You might want to take off those deely-boppers and put your Duran Duran singles in a drawer. We don't like in the 1980s any more.
To the best of my knowledge, most member states have sold their telephone companies - certainly, the big ones (UK, France, Germany) have done so. Off the top of my head, I'm not aware of a country in the EU with a state owned telephone company - I'm not saying one doesn't exist, I just don't know of one.
The "heavily regulated GSM operators" aren't that heavily regulated in most juristictions, and most countries have at least four nationwide mobile phone operators (two on 900MHz, two on 1800MHz), with 3G operators opening in addition to these. Far from knowing no new player could enter the market, most operators are putting up the auctions of 3G frequencies at the moment that's resulting in precisely that - new players being given an opportunity. The original opening of PCN (1800MHz) by the UK government in the early nineties was specifically to create an opportunity for new operators to emerge, and the rest of Europe followed suit.
The situation isn't directly comparable to the US - I have a choice of about five or six operators where I live in Florida, but "nationwide" is still a relative term. Verizon, Cingular, Sprint PCS, T-Mobile, and Nextel (soon to become part of SPCS) would probably all describe themselves as nationwide (and would probably be the only US operators who reasonably could do so), but all have massive holes in their coverage maps, frequently omitting entire, relatively populous, counties while covering the neighbours. It's only because of transparent roaming and operators gobbling each other up we're seeing anything approaching usability in these networks. Sprint PCS is rapidly becoming a service network for operators like Verizon, Nextel and SPCS are merging, T-Mobile is a prime takeover target, probably for Cingular.
Outside of that four and a half, there's a bunch of ultralocal operators who seem to live in some era where mobile phones are just cordless phones with a longer range, frequently covering single cities, for all intents and purposes aimed at an entirely different application.
I don't want to suggest everything's great in Europe, it isn't. Operators in the US are generally now offering better plans. Much of this is because of the monetary culture that's different between the countries rather than regulatory. Europeans tend to be interested in spending as little as possible, resulting in large numbers of users choosing $20-30 a month "plans" (frequently pay-as-you-go) with very few minutes. Americans are more interested in trouble free/worry free usage, and have to pay for incoming calls, so tend to spend more, which gives the operators disproportionally more money after they've bought their infrastructure, so allowing them to offer more bundled minutes and features like unlimited calling.
But that's entirely seperate from regulatory pressures.
That's how patents work. The winner is the won who publishes first and gets the idea to the patent office.
This is why many people feel that the number of categories of things that can be patented should be as small as possible. If there are already incentives to invent in a particular sphere, there's no need for patents. In this case, it's hardware, and arguably the amount of investment needed to come up with and implement an idea is so high patents have some validity. Still sucks to be in that industry though as you suffer the risk of developing something and then finding that some guy got there first. You do the work and the investment, someone else (who, admittedly, also did the work and investment) gets to profit.
Ann Coulter is not a journalist, she's a columnist/commentator. Never heard of Dunne. Thompson is generally considered a journalist but not necessarily a respectable one or one to emulate ("gonzo journalism" involves making yourself a part of the story, which is counter to usual journalistic ethics.)
I guess at the end of the day people should respect the wishes of authors and creators, it is now up to the reformers to ensure that what is being enforced is indeed the will of the rightfull owner.
FWIW, patents are not copyrights. Patents are a "land-grab" on ideas. The reason I point this out is that I don't actually go with the logic that we should respect the wishes of "creators" automatically simply because they created something first - which is what patents require. In the world of copyrights, two people independently coming up with the same thing can do so without worry. In patents, if I come up with an idea by myself, I can't guarantee that it's legal to use, because if someone came up with the same idea before me, they can patent it.
Patents have always been a bit of a compromise. There were circumstances in which the amount of work and money required to solve a particular problem was so great, you needed to create a competition to persuade people to get into the game. Patents are that competition - you get to the finish line first, and you get a temporarily but draconian monopoly on the right to use your answer. Computing has never been short of people wanting to solve problems, so there's never been any need to introduce this competition. It doesn't help the software industry, it hinders it. It means it's becoming increasingly difficult to program and know you're allowed to write what you just wrote.
People who say "regime" don't use it in that context. One of the definitions of the term is "fascist government," and that's the definition they're referring to. They're not using it to refer to "a current prevailing government."
