Then you ascribe somewhat more altruistic measures to a company which has screwed over everyone who tries to make a clean implementation of their "open" language.
Black and white thinking, and offtopic as well. You don't have to tell me that Sun is full of idiots. They make boneheaded decisions all the time. But what does that have to do with coercing universities to teach a proprietary language?
No, they're both junk to me. Inherently, no controlled language can provide all the functionality of a open one, and thus they are doomed to failure in the long term.
Well I agree with this except the "doomed to failure" part. Controlled languages are junk but they're more forgiving of bad programmers, so they're not going to go away.
If you think it's less evil to use Java in a curriculuum you've got some serious morality problems.
I've seen this argument many times. ALL PROPRIETARY SOFTWARE IS NOT EQUIVALENTLY EVIL.
LESS EVIL: Here, have all the Java crap you want.
MORE EVIL: Here, have all the.NET crap you want, and we better see this entering your curriculum or else you lose your discounts and we audit your asses.
Why should they receive either subsidies or protection of their monopolies?
Maybe they shouldn't have. You're welcome to step into a time machine, go back 70 years, and prevent both from happening.
Until you succeed in changing the history of the public telephone network, we are entitled to dictate terms to common carriers. The infrastructure that SBC always brags about in its commercials was built with public money.
Ya, alarms go off in my head too when I hear that, but I'm confident that these small degredations in our personal privacy are as far as they can go. This is because, in America, we have paranoid, untrusting, civil rights wackos who do a great job of keeping any civil rights degredations in check. So because of these many paranoid Americans, there is absolutely no chance we'll ever get close to the Orwellian 1984 world we all dread.
Funny, I detect not a trace of gratitude towards those "paranoid, untrusting, civil rights wackos" in your post.
We've all probably seen perfectly valid i86 machine code entirely composed of printable ASCII, too
Remember Code Red? Whoever wrote that one managed to embed x86 machine code instructions in a frigging URL! I hate to say it, but that impressed me deeply.:)
But let me clarify: I don't want a police state - I just want to give the guard dog a few more links of chain. As the house has been broken into, this is perfectly reasonable. That the kids will have a bit less yard to play in is unavoidable. That they will in some short order have absolutely no yard whatsoever to play in is an unreasonable assumption.
Well, this is an interesting analogy. I had been thinking in terms of popping a hole in a balloon or making a crack in a dam.
Where did the robbers come in, the front door? Did the dog's chain already reach the door? Maybe instead of a longer chain, we should get a dog that won't be asleep when the robbers come the way this one was!
And this isn't an ordinary dog. This is a dog that can put you in jail and take your house away from you. The dog has already been busy, lengthening its own chain one link at a time, granting itself powers that previous dogs have never had but that subsequent dogs will always enjoy, using your own fear of the robbers coming back as an excuse. Its chain is now longer than it will even let on. The dog can now hold you and not even give you a bail hearing if it considers you dangerous. It can conduct surveillance of your private life. Once the dog acquires the ability to unilaterally lengthen its chain, along with the ability to hide its chain length from you, the entire concept of a chain becomes meaningless. Maybe the dog can reach the part of your yard where your kids are playing. Maybe not. Are you comfortable not knowing? Maybe it will stop the robbers next time. Who knows? What if it turns on someone you like someday? What if it turns on you?
Such "domino theory" logic has reared its ugly head before in American history. It would seem prudent to me to circle the wagons around the truly important rights.
Yeah, but back then the abstract concept of a "domino theory" was incorporated into a larger political theory that made no sense. Nobody ever explained how or why communism should spread from Vietnam to Laos. (Nor was it ever explained why we should even care.) The abstract concept of evolution has also been dragged into confused political thought, more than once in fact, but this says nothing about the validity of biological evolution as a theory. And we don't even have to talk about dominoes. Ever hear of the expression "give them an inch and they'll take a mile"? That sums it up!
When Jefferson said "the price of freedom is eternal vigilance", this is what he was talking about! We have to constantly be on guard against the chipping away of civil liberties by those in government who falsely promise security and safety in return. Which rights are "truly important" to you? The ones you aren't using personally, right this minute? Please don't hand away any that I might need in the future when you're adding more links to your dog's chain.
Really? And you consider the fundamental advancement of space technology (in any shape of form) to be less important than entertainment?
Except that this "fundamental advancement of space technology", in the case of the ISS, is being done primarily for its entertainment value!
