It's not Flash, and it's not fancy, but it is massively multi-player, free and ad-free. Give WEBoggle a try, and maybe throw something in the tip jar if you like it - I could really use it right now.
You have my sympathy, for what it's worth. You have obvious cause to feel screwed over by the legal system. I can't offer legal advice, and I suspect that you won't like the advice I do offer: if you haven't already, consult with a lawyer *now* rather than waiting for the grandparents to make the first move. There is such a thing as a declaratory judgment in which *you* get to sue to have your rights decided, allowing you to choose the venue and frame the issues. You also might be able to persuade a judge to send you all to mediation in a local dispute resolution center, which can be a *lot* cheaper than court. Best of luck to you.
Neither lawyers nor lawmakers deliberately write laws to keep lawyers in business, as a rule. You seem to think that it would be easy to write a law or a contract so that it is utterly clear under all circumstances. You are mistaken. Clarity is, in fact, the (unattainable) goal of every good lawyer; If I write a sloppy contract, promissory note, or other legal document then my client is probably going to sue me for malpractice once it blows up in their face. I do my utmost (within the constraints of my client's patience and willingness to pay) to anticipate problems while drafting, and to head them off.
There are two approaches to writing laws. Civil law (see Louisiana and France) tries to capture every possible corner case and extreme circumstance in the written statutes, leaving judges and lawyers to "merely" read and apply them. Case law (see the rest of the U.S.) tries to keep statutes relatively simple expressions of the intent of the legislature, deferring decisions on corner cases and extreme situations until they arise in practice. Some areas of law, such as tax, finance, and commerce, *do* lend themselves to very specific and mechanical rules. In family law, torts, and other areas we are more concerned with flexible but fair rules than we are with rigid-but-simple "bright line" rules. It sounds like you would prefer civil law, but I expect that you would complain bitterly about its (necessary) density and complexity.
Let's look at your example, the "child's best interest". Phrasing it this way makes the fundamental intent pretty clear, doesn't it? We're obviously focusing on the child, to the exclusion of what the parents, grandparents, friends, or anyone else might want. You want a meaningful tangible definition for what this means in practice? This effectively means that you want someone to sit down and thing of every possible set of circumstances we might find a child in, in advance, and decide what the outcome should be. It isn't possible, and to the extent that civil law tries to do it, it results in huge expenditure of time and energy that *still* doesn't make the resolution of actual cases any easier. So instead, when the "best interest" is unclear, we let two teams of legal experts argue over what the best interest is given the specific facts before the court, and another legal expert (the judge) tries to craft a new rule based on the arguments presented. This rule may be sweeping, or may be very specific to quirks of the case, but it is now part of the law. That *specific* issue is settled (in that jurisdiction) and the new rule can be used in future cases.
Frankly, nothing in the Wikipedia entry dissuades me from the idea that a "Novel" means either "okay, yeah, it's a magazine serial, but it's a good magazine serial" or "Okay, yeah, it's a magazine serial, but we feel rather pretentious today." The only non-subjective distinction I could glean from the article is that novels are usually longer than a magazine serial. But given that some standard magazine serials have plot arcs spanning dozens of issues, that distinction strikes me as an unimportant one.
[...]
Stop being so insistent on terminology. You're nearly as bad as the person you're responding to. If these "novelists" are doing what they claim they are doing, they don't need the crutch of a separate designation; the term "magazine serial" will expand to fit their works.
I wish that I had read about JSON before coding up my own yet-another-lightweight data format for WEBoggle. It uses scgi with a persistent Python server rather than mod_python, and is a single-page application. My experience of JavaScript is quite similar to yours, although I'm a lot more affected by compatibility concerns.
Ah, the modest and self-effacing MEEPT. The glorious MEEPT, who would have liked to bring all the divided factions of linux into one big divided faction. He is missed, though his place in history is secure.
Suppose lots of people started crypto-signing their email. Some signatures might involve certifying that the sender is Bob, an employee of BigCorp. Others may be completely anonymous, only allowing the recipient to know that this email was sent by the same entity who sent me that email last week. Now we can begin to whitelist email from friends, mailing lists, etc based on these signatures. So far, so good.
