I beleive the problem with the failed missile defense systems so far has been targetting. We can get defense projectiles into the air, but getting them to meet incoming stuff has been a problem (ask anyone who's played Missile Command:).
I'd like to see more info on how they solved the
problem. I'm sure it helps that a laser beam travels a bit faster than a projectile, but there
would still be some sort of tracking problem to solve, wouldn't there?
I believe OS X started life (back in its OpenStep
days) from BSD 3.2 put on top of Mach. It's now probably a 4.x on top of Mach. This means its codebase really isn't directly inherited from FreeBSD or NetBSD, AFAIK.
However, that might not stop it from contributing. The Apple-open OS X distro Darwin may have a tip or trick to contribute back, and likely incorporates a bunch of *BSD stuff as well.
While all of this is fairly unreadable -- even by geneticists -- it is easily read by a computer
GEML? Hard to read? Bah! What we should *REALLY* do is figure out a quadrary (you know, after binary and trinary) encoding scheme for all the other info and just pre-pend it to the beginning of the amino acid sequence. Maybe even insert it in some points, with some sort of delimiting sequcne, of course. None of this wimpy markup language stuff.
Unfortunately, I don't find OS X to be all that useable as a desktop yet, in terms of its pathetic clone of the Finder, which throws away all the subtle aspects of useability.
Somewhere, recently, there were some articles on how to make the OS X Finder more like OS 9's. Start here if you're interested.
But I rather like the new Finder. Which subtle aspects of the UI do you find degraded?
Plus that stupid dock, which takes up precious vertical screen space
In the Finder/Desktop App, go over to the "Desktop" menu, and choose "Dock & Desktop Preferences". You can shrink the Dock to just about nothing, and then if that isn't enough, set it to auto show/hide, much like the Windows or KDE toolbars...
and prevents you from using the both lower corners of the screen when it is short
Huh? Things work fine for me in the lower corners of the screen below the top of the dock.
(An option for a vertical dock dangling from the menu bar would be a small improvement.)
The Apple Menu hack would probably get you what you need. But you're right, I'm very surprised they didn't include the option to make the dock vertical -- after all, you could do that under NeXTStep, OS X's grandaddy.
I'm thinking about never going back to any of the PPC Linux distros. And no, it's not because I'm a gloss-loving CLI-inept sheep -- it's because I'm a gloss-liking CLI-phile who likes easy installs and system administration. The less a system requires of you to do what you want to do, the better.
I've done web app development for the last 4 years, primarily on Linux. I'm quite fond of Linux. I'd rather develop on a *nix system than anything else -- especially server stuff. I also like the MacOS better than windows for the various non-programmer stuff I do. It gets in my way less than Linux or Windows do.
I am not, however, a system administrator.
It's not that I don't like occasionally firing up vi and tweaking various files under/etc. It's that I really hate having to do it when what I really want to be doing is creating the web app I've got in my head. Especially since I've been a contractor in the last several months. Time spent doing sysadmin stuff -- which I don't do well -- is money lost.
LinuxPPC has been decent on my desktop over the last 6 months or so. There've been some configuration problems (some that still haven't worked out), but I managed to find the right combo of stuff to get PPP working, and compile Apache with everything I wanted.
However, on the laptops, I haven't been able to even get the kernel to boot. This despite weeks of effort, lots of reading, and lots of support from comp.os.linux.ppc.
MacOS X, on the other hand, installed nicely in under an hour. So far, everything has just worked.
I've still got an open partition on my hard drive. I'm just not sure I want to spend the time on installing LinuxPPC, when really, I've got everything I need. I'm sure the performance of OS X is a little bit slower, but frankly, that's the only downside I can see, and I'm making up for any of that by actually spending time getting development done.
The effect for most folks will be no more noticable then an high-altitude cloud.
It may not be extremely "noticeable", in that it's not something that demands attention. But it's definitely perceptible, and (I think) fairly unique. The dimming is not so pronounced as a cloud -- it's a much more gradual change in color and intensity. The only other phenomena I've experienced that brings to pass the same change of character in sunlight are fires; with some big enough blazes in the surrounding area, you get a similar color and subtle intensity shift.
from what I remember, four keys and he could enter whatever he wanted
If keys are only up or down, the number of combinations possible for 4 keys should be the same as 4 bits -- 16. That is, there are 16 possible up/down arrangements for pressing 4 keys.
So I can't imagine the scenario was just up down....
One premise I'm not sure is true is that online communities are capable of greater things because "on the internet, no one knows you're a CHICKEN! A GIANT CHICKEN!" Or a dog. Or, your race, gender, or anything beyond what you type and tell. The premise is that these are the things we have trouble dealing with that keep us from coming together into a community.
If it were so, we'd obviously all be singing together right now.
I think the problem doesn't lie in the differences we usually think do. There's other differences and flaws in human beings that we have to fix, whether we communicate face to face, by phone, or slashdot posting.
