Well, if the laws run counter to, say, the Constitution (particularly ammendments), you could see the laws themselves as being illegally created, and illegitimate, and... illegal?
I'm in favor of dropping finance laws entirely. The way I see it, if special interests can really throw so much money at campaigns that the people "don't have a choice", then we're screwed anyway. But I think we all do have a choice. No matter how much a message is hammered on TV and radio, we're free to ignore it and vote 'correctly'. If our people aren't interested in doing a little research themselves, in thinking through the issues themselves, then they (all of us) deserve exactly what we get.
And then there's the effectiveness issue: somewhere recently (sorry that I can't remember where) I came across something saying that if a campaign increases its spending by 50% [in the last week?], it may only expect a 1% change in the final vote. The same went for decreasing spending. If nothing else, they're probably wasting money on the erroneous assumption that it'll have some effect. Most americans vote down party lines, from what I can tell, and no amount of marketing is going to change their minds.
So I say bah. Drop the laws, let it run free, and don't worry about it. At least we'll save money policing the issue.
my mind boggles that Sony thought it would be necessary to DRM such crappy discs.
Well, aren't they glad they did it to crappy ones first? Test the market for backlash, test the software for bugs, test the numbers to see if DRM actually helps them make money at all,... No, I'd say it's probably entirely on purpose they started with crappy disks, before moving on to "everything".
I'm pretty sure I've heard some libertarians (not all) argue that it should be based on land property taxes, asserting that land is a common resource and that nobody should really be able to own it -- instead, land-owners should rent it from the government (the collective) which would in turn pay for the government that oversees those areas, and provide incentives to land owners to always make good use of their land by building industries on them that take advantage of the local resources. It's an argument. Take/leave/quibble/correct as desired.
I'm glad you found a solution that meets your needs and preferences. While I do what I can to bring up Firebird in discussions of F/OSS DBMS's, it's mostly to give people more choices. Our project has been using Firebird for several years (somewhere around 50 concurrent users on average) but I'm quite impressed by Postgres.
I won't be able to answer your concerns specifically, without a little elaboration. But the documentation hasn't improved much; I hear it's being worked on, but I've not seen a replacement for the Interbase 6 documentation we still use on occasion. There are several new admin tools available, but we don't use any of them. We stick with isql and ibconsole most of the time. (We've built our own, into our project, with some features only we would care about.) Updatable views are a problem, in the sense that Firebird (nor, that I've seen, any DBMS) doesn't support them in every conceivable case, but there is automatic support for simple cases, and you can write triggers for complicated (but technically logically sound) ones. I don't know about using them from Access though -- that sounds more like a driver issue. As we don't use any of those drivers, I haven't kept up on their status.
Again, I'm happy you found a solution that suits you. I encourage you to keep Firebird in mind as an option for future projects, at least as something to look at and ignore. I always prefer to have some throw-away options, like MySQL. Makes me feel free.
To clarify: Firebird has an embedded version containing the full Firebird database engine (full sql support, etc.) as a.dll file. The main limitation of the embedded version vs. others is that it takes exclusive control of the database file(s) it attaches to, so only one Firebird-embedded application (at a time) can be reading/writing a particular database file. The advantage is that the.dll has all the appearances of a bloated remote client library -- in fact, you rename the.dll to the name the application would have expected for the client library. An otherwise client/server application can be switched back and forth between embedded and client/server by simply swapping out the.dll it uses. You can develop your application with client/server, multi-user environments in mind, but then make your application available to home users who don't want a Firebird server process running on their machines 24/7, with a port open for connections. Stinkin' easy to do. And you don't have to give up good SQL and database integrity support to do this.
As I recall though, the embedded.dll is only available under Windows (no.so equivalent?) I'm not sure why. Maybe they figure that under linux, you'd just run the full server process?
(Firebird, like Postgres, runs on many platforms. And it's open-source. And it's free. And it's accessible from a variety of languages. And it has all sorts of neat SQL support, is extensible, is ACID, has had MVCC from the beginning, has SP's, triggers, check constraints, hot backup, etc. In other words, it's that other-other open-source DBMS every forgets about. It just happens to also have an embedded version.)
Your counter-argument is completely assinine. By your implied logic, any customer of any company could require the company to change its policies to suit his or her needs. If you don't like a product or serivce, what, use the full force of the law to change it?
Sometimes you have to boycott, specifically because it is just a stupid video game. That's how free-market capitalism works.
Philip
[Sorry, too lazy to dream up a terrible example of what would happen if customers got anything they wanted. The possibilities are endless.]
My girlfriend decides whether or not a rerun episode is worth watching based on which season it is -- not for the acting, but for how good Shanks looks in that season. Season 6 (when Jackson is ascended) is her favorite; she mumbles something about how "hot" he looks in his little white sweater. It gets a wee bit disturbing.
- Publishers pay: publishers pick the ratings they want to try to get, they pay to have their game (or movie, or music, or book, or painting, etc.) reviewed. The problem is the conflict of interest: if a rating board is seen as being 'nicer' to companies (per dollar) than others, they'll get the business, creating an incentive to be nicer.
- Customers pay: removes the conflict of interest to a good degree. The only way I see for this to happen is for third parties to publish a non-free 'guide' to games on the market, listing their ratings for each. These guides could be centralized and cross-referenced by yet another company, also as a non-free guide. Stores could carry the cost of such guides (buy them in bulk, have them available at the counter or on the shelves) and just include the price of the game-rating service into the price of the games they sell.