The ISS is a crowd pleaser, nothing more. Real projects for real science are being hacked and cut so we can have a habitable garbage can in low earth orbit. For example, soon Pluto's atmosphere is going to freeze and blanket its surface, rendering Pluto unvisitable in any practical sense, for a hundred and fifty years. We had a probe ready to enter the Pluto-Charon system before this would happen but it got hacked because of ISS cost overruns. In fact, NASA is hardly doing anything interesting anymore because of that stupid ISS. They're the ISS agency now. The scientific community hates the ISS. The general public loves it, because they're scientifically illiterate and believe it will lead to bigger and more interesting manned spaceflight, but the ISS has little scientific or practical value other than allowing us to observe the horrible long term effects of weightlessness and ionizing radiation on people in space. (In fact, this was one of the very few rationalizations actually offered by its proponents.)
NASA is wasting it's money daily, this is just another example of that waste.
NASA will save a lot of money for way more worthwhile projects if it mothballs this orbiting turkey. Crashing the damn thing into the ocean would be an even better idea if there were enough political will to do it. It breaks people's hearts, and they don't want to believe it, but manned space flight in general is a dead end and an immense waste of money. Things are just too far away and the mere requirement of a return trip cripples all but the least ambitious projects.
As a voting citizen, I have every right to demand this, just as you have every right to disagree.
Of course you have a legal right to demand a police state, just as I have a legal right to say "Who are you to demand that the country turn into a police state". Usually when people say "Who are you to say blah blah blah" it's understood to be in a rhetorical and not a legal sense.
If I and other likeminded citizens either outnumber or out-organize those with dissenting opinions such as yourself, then we have every right to expect the reforms and changes we desire.
I'm not sure of the procedural issues, but I think modifying the Constitution requires a supermajority at some point. Of course, the correct way to implement a police state is to undermine those rights so that they continue to exist on paper and yet are meaningless in the real world. That doesn't even require a majority at all.
Do you realize you sound rather like a right-wing bumper sticker? "If you don't love your county, LEAVE IT!"
Yes, the sentence structure is much the same, but the meanings are way, way different. Those bumper stickers are telling you to leave the country rather than express any dissent. All I'm saying, is that if you feel nervous living in Manhattan because of your (disproportionally large) fear of a terrorist attack, you should probably consider one of the other boroughs of New York or even New Jersey which is a fine state to live in. I would say the same sort of thing to people who continually build new McMansions too close to the beach and then whine for help after every hurricane. Except that there is an obvious hazard living close to a beach. The same doesn't go for living in Manhattan, even considering 9/11. Manhattan is still a very safe place to live. I live in Silicon Valley and I would trade places with you in an instant if I could convince my company to relocate there, because this place is too expensive.
As someone who has chosen not to reside in Manhattan, I have no sympathy for you. Is someone forcing you to live in Manhattan? If you don't like us retaining our civil rights, why don't you give up your 212 number and just move to Brooklyn?
Many areas of the country are associated with their own specific dangers. People live near volcanoes in Hawaii that sometimes engulf their houses and towns. The Mississippi river is lined with communities that are periodically flooded. The coasts are lined with houses that get wiped out in hurricanes. Millions of people live in Tornado Alley, and tornadoes actually kill people. Hell, millions of us live in crime-ridden inner city areas, and even these people are not screaming for a police state even though a police state might actually have an effect on crime in those areas.
Compared to these places, Manhattan is relatively safe. The terrorists chose the twin towers for their large symbolic value. Unless you live or work in one of the few remaining skyscrapers that loom large in the symbolic view of the country as seen from overseas (Empire State, maybe the Chrysler building) you are more likely to be a spectator of a terrorist attack in Manhattan than a victim of one. Even if terrorists manage to produce a nuclear weapon, it will be a small one (with the range of a city block) and they'll go to D.C. with it, not New York.
But this is all beside the point. Who the hell are you to demand that the country turn into a police state so you can feel some false safety in your Upper East Side apartment? If you don't like the peril associated with your choice of where to live, MOVE.
I agree with you; people do make some very confused arguments against Microsoft on Slashdot. Their OS doesn't crash anymore, that's true. Regarding.NET being a Java ripoff- there's a grain of truth to that one, sorta, especially if you're a Java programmer, although to be fair to MS that's an extremely harsh way of putting it. I guess you could say any virtual machine is a "ripoff of Java" but I wouldn't agree with that statement since p-code predates both Java and.NET. MS has put enough work and energy into.NET that to simply call it a ripoff is being overly simplistic, even if their original starting material was their Java implementation. It's their implementation, and they can do what they want with it if they're not going to call it Java anymore.
