See, I knew someone would say "strong crypto=guns", everybody should have the right to use strong crypto, and everybody should have the right to use guns.
Let me point out what I think is the fundamental difference between these two arguments: crypto, used in anger or accidentally, is not dangerous.
The saying "guns don't kill people, people kill people" is completely true. But guns make it really easy for people to kill. If a kid accidentally uses strong crypto, nobody dies. If a kid accidentally uses a gun, someone will probably be hurt or killed.
Another popular saying is "if guns are outlawed only outlaws will have guns". That's kinda the point. If a police officer sees someone with a gun, he doesn't have to wonder if it is legal or not. Anybody trading in guns is breaking the law, there is no grey area like there is with gun shows, etc. It also means that petty criminals will not easily obtain guns. While it's true that "if strong crypto is outlawed only outlaws will have strong crypto", this doesn't really help law enforcement. If somehow they manage to intercept communication and realize it's encrypted, that'll be as much as they can do. Any outlaw with any skill will pick a good crypto system and make it strong enough to defeat law enforcement. Crypto is easy to use, hide and copy, unlike guns. Anybody with anything to hide would be able to obtain complete privacy, but the average citizen would have none. That's just dumb.
Never mind whether or not making guns illegal is a good or bad thing. That's a different battle. But guns are not the same as crypto tools.
That may be the case, but it seems to me that the way those skinned COM controls work isn't the way tools like "grep" and "sort" work. Word isn't an editor that calls up a spell-checker when needed, pipes things to a printing subsystem later, uses a word-counter-tool when needed, etc. It is a monolithic thing that (seemingly at least) runs all those tools at the same time. Something monolithic must be starting, otherwise why does Word take so long to load, even on the fastest machine?
I think what the author is suggesting, and what people would love, is something more unixlike. The main application should be the editor, and it should do only that -- editing. The spell-checker should be a completely different module. If the user wants squigglies underlining mis-spelled words as he/she types then this spell checker could be triggered every time a word is finished to check that new word.
Obviously the pure unix method of truly different applications wouldn't work right for a system like this. Running a spell-checking application every time a word needs to be checked would be too slow and cpu-hogging, but maybe having a spell-checking daemon running waiting to check words would be the way to go.
I think a Linux office suite would need something that could accept word documents, but maybe this could be done with a standalone ms-format-converter program, writing the contents as XML which the main editor can read. I see no need to be able to write word documents directly, though chaining to the ms-format-converter as a convenience might be a nice touch.
A great way to do this would be modules that could be loaded at runtime as needed. Ideally something could even be integrated with 'net access. Say Amy is editing a lab report and wants to add a formula. She goes to a "tools" menu and doesn't see what she wants, so she clicks on "other tools". The system shows her what tools are available on her system. She clicks on "check the web" and a few moments later a list of all tools is displayed by category, she chooses "scientific | formula editor", it seamlessly downloads and installs locally (a la perl / apt get) and a few minutes later she's entering the formula into the editor.
Open source software would have the advantage that a small, basic subset of functionality could be included by default. The software package would be small and the install time would be quick. Then as the user needed additional modules could be downloaded. A university student doing essays would have a spelling, grammar and formatting tools. A chemistry researcher writing papers would have formula editors, grammar, spelling, bibliography, formatting, etc. tools installed. Little girls and script kiddies might have wild fonts, crazy borders, and similar tools installed. But everybody would only have what they need.
There just has to be a way that has a better user experience than the Microsoft Way. I don't want to have to wait 20 seconds to open a ".doc" file that happens to be plain text with a ".doc" extension. I also don't want to have all other programs grind to a halt when I open a word document that contains nested Excel tables, or.AVI movies, or whatever else you can embed in a word document these days.
Is this possible, or am I just dreaming? That's what I want out of an office suite anyhow. Simple tools with numerous plugins/addons. Is that so hard?
Sure to be controversial, but
Micheal Moore has a very interesting message about the attacks. He mentions that the person whose name has been mentioned the most in connection to these attacks, Osama bin Laden was trained by the CIA.
I'm a citizen of both the US and Canada, and I draw a different conclusion here. If you asked around the world today and said "what country thinks they are the supreme country and their president is the most powerful man in the world", most people would point to the US. If you asked "which country treats the population of the rest of the world like mongrel scum and commits horrendous atrocities on those people", many people would point to the US.
