Who gets to decide which single UI is the best though? And then what happens when tens of thousands of people disagree?
Develop a good UI and let experts in the area choose it and you will find that there are few people who disagree that it's the best. UI design doesn't come down to personal preference, it is based on common traits that almost all people share. People only have one locus of attention, it is easier to use an interface that makes the options visible in a clear manner rather than making you guess at it, the time taken to hit a target is directly related to the distance distance to the object and the size of the object, etc, etc. It's all been documented, go do some reading on it.
They think their Mac is 'fast' but only because they've never used anything faster.
I'm sitting here next to a 1.2Ghz Athlon running XP, I work on a wide range of hardware from Windows 98 to Solaris servers (usually with low levels of load) and various linux boxes. I also use OS X on iMacs, iBooks, my Ti Laptop and my G3 300Mhz B&W G3. OS X is snappy. The key to OS X performance (and XP performance) is to give it enough RAM. 384MB for X and XP seems to be the minimum for good performance, but the more the merrier.
OS X was slow through the 10.0.x series but was hugely improved with 10.1 and every release has improved speed since.
Chimera [mozdev.org] is, according to these tests [mozdev.org], the fastest MacOS Web browser by a factor of 2.
I finally got around to checking out Chimera and it is looking really cool. Typing into a form needs a little work I now see (the last character typed flashes once straight after typing). There is a significant lack of features at the moment, but once they are added in this is going to be a great browser. I always said that Mozilla needed a native UI to have any chance and by the look of this I was right.
If you have a copy of OS X grab a copy of Chimera and you'll be amazed at how cool it is considering it's at 0.2. The best features I've found so far is the sidebar that shows my bookmarks (the OS X sidebar is different to the typical Mozilla sidebars or IE sidebars and seems to work a lot better) and the tabbed browsing (due to the "Open Link In New Tab" in the popup menu).
One gripe is that it's not using native widgets for form elements like buttons and popup menus yet (but it has a native looking scroll bar on the text box).
On an off-topic side note: Anyone got good suggestions for places to explore in Fiji - preferably of the non-geek kind (it's a holiday afterall). I've just booked 6 nights over there starting in a weeks time.
Darwin may be (mostly) open, but the rest of OSX isn't...
Wrong, Darwin is fully opensource. The original poster was suggesting using Darwin and X-Windows which doesn't involve anything proprietary and there are plenty of people already doing this. Plus, with the GNU-Darwin project, you're looking at a complete environment a la RedHat, though currently much more immature.
And the Darwin microkernal would be much more user-friendly as far as kernal re-compiles go...
Now there's a man who's never tried to compile the Darwin kernel. The build process is awful, absolutely awful. Admittedly I believe Apple has been working on it but last I check it was *far* more difficult than Linux.
I hear that OSX requries a big honking Mac, so that's going to cost you more:)
For the record, you heard wrong. It runs just fine on any colorful mac - you probably want to give it a fair bit of RAM but I know people who are relatively happy with it in 64MB, your mileage probably will vary.:)
Your other points have by and large been answered in various other posts to this story but your final comment sends chills down my spine.
Nor am I stupid enough to believe that abstinence is viable, especially for teenagers. This is the bailiwick of the religiously naive, who think that 'just say no' is both feasible and desirable simply because they claim it is.
If you or the people you know are in a position where they cannot simply say 'no' to sex, it is rape - plain and simple. If you are meaning to suggest that it is not possible to go through teenagedom without having sex then you are very sorely mistaken and I can site literally hundreds of examples that prove you wrong. I think you may need a reality check if you don't think that's the case.
My counter-example clearly shows that your point is invalid. We don't counsel teenagers not to drive (when they're legally allowed to), and we shouldn't counsel teenagers not to fuck (considering age of consent yadda yadda). In both cases, we (ideally) make them aware of the risks involved.
No, your counter-example supports my point and your additional clarifications here continue to do so - in particular the "when they're legally allowed to" in regards to teens driving. You don't argue that 12 year olds should be able to drive, so why argue that 12 year olds should be able to have sex?
Counseling teenagers to be abstinent is foolhardy and puritan.
Agreed. Counseling teenagers to be promiscous or frivolent with their sexuality is also foolhardy.
The fact that this is a loaded issue is very relevant. I notice you're not saying that teenagers should be forever banned from driving, because they might die.
I am saying that teenagers shouldn't drive until they know the risks and are mature enough to make an informed decision about it. I say the same thing for sex. You are the one in this argument who sees the two cases as different, not I. I never said people shouldn't have sex, I said they shouldn't have sex until they know what they're doing. I said they should be aware of the risks, but at no point did I say that sex was evil or that people shouldn't have sex.
