The good thing about Linux patches is that they are cumulative whereas Windows likes to start over (for the most part) every couple years with a fresh, untested system.
WTF? By that logic... when I install a Windows 2000 machine, in order to be completely up to date, I need to install Service Pack 1, then Service Pack 2, next onto Service Pack 3, and then Service Pack 4... and if I have time, DL all of the patches from WindowsUpdate.com, sadly... that'd be wrong.
Microsoft patches and operating systems are cumulative. Whenever XPSP2 is releases, it will provide all XP bug patches up to a certain date along with it's other improvements, including all of those offered in SP1.
Along the way, each bug that is patched in 2k and XP these days is also fixed in Longhorn. This is common practice at MS and has been for years.
You think that Fortran, Cobol and Perl have been retired?
By any chance would you or anyone you know have a Citibank credit card? A fact you may not be aware of that most of Citibank's back end is written in Cobol. Federated Insurance is another organization that has plenty of Cobol based systems and when last I checked, neither company has any plan to change it.
Yes, there are newer and possibly 'better' language out there, does that make them better in all such cases? Hell no.
When speaking with a Federated representative she proudly said that their database backend system was completely Cobol based and was faster and more efficient then anything else on the market. It too me a little while to realize that she wasn't saying that it could process a days worth of transactions faster than anything else on the market with newer hardware, the issue was the cost of upgrading.
If you have millions of lines of code in an older language and a database system that has been in place for 20+ years... it's not easy to upgrade no matter the advantages. If you worked for such a large company, it'd be pretty easy to sell something new, but do you want to guarantee a seamless transition from one system to another? Any hiccups along the way will most likely make the transition be regretted.
Same goes for C. Yes, Java and other languages might be able to do a better job, the fact is that huge amounts of legacy code exists and needs to be supported.
Example: Linux. Written in C primarily if I am not mistaken. How should it be fixed? Should it be ported to C++? VB? Java? C#? Such a conversion *may* be possible, however even if it were, the potential benefits to be realized are so inconsequential compared to the cost of doing so to make such an endeavor be wasted.
Visual Basic that lacks such archaic coding styles, one will also note a serious speed increase over C.
I'd suggest you do some research on that point. Raw C/C++ tends to be a hell of a lot faster than VB. Yes, you can often create a front end in VB much faster than you can in C. I would remind you though that in C/C++ you can create far more dynamic and elegant code for your task. In fact, the advantage of C++ over VB I think can be summed up in a single word: Inheritance.
As a programmer who spends about 1/4th of his time working in embedded systems (not the niceties of XP embedded mind you, but micro controllers and other such horrors), I can tell you that VB has no place in such a world.
Hell, I'd love to see an 8051 VB compiler, just to for a laugh.
I'm curious to know why you highlighted "or if the president elect shall have failed to qualify", as conceding election has no more legal basis then me looking at my watch to know what time it is.
By your apparent logic... If Bush and Gore would have conceded that night as well, that Patrick Buchanan would become president... This is not the case, Bush and Gore would still be eligible and the winner of the election (or any subsequent voting in the Senate or Congress) would become president, not the person with the most votes and who didn't concede.
You speak of disenfranchisement... what would you say if I told you that disenfranchisement is effectively built into the law?
Quoting from Florida Law, specifically: Section 102.111 Elections Canvassing Commission, a little way down through the paragraph we find:
"If the county returns are not received by the Department of State by 5 p.m. of the seventh day following an election, all missing counties shall be ignored, and the results shown by the returns on file shall be certified."
Back to your quote of: "patently false premise that the election had to be done on time" on the contrary, the above line says so at the state level, just as there are deadlines at the federal level.
Nay, I was already quite aware of the US being a Republic and was using sarcasm in my original post... it seems that some (those with mod points and you) have miss understood it.
