The voting may be over, but court still has some right to review the law. The question is if they have any room left to maneuver and if they're inclined to do so. With the state constitution amended, I suspect they really have one option, and that's to find that the amendment Prop 8 enacts runs afoul of the U.S. Constitution, in which case, they'd be tossing the case up to the federal level. It's not clear the court would do this, however -- the court was pretty closely divided on the decision that overturned prop 22, and a second public referendum that amends the state constitution might be something one of the judges wouldn't be willing to overturn. On the other hand, there may be other ways to toss this into the federal system.
In short, there are fewer options for prop 8 opponents, but it's not necessarily over.
Then what did it have to do with? Not trolling or anything, I'm genuinely curious. I can't think of anything outside of "Because God said so" or "Fags are gross".
"Because God said so" might be one way of boiling it down for some of the voters, in some cases directly, in some cases through some authority they recognized, and in some cases as a highly reduced expression that's not a particularly good vessel for a general philosophy of sexuality that underlies some conservative religious moral codes.
Still, I'm pretty confident that's not the whole story. In my conversations with people, a recurring (if not universal) theme was an acknowledgment that everybody should have legal tools they need to build the domestic life that they find most suits them -- if my experience was representative of the overall population, I can almost guarantee you that any proposition to eliminate domestic partnerships or civil unions or what have you wouldn't have had *half* the support Prop 8 did. And a near universal theme was that nobody should be threatened or beaten or denied housing or employment because they're gay (though some were really uncomfortable with open sexuality in general in the workplace). So this is definitely not "gay people are icky subhumans."
So what made pro prop 8 folks break in the direction of support if they felt pulled in both directions? Most of them wouldn't have put it the way I'm about to, but the biggest thread I pulled out of the conversations is this:
Marriage really isn't simply a personal matter. It's also a community matter in a lot of ways that isn't simply a recognition of legal rights, it's also a form of moral approval regarding the relationship. You can argue that it shouldn't be like this, but it's essentially a social reality at the moment. It works fine as long as you have communities with more or less homogenous values, but it's also now a reality that we don't. So if the state expands the definition of marriage to gender homogenous relationships, it is extending moral approbation to the relationships, and moreover, any citizen of the state will also be compelled as members of the state community to either similarly extend that approval or abandon a conception of marriage that involves communal approval. The later, by the way, is what some people seem to mean when they talk about this damaging marriage.
I suspect some people react violently to the idea that anybody might withhold approbation from gays. Leaving aside that demands for acceptance/tolerance vs essentially forced approbation are pretty much on entirely different planes, I see even a bifurcation on the approbation plane: a willingness to accept that marriage needs to be not the only way to get social approbation (if not moral) if marriage is going to continue to exist in a value heterogenous society, so it's really not going to work that way.
Not everybody had thought this out and framed it quite the way I did. Hell, I'm not sure I did a good job at actually trying to pull this out, and even the most articulate people I talked with had some trouble teasing this out. I think that's one reason you get a lot of people saying "I'm just uncomfortable with it" or "God said so" (or, conversely "Stop the hate"). I do also know people for whom it was, more or less a matter of delegating the decision to people they'd already recognized as spiritual authorities (or they just said they thought and prayed about it and felt intuitive signals that supporting 8 was the right choice). But the majority of people I know were familiar enough with some of the actual dilemmas gay people face they really couldn't let it go at that without grappling with the tension between those real problems and their own moral philosophy.
I can't say if this is actually reflective of Prop 8 voters as a whole. Just my experience. The plural of anecdote is not data, YMMV, offer void in Alabama.
They'll wiggle about trying to call you intolerant for not tolerating their attempts to use the machinery of government
Way to imply anyone that doesn't agree with you is acting in bad faith.
Almost everybody involved in this case is trying to get the machinery of government involved to reflect their particular morality here. The only people who have a position that doesn't involve this are those who advocate separating government involvement with the term marriage entirely.
The argument is more than a little weird and weak in the current climate, but what exactly would be wrong with taking a position with respect to the proposition?
surprising coming from the guy who had been charged with diversity and sensitivity training during his ten-year Microsoft stint
It's surprising only if you assume that anybody who believes the term marriage should remain gender heterogenous must also think the murder of Matthew Shephard was a really good idea.
I didn't vote yes on 8, but I know a lot of people who did, and their decision had little to do with any lack of sensitivity or exposure to diversity.
Maybe the future will be something more along the lines of Nomadic Pict, or Mozart/Oz or maybe some new experimental linear logic programming language seemingly a perfect fit for exchanging web resources over the internet.
I'm intruiged. In general about the potential of logic programming languages (I'd love to replace SQL with Prolog in a number of contexts), and specifically about your proposition, but I'm not sure I see how constraint/logic programming is the perfect fit for web services. Can you elaborate?
/. crowd has yet to find a file manager they actually like.
