I'm sure Stallman would have preferred if Jobs didn't die or get debilitated in those ways and instead would have started living up to his stated ideals of openness, creativity, and competition.
It's Java, but without Oracle, without the JCP, and without the tons of patents that Oracle holds on Java. And maybe they even got around to fixing some of the blunders in Java's design.
Yes, that's because they are violating patents for not conforming to the agreed upon Java standard. That's because Google could not take the time to work within an inherently slow community process.
Why should they work within the community process? Google has its own VM and its own libraries, they just used Java to bootstrap their environment and use Java syntax.
Apple gave Java the boot, for the same reason that Google wasn't working "within the community process": the Java standard sucks and it isn't getting fixed. And Apple has done the same thing with Objective-C: they took a clone of StepStone's language and a clone of Xerox's Smalltalk libraries and made a new product out of it. What Google did was reasonable and normal; it was Sun's management of Java that was unacceptable.
The reality for Java is much worse: it is extremely patent encumbered, and both Sun and Oracle have a long history of using their ownership of key Java-related IP to kill competition and open source. The fact that Oracle has a bunch of people giving them free consulting and advice through the JCP doesn't change that.
Java's second problem is that it sucks technically: it has a bad type system, and awful set of toolkits and libraries, and lousy numerical support. That's the consequence of Sun/Oracle's control: all the real experts gave up on using the JCP to fix the language more than a decade ago, and since then the language has just floundered and rotted away.
The courts interpreted current law and came to the conclusion that these kinds of warrantless searches were legal.
That is why the law is being changed: it doesn't reflect what we the people want.
In effect the governor's justification for the veto is: "you can't pass this new law because it would change existing law". Well, that's the whole point of passing a new law!
Lots of people will vote for him: between the people who don't understand the issue, who don't care, and who will vote for someone because of his party no matter what he does, this won't affect his chances.
You are arguing that pseudoscience is science, and that actually dire predictions are good news.
Pseudoscience is exactly what you are engaging in: you distort scientific results, misinterpret them, and misapply them.
And I am now repeating my good faith answers, without you accepting them. I can't do any more use in this discussion. Goodbye.
The emphasis being on "faith". You have not made a single substantive contribution to this discussion. You are the left-wing equivalent of a young earth creationist.
You're missing the point that all of these are examples of how the scientific community--the experts, the people who advised politicians--held one opinion that differed from what we now recognize as the truth.
But climate models that predict climate change from documented manmade CO2 pollution are the result of thousands of actual scientists producing decades of actual science.
And those models are nice and interesting. But they also have big uncertainties and they don't even work correctly on past data. Furthermore, even the most dire predictions those models make only take us back to about the same interglacial peak temperatures we had before the last glaciation event. So even if those models are totally accurate, why should we do anything? In fact, the worst thing that could happen is if the current glaciation cycle continues like the last ones, because then we're really in trouble.
There is plenty of evidence, but it is impossible to convince people who have made up their minds that there isn't so this conversation might as well end here.
That's a cop-out. In fact, I used to assume that reducing carbon emissions would have an effect, but I looked at the data, read the IPCC report, and read plenty of papers. In fact, it sounds like you have already made up your mind and are completely unwilling to listen to other views.
You want to talk about evidence? Explain to me first of all why you even want to prevent global warming, in light of the climate history over the last half million years.
Sure, it won't stop it but it will slow it down and reduce the magnitude of the changes.
There is not a shred of evidence that it will have any effect at all; the current warming is so small, you can't even see it if you try to find it on a graph of the last 120ka. And even if it has an effect, it's far from clear that it is in the right direction. We're currently in a brief interglacial period; why would you want to accelerate our return to glaciation again?
but I wouldn't argue that we should stop using fossil fuel entirely at all, just make an effort to reduce our dependence on it
There are tons of reasons for reducing our use of oil for energy: it has better uses, it's difficult to obtain, it occurs in the wrong places in the world. Climate change isn't among those.
In a decade or so when a couple of European countries and Japan have reduced their oil and nuclear reliance substantially the doubters will be forced to change their tune, which is a shame because we could have a big slice of that particularly lucrative pie if we get in early like they are.
As far as I can tell, places like California are at the forefront of electric vehicles and other new energy technologies. European car manufacturers were asleep at the wheel when it came to these kinds of vehicles. But what the Europeans and Asians are good at is to try to use international organizations to gain a competitive advantage.
What the US government can and should do is reduce government subsidies related to oil and gas so that there is a more level economic playing field. But subsidizing both oil, gas, and new energies just doesn't make any sense. And commitments to something like the Kyoto protocols also don't make any sense.