First up though... it was not the Senate's place to act as the vote in Florida was certified and the electors voted as expected based on the certified results. Quoting from the Federal Election Comission:
In the event no one obtains an absolute majority of electoral votes for president, the U.S. House of Representatives (as the chamber closest to the people) selects the president from among the top three contenders with each State casting only one vote and an absolute majority of the States being required to elect. Similarly, if no one obtains an absolute majority for vice president, then the U.S. Senate makes the selection from among the top two contenders for that office.
Now back to my point:
In a democracy, the majority rules, and those eligible to vote are given the opportunity to directly vote on an issue.
In a representative democracy, we elect persons who we believe will represent our interests.
In a republic (as we have (I can prove it later if you don't believe me), we vote for electors and ultimately tell them what we would like them to do, but for the most part they are NOT required to act as we ask.
Only 26 states in the union ( + DC) have laws requiring an elector to cast their ballot in a given way... and yes, Florida is one of those states.
That means of the remaining 24, comprising of 254 Electoral Votes, are NOT required to vote for the candidate that their state does. Traditionally they do, however they are not required to and theoretically, if a large enough number of electors voted differently then the population of the states they represent did... we could have an elected president who received even fewer votes (percentage wise) then Bush did in 2000.
If you think for a moment that the fact that "The fact that Gore acquiesced" counts him out, you are sadly mistaken and need to do some reading on how US Presidential Elections work.
Democracy? Oh yea... that thing we keep hearing of bring to other countries and yet we have so little of it here at the federal level.
After all... the fact that George W Bush is President proves that we do not have a democracy.
If I were a Bush fan I would be screaming "Long love the Republic of the United States of America". (which I would remind you the US is (not a democracy, and certainly not a representative democracy)).
I'm more concerned about the evil radio waves which keep trespassing on my property, permeating my entire home and being. My tin foil hat just isn't enough!!!
I'm thinking I need to construct a large set of lead shielded antennas and satellite dishes so as to keep them from getting inside my home... and... while I've got em captured, might as well do something with em, same I have no clue what to do.
Personally speaking, I've never given away or sold a HD in my life... not that I'm paranoid about what might be on it, I find it a good practice to use em until they die, even if it's only a few extra gigs.
and shows why open source is an effective model Not so, it only shows that open source is an effective model IF these transitions occur smoothly and the destination is found to be worthy the journey.
Another advantage of the using the hosts file is that you can specify where it'll look.
For the longest time I had it set to 127.0.0.1, but often a web page would try to hit a file on my local machine which would require a password... so, I picked a new ip address. That of your friend and mine, SCO. Almost every time I am supposed to see a banner ad, I see instead a copy of the SCO web site.
What ifwe don't care about OGG support? I when I bought my iPod a year ago, there was no iTMS for the PC (nor iTunes), nor any OGG support. I was quite happy then, just as I am now.
I guess I don't understand the draw for people to want OGG support so bad.
If you want an iPod, then you don't get OGG support, if you want to play your OGG files... you are forced to convert em.
If you MUST have OGG support in a portable device, then buy one with it already and quit complaining to Apple!
"Such laws criminalize thought; they add an additional penalty not based on the damage actually inflicted upon the victim, but based on the thoughts and feelings of the aggressor toward the victim."
Not necessarily. In most cases, to prove a "Hate Crime" you must prove that the person committed the crime because of some racial/cultural difference and hatred.
You seem to be going with the same logic of many of our lawmakers, that if someone hates a member of a minority group, that they are hated because they are a member of that group.
Personally speaking, I am an equally opportunity hater, my hatred is not bound by race, religion, national origin, sex, disability, age, spoken language, political affiliation, weight, height, natural hair color or any other easily categorized term related to something someone has little if any choice related to.
If I hate someone, I hate because of stupidity, ignorance or other areas which one does have control over.
I do agree that such "Hate Crime" laws are rather pointless, like the death penalty, they do little to deter crime. I can't say I've ever heard a person say: "I want to kill someone, better not make it a black guy, otherwise I might go to jail for even longer."
