then I don't see why having guns also be illegal would hinder you in any way.
Because weapons (and ammunition) do need to be commercially produced and available in some manner for people to get their hands on them. They need to be distributed somewhat anonymously throughout the population *before* anything bad happens in order for them to serve any deterrent effect.
if things get that bad, what the government you're trying to overthrow says you can or can not do will be irrelevant at that point. Therefore, the sole reason claimed for the 2nd amendment to continue to exist is just silly.
True, but it is well before that point (historically speaking) that private firearms are usually confiscated. Which is why attempts to confiscate or restrict access to firearms, even when there is no particular notion of any imminent threat, is still treated as a worrisome move. Similarly, most people don't particularly care if the Ku Klux Klan gets to march through the town -- I suspect everyone would be perfectly happy to tell them not to. But we also recognize that easy cases make bad laws, and by telling the KKK they don't qualify for free speech, we'd likely be preventing a far more important protest from happening in the future.
But the whole "failsafe against the government" argument just makes no sense in this century.
Well, then amend the Constitution. Slavery doesn't make sense in this century either, prohibition doesn't make sense, the lack of clear lines of presidential succession doesn't make sense. That's why we amended the Constitution to get it up to date with what we thought were current needs and changing times.
I suspect that it would be difficult to win an argument claiming that firearms would be ineffective against a modern military, though (which seems to be what you're saying elsewhere). When you cannot tell civilians from enemy combatants or friendly personnel, it's pretty much impossible to effectively use any significant military power. Battleships and fighter jets are fairly useless when the enemy is the guy you hired to work in the army kitchen or drive the truck full of important spare parts. Nuclear weapons don't do any good if the guy you're fighting lives a block away from your own base.
A file system IS a database. Of course the issue is moot since WinFS will be released on the 43rd day of Lovermber in the year Two thousand and flibbity quard.
You can run terminal stuff right in Quicksilver if you want -- I hate the modal nature of dashboard, so I never use it, but do use Quicksilver for quick lines of bash.
That's what the 's' keys are for -- after them, I could type more of the menu item name rather than hit the arrow, the point is that there is no one-key solution for getting to a specific item. Such progressive name matching is great for spotlight and quicksilver, where you're dealing with arbitrary data and names, but for application menus which are limited and fixed lists, I'd rather the developer just picked a key to be the accelerator and I could hit that key to jump right to an item without any ambiguity.
I know I can sit down on any windows application and navigate through the keyboard more quickly than most use the mouse, but it just is nowhere near as fast using menus on the mac because you have to be paying much more attention to what's getting highlighted at any given moment rather than looking ahead to what the NEXT key you need to press is.
That's what i was referring to about there being access, but nowhere near as straightforward. Yeah, it works, but it's not as fast as the more direct Windows Alt-key menu access. If I want to apply an unsharp mask in photoshop, I can hit Alt-t, s, n, enter, which can be done in about a half-second.
On the Mac I'd have to do ctrl-F2, s, right arrow, s, right arrow, u, enter (and that would be if I knew the shortest possible way, in reality I'd be doing something more like ctrl-F2, right, right, right, etc). It's much slower because you can't reliably get to a specific menu in one combination, and then once you're in the menus you wind up doing a lot of manual arrow key directing to get from place to place because you can't tell without experimentation which particular letter can be used to jump from to a specific item or if it's even possible.
(Of course now I make a shortcut in Photoshop that goes directly to unsharp mask, it's just an example)
Quicksilver, makes launching apps/finding information insanely great and is completely customizable -- much more powerful than the default Spotlight interface. You could easily make a Windows-R shortcut to launch terminal, or you can enter terminal commands directly in the QS interface. QS can even access my bash history and rerun command lines that I ran manually from terminal.app two days ago.
There's also an app that adds a small terminal to every window on the system (can't think of the name of it at the moment, pretty sure it's on sourceforge).
I do wish there was an easier way to universally access all menus on OSX from the keyboard, the way that Alt does on Windows (there is keyboard access, but it's nowhere near as straightforward), but beyond that I've found the Mac to be ridiculously powerful in terms of keyboard use, even before I found QS.
Or he could create a shortcut in Universal Access. Or make a service with a shortcut. Or make a QS shortcut. Or geez, just put the terminal on his dock if it's such a hassle.
After all, he works for them. The fact that he is a professor does not eliminate the fact that he has a superior he is supposed to listen to. This isn't government censorship, this is simply a case of a man wanting to disobey his boss.