Maybe this will finally wake the people of the US up to the fact that even the most friendly neighbors (Canada and Mexico) are often pissed off at the way the US treats the rest of the world. "The American Way" is not the only way, and isn't the same as "the right way".
Even the fact that you suggest that somehow the US might have the option of enforcing it's views on which religions are "A-OK" and which are "unamerican" shows the kind of arrogance the rest of the world can't stand.
The destruction of the WTC and the Pentagon were horrible tragedies, but they were the direct result of the US pushing the rest of the world around with its monetary and military might.
Instead of asking "who can we kill to avenge this?", maybe you should ask "why would someone hate us enough to do this?"
Actually it's more like putting bullet-proof glass in every car in the US. It would be hugely expensive, increasing the cost of the average car by thousands of dollars. For the average family, it might never be useful. And it is pretty much pointless if people are always dying in car crashes instead.
For a better analogy look at the Maginot Line in France. At the time it was a "high tech" defence against invasion by the German army, it took years to build and cost a lot of money. When the Germans invaded France, they simply went around it. The line was never taken by force, but that didn't matter much because by the time the French surrendered it, it was meaningless.
All a defence like the Maginot Line or a Star Wars missile shield will do is force an attacker to change attack plans. That in itself has some value, but it could probably be accomplished for less than $100 billion dollars.
For more info on the Maginot Line (and other comparisons to the Star Wars plans) search on Google.
I somewhat agree. Training to fly the plane is a lot easier if you don't care about safety regulations and don't care about learning to land or take off. But it's not that easy.
Big planes have *lots* of momentum. Any change in altitude or direction has to be planned long in advance. Turns also have to be smooth. The roll-rate of a jumbo-jet isn't all that great.
The one part of this that really indicates training to me is the navigation. The planes that hit the World Trade Center took off from Boston headed for California. Sometime in the flight they successfully found the right bearing to NYC, then found the world trade centre buildings in NYC. Even though they're a prominent landmark in Manhattan, finding Manhattan itself would require some real navigation skills.
"And Javascript is even worse." Javascript really has nothing to do with Java. It's an untyped, interpreted language with a syntax vaguely similar to Java. But there are things you can do with Javascript that you can't do in C. Lambda forms: "new Function("x", "x+6")", runtime modification of objects, etc.
"I want to pass a variable to a function and have it modify it, oops, no pointers." Objects in Java are passed by reference, built-in types aren't, but it's trivial to wrap them in an object if you want a function to modify them.
Re garbage collection: "I never did understand this gripe. Whenever I put a malloc, I immediately put a free. Whenever I do a new, I immediately put the destroy somewhere." Ok, but what about when the memory is allocated by a 3rd party library you're using? What if it is badly documented and doesn't explain which functions allocate memory and which don't? What about exceptions and errors? Sometimes knowing when/where to delete memory is a very complex process, and really, is this something the average programmer should be doing, or something a compiler/runtime/vm should be doing?
Maybe I'm just lazy but I prefer to design a system rather than worry about memory. I've done tight C/C++ code (on the Palm Pilot among other things), and I've done Java. To me, Java is just less frustrating, and places fewer barriers in my way.
C/C++ is really C/C++/preprocessor. When I include a file I don't want to care if it has already been included, but C/C++ requires that every header file be protected with ifdefs. Why can't the system take care of that for me? What about changing functions? In Java I change it one place, in C/C++ I have to change the header and the source. Why can't the system take care of that for me? I guess I'm just lazy but to me those things are minutia that I don't want to have to bother with. I realize that Java handcuffs me, and I would never choose it for something that had to be highly optimized or really small. At the same time, I'm glad it handcuffs other less skilled developers. If nobody can use pointers, goto statements, global variables, and other messy things, it makes maintaining code so much nicer.
My biggest problem with Java is with the implementation, not the language. If it were designed from the start to be platform-independant code, but code that had to be recompiled for each platform, that would be great. That would fix most of the speed issues, except for the garbage collection.
About beauty: Generally inline assembly, preprocessor junk, goto statements, pointer arithmetic, etc. are ugly code. Sometimes they have their place, but unless they're well documented they're really nasty. Because of this I think it's much easier to write beautiful code in Java.
Re:Beauty for beauty's sake makes crappy software
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Software Aesthetics
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See, that's just why that coding style is wrong. Opening braces don't belong on their own line! Imagine how much money we could have saved if those coders just used the right coding style!
