Copyright only protects new and original creative expression. While some new arrangements and transcriptions of music may so qualify, (such as, for example, Paul Galbraith's transcriptions of Bach's "six solo" for violin to his eight string guitar) it is arguable that no copyright could be legitimately asserted on the simply mechanical act of rescoring an old work for the pitch of modern instruments.
If you're not committed yet, check out XMLC.
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XMLC and Barracuda offer a nice alternative to Struts without all the crap of JSP and the enormous clusterf**k single XML file that Struts uses.
XMLC enforces a nice clean seperation of code and presentation data and has a great framework (Barracuda) that does everything Struts does and more. (polymorphic event dispatch and real OO event handling, for example)
Check it out at www.enhydra.org. There's also a great book out on XMLC, if you prefer paper.
Well, if it makes you feel any better, garote is a friend of mine (I contributed to those notebook pages on other subjects, and holy crap if I ever thought as many folks as read/. would ever be looking at them!) and we had to endure quite a bit torment and harassment by the goons.
A decade later, we're now all quite successful and happy in our lives. In contrast, while home visiting the 'rents a few years ago, I caught a story on the local news about one of the worst bullies we had to deal with. He got his kicks throwing fist-sized rocks at us in high school. He has just been convicted of attacking a randomly chosen homeless man with a bat, just for fun. They said they were postponing his sentencing hearing pending tests to see if he had brain damage. Nothing any of us couldn't have told everybody years before. ..its' just sad somebody had to really get hurt before anything was done.
Well, it's sort of a good analogy. Nobody would dream of running a nuclear power plant without security fences, guards, etc. If that infrastructure was so lacking that any reasonably motivated/curious teenager could just wander into the plant unchallenged and start pushing buttons, Homer Simpson style, you can bet that fault would be found with the security provider, even to the point of their being criminally liable for negligence.
We obviously cannot expect security to stop all attacks, physical or over a network, but you can demand a certain level of due dilligence. This is harder to define in the computer world than the physical world, but our legal system can and does deal with more complex issues than this.
This is not to absolve hackers of responsibility for their actions, but merely to say that people running dams, power grids, etc. have a responsibility to anticipate these sorts of things and take appropriate measures to protect the public. Firewalls, intrusion detection, anti-virus software, strong passwords, secure software and a good permissions system are no less necesary than fences, door locks, alarm systems, security cameras and badges.
No offense, but user-submitted blogs like K5 are nowhere near the quality of Salon, with real writers (with editors! *gasp*), investigative journalism, news feeds, commentary from notables in the fields they cover, work for hire from professional writers, etc...
K5 and it's ilk have their niche, but there's no way that Plastic compares to what Suck used to be.
I do not think that being a Christian is, by itself, any sign of being crazy or irrational.
I do think that many groups thrive on creating feelings of persecution and minority status, as if we were somehow in the first century, not a modern state that has EXPLICIT PROTECTION for their (and everyone's) religous practice and in which they (Christians in general) constitute a large and politically powerful majority. Repeat after me: This decision is not a threat to Christianity. This decision does not force you to say you don't believe in God. It just says you can't be forced or coerced to say that you do.
The "enforced agnosticism" you talk about is only in the functions of government and what it requires of its citizens. This is a distinction that many, unfortunately, fail to make, and actually is a good thing for religion.
The seperation of church and state protects both ways. I think that only someone ignorant or delusional would actually WANT our political system, with all it's day-to-day vaguaries, corruption, etc., to be dictating their religious practice to them.
A sensible Christian, as much as a sensible atheist, should want the coercive power of the state to be kept well away from matters of their heart, conscience and soul.
As much as I agree in spirit (ha ha) with the ruling, I am pretty disappointed by it.
Why? Because it throws gasoline on the fire of the paranoid delusions of many Christians in this country that they are somehow a persecuted minority squaring off with an evil govenrment committed to state-enforced atheism.
The Pledge of Allegiance has such enormous emotional and social weight behind it, especially post 9/11, that it makes a perfect rallying point for "the lengths to which the atheists will go." This decision is just begging for a major political backlash and reeastablishment of the Christian Right's morality in our national political dialogue.
