Since the only thing our politicians will listen to is lobbyists, we need to form powerful lobbyists groups of our own to protect our interests.
More specifically, they listen to lobbyists with money. If you can help legislator X to get reelected by contributing to his campaign funds, you will have that legislator's ear. If you are merely operating from ideology but can do nothing to help that legislator win the next election, you may get lucky and be able to have lunch with him or her, but you will not have any long term effect.
The day of effective public advocacy groups is over. Nader is a laughing-stock, the ACLU is loathed by many members of the judiciary and much of the public, the EFF has been almost completely ineffective, and the American public is content with whatever legislative travesty the President advocates, so long as it is in the name of national security and supported by Republicans.
Corporate lobbyists control the legislative process. You, unfortunately, have no impact on this process. Your precious vote is worthless.
For crying out loud people, leave you homes and SHOW them how many people care.
Do you really think it will matter? Ok, so a bunch of people show up, and facing a modicum of public opposition they don't act on the bill.
...until 9 months from now when people lose interest in it, the lobbyists make their wishes known, and the bill gets tacked on as a rider to some unrelated (but much easier to pass) piece of legislation, signed by the governor, and becomes law. The end.
I don't think you realize how little control you have over your government. It's all money, all the time. In cases where public interest collides with money, the public interest will lose every single time. And if they can't get it the first time, they'll get it the second.
The thing that infuriates me is that if this were a Democratic administration pursuing these legislative goals, we would see the neocon propaganda machine going balls-to-the-wall with apocalyptic wrath. Limbaugh and his lesser clones would daily be spewing out crap about how this is yet another example of how the Democrats are in cahoots with the commies and blah blah blah. But since we have Republicans in office there is next to nothing coming from these mindless sycophants who are responsible for propping up this administration.
I oppose any measures which lessen civil liberties no matter who is in office. Democrat, Republican, Green, don't care, doesn't matter. The "PATRIOT" Act was a complete load of shit, and kudos to the lone Senator who voted against it. (I think it was Feingold.)
Meanwhile, this so-called conservative administration is doing everything in its power to roll back civil liberties, and is succeeding in doing so on a daily basis. Congress is compliant, and the courts are becoming packed with judges friendly to the administration's views.
"Gotta give the cops MORE power! MORE! MORE! MORE, I SAY!" And if you complain about it, you are slandered as being unpatriotic or (worse!) a liberal.
Fuck all. These guys are power hungry goons the likes of which the Clinton administration never even got close to pursuing. Vote em all out, war success be goddamned!
Anybody know how to go about requesting this feature? Or, better yet, know how difficult this would be to implement? This kind of changes seems rather fundamental, and I would imagine difficult to do. However, Moz seems pretty well architected, so I wouldn't be surprised if this turned out not to be the case.
Man. If I could just see an icon that indicated valid/invalid documents, life would be so much easier.
I consider my library to be analogous to a carpenter's toolbelt: each book in my library is a tool. How useful the tool is is generally indicated by how often I open up the book to find an answer to a question. I rarely find myself referring back to Wrox books. There are other publishers - namely O'Reilly and Addison-Wesley - whose books I do find myself returning to, over and over. The difference in quality is large.
Wrox books are, in my experience, hastily thrown together collaborative works that do me little good in my day-to-day activities. Your mileage may vary, but I've steered clear of Wrox for the past several months, and I haven't suffered at all.
Since nobody around here really gives a crap about what the various companies think anywho, would someone please put this up on Kazaa or one of the other P2P networks? If we can make a habit of doing this when binaries are available then future/.ings might be somewhat abated.
REAL conservative believe that you should be able to do anything you want as long as it doesnt adversely affect others.
Really? So I should just be able to run right out and get an abortion on demand? Or buy porno at my local Wal-Mart?
There is no "real" definition of conservative. There's a definition that YOU like. Then there's Rush Limbaugh's definition, John McCain's definition, Joseph Lieberman's definition, and Noam Chomsky's definition. You, however, are in the distinct minority in the conservative community. Very, very few mainstream conservatives -- and certainly none in positions of any power -- would hold your definition to be true.
Republicanism is not the same as conservatism. No matter what the media tells you.
Yea, we don't need no stinking "Due Process" Its theirs now, huh?