Find me one car that is 100% reliable at not getting you killed on the highway. There isn't one. Thus, eventually driving == horrible flaming death. If you don't realize that, you don't know what you're getting yourself into."
Correct and provable by probability. Given enough time in a car you will be killed in an accident. Of course to guarantee that will happen would take an infinite amount of time in the car, but the more time you spend in a car the more chance of it happening.
Very, very few things are a hundred percent reliable. It's called "acceptable risk". We mitigate these risks---in the example above, by wearing seat belts and not drinking.
Correct. Key point here is calculated risk. Your original statement was that sex != getting pregnant. This is not true. sex == chance of getting pregnant and most people fail to factor in that chance correctly (as in your case).
Your argument is completely fallacious and utterly worthless. If you weren't talking about such a loaded issue, you'd see that in a second.
Your counter example further supports my point, hence your argument is worthless. Furthermore, the fact that this is a loaded issue is irrelevant.
Wrong. Find me one form of contraception which is 100% reliable. There isn't one. Thus, evenutally having sex == getting pregnant. If you don't realise that, you don't know what you're getting yourself into.
Nobody can seriously think that teens aren't aware of the issues facing adults... but they're getting a distorted view and not able to make "small" mistakes.
I agree with your post completely - there are a lot of really stupid laws out there. I still stand by my earlier comments though in that I would prefer to see things to strict on teens than too lax, though certainly many of the things you mention should be fixed. I think we have close to the best solution the law can provide in regards to sexual age of consent though, the rest is left to good parenting and that will (and should) always be required.
This says nothing of the 16-year-old but rather the society they live in, and their parents.
Mostly that they were left to enjoy the innocence of youth while they had their chance. There's no need to be sexually active at 16 any more and there's nothing particularly great about being sexually active at a young age. Why is it so important to you that underage sex be legal? The only reason I've ever heard is that "people are doing it anyway". "It's natural" is a valid reason I suppose, but it's natural to not have sex until a certain point in life in order to maximise the chance of the offsprings survival, so the argument fails - a 16 year old mother is usually not in a good position to care for her child.
A common fallacy among Americans is the idea that a) they know better than everyone else what the age for sexual activity should be, and b) that whatever limit is currently in place is the way it's always been.
A common fallacy among/. readers is that everyone's American - I'm not. I also never claimed either a or b and was well aware that neither apply.
And we should also be aware that girls and boys have been able to have sex at an age earlier than 18 ever since the race evolved.
Whether you can and whether you should are two different things. Society has changed a lot in the past few centuries, you can't expect the same rules to apply, nor the same logic. Try thinking about things in terms of the percentage of life instead of years and you'll start to see that not so much has changed. Which way should we look at it - how should I know?
Or that it was just recently 'discovered' that teens aren't 'capable' of handling sex, whatever that means.
Look at the number of people who have screwed up their lives (by their own admition) by getting pregnant early in life and you'll see what teens not being capable of handling sex means. If you think there's no harm, you don't know enough about what you're talking about, plain and simple. This is an activity of calculated risks which has good points and bad points, it is not just good nor is it all just bad.
Dr. Richard Rinewalt, has been head judge of the ACM programming contest-THAT programming contest-for several years. He supports this format and knows that it works. I believe it's reasonable to trust what he is doing.
The ACM programming contest is an awful model for assessing coding ability. The entire contest is based on time pressures and it encourages writing bad code, not doing design work and not commenting anything (it all just wastes time).
Something that makes a good competition does not nessecarily make a good exam.
The smart kids in the group (if there were any) ended up doing all the work. The stupid kids hung around for one or two meetings and maybe sent off the occasional email asking when the next meeting was, but never contributed line one of code.
I generally have no problem with people being incompetant and I will go out of my way to help them learn, what really annoys me is the people who know what they're doing but figure the rest of the team will do it for them anyway.
So people who watch robberies in movies become people who want to become robbers? Very flawed logic.
Careful, taking a logical derivation and applying it to a different problem, no matter how related that problem may seem may render the logic incorrect. Robbery and child abuse are different in so many ways. The biggest being that the majority of people don't need nor want to become a robber (there is no initial desire), whereas people who look at child pornography tend to have an initial desire. Does this make a difference, I don't know, but it may and it highlights the fact that you must argue this in terms of child abuse, not robbery because the situations are different.
