The reason why (oil) companies are being treated more sceptically than non-profit organisations is simply because people are assuming that the companies don't have a particular point of view on the issue at hand per se, but rather that the opposing view point will hurt their (short term) bottom line. In other words: where if you don't agree with the environmentalists, you think they are misguided, with the company, you think they're purposefully lying.
In this particular case it's even more damning, as they're lying through their teeth to protect their profits while potentially destroying the world . People tend to get upset about that last part, given that we live there.
As for the 'controversy' on global warming. That's a US thing. It has been understood in the rest of the world for quite some time that (a) global warming is real, and that (b) we're contributing majorly to it. Discussions on the Exxon points has been non-existent here in Europe. Guess where Exxon has spent his 'educational' dollars? Yes, to the gullable.
I think you're missing the real point for the 'or later' clause. It allows voluntary updates of the license. Suppose you build a piece of software alongside many contributors. Some contributors have moved on, others are hard to find. No one signed their copyright over to you, but all licensed their software under the same license. Two scenario's: one where there is an 'or later' clause, one where there isn't.
Now Tivo comes along and takes your software and with a legal trick circumvents your license, making sure nobody is actually able to obtain Tivo's modifications to your software. Others get the hang of it too, and before you know it, Microsoft, Google and Amazon are using your software in a proprietary fashion, making your software non-free.
You are pissed off, with many others, and decide to update the license to one that explicitly counters this trick. In scenario one (with the 'or later' clause), this works painlessly. Every new piece of code is licensed under the new version, and the old source is slowly superceded. In the second scenario, you're out of luck. You haven't made any provisions to upgrade your license, and the bug in the old license is there to stay. This is the situation that Linux is finding itself now, as they haven't gone the 'or later' clause. They're toast.
Now, for the evil power-grab that the FSF might want to do. Their anger has always been a sign of something dark, and suddenly it comes to full bloom. What can they do now? Suppose they build up the new license: BSD-style. Now, because of the 'or later' clause, anyone can grab your software and use it BSD-style. Tough luck, but you retaliate. All new code you write will have the 'or later' clause removed, and you will continue, never trusting the FSF itself. In any scenario, the worst that can happen is that the FSF will give away your code to someone in a new license: be it the general public, be it Microsoft. You can cut your losses and continue without the 'or later' clause from that point on. Without the clause, you are trusting that no one will ever discover a legal loophole in your current license. In this case you have effectively given away your code to the one discovering the loophole (Tivo), and you have no other recourses than to either allow the company to keep screwing you over, or abandon your project alltogether, as you can neither change, nor update your buggy license. What would be the best pick?
Hmm, so Standard Oil and the rail robber barons have really been forgotten now?
Re:Smoking bans: reducing freedom, or increasing i
on
2006's Bill of Wrongs
·
· Score: 1
How come you can do somethings in your home that cause harm to some people and yet a restaurant owner cannot do what he pleases on his property?
You have the right to neglect even the most basic forms of hygiene on your property, yet a restaurant owner would get shut down pretty quickly if he does so. There are different rules for what people can do in their home and what they can do in a commercial enterprise. And for good reason. Equating the liberties of a restaurant owner with a home owner is nonsensical.
You apparently haven't followed the news since 1999. The entire lawsuit of the EU against Microsoft was centered around the abuse of Microsoft's desktop monopoly to obtain a monopoly in the field of media content. Although the lawsuit on the surface centered around bundling the Media player itself (*), the true danger the EU tried to curtail was that MS would use its desktop, with bundled media-player to obtain a monopoly in streaming content: i.e., entrench WMV as the safe choice to stream any content.
In the light of this, it is both contradictory and deeply ironic that this same EU is now actively promoting WMV as the method of choice for streaming media content. As other posters have noticed, this also promotes the use of Windows on handhelds (like mobile phones), as only windows based mobile phones will be able to play this content. Is the EU interested in Microsoft obtaining a monopoly there as well?
(*) Sort of like how Al Capone was hit with a tax law suits.
My guess is that the Biblical scholars will all huddle together, find ancient texts that seemingly argue both points (clones having/not having souls), argue which point of view is best for their view of Christianity, make a choice, and stigmatize and persecute anyone that argues otherwise.
That's how Christian religion usually tackles theological issues, right?