In the proposed system, if you want to send an email to someone who doesn't know you, you enclose a coupon redeemable for a small amount of digital cash. If you offered enough, they'll receive the email and decide whether to take the money. You are notified if your message is rejected, if the coupon is redeemed, or (after some delay) if it wasn't. Add notification to you if your Id is whitelisted, and this looks pretty good.
Mailing lists (and anything else you genuinely opt into) don't have a problem. They don't offer a warranty, but you've whitelisted the list ID, so you receive the list mail.
Only two of the problems cited in this thread seem genuine to me -- security of the sender's Id and security of the digital cash transaction system.
Like the ZODB, except that the ZODB has pluggable storage backends, so that your objects can live in a FileStorage, DirectoryStorage, OracleStorage, etc. Except that ZODB has true transactions, with rollback and two-stage commit (allowing transactions to span other systems, such as an RDBMS). Oh, and except that the ZODB doesn't force all of your objects to live in memory at once; you set the cache size and it dynamically loads and unloads objects as necessary. Oh yeah, it also has ZEO for client-server access to object databases, so that you can spread your object processing across more than one computer. Did I forget anything? Sorry, the overdone Prevayler hype got to me:-)
By the way, ZODB is completely independent of Zope, although Zope relies on ZODB.
Re:Pre dot-com days.
on
Dotcom Era Fads
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I remember my wife telling me about this new web browser thingy. I looked at it, and there were about 200 sites in all, so I shrugged and went back to reading netnews. She never lets me forget that:-)
I'm with RackSpace too. They've been great, from a technical standpoint; When I had hardware problems with my server they got it fixed, quickly, on a Sunday. I've *never* had a service outage. Therefore, I'm really sorry that I'll be having to leave them soon due to their utter lack of enforcement of their spam AUP.
Yep. See Alan Dechert's page for some information. They're going to create a mockup in Python (coming soon to sourceforge) in order to be able to demo the system. They have the theory completely worked out, now they are doing the software.
It's rather tangled up in Zope, but there *is* a way to execute untrusted Python code safely (for certain definitions of "safely"). It's used by "Script (Python)" objects, and involves compiling the code into a semantic tree, walking the tree applying transformations and looking for forbidden operations, then generating bytecode. The generated bytecode is also executed with a globals dictionary that contains a custom builtins dict. Zope's security framework is used to control access to packages and modules. Zope 3 takes a totally different approach based on proxy wrappers, but there it is.
Yep. My wife and I are longtime Buffy fans, and a few months ago we decided to give Charmed a try. It wasn't worth it, and its faults highlighted for us all of the reasons that Buffy is so excellent. Charmed has decent characters and reasonable acting going for it, but the writing is abysmal -- cliched, arbitrary, formulaic, unimaginative. Several episodes left me wanting to punch the writers in the nose for subjecting me to such manipulative stupidity, and hardly one went by where I didn't groan about the failure of a character to do or grasp the blindly obvious.
Buffy, while it has had its weak patches, is consistently funny, intelligent, insightful, and unpredictable. I don't like soap operas, but I love the soap opera-ish continuity and flow that is fundamental to Buffy, and which is my prime candidate for the reason non-fans are left cold by viewing individual episodes.
As LHA says, the best of Buffy stands up against the best of anything else on television.
The moment I realize that I'm talking to a telemarketer, I say "Sorry, we don't accept phone solicitations, goodbye." and hang up. I don't wait for or listen to their response -- the phone is back in the cradle as soon as I finish speaking. I don't even care if they try to talk over me.
You may be correct that many people prefer convenience over freedom, but I don't think that the popularity of Microsoft is evidence for that.
I suspect that from the point of view of most non-programmer users of software, convenience *is* freedom -- they are free to get their job/hobby/whatever done without a lot of hassle. They are simply unaware of the additional freedom that they might experience by using Free software, and are put off by the (real or imagined) inconveniences of switching.
It is only when being "forced" to upgrade, or encountering bugs that no one will take care of for them, that they begin to feel the lack of freedom.
