I used to think the same thing, regarding this contest as propoganda in the language holy wars. Then I came to the conclusion, so what? If any of these utilities is actually useful it will be sufficiently generic that it can be reimplemented in other languages. Someone will produce a C version, which will subsequently be be ported to every platform in existence, and maybe, just maybe, we'll be one step closer to replacing 'make' with something better. So in the end, I see this contest as a good thing, though the python lobby might not like my take on it.
Troll? Someone moderated this as a troll? Ha! Did it frighten you for someone to question your assumptions like that? Was the cognative dissonance making your head rattle?
No has yet given a satisfactory rebutal, only given reductio-ad-absurdum examples that are irrelevant to the axioms that I'm questioning.
I'll rephrase: assuming natural rights are real and not a fiction invented to justify that which is arbitrary, how is the right to share information less valid than the right to have ownership of information? Are either of these "natural rights", and can you support that arguement?
So answer this: why do the other 25% think it is a good idea? Doesn't this come down to a tyranny of the majority, where the larger group coerces the smaller group into adhering to the larger group's ideology? If someone claims it is a natural right to copy information freely, how can you prove otherwise?
You consider Duke Ivy League? Not that I give a damn, but I bet the snobs at Princeton, Harvard, and Yale would disagree.
I do give a damn about CS. Let's look at the US News rankings on CS programs:
1. Massachusetts Institute of Technology 2. Stanford University (CA) 3. University of California-Berkeley 4. Carnegie Mellon University (PA) 5. University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign 6. University of Michigan-Ann Arbor 7. University of Texas-Austin 8. Cornell University (NY) 9. University of Washington 10. Princeton University (NJ) 11. Purdue University-West Lafayette (IN) 12. University of Wisconsin-Madison 13. California Institute of Technology 14. Georgia Institute of Technology 15. University of Southern California 16. University of California-Los Angeles 17. Rice University (TX) 18. University of California-San Diego 19. Johns Hopkins University (MD) 19. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (NY) 19. University of Minnesota-Twin Cities
Gosh, about half are public. Where's Duke?
Looking at other technical fields, I still don't see Duke in the top rankings for engineering and hard science. I do see a lot public institutions, however. What's up with that?
in absence of government interferance, we ARE the regulation, gets ignored by the pundits in favor of philosophical mud-slinging
Actually, Lessig has advocates a similar viewpoint to this. He presents the argument that the most important regulation of the internet is not made as policy, but in the design and implementation of the hardware and software that comprise it, aka "code is law". I think what he's advocating is using the government's influence to ensure that this situation continues, to keep the development of the internet in the hands of the technicial people, rather than at the whims of corporate PHBs.
The real question is can you do that without government PHBs screwing it all up.
I checked to make sure that site wasn't a parody. This Billington guy seems like a straw man representation of the elitist literature prof who hates everything to do with technology, and whose entire worldview is constructed by the words of dead philosophers. This pompous fool probably doesn't even realize that writing itself is a technology.
Everytime I start to feel some sympathy for the people who feel overwhelmed by the rate of technological progress, some moron like this guy makes himself known, and then all I want to do is drag these people kicking and screeming into a world dominated by genetic/nano-engineering and mechanical intelligence.
It's those BSD zealots that are the phonies. They claim that letting every crook and swindler mooch of my intellectual property is somehow more moral than requiring quid pro quo on enhancements to my software. And they call RMS a commie... sheesh.
OK, so now I've pissed off every moderator with a degree in computer science...
No, but they're probably laughing at you.
Re:Will RMS shut up for once??
on
RMS On eBooks
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· Score: 1
CAPITALISM would get along quite well without INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY. With all this CHEAP LABOR working in COAL MINES, we could produce more COAL than ever BEFORE. This COAL would support more INDUSTRY, which would produce more GOODS, creating more WEALTH for EVERYBODY.
The admission that large percentages of our population would be in severe financial crisis if the state did not pay for the daily supervision of their children is more an indictment of our economy than an argument for that system's virtue.
This is an interesting statement, given how long the current economic boom has endured. How would the destruction of the public school system solve this problem?