How does restrictions on the production of goods actually help free trade? You can't have it both ways: either you are in favour of free trade and thus against government enforced monopolies (patents), or you are against free trade and think the government should regulate the market (by for instance granting monopolies to drug-inventors, but possibly also by setting prices for those monopolies). If you want to be logically consistent, you have to realize that patents and copyrights are anti free trade at heart, and you can't make an argument based on free trade to argue for these two. If you think the market cannot operate efficiently without government granted monopolies, then you obviously think free trade is an impossibility.
And then Joe pays a buck for Italian, and combined with your 50p this tips the scale. Off you go, eat Italian you didn't want, and paying 50p for the privilege.
Note that in this scheme you're not going to be able to lower your bid, so this is quite a likely outcome.
Then, most of the times it's much more difficult to maintain a solution which depends on a framework producing files for you at compile time.
And how is this different from a compiler? Whether it's object files or class files, it's probably worse to debug the raw assembler/byte code then it is to wade through generated javascript. And yes, compilers make errors. Apparently, GWT is a compiler, with the only twist that it generates javascript rather than raw machine language or a (different) virtual machine. Find an error, file a bug report and trust that your compiler builder will fix the bug. In the meantime, write your logic differently so that the bug goes away.
Just a small (but important point). Every country has their own unemployment rate calculation.
The US unemployment rate calculation only includes people who currently receive unemployment benefits. This thus only includes people who have been unemployed for less than 6 months. All others without paid jobs are considered inactive, yet not unemployed. In Europe, anyone that is 'officially' looking for a job is counted. In effect a 10% unemployment rate in Europe could translate to a 2% rate in the US. 4% US unemployment could easily mean that 20% of the workforce does not have a paid job. It's all in the counting.
Maybe an idea for the gubment: slash unemployment benefits entirely, and boast a 0% unemployment rate, just like the good old USSR.
You misunderstand. The GP acknowledges that some documentation in abstract legalese is made public once the patent is granted, he doesn't however consider that an actual disclosure of the software device. Source code would be such a disclosure. I agree wholeheartedly with the GP. I have read several software patents and almost none of them allow me to figure out even what the hell they're talking about, let alone being able to implement it.
glibc is FSF copyright, and *will* move to GPL3. Without glibc, linux is a kernel without userland tools. So although linux-the-kernel might stay GPL2, linux-the-operating-system will be GPL2+3.
Not really, agnosticism is 'there's no point in arguing there is a God, so stop bothering me'. Atheism is 'This God nonsense is obviously non-sensical, you're a moron in believing it'. Atheism is just a more aggressive form of agnosticism. Both think God is a misconception, the agnost is just more polite.
Philosophy is not this wild area of thinking without boundaries that you think it is. It is actually a very thorough discipline in thought were anything unreasonable gets tossed out immediately. Religion is one. Philosophy also studies the nature of questions. The 'big why' questions are not of particular interest at the moment, as it has been concluded that they are in general nonsensical. Philosophically that is.
2.Stop the fucking torcher of fellow human beings! Changing the definition doesn't make it okay!
As if misspelling 'torture' makes it less painful. I agree with points 1-5 though, but point 6 makes my blood boil. And not from torching:
6.Get the hell out of Iraq. We never should have gone there. There never were WMDs. We went there as part of an evil agenda. I'm sorry that leaving will lead to massive bloodshed in Iraq but the bloodshed will be due to their own hatred of one another and we could stay the course forever and that hatred will never change. Quite frankly there is nothing in Iraq worth even one American life.
So how much is an American life going for these days, compared with ordinary lives? Some quick calculations show that one American life is worth approximately 200 Iraqi lifes (3,000 vs 600,000), but how about European lives, or Asian lives? What's the exchange rate these days, and how many Brits would you be willing to kill to save one American?
And then, apart from the rhetoric. What's there in Iraq? Well, quite simply, big loads of oil. And not only in Iraq, its neighbours are loaded as well. A quick withdrawal of all American troops from Iraq would mean an unchecked civil war, enhanced influence of Iran on a large part of Iraq, maybe even an occupation, a definite attack and conquer of Turkey on the Kurd area, and possibly Syria picking up some spoils as well. With all that turmoil, the markets go haywire, and you can say bye-bye to cheap oil and say hello to $20 / gallon oil prices real soon. Let's see if your paycheck will actually allow for that car in that scenario. Bush has opened Pandora's box, and there's no longer a cheap way out of the mess.
