1. Mass media enables mass marketing. 2. Mass marketing leads companies to target "the sweet spot." 3. This pays off, and so reinforces the idea. 4. Companies become more and more focused on the center of the market. 5. The tails become under-served, the center gets over-served. 6. White Stripes, Pulp Fiction, Clerks, et al. do it for the artistic vision. 7. Hungry tails turn White Stripes et al. into overnight sensations. 8. Meanwhile, companies continue to pump the center. 9. Overfed center can't consume all the mass-market product. 10. Idiot misinterprets this as the the curve flattening, rather than companies over-serving one market and under-serving another. 11. Idiot publishes a pop-business book, which appeals to the mass of idiots that make up the heart of the market. 12. Some companies buy it, and rush out to the tails. 13. Some of these get burned, and so they backlash against Idiot. 14. Gomes writes a backlash piece. 15. With any luck, we can get the companies to rush back to the center, and start all over again - feeding the economic market for half-witted business books. (not casting aspursions at all business books, many of which are good, just the ones that are the business equivalent of Dr. Phil)
All the while, the market hasn't changed at all. It's a bell curve, same as it ever was. Gomes isn't so much sharp, as just not quite as idiotic as the heart of the pop-business market.
Given that, I'd say the police did not implicitly agree to be recorded, and as they did not explicitly agree to be recorded, that's all she wrote.
What you are referring to is the concept of "expectation of privacy." If a person has a reasonable expectation of privacy, then privacy is their right. They must give up that right or the recording is illegal. For example, recording a person in a public park requires no authorization, because there is no expectation of privacy. Recording a person in the bathroom requires authorization, because they have a reasonable expectation of privacy.
So the question then becomes, do the police have a reasonable expectation of privacy? First, do they ever have a reasonable expectation of privacy when executing the law? I think that we could probably come up with some reasonable situations in which regular police have that expectation during the execution of their duty, but I think generally it would not hold. The police are public servants with extraordinary powers. As such, it is vital to our form of government that they be accountable for their actions. Accountability hinges on public knowledge. While there are situations in which a person may be accountable without public knowledge, public knowledge is the only way to guarantee accountability.
Do they have a reasonable expectation of privacy when executing the law in a public place? How could they? It is a public place. The very concept of a public place is that there is no reasonable expectation of privacy.
Do they have a reasonable expectation of privacy when executing the law on someone's private property? Absolutely not. Does the local Circle K give up its right to use its cameras when a police officer walks into the store? It is an absurd notion.
From Circuit City's policy on CD ripping (they offer ripping services for CDs):
Can copy-protected CDs be encoded?
Encoding copy-protected discs is a violation of the record company's copyright protection. Get Digital will not encode any copyrighted discs. Instead Get Digital will notify you of any discs with copyright protection. These discs will be set aside and returned to you with the rest of your collection--without charge.
Can a DVD-Audio or SACD disc be encoded?
Both SACD and DVD-Audio discs feature the same copy protection that regular DVDs do. Any SACD, DVD-Audio or standard DVDs will be set aside and returned to you with the rest of your collection without charge.
Sounds to me like they already know about the DMCA, and that this would violate it. I am now more than a little dubious that this is actually being done with corporate's knowledge.
This "photographer's exception" to the copyright-owner's rights applies only to buildings, a category which includes houses, office buildings, churches, gazebos, and garden pavilions.
A photographer shot a picture of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, OH. He made a poster of it. He was sued, and lost. The finding was that if the picture has only the Rock Hall (ie: shot from downtown, facing Lake Erie), it is in violation. If it is of the skyline and includes the Rock Hall (ie: from Lake Erie including downtown, or from the East including the stadium), then it is OK.
it does not inspire confidence that a public organisation who allegedly operate inside the law, to uphold the law, should feel it necessary to use their power to conceal the detailed workings of their activities.
Well said, and may I expand:
If the judicial system works so poorly that photographs of the executive branch during the public execution of their duty are dangerous, what does that say of the same judicial system when faced with a suspect who cannot provide sufficient proof of his innocence? If the judicial system is making so many mistakes that the police do not trust it, how can we?
Anyone able to point a finger at the legislation that enables them to do this? Or is there none, and they are just overstepping the mark?