It will contribute to the alienation of atheists and other non-Christians as "unpatriotic" in a time when that equates to "terrorist enemy" and constitutional protections are weaker than they have been in 60 years.
With the amount of US cash stored around the world as hard currency savings (in the range of many many billions of dollars in just the former USSR alone) there would be incredible turmoil and devaluation of the dollar as folks rushed to spend it or convert it in a panic. That's the last thing anybody wants.
I used to buy 10-20 cd's a year. At the height of Napster, I was buying more like 30-40 because I could discover so much more great music that I liked, and was apolitical with regard to music purchases.
Since Napster was shut down, I've come to see what a bunch of greedy f**kheads the RIAA are, and how, collaborating with the monolithic radio industry, they don't want me to hear and discover diverse music. They just want me to shut up and shell out for whomever they've decided is the next star.
Now, instead of feeling excited about all the great music out there, I just feel disgusted, ripped off and insulted when I see the price tag on a CD.
As a result, I've only purchased 2 CDs in the last year, both from independent labels-- a 90% drop from my normal buying habits over the last decade.
It's not really a conceptual model of software, such as you seem to be seeking (pehaps barking up the wrong tree) but the Design Patterns book and community around these ideas are excellent.
Perhaps more similar to ideas from systems theory than from ontology, design patterns are sets of abstractions and ideas that are repeatedly useful in many different contexts for solving complex problems in an elegant manner.
As a developer, patterns are the most powerful part of my design repertoire. Conceptual models are invariably domain specific, but uses for patterns come up again and again.
Try Design Patterns, by Gamma, Helm, Johnson and Vlissides. There are many other books in that genere, though. Analysis Patterns by Martin Fowler may be more of what you want if you're looking for domain-specific analytical abstractions.
The book Cognitive Patterns by Karen Gardner describes a different kind of conceptual model for programming. An interesting read, but I've rarely used anything from it.
If you really want to get into a detailed ontological perspective on programming and the world, read On the Origin of Objects by Brian Cantwell Smith. Absolutely fascinating philosophical study. Absolutely useless to a working programmer. (unless you work at PARC or Watson labs):)
In any discussion involving the government, the probability over of the phrase "use/using my tax dollars" appearing is one. This signals the end of rational discussion in that thread.
They're NOT YOUR tax dollars. They're PUBLIC funds , the usage of which is decided by Constitional processes for the public interest and good. A system where the usage of the money you pay in taxes is based on your personal whim is called a plutocracy. We live in a (nominally) democratic republic.
If a show REALLY sucks, yes nobody will watch it and no ads will sell. But, the advertising system also puts a cap on really GOOD shows too, because it's in their best interest to make sure that the ads are just a little more interesting than the show - so you'll actually watch them. Thus, mediocrity is assured.
Britian, in contrast, has shows that are terrible, dull as dirt crap, but also shows that are outstanding works of art. Not very much of the latter outside PBS here.
Well, the ISS is pretty big. There's already speculation that if it were destroyed in a collision with space junk it would set off a chain reaction that would frag LEO. You could use an inertial gun to clandestinely launch stuff to destroy the ISS in a freakish "accident" that happens to also eliminate the interceptor system.
And who's to say the gravel launch couldn't be disguised as a legitimate satellite launch. The deception wouldn't be apparent until too late. Only one missile has to make it up to disable the entire system, so such fraud is readily possible, where it is implausible with a full on attack.
Maybe we wouldn't care about LEO after a serious nuclear exchange, but the point to take away is that it's stupid to spend ALL THAT MONEY to build an interceptor system that is USELESS because the means and cost of disabing/destroying a satellite based interceptor system are trivial for those actually capable and intent on launching an ICBM based nuclear attack.
This COMPLETELY IGNORES the EVEN MORE OBVIOUS fact that it is easy to mount a nuclear attack by means other than ICBM (and to possibly even avoid retaliation by doing so anonymously).
Well, IBM is still producing record numbers of patents every year and doing lots of good research. I've been to a few OOPSLAs, and it seems like the research output from IBM's Watson Labs on object-oriented stuff is nearly equal to the rest of the world's academic facilities combined.
