I don't buy your "be funny and people will agree" bit. People smile and laugh and then forget. That works great if you're talking about getting 2% of people who drink Coke to buy a Pepsi - the free market has both options clearly available.
But when you are opposing a corrupt system of backscratchers that has more systemic power than you do, a dramatically tilted market, a gov't that gets paid to not care about the free market, and an apathetic/sheeplike populace, you've only got two options. There's nonviolent protest and the other kind. You just crapped all over nonviolent protest, but you can't possibly mean what that implies.
I guess there is another option - try to think about baseball and hope it's over quickly, but that doesn't sound to pleasant.
They claim it's to eliminate scalping, but in truth it guarantees every seat will be scalped for the highest price with all the money going to ticketmaster. It also eliminates the possibility of getting a decent seat by waiting in line or being lucky.
No bias there at all. Just to add a little counter-spin, it also means it is possible to get good tickets for a show when you want them. Right now the good tickets are, at best, chaotically distributed, meaning there is no way to ensure you get an optimal seat. Really want a good seat? A band you've been a fan of for ten years? Want to treat your girlfriend to an extravagent night out? Tough.
Why can't you get them? Since the best tickets go for the same price as the good tickets, there is no upside in selling the best tickets. They all go to concert promoters and wind up being given to local celebrities in exchange for a possible sound byte on the local news, or given away on the "Annoying Morning Stupidity" show. How does that benefit the real fans?
We get in trouble when we speak of absolutes, and there are people on one side of the fence who say 100% 1st amendment right trumps. and people on the other side of the fence who say 100% National Security trumps. They are both wrong - it needs to be a depends.
You are wrong.
The controls on this information are the oaths of office and sworn secrecy, and the laws that govern those things. If the government is doing something either so far-reaching that people who cannot be trusted know about it, or if the people who are trusted with the information and sworn to secrecy believe that their constitutional oath supercedes their sworn secrecy, then the press is not at fault for publishing it.
That is; if it gets to the press, it is right for the press to publish. If you don't want it published, either don't do it, or keep it small enough scale that it doesn't get leaked.
"But it can't be the case that that right trumps over the right that Americans would like to see, the ability of the federal government to go after criminal activity," he said. "And so those two principles have to be accommodated."
The answer is as simple as it is obvious. "Congress shall make no law... abridging... the freedom of the press." Thus there can be no law that abridges the freedom of the press. If every person in Congress voted in favor, and the President signs it, then all those people have violated their oaths of office. As such they were not duly appointed officers at the time that they voted in favor. Hence the piece of paper with the offending words is not a law.
Of course, there's a much more reasonable solution - the judicial can simply say, "umm, no - go read the first ammendment again."
Note that that is only the enlistment oath. Officers swear only to defend the Constitution - as well they should. It's actually almost identical to the Congressional and Presidential oaths.
"I, _____ (SSAN), having been appointed an officer in the Army of the United States, as indicated above in the grade of _____ do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign or domestic, that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservations or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office upon which I am about to enter; So help me God." (DA Form 71, 1 August 1959, for officers.)
Sometimes the police requests are highly targeted and scrupulously legalistic, while other times they were seen by the company as little more than sloppy fishing expeditions. AOL says that most requests get turned down.
Hmmm - phone records and postal mail are covered by law. It's against the law for the post office to turn over your mail, or the phone company to allow a wiretap, without due authority. Hence the EFF lawsuit against AT&T.
That is not the case (AFAIK) with, for example, credit card records (unless you've filled out the privacy request form). What about email and surfing records? "AOL says that most requests get turned down." Is that just their choice? Should it really be just somebody at AOL's choice? What if your ISP is run by one of the, "If you're not doing anything illegal, you've got nothing to fear" people? Do they have the right to just turn over your information?