True!
Until then I would say the Finder is the head of pack
Uh, you lost me there.
I'm a big OS X fan, I've used Apple products for 20 years. And I'd still rather be using Windows Explorer than the OS X Finder more than half the time.
The Finder hasn't been competitive in this respect since the age of OS 9.
Not only is it excruciatingly condescending, it's quite wrong, even if a computer scientist was the one who originally uttered it. Computer science is very damn well about computers because there would be no computer science if you took away the computer.
It's not wrong. It's substantially correct, even if Dijkstra takes a little license by introducing a bit of hyperbole. He *didn't* say computers have no place in computer science or anything ridiculous like that. He's explaining, roughly, that actual computers are really only tools and that the concrete tools themselves do not encompass the field of computation.
Of course, that changes if your definition of "computer" is wide enough to include, say, something between its original meaning and the entire universe in which we live. And having a rather application-oriented viewpoint, I do think the concrete tools are one of the most interesting part of the field. But I also think Dijkstra's comment is extremely useful for performing perspective inversions among people who haven't understood the field is wider and deeper than the conventional set of Von Neumman architectures we've managed to make so far.
If there were no digital processors, data storage, or networks, there would be no reason to develop solutions to problems that are unique to information systems alone. No reason for someone to sit around all day dreaming up the optimal programming language for a given application. No reason for teams of graduate students to work tirelessly in search of the best human-computer interface.
As it turns out, the field is bigger than these things too: even if you eliminated every last one of these things, theoretical computation would probably remain interesting to some people, and indeed, you can find a significant amount of theoretical work done back before most of these things existed in digital form.
I'll agree that there's a great (almost overwhelming) amount of math in studying the theory of computer science, but you can't honestly say that a computer science graduate is merely just some sort of specialized mathematician and leave it at that.
As a Math grad and a programmer of 20+ years, I'd agree that CS is best served as a separate discipline drawing from mathematics, physics, chemistry, EE, and more. And yet you could in fact devote yourself entirely to studying specialized mathematics, never writing a single line of code, and still be working in computer science.
It doesn't do justice to those in the field and it misinforms those who don't understand what the field is all about.
I'd agree it's hard to do the entire field justice in a single sentence, but far from bounding it badly, this phrase invites people to look outside of preconceptions about the field and potentially see something beyond the boxes and screens on their desks.
My argument: Here is the changelog. These are the real risks that are posed by continuing to use the old version. These are the benefits of upgrading.
Those are what's on the label. I'm going to guess "breaks some laptops" isn't.
The fact is there's often the risk of some unpredicted interaction. The more diligent the manufacturer is about mapping out potential machine states, the lower that risk is, but the risk is going to exist.
Waiting a while does in fact provide some advantage: rolling out the updates effectively tests it on a wider variety of potential machine states. The manufacturer then has an opportunity to fix reported problems.
software was years and years out of date
Years and years is obviously too long to wait, but a few weeks can be quite prudent, unless your risk is a security vulnerability with an exploit already in the wild.
Yes, everyone should understand that the POTUS has no real power to change the economy.
The President has few tools at his disposal to directly work on the economy. HOWEVER... that doesn't mean the President couldn't have done something about the financial irresponsibility that led to the current crisis.
There's a lot of signs that some actions 4 years ago by regulators who were with it and weren't ideologically opposed to acting might have prevented some of the worst problems. Recognizing that Credit Default Swaps were insurance and treating them as such might have done it alone, although having someone turn a cold eye to ratings vs real risk of the Mortgage Backed Securities sure would have helped.
I don't have a high degree of confidence, however, that Kerry or Gore would have necessarily been Presidents who created administrations that fit the bill. A lot of people were a step or two behind the industry in understanding the various instruments and a lot of leadership, Democrats and Republicans alike, subscribed to the idea that the market could/would take care of itself, that the risks were well-managed, etc etc.
In what universe do you live? This is completely untrue.
The universe where of the last 7 presidential terms, 5 have been Republicans of reasonably conservative stature. Additionally, during a good chunk of the Bush administration, Republicans also had control of both houses of Congress, and there's evidence they were anything but shy about pushing the boundaries of political appointment. And furthermore, despite lots of hand-wringing about Clinton's "liberalness", a lot of his policy/politics was quite possibly right of Eisenhower.
All in all, it points towards a trend of increasingly conservative appointments, and that's before you even touch things like the Federalist Society....
The recent push for the reinstitution of the "Fairness Doctrine" [wikipedia.org] by the Dems is not really about "fairness" it's about their trying to take a stab at media outlets that don't carry their party line; you can be damn sure they would claim the "big" news networks are already "fair"
This kind of distinction assumes congress would specify either particular outlets or congress in law, which is a pretty dubious assertion. Even assuming the Democrats as horrible as the most partisan conservative thinks they are, the chances they'd get away with it are exceptionally slim.
