Also without a tax, they'd be able to sell more and gas prices would be cheaper.
Buh? Have you never heard of supply and demand? If taxes were lower, demand would go up, and world prices (as in, the cost of a barrel of crude oil) would go up, not down (though the net change may be zero, it's hard to say). Why do you think oil prices dropped a bit after a number of nations announced they were thinking of cutting oil subsidies? Answer: reduced demand projections.
Which, really, just furthers my original point. Reducing taxes would increase demand, and allow these corporations to charge more for a barrel of oil (up to the point where demand destruction kicks in). Those profits would go straight into their pockets. So not only would they benefit from lower taxes, they would also benefit from higher prices.
Security is all of it together and it is as strong as the weakest link. To me as a user, I do not care what or who you want to blame.
Well, if you believe in the idea of authentication, then at some point, you have to trust an individual or group of individuals to properly verify identities. Whether it be a CA or a web-of-trust, ultimately, the problem is the same: you're relying on people to perform due diligence to ensure that identities are being properly validated. If you can't trust this process, then authentication is a non-starter, something I'm sure much of the security and cryptography world would take rather strong issue with.
So, where does that 27.9 BILLION dollars come from. The taxpayer. Exxon merely wrote the check for all the dollars it collected from you and me to pay it.
And in absence of said tax, they'd stuff that money in their pockets instead. What's your point?
Until someone actually PROVES evolution, doesn't hte burden of proof remain against it?
Umm, in science, you don't prove a theory. You acquire evidence and validate or invalidate the theory based on it. Theories must also make predictions that are testable. A good theory is able to explain, within it's framework, all observations related to it. That's it, that's all. And evolution most certainly must stand up to this scrutiny (and has done so remarkably well... only a few other theories have been so successful; relativity and quantum mechanics come to mind).
Your obvious confusion is that you're using the colloquial term "theory", as opposed to the scientific term "theory". The former is used to indicate a guess, an idea with no basis. The latter is a rigorous scientific construct that is immensely powerful.
So, evolution is a scientific theory because it makes predictions (eg, antibacterial agents triggering the upswell of resistant strains) that can be tested (just go to a hospital), and is able to explain observations (the tree of life) within it's framework. The same can't be said for religion (last I checked, intelligent design has made no testable predictions).
I do not know one way or the other about evolution OR intelligent design.
Clearly, given that you're under the mistaken impression that evolution hasn't stood up to rigorous scientific scrutiny since it's very inception.
I find it unfair that evolution enjoys a presumption of being right, while anything else that goes against it must bear a greater burden of proof.
Do you also find it unfair that the theory of heliocentrism, or a spherical earth, enjoys the presumption of being right, while anything else that goes against them must bear a greater burden of proof?
In science class, you damn well say and write whatever the teacher tells you to.
I know! It's like Math teachers insisting that the square root of 9 is 3. I say it's 2, and who are they to say I'm wrong? Damn those authority figures!
Any notion of the involvement of intelligence is rejected as abominable heresy by the evolution faithful.
No, it's rejected as baseless nonsense. Bring some real, testable evidence to the table, and maybe people will listen. And no, the bible doesn't count.
Really. So, all private industry is automatically good, or would you care to qualify that statement? The free market has failure modes, you know. Perhaps you've heard of natural monopoly, imbalance of information, and externalities?
Hear that noise? It's the sound of thousands of libertarians plugging their ears and yelling "LA LA LA" as loud as they can.
Tell that to Enron's customers. Or those whose investments are now destroyed by the ongoing collapse of the mortgage industry. Or those who suffered through the massive NY blackout a few years back.
But, yeah... private industry is always good. Right.
it seems the software is supposed to be "invisible" to the end user, so going to the end user and saying, "Hey, you know that software that runs on the expensive piece of equipment we sold you, well underneath the covers its crap and I need to convince the CEO of that" is probably a bad idea.
First off, it's not at all clear that this software is "invisible" to the end user. Quite the opposite, actually, as according to TFS, the only way to collect and analyze the data retrieved from their product is to use the software they've written. Seems far from invisible to me.
Second, I don't think anyone would advocate going to your customer and saying, "Wow, our product sucks, help me convince my managers". That's downright stupid, for any number of reasons (not the least of which is exposing internal company politics to outside customers). What you *should* be doing is going to the customer and saying, "As part of our support contract, I'd like to get some feedback from you regarding our software." But, the vital key, when doing this, is to make sure you're talking to the right people. Make sure you're talking to the guys actually using the product in the field. It's them you're trying to developer the product for, not the CTO or some useless middle manager.