Somehow I suspect that this university's professors do not report to the IT or security staff. They certainly don't at any of the universities I attended or worked at
Having an IT guy show up with campus police and telling you what you are not allowed to teach in class is the sort of thing I'd expect to make interesting conversation at the next faculty meeting. It is not the professor who would be reprimanded in such a situation.
If the CS department chair decides to remove all discussion of anonymizing networks from the class' curriculum, then the professor will certainly have to choose whether to stay or leave.
My girlfriend has a pair of E2Cs, which she can easily tell the difference betweek 192k VBR mp3 and lossless.
Wow, you and your girlfriend should get jobs as audio engineers. In double-blind listening tests, even the guys at Hydrogenaudio can tell no difference between most modern audio codecs at 128kbp or higher and CDDA. I remember doing my first ABX test back in 1999 and laughing at how bad even 192kbps MP3s sounded. I recently ABXed a dozen codecs after reading the Hydrogenaudio results, and outside of classical music couldn't tell the lossy from the lossless until the compression was 112kbps and below. Audio compression has come a long way since BladeEnc.
I thought you were backing up my points until I read the last line of your post. I don't understand what in your quotes disagreed with anything I said about the development of NeXTSTEP.
they didn't build it at all, in fact. They took an extremely secure and mature server OS and conveniently made it theirs. So Bill's comment is in fact, correct: Apple hasn't really done anything for the security of their OS
On the contrary, NeXTSTEP was built by Steve Jobs' NeXT almost 20 years ago now. Yes, they make liberal use of BSD and other open software components in the middleware, but pretty much everything below the user level and above the command line was created from scratch (for better or worse, as anyone trying to run a web server on native OS X sockets can tell you). Apple most certainly made a huge investment in security (and features and other things) when they bought NeXT and started the transition to what became OS X. It took several years and many millions of dollars and lines of code.
And even from day 1 of OS X's release, they've made mostly good decisions when faced with security vs usability choices, while in the same 8 years MS has made pretty much all the wrong decisions when faced with the same questions. It's possible they've changed 180 degrees on their security with Vista, but it sure doesn't seem that way from the installations we've set up for testing. They seem more interested in bombarding the user with confirmation dialogs so that they can then blame the user when something goes wrong, rather than actually coming up with a (or using an existing) security model that is both useful and usable for a non-computer expert.
I think Gates (and MS) is too much like most slashdotters, thinking that if anything goes wrong it's because the user didn't RTFM, not because the system was poorly designed. Jobs, at the opposite extreme, wants to make computers be sealed appliances with no user-serviceable parts but expensive maintenance contracts. Somewhere in-between is the right answer, Apple is just fortunate to have enough good programmers to translate Jobs' desires into a functional compromise. MS doesn't have anywhere near enough UI designers or usability testers to overcome the RTFM attitude that comes from MS's geek culture.
Funny you mention Consumer Reports as "education" by that definition. I find them misleading in every topic I can....They called it entirely ineffective and cited the lack of fans as justification that it didn't do anything at all...And ask any educated mother of someone under the age of 6 what Consumer Reports just did about car seats.
I've had the exact opposite experience. On every subject I am informed about, Consumer Reports does a good job of advising the layman buyer. That doesn't mean they're 100% technically correct about every way they phrase an article, or that I agree with their ultimate recommendations, but they always have solid methodology and testing, and sensible conclusions for the average consumer.
I've met a lot of people who like to bitch about Consumer Reports because it shows their particular love isn't really all that great to most people. They showed empirically that the Ionic Breeze didn't do much. They suggested that if it was supposed to filter a roomful of air, maybe some way of getting a larger volume of air through the device would increase effectiveness. Either way, it certainly was not useful at removing particulates from the rooms they tested it in. It still wasn't useful when SI had them test a newer version a year later. If you find that it makes your air fresher and more beautiful, by all means continue to use it. A third of all patients respond to the placebo, and if they're getting good results, why burst their bubble?
The car seat thing was pretty major. I think ten years ago they had a similar screwup. This isn't Dateline NBC where they're rigging tests to be spectacular -- I think you can expect that once a decade or so their lab (or a third-party lab, in this case) will mess up on something.
As someone else suggested, check your memory, it may be bad. I think 95% of the crashes I've had in my lifetime that weren't clearly a particular piece of broken software or a video driver were bad hardware.
My G5 runs 24/7 doing plenty of heavy-duty production stuff and only crashes (ironically enough) any time a particular iPod is plugged in via Firewire. I assume it is the FW chipset on my mobo but it hasn't been a big enough deal to worry about, the scanner works fine and nothing else is on FW.