The *only* sort of "eVoting" that I would want adopted is one where you can use a Website/application to prepare and submit your vote, but you still have to show up in person (or follow some sort of separate mail-in process) to make your vote count. You could submit your vote any number of times you like, and select the one you settled on at the polling station.
Why do I require the second step?
1. To prevent security flaws from allowing mass vote fraud. If you get to the polling station and your ballot has been cracked, ignore and re-do it.
2. To prevent violation of secrecy. If someone or some group pressures/forces you to submit a ballot while they watch, you can submit your true ballot at another time, or at the polling station.
Why bother with eVoting at all then?
To allow you the convenience and assistance in composing your ballot that a well-designed Web site or downloadable application could provide, such as links to candidate-provided information and more complex and expressive options such as Condorcet or Approval voting.
[sarcasm] Gosh, thanks for setting me straight on that one. Capitalism certainly has nothing to do with venture capital. A company that did a funding round two years ago in order to enable more rapid growth can't possibly have become profitable since then. I guess all of the major projects I worked on as a Zope employee were imaginary, and the ones they've announced completion of since then are lies. Even if they were real, they were only little bitty contracts with unknowns like the Navy, AARP, Viacom, and SGI. [/sarcasm]
Zope Corporation. By Freeing Zope and supporting the Zope community, they created a market for Zope-based solutions that wouldn't have otherwise existed. By being the creators of Zope, with the greatest expertise in using it, they get the cream of the market's contracts.
Lest anyone think that you're full of theory, here's a concrete example: Zope Corporation and the Zope application server.
Quick background: ZC wrote Zope, released it under a GPL-compatible license, and makes money from large (>$100,000) contracts to build applications using Zope.
1. ZC's engineers know the code better than anyone else, giving them an edge over other contractors who do Zope.
2. There are no direct competitors involved, but customers and community members alike ensure that Zope supports standards (WebDAV, XMLRPC, etc).
3. Several major features of Zope were developed by community members, then adopted into the core. This led directly to some of the authors joining the company.
4. ZC was originally Digital Creations, Inc. They finally changed their name because the association was so valuable. Most of the community called the company "Zope" already anyhow.
5. The fact that every single dollar of a contract with ZC is spent on custom development, and none on licences, is a *huge* marketing advatage.
6. If ZC hadn't made Zope Free, they would never have been able to compete with the likes of BEA and Vignette. The Zope community, and the fact that Zope solutions don't depend on ZC for maintenance, put Zope in a league that no penny-ante proprietary startup could reach.
I'm serious; I am truly surprised by this thread's outpouring of fear and revulsion at the very idea of cryonics. "Won't work, you'll be ground hamburger. Even if it did, nobody would revive you, you sicko egomaniac."
I haven't signed up, but I'm interested. Along with a few others here, I figure that if it doesn't work, I'm dead anyway. More than that, I'm optimistic about my chances, but I'm not going to argue that here. What I *will* argue is that I am neither avoiding living now, nor arrogantly imposing myself on an unwilling future society, any more than anyone who takes advantage of a risky lifesaving medical procedure.
Would you tell a cancer patient who is about to undergo an expensive treatment regime with little chance of success not to be such a selfish bastard , to die already, and to leave the money to charity?
Hire Zope Corp. to build your CMS for you. That way, all of your money gets spent on training and development rather than licenses, and you end up with a completely Free solution that you can extend and maintain yourselves.
I'm surprised at how little attention Zope Corp. gets when people are discussing Open Source business models. They've gotten fantastic growth and exposure, to the point where they are regularly beating the likes of Vignette for contracts, by Freeing their core software. While they do sell support, that's not their primary source of revenue. They make money by building web systems and CMS applications using Zope. The fact that Zope is free (both ways) is a powerful selling point when used correctly, coupled with the fact that the engineers at Zope Corp. are naturally the most experienced Zope developers around.
(disclaimer: I worked for Zope Corp since back when they were Digital Creations. Great folks!)
Slashdot Mirror
It's not Flash, and it's not fancy, but it is massively multi-player, free and ad-free. Give WEBoggle a try, and maybe throw something in the tip jar if you like it - I could really use it right now.
