For the record I do believe homosexuals have the right to get married, but to play Devil's advocate, would you support polygamy? It's the same logic in that the people entering into the contract are consenting adults who happen to have a different way of expressing their love/sexuality.
No, it's not, because 2 people != >2 people.
The *only* thing that changes to enable gay marriage is removing discrimination against homosexuals. Nothing else. Enabling polygamy really would require a fundamental re-evaluation of what marriage is because it changes from being a legal contract between two people to being a legal contract between 3 or more people. That's before even getting into the taxation and welfare situations.
Upon the creation of a work you get an automatic 10 year copyright, no work required. This means that even if you create something you don't think has value, but realize later it does you aren't screwed.
If you didn't create the work for the purpose of making money, then the "incentive" represented by Copyright is irrelevant - ie: you simply can't be "screwed" because you weren't expecting to have anything to be screwed out of (with the exception of proper attribution and recognition).
An analogy: a friend's child is getting into collecting coins and I give him a jar full of old coins that's been accumulating for years. If said kid finds something in there worth a zillion dollars, I have no right to ask for a cut of the profits.
Any work done should automatically go into the public domain after 30 years regardless of whether or not the artist is still living.
Thirty ? In today's world of global communications and essentially free and instant distribution it should be more like five, or maybe ten at the outside. Ideally, it would be proportional to how much effort was actually expended creating the work, or the popularity, such that "low effort" works and more popular works entered the public domain sooner.
Fundamentally, Copyright protection needs to be split into two sections - one regarding authorship and attribution and one regarding commercialised infringement. The former should be automatic and in perpetuity, the latter should be opt-in and very limited (with no justification whatsoever for copyright to last an instant past the death of the copyright holder).
The common wisdom is that the purpose was to ensure that if the work is popular, then the artist is rewarded appropriately (you know, like every other product sold, so that the free market can actually work).
If copyright worked like the free market, then copyright holders would have to bear some of the consequences of infinite supply, rather than just reaping the benefits.
This includes the kid down the street downloading for nothing else apart from his own profit.
No, copyright was supposed to protect against large scale, commercialised infringement.
If everyone was like this kid, and copyright couldn't touch us, then our culture would die a slow and painful death.
That explains why there wasn't any "culture" at all until a few hundred years ago, right ?
If you're wearing a seat and shoulder belt, the additional benefit of an airbag is not large. The alternative may be merely bruises from the belts.
It is if you hit something at 120km/h.
You also discount the role of incentives to get people to attend more careful to automobile maintenance, etc.:-)
Mechanical failures are not always caused by bad maintenance.
As far as actual measured death rates go, the safest vehicle on the road is a bicycle -- even after adjusting for other risk factors, non-bicycle commuters have a 39% higher mortality rate, says this study: http://archinte.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/160/11/1621.
I don't think that's a valid conclusion to be drawn from that study.
Presumably everyone has a spike in their steering wheel.
Awesome. All that leaves is things like heart attacks, mechanical failures, and all the other things where neither driver is actually responsible for causing the accident.
The simple point is this: making a vehicle more dangerous for the occupants is not going to save any more lives. The whole idea is fundamentally stupid, and while I can certainly see how an economist's naive and simplistic worldview might come up with it, a simple look at the fatality rates past and present (or even just between drivers and motorcyclists) should provide sufficiently conclusive evidence.
I was going to say, just like an airbag, when it occurred to me that the airbag is already a pretty dangerous beast -- if you drive with your hands high on the steering wheel, if the airbag fires, you are likely to end up with a broken something (arm or face, most likely).
The alternative is to end up with a much more broken something (anything from your nose to major arteries). Airbags don't just go off for the hell of it (though they have to inflate harder and faster in the US - particularly in older vehicles - to account for the common American attitude of sticking it to The Man by not wearing seatbelts).
Which the entire bill is irrelevant when you would consider that the idea of a marriage shouldn't be something that the government should deal with [...]
Marriage is first and foremost a legal contract. Hard to argue Government shouldn't be involved somewhere.
Precisely what I'm claiming SHOULD NOT be the case.
Marriage has existed for "legal" reasons far longer than it has for religious ones. That is precisely why Government is "involved" in marriage - the legal ramifications are arguably too ingrained in society to ever be removed.
