab the public's attention somehow. Since the last few weeks have been utterly dominated by discussion of Iraq both inside and outside Kerry's campaign, however, there has not been a chance for this to happen.
Kerry has a chance to swing the national debate over to domestic and economic policy at least for a little while in this debate. Since Kerry did not begin to heavily harp on Iraq until shortly before the foreign policy debate, it is likely Kerry will take this opportunity. The debate also offers Kerry a chance to convince the country to briefly sit down and listen to his economic views. Meanwhile, the domestic policy debate offers no positive opportunities to the Bush campaign. The best Bush can hope for is to ramble about marriage and small business owners enough that he can distract viewers from what Kerry is saying; he has no points of his own to score. The question is not whether Bush or Kerry will benefit from wednesday's debate. The question is how much of Kerry's benefit from Wednesday's debate Bush will be able to blunt.
If Badnarik gets his order granted, this becomes moot. The final debate will suddenly have an unplanned random factor plunged into it enough to totally disrupt the debate. Not only would Badnarik's mere presence in the debate be a distraction from the two candidates there, but his input and any obligation on the part of the major-party candidates to respond to it would effectively prevent discussion on the subject of which of the two major-party candidates would offer a better economic policy. Kerry could still attempt to outline his economic policy. Viewers would not pick up on it. It would be lost in the chaos.
My conclusion: Allowing Badnarik into the debate would be a serious impairment to the Kerry campaign, and have little to no effect on the Bush campaign. The Kerry campaign would lose its one given opportunity to outline to the nation a major plank of its platform. The Bush campaign would neatly get to opt-out of a potentially embarrassing debate. This would be a disastrous result for Kerry's chances of winning and an extremely positive result for Bush's.
These arguments get made a lot, but the fact of the matter is that they actually do own the copyrights on the materials, and legally should be allowed to dictate what happens to them.
Not necessarily. Copyright owners don't actually have any "rights". What they have are privileges, granted by congress based on a mandate to "promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries".
It may be some of the privileges granted to copyright owners may be in the best interests of promoting the useful arts and sciences; but if we begin to fall into the misconception that the copyright system exists for the copyright owners' benefit, we are making a big mistake.
I'd say artists have to a certain degree a right to be compensated for use of their work, but I'd say saying copyright owners get complete and total control over exactly how copyrighted material is used is something which benefits no one at all except the owners of the RIAA and MPAA corporations.
I'm curious, why do we still get buffer overflows in C++ code? I mean, the C++ string type and the vector container have been around for the better part of a decade now, and a standard part of the language for, what, six years? Seven years? And you can grab smart pointers from boost.
Widespread support for the STL-- meaning standard support, meaning your code's portable, not meaning "it works sort of similar as with the other compilers"-- was really, really slow in coming, and didn't really become universal until, well.. after Java.
Meanwhile very, very little of the associated literature for C++ really covers the STL. Many introductory C++ texts don't even indicate the STL's existence outside of cout, and I've never, ever seen any sort of teaching institution use a text for learning C++ that introduced things like STL strings and vectors immediately as something that coders should be using as soon as they know what strings and arrays are. If the STL is introduced by C++ textbooks at all it's introduced very late, as an "oh you can do this as well" sort of thing, after the reader's already become accustomed to using C strings and arrays.
As a result the "standard" C++ classes never really caught on as such. When people use C++ generally either they're locked entirely in to some vendor's APIs, or they're just doing C programming with classes. Most C++ libraries you'll come across will expect data passed to them as a C string or a C array or some kind of library-specifc homerolled string/vector class-- which doesn't particularly encourage developers to use the STL container classes since they'll just have to convert them to some other format in order to interoperate with anyone else.
I think basically the problem here is that even after all these years C++ just doesn't have a standard class library. It does have a class library that's endorsed by the C++ standards body, and you can claim that's the same thing if you like. But I'm not sure I'd agree.
That he trashes C#/Java for requiring virtual machines, then suggests instead people use PHP/Perl... both of which are interpreted languages.
...
What?
it just does not force you to declare and handle checked exceptions, an issue of strong contention within the Java community
Um, Java supports both checked and unchecked exceptions.
I've really heard a LOT of people expressing the sentiment that they liked gnome better than kde at one time, but really feel like the recent GNOME releases are moving in the wrong direction while not making the changes that need to be made.
With this sort of sentiment so incredibly widespread, do you think the time might be right for a fork to take place emphasizing the things that people care about instead of these dumbing-down tendencies and mono?
The funny thing here is that the sort of "everyone is judged by the standards of the least free country" treaties that turn out to have resulted in this shutdown are the exact sort of thing that the Indymedia crowd has been trying to oppose with their "anti-globalization" tirades all along.