The house prices are the result of people taking on excessive debts to finance their own homes, thus creating a big demand that drives up prices.
As well as lenders and investors, drunk on the income from selling and re-selling those loans for big profits, unwisely handing out loans to those who clearly couldn't qualify, all the while believing their house of cards would never fall down.
It was (and is) a systemic problem, and you can blame everyone up and down the chain: the feds for not regulating, the lendors for giving out bad loans, the banks for repackaging the loans into vehicles with misleading/obfuscated risk profiles, the investors for buying those vehicles, the speculators for driving up prices, and regular homeowners for being to fucking stupid to realize they were taking on debt they would be unable to service.
Spoken like someone who has not programmed in enough languages to understand the GP's points.
Ahh, good ol' baseless ad hominems. Shall we get into a language pissing context next?
For myself, the "Postel's Law" item has been the cause of a lot of grief, tied in a dead heat with the lack of strict typing. Grrrr.....
And I can't stand strict typing, preferring languages like Smalltalk and Lisp, which provide type safety without all the headaches and horrible gymnastics, which have only been slightly eased by the introduction of generics and template-style programming. Again, it's a matter of taste.
My comment was *clearly* about JavaScript in the context of web apps.
Then you should've framed it as such, rather than stating "[your] complaints with JS don't lie with performance.", thus clearly implying that you were going to go on a rant about JS, the language, as opposed to web browsers in general. Furthermore, your first bullet was this:
"Tied too much to the browser. JS works great for some (some love it) but syntactically I hate every last part of it. However: web == JS so I have no other option."
Frankly, I'm not sure *what* you're complaining about, here. First, it's that it's tied too much to the browser. 'course, that's simply a matter of tradition, there's nothing about the language that makes it browser specific (and there are a number of implementations of javascript that work outside of a browser context), and so it's a weak criticism at best. But then you bitch about the syntax... which, again, is just personal dogma, but so be it. And then you complain that you have "no other option", which isn't even a complaint about javascript, but rather about the browser implementations.
JavaScript has no libraries or modules which means all functionality IS the language (no more differentiable than alert())
Tell that to the guys who built Rhino. Or any number of other standalone JS implementations.
If you want to write real apps then that stuff is not "bits" but necessities.
Yes, but again, that has nothing to do with Javascript, the language, which is the subject of this article. Your problems seem to be with the W3C and the browser implementations, not with JS, so perhaps you should've phrased your post accordingly.
Exactly. Most of the user waiting time consists of socket communications and library calls. The actual computing time needed to interpret Javascript code is a small fraction of that, which occurs in bursts.
You should probably let the Mozilla guys know this. I'm sure they'd love to hear they've been wasting their time optimizing Firefox's Javascript engine. I'm sure the marked improvements in performance of JS-heavy sites like gmaps are just a coincidence...
It's true that for applications where a Javascript function takes a long time to execute, that translation overhead can be neglected, yielding comparable speed with C, however such functions are rare enough in ordinary web applications that the point is moot.
They are? Really! So you're saying Google Maps and gmail just fire off a bit of Javascript and then stop?
Oh, and you are aware that a significant portion of Firefox, itself, is written in Javascript?
I think that's enough. I'm sure you could easily argue back but this is my rant about why this boost is not the saving grace to JavaScript.
Darn right. Virtually everyone one of your complaints is either based on personal taste (classes, strict typing, etc), missing bits of framework (threading, logging), or the inability to differentiate the DOM from JS the language (load order issues, dialog complaints, etc). About the only legitimate complaints I was able to identify are:
* lack of modules * lack of namespaces
And both of these are well-known issues that were *supposed* to be addressed in JS4 (and hopefully will be addressed in the future).
You know what's even simpler (and doesn't require legible handwriting)? Something like this, or this. Yes, god forbid people should have to actually make a checkmark inside of a circle, or draw a line to connect a broken arrow...
It's an interesting idea... I don't like the idea of blindly accepting self-signed certs (at least a warning box should, IMHO, be presented, as per the older versions), but otherwise treating the site as insecure, as you suggest, would address both concerns, I think.
Really? Weird. I have digital cable... picked up a couple STBs up on eBay for $20 each, a couple IR blasters from irblaster.org for another $20 (which work like a charm... I've never once missed a tune), and I can record the full gamut of content I have access to. I plan to use a similar setup for HD, once support for the Hauppauge HD-PVR becomes stable (and I have the capacity to view HD content:).