What does adding in cameras, adding in LCD screens, adding in extra hardware to process it, etc. cost? A shitload more money.
It's difficult to see how it could add more than a couple of hundred bucks to a car in actual costs.
Secondly, you seem to have made the incorrect assumption that somehow car manufacturers don't add safety features when pressured by consumers. They do.
You seem to make the incorrect assumption that most people will pressure for safety features. They won't. Most of them care only about the price. Heck, without safety regulations seatbelts would probably be optional extras.
All extra government regulation does it add in big bucks for a handful of "approved" suppliers while eliminating the competition in most cases.
What ? They'll come fitted from the factory. The "supplier" will be the car manufacturer.
And as for the "bang for your buck" this is a pretty insignificant issue. Yes, 292 people lost per year to these things is tragic but it doesn't require massive costs. As for pedestrians, simply get away from cars that are backing up. It isn't that hard to see that a car is moving backwards and then move outside of its path.
It is if you're blind or looking in the other direction. Or simply not capable of making the cause-effect connection - like, say, young children.
It is more government regulation with little to no true upside [...]
Actually you've got that backwards. It's regulation with a pretty clear upside and essentially no downside. Just like, say, the one making seatbelts mandatory.
A Famous Economist (or maybe it was a Famous Sociologist, can't recall which) proposed a giant steel spike from the steering wheel, aimed directly at the driver's heart. An incentive.
Where's the incentive when you get slammed into the steering wheel through no fault of your own ?
I wonder how many accidents will be caused by lost people traveling alone with no easy/safe place to pull over, who attempt to enter the override code while driving anyways?
Probably nowhere near as many as are caused by people trying to send text messages (especially on touchscreen phones) while driving.
For a hypothetical (yes, yes...I know) example, would a single mother, new to L.A. and lost in a bad area, stop to use the GPS while chatting with the group of bored gang members standing around nearby looking for entertainment, or try to override it to get out of there rather than risking passing the same gang's corner again?
Or she could just keep driving until she's no longer in a bad area. Or program in the destination before starting.
I wonder if the driver in this example could be successful in a lawsuit if she were to stop to use the GPS and then be attacked?
Probably. There's no shortage of idiotic legal decisions out there.
That's a religious matter that should have nothing to do with the state in my mind.
Marriage is *far* from just a religious matter in every country I'm aware of. Being married has significant legal ramifications for everything from taxation to estate planning.
You open the file normally, as you would. The system creates a copy of the file though.
So... I edit a copy of my Resume in Word, then later open it up and modify it in Writer (since I'm trying it out) then later I go back to Word and -- OMG! My changes are gone !
What happens to the copy of my Resume if I delete OpenOffice ? Does it get deleted as well, or does it hang aroung in Limbo until I reinstall OpenOffice ?
Two ways:
Who decides when/if the resource should be hidden and from what ? There will be completely legitimate reasons why $SOME_APPLICATION might want to look at my address book.
No, it does not. Windows doesn't create a virtual session for each executable.
It does "virtualise" certain parts of the system though (to support legacy applications) - Registry, certain system paths, etc. The capability exists.
Examples: nuclear reactors, military aircraft, avionics for commercial aircraft, modern cars, military ships etc
None of those are particularly complex. They're all single or very limited purpose, with tightly controlled and well-known inputs, never extended in an ad-hoc fashion and nearly always operated by trained and certified users.
How is that more complex than an autonomous system with hundreds of processors and network nodes, with multiple tasks running autonomously with 100% uptime?
Er, in pretty much every way ? What embedded system are you thinking of that can handle all the things I listed in that paragraph ? Your "autonomous system with hundreds of processors and network nodes, with multiple tasks running autonomously with 100% uptime" isn't particularly complex if all it has to do is changing some coloured lights from green to orange to red based on half a dozen well-specified input types.
Actually, it's you that has it backwards. Critical safety systems don't run commercial OSes because the commercial OSes are not secure and cannot be secured.
...Because they have to provide so much more functionality and deal with so much more complexity.
On the other hand, embedded real time OSes can be used as general purpose OSes, because they have the security required.
But they can't because they lack the features, functionality, flexibility, extensibility, time to market and cost requirements of a general purpose OS.