For a lot of companies being "socially responsible" is just another form of lobbying or advertising. I read somewhere that one of the big tobacco companies spent more in advertising to tell everyone about its wonderful charity work than it actually spent on the charities themselves.
I absolutely hate MDI, for the same reasons you seem to like it. I switch between apps in windows using the alt-tab feature, and I really like the way it sorts items by last use. I generally don't even have to look at the icons, much less read the titles, because I unconsiously remember the last few apps I used in the order I used them. Really handy skill when you've got half a dozen xterm/gvim windows open from a seperate unix box.
MDI kills that, because every application has its own way of selecting documents. And some of them don't even have keyboard accelerators. I absolutely despise Word for this. What makes it worse is that you can't easily tile documents side-by-size, only top-bottom, and because of the MDI nature, you can't layer a Word document over/under another window without the whole app layering over/under it.
Virtual desktops are the more elegant solution to the problems you describe. It gives you more screen real estate, and it doesn't require one to learn every MDI app's window management techniques. In MDI apps I tend to maximize the top-level window anyway, so how is that worse than switching screens?
You are intentionally confusing the context, comparing what a benign corporation can do legally with what dictatorial government can get away with.
Governments *and* corporations are made up of individuals. Accountability always comes down to individuals making decisions. That's the catch, because individuals acting alone do not have the resources or the know-how to pull off gross acts of tyranny and get away with it. The individuals running governments *and* corporations do.
No, a corporation can't legally murder. But neither can the government. If things get so far gone that a government can and does get away with assasination, well you can surely bet that every big corporation's got a friend in the secret police that can do it for them too.
Tracing cash does not appear to be either technologically or politically feasible in the foreseeable future.
It's no difficult feat to scan serial numbers in a counting machine. I wouldn't be suprised if banks already track bills internally.
That was the whole reason Kaa mentioned the ATM machine. If you only get your cash from ATM machines, it'd be pretty easy for banks to collude with retailers to find out all about you.
And even if you got your money somewhere else, they can still trace the money to the last time it was scanned, and do some inferring. Then they can find out who you associate with.
The governments were a joke, sure, but the corporations weren't all that powerful either.
Nope, they were pretty much subserviant to the mafia and a that nut with the aircraft carrier.:-)
The government can make your life very miserable and, in exterme circumstances, can kill you.
Corporations can quite easily kill you, just like the mafia, and just like the CIA. All it takes is money and access to the right people. The only thing that stops them is they have a much harder time keeping secrets. Do you really think a corporation is any more moral than a government? At least with government, I have a *right* to citizen oversight. Whether I can exercise that right is another matter....
quite a while before my ATM cash withdrawals could be cross-referenced against my grocery shopping
They can do that now, if you use a check card. They can probably do it with cash too, if it were worth the cost of scanning the money.
advances, but try living in say, the Taliban-controlled parts of Afganistan and see how "wonderful" this period of time is. The 20th century has been the home of some of the worst violence and atrocities in history, and it is only people like you who are secure in your luxury that have the gall to say that.
The Taliban is overtly hostile to technology and Western ideals, so how can you blame technological progress for the condition of Afganistan? The county is controled by a bunch of crazy fundamentalist militants. They are about as far from the "cluetrain" as one can get. People like the leaders of the Taliban are directly responsible for the atrocities you speak of, and guess what, they've been around since the beginning of history! The Greeks, the Romans, the Vandals, the Aztecs, the Vikings, the Manchurians, etc. etc., they all slaughtered millions. There was no Golden Age, there was no primeval perfection, so get off your elitist moral high horse.
True individuality doesn't come from being brainwashed into false beliefs, it comes from within a person. But then again, I wouldn't expect the average/.er to be capable of that level of introspection.
I suppose your entire worldview was constructed in isolation, in some godlike feat of deduction? Oh tell us, great one, what wonderous insights you have divined in your solipsitic introspection!
I'll think about that while I spam usenet with faked naked pictures of your mom. Perhaps I should also drop tips to your boss about all those drugs you use. Who cares if its true or not, I'm anonymous, you can't hurt me. Or maybe I'll just send out some anonymous mail bombs, you know, like crazy uncle Ted.