I believe it is a part of the NEAC-SEFA Act - Nine Eleven And Children's-Safety Executive Free Action Act. It states that the executive can do anything, without oversight, if they are protecting children or fighting terrorists. It was written by the NSA, approved by two senators and Dick Cheney, and signed into law by GWB. Of course, the law must remain secret, because making it public would lend aid and comfort to the terrorists, who hate our freedom, and help child molestors escape justice.
So the question is not whether NEAC-SEFA is a good law - it is a necessary and vital law enforcement tool. The question is, do you support child molestors and terrorists, or do you support NEAC-SEFA?
CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano declined to comment on Axsmith's case but said the policy on blogs is that 'postings should relate directly to the official business of the author and readers of the site, and that managers should be informed of online projects that use government resources. CIA expects contractors to do the work they are paid to do.'
Tomorrow's story will be, "Axsmith was fired for numerous reasons completely unrelated to his blog entry, which we spent last night inventing. Paul Gimigliano has been fired for not knowing when to employ liberal amounts of whitewash."
but what a private company does with it's own product is fair game, as long as they let me know about it before I buy it.
Sure. Equally, if a company decides to sell a user-hostile product then it is my duty to dissuade people from the product. And if they provide vague or misleading information about the product (eg: naming a genuine hinderance, "Genuine Advantage"), then they have further obliged me to use equally underhanded tactics to dissuade. That is my responsibility as a proponent of this pale image of a free market economy.
Which leads me to comment on your earlier statement:
They've always been tremendously helpful, non-judgemental and ready to listen.
Noone should say anything good of Microsoft until they clean up their act (and not just by publishing 12 tenets - by actually adhering to them). They are being deceptive and hostile to their customers. If you know that they are being deceptive and hostile to their customers, how can you justify saying anything nice about them? If you can't think of something derogatory to say, don't say anything at all.
Keeping in line with their belief system, this allows ISPs to make sure that developing connectivity can in fact, keep up with the explosive demand for broadband in more places. In other words, it allows for fatter pipes.
I agree that that is the theoretical ideal that the free market shoots for. However, given that this is not a free market we are talking about (many of the players involved have explicit fiat monopolies, and all have contract-established trusts), the free-market argument doesn't necessarily hold water.
The very real fear is that the legal right to restrict access will be used as a barrier to entry. Most major corporations in the US today focus massive resources on developing and expanding barriers to entry, because they allow you to charge above-market prices. Patents, exclusive contracts, volume contracts, per-employee licensing, per-computer licensing, and dozens of other lawyerly schemes; all these things are thinly veiled barriers to entry based on government and court fiat power. They destroy the competition on which the free market depends for efficiency. All these things are heavily invested in by corporations that claim to be free market capitalists, but are in fact oligopolists and fiat monopolists.
It is killing our global competitiveness. We're getting our asses handed to us in the auto market by China, Korea, and Japan because the cushy barriers to entering our auto markets made Ford, Chrysler, and GM fat, lazy, and stupid (not respectively, all three are all three). Blocking competition is nice in the short run from the corporate executive's stock-option perspective, but it is miserable in the long run. For the consumer it even sucks in the short run.
That is the real problem with net bias - it is another way that corporations are granted a legal right to bar entry.
You memorize the picture of the guy, put on your nifty EEG space helmet, and tap into the face recognition system camera database at the airport.... The EEG can detect the signals of your brain recognizing images and when it gets a 'hit', it dumps that image them into a cache for closer review at a later time.
MIB1: Hmm, well, we didn't get the terrorist, but we did harvest 1394 security camera images of attractive women bending over to pick things up. MIB2: We should expand the program.
Now, in this case, they do appear to be going after the offenders and so good luck to them.
Are they going after copyright infringers, or are they going after 59 John Does who posted articles on Yahoo's bulletin boards that suggested the labels' P/E ratios are unjustified? How do you know? While I wholeheartedly agree with the principle of policing actual infringers (perhaps with the caveat that the labels have an obligation to lobby against DRM &c before they have any moral ground to stand on), it is not the prerogative of corporations to engage in private law enforcement. That is the purpose of a court system, and that is the problem here.
Did you miss the part that says, "that anyone can edit?" It's right there at the end, after the word, "encyclopedia." It's like observing, "The flying boat - a cross between a boat and an airplane." Then criticizing it because it can't handle 15 foot swells as well as other boats.
You step into a blog, you know what you're getting. But if you search an encyclopedia, it's fair to expect something else. Actual facts, say. At its worst, Wikipedia is an active deception, a powerful piece of agitprop, not information.