What embedded OS do you think could be a functional replacement for - and we'll pick the easy one - OS X ?
I'd like to point out, because I am sure you are ignorant about it, that military grade OSes have multiple users as well, [..]
Who are trained.
[...] and they run multiple applications.
Which are all known, tested and certified in advance. J. Random Soldier is not going to be able to download and run SuperAwesomeGemHunt off the intarcloudweb, nor does the system need to make any allowances for him to do that.
For example, in modern ships that run military OSes, all the weapons and radars are in the same network. There are lots of different software components running all the time and interacting with each other.
But the tasks they have to do are very limited and almost completely static. Manage systems with capabilities fully known in advance, manufactured to extremely high quality and tolerances, and which will never unexpectedly change.
How well do you think the RADAR and weapons computers will do at managing the propulsion or HVAC systems ? Do you think the RADAR and weapons computers from one ship could run the hardware on another ship in another Navy ? That's the kind of scenarios a general purpose OS has to deal with.
A military system can be nearly guaranteed to never have to run an unknown piece of software and, more importantly, will never be criticised if it cannot do so.
There are extremely complex graphical interfaces with all sorts of information displayed: from complex maps to complex real time graphs, and y
How can you forward individual app windows over an RDP interface? You can't.
Actually you can, it's just not supported without terminal server installed.
Instead, X11 forwarding allows individual windows to get forwarded, which is great if you're SSH'd into a machine the other side of the world and need to use one GUI app without having to set up a full blown RDP/VNC desktop on the machine.
Of course, it's pretty shit when your network link hiccups and the app closes, losing all state and any unsaved work. Standard X11 on anything except a high-speed local LAN is utter crap.
Given a choice between fancier compositing effects and being able to run any program on any machine while rendering on any other machine, I'll take the latter any day.
Most would not, as the ability to do that in today's world is relevant only to a vanishingly small number of people (and only like to get smaller, as web apps continue to take over the world).
Yes, because in normal "client-server" nomenclature, the user (or his machine) is the client, and the thing he connects to is the server. With X11, this is basically reversed - the user is the server, and the other things are the clients.
You are extremely stubborn. It's amazing that you don't get such a simple concept.
I get the concept fine. You seem to be either ignorant of, or refusing to consider, the problems with it.
For the application, the real files are the files it sees. It's the files the application has created or it is registered to manipulate. For the rest of the system though, the real files are different.
Who decides which applications can manipulate what ? Who decides what a "trusted" application is ? How do you share information between different applications (eg: how can a document be edited by Office, OpenOffice, or some other random application ? How do you help with malware that's only interested in read-only access (eg: sending a trojan to everyone in an address book) ?
Everything you listed as an example is already possible with existing systems. Indeed, Windows has already been doing it to some degree for 3+ years.
Unfounded speculation.
On the contrary. Quite well-founded speculation. Ada isn't exactly some "new hotness" language that's sprung up in the last decade, it's been around for thirty years.
Not true. One of the reasons the US DoD has created Ada is that there was a need for a truly safe programming language that does not allow systems to be compromised due to bugs even by the personnel that uses those systems.
The DoD uses (mostly used, these days) Ada because it needed a language that enforced correctness, to proactively prevent certain types of bugs and misfeatures. That has nothing to do with end users causing security breaches that don't leverage software bugs, which is what happens most of the time (trojans, third-party software errors, malicious and/or ignorant data leakages).
There is nothing in Ada that prevents systems to manage latency as they require.
That's great, but it's not really relevant to what I said. RTOSes and other embedded systems strive (and are often defined by their ability) to make latency *consistent*, and for this they typically sacrifice raw performance. General Purposes OSes strive to make it as fast as possible most of the time, with the sacrifice that sometimes it will be much higher than usual when unusual situations are encountered.
The best example of this I can think of off the top of my head is "enterprise" vs "consumer" hard disks:
* "Enterprise" drives have firmware that has hard and short timeout limits when dealing with errors. This is because they are nearly always used in performance-sensitive RAIDed environments, and thus a failure on a single disk usually doesn't imply a system-wide critical failure, and performance is a higher priority. Hence, it's better for the drive to have a predictable response time in which it will return either the correct data or an error, rather than a variable response time in which it may be relatively more likely to return data, but could also still return an error *and also have hung the system for minutes to get that result*.