And who would the anti-trust be directed to? Redhat, Novell, Gentoo, Ubuntu, Debian, Mandriva, etc., etc., etc.? Or should they target Linus himself: the evil bastard that created a monopoly without actually having a stranglehold on the industry?
Psyco compiles to native machine code. It is still not very fast compared to, say, Java. This is inherent in the language, where a lot of typing is done by looking into hashmaps. A hash lookup, while running in constant time, is much slower than traversal of an actual function pointer.
def myDuck(duck): duck.quack()
This works for anything that has a quack function. How does Python figure out that it has such a function? Hash lookup, followed by a function call or an exception being thrown. Compare with:
void myDuck(DuckInterface duck) {
duck.quack();
}
Translates to a direct virtual function call at (bytecode) compile time. Psyco is capable of getting rid of the hash lookup by compiling specializations of the myDuck function. These specializations take up space, need to be maintained, compiled, etc. All to the detriment of speed.
I don't completely disagree, only I don't think infatuation with speed is the greatest offender. It's infatuation with abstraction. I like to call this the curse of OO. Have you ever looked at stacktraces of Java applications, preferably running on a appserver? Hundreds of nested function calls, just to move a few bits from one side of the app to the other? The timing of the actual work done is dwarfed by the amount of calls that need to be made to get there. If such an application runs slowly, there's no profiling that can be done to pinpoint the hotspot. Everything is slow. Same goes for frameworks such as Zope. Big, abstract and slow.
Careless memory use, another bigger offender. This one cropped up with popular garbage collected languages. If apps grow, careless use of memory will byte you. Again from practice, I've seen many apps that will simply max out memory, on tasks that should not be that memory intensive. This includes python apps. In many languages, the average programmer actually wouldn't know how heavy things are. In python: how much does a class weight? How much does an instance weight? Ask a programmer, and often he wouldn't know. I asked.
Heavy objects have another downside: lack of speed. If every object has an 8 or 16 byte overhead attached to it (Java numbers, normal objects and serializable objects), arrays of these objects will more quickly flush the L1 and L2 caches, leading to a slower application. Again, it takes a whole lot of profiling to fix that problem. Of course, if these are not your concerns and your app is waiting for IO, that's fine. But still, having 500 Megs committed on something that will just push a few bits around will become a problem some day.
This is not against Python per se. I think Python apps are usually of very high quality. Problems start when you try to scale these things up. This is usually the point where Python is abandoned, because it's overall speed falls short.
In this day and age, I would not say anymore that premature optimization is the root of all evil. It is still evil, but there are bigger evils now: needless abstraction and careless use of memory. In Knuth's days, those were not even an option. In 1K of memory, there's not much abstraction or memory bloat that is tolerable.
Interesting perspective, but please tell: how do you think you can possible win this thing? It's one thing to get rid of a dictator that has three rusty tanks, it's quite another challenge to build up the nation that does not want to be build up. Do you want to pump it full of soldiers, kill all Iraqis and declare victory? Doesn't fly. The Iraqi population is by now determined to have it out with one another, and no military force will be able to keep it in check. The window of opportunity has closed, and the clown that screwed this up is now leaving office.
The first part is to accept that the US lost. The second part is to do damage control.
So what options do the US have at this point?
The majority of the US seems to think pulling out is an option. It is not. America pulling out of Iraq completely would mean that Iran would have a controlling influence on the Shiit part of Iraq, Turkey would quite probably invade and annihilate the Kurd area, while Syria would take its gambles with the Sunnis. While this is happening, better accept the fact that a gallon of gas will cost you 20 bucks or more.
America cannot leave. America cannot win. It just has to sit this out and lose with the least amount of damage to its soldiers and its interests. Its name is down the drain already, so saving face is no longer necessary. The best it can do is retreat from the cities, let the civil war rage and assure by their presence that none of Iraq's neighbours will dare to do something. In about ten years time, it might be feasible to help build up the nation again. America will still be there though. There is no choice. The biggest problem for a relatively safe conclusion of this whole affair is the same population that, at least 80% of them, cheered on the attack. Now they've flip-flopped and want their troops out, not realizing the additional damage they will be inflicting with that. Luckily most politicians realize this and I surely hope that they will stand tall against the lack of perspective of their population. They must, as this same population will have their heads if prices hit 20 bucks a gallon.