Well, Java isn't SUPPOSED to be complete by your definition. The point to not having an "I know what I'm doing" flag for unsafe operation is that a) it's not really necessary, except for implementing a tiny tiny bit of the way-down-low-guts of the runtime and b) it makes security a lot simpler.
Hostile code should not have the option of saying that "it's OK, I know what I'm doing." You could use multi-layer zones like MSFT did with.NET, but then you're undermining the appeal of the system - that everything is safe and you don't really have to trust anybody to run their code. It also prevents trojans from riding along in "trustworthy" code or just stupid things like unintentional bad pointer arithmetic or array bounds checking in non-hostile code. (I know, I know - JNI, but "Pure" Java programs are safe)
You are correct that there are certain operations that are outside (deliberately!) of the Java program model. This is a good thing.
access to machine registers and memory
architecture specific machine instructions
transfer of execution to an arbitrary address
coerce object refs to addresses and back
invoke OS services
This doesn't mean that you can't write GC in Java! IBM implemented a JVM and GC system entirely in Java, called Jalapeno. To do this, they created a Java class called "Magic" that had empty methods for these services which any Java compiler could build. Then, the internal Jalapeno VM compiler would recognize calls to the Magic class, verify that what they are compiling is a valid part of the JVM and inline appropriate machine code where these calls occur.
Now, all GC systems can be written in reference to this Magic class and porting the VM is simply a matter of generating appropriate machine code for these half-dozen methods. And you get all the security of Java's automatic memory management model!
Check the ACM's OOPSLA Conference Proceedings, 1999, Implementing Jalapeno in Java or www.research.ibm.com/jalapeno for the paper.
There are only about 200 accidental handgun related deaths a year in the US.
In the 10 years following the Ford Explorer's introduction nearly 13,000 people died in SUV rollovers (only 300 of those deaths are attributable to tire failure). In 2002, there will be an estimated 20,000 SUV rollovers that will kill an estimated 2000 people. This figure on deaths does not include people killed when hit by SUVs. The Ford Explorer is SIXTEEN TIMES AS LIKELY AS THE AVERAGE PASSENGER CAR TO KILL OCCUPANTS OF ANOTHER VEHICLE IN A CRASH.
Even if you're a major automaker and refuse to acknowledge that there are fundamental design flaws in SUVs, these figures should be justification enough to require special training and licensing for using a vehicle, in Detroit's own words, "designed for off-road use", on the public streets.
The symmetric key used by SSL (usually for the RC4 algorithm) is negotiated using an asymmetric public key cryposystem. (usually RSA) If that can be broken easily, the keys to the symmetric algorithm are right there.
The real reason a symmetric algorithm is used for the bulk of an SSL session is that it is much less computationally intensive than an asymmetric algorithm with a similar degree of security.
Note that these algorithms are independently pluggable, so a more secure or larger key size asymmetric algorithm could be used alongside the same old 128 bit RC4.
The big problem here is for systems using browser managed certificates for authentication would have to be upgraded and new certs issued. This is not the most common usage of SSL, but where it is in place the systems tend to be large and expensive.
It's especially disgusting when you realize the actual costs to us collectively. For a few millions, corporations buy their way into legal tax and accounting loopholes and exceptions worth TENS OF BILLIONS of dollars. It's estimated that there are at least $50bn in taxes uncollected due to shuttling profits to offshore holding companies. I think the "economic stimulus package" Bush proposed gave almost that much away to a few big companies like IBM. It is also quite common for companies like Pepsi(!) to use "restructuring" to avoid paying any income tax.
It would be cheaper to pay all of our Sentators and Congresspeople a million dollars a year and give a million dollar government sponsored budget to every candidate with more than 25% poll numbers in every race for each seat than to keep the current system of influence peddling.
Hell, if you paid people that much, you could even forbid them from working after they retire and avoid the corporate board/Presidential cabinet recycling loop that is an even bigger bribery scam than campaign contributions.
Part of Java's slowness in initializing is that it does extensive security oriented bytecode verification of every class loaded. If.NET doesn't do that, it will be faster, but arguably not as secure against people rearranging the CLR bytecodes in ways that a compiler conforming to the security spec wouldn't. BTW: You can disable this as a command line option to your JVM and speed things up if you trust your.class files, but the default is to be secure.