As for the credit card records - those are already for sale, I think. Advertisers buy them, right? That's why casinos I've never been to send me stuff in the mail. So... if there's a bunch of data that is already legally available - what do you think the odds are that the gov't already has it? Good, I'd say. That is - I'd bet size cash the gov't already knows about my occasional trips to Las Vegas and my penchant for cheesy spy novel audiobooks.
Since in America your government, it would appear, doesn't bother with the ``lawful search with a warrant'' part, I think we can safely tone down the ``UK sucks'' tone.
If finalize was good enough you wouldn't have GenericServlet.destroy().
Servlet.destroy() is for instances that are not being GC'd (ie: finalize will not be called - but if you followed the same design, nor would destroy be called in C++). It is called when they are taken out of the front line because they haven't been called in a while. Finalize works with servlets, it just doesn't get called until the servlet engine is shut down. Servlet.destroy() is specific to servlets because servlet engines create one instance of the servlet at engine start and keep it for the life of the engine. Servlet.init() and Servlet.destroy() are not like ctors and dtors in C++, they are to enable servlets (which are singleton) to have allocation and deallocation during the singleton's tansition to/from service.
C++ could have an equivalent of Servlet.destroy() too. If you wrote a C++ service engine, which supported singleton service handlers, it would actually make a lot of sense for your engine to have methods equivalent to Servlet.init() and Servlet.destroy(). Of course, you'd want to name it something other than destroy() - maybe finalize() just to be funny:)
Also, you can make finalize() come into play with servlets by having each service call construct an instance of some ServiceHandler class that takes a Request and Response, and goes out of scope at the end of the service call (whence it will be GC'd and finalized). Write ServiceHandler.finalize() and you're good to go.
Or are you just saying you don't like the GC controlling when finalize is called - that you don't want a GC at all for your application? If that's the case, then, umm, don't use Java. It's not the right tool for apps that need fine-grained control of memory deallocation. Open Sourcing Java won't change that - the GC is pretty fundamental to the way Java code is meant to be written. The GC is an intentional trade-off, like Perl's lack of type safety. Java without the GC wouldn't be Java.
finalize isn't good enough? I know it's not guaranteed to run, but I think it only fails to run if you kick the plug out of the wall or kill -9. Do C++ destructors run when you kill -9? How does finalize miss the mark? (genuinely curious to learn more)
and a sizeof method
Now there's one I can get behind. There is at least one good OSS library out there for doing it though. Reply if you want it, I'll dig up a link.
Is there a command line installable Linux client for this thing? I'll put a machine or two into the fray. I may not be very good at real security, but I know how to close ports.
The timing of the tape release couldn't be more perfect, as a reminder to the populace for the reason why their civil liberties are being curtailed.
You say the timing is "perfect", and yet, there are so many other times that it could have been released since 9/11 that would have been just as perfect. In fact, can you name a time in the past few years when there wasn't a borderline catastrophe bubbling away in DC? Perfect timing? I think not - our bold DC leaders are truly dedicated to ensuring that every moment is equally perfect for a distracting press release. The rules changed on 9/11 - we can no longer afford to leave months or even weeks unfilled by scandal at the highest levels of government.
And standing behind them also means listening to them, even the ideas that you don't like.
Hear Hear! Where's my "javac -autobox=warn" and "javac -autobox=no"? That's the first thing I'm going to do if they make it legal to modify. JCP response was slightly less diplomatic than, "No." Is Long.valueOf( myPrimitive ) really so hard that they had to make it impossible for me to prevent autoboxing?!?/rant. Everything else in Tiger is awesome.
An unfortunate sentence in an otherwise splendid post.
Yeah, agreed. I regretted it after hitting submit. It was just an impulsive desire to turn that bloody phrase back on one of the "support the gov't blindly" people.
FWIW, I also regret the "these are the times" part. I actually don't think we are at that level. (but perhaps I being overly prudent, or disposed to suffer, haha)
The reason we have journalistst and freedom of the press is because we can't trust the government.
Well said, and to the grandparent, I would go a step further.
