There are many different kinds of rights you have and many different ways in which they get enforced.
The government does enforce criminal law all by itself, which involve some violations of your person or property. The government does not automatically enforce civil law; you need to take action yourself. If you don't take action, you won't get anything. And some of those actions don't even involve the government: you may have to submit to binding arbitration to get your rights.
Copyright and patents aren't even "rights" in the usual sense, they are temporary monopolies granted by the government. There is no reason in the world why anybody other than you should have to bear the burden and expense of making sure you take proper advantage of that temporary monopoly.
Although people picture this as a gigantic, compact floating mass of plastic, it isn't. It's mostly tiny particles floating in the water, with one a small fraction of the junk floating on top. From Wikipedia:
The patch is not a visibly dense field of floating debris. The process of disintegration means that the plastic particulate in much of the affected region is too small to be seen. Researchers must estimate the patch's overall extent and debris density from samples
I don't understand this statement. Apple's gcc team (e.g. snaroff et al) have supported integrating their Objective C implementation into the main line of gcc since the NeXT days -- almost 20 years.
NeXT originally tried to weasel out of the GPL through dynamic linking. As I recall, it was only legal threats from the FSF that caused them to open source their code.
Since then, although the compiler itself has been integrated (a requirement of the license), they have not made any effort to actually make it useful to anybody. (If they had made available a runtime and standard library with their compiler in the 1980's, the world might look quite different today.)
Self-serving? Sure, most FOSS projects are, in the end. There are plenty of legit reasons to criticise Apple, but I would not consider their nature and level of support for FOSS (App store excepted) to be one of them.
I'm not criticizing Apple over their level of support for open source, I'm just saying that they don't deserve particular praise. If Apple's FOSS contributions disappeared from the world overnight, I think hardly anybody on non-Apple platforms would notice (with the exception maybe of their contributions to webkit).
Your cousins have the right observation, but they are drawing the wrong conclusions from it. Listening to "experts" is what gave Europe fascism, communism, the holocaust, military dictatorships, and many of the other ills Europe has experienced over the last few centuries; many of those started out as academic theories that looked good on paper and then were enthusiastically embraced.
The hostility of the US population to authority and government experts has meant that the US has had more than two centuries of continuous, uninterrupted democracy; it may have been a bad democracy at times, but at least it has been a democracy.
European acquiescence to experts has meant that Europe had had periods of spectacular cultural and political success--when they happened to have experts that made good recommendations--interrupted by periods of chaos, oppression, and violence.
US politics has always been divisive and had a huge irrational component. But at least people talk, challenge, and debate things at all.
It's the Europeans that are being manipulated; there is comparatively little debate--rational or otherwise--about anything of significance. People generally just parrot what their government experts tell them and fancy themselves informed and smart because they're saying the same thing that the experts are saying.
In different words, the irrationality and divisiveness of US debates reflects what the population is like. But Europeans are no more rational or unified, they simply avoid the problem by not talking at all. That's far worse. Europe's political chaos over the last few centuries is ample testament to that.
Based on European history in the 20th century, any notion that Europeans are politically or socially more mature, or historically more aware, than the US is obviously ridiculous.
They observe that seems to make Americans rather listen to people we know instead of "experts tell us" and sometimes outright hostility to "authority tells us".
Yes, and that's a good thing. Fascism, anti-semitism, and communism were all so readily embraced by Europeans because Europeans believed their "experts".
It is disturbing how readily many Europeans accept liberal positions on hotbutton issues like global warming and gay marriage when some intellectual elite tells them what to think. It's disturbing not because the liberal positions might be wrong (I think they are right), but because Europeans simply don't even engage in the debates necessary to reach an informed decision; many Europeans just line up in lock-step behind their governments and their experts and feel a smug sense of superiority about it.
Anyone with a little bit of collegic philosophy or logic study should realize that it isn't that our friends are purposely misleading but that they can be just as wrong.
Yes, but your friends are much less likely to have an agenda than a government expert or other public figure, and if they do have an agenda, you have better ways of figuring out what it is.
