You are just as guilty as the uploader, the downloader, the photographer and the abuser.
Grow up. Are the people at Nokia responsible because the 9/11 hijackers used their phones? Or AT&T because some phone calls went over their network? What about Microsoft, because some of them likely used Windows.
The legal construct of "common carrier" applies only to telcos as far as I know, but the concept is pretty well ubiquitous in real life and for good reason. If you buy gasoline, then you're financing oppression of Saudi women and non-Muslims. See how quickly everyone can be shown to support bad things?
The point with Freenet, though, is that you may be responsible for hosting / serving abhorrent material and you'd never know.
Umm, so? I hate child porn as much as the next person, but the same is true for so many other activities. I used to work for an ISP, and I'm 99.999% sure that at least one user downloaded at least one naked kid picture during that time. I'm not going to lose sleep over it, though - I was neither the uploader nor downloader.
Every six months or so I re-install Freenet to see if the performance has gotten any better. Every time, I look at each of the pre-configured index pages to see what people are posting these days. Not once - never - have I seen childporn in any of those indexes.
There's a simple explanation for all the people who talk about how Freenet is saturated with kiddy porn: they're either repeating a stupid meme that they know nothing about, or they've gone looking and found something. Which group are you in?
New online chat system? "Here come the pedophiles!"
New photo sharing site? "Here come the pedophiles!"
Exactly how many damn pedophiles live in the hellhole where you reside? Has it ever occurred to you to try, you know, moving to someplace with a better normal:kiddielover ratio?
I have excellent Karma and I am not afraid to Troll it.
My middle school science text in the early 80s presented both global cooling igloo effect and global warming. I guess they were covering their bets...
Don't bother. You and I know we were taught this stuff as kids, and I explicitly remember being terrified when the nightly news ran stories of our impending frigid death. No one will believe you, though - we're just repeating a lie told by oil companies, and too dumb to know the difference.
Droughts: You ask any Australian, and particularly, Melbournians, if they've had any drought!
We didn't have droughts before now? See also: Oklahoma, 1930.
Famine: Well, there's a lot of Africans who still don't get enough to eat.
Robert Mugabe turned the breadbasket of Africa into the killing fields. Global Jackass is not the same as Global Warming.
Floods: Might as well include storms, so think about the number of hurricanes in the last couple of years, and many people in Europe have been experiencing SOME flooding.
The last couple of years have been relatively calm. Lots of places in Europe are built on Really Bad Ideas. New Orleans won't have anything on what The Netherlands would look like if the ocean decides to resume its rightful level there.
Rising water: that's a really slow effect. Mind you, eroding shore lines are a sure sign of this phenomena.
Erosion is a new phenomenon?
I believe in Global Warming, but honestly, you can't go around blaming everything on it. After a while, people will stop believing you when you have a real complaint.
Do you really think the license of Java really caused people to not write apps in it?
I don't know about Java specifically, but there's certainly precedent. A lot of people are (justifiably) avoiding C#/Mono right now exactly because of such issues. Now, I think Sun has always been much less likely to put the smackdown on developers than Microsoft has been, but I could understand people being skittish.
Even if I don't really care for Java, I'm glad to see it being opened for that reason. It allows our community to welcome in another big talent pool, and that's always a good thing.
The "EOL" of XP means that they're not selling it any more. No-one's going to switch OSes because their current one isn't being actively sold; if they're running it, they already have a licence.
But at that point, you're living on borrowed time. If you have to replaced a broken laptop, you'll be getting Vista unless you work someplace with an IT department that will upgrade you to XP. Microsoft has recently demonstrated that they're more than happy to pull the plug on their products, too. Are you that confident they won't turn off the activation servers for XP any time soon?
Someone gave me a tube of hemp-based, patchouli-scented skin lotion once. Thanks. Not only do I have still dry skin, but now I smell like a freakin' hippie from 20 yards away. I couldn't even walk into a coffee shop without someone inviting me to recite poetry.
Their argument is based off a strictly capitalist view.
I think you have that exactly backwards. Microsoft and a few other lumbering dinosaurs really, really wish these upstart punks would quit competing with them. They don't want a free market; they want someone to tell you that you have to buy their products.