Presumably the fairness doctrine would be constructed much as before, which is to say, congress wouldn't be specifying which outlets but rather writing the law that would specify procedures for gaining access to any station, and rules would be applied by regulatory agencies and courts.
And especially given that regulatory agencies and courts have been loaded conservative for most of recent history, in theory at least reintroducing fairness doctrine ought to provide unprecedented opportunity for conservatives to address the ostensible problem of the liberal mainstream media in America.
The fact that it doesn't provides a potential insight into how those who direct talking points for conservative media really see the landscape.
5.3 is an interesting release. IMHO they've saved it from being yet another mundane bridge release that's a small step down the path to Java by paying attention to a lot of the excitement surrounding the other dynamic languages. But it's been clear for a while that Java was originally what they planned to grow up into with 6, and 5 being the bridge between it and 4, and the PHP community has always been by and large a bit... pedestrian... in their vision.
I don't think PHP is where people fleeing Perl at this point might go. Python and Ruby and even Javascript have better communities and much more thoughtful design behind them. The biggest thing PHP has had going for it is that it's been on most web servers, and that'll pull the market that just wants to use whatever's available on their web host, but I think overlap between that and Perl users probably split years ago.
Free nationwide internet access would be just like what happens with free nationwide health service.
These services and the markets in which they operate are so unlike each other that any prediction that depends on the similarities between the two is going to fail.
It works so that nobody is left unconnected, but not much more.
The idea that the service would be "not much more" than basic connectivity is at odds with the idea that other services would wither. If the service is mediocre, blocks any substantial portion of the web, or is ad supported then it seems quite likely there's a market for competing services.
Privacy is nixed.
Given the recent and well-publicized level of cooperation between large private telecoms and the state, I'm not sure this is a change from the status quo.
almost everybody is hooked up to STATENET
Bit of a misnomer for privately operated networks with some common state rules, administered by as many parties as choose to participate.
That's why most programming courses require Algebra as a prerequisite - they don't want to spend time explaining logic and representative symbols to students, they want to teach code.
FWIW, my experience was the reverse -- I was exposed to programming well before I hit pre-algebra in 7th grade, via periodic workshops at our elementary school, via Logo classes taught at the community level, and eventually, via the basic interpreter that came with the TI-99/4A computer my parents bought for the family when I was in 5th grade. And for me at least, not having had algebra beforehand wasn't much of a handicap, it simply meant that programming was my introduction to the concept of a variable... and it seemed an easier one than some of the definitions/introductions I later encountered in algebra books...
Does anyone actually enjoy programming JavaScript?
Yes.
No real objects
You might have meant "classes" rather than objects, which is a legitimate formal point, though on a practical level, creating things that act very much like classes is easy.
weak typing
Sometimes, this is a feature, not a bug.
It's fine for small bits of code, but for larger apps?
There are increasing numbers of proofs by example that dynamic languages are able to create large applications.
In fact, there's a half-decent chance that you're browsing this comment in a browser that's a collection of components scripted and glued together via... Javascript.
I can't believe I'm seeing this argument again. Here. Now. In 2008.
Well, as long as we're adopting insulting tones...
It's becoming clearer to me that disbelief at any expression of support for tables as a layout tool may be a sign of inexperience and incomplete knowledge rather than real expertise, and I don't know that I'd ever hire anybody who was dogmatic about this issue. Certainly not at an hourly rate.
I've coded layouts using pure CSS positioning on literally hundreds of sites from 2004 through this year. I can take nearly any arbitrary design and transform it into table-free markup, images, and a stylesheet. And while I think the tools CSS positioning yields are invaluable, it's also unquestionable that for certain designs and tasks, straightjacketing yourself into using *only* those tools often results in extra time/resources spent. Whether or not the benefits are worth it is a cost-benefit analysis problem, not a hard-and-fast rule with a foregone conclusion.
Maybe I'll fire up IE6 to really complete the feeling I'm getting.
If you're not firing up IE6 regularly, you're either blessed to work only on sites that have a skewed audience, or you're falling down on the job. Most general browser share stats I've seen show IE6 as still having over 20% market share, writing them off is premature. Even trying to apply the "bad browsers get gracefully degraded designs" philosophy can be a bit tricky with IE6.
How's inline-block doing these days? I learned about it five years ago, but *Mozilla* didn't correctly support it as of last year. And of course, IE support was, well, limited (only on elements that are inline to start with, doesn't work in quirks mode)....
Worse at sharing vertical. AFAIK, there's still no cross-browser way to vertically center in or proportionally apportion vertical space in a non-td container that's height dependent on the height of the viewport and/or page.
Things will get better in the far future where IE8 supports display: table-cell and IE 6 and 7 drop out of the market... so, about 4-5 years from now...