You are kidding, right? You think in the post-9/11 world that anybody gives a rats ass about anachronistic political concepts like due process? Fuck no. We have Republicans in charge now. If there is one thing Republicans pride themselves on it is about getting criminals, getting them fast, and respecting "rights" later. Rights are what liberals complain about. Conservatives fucking take care of business.
You can whine all you want. Don't worry. There's a war coming. The boost in approval ratings will surely carry through '04. All your base, etc., etc.
4) Increased usage of Passport. I would imagine that a significant number of people first encounter Passport through their Hotmail account. If Hotmail users are drifting away because of spam, this would affect the general acceptance of Passport.
I am sure that since the article doesn't mention security that no one on either the Rendezvous or the Zeroconf teams have discussed it either. I'm pretty sure, as you insinuate, that it's an open protocol and anyone with a 802.11b card can pop up the contents of your HD without too much trouble.
Have you read about the litigation? The antitrust stuff, you know. It talks about leveraging *DESKTOP* monopoly. Everything goes around IE and the only Java technology you can run in IE is applets. Don't throw J2EE and any other irrelevant bits to me.
So? I said nothing about the litigation, and admit full-well to not being fully versed in this. You have avoided my central point that applets are for the most part historical relics.
Further, your use of the phrase "J2EE and other irrelevant bits" convinces me that you are -- as happens so frequently in these kinds of dicussions -- attempting to knock Java in lieu of your favorite technology. Judging by the history of your posts I'm not too far off the mark.
What is the point of Sun accusing Microsoft of not bundling the JVM, if all that the Microsoft's JVM can do is to run applets or antique Java apps?
The dispute was not about whether MS shipped or didn't ship a JVM, it was that the JVM Microsoft shipped was intentionally broken. The hooks into MFC that Microsoft put into the JVM were quite simply not part of the Java specification.
Anyway, regardless of the JVM, applets are only applets.
I hate to sound trite, but the fact that you place so much importance on applets (they are, after all, the only example of the technology that you imply exists) leads me to believe you're not really versed in the current trends in Java. The simple fact is that no one use's applets anymore; certainly there is no new development going on in that area. Most Java applications are written for the J2EE platform.
Even at that, those who do wish to write the modern equivalient of applets use Java Web Start, which is much more robust and doesn't operate within the confines of a browser.
If you can fit it on a floppy it's small enough to email. It's very rare that you encounter a machine without some sort of Internet connection, even if all you can do is get to your favorite freemail service. If you don't have any kind of network access whatsoever it probably indicates a larger problem that would require some sort of OS install and therefore a CD.
I'm sure you'll reply with all sorts of situations where you would need a floppy, but for most consumers they simply aren't needed. Dealing with legacy equipment is one such situation, another is with non-networked systems. Both are fairly rare when dealing with desktops.
Whatever. I haven't needed a floppy disk in many, many moons and will give less than a crap about its demise.
Did you hear the prank calls to CBS from some Howard Stern fan? He got on the air claiming to be a NASA rep, called Dan Rather an idiot, and threw in a "Bababooey." Fucking asshole, man. I hope that guy gets seriously beaten sometime soon.
I live in the Dallas area. Around 8 AM CST we were making breakfast when we heard what sounded like the distant sound of thunder, loud enough for me to hear over the crackling of bacon. 30 minutes later we turn on the TV and are told that NASA lost contact with Columbia at around 8AM CST somewhere south of Dallas.
Now they're speculating about the presence of an Israeli on board.
You have raised some interesting points regarding the legal issues surrounding the case, some of which I was not aware of. I thought this case was a direct extension of the contractual violations made by Microsoft in their Java implementation. Thanks for the correction.
However:
Java is dead regardless of the outcome of the case. Sun is merely showing that Java is a completely closed language that only Sun is allowed to change. Sun is only getting a free ride on this in the Linux-media like slashdot.
This I do know enough about to disagree with. Java is far, far from being dead, nor is it in fact a closed language. Java is hugely popular in server-side applications, and that popularity has not significantly abated with the introduction of.NET. Further, the mechanism used to introduce new features into the language, Java Community Process, is largely outside of the control of Sun and is driven instead by a large and active user base. Read both the FAQ and the Procedural Overview for more info.
2) Something about the supposed monopoly that Microsoft has, and how bad monopolies are, so this one should be broken as much as possible.