First off, I agree that too many people in Utah just vote Republican, or just vote for Hatch because they *like* the idea of a Washington Insider as a champion for them. There might be some legitimate reasons to vote for Hatch, but these ain't it. I voted for Howell, and Orton, and was happy to see the sensible Matheson beat Derek Smith, who tried to run on "I'm a Republican, vote for me."
But I'm a little bit worried about this point:
mormon church carries enough influence to affect any election they want to
That's pretty much true. But the implication that they use this influence to get behind parties or candidates -- such as Hatch -- doesn't seem quite right to me. The official line of the church is that no party or candidate is endorsed by the church. Occasionally the church becomes involved in an issue/initiative (MX missile, Gambling, Religious Freedom Act, Gay Marriage -- generally moral issues), but I've never heard the church endorse any person or party specifically. I've heard them repeatedly emphasize that they don't do that and don't want anyone to pretend they have been endorsed by the church. The "Republicans are Righteous" view is an unfortunate cultural side effect, not religious dogma.
"heriditary republicans" that will vote republican on election day no matter what, without giving it a second thought
I think it's the "second thought" that people have problems with, rather than the church. They want things to be simple. So there's two politcal parties: God-fearing armed free market capitalists, and pinko gay-loving baby killing communists. Black and white. Vote Republican.:|
A "reactionary left" or "group of angry liberals" can only exacerbate the problem in Utah, I think. Trying to blame the problem on the Mormon Church won't help a bit. The only solution I can think of is to somehow raise the level of dialogue. People in Utah really need to learn how to investigate policy and issues and discuss them w/o the usual polemics (really, that probably goes for people everywhere, but I live here, so that's where I see it).
I'm from Utah. I'm from Utah Valley -- one of the most conservative places in Utah.
I see the dichotomy that you're talking about -- many people have strong constitutionalist sentiments and a beleif in protecting individual rights. And yet civil liberty issues often go ignored. I think it's largely because the press ignores the issue and people don't get informed. To many Utahns, civil liberties are still simply about guns and freedom to worship (which are included, yes, but not the end of the list).
It's not totally so: for example, in the last election, a proposition curtailing powers of forfeiture and seizure passed with something like 67% approval. I think this shows that when the issues are brought before them, Utahns would tend to favor personal liberties. They just need to be better informed.
The concern about policy matters is legitimate: Republican philosophy tends to beleive that business interests are the countries/citizens best interests. If you disagree with this philosophy sometimes, republican control as great as come to pass will happen on Jan 20th is a scary idea. What to do? That's what you should really be responding to.
But you decided to take the flamebait. So, now, your comments about the election:
I'm sure you wouldn't be complaining had a certain other candidate won
There are a few of us out here that don't mind so much that fact that Bush won as the way he won. Blocking hand recounts and having a republican legislature and your bro name a slate of electors is a bit shady. Yes, Gore's not Mr. purity, but that's no excuse for Bush's behavior.
(and NO, he did not win the popular vote, no one can accurately tell who did due to millions of uncounted ballots that wouldn't matter due to the current system).
If you beleive that, then you must have seen the merit of the idea of a hand recount in Florida. I commend you.
The supreme court did not pick the next president, the people of florida did
The people of Florida arguably didn't pick anyone conclusively, for much the same reason that you argue Gore did not win the popular vote. The supreme court clarified details of election law and proceedings that were in question, which had the result that hand recounts didn't matter. They were at the end of a long string of events, starting with the actual razor thin vote margin and going to suits brought and Florida court decisions. To say they "picked" the president is ludicrous, true, if you mean that they were the sole deciders. But to say they didn't influence the outcome -- to even say they didn't have a large role in deciding the outcome -- is equally ludicrous.
(in fact, they picked him three times;)).
Two and a half, max. And not even that. Gore focused on a few Democratic counties (offered Bush a recount of the whole state when taking flak for this, Bush refused, IIRC), so maybe 2.1 counts, max. Some of those hand recounts were never completed. And the hand recounts were not accepted as certified. So two times, max. Both times, Bush's lead was well within accepted margin of error for machine counts, so we'll never know if he really won. The stat analysis I read says his chances were favorable -- 2-1 -- so I'm not really that upset that he won. I am sometimes upset that we couldn't get it together enough as a nation to figure out a way to do a hand recount and find out, and that it looked as if that was part of Bush's tactics (not to mention that it looked as if the GOP was set to try to name its own set of electors while decrying the Florida Supreme Court for retroactively changing election law).
Still, the close margin politically forces Bush to stay close to the center, and carefully live up to his campaign promises. He shows every sign of keeping them, so far.
A couple of months back I wrote a work of fiction speculating on the possibility that a *company* (rather than a government) was capable of constant surveillance of any individual. What would they do with it? Well, you know how amusement parks and such are always trying to sell you footage of you doing stuff? Maybe something like that. And of course, maybe some people would pay more NOT to have their activities visible...