Furthermore, there are layout problems that CSS is suited for that are still a bigger pain than an equivalent table layout. CSS positioning is a great tool, I'm glad we have it, but it's less useful as a religion. Nothing wrong with keeping tables in your layout toolbox as long as they're used wisely.
Long and the short of it: CRA/CAP loans actually had better underwriting standards, and the evidence suggests that rather than being the bulk of the weight of failing loans, CRA/CAP loans have lower default rates than comparable commercial lending. The GSAs (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) and Congress (including Democrats) are not without responsibility, but the policy Card's talking doesn't really have much to do with the heart of the problem.
A better explanation of some of the underlying mechanics is given in an award-winning episode of This American Life called The Giant Pool of Money. There's a lot of blame to go around -- from the borrowers up through the securitizers who sold global investors the Mortgage Backed Securities, but it seems pretty obvious that without the MBSs and in particular some of the faulty representations of the risks involved in MBSs, you couldn't have had the disconnect between the loans and sensible lending standards (*not* mandated by the CRA), which is ultimately where things really started going off the tracks.
Yahoo is one of the few companies that's positioned anywhere near a place where they could grab a share of what Google's doing.
They have some of the web's most trafficked destinations -- I think they're still #1 in traffic even with the rise of the social networking sites. Part of it's mindshare and brand recognition, part of it is the sheer variety the apps in their portal portfolio (flickr, delicious, groups...).
Microsoft right now is in a position where they are losing control of the web as a platform. Even with some huge advantages leftover from their desktop dominance, they don't seem to be able to do all that great at creating compelling destinations, and what's more, there's an increasing number of destinations that don't require any of their technology at all.
Frankly, if I were betting on which company were more likely to be relevant in 10-15 years, I'd bet on Yahoo.... assuming it survives investors who've forgotten there's such a thing as a decade, and suits and others who can't get their heads around Yahoo's assets, much less put together the engineering culture and talent the company does need to make its bid for resurgence.
Be sure that Microsoft understands this. Getting their hands on these web properties could do wonders for their efforts to shoehorn their proprietary tech back into popular usage. They may not be able to execute, but it's quite probably worth even more than a $20 billion shot.
I don't like the idea so much, because I think their product "management" of IE from 2001-2006 shows that rather than deserving any kind of trust, they're all too happy to leave their products in a state that should constitute criminal theft for sheer number of hours of productivity it stole from web developers, if they can get away with it, which, even in the current environment where their grip is looser than it used to be, they more or less can. But it's a very real possibility if MS acquires Yahoo.
I've been buying Apple products for years. I've been a cemented customer who's never seriously considered non-apple hardware as my main workstation since I used the OS X beta and was hooked. I think people who dismiss Apple's products as merely shinier and better looking either haven't looked at them closely enough or are terminally retarded in terms of their ability to consider product merits outside of their favored spec gestalt. I find Apple's stuff generally (not always, but generally) more convenient and reliable. I'm certain I qualify as a fan, even if I might not make the fanbois cut.
But restrictions like this one absolutely do curb my inclination to buy.
As an example, I've avoided an iPhone because of the tethering and application restrictions (not to mention a desire to avoid being locked to *any* cell phone carrier, let alone AT&T).
And I already don't like a number of choices made with the new MacBooks (in particular, the fact they're only available with glossy screens). Adding DRM to that means I'm simply uninterested -- the upgraded specs might be nice, maybe even very nice in a year or two, but let's face it, modern machines are already ridiculously powerful, and if I'm going to see artificial restrictions and annoying features like extra glare, I'd probably get more utility out of maintaining/upgrading my current MacBook pro than buying a new one in 2-3 years.
I can't speak for the whole of Apple's market. My preferences may not be typical. But there's at least one customer out there who will stop buying if they go far enough off course.
I think one of the reason Apple gets some slack is that they make better products and people *like* them more. It's not hard to realize that being locked in to mobile safari doesn't suck anywhere near as much as being locked in to any incarnation of IE (shudder).
Not to excuse the control-freak behavior, but I think it explains some of the difference in reaction.
You mean like "we'll tax 5% of the people and give it to the other 95%" class warfare thing?
I'm interested. Other than a potential tax credit for the poorest a lá Milton Freaking Friedman (socialist if there ever was one, right?), can you point to any kind of program where anybody in the 95% will get direct cash disbursements?
I'm also not aware of any tax proposals from Obama where 95% will escape paying taxes.
If you want to argue against progressive taxation, that's one thing. But these other things look like hyperbole or sloppy generalizations to me.
Slashdot Mirror
The voting may be over, but court still has some right to review the law. The question is if they have any room left to maneuver and if they're inclined to do so. With the state constitution amended, I suspect they really have one option, and that's to find that the amendment Prop 8 enacts runs afoul of the U.S. Constitution, in which case, they'd be tossing the case up to the federal level. It's not clear the court would do this, however -- the court was pretty closely divided on the decision that overturned prop 22, and a second public referendum that amends the state constitution might be something one of the judges wouldn't be willing to overturn. On the other hand, there may be other ways to toss this into the federal system.