For the most part, those "open source projects" are self-serving and scarcely used by anybody else. The only project from Apple that has much use beyond Apple is WebKit, but they probably released that only because they were forced to by the license. You can see Jobs's attitude towards open source in the way he tried to weasel out of the GPL on gcc. And even to this day, Apple has not release an actually useful version of Objective-C.
If you weigh Apple's self-serving and useless contributions to open source against the harm they continue to do to open source, Linux, and programming freedom with their rhetoric, advertising, and outright lies, Apple is arguably a big net minus for open source.
Can you name anything that Obama's cabinet, personally or collectively, can do that will in any way get the relief wells drilled sooner?
Oh, there is a lot more to be done, like figuring out how to reduce the oil spilling from the current well, figuring out how to reduce the ecological impact of the oil that has already spilled, drafting legislation preventing such problems in the future, figuring out a better energy strategy for the US, supervising BP on their current efforts to drill the relief wells so that they aren't cutting corners again (they aren't done yet, you know).
If the secretary wants to get his hand dirty technically in addition to his legislative and strategic duties, those are also excellent areas. If that's not where he can apply his expertise, he can do what he is there to do: figuring out funding, legislation, and long-term strategy.
Sorry, but cabinet-level positions and the presidency are 24/7 jobs. You can see what kinds of disasters happen if people treat them as just day jobs when you look at the Bush years.
Protip: Nokia was leading so strongly in terms of UI, that it’s well known that for at least 10 years, people working at Motorola usually bought Nokia phones. It was the single biggest strength of S40 and S60
I've owned Nokia phones for years; their UIs have always sucked. What Nokia was good at was functionality: multitasking, modem support, battery life, etc. In terms of UI, Palm used to be the leader for easy-to-use touch screen phones.
So what the hell are you talking about?
What the hell are *you* talking about?
Oh, and sorry, if you don’t even offer the ability to install my own choice of software, you can fuck right off. So iOS does not even get to compete here.
Why do you bring up iOS? Did I say anything about iOS? I suggested Nokia ship Android because it's pretty clear they are not going to be able to produce anything substantially better themselves in the foreseeable future.
Or, in different words, 99% of tax audit-related data is saved by never read. But if you get audited and you don't have it, you're in trouble, and your costs likely far exceed 100x the cost of having kept the records in the first place.
90% of backup data is also never read. That doesn't make it useless or "dead weight".
They didn't patent the implementation (which is unpatentable, even if it's a lot of work), they patented the look and feel. And the look and feel of this feature has been around for many years, implemented by other people who had to work a lot harder on ancient 3D hardware to make this look good.
Nokia makes great hardware, but they obviously have problems putting together a good UI or development platform. They are unlikely to come up with something better than Android, Chrome, or iOS.
So what Nokia should do is ship Android and build whatever software and hardware innovations they want on top of that. I think Nokia Android phones would be spectacular. Symbian^4? Sorry, not interested.
Roundup is a herbicide; it has fairly low toxicity in humans. If you're a farmer and spray it, you may have to worry. But levels found in food, even Roundup treated, are orders of magnitude below those where toxic effects have been seen. Calling that "not safe" is really a stretch.
No, the arguments against Roundup are environmental and economic, not safety, but those are compelling.
This may come as a surprise to you, but it is actually possible to have meaningful discussions about politics and science without citations. Furthermore, it's not the job of other people to do your literature search for you. If there are specific issues that are controversial, you can ask for references, otherwise your comment is idiotic.
As for what damage they have done, I doubt there is much disagreement on the facts: they support factory farming, support large monocultures, and create and patent genetically modified organisms. Many people (myself include) consider that damage. You may not. We'll just have to agree to disagree on that.
If you had taken really care to read my comments, then you would not make such statement. I am pro-checked exceptions but I also stated that I find the Java implementation to be inflexible. I am not saying anything like "Java's exception handling is the better way".
So which language implements static exception declarations better then? If you don't know of any, then I'm wondering why nobody has come up with any such language in 50 years of programming language design.