Although python *does* compile to bytecode, there are also compilers for python (psyco). None of these approach the speed of C simply for the reason that much of python's power lies in the run-time nature of its type system. To figure out if an operation is allowed on a particular type (whose type is not specified in the function signature), it needs to do a method lookup. This costs time. Psyco tries to circumvent this by, at run-time, compiling different versions of a function when called with different types as the argument. Having many versions of one function lying around increases the memory footprint, thrashes both the L1 and L2 cache and is therefore also slower than a statically typed language. For a language that did get this right, try Ocaml. There the type-system is so (annoyingly) strict, that all type information can be thrown out after a succesful compilation, and the resulting code does nothing but bit-twiddling, proven to be correct. Bit twiddling is a thing computers are particularly good at. Python, and other runtime typed languages such as Java, always need to keep quite a bit of memory around with every object/type, meaning a performance disadvantage simply because the caches need to store more bytes per bit of useful information, and these caches thus fill up more quickly, leading to reduced performance.
Interestingly: try to ask a runtime typed language programmer how big their objects are, and they usually they don't have a clue. This general lack of knowledge leads to bloated memory apps and, by the caching argument, to lack of speed.
Premature optimization was a sin in the days when people were arguing about the efficiency difference of particular assembler instructions, or if it was wiser to use post- or pre-increment. In current days of dynamic languages, on-the-fly typing, dynamic dispatch, remote procedure calls and multi-Ghz processors churning through billions of unnecessary instructions, the mantra should be revisited. If the tool you use sprinkles millions of unnecessary instructions around at random, no amount of profiling will allow you to optimize the whole program. Everything runs slow, and only some particularly obnoxious bottlenecks are found. The end result: a program that is slow as mollasses, even on the fastest hardware. Some 'premature' attempts at making the entire thing efficient could have avoided such a nightmare, but alas, the wrong application of Knuths comment on (for him) contemporary programming allows programmers to get away with sloppy thinking and therefore sloppy coding. Speed matters, if only that with more speed, you can pack more functionality in the program.
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As for the 'controversy' on global warming. That's a US thing. It has been understood in the rest of the world for quite some time that (a) global warming is real, and that (b) we're contributing majorly to it. Discussions on the Exxon points has been non-existent here in Europe. Guess where Exxon has spent his 'educational' dollars? Yes, to the gullable.
Now Tivo comes along and takes your software and with a legal trick circumvents your license, making sure nobody is actually able to obtain Tivo's modifications to your software. Others get the hang of it too, and before you know it, Microsoft, Google and Amazon are using your software in a proprietary fashion, making your software non-free.
You are pissed off, with many others, and decide to update the license to one that explicitly counters this trick. In scenario one (with the 'or later' clause), this works painlessly. Every new piece of code is licensed under the new version, and the old source is slowly superceded. In the second scenario, you're out of luck. You haven't made any provisions to upgrade your license, and the bug in the old license is there to stay. This is the situation that Linux is finding itself now, as they haven't gone the 'or later' clause. They're toast.
Now, for the evil power-grab that the FSF might want to do. Their anger has always been a sign of something dark, and suddenly it comes to full bloom. What can they do now? Suppose they build up the new license: BSD-style. Now, because of the 'or later' clause, anyone can grab your software and use it BSD-style. Tough luck, but you retaliate. All new code you write will have the 'or later' clause removed, and you will continue, never trusting the FSF itself. In any scenario, the worst that can happen is that the FSF will give away your code to someone in a new license: be it the general public, be it Microsoft. You can cut your losses and continue without the 'or later' clause from that point on. Without the clause, you are trusting that no one will ever discover a legal loophole in your current license. In this case you have effectively given away your code to the one discovering the loophole (Tivo), and you have no other recourses than to either allow the company to keep screwing you over, or abandon your project alltogether, as you can neither change, nor update your buggy license. What would be the best pick?
Hmm, so Standard Oil and the rail robber barons have really been forgotten now?