Even if/when you can trust the gov't, it is your duty as a US Citizen to not trust the government. Try reading the Declaration of Independance sometime. It makes it pretty clear that your obligation as a citizen of this great nation is to defend it against all aggressors, foreign and domestic. Defend the nation, not the government. It is not necessary now (IMO), but may someday become necessary to defend this nation against the government, just as was done in 1776. The media is the fourth estate that guarantees that it is possible for us to know when we must fulfill that duty.
To make it more explicit, while I do not know nor automatically believe that such is the case here, any attempt to prevent the media from fulfilling their role as the fourth estate is every bit as treasonous as trying to short-circuit one of the three branches of government.
If you don't feel you can live up to this obligation, you are not required to stay in this country. Our Founding Fathers had some very big and difficult goals. It is times like these that test our resolve to live up to their ideals.
What's the current state of something like Debian's apt system and repositories for BSD? Is there a system for single command installation of applications and all the libs on which they depend? Does it work 99.9% of the time like Debian's repositories? 95% of the reason I use Debian primarily instead of the other Linuxen I have used extensively (RedHat, Ubuntu, Mandrake, Xandros) is the flawlessness, breadth, and depth of Deb's repositories. If BSD has something substantially similar, I'll give it a go.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, so, what then?
I don't buy your "be funny and people will agree" bit. People smile and laugh and then forget. That works great if you're talking about getting 2% of people who drink Coke to buy a Pepsi - the free market has both options clearly available.
But when you are opposing a corrupt system of backscratchers that has more systemic power than you do, a dramatically tilted market, a gov't that gets paid to not care about the free market, and an apathetic/sheeplike populace, you've only got two options. There's nonviolent protest and the other kind. You just crapped all over nonviolent protest, but you can't possibly mean what that implies.
I guess there is another option - try to think about baseball and hope it's over quickly, but that doesn't sound to pleasant.
They claim it's to eliminate scalping, but in truth it guarantees every seat will be scalped for the highest price with all the money going to ticketmaster. It also eliminates the possibility of getting a decent seat by waiting in line or being lucky.
No bias there at all. Just to add a little counter-spin, it also means it is possible to get good tickets for a show when you want them. Right now the good tickets are, at best, chaotically distributed, meaning there is no way to ensure you get an optimal seat. Really want a good seat? A band you've been a fan of for ten years? Want to treat your girlfriend to an extravagent night out? Tough.
Why can't you get them? Since the best tickets go for the same price as the good tickets, there is no upside in selling the best tickets. They all go to concert promoters and wind up being given to local celebrities in exchange for a possible sound byte on the local news, or given away on the "Annoying Morning Stupidity" show. How does that benefit the real fans?
We get in trouble when we speak of absolutes, and there are people on one side of the fence who say 100% 1st amendment right trumps. and people on the other side of the fence who say 100% National Security trumps. They are both wrong - it needs to be a depends.
You are wrong.
The controls on this information are the oaths of office and sworn secrecy, and the laws that govern those things. If the government is doing something either so far-reaching that people who cannot be trusted know about it, or if the people who are trusted with the information and sworn to secrecy believe that their constitutional oath supercedes their sworn secrecy, then the press is not at fault for publishing it.
That is; if it gets to the press, it is right for the press to publish. If you don't want it published, either don't do it, or keep it small enough scale that it doesn't get leaked.
Tell that to England (IRA bombings) or Israel, which seem to function just fine.
Or Spain (Basques) or Japan (Aum Shinrikyo).
"But it can't be the case that that right trumps over the right that Americans would like to see, the ability of the federal government to go after criminal activity," he said. "And so those two principles have to be accommodated."
The answer is as simple as it is obvious. "Congress shall make no law... abridging... the freedom of the press." Thus there can be no law that abridges the freedom of the press. If every person in Congress voted in favor, and the President signs it, then all those people have violated their oaths of office. As such they were not duly appointed officers at the time that they voted in favor. Hence the piece of paper with the offending words is not a law.
