you're merely trying to make excuses as to why it's not censorship, even though it clearly is.
No it isn't clear. I'm not saying the US hasn't shut down internet sites engaging in commerce, they certainly have. But that has nothing to do with censorship. Lets take your example and simplify by assuming it were domestic. The government could very easily seize a cardroom or illegal casino and that wouldn't be censorship. If they seized something like cardplayer magazine that would be censorship. Absolutely the USA wants to regulate commerce.
Your complaints about ICE, the customs office is subject to US law and rules of due process. If they suspect criminal activity and the agency appears in court then it does go through the court system. There is the process. Now I agree that what the US is going is effectively exporting US law, and that is a problem. But it is not censorship.
The Nation has been publishing continuously since 1865. Labor newspapers that had existed for a century only closed in the last few decades. Books of all sorts are published freely. The internet allows for free speech.
Yes the US does believe in free speech even when it threatens the powerful. There are infrequent incidents in the other direction but they have a fantastic record.
____
As for mega upload they were charged in Virginia court and Australia courts for crimes related to piracy. That is a typical business seizure that happens to businesses which are fundamentally criminal enterprises. You may disagree that megaupload was a fundamentally criminal enterprise but there is nothing unusual about the government seizing business assets for companies under indictment. That's not censorship.
because they don't want to be able to give up their ability to censor international domains at will,whilst simultaneously using censorship as their go-to excuse as to why no one else should run the net
When has the USA ever censored international domains? We have enough real problems in the world let's not make up fake ones to fight about. The USA has a several hundred year strong history of light censorship, especially political censorship an excellent track record. If I had to trust any single entity not to censor the US government is a good choice.
There is nothing hypocritical about having them play that role. Anymore than there would be in choosing the German government to conduct accounting audits all over the planet.
I'm American and yes treaties aren't popular here. Though in all fairness most Americans in almost all their practices live in a world where on most things the US congress is the final authority. There is no American version of Brussels. Further remember that 1/2 of Americans haven't been out of the country, for many Americans their primary view of foreign countries are the stories about how their family fled and images on news programs emphasizing how much the USA is hated globally. So a large percentage of American population are isolationist. I good deal of the US probably wouldn't mind a US internet, that is loosely connected to other nation's networks; like the telephone system rather than a genuinely global system. Which isn't hypocrisy but rather a deeper desire to move away from empire.
That being said, we also do have foreign policy hawks and then business interests that like US domination rather than US participation.
It seems like the focus is mainly compensation structure and what obligations exist for telcos passing traffic through. Content provisions are light. For example
Member States are encouraged: a) to adopt national legislation to act against spam; b) to cooperate to take actions to counter spam; c) to exchange information on national findings/actions to counter spam.
This is a crucial treaty in the way the public water system is crucial to public welfare. Its existence is a matter of public interest, the details of implementation not so much. Most people want their messages to pass but don't really care how telcos pass expenses around.
VBScript isn't an alternative because only IE supports it.
I understand but a good deal of the thread was about a Microsoft takeover or whatever of Javascript and I thought the context of VBScript, that Microsoft has had an alternative and one they preferred was important.
As for building a strongly typed language on top of a dynamically typed one. I think you can author strongly typed DSLs in a dynamic language but I don't think you can really get it to work as a layer that just passes down. The two models are fundamentally in conflict. The dynamically typed code gets used when it is needed for "power" and this pollutes the entire code. In precisely the same way that C's use of void pointers introduces weak typing back into otherwise strongly typed languages like C++, or Objective-C. Something may be better than nothing And if TypeScript makes it possible to create high power GUIs for web programming that's a wonderful step forward.
I should mention the insane OO model in Javascript comes from a fundamental unwillingness to choose functional or object oriented. This is the same problem Perl has, where Perl can have any style for an individual programmer, so once you start pulling in libraries you constantly have to break your paradigm. There are strongly typed high power functional languages but they aren't object oriented. There are strongly typed object oriented languages but they aren't functional. JavaScript makes heavy use of functions, jQuery is fundamentally functional. Either you tie you methods to your data, and you have a hierarchy on your data. Or your functions are highly polymorphic, you have complex types and a hierarchy on them; with instances fo the data being isolated. You can't code both ways.
Javascript has far too many features that would be crippled by static typing. For example you can implement a Y combinator naturally in Javascript: function Y(F) { return F(function (x) { return (Y(F))(x) ; } ) ; } That's the sort of thing you would need to absolutely prohibit in a static language that is incredibly powerful and useful in a dynamic language.I think static vs. dynamic is more or less a choice a language makes at design time that is an impossible fork to ever cross back over.