FWIW, I use "Bush regime" all the time and I never mean it to mean "fascist government". It's a negative way of describing the current entity in power, but it does mean "current prevailing government" and I believe the majority of people who use the term mean it to mean that.
The page contained no concrete information, it could have been a rewritten press release for all I could see. The "links" linked not to anything relevent but to ads - for example, the link on Duke's "technology" went straight to an ad for Microsoft LiveMeeting.
This is obviously a click farm, albeit a slightly cleverer one than usual.
So far there's no evidence that DNF is anything but vapourware. An article that talks excitedly about improvements in realism, without showing any evidence, and whose links turn out to be ads, strikes me as about as trustworthy a source as an email entitled "L@@K! FR33 V10XX 1N Y0UR MA1LB0X N0W!!"
Much as I liked the Dragon, I don't think there's much space for a 6809 based Tandy CoCo clone in 2005 even if, with substantial upgrades, it can run OS-9 (no, not Mac OS 9, the multitasking thing.)
Income level would be a bad idea. An individual selling a big ticket item like a boat or car may end up netting more for that single sale than someone who makes money selling Italian charm links.
...which in some ways underlines your point. It's going to be hard for this law to be drafted in the way promised (ie one that will not penalise individual sellers.)
The other major difference is that if I was given a catalogue in 1973, I wouldn't expect its prices to be valid today, but if I was given a catalogue today, I most certainly would, even if it was printed in 1973
Before anyone leaps in and flames this, I should point out I'm talking about being given it by the seller in both cases, without any suggestion from the seller that the catalogue isn't current. eg I walk up and say "Do you have a catalogue?" And they say "Yeah, sure, have this. Give us a call if you want to buy anything."
Or in other words (fucking two minute bullshit), I say "Can you give me a catalog", and they hand me this thing from 1973, but they don't say "Well, all I can find is an old catalogue, the prices may have changed and we probably don't sell flared white trousers any more", they act as if there's nothing unusual about it at all. And the catalog doesn't say anything about valid date ranges.
One thing I've noticed is that most catalogues, and the majority of other leaflets advertising things, that arrive at my house have an expiry date on them in some shape or form ("Offer valid until 12/1/2005")
The other major difference is that if I was given a catalogue in 1973, I wouldn't expect its prices to be valid today, but if I was given a catalogue today, I most certainly would, even if it was printed in 1973. The website is being served in real time, it's not as if someone's gone to a website three years ago and expected the prices to be valid today. They've gone today, the website - with the full consent of the seller - has said "The price is X". But it wasn't.
I don't understand what you're saying here. Load the page once. Note memory usage. Reload. How many more bytes do you expect to see there?
None, but that's irrelevent. We're talking about GMail here, not some page that automatically reloads itself. GMail makes queries in a hidden frame, it's a Javascript application, not a more-or-less static HTML page.
Like I said in the comment you described as "funny", I've written an application that works in a similar way, and if it wasn't for the fact we don't put the user in a position where they would stay on one "main" page for very long (ie we move from one top level frameset to another, and we don't automatically poll for anything), then they'd be in the same situation.
GMail is not an application. It's a bunch of scripts running in the browser. The browser is the application, and it's the browser's responsibility to ensure that no memory leaks, because, again, the script has no control over it.
Oh boy.
Give me one example of how you "leak" memory in a script. Note that I'm not talking about creating an array and filling it with 1 gazillion strings between the focus() and blur() events. Even in those cases, the browser should clean up after me. At least I hope so. No, an example of a memory leak that is the script's direct fault and responsibility. I'd like to see one.
Try reading the explanation of how the app I maintain works. I gave you an explanation. You've chosen so far to ignore it. More to the point, by repeatedly ignoring it and claiming it's not possible, you're essentially calling me a liar.
It's not even that difficult to get your head around: If you have something that allocates objects periodically, and doesn't deallocate them, then you have a memory leak. As an example, if you poll a server using a hidden frame, and you allocate an object each time, which you store (for whatever reason) without overwriting what you did previously, then you end up with a memory leak. It's that simple. Really. Honestly. It's fucking easy to end up with a leak in Javascript apps if those apps aren't trivial. I know, I've done it.