This has little to do with Microsoft's monopoly status. The complaint is that Microsoft signed a contract with Sun to distribute a Sun-certified JVM and Microsoft broke both the spirit and the letter of this agreement. They are now being forced to comply, and rightfully so.
Re:Flamebait? Oh, come on
on
Effective Java
·
· Score: 1
Well, *I* thought it was funny. I just bought Logan's Run a couple of weeks ago. Loved it when I was a kid.
Not trying to troll here (and speaking as a creationist), but I fail to see how a range this wide is helpful to anybody, let alone intriguing. This has always been my biggest fault with the theory of evolution: it will always remain indeterminate. Questions abound:
Which have answers. Read a book. And no, by "book " I do not mean "currently fashionable creationist diatribe."
I'm not trying to pessimistic, but it's always hard for me to believe any of these theories given that they seem to change on the decade. (And yes, I've been around a few decades.)
Which is more desirable: Theories that change based upon newly available evidence, or theories that insist upon changing the data to fit the theory? I tend to prefer the former, thanks.
The "evolution" of the theory of evolution itself should be evidence of its failure. (BTW, has anybody ever written about this?)
Probably, but fools abound. One of the primary reasons that science is so much better able to ascertain truth, such as it can, is because it is not married to dogma. (Dogmatists tend to claim the opposite, of course. I'll take it as given that you do as well.) The evolution of theories is a feature, not a bug. However, the underlying premise of evolution -- that species change over time in response to competitive pressures in their environment -- has not changed since Darwin proposed it. Tweaks have occured on the edges; however you may wish these changes to show its invalidity, they only serve to strengthen the underlying theory.
And while we're talking about ridiculousness, let's talk about moody Babylonian sky-gods creating the entire universe in 6 days a few thousand years ago... Hmm... You think your religion hasn't evolved over time? That the things you believe were believed by Christians 1500 years ago? 500 years ago? 50?
Read a book.
Re:No idea what it does
on
Struts Kick Start
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I thought we already had MVC with JSP/servlet/EJB. How does Struts change this? From what I can tell it's some sort of framework that handles form data validation. That's always rather tedious, so if Struts saves time it's a good deal.
Mmmm.... Part of Struts is validation, although technically it is a separate component. (See the Jakarta Commons Validator) This is a minor (though extremely useful) part of it, however.
What makes Struts what it is are (arguably) ActionForms (basically, JavaBeans with some enhanced functionality) and ActionForwards/ActionMappings. These allow you to separate out the logic which operates upon data which will eventually be diplayed from the actual display of that data. Because solutions which depend upon JSPs tend to become a mass of unreusable scriplets, having this separation allows for a more maintainable site and avoids the pitfalls which have traditionally plagued JSPs.
...or is it that Struts, JavaServer Faces and MVC methodologies merely enforce good coding techniques/styles that one should be using anyway? Regardless of if you are using PHP, Perl, etc.
Yes. That is indeed largely their purpose. I don't see how that's a bad thing given that you almost always develop with people who have varying degrees of discipline when it comes to sticking with good coding practices. Some (like me, honestly) are damn near fanatical when it comes to sticking to plan. Others don't care as much, so long as the job gets done.
Sometimes I think Java, OO and other development technologies are like grammer school teachers hovering over our heads saying, "Now, we *know* you are going to be sloppy if left on your own, so are going box you in so that you CAN'T do those sloppy things." Except that you still can. VERY easy to understand and maintain applications can be coding procedual languages. VERY difficult to understand and maintain applications can be written in OO languages.
I think that both cases depend upon the quality of the code(r), and what you personally prefer. I tend to find OO solutions more elegant and easier to maintain, whereas it has been my experience that with functional languages it is dangerously easy to wind up with an unmaintainable and barely understandable mass of spaghetti code. This is especially true whenever time begins to run out and deadlines approach: people freak out and start slapping out code that they would normally be embarrased about. Having a structure like Struts in place helps to keep this from happening.
This is not to say, of course, that people don't make classes that are nothing more than a series of
public static final
methods, and that wind up behaving exactly like the procedural languages. In any language worth it's salt it will be possible to code both well and badly.
Slashdot Mirror
Since the only thing our politicians will listen to is lobbyists, we need to form powerful lobbyists groups of our own to protect our interests.