Red Hat, IBM, Sun, and other new and old companies that "get it" see this as an opportunity to become more efficient capitalists by competing in real markets, not just ones that temporarily exist due to artificial scarcity.
No, I think you got the roles reversed. Microsoft thinks that you owe them because, darn it, they've tried so hard! If Gates and Ballmer would spend as much time actually writing cool stuff that customers want to buy as they do bitching that everyone else is doing exactly that, then maybe they'd have something better to show than Vista. Competition is too hard, though, so now they're begging for the cozy straitjacket of government protection. Capitalists? I don't think so.
Remember, kids: drugs are bad for you. Even if the dealer says you'll like it, it's nothing more than an expensive, antisocial habit that you'll come to regret once you're hooked.
The easy answer these days: Microsoft is EOLing XP, and no one wants Vista. If you're being forced to switch to something that's new with different hardware compatibility lists and less-than-perfect backward compatibility, why not make a clean start with a system that has a future?
The VP wanted to have someone he could call and swear at if there was any problem
Even if I'm not partial to Java, I despise that way of thinking. As I mentioned earlier, Microsoft EOLed Visual FoxPro, thereby forcing us to invest a lot of programmer hours in migrating to something else. I am under no illusion that I can call Steve Ballmer and swear at him.
The thing is, before Java, sun tried doing the whole open source thing, with Tcl/Tk. Which was (and is) a superb language, but got a resounding "meh" from the community;
In all fairness, that's very much a statement of opinion. I don't like Tcl/Tk for my own reasons, and didn't know until this post that RMS also disliked it.
instead 10 years later we still have a huge mishmash of incompatible configuration file formats on linux).
I don't follow you here. Is Tcl good at parsing config files?
So given that, I can't blame Sun for saying sod this open source lark, let's appeal to business people, with Java.
Well, they've done lots with FOSS besides Java and Tcl.:-)
For one thing Python is dynamically typed and Java isn't and there are a lot of cases where I personally prefer the rigor of a language with strict typing.
Python is dynamically, strictly typed.
Or perhaps you're a bit confused between Java and JavaScript? A lot of people make that mistake.
Yeah, we had been seriously considering rewriting our core business logic modules in JavaScript.
Thanks, and yes, that's pretty much what my company's like. My boss likes to be included in such decisions because it's ultimately his responsibility if we really screw up, but I've never once been overruled when I had solid reasons for my choice. In general, he just likes the nice toys we give him (internal Jabber server, spam-free email, PostgreSQL, etc.) and trusts us when we want to use something cool.
That is exactly how we feel about it. FoxPro certainly isn't my choice of development environments, but our old code runs - and runs well. The only reason we're migrating away is that it's officially a dead language, and it's crazy to keep developing on something whose owner has said has no future.
So that's how we ended up on Python. Java probably would have done most of the same stuff, and it'd probably be easier to find Java programmers where I live, but we weren't going to fall sucker to that problem again.
Liar. You have to pay per instance of VisualBasic to even run the compiler. Java's tools (while not as good IDE-wise as VB) have always been available with a $free$ license.
Who cares? We're a company, not a bunch of broke kids, and don't have problems spending money if we need to. "Free as in speech" is much more important to us than "free as in beer", even though the lack of price tag is a nice bonus.
You chose your language based solely on the license, rather than how well it supported your development tasks?
You say that as though there's a difference. We were migrating from a legacy codebase in Visual FoxPro, and learned well the lessons against using sole-provider solutions. The absolute last thing we were willing to do was throw ourselves again to the mercy of someone else's whims. With Python, and now Java, we get to keep some of that control.
You can write cross-platform backend and user interface code with both, both of them run on Windows and Unix, and both support OOP. That made those languages pretty reasonable choices for our needs.
They've open sourced everything they had rights to do long ago. The only parts they didn't was due to stuff they had licensed and had no right to release the source code for. Seriously, how dare they not violate their contracts so that you could get code they had no right to release!