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Either MS is doing OK or People Can Pick Wrong
on
The Encryption Wars
·
· Score: 2
I don't know whether it takes fifteen or twenty years to do Microsoft in - what difference does it make? They're going down. You can't make less good stuff and sell it at high prices indefinitely when the good stuff is free.
Microsoft makes $400 billion a year selling stuff, than which there is better available for nothing. In the pure microeconomics of this you would expect it to go away.
I think there's two possibilities here.
1) MS is doing enough things right -- and the right things right, for the largest available market -- that they're not going down. And they'll continue to. You know that attitude -- it doesn't have to perfect
2) People don't optimize well. For lots of human reasons, not the least of which is flow of information.
Moglen seems to pick up on #2....
Now, there are a whole lot of things that can be done to stave off the law of supply and demand - you can advertise heavily; you can give people fear, uncertainty and doubt; you can do all sorts of things
And they do. Plus there's the simple fact that people frequently make wrong choices. The theme of being deceived and chosing something of lesser value over something of greater value is VERY old.
Isaiah "Wherefore do ye spend your money for that which is not bread? and your labor for that which satisfieth not?"
Of course, there's themes of redemption, too, and maybe that fits in with the MLK quote he throws in "The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice".
And so might it be a long time before MS goes down.
I'm seeing a common misconception of the article in a lot of posts here: that all advocacy is bad.
The author says, at the end of the article:
I don't really hate advocacy. I just hate the way we do it most of the time.
The article is not against advocating things. The article is about people's bad "discursive habits" -- the way we tend to discuss things. The author, for example, is not against discussing the advantages of the typing system in Standard ML. What the article *is* about is the curious fact that most people can't seem to do advocacy right.
We do it in a dumb way. And I think the discoursive habits we pick up as a result are going to impede the progress of programming languages for a long time.
And the progress of a lot of things. I wish more people understood this.
The humor is well taken, but I thought that I'd include the point that at the end of the article, he says something like "I don't really hate advocacy, I just hate how we do it most of the time."
Alright, I see your point. There's a difference between the skillset of this person who we call a "sysadmin" and... well, me. Software developer for years, UNIX/PC/Mac/TI-994A user for years more. Generally computer savy. But mediocre at system administration.
Yet I don't think it's incorrect to say that every computer owner -- who doesn't have someone to do it for them -- has to do system administration tasks. And that (from what I've read) is what the folks at Nautilus (the Eazel folks) figured out: that most often, it's not a matter of mastering UI that makes computers hard to use for people. Most folks can learn to navigate a GUI or use a CLI just fine. They just aren't sysadmins, but they're called on to do system administration anytime they install software or change a setting from what it was out of the box.
I'm not convinced that Perl couldn't do this job, but I think I see your point:
1) MS products have the virtue of being more highly integrated with other MS products. In some cases, this is an advantage
2) If you're writing something for someone with an investment (knowledge or technical) in a certain system, it's to their advantage for you to make that investment work best.
#2 is not necessarily a virtue of VB... it's a requirement impossed by an earlier (possibly poor, possibly good) choice. #1 could arguably be a true virtue of MS products.
I agree with the other posts that have said that 7 years in jail seems a bit over the top, especially considering that many of us endorse white hat hacking. Maybe even grey hat.
I think computer security law should reflect physical security law, and provide for different kinds of crime. As far as I know, neither "trespassing" nor "breaking and entering" land you seven years in the slammer.
Now, using a mail server to send unauthorized resource wasting mail is probably a crime. Taking someone's car for a spin w/o permission or pirating airwaves on a spectrum allocated to someone else are probably comparable law breaking actions (if you disagree, find something closer). Is 7 years in jail a crime fitting punishment?
There's different grades of trespassing and use of others property. Computer law should reflect this as well.
Well, the obvious solution is to write something that will convert tar files to aiffs (or pick your own favorite non-lossy format). This way, you can also *listen* to your data, just like Ellie Arroway in contact. It's like loading programs from casette all over again! And with ADAT, you could back up and restore up to 8 tracks simultaneously!
I think you're right. Most programmers have to do some system administration. Many sysadmins have to acquire programming skills.
But what I'm finding is that any computer owner has to be a sysadmin for their own system. The tasks are different and vary in depth and patience required from platform to platform, but they're all there. Linux raises the bar -- in order to run your own Linux box, you have to become a *nix sysadmin.
The only situations I can think of where I haven't had to be a sysadmin is when I worked for places large enough to hire their own.
I'll admit that I've rarely done things with Perl outside web development and system administration. And Perl doesn't often seem to be the best choice for large projects. Still, it's been useful outside of those contexts often enough and some of your objections seem crazy enough that I feel compelled to reply. Even though I know 37 other people will.
First off, the biggest idea I take issue with is that web development isn't programming. Web applications can match other applications in their scale and the engineering effort required. You come up with requirements, you spec, you code, you test. The fact that the UI comes through a browser through a web server doesn't change this. And boy, I *long* for the wasted months of youth that could have been saved if I had only used Perl for some of these projects instead of C.
