I can't log into Slashdot using Amaya. What good is a browser if I can't turn karma tricks with it?
The interface looks like something my kid brother would have put together using a five year old copy of MS Visual Studio. Or Borland.
You actually need to type in http:// in the "Open" field at the top of the screen. Every other browser maker got over this fixation in '95. Why can't the W3C?
It isn't confusing at all. Not at all. The only people who are responsible for the problem are the people who couldn't follow simple instructions and take the time to look at what they were doing.
So you say. Expert testimony says otherwise. Jakob Nielsen:
The Florida ballot clearly had usability problems, caused by the attempt to map a two-column set of labels onto a one-column action area. A direct mapping between two single-column areas would have been much less error-prone.
Nielsen doesn't go so far as to say that this is specifcally what cost Gore the election, but with 19K incorrectly filled out ballots in two counties, I'd say it's a pretty fair guess.
You can see pictures of the ballot on the Palm Beach County Supervisor of Election's web site... What isn't obvious from these pictures is exactly how the ballots aligned with the holes in real machines. Boston.com has an AP picture that shows one situation without the card but a real holder. The artist's conception many others are showing doesn't look as realistic.
Nineteen thousand. People with poor vision, people who received incorrect sample ballots. It's obvious that the statistical anomoly is there, especially when graphed. So rather than grousing about how dumb people are, why not design a ballot that doesn't skew the result?
If the old people in Florida can't follow simple directions, then maybe they shouldn't be voting. The ballots here in Ohio are almost identical to the ballots in South Palm Beach. And there's no spike of Buchanan votes here.
Point of fact - the alleged confusion is supposed to arise due to the placement of the Democrat and Reform party punches, not the Republican one (which was pretty clearly located first on the ballot). Since the ballots in question were used in the West Palm Beach area, it might be useful to check how the numbers broke down there. Acc ording to CNN:
Gore carried the county by more than 110,000 votes, but the 3,407 votes for Buchanan were by far the most of any Florida county, and almost 20 percent of his total vote in the state.
Since the original margin between the Bush and Gore was only 1784 votes, I'd call that signifigant.
Additional evidence that the ballots may have caused widespread confusion, from the same article:
Officials in Palm Beach announced 19,120 ballots in the presidential race were tossed out before they were counted because more than one candidate was picked. Only 3,783 voters made that mistake on the U.S. Senate portion of the ballot. "That total is a high number," said Palm Beach County Commissioner Carol Roberts, who is part of the canvassing board that is conducting the recount.
So, another comparison, this time of the two-selection error rate on two different parts of the ballot. More than 19,000 voters selected two presidential candidates, which is more than five times as many as made the same mistake for senators, and more than ten times as many as Bush's lead statewide.
Say what you want to about Daley, Jackson, Mfume, and whomever else you feel is a little too leftward leaning for your tastes. But the numbers do tell a story here.
I honestly find this scary, as it opens the door for a strong government (if we ever get one) to introduce all manner of ills - socialism, liberalism or hell, even communism!
<sarcasm>
Oh, for fuck's sake, no! Not the liberals!
</sarcasm>
I agree that the lack of accountability on the part of the electorate is scary, but I'm not ready to scrap the entire system. The recent article referenced by Slashdot (no link handy, sorry) mentioned some fairly compelling reasons to keep it around.
And get harassed as a POTENTIAL pirate anyway. I prefer to use software where piracy is IMPOSSIBLE to avoid any of those issues.
Depending on what the BSA needs to start an investigation of your organization, that might not help you. Instead of providing proof that you've paid for all the commerical software you use, you'd have to provide proof that you don't use any at all, which may not be quite as burdensome, but would still suck.
I did kinda phrase my point badly, though. My point is that using only free software may not save you from going through an investigation, and shouldn't be used as a justification for it.
The best thing to do is of course to go free as in speech.
Or, just to throw an alternative out there, you could try paying for commercial software you use. Just a thought.
IANAL, but it's my suspicion that this the majority of these cases are going to turn out to be chest-thumping. Law enforcement can't (or at least, shouldn't) go around obtaining search warrants unless they're within the context of an investigation, and that would mean the BSA pointing the finger and saying "Je vous accuse" with whatever evidence they already had.
Although, the more I think about it, the likelier it seems that with the amount of funding the BSA receives, it could actually pursue one or three high-profile cases against companies using pirated software. That's all it takes to get the ball rolling - I don't see many organizations lining up to take the BSA on.