But there are plenty of nasty things to say that are completely true, like their abuse of their monopoly in the OS market to form monopolies in other markets, their embrace/extend/encrypt/extinguish approach to open protocols and file formats, the designed incompatibility, the ridiculous reverse engineering they make people do in order to interoperate with their products, the boneheaded decisions they make (like a mail client that executes any crap that shows up in your Inbox), their conspiring with Hollywood to destroy the general purpose computer, etc. If all they did was crash a lot (which they don't anymore) and create ripoffs of good technologies (which they still do) I wouldn't have any problem with them.
Forcing MS to carry Java means.NET at least has competition present on the same machine, and that can only be a good thing for both.NET and Java. If one wins out over the other, it shouldn't be because of something stupid like a 30 MB download being required for one and not the other. That would really suck.
Although Sun has made some very bad, very ideological decisions with Java on the client. Java has an albatross hanging around its neck called Swing. Everything is drawn in the Java layer. There are no buttons, just pictures of buttons pretending to be buttons. Before that they gave us AWT, which took the opposite extreme (using the lowest common denominator of all native widgets for EVERYTHING). No tree control on AIX? Then you can't have one on Windows/Mac/etc. Hopefully IBM's SWT will take off in the Java realm. You can write a real application with it- meaning it doesn't have that cheesy Java feel that Sun's GUI libraries impart to Java applications.
Read the article, or the verdict. Microsoft and Sun had a pre-existing contract and Microsoft broke it. Since Redhat has not ever entered any contractual relationship with Microsoft, nobody will be forcing Microsoft to bundle Redhat.
Hey, dumbass, the only way to GET the.NET runtime is to go to the Windows Update site and request it. At which point it does, as a matter of fact, show up under Add/Remove Programs.
Enjoy your upcoming Score:5, M$-Bash moderation.
Only a few things to say about this:
1. I hit the "Excellent" cap already so neener neener neener. If I could trade my Slashdot karma for something real, like 50 cents, I might give a crap.
2. Early versions of IE also appeared in Add/Remove Programs. Seeing that Microsoft is deprecating C/C++ for Windows development and is furiously rewriting as much of their crap as possible in C#, I don't see how you think that the.NET runtime is going to stay on Add/Remove Programs for long. Their obvious goal is an OS where the absence of.NET will render your computer inoperable.
3. (This is a rant, not directed against your post in particular, but the 17,231 other posts I've read that are just like it.) People say bad things about Microsoft all the time, for the simple reason that there are so many bad things to say about them. It's become chic recently to play "Let's defend Microsoft" every time someone bashes them, even if the basher has a valid argument. "Look at me! I'm so cool, defending Microsoft! I'm going to get modded down by all you hypocrites! I'm going to get a -1, pro-Microsoft! Huh huh huhuh huh huh!" But the majority of these posts are all the same- each one is a straw man attack on what the poster thinks is a Slashdot stereotype of a Linux hippie who hates successful software companies because they make money and don't release all their software under the GPL. In fact you can't engage in any discussion about Microsoft around here anymore without some douchebag replying with the same pro-MS post I've read hundreds of times already! And this same post gets modded up all the time because moderators feel guilty for disagreeing with an unpopular opinion (even if it's unpopular for being wrong) and they want to be "fair". But knee-jerk defense of Microsoft doesn't automatically make you cool. It doesn't make your post worth reading. Maybe it used to, but not anymore. Maybe you have an interesting defense of Microsoft we haven't seen 17232 times before. If so please share it. If you're just going to play the part of an antisocial pro-MS stooge then shut up. And if you're moderating, please try to recall for a moment whether you have already read the same post by a different author before you give it mod points just for expressing a sentiment in favor of Microsoft.
Then remove it and quit whining. Settings->Control Panel->Add Remove Programs->Click, click, done.
I don't want.NET either, any more than I wanted Internet Explorer, but I suspect the.NET runtime isn't going to show up in "Add/Remove Programs", will it? I'll need Ed Felten to come over to my house if I want to get rid of.NET.
Yeah, maybe the 9/11 attacks never happened and I'm only seeing all this film footage of skyscrapers falling because I'm on the Truman show and everyone is engaged in a vast conspiracy to fool me. Or maybe the French revolution never happened either, etc. You can make the same argument about any historical event. The probability of being right in such an assertion isn't quite zero but it's close enough that I can say that anyone denying that the 9/11 events happened is a crackpot. I can also tell you that if you think we didn't go to the moon, or that the Holocaust is one big lie, you're a crackpot. Life is short. If I have to waste time explaining to every crackpot in the world why they're a crackpot I'll go blue in the face because crackpots won't listen to sound arguments and there are just too many crackpots to get around to.