How well does myth now deal with HD on cable providers, like comcast?
Well, in the past, the solution was to live with whatever you could get on unencrypted QAM or through the firewire connector on your cable box. But in the near future, Myth will support the new generation of inexpensive HD component capture devices that've recently hit the market. Yeah, it's not direct digital capture, but it's certainly good enough (at least for me).
The only realy upside to MythTV was that it was free...but not anymore!
Well, if all you're looking for is a straight-up PVR, then yeah, a TiVo or something similar may do the job for you. But if you're shooting for a full-fledged multimedia setup, including digital audio and video playback, games/emulators, DVD playback, etc, etc, then a DIY setup like MythTV might be more appropriate.
And, you gotta admit, Myth does have some killer features that make it a pretty awesome PVR, despite it's clear UI shortcomings: incredibly flexible scheduling and conflict resolution options (being able to set up recording rules using raw SQL is incredibly handy, assuming you're a programmer by trade:), unlimited tuner support, storage only limited by your chassis and wallet, not to mention the sweet, sweet networked architecture (being able to watch my recorded content on my laptop with the same user interface really rocks).
But I agree, it ain't for everyone, and unless you plan to use more than just the PVR features, you can probably get by paying the money for a COTS solution. But I'd *never* go with anything but MythTV for my system...
The point is, what's worse: Using NOTHING or using an expired/self-signed cert?
That's easy: using a self-signed cert and telling the user the link is secured is *far* worse.
The problem is a simple matter of perception. Average users are too uneducated to understand that https + self-signed cert is less secure than https + CA-issued cert. And so they'll treat the former the same as the latter, potentially trusting such a site with sensitive information that, unbeknownst to them, may be getting picked up by a MITM attack.
Contrast this with straight HTTP: the is *no* expectation of security, period, and so the user will treat the site accordingly. Clearly, that's far better than believing a site secure when it's really not.
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Also without a tax, they'd be able to sell more and gas prices would be cheaper.
Buh? Have you never heard of supply and demand? If taxes were lower, demand would go up, and world prices (as in, the cost of a barrel of crude oil) would go up, not down (though the net change may be zero, it's hard to say). Why do you think oil prices dropped a bit after a number of nations announced they were thinking of cutting oil subsidies? Answer: reduced demand projections.
Which, really, just furthers my original point. Reducing taxes would increase demand, and allow these corporations to charge more for a barrel of oil (up to the point where demand destruction kicks in). Those profits would go straight into their pockets. So not only would they benefit from lower taxes, they would also benefit from higher prices.
Security is all of it together and it is as strong as the weakest link. To me as a user, I do not care what or who you want to blame.
Well, if you believe in the idea of authentication, then at some point, you have to trust an individual or group of individuals to properly verify identities. Whether it be a CA or a web-of-trust, ultimately, the problem is the same: you're relying on people to perform due diligence to ensure that identities are being properly validated. If you can't trust this process, then authentication is a non-starter, something I'm sure much of the security and cryptography world would take rather strong issue with.
So, where does that 27.9 BILLION dollars come from. The taxpayer. Exxon merely wrote the check for all the dollars it collected from you and me to pay it.
And in absence of said tax, they'd stuff that money in their pockets instead. What's your point?
This measure was supposed to boost local businesses and lower unemployment.
AKA state-level protectionism. And we know how well protectionism has worked in the past...
Until someone actually PROVES evolution, doesn't hte burden of proof remain against it?
Umm, in science, you don't prove a theory. You acquire evidence and validate or invalidate the theory based on it. Theories must also make predictions that are testable. A good theory is able to explain, within it's framework, all observations related to it. That's it, that's all. And evolution most certainly must stand up to this scrutiny (and has done so remarkably well... only a few other theories have been so successful; relativity and quantum mechanics come to mind).
Your obvious confusion is that you're using the colloquial term "theory", as opposed to the scientific term "theory". The former is used to indicate a guess, an idea with no basis. The latter is a rigorous scientific construct that is immensely powerful.
So, evolution is a scientific theory because it makes predictions (eg, antibacterial agents triggering the upswell of resistant strains) that can be tested (just go to a hospital), and is able to explain observations (the tree of life) within it's framework. The same can't be said for religion (last I checked, intelligent design has made no testable predictions).
I do not know one way or the other about evolution OR intelligent design.
Clearly, given that you're under the mistaken impression that evolution hasn't stood up to rigorous scientific scrutiny since it's very inception.