Of course, my Windows XP system also runs 24/7 doing plenty of production stuff and it doesn't crash except due to bad software. Video drivers do tend to be more flakey if you update them a lot, but that's the price of getting new, optimized drivers every month. It's good to at least have the choice to be stable or bleeding edge:)
And my FreeBSD system, well geez, it's FreeBSD, it just keeps going and going! But I'm not attaching and removing hardware all the time or running 50 different performance applications, so you could say that it isn't being stressed as much.
They do not see, though, how limited they are in their ability to customize their systems
Or perhaps they don't see that as a virtue. To an individual power user, customization may be a critical feature, but over a large population predictability, simplicity and uniformity will be far more important. Not everyone driving to the grocery store wants a Formula 1 race car, regardless of how much more advanced it is over their Ford Taurus.
This argument about viruses has absolutely no basis since...
It doesn't matter WHY the system is secure, as long as it is. It's still an advantage to the system.
Our group's web server is secure. It's running IIS3 on WinNT 4.0, so it doesn't have any of the modern features required for modern exploits. Yeah, we miss out on bullet points, but it runs 24/7 and never gives us any trouble, so we don't worry about it.
I use a Mac OS X desktop, in part because the maintenance of security and such is nonexistent. Do I care why it is nonexistent? No, it saves me time whether it is "fair" or not. I don't worry about viruses, and I haven't for several years now. Maybe if Linux or OSX were dominating the market they'd be exploited the most. As a user, who cares about a hypothetical world? I'm saving time and money in this one.
Interesting, i lived in CT for a year and didn't notice that, but wasn't looking much, either. I know here in TX in the several cities I've lived, the prices were significantly higher at convenience stores (though i admit I only go to ones with gas pumps, so they may price higher since you're stopping for gas already). I was really counting my pennies at one point, so I was acutely aware of which stores had staple goods for 20 cents less than the others:)
The same reason people are willing to pay 99 cents for a music file they could download free from Kazaa, or willing to pay $3.99 for a gallon of milk at the gas station they could buy for $2.50 at the grocery store just a few blocks away.
It's shocking news to both content providers and pirates, but most people have money in their pocket and they don't mind spending it on things that they like when it is made convenient to do so. They are particularly happy to spend more when it saves them time and gives them a guarantee of quality, both of which are major motivators of buying songs/TV shows rather than simply getting a radio or cable hookup.
Keep in mind that if you want to watch particular shows and don't have an infinitely flexible schedule, you'll need to include the price of a TiVo or something similar to make sure you're recording all those "cheap" shows. And you'll have to wait for a rerun or a DVD to be released if you missed an episode.
In the article, they keep on talking about high capacitance as if it's a good thing, but I was under the impression that you want to minimize the capacitance to let the transistor switch faster. Am I wrong? Is the article wrong? Is this a different capacitance that they're talking about?
I interpreted it to mean that the high capacitance referred to the low level of leakage -- ie, more energy stays inside the path as productive power rather than radiating as heat or creating static interference with nearby paths. Resistance should be the same or lower, allowing the same charge/discharge speeds. Although even if it were higher and the switching was slower, the increase in performance per watt (since you're wasting massively fewer watts) might be worth the tradeoff.
A distributor tells a manufacturer what it will buy based on what it thinks its retail customers will find acceptable.
And a government tells a manufacturer what it's citizens find acceptable. In many industries, this is a more direct route from customer feedback to manufacturer than the financial link. In both cases it is a matter of many customers collectively negotiating by proxy.
That is a whole lot different from a government mandating what can and cannot be sold.
How is it any different than Wal*Mart mandating what can and cannot be sold in its stores? Doesn't Wal*Mart have the right to decide what they want to sell in their stores? Doesn't Norway have the right to decide what they want to sell in their borders?
In the first case, the manufacturer can always find a different distribution channel or create its own. These two things don't even come close to equating which to me shows how skewed your view of economics is.
Apple has several hundred countries in which they can sell their products, and which Norway has no influence over. Most commercial products rely on a handful of distribution and sales corporations to reach the vast majority of the retail customers. In terms of viable economic market choices, Apple has a lot more freedom of where to sell and under that terms than Norway does of what to buy and under what terms.
Nobody is being force to buy iPods or use the iTunes store.
Nobody is being forced to sell music players in Norway, either.
Free market principles work in both directions. Anyone can set the terms they like for a deal, and it is up to the other side to decide whether or not those terms are acceptable.
Slashdot Mirror
Because weapons (and ammunition) do need to be commercially produced and available in some manner for people to get their hands on them. They need to be distributed somewhat anonymously throughout the population *before* anything bad happens in order for them to serve any deterrent effect.