So if you're a Holocaust denier, and all you get are ad hominem attacks, please consider the possibility that nobody wants to waste time talking to you, because considering the mountains of contradictory evidence, chances are you're impervious to logic if you hold such a position. At least, that's been my own experience with Holocaust deniers, evolution deniers, and moon hoaxers. But instead I'll ask you: why do you think the Holocaust never happened? Your post offers not one iota of a reason for your apparent skepticism, except for this:
One thing that always stood out in my mind was a High School teacher of mine telling us that the gas chambers used to kill people in Dachau way back when was equivelant to the gas chambers in "current" (1994?) federal penitentiaries. Up untill that moment I had no reason to doubt the Holocaust. After that, however, I started to wonder - not doubt, mind you - but wonder.
THIS is your reason for doubting the Holocaust? That not much R&D has gone into gas chambers since WWII? Surprise surprise, gas chambers work well enough that nobody cares to waste time and lives improving them. People have been making wine the same way for hundreds of years. Are you going to doubt then that people drank wine long ago? The evidence (film, eyewitness, paperwork, etc.) that the Holocaust did happen far outweighs what you've produced here.
If you're going to make outlandish assertions you had better supply good evidence to back them up. If you don't, or you just offer the same canards that have been debunked time and again (e.g. "There aren't any stars in the moon pics!"), don't be surprised when people label you a crackpot.
Your comment was moderated as Flamebait, so here is a flame:
Nobody voted for Ashcroft- he is a Bush appointee. The only "votes" taken were in his Senate confirmation hearings.
That having been said, I believe you are otherwise correct in your analysis of the fucktards you were speaking of.
After all, nothing assures freedom like easily manipulated, credulous and distractible voters. Keep it up!
We'll see if everyone stays at home on election night in 2004 the way they did this year. People actually don't seem to mind living in a police state, but there may be trouble ahead for Bush once the word is out that his administration wants to increase income taxes on those earning between $50-75K per year by a third to support their tax cuts for the highest income brackets that they're always bragging about. This idea was test marketed in a recent Wall Street Journal editorial. The plan is to raise taxes on the poor so that they become furious at government spending, which means they will vote for antitax Republicans.
They are also arguing that the FICA payroll tax isn't really a tax, it's like a "Christmas club" at a bank and you eventually get the money back when you retire anyway, so therefore we poor suckers are very lightly taxed. The WSJ even refers to people earning $12000 or less per year as "lucky duckies".
Public discourse has fallen into a sad state of affairs. I'm going to get skewered and modded down for saying this, but I miss the Clinton years- no police state and there wasn't this open class warfare going on either.
I find it sad that the Terrorist's have accomplished what they set out to do. by attacking us on american soil they managed to start a process that is slowly stripping our freedoms ( what they hate us for )...
I agree with the rest of your post, but I find it difficult to believe that anyone in the Arab world gives a rat's ass about our "freedom", much as we like to tell ourselves that this is what offends them.
As far as I can tell, it has more to do with our foreign policy. Specifically, they don't like what they see as our one-sided support of Israel and our habit of propping up unpopular and oppressive regimes in other places such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Our reputation for "freedom" in this country probably isn't that impressive to them either.
How can anyone say we actually have poverty in the USA? Poverty? Go to Africa if you want to see poverty. Sorry, but when the #1 problem among the 'poor' is obesity the word has lost it's meaning.
Therefore, for poverty to impress you as such, it must be accompanied by starvation. Mere homelessness won't do.
I know you're trolling, but I still like your implication that Microsoft is speaking for its employees when it lobbies for more H1-B visas. Maybe the next version of Windows can be outsourced to Indian programmers working in sweatshops for five cents an hour. I bet if I worked at Microsoft I would think that was a great idea.
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You ascribe certain actions to MS with no info behind it.
.NET crap you want, and here is lots of $$$ to entice you to make C# mandatory in your curriculum. In that case they were using a carrot instead of a stick, which is why it wasn't kept a secret. From the point of view of a student, the effect isn't any different.
Ostensibly this is because those details are wisely being kept secret.
Then how about this:
MORE EVIL: Here, have all the
Then you ascribe somewhat more altruistic measures to a company which has screwed over everyone who tries to make a clean implementation of their "open" language.
Black and white thinking, and offtopic as well. You don't have to tell me that Sun is full of idiots. They make boneheaded decisions all the time. But what does that have to do with coercing universities to teach a proprietary language?