I find it unfair that evolution enjoys a presumption of being right, while anything else that goes against it must bear a greater burden of proof.
Do you also find it unfair that the theory of heliocentrism, or a spherical earth, enjoys the presumption of being right, while anything else that goes against them must bear a greater burden of proof?
In science class, you damn well say and write whatever the teacher tells you to.
I know! It's like Math teachers insisting that the square root of 9 is 3. I say it's 2, and who are they to say I'm wrong? Damn those authority figures!
Any notion of the involvement of intelligence is rejected as abominable heresy by the evolution faithful.
No, it's rejected as baseless nonsense. Bring some real, testable evidence to the table, and maybe people will listen. And no, the bible doesn't count.
Really. So, all private industry is automatically good, or would you care to qualify that statement? The free market has failure modes, you know. Perhaps you've heard of natural monopoly, imbalance of information, and externalities?
Hear that noise? It's the sound of thousands of libertarians plugging their ears and yelling "LA LA LA" as loud as they can.
"Private industry good" true.
Tell that to Enron's customers. Or those whose investments are now destroyed by the ongoing collapse of the mortgage industry. Or those who suffered through the massive NY blackout a few years back.
But, yeah... private industry is always good. Right.
it seems the software is supposed to be "invisible" to the end user, so going to the end user and saying, "Hey, you know that software that runs on the expensive piece of equipment we sold you, well underneath the covers its crap and I need to convince the CEO of that" is probably a bad idea.
First off, it's not at all clear that this software is "invisible" to the end user. Quite the opposite, actually, as according to TFS, the only way to collect and analyze the data retrieved from their product is to use the software they've written. Seems far from invisible to me.
Second, I don't think anyone would advocate going to your customer and saying, "Wow, our product sucks, help me convince my managers". That's downright stupid, for any number of reasons (not the least of which is exposing internal company politics to outside customers). What you *should* be doing is going to the customer and saying, "As part of our support contract, I'd like to get some feedback from you regarding our software." But, the vital key, when doing this, is to make sure you're talking to the right people. Make sure you're talking to the guys actually using the product in the field. It's them you're trying to developer the product for, not the CTO or some useless middle manager.
But... but... government bad. GOVERNMENT BAD! Private industry good!
The house prices are the result of people taking on excessive debts to finance their own homes, thus creating a big demand that drives up prices.
As well as lenders and investors, drunk on the income from selling and re-selling those loans for big profits, unwisely handing out loans to those who clearly couldn't qualify, all the while believing their house of cards would never fall down.
It was (and is) a systemic problem, and you can blame everyone up and down the chain: the feds for not regulating, the lendors for giving out bad loans, the banks for repackaging the loans into vehicles with misleading/obfuscated risk profiles, the investors for buying those vehicles, the speculators for driving up prices, and regular homeowners for being to fucking stupid to realize they were taking on debt they would be unable to service.
Spoken like someone who has not programmed in enough languages to understand the GP's points.
Ahh, good ol' baseless ad hominems. Shall we get into a language pissing context next?
For myself, the "Postel's Law" item has been the cause of a lot of grief, tied in a dead heat with the lack of strict typing. Grrrr.....
And I can't stand strict typing, preferring languages like Smalltalk and Lisp, which provide type safety without all the headaches and horrible gymnastics, which have only been slightly eased by the introduction of generics and template-style programming. Again, it's a matter of taste.
My comment was *clearly* about JavaScript in the context of web apps.
Then you should've framed it as such, rather than stating "[your] complaints with JS don't lie with performance.", thus clearly implying that you were going to go on a rant about JS, the language, as opposed to web browsers in general. Furthermore, your first bullet was this:
"Tied too much to the browser. JS works great for some (some love it) but syntactically I hate every last part of it. However: web == JS so I have no other option."
Frankly, I'm not sure *what* you're complaining about, here. First, it's that it's tied too much to the browser. 'course, that's simply a matter of tradition, there's nothing about the language that makes it browser specific (and there are a number of implementations of javascript that work outside of a browser context), and so it's a weak criticism at best. But then you bitch about the syntax... which, again, is just personal dogma, but so be it. And then you complain that you have "no other option", which isn't even a complaint about javascript, but rather about the browser implementations.
JavaScript has no libraries or modules which means all functionality IS the language (no more differentiable than alert())
Tell that to the guys who built Rhino. Or any number of other standalone JS implementations.
If you want to write real apps then that stuff is not "bits" but necessities.