Enforce the laws against child explotation to the fullest, make the penalties tougher
What makes you think that and is there any evidence that this is the case? Here's some complete heresay reasoning to give people somewhere to start researching. I have been informed by a friend who was studying the effectiveness of Australia's reform system (read: jails) and who had a real passion for solving these problems. Her comment was that in countries where the punishments were very lenient, the crime rate was lower and there were fewer reoffenders. I also have a comment from a tourist to Dubai that punishment was either deportation or death (I have a feeling that was exaggerated a little) and that there was virtually no crime. Perhaps both ways work and the only wrong answer is to sit in the middle ground. I don't know, but don't assume that harsher punishments will help.
never, never, never believe the government is your babysitter and will protect you from all the ills of the world
Agreed. Parents should take care of and protect their children (including educating them about these things - "if anyone touches you in a way you don't like, tell them no and tell me straight away" and similar speeches), and people should be responsible for their actions (including realising that sex makes babies and that contraception is not 100% effective). If you are having sex make sure you're prepared to take care of the child and protect them like a parent should.
It just won't happen, and selective enforcement will put your liberties at risk.
Australia and America both have selective enforcement on various issues. You Americans (or/.ing Americans at the least) seem to be quite upset, but we Australians seem to be happy with the way it's working. I'm not saying your wrong, but your not right just because you state it, you need to back it up.
All in all, you make some good points and they appeal to the kind of thinking that is prevalent on/. but be careful not to believe the rhetoric that "the/. collective concious" produces, just as you should be careful not to believe the rhetoric that the government puts out. Finally, I realise I haven't backed anything up in this post, it's merely intended to suggest other views that may or may not be correct.
right, because the day they turn 18, something magical happens and suddenly they understand all the possible repercussions that getting naked on camera could have.
No, that's not what the law tries to achieve. The age of 18 was picked because the vast majority of people are informed about these issues before they turn 18. That makes 18 a safe age to give them them control of their sexuality. I'm well aware that their are 15 year olds having sex - some of them know what the full consequences of their actions, some don't. I've only met two 18 year olds that really didn't know enough about sex to make a well informed decision and both of them had it beaten into their head that sex was bad so they weren't going be easily taken advantage of anyway. I know many 16 year olds that had no clue what they were getting themselves into.
When it comes down to it, this law is about whether it is better to set a conservative age of consent and have a very high probability that any legal sex is between people who know what they're doing or reducing the age of consent and having a lower percentage. Personally, I think it's better that you wait until you're 18 until you have sex in exchange for lowering the number of people who are taken advantage of. I've seen how devastating it can be to be taken advantage of (not just abused, but that druken one night stand as well), it really can destroy self-confidence and sense of worth. Sure, it shouldn't be that big a deal, but it is.
The other option is to have to a court (or some other board) assess whether or not someone is fit to make their own decisions. Apart from this being a pretty horrific experience for someone who has just been taken advantage of (ever seen how awful a rape case can be for the victim?), it also means that you can never be sure that you're sexual activities are legal.
the fact that an 18 year old male can be placed in prison and permanently branded "sex offender" for having sex with his 17 year old girlfriend offends me.
If he's mature enough to decide to have sex, shouldn't he be mature enough to know the laws regarding sex and take this into consideration in his decision? I don't know about the US, but here in Australia it is illegal to have sex when under the age of consent regardless of the age of your partner (ie: two 15 year olds having sex with each other is illegal - they are both guilty of carnal knowledge). If this is the case in the US, then your 18 year old example by law shouldn't have been having sex previously and now has at most a year to wait if he wants to have sex with his (currently 17 year old)girlfriend. Seriously, is that really so bad?
It's not easy to turn down an opportunity to have sex - it takes a great deal of maturity to realise that you shouldn't be doing it even though you know it's going to feel "oh so good", so I pity this 18 year old male who has to make that decision, but for the reasons I've outlined above, it's probably the best option that I've seen. Got something better? I'd love to hear it, heck I'd love to see it implemented. We need to find a system that allows you to be certain that what your doing is legal, protects the innocent as much as possible and allows "mature teens" (for some definition of mature) to be able to control their own sexuality. Perhaps the hardest thing though, is defining "mature teens" - when exactly are you mature enough? At least to me, the answer that your mature enough when you're 18 isn't such a bad solution as the only thing it really fails on is handling those mature teens to have sex earlier than the others and that really doesn't hurt anyone (frustrate the hell out of them maybe, but hurt no).
Apple should kill AppleWorks and start putting some people on OpenOffice
Wrong target market. AppleWorks is intended for people with simple word processing needs and that don't want to learn Word. AppleWorks is sensational in education, particularly K-7. Put a kid in front of AppleWorks and they get something done pretty quickly, put them in front of Word and for some reason they get quite confused, even when they're new to both apps. OpenOffice is just a clone of Word that doesn't work as well, other than being free it doesn't seem to have any real advantage.
That's not to discourage the OpenOffice team, I was working on the project in it's very early stages, but it is definitely not an alternative to AppleWorks. With a lot of work it may well be a good alternative to MS Office, but since it doesn't run on OS X yet, that's an awful lot of work. Besides, MS Office on OS X is *really* nice.