And how, exactly, is Mozilla supposed to clean up after someone who makes an array and fills it with 1 gazillion strings between focus() and blur() events anyway?
I've said I've done it. You've said it's impossible. You're calling me a liar. I resent that. I'm foeing you. Asshole.
I'm sorry, but how exactly is Firefox supposed to prevent GMail from leaking memory? Should it shut it down after it's allocated X number of objects? I mean, what exactly is Firefox supposed to do? How is it "spinning it" to point out that if GMail is allocating lots of objects that it doesn't discard, it's GMail's problem, not Firefox's?
If FF is going to eat up 100MB of RAM to open Gmail, fine. Assuming nothing happens except for their refresh interval (which I think is 5 minutes), when I get back the next day I expect it to be at 100MB. It's as simple as that.
Even if GMail has actually done several hundred polls of the server since then? You're saying that if a running application's memory usage increases, it's the underlying platform's problem?
Why stop at the Javascript interpreter? Why not blame your operating system?
But you and everyone else around here tends to come up with these amazing theories as to why FF consumes/leaks so much memory. Your was just one of the funnier ones I've read.
You, so far, have given one instance in which memory was leaked, using as your example a particular application that isn't idle when left overnight. It's far more reasonable to suggest the application is leaking memory than the platform running that application.
What, exactly, was "funny" about my suggestion? Why did you ignore the suggestion that you measure usage of a static page (one that you know doesn't run Javascript that would be allocating data objects during the night) and then determine if the issue is Firefox, or GMail?
Applications can leak memory. There's little the underlying platform can do, except perhaps kill them once they've used a certain amount of memory. I'm sure, assuming it is GMail's Javascript allocating objects, that you'd be far more pissed if your browser closed GMail every evening than if it had used an extra 100Mb of RAM.
Or is your problem that you honestly cannot understand how a Javascript application can leak memory? Because they can, I've seen it, I've written Javascript with known memory leaks.
Re:So basically you recommend the book then?
on
Apple I Replica Creation
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Says you! I remember back then you'd get a pile of circuit diagrams and a book on programming (a good book on programming) with every computer. I remember pouring over the instructions and diagrams for the Sinclair ZX81, and the fantastic Steve Vickers BASIC manual that came with it.
Then the BASIC manuals kind of went. By the late eighties you often got circuit diagrams, and some introduction to the OS but nothing on programming. My Amiga 500+ was typical, including a little booklet that included circuit diagrams for the entire thing, and a walk-through of Workbench 2.
Now you get... pretty close to nothing. My PowerBook (and the Jaguar and Panther boxes I got) came with an advertising brochure. You're lucky if you get something describing what plugs into what.
As the computers have been dumbed down, there's been an assumption nobody actually wants to know how the machine works, how to program it, how to understand it. I think that sucks personally.
I'd see it as a combination of poor programming on the part of the Javascript interpreter coupled with a memory leak in the Javascript itself.
Until recently, it's been assumed by most programmers that Javascript is for small scripts that do not do a lot of data manipulation. GMail isn't typical, so the assumptions the creators of many Javascript implementations are kind of blown out of the water.
I use Javascript to implement the bulk of a front-end to an online database where users are extracting financial information for a large group of sellers. Typical queries are in the order of a few hundred rows and five to ten columns. This is broken down by the front end, we query twelve columns at a time (because of limitations of the back-end tool, something called Pilot Internet Publisher), make queries for user-calculated columns, stitch everything together, and show the results, nicely formatted. All of the data requested has to be stored in arrays on the client browser while we stitch it together, format it, etc.
Are the memory requirements large? You betcha! When we started, 32-64Mb was relatively typical for the types of machines our major clients used, and some larger queries would cause these machines to slow down chronically.
Is it easy to create a memory leak? Why yes, yes it is! We dealt with it somewhat crudely - operations occur only when the user clicks on buttons (there's no GMail style polling), and we try to avoid the user being on one particular page (building up a store of objects) for the most part.
It's important to understand the difference here: Is Mozilla's, IE's, etc, implementation of Javascript efficient? No way. But at the same time, the precise issue the GGP was complaining about, a memory leak, is unlikely to be because of the Javascript implementation. It's more likely to be the GMail application itself. It's just the Javascript implementation makes the entire issue more chronic because it already uses memory relatively inefficiently. So far as I can tell, anyway.