If you're going to supply a form letter at least make it readable:
This law is currently being used by the federal government to quash the Free Speech rights of a Russian computer programmer, Dmitry Sklyarov, who was arrested for using his programming skills to demonstrate that Adobe Corporation's E-Book security was flawed and held without bail for several weeks in the United States.
Change that unreadable run-on sentence to something like: "This law is currently being used to quash the Free Speech rights of Dmitry Sklyarov, a Russian computer programmer. Mr. Sklyarov was arrested after using his computer programming skills to demonstrate the serious security flaws in Adobe corporation's E-Book technology. Adding insult to this arrest, Mr. Sklyarov was held without bail for several weeks before being indicted." I also think any letter should emphasize that Sklyarov wasn't sneaking around, he was speaking at a conference on computer security.
Yeah, that is the difference..NET, an experiment with theoretical support for multiple languages. JVM, a working environment designed for use with Java that theoretically supports other languages.
But how do you determine if your computer has become intelligent? Would it just require that a popup dialog came up on your screen saying "I'm intelligent", or would it have to really convince you through an intelligent discussion?
But what if it was 10x more intelligent than a person, and even more self-aware, but not able to express that intelligence and self-awareness in a language you can understand?
And from a practical point of view, how would you "set your computer free"? Unplug it and set it out on the street? That'd kill it right? Provide it a generator, interface it to an electric wheelchair, design protection from the elements? Buy a house for it? What about just stopping using it? Then you'd be denying it sensory stimulus which living things might need. Who knows what a self-aware computer would consider "Freedom"?
Re:Big Brother Has Been Around for a While
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Taming the Web
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If you have a bank account, you have an account number. If you have a computer it has a serial number (and you as the owner can be identified by that). If you have a job you probably have a SSN/SIN. Does anybody ask me for any of those numbers when I go buy a pack of gum? What about when I travel across the country? Nope. Having a number of numeric IDs doesn't mean I was assigned a number at birth, and certainly doesn't give it that ominous feel you talked about. Don't let numbers scare you so much. Despite all these numbers we have, we still have more freedom than the numberless slaves did, or than the peasants of the middle ages. It's not the number that's dangerous -- it's how it's used, and until you can convince me that big brother is tracking my every bubble-gum purchase I'm not going to worry.
Imagine this scenario:
Officer: "ON THE GROUND TERRORIST!!"
Officer 2: "HE HAS A GUN!!"
Officer: "Damn armed terrorists"
Don't you think that's a wee bit more likely than being shot for being lippy?
The international nature of the Internet is really just a red herring. The real important point is the 'net is too hetrogenous to control. Too many different protocols, laws and locations are involved. The proof of this is that even though nearly all countries with significan Internet connections consider kiddie-pr0n to be highly illegal, it continues to thrive. If being illegal were enough of a reason for something to disappear wouldn't that be gone by now?
Napster, Gnutella and BearShare all have their flaws. This shows that regulators/authorities will always find a way to shut down any new innovation. Whether this is true or not is unimportant. The only thing that could make the interconnected nature of the Internet meaningless is if somehow it were possible to stop the next version of the program to avoid blocking. Freenet may well have many flaws and may be blocked completely some day, but how long do you think it would be till Freenet2?
The only argument the article addresses that's at all meaningful (hidden away in that secret 3rd page) is that the 'net is full of hackers that are impossible to control. This really ends up being the same argument as the other ones. The only way these hackers are not an issue is if the thing they're attacking is attackproof. The only way to make something inaccessible to hackers is to make it inaccessible to everybody. The best that someone protecting something is that they make it so hard it's not worth the while to try. This is possible, but very unlikely.
Back to the subject line. This whole article is about preventing one or more people from getting something they want. One obvious example of this is video games. EA has been publishing computer games for about 20 years now, and in that time I've played cracked EA games on just about every platform, from the C64 to the PS2. Throughout that whole time EA has fought against "pirates", but they just can't stop them.
Right now getting an MP3 of RIAA music is about as easy as using a few POKE and PEEK commands on a C64 to bypass the copy protection of MULE or the Pinball Construction Set. In the future it may well be as hard as getting past the copy protection in Madden 2002 on a Nintendo cartridge. If it's worth it to them, people will do it.
The fact nobody has yet broken into Fort Knox doesn't mean that Fort Knox can't be broken into. It especially doesn't mean the issue of "keeping gold safe" has been solved. It's always just a matter of time.