People bitch about us not voting (and the fact that we're proud of it), but they never ask why. So, why, you ask? Because it wouldn't make a difference.
Interesting that you don't seem to be saying anything about voting fraud in specific, but rather the electoral system in general. I'm the last person to try to defend the archaic system we've got now, but just for the sake of argument: if you're living in Flordia (as the original poster in this thread does), with a twelve hundred vote difference between the two front-runners, it damn well would have mattered to someone. Just not who you might like.
Warning: I'm by no means an expert on election law, which varies from state to state. However, I'm pretty sure that some of the "crimes" you're citing aren't actually illegal at all. For example, voting absentee while away at college is not only not illegal, but it was actually encouraged while I was in school. It merely depends on in which state/district you've declared residency.
And finally: in instances where voting fraud is systematic and intentional, I absolutely believe that severe punishment is in order, comparable with that for battery of a police officer. Voting is serious business, and deliberately rigging an election is a crime in the same vein (although not as severe) as treason, in my view.
Re:How I could tell ...
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Death March
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A friend once pointed out to me that at any company with projects deeply in trouble, you'll find copies of "Code Complete," and "Managing the Software Development Process."
Steve McConnell addresses that very fact in "Code Complete." Essentially, he says that no organization wants to spend the time to develop good software design processes until the need for them is obvious, but by that time, it's too late.
Put another way, an bit of prevention is worth a gig of cure. Or something.
I have to agree, to a point. The general tenor of the discussion on/. seems to portray Kinkel and Harris as being ordinary kids - if "misfits" - who were driven over the edge by constant abuse by the in crowd. I suspect that larger than average percentage of the readers here were also misfits, and are therefore more likely to sympathize with that point of view.
There's another side to the story though, which I think remains valid, whatever you think about the gunmen. The experiences of many of the people who wrote in response to the "Voices" piece indicates that they were taunted, submitted to official scrutiny (even nearly to the point of strip searches), and general the targets of fear and hatred, because they happened to dress a certain way and like video games. And that's all.
We see this all the time in other arenas. Hizbollah or Islamic Jihad terrorists strike, and an innocent Muslim is the subject of a hate crime. Israel creates new settlements on the West Bank, and synogogues burn. But this wasn't racially motivated violence: this was the state (through its schools) and the general public turning against its own children because they didn't look like most people.
An example: the same article in Salon that you quote indicates that neither Kleibold nor Harris were members of the Trech Coat Mafia, as was reported widely. Those people who actually were associated with the group were ostracized in their own communities, "and some students even threatened 'retaliatory' violence should they show their faces [at] impromptu memorials."
It's good to view the Columbine story with a critical eye. But don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. The "Voices" stories are still good, and telling, even if not for the reasons you might think.
Re:Targeting Corporate Critics
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What the hell does attacking the bumblings of the USPTO and have anything to do with patent infringement?
Agreed. This lawsuit is so obviously bad that it's shocking.
What's even worse is that TechSearch is so obviously launching this lawsuit as a means of harassment (what vergil called a "slap suit"). When asked why TechSearch went after Aharonian specifically, when in theory anyone with a web server is "infringing," TechSearch president Anthony Brown had an intesting response to the reporter:
"I don't want to get into why we choose to go after certain people," Brown said. But he contended that Aharonian has been critical of TechSearch and has said things about its patent that are incorrect. "If that is his position, let him defend it," Brown said.
The last I checked, "letting someone defend his position" is not sufficient grounds for a lawsuit of this nature. Feh.
It's the kind of suit that makes me want to say, "Oh, it'll be dismissed, no problem." Of course, I wanted to say, "Oh, the whole Whitewater investigation is going to blow over eventually," too, and instead it produced the Lewinsky scandal, so who the hell knows where this is going?
A bunch of people have already made the argument that a network file server (or SAN, or whatever) would be the best way to go. I want to second that argument, especially in light of the price points you've picked.
Consider that out of the 20K students at your university (and few hundred staff and faculty), maybe about half would be enthusiastic about a network drive. Multiply that by a quarter of your price point for the media drive, $10. $10 per student, times 10K students, equals a pretty beefy file server with RAID 5 and tape backup, with a little left over for setup costs and training.