It's the same as in any language. You keep storing more and more objects, and do not "deallocate" what you've already stored ("deallocate" in quotes because in Javascript - as with any language with automatic GC - deallocation is a matter of removing references.) To make matters worse, it's increadibly easy to create references to objects without even trying, given browser-based Javascript's default behaviour of assuming any reference to a non-local variable is a property of the window object.
GMail, from memory, makes regular queries via a hidden frame to Google's server. If an object is allocated each time the query is made and put somewhere where it cannot be deallocated (in an array, for instance) then you'll observe memory use increasing without anything useful occurring.
Could be GMail that has the "leak". GMail is some very clever Javascript, but Javascript is a high level language and it's just as easy to create memory leaks in it as any other HLL.
To determine if Firefox has a leak, you probably need to leave it open over night showing about:blank, or even a page with some simple, clearly not leaking, Javascript running.
I'm not saying allofmp3 are doing something good, but they are putting one in the eye of those who claim $.99 is the minimum a company can provide downloadable tracks for.
Well, in fairness, that's because allofmp3 isn't paying anything (that'd make a difference) to the artist, anything to offset the costs of recording the music, producing it, mastering it, etc. It's essentially a CD ripping, storage, and download service.
A legitimate operation has real costs to cover. Artists need to eat. Equipment costs money. Sound engineers need to eat. Producers need to eat. The people overseeing all of this need to eat. Anyone can reduce the prices to close to zero if they just "forget" about paying for all of these overheads. But the long term consequences of doing so is that the amount of new works will be drastically reduced, or that models none of us like in practice will come into force - every song funded by product placement, or enforced taxation, or sponsored by some opinionated millionaire whose idea of music is far from your's.
I think the GP's point was that they accept "Dinners Club" rather than Diners Club. It's a somewhat semi-legitimate point about the credibility of the website. Why would he complain about cards he hadn't heard of being there? You'd expect "obscure" brands to feature on a foreign website.
Well, I don't think that's what the article says. In any case, it would be fair turnabout if that were the case - most downloaders have NEVER allowed the fact it's illegal to stop them from downloading...;-)
You say that, but it's interesting how many people I know working two or three jobs at the moment, all of whom are on low incomes and are working the extra jobs precisely because they're on low incomes.
A fundamental problem with the article was that the entire thing relied upon the title being fundamentally correct. This is something those trying to explain it away have tended to ignore. I don't see any evidence that blacks, as a group, actually are lazy. But Nelson's column goes into detail as to why they're lazy without actually backing up the assertion that they actually are to begin with. The headline is an underlying accusation that's implied by the argument, not contradicted by it.
You don't explain why blacks are lazy if you don't think they're lazy to begin with.
Of course, Nelson clearly believed, when writing it, that his motive was reasonable and anti-racist, that comes out too.
I agree completely with your second paragraph. For me, this article was the final straw. I'd seen the confrontational attitude he'd taken about concerns from the free software crowd. Now he'd written and published publically an objectively racist article, one that even if he failed to understand his own written argument, he could have seen was unnecessarily insensitive and inherently insulting to a large group of people. He clearly wasn't the right person to be the public face of an advocacy organization (at least, not one whose views I broadly agree with.) That role requires diplomacy and tact.
I don't know if it had anything directly to do with the decision, but I know I felt, and a lot of people felt, coming on top of remarks Nelson had made in the original Slashdot thread announcing his appointment, that it demonstrated a lack of the diplomatic skills needed for the figurehead representing a major advocacy group. FWIW, I was one of the people who drew attention to this particular posting, via my journal. (I may have been the first to do so publicly, I'm not sure)
Regardless of whether Nelson thinks blacks, as a group (for genetic or, as he appeared to argue, economic reasons), really are lazy or whether he meant it to be read that way, it was clearly representative of a mindset that wasn't going to win over new friends. I, personally, was relieved he withdrew the article, as it was a step in the right direction, but knowing Russ Nelson's argumentative skills in general, I'm more relieved he's no longer in that position.
This is not to suggest Russ is evil, or an idiot, or anything like that; it's just some people are suited to some jobs and not others. I'd make a crap OSI President too. I suspect Jack Valenti would have made an awful movie maker, but he was highly influential as an MPAA president (regretably!) Hopefully the new OSI leadership will be an obvious improvement.