No, they're both junk to me. Inherently, no controlled language can provide all the functionality of a open one, and thus they are doomed to failure in the long term.
Well I agree with this except the "doomed to failure" part. Controlled languages are junk but they're more forgiving of bad programmers, so they're not going to go away.
A felon is someone who does something very bad and goes to jail for it and can no longer vote.
Bzzt, wrong. A felon is a black voter in Florida.
If you think it's less evil to use Java in a curriculuum you've got some serious morality problems.
.NET crap you want, and we better see this entering your curriculum or else you lose your discounts and we audit your asses.
I've seen this argument many times. ALL PROPRIETARY SOFTWARE IS NOT EQUIVALENTLY EVIL.
LESS EVIL: Here, have all the Java crap you want.
MORE EVIL: Here, have all the
Do you see the difference?
Why should they receive either subsidies or protection of their monopolies?
Maybe they shouldn't have. You're welcome to step into a time machine, go back 70 years, and prevent both from happening.
Until you succeed in changing the history of the public telephone network, we are entitled to dictate terms to common carriers. The infrastructure that SBC always brags about in its commercials was built with public money.
Ya, alarms go off in my head too when I hear that, but I'm confident that these small degredations in our personal privacy are as far as they can go. This is because, in America, we have paranoid, untrusting, civil rights wackos who do a great job of keeping any civil rights degredations in check. So because of these many paranoid Americans, there is absolutely no chance we'll ever get close to the Orwellian 1984 world we all dread.
Funny, I detect not a trace of gratitude towards those "paranoid, untrusting, civil rights wackos" in your post.
We've all probably seen perfectly valid i86 machine code entirely composed of printable ASCII, too
:)
Remember Code Red? Whoever wrote that one managed to embed x86 machine code instructions in a frigging URL!
I hate to say it, but that impressed me deeply.
But let me clarify: I don't want a police state - I just want to give the guard dog a few more links of chain. As the house has been broken into, this is perfectly reasonable. That the kids will have a bit less yard to play in is unavoidable. That they will in some short order have absolutely no yard whatsoever to play in is an unreasonable assumption.
Well, this is an interesting analogy. I had been thinking in terms of popping a hole in a balloon or making a crack in a dam.
Where did the robbers come in, the front door? Did the dog's chain already reach the door? Maybe instead of a longer chain, we should get a dog that won't be asleep when the robbers come the way this one was!
And this isn't an ordinary dog. This is a dog that can put you in jail and take your house away from you. The dog has already been busy, lengthening its own chain one link at a time, granting itself powers that previous dogs have never had but that subsequent dogs will always enjoy, using your own fear of the robbers coming back as an excuse. Its chain is now longer than it will even let on. The dog can now hold you and not even give you a bail hearing if it considers you dangerous. It can conduct surveillance of your private life. Once the dog acquires the ability to unilaterally lengthen its chain, along with the ability to hide its chain length from you, the entire concept of a chain becomes meaningless. Maybe the dog can reach the part of your yard where your kids are playing. Maybe not. Are you comfortable not knowing? Maybe it will stop the robbers next time. Who knows? What if it turns on someone you like someday? What if it turns on you?
Such "domino theory" logic has reared its ugly head before in American history. It would seem prudent to me to circle the wagons around the truly important rights.
Yeah, but back then the abstract concept of a "domino theory" was incorporated into a larger political theory that made no sense. Nobody ever explained how or why communism should spread from Vietnam to Laos. (Nor was it ever explained why we should even care.) The abstract concept of evolution has also been dragged into confused political thought, more than once in fact, but this says nothing about the validity of biological evolution as a theory. And we don't even have to talk about dominoes. Ever hear of the expression "give them an inch and they'll take a mile"? That sums it up!
When Jefferson said "the price of freedom is eternal vigilance", this is what he was talking about! We have to constantly be on guard against the chipping away of civil liberties by those in government who falsely promise security and safety in return. Which rights are "truly important" to you? The ones you aren't using personally, right this minute? Please don't hand away any that I might need in the future when you're adding more links to your dog's chain.
Really? And you consider the fundamental advancement of space technology (in any shape of form) to be less important than entertainment?
Except that this "fundamental advancement of space technology", in the case of the ISS, is being done primarily for its entertainment value!