Most likely the Microsoft languages group has no say one way or another over the implementation of the trident engine. Microsoft is not a company with a dozen people.
They've had a JavaScript alternative for years, VBScript. IE is not the standard browser anymore and IIS is not the large enough. So they need something more open. But this isn't a change they've had a VB alternative since Microsoft got in the webserver business.
research.microsoft.com has been advancing lots of open source functional languages that use type inference and no one has been getting burned. The research group lets them do cutting edge research and then another research group builds an implementation for more mainstream languages and then it gets pulled in by product management.
So I'd say in the open source language arena the public has learned the opposite. I'll agree it is different with products as opposed to technologies.
No I don't have it flipped. Try configuring something like the MacBook air or retina. Even though it has been several months they still are likely close to what you would pay from a Dell, HP or Toshiba. On the other hand the PC all in ones are much cheaper for the same hardware than the iMac
Estimates for gross margin from PCs for 2011 were 28%. Average sale prices are in the $1350-1410 range, Conversely their competition sells their system with a gross margin of around 6%. But estimates of average sale prices are $550-620 range. Apple doesn't even sell machines at that price point.
The comparison with Apple is margins on high end systems from the other PC vendors.
Apple doesn't offer nearly the product selection of the other major PC vendors. There is no question about that. The claim was that for the same hardware Apple was grossly overcharging.
Just to throw out a specific example. When the retina macbook pro came out I specked out a Dell with similar features (16g of ram, Nvidia 650M, same CPU, 256g SSD)
The Apple was about $200 cheaper. The SSD was way faster. Dell didn't have the Retina display. The Dell did not have the same factor i.e. nowhere near as thin and light.
BS. I've been having this discussion for 11 years. Pick a mac, configure a Dell, Toshiba, HP similarly and you usually get the Apple coming in cheaper when it is first released moving up to about a 15-30% premium by the time right before it is pulled. What I've frequently happen is this dialogue.
Apple has A,B,C,D and E PC has A, B,C+ (something even better), D- (something worse) and is missing E and that is much cheaper.
That's nostalgia, not reality. In everything, from civil rights to free speech to economics, people were far worse off in the 1980's than they are now.
Your claim was the policy I was advocating were used by totalitarian governments and would bring on totalitarianism. The fact is they aren't used by totalitarian governments and were used by this government a generation ago. Ergo they don't pose a threat to overthrowing democracy. Whatever the USA was in the 1980s it was not totalitarian.
Now in terms of where we stand. I think we have more free speech today, because of the internet. On the other hand mass media was because of the move away from independent news divisions is mostly worse. Certainly 2001-2005 was far worse in terms of free speech than anytime in my lifetime.
I'm not sure about all civil rights being better, they are different. For example prison terms are much longer and much harsher. In the 1970s and 1980s we elevated 2/3rds of the black population out of poverty. Today we are throwing huge percentages of them back into poverty.
In the 1980s no self respecting Republican would have had anything to do with voter suppression like we see today in Ohio, that was a legacy of the South. Today we have a nationally organized voter suppression effort in about a dozen states, more or less openly embraced by a national Republican candidate from the North East.
Overturning Citizens United won't keep multimillionaires from stuffing mailboxes with DVDs or buying television air time.
That and the dozen or so other laws that existed in the 1980s did prevent those things. Because illegal campaign donations were actual a form of election fraud and the multimillionaire could go to jail if he wasn't careful about those DVDs. And the airtime wasn't for sale for campaign ads bought from someone outside the campaign
but the idea that a few thousand citizens can get together, pool their money, and run a series of devastating attack ads scares them to death.
That always existed. Those are called political parties.
I've traveled to countries that work like you want it to. They are socialist states and totalitarian regimes. My family fled from such countries. We are going to fight that sort of thing happening in the US every step of the way. What you want is anti-democratic and plain evil.
These are the laws that existed in the 1980s when America had fully functioning democracy and arguably the democracy that was least restrictive on speech. There are not now nor have there even been many totalitarian regimes. And generally dictatorships don't regulate speech nearly as much as Democracies do because they regulate behavior directly. The opinions of the people are of little consequence in a dictatorship.