You have my sympathy, for what it's worth. You have obvious cause to feel screwed over by the legal system. I can't offer legal advice, and I suspect that you won't like the advice I do offer: if you haven't already, consult with a lawyer *now* rather than waiting for the grandparents to make the first move. There is such a thing as a declaratory judgment in which *you* get to sue to have your rights decided, allowing you to choose the venue and frame the issues. You also might be able to persuade a judge to send you all to mediation in a local dispute resolution center, which can be a *lot* cheaper than court. Best of luck to you.
Neither lawyers nor lawmakers deliberately write laws to keep lawyers in business, as a rule. You seem to think that it would be easy to write a law or a contract so that it is utterly clear under all circumstances. You are mistaken. Clarity is, in fact, the (unattainable) goal of every good lawyer; If I write a sloppy contract, promissory note, or other legal document then my client is probably going to sue me for malpractice once it blows up in their face. I do my utmost (within the constraints of my client's patience and willingness to pay) to anticipate problems while drafting, and to head them off.
There are two approaches to writing laws. Civil law (see Louisiana and France) tries to capture every possible corner case and extreme circumstance in the written statutes, leaving judges and lawyers to "merely" read and apply them. Case law (see the rest of the U.S.) tries to keep statutes relatively simple expressions of the intent of the legislature, deferring decisions on corner cases and extreme situations until they arise in practice. Some areas of law, such as tax, finance, and commerce, *do* lend themselves to very specific and mechanical rules. In family law, torts, and other areas we are more concerned with flexible but fair rules than we are with rigid-but-simple "bright line" rules. It sounds like you would prefer civil law, but I expect that you would complain bitterly about its (necessary) density and complexity.
Let's look at your example, the "child's best interest". Phrasing it this way makes the fundamental intent pretty clear, doesn't it? We're obviously focusing on the child, to the exclusion of what the parents, grandparents, friends, or anyone else might want. You want a meaningful tangible definition for what this means in practice? This effectively means that you want someone to sit down and thing of every possible set of circumstances we might find a child in, in advance, and decide what the outcome should be. It isn't possible, and to the extent that civil law tries to do it, it results in huge expenditure of time and energy that *still* doesn't make the resolution of actual cases any easier. So instead, when the "best interest" is unclear, we let two teams of legal experts argue over what the best interest is given the specific facts before the court, and another legal expert (the judge) tries to craft a new rule based on the arguments presented. This rule may be sweeping, or may be very specific to quirks of the case, but it is now part of the law. That *specific* issue is settled (in that jurisdiction) and the new rule can be used in future cases.
Try this:
Frankly, nothing in the Wikipedia entry dissuades me from the idea that a "Novel" means either "okay, yeah, it's a magazine serial, but it's a good magazine serial" or "Okay, yeah, it's a magazine serial, but we feel rather pretentious today." The only non-subjective distinction I could glean from the article is that novels are usually longer than a magazine serial. But given that some standard magazine serials have plot arcs spanning dozens of issues, that distinction strikes me as an unimportant one.
[...]
Stop being so insistent on terminology. You're nearly as bad as the person you're responding to. If these "novelists" are doing what they claim they are doing, they don't need the crutch of a separate designation; the term "magazine serial" will expand to fit their works.
I wish that I had read about JSON before coding up my own yet-another-lightweight data format for WEBoggle. It uses scgi with a persistent Python server rather than mod_python, and is a single-page application. My experience of JavaScript is quite similar to yours, although I'm a lot more affected by compatibility concerns.
MEEPT!
So, where's the Linucon report? Eh? (pokes Wil with a stick) Eh? Sure, I was there, but I want to read your take on it.
I was tickled by the fact that I immediately saw alternate readings of both of your sample URLs:
you cant rust us
go tally our money
Suppose lots of people started crypto-signing their email. Some signatures might involve certifying that the sender is Bob, an employee of BigCorp. Others may be completely anonymous, only allowing the recipient to know that this email was sent by the same entity who sent me that email last week. Now we can begin to whitelist email from friends, mailing lists, etc based on these signatures. So far, so good.