In either case, customers can vote with their purchase. If the games they're interested in don't care the certifications they think are good (that is, they've looked into the rules the rating boards use, and picked a few they think are fair), they don't buy the game. That at least creates a (slight) incentive for publishers to get their games rated by as many review boards as they can, whether it costs them or not.
Should there be a requirement to publish what rating was received, if the publisher disagrees with it? If the review board self-publishes, that could be a problem. If the publisher is the one doing it, it at least physically has the choice not to include the rating on the box. There's also a difference between asking the board for a particular rating and getting a yes/no answer, and just asking the board to assign a rating -- I think it affects how the requirement to publish would affect publishers' willingness to ask.
Note that all of this could be said of, say, FDA approval. Rather than having a government agency approve foods and drugs, customers could choose to trust (or not trust) each independent review board, and each manufacturer could choose to ask (or not ask) each review board to check their practices, or review boards could themselves decide to review products (particularly if self-published.) After all, shouldn't you be the one deciding whether or not you want to take the risk of using a particular drug or eating a particular food that you might be allergic to?
There are a lot of areas though where we're: a) not willing to trust a multi-party system (but willing to trust a black-box single-party, governmental, system) b) not willing to take the time to investigate each rating board, ask around to find out if they're actually reliable, whether or not their ratings seem satisfactory, whether or not there have been 'bad surprises'... and then check each product for a certification it may or may not have, depending on the publisher/manufacturer's whim.
But this works with most product reviews already -- no standard label on the box lists the quality of the game, the flavor of the meat, etc. There are, what, hundreds of game-review sites on the 'net, and people seem to pick a few they like and trust, but cross-reference them to avoid bias?
Looks to be javascript in the article itself somewhere. Disabling javascript prevents redirection, and it seems to only happen on -that- article on japantoday, not all of their articles. I didn't look further, but perhaps their discussion forum stuff got hijacked?
Make no mistake, this is a market ripe for the OSS picking, if the programmers can just get past the contacts that keep IntraLearn and their ilk in business.
Also not to make a mistake: it seems the market is just as ripe for non-OSS developers willing to do things better ("correctly" would be nice, but not required) for a reasonable ("cheap" or "free" would be nice, but not required) price. It's not a binary "bad closed source" vs. "good open source" question.
I can only guess it has something to do with "sucking", for which a vacuum cleaner serves as an icon. The ALT for it is "quickies", which reminds me of blow-jobs, which in turn reminds me of idiots using vacuum cleaners to vaguely satisfy their desires (or hurt themselves.) How does this apply to Mitnick? Hmmm. He sucked? He was an idiot? This is all about jerking off to a demi-god of nerddom? The write-up sucks? The linked server's bandwidth is easily sucked? Heck if I know.
We'll probably start to get a better idea of this icon's purpose as it gets used more. Collect some data and whatnot. Stay tuned?
How does that work, law-wise? Is it unlawful to knowingly expose other individuals to a disease? If so, wouldn't that apply to people going in to work when they're sick, or even staying home (with kids, family, etc.) when sick? Is it only based on maliciously exposing them, as opposed to knowingly? Is it only some diseases? If so, which diseases, and who gets to decide and on what basis? Obviously, we can see how this ties in with, say, biological terror (or war) attacks. Using a disease as a means of aggression. But since diseases can spread on their own, without any intent, and sometimes without knowledge, on the part of the carrier...
(Not like I expect our laws to truly make sense. Just look at the FDA, drug laws...)
Re:My problem with those game:
on
Review: Dragonshard
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Pause? Hmmm. Homeworld2 (at least) let you do exactly that in single-player missions. In fact, it was suggested in strategy guides. You could still issue commands while paused, which made it much easier to get your fleet(s) into position, then pause every minute or so and re-arrange units as you saw fit, or quickly switch back and forth between targets. However, if you got used to doing this, you were in for a sharp surprise in multiplayer. At least the AI seemed fairly smart. I've played Empire Earth since then, and have been nothing but annoyed at the AI (on my side). They seem incapable of actually just holding their ground, defending each other. My options seem to be: either they take a hit, then chaotically run at the enemy (and get themselves killed), or they hold their ground, but forget to use ranged weapons at approaching enemies and won't defend each other even if close enough to do so, or I can micromanage -- but without the ability to pause, that's pretty much moot.
Delegating to smart AI seems important. These games like to give you both strategic and tactical responsibilities, but with only tactical commands, and only enough time to do strategic things. You can't give broad commands, and you don't have time to use specific ones.
I think you're confusing Libertarianism with Anarchism (if that can even truly be an -ism.) Anarchism may point you away from rules in general, but Libertarianism is about a minimum set of rules. Most specifically, harming other people and/or their property is still very much against the rules, and very much still punishable.
(To those who might miss out -- check out "Nolan charts" and the two-axis model for political thought. There's an example on my site, if you're lazy. There are authoritarians and libertarians in both directions. The Libertarian party -tends- toward being freedom-loving in both directions. Other parties vary greatly.)
The problem with "imposing lots of rules on everybody, but at least the majority agreed to them" is that it goes counter to the very principles of our nation -- namely, that laws exist to protect minorities. Only doing what majorities like is mob rule -- which isn't very different from what we had thousands of years ago, or for that matter very recently, with posses and lynchings.
Why did we go to so much trouble to separate church and state? Was it because the atheists were the majority? Heck no. Why did we go to so much trouble to to protect free speech? Was it because the powerful with an interest in controlling the media were the minority voice, and the people as a majority wanted to speak freely? No! People -still- support obscenity laws; back then, they had a lot more topics they felt you shouldn't be talking about. It took a lot of convincing at the time to show representatives from the colonies that they all had differences -- and that leaving each other alone, rather than trying to find and impose a majority rule (whatever the majority) -had- to be the only solution for getting along. We get along best when we impose fewer rules on each other, not more.