If you do not have citations then you cannot have a good point, that's what you imply? Or are you stating that every important research is already done, and no new research will ever happen that deserves attention?
I didn't ask you for "citations". Observations, specific anecdotes, and examples would do. I've given some (ML, looking at the Sun Java source code, etc.), I'm not asking for more.
What I see, is that people fuck up exception handling in ALL of the languages that have exceptions regardless of checked or not-checked. Also, a lot of people still avoid using exceptions at all.
Well, the question is whether checked exceptions cause people to "fuck up" in more ways than otherwise. Java is the only language where I have seen deployed, supposedly working applications output exception backtraces on standard output. Haven't you seen that?
It is also important to note that most of the exceptions coming out from Java programs are NullPointerExceptions.
My point is that if you see a backtrace, that means there is no recovery code; I consider that a problem. Why do you think there is no recovery code?
"when I reviewed Sun's Java source code, a large percentage of exception handlers were incorrect," Sun messed up other things, too. If you want to see some nice exception handling, look at the code of the Guice framework.
Yes, but if even the creators of Java can't do exception handling well with declarations, what reason is there to believe that declarations provide any benefit? (In fact, a lot of the Java exception handling code has clearly been put in because the compiler was complaining, but the code was incorrect. Arguably, Java's exception handling requirements caused errors to be introduce.)
I don't know ML specifically (although I learned SML long ago), but many functional languages adopt the two-state return type, like the Option[T] type in Scala. Now constructs like this with a strict type system ends up people writing almost the same code as with try...catch.
Option[T] in functional languages is the equivalent of alternatively returning a null pointer; you use it when returning nothing is an option during normal operations. Exceptions are for unexpected occurrences, not for loop exits or alternate return values, among other things because exceptions may be extremely slow. Program as if every exception contains a "sleep(1)".
Scala has exceptions but doesn't check them, which also tells you something when a statically typed Java derivative dispenses with checking exceptions.
So, I'm still wondering whether there is any argument or example for checked exceptions other than "I think they are a good idea". I'm genuinely interested. I doubt it's going to convince me, but that's not the point. At least I'd like to understand more why people want checked exceptions because I simply don't understand why anybody would want them.
Quite right. Actually, the problem is food subsidies in general. In the US, corn subsidies are the big culprit, in Europe, it's milk and other products. Food subsidies in the US and Europe also keep other nations from developing a reasonable economy; if we stopped subsidizing food production in our countries, dropped import duties, and imported more from South America and Africa, those nations would actually have a chance to get out of poverty and develop decent, functioning economy. Instead, we send them "development aid", which simply gets misused as subsidies to our own corporations and disappears in corrupt governments and aid organizations.
Well, you can "totally disagree", but what are your reasons? I think if you want to argue that Java's exception handling is a better way of doing it, it would be good if you could point at some observations and some examples/research from other languages supporting your view.
What is see is that: (1) Java programs spew out uncaught exceptions more frequently than programs in other languages with exceptions, (2) when I reviewed Sun's Java source code, a large percentage of exception handlers were incorrect, and (3) even religiously statically typed languages like ML do not use exception declarations (in fact, they tried it in early versions of the language and then removed them because they found that they don't make sense).
Just because people feel religious about it doesn't mean there aren't objective criteria for comparing IDEs. It's just an objective fact that many of VisualStudio's features were only added long after they were pioneered by other IDEs. And usability and productivity can be quantified at least in principle, so we could know whether VisualStudio is a more productive IDE than alternatives.
Slashdot Mirror
Registered mail is guaranteed to be sealed; postal workers place stickers and stamps over any opening.
The issue is that you're paying for a license to listen to the music in a certain format; you don't pay for (or own) the music itself.
That wasn't the original intent of copyright. You didn't license books, you bought them and then you owned them.
There are many different kinds of rights you have and many different ways in which they get enforced.
The government does enforce criminal law all by itself, which involve some violations of your person or property. The government does not automatically enforce civil law; you need to take action yourself. If you don't take action, you won't get anything. And some of those actions don't even involve the government: you may have to submit to binding arbitration to get your rights.