People just haven't thought of the cool stuff do
do with peer-to-peer yet. Imagine a high bandwidth cell phone that acts like a Gnutella client. Your call finds somebody else's phone locally and frog-hops across phones until it reaches its destination, no towers, no phone company bills, etc. It would be great for military networks, ad-hoc networking at conferences (ever try to make a cell call at Comdex? Good luck getting a circut.), etc.
Exactly! I'm not concerned about people using that particular smile graphic, but the fact that trademark law allows McDonald's to enjoin the use of anything similar to their not-very-stylized-at-all use of the common, English word "smile." This is doubly bad in McDonald's case since where large, multi-national corporations like Nike, Coke and McDonald's are concerned trademarks are considered "famous" and often upheld across all market categories.
Thus, if I, owner of the hypothetical "Brad's Camera Shop" want to end my TV commercial with the word "smile", McDonald's could sue me. Even though I'd be likely to win in court, I'd have to face the considerable expense of fighting McDonald's legal team, which would by itself force most small business owners into concession.
Worse, if I did fight it and win, I wouldn't even be able to countersue to recover the costs of defending this frivolous, harassing lawsuit because, since some bozo at the USPTO granted them a trademark, it is their "obligation" to defend it.
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Copyright only protects new and original creative expression. While some new arrangements and transcriptions of music may so qualify, (such as, for example, Paul Galbraith's transcriptions of Bach's "six solo" for violin to his eight string guitar) it is arguable that no copyright could be legitimately asserted on the simply mechanical act of rescoring an old work for the pitch of modern instruments.
XMLC and Barracuda offer a nice alternative to Struts without all the crap of JSP and the enormous clusterf**k single XML file that Struts uses.
XMLC enforces a nice clean seperation of code and presentation data and has a great framework (Barracuda) that does everything Struts does and more. (polymorphic event dispatch and real OO event handling, for example)
Check it out at www.enhydra.org. There's also a great book out on XMLC, if you prefer paper.
A decade later, we're now all quite successful and happy in our lives. In contrast, while home visiting the 'rents a few years ago, I caught a story on the local news about one of the worst bullies we had to deal with. He got his kicks throwing fist-sized rocks at us in high school. He has just been convicted of attacking a randomly chosen homeless man with a bat, just for fun. They said they were postponing his sentencing hearing pending tests to see if he had brain damage. Nothing any of us couldn't have told everybody years before. .
We obviously cannot expect security to stop all attacks, physical or over a network, but you can demand a certain level of due dilligence. This is harder to define in the computer world than the physical world, but our legal system can and does deal with more complex issues than this.
This is not to absolve hackers of responsibility for their actions, but merely to say that people running dams, power grids, etc. have a responsibility to anticipate these sorts of things and take appropriate measures to protect the public. Firewalls, intrusion detection, anti-virus software, strong passwords, secure software and a good permissions system are no less necesary than fences, door locks, alarm systems, security cameras and badges.
K5 and it's ilk have their niche, but there's no way that Plastic compares to what Suck used to be.
I do think that many groups thrive on creating feelings of persecution and minority status, as if we were somehow in the first century, not a modern state that has EXPLICIT PROTECTION for their (and everyone's) religous practice and in which they (Christians in general) constitute a large and politically powerful majority. Repeat after me: This decision is not a threat to Christianity. This decision does not force you to say you don't believe in God. It just says you can't be forced or coerced to say that you do.
The "enforced agnosticism" you talk about is only in the functions of government and what it requires of its citizens. This is a distinction that many, unfortunately, fail to make, and actually is a good thing for religion.
The seperation of church and state protects both ways. I think that only someone ignorant or delusional would actually WANT our political system, with all it's day-to-day vaguaries, corruption, etc., to be dictating their religious practice to them.
A sensible Christian, as much as a sensible atheist, should want the coercive power of the state to be kept well away from matters of their heart, conscience and soul.
Why? Because it throws gasoline on the fire of the paranoid delusions of many Christians in this country that they are somehow a persecuted minority squaring off with an evil govenrment committed to state-enforced atheism.