In short, there are fewer options for prop 8 opponents, but it's not necessarily over.
Then what did it have to do with? Not trolling or anything, I'm genuinely curious. I can't think of anything outside of "Because God said so" or "Fags are gross".
"Because God said so" might be one way of boiling it down for some of the voters, in some cases directly, in some cases through some authority they recognized, and in some cases as a highly reduced expression that's not a particularly good vessel for a general philosophy of sexuality that underlies some conservative religious moral codes.
Still, I'm pretty confident that's not the whole story. In my conversations with people, a recurring (if not universal) theme was an acknowledgment that everybody should have legal tools they need to build the domestic life that they find most suits them -- if my experience was representative of the overall population, I can almost guarantee you that any proposition to eliminate domestic partnerships or civil unions or what have you wouldn't have had *half* the support Prop 8 did. And a near universal theme was that nobody should be threatened or beaten or denied housing or employment because they're gay (though some were really uncomfortable with open sexuality in general in the workplace). So this is definitely not "gay people are icky subhumans."
So what made pro prop 8 folks break in the direction of support if they felt pulled in both directions? Most of them wouldn't have put it the way I'm about to, but the biggest thread I pulled out of the conversations is this:
Marriage really isn't simply a personal matter. It's also a community matter in a lot of ways that isn't simply a recognition of legal rights, it's also a form of moral approval regarding the relationship. You can argue that it shouldn't be like this, but it's essentially a social reality at the moment. It works fine as long as you have communities with more or less homogenous values, but it's also now a reality that we don't. So if the state expands the definition of marriage to gender homogenous relationships, it is extending moral approbation to the relationships, and moreover, any citizen of the state will also be compelled as members of the state community to either similarly extend that approval or abandon a conception of marriage that involves communal approval. The later, by the way, is what some people seem to mean when they talk about this damaging marriage.
I suspect some people react violently to the idea that anybody might withhold approbation from gays. Leaving aside that demands for acceptance/tolerance vs essentially forced approbation are pretty much on entirely different planes, I see even a bifurcation on the approbation plane: a willingness to accept that marriage needs to be not the only way to get social approbation (if not moral) if marriage is going to continue to exist in a value heterogenous society, so it's really not going to work that way.
Not everybody had thought this out and framed it quite the way I did. Hell, I'm not sure I did a good job at actually trying to pull this out, and even the most articulate people I talked with had some trouble teasing this out. I think that's one reason you get a lot of people saying "I'm just uncomfortable with it" or "God said so" (or, conversely "Stop the hate"). I do also know people for whom it was, more or less a matter of delegating the decision to people they'd already recognized as spiritual authorities (or they just said they thought and prayed about it and felt intuitive signals that supporting 8 was the right choice). But the majority of people I know were familiar enough with some of the actual dilemmas gay people face they really couldn't let it go at that without grappling with the tension between those real problems and their own moral philosophy.
I can't say if this is actually reflective of Prop 8 voters as a whole. Just my experience. The plural of anecdote is not data, YMMV, offer void in Alabama.
They'll wiggle about trying to call you intolerant for not tolerating their attempts to use the machinery of government
Way to imply anyone that doesn't agree with you is acting in bad faith.
Almost everybody involved in this case is trying to get the machinery of government involved to reflect their particular morality here. The only people who have a position that doesn't involve this are those who advocate separating government involvement with the term marriage entirely.
The argument is more than a little weird and weak in the current climate, but what exactly would be wrong with taking a position with respect to the proposition?
surprising coming from the guy who had been charged with diversity and sensitivity training during his ten-year Microsoft stint
It's surprising only if you assume that anybody who believes the term marriage should remain gender heterogenous must also think the murder of Matthew Shephard was a really good idea.
I didn't vote yes on 8, but I know a lot of people who did, and their decision had little to do with any lack of sensitivity or exposure to diversity.
Maybe the future will be something more along the lines of Nomadic Pict, or Mozart/Oz or maybe some new experimental linear logic programming language seemingly a perfect fit for exchanging web resources over the internet.
I'm intruiged. In general about the potential of logic programming languages (I'd love to replace SQL with Prolog in a number of contexts), and specifically about your proposition, but I'm not sure I see how constraint/logic programming is the perfect fit for web services. Can you elaborate?
/. crowd has yet to find a file manager they actually like.
True!
Until then I would say the Finder is the head of pack
Uh, you lost me there.
I'm a big OS X fan, I've used Apple products for 20 years. And I'd still rather be using Windows Explorer than the OS X Finder more than half the time.
The Finder hasn't been competitive in this respect since the age of OS 9.