The USA is an experiment. It was intended as such. It was noble, and it was radical, it was revolutionary. It was also not intended to be permanent. The founders had just finished a revolution; many saw no reason why another should not occur. They meant for us to move forward, but we stagnated.
Libertarians may believe in conservation (the ecological kind) -- because resources know no boundaries. You can't expect to pollute and not harm other people; you're harming others and/or their property, so it's a problem. Some even fail to believe in owning land, because it's not the fruit of labor; they see it as an inheritance of all mankind, something to be shared. (That's only 'some', however.) They may also believe in socialist-seeming welfare systems, but they'll most likely be voluntary. Those who band together voluntarily, and give up their resources for the common good, receive the benefits. Those who don't, don't. They are, however, very likely to believe in the right to gay marriage (it's just a contract, and we shouldn't have a say in what contracts you can form), the use of drugs of any sort and for any (personal) reason, the possession of weapons (it's the use thereof that causes problems, not the possession); they'll allow prostitution and gambling. Heck, they'll allow polygamy. What they will not do is allow rapes, murders, thefts, muggings, kidnappings, and the breaking of contracts (marriage vows or otherwise). Man-on-dog and man-on-child sex, contrary to the belief of some (Santorum), are not automatically allowed simply because gay marriage and polygamy are allowed -- you still need consent; a dog cannot communicate it, a child is not ready to provide it.
As to people who don't agree, and want more restrictions? I'm all in favor of them keeping to themselves. That's what independence is for. But -some- people just can't let others go. How many rebellions have we put down or helped to put down? (Serenity's universe is a parallel to the US Civil War -- on that subject, I think it was wrong to prevent the South from leaving, but it was right to want to free the slaves. Maybe we could have had it both ways. It can be a tough call, deciding when to intervene in the matters of others.)
Which implies that some legislators, somewhere, sometime, understood there was an obvious unfairness in the system. That you should be punished for re-inventing something you didn't know existed yet is a bit harsh. Yes, you're doubling the effort, and yes, that's slightly inefficient in the grand scheme of things, but no... that's not fair, either. Someone knew this, and tried to hack up a quick bugfix in the code (law) -- that knowing should cost you more. Obviously, they realized that if they changed it to "iff you know about the patent, you pay for violating it", people would just never, ever look up patents, would cover their ears when you tried to tell them about them, etc.
I'm much more in favor of trade secrets. You invent something, fine. If you can manage to only dissemenate that knowledge to people sworn to secrecy (that you can sue for violating their agreement with you) then you get to keep your invention. 'Course, that pretty much only guarantees you'll get out one batch of your product before someone reverse-engineers it, and can build their own. But it's bought you sufficient time to be the first player on the market, which isn't a bad thing. This doesn't require any special laws governing intellectual property -- it's simple contract law. Even if they add a contract, to every item sold, specifying that the buyer cannot reverse-engineer it AND must always force his buyers to agree to the same, eventually someone would break the contract, the secret would get out, it would be hard to hunt down who was responsible... and that'd be that. (Counter-argument: patents always expire eventually, but a contract-based system could theoretically go on forever.)
As a programmer though, I'm afraid to freelance. If I go to the trouble of building really cool software, only to later discover that 0.01% of my code is already patented elsewhere, and I can't afford to buy the license for it... my code could be stuck unable to go to production for years. If I'm unable to publish it, can it serve as prior art when I next try to publish it, and discover that someone has, in the mean time, patented something else I had already done in my code? Could this go on forever, or would I be guaranteed that after X (13? 17? 20?) years, assuming my code didn't change at all, it could finally be released without patent-infringement lawsuits waiting at the door? I don't think this is the kind of "spurring of innovation" they had in mind with patents. What's that term again? "Chilling effect"?
Shouldn't that mean that it's a rather obvious solution to practitioners in the field, possibly the only truly reasonable solution? These teams all developed similar solutions independently, without the help of the patent holders, yes? The teams didn't even know about the patent beforehand?
Maybe, in a few rare cases, patents have spurred development of new, truly innovative, technologies. But, to quote Lyndon Johnson, "You do not examine legislation in the light of the benefits it will convey if properly administered, but in the light of the wrongs it would do and the harms it would cause if improperly administered." I would feel vaguely sorry for the little and truly innovative companies if we took away patents, but not sorry enough.
Wikipedia confirms your statement partially: if a clerk thinks the chosen name will somehow be bad for the kid (e.g. "Jackass Jerk Johnson") he can refer the matter to a court. But there's no list of acceptable names. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_names
Laws against porn, drugs, sodomy, homosexual marriage, slavery, censorship, etc. are no more 'right' at the local level than at the national level. People go on and on about how the federal government has no right to declare laws across the whole nation that they, as residents of a particular state, disagree with. Yet those same people are just as happy to turn around and declare such laws across the whole state? Whole county? Whole city?
The size of the community shouldn't be the deciding factor as to which laws do and don't make sense. Either we're trying to get along, or we're not. Enacting these laws is creating an artificial dilema: a) we can decide to conform, even though we weren't harming anyone, just because our neighbors are stupid; b) we can rebel, which never goes well, always seems to cause casualties, and then we -will- have harmed someone.
Secessation/autonomy/etc. movements really interest me. In the case of an area like Northern Ireland or Kashmir, where there are two (or more) communities of fairly different origin, how do you feel about movements to integrate and/or keep that area under the control of only one of the two original cultures? How does one justify such actions? If the problem is that the foreign government is oppressive in some way, what guarantee do the remaining people of the other culture have that your own government won't be just as biased against them?