In the proposed system, if you want to send an email to someone who doesn't know you, you enclose a coupon redeemable for a small amount of digital cash. If you offered enough, they'll receive the email and decide whether to take the money. You are notified if your message is rejected, if the coupon is redeemed, or (after some delay) if it wasn't. Add notification to you if your Id is whitelisted, and this looks pretty good.
Mailing lists (and anything else you genuinely opt into) don't have a problem. They don't offer a warranty, but you've whitelisted the list ID, so you receive the list mail.
Only two of the problems cited in this thread seem genuine to me -- security of the sender's Id and security of the digital cash transaction system.
Like the ZODB, except that the ZODB has pluggable storage backends, so that your objects can live in a FileStorage, DirectoryStorage, OracleStorage, etc. Except that ZODB has true transactions, with rollback and two-stage commit (allowing transactions to span other systems, such as an RDBMS). Oh, and except that the ZODB doesn't force all of your objects to live in memory at once; you set the cache size and it dynamically loads and unloads objects as necessary. Oh yeah, it also has ZEO for client-server access to object databases, so that you can spread your object processing across more than one computer. Did I forget anything? Sorry, the overdone Prevayler hype got to me :-)
By the way, ZODB is completely independent of Zope, although Zope relies on ZODB.
I remember my wife telling me about this new web browser thingy. I looked at it, and there were about 200 sites in all, so I shrugged and went back to reading netnews. She never lets me forget that :-)
I'm with RackSpace too. They've been great, from a technical standpoint; When I had hardware problems with my server they got it fixed, quickly, on a Sunday. I've *never* had a service outage. Therefore, I'm really sorry that I'll be having to leave them soon due to their utter lack of enforcement of their spam AUP.
Yep. See Alan Dechert's page for some information. They're going to create a mockup in Python (coming soon to sourceforge) in order to be able to demo the system. They have the theory completely worked out, now they are doing the software.
It's rather tangled up in Zope, but there *is* a way to execute untrusted Python code safely (for certain definitions of "safely"). It's used by "Script (Python)" objects, and involves compiling the code into a semantic tree, walking the tree applying transformations and looking for forbidden operations, then generating bytecode. The generated bytecode is also executed with a globals dictionary that contains a custom builtins dict. Zope's security framework is used to control access to packages and modules. Zope 3 takes a totally different approach based on proxy wrappers, but there it is.
Yep. My wife and I are longtime Buffy fans, and a few months ago we decided to give Charmed a try. It wasn't worth it, and its faults highlighted for us all of the reasons that Buffy is so excellent. Charmed has decent characters and reasonable acting going for it, but the writing is abysmal -- cliched, arbitrary, formulaic, unimaginative. Several episodes left me wanting to punch the writers in the nose for subjecting me to such manipulative stupidity, and hardly one went by where I didn't groan about the failure of a character to do or grasp the blindly obvious.
Buffy, while it has had its weak patches, is consistently funny, intelligent, insightful, and unpredictable. I don't like soap operas, but I love the soap opera-ish continuity and flow that is fundamental to Buffy, and which is my prime candidate for the reason non-fans are left cold by viewing individual episodes.
As LHA says, the best of Buffy stands up against the best of anything else on television.
The moment I realize that I'm talking to a telemarketer, I say "Sorry, we don't accept phone solicitations, goodbye." and hang up. I don't wait for or listen to their response -- the phone is back in the cradle as soon as I finish speaking. I don't even care if they try to talk over me.
Works great.
You may be correct that many people prefer convenience over freedom, but I don't think that the popularity of Microsoft is evidence for that.
I suspect that from the point of view of most non-programmer users of software, convenience *is* freedom -- they are free to get their job/hobby/whatever done without a lot of hassle. They are simply unaware of the additional freedom that they might experience by using Free software, and are put off by the (real or imagined) inconveniences of switching.
It is only when being "forced" to upgrade, or encountering bugs that no one will take care of for them, that they begin to feel the lack of freedom.