True, but it is well before that point (historically speaking) that private firearms are usually confiscated. Which is why attempts to confiscate or restrict access to firearms, even when there is no particular notion of any imminent threat, is still treated as a worrisome move. Similarly, most people don't particularly care if the Ku Klux Klan gets to march through the town -- I suspect everyone would be perfectly happy to tell them not to. But we also recognize that easy cases make bad laws, and by telling the KKK they don't qualify for free speech, we'd likely be preventing a far more important protest from happening in the future.
Well, then amend the Constitution. Slavery doesn't make sense in this century either, prohibition doesn't make sense, the lack of clear lines of presidential succession doesn't make sense. That's why we amended the Constitution to get it up to date with what we thought were current needs and changing times.
I suspect that it would be difficult to win an argument claiming that firearms would be ineffective against a modern military, though (which seems to be what you're saying elsewhere). When you cannot tell civilians from enemy combatants or friendly personnel, it's pretty much impossible to effectively use any significant military power. Battleships and fighter jets are fairly useless when the enemy is the guy you hired to work in the army kitchen or drive the truck full of important spare parts. Nuclear weapons don't do any good if the guy you're fighting lives a block away from your own base.
A file system IS a database. Of course the issue is moot since WinFS will be released on the 43rd day of Lovermber in the year Two thousand and flibbity quard.
Wow, I'm building a Doomsday Vault of Macaroni and Cheese and canned ravioli in my utility room!
I'm quite certain you've never seen a free market in health care.
You can run terminal stuff right in Quicksilver if you want -- I hate the modal nature of dashboard, so I never use it, but do use Quicksilver for quick lines of bash.
That's what the 's' keys are for -- after them, I could type more of the menu item name rather than hit the arrow, the point is that there is no one-key solution for getting to a specific item. Such progressive name matching is great for spotlight and quicksilver, where you're dealing with arbitrary data and names, but for application menus which are limited and fixed lists, I'd rather the developer just picked a key to be the accelerator and I could hit that key to jump right to an item without any ambiguity.
I know I can sit down on any windows application and navigate through the keyboard more quickly than most use the mouse, but it just is nowhere near as fast using menus on the mac because you have to be paying much more attention to what's getting highlighted at any given moment rather than looking ahead to what the NEXT key you need to press is.
That's what i was referring to about there being access, but nowhere near as straightforward. Yeah, it works, but it's not as fast as the more direct Windows Alt-key menu access. If I want to apply an unsharp mask in photoshop, I can hit Alt-t, s, n, enter, which can be done in about a half-second.
On the Mac I'd have to do ctrl-F2, s, right arrow, s, right arrow, u, enter (and that would be if I knew the shortest possible way, in reality I'd be doing something more like ctrl-F2, right, right, right, etc). It's much slower because you can't reliably get to a specific menu in one combination, and then once you're in the menus you wind up doing a lot of manual arrow key directing to get from place to place because you can't tell without experimentation which particular letter can be used to jump from to a specific item or if it's even possible.
(Of course now I make a shortcut in Photoshop that goes directly to unsharp mask, it's just an example)
Quicksilver, makes launching apps/finding information insanely great and is completely customizable -- much more powerful than the default Spotlight interface. You could easily make a Windows-R shortcut to launch terminal, or you can enter terminal commands directly in the QS interface. QS can even access my bash history and rerun command lines that I ran manually from terminal.app two days ago.
There's also an app that adds a small terminal to every window on the system (can't think of the name of it at the moment, pretty sure it's on sourceforge).
I do wish there was an easier way to universally access all menus on OSX from the keyboard, the way that Alt does on Windows (there is keyboard access, but it's nowhere near as straightforward), but beyond that I've found the Mac to be ridiculously powerful in terms of keyboard use, even before I found QS.
Or he could create a shortcut in Universal Access. Or make a service with a shortcut. Or make a QS shortcut. Or geez, just put the terminal on his dock if it's such a hassle.
Somehow I suspect that this university's professors do not report to the IT or security staff. They certainly don't at any of the universities I attended or worked at
Having an IT guy show up with campus police and telling you what you are not allowed to teach in class is the sort of thing I'd expect to make interesting conversation at the next faculty meeting. It is not the professor who would be reprimanded in such a situation.
If the CS department chair decides to remove all discussion of anonymizing networks from the class' curriculum, then the professor will certainly have to choose whether to stay or leave.
I thought you were backing up my points until I read the last line of your post. I don't understand what in your quotes disagreed with anything I said about the development of NeXTSTEP.