Copyright and patents aren't even "rights" in the usual sense, they are temporary monopolies granted by the government. There is no reason in the world why anybody other than you should have to bear the burden and expense of making sure you take proper advantage of that temporary monopoly.
Although people picture this as a gigantic, compact floating mass of plastic, it isn't. It's mostly tiny particles floating in the water, with one a small fraction of the junk floating on top. From Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_Garbage_Patch
Sorry, but recycling plastic just doesn't get easier by throwing it into the ocean and having it swirl around for a while, sadly it gets harder.
I don't understand this statement. Apple's gcc team (e.g. snaroff et al) have supported integrating their Objective C implementation into the main line of gcc since the NeXT days -- almost 20 years.
NeXT originally tried to weasel out of the GPL through dynamic linking. As I recall, it was only legal threats from the FSF that caused them to open source their code.
Since then, although the compiler itself has been integrated (a requirement of the license), they have not made any effort to actually make it useful to anybody. (If they had made available a runtime and standard library with their compiler in the 1980's, the world might look quite different today.)
Self-serving? Sure, most FOSS projects are, in the end. There are plenty of legit reasons to criticise Apple, but I would not consider their nature and level of support for FOSS (App store excepted) to be one of them.
I'm not criticizing Apple over their level of support for open source, I'm just saying that they don't deserve particular praise. If Apple's FOSS contributions disappeared from the world overnight, I think hardly anybody on non-Apple platforms would notice (with the exception maybe of their contributions to webkit).
Your cousins have the right observation, but they are drawing the wrong conclusions from it. Listening to "experts" is what gave Europe fascism, communism, the holocaust, military dictatorships, and many of the other ills Europe has experienced over the last few centuries; many of those started out as academic theories that looked good on paper and then were enthusiastically embraced.
The hostility of the US population to authority and government experts has meant that the US has had more than two centuries of continuous, uninterrupted democracy; it may have been a bad democracy at times, but at least it has been a democracy.
European acquiescence to experts has meant that Europe had had periods of spectacular cultural and political success--when they happened to have experts that made good recommendations--interrupted by periods of chaos, oppression, and violence.
The US model is the better one.
US politics has always been divisive and had a huge irrational component. But at least people talk, challenge, and debate things at all.
It's the Europeans that are being manipulated; there is comparatively little debate--rational or otherwise--about anything of significance. People generally just parrot what their government experts tell them and fancy themselves informed and smart because they're saying the same thing that the experts are saying.
In different words, the irrationality and divisiveness of US debates reflects what the population is like. But Europeans are no more rational or unified, they simply avoid the problem by not talking at all. That's far worse. Europe's political chaos over the last few centuries is ample testament to that.
Based on European history in the 20th century, any notion that Europeans are politically or socially more mature, or historically more aware, than the US is obviously ridiculous.
They observe that seems to make Americans rather listen to people we know instead of "experts tell us" and sometimes outright hostility to "authority tells us".
Yes, and that's a good thing. Fascism, anti-semitism, and communism were all so readily embraced by Europeans because Europeans believed their "experts".
It is disturbing how readily many Europeans accept liberal positions on hotbutton issues like global warming and gay marriage when some intellectual elite tells them what to think. It's disturbing not because the liberal positions might be wrong (I think they are right), but because Europeans simply don't even engage in the debates necessary to reach an informed decision; many Europeans just line up in lock-step behind their governments and their experts and feel a smug sense of superiority about it.
Anyone with a little bit of collegic philosophy or logic study should realize that it isn't that our friends are purposely misleading but that they can be just as wrong.
Yes, but your friends are much less likely to have an agenda than a government expert or other public figure, and if they do have an agenda, you have better ways of figuring out what it is.
So... I don't want to sound like an Apple fanboy, but nobody ever said that the Apple forums on Apple's website are a place of free speech, right?
No. But this isn't about "rights" it's about what Apple pretends to be in their marketing info and what they are in reality.
The multiple posts about an external magazine review have been removed because discussing magazine articles is offtopic for a tech support board
I see. You mean Apple's tech support goes something like this:
Customer: I'm having reception problems. I think your antenna is broken.