Re:Big Brother Has Been Around for a While
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Taming the Web
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So... you were given a number at birth? I wasn't. In fact I was never forced to have an ID number. I do currently have a number of numbers that uniquely identify me or my possessions, but certainly no supreme ID tag. When I decided I wanted an above-the-board job and was willing to pay taxes I accepted a government-given number. But rarely do I need that number except when dealing with such an above-the-board job.
You talk about what happens when I decide to fight. I'll tell you something -- I'm fighting already. And the government isn't going to have much luck disarming me. See, I'm not dumb enough to think that I can actually take on the government through physical violence. My weapon is my mind.
Re:How much deeper does this hole get?
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Netscape 6.1
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Unfortunately Pavlovich, like most Americans, is very America-centric. If he had thought things through he might have noted that far more movies are made in India (Bollywood) than in Hollywood, and that most computer manufacturing occurs in Taiwan or other locations in south-east Asia.
If pushed he could have admitted that there is a cultural bias suggesting that Hollywood is the source of all movies and Silicon Valley the source of all technology. But he would have been clever to follow that up with "You have identified that I am an expert witness, and as such I would have to note that I realize that California is a major player, but by no means the center of motion picture activity or technology".
I dunno, probably a decent lawyer would have trashed him no matter what he said, but it sure seems to me like he walked into that one. But then again, it must be hard to believe what they're trying is actually legal.
A jealous husband? You're making a lot of cultural assumptions there. Traditional inuit families often had wives with two husbands, or husbands with two wives. I even recall hearing once that it was custom for a man to lend his wife to a visiting guest.
This man died 5000 years ago. People then were very primitive by our standards. It could be this man was killed because people thought he was posessed by an evil spirit. It could be that he was old and a drain on his community so he was chased out of his home.
Good science requires that you don't forget all your assupmtions and look at only the facts. Don't jump to conclusions based on what might make you shoot a guy in the back.
I'm a big fan of useful science, but just because something can be done, and some potentially interesting (though not particularly useful) information may come from some investigation isn't necessarily enough of a reason to go digging up people's graves.
Most slashdot readers are western-educated christian (at least culturally) scientific-minded people. We might not even mind if someone dug up our grandparents for the sake of science. But part of being a good citizen of the world is having respect for other people and their beliefs.
Considering the way north-american natives were treated for the last 300 years or so, are they really asking for so much? Shouldn't they have some say in how the sites which they considered sacred and the remains of their ancestors are treated? I'm sure if they saw a real value in the science then they might make concessions, but "We wanna dig up a body to find out what killed him" is a pretty poor reason.
Sure, but many people get "pay per view" movies on TV, or special events like boxing matches, etc. They're willing to pay extra for that content on top of the delivery cost. Why won't people pay for (non-porn) content on the Internet?
Sun Tzu gives good advice, but you have to be careful following it. Grok the whole text before you take small quotes out of context.
Hence to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting. Thus the highest form of generalship is to balk the enemy's plans, the next best is to prevent the junction of the enemy's forces, the next in order is to attack the enemy's army in the field, (when he is already at full strength) and the worst policy of all is to besiege walled cities.
Attacking core deployed MS services is akin to besieging walled cities. If it is possible to stop them before they fully deploy.NET that would be like balking their plans. But MS is still the big army and when fighting a superior (numerically anyhow) enemy, it is smart to pick your fights.
The spot where we intend to fight must not be made known; for then the enemy will have to prepare against a possible attack at several different points;
In an open source context this doesn't mean secrecy, I believe it means keep all kinds of small projects open and underway and whatever project makes good headway against Microsoft should become "the spot where we intend to fight".
I think it's important to not ignore.NET, and like Sun Tzu says: "Thus, though we have heard of stupid haste in war, cleverness has never been seen associated with long delays." Don't ignore.NET until it becomes entrenched. But don't let them choose the fight. Don't rush in and make a broken, inferior.NET implementation or people will think only MS can do.NET properly.
Sure, but we ignore relativity when doing simple physics in high school, pretending that F = m*a, and that mass, length and time are all constants. The fact is, for the most part Newtonian mechanics are pretty much correct, even if they're mathematically wrong. The equations are just simpler if the speed of light isn't a limit.
Work is in a city which has air brown enough to see as I descend into the valley in the morning. I watch the brown crud rise several hundred feet during the day, just before I escape back home.
If the air doesn't get you, the traffic probably will. Some of the most dense traffic in the country.
And I'm sure have plenty of time to wonder exactly where all that pollution and traffic comes from as you SPEND 2 HOURS COMMUTING EACH DAY.