If your university is anything like mine, $100k isn't the kind of money you'll be able to easily lay your hands on. If you're low in the procurement food chain, you'll need to make the argument to your higher-ups. If you're higher in the food chain, you may already have this kind of cash in the budget, but if not, be prepared to defend your decision to funding sources. Write up your understanding of the problem, as well as costs for competing solutions. You may even want to consider doing a straw poll of students to see which they'd prefer: new media types, a file server, or keeping the status quo.
In the early 90's a couple of Amiga magazines in England (Amiga Format and Commodore Abu^H^H^H User) made a big deal about it and asked people to write in when they saw an Amiga on TV.
Y'know, I remember this too. I seem to recall a bunch of folks in the States getting all excited because an Amiga ("Amy," as they were calling it) showed up a few times in Miami Vice. Except it had been painted black. At least it wasn't painted those fruity pastel/neon colors.
Come to think of it, fat lot of good that seemed to do for the Amiga platform...
With regard to the subject line: Yes. It will always be funny to bash Daikatana. Hundreds of years from now, when the digital computer age is long past, and the new race of mutants has arisen from the ashes and built a new paradise upon the rubble of forgotten ancestors, people will still be making jokes about what a farce Daikatana was, and what a righteous slap in the face for that overly-sissified John Romero, and it will still be fucking funny.
Just thought I'd clear that up.
(By the way: the core game engine, which is arguably the best thing about the game, wasn't written by anyone at Ion Storm. It was licensed from id Software.)
The hell it isn't a fork of C++. The syntax is IDENTICAL. They took namespaces and called them "packages", removed pointers and called it a new langauge. Oh, and made it compile to bytecode so it would be slow as shit due to JVM overhead.
So you think the two languages are essentially the same because of the syntax? Allow me to introduce someone who believes the contrary. His name is Bjarne Stroustrup.
If people insist on comparing C++ and Java - as they seem to do - I suggest they read The Design and Evolution of C++ (D&E) to see why C++ is the way it is, and consider both languages in the light of the design criteria I set for C++. Those criteria will obviously differ from the criteria of Sun's Java team. Despite the syntactic similarities, C++ and Java are very different languages. In many ways, Java seems closer to Smalltalk than to C++. - from Bjarne Stroustrup's personal FAQ
Of course, Stroustrup doesn't really like Java all that much, so you might infer that his claim might be biased by a desire not to be associated with it. In any case, I'd say this pretty neatly blows a hole in your theory that Java is a fork of C++ because the syntax looks the same.
Java is itself a language fork for christ's sake. Surely you've heard of it's predecessors C++, C with classes, K&R C, C, B and BCPL. Not to mention the many other langs it stole other idioms from!
Calling Java a "fork" of C++ because C++ preceeds it and has some things in common is patently ridiculous, and appropriation of features from other languages does not a fork make.
Don't forget that Java itself is basically just a specification for a language and a means of implementation. The stuff that Sun [ is | may be ] looking at open sourcing are their virtual machine and bytecode compilers (we assume).
The "forking danger" here is that a bunch of other organizations might simply decide they want to introduce new stuff to the language and say, "Okay. This is our version of Java. So there." Microsoft licensed the technology from Sun and proceeded to do just that, completely against the terms of the contract.
(Incidentally: John Heilemann writes a fantastic article about the Microsoft anti-trust suit in this month's Wired. He asked Steve Ballmer if Microsoft believed they were signing the contract in bad faith. His answer was a bit on the long and vitriolic side, but it seemed to boil down to, "Of course we were, and the sub-50 IQ people at Sun were morons if they didn't think so too." Yes, "sub-50 IQ" was his phrase.)
Would it be so bad if someone forked the code in that manner? Maybe not. But I suspect that plenty of people are twitchy about just that possibility, given the whole J++ fiasco.
This is one of the problems with letting machines decide what should be filtered. The machine may filter out all "sex" sites -- including sites concerned with biology, like animal and plant reproduction.
If this is the type of gaffe we can expect for selecting sites which contain nudity or sexual content, what can we expect for other categories which are more nebulous, like "Questionable/Illegal & Gambling?"
By the way: Peacefire does link to Cyber Patrol's category definitions in their analysis of that product. I picked them because they had a high error rate which was pretty illustrative of the problem, but there were several other products reviewed with similar error rates.
The missive you reference was written by Tim Cavanaugh. Tim does a bunch of writing for Suck magazine, which is one of the few consistently good web 'zines out there (and in which, there ran an entire article about what Tim refers to as scare quotes. Don't know if he wrote it, though.)