The ISS is a crowd pleaser, nothing more. Real projects for real science are being hacked and cut so we can have a habitable garbage can in low earth orbit. For example, soon Pluto's atmosphere is going to freeze and blanket its surface, rendering Pluto unvisitable in any practical sense, for a hundred and fifty years. We had a probe ready to enter the Pluto-Charon system before this would happen but it got hacked because of ISS cost overruns. In fact, NASA is hardly doing anything interesting anymore because of that stupid ISS. They're the ISS agency now. The scientific community hates the ISS. The general public loves it, because they're scientifically illiterate and believe it will lead to bigger and more interesting manned spaceflight, but the ISS has little scientific or practical value other than allowing us to observe the horrible long term effects of weightlessness and ionizing radiation on people in space. (In fact, this was one of the very few rationalizations actually offered by its proponents.)
NASA is wasting it's money daily, this is just another example of that waste.
NASA will save a lot of money for way more worthwhile projects if it mothballs this orbiting turkey. Crashing the damn thing into the ocean would be an even better idea if there were enough political will to do it. It breaks people's hearts, and they don't want to believe it, but manned space flight in general is a dead end and an immense waste of money. Things are just too far away and the mere requirement of a return trip cripples all but the least ambitious projects.
As a voting citizen, I have every right to demand this, just as you have every right to disagree.
Of course you have a legal right to demand a police state, just as I have a legal right to say "Who are you to demand that the country turn into a police state". Usually when people say "Who are you to say blah blah blah" it's understood to be in a rhetorical and not a legal sense.
If I and other likeminded citizens either outnumber or out-organize those with dissenting opinions such as yourself, then we have every right to expect the reforms and changes we desire.
I'm not sure of the procedural issues, but I think modifying the Constitution requires a supermajority at some point. Of course, the correct way to implement a police state is to undermine those rights so that they continue to exist on paper and yet are meaningless in the real world. That doesn't even require a majority at all.
Do you realize you sound rather like a right-wing bumper sticker? "If you don't love your county, LEAVE IT!"
Yes, the sentence structure is much the same, but the meanings are way, way different. Those bumper stickers are telling you to leave the country rather than express any dissent. All I'm saying, is that if you feel nervous living in Manhattan because of your (disproportionally large) fear of a terrorist attack, you should probably consider one of the other boroughs of New York or even New Jersey which is a fine state to live in. I would say the same sort of thing to people who continually build new McMansions too close to the beach and then whine for help after every hurricane. Except that there is an obvious hazard living close to a beach. The same doesn't go for living in Manhattan, even considering 9/11. Manhattan is still a very safe place to live. I live in Silicon Valley and I would trade places with you in an instant if I could convince my company to relocate there, because this place is too expensive.
As someone who has chosen not to reside in Manhattan, I have no sympathy for you. Is someone forcing you to live in Manhattan? If you don't like us retaining our civil rights, why don't you give up your 212 number and just move to Brooklyn?
Many areas of the country are associated with their own specific dangers. People live near volcanoes in Hawaii that sometimes engulf their houses and towns. The Mississippi river is lined with communities that are periodically flooded. The coasts are lined with houses that get wiped out in hurricanes. Millions of people live in Tornado Alley, and tornadoes actually kill people. Hell, millions of us live in crime-ridden inner city areas, and even these people are not screaming for a police state even though a police state might actually have an effect on crime in those areas.
Compared to these places, Manhattan is relatively safe. The terrorists chose the twin towers for their large symbolic value. Unless you live or work in one of the few remaining skyscrapers that loom large in the symbolic view of the country as seen from overseas (Empire State, maybe the Chrysler building) you are more likely to be a spectator of a terrorist attack in Manhattan than a victim of one. Even if terrorists manage to produce a nuclear weapon, it will be a small one (with the range of a city block) and they'll go to D.C. with it, not New York.
But this is all beside the point. Who the hell are you to demand that the country turn into a police state so you can feel some false safety in your Upper East Side apartment? If you don't like the peril associated with your choice of where to live, MOVE.
"People that are dead don't exist anymore. What does freedom matter then?"
- Anonymous Coward
According to that logic, why don't we install a camera in your bathroom? After all, it's not like you're going to live forever.
Freedom might not matter for dead people, but if you're not dead yet it's a different story.
I agree with you; people do make some very confused arguments against Microsoft on Slashdot. Their OS doesn't crash anymore, that's true. Regarding .NET being a Java ripoff- there's a grain of truth to that one, sorta, especially if you're a Java programmer, although to be fair to MS that's an extremely harsh way of putting it. I guess you could say any virtual machine is a "ripoff of Java" but I wouldn't agree with that statement since p-code predates both Java and .NET. MS has put enough work and energy into .NET that to simply call it a ripoff is being overly simplistic, even if their original starting material was their Java implementation. It's their implementation, and they can do what they want with it if they're not going to call it Java anymore.