We were looking for something cross-platform, and at that time Java was every bit as proprietary as VB and other close dead-end languages. I understand why Java wasn't FOSS at that time, but that still made it ineligible as a serious contender for long-term development. Had Sun made Java's openness a goal a lot sooner, many companies (including mine) might have chosen it over whatever else they decided upon.
Kudos to Sun for waiting so long to open source it. Had it been FOSS back when my company was trying to decide what language to standardize on, we might have picked it instead of Python. Thanks!
A protocol could be developed to allow one peer to request, or steer, the network to locate and deliver requested blocks on demand. This might be a high-cost operation, akin to bringing data in from backup tape. Or, a client could just wait for the right chunk of data to recirculate to its position in the network. But storing data is easy -- just encrypt it, format it a certain way, and inject it into the network.
Slashdot Mirror
Grow up. Are the people at Nokia responsible because the 9/11 hijackers used their phones? Or AT&T because some phone calls went over their network? What about Microsoft, because some of them likely used Windows.
The legal construct of "common carrier" applies only to telcos as far as I know, but the concept is pretty well ubiquitous in real life and for good reason. If you buy gasoline, then you're financing oppression of Saudi women and non-Muslims. See how quickly everyone can be shown to support bad things?
Umm, so? I hate child porn as much as the next person, but the same is true for so many other activities. I used to work for an ISP, and I'm 99.999% sure that at least one user downloaded at least one naked kid picture during that time. I'm not going to lose sleep over it, though - I was neither the uploader nor downloader.
Every six months or so I re-install Freenet to see if the performance has gotten any better. Every time, I look at each of the pre-configured index pages to see what people are posting these days. Not once - never - have I seen childporn in any of those indexes.
There's a simple explanation for all the people who talk about how Freenet is saturated with kiddy porn: they're either repeating a stupid meme that they know nothing about, or they've gone looking and found something. Which group are you in?
New Freenet? "Here come the pedophiles!"
New online chat system? "Here come the pedophiles!"
New photo sharing site? "Here come the pedophiles!"
Exactly how many damn pedophiles live in the hellhole where you reside? Has it ever occurred to you to try, you know, moving to someplace with a better normal:kiddielover ratio?
I have excellent Karma and I am not afraid to Troll it.I can tell.
Don't bother. You and I know we were taught this stuff as kids, and I explicitly remember being terrified when the nightly news ran stories of our impending frigid death. No one will believe you, though - we're just repeating a lie told by oil companies, and too dumb to know the difference.
We didn't have droughts before now? See also: Oklahoma, 1930.
Famine: Well, there's a lot of Africans who still don't get enough to eat.Robert Mugabe turned the breadbasket of Africa into the killing fields. Global Jackass is not the same as Global Warming.
Floods: Might as well include storms, so think about the number of hurricanes in the last couple of years, and many people in Europe have been experiencing SOME flooding.The last couple of years have been relatively calm. Lots of places in Europe are built on Really Bad Ideas. New Orleans won't have anything on what The Netherlands would look like if the ocean decides to resume its rightful level there.
Rising water: that's a really slow effect. Mind you, eroding shore lines are a sure sign of this phenomena.Erosion is a new phenomenon?
I believe in Global Warming, but honestly, you can't go around blaming everything on it. After a while, people will stop believing you when you have a real complaint.
...is a myth. All of the languages you listed are strongly typed and ready for large application development.
I don't know about Java specifically, but there's certainly precedent. A lot of people are (justifiably) avoiding C#/Mono right now exactly because of such issues. Now, I think Sun has always been much less likely to put the smackdown on developers than Microsoft has been, but I could understand people being skittish.
Even if I don't really care for Java, I'm glad to see it being opened for that reason. It allows our community to welcome in another big talent pool, and that's always a good thing.
But at that point, you're living on borrowed time. If you have to replaced a broken laptop, you'll be getting Vista unless you work someplace with an IT department that will upgrade you to XP. Microsoft has recently demonstrated that they're more than happy to pull the plug on their products, too. Are you that confident they won't turn off the activation servers for XP any time soon?