Of all the companies that should hold their tongue about the worry that Linux could "mutate" into something that causes you support troubles, Microsoft sits on top. Between versions of Windows 95 (sing 'em with me now - 95A, 95B, OSR2...), incompatibilities with service packs in NT products, and file format changes in just about every successive release of Office, it's surprising that they can even remember what the hell the products are long enough to mount a defense to the anti-trust... oh, wait. The lost that big time, didn't they.
Of course, I suppose this experience does lend them some degree of credibility. I'm looking for an English version that reads something like this:
Obsolesence and incompatibility aren't things you want to lose sleep over. We've been building obsolescence into our products at the design level since before that Finnish guy could even spell WWW. With Microsoft products, you know that your forced upgrades will come at semi-regular, three year intervals. Unless we need to generate some liquid cash or something. Then we'll just introduce Windows ME Double Live, or something. No big deal, right?
This is being literal-minded to the point of obstinance. By this logic, I am a supporter of every law passed by Congress, because my tax dollars sustained their passage. Being a supporter or apologist also implies a systematic intent: I do not make a habit of defending the Vice President. I will concede, however, that by voting for him, I am (reluctantly) giving him my support.
My goal in getting involved in this conversation was to point out the slipshod manner in which the media has covered him: I am equally angered by inaccuracies about Bush and Nader, although I feel that Gore's treatment in this arena has been much worse.
If you think that voting for anyone who is running in this election is throwing a vote away, then yes. I, and millions of other Americans, will go to the polls to throw our votes away.
If you mean that by voting for what I see as the least of a half-dozen or so evils, I'm throwing my vote away, then yeah, I guess what I'm doing.
If you mean that I'm voting for someone I don't like even though I know there's someone better in the running, you're dead wrong.
I got into a discussion (read: name calling session) on/. the other day regarding misstatements/falsehoods told by Gore, and misstatements/falsehoods told by the media in reporting them. The entire thread starts here, but if you're interested specifically in the "invented the Internet" story, check here .
And finally, because I wind up having to make this disclaimer every time I get involved in this topic, I do not consider myself to be a Gore supporter, let alone apologist, even though I'll probably wind up voting for him.
Oh really? For someone so obviously indoctrinated as to not recognize that Gore is an even more pathological liar than his boss, here's a link to an actual transcript of the CNN program where Gore claimed to have created the Internet: htt p://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/stories/1999/03/09/pre sident.2000/transcript.gore/
Indoctrination implies that I'm in some way a Gore shill, which is far from the case. As I've stated before, I am not a Gore apologist, or even a supporter, despite the fact that he's probably going to wind up with my vote. The way I see it, I have the choice of voting for someone I don't trust to do the right things, or someone I do trust to do the wrong things. If this is damning with faint praise, so be it.
It's also interesting that you selected your words in the manner that you did. The most common version of the story is that Gore claimed to have "invented" the Internet, which he obviously did not. Most news agencies played fast and loose with this distinction.
However, you've provided me with a reference, so I'll provide you with a couple of my own. If I really, desperately wanted to refute your accusation regarding the "creatation of the Internet" story, what would I look for? Well, first I'd look for a rebuttal by the guy who broke the story to begin with. Then, I'd look for a statement by key Internet muckity-mucks - I dunno, IETF members or something - claiming that Gore was all that and a bag of chips.
To wit:
The Mother of Gore's Invention, an article by Declan MucCullagh, the guy who broke the story. Relevant quotes: "...Gore in the 1980s supported universities' efforts to increase funding for NSFNet, a measure that became law in the High Performance Computing Act of 1991. Gore's guest columns in Byte magazine at the time showed an appreciation of technology that was far from usual on Capitol Hill. "
Did Al Gore Really Invent the Internet?, an article by none other than Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf (whose names I assume you recognize, seeing as how you were "following the development of the Internet fairly closely at the time"). Relevant quote: "As far back as the 1970s Congressman Gore promoted the idea of high speed telecommunications as an engine for both economic growth and the improvement of our educational system....No one in public life has been more intellectually engaged in helping to create the climate for a thriving Internet than the Vice President."
When Vint Cerf says, "This guy was important in the creation of the Internet," I listen. In the face of that statement, the speech which is the subject of your complaint seems to drop from the realm of outright falsehood into mere political hyperbole. In the shitty political climate of the US these days, I find it difficult to get worked up about that.