Anonymity is a great way to protect oneself from retribution. Of course, there is a time and place for that. As I have demonstrated, a lot of people who wish to be anonymous actually deserve a great deal of retribution.
Think of it this way. Of every evil committed in the world, how many are lessened by the perpetrators being anonymous?
Besides, Big brother laughs at your feeble attempt at anonymity. Big Brother already knows all about you. And while you were so busy playing secret agent man, Big Brother took all your rights away. Because everyone was trying so hard to hide, nobody spoke up to try and stop it.
You've hit the nail on the head. But many slashdotters don't get that, so how can one expect lawyers and judges to get it?
These are people who make their living exploiting the ambiguity of natural language. They believe rhetoric is an art form, and that the worthiness of an argument is dependant on its expression as much, if not more, than the facts behind it. To them, logic is a technique of layering and connecting metaphores, not of derivation as in formal systems.
And they are both a *lot* closer to the standards than VC++.
Actually, no. VC++ encourages stupidity by having some non-standard features, but it is in fact a lot closer to the C++ standard than g++.
g++ is still using an obselete iostreams library, and namespaces don't really work, and there are a lot of problems with the STL implementation that comes with it (at least on my Mandrake 6.1 machine), probably because there are bugs in compiler dealing with templates.
Though on the whole I agree with you. That AC is a dufus. MFC as a reason to stick to windows, LOL on that one. And Visual Studio... using it after coming from a unix environment is about as frustrating as typing with mittens on.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't stop there. Just think, in another 100 years we'll be able to manufacture anti-matter. What a bunch of ignorant monsters we'll all be. sheesh
I used to think the same thing, regarding this contest as propoganda in the language holy wars.
Then I came to the conclusion, so what? If any of these utilities is actually useful it will be sufficiently generic that it can be reimplemented in other languages. Someone will produce a C version, which will subsequently be be ported to every platform in existence, and maybe, just maybe, we'll be one step closer to replacing 'make' with something better. So in the end, I see this contest as a good thing, though the python lobby might not like my take on it.
Troll? Someone moderated this as a troll? Ha!
Did it frighten you for someone to question your assumptions like that? Was the cognative dissonance making your head rattle?
No has yet given a satisfactory rebutal, only given reductio-ad-absurdum examples that are irrelevant to the axioms that I'm questioning.
I'll rephrase: assuming natural rights are real and not a fiction invented to justify that which is arbitrary, how is the right to share information less valid than the right to have ownership of information? Are either of these "natural rights", and can you support that arguement?
So answer this: why do the other 25% think it is a good idea? Doesn't this come down to a tyranny of the majority, where the larger group coerces the smaller group into adhering to the larger group's ideology? If someone claims it is a natural right to copy information freely, how can you prove otherwise?
You consider Duke Ivy League? Not that I give a damn, but I bet the snobs at Princeton, Harvard, and Yale would disagree.
I do give a damn about CS. Let's look at the US News rankings on CS programs:
1. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
2. Stanford University (CA)
3. University of California-Berkeley
4. Carnegie Mellon University (PA)
5. University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign
6. University of Michigan-Ann Arbor
7. University of Texas-Austin
8. Cornell University (NY)
9. University of Washington
10. Princeton University (NJ)
11. Purdue University-West Lafayette (IN)
12. University of Wisconsin-Madison
13. California Institute of Technology
14. Georgia Institute of Technology
15. University of Southern California
16. University of California-Los Angeles
17. Rice University (TX)
18. University of California-San Diego
19. Johns Hopkins University (MD)
19. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (NY)
19. University of Minnesota-Twin Cities
Gosh, about half are public. Where's Duke?
Looking at other technical fields, I still don't see Duke in the top rankings for engineering and hard science. I do see a lot public institutions, however. What's up with that?
in absence of government interferance, we ARE the regulation, gets ignored by the pundits in favor of philosophical mud-slinging
Actually, Lessig has advocates a similar viewpoint to this. He presents the argument that the most important regulation of the internet is not made as policy, but in the design and implementation of the hardware and software that comprise it, aka "code is law". I think what he's advocating is using the government's influence to ensure that this situation continues, to keep the development of the internet in the hands of the technicial people, rather than at the whims of corporate PHBs.