OK, some line by line responses:
Object orientation - Perl's oop features are available, but not enforced. Real programming languages like java and pascal try to enforce good programming methodologies. This is a good thing, and the reason we don't code in assembly anymore.
People still code in assembly sometimes. Why? When it gives them an advantage they're looking for. Ditto for Perl. Except Perl arguably has a larger set of advantages. OK, most people really do a lot of the things we think of as for assembly in C. But wait. C's object orientation features aren't enforced -- they're nearly non-existent (though you can and should learn to do OO in plain ol' C). Alright, C++. Which has a dozen workarounds for its OO features and doesn't enforce their use. Still pretty popular for all sorts of things. I assume some people find its feature set useful somehow.
Readability - I know that it's possible to write readable perl, but nobody does it. Go search cpan, look at how many people bother to explain their line noise looking regexes. If programmers are allowed to be lazy, they will.
Been said before, will be said again (at least by me): bad code can be (and is) written in ANY language. Especially C and/or C++. Which are still widely used by developer for their advantages.
(That said, Perl programmers really do seem to gloat sometimes over their terseness and cleverness. Great, guys... just don't put it in code someone else has to maintain. Same goes for you clever C programmers).
Standardization - Perl isn't standardized. There's no guarantee that ANY language feature will work in future releases. Do you want to stake your buisness on that?
Well, for one thing, I don't have a problem staking my business on that because any version of Perl is pretty much freely available.
And furthermore, in practice, I find that Perl is as portable as anything I've written in C or Java or Pascal. Maybe more. The problems with all the latter languages are usually with libraries and class frameworks and proprietary extensions, but they're still there. The only problem I've ever had with Perl portability has to do with certain features not being available on *nix but not DOS/win32. And so I put some extra effort in and wrote cross-platform Perl.
Maintainability - Perl is damned near impossible to maintain bin the real world. Combine terseness with "there's more than one way to do it" and you have a recipe for disaster. Competent programmers can maintain another competent programmers perl code, but when was the last time you were assigned to maintain good code?
When was the last time your were assigned to maintain good code in any language?
This is practically the same argument as readability above. All the same responses apply.
When was the last time someone competent was hired to maintain yours?
Three weeks ago.
There's a reason why COBOL and VB are so popular in buisness, and that's that any idiot can write and maintain them.
This is a virtue? COBOL and VB have virtues that Perl has not? Ahhhh... ok.
Wow.. you take porn pretty serious, huh? Maybe that's the problem. Porn is entertainment. It's not art. It's not meant to educate you about relationships between men and women. It's designed to arouse and stimulate your imagination.
I can buy this in part -- you're probably right in that most people can distinguish between the fantasies portrayed in porn and real life.
Still, it seems to me that arousing and stimulating your imagination in that way has got to color -- note I say color and not determine -- how you look at your relationships. Heck, biology and general culture are already pushing me to favor the woman who looks like Pamela Anderson over the average looking girl who I feel peaceful around, and recreational affection over conversation. Seems to me porn pushes you further that way. Not that I think anyone should plan lifelong celibacy. Just think you're more likely to make good relationship decisions w/o its influence. For some imbalanced people, it doesn't seem impossible the effects might be harsher.
You're free to either look at porn or not. You're free to determine when and with whom you have sex. So are the rest of us. Now if we can just get the damn politicians and religious groups to understand that it's not their place to decide for us how we should live our lives, things should be just fine.
Relax. I wasn't advocating that we send everybody with porn to jail. I'm not even advocating that we should burn all the stuff; though I'm of the opinion it might be a good thing if everybody got rid of it themselves, the implementation of trying to do it for everyone would be nightmarish and in the end futile and impossible. I agree that people have got to take responsibility for their own lives, so I state what I think some of the problems are with porn, and you still get to chose. Good system, huh?
I think many religious leaders have a handle on that idea, too. They'd rather not see even borderline porn showing up on TV and billboards and anywhere people are likely to just trip over it ( Which is at least as valid a request as not being subject to public prayer and creationism in schools), but they also understand that the only way to really affect change in society is for individuals to chose to do so in their own life, rather than trying to solve problems by policy. Some go beyond this. It's too bad.
I'd be curious to know, however, what you'd think of the following idea: making it illegal not to posses or produce porn, but to profit from it. Might end concerns about exploitation, and people who were into it would have to be into it for love of the hobby.:) Might drive everything underground and cause worse ills. Might have a problem defining porn. It's hard to say. I thought the idea was intruiging, though.
The thing that I don't like about porn is that I feel like I'm being lied to -- that I'm subtly (or sometimes not so subtly) being educated in falseness about what relationships between men and women are supposed to be.
But then again, I'm one of those people who feels that sex only has a proper role in a monogamous committed relationship, so, you know, why beleive me?
Slashdot Mirror
I beleive the problem with the failed missile defense systems so far has been targetting. We can get defense projectiles into the air, but getting them to meet incoming stuff has been a problem (ask anyone who's played Missile Command :).