You have the right to neglect even the most basic forms of hygiene on your property, yet a restaurant owner would get shut down pretty quickly if he does so. There are different rules for what people can do in their home and what they can do in a commercial enterprise. And for good reason. Equating the liberties of a restaurant owner with a home owner is nonsensical.
In the light of this, it is both contradictory and deeply ironic that this same EU is now actively promoting WMV as the method of choice for streaming media content. As other posters have noticed, this also promotes the use of Windows on handhelds (like mobile phones), as only windows based mobile phones will be able to play this content. Is the EU interested in Microsoft obtaining a monopoly there as well?
(*) Sort of like how Al Capone was hit with a tax law suits.
That's how Christian religion usually tackles theological issues, right?
How does restrictions on the production of goods actually help free trade? You can't have it both ways: either you are in favour of free trade and thus against government enforced monopolies (patents), or you are against free trade and think the government should regulate the market (by for instance granting monopolies to drug-inventors, but possibly also by setting prices for those monopolies). If you want to be logically consistent, you have to realize that patents and copyrights are anti free trade at heart, and you can't make an argument based on free trade to argue for these two. If you think the market cannot operate efficiently without government granted monopolies, then you obviously think free trade is an impossibility.
And then Joe pays a buck for Italian, and combined with your 50p this tips the scale. Off you go, eat Italian you didn't want, and paying 50p for the privilege.
Note that in this scheme you're not going to be able to lower your bid, so this is quite a likely outcome.
And how is this different from a compiler? Whether it's object files or class files, it's probably worse to debug the raw assembler/byte code then it is to wade through generated javascript. And yes, compilers make errors. Apparently, GWT is a compiler, with the only twist that it generates javascript rather than raw machine language or a (different) virtual machine. Find an error, file a bug report and trust that your compiler builder will fix the bug. In the meantime, write your logic differently so that the bug goes away.
Maybe an idea for the gubment: slash unemployment benefits entirely, and boast a 0% unemployment rate, just like the good old USSR.
You misunderstand. The GP acknowledges that some documentation in abstract legalese is made public once the patent is granted, he doesn't however consider that an actual disclosure of the software device. Source code would be such a disclosure. I agree wholeheartedly with the GP. I have read several software patents and almost none of them allow me to figure out even what the hell they're talking about, let alone being able to implement it.
glibc is FSF copyright, and *will* move to GPL3. Without glibc, linux is a kernel without userland tools. So although linux-the-kernel might stay GPL2, linux-the-operating-system will be GPL2+3.
Not really, agnosticism is 'there's no point in arguing there is a God, so stop bothering me'. Atheism is 'This God nonsense is obviously non-sensical, you're a moron in believing it'. Atheism is just a more aggressive form of agnosticism. Both think God is a misconception, the agnost is just more polite.
Philosophy is not this wild area of thinking without boundaries that you think it is. It is actually a very thorough discipline in thought were anything unreasonable gets tossed out immediately. Religion is one. Philosophy also studies the nature of questions. The 'big why' questions are not of particular interest at the moment, as it has been concluded that they are in general nonsensical. Philosophically that is.
And all would-be philosophers are silent for a while. Then they start babbling again.
The assertion of "Santa Claus does exists" is epistemologically equivalent to "God does exit". Your point is?
As if misspelling 'torture' makes it less painful. I agree with points 1-5 though, but point 6 makes my blood boil. And not from torching:
So how much is an American life going for these days, compared with ordinary lives? Some quick calculations show that one American life is worth approximately 200 Iraqi lifes (3,000 vs 600,000), but how about European lives, or Asian lives? What's the exchange rate these days, and how many Brits would you be willing to kill to save one American?
And then, apart from the rhetoric. What's there in Iraq? Well, quite simply, big loads of oil. And not only in Iraq, its neighbours are loaded as well. A quick withdrawal of all American troops from Iraq would mean an unchecked civil war, enhanced influence of Iran on a large part of Iraq, maybe even an occupation, a definite attack and conquer of Turkey on the Kurd area, and possibly Syria picking up some spoils as well. With all that turmoil, the markets go haywire, and you can say bye-bye to cheap oil and say hello to $20 / gallon oil prices real soon. Let's see if your paycheck will actually allow for that car in that scenario. Bush has opened Pandora's box, and there's no longer a cheap way out of the mess.