Of course, there's a much more reasonable solution - the judicial can simply say, "umm, no - go read the first ammendment again."
Note that that is only the enlistment oath. Officers swear only to defend the Constitution - as well they should. It's actually almost identical to the Congressional and Presidential oaths.
"I, _____ (SSAN), having been appointed an officer in the Army of the United States, as indicated above in the grade of _____ do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign or domestic, that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservations or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office upon which I am about to enter; So help me God." (DA Form 71, 1 August 1959, for officers.)
Sometimes the police requests are highly targeted and scrupulously legalistic, while other times they were seen by the company as little more than sloppy fishing expeditions. AOL says that most requests get turned down.
Hmmm - phone records and postal mail are covered by law. It's against the law for the post office to turn over your mail, or the phone company to allow a wiretap, without due authority. Hence the EFF lawsuit against AT&T.
That is not the case (AFAIK) with, for example, credit card records (unless you've filled out the privacy request form). What about email and surfing records? "AOL says that most requests get turned down." Is that just their choice? Should it really be just somebody at AOL's choice? What if your ISP is run by one of the, "If you're not doing anything illegal, you've got nothing to fear" people? Do they have the right to just turn over your information?
As for the credit card records - those are already for sale, I think. Advertisers buy them, right? That's why casinos I've never been to send me stuff in the mail. So... if there's a bunch of data that is already legally available - what do you think the odds are that the gov't already has it? Good, I'd say. That is - I'd bet size cash the gov't already knows about my occasional trips to Las Vegas and my penchant for cheesy spy novel audiobooks.
Just my random tinfoil hat thoughts.
Blue Cross and Aetna have opened medical schools in Bombay, Mumbai, and Delhi. Outsourced surgery anyone?
Since in America your government, it would appear, doesn't bother with the ``lawful search with a warrant'' part, I think we can safely tone down the ``UK sucks'' tone.
:P
UK SUCKS UK SUCKS UK SUCKS.
SO DOES MY GOV'T SO DOES MY GOV'T.
Tone it down? thtbtthbtt
You can have my keys when you pry them from my cold, dead, fingers.
If finalize was good enough you wouldn't have GenericServlet.destroy().
:)
Servlet.destroy() is for instances that are not being GC'd (ie: finalize will not be called - but if you followed the same design, nor would destroy be called in C++). It is called when they are taken out of the front line because they haven't been called in a while. Finalize works with servlets, it just doesn't get called until the servlet engine is shut down. Servlet.destroy() is specific to servlets because servlet engines create one instance of the servlet at engine start and keep it for the life of the engine. Servlet.init() and Servlet.destroy() are not like ctors and dtors in C++, they are to enable servlets (which are singleton) to have allocation and deallocation during the singleton's tansition to/from service.
C++ could have an equivalent of Servlet.destroy() too. If you wrote a C++ service engine, which supported singleton service handlers, it would actually make a lot of sense for your engine to have methods equivalent to Servlet.init() and Servlet.destroy(). Of course, you'd want to name it something other than destroy() - maybe finalize() just to be funny
Also, you can make finalize() come into play with servlets by having each service call construct an instance of some ServiceHandler class that takes a Request and Response, and goes out of scope at the end of the service call (whence it will be GC'd and finalized). Write ServiceHandler.finalize() and you're good to go.
Or are you just saying you don't like the GC controlling when finalize is called - that you don't want a GC at all for your application? If that's the case, then, umm, don't use Java. It's not the right tool for apps that need fine-grained control of memory deallocation. Open Sourcing Java won't change that - the GC is pretty fundamental to the way Java code is meant to be written. The GC is an intentional trade-off, like Perl's lack of type safety. Java without the GC wouldn't be Java.