Someone gave me a tube of hemp-based, patchouli-scented skin lotion once. Thanks. Not only do I have still dry skin, but now I smell like a freakin' hippie from 20 yards away. I couldn't even walk into a coffee shop without someone inviting me to recite poetry.
I think you have that exactly backwards. Microsoft and a few other lumbering dinosaurs really, really wish these upstart punks would quit competing with them. They don't want a free market; they want someone to tell you that you have to buy their products.
Red Hat, IBM, Sun, and other new and old companies that "get it" see this as an opportunity to become more efficient capitalists by competing in real markets, not just ones that temporarily exist due to artificial scarcity.
No, I think you got the roles reversed. Microsoft thinks that you owe them because, darn it, they've tried so hard! If Gates and Ballmer would spend as much time actually writing cool stuff that customers want to buy as they do bitching that everyone else is doing exactly that, then maybe they'd have something better to show than Vista. Competition is too hard, though, so now they're begging for the cozy straitjacket of government protection. Capitalists? I don't think so.
Remember, kids: drugs are bad for you. Even if the dealer says you'll like it, it's nothing more than an expensive, antisocial habit that you'll come to regret once you're hooked.
The easy answer these days: Microsoft is EOLing XP, and no one wants Vista. If you're being forced to switch to something that's new with different hardware compatibility lists and less-than-perfect backward compatibility, why not make a clean start with a system that has a future?
This is Linux, not Windows. Try to download from someplace where it's noon.
Even if I'm not partial to Java, I despise that way of thinking. As I mentioned earlier, Microsoft EOLed Visual FoxPro, thereby forcing us to invest a lot of programmer hours in migrating to something else. I am under no illusion that I can call Steve Ballmer and swear at him.
In all fairness, that's very much a statement of opinion. I don't like Tcl/Tk for my own reasons, and didn't know until this post that RMS also disliked it.
instead 10 years later we still have a huge mishmash of incompatible configuration file formats on linux).I don't follow you here. Is Tcl good at parsing config files?
So given that, I can't blame Sun for saying sod this open source lark, let's appeal to business people, with Java.Well, they've done lots with FOSS besides Java and Tcl. :-)
Python is dynamically, strictly typed.
Or perhaps you're a bit confused between Java and JavaScript? A lot of people make that mistake.Yeah, we had been seriously considering rewriting our core business logic modules in JavaScript.
Thanks, and yes, that's pretty much what my company's like. My boss likes to be included in such decisions because it's ultimately his responsibility if we really screw up, but I've never once been overruled when I had solid reasons for my choice. In general, he just likes the nice toys we give him (internal Jabber server, spam-free email, PostgreSQL, etc.) and trusts us when we want to use something cool.
That is exactly how we feel about it. FoxPro certainly isn't my choice of development environments, but our old code runs - and runs well. The only reason we're migrating away is that it's officially a dead language, and it's crazy to keep developing on something whose owner has said has no future.
So that's how we ended up on Python. Java probably would have done most of the same stuff, and it'd probably be easier to find Java programmers where I live, but we weren't going to fall sucker to that problem again.
Who cares? We're a company, not a bunch of broke kids, and don't have problems spending money if we need to. "Free as in speech" is much more important to us than "free as in beer", even though the lack of price tag is a nice bonus.
You say that as though there's a difference. We were migrating from a legacy codebase in Visual FoxPro, and learned well the lessons against using sole-provider solutions. The absolute last thing we were willing to do was throw ourselves again to the mercy of someone else's whims. With Python, and now Java, we get to keep some of that control.
You can write cross-platform backend and user interface code with both, both of them run on Windows and Unix, and both support OOP. That made those languages pretty reasonable choices for our needs.
We were looking for something cross-platform, and at that time Java was every bit as proprietary as VB and other close dead-end languages. I understand why Java wasn't FOSS at that time, but that still made it ineligible as a serious contender for long-term development. Had Sun made Java's openness a goal a lot sooner, many companies (including mine) might have chosen it over whatever else they decided upon.
Kudos to Sun for waiting so long to open source it. Had it been FOSS back when my company was trying to decide what language to standardize on, we might have picked it instead of Python. Thanks!
Done. Next?