Not only is it excruciatingly condescending, it's quite wrong, even if a computer scientist was the one who originally uttered it. Computer science is very damn well about computers because there would be no computer science if you took away the computer.
It's not wrong. It's substantially correct, even if Dijkstra takes a little license by introducing a bit of hyperbole. He *didn't* say computers have no place in computer science or anything ridiculous like that. He's explaining, roughly, that actual computers are really only tools and that the concrete tools themselves do not encompass the field of computation.
Of course, that changes if your definition of "computer" is wide enough to include, say, something between its original meaning and the entire universe in which we live. And having a rather application-oriented viewpoint, I do think the concrete tools are one of the most interesting part of the field. But I also think Dijkstra's comment is extremely useful for performing perspective inversions among people who haven't understood the field is wider and deeper than the conventional set of Von Neumman architectures we've managed to make so far.
If there were no digital processors, data storage, or networks, there would be no reason to develop solutions to problems that are unique to information systems alone. No reason for someone to sit around all day dreaming up the optimal programming language for a given application. No reason for teams of graduate students to work tirelessly in search of the best human-computer interface.
As it turns out, the field is bigger than these things too: even if you eliminated every last one of these things, theoretical computation would probably remain interesting to some people, and indeed, you can find a significant amount of theoretical work done back before most of these things existed in digital form.
I'll agree that there's a great (almost overwhelming) amount of math in studying the theory of computer science, but you can't honestly say that a computer science graduate is merely just some sort of specialized mathematician and leave it at that.
As a Math grad and a programmer of 20+ years, I'd agree that CS is best served as a separate discipline drawing from mathematics, physics, chemistry, EE, and more. And yet you could in fact devote yourself entirely to studying specialized mathematics, never writing a single line of code, and still be working in computer science.
It doesn't do justice to those in the field and it misinforms those who don't understand what the field is all about.
I'd agree it's hard to do the entire field justice in a single sentence, but far from bounding it badly, this phrase invites people to look outside of preconceptions about the field and potentially see something beyond the boxes and screens on their desks.
My argument: Here is the changelog. These are the real risks that are posed by continuing to use the old version. These are the benefits of upgrading.
Those are what's on the label. I'm going to guess "breaks some laptops" isn't.
The fact is there's often the risk of some unpredicted interaction. The more diligent the manufacturer is about mapping out potential machine states, the lower that risk is, but the risk is going to exist.
Waiting a while does in fact provide some advantage: rolling out the updates effectively tests it on a wider variety of potential machine states. The manufacturer then has an opportunity to fix reported problems.
software was years and years out of date
Years and years is obviously too long to wait, but a few weeks can be quite prudent, unless your risk is a security vulnerability with an exploit already in the wild.
Yes, everyone should understand that the POTUS has no real power to change the economy.
The President has few tools at his disposal to directly work on the economy. HOWEVER... that doesn't mean the President couldn't have done something about the financial irresponsibility that led to the current crisis.
There's a lot of signs that some actions 4 years ago by regulators who were with it and weren't ideologically opposed to acting might have prevented some of the worst problems. Recognizing that Credit Default Swaps were insurance and treating them as such might have done it alone, although having someone turn a cold eye to ratings vs real risk of the Mortgage Backed Securities sure would have helped.
I don't have a high degree of confidence, however, that Kerry or Gore would have necessarily been Presidents who created administrations that fit the bill. A lot of people were a step or two behind the industry in understanding the various instruments and a lot of leadership, Democrats and Republicans alike, subscribed to the idea that the market could/would take care of itself, that the risks were well-managed, etc etc.
In what universe do you live? This is completely untrue.
The universe where of the last 7 presidential terms, 5 have been Republicans of reasonably conservative stature. Additionally, during a good chunk of the Bush administration, Republicans also had control of both houses of Congress, and there's evidence they were anything but shy about pushing the boundaries of political appointment. And furthermore, despite lots of hand-wringing about Clinton's "liberalness", a lot of his policy/politics was quite possibly right of Eisenhower.
All in all, it points towards a trend of increasingly conservative appointments, and that's before you even touch things like the Federalist Society....
The recent push for the reinstitution of the "Fairness Doctrine" [wikipedia.org] by the Dems is not really about "fairness" it's about their trying to take a stab at media outlets that don't carry their party line; you can be damn sure they would claim the "big" news networks are already "fair"
This kind of distinction assumes congress would specify either particular outlets or congress in law, which is a pretty dubious assertion. Even assuming the Democrats as horrible as the most partisan conservative thinks they are, the chances they'd get away with it are exceptionally slim.
Presumably the fairness doctrine would be constructed much as before, which is to say, congress wouldn't be specifying which outlets but rather writing the law that would specify procedures for gaining access to any station, and rules would be applied by regulatory agencies and courts.