How about Java with destructors
finalize isn't good enough? I know it's not guaranteed to run, but I think it only fails to run if you kick the plug out of the wall or kill -9. Do C++ destructors run when you kill -9? How does finalize miss the mark? (genuinely curious to learn more)
and a sizeof method
Now there's one I can get behind. There is at least one good OSS library out there for doing it though. Reply if you want it, I'll dig up a link.
Our users never signed up for this kind of thing.
I'll sign up.
Is there a command line installable Linux client for this thing? I'll put a machine or two into the fray. I may not be very good at real security, but I know how to close ports.
The timing of the tape release couldn't be more perfect, as a reminder to the populace for the reason why their civil liberties are being curtailed.
:)
You say the timing is "perfect", and yet, there are so many other times that it could have been released since 9/11 that would have been just as perfect. In fact, can you name a time in the past few years when there wasn't a borderline catastrophe bubbling away in DC? Perfect timing? I think not - our bold DC leaders are truly dedicated to ensuring that every moment is equally perfect for a distracting press release. The rules changed on 9/11 - we can no longer afford to leave months or even weeks unfilled by scandal at the highest levels of government.
Anyone can use the code... Is there any reason why such an approach wouldn't work?
I'd have to toss in "can modify and redistribute." Open Source ain't Open Source if I can't let others try my dodgy hack.
And standing behind them also means listening to them, even the ideas that you don't like.
/rant. Everything else in Tiger is awesome.
Hear Hear! Where's my "javac -autobox=warn" and "javac -autobox=no"? That's the first thing I'm going to do if they make it legal to modify. JCP response was slightly less diplomatic than, "No." Is Long.valueOf( myPrimitive ) really so hard that they had to make it impossible for me to prevent autoboxing?!?
But they DO care about IBM or Microsoft creating a VM that advertises compatbility, but actually pulls the bait-and-switch routine.
.net version of Java is come to mind.
Uhhh, don't they already have this? Jikes, VisualJ++, and whatever the
An unfortunate sentence in an otherwise splendid post.
Yeah, agreed. I regretted it after hitting submit. It was just an impulsive desire to turn that bloody phrase back on one of the "support the gov't blindly" people.
FWIW, I also regret the "these are the times" part. I actually don't think we are at that level. (but perhaps I being overly prudent, or disposed to suffer, haha)
The reason we have journalistst and freedom of the press is because we can't trust the government.
Well said, and to the grandparent, I would go a step further.
Even if/when you can trust the gov't, it is your duty as a US Citizen to not trust the government. Try reading the Declaration of Independance sometime. It makes it pretty clear that your obligation as a citizen of this great nation is to defend it against all aggressors, foreign and domestic. Defend the nation, not the government. It is not necessary now (IMO), but may someday become necessary to defend this nation against the government, just as was done in 1776. The media is the fourth estate that guarantees that it is possible for us to know when we must fulfill that duty.
To make it more explicit, while I do not know nor automatically believe that such is the case here, any attempt to prevent the media from fulfilling their role as the fourth estate is every bit as treasonous as trying to short-circuit one of the three branches of government.
If you don't feel you can live up to this obligation, you are not required to stay in this country. Our Founding Fathers had some very big and difficult goals. It is times like these that test our resolve to live up to their ideals.
That's just what I was looking for, thank you!
Thank you! I'll give that a try.
Thanks! I'll try it.
Thanks! I'll give it a go.
Yes the threat of terrorism is real, but I'm think we have a lot more to fear from our own government than from terrorists.
:)
You are not alone.
Question for BSD people:
What's the current state of something like Debian's apt system and repositories for BSD? Is there a system for single command installation of applications and all the libs on which they depend? Does it work 99.9% of the time like Debian's repositories? 95% of the reason I use Debian primarily instead of the other Linuxen I have used extensively (RedHat, Ubuntu, Mandrake, Xandros) is the flawlessness, breadth, and depth of Deb's repositories. If BSD has something substantially similar, I'll give it a go.