Who would not want to have choice in software? You choose what you want.
I choose Mac software not crappy ported software. Simple. The Mac only has a consistent interface because it's users moan incessently about any product that doesn't fit in properly. Mozilla works on OS X so you have your choice but if Apple were to include it with the OS in any way shape or form it would be a sad day for the consistency of the Mac interface.
Sorry to burst you bubble, but Office for Mac is not written specifically for the Mac. I don't know about the entire suite, but I am certain that Excel is written as platform idependent code. There is an underlying interface that allows the code to be run on the mac, but it is based off the same code as the windows version.
Wrong, the entire sweet is specifically written for Mac. Of course there will be code reuse, but none of it is a port of the windows version nor is it specifically designed to be used for both. To prove this to yourself look at a) incompatible file formats between the mac and windows versions (not including Office vX) b) the difference in features between platforms. The mac business unit is a separate division of MS that creates it's own products.
Apple really ought to make an effort to get OpenOffice working really, really well as a native Mac OS X application.
As a Mac user, I really hope they don't. OpenOffice is awful compared to the Mac version of Office and OO is being developed to be cross platform and then ported. Office for Mac is written specifically for the Mac. I don't want crappy ported software that looks like it belongs on Windows, I want good Mac software (same argument applies in reverse when I'm using my Windows box btw).
Then they should use the Mozilla technology to integrate a web browser into the Finder.
Again, please don't. Mozilla is awful - it makes no attempt to fit in with Mac OS and advertises that fact as one of it's features (customizable interface - does that sound like a Mac experience to you?). Mozilla fits in really well with Linux with it's customizability and it's general look and feel of the interface, but it does not fit into Mac OS. It's saving grace however may be Chimera (or some similar name) which is taking the Mozilla engine and putting a proper OS X interface on it using native widgets (not just trying to simulate them).
If done well enough (and we know how good Apple is at desktop stuff), they could make Microsoft irrelevant on the Macintosh platform
Microsoft has no power on the Macintosh platform - we use their products because they happen to be good, not because we need to. AppleWorks is an excellent office alternative which reads and writes Office files. Mac users have already shown that if MS puts out a bad version of Office they are happy to either not upgrade or switch to AppleWorks - it happened when Word 6.0 came out as a Windows port instead of a real Mac version.
Basically, Mac users are picky about their user interfaces, that's what makes the Mac platform so much easier to use - anything that doesn't conform to the human interface guidlines is hammered in reviews and given really bad publicity all over the place, resulting in really poor sales. Mac users don't want Windows software and they don't want Linux software, they want Mac software that looks *and feels* like Mac software, just looking the same does not cut it.
Either you're full of it and have never worked on a large Java project, or our vendor (one of the biggest and best-known in the industry) writes utterly crap code. The sad thing is that I'd estimate the odds at about 20:80...
I'd make the odds out to be 0:100. If no classpath is specified, Java assumes the current directory to be the first place to look and then in the system standard places (which is where the java standard API classes will be found). So if you call the java application you want to run from the current directory and you arranged your classes according to packages (as the compiler does for you), it will just work.
The other note here is that if you package your java app in a jar file (which makes it easier to distribute, take up less space etc) you can specify the main class to use and then all you need to do is: java -jar myJar.jar
and your program will run. On OS X and probably a few other systems you can just double click the jar file and it will run.
It is worth considering that on server side projects like what your company is running there are often good reasons to put class files, jars and wars in "strange" places and then use the classpath to point to them as this can make things easier to manage on a server that has numerous apps being delivered by one server instance. Even so, it's no more difficult than specifying where gcc can find it's libraries etc, etc.
Ok. You omitted the following (as Java people usually do)
ADD:
1) A pain: install Java
2) A pain: install CLASSPATH and packets.
3) A LONG pain - compile.
I don't know where you've been but for quite some time Java has worked out the CLASSPATH by itself. If you have a sane development environment (read: you arrange your source files according to their packages) you don't need to fiddle with the CLASSPATH at all.
Also, compilation is a good thing, it may take time but it means that the computer is checking your code for stupid mistakes (misspelled function call, wrong paramaters, missing bracket, etc, etc). Without that check you are far more likely to leave a stupid error in your code. It takes an incredibly long time (and usually is not feasible) to test every line of code in a program in every possible situation, so anything you can do to reduce the chance of error is a good thing.
Oh and you need to install any program before you can use it, TCL, Visual Studio, Java, gcc etc etc, they all need to be installed.
That's not to say that TCL is a bad language (I personally haven't used it) or that Java is the be all and end all, but the things you highlight are not the faults with Java.