Under 1.3 the record button recorded (for me records) for 30 minutes. They're not dropping any functionality that used to be there, they're simply changing it back. Since there's no stop button they don't really have a good alternative. It is supposed to record a currently playing show, so I see a 30 minute recording for a currently playing show as a good compromise. If what you want to record is going to run longer, bring up the "manual recording" option and set it up to stop when you want it to stop.
Slashdot Mirror
See, I knew someone would say "strong crypto=guns", everybody should have the right to use strong crypto, and everybody should have the right to use guns.
Let me point out what I think is the fundamental difference between these two arguments: crypto, used in anger or accidentally, is not dangerous.
The saying "guns don't kill people, people kill people" is completely true. But guns make it really easy for people to kill. If a kid accidentally uses strong crypto, nobody dies. If a kid accidentally uses a gun, someone will probably be hurt or killed.
Another popular saying is "if guns are outlawed only outlaws will have guns". That's kinda the point. If a police officer sees someone with a gun, he doesn't have to wonder if it is legal or not. Anybody trading in guns is breaking the law, there is no grey area like there is with gun shows, etc. It also means that petty criminals will not easily obtain guns. While it's true that "if strong crypto is outlawed only outlaws will have strong crypto", this doesn't really help law enforcement. If somehow they manage to intercept communication and realize it's encrypted, that'll be as much as they can do. Any outlaw with any skill will pick a good crypto system and make it strong enough to defeat law enforcement. Crypto is easy to use, hide and copy, unlike guns. Anybody with anything to hide would be able to obtain complete privacy, but the average citizen would have none. That's just dumb.
Never mind whether or not making guns illegal is a good or bad thing. That's a different battle. But guns are not the same as crypto tools.
That may be the case, but it seems to me that the way those skinned COM controls work isn't the way tools like "grep" and "sort" work. Word isn't an editor that calls up a spell-checker when needed, pipes things to a printing subsystem later, uses a word-counter-tool when needed, etc. It is a monolithic thing that (seemingly at least) runs all those tools at the same time. Something monolithic must be starting, otherwise why does Word take so long to load, even on the fastest machine?
I think what the author is suggesting, and what people would love, is something more unixlike. The main application should be the editor, and it should do only that -- editing. The spell-checker should be a completely different module. If the user wants squigglies underlining mis-spelled words as he/she types then this spell checker could be triggered every time a word is finished to check that new word.
Obviously the pure unix method of truly different applications wouldn't work right for a system like this. Running a spell-checking application every time a word needs to be checked would be too slow and cpu-hogging, but maybe having a spell-checking daemon running waiting to check words would be the way to go.
I think a Linux office suite would need something that could accept word documents, but maybe this could be done with a standalone ms-format-converter program, writing the contents as XML which the main editor can read. I see no need to be able to write word documents directly, though chaining to the ms-format-converter as a convenience might be a nice touch.
A great way to do this would be modules that could be loaded at runtime as needed. Ideally something could even be integrated with 'net access. Say Amy is editing a lab report and wants to add a formula. She goes to a "tools" menu and doesn't see what she wants, so she clicks on "other tools". The system shows her what tools are available on her system. She clicks on "check the web" and a few moments later a list of all tools is displayed by category, she chooses "scientific | formula editor", it seamlessly downloads and installs locally (a la perl / apt get) and a few minutes later she's entering the formula into the editor.
Open source software would have the advantage that a small, basic subset of functionality could be included by default. The software package would be small and the install time would be quick. Then as the user needed additional modules could be downloaded. A university student doing essays would have a spelling, grammar and formatting tools. A chemistry researcher writing papers would have formula editors, grammar, spelling, bibliography, formatting, etc. tools installed. Little girls and script kiddies might have wild fonts, crazy borders, and similar tools installed. But everybody would only have what they need.
There just has to be a way that has a better user experience than the Microsoft Way. I don't want to have to wait 20 seconds to open a ".doc" file that happens to be plain text with a ".doc" extension. I also don't want to have all other programs grind to a halt when I open a word document that contains nested Excel tables, or .AVI movies, or whatever else you can embed in a word document these days.
Is this possible, or am I just dreaming? That's what I want out of an office suite anyhow. Simple tools with numerous plugins/addons. Is that so hard?
Sure to be controversial, but Micheal Moore has a very interesting message about the attacks. He mentions that the person whose name has been mentioned the most in connection to these attacks, Osama bin Laden was trained by the CIA.