So you want the media to be arbiters over who speaks the truth, and hence what information is "incorrect or biased". No way
I find it interesting that you perfectly OK with corporations in general regulating speech but not a particular group of corporations with a much narrower set of objectives. Those corporations can't be trusted while other corporations in general are all puppies and kittens.
Furthermore, no matter what you do, rich people can always spend their own money privately to broadcast their opinions. Or are you going to restrict that too?
They can broadcast their opinions on issues just not engage in campaign spending. Issue oriented policy discussion isn't what we are discussing. We are discussing the right for corporation to endorse particular candidates.
Rich people have always been able to give up to $2500 to the political campaign of the candidate of their choosing.
Well, I cannot live with it, because that restricts my right to free speech, which I exercise by donating to organizations that represent my points of view.
That's money not speech. You at the amounts you are talking about would be free to donate to candidates and parties.
Everybody can afford to contribute to organizations that buy advertising: the Sierra club, Catholic charities, the ACLU, unions, and many others. Citizens United (which has Obama riled up so much) is a nonprofit corporation, just like any of these others.
Those organizations weren't able to buy direct political ads a generation ago. They could have issue ads but they could not buy political advertising. More importantly they couldn't coordinate and donate themselves. If the Sierra club wanted to buy an ad they had to buy it directly and sign it with their name.
Well Slackware was in the 2nd generation of distributions before even Debian and RedHat baed on SLS. So an Ubuntu user can't really complain about Slackware causing fragmentation.
I never did a fully Linux install from floppies but I did use distributions like Debian which required floppy boot. So you got the CD and that contained disk images you had to burn to 2 floppies to get the kernel booted enough to install the rest from CD.
Given that Microsoft is an American company I'd say it is doubtful there is going to be a huge USA led shift away from Microsoft. Probably better looking at Europe to lead the way for desktop, there and things didn't go so well with the European initiatives. OTOH Apple and Google are both American companies so you might see iOS/Android being the ticket.
I've been following the federal government on this. It is wonderful to see the government taking the lead and helping to drive a technology. We often talk about complaints with government but they deserve kudos for doing some hard and doing it right.
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you're merely trying to make excuses as to why it's not censorship, even though it clearly is.
No it isn't clear. I'm not saying the US hasn't shut down internet sites engaging in commerce, they certainly have. But that has nothing to do with censorship. Lets take your example and simplify by assuming it were domestic. The government could very easily seize a cardroom or illegal casino and that wouldn't be censorship. If they seized something like cardplayer magazine that would be censorship. Absolutely the USA wants to regulate commerce.
Your complaints about ICE, the customs office is subject to US law and rules of due process. If they suspect criminal activity and the agency appears in court then it does go through the court system. There is the process. Now I agree that what the US is going is effectively exporting US law, and that is a problem. But it is not censorship.
The Nation has been publishing continuously since 1865.
Labor newspapers that had existed for a century only closed in the last few decades.
Books of all sorts are published freely.
The internet allows for free speech.
Yes the US does believe in free speech even when it threatens the powerful. There are infrequent incidents in the other direction but they have a fantastic record.
____
As for mega upload they were charged in Virginia court and Australia courts for crimes related to piracy. That is a typical business seizure that happens to businesses which are fundamentally criminal enterprises. You may disagree that megaupload was a fundamentally criminal enterprise but there is nothing unusual about the government seizing business assets for companies under indictment. That's not censorship.
because they don't want to be able to give up their ability to censor international domains at will,whilst simultaneously using censorship as their go-to excuse as to why no one else should run the net
When has the USA ever censored international domains? We have enough real problems in the world let's not make up fake ones to fight about. The USA has a several hundred year strong history of light censorship, especially political censorship an excellent track record. If I had to trust any single entity not to censor the US government is a good choice.
There is nothing hypocritical about having them play that role. Anymore than there would be in choosing the German government to conduct accounting audits all over the planet.
I'm American and yes treaties aren't popular here. Though in all fairness most Americans in almost all their practices live in a world where on most things the US congress is the final authority. There is no American version of Brussels. Further remember that 1/2 of Americans haven't been out of the country, for many Americans their primary view of foreign countries are the stories about how their family fled and images on news programs emphasizing how much the USA is hated globally. So a large percentage of American population are isolationist. I good deal of the US probably wouldn't mind a US internet, that is loosely connected to other nation's networks; like the telephone system rather than a genuinely global system. Which isn't hypocrisy but rather a deeper desire to move away from empire.
That being said, we also do have foreign policy hawks and then business interests that like US domination rather than US participation.