The *only* sort of "eVoting" that I would want adopted is one where you can use a Website/application to prepare and submit your vote, but you still have to show up in person (or follow some sort of separate mail-in process) to make your vote count. You could submit your vote any number of times you like, and select the one you settled on at the polling station.
Why do I require the second step?
1. To prevent security flaws from allowing mass vote fraud. If you get to the polling station and your ballot has been cracked, ignore and re-do it.
2. To prevent violation of secrecy. If someone or some group pressures/forces you to submit a ballot while they watch, you can submit your true ballot at another time, or at the polling station.
Why bother with eVoting at all then?
To allow you the convenience and assistance in composing your ballot that a well-designed Web site or downloadable application could provide, such as links to candidate-provided information and more complex and expressive options such as Condorcet or Approval voting.
[sarcasm]
Gosh, thanks for setting me straight on that one. Capitalism certainly has nothing to do with venture capital. A company that did a funding round two years ago in order to enable more rapid growth can't possibly have become profitable since then. I guess all of the major projects I worked on as a Zope employee were imaginary, and the ones they've announced completion of since then are lies. Even if they were real, they were only little bitty contracts with unknowns like the Navy, AARP, Viacom, and SGI.
[/sarcasm]
Zope Corporation. By Freeing Zope and supporting the Zope community, they created a market for Zope-based solutions that wouldn't have otherwise existed. By being the creators of Zope, with the greatest expertise in using it, they get the cream of the market's contracts.
Most of my faves have already been mentioned, so I'll just add Lawrence Watt-Evans and David Duncan to the list.
Lest anyone think that you're full of theory, here's a concrete example: Zope Corporation and the Zope application server.
.
Quick background: ZC wrote Zope, released it under a GPL-compatible license, and makes money from large (>$100,000) contracts to build applications using Zope.
1. ZC's engineers know the code better than anyone else, giving them an edge over other contractors who do Zope.
2. There are no direct competitors involved, but customers and community members alike ensure that Zope supports standards (WebDAV, XMLRPC, etc).
3. Several major features of Zope were developed by community members, then adopted into the core. This led directly to some of the authors joining the company.
4. ZC was originally Digital Creations, Inc. They finally changed their name because the association was so valuable. Most of the community called the company "Zope" already anyhow
5. The fact that every single dollar of a contract with ZC is spent on custom development, and none on licences, is a *huge* marketing advatage.
6. If ZC hadn't made Zope Free, they would never have been able to compete with the likes of BEA and Vignette. The Zope community, and the fact that Zope solutions don't depend on ZC for maintenance, put Zope in a league that no penny-ante proprietary startup could reach.
I'm serious; I am truly surprised by this thread's outpouring of fear and revulsion at the very idea of cryonics. "Won't work, you'll be ground hamburger. Even if it did, nobody would revive you, you sicko egomaniac."
I haven't signed up, but I'm interested. Along with a few others here, I figure that if it doesn't work, I'm dead anyway. More than that, I'm optimistic about my chances, but I'm not going to argue that here. What I *will* argue is that I am neither avoiding living now, nor arrogantly imposing myself on an unwilling future society, any more than anyone who takes advantage of a risky lifesaving medical procedure.
Would you tell a cancer patient who is about to undergo an expensive treatment regime with little chance of success not to be such a selfish bastard , to die already, and to leave the money to charity?
I suppose some of you would. Sheesh.
Hire Zope Corp. to build your CMS for you. That way, all of your money gets spent on training and development rather than licenses, and you end up with a completely Free solution that you can extend and maintain yourselves.
I'm surprised at how little attention Zope Corp. gets when people are discussing Open Source business models. They've gotten fantastic growth and exposure, to the point where they are regularly beating the likes of Vignette for contracts, by Freeing their core software. While they do sell support, that's not their primary source of revenue. They make money by building web systems and CMS applications using Zope. The fact that Zope is free (both ways) is a powerful selling point when used correctly, coupled with the fact that the engineers at Zope Corp. are naturally the most experienced Zope developers around.
(disclaimer: I worked for Zope Corp since back when they were Digital Creations. Great folks!)
It sounds like you may want to take a look at
Numeric Python:
http://numpy.sourceforge.net/