More specifically, they listen to lobbyists with money. If you can help legislator X to get reelected by contributing to his campaign funds, you will have that legislator's ear. If you are merely operating from ideology but can do nothing to help that legislator win the next election, you may get lucky and be able to have lunch with him or her, but you will not have any long term effect.
The day of effective public advocacy groups is over. Nader is a laughing-stock, the ACLU is loathed by many members of the judiciary and much of the public, the EFF has been almost completely ineffective, and the American public is content with whatever legislative travesty the President advocates, so long as it is in the name of national security and supported by Republicans.
Corporate lobbyists control the legislative process. You, unfortunately, have no impact on this process. Your precious vote is worthless.
For crying out loud people, leave you homes and SHOW them how many people care.
Do you really think it will matter? Ok, so a bunch of people show up, and facing a modicum of public opposition they don't act on the bill.
...until 9 months from now when people lose interest in it, the lobbyists make their wishes known, and the bill gets tacked on as a rider to some unrelated (but much easier to pass) piece of legislation, signed by the governor, and becomes law. The end.
I don't think you realize how little control you have over your government. It's all money, all the time. In cases where public interest collides with money, the public interest will lose every single time. And if they can't get it the first time, they'll get it the second.
Your voice doesn't matter.
The thing that infuriates me is that if this were a Democratic administration pursuing these legislative goals, we would see the neocon propaganda machine going balls-to-the-wall with apocalyptic wrath. Limbaugh and his lesser clones would daily be spewing out crap about how this is yet another example of how the Democrats are in cahoots with the commies and blah blah blah. But since we have Republicans in office there is next to nothing coming from these mindless sycophants who are responsible for propping up this administration.
I oppose any measures which lessen civil liberties no matter who is in office. Democrat, Republican, Green, don't care, doesn't matter. The "PATRIOT" Act was a complete load of shit, and kudos to the lone Senator who voted against it. (I think it was Feingold.)
Meanwhile, this so-called conservative administration is doing everything in its power to roll back civil liberties, and is succeeding in doing so on a daily basis. Congress is compliant, and the courts are becoming packed with judges friendly to the administration's views.
"Gotta give the cops MORE power! MORE! MORE! MORE, I SAY!" And if you complain about it, you are slandered as being unpatriotic or (worse!) a liberal.
Fuck all. These guys are power hungry goons the likes of which the Clinton administration never even got close to pursuing. Vote em all out, war success be goddamned!
Anybody know how to go about requesting this feature? Or, better yet, know how difficult this would be to implement? This kind of changes seems rather fundamental, and I would imagine difficult to do. However, Moz seems pretty well architected, so I wouldn't be surprised if this turned out not to be the case.
Man. If I could just see an icon that indicated valid/invalid documents, life would be so much easier.
Lessee....
Pro-market Administration: Check.
Mostly conservative Supreme Court: Check.
Decreased interest in public works by the public: Check.
Right wing propaganda machine: Check
Bookoo gajillions of greenbacks going into politicians pockets in favor of DMCA: Check.
I consider my library to be analogous to a carpenter's toolbelt: each book in my library is a tool. How useful the tool is is generally indicated by how often I open up the book to find an answer to a question. I rarely find myself referring back to Wrox books. There are other publishers - namely O'Reilly and Addison-Wesley - whose books I do find myself returning to, over and over. The difference in quality is large.
Wrox books are, in my experience, hastily thrown together collaborative works that do me little good in my day-to-day activities. Your mileage may vary, but I've steered clear of Wrox for the past several months, and I haven't suffered at all.
Since nobody around here really gives a crap about what the various companies think anywho, would someone please put this up on Kazaa or one of the other P2P networks? If we can make a habit of doing this when binaries are available then future /.ings might be somewhat abated.
REAL conservative believe that you should be able to do anything you want as long as it doesnt adversely affect others.
Really? So I should just be able to run right out and get an abortion on demand? Or buy porno at my local Wal-Mart?
There is no "real" definition of conservative. There's a definition that YOU like. Then there's Rush Limbaugh's definition, John McCain's definition, Joseph Lieberman's definition, and Noam Chomsky's definition. You, however, are in the distinct minority in the conservative community. Very, very few mainstream conservatives -- and certainly none in positions of any power -- would hold your definition to be true.