I'd like to see more info on how they solved the
problem. I'm sure it helps that a laser beam travels a bit faster than a projectile, but there
would still be some sort of tracking problem to solve, wouldn't there?
--
I believe OS X started life (back in its OpenStep
days) from BSD 3.2 put on top of Mach. It's now probably a 4.x on top of Mach. This means its codebase really isn't directly inherited from FreeBSD or NetBSD, AFAIK.
However, that might not stop it from contributing. The Apple-open OS X distro Darwin may have a tip or trick to contribute back, and likely incorporates a bunch of *BSD stuff as well.
--
While all of this is fairly unreadable -- even by geneticists -- it is easily read by a computer
GEML? Hard to read? Bah! What we should *REALLY* do is figure out a quadrary (you know, after binary and trinary) encoding scheme for all the other info and just pre-pend it to the beginning of the amino acid sequence. Maybe even insert it in some points, with some sort of delimiting sequcne, of course. None of this wimpy markup language stuff.
--
Unfortunately, I don't find OS X to be all that useable as a desktop yet, in terms of its pathetic clone of the Finder, which throws away all the subtle aspects of useability.
Somewhere, recently, there were some articles on how to make the OS X Finder more like OS 9's. Start here if you're interested.
But I rather like the new Finder. Which subtle aspects of the UI do you find degraded?
Plus that stupid dock, which takes up precious vertical screen space
In the Finder/Desktop App, go over to the "Desktop" menu, and choose "Dock & Desktop Preferences". You can shrink the Dock to just about nothing, and then if that isn't enough, set it to auto show/hide, much like the Windows or KDE toolbars...
and prevents you from using the both lower corners of the screen when it is short
Huh? Things work fine for me in the lower corners of the screen below the top of the dock.
(An option for a vertical dock dangling from the menu bar would be a small improvement.)
The Apple Menu hack would probably get you what you need. But you're right, I'm very surprised they didn't include the option to make the dock vertical -- after all, you could do that under NeXTStep, OS X's grandaddy.
--
I'm thinking about never going back to any of the PPC Linux distros. And no, it's not because I'm a gloss-loving CLI-inept sheep -- it's because I'm a gloss-liking CLI-phile who likes easy installs and system administration. The less a system requires of you to do what you want to do, the better.
/etc. It's that I really hate having to do it when what I really want to be doing is creating the web app I've got in my head. Especially since I've been a contractor in the last several months. Time spent doing sysadmin stuff -- which I don't do well -- is money lost.
:)
I've done web app development for the last 4 years, primarily on Linux. I'm quite fond of Linux. I'd rather develop on a *nix system than anything else -- especially server stuff. I also like the MacOS better than windows for the various non-programmer stuff I do. It gets in my way less than Linux or Windows do.
I am not, however, a system administrator.
It's not that I don't like occasionally firing up vi and tweaking various files under
LinuxPPC has been decent on my desktop over the last 6 months or so. There've been some configuration problems (some that still haven't worked out), but I managed to find the right combo of stuff to get PPP working, and compile Apache with everything I wanted.
However, on the laptops, I haven't been able to even get the kernel to boot. This despite weeks of effort, lots of reading, and lots of support from comp.os.linux.ppc.
MacOS X, on the other hand, installed nicely in under an hour. So far, everything has just worked.
I've still got an open partition on my hard drive. I'm just not sure I want to spend the time on installing LinuxPPC, when really, I've got everything I need. I'm sure the performance of OS X is a little bit slower, but frankly, that's the only downside I can see, and I'm making up for any of that by actually spending time getting development done.
Oh yeah, it really does look cool.
--
The effect for most folks will be no more noticable then an high-altitude cloud.
It may not be extremely "noticeable", in that it's not something that demands attention. But it's definitely perceptible, and (I think) fairly unique. The dimming is not so pronounced as a cloud -- it's a much more gradual change in color and intensity. The only other phenomena I've experienced that brings to pass the same change of character in sunlight are fires; with some big enough blazes in the surrounding area, you get a similar color and subtle intensity shift.
from what I remember, four keys and he could enter whatever he wanted
If keys are only up or down, the number of combinations possible for 4 keys should be the same as 4 bits -- 16. That is, there are 16 possible up/down arrangements for pressing 4 keys.
So I can't imagine the scenario was just up down....
One premise I'm not sure is true is that online communities are capable of greater things because "on the internet, no one knows you're a CHICKEN! A GIANT CHICKEN!" Or a dog. Or, your race, gender, or anything beyond what you type and tell. The premise is that these are the things we have trouble dealing with that keep us from coming together into a community.
If it were so, we'd obviously all be singing together right now.
I think the problem doesn't lie in the differences we usually think do. There's other differences and flaws in human beings that we have to fix, whether we communicate face to face, by phone, or slashdot posting.
Some members of BNL have always been a bit tubby. Fortunately, this does not seem to have affected their music.