Ultimately the commissioners are answerable to the governments, and the governments are elected.
The lack of democracy is seen as a plus by many eurosceptics. Essentially, if governments have a veto on the EU, and the only democratic institutions (simple majority types) do not have the power to force through what they want, then, Eurosceptics believe, the EU has less of an ability to override individual country's soverenty.
Here we have a situation where the democratic institution appears to be a little more intelligent than the individual governments, who largely support this stupid set of proposals. It's the equivalent, in US terms, of Congress wanting to abolish the DMCA, but not actually having the constitutional power to do so if 49 of the 50 states governors support it.
Slashdot Mirror
To the best of my knowledge, most member states have sold their telephone companies - certainly, the big ones (UK, France, Germany) have done so. Off the top of my head, I'm not aware of a country in the EU with a state owned telephone company - I'm not saying one doesn't exist, I just don't know of one.
The "heavily regulated GSM operators" aren't that heavily regulated in most juristictions, and most countries have at least four nationwide mobile phone operators (two on 900MHz, two on 1800MHz), with 3G operators opening in addition to these. Far from knowing no new player could enter the market, most operators are putting up the auctions of 3G frequencies at the moment that's resulting in precisely that - new players being given an opportunity. The original opening of PCN (1800MHz) by the UK government in the early nineties was specifically to create an opportunity for new operators to emerge, and the rest of Europe followed suit.
The situation isn't directly comparable to the US - I have a choice of about five or six operators where I live in Florida, but "nationwide" is still a relative term. Verizon, Cingular, Sprint PCS, T-Mobile, and Nextel (soon to become part of SPCS) would probably all describe themselves as nationwide (and would probably be the only US operators who reasonably could do so), but all have massive holes in their coverage maps, frequently omitting entire, relatively populous, counties while covering the neighbours. It's only because of transparent roaming and operators gobbling each other up we're seeing anything approaching usability in these networks. Sprint PCS is rapidly becoming a service network for operators like Verizon, Nextel and SPCS are merging, T-Mobile is a prime takeover target, probably for Cingular.
Outside of that four and a half, there's a bunch of ultralocal operators who seem to live in some era where mobile phones are just cordless phones with a longer range, frequently covering single cities, for all intents and purposes aimed at an entirely different application.
I don't want to suggest everything's great in Europe, it isn't. Operators in the US are generally now offering better plans. Much of this is because of the monetary culture that's different between the countries rather than regulatory. Europeans tend to be interested in spending as little as possible, resulting in large numbers of users choosing $20-30 a month "plans" (frequently pay-as-you-go) with very few minutes. Americans are more interested in trouble free/worry free usage, and have to pay for incoming calls, so tend to spend more, which gives the operators disproportionally more money after they've bought their infrastructure, so allowing them to offer more bundled minutes and features like unlimited calling.
But that's entirely seperate from regulatory pressures.
This is why many people feel that the number of categories of things that can be patented should be as small as possible. If there are already incentives to invent in a particular sphere, there's no need for patents. In this case, it's hardware, and arguably the amount of investment needed to come up with and implement an idea is so high patents have some validity. Still sucks to be in that industry though as you suffer the risk of developing something and then finding that some guy got there first. You do the work and the investment, someone else (who, admittedly, also did the work and investment) gets to profit.
FYI, and all that.
Patents have always been a bit of a compromise. There were circumstances in which the amount of work and money required to solve a particular problem was so great, you needed to create a competition to persuade people to get into the game. Patents are that competition - you get to the finish line first, and you get a temporarily but draconian monopoly on the right to use your answer. Computing has never been short of people wanting to solve problems, so there's never been any need to introduce this competition. It doesn't help the software industry, it hinders it. It means it's becoming increasingly difficult to program and know you're allowed to write what you just wrote.
We need software patents scrapped.
The page contained no concrete information, it could have been a rewritten press release for all I could see. The "links" linked not to anything relevent but to ads - for example, the link on Duke's "technology" went straight to an ad for Microsoft LiveMeeting.
This is obviously a click farm, albeit a slightly cleverer one than usual.