.NET at least has competition present on the same machine, and that can only be a good thing for both .NET and Java. If one wins out over the other, it shouldn't be because of something stupid like a 30 MB download being required for one and not the other. That would really suck.
But there are plenty of nasty things to say that are completely true, like their abuse of their monopoly in the OS market to form monopolies in other markets, their embrace/extend/encrypt/extinguish approach to open protocols and file formats, the designed incompatibility, the ridiculous reverse engineering they make people do in order to interoperate with their products, the boneheaded decisions they make (like a mail client that executes any crap that shows up in your Inbox), their conspiring with Hollywood to destroy the general purpose computer, etc. If all they did was crash a lot (which they don't anymore) and create ripoffs of good technologies (which they still do) I wouldn't have any problem with them.
Forcing MS to carry Java means
Although Sun has made some very bad, very ideological decisions with Java on the client. Java has an albatross hanging around its neck called Swing. Everything is drawn in the Java layer. There are no buttons, just pictures of buttons pretending to be buttons. Before that they gave us AWT, which took the opposite extreme (using the lowest common denominator of all native widgets for EVERYTHING). No tree control on AIX? Then you can't have one on Windows/Mac/etc. Hopefully IBM's SWT will take off in the Java realm. You can write a real application with it- meaning it doesn't have that cheesy Java feel that Sun's GUI libraries impart to Java applications.
Read the article, or the verdict. Microsoft and Sun had a pre-existing contract and Microsoft broke it. Since Redhat has not ever entered any contractual relationship with Microsoft, nobody will be forcing Microsoft to bundle Redhat.
Hey, dumbass, the only way to GET the .NET runtime is to go to the Windows Update site and request it. At which point it does, as a matter of fact, show up under Add/Remove Programs.
.NET runtime is going to stay on Add/Remove Programs for long. Their obvious goal is an OS where the absence of .NET will render your computer inoperable.
Enjoy your upcoming Score:5, M$-Bash moderation.
Only a few things to say about this:
1. I hit the "Excellent" cap already so neener neener neener. If I could trade my Slashdot karma for something real, like 50 cents, I might give a crap.
2. Early versions of IE also appeared in Add/Remove Programs. Seeing that Microsoft is deprecating C/C++ for Windows development and is furiously rewriting as much of their crap as possible in C#, I don't see how you think that the
3. (This is a rant, not directed against your post in particular, but the 17,231 other posts I've read that are just like it.)
People say bad things about Microsoft all the time, for the simple reason that there are so many bad things to say about them. It's become chic recently to play "Let's defend Microsoft" every time someone bashes them, even if the basher has a valid argument. "Look at me! I'm so cool, defending Microsoft! I'm going to get modded down by all you hypocrites! I'm going to get a -1, pro-Microsoft! Huh huh huhuh huh huh!"
But the majority of these posts are all the same- each one is a straw man attack on what the poster thinks is a Slashdot stereotype of a Linux hippie who hates successful software companies because they make money and don't release all their software under the GPL. In fact you can't engage in any discussion about Microsoft around here anymore without some douchebag replying with the same pro-MS post I've read hundreds of times already! And this same post gets modded up all the time because moderators feel guilty for disagreeing with an unpopular opinion (even if it's unpopular for being wrong) and they want to be "fair".
But knee-jerk defense of Microsoft doesn't automatically make you cool. It doesn't make your post worth reading. Maybe it used to, but not anymore. Maybe you have an interesting defense of Microsoft we haven't seen 17232 times before. If so please share it. If you're just going to play the part of an antisocial pro-MS stooge then shut up. And if you're moderating, please try to recall for a moment whether you have already read the same post by a different author before you give it mod points just for expressing a sentiment in favor of Microsoft.
But I don't want Java!
.NET either, any more than I wanted Internet Explorer, but I suspect the .NET runtime isn't going to show up in "Add/Remove Programs", will it? I'll need Ed Felten to come over to my house if I want to get rid of .NET.
Then remove it and quit whining. Settings->Control Panel->Add Remove Programs->Click, click, done.
I don't want
I see. You have my apologies sir!
:)
Now I feel stupid.
I missed your use of "wonder" vs. "doubt".
Still, what are you wondering about then?