My friends and I call this sort of conversation (along with discussions of makeup and appearance and does-this-make-me-look- ) "lipo" discussions...
First off, I agree that too many people in Utah just vote Republican, or just vote for Hatch because they *like* the idea of a Washington Insider as a champion for them. There might be some legitimate reasons to vote for Hatch, but these ain't it. I voted for Howell, and Orton, and was happy to see the sensible Matheson beat Derek Smith, who tried to run on "I'm a Republican, vote for me."
:|
But I'm a little bit worried about this point:
mormon church carries enough influence to affect any election they want to
That's pretty much true. But the implication that they use this influence to get behind parties or candidates -- such as Hatch -- doesn't seem quite right to me. The official line of the church is that no party or candidate is endorsed by the church. Occasionally the church becomes involved in an issue/initiative (MX missile, Gambling, Religious Freedom Act, Gay Marriage -- generally moral issues), but I've never heard the church endorse any person or party specifically. I've heard them repeatedly emphasize that they don't do that and don't want anyone to pretend they have been endorsed by the church. The "Republicans are Righteous" view is an unfortunate cultural side effect, not religious dogma.
"heriditary republicans" that will vote republican on election day no matter what, without giving it a second thought
I think it's the "second thought" that people have problems with, rather than the church. They want things to be simple. So there's two politcal parties: God-fearing armed free market capitalists, and pinko gay-loving baby killing communists. Black and white. Vote Republican.
A "reactionary left" or "group of angry liberals" can only exacerbate the problem in Utah, I think. Trying to blame the problem on the Mormon Church won't help a bit. The only solution I can think of is to somehow raise the level of dialogue. People in Utah really need to learn how to investigate policy and issues and discuss them w/o the usual polemics (really, that probably goes for people everywhere, but I live here, so that's where I see it).
I'm from Utah. I'm from Utah Valley -- one of the most conservative places in Utah.
I see the dichotomy that you're talking about -- many people have strong constitutionalist sentiments and a beleif in protecting individual rights. And yet civil liberty issues often go ignored. I think it's largely because the press ignores the issue and people don't get informed. To many Utahns, civil liberties are still simply about guns and freedom to worship (which are included, yes, but not the end of the list).
It's not totally so: for example, in the last election, a proposition curtailing powers of forfeiture and seizure passed with something like 67% approval. I think this shows that when the issues are brought before them, Utahns would tend to favor personal liberties. They just need to be better informed.
The concern about policy matters is legitimate: Republican philosophy tends to beleive that business interests are the countries/citizens best interests. If you disagree with this philosophy sometimes, republican control as great as come to pass will happen on Jan 20th is a scary idea. What to do? That's what you should really be responding to.
;)).
But you decided to take the flamebait. So, now, your comments about the election:
I'm sure you wouldn't be complaining had a certain other candidate won
There are a few of us out here that don't mind so much that fact that Bush won as the way he won. Blocking hand recounts and having a republican legislature and your bro name a slate of electors is a bit shady. Yes, Gore's not Mr. purity, but that's no excuse for Bush's behavior.
(and NO, he did not win the popular vote, no one can accurately tell who did due to millions of uncounted ballots that wouldn't matter due to the current system).
If you beleive that, then you must have seen the merit of the idea of a hand recount in Florida. I commend you.
The supreme court did not pick the next president, the people of florida did
The people of Florida arguably didn't pick anyone conclusively, for much the same reason that you argue Gore did not win the popular vote. The supreme court clarified details of election law and proceedings that were in question, which had the result that hand recounts didn't matter. They were at the end of a long string of events, starting with the actual razor thin vote margin and going to suits brought and Florida court decisions. To say they "picked" the president is ludicrous, true, if you mean that they were the sole deciders. But to say they didn't influence the outcome -- to even say they didn't have a large role in deciding the outcome -- is equally ludicrous.
(in fact, they picked him three times
Two and a half, max. And not even that. Gore focused on a few Democratic counties (offered Bush a recount of the whole state when taking flak for this, Bush refused, IIRC), so maybe 2.1 counts, max. Some of those hand recounts were never completed. And the hand recounts were not accepted as certified. So two times, max. Both times, Bush's lead was well within accepted margin of error for machine counts, so we'll never know if he really won. The stat analysis I read says his chances were favorable -- 2-1 -- so I'm not really that upset that he won. I am sometimes upset that we couldn't get it together enough as a nation to figure out a way to do a hand recount and find out, and that it looked as if that was part of Bush's tactics (not to mention that it looked as if the GOP was set to try to name its own set of electors while decrying the Florida Supreme Court for retroactively changing election law).
Still, the close margin politically forces Bush to stay close to the center, and carefully live up to his campaign promises. He shows every sign of keeping them, so far.
A couple of months back I wrote a work of fiction speculating on the possibility that a *company* (rather than a government) was capable of constant surveillance of any individual. What would they do with it? Well, you know how amusement parks and such are always trying to sell you footage of you doing stuff? Maybe something like that. And of course, maybe some people would pay more NOT to have their activities visible...