I'm a citizen of both the US and Canada, and I draw a different conclusion here. If you asked around the world today and said "what country thinks they are the supreme country and their president is the most powerful man in the world", most people would point to the US. If you asked "which country treats the population of the rest of the world like mongrel scum and commits horrendous atrocities on those people", many people would point to the US.
Maybe this will finally wake the people of the US up to the fact that even the most friendly neighbors (Canada and Mexico) are often pissed off at the way the US treats the rest of the world. "The American Way" is not the only way, and isn't the same as "the right way".
Even the fact that you suggest that somehow the US might have the option of enforcing it's views on which religions are "A-OK" and which are "unamerican" shows the kind of arrogance the rest of the world can't stand.
The destruction of the WTC and the Pentagon were horrible tragedies, but they were the direct result of the US pushing the rest of the world around with its monetary and military might.
Instead of asking "who can we kill to avenge this?", maybe you should ask "why would someone hate us enough to do this?"
Bye bye Karma, but this rant was necessary.
Actually it's more like putting bullet-proof glass in every car in the US. It would be hugely expensive, increasing the cost of the average car by thousands of dollars. For the average family, it might never be useful. And it is pretty much pointless if people are always dying in car crashes instead.
For a better analogy look at the Maginot Line in France. At the time it was a "high tech" defence against invasion by the German army, it took years to build and cost a lot of money. When the Germans invaded France, they simply went around it. The line was never taken by force, but that didn't matter much because by the time the French surrendered it, it was meaningless.
All a defence like the Maginot Line or a Star Wars missile shield will do is force an attacker to change attack plans. That in itself has some value, but it could probably be accomplished for less than $100 billion dollars.
For more info on the Maginot Line (and other comparisons to the Star Wars plans) search on Google.
I somewhat agree. Training to fly the plane is a lot easier if you don't care about safety regulations and don't care about learning to land or take off. But it's not that easy.
Big planes have *lots* of momentum. Any change in altitude or direction has to be planned long in advance. Turns also have to be smooth. The roll-rate of a jumbo-jet isn't all that great.
The one part of this that really indicates training to me is the navigation. The planes that hit the World Trade Center took off from Boston headed for California. Sometime in the flight they successfully found the right bearing to NYC, then found the world trade centre buildings in NYC. Even though they're a prominent landmark in Manhattan, finding Manhattan itself would require some real navigation skills.
"And Javascript is even worse." Javascript really has nothing to do with Java. It's an untyped, interpreted language with a syntax vaguely similar to Java. But there are things you can do with Javascript that you can't do in C. Lambda forms: "new Function("x", "x+6")", runtime modification of objects, etc.
"I want to pass a variable to a function and have it modify it, oops, no pointers." Objects in Java are passed by reference, built-in types aren't, but it's trivial to wrap them in an object if you want a function to modify them.
Re garbage collection: "I never did understand this gripe. Whenever I put a malloc, I immediately put a free. Whenever I do a new, I immediately put the destroy somewhere." Ok, but what about when the memory is allocated by a 3rd party library you're using? What if it is badly documented and doesn't explain which functions allocate memory and which don't? What about exceptions and errors? Sometimes knowing when/where to delete memory is a very complex process, and really, is this something the average programmer should be doing, or something a compiler/runtime/vm should be doing?
Maybe I'm just lazy but I prefer to design a system rather than worry about memory. I've done tight C/C++ code (on the Palm Pilot among other things), and I've done Java. To me, Java is just less frustrating, and places fewer barriers in my way.
C/C++ is really C/C++/preprocessor. When I include a file I don't want to care if it has already been included, but C/C++ requires that every header file be protected with ifdefs. Why can't the system take care of that for me? What about changing functions? In Java I change it one place, in C/C++ I have to change the header and the source. Why can't the system take care of that for me? I guess I'm just lazy but to me those things are minutia that I don't want to have to bother with. I realize that Java handcuffs me, and I would never choose it for something that had to be highly optimized or really small. At the same time, I'm glad it handcuffs other less skilled developers. If nobody can use pointers, goto statements, global variables, and other messy things, it makes maintaining code so much nicer.
My biggest problem with Java is with the implementation, not the language. If it were designed from the start to be platform-independant code, but code that had to be recompiled for each platform, that would be great. That would fix most of the speed issues, except for the garbage collection.
About beauty: Generally inline assembly, preprocessor junk, goto statements, pointer arithmetic, etc. are ugly code. Sometimes they have their place, but unless they're well documented they're really nasty. Because of this I think it's much easier to write beautiful code in Java.