Yeah, maybe the 9/11 attacks never happened and I'm only seeing all this film footage of skyscrapers falling because I'm on the Truman show and everyone is engaged in a vast conspiracy to fool me. Or maybe the French revolution never happened either, etc. You can make the same argument about any historical event. The probability of being right in such an assertion isn't quite zero but it's close enough that I can say that anyone denying that the 9/11 events happened is a crackpot. I can also tell you that if you think we didn't go to the moon, or that the Holocaust is one big lie, you're a crackpot. Life is short. If I have to waste time explaining to every crackpot in the world why they're a crackpot I'll go blue in the face because crackpots won't listen to sound arguments and there are just too many crackpots to get around to.
So if you're a Holocaust denier, and all you get are ad hominem attacks, please consider the possibility that nobody wants to waste time talking to you, because considering the mountains of contradictory evidence, chances are you're impervious to logic if you hold such a position. At least, that's been my own experience with Holocaust deniers, evolution deniers, and moon hoaxers. But instead I'll ask you: why do you think the Holocaust never happened? Your post offers not one iota of a reason for your apparent skepticism, except for this:
One thing that always stood out in my mind was a High School teacher of mine telling us that the gas chambers used to kill people in Dachau way back when was equivelant to the gas chambers in "current" (1994?) federal penitentiaries.
Up untill that moment I had no reason to doubt the Holocaust. After that, however, I started to wonder - not doubt, mind you - but wonder.
THIS is your reason for doubting the Holocaust? That not much R&D has gone into gas chambers since WWII? Surprise surprise, gas chambers work well enough that nobody cares to waste time and lives improving them. People have been making wine the same way for hundreds of years. Are you going to doubt then that people drank wine long ago? The evidence (film, eyewitness, paperwork, etc.) that the Holocaust did happen far outweighs what you've produced here.
If you're going to make outlandish assertions you had better supply good evidence to back them up. If you don't, or you just offer the same canards that have been debunked time and again (e.g. "There aren't any stars in the moon pics!"), don't be surprised when people label you a crackpot.
Your comment was moderated as Flamebait, so here is a flame:
Nobody voted for Ashcroft- he is a Bush appointee. The only "votes" taken were in his Senate confirmation hearings.
That having been said, I believe you are otherwise correct in your analysis of the fucktards you were speaking of.
After all, nothing assures freedom like easily manipulated, credulous and distractible voters. Keep it up!
We'll see if everyone stays at home on election night in 2004 the way they did this year. People actually don't seem to mind living in a police state, but there may be trouble ahead for Bush once the word is out that his administration wants to increase income taxes on those earning between $50-75K per year by a third to support their tax cuts for the highest income brackets that they're always bragging about. This idea was test marketed in a recent Wall Street Journal editorial. The plan is to raise taxes on the poor so that they become furious at government spending, which means they will vote for antitax Republicans.
They are also arguing that the FICA payroll tax isn't really a tax, it's like a "Christmas club" at a bank and you eventually get the money back when you retire anyway, so therefore we poor suckers are very lightly taxed. The WSJ even refers to people earning $12000 or less per year as "lucky duckies".
Public discourse has fallen into a sad state of affairs. I'm going to get skewered and modded down for saying this, but I miss the Clinton years- no police state and there wasn't this open class warfare going on either.
I find it sad that the Terrorist's have accomplished what they set out to do. by attacking us on american soil they managed to start a process that is slowly stripping our freedoms ( what they hate us for )...
I agree with the rest of your post, but I find it difficult to believe that anyone in the Arab world gives a rat's ass about our "freedom", much as we like to tell ourselves that this is what offends them.
As far as I can tell, it has more to do with our foreign policy. Specifically, they don't like what they see as our one-sided support of Israel and our habit of propping up unpopular and oppressive regimes in other places such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Our reputation for "freedom" in this country probably isn't that impressive to them either.
"They hate us for our freedom", huh? Sure.
It was an example. And a joke example at that. :)
Microsoft would never specify the base "64" in plaintext.
Actually I was surprised by that too. Although I'm sure the XML format that Microsoft is using wouldn't get by.
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How can anyone say we actually have poverty in the USA? Poverty? Go to Africa if you want to see poverty. Sorry, but when the #1 problem among the 'poor' is obesity the word has lost it's meaning.
Therefore, for poverty to impress you as such, it must be accompanied by starvation. Mere homelessness won't do.
I nominate you for Upper Class Twit of the Year.
I know you're trolling, but I still like your implication that Microsoft is speaking for its employees when it lobbies for more H1-B visas. Maybe the next version of Windows can be outsourced to Indian programmers working in sweatshops for five cents an hour. I bet if I worked at Microsoft I would think that was a great idea.