And especially given that regulatory agencies and courts have been loaded conservative for most of recent history, in theory at least reintroducing fairness doctrine ought to provide unprecedented opportunity for conservatives to address the ostensible problem of the liberal mainstream media in America.
The fact that it doesn't provides a potential insight into how those who direct talking points for conservative media really see the landscape.
even PHP will be grown up with 5.3 and 6.0
But grown up into what? :)
5.3 is an interesting release. IMHO they've saved it from being yet another mundane bridge release that's a small step down the path to Java by paying attention to a lot of the excitement surrounding the other dynamic languages. But it's been clear for a while that Java was originally what they planned to grow up into with 6, and 5 being the bridge between it and 4, and the PHP community has always been by and large a bit... pedestrian... in their vision.
I don't think PHP is where people fleeing Perl at this point might go. Python and Ruby and even Javascript have better communities and much more thoughtful design behind them. The biggest thing PHP has had going for it is that it's been on most web servers, and that'll pull the market that just wants to use whatever's available on their web host, but I think overlap between that and Perl users probably split years ago.
Free nationwide internet access would be just like what happens with free nationwide health service.
These services and the markets in which they operate are so unlike each other that any prediction that depends on the similarities between the two is going to fail.
It works so that nobody is left unconnected, but not much more.
The idea that the service would be "not much more" than basic connectivity is at odds with the idea that other services would wither. If the service is mediocre, blocks any substantial portion of the web, or is ad supported then it seems quite likely there's a market for competing services.
Privacy is nixed.
Given the recent and well-publicized level of cooperation between large private telecoms and the state, I'm not sure this is a change from the status quo.
almost everybody is hooked up to STATENET
Bit of a misnomer for privately operated networks with some common state rules, administered by as many parties as choose to participate.
That's why most programming courses require Algebra as a prerequisite - they don't want to spend time explaining logic and representative symbols to students, they want to teach code.
FWIW, my experience was the reverse -- I was exposed to programming well before I hit pre-algebra in 7th grade, via periodic workshops at our elementary school, via Logo classes taught at the community level, and eventually, via the basic interpreter that came with the TI-99/4A computer my parents bought for the family when I was in 5th grade. And for me at least, not having had algebra beforehand wasn't much of a handicap, it simply meant that programming was my introduction to the concept of a variable... and it seemed an easier one than some of the definitions/introductions I later encountered in algebra books...
Does anyone actually enjoy programming JavaScript?
Yes.
No real objects
You might have meant "classes" rather than objects, which is a legitimate formal point, though on a practical level, creating things that act very much like classes is easy.
weak typing
Sometimes, this is a feature, not a bug.
It's fine for small bits of code, but for larger apps?
There are increasing numbers of proofs by example that dynamic languages are able to create large applications.
In fact, there's a half-decent chance that you're browsing this comment in a browser that's a collection of components scripted and glued together via... Javascript.
I can't believe I'm seeing this argument again. Here. Now. In 2008.
Well, as long as we're adopting insulting tones...
It's becoming clearer to me that disbelief at any expression of support for tables as a layout tool may be a sign of inexperience and incomplete knowledge rather than real expertise, and I don't know that I'd ever hire anybody who was dogmatic about this issue. Certainly not at an hourly rate.
I've coded layouts using pure CSS positioning on literally hundreds of sites from 2004 through this year. I can take nearly any arbitrary design and transform it into table-free markup, images, and a stylesheet. And while I think the tools CSS positioning yields are invaluable, it's also unquestionable that for certain designs and tasks, straightjacketing yourself into using *only* those tools often results in extra time/resources spent. Whether or not the benefits are worth it is a cost-benefit analysis problem, not a hard-and-fast rule with a foregone conclusion.
Maybe I'll fire up IE6 to really complete the feeling I'm getting.
If you're not firing up IE6 regularly, you're either blessed to work only on sites that have a skewed audience, or you're falling down on the job. Most general browser share stats I've seen show IE6 as still having over 20% market share, writing them off is premature. Even trying to apply the "bad browsers get gracefully degraded designs" philosophy can be a bit tricky with IE6.
How's inline-block doing these days? I learned about it five years ago, but *Mozilla* didn't correctly support it as of last year. And of course, IE support was, well, limited (only on elements that are inline to start with, doesn't work in quirks mode)....
CSS is terrible at sharing horizontal space
Worse at sharing vertical. AFAIK, there's still no cross-browser way to vertically center in or proportionally apportion vertical space in a non-td container that's height dependent on the height of the viewport and/or page.
Things will get better in the far future where IE8 supports display: table-cell and IE 6 and 7 drop out of the market... so, about 4-5 years from now...
Furthermore, there are layout problems that CSS is suited for that are still a bigger pain than an equivalent table layout. CSS positioning is a great tool, I'm glad we have it, but it's less useful as a religion. Nothing wrong with keeping tables in your layout toolbox as long as they're used wisely.