See, that's just why that coding style is wrong. Opening braces don't belong on their own line! Imagine how much money we could have saved if those coders just used the right coding style!
If you're going to supply a form letter at least make it readable:
Change that unreadable run-on sentence to something like: "This law is currently being used to quash the Free Speech rights of Dmitry Sklyarov, a Russian computer programmer. Mr. Sklyarov was arrested after using his computer programming skills to demonstrate the serious security flaws in Adobe corporation's E-Book technology. Adding insult to this arrest, Mr. Sklyarov was held without bail for several weeks before being indicted." I also think any letter should emphasize that Sklyarov wasn't sneaking around, he was speaking at a conference on computer security.
Yeah, that is the difference. .NET, an experiment with theoretical support for multiple languages. JVM, a working environment designed for use with Java that theoretically supports other languages.
But how do you determine if your computer has become intelligent? Would it just require that a popup dialog came up on your screen saying "I'm intelligent", or would it have to really convince you through an intelligent discussion?
But what if it was 10x more intelligent than a person, and even more self-aware, but not able to express that intelligence and self-awareness in a language you can understand?
And from a practical point of view, how would you "set your computer free"? Unplug it and set it out on the street? That'd kill it right? Provide it a generator, interface it to an electric wheelchair, design protection from the elements? Buy a house for it? What about just stopping using it? Then you'd be denying it sensory stimulus which living things might need. Who knows what a self-aware computer would consider "Freedom"?
If you have a bank account, you have an account number. If you have a computer it has a serial number (and you as the owner can be identified by that). If you have a job you probably have a SSN/SIN. Does anybody ask me for any of those numbers when I go buy a pack of gum? What about when I travel across the country? Nope. Having a number of numeric IDs doesn't mean I was assigned a number at birth, and certainly doesn't give it that ominous feel you talked about. Don't let numbers scare you so much. Despite all these numbers we have, we still have more freedom than the numberless slaves did, or than the peasants of the middle ages. It's not the number that's dangerous -- it's how it's used, and until you can convince me that big brother is tracking my every bubble-gum purchase I'm not going to worry.
Imagine this scenario:
Officer: "ON THE GROUND TERRORIST!!" Officer 2: "HE HAS A GUN!!" Officer: "Damn armed terrorists"
Don't you think that's a wee bit more likely than being shot for being lippy?
The international nature of the Internet is really just a red herring. The real important point is the 'net is too hetrogenous to control. Too many different protocols, laws and locations are involved. The proof of this is that even though nearly all countries with significan Internet connections consider kiddie-pr0n to be highly illegal, it continues to thrive. If being illegal were enough of a reason for something to disappear wouldn't that be gone by now?
Napster, Gnutella and BearShare all have their flaws. This shows that regulators/authorities will always find a way to shut down any new innovation. Whether this is true or not is unimportant. The only thing that could make the interconnected nature of the Internet meaningless is if somehow it were possible to stop the next version of the program to avoid blocking. Freenet may well have many flaws and may be blocked completely some day, but how long do you think it would be till Freenet2?
The only argument the article addresses that's at all meaningful (hidden away in that secret 3rd page) is that the 'net is full of hackers that are impossible to control. This really ends up being the same argument as the other ones. The only way these hackers are not an issue is if the thing they're attacking is attackproof. The only way to make something inaccessible to hackers is to make it inaccessible to everybody. The best that someone protecting something is that they make it so hard it's not worth the while to try. This is possible, but very unlikely.
Back to the subject line. This whole article is about preventing one or more people from getting something they want. One obvious example of this is video games. EA has been publishing computer games for about 20 years now, and in that time I've played cracked EA games on just about every platform, from the C64 to the PS2. Throughout that whole time EA has fought against "pirates", but they just can't stop them.
Right now getting an MP3 of RIAA music is about as easy as using a few POKE and PEEK commands on a C64 to bypass the copy protection of MULE or the Pinball Construction Set. In the future it may well be as hard as getting past the copy protection in Madden 2002 on a Nintendo cartridge. If it's worth it to them, people will do it.
The fact nobody has yet broken into Fort Knox doesn't mean that Fort Knox can't be broken into. It especially doesn't mean the issue of "keeping gold safe" has been solved. It's always just a matter of time.