I don't understand. Why do people insist on making Wikipedia something that it is not? Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia. It is a Wikipedia. If you know what the term "wiki" means, how can you expect perfect accuracy? If you don't, aren't you curious what those four funny sounding letters out front of "pedia" mean?
Wikipedia is what it is. And it is brilliant for what it is. As far as I know, it is the world's best example of what it is - it is it's own archetype. Isn't that enough?
1. The bank bought a computer, and chose not to use some software bundled with it, the same as if I "bought" Norton Antivirus with a new computer but never used it because I choose to use AVG. Dell won't refund to me their cost of the Norton software just because I don't choose to use it. Arguable, but not overly evil.
Whoah - not so fast with that "not overly evil" statement. I'll buy that this fact in and of itself is not evil. But put it in context with "You cannot buy a computer from most major companies without Windows" and suddenly things start to get fishy.
If MS is allowed to create contracts that depend on being paid for software on a per-computer-sold basis, rather than on a per-copy-of-software sold basis, then they are effectively inducing me to bpay for the software. That's fine, as long as I am in fact buying something that I can resell, or for which I can get a full refund. But if I'm being induced to buy, and I can't recover any value, and the company doing the inducing is doing so by leveraging its monopoly, then we have a problem.
the "social, political, and environmental chaos" he refers to is absolutely nothing new. The only difference between then and now is that our toys are bigger and shinier.
Nope - there's one other enormous difference. In the past, there was always someplace for advancing technology to revolutionize. Technological advancements occured locally, lead to population growth, and the overpopulated colony spread to relatively inefficiently used lands, applied their new technology, and took over (or failed in many cases, like Greenland). In the past one or two hundred years, this changed. Today, technological advances hit the entire planet pretty quickly. The most efficiently harvested parts of the planet are only maybe twice as efficient as the least so, and "efficient" is used here in the short term sense - many highly productive areas are actually being overharvested like the US Dust Bowl was.
So what? So this - we're still programmed to reproduce at the rate that was efficient when there were new lands to conquer. But there aren't any dramatically inefficiently harvested (food and energy) lands left to take over and revolutionize. Interestingly, some evidence is beginning to show that the rate of reproduction actually adapts to the changing viable birth rate faster than mere evolution can explain. So maybe we will actually curb our growth fast enough to avoid a really big change, but the world wars you mention are a sign that it hasn't been changing fast enough to avoid violence yet. Look at it like an ant farm, and it appears that right now today the powerful ant colony is reducing the population of the less powerful ant colony to allow the powerful ant colony to continue to harvest resources that are in the weaker colony's part of the terrarium.
Good? Bad? Not really my area of interest.
So the question, more specifically, is, "Will we reduce birth rates, increase death rates, or colonize points in space other than those on the surface of this slightly squashed sphere?" Chances are it will be some combination of those three, so then the question becomes, "How would we like to, and how can we, steer the direction of increased death rates, reduced birth rates, and non-earth-surface harvesting?" Heck - you've probably seen it in Civilization or StarCraft or whatever - you want more units, you need to take over new territory and harvest the stuff.
For a good right-of-center economist's view of one of the issues, check out The Coming Economic Collapse. It helped me confirm that it's not just lefty FUD.
Very agreed - trees are good. Parent/child relationships are not, as you note, extension. There are trees with node types that extend other node types (or node types that extend a base type).
And you can represent them in a database by having discriminator fields (as pointed out in another response). And if you were doing a tree that contained a variety of node types, it might make some amount of sense to use discriminators. But I would contend that discriminator fields cost more than they pay, much like multiple inheritance. Much as I haven't seen the real world problem that is best solved with multiple inheritance, I have not seen the real world problem that is best solved with discriminators. So I believe it does not exist, much as I believe other things that could be disproven tomorrow.
Is it true that you accepted money (which is how I interpret "support") to do open source development and then did not release the code? I'd like to hear your side of the story.
Hmmm, no response. Now I understand the term "deafening silence."
If he releases the code in the next several weeks, and as he says, he's adding documentation, cleaning it up. etc., where is the problem?
The problem is, right now, he's asking us to contribute data to him while trusting to his good will. That is exactly what CDDB did. Do you remember CDDB? They were the FreeDB before FreeDB. They took our data, then told us to fuck off while they sold it.
If he just dumped the code, there are likely to be just as many complaints.