Giving risky loans to people less likely to be able to repay them is what caused the crisis.
http://debatebothsides.com/showthread.php?t=73500
http://www.ptmortgage.com/blog/2008/10/01/pointing-fingers-was-it-cra-and-minority-lending-that-caused-the-mortgage-mess/
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=did_liberals_cause_the_subprime_crisis
Long and the short of it: CRA/CAP loans actually had better underwriting standards, and the evidence suggests that rather than being the bulk of the weight of failing loans, CRA/CAP loans have lower default rates than comparable commercial lending. The GSAs (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) and Congress (including Democrats) are not without responsibility, but the policy Card's talking doesn't really have much to do with the heart of the problem.
A better explanation of some of the underlying mechanics is given in an award-winning episode of This American Life called The Giant Pool of Money. There's a lot of blame to go around -- from the borrowers up through the securitizers who sold global investors the Mortgage Backed Securities, but it seems pretty obvious that without the MBSs and in particular some of the faulty representations of the risks involved in MBSs, you couldn't have had the disconnect between the loans and sensible lending standards (*not* mandated by the CRA), which is ultimately where things really started going off the tracks.
Yahoo is one of the few companies that's positioned anywhere near a place where they could grab a share of what Google's doing.
They have some of the web's most trafficked destinations -- I think they're still #1 in traffic even with the rise of the social networking sites. Part of it's mindshare and brand recognition, part of it is the sheer variety the apps in their portal portfolio (flickr, delicious, groups...).
Microsoft right now is in a position where they are losing control of the web as a platform. Even with some huge advantages leftover from their desktop dominance, they don't seem to be able to do all that great at creating compelling destinations, and what's more, there's an increasing number of destinations that don't require any of their technology at all.
Frankly, if I were betting on which company were more likely to be relevant in 10-15 years, I'd bet on Yahoo.... assuming it survives investors who've forgotten there's such a thing as a decade, and suits and others who can't get their heads around Yahoo's assets, much less put together the engineering culture and talent the company does need to make its bid for resurgence.
Be sure that Microsoft understands this. Getting their hands on these web properties could do wonders for their efforts to shoehorn their proprietary tech back into popular usage. They may not be able to execute, but it's quite probably worth even more than a $20 billion shot.
I don't like the idea so much, because I think their product "management" of IE from 2001-2006 shows that rather than deserving any kind of trust, they're all too happy to leave their products in a state that should constitute criminal theft for sheer number of hours of productivity it stole from web developers, if they can get away with it, which, even in the current environment where their grip is looser than it used to be, they more or less can. But it's a very real possibility if MS acquires Yahoo.
I've been buying Apple products for years. I've been a cemented customer who's never seriously considered non-apple hardware as my main workstation since I used the OS X beta and was hooked. I think people who dismiss Apple's products as merely shinier and better looking either haven't looked at them closely enough or are terminally retarded in terms of their ability to consider product merits outside of their favored spec gestalt. I find Apple's stuff generally (not always, but generally) more convenient and reliable. I'm certain I qualify as a fan, even if I might not make the fanbois cut.
But restrictions like this one absolutely do curb my inclination to buy.
As an example, I've avoided an iPhone because of the tethering and application restrictions (not to mention a desire to avoid being locked to *any* cell phone carrier, let alone AT&T).
And I already don't like a number of choices made with the new MacBooks (in particular, the fact they're only available with glossy screens). Adding DRM to that means I'm simply uninterested -- the upgraded specs might be nice, maybe even very nice in a year or two, but let's face it, modern machines are already ridiculously powerful, and if I'm going to see artificial restrictions and annoying features like extra glare, I'd probably get more utility out of maintaining/upgrading my current MacBook pro than buying a new one in 2-3 years.
I can't speak for the whole of Apple's market. My preferences may not be typical. But there's at least one customer out there who will stop buying if they go far enough off course.
*Some* of this comment's content has been covered in the story and discussion, but not nearly all of it. The redundant mod isn't apt.
I know this will be moderated down into oblivion
Ooo! False! Burn! :)
I think one of the reason Apple gets some slack is that they make better products and people *like* them more. It's not hard to realize that being locked in to mobile safari doesn't suck anywhere near as much as being locked in to any incarnation of IE (shudder).
Not to excuse the control-freak behavior, but I think it explains some of the difference in reaction.
You mean like "we'll tax 5% of the people and give it to the other 95%" class warfare thing?
I'm interested. Other than a potential tax credit for the poorest a lá Milton Freaking Friedman (socialist if there ever was one, right?), can you point to any kind of program where anybody in the 95% will get direct cash disbursements?
I'm also not aware of any tax proposals from Obama where 95% will escape paying taxes.
If you want to argue against progressive taxation, that's one thing. But these other things look like hyperbole or sloppy generalizations to me.