Slashdot Mirror
Some notes after testing on Win98:
So you say. Expert testimony says otherwise. Jakob Nielsen:
Nielsen doesn't go so far as to say that this is specifcally what cost Gore the election, but with 19K incorrectly filled out ballots in two counties, I'd say it's a pretty fair guess.
Additionally, from Dan Bricklin:
Nineteen thousand. People with poor vision, people who received incorrect sample ballots. It's obvious that the statistical anomoly is there, especially when graphed. So rather than grousing about how dumb people are, why not design a ballot that doesn't skew the result?Point of fact - the alleged confusion is supposed to arise due to the placement of the Democrat and Reform party punches, not the Republican one (which was pretty clearly located first on the ballot). Since the ballots in question were used in the West Palm Beach area, it might be useful to check how the numbers broke down there. Acc ording to CNN:
Since the original margin between the Bush and Gore was only 1784 votes, I'd call that signifigant.
Additional evidence that the ballots may have caused widespread confusion, from the same article:
So, another comparison, this time of the two-selection error rate on two different parts of the ballot. More than 19,000 voters selected two presidential candidates, which is more than five times as many as made the same mistake for senators, and more than ten times as many as Bush's lead statewide.
Say what you want to about Daley, Jackson, Mfume, and whomever else you feel is a little too leftward leaning for your tastes. But the numbers do tell a story here.
Oh, for fuck's sake, no! Not the liberals!
</sarcasm>
I agree that the lack of accountability on the part of the electorate is scary, but I'm not ready to scrap the entire system. The recent article referenced by Slashdot (no link handy, sorry) mentioned some fairly compelling reasons to keep it around.
Depending on what the BSA needs to start an investigation of your organization, that might not help you. Instead of providing proof that you've paid for all the commerical software you use, you'd have to provide proof that you don't use any at all, which may not be quite as burdensome, but would still suck.
I did kinda phrase my point badly, though. My point is that using only free software may not save you from going through an investigation, and shouldn't be used as a justification for it.
Or, just to throw an alternative out there, you could try paying for commercial software you use. Just a thought.
IANAL, but it's my suspicion that this the majority of these cases are going to turn out to be chest-thumping. Law enforcement can't (or at least, shouldn't) go around obtaining search warrants unless they're within the context of an investigation, and that would mean the BSA pointing the finger and saying "Je vous accuse" with whatever evidence they already had.
Although, the more I think about it, the likelier it seems that with the amount of funding the BSA receives, it could actually pursue one or three high-profile cases against companies using pirated software. That's all it takes to get the ball rolling - I don't see many organizations lining up to take the BSA on.
Interesting that you don't seem to be saying anything about voting fraud in specific, but rather the electoral system in general. I'm the last person to try to defend the archaic system we've got now, but just for the sake of argument: if you're living in Flordia (as the original poster in this thread does), with a twelve hundred vote difference between the two front-runners, it damn well would have mattered to someone. Just not who you might like.
Warning: I'm by no means an expert on election law, which varies from state to state. However, I'm pretty sure that some of the "crimes" you're citing aren't actually illegal at all. For example, voting absentee while away at college is not only not illegal, but it was actually encouraged while I was in school. It merely depends on in which state/district you've declared residency.
Second, you have to remember that Florida has a really ugly history of absentee ballot fraud. A lot of the signs that you're seeing now are a reflection of the legislature and judiciary's efforts to combat this.
And finally: in instances where voting fraud is systematic and intentional, I absolutely believe that severe punishment is in order, comparable with that for battery of a police officer. Voting is serious business, and deliberately rigging an election is a crime in the same vein (although not as severe) as treason, in my view.
Steve McConnell addresses that very fact in "Code Complete." Essentially, he says that no organization wants to spend the time to develop good software design processes until the need for them is obvious, but by that time, it's too late.
Put another way, an bit of prevention is worth a gig of cure. Or something.
I have to agree, to a point. The general tenor of the discussion on /. seems to portray Kinkel and Harris as being ordinary kids - if "misfits" - who were driven over the edge by constant abuse by the in crowd. I suspect that larger than average percentage of the readers here were also misfits, and are therefore more likely to sympathize with that point of view.
There's another side to the story though, which I think remains valid, whatever you think about the gunmen. The experiences of many of the people who wrote in response to the "Voices" piece indicates that they were taunted, submitted to official scrutiny (even nearly to the point of strip searches), and general the targets of fear and hatred, because they happened to dress a certain way and like video games. And that's all.