Here I am, in the US, unhappy with some (but not quite all) of our laws. I don't mind other people living under those laws, if they like them. Really. But I don't want to. Now then, that means having my own area, as jurisdiction is traditionally defined in terms of geography. But I'm not going to go claiming the whole state that I'm living in for my own use, nor that of those who agree with me -- plenty of other people live here, don't want to move any more than I do, and disagree with me. So now what?
It really seems to me like there are two options: a) [be nice] majorities need to learn to get along with minorities when at all possible, to avoid breaking areas up. (this leads, eventually, to a one-world-government with extremely minimal laws, if any, and because we can't quite agree on what 'absolute' rules there are, is probably impossible.)
b) [split] people need to give up the fatherland and move, and people need to learn that independence happens, that owning land isn't precisely a right, and that if you just must oppress people, you'll have to deal with violence (in some form or other) when they fight back... until they get their own land so you can leave each other alone. (this leads to city-states, or neighborhood-states, and a constant migratory problem as people shift themselves around to live near like-minded folk only, making work, trade, culture, etc. difficult.)
I don't see either extreme happening, but the in-between situation isn't exactly a beautiful moderate solution. At least in the US, majorities are constantly happy to take rights away (or not grant rights we forgot to enumerate in the constitution) from minorities, and we don't exactly help people achieve independence elsewhere. We tend to frown on movements to secede from a parent country... at home or abroad. Whether it's the Kurds, the Chechens, the Irish, the Mauritanians,... we tell people to just "deal with it" because forming city-states (or something even more granular) isn't practical, and nobody is willing to give up control.
Authoritarian is authoritarian is authoritarian... the parties feel strongly about different issues, but in their respective areas of interest, they're just as vehement about imposing their view of "the right thing"... It's hard to have a political party based on the idea of forcing people not to oppress each other.
Legislating victimless crimes pisses me off. So does this idea that the state has the *right* to push its rules on us simply because it sees long-term benefits from doing so, through some convoluted and terribly unproven chain of plausible events. Gay marriage, violent games, the use of encryption as part of hacking... it's all the same. Someone sees some opportunity to indirectly "improve" society (or in the eyes of some, simply prevent it from degrading) by tweaking variables left and right that they don't understand and they have no right to tweak in the first place. Got a problem with criminals? Don't just blame the criminals -- blame the manufacturers of any devices the criminals used, the people who gave them any and all information they used, anyone who had anything to do with their upbringing...
And then they have the audacity to tell us that rebellions, revolutions, wars of independence, etc. are unfair. That those of us who just want to be left alone *must* remain shackled to those who wish to oppress us. Sheesh. It's not like we want our freedoms so we can go around killing people.
It seems like it'd be nice if apps like Firefox were routinely (!) run as a user with fewer privs than the actual user sitting at the terminal. I know it needs -some- disk access for cache, etc. and some access to the user's files (when uploading or downloading specific files) but on the whole it'd be nice to have some sort of mechanism in place to keep apps from accessing things when they shouldn't. The view that an app should only have access to the current user's files is okay, but not ideal -- users still don't want their own setup trashed by some tricky extension, even if the rest of the host computer is fine. In a multi-user environment, that's not so easy... creating a new user, for every app/user combination, that provides exactly the access required by the app and no more. Lots of maintenance.
I'm not sure that users would be very accepting of an environment in which they were asked each time an app requested a new file handle -- "would you like to allow Firefox to access/home/unordained/file1.txt in read-only mode?"... "would you like to allow p2p-app-1 to open a socket to ip xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx?"... "would you like to allow some-app-2 to change the following registry keys?"... but that is, (without the annoyance) what I'd like. Our computing environments are just far too unsafe for the average user.
Suggestions? Existing (partial) solutions? (This is your opportunity to go on at length about your preferred, overly-safe-for-you operating system, and for others to trash it on grounds of any remaining work-arounds.)
I read through the one about detecting that threads/processes have died, and wasn't impressed there either. It takes all that space to declare the following algorithm: while(1) {
ask operating system for list of processes / threads
compare to previous results
diff
new things are new
missing things are missing
store list for next pass
wait() } It even includes the term "periodically", telling me we're talking about polling for this information, not registering callbacks of any sort to actually trap the events exactly as they happen. And they patented this? "How to use an operating system's API to do exactly what that API was meant for"? It's not a marketable patent, even. It's not like an entire car engine design, where the patent covers a large chunk of the final product. We can't point to the patent and say "you protected technology that you weren't relying upon to make money!" because it's so little... hell, we wouldn't even know where to look. And does keeping competitors from using this technology have any result on the bottom-line (excluding patent royalties)? "Oh no, they can also find out if a process dies by querying the operating system via a documented interface -- our entire product line is doomed! We'll never be able to make money off our database server software!"
Nitpick: Firebird (Interbase) started off on, what, an Apollo DN320? Not exactly designed for Windows. It got the Windows-oriented feel from being owned by Borland at a time when Borland focused on Windows only. (Note that they're now working on Delphi/Builder for Linux, so that's changing.) The Firebird project dropped support (last year?) for several very old machines that simply don't exist anymore. It worked, but nobody needed it anymore. I'd say it was more designed for a Unix environment, and happens to install easily on Windows (and Linux. Our production firebird server runs Slackware.)
Slashdot Mirror
Well, if the laws run counter to, say, the Constitution (particularly ammendments), you could see the laws themselves as being illegally created, and illegitimate, and ... illegal?