Statistics of large systems, not statistics of the random opinion of scientists.
You have demonstrated you have competence in neither. But you're so incompetent that you think that shows you're correct.There is no point talking further with you about it, because you are propping up your foregone conclusion with fallacies.
Troed is right. It's you who is wrong and incompetent.
We are running a vast experiment, and the results could be great, benign, or tragic.
I used to think the same way, but it doesn't make sense; the climate doesn't work that way.
We're currently at the peak of an interglacial period, and that process started long before humans put large quantities of CO2 into the air. Global temperatures have increased by about 9C and sea levels have risen about 120m compared to the last minimum about 20ka ago. We are still about 4C below the top of the last peak, 120ka ago.
Even with the "worst" predictions from IPCC for 2100, we'd merely reach about the temperature of the last interglacial period. Last time (and the dozens of times before that that happened), that didn't even cause the polar ice caps to melt.
The normal thing for our planet to do now is to slip down into another major glaciation event, even worse than the last one if historic trends are any guide. That would mean that North America and Europe would become largely uninhabitable. That could happen within a century or it could happen a few thousand years from now.
Now assume the worst case AGW scenario happens: we burn all the fossil fuels, manage to melt the polar ice caps, and the current rapid glaciation cycle stops. What would happen? Sea levels would rise by about 60m and temperatures would go up about 8C. Coastal cities would get flooded, millions would have to move. But would that turn the world into an uninhabitable wasteland? Not at all: it would merely return us to the Miocene or Eocene. Life on earth, including mammals, were thriving. Compared to another glaciation event, that would be a far preferable outcome.
AGW just adds a minor amount of variation to the normal huge variation in climate our planet experiences. And as far as that variation goes, it is in the right direction, because warmer is a lot better for our species and civilization than colder. If we get another ice age like the one that just ended about 10ka ago, you can kiss civilization good bye. Unfortunately, even burning all the fossil fuel we can get our hands on probably won't keep us from going through another glacial cycle.
What to do about AGW is a policy problem that is outside of the purvey of science, as is clearly stated in the IPCC reports.
It is very much within the purview of science to predict what effects of different interventions are likely to have, but the IPCC has no consensus statement on that because nobody really knows for certain.
It wasn't "a single Nobel Prize winner". Racial theories, Einstein's relativity, evolution, the settlement of the Americas, deep space and time, quantum mechanics--most major scientific revolutions took decades, sometimes centuries, to be settled and widely accepted. Your faith in "scientific consensus" is based on your ignorance of science, nothing more. Science is ill-equipped to make definitive short-term conclusions. Really the only time a matter is settled in science is when almost nobody is working on it anymore.
As you can see, we're just near the peak of our current interglacial cycle, and that peak is actually still lower than the last few times around. Human influence on the shape of our current peak is negligible and not even visible on a 500ky scale. And even with worst case scenario global warming, we'd barely make it to the top temperatures of the last peak about 120ky ago.
Lets try this, let's hang all the oil producers and save the money from all the flooded coastal cities and hundreds of millions of displaced persons and then see what happens.
You are making the assumption that stopping to burn fossil fuel will prevent climate change. It will not do so. The polar ice caps will melt no matter what we do. Coast lines will move around, that parts of the globe will become uninhabitable, and that other parts will become habitable. Change is part of living on this planet. If we set up societies that can't deal with that, we are doomed. Given that most of the houses and infrastructure we build doesn't last more than a few decades anyway, there isn't even a big problem with that in principle.
Climatically speaking we are at the warmest and are in fact due for an ice age.
Wrong. Climatically speaking, we are still in the middle of an ice age. An "ice age" is any time when there are big polar ice sheets, and there are. We are merely at the end of a deep glaciation cycle within that ice age.
The normal state of earth is to have no polar ice caps and for the sea levels to be about 180 ft higher than they are right now. The temperature at the poles was about 12C (21F) higher 50 million years ago. Mankind already witnessed a 120m (360ft) rise in sea levels. That's why many archaeological finds are on the bottom of the ocean and why we have all the flood myths.
We are "at the warmest" only within the rapid glacial cycles, but those cycles invariably will end. And they better end, because if we get another deep glaciation like we experienced before, we are in much worse trouble than any global warming.
Why protect the profits of a psychopathic, disgusting minority, we instead we should be protecting our environment, our selves and our future. . Gees some of the lying deceitful bullshit the fossil fuellers come up with
You are "psychopathic", because your entire life and standard of living is based on burning huge amounts of fossil fuels and you don't even see it. You think there are some magic bullets that make CO2 emissions go away with minimal change, and that if we stop CO2 emissions, the climate will stabilize. Both notions are as ridiculous as believing that the earth is flat.