Such craziness is not limited however to written law. It also plays a big part in perception, for example:
If a large and small dog get into a fight, and the little dog is the aggressor. We would most likely see the small dog come away dead or fairly injured. This makes perfect sense as the large dog by it's size would be stronger and able to do more harm to the small dog... does that mean it is fully responsible for what happened?
If a large person (height and weight) were to get into a fight with a smaller person, no matter the outcome, the larger person would be vilified because they should have known better and have a responsibility not to harm those smaller then them... regardless of what threat they may pose.
The difference is that the human has some choice. The little dog does not know that it might/will get hurt, the small person may know that, but they think they can beat the larger person. But no matter how it turns out, the larger person will be to blame for harming someone who they can harm, while the smaller person was just 'defending themselves against a bully'.
Nay, wouldn't have gone anywhere as he owned no copyrights on what he said within the e-mails.
As a professor of the University, using a University provided PC, using a university provided e-mail account, acing as a professor of the University, he had no claim to material he may create while on the job. Any e-mails he would write to me or anyone else, are 'copyrighted' by the University and he has no claim to them.
This is similar to how a student can record a professors lectures and in most cases the professor cannot stop the student unless doing so is a disturbance. This is because the professor does not own the copyrights to the performance they give in the classroom, it is up to the U to decide such matters.
Now if the U wanted to sue me, then that would be a different story.
You are not being held accountable solely for what you think or feel, but how you express such feelings.
If a racists runs around screaming "I hate *insert race here*'s" there is nothing legally wrong with that. However if our same racist goes off and kills a *insert race here* man while screaming "I hate *insert race here*s", then it is no longer just them saying how they feel but acting upon how the feel and in an illegal manor.
While we do have the freedom of speech, expression of it can be curtailed. Advocating violence against an individual or group does tend to be illegal, it is the difference between simply saying "I hate *insert race here*'s" and "I think someone should kill *insert race here*'s".
Hence this is part of the logic behind it being illegal to advocate violence against the president. No matter how much you don't like him or dislike him, do not say that someone should harm him in any physical way... doing so can get the Feds on your rear.
Libel/Slander can exist if the intent of the quote was to cause harm. That is to say, if I quoted something that painted someone in a very bad light and my intent of quoting it was to cause them to loose a job, money, etc then yes, I could held liable (although in the US, Libel/Slander are very very very difficult things to sell in court).
Thus when ever you quote the opposition, it is important not to mean it in a "hahaha, I'm going to get you way" but instead a more dignified "here is the truth, nothing more" manor.
Exactly, and for the longest time, the only place you can truly be confident of the security of a document is within your own head... that is until the Thought Police from the Ministry of Love are unleashed... I can only imagine the kinds of Thought Crimes I have committed! Down with Big Brother... er... oh crap.
... one can still gripe about the 'confidentiality' of an e-mail and have a case (albeit limited).
Not too long ago I was having a bit of an e-mail battle with a professor and as many of what he said was flat out wrong, I put up a small webpage with the unabridged text of the e-mails for other students in the class to read so they would be aware of the problems I had raised which concerned them all.
The professor later threatened to sue me for "libel, slander and defamation" because of the "publication of our confidential and private e-mail conversations", even though there was no disclaimer or even an assumption of privacy.
Thankfully, given a number of illegal things he had done in the e-mails (IE blowing off FERPA), any such case would have been thrown out quite quickly.
When I told this story to my father, he told me a quote he heard long ago:
"Never put something in a letter that you don't want the other guy's lawyer holding up in court"
The moral of this story: Disclaimer or not, don't write anything in an e-mail, letter, diary, word document that you don't want getting out.
Slashdot Mirror
The good thing about Linux patches is that they are cumulative whereas Windows likes to start over (for the most part) every couple years with a fresh, untested system.
WTF? By that logic... when I install a Windows 2000 machine, in order to be completely up to date, I need to install Service Pack 1, then Service Pack 2, next onto Service Pack 3, and then Service Pack 4... and if I have time, DL all of the patches from WindowsUpdate.com, sadly... that'd be wrong.