And even from day 1 of OS X's release, they've made mostly good decisions when faced with security vs usability choices, while in the same 8 years MS has made pretty much all the wrong decisions when faced with the same questions. It's possible they've changed 180 degrees on their security with Vista, but it sure doesn't seem that way from the installations we've set up for testing. They seem more interested in bombarding the user with confirmation dialogs so that they can then blame the user when something goes wrong, rather than actually coming up with a (or using an existing) security model that is both useful and usable for a non-computer expert.
I think Gates (and MS) is too much like most slashdotters, thinking that if anything goes wrong it's because the user didn't RTFM, not because the system was poorly designed. Jobs, at the opposite extreme, wants to make computers be sealed appliances with no user-serviceable parts but expensive maintenance contracts. Somewhere in-between is the right answer, Apple is just fortunate to have enough good programmers to translate Jobs' desires into a functional compromise. MS doesn't have anywhere near enough UI designers or usability testers to overcome the RTFM attitude that comes from MS's geek culture.
The only question is whether the story and craft appeals across generations, which Harry Potter seems to do very well so far.
I've met a lot of people who like to bitch about Consumer Reports because it shows their particular love isn't really all that great to most people. They showed empirically that the Ionic Breeze didn't do much. They suggested that if it was supposed to filter a roomful of air, maybe some way of getting a larger volume of air through the device would increase effectiveness. Either way, it certainly was not useful at removing particulates from the rooms they tested it in. It still wasn't useful when SI had them test a newer version a year later. If you find that it makes your air fresher and more beautiful, by all means continue to use it. A third of all patients respond to the placebo, and if they're getting good results, why burst their bubble?
The car seat thing was pretty major. I think ten years ago they had a similar screwup. This isn't Dateline NBC where they're rigging tests to be spectacular -- I think you can expect that once a decade or so their lab (or a third-party lab, in this case) will mess up on something.
As someone else suggested, check your memory, it may be bad. I think 95% of the crashes I've had in my lifetime that weren't clearly a particular piece of broken software or a video driver were bad hardware.
:)
My G5 runs 24/7 doing plenty of heavy-duty production stuff and only crashes (ironically enough) any time a particular iPod is plugged in via Firewire. I assume it is the FW chipset on my mobo but it hasn't been a big enough deal to worry about, the scanner works fine and nothing else is on FW.
Of course, my Windows XP system also runs 24/7 doing plenty of production stuff and it doesn't crash except due to bad software. Video drivers do tend to be more flakey if you update them a lot, but that's the price of getting new, optimized drivers every month. It's good to at least have the choice to be stable or bleeding edge
And my FreeBSD system, well geez, it's FreeBSD, it just keeps going and going! But I'm not attaching and removing hardware all the time or running 50 different performance applications, so you could say that it isn't being stressed as much.
Our group's web server is secure. It's running IIS3 on WinNT 4.0, so it doesn't have any of the modern features required for modern exploits. Yeah, we miss out on bullet points, but it runs 24/7 and never gives us any trouble, so we don't worry about it.
I use a Mac OS X desktop, in part because the maintenance of security and such is nonexistent. Do I care why it is nonexistent? No, it saves me time whether it is "fair" or not. I don't worry about viruses, and I haven't for several years now. Maybe if Linux or OSX were dominating the market they'd be exploited the most. As a user, who cares about a hypothetical world? I'm saving time and money in this one.
Interesting, i lived in CT for a year and didn't notice that, but wasn't looking much, either. I know here in TX in the several cities I've lived, the prices were significantly higher at convenience stores (though i admit I only go to ones with gas pumps, so they may price higher since you're stopping for gas already). I was really counting my pennies at one point, so I was acutely aware of which stores had staple goods for 20 cents less than the others :)
The same reason people are willing to pay 99 cents for a music file they could download free from Kazaa, or willing to pay $3.99 for a gallon of milk at the gas station they could buy for $2.50 at the grocery store just a few blocks away.
It's shocking news to both content providers and pirates, but most people have money in their pocket and they don't mind spending it on things that they like when it is made convenient to do so. They are particularly happy to spend more when it saves them time and gives them a guarantee of quality, both of which are major motivators of buying songs/TV shows rather than simply getting a radio or cable hookup.
Keep in mind that if you want to watch particular shows and don't have an infinitely flexible schedule, you'll need to include the price of a TiVo or something similar to make sure you're recording all those "cheap" shows. And you'll have to wait for a rerun or a DVD to be released if you missed an episode.
Yes, governments are part of the free market.
Free market principles work in both directions. Anyone can set the terms they like for a deal, and it is up to the other side to decide whether or not those terms are acceptable.