True, but making the code better will not change that. No matter how good the code is, some jackass is going to find fault with it. The trick to Free Software is not making perfect software, but realizing that there is no such thing.
If Andrew (or whatever his name is) hasn't attempted to distribute binaries that contain GPL code (and I'm not sure we know that he has for a fact), then we need to back the fuck up.
Sure, that's fine, he can do whatever the hell he pleases. But we should no more go use FreeDB2 than go back to CDDB. As it stands today, FreeDB2 is proprietary. We all know what happens with proprietary versions of CDDB, because it happened. CDDB said they would be freee. They asked us to trust them. Then they took our data and told us to fuck off.
Moreover, he broke his obligation to FreeDB. FreeDB has our support because it is Free. At least one person, the person who started FreeDB, the person who grasped why we chose FreeDB over CDDB, expected him to maintain the agreement that is the core value proposition of FreeDB. If Andrew broke that agreement (and maybe he hasn't yet), then he has stolen from a Free project. Should FreeDB have insisted on the copyright like Apache does? Perhaps, then this wouldn't be a problem. Does that mean it's FreeDB's fault? Perhaps, at least in part. Does that mean we should stand up for Andrew (or whatever his name is)? Absolutely not. At this point, he is a maybe crook.
Slashdot Mirror
"We acknowledged that there was information that could potentially lead to people being identified, which is why we were so angry."
No, actually, what you said was:
"Although there was no personally identifiable data linked to these accounts,..."
That is pretty much the opposite of acknowledging that there was information that could potentially lead to people being identified.
Let me see if I can break this down...
1. Mass media enables mass marketing.
2. Mass marketing leads companies to target "the sweet spot."
3. This pays off, and so reinforces the idea.
4. Companies become more and more focused on the center of the market.
5. The tails become under-served, the center gets over-served.
6. White Stripes, Pulp Fiction, Clerks, et al. do it for the artistic vision.
7. Hungry tails turn White Stripes et al. into overnight sensations.
8. Meanwhile, companies continue to pump the center.
9. Overfed center can't consume all the mass-market product.
10. Idiot misinterprets this as the the curve flattening, rather than companies over-serving one market and under-serving another.
11. Idiot publishes a pop-business book, which appeals to the mass of idiots that make up the heart of the market.
12. Some companies buy it, and rush out to the tails.
13. Some of these get burned, and so they backlash against Idiot.
14. Gomes writes a backlash piece.
15. With any luck, we can get the companies to rush back to the center, and start all over again - feeding the economic market for half-witted business books. (not casting aspursions at all business books, many of which are good, just the ones that are the business equivalent of Dr. Phil)
All the while, the market hasn't changed at all. It's a bell curve, same as it ever was. Gomes isn't so much sharp, as just not quite as idiotic as the heart of the pop-business market.
Given that, I'd say the police did not implicitly agree to be recorded, and as they did not explicitly agree to be recorded, that's all she wrote.
What you are referring to is the concept of "expectation of privacy." If a person has a reasonable expectation of privacy, then privacy is their right. They must give up that right or the recording is illegal. For example, recording a person in a public park requires no authorization, because there is no expectation of privacy. Recording a person in the bathroom requires authorization, because they have a reasonable expectation of privacy.
So the question then becomes, do the police have a reasonable expectation of privacy? First, do they ever have a reasonable expectation of privacy when executing the law? I think that we could probably come up with some reasonable situations in which regular police have that expectation during the execution of their duty, but I think generally it would not hold. The police are public servants with extraordinary powers. As such, it is vital to our form of government that they be accountable for their actions. Accountability hinges on public knowledge. While there are situations in which a person may be accountable without public knowledge, public knowledge is the only way to guarantee accountability.
Do they have a reasonable expectation of privacy when executing the law in a public place? How could they? It is a public place. The very concept of a public place is that there is no reasonable expectation of privacy.
Do they have a reasonable expectation of privacy when executing the law on someone's private property? Absolutely not. Does the local Circle K give up its right to use its cameras when a police officer walks into the store? It is an absurd notion.
yet this is the burden that the RIAA must now bear. I'm sure they have some sort of "proof" up their sleeves of LimeWire's misdeeds.
The RIAA need not prove anything. All they have to do is make it more expensive for LimeWire to defend itself than to give up.
From Circuit City's policy on CD ripping (they offer ripping services for CDs):
Can copy-protected CDs be encoded?