Don't count on Prodigy doing the Right Thing
But you can help create an atmosphere in which they feel encouraged, perhaps.
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I don't know whether it takes fifteen or twenty years to do Microsoft in - what difference does it make? They're going down. You can't make less good stuff and sell it at high prices indefinitely when the good stuff is free.
Microsoft makes $400 billion a year selling stuff, than which there is better available for nothing. In the pure microeconomics of this you would expect it to go away.
I think there's two possibilities here.
1) MS is doing enough things right -- and the right things right, for the largest available market -- that they're not going down. And they'll continue to. You know that attitude -- it doesn't have to perfect
2) People don't optimize well. For lots of human reasons, not the least of which is flow of information.
Moglen seems to pick up on #2....
Now, there are a whole lot of things that can be done to stave off the law of supply and demand - you can advertise heavily; you can give people fear, uncertainty and doubt; you can do all sorts of things
And they do. Plus there's the simple fact that people frequently make wrong choices. The theme of being deceived and chosing something of lesser value over something of greater value is VERY old.
Isaiah "Wherefore do ye spend your money for that which is not bread? and your labor for that which satisfieth not?"
Of course, there's themes of redemption, too, and maybe that fits in with the MLK quote he throws in "The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice".
And so might it be a long time before MS goes down.
I'm seeing a common misconception of the article in a lot of posts here: that all advocacy is bad.
The author says, at the end of the article:
I don't really hate advocacy. I just hate the way we do it most of the time.
The article is not against advocating things. The article is about people's bad "discursive habits" -- the way we tend to discuss things. The author, for example, is not against discussing the advantages of the typing system in Standard ML. What the article *is* about is the curious fact that most people can't seem to do advocacy right.
We do it in a dumb way. And I think the discoursive habits we pick up as a result are going to impede the progress of programming languages for a long time.
And the progress of a lot of things. I wish more people understood this.
The humor is well taken, but I thought that I'd include the point that at the end of the article, he says something like "I don't really hate advocacy, I just hate how we do it most of the time."
Alright, I see your point. There's a difference between the skillset of this person who we call a "sysadmin" and... well, me. Software developer for years, UNIX/PC/Mac/TI-994A user for years more. Generally computer savy. But mediocre at system administration.
Yet I don't think it's incorrect to say that every computer owner -- who doesn't have someone to do it for them -- has to do system administration tasks. And that (from what I've read) is what the folks at Nautilus (the Eazel folks) figured out: that most often, it's not a matter of mastering UI that makes computers hard to use for people. Most folks can learn to navigate a GUI or use a CLI just fine. They just aren't sysadmins, but they're called on to do system administration anytime they install software or change a setting from what it was out of the box.
I'm not convinced that Perl couldn't do this job, but I think I see your point:
... it's a requirement impossed by an earlier (possibly poor, possibly good) choice. #1 could arguably be a true virtue of MS products.
1) MS products have the virtue of being more highly integrated with other MS products. In some cases, this is an advantage
2) If you're writing something for someone with an investment (knowledge or technical) in a certain system, it's to their advantage for you to make that investment work best.
#2 is not necessarily a virtue of VB
I agree with the other posts that have said that 7 years in jail seems a bit over the top, especially considering that many of us endorse white hat hacking. Maybe even grey hat.
I think computer security law should reflect physical security law, and provide for different kinds of crime. As far as I know, neither "trespassing" nor "breaking and entering" land you seven years in the slammer.
Now, using a mail server to send unauthorized resource wasting mail is probably a crime. Taking someone's car for a spin w/o permission or pirating airwaves on a spectrum allocated to someone else are probably comparable law breaking actions (if you disagree, find something closer). Is 7 years in jail a crime fitting punishment?
There's different grades of trespassing and use of others property. Computer law should reflect this as well.
Well, the obvious solution is to write something that will convert tar files to aiffs (or pick your own favorite non-lossy format). This way, you can also *listen* to your data, just like Ellie Arroway in contact. It's like loading programs from casette all over again! And with ADAT, you could back up and restore up to 8 tracks simultaneously!
I think you're right. Most programmers have to do some system administration. Many sysadmins have to acquire programming skills.
But what I'm finding is that any computer owner has to be a sysadmin for their own system. The tasks are different and vary in depth and patience required from platform to platform, but they're all there. Linux raises the bar -- in order to run your own Linux box, you have to become a *nix sysadmin.
The only situations I can think of where I haven't had to be a sysadmin is when I worked for places large enough to hire their own.
I'll admit that I've rarely done things with Perl outside web development and system administration. And Perl doesn't often seem to be the best choice for large projects. Still, it's been useful outside of those contexts often enough and some of your objections seem crazy enough that I feel compelled to reply. Even though I know 37 other people will.