The Pledge of Allegiance has such enormous emotional and social weight behind it, especially post 9/11, that it makes a perfect rallying point for "the lengths to which the atheists will go." This decision is just begging for a major political backlash and reeastablishment of the Christian Right's morality in our national political dialogue.
It will contribute to the alienation of atheists and other non-Christians as "unpatriotic" in a time when that equates to "terrorist enemy" and constitutional protections are weaker than they have been in 60 years.
ARRRGH. What HORRIBLE timing.
With the amount of US cash stored around the world as hard currency savings (in the range of many many billions of dollars in just the former USSR alone) there would be incredible turmoil and devaluation of the dollar as folks rushed to spend it or convert it in a panic. That's the last thing anybody wants.
BillG: "Microsoft Visual Studio .NET: Now with Securi-hancers!"
Windows user: "Finally, a product for me! I believe every word that man just said, because it's exactly what I wanted to hear."
Linux user: "Man, you've been brainwashed."
News.com: "Microsoft developer tool distributed with viral payload."
BillG: "He's making a mockery of the product! You're making a mockery of the product!"
(Linux user): Noooo!! Can you not comprehend that your ignorance will cause me to explode now? Arrgghhh!!!
BillG: "I AM THE KING!"
I used to buy 10-20 cd's a year. At the height of Napster, I was buying more like 30-40 because I could discover so much more great music that I liked, and was apolitical with regard to music purchases.
Since Napster was shut down, I've come to see what a bunch of greedy f**kheads the RIAA are, and how, collaborating with the monolithic radio industry, they don't want me to hear and discover diverse music. They just want me to shut up and shell out for whomever they've decided is the next star.
Now, instead of feeling excited about all the great music out there, I just feel disgusted, ripped off and insulted when I see the price tag on a CD.
As a result, I've only purchased 2 CDs in the last year, both from independent labels-- a 90% drop from my normal buying habits over the last decade.
Perhaps more similar to ideas from systems theory than from ontology, design patterns are sets of abstractions and ideas that are repeatedly useful in many different contexts for solving complex problems in an elegant manner.
As a developer, patterns are the most powerful part of my design repertoire. Conceptual models are invariably domain specific, but uses for patterns come up again and again.
Try Design Patterns, by Gamma, Helm, Johnson and Vlissides. There are many other books in that genere, though. Analysis Patterns by Martin Fowler may be more of what you want if you're looking for domain-specific analytical abstractions.
The book Cognitive Patterns by Karen Gardner describes a different kind of conceptual model for programming. An interesting read, but I've rarely used anything from it.
If you really want to get into a detailed ontological perspective on programming and the world, read On the Origin of Objects by Brian Cantwell Smith. Absolutely fascinating philosophical study. Absolutely useless to a working programmer. (unless you work at PARC or Watson labs)
They're NOT YOUR tax dollars. They're PUBLIC funds , the usage of which is decided by Constitional processes for the public interest and good. A system where the usage of the money you pay in taxes is based on your personal whim is called a plutocracy. We live in a (nominally) democratic republic.
Britian, in contrast, has shows that are terrible, dull as dirt crap, but also shows that are outstanding works of art. Not very much of the latter outside PBS here.
And who's to say the gravel launch couldn't be disguised as a legitimate satellite launch. The deception wouldn't be apparent until too late. Only one missile has to make it up to disable the entire system, so such fraud is readily possible, where it is implausible with a full on attack.
This COMPLETELY IGNORES the EVEN MORE OBVIOUS fact that it is easy to mount a nuclear attack by means other than ICBM (and to possibly even avoid retaliation by doing so anonymously).
Well, IBM is still producing record numbers of patents every year and doing lots of good research. I've been to a few OOPSLAs, and it seems like the research output from IBM's Watson Labs on object-oriented stuff is nearly equal to the rest of the world's academic facilities combined.