We see this all the time in other arenas. Hizbollah or Islamic Jihad terrorists strike, and an innocent Muslim is the subject of a hate crime. Israel creates new settlements on the West Bank, and synogogues burn. But this wasn't racially motivated violence: this was the state (through its schools) and the general public turning against its own children because they didn't look like most people.
An example: the same article in Salon that you quote indicates that neither Kleibold nor Harris were members of the Trech Coat Mafia, as was reported widely. Those people who actually were associated with the group were ostracized in their own communities, "and some students even threatened 'retaliatory' violence should they show their faces [at] impromptu memorials."
It's good to view the Columbine story with a critical eye. But don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. The "Voices" stories are still good, and telling, even if not for the reasons you might think.
Agreed. This lawsuit is so obviously bad that it's shocking.
What's even worse is that TechSearch is so obviously launching this lawsuit as a means of harassment (what vergil called a "slap suit"). When asked why TechSearch went after Aharonian specifically, when in theory anyone with a web server is "infringing," TechSearch president Anthony Brown had an intesting response to the reporter:
The last I checked, "letting someone defend his position" is not sufficient grounds for a lawsuit of this nature. Feh.
It's the kind of suit that makes me want to say, "Oh, it'll be dismissed, no problem." Of course, I wanted to say, "Oh, the whole Whitewater investigation is going to blow over eventually," too, and instead it produced the Lewinsky scandal, so who the hell knows where this is going?
Consider that out of the 20K students at your university (and few hundred staff and faculty), maybe about half would be enthusiastic about a network drive. Multiply that by a quarter of your price point for the media drive, $10. $10 per student, times 10K students, equals a pretty beefy file server with RAID 5 and tape backup, with a little left over for setup costs and training.
If your university is anything like mine, $100k isn't the kind of money you'll be able to easily lay your hands on. If you're low in the procurement food chain, you'll need to make the argument to your higher-ups. If you're higher in the food chain, you may already have this kind of cash in the budget, but if not, be prepared to defend your decision to funding sources. Write up your understanding of the problem, as well as costs for competing solutions. You may even want to consider doing a straw poll of students to see which they'd prefer: new media types, a file server, or keeping the status quo.
Y'know, I remember this too. I seem to recall a bunch of folks in the States getting all excited because an Amiga ("Amy," as they were calling it) showed up a few times in Miami Vice. Except it had been painted black. At least it wasn't painted those fruity pastel/neon colors.
Come to think of it, fat lot of good that seemed to do for the Amiga platform...
Just thought I'd clear that up.
(By the way: the core game engine, which is arguably the best thing about the game, wasn't written by anyone at Ion Storm. It was licensed from id Software.)
So you think the two languages are essentially the same because of the syntax? Allow me to introduce someone who believes the contrary. His name is Bjarne Stroustrup.
Of course, Stroustrup doesn't really like Java all that much, so you might infer that his claim might be biased by a desire not to be associated with it. In any case, I'd say this pretty neatly blows a hole in your theory that Java is a fork of C++ because the syntax looks the same.
Calling Java a "fork" of C++ because C++ preceeds it and has some things in common is patently ridiculous, and appropriation of features from other languages does not a fork make.
Don't forget that Java itself is basically just a specification for a language and a means of implementation. The stuff that Sun [ is | may be ] looking at open sourcing are their virtual machine and bytecode compilers (we assume).
The "forking danger" here is that a bunch of other organizations might simply decide they want to introduce new stuff to the language and say, "Okay. This is our version of Java. So there." Microsoft licensed the technology from Sun and proceeded to do just that, completely against the terms of the contract.
(Incidentally: John Heilemann writes a fantastic article about the Microsoft anti-trust suit in this month's Wired. He asked Steve Ballmer if Microsoft believed they were signing the contract in bad faith. His answer was a bit on the long and vitriolic side, but it seemed to boil down to, "Of course we were, and the sub-50 IQ people at Sun were morons if they didn't think so too." Yes, "sub-50 IQ" was his phrase.)
Would it be so bad if someone forked the code in that manner? Maybe not. But I suspect that plenty of people are twitchy about just that possibility, given the whole J++ fiasco.