* In contrast, "consumer" drive firmware is designed to try as long and hard as possible to try and return data from read, even when that can mean multiple minutes before either data is returned, or a sector is finally marked "bad" and an error returned. This is because such drives are nearly always used in non-redundant environments, hence returning data is a higher priority than consistent performance.
Wrong again. Embedded systems can be vastly more complex than your desktop OS, which is mostly for viewing and manipulating documents and media.
What complex embedded systems are you thinking of ?
A desktop OS is written to do a lot more than "viewing and manipulating documents and media". It has to handle multiple user contexts running arbitrary code of unknown origin and quality. It has to handle random hardware devices (and their drivers) of unknown origin and quality being connected and disconnected at arbitrary times and for arbitrary periods.
Then there are people who work at home and do the school run for their kids, because their kids are lazy and don't want to sit in a bus.
It's not that the kids are lazy, it's because Today Tonight and various similar trash have convinced them that if their precious snowflake is out of their sight for more than a few seconds between authorised locations, they'll be kidnapped, raped and murdered.
Huh? How is providing healtcare to those that can't afford it wealth redistribution?
Not that I disagree with your philosophy, but taking money from group A to give to group B - either directly or indirectly - is pretty clearly "wealth distribution".
And while we're on that topic, why is always considered a bad thing when wealth redistribution benefits the lower-middle income, but it's a good thing when it benefits the upper 2% (e.g. tax breaks for the wealthy)?
Tax breaks for the wealthy aren't really wealth distribution because you're not taking from anyone. Bailing out banks and other failed businesses, on the other hand...
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For the record I do believe homosexuals have the right to get married, but to play Devil's advocate, would you support polygamy? It's the same logic in that the people entering into the contract are consenting adults who happen to have a different way of expressing their love/sexuality.
No, it's not, because 2 people != >2 people.
The *only* thing that changes to enable gay marriage is removing discrimination against homosexuals. Nothing else. Enabling polygamy really would require a fundamental re-evaluation of what marriage is because it changes from being a legal contract between two people to being a legal contract between 3 or more people. That's before even getting into the taxation and welfare situations.
Upon the creation of a work you get an automatic 10 year copyright, no work required. This means that even if you create something you don't think has value, but realize later it does you aren't screwed.
If you didn't create the work for the purpose of making money, then the "incentive" represented by Copyright is irrelevant - ie: you simply can't be "screwed" because you weren't expecting to have anything to be screwed out of (with the exception of proper attribution and recognition).
An analogy: a friend's child is getting into collecting coins and I give him a jar full of old coins that's been accumulating for years. If said kid finds something in there worth a zillion dollars, I have no right to ask for a cut of the profits.
i personally thing it should be for the life of the artist.. the actual person who created it.. not the company .. but the person to whom it came from.
This idea falls apart as soon as any sort of collaborative work is considered. Music and films being the two most obvious examples.
Any work done should automatically go into the public domain after 30 years regardless of whether or not the artist is still living.
Thirty ? In today's world of global communications and essentially free and instant distribution it should be more like five, or maybe ten at the outside. Ideally, it would be proportional to how much effort was actually expended creating the work, or the popularity, such that "low effort" works and more popular works entered the public domain sooner.
Fundamentally, Copyright protection needs to be split into two sections - one regarding authorship and attribution and one regarding commercialised infringement. The former should be automatic and in perpetuity, the latter should be opt-in and very limited (with no justification whatsoever for copyright to last an instant past the death of the copyright holder).
The common wisdom is that the purpose was to ensure that if the work is popular, then the artist is rewarded appropriately (you know, like every other product sold, so that the free market can actually work).
If copyright worked like the free market, then copyright holders would have to bear some of the consequences of infinite supply, rather than just reaping the benefits.
This includes the kid down the street downloading for nothing else apart from his own profit.
No, copyright was supposed to protect against large scale, commercialised infringement.
If everyone was like this kid, and copyright couldn't touch us, then our culture would die a slow and painful death.
That explains why there wasn't any "culture" at all until a few hundred years ago, right ?
If you're wearing a seat and shoulder belt, the additional benefit of an airbag is not large. The alternative may be merely bruises from the belts.