The b3d player was bundled with Morpheus for several months at the end of last year. The download.com filename changed from something like "morpheus.zip" to "morpheus-b3d.zip" at the time.
This is definitely not the only other source. I recently did a clean install of Windows and still have not installed KazAA, Morpheus or any other peer-to-peer filesharing applications, yet AdAdware picked up BDE software on my computer as well. I'd love to know where it came from as I hadn't done anything but install the standard stuff and most of that was from old installers I had from the last install - so the problem is likely to have been around for quite a while.
365 people working on security for a single 8-hour day is a man-year of effort. How much can one person accomplish in one day--or even a month--when starting totally cold?
A code review done properly should use people who are not familiar with the code. In this case, MS is doing better audits. When you understand code, you tend to overlook bugs because "that's the way it works". In a review, you should have a systematic way of reviewing the code and not an ad-hoc "I'll take a look at it" approach.
that usually, many of the most brilliant people aren't that interested in school.
On what basis do you make that statement? The most brilliant people almost always look for intellectual challenges and you are much more likely to find those challenges in an academic setting (because that's the point of them). Certainly some very intelligent people burn out and drop out of school but they generally do not live up to their potential intellectually, despite the fact that they may well have a much more satisfying life.
In reality, most of the really brilliant people in this world are professors in universities (note that the reverse is not nessecarily true however).
Slashdot Mirror
Develop a good UI and let experts in the area choose it and you will find that there are few people who disagree that it's the best. UI design doesn't come down to personal preference, it is based on common traits that almost all people share. People only have one locus of attention, it is easier to use an interface that makes the options visible in a clear manner rather than making you guess at it, the time taken to hit a target is directly related to the distance distance to the object and the size of the object, etc, etc. It's all been documented, go do some reading on it.
I'm sitting here next to a 1.2Ghz Athlon running XP, I work on a wide range of hardware from Windows 98 to Solaris servers (usually with low levels of load) and various linux boxes. I also use OS X on iMacs, iBooks, my Ti Laptop and my G3 300Mhz B&W G3. OS X is snappy. The key to OS X performance (and XP performance) is to give it enough RAM. 384MB for X and XP seems to be the minimum for good performance, but the more the merrier.
OS X was slow through the 10.0.x series but was hugely improved with 10.1 and every release has improved speed since.
I finally got around to checking out Chimera and it is looking really cool. Typing into a form needs a little work I now see (the last character typed flashes once straight after typing). There is a significant lack of features at the moment, but once they are added in this is going to be a great browser. I always said that Mozilla needed a native UI to have any chance and by the look of this I was right.
If you have a copy of OS X grab a copy of Chimera and you'll be amazed at how cool it is considering it's at 0.2. The best features I've found so far is the sidebar that shows my bookmarks (the OS X sidebar is different to the typical Mozilla sidebars or IE sidebars and seems to work a lot better) and the tabbed browsing (due to the "Open Link In New Tab" in the popup menu).
One gripe is that it's not using native widgets for form elements like buttons and popup menus yet (but it has a native looking scroll bar on the text box).
On an off-topic side note: Anyone got good suggestions for places to explore in Fiji - preferably of the non-geek kind (it's a holiday afterall). I've just booked 6 nights over there starting in a weeks time.
Wrong, Darwin is fully opensource. The original poster was suggesting using Darwin and X-Windows which doesn't involve anything proprietary and there are plenty of people already doing this. Plus, with the GNU-Darwin project, you're looking at a complete environment a la RedHat, though currently much more immature.
Now there's a man who's never tried to compile the Darwin kernel. The build process is awful, absolutely awful. Admittedly I believe Apple has been working on it but last I check it was *far* more difficult than Linux.
For the record, you heard wrong. It runs just fine on any colorful mac - you probably want to give it a fair bit of RAM but I know people who are relatively happy with it in 64MB, your mileage probably will vary. :)
Nor am I stupid enough to believe that abstinence is viable, especially for teenagers. This is the bailiwick of the religiously naive, who think that 'just say no' is both feasible and desirable simply because they claim it is.
If you or the people you know are in a position where they cannot simply say 'no' to sex, it is rape - plain and simple. If you are meaning to suggest that it is not possible to go through teenagedom without having sex then you are very sorely mistaken and I can site literally hundreds of examples that prove you wrong. I think you may need a reality check if you don't think that's the case.
No, your counter-example supports my point and your additional clarifications here continue to do so - in particular the "when they're legally allowed to" in regards to teens driving. You don't argue that 12 year olds should be able to drive, so why argue that 12 year olds should be able to have sex?
Counseling teenagers to be abstinent is foolhardy and puritan.