Microsoft patches and operating systems are cumulative. Whenever XPSP2 is releases, it will provide all XP bug patches up to a certain date along with it's other improvements, including all of those offered in SP1.
Along the way, each bug that is patched in 2k and XP these days is also fixed in Longhorn. This is common practice at MS and has been for years.
You think that Fortran, Cobol and Perl have been retired?
By any chance would you or anyone you know have a Citibank credit card? A fact you may not be aware of that most of Citibank's back end is written in Cobol. Federated Insurance is another organization that has plenty of Cobol based systems and when last I checked, neither company has any plan to change it.
Yes, there are newer and possibly 'better' language out there, does that make them better in all such cases? Hell no.
When speaking with a Federated representative she proudly said that their database backend system was completely Cobol based and was faster and more efficient then anything else on the market. It too me a little while to realize that she wasn't saying that it could process a days worth of transactions faster than anything else on the market with newer hardware, the issue was the cost of upgrading.
If you have millions of lines of code in an older language and a database system that has been in place for 20+ years... it's not easy to upgrade no matter the advantages. If you worked for such a large company, it'd be pretty easy to sell something new, but do you want to guarantee a seamless transition from one system to another? Any hiccups along the way will most likely make the transition be regretted.
Same goes for C. Yes, Java and other languages might be able to do a better job, the fact is that huge amounts of legacy code exists and needs to be supported.
Example: Linux. Written in C primarily if I am not mistaken. How should it be fixed? Should it be ported to C++? VB? Java? C#? Such a conversion *may* be possible, however even if it were, the potential benefits to be realized are so inconsequential compared to the cost of doing so to make such an endeavor be wasted.
Visual Basic that lacks such archaic coding styles, one will also note a serious speed increase over C.
I'd suggest you do some research on that point. Raw C/C++ tends to be a hell of a lot faster than VB. Yes, you can often create a front end in VB much faster than you can in C. I would remind you though that in C/C++ you can create far more dynamic and elegant code for your task. In fact, the advantage of C++ over VB I think can be summed up in a single word: Inheritance.
As a programmer who spends about 1/4th of his time working in embedded systems (not the niceties of XP embedded mind you, but micro controllers and other such horrors), I can tell you that VB has no place in such a world.
Hell, I'd love to see an 8051 VB compiler, just to for a laugh.
I'm curious to know why you highlighted "or if the president elect shall have failed to qualify", as conceding election has no more legal basis then me looking at my watch to know what time it is.
By your apparent logic... If Bush and Gore would have conceded that night as well, that Patrick Buchanan would become president... This is not the case, Bush and Gore would still be eligible and the winner of the election (or any subsequent voting in the Senate or Congress) would become president, not the person with the most votes and who didn't concede.
You speak of disenfranchisement... what would you say if I told you that disenfranchisement is effectively built into the law?
Quoting from Florida Law, specifically: Section 102.111 Elections Canvassing Commission, a little way down through the paragraph we find:
"If the county returns are not received by the Department of State by 5 p.m. of the seventh day following an election, all missing counties shall be ignored, and the results shown by the returns on file shall be certified."
Back to your quote of: "patently false premise that the election had to be done on time" on the contrary, the above line says so at the state level, just as there are deadlines at the federal level.
Nay, I was already quite aware of the US being a Republic and was using sarcasm in my original post... it seems that some (those with mod points and you) have miss understood it.
You misunderstand my point.
First up though... it was not the Senate's place to act as the vote in Florida was certified and the electors voted as expected based on the certified results. Quoting from the Federal Election Comission:
In the event no one obtains an absolute majority of electoral votes for president, the U.S. House of Representatives (as the chamber closest to the people) selects the president from among the top three contenders with each State casting only one vote and an absolute majority of the States being required to elect. Similarly, if no one obtains an absolute majority for vice president, then the U.S. Senate makes the selection from among the top two contenders for that office.