It is if you hit something at 120km/h.
You also discount the role of incentives to get people to attend more careful to automobile maintenance, etc. :-)
Mechanical failures are not always caused by bad maintenance.
As far as actual measured death rates go, the safest vehicle on the road is a bicycle -- even after adjusting for other risk factors, non-bicycle commuters have a 39% higher mortality rate, says this study: http://archinte.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/160/11/1621.
I don't think that's a valid conclusion to be drawn from that study.
Presumably everyone has a spike in their steering wheel.
Awesome. All that leaves is things like heart attacks, mechanical failures, and all the other things where neither driver is actually responsible for causing the accident.
The simple point is this: making a vehicle more dangerous for the occupants is not going to save any more lives. The whole idea is fundamentally stupid, and while I can certainly see how an economist's naive and simplistic worldview might come up with it, a simple look at the fatality rates past and present (or even just between drivers and motorcyclists) should provide sufficiently conclusive evidence.
I was going to say, just like an airbag, when it occurred to me that the airbag is already a pretty dangerous beast -- if you drive with your hands high on the steering wheel, if the airbag fires, you are likely to end up with a broken something (arm or face, most likely).
The alternative is to end up with a much more broken something (anything from your nose to major arteries). Airbags don't just go off for the hell of it (though they have to inflate harder and faster in the US - particularly in older vehicles - to account for the common American attitude of sticking it to The Man by not wearing seatbelts).
That spike gives you an incentive to take those steps.
And what incentive does it give the other person ?
So why is this even a story? You'd think there would have been enough sensible businessmen all along for lots of Red Hats to prosper.
"Paying external parties for a common solution" and "giving our solution to a common problem to the world" are two very different scenarios.
The thinking behind your other conflation is similarly flawed.
Which the entire bill is irrelevant when you would consider that the idea of a marriage shouldn't be something that the government should deal with [...]
Marriage is first and foremost a legal contract. Hard to argue Government shouldn't be involved somewhere.
Precisely what I'm claiming SHOULD NOT be the case.
Marriage has existed for "legal" reasons far longer than it has for religious ones. That is precisely why Government is "involved" in marriage - the legal ramifications are arguably too ingrained in society to ever be removed.
A corporation's goal is to make a product that is free of defects and doesn't use fraud to persuade an individual.
Ah, I see your problem, you're living in Everything's Opposite World.
What does adding in cameras, adding in LCD screens, adding in extra hardware to process it, etc. cost? A shitload more money.
It's difficult to see how it could add more than a couple of hundred bucks to a car in actual costs.
Secondly, you seem to have made the incorrect assumption that somehow car manufacturers don't add safety features when pressured by consumers. They do.
You seem to make the incorrect assumption that most people will pressure for safety features. They won't. Most of them care only about the price. Heck, without safety regulations seatbelts would probably be optional extras.
All extra government regulation does it add in big bucks for a handful of "approved" suppliers while eliminating the competition in most cases.
What ? They'll come fitted from the factory. The "supplier" will be the car manufacturer.
And as for the "bang for your buck" this is a pretty insignificant issue. Yes, 292 people lost per year to these things is tragic but it doesn't require massive costs. As for pedestrians, simply get away from cars that are backing up. It isn't that hard to see that a car is moving backwards and then move outside of its path.
It is if you're blind or looking in the other direction. Or simply not capable of making the cause-effect connection - like, say, young children.
It is more government regulation with little to no true upside [...]
Actually you've got that backwards. It's regulation with a pretty clear upside and essentially no downside. Just like, say, the one making seatbelts mandatory.
A Famous Economist (or maybe it was a Famous Sociologist, can't recall which) proposed a giant steel spike from the steering wheel, aimed directly at the driver's heart. An incentive.
Where's the incentive when you get slammed into the steering wheel through no fault of your own ?
I wonder how many accidents will be caused by lost people traveling alone with no easy/safe place to pull over, who attempt to enter the override code while driving anyways?
Probably nowhere near as many as are caused by people trying to send text messages (especially on touchscreen phones) while driving.
For a hypothetical (yes, yes...I know) example, would a single mother, new to L.A. and lost in a bad area, stop to use the GPS while chatting with the group of bored gang members standing around nearby looking for entertainment, or try to override it to get out of there rather than risking passing the same gang's corner again?