And who would the anti-trust be directed to? Redhat, Novell, Gentoo, Ubuntu, Debian, Mandriva, etc., etc., etc.? Or should they target Linus himself: the evil bastard that created a monopoly without actually having a stranglehold on the industry?
This works for anything that has a quack function. How does Python figure out that it has such a function? Hash lookup, followed by a function call or an exception being thrown. Compare with:
void myDuck(DuckInterface duck) { duck.quack(); }
Translates to a direct virtual function call at (bytecode) compile time. Psyco is capable of getting rid of the hash lookup by compiling specializations of the myDuck function. These specializations take up space, need to be maintained, compiled, etc. All to the detriment of speed.
Careless memory use, another bigger offender. This one cropped up with popular garbage collected languages. If apps grow, careless use of memory will byte you. Again from practice, I've seen many apps that will simply max out memory, on tasks that should not be that memory intensive. This includes python apps. In many languages, the average programmer actually wouldn't know how heavy things are. In python: how much does a class weight? How much does an instance weight? Ask a programmer, and often he wouldn't know. I asked.
Heavy objects have another downside: lack of speed. If every object has an 8 or 16 byte overhead attached to it (Java numbers, normal objects and serializable objects), arrays of these objects will more quickly flush the L1 and L2 caches, leading to a slower application. Again, it takes a whole lot of profiling to fix that problem. Of course, if these are not your concerns and your app is waiting for IO, that's fine. But still, having 500 Megs committed on something that will just push a few bits around will become a problem some day.
This is not against Python per se. I think Python apps are usually of very high quality. Problems start when you try to scale these things up. This is usually the point where Python is abandoned, because it's overall speed falls short.
In this day and age, I would not say anymore that premature optimization is the root of all evil. It is still evil, but there are bigger evils now: needless abstraction and careless use of memory. In Knuth's days, those were not even an option. In 1K of memory, there's not much abstraction or memory bloat that is tolerable.
The first part is to accept that the US lost. The second part is to do damage control.
So what options do the US have at this point?
The majority of the US seems to think pulling out is an option. It is not. America pulling out of Iraq completely would mean that Iran would have a controlling influence on the Shiit part of Iraq, Turkey would quite probably invade and annihilate the Kurd area, while Syria would take its gambles with the Sunnis. While this is happening, better accept the fact that a gallon of gas will cost you 20 bucks or more.
America cannot leave. America cannot win. It just has to sit this out and lose with the least amount of damage to its soldiers and its interests. Its name is down the drain already, so saving face is no longer necessary. The best it can do is retreat from the cities, let the civil war rage and assure by their presence that none of Iraq's neighbours will dare to do something. In about ten years time, it might be feasible to help build up the nation again. America will still be there though. There is no choice. The biggest problem for a relatively safe conclusion of this whole affair is the same population that, at least 80% of them, cheered on the attack. Now they've flip-flopped and want their troops out, not realizing the additional damage they will be inflicting with that. Luckily most politicians realize this and I surely hope that they will stand tall against the lack of perspective of their population. They must, as this same population will have their heads if prices hit 20 bucks a gallon.
Interestingly: try to ask a runtime typed language programmer how big their objects are, and they usually they don't have a clue. This general lack of knowledge leads to bloated memory apps and, by the caching argument, to lack of speed.
Premature optimization was a sin in the days when people were arguing about the efficiency difference of particular assembler instructions, or if it was wiser to use post- or pre-increment. In current days of dynamic languages, on-the-fly typing, dynamic dispatch, remote procedure calls and multi-Ghz processors churning through billions of unnecessary instructions, the mantra should be revisited. If the tool you use sprinkles millions of unnecessary instructions around at random, no amount of profiling will allow you to optimize the whole program. Everything runs slow, and only some particularly obnoxious bottlenecks are found. The end result: a program that is slow as mollasses, even on the fastest hardware. Some 'premature' attempts at making the entire thing efficient could have avoided such a nightmare, but alas, the wrong application of Knuths comment on (for him) contemporary programming allows programmers to get away with sloppy thinking and therefore sloppy coding. Speed matters, if only that with more speed, you can pack more functionality in the program.
As always, there are exceptions..
Having the puppet-master in full vision is preferable to him in the corner. People might actually see who is governing them.