So far there's no evidence that DNF is anything but vapourware. An article that talks excitedly about improvements in realism, without showing any evidence, and whose links turn out to be ads, strikes me as about as trustworthy a source as an email entitled "L@@K! FR33 V10XX 1N Y0UR MA1LB0X N0W!!"
Much as I liked the Dragon, I don't think there's much space for a 6809 based Tandy CoCo clone in 2005 even if, with substantial upgrades, it can run OS-9 (no, not Mac OS 9, the multitasking thing.)
Or in other words (fucking two minute bullshit), I say "Can you give me a catalog", and they hand me this thing from 1973, but they don't say "Well, all I can find is an old catalogue, the prices may have changed and we probably don't sell flared white trousers any more", they act as if there's nothing unusual about it at all. And the catalog doesn't say anything about valid date ranges.
The other major difference is that if I was given a catalogue in 1973, I wouldn't expect its prices to be valid today, but if I was given a catalogue today, I most certainly would, even if it was printed in 1973. The website is being served in real time, it's not as if someone's gone to a website three years ago and expected the prices to be valid today. They've gone today, the website - with the full consent of the seller - has said "The price is X". But it wasn't.
Like I said in the comment you described as "funny", I've written an application that works in a similar way, and if it wasn't for the fact we don't put the user in a position where they would stay on one "main" page for very long (ie we move from one top level frameset to another, and we don't automatically poll for anything), then they'd be in the same situation.
Oh boy. Try reading the explanation of how the app I maintain works. I gave you an explanation. You've chosen so far to ignore it. More to the point, by repeatedly ignoring it and claiming it's not possible, you're essentially calling me a liar.It's not even that difficult to get your head around: If you have something that allocates objects periodically, and doesn't deallocate them, then you have a memory leak. As an example, if you poll a server using a hidden frame, and you allocate an object each time, which you store (for whatever reason) without overwriting what you did previously, then you end up with a memory leak. It's that simple. Really. Honestly. It's fucking easy to end up with a leak in Javascript apps if those apps aren't trivial. I know, I've done it.
And how, exactly, is Mozilla supposed to clean up after someone who makes an array and fills it with 1 gazillion strings between focus() and blur() events anyway?
I've said I've done it. You've said it's impossible. You're calling me a liar. I resent that. I'm foeing you. Asshole.
Why stop at the Javascript interpreter? Why not blame your operating system?
You, so far, have given one instance in which memory was leaked, using as your example a particular application that isn't idle when left overnight. It's far more reasonable to suggest the application is leaking memory than the platform running that application.What, exactly, was "funny" about my suggestion? Why did you ignore the suggestion that you measure usage of a static page (one that you know doesn't run Javascript that would be allocating data objects during the night) and then determine if the issue is Firefox, or GMail?
Applications can leak memory. There's little the underlying platform can do, except perhaps kill them once they've used a certain amount of memory. I'm sure, assuming it is GMail's Javascript allocating objects, that you'd be far more pissed if your browser closed GMail every evening than if it had used an extra 100Mb of RAM.
Or is your problem that you honestly cannot understand how a Javascript application can leak memory? Because they can, I've seen it, I've written Javascript with known memory leaks.
Then the BASIC manuals kind of went. By the late eighties you often got circuit diagrams, and some introduction to the OS but nothing on programming. My Amiga 500+ was typical, including a little booklet that included circuit diagrams for the entire thing, and a walk-through of Workbench 2.
Now you get... pretty close to nothing. My PowerBook (and the Jaguar and Panther boxes I got) came with an advertising brochure. You're lucky if you get something describing what plugs into what.
As the computers have been dumbed down, there's been an assumption nobody actually wants to know how the machine works, how to program it, how to understand it. I think that sucks personally.
Until recently, it's been assumed by most programmers that Javascript is for small scripts that do not do a lot of data manipulation. GMail isn't typical, so the assumptions the creators of many Javascript implementations are kind of blown out of the water.
I use Javascript to implement the bulk of a front-end to an online database where users are extracting financial information for a large group of sellers. Typical queries are in the order of a few hundred rows and five to ten columns. This is broken down by the front end, we query twelve columns at a time (because of limitations of the back-end tool, something called Pilot Internet Publisher), make queries for user-calculated columns, stitch everything together, and show the results, nicely formatted. All of the data requested has to be stored in arrays on the client browser while we stitch it together, format it, etc.