Agreed. Counseling teenagers to be promiscous or frivolent with their sexuality is also foolhardy.
The fact that this is a loaded issue is very relevant. I notice you're not saying that teenagers should be forever banned from driving, because they might die.
I am saying that teenagers shouldn't drive until they know the risks and are mature enough to make an informed decision about it. I say the same thing for sex. You are the one in this argument who sees the two cases as different, not I. I never said people shouldn't have sex, I said they shouldn't have sex until they know what they're doing. I said they should be aware of the risks, but at no point did I say that sex was evil or that people shouldn't have sex.
Correct and provable by probability. Given enough time in a car you will be killed in an accident. Of course to guarantee that will happen would take an infinite amount of time in the car, but the more time you spend in a car the more chance of it happening.
Very, very few things are a hundred percent reliable. It's called "acceptable risk". We mitigate these risks---in the example above, by wearing seat belts and not drinking.
Correct. Key point here is calculated risk. Your original statement was that sex != getting pregnant. This is not true. sex == chance of getting pregnant and most people fail to factor in that chance correctly (as in your case).
Your argument is completely fallacious and utterly worthless. If you weren't talking about such a loaded issue, you'd see that in a second.
Your counter example further supports my point, hence your argument is worthless. Furthermore, the fact that this is a loaded issue is irrelevant.
Wrong. Find me one form of contraception which is 100% reliable. There isn't one. Thus, evenutally having sex == getting pregnant. If you don't realise that, you don't know what you're getting yourself into.
I agree with your post completely - there are a lot of really stupid laws out there. I still stand by my earlier comments though in that I would prefer to see things to strict on teens than too lax, though certainly many of the things you mention should be fixed. I think we have close to the best solution the law can provide in regards to sexual age of consent though, the rest is left to good parenting and that will (and should) always be required.
Mostly that they were left to enjoy the innocence of youth while they had their chance. There's no need to be sexually active at 16 any more and there's nothing particularly great about being sexually active at a young age. Why is it so important to you that underage sex be legal? The only reason I've ever heard is that "people are doing it anyway". "It's natural" is a valid reason I suppose, but it's natural to not have sex until a certain point in life in order to maximise the chance of the offsprings survival, so the argument fails - a 16 year old mother is usually not in a good position to care for her child.
A common fallacy among Americans is the idea that a) they know better than everyone else what the age for sexual activity should be, and b) that whatever limit is currently in place is the way it's always been.
A common fallacy among /. readers is that everyone's American - I'm not. I also never claimed either a or b and was well aware that neither apply.
And we should also be aware that girls and boys have been able to have sex at an age earlier than 18 ever since the race evolved.
Whether you can and whether you should are two different things. Society has changed a lot in the past few centuries, you can't expect the same rules to apply, nor the same logic. Try thinking about things in terms of the percentage of life instead of years and you'll start to see that not so much has changed. Which way should we look at it - how should I know?
Or that it was just recently 'discovered' that teens aren't 'capable' of handling sex, whatever that means.
Look at the number of people who have screwed up their lives (by their own admition) by getting pregnant early in life and you'll see what teens not being capable of handling sex means. If you think there's no harm, you don't know enough about what you're talking about, plain and simple. This is an activity of calculated risks which has good points and bad points, it is not just good nor is it all just bad.
The ACM programming contest is an awful model for assessing coding ability. The entire contest is based on time pressures and it encourages writing bad code, not doing design work and not commenting anything (it all just wastes time).
Something that makes a good competition does not nessecarily make a good exam.
I generally have no problem with people being incompetant and I will go out of my way to help them learn, what really annoys me is the people who know what they're doing but figure the rest of the team will do it for them anyway.
Careful, taking a logical derivation and applying it to a different problem, no matter how related that problem may seem may render the logic incorrect. Robbery and child abuse are different in so many ways. The biggest being that the majority of people don't need nor want to become a robber (there is no initial desire), whereas people who look at child pornography tend to have an initial desire. Does this make a difference, I don't know, but it may and it highlights the fact that you must argue this in terms of child abuse, not robbery because the situations are different.
Enforce the laws against child explotation to the fullest, make the penalties tougher
What makes you think that and is there any evidence that this is the case? Here's some complete heresay reasoning to give people somewhere to start researching. I have been informed by a friend who was studying the effectiveness of Australia's reform system (read: jails) and who had a real passion for solving these problems. Her comment was that in countries where the punishments were very lenient, the crime rate was lower and there were fewer reoffenders. I also have a comment from a tourist to Dubai that punishment was either deportation or death (I have a feeling that was exaggerated a little) and that there was virtually no crime. Perhaps both ways work and the only wrong answer is to sit in the middle ground. I don't know, but don't assume that harsher punishments will help.
never, never, never believe the government is your babysitter and will protect you from all the ills of the world
Agreed. Parents should take care of and protect their children (including educating them about these things - "if anyone touches you in a way you don't like, tell them no and tell me straight away" and similar speeches), and people should be responsible for their actions (including realising that sex makes babies and that contraception is not 100% effective). If you are having sex make sure you're prepared to take care of the child and protect them like a parent should.