Republicanism is not the same as conservatism. No matter what the media tells you.
Fuck you.
Yea, we don't need no stinking "Due Process" Its theirs now, huh?
You are kidding, right? You think in the post-9/11 world that anybody gives a rats ass about anachronistic political concepts like due process? Fuck no. We have Republicans in charge now. If there is one thing Republicans pride themselves on it is about getting criminals, getting them fast, and respecting "rights" later. Rights are what liberals complain about. Conservatives fucking take care of business.
You can whine all you want. Don't worry. There's a war coming. The boost in approval ratings will surely carry through '04. All your base, etc., etc.
I am interested in your religion, and want to know where I can pick up a brochure. This available at game shoppes?
I would add:
:)
4) Increased usage of Passport. I would imagine that a significant number of people first encounter Passport through their Hotmail account. If Hotmail users are drifting away because of spam, this would affect the general acceptance of Passport.
This ties directly into point 3, of course.
I am sure that since the article doesn't mention security that no one on either the Rendezvous or the Zeroconf teams have discussed it either. I'm pretty sure, as you insinuate, that it's an open protocol and anyone with a 802.11b card can pop up the contents of your HD without too much trouble.
I'm sure.
Have you read about the litigation? The antitrust stuff, you know. It talks about leveraging *DESKTOP* monopoly. Everything goes around IE and the only Java technology you can run in IE is applets. Don't throw J2EE and any other irrelevant bits to me.
So? I said nothing about the litigation, and admit full-well to not being fully versed in this. You have avoided my central point that applets are for the most part historical relics.
Further, your use of the phrase "J2EE and other irrelevant bits" convinces me that you are -- as happens so frequently in these kinds of dicussions -- attempting to knock Java in lieu of your favorite technology. Judging by the history of your posts I'm not too far off the mark.
What is the point of Sun accusing Microsoft of not bundling the JVM, if all that the Microsoft's JVM can do is to run applets or antique Java apps?
The dispute was not about whether MS shipped or didn't ship a JVM, it was that the JVM Microsoft shipped was intentionally broken. The hooks into MFC that Microsoft put into the JVM were quite simply not part of the Java specification.
Anyway, regardless of the JVM, applets are only applets.
I hate to sound trite, but the fact that you place so much importance on applets (they are, after all, the only example of the technology that you imply exists) leads me to believe you're not really versed in the current trends in Java. The simple fact is that no one use's applets anymore; certainly there is no new development going on in that area. Most Java applications are written for the J2EE platform.
Even at that, those who do wish to write the modern equivalient of applets use Java Web Start, which is much more robust and doesn't operate within the confines of a browser.
If you can fit it on a floppy it's small enough to email. It's very rare that you encounter a machine without some sort of Internet connection, even if all you can do is get to your favorite freemail service. If you don't have any kind of network access whatsoever it probably indicates a larger problem that would require some sort of OS install and therefore a CD.
I'm sure you'll reply with all sorts of situations where you would need a floppy, but for most consumers they simply aren't needed. Dealing with legacy equipment is one such situation, another is with non-networked systems. Both are fairly rare when dealing with desktops.
Whatever. I haven't needed a floppy disk in many, many moons and will give less than a crap about its demise.
Did you hear the prank calls to CBS from some Howard Stern fan? He got on the air claiming to be a NASA rep, called Dan Rather an idiot, and threw in a "Bababooey." Fucking asshole, man. I hope that guy gets seriously beaten sometime soon.
They were speculating about what the presence of said Israeli implies.
I live in the Dallas area. Around 8 AM CST we were making breakfast when we heard what sounded like the distant sound of thunder, loud enough for me to hear over the crackling of bacon. 30 minutes later we turn on the TV and are told that NASA lost contact with Columbia at around 8AM CST somewhere south of Dallas.
Now they're speculating about the presence of an Israeli on board.
Not again.
IDEA.
You have raised some interesting points regarding the legal issues surrounding the case, some of which I was not aware of. I thought this case was a direct extension of the contractual violations made by Microsoft in their Java implementation. Thanks for the correction.
However:
Java is dead regardless of the outcome of the case. Sun is merely showing that Java is a completely closed language that only Sun is allowed to change. Sun is only getting a free ride on this in the Linux-media like slashdot.