I read through the very early draft: http://www.itu.int/en/wcit-12/Documents/draft-future-itrs-public.pdf
It seems like the focus is mainly compensation structure and what obligations exist for telcos passing traffic through. Content provisions are light. For example
This is a crucial treaty in the way the public water system is crucial to public welfare. Its existence is a matter of public interest, the details of implementation not so much. Most people want their messages to pass but don't really care how telcos pass expenses around.
VBScript isn't an alternative because only IE supports it.
I understand but a good deal of the thread was about a Microsoft takeover or whatever of Javascript and I thought the context of VBScript, that Microsoft has had an alternative and one they preferred was important.
As for building a strongly typed language on top of a dynamically typed one. I think you can author strongly typed DSLs in a dynamic language but I don't think you can really get it to work as a layer that just passes down. The two models are fundamentally in conflict. The dynamically typed code gets used when it is needed for "power" and this pollutes the entire code. In precisely the same way that C's use of void pointers introduces weak typing back into otherwise strongly typed languages like C++, or Objective-C. Something may be better than nothing And if TypeScript makes it possible to create high power GUIs for web programming that's a wonderful step forward.
I should mention the insane OO model in Javascript comes from a fundamental unwillingness to choose functional or object oriented. This is the same problem Perl has, where Perl can have any style for an individual programmer, so once you start pulling in libraries you constantly have to break your paradigm. There are strongly typed high power functional languages but they aren't object oriented. There are strongly typed object oriented languages but they aren't functional. JavaScript makes heavy use of functions, jQuery is fundamentally functional. Either you tie you methods to your data, and you have a hierarchy on your data. Or your functions are highly polymorphic, you have complex types and a hierarchy on them; with instances fo the data being isolated. You can't code both ways.
I think static vs. dynamic is more or less a choice a language makes at design time that is an impossible fork to ever cross back over.
Nope. The good languages in 2030 are the new ones being invented today.
Javascript has far too many features that would be crippled by static typing. For example you can implement a Y combinator naturally in Javascript:
function Y(F) { return F(function (x) { return (Y(F))(x) ; } ) ; }
That's the sort of thing you would need to absolutely prohibit in a static language that is incredibly powerful and useful in a dynamic language.I think static vs. dynamic is more or less a choice a language makes at design time that is an impossible fork to ever cross back over.
Clojure is a Lisp that runs on the JVM and can pull in JVM libraries. It has nothing to do with Javascript in browsers.
Most likely the Microsoft languages group has no say one way or another over the implementation of the trident engine. Microsoft is not a company with a dozen people.
They've had a JavaScript alternative for years, VBScript. IE is not the standard browser anymore and IIS is not the large enough. So they need something more open. But this isn't a change they've had a VB alternative since Microsoft got in the webserver business.
research.microsoft.com has been advancing lots of open source functional languages that use type inference and no one has been getting burned. The research group lets them do cutting edge research and then another research group builds an implementation for more mainstream languages and then it gets pulled in by product management.
So I'd say in the open source language arena the public has learned the opposite.
I'll agree it is different with products as opposed to technologies.
No I don't have it flipped. Try configuring something like the MacBook air or retina. Even though it has been several months they still are likely close to what you would pay from a Dell, HP or Toshiba. On the other hand the PC all in ones are much cheaper for the same hardware than the iMac
Estimates for gross margin from PCs for 2011 were 28%. Average sale prices are in the $1350-1410 range, Conversely their competition sells their system with a gross margin of around 6%. But estimates of average sale prices are $550-620 range. Apple doesn't even sell machines at that price point.
The comparison with Apple is margins on high end systems from the other PC vendors.
Apple doesn't offer nearly the product selection of the other major PC vendors. There is no question about that. The claim was that for the same hardware Apple was grossly overcharging.
Just to throw out a specific example. When the retina macbook pro came out I specked out a Dell with similar features (16g of ram, Nvidia 650M, same CPU, 256g SSD)
The Apple was about $200 cheaper.
The SSD was way faster.
Dell didn't have the Retina display.
The Dell did not have the same factor i.e. nowhere near as thin and light.
BS. I've been having this discussion for 11 years. Pick a mac, configure a Dell, Toshiba, HP similarly and you usually get the Apple coming in cheaper when it is first released moving up to about a 15-30% premium by the time right before it is pulled. What I've frequently happen is this dialogue.
Apple has A,B,C,D and E
PC has A, B,C+ (something even better), D- (something worse) and is missing E and that is much cheaper.