It just won't happen, and selective enforcement will put your liberties at risk.
Australia and America both have selective enforcement on various issues. You Americans (or /.ing Americans at the least) seem to be quite upset, but we Australians seem to be happy with the way it's working. I'm not saying your wrong, but your not right just because you state it, you need to back it up.
All in all, you make some good points and they appeal to the kind of thinking that is prevalent on /. but be careful not to believe the rhetoric that "the /. collective concious" produces, just as you should be careful not to believe the rhetoric that the government puts out. Finally, I realise I haven't backed anything up in this post, it's merely intended to suggest other views that may or may not be correct.
No, that's not what the law tries to achieve. The age of 18 was picked because the vast majority of people are informed about these issues before they turn 18. That makes 18 a safe age to give them them control of their sexuality. I'm well aware that their are 15 year olds having sex - some of them know what the full consequences of their actions, some don't. I've only met two 18 year olds that really didn't know enough about sex to make a well informed decision and both of them had it beaten into their head that sex was bad so they weren't going be easily taken advantage of anyway. I know many 16 year olds that had no clue what they were getting themselves into.
When it comes down to it, this law is about whether it is better to set a conservative age of consent and have a very high probability that any legal sex is between people who know what they're doing or reducing the age of consent and having a lower percentage. Personally, I think it's better that you wait until you're 18 until you have sex in exchange for lowering the number of people who are taken advantage of. I've seen how devastating it can be to be taken advantage of (not just abused, but that druken one night stand as well), it really can destroy self-confidence and sense of worth. Sure, it shouldn't be that big a deal, but it is.
The other option is to have to a court (or some other board) assess whether or not someone is fit to make their own decisions. Apart from this being a pretty horrific experience for someone who has just been taken advantage of (ever seen how awful a rape case can be for the victim?), it also means that you can never be sure that you're sexual activities are legal.
the fact that an 18 year old male can be placed in prison and permanently branded "sex offender" for having sex with his 17 year old girlfriend offends me.
If he's mature enough to decide to have sex, shouldn't he be mature enough to know the laws regarding sex and take this into consideration in his decision? I don't know about the US, but here in Australia it is illegal to have sex when under the age of consent regardless of the age of your partner (ie: two 15 year olds having sex with each other is illegal - they are both guilty of carnal knowledge). If this is the case in the US, then your 18 year old example by law shouldn't have been having sex previously and now has at most a year to wait if he wants to have sex with his (currently 17 year old)girlfriend. Seriously, is that really so bad?
It's not easy to turn down an opportunity to have sex - it takes a great deal of maturity to realise that you shouldn't be doing it even though you know it's going to feel "oh so good", so I pity this 18 year old male who has to make that decision, but for the reasons I've outlined above, it's probably the best option that I've seen. Got something better? I'd love to hear it, heck I'd love to see it implemented. We need to find a system that allows you to be certain that what your doing is legal, protects the innocent as much as possible and allows "mature teens" (for some definition of mature) to be able to control their own sexuality. Perhaps the hardest thing though, is defining "mature teens" - when exactly are you mature enough? At least to me, the answer that your mature enough when you're 18 isn't such a bad solution as the only thing it really fails on is handling those mature teens to have sex earlier than the others and that really doesn't hurt anyone (frustrate the hell out of them maybe, but hurt no).
Wrong target market. AppleWorks is intended for people with simple word processing needs and that don't want to learn Word. AppleWorks is sensational in education, particularly K-7. Put a kid in front of AppleWorks and they get something done pretty quickly, put them in front of Word and for some reason they get quite confused, even when they're new to both apps. OpenOffice is just a clone of Word that doesn't work as well, other than being free it doesn't seem to have any real advantage.
That's not to discourage the OpenOffice team, I was working on the project in it's very early stages, but it is definitely not an alternative to AppleWorks. With a lot of work it may well be a good alternative to MS Office, but since it doesn't run on OS X yet, that's an awful lot of work. Besides, MS Office on OS X is *really* nice.
I choose Mac software not crappy ported software. Simple. The Mac only has a consistent interface because it's users moan incessently about any product that doesn't fit in properly. Mozilla works on OS X so you have your choice but if Apple were to include it with the OS in any way shape or form it would be a sad day for the consistency of the Mac interface.