Yes, but again, that has nothing to do with Javascript, the language, which is the subject of this article. Your problems seem to be with the W3C and the browser implementations, not with JS, so perhaps you should've phrased your post accordingly.
Exactly. Most of the user waiting time consists of socket communications and library calls. The actual computing time needed to interpret Javascript code is a small fraction of that, which occurs in bursts.
You should probably let the Mozilla guys know this. I'm sure they'd love to hear they've been wasting their time optimizing Firefox's Javascript engine. I'm sure the marked improvements in performance of JS-heavy sites like gmaps are just a coincidence...
It's true that for applications where a Javascript function takes a long time to execute, that translation overhead can be neglected, yielding comparable speed with C, however such functions are rare enough in ordinary web applications that the point is moot.
They are? Really! So you're saying Google Maps and gmail just fire off a bit of Javascript and then stop?
Oh, and you are aware that a significant portion of Firefox, itself, is written in Javascript?
I think that's enough. I'm sure you could easily argue back but this is my rant about why this boost is not the saving grace to JavaScript.
Darn right. Virtually everyone one of your complaints is either based on personal taste (classes, strict typing, etc), missing bits of framework (threading, logging), or the inability to differentiate the DOM from JS the language (load order issues, dialog complaints, etc). About the only legitimate complaints I was able to identify are:
* lack of modules
* lack of namespaces
And both of these are well-known issues that were *supposed* to be addressed in JS4 (and hopefully will be addressed in the future).
Not only that, but can't sushi also contain cooked fish?
Of course. I've had many a sushi roll containing tempura shrimp, tataki-style tuna, and so forth.
You know what's even simpler (and doesn't require legible handwriting)? Something like this, or this. Yes, god forbid people should have to actually make a checkmark inside of a circle, or draw a line to connect a broken arrow...
SSL is intended to address both issues, authentication and encryption.
According to...? Given SSL supports non-authenticated connections, I see no reason to believe this assertion is anything but speculation on your part.
It's an interesting idea... I don't like the idea of blindly accepting self-signed certs (at least a warning box should, IMHO, be presented, as per the older versions), but otherwise treating the site as insecure, as you suggest, would address both concerns, I think.
In the digital cable, MythTV isn't very useful
Really? Weird. I have digital cable... picked up a couple STBs up on eBay for $20 each, a couple IR blasters from irblaster.org for another $20 (which work like a charm... I've never once missed a tune), and I can record the full gamut of content I have access to. I plan to use a similar setup for HD, once support for the Hauppauge HD-PVR becomes stable (and I have the capacity to view HD content :).
This works find for SD, but you're not going to be recording HD over component.
Sure you can. Note, Myth's support for this is just getting there, but it'll be an option in the near future.
How well does myth now deal with HD on cable providers, like comcast?
Well, in the past, the solution was to live with whatever you could get on unencrypted QAM or through the firewire connector on your cable box. But in the near future, Myth will support the new generation of inexpensive HD component capture devices that've recently hit the market. Yeah, it's not direct digital capture, but it's certainly good enough (at least for me).
The only realy upside to MythTV was that it was free...but not anymore!
Well, if all you're looking for is a straight-up PVR, then yeah, a TiVo or something similar may do the job for you. But if you're shooting for a full-fledged multimedia setup, including digital audio and video playback, games/emulators, DVD playback, etc, etc, then a DIY setup like MythTV might be more appropriate.
And, you gotta admit, Myth does have some killer features that make it a pretty awesome PVR, despite it's clear UI shortcomings: incredibly flexible scheduling and conflict resolution options (being able to set up recording rules using raw SQL is incredibly handy, assuming you're a programmer by trade :), unlimited tuner support, storage only limited by your chassis and wallet, not to mention the sweet, sweet networked architecture (being able to watch my recorded content on my laptop with the same user interface really rocks).
But I agree, it ain't for everyone, and unless you plan to use more than just the PVR features, you can probably get by paying the money for a COTS solution. But I'd *never* go with anything but MythTV for my system...
The point is, what's worse: Using NOTHING or using an expired/self-signed cert?
That's easy: using a self-signed cert and telling the user the link is secured is *far* worse.
The problem is a simple matter of perception. Average users are too uneducated to understand that https + self-signed cert is less secure than https + CA-issued cert. And so they'll treat the former the same as the latter, potentially trusting such a site with sensitive information that, unbeknownst to them, may be getting picked up by a MITM attack.
Contrast this with straight HTTP: the is *no* expectation of security, period, and so the user will treat the site accordingly. Clearly, that's far better than believing a site secure when it's really not.