Clean renewable energy means cleaner smog free cities and that's worth investing in.
It is very much worth investing in. But it won't reduce our carbon emissions for many decades, and it certainly won't reduce China's and India's. And even if we could totally eliminated human carbon emissions, it still wouldn't prevent climate change.
Look at the history of science: the scientific community is often wrong for decades on end, with the economic incentive being merely that people keep their jobs and keep getting past peer review. In the long term, science is self-correcting, but in the short term, its predictions and conclusions are dubious and unreliable.
Besides, while scientists by and large agree that CO2 and temperatures have increased due to human activity, there is no consensus whatsoever on the long term consequences or on effective interventions.
It's a well-established, replicated fact that healthy nutrition leads to better health. That's why it makes sense to eat healthy, for each generation in perpetuity.
For burning oil, the situation is entirely different. It is certain that the planet will get hotter because earth's normal climate is hotter than it is today. So, the best we can hope for is delay that a little, but there is no evidence that even completely stopping man-made carbon emissions would accomplish even that. What is clear is that all the proposals to combat climate change on the table so far are going to be totally ineffective in affecting the climate at all.
So, it's you who is rationalizing. You're like someone who orders a Big Mac with extra cheese and thinks that having a Diet Coke is going to make up for the hardened arteries. It doesn't work that way.
We should reduce our oil consumption because oil is a finite and precious resource. But don't kid yourself into thinking that that's going to prevent or even delay climate change.
Pre-iPhone/iPod PDA connectors support data transfers/mass storage, expansion (peripherals), charging, composite video, component video, HDMI/DVI, and S/PDIF amount other features?
Typical Apple fanboy: respond to a substantive point by shifting the argument to something irrelevant.
The fact remains: Apple copied the iPod connector and its functionality from Palm and other devices, not the other way around. They also used it the same way: for charging, syncing, docking. Palm wasn't even the first one, it's just the one that Apple obviously copied a lot of features from.
Honestly, Palm was a joke until the PocketPC gained market share
And even if it were, it doesn't change the fact that the iPod Touch and iPhone designs "stole" heavily from Palm and PocketPC.
However, they are inferior to the iPhone
Also totally irrelevant. Apple builds nice hardware, but that doesn't entitle them to claim that they own ideas they didn't invent.
Almost every PDA since the 1990's has had iPod-like connectors, since before USB.
Palm and Windows PDAs and phones have had most of the other things Apple-fans associated with the iPhone, including the launch screen, MP3 players, finger keyboards, cameras, etc.
For tablets, it's pretty much the same: tons of prior art, tons of prior designs that were quite similar.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure Stallman would have preferred if Jobs didn't die or get debilitated in those ways and instead would have started living up to his stated ideals of openness, creativity, and competition.
It's Java, but without Oracle, without the JCP, and without the tons of patents that Oracle holds on Java. And maybe they even got around to fixing some of the blunders in Java's design.
Why should they work within the community process? Google has its own VM and its own libraries, they just used Java to bootstrap their environment and use Java syntax.
Apple gave Java the boot, for the same reason that Google wasn't working "within the community process": the Java standard sucks and it isn't getting fixed. And Apple has done the same thing with Objective-C: they took a clone of StepStone's language and a clone of Xerox's Smalltalk libraries and made a new product out of it. What Google did was reasonable and normal; it was Sun's management of Java that was unacceptable.
The reality for Java is much worse: it is extremely patent encumbered, and both Sun and Oracle have a long history of using their ownership of key Java-related IP to kill competition and open source. The fact that Oracle has a bunch of people giving them free consulting and advice through the JCP doesn't change that.
Java's second problem is that it sucks technically: it has a bad type system, and awful set of toolkits and libraries, and lousy numerical support. That's the consequence of Sun/Oracle's control: all the real experts gave up on using the JCP to fix the language more than a decade ago, and since then the language has just floundered and rotted away.
The courts interpreted current law and came to the conclusion that these kinds of warrantless searches were legal.
That is why the law is being changed: it doesn't reflect what we the people want.
In effect the governor's justification for the veto is: "you can't pass this new law because it would change existing law". Well, that's the whole point of passing a new law!
The problem is during nominations and primaries. By the time the final vote comes around, by design, there is almost no choice.
Lots of people will vote for him: between the people who don't understand the issue, who don't care, and who will vote for someone because of his party no matter what he does, this won't affect his chances.