Now back to my point:
In a democracy, the majority rules, and those eligible to vote are given the opportunity to directly vote on an issue.
In a representative democracy, we elect persons who we believe will represent our interests.
In a republic (as we have (I can prove it later if you don't believe me), we vote for electors and ultimately tell them what we would like them to do, but for the most part they are NOT required to act as we ask.
Only 26 states in the union ( + DC) have laws requiring an elector to cast their ballot in a given way... and yes, Florida is one of those states.
That means of the remaining 24, comprising of 254 Electoral Votes, are NOT required to vote for the candidate that their state does. Traditionally they do, however they are not required to and theoretically, if a large enough number of electors voted differently then the population of the states they represent did... we could have an elected president who received even fewer votes (percentage wise) then Bush did in 2000.
If you think for a moment that the fact that "The fact that Gore acquiesced" counts him out, you are sadly mistaken and need to do some reading on how US Presidential Elections work.
Democracy? Oh yea... that thing we keep hearing of bring to other countries and yet we have so little of it here at the federal level.
After all... the fact that George W Bush is President proves that we do not have a democracy.
If I were a Bush fan I would be screaming "Long love the Republic of the United States of America". (which I would remind you the US is (not a democracy, and certainly not a representative democracy)).
I'm more concerned about the evil radio waves which keep trespassing on my property, permeating my entire home and being. My tin foil hat just isn't enough!!!
I'm thinking I need to construct a large set of lead shielded antennas and satellite dishes so as to keep them from getting inside my home... and... while I've got em captured, might as well do something with em, same I have no clue what to do.
Don't forget the Swiss!
From the article:
'Switzerland proposed language that "roughly corresponds" to it.'
True... or you have sufficient redundancy that the death of a single disk does not result in a catastrophe.
Personally speaking, I've never given away or sold a HD in my life... not that I'm paranoid about what might be on it, I find it a good practice to use em until they die, even if it's only a few extra gigs.
Prior to March 6th, 2000 when the patent was applied for?
or post-it notes on the monitor or near by wall... my mother still does this despite my insistence that she stop.
and shows why open source is an effective model
Not so, it only shows that open source is an effective model IF these transitions occur smoothly and the destination is found to be worthy the journey.
Another advantage of the using the hosts file is that you can specify where it'll look.
For the longest time I had it set to 127.0.0.1, but often a web page would try to hit a file on my local machine which would require a password... so, I picked a new ip address. That of your friend and mine, SCO. Almost every time I am supposed to see a banner ad, I see instead a copy of the SCO web site.
What ifwe don't care about OGG support? I when I bought my iPod a year ago, there was no iTMS for the PC (nor iTunes), nor any OGG support. I was quite happy then, just as I am now.
I guess I don't understand the draw for people to want OGG support so bad.
If you want an iPod, then you don't get OGG support, if you want to play your OGG files... you are forced to convert em.
If you MUST have OGG support in a portable device, then buy one with it already and quit complaining to Apple!
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Just a lil FYI...
C# != "C-pound"
C# == "C Sharp"
... and run Windows! *ducks*
"Such laws criminalize thought; they add an additional penalty not based on the damage actually inflicted upon the victim, but based on the thoughts and feelings of the aggressor toward the victim."
Not necessarily. In most cases, to prove a "Hate Crime" you must prove that the person committed the crime because of some racial/cultural difference and hatred.
You seem to be going with the same logic of many of our lawmakers, that if someone hates a member of a minority group, that they are hated because they are a member of that group.
Personally speaking, I am an equally opportunity hater, my hatred is not bound by race, religion, national origin, sex, disability, age, spoken language, political affiliation, weight, height, natural hair color or any other easily categorized term related to something someone has little if any choice related to.
If I hate someone, I hate because of stupidity, ignorance or other areas which one does have control over.
I do agree that such "Hate Crime" laws are rather pointless, like the death penalty, they do little to deter crime. I can't say I've ever heard a person say: "I want to kill someone, better not make it a black guy, otherwise I might go to jail for even longer."