The real question is can you do that without government PHBs screwing it all up.
Oh good, somebody already put those quotes here.
I checked to make sure that site wasn't a parody. This Billington guy seems like a straw man representation of the elitist literature prof who hates everything to do with technology, and whose entire worldview is constructed by the words of dead philosophers. This pompous fool probably doesn't even realize that writing itself is a technology.
Everytime I start to feel some sympathy for the people who feel overwhelmed by the rate of technological progress, some moron like this guy makes himself known, and then all I want to do is drag these people kicking and screeming into a world dominated by genetic/nano-engineering and mechanical intelligence.
It's those BSD zealots that are the phonies. They claim that letting every crook and swindler mooch of my intellectual property is somehow more moral than requiring quid pro quo on enhancements to my software. And they call RMS a commie... sheesh.
OK, so now I've pissed off every moderator with a degree in computer science...
No, but they're probably laughing at you.
CAPITALISM would get along quite well without INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY. With all this CHEAP LABOR working in COAL MINES, we could produce more COAL than ever BEFORE. This COAL would support more INDUSTRY, which would produce more GOODS, creating more WEALTH for EVERYBODY.
And for the same reason, libertarians are now increasingly wary of aggregating corporate power.
Amusing, since anarchists have been wary of corporate power going all the way back to the time that they were mercantilist extensions of the state.
The admission that large percentages of our population would be in severe financial crisis if the state did not pay for the daily supervision of their children is more an indictment of our economy than an argument for that system's virtue.
This is an interesting statement, given how long the current economic boom has endured. How would the destruction of the public school system solve this problem?
Well, one obvious approach is called eugenics. I has a really, and I mean really, bad reputation.
/hist102/photos/html/1150.html
http://us.history.wisc.edu
For a lot of companies being "socially responsible" is just another form of lobbying or advertising. I read somewhere that one of the big tobacco companies spent more in advertising to tell everyone about its wonderful charity work than it actually spent on the charities themselves.
which is how I first read that title.
If only Katz could write an article that entertaining.
How untracable do you think the internet really is? You do understand how packet routing works, right?
I absolutely hate MDI, for the same reasons you seem to like it. I switch between apps in windows using the alt-tab feature, and I really like the way it sorts items by last use. I generally don't even have to look at the icons, much less read the titles, because I unconsiously remember the last few apps I used in the order I used them. Really handy skill when you've got half a dozen xterm/gvim windows open from a seperate unix box.
MDI kills that, because every application has its own way of selecting documents. And some of them don't even have keyboard accelerators. I absolutely despise Word for this. What makes it worse is that you can't easily tile documents side-by-size, only top-bottom, and because of the MDI nature, you can't layer a Word document over/under another window without the whole app layering over/under it.
Virtual desktops are the more elegant solution to the problems you describe. It gives you more screen real estate, and it doesn't require one to learn every MDI app's window management techniques. In MDI apps I tend to maximize the top-level window anyway, so how is that worse than switching screens?
You are intentionally confusing the context, comparing what a benign corporation can do legally with what dictatorial government can get away with.
Governments *and* corporations are made up of individuals. Accountability always comes down to individuals making decisions. That's the catch, because individuals acting alone do not have the resources or the know-how to pull off gross acts of tyranny and get away with it. The individuals running governments *and* corporations do.
No, a corporation can't legally murder. But neither can the government. If things get so far gone that a government can and does get away with assasination, well you can surely bet that every big corporation's got a friend in the secret police that can do it for them too.
Tracing cash does not appear to be either technologically or politically feasible in the foreseeable future.
It's no difficult feat to scan serial numbers in a counting machine. I wouldn't be suprised if banks already track bills internally.
That was the whole reason Kaa mentioned the ATM machine. If you only get your cash from ATM machines, it'd be pretty easy for banks to collude with retailers to find out all about you.