I'm in favor of dropping finance laws entirely. The way I see it, if special interests can really throw so much money at campaigns that the people "don't have a choice", then we're screwed anyway. But I think we all do have a choice. No matter how much a message is hammered on TV and radio, we're free to ignore it and vote 'correctly'. If our people aren't interested in doing a little research themselves, in thinking through the issues themselves, then they (all of us) deserve exactly what we get.
And then there's the effectiveness issue: somewhere recently (sorry that I can't remember where) I came across something saying that if a campaign increases its spending by 50% [in the last week?], it may only expect a 1% change in the final vote. The same went for decreasing spending. If nothing else, they're probably wasting money on the erroneous assumption that it'll have some effect. Most americans vote down party lines, from what I can tell, and no amount of marketing is going to change their minds.
So I say bah. Drop the laws, let it run free, and don't worry about it. At least we'll save money policing the issue.
my mind boggles that Sony thought it would be necessary to DRM such crappy discs.
... No, I'd say it's probably entirely on purpose they started with crappy disks, before moving on to "everything".
Well, aren't they glad they did it to crappy ones first? Test the market for backlash, test the software for bugs, test the numbers to see if DRM actually helps them make money at all,
I'm pretty sure I've heard some libertarians (not all) argue that it should be based on land property taxes, asserting that land is a common resource and that nobody should really be able to own it -- instead, land-owners should rent it from the government (the collective) which would in turn pay for the government that oversees those areas, and provide incentives to land owners to always make good use of their land by building industries on them that take advantage of the local resources. It's an argument. Take/leave/quibble/correct as desired.
I'm glad you found a solution that meets your needs and preferences. While I do what I can to bring up Firebird in discussions of F/OSS DBMS's, it's mostly to give people more choices. Our project has been using Firebird for several years (somewhere around 50 concurrent users on average) but I'm quite impressed by Postgres.
I won't be able to answer your concerns specifically, without a little elaboration. But the documentation hasn't improved much; I hear it's being worked on, but I've not seen a replacement for the Interbase 6 documentation we still use on occasion. There are several new admin tools available, but we don't use any of them. We stick with isql and ibconsole most of the time. (We've built our own, into our project, with some features only we would care about.) Updatable views are a problem, in the sense that Firebird (nor, that I've seen, any DBMS) doesn't support them in every conceivable case, but there is automatic support for simple cases, and you can write triggers for complicated (but technically logically sound) ones. I don't know about using them from Access though -- that sounds more like a driver issue. As we don't use any of those drivers, I haven't kept up on their status.
Again, I'm happy you found a solution that suits you. I encourage you to keep Firebird in mind as an option for future projects, at least as something to look at and ignore. I always prefer to have some throw-away options, like MySQL. Makes me feel free.
To clarify: Firebird has an embedded version containing the full Firebird database engine (full sql support, etc.) as a .dll file. The main limitation of the embedded version vs. others is that it takes exclusive control of the database file(s) it attaches to, so only one Firebird-embedded application (at a time) can be reading/writing a particular database file. The advantage is that the .dll has all the appearances of a bloated remote client library -- in fact, you rename the .dll to the name the application would have expected for the client library. An otherwise client/server application can be switched back and forth between embedded and client/server by simply swapping out the .dll it uses. You can develop your application with client/server, multi-user environments in mind, but then make your application available to home users who don't want a Firebird server process running on their machines 24/7, with a port open for connections. Stinkin' easy to do. And you don't have to give up good SQL and database integrity support to do this.
.dll is only available under Windows (no .so equivalent?) I'm not sure why. Maybe they figure that under linux, you'd just run the full server process?
As I recall though, the embedded
(Firebird, like Postgres, runs on many platforms. And it's open-source. And it's free. And it's accessible from a variety of languages. And it has all sorts of neat SQL support, is extensible, is ACID, has had MVCC from the beginning, has SP's, triggers, check constraints, hot backup, etc. In other words, it's that other-other open-source DBMS every forgets about. It just happens to also have an embedded version.)
Your counter-argument is completely assinine. By your implied logic, any customer of any company could require the company to change its policies to suit his or her needs. If you don't like a product or serivce, what, use the full force of the law to change it?
Sometimes you have to boycott, specifically because it is just a stupid video game. That's how free-market capitalism works.
Philip
[Sorry, too lazy to dream up a terrible example of what would happen if customers got anything they wanted. The possibilities are endless.]
My girlfriend decides whether or not a rerun episode is worth watching based on which season it is -- not for the acting, but for how good Shanks looks in that season. Season 6 (when Jackson is ascended) is her favorite; she mumbles something about how "hot" he looks in his little white sweater. It gets a wee bit disturbing.
Two choices:
... and then check each product for a certification it may or may not have, depending on the publisher/manufacturer's whim.
...
- Publishers pay: publishers pick the ratings they want to try to get, they pay to have their game (or movie, or music, or book, or painting, etc.) reviewed. The problem is the conflict of interest: if a rating board is seen as being 'nicer' to companies (per dollar) than others, they'll get the business, creating an incentive to be nicer.
- Customers pay: removes the conflict of interest to a good degree. The only way I see for this to happen is for third parties to publish a non-free 'guide' to games on the market, listing their ratings for each. These guides could be centralized and cross-referenced by yet another company, also as a non-free guide. Stores could carry the cost of such guides (buy them in bulk, have them available at the counter or on the shelves) and just include the price of the game-rating service into the price of the games they sell.
In either case, customers can vote with their purchase. If the games they're interested in don't care the certifications they think are good (that is, they've looked into the rules the rating boards use, and picked a few they think are fair), they don't buy the game. That at least creates a (slight) incentive for publishers to get their games rated by as many review boards as they can, whether it costs them or not.