Such craziness is not limited however to written law. It also plays a big part in perception, for example:
If a large and small dog get into a fight, and the little dog is the aggressor. We would most likely see the small dog come away dead or fairly injured. This makes perfect sense as the large dog by it's size would be stronger and able to do more harm to the small dog... does that mean it is fully responsible for what happened?
If a large person (height and weight) were to get into a fight with a smaller person, no matter the outcome, the larger person would be vilified because they should have known better and have a responsibility not to harm those smaller then them... regardless of what threat they may pose.
The difference is that the human has some choice. The little dog does not know that it might/will get hurt, the small person may know that, but they think they can beat the larger person. But no matter how it turns out, the larger person will be to blame for harming someone who they can harm, while the smaller person was just 'defending themselves against a bully'.
Similar craziness.
Nay, wouldn't have gone anywhere as he owned no copyrights on what he said within the e-mails.
As a professor of the University, using a University provided PC, using a university provided e-mail account, acing as a professor of the University, he had no claim to material he may create while on the job. Any e-mails he would write to me or anyone else, are 'copyrighted' by the University and he has no claim to them.
This is similar to how a student can record a professors lectures and in most cases the professor cannot stop the student unless doing so is a disturbance. This is because the professor does not own the copyrights to the performance they give in the classroom, it is up to the U to decide such matters.
Now if the U wanted to sue me, then that would be a different story.
You are not being held accountable solely for what you think or feel, but how you express such feelings.
If a racists runs around screaming "I hate *insert race here*'s" there is nothing legally wrong with that. However if our same racist goes off and kills a *insert race here* man while screaming "I hate *insert race here*s", then it is no longer just them saying how they feel but acting upon how the feel and in an illegal manor.
While we do have the freedom of speech, expression of it can be curtailed. Advocating violence against an individual or group does tend to be illegal, it is the difference between simply saying "I hate *insert race here*'s" and "I think someone should kill *insert race here*'s".
Hence this is part of the logic behind it being illegal to advocate violence against the president. No matter how much you don't like him or dislike him, do not say that someone should harm him in any physical way... doing so can get the Feds on your rear.
Libel/Slander can exist if the intent of the quote was to cause harm. That is to say, if I quoted something that painted someone in a very bad light and my intent of quoting it was to cause them to loose a job, money, etc then yes, I could held liable (although in the US, Libel/Slander are very very very difficult things to sell in court).
Thus when ever you quote the opposition, it is important not to mean it in a "hahaha, I'm going to get you way" but instead a more dignified "here is the truth, nothing more" manor.
Exactly, and for the longest time, the only place you can truly be confident of the security of a document is within your own head... that is until the Thought Police from the Ministry of Love are unleashed... I can only imagine the kinds of Thought Crimes I have committed! Down with Big Brother... er... oh crap.
... one can still gripe about the 'confidentiality' of an e-mail and have a case (albeit limited).
Not too long ago I was having a bit of an e-mail battle with a professor and as many of what he said was flat out wrong, I put up a small webpage with the unabridged text of the e-mails for other students in the class to read so they would be aware of the problems I had raised which concerned them all.
The professor later threatened to sue me for "libel, slander and defamation" because of the "publication of our confidential and private e-mail conversations", even though there was no disclaimer or even an assumption of privacy.
Thankfully, given a number of illegal things he had done in the e-mails (IE blowing off FERPA), any such case would have been thrown out quite quickly.
When I told this story to my father, he told me a quote he heard long ago:
"Never put something in a letter that you don't want the other guy's lawyer holding up in court"
The moral of this story: Disclaimer or not, don't write anything in an e-mail, letter, diary, word document that you don't want getting out.
I personally know my rights and thus am willing to give them up for a higher purpose.
You sir make me sick, and in response I have a quote for you... from the mind of Benjamin Franklin:
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
And now simply ask that you get the hell out of the way of those of us who care about liberty and will fight with our last breath to keep it!