Hostile code should not have the option of saying that "it's OK, I know what I'm doing." You could use multi-layer zones like MSFT did with .NET, but then you're undermining the appeal of the system - that everything is safe and you don't really have to trust anybody to run their code. It also prevents trojans from riding along in "trustworthy" code or just stupid things like unintentional bad pointer arithmetic or array bounds checking in non-hostile code. (I know, I know - JNI, but "Pure" Java programs are safe)
access to machine registers and memory
architecture specific machine instructions
transfer of execution to an arbitrary address
coerce object refs to addresses and back
invoke OS services
This doesn't mean that you can't write GC in Java! IBM implemented a JVM and GC system entirely in Java, called Jalapeno. To do this, they created a Java class called "Magic" that had empty methods for these services which any Java compiler could build. Then, the internal Jalapeno VM compiler would recognize calls to the Magic class, verify that what they are compiling is a valid part of the JVM and inline appropriate machine code where these calls occur.
Now, all GC systems can be written in reference to this Magic class and porting the VM is simply a matter of generating appropriate machine code for these half-dozen methods. And you get all the security of Java's automatic memory management model!
Check the ACM's OOPSLA Conference Proceedings, 1999, Implementing Jalapeno in Java or www.research.ibm.com/jalapeno for the paper.
In the 10 years following the Ford Explorer's introduction nearly 13,000 people died in SUV rollovers (only 300 of those deaths are attributable to tire failure). In 2002, there will be an estimated 20,000 SUV rollovers that will kill an estimated 2000 people. This figure on deaths does not include people killed when hit by SUVs. The Ford Explorer is SIXTEEN TIMES AS LIKELY AS THE AVERAGE PASSENGER CAR TO KILL OCCUPANTS OF ANOTHER VEHICLE IN A CRASH.
Even if you're a major automaker and refuse to acknowledge that there are fundamental design flaws in SUVs, these figures should be justification enough to require special training and licensing for using a vehicle, in Detroit's own words, "designed for off-road use", on the public streets.
The real reason a symmetric algorithm is used for the bulk of an SSL session is that it is much less computationally intensive than an asymmetric algorithm with a similar degree of security.
Note that these algorithms are independently pluggable, so a more secure or larger key size asymmetric algorithm could be used alongside the same old 128 bit RC4.
The big problem here is for systems using browser managed certificates for authentication would have to be upgraded and new certs issued. This is not the most common usage of SSL, but where it is in place the systems tend to be large and expensive.
It's especially disgusting when you realize the actual costs to us collectively. For a few millions, corporations buy their way into legal tax and accounting loopholes and exceptions worth TENS OF BILLIONS of dollars. It's estimated that there are at least $50bn in taxes uncollected due to shuttling profits to offshore holding companies. I think the "economic stimulus package" Bush proposed gave almost that much away to a few big companies like IBM. It is also quite common for companies like Pepsi(!) to use "restructuring" to avoid paying any income tax.
It would be cheaper to pay all of our Sentators and Congresspeople a million dollars a year and give a million dollar government sponsored budget to every candidate with more than 25% poll numbers in every race for each seat than to keep the current system of influence peddling.
Hell, if you paid people that much, you could even forbid them from working after they retire and avoid the corporate board/Presidential cabinet recycling loop that is an even bigger bribery scam than campaign contributions.
ROFL
Part of Java's slowness in initializing is that it does extensive security oriented bytecode verification of every class loaded. If .NET doesn't do that, it will be faster, but arguably not as secure against people rearranging the CLR bytecodes in ways that a compiler conforming to the security spec wouldn't. BTW: You can disable this as a command line option to your JVM and speed things up if you trust your .class files, but the default is to be secure.
People just haven't thought of the cool stuff do do with peer-to-peer yet. Imagine a high bandwidth cell phone that acts like a Gnutella client. Your call finds somebody else's phone locally and frog-hops across phones until it reaches its destination, no towers, no phone company bills, etc. It would be great for military networks, ad-hoc networking at conferences (ever try to make a cell call at Comdex? Good luck getting a circut.), etc.
Thus, if I, owner of the hypothetical "Brad's Camera Shop" want to end my TV commercial with the word "smile", McDonald's could sue me. Even though I'd be likely to win in court, I'd have to face the considerable expense of fighting McDonald's legal team, which would by itself force most small business owners into concession.
Worse, if I did fight it and win, I wouldn't even be able to countersue to recover the costs of defending this frivolous, harassing lawsuit because, since some bozo at the USPTO granted them a trademark, it is their "obligation" to defend it.