Or she could just keep driving until she's no longer in a bad area. Or program in the destination before starting.
I wonder if the driver in this example could be successful in a lawsuit if she were to stop to use the GPS and then be attacked?
Probably. There's no shortage of idiotic legal decisions out there.
That's a religious matter that should have nothing to do with the state in my mind.
Marriage is *far* from just a religious matter in every country I'm aware of. Being married has significant legal ramifications for everything from taxation to estate planning.
Then the Government will pay the postage for my tax return if I mail it in?
No. They do, however, pay for the postal service that you use to mail it in.
In general, humans are lazy, and if their basic needs are met without them needing to do anything, most will not do anything.
Then how does anything get done in places where welfare provides a basic living wage ?
You open the file normally, as you would. The system creates a copy of the file though.
So... I edit a copy of my Resume in Word, then later open it up and modify it in Writer (since I'm trying it out) then later I go back to Word and -- OMG! My changes are gone !
What happens to the copy of my Resume if I delete OpenOffice ? Does it get deleted as well, or does it hang aroung in Limbo until I reinstall OpenOffice ?
Two ways:
Who decides when/if the resource should be hidden and from what ? There will be completely legitimate reasons why $SOME_APPLICATION might want to look at my address book.
No, it does not. Windows doesn't create a virtual session for each executable.
It does "virtualise" certain parts of the system though (to support legacy applications) - Registry, certain system paths, etc. The capability exists.
Examples: nuclear reactors, military aircraft, avionics for commercial aircraft, modern cars, military ships etc
None of those are particularly complex. They're all single or very limited purpose, with tightly controlled and well-known inputs, never extended in an ad-hoc fashion and nearly always operated by trained and certified users.
How is that more complex than an autonomous system with hundreds of processors and network nodes, with multiple tasks running autonomously with 100% uptime?
Er, in pretty much every way ? What embedded system are you thinking of that can handle all the things I listed in that paragraph ? Your "autonomous system with hundreds of processors and network nodes, with multiple tasks running autonomously with 100% uptime" isn't particularly complex if all it has to do is changing some coloured lights from green to orange to red based on half a dozen well-specified input types.
Actually, it's you that has it backwards. Critical safety systems don't run commercial OSes because the commercial OSes are not secure and cannot be secured.
...Because they have to provide so much more functionality and deal with so much more complexity.
On the other hand, embedded real time OSes can be used as general purpose OSes, because they have the security required.
But they can't because they lack the features, functionality, flexibility, extensibility, time to market and cost requirements of a general purpose OS.
What embedded OS do you think could be a functional replacement for - and we'll pick the easy one - OS X ?
I'd like to point out, because I am sure you are ignorant about it, that military grade OSes have multiple users as well, [..]
Who are trained.
[...] and they run multiple applications.
Which are all known, tested and certified in advance. J. Random Soldier is not going to be able to download and run SuperAwesomeGemHunt off the intarcloudweb, nor does the system need to make any allowances for him to do that.
For example, in modern ships that run military OSes, all the weapons and radars are in the same network. There are lots of different software components running all the time and interacting with each other.
But the tasks they have to do are very limited and almost completely static. Manage systems with capabilities fully known in advance, manufactured to extremely high quality and tolerances, and which will never unexpectedly change.
How well do you think the RADAR and weapons computers will do at managing the propulsion or HVAC systems ? Do you think the RADAR and weapons computers from one ship could run the hardware on another ship in another Navy ? That's the kind of scenarios a general purpose OS has to deal with.
A military system can be nearly guaranteed to never have to run an unknown piece of software and, more importantly, will never be criticised if it cannot do so.
There are extremely complex graphical interfaces with all sorts of information displayed: from complex maps to complex real time graphs, and y
How can you forward individual app windows over an RDP interface? You can't.
Actually you can, it's just not supported without terminal server installed.
Instead, X11 forwarding allows individual windows to get forwarded, which is great if you're SSH'd into a machine the other side of the world and need to use one GUI app without having to set up a full blown RDP/VNC desktop on the machine.
Of course, it's pretty shit when your network link hiccups and the app closes, losing all state and any unsaved work. Standard X11 on anything except a high-speed local LAN is utter crap.