Should there be a requirement to publish what rating was received, if the publisher disagrees with it? If the review board self-publishes, that could be a problem. If the publisher is the one doing it, it at least physically has the choice not to include the rating on the box. There's also a difference between asking the board for a particular rating and getting a yes/no answer, and just asking the board to assign a rating -- I think it affects how the requirement to publish would affect publishers' willingness to ask.
Note that all of this could be said of, say, FDA approval. Rather than having a government agency approve foods and drugs, customers could choose to trust (or not trust) each independent review board, and each manufacturer could choose to ask (or not ask) each review board to check their practices, or review boards could themselves decide to review products (particularly if self-published.) After all, shouldn't you be the one deciding whether or not you want to take the risk of using a particular drug or eating a particular food that you might be allergic to?
There are a lot of areas though where we're:
a) not willing to trust a multi-party system (but willing to trust a black-box single-party, governmental, system)
b) not willing to take the time to investigate each rating board, ask around to find out if they're actually reliable, whether or not their ratings seem satisfactory, whether or not there have been 'bad surprises'
But this works with most product reviews already -- no standard label on the box lists the quality of the game, the flavor of the meat, etc. There are, what, hundreds of game-review sites on the 'net, and people seem to pick a few they like and trust, but cross-reference them to avoid bias?
But hey, from a libertarian standpoint
Looks to be javascript in the article itself somewhere. Disabling javascript prevents redirection, and it seems to only happen on -that- article on japantoday, not all of their articles. I didn't look further, but perhaps their discussion forum stuff got hijacked?
Make no mistake, this is a market ripe for the OSS picking, if the programmers can just get past the contacts that keep IntraLearn and their ilk in business.
Also not to make a mistake: it seems the market is just as ripe for non-OSS developers willing to do things better ("correctly" would be nice, but not required) for a reasonable ("cheap" or "free" would be nice, but not required) price. It's not a binary "bad closed source" vs. "good open source" question.
Ah hell, I even managed to miss the "from the explorations-of-modesty dept." joke. I'm sticking with the sexual inuendo hypothesis for now.
I can only guess it has something to do with "sucking", for which a vacuum cleaner serves as an icon. The ALT for it is "quickies", which reminds me of blow-jobs, which in turn reminds me of idiots using vacuum cleaners to vaguely satisfy their desires (or hurt themselves.) How does this apply to Mitnick? Hmmm. He sucked? He was an idiot? This is all about jerking off to a demi-god of nerddom? The write-up sucks? The linked server's bandwidth is easily sucked? Heck if I know.
We'll probably start to get a better idea of this icon's purpose as it gets used more. Collect some data and whatnot. Stay tuned?
How does that work, law-wise? Is it unlawful to knowingly expose other individuals to a disease? If so, wouldn't that apply to people going in to work when they're sick, or even staying home (with kids, family, etc.) when sick? Is it only based on maliciously exposing them, as opposed to knowingly? Is it only some diseases? If so, which diseases, and who gets to decide and on what basis? Obviously, we can see how this ties in with, say, biological terror (or war) attacks. Using a disease as a means of aggression. But since diseases can spread on their own, without any intent, and sometimes without knowledge, on the part of the carrier ...
...)
(Not like I expect our laws to truly make sense. Just look at the FDA, drug laws
Pause? Hmmm. Homeworld2 (at least) let you do exactly that in single-player missions. In fact, it was suggested in strategy guides. You could still issue commands while paused, which made it much easier to get your fleet(s) into position, then pause every minute or so and re-arrange units as you saw fit, or quickly switch back and forth between targets. However, if you got used to doing this, you were in for a sharp surprise in multiplayer. At least the AI seemed fairly smart. I've played Empire Earth since then, and have been nothing but annoyed at the AI (on my side). They seem incapable of actually just holding their ground, defending each other. My options seem to be: either they take a hit, then chaotically run at the enemy (and get themselves killed), or they hold their ground, but forget to use ranged weapons at approaching enemies and won't defend each other even if close enough to do so, or I can micromanage -- but without the ability to pause, that's pretty much moot.
Delegating to smart AI seems important. These games like to give you both strategic and tactical responsibilities, but with only tactical commands, and only enough time to do strategic things. You can't give broad commands, and you don't have time to use specific ones.
I think you're confusing Libertarianism with Anarchism (if that can even truly be an -ism.) Anarchism may point you away from rules in general, but Libertarianism is about a minimum set of rules. Most specifically, harming other people and/or their property is still very much against the rules, and very much still punishable.
(To those who might miss out -- check out "Nolan charts" and the two-axis model for political thought. There's an example on my site, if you're lazy. There are authoritarians and libertarians in both directions. The Libertarian party -tends- toward being freedom-loving in both directions. Other parties vary greatly.)
The problem with "imposing lots of rules on everybody, but at least the majority agreed to them" is that it goes counter to the very principles of our nation -- namely, that laws exist to protect minorities. Only doing what majorities like is mob rule -- which isn't very different from what we had thousands of years ago, or for that matter very recently, with posses and lynchings.
Why did we go to so much trouble to separate church and state? Was it because the atheists were the majority? Heck no. Why did we go to so much trouble to to protect free speech? Was it because the powerful with an interest in controlling the media were the minority voice, and the people as a majority wanted to speak freely? No! People -still- support obscenity laws; back then, they had a lot more topics they felt you shouldn't be talking about. It took a lot of convincing at the time to show representatives from the colonies that they all had differences -- and that leaving each other alone, rather than trying to find and impose a majority rule (whatever the majority) -had- to be the only solution for getting along. We get along best when we impose fewer rules on each other, not more.