Encoding copy-protected discs is a violation of the record company's copyright protection. Get Digital will not encode any copyrighted discs. Instead Get Digital will notify you of any discs with copyright protection. These discs will be set aside and returned to you with the rest of your collection--without charge.
Can a DVD-Audio or SACD disc be encoded?
Both SACD and DVD-Audio discs feature the same copy protection that regular DVDs do. Any SACD, DVD-Audio or standard DVDs will be set aside and returned to you with the rest of your collection without charge.
Sounds to me like they already know about the DMCA, and that this would violate it. I am now more than a little dubious that this is actually being done with corporate's knowledge.
The question is, do you support child molestors and terrorists, or do you support NEAC-SEFA?
The answer is mu.
That's what mu is! I'd heard it once or twice, but hadn't gotten around to learning what it was. Thanks!
This "photographer's exception" to the copyright-owner's rights applies only to buildings, a category which includes houses, office buildings, churches, gazebos, and garden pavilions.
A photographer shot a picture of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, OH. He made a poster of it. He was sued, and lost. The finding was that if the picture has only the Rock Hall (ie: shot from downtown, facing Lake Erie), it is in violation. If it is of the skyline and includes the Rock Hall (ie: from Lake Erie including downtown, or from the East including the stadium), then it is OK.
it does not inspire confidence that a public organisation who allegedly operate inside the law, to uphold the law, should feel it necessary to use their power to conceal the detailed workings of their activities.
Well said, and may I expand:
If the judicial system works so poorly that photographs of the executive branch during the public execution of their duty are dangerous, what does that say of the same judicial system when faced with a suspect who cannot provide sufficient proof of his innocence? If the judicial system is making so many mistakes that the police do not trust it, how can we?
Anyone able to point a finger at the legislation that enables them to do this? Or is there none, and they are just overstepping the mark?
I believe it is a part of the NEAC-SEFA Act - Nine Eleven And Children's-Safety Executive Free Action Act. It states that the executive can do anything, without oversight, if they are protecting children or fighting terrorists. It was written by the NSA, approved by two senators and Dick Cheney, and signed into law by GWB. Of course, the law must remain secret, because making it public would lend aid and comfort to the terrorists, who hate our freedom, and help child molestors escape justice.
So the question is not whether NEAC-SEFA is a good law - it is a necessary and vital law enforcement tool. The question is, do you support child molestors and terrorists, or do you support NEAC-SEFA?
CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano declined to comment on Axsmith's case but said the policy on blogs is that 'postings should relate directly to the official business of the author and readers of the site, and that managers should be informed of online projects that use government resources. CIA expects contractors to do the work they are paid to do.'
Tomorrow's story will be, "Axsmith was fired for numerous reasons completely unrelated to his blog entry, which we spent last night inventing. Paul Gimigliano has been fired for not knowing when to employ liberal amounts of whitewash."
but what a private company does with it's own product is fair game, as long as they let me know about it before I buy it.
Sure. Equally, if a company decides to sell a user-hostile product then it is my duty to dissuade people from the product. And if they provide vague or misleading information about the product (eg: naming a genuine hinderance, "Genuine Advantage"), then they have further obliged me to use equally underhanded tactics to dissuade. That is my responsibility as a proponent of this pale image of a free market economy.
Which leads me to comment on your earlier statement:
They've always been tremendously helpful, non-judgemental and ready to listen.
Noone should say anything good of Microsoft until they clean up their act (and not just by publishing 12 tenets - by actually adhering to them). They are being deceptive and hostile to their customers. If you know that they are being deceptive and hostile to their customers, how can you justify saying anything nice about them? If you can't think of something derogatory to say, don't say anything at all.
So brief, so concise, so insightful. I had not thought of that angle. Thank you.
I'm sure that's going to be a common refrain in this new era of untrusting software and companies. Ah well.
Ah well?!?! WTF Ah well?!?
"I guess I'll just bend over and take it. I'll try to think about baseball."
To steal a line from the skript kiddies, j00 are pwn3d. I suppose I should feel pity for this guy, like the abused spouse who can't leave.
How do you turn a parliamentary democracy into an empire? Make every citizen a criminal. Puppy dog Blair imitating his master again, I guess.
Keeping in line with their belief system, this allows ISPs to make sure that developing connectivity can in fact, keep up with the explosive demand for broadband in more places. In other words, it allows for fatter pipes.