Given a choice between fancier compositing effects and being able to run any program on any machine while rendering on any other machine, I'll take the latter any day.
Most would not, as the ability to do that in today's world is relevant only to a vanishingly small number of people (and only like to get smaller, as web apps continue to take over the world).
Confusing?
Yes, because in normal "client-server" nomenclature, the user (or his machine) is the client, and the thing he connects to is the server. With X11, this is basically reversed - the user is the server, and the other things are the clients.
You are extremely stubborn. It's amazing that you don't get such a simple concept.
I get the concept fine. You seem to be either ignorant of, or refusing to consider, the problems with it.
For the application, the real files are the files it sees. It's the files the application has created or it is registered to manipulate. For the rest of the system though, the real files are different.
Who decides which applications can manipulate what ? Who decides what a "trusted" application is ? How do you share information between different applications (eg: how can a document be edited by Office, OpenOffice, or some other random application ? How do you help with malware that's only interested in read-only access (eg: sending a trojan to everyone in an address book) ?
Everything you listed as an example is already possible with existing systems. Indeed, Windows has already been doing it to some degree for 3+ years.
Unfounded speculation.
On the contrary. Quite well-founded speculation. Ada isn't exactly some "new hotness" language that's sprung up in the last decade, it's been around for thirty years.
Not true. One of the reasons the US DoD has created Ada is that there was a need for a truly safe programming language that does not allow systems to be compromised due to bugs even by the personnel that uses those systems.
The DoD uses (mostly used, these days) Ada because it needed a language that enforced correctness, to proactively prevent certain types of bugs and misfeatures. That has nothing to do with end users causing security breaches that don't leverage software bugs, which is what happens most of the time (trojans, third-party software errors, malicious and/or ignorant data leakages).
There is nothing in Ada that prevents systems to manage latency as they require.
That's great, but it's not really relevant to what I said. RTOSes and other embedded systems strive (and are often defined by their ability) to make latency *consistent*, and for this they typically sacrifice raw performance. General Purposes OSes strive to make it as fast as possible most of the time, with the sacrifice that sometimes it will be much higher than usual when unusual situations are encountered.
The best example of this I can think of off the top of my head is "enterprise" vs "consumer" hard disks:
* "Enterprise" drives have firmware that has hard and short timeout limits when dealing with errors. This is because they are nearly always used in performance-sensitive RAIDed environments, and thus a failure on a single disk usually doesn't imply a system-wide critical failure, and performance is a higher priority. Hence, it's better for the drive to have a predictable response time in which it will return either the correct data or an error, rather than a variable response time in which it may be relatively more likely to return data, but could also still return an error *and also have hung the system for minutes to get that result*.
* In contrast, "consumer" drive firmware is designed to try as long and hard as possible to try and return data from read, even when that can mean multiple minutes before either data is returned, or a sector is finally marked "bad" and an error returned. This is because such drives are nearly always used in non-redundant environments, hence returning data is a higher priority than consistent performance.
Wrong again. Embedded systems can be vastly more complex than your desktop OS, which is mostly for viewing and manipulating documents and media.
What complex embedded systems are you thinking of ?
A desktop OS is written to do a lot more than "viewing and manipulating documents and media". It has to handle multiple user contexts running arbitrary code of unknown origin and quality. It has to handle random hardware devices (and their drivers) of unknown origin and quality being connected and disconnected at arbitrary times and for arbitrary periods.
Then there are people who work at home and do the school run for their kids, because their kids are lazy and don't want to sit in a bus.
It's not that the kids are lazy, it's because Today Tonight and various similar trash have convinced them that if their precious snowflake is out of their sight for more than a few seconds between authorised locations, they'll be kidnapped, raped and murdered.
Huh? How is providing healtcare to those that can't afford it wealth redistribution?
Not that I disagree with your philosophy, but taking money from group A to give to group B - either directly or indirectly - is pretty clearly "wealth distribution".
And while we're on that topic, why is always considered a bad thing when wealth redistribution benefits the lower-middle income, but it's a good thing when it benefits the upper 2% (e.g. tax breaks for the wealthy)?
Tax breaks for the wealthy aren't really wealth distribution because you're not taking from anyone. Bailing out banks and other failed businesses, on the other hand...