The USA is an experiment. It was intended as such. It was noble, and it was radical, it was revolutionary. It was also not intended to be permanent. The founders had just finished a revolution; many saw no reason why another should not occur. They meant for us to move forward, but we stagnated.
Libertarians may believe in conservation (the ecological kind) -- because resources know no boundaries. You can't expect to pollute and not harm other people; you're harming others and/or their property, so it's a problem. Some even fail to believe in owning land, because it's not the fruit of labor; they see it as an inheritance of all mankind, something to be shared. (That's only 'some', however.)
They may also believe in socialist-seeming welfare systems, but they'll most likely be voluntary. Those who band together voluntarily, and give up their resources for the common good, receive the benefits. Those who don't, don't.
They are, however, very likely to believe in the right to gay marriage (it's just a contract, and we shouldn't have a say in what contracts you can form), the use of drugs of any sort and for any (personal) reason, the possession of weapons (it's the use thereof that causes problems, not the possession); they'll allow prostitution and gambling. Heck, they'll allow polygamy. What they will not do is allow rapes, murders, thefts, muggings, kidnappings, and the breaking of contracts (marriage vows or otherwise). Man-on-dog and man-on-child sex, contrary to the belief of some (Santorum), are not automatically allowed simply because gay marriage and polygamy are allowed -- you still need consent; a dog cannot communicate it, a child is not ready to provide it.
As to people who don't agree, and want more restrictions? I'm all in favor of them keeping to themselves. That's what independence is for. But -some- people just can't let others go. How many rebellions have we put down or helped to put down? (Serenity's universe is a parallel to the US Civil War -- on that subject, I think it was wrong to prevent the South from leaving, but it was right to want to free the slaves. Maybe we could have had it both ways. It can be a tough call, deciding when to intervene in the matters of others.)
First sale doctrine as an exception to copyright law
Which implies that some legislators, somewhere, sometime, understood there was an obvious unfairness in the system. That you should be punished for re-inventing something you didn't know existed yet is a bit harsh. Yes, you're doubling the effort, and yes, that's slightly inefficient in the grand scheme of things, but no ... that's not fair, either. Someone knew this, and tried to hack up a quick bugfix in the code (law) -- that knowing should cost you more. Obviously, they realized that if they changed it to "iff you know about the patent, you pay for violating it", people would just never, ever look up patents, would cover their ears when you tried to tell them about them, etc.
... and that'd be that. (Counter-argument: patents always expire eventually, but a contract-based system could theoretically go on forever.)
... my code could be stuck unable to go to production for years. If I'm unable to publish it, can it serve as prior art when I next try to publish it, and discover that someone has, in the mean time, patented something else I had already done in my code? Could this go on forever, or would I be guaranteed that after X (13? 17? 20?) years, assuming my code didn't change at all, it could finally be released without patent-infringement lawsuits waiting at the door? I don't think this is the kind of "spurring of innovation" they had in mind with patents. What's that term again? "Chilling effect"?
I'm much more in favor of trade secrets. You invent something, fine. If you can manage to only dissemenate that knowledge to people sworn to secrecy (that you can sue for violating their agreement with you) then you get to keep your invention. 'Course, that pretty much only guarantees you'll get out one batch of your product before someone reverse-engineers it, and can build their own. But it's bought you sufficient time to be the first player on the market, which isn't a bad thing. This doesn't require any special laws governing intellectual property -- it's simple contract law. Even if they add a contract, to every item sold, specifying that the buyer cannot reverse-engineer it AND must always force his buyers to agree to the same, eventually someone would break the contract, the secret would get out, it would be hard to hunt down who was responsible
As a programmer though, I'm afraid to freelance. If I go to the trouble of building really cool software, only to later discover that 0.01% of my code is already patented elsewhere, and I can't afford to buy the license for it
Shouldn't that mean that it's a rather obvious solution to practitioners in the field, possibly the only truly reasonable solution? These teams all developed similar solutions independently, without the help of the patent holders, yes? The teams didn't even know about the patent beforehand?
Maybe, in a few rare cases, patents have spurred development of new, truly innovative, technologies. But, to quote Lyndon Johnson, "You do not examine legislation in the light of the benefits it will convey if properly administered, but in the light of the wrongs it would do and the harms it would cause if improperly administered." I would feel vaguely sorry for the little and truly innovative companies if we took away patents, but not sorry enough.
Wikipedia confirms your statement partially: if a clerk thinks the chosen name will somehow be bad for the kid (e.g. "Jackass Jerk Johnson") he can refer the matter to a court. But there's no list of acceptable names. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_names
And why should States have any such right?
Laws against porn, drugs, sodomy, homosexual marriage, slavery, censorship, etc. are no more 'right' at the local level than at the national level. People go on and on about how the federal government has no right to declare laws across the whole nation that they, as residents of a particular state, disagree with. Yet those same people are just as happy to turn around and declare such laws across the whole state? Whole county? Whole city?
The size of the community shouldn't be the deciding factor as to which laws do and don't make sense. Either we're trying to get along, or we're not. Enacting these laws is creating an artificial dilema:
a) we can decide to conform, even though we weren't harming anyone, just because our neighbors are stupid;
b) we can rebel, which never goes well, always seems to cause casualties, and then we -will- have harmed someone.
Is asking for a fight really worth it?