Your claim was the policy I was advocating were used by totalitarian governments and would bring on totalitarianism. The fact is they aren't used by totalitarian governments and were used by this government a generation ago. Ergo they don't pose a threat to overthrowing democracy. Whatever the USA was in the 1980s it was not totalitarian.
Now in terms of where we stand. I think we have more free speech today, because of the internet. On the other hand mass media was because of the move away from independent news divisions is mostly worse. Certainly 2001-2005 was far worse in terms of free speech than anytime in my lifetime.
I'm not sure about all civil rights being better, they are different. For example prison terms are much longer and much harsher. In the 1970s and 1980s we elevated 2/3rds of the black population out of poverty. Today we are throwing huge percentages of them back into poverty.
In the 1980s no self respecting Republican would have had anything to do with voter suppression like we see today in Ohio, that was a legacy of the South. Today we have a nationally organized voter suppression effort in about a dozen states, more or less openly embraced by a national Republican candidate from the North East.
Overturning Citizens United won't keep multimillionaires from stuffing mailboxes with DVDs or buying television air time.
That and the dozen or so other laws that existed in the 1980s did prevent those things. Because illegal campaign donations were actual a form of election fraud and the multimillionaire could go to jail if he wasn't careful about those DVDs. And the airtime wasn't for sale for campaign ads bought from someone outside the campaign
but the idea that a few thousand citizens can get together, pool their money, and run a series of devastating attack ads scares them to death.
That always existed. Those are called political parties.
I've traveled to countries that work like you want it to. They are socialist states and totalitarian regimes. My family fled from such countries. We are going to fight that sort of thing happening in the US every step of the way. What you want is anti-democratic and plain evil.
These are the laws that existed in the 1980s when America had fully functioning democracy and arguably the democracy that was least restrictive on speech. There are not now nor have there even been many totalitarian regimes. And generally dictatorships don't regulate speech nearly as much as Democracies do because they regulate behavior directly. The opinions of the people are of little consequence in a dictatorship.
So you want the media to be arbiters over who speaks the truth, and hence what information is "incorrect or biased". No way
I find it interesting that you perfectly OK with corporations in general regulating speech but not a particular group of corporations with a much narrower set of objectives. Those corporations can't be trusted while other corporations in general are all puppies and kittens.
Furthermore, no matter what you do, rich people can always spend their own money privately to broadcast their opinions. Or are you going to restrict that too?
They can broadcast their opinions on issues just not engage in campaign spending. Issue oriented policy discussion isn't what we are discussing. We are discussing the right for corporation to endorse particular candidates.
Rich people have always been able to give up to $2500 to the political campaign of the candidate of their choosing.
Well, I cannot live with it, because that restricts my right to free speech, which I exercise by donating to organizations that represent my points of view.
That's money not speech. You at the amounts you are talking about would be free to donate to candidates and parties.
Everybody can afford to contribute to organizations that buy advertising: the Sierra club, Catholic charities, the ACLU, unions, and many others. Citizens United (which has Obama riled up so much) is a nonprofit corporation, just like any of these others.
Those organizations weren't able to buy direct political ads a generation ago. They could have issue ads but they could not buy political advertising. More importantly they couldn't coordinate and donate themselves. If the Sierra club wanted to buy an ad they had to buy it directly and sign it with their name.
Well Slackware was in the 2nd generation of distributions before even Debian and RedHat baed on SLS. So an Ubuntu user can't really complain about Slackware causing fragmentation.
I never did a fully Linux install from floppies but I did use distributions like Debian which required floppy boot. So you got the CD and that contained disk images you had to burn to 2 floppies to get the kernel booted enough to install the rest from CD.
ARIN which is quasi governmental is handling that part of switching over ISPs. But there is a chicken and egg problem some people have to go first.
Given that Microsoft is an American company I'd say it is doubtful there is going to be a huge USA led shift away from Microsoft. Probably better looking at Europe to lead the way for desktop, there and things didn't go so well with the European initiatives. OTOH Apple and Google are both American companies so you might see iOS/Android being the ticket.
Google and Android is very very good. Google on iOS was OK.
Most likely by 2014 we will have:
Google / Android has better maps.
Google maps is available for iOS.
Apple has worse data but with terrific integration.
I've been following the federal government on this. It is wonderful to see the government taking the lead and helping to drive a technology. We often talk about complaints with government but they deserve kudos for doing some hard and doing it right.