And even if you got your money somewhere else, they can still trace the money to the last time it was scanned, and do some inferring. Then they can find out who you associate with.
The governments were a joke, sure, but the corporations weren't all that powerful either.
:-)
Nope, they were pretty much subserviant to the mafia and a that nut with the aircraft carrier.
The government can make your life very miserable and, in exterme circumstances, can kill you.
Corporations can quite easily kill you, just like the mafia, and just like the CIA. All it takes is money and access to the right people. The only thing that stops them is they have a much harder time keeping secrets. Do you really think a corporation is any more moral than a government? At least with government, I have a *right* to citizen oversight. Whether I can exercise that right is another matter....
quite a while before my ATM cash withdrawals could be cross-referenced against my grocery shopping
They can do that now, if you use a check card. They can probably do it with cash too, if it were worth the cost of scanning the money.
advances, but try living in say, the Taliban-controlled parts of Afganistan and see how "wonderful" this period of time is. The 20th century has been the home of some of the worst violence and atrocities in history, and it is only people like you who are secure in your luxury that have the gall to say that.
/.er to be capable of that level of introspection.
The Taliban is overtly hostile to technology and Western ideals, so how can you blame technological progress for the condition of Afganistan? The county is controled by a bunch of crazy fundamentalist militants. They are about as far from the "cluetrain" as one can get. People like the leaders of the Taliban are directly responsible for the atrocities you speak of, and guess what, they've been around since the beginning of history! The Greeks, the Romans, the Vandals, the Aztecs, the Vikings, the Manchurians, etc. etc., they all slaughtered millions. There was no Golden Age, there was no primeval perfection, so get off your elitist moral high horse.
True individuality doesn't come from being brainwashed into false beliefs, it comes from within a person. But then again, I wouldn't expect the average
I suppose your entire worldview was constructed in isolation, in some godlike feat of deduction? Oh tell us, great one, what wonderous insights you have divined in your solipsitic introspection!
I'll think about that while I spam usenet with faked naked pictures of your mom. Perhaps I should also drop tips to your boss about all those drugs you use. Who cares if its true or not, I'm anonymous, you can't hurt me. Or maybe I'll just send out some anonymous mail bombs, you know, like crazy uncle Ted.
Anonymity is a great way to protect oneself from retribution. Of course, there is a time and place for that. As I have demonstrated, a lot of people who wish to be anonymous actually deserve a great deal of retribution.
Think of it this way. Of every evil committed in the world, how many are lessened by the perpetrators being anonymous?
Besides, Big brother laughs at your feeble attempt at anonymity. Big Brother already knows all about you. And while you were so busy playing secret agent man, Big Brother took all your rights away. Because everyone was trying so hard to hide, nobody spoke up to try and stop it.
You've hit the nail on the head. But many slashdotters don't get that, so how can one expect lawyers and judges to get it?
These are people who make their living exploiting the ambiguity of natural language. They believe rhetoric is an art form, and that the worthiness of an argument is dependant on its expression as much, if not more, than the facts behind it. To them, logic is a technique of layering and connecting metaphores, not of derivation as in formal systems.
Oh wow, they are really moving on template support. I'm so hopelessly out of date.
For the curious, here's SGI's iostreams library:
http://www.sgi.com/Technolo gy/STL/standard_library.html
Now I gotta find some egcs rpms...
What are Koenig lookups?
Where the compiler searches the namespaces of a function's arguments to find the function if it isn't found in the current namespace.
And they are both a *lot* closer to the standards than VC++.
Actually, no. VC++ encourages stupidity by having some non-standard features, but it is in fact a lot closer to the C++ standard than g++.
g++ is still using an obselete iostreams library, and namespaces don't really work, and there are a lot of problems with the STL implementation that comes with it (at least on my Mandrake 6.1 machine), probably because there are bugs in compiler dealing with templates.
Though on the whole I agree with you. That AC is a dufus. MFC as a reason to stick to windows, LOL on that one. And Visual Studio... using it after coming from a unix environment is about as frustrating as typing with mittens on.