So... you were given a number at birth? I wasn't. In fact I was never forced to have an ID number. I do currently have a number of numbers that uniquely identify me or my possessions, but certainly no supreme ID tag. When I decided I wanted an above-the-board job and was willing to pay taxes I accepted a government-given number. But rarely do I need that number except when dealing with such an above-the-board job.
You talk about what happens when I decide to fight. I'll tell you something -- I'm fighting already. And the government isn't going to have much luck disarming me. See, I'm not dumb enough to think that I can actually take on the government through physical violence. My weapon is my mind.
I'm guessing the guys who run the prisons?
Unfortunately Pavlovich, like most Americans, is very America-centric. If he had thought things through he might have noted that far more movies are made in India (Bollywood) than in Hollywood, and that most computer manufacturing occurs in Taiwan or other locations in south-east Asia.
If pushed he could have admitted that there is a cultural bias suggesting that Hollywood is the source of all movies and Silicon Valley the source of all technology. But he would have been clever to follow that up with "You have identified that I am an expert witness, and as such I would have to note that I realize that California is a major player, but by no means the center of motion picture activity or technology".
I dunno, probably a decent lawyer would have trashed him no matter what he said, but it sure seems to me like he walked into that one. But then again, it must be hard to believe what they're trying is actually legal.
A jealous husband? You're making a lot of cultural assumptions there. Traditional inuit families often had wives with two husbands, or husbands with two wives. I even recall hearing once that it was custom for a man to lend his wife to a visiting guest.
This man died 5000 years ago. People then were very primitive by our standards. It could be this man was killed because people thought he was posessed by an evil spirit. It could be that he was old and a drain on his community so he was chased out of his home.
Good science requires that you don't forget all your assupmtions and look at only the facts. Don't jump to conclusions based on what might make you shoot a guy in the back.
I'm a big fan of useful science, but just because something can be done, and some potentially interesting (though not particularly useful) information may come from some investigation isn't necessarily enough of a reason to go digging up people's graves.
Most slashdot readers are western-educated christian (at least culturally) scientific-minded people. We might not even mind if someone dug up our grandparents for the sake of science. But part of being a good citizen of the world is having respect for other people and their beliefs.
Considering the way north-american natives were treated for the last 300 years or so, are they really asking for so much? Shouldn't they have some say in how the sites which they considered sacred and the remains of their ancestors are treated? I'm sure if they saw a real value in the science then they might make concessions, but "We wanna dig up a body to find out what killed him" is a pretty poor reason.
http://www.dictionary.com/cgi-bin/dict.pl?term=noo ne
Perhaps you meant "no one"?
Who is this "noone" fellow and why do you care what he remembers or forgets? Is he related to the "Right" brothers? I don't know them either.
Sure, but many people get "pay per view" movies on TV, or special events like boxing matches, etc. They're willing to pay extra for that content on top of the delivery cost. Why won't people pay for (non-porn) content on the Internet?
Sun Tzu gives good advice, but you have to be careful following it. Grok the whole text before you take small quotes out of context.
Attacking core deployed MS services is akin to besieging walled cities. If it is possible to stop them before they fully deploy .NET that would be like balking their plans. But MS is still the big army and when fighting a superior (numerically anyhow) enemy, it is smart to pick your fights.
In an open source context this doesn't mean secrecy, I believe it means keep all kinds of small projects open and underway and whatever project makes good headway against Microsoft should become "the spot where we intend to fight".
I think it's important to not ignore .NET, and like Sun Tzu says: "Thus, though we have heard of stupid haste in war, cleverness has never been seen associated with long delays." Don't ignore .NET until it becomes entrenched. But don't let them choose the fight. Don't rush in and make a broken, inferior .NET implementation or people will think only MS can do .NET properly.
(thank you Project Gutenberg)
Sure, but we ignore relativity when doing simple physics in high school, pretending that F = m*a, and that mass, length and time are all constants. The fact is, for the most part Newtonian mechanics are pretty much correct, even if they're mathematically wrong. The equations are just simpler if the speed of light isn't a limit.
And I'm sure have plenty of time to wonder exactly where all that pollution and traffic comes from as you SPEND 2 HOURS COMMUTING EACH DAY.
Under 1.3 the record button recorded (for me records) for 30 minutes. They're not dropping any functionality that used to be there, they're simply changing it back. Since there's no stop button they don't really have a good alternative. It is supposed to record a currently playing show, so I see a 30 minute recording for a currently playing show as a good compromise. If what you want to record is going to run longer, bring up the "manual recording" option and set it up to stop when you want it to stop.