I agree that that is the theoretical ideal that the free market shoots for. However, given that this is not a free market we are talking about (many of the players involved have explicit fiat monopolies, and all have contract-established trusts), the free-market argument doesn't necessarily hold water.
The very real fear is that the legal right to restrict access will be used as a barrier to entry. Most major corporations in the US today focus massive resources on developing and expanding barriers to entry, because they allow you to charge above-market prices. Patents, exclusive contracts, volume contracts, per-employee licensing, per-computer licensing, and dozens of other lawyerly schemes; all these things are thinly veiled barriers to entry based on government and court fiat power. They destroy the competition on which the free market depends for efficiency. All these things are heavily invested in by corporations that claim to be free market capitalists, but are in fact oligopolists and fiat monopolists.
It is killing our global competitiveness. We're getting our asses handed to us in the auto market by China, Korea, and Japan because the cushy barriers to entering our auto markets made Ford, Chrysler, and GM fat, lazy, and stupid (not respectively, all three are all three). Blocking competition is nice in the short run from the corporate executive's stock-option perspective, but it is miserable in the long run. For the consumer it even sucks in the short run.
That is the real problem with net bias - it is another way that corporations are granted a legal right to bar entry.
You memorize the picture of the guy, put on your nifty EEG space helmet, and tap into the face recognition system camera database at the airport. ... The EEG can detect the signals of your brain recognizing images and when it gets a 'hit', it dumps that image them into a cache for closer review at a later time.
MIB1: Hmm, well, we didn't get the terrorist, but we did harvest 1394 security camera images of attractive women bending over to pick things up.
MIB2: We should expand the program.
Now, in this case, they do appear to be going after the offenders and so good luck to them.
Are they going after copyright infringers, or are they going after 59 John Does who posted articles on Yahoo's bulletin boards that suggested the labels' P/E ratios are unjustified? How do you know? While I wholeheartedly agree with the principle of policing actual infringers (perhaps with the caveat that the labels have an obligation to lobby against DRM &c before they have any moral ground to stand on), it is not the prerogative of corporations to engage in private law enforcement. That is the purpose of a court system, and that is the problem here.
the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.
Did you miss the part that says, "that anyone can edit?" It's right there at the end, after the word, "encyclopedia." It's like observing, "The flying boat - a cross between a boat and an airplane." Then criticizing it because it can't handle 15 foot swells as well as other boats.
It says "Wikipedia - The Free Encyclopedia"
Apparently you missed the that says, "that anyone can edit." It's right there on the front page, after the word, "encyclopedia."
Here's another fun one, "Flying Boat". They can't handle 15 foot swells very well. Clear false advertising, it's hardly a boat!
You step into a blog, you know what you're getting. But if you search an encyclopedia, it's fair to expect something else. Actual facts, say. At its worst, Wikipedia is an active deception, a powerful piece of agitprop, not information.
I don't understand. Why do people insist on making Wikipedia something that it is not? Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia. It is a Wikipedia. If you know what the term "wiki" means, how can you expect perfect accuracy? If you don't, aren't you curious what those four funny sounding letters out front of "pedia" mean?
Wikipedia is what it is. And it is brilliant for what it is. As far as I know, it is the world's best example of what it is - it is it's own archetype. Isn't that enough?
1. The bank bought a computer, and chose not to use some software bundled with it, the same as if I "bought" Norton Antivirus with a new computer but never used it because I choose to use AVG. Dell won't refund to me their cost of the Norton software just because I don't choose to use it. Arguable, but not overly evil.
Whoah - not so fast with that "not overly evil" statement. I'll buy that this fact in and of itself is not evil. But put it in context with "You cannot buy a computer from most major companies without Windows" and suddenly things start to get fishy.
If MS is allowed to create contracts that depend on being paid for software on a per-computer-sold basis, rather than on a per-copy-of-software sold basis, then they are effectively inducing me to bpay for the software. That's fine, as long as I am in fact buying something that I can resell, or for which I can get a full refund. But if I'm being induced to buy, and I can't recover any value, and the company doing the inducing is doing so by leveraging its monopoly, then we have a problem.
the "social, political, and environmental chaos" he refers to is absolutely nothing new. The only difference between then and now is that our toys are bigger and shinier.