Wrong, the entire sweet is specifically written for Mac. Of course there will be code reuse, but none of it is a port of the windows version nor is it specifically designed to be used for both. To prove this to yourself look at a) incompatible file formats between the mac and windows versions (not including Office vX) b) the difference in features between platforms. The mac business unit is a separate division of MS that creates it's own products.
As a Mac user, I really hope they don't. OpenOffice is awful compared to the Mac version of Office and OO is being developed to be cross platform and then ported. Office for Mac is written specifically for the Mac. I don't want crappy ported software that looks like it belongs on Windows, I want good Mac software (same argument applies in reverse when I'm using my Windows box btw).
Then they should use the Mozilla technology to integrate a web browser into the Finder.
Again, please don't. Mozilla is awful - it makes no attempt to fit in with Mac OS and advertises that fact as one of it's features (customizable interface - does that sound like a Mac experience to you?). Mozilla fits in really well with Linux with it's customizability and it's general look and feel of the interface, but it does not fit into Mac OS. It's saving grace however may be Chimera (or some similar name) which is taking the Mozilla engine and putting a proper OS X interface on it using native widgets (not just trying to simulate them).
If done well enough (and we know how good Apple is at desktop stuff), they could make Microsoft irrelevant on the Macintosh platform
Microsoft has no power on the Macintosh platform - we use their products because they happen to be good, not because we need to. AppleWorks is an excellent office alternative which reads and writes Office files. Mac users have already shown that if MS puts out a bad version of Office they are happy to either not upgrade or switch to AppleWorks - it happened when Word 6.0 came out as a Windows port instead of a real Mac version.
Basically, Mac users are picky about their user interfaces, that's what makes the Mac platform so much easier to use - anything that doesn't conform to the human interface guidlines is hammered in reviews and given really bad publicity all over the place, resulting in really poor sales. Mac users don't want Windows software and they don't want Linux software, they want Mac software that looks *and feels* like Mac software, just looking the same does not cut it.
I'd make the odds out to be 0:100. If no classpath is specified, Java assumes the current directory to be the first place to look and then in the system standard places (which is where the java standard API classes will be found). So if you call the java application you want to run from the current directory and you arranged your classes according to packages (as the compiler does for you), it will just work.
The other note here is that if you package your java app in a jar file (which makes it easier to distribute, take up less space etc) you can specify the main class to use and then all you need to do is:
java -jar myJar.jar
and your program will run. On OS X and probably a few other systems you can just double click the jar file and it will run.
It is worth considering that on server side projects like what your company is running there are often good reasons to put class files, jars and wars in "strange" places and then use the classpath to point to them as this can make things easier to manage on a server that has numerous apps being delivered by one server instance. Even so, it's no more difficult than specifying where gcc can find it's libraries etc, etc.
ADD:
1) A pain: install Java
2) A pain: install CLASSPATH and packets.
3) A LONG pain - compile.
I don't know where you've been but for quite some time Java has worked out the CLASSPATH by itself. If you have a sane development environment (read: you arrange your source files according to their packages) you don't need to fiddle with the CLASSPATH at all.
Also, compilation is a good thing, it may take time but it means that the computer is checking your code for stupid mistakes (misspelled function call, wrong paramaters, missing bracket, etc, etc). Without that check you are far more likely to leave a stupid error in your code. It takes an incredibly long time (and usually is not feasible) to test every line of code in a program in every possible situation, so anything you can do to reduce the chance of error is a good thing.
Oh and you need to install any program before you can use it, TCL, Visual Studio, Java, gcc etc etc, they all need to be installed.
That's not to say that TCL is a bad language (I personally haven't used it) or that Java is the be all and end all, but the things you highlight are not the faults with Java.
This is definitely not the only other source. I recently did a clean install of Windows and still have not installed KazAA, Morpheus or any other peer-to-peer filesharing applications, yet AdAdware picked up BDE software on my computer as well. I'd love to know where it came from as I hadn't done anything but install the standard stuff and most of that was from old installers I had from the last install - so the problem is likely to have been around for quite a while.
A code review done properly should use people who are not familiar with the code. In this case, MS is doing better audits. When you understand code, you tend to overlook bugs because "that's the way it works". In a review, you should have a systematic way of reviewing the code and not an ad-hoc "I'll take a look at it" approach.
On what basis do you make that statement? The most brilliant people almost always look for intellectual challenges and you are much more likely to find those challenges in an academic setting (because that's the point of them). Certainly some very intelligent people burn out and drop out of school but they generally do not live up to their potential intellectually, despite the fact that they may well have a much more satisfying life.
In reality, most of the really brilliant people in this world are professors in universities (note that the reverse is not nessecarily true however).