First off, the biggest idea I take issue with is that web development isn't programming. Web applications can match other applications in their scale and the engineering effort required. You come up with requirements, you spec, you code, you test. The fact that the UI comes through a browser through a web server doesn't change this. And boy, I *long* for the wasted months of youth that could have been saved if I had only used Perl for some of these projects instead of C.
OK, some line by line responses:
Object orientation - Perl's oop features are available, but not enforced. Real programming languages like java and pascal try to enforce good programming methodologies. This is a good thing, and the reason we don't code in assembly anymore.
People still code in assembly sometimes. Why? When it gives them an advantage they're looking for. Ditto for Perl. Except Perl arguably has a larger set of advantages. OK, most people really do a lot of the things we think of as for assembly in C. But wait. C's object orientation features aren't enforced -- they're nearly non-existent (though you can and should learn to do OO in plain ol' C). Alright, C++. Which has a dozen workarounds for its OO features and doesn't enforce their use. Still pretty popular for all sorts of things. I assume some people find its feature set useful somehow.
Readability - I know that it's possible to write readable perl, but nobody does it. Go search cpan, look at how many people bother to explain their line noise looking regexes. If programmers are allowed to be lazy, they will.
Been said before, will be said again (at least by me): bad code can be (and is) written in ANY language. Especially C and/or C++. Which are still widely used by developer for their advantages.
(That said, Perl programmers really do seem to gloat sometimes over their terseness and cleverness. Great, guys... just don't put it in code someone else has to maintain. Same goes for you clever C programmers).
Standardization - Perl isn't standardized. There's no guarantee that ANY language feature will work in future releases. Do you want to stake your buisness on that?
Well, for one thing, I don't have a problem staking my business on that because any version of Perl is pretty much freely available.
And furthermore, in practice, I find that Perl is as portable as anything I've written in C or Java or Pascal. Maybe more. The problems with all the latter languages are usually with libraries and class frameworks and proprietary extensions, but they're still there. The only problem I've ever had with Perl portability has to do with certain features not being available on *nix but not DOS/win32. And so I put some extra effort in and wrote cross-platform Perl.
Maintainability - Perl is damned near impossible to maintain bin the real world. Combine terseness with "there's more than one way to do it" and you have a recipe for disaster. Competent programmers can maintain another competent programmers perl code, but when was the last time you were assigned to maintain good code?
When was the last time your were assigned to maintain good code in any language?
This is practically the same argument as readability above. All the same responses apply.
When was the last time someone competent was hired to maintain yours?
Three weeks ago.
There's a reason why COBOL and VB are so popular in buisness, and that's that any idiot can write and maintain them.
This is a virtue? COBOL and VB have virtues that Perl has not? Ahhhh... ok.
Wow.. you take porn pretty serious, huh? Maybe that's the problem. Porn is entertainment. It's not art. It's not meant to educate you about relationships between men and women. It's designed to arouse and stimulate your imagination.
:) Might drive everything underground and cause worse ills. Might have a problem defining porn. It's hard to say. I thought the idea was intruiging, though.
I can buy this in part -- you're probably right in that most people can distinguish between the fantasies portrayed in porn and real life.
Still, it seems to me that arousing and stimulating your imagination in that way has got to color -- note I say color and not determine -- how you look at your relationships. Heck, biology and general culture are already pushing me to favor the woman who looks like Pamela Anderson over the average looking girl who I feel peaceful around, and recreational affection over conversation. Seems to me porn pushes you further that way. Not that I think anyone should plan lifelong celibacy. Just think you're more likely to make good relationship decisions w/o its influence. For some imbalanced people, it doesn't seem impossible the effects might be harsher.
You're free to either look at porn or not. You're free to determine when and with whom you have sex. So are the rest of us. Now if we can just get the damn politicians and religious groups to understand that it's not their place to decide for us how we should live our lives, things should be just fine.
Relax. I wasn't advocating that we send everybody with porn to jail. I'm not even advocating that we should burn all the stuff; though I'm of the opinion it might be a good thing if everybody got rid of it themselves, the implementation of trying to do it for everyone would be nightmarish and in the end futile and impossible. I agree that people have got to take responsibility for their own lives, so I state what I think some of the problems are with porn, and you still get to chose. Good system, huh?
I think many religious leaders have a handle on that idea, too. They'd rather not see even borderline porn showing up on TV and billboards and anywhere people are likely to just trip over it ( Which is at least as valid a request as not being subject to public prayer and creationism in schools), but they also understand that the only way to really affect change in society is for individuals to chose to do so in their own life, rather than trying to solve problems by policy. Some go beyond this. It's too bad.
I'd be curious to know, however, what you'd think of the following idea: making it illegal not to posses or produce porn, but to profit from it. Might end concerns about exploitation, and people who were into it would have to be into it for love of the hobby.
The thing that I don't like about porn is that I feel like I'm being lied to -- that I'm subtly (or sometimes not so subtly) being educated in falseness about what relationships between men and women are supposed to be.
But then again, I'm one of those people who feels that sex only has a proper role in a monogamous committed relationship, so, you know, why beleive me?