Apple: You're crazy. Our products are perfect. Nobody else is having this problem.
Customer: Lots of people are having this problem, and Consumer Reports confirmed it.
Apple: References to other publications are offtopic, so we now have good cause to delete this thread.
For the most part, those "open source projects" are self-serving and scarcely used by anybody else. The only project from Apple that has much use beyond Apple is WebKit, but they probably released that only because they were forced to by the license. You can see Jobs's attitude towards open source in the way he tried to weasel out of the GPL on gcc. And even to this day, Apple has not release an actually useful version of Objective-C.
If you weigh Apple's self-serving and useless contributions to open source against the harm they continue to do to open source, Linux, and programming freedom with their rhetoric, advertising, and outright lies, Apple is arguably a big net minus for open source.
Can you name anything that Obama's cabinet, personally or collectively, can do that will in any way get the relief wells drilled sooner?
Oh, there is a lot more to be done, like figuring out how to reduce the oil spilling from the current well, figuring out how to reduce the ecological impact of the oil that has already spilled, drafting legislation preventing such problems in the future, figuring out a better energy strategy for the US, supervising BP on their current efforts to drill the relief wells so that they aren't cutting corners again (they aren't done yet, you know).
If the secretary wants to get his hand dirty technically in addition to his legislative and strategic duties, those are also excellent areas. If that's not where he can apply his expertise, he can do what he is there to do: figuring out funding, legislation, and long-term strategy.
Sorry, but cabinet-level positions and the presidency are 24/7 jobs. You can see what kinds of disasters happen if people treat them as just day jobs when you look at the Bush years.
Protip: Nokia was leading so strongly in terms of UI, that it’s well known that for at least 10 years, people working at Motorola usually bought Nokia phones. It was the single biggest strength of S40 and S60
I've owned Nokia phones for years; their UIs have always sucked. What Nokia was good at was functionality: multitasking, modem support, battery life, etc. In terms of UI, Palm used to be the leader for easy-to-use touch screen phones.
So what the hell are you talking about?
What the hell are *you* talking about?
Oh, and sorry, if you don’t even offer the ability to install my own choice of software, you can fuck right off. So iOS does not even get to compete here.
Why do you bring up iOS? Did I say anything about iOS? I suggested Nokia ship Android because it's pretty clear they are not going to be able to produce anything substantially better themselves in the foreseeable future.
Just wondering.
Someone doesn't understand opportunity cost.
Or, in different words, 99% of tax audit-related data is saved by never read. But if you get audited and you don't have it, you're in trouble, and your costs likely far exceed 100x the cost of having kept the records in the first place.
90% of backup data is also never read. That doesn't make it useless or "dead weight".
They didn't patent the implementation (which is unpatentable, even if it's a lot of work), they patented the look and feel. And the look and feel of this feature has been around for many years, implemented by other people who had to work a lot harder on ancient 3D hardware to make this look good.
This patent is theft and fraud, pure and simple.
Nokia makes great hardware, but they obviously have problems putting together a good UI or development platform. They are unlikely to come up with something better than Android, Chrome, or iOS.
So what Nokia should do is ship Android and build whatever software and hardware innovations they want on top of that. I think Nokia Android phones would be spectacular. Symbian^4? Sorry, not interested.
Between walking and biking, what else do we need?
This seems like an even bigger and less efficient version of the Segway, another solution in search of a problem.
Roundup is a herbicide; it has fairly low toxicity in humans. If you're a farmer and spray it, you may have to worry. But levels found in food, even Roundup treated, are orders of magnitude below those where toxic effects have been seen. Calling that "not safe" is really a stretch.
No, the arguments against Roundup are environmental and economic, not safety, but those are compelling.
This may come as a surprise to you, but it is actually possible to have meaningful discussions about politics and science without citations. Furthermore, it's not the job of other people to do your literature search for you. If there are specific issues that are controversial, you can ask for references, otherwise your comment is idiotic.