Pseudoscience is exactly what you are engaging in: you distort scientific results, misinterpret them, and misapply them.
The emphasis being on "faith". You have not made a single substantive contribution to this discussion. You are the left-wing equivalent of a young earth creationist.
You're missing the point that all of these are examples of how the scientific community--the experts, the people who advised politicians--held one opinion that differed from what we now recognize as the truth.
And those models are nice and interesting. But they also have big uncertainties and they don't even work correctly on past data. Furthermore, even the most dire predictions those models make only take us back to about the same interglacial peak temperatures we had before the last glaciation event. So even if those models are totally accurate, why should we do anything? In fact, the worst thing that could happen is if the current glaciation cycle continues like the last ones, because then we're really in trouble.
That's a cop-out. In fact, I used to assume that reducing carbon emissions would have an effect, but I looked at the data, read the IPCC report, and read plenty of papers. In fact, it sounds like you have already made up your mind and are completely unwilling to listen to other views.
You want to talk about evidence? Explain to me first of all why you even want to prevent global warming, in light of the climate history over the last half million years.
There is not a shred of evidence that it will have any effect at all; the current warming is so small, you can't even see it if you try to find it on a graph of the last 120ka. And even if it has an effect, it's far from clear that it is in the right direction. We're currently in a brief interglacial period; why would you want to accelerate our return to glaciation again?
There are tons of reasons for reducing our use of oil for energy: it has better uses, it's difficult to obtain, it occurs in the wrong places in the world. Climate change isn't among those.
As far as I can tell, places like California are at the forefront of electric vehicles and other new energy technologies. European car manufacturers were asleep at the wheel when it came to these kinds of vehicles. But what the Europeans and Asians are good at is to try to use international organizations to gain a competitive advantage.
What the US government can and should do is reduce government subsidies related to oil and gas so that there is a more level economic playing field. But subsidizing both oil, gas, and new energies just doesn't make any sense. And commitments to something like the Kyoto protocols also don't make any sense.
Statistics of large systems, not statistics of the random opinion of scientists.
Troed is right. It's you who is wrong and incompetent.
I used to think the same way, but it doesn't make sense; the climate doesn't work that way.
We're currently at the peak of an interglacial period, and that process started long before humans put large quantities of CO2 into the air. Global temperatures have increased by about 9C and sea levels have risen about 120m compared to the last minimum about 20ka ago. We are still about 4C below the top of the last peak, 120ka ago.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vostok_Petit_data.svg
Even with the "worst" predictions from IPCC for 2100, we'd merely reach about the temperature of the last interglacial period. Last time (and the dozens of times before that that happened), that didn't even cause the polar ice caps to melt.
The normal thing for our planet to do now is to slip down into another major glaciation event, even worse than the last one if historic trends are any guide. That would mean that North America and Europe would become largely uninhabitable. That could happen within a century or it could happen a few thousand years from now.
Now assume the worst case AGW scenario happens: we burn all the fossil fuels, manage to melt the polar ice caps, and the current rapid glaciation cycle stops. What would happen? Sea levels would rise by about 60m and temperatures would go up about 8C. Coastal cities would get flooded, millions would have to move. But would that turn the world into an uninhabitable wasteland? Not at all: it would merely return us to the Miocene or Eocene. Life on earth, including mammals, were thriving. Compared to another glaciation event, that would be a far preferable outcome.
AGW just adds a minor amount of variation to the normal huge variation in climate our planet experiences. And as far as that variation goes, it is in the right direction, because warmer is a lot better for our species and civilization than colder. If we get another ice age like the one that just ended about 10ka ago, you can kiss civilization good bye. Unfortunately, even burning all the fossil fuel we can get our hands on probably won't keep us from going through another glacial cycle.
It is very much within the purview of science to predict what effects of different interventions are likely to have, but the IPCC has no consensus statement on that because nobody really knows for certain.
It wasn't "a single Nobel Prize winner". Racial theories, Einstein's relativity, evolution, the settlement of the Americas, deep space and time, quantum mechanics--most major scientific revolutions took decades, sometimes centuries, to be settled and widely accepted. Your faith in "scientific consensus" is based on your ignorance of science, nothing more. Science is ill-equipped to make definitive short-term conclusions. Really the only time a matter is settled in science is when almost nobody is working on it anymore.
By the way, here is a zoom to the last 500000 years, showing the last 5 interglacial periods:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ice_Age_Temperature.png
As you can see, we're just near the peak of our current interglacial cycle, and that peak is actually still lower than the last few times around. Human influence on the shape of our current peak is negligible and not even visible on a 500ky scale. And even with worst case scenario global warming, we'd barely make it to the top temperatures of the last peak about 120ky ago.