Now it turns out they're the first to be targetted by these treaties.
Go figure.
And this is exactly why law which holds service carriers such as ISP responsible for the actions of their owners is both invalid and dangerous. ISPs can't and shouldn't be expected to police their customers, and laws or copyright treaties such as the DMCA which place them into the position of having to do so must be changed...
The company that came out the worst was iFast, who forwarded all the personal details of the site owner to the sender of the fake takedown notice without even being asked to do so."
I can't help but wonder, is this consistent with iFast's user privacy policy? I can't tell, I don't speak Dutch...
Knowing how to develop stuff like this is not a skill everyone has.
Yes, it is. This is very basic javascript sort of stuff and it is commonly seen used by 12-year olds on crappy geocities pages so that right-clicking to "save as" pops up an "OMG DONT STEAL MY PICTURES OF EMINEM!!!" error box.
This event will legitimize IndyMedia in a way that none of their reporting ever has.
The slashdot blurb implies that the article is about rumors of the PSP being delayed until 2004. Many people seem to be assuming this is, in fact, what it says.
Actually the PSP was never intended to come out in 2004. The currently widely reported U.S. release date for the PSP has been march 2005 since E3. This article theorizes that the PSP will not actually be ready until november 2005.
So you pull some never-begun sourceforge project no one's ever heard of, and compare it to AtheOS/Syllable, a very serious development project that's been making news for years and is currently available for sale.
That's about as useful as saying "Just because Perl is aimed at being a web programming tool doesn't mean it will ever get there, just look at what happened to the interpreter for this crappy basic derivative that someone uploaded began a sourceforge project for four years ago".
Wait, this is a pretty big deal, isn't it? This is basically the fabled iTunes Music Store for Video.
I mean, yeah, there have been net video stores before, but none of them seemed terribly serious, all of them lacked a focus on appealing to traditional consumer rather than (well) people like us, and none of them possessed any pleasant sort of integration with more traditional video technology not based entirely on a computer-- all very much, interestingly, like the net music stores that existed before the iTunes Music Store...
This has the potential to become a big deal and resecure the position as "the PVR" Tivo once had...
Why is my post further up the thread tree being voted up, but not the parent?
Interesting. I'd never actually tried it.
You can permanently disable individual slashdot sections, such as politics.slashdot.org, from appearing on the slashdot front page by going to your user preferences.
You should ignore the memos, slap upside the head anyone who still claimed they were legitimate once the Microsoft Word and Selectric typewriter recreations were available, and be aware of the large body of valid circumstantial evidence of irregularities in Bush's National Guard service record.
You should also be aware of what it means when a political leader supposedly chosen to be autonomous is literally acting as a spokesperson of the group that put him in power.
You should also never take on faith the words of either 60 minutes or the Bush Administration, but that should have been clear before this latest incident.
Inflatable space stations?
So Dr. Schlock from Sluggy Freelance has now escaped into reality, or something?
When can we expect the vampires and nanoviruses and killer rabbits to follow?
Seriously? I thought the Netscape Enterprise product line fizzled out back when people thought selling pet food on the internet was a good idea.
Do you mind if I ask, how worthwhile are these products to Redhat? What kind of state are they in? How recently have they been updated, are they still in active development or just maitenence mode? Does anyone still use them? And do they offer any worthwhile features or functionality not already available in free products?
Objective C lacks closures as well. Meanwhile Java's anonymous inner classes when used properly allow you to partially regain the convenience of closures, a convenience Objective C lacks.
True dynamic binding for method dispatch would certainly be a lovely feature, but Java is dynamic enough that much of the functionality lost can be regained by use of the (admittedly clumsy) reflection features.
Admittedly the list of non-superficial differences between Java and C++ is somewhat short. However these differences are fundamental enough that in practice Java programmers wind up far more likely to use Smalltalk-like principles of coding; it does not have to the same extent C++'s problem of becoming "C with classes" in practice. Java, like Objective C, is legtimately an attempt at a balance between Smalltalk and C, whereas C++ is just a better C. Objective C and Java attain this balance in different ways but overall I do not really think either one is really closer to Smalltalk than the other.
It is a bit funny, though, that this evolution takes the form of borrowing stuff from an ancient language. Maybe C just got things right in the first place, huh?
Um, why is this surprising? From the very beginning Java was mostly geared to be a variant of Smalltalk (1978) with C-like syntax.
Java is less important for its new concepts than it is for the fact that it takes a whole lot of very good ideas from mostly painful languages and puts it all together in a coherent, usable package...
One man's Useful is another man's Bloat...
Considering that nearly 100% of the justification I've heard from people who like C# is along the lines of "It's not Java".
...
Come to think of it, this entire situation is sort of starting to sound like, um, something else...