As for what damage they have done, I doubt there is much disagreement on the facts: they support factory farming, support large monocultures, and create and patent genetically modified organisms. Many people (myself include) consider that damage. You may not. We'll just have to agree to disagree on that.
If you had taken really care to read my comments, then you would not make such statement. I am pro-checked exceptions but I also stated that I find the Java implementation to be inflexible. I am not saying anything like "Java's exception handling is the better way".
So which language implements static exception declarations better then? If you don't know of any, then I'm wondering why nobody has come up with any such language in 50 years of programming language design.
If you do not have citations then you cannot have a good point, that's what you imply? Or are you stating that every important research is already done, and no new research will ever happen that deserves attention?
I didn't ask you for "citations". Observations, specific anecdotes, and examples would do. I've given some (ML, looking at the Sun Java source code, etc.), I'm not asking for more.
What I see, is that people fuck up exception handling in ALL of the languages that have exceptions regardless of checked or not-checked. Also, a lot of people still avoid using exceptions at all.
Well, the question is whether checked exceptions cause people to "fuck up" in more ways than otherwise. Java is the only language where I have seen deployed, supposedly working applications output exception backtraces on standard output. Haven't you seen that?
It is also important to note that most of the exceptions coming out from Java programs are NullPointerExceptions.
My point is that if you see a backtrace, that means there is no recovery code; I consider that a problem. Why do you think there is no recovery code?
"when I reviewed Sun's Java source code, a large percentage of exception handlers were incorrect," Sun messed up other things, too. If you want to see some nice exception handling, look at the code of the Guice framework.
Yes, but if even the creators of Java can't do exception handling well with declarations, what reason is there to believe that declarations provide any benefit? (In fact, a lot of the Java exception handling code has clearly been put in because the compiler was complaining, but the code was incorrect. Arguably, Java's exception handling requirements caused errors to be introduce.)
I don't know ML specifically (although I learned SML long ago), but many functional languages adopt the two-state return type, like the Option[T] type in Scala. Now constructs like this with a strict type system ends up people writing almost the same code as with try...catch.
Option[T] in functional languages is the equivalent of alternatively returning a null pointer; you use it when returning nothing is an option during normal operations. Exceptions are for unexpected occurrences, not for loop exits or alternate return values, among other things because exceptions may be extremely slow. Program as if every exception contains a "sleep(1)".
Scala has exceptions but doesn't check them, which also tells you something when a statically typed Java derivative dispenses with checking exceptions.
So, I'm still wondering whether there is any argument or example for checked exceptions other than "I think they are a good idea". I'm genuinely interested. I doubt it's going to convince me, but that's not the point. At least I'd like to understand more why people want checked exceptions because I simply don't understand why anybody would want them.
Quite right. Actually, the problem is food subsidies in general. In the US, corn subsidies are the big culprit, in Europe, it's milk and other products. Food subsidies in the US and Europe also keep other nations from developing a reasonable economy; if we stopped subsidizing food production in our countries, dropped import duties, and imported more from South America and Africa, those nations would actually have a chance to get out of poverty and develop decent, functioning economy. Instead, we send them "development aid", which simply gets misused as subsidies to our own corporations and disappears in corrupt governments and aid organizations.
Most GM food is biologically perfectly safe to eat. The problem is that it's not economically, ecologically, and socially safe.
Well, you can "totally disagree", but what are your reasons? I think if you want to argue that Java's exception handling is a better way of doing it, it would be good if you could point at some observations and some examples/research from other languages supporting your view.
What is see is that: (1) Java programs spew out uncaught exceptions more frequently than programs in other languages with exceptions, (2) when I reviewed Sun's Java source code, a large percentage of exception handlers were incorrect, and (3) even religiously statically typed languages like ML do not use exception declarations (in fact, they tried it in early versions of the language and then removed them because they found that they don't make sense).
Just because people feel religious about it doesn't mean there aren't objective criteria for comparing IDEs. It's just an objective fact that many of VisualStudio's features were only added long after they were pioneered by other IDEs. And usability and productivity can be quantified at least in principle, so we could know whether VisualStudio is a more productive IDE than alternatives.