Nope - there's one other enormous difference. In the past, there was always someplace for advancing technology to revolutionize. Technological advancements occured locally, lead to population growth, and the overpopulated colony spread to relatively inefficiently used lands, applied their new technology, and took over (or failed in many cases, like Greenland). In the past one or two hundred years, this changed. Today, technological advances hit the entire planet pretty quickly. The most efficiently harvested parts of the planet are only maybe twice as efficient as the least so, and "efficient" is used here in the short term sense - many highly productive areas are actually being overharvested like the US Dust Bowl was.
So what? So this - we're still programmed to reproduce at the rate that was efficient when there were new lands to conquer. But there aren't any dramatically inefficiently harvested (food and energy) lands left to take over and revolutionize. Interestingly, some evidence is beginning to show that the rate of reproduction actually adapts to the changing viable birth rate faster than mere evolution can explain. So maybe we will actually curb our growth fast enough to avoid a really big change, but the world wars you mention are a sign that it hasn't been changing fast enough to avoid violence yet. Look at it like an ant farm, and it appears that right now today the powerful ant colony is reducing the population of the less powerful ant colony to allow the powerful ant colony to continue to harvest resources that are in the weaker colony's part of the terrarium.
Good? Bad? Not really my area of interest.
So the question, more specifically, is, "Will we reduce birth rates, increase death rates, or colonize points in space other than those on the surface of this slightly squashed sphere?" Chances are it will be some combination of those three, so then the question becomes, "How would we like to, and how can we, steer the direction of increased death rates, reduced birth rates, and non-earth-surface harvesting?" Heck - you've probably seen it in Civilization or StarCraft or whatever - you want more units, you need to take over new territory and harvest the stuff.
For a good right-of-center economist's view of one of the issues, check out The Coming Economic Collapse. It helped me confirm that it's not just lefty FUD.
Very agreed - trees are good. Parent/child relationships are not, as you note, extension. There are trees with node types that extend other node types (or node types that extend a base type).
And you can represent them in a database by having discriminator fields (as pointed out in another response). And if you were doing a tree that contained a variety of node types, it might make some amount of sense to use discriminators. But I would contend that discriminator fields cost more than they pay, much like multiple inheritance. Much as I haven't seen the real world problem that is best solved with multiple inheritance, I have not seen the real world problem that is best solved with discriminators. So I believe it does not exist, much as I believe other things that could be disproven tomorrow.
Is it true that you accepted money (which is how I interpret "support") to do open source development and then did not release the code? I'd like to hear your side of the story.
Hmmm, no response. Now I understand the term "deafening silence."
If he releases the code in the next several weeks, and as he says, he's adding documentation, cleaning it up. etc., where is the problem?
The problem is, right now, he's asking us to contribute data to him while trusting to his good will. That is exactly what CDDB did. Do you remember CDDB? They were the FreeDB before FreeDB. They took our data, then told us to fuck off while they sold it.
If he just dumped the code, there are likely to be just as many complaints.
True, but making the code better will not change that. No matter how good the code is, some jackass is going to find fault with it. The trick to Free Software is not making perfect software, but realizing that there is no such thing.
If Andrew (or whatever his name is) hasn't attempted to distribute binaries that contain GPL code (and I'm not sure we know that he has for a fact), then we need to back the fuck up.
Sure, that's fine, he can do whatever the hell he pleases. But we should no more go use FreeDB2 than go back to CDDB. As it stands today, FreeDB2 is proprietary. We all know what happens with proprietary versions of CDDB, because it happened. CDDB said they would be freee. They asked us to trust them. Then they took our data and told us to fuck off.
Moreover, he broke his obligation to FreeDB. FreeDB has our support because it is Free. At least one person, the person who started FreeDB, the person who grasped why we chose FreeDB over CDDB, expected him to maintain the agreement that is the core value proposition of FreeDB. If Andrew broke that agreement (and maybe he hasn't yet), then he has stolen from a Free project. Should FreeDB have insisted on the copyright like Apache does? Perhaps, then this wouldn't be a problem. Does that mean it's FreeDB's fault? Perhaps, at least in part. Does that mean we should stand up for Andrew (or whatever his name is)? Absolutely not. At this point, he is a maybe crook.
>> mapping class inheritance to rows within a table
> Row 2 extends row 1? I think not (except maybe as a lab experiment proving it's possible).
This is what a "discriminator" in Hibernate does. Which I would think is quite common in any ORM product.
A discriminator makes it possible. That does not mean it is a good idea outside of the lab.