True, but the problems reported by the Peacefire study are far worse than that. For example: Cyber Patrol was tested using their "Partial Nudity," "Full Nudity," and "Sexual Acts/Text" filters turned on (and no other filters). Among the sites blocked: an attorney's site (http://www.a-attorney-virginia.com), and a home inspection company (http://www.a-actionhomeinspection.com).
If this is the type of gaffe we can expect for selecting sites which contain nudity or sexual content, what can we expect for other categories which are more nebulous, like "Questionable/Illegal & Gambling?"
By the way: Peacefire does link to Cyber Patrol's category definitions in their analysis of that product. I picked them because they had a high error rate which was pretty illustrative of the problem, but there were several other products reviewed with similar error rates.
The missive you reference was written by Tim Cavanaugh. Tim does a bunch of writing for Suck magazine, which is one of the few consistently good web 'zines out there (and in which, there ran an entire article about what Tim refers to as scare quotes. Don't know if he wrote it, though.)
Of all the companies that should hold their tongue about the worry that Linux could "mutate" into something that causes you support troubles, Microsoft sits on top. Between versions of Windows 95 (sing 'em with me now - 95A, 95B, OSR2...), incompatibilities with service packs in NT products, and file format changes in just about every successive release of Office, it's surprising that they can even remember what the hell the products are long enough to mount a defense to the anti-trust... oh, wait. The lost that big time, didn't they.
Of course, I suppose this experience does lend them some degree of credibility. I'm looking for an English version that reads something like this:
From the article:
Not having read Rees' work in its entirety, I'm still surprised that Rees could make this sort of comment. I can imagine staring at a piece of paper, re-reading Flatland&l t;/a>, and saying "Okay, I can't imagine life existing in only two dimensions." But four?
Oh. Well, if that's what St. Francis said, I guess that settles it.
This is being literal-minded to the point of obstinance. By this logic, I am a supporter of every law passed by Congress, because my tax dollars sustained their passage. Being a supporter or apologist also implies a systematic intent: I do not make a habit of defending the Vice President. I will concede, however, that by voting for him, I am (reluctantly) giving him my support.
My goal in getting involved in this conversation was to point out the slipshod manner in which the media has covered him: I am equally angered by inaccuracies about Bush and Nader, although I feel that Gore's treatment in this arena has been much worse.
If you think that voting for anyone who is running in this election is throwing a vote away, then yes. I, and millions of other Americans, will go to the polls to throw our votes away.
If you mean that by voting for what I see as the least of a half-dozen or so evils, I'm throwing my vote away, then yeah, I guess what I'm doing.
If you mean that I'm voting for someone I don't like even though I know there's someone better in the running, you're dead wrong.
I got into a discussion (read: name calling session) on /. the other day regarding misstatements/falsehoods told by Gore, and misstatements/falsehoods told by the media in reporting them. The entire thread starts here, but if you're interested specifically in the "invented the Internet" story, check here .
In summary: Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn credit Gore with having more effect on the the development of the Internet than anyone else in public life. Declan McCullagh, the guy who broke the story in the first place, talks about how the story was mishandled by the press. Finally, The Washington Monthly reports on "how the press has exaggerated Al Gore's exaggerations."
And finally, because I wind up having to make this disclaimer every time I get involved in this topic, I do not consider myself to be a Gore supporter, let alone apologist, even though I'll probably wind up voting for him.
Indoctrination implies that I'm in some way a Gore shill, which is far from the case. As I've stated before, I am not a Gore apologist, or even a supporter, despite the fact that he's probably going to wind up with my vote. The way I see it, I have the choice of voting for someone I don't trust to do the right things, or someone I do trust to do the wrong things. If this is damning with faint praise, so be it.
It's also interesting that you selected your words in the manner that you did. The most common version of the story is that Gore claimed to have "invented" the Internet, which he obviously did not. Most news agencies played fast and loose with this distinction.
However, you've provided me with a reference, so I'll provide you with a couple of my own. If I really, desperately wanted to refute your accusation regarding the "creatation of the Internet" story, what would I look for? Well, first I'd look for a rebuttal by the guy who broke the story to begin with. Then, I'd look for a statement by key Internet muckity-mucks - I dunno, IETF members or something - claiming that Gore was all that and a bag of chips.
To wit:
When Vint Cerf says, "This guy was important in the creation of the Internet," I listen. In the face of that statement, the speech which is the subject of your complaint seems to drop from the realm of outright falsehood into mere political hyperbole. In the shitty political climate of the US these days, I find it difficult to get worked up about that.