This I do know enough about to disagree with. Java is far, far from being dead, nor is it in fact a closed language. Java is hugely popular in server-side applications, and that popularity has not significantly abated with the introduction of .NET. Further, the mechanism used to introduce new features into the language, Java Community Process, is largely outside of the control of Sun and is driven instead by a large and active user base. Read both the FAQ and the Procedural Overview for more info.
Legally, the only point you make is:
2) Something about the supposed monopoly that Microsoft has, and how bad monopolies are, so this one should be broken as much as possible.
This has little to do with Microsoft's monopoly status. The complaint is that Microsoft signed a contract with Sun to distribute a Sun-certified JVM and Microsoft broke both the spirit and the letter of this agreement. They are now being forced to comply, and rightfully so.
Well, *I* thought it was funny. I just bought Logan's Run a couple of weeks ago. Loved it when I was a kid.
Not trying to troll here (and speaking as a creationist), but I fail to see how a range this wide is helpful to anybody, let alone intriguing. This has always been my biggest fault with the theory of evolution: it will always remain indeterminate. Questions abound:
Which have answers. Read a book. And no, by "book " I do not mean "currently fashionable creationist diatribe."
I'm not trying to pessimistic, but it's always hard for me to believe any of these theories given that they seem to change on the decade. (And yes, I've been around a few decades.)
Which is more desirable: Theories that change based upon newly available evidence, or theories that insist upon changing the data to fit the theory? I tend to prefer the former, thanks.
The "evolution" of the theory of evolution itself should be evidence of its failure. (BTW, has anybody ever written about this?)
Probably, but fools abound. One of the primary reasons that science is so much better able to ascertain truth, such as it can, is because it is not married to dogma. (Dogmatists tend to claim the opposite, of course. I'll take it as given that you do as well.) The evolution of theories is a feature, not a bug. However, the underlying premise of evolution -- that species change over time in response to competitive pressures in their environment -- has not changed since Darwin proposed it. Tweaks have occured on the edges; however you may wish these changes to show its invalidity, they only serve to strengthen the underlying theory.
And while we're talking about ridiculousness, let's talk about moody Babylonian sky-gods creating the entire universe in 6 days a few thousand years ago... Hmm... You think your religion hasn't evolved over time? That the things you believe were believed by Christians 1500 years ago? 500 years ago? 50?
Read a book.
I thought we already had MVC with JSP/servlet/EJB. How does Struts change this? From what I can tell it's some sort of framework that handles form data validation. That's always rather tedious, so if Struts saves time it's a good deal.
Mmmm.... Part of Struts is validation, although technically it is a separate component. (See the Jakarta Commons Validator) This is a minor (though extremely useful) part of it, however.
What makes Struts what it is are (arguably) ActionForms (basically, JavaBeans with some enhanced functionality) and ActionForwards/ActionMappings. These allow you to separate out the logic which operates upon data which will eventually be diplayed from the actual display of that data. Because solutions which depend upon JSPs tend to become a mass of unreusable scriplets, having this separation allows for a more maintainable site and avoids the pitfalls which have traditionally plagued JSPs.
Yes. That is indeed largely their purpose. I don't see how that's a bad thing given that you almost always develop with people who have varying degrees of discipline when it comes to sticking with good coding practices. Some (like me, honestly) are damn near fanatical when it comes to sticking to plan. Others don't care as much, so long as the job gets done.
Sometimes I think Java, OO and other development technologies are like grammer school teachers hovering over our heads saying, "Now, we *know* you are going to be sloppy if left on your own, so are going box you in so that you CAN'T do those sloppy things." Except that you still can. VERY easy to understand and maintain applications can be coding procedual languages. VERY difficult to understand and maintain applications can be written in OO languages.
I think that both cases depend upon the quality of the code(r), and what you personally prefer. I tend to find OO solutions more elegant and easier to maintain, whereas it has been my experience that with functional languages it is dangerously easy to wind up with an unmaintainable and barely understandable mass of spaghetti code. This is especially true whenever time begins to run out and deadlines approach: people freak out and start slapping out code that they would normally be embarrased about. Having a structure like Struts in place helps to keep this from happening.
This is not to say, of course, that people don't make classes that are nothing more than a series of
methods, and that wind up behaving exactly like the procedural languages. In any language worth it's salt it will be possible to code both well and badly.