Are the memory requirements large? You betcha! When we started, 32-64Mb was relatively typical for the types of machines our major clients used, and some larger queries would cause these machines to slow down chronically.
Is it easy to create a memory leak? Why yes, yes it is! We dealt with it somewhat crudely - operations occur only when the user clicks on buttons (there's no GMail style polling), and we try to avoid the user being on one particular page (building up a store of objects) for the most part.
It's important to understand the difference here: Is Mozilla's, IE's, etc, implementation of Javascript efficient? No way. But at the same time, the precise issue the GGP was complaining about, a memory leak, is unlikely to be because of the Javascript implementation. It's more likely to be the GMail application itself. It's just the Javascript implementation makes the entire issue more chronic because it already uses memory relatively inefficiently. So far as I can tell, anyway.
GMail, from memory, makes regular queries via a hidden frame to Google's server. If an object is allocated each time the query is made and put somewhere where it cannot be deallocated (in an array, for instance) then you'll observe memory use increasing without anything useful occurring.
To determine if Firefox has a leak, you probably need to leave it open over night showing about:blank, or even a page with some simple, clearly not leaking, Javascript running.
A legitimate operation has real costs to cover. Artists need to eat. Equipment costs money. Sound engineers need to eat. Producers need to eat. The people overseeing all of this need to eat. Anyone can reduce the prices to close to zero if they just "forget" about paying for all of these overheads. But the long term consequences of doing so is that the amount of new works will be drastically reduced, or that models none of us like in practice will come into force - every song funded by product placement, or enforced taxation, or sponsored by some opinionated millionaire whose idea of music is far from your's.
I think the GP's point was that they accept "Dinners Club" rather than Diners Club. It's a somewhat semi-legitimate point about the credibility of the website. Why would he complain about cards he hadn't heard of being there? You'd expect "obscure" brands to feature on a foreign website.
If that's true, that might be something worth bearing in mind by anyone tempted to trust AllOfMP3 with their credit card details.
Well, I don't think that's what the article says. In any case, it would be fair turnabout if that were the case - most downloaders have NEVER allowed the fact it's illegal to stop them from downloading... ;-)
Sci-fi is owned by Universal, who are (ultimately) members of both the MPAA and RIAA.
You say that, but it's interesting how many people I know working two or three jobs at the moment, all of whom are on low incomes and are working the extra jobs precisely because they're on low incomes.
You don't explain why blacks are lazy if you don't think they're lazy to begin with.
Of course, Nelson clearly believed, when writing it, that his motive was reasonable and anti-racist, that comes out too.
I agree completely with your second paragraph. For me, this article was the final straw. I'd seen the confrontational attitude he'd taken about concerns from the free software crowd. Now he'd written and published publically an objectively racist article, one that even if he failed to understand his own written argument, he could have seen was unnecessarily insensitive and inherently insulting to a large group of people. He clearly wasn't the right person to be the public face of an advocacy organization (at least, not one whose views I broadly agree with.) That role requires diplomacy and tact.
Regardless of whether Nelson thinks blacks, as a group (for genetic or, as he appeared to argue, economic reasons), really are lazy or whether he meant it to be read that way, it was clearly representative of a mindset that wasn't going to win over new friends. I, personally, was relieved he withdrew the article, as it was a step in the right direction, but knowing Russ Nelson's argumentative skills in general, I'm more relieved he's no longer in that position.
This is not to suggest Russ is evil, or an idiot, or anything like that; it's just some people are suited to some jobs and not others. I'd make a crap OSI President too. I suspect Jack Valenti would have made an awful movie maker, but he was highly influential as an MPAA president (regretably!) Hopefully the new OSI leadership will be an obvious improvement.
The lack of democracy is seen as a plus by many eurosceptics. Essentially, if governments have a veto on the EU, and the only democratic institutions (simple majority types) do not have the power to force through what they want, then, Eurosceptics believe, the EU has less of an ability to override individual country's soverenty.
Here we have a situation where the democratic institution appears to be a little more intelligent than the individual governments, who largely support this stupid set of proposals. It's the equivalent, in US terms, of Congress wanting to abolish the DMCA, but not actually having the constitutional power to do so if 49 of the 50 states governors support it.