You are making the assumption that stopping to burn fossil fuel will prevent climate change. It will not do so. The polar ice caps will melt no matter what we do. Coast lines will move around, that parts of the globe will become uninhabitable, and that other parts will become habitable. Change is part of living on this planet. If we set up societies that can't deal with that, we are doomed. Given that most of the houses and infrastructure we build doesn't last more than a few decades anyway, there isn't even a big problem with that in principle.
Wrong. Climatically speaking, we are still in the middle of an ice age. An "ice age" is any time when there are big polar ice sheets, and there are. We are merely at the end of a deep glaciation cycle within that ice age.
The normal state of earth is to have no polar ice caps and for the sea levels to be about 180 ft higher than they are right now. The temperature at the poles was about 12C (21F) higher 50 million years ago. Mankind already witnessed a 120m (360ft) rise in sea levels. That's why many archaeological finds are on the bottom of the ocean and why we have all the flood myths.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:65_Myr_Climate_Change.png
We are "at the warmest" only within the rapid glacial cycles, but those cycles invariably will end. And they better end, because if we get another deep glaciation like we experienced before, we are in much worse trouble than any global warming.
You are "psychopathic", because your entire life and standard of living is based on burning huge amounts of fossil fuels and you don't even see it. You think there are some magic bullets that make CO2 emissions go away with minimal change, and that if we stop CO2 emissions, the climate will stabilize. Both notions are as ridiculous as believing that the earth is flat.
It is very much worth investing in. But it won't reduce our carbon emissions for many decades, and it certainly won't reduce China's and India's. And even if we could totally eliminated human carbon emissions, it still wouldn't prevent climate change.
Anybody who thinks that my statement is idiotic obviously has no idea how science works in the real world.
Do some reading in the history of science before you open your mouth again and more nonsense spills out.
I will--as soon as irrational, ideology-driven nuts like you stop messing with politics.
Look at the history of science: the scientific community is often wrong for decades on end, with the economic incentive being merely that people keep their jobs and keep getting past peer review. In the long term, science is self-correcting, but in the short term, its predictions and conclusions are dubious and unreliable.
Besides, while scientists by and large agree that CO2 and temperatures have increased due to human activity, there is no consensus whatsoever on the long term consequences or on effective interventions.
Your analogy is faulty.
It's a well-established, replicated fact that healthy nutrition leads to better health. That's why it makes sense to eat healthy, for each generation in perpetuity.
For burning oil, the situation is entirely different. It is certain that the planet will get hotter because earth's normal climate is hotter than it is today. So, the best we can hope for is delay that a little, but there is no evidence that even completely stopping man-made carbon emissions would accomplish even that. What is clear is that all the proposals to combat climate change on the table so far are going to be totally ineffective in affecting the climate at all.
So, it's you who is rationalizing. You're like someone who orders a Big Mac with extra cheese and thinks that having a Diet Coke is going to make up for the hardened arteries. It doesn't work that way.
We should reduce our oil consumption because oil is a finite and precious resource. But don't kid yourself into thinking that that's going to prevent or even delay climate change.
The planet will get hot no matter what, so who cares?
Typical Apple fanboy: respond to a substantive point by shifting the argument to something irrelevant.
The fact remains: Apple copied the iPod connector and its functionality from Palm and other devices, not the other way around. They also used it the same way: for charging, syncing, docking. Palm wasn't even the first one, it's just the one that Apple obviously copied a lot of features from.
And even if it were, it doesn't change the fact that the iPod Touch and iPhone designs "stole" heavily from Palm and PocketPC.
Also totally irrelevant. Apple builds nice hardware, but that doesn't entitle them to claim that they own ideas they didn't invent.
That means "no matter what you say, it is not libel", as opposed to "there is an absolute prohibition against libeling the dead".
But whatever. It's clear that Jobs "stole" a lot of other people's ideas in making the iPod/iPhone; he said so himself, so it's not "libel".
Almost every PDA since the 1990's has had iPod-like connectors, since before USB.
Palm and Windows PDAs and phones have had most of the other things Apple-fans associated with the iPhone, including the launch screen, MP3 players, finger keyboards, cameras, etc.
For tablets, it's pretty much the same: tons of prior art, tons of prior designs that were quite similar.
After bringing DTrace to Linux, they are then likely going to turn around and sue people somehow; kind of like they did with Java.
Don't use anything from Oracle; they are worse than Microsoft.