Secessation/autonomy/etc. movements really interest me. In the case of an area like Northern Ireland or Kashmir, where there are two (or more) communities of fairly different origin, how do you feel about movements to integrate and/or keep that area under the control of only one of the two original cultures? How does one justify such actions? If the problem is that the foreign government is oppressive in some way, what guarantee do the remaining people of the other culture have that your own government won't be just as biased against them?
... until they get their own land so you can leave each other alone. (this leads to city-states, or neighborhood-states, and a constant migratory problem as people shift themselves around to live near like-minded folk only, making work, trade, culture, etc. difficult.)
... at home or abroad. Whether it's the Kurds, the Chechens, the Irish, the Mauritanians, ... we tell people to just "deal with it" because forming city-states (or something even more granular) isn't practical, and nobody is willing to give up control.
Here I am, in the US, unhappy with some (but not quite all) of our laws. I don't mind other people living under those laws, if they like them. Really. But I don't want to. Now then, that means having my own area, as jurisdiction is traditionally defined in terms of geography. But I'm not going to go claiming the whole state that I'm living in for my own use, nor that of those who agree with me -- plenty of other people live here, don't want to move any more than I do, and disagree with me. So now what?
It really seems to me like there are two options:
a) [be nice] majorities need to learn to get along with minorities when at all possible, to avoid breaking areas up. (this leads, eventually, to a one-world-government with extremely minimal laws, if any, and because we can't quite agree on what 'absolute' rules there are, is probably impossible.)
b) [split] people need to give up the fatherland and move, and people need to learn that independence happens, that owning land isn't precisely a right, and that if you just must oppress people, you'll have to deal with violence (in some form or other) when they fight back
I don't see either extreme happening, but the in-between situation isn't exactly a beautiful moderate solution. At least in the US, majorities are constantly happy to take rights away (or not grant rights we forgot to enumerate in the constitution) from minorities, and we don't exactly help people achieve independence elsewhere. We tend to frown on movements to secede from a parent country
Any creative solutions from engineers?
Authoritarian is authoritarian is authoritarian ... the parties feel strongly about different issues, but in their respective areas of interest, they're just as vehement about imposing their view of "the right thing" ... It's hard to have a political party based on the idea of forcing people not to oppress each other.
... it's all the same. Someone sees some opportunity to indirectly "improve" society (or in the eyes of some, simply prevent it from degrading) by tweaking variables left and right that they don't understand and they have no right to tweak in the first place. Got a problem with criminals? Don't just blame the criminals -- blame the manufacturers of any devices the criminals used, the people who gave them any and all information they used, anyone who had anything to do with their upbringing ...
Legislating victimless crimes pisses me off. So does this idea that the state has the *right* to push its rules on us simply because it sees long-term benefits from doing so, through some convoluted and terribly unproven chain of plausible events. Gay marriage, violent games, the use of encryption as part of hacking
And then they have the audacity to tell us that rebellions, revolutions, wars of independence, etc. are unfair. That those of us who just want to be left alone *must* remain shackled to those who wish to oppress us. Sheesh. It's not like we want our freedoms so we can go around killing people.
It seems like it'd be nice if apps like Firefox were routinely (!) run as a user with fewer privs than the actual user sitting at the terminal. I know it needs -some- disk access for cache, etc. and some access to the user's files (when uploading or downloading specific files) but on the whole it'd be nice to have some sort of mechanism in place to keep apps from accessing things when they shouldn't. The view that an app should only have access to the current user's files is okay, but not ideal -- users still don't want their own setup trashed by some tricky extension, even if the rest of the host computer is fine. In a multi-user environment, that's not so easy ... creating a new user, for every app/user combination, that provides exactly the access required by the app and no more. Lots of maintenance.
/home/unordained/file1.txt in read-only mode?" ... "would you like to allow p2p-app-1 to open a socket to ip xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx?" ... "would you like to allow some-app-2 to change the following registry keys?" ... but that is, (without the annoyance) what I'd like. Our computing environments are just far too unsafe for the average user.
I'm not sure that users would be very accepting of an environment in which they were asked each time an app requested a new file handle -- "would you like to allow Firefox to access
Suggestions? Existing (partial) solutions? (This is your opportunity to go on at length about your preferred, overly-safe-for-you operating system, and for others to trash it on grounds of any remaining work-arounds.)
I read through the one about detecting that threads/processes have died, and wasn't impressed there either. It takes all that space to declare the following algorithm: ... hell, we wouldn't even know where to look. And does keeping competitors from using this technology have any result on the bottom-line (excluding patent royalties)? "Oh no, they can also find out if a process dies by querying the operating system via a documented interface -- our entire product line is doomed! We'll never be able to make money off our database server software!"
while(1)
{
ask operating system for list of processes / threads
compare to previous results
diff
new things are new
missing things are missing
store list for next pass
wait()
}
It even includes the term "periodically", telling me we're talking about polling for this information, not registering callbacks of any sort to actually trap the events exactly as they happen. And they patented this? "How to use an operating system's API to do exactly what that API was meant for"?
It's not a marketable patent, even. It's not like an entire car engine design, where the patent covers a large chunk of the final product. We can't point to the patent and say "you protected technology that you weren't relying upon to make money!" because it's so little
Nitpick: Firebird (Interbase) started off on, what, an Apollo DN320? Not exactly designed for Windows. It got the Windows-oriented feel from being owned by Borland at a time when Borland focused on Windows only. (Note that they're now working on Delphi/Builder for Linux, so that's changing.) The Firebird project dropped support (last year?) for several very old machines that simply don't exist anymore. It worked, but nobody needed it anymore. I'd say it was more designed for a Unix environment, and happens to install easily on Windows (and Linux. Our production firebird server runs Slackware.)