As for the memory requirements, C++, in my experience, is slower/bigger than C, no doubt there. But that has not stopped pretty much EVERY commercial application (I forgot the actual numbers) from using it, because it just lends itself better to good design principles.
I'm guessing you don't program. C++ lends itself to incoherent parameter-passing, inscrutable overloading, downright insane side-effects of innocuous looking declarations and the kind of debugability that one has come to expect of biological systems.
I have a great deal of respect for what C++ tried to do with C, but let's face it: good design principles are not what C++ lends itself to. What C++ has going for it is that it's the first language that a lot of people learned OO concepts in. Certainly, all of those concepts can be applied in other languages (e.g. Gtk+ in C), and OO has been done better elsewhere (e.g. Java, Smalltalk, Python, etc), but that's not why people use C++. They use C++ because they feel they need speed and a language that the average joe will know how to "do OO stuff" in.
I'll trade.8 more seconds of start up time...
Ignore the startup time. How much slower will your desktop be overall? Will people with last month's machine be able to run it cleanly? How embeddable is it?
...for the power of a rich, clean, well-designed, well-documented, object-oriented, portable Qt anyday.
rich Every feature that I know of in Qt is supported in other widget sets
clean Large widget sets are cleanly coded (e.g. Gtk+) or they die (e.g. Motif). It's very hard to maintain a poorly coded widget set.
well-designed What widget set do you feel is poorly designed and has traded memory requirements for it other than Motif, which is a poorly designed pig, I'll grant.
well-documented None of the widget sets that I know of trade memory for documentation. I think this one's a bit of a straw-man.
object-oriented I've never seen a non-OO widget set for X or Widnows. Which ones were you thinking of?
portable This is the one that gets me. Qt is written in C++, and thus suffers from C++'s portability problems (which is exactly why Sun was unable to choose Qt for Solaris) from the onset. It can never be as portable as something written in C (e.g. Gtk+).
All things considered, I don't think any of your points are sufficient to warrent the extra memory requirements....
Awe damn, now look what I've done. I've responded to a toolkit troll with a language troll!
If you intended this as a troll, I guess you succeded, but you certainly did not succeed in laying out a case for Qt or C++. Both are deeply flawed, and those flaws are not sufficiently offset by either's merits.
Unions have a whole lot of baggage that I don't think this industry needs. A stripped-down sort of union might be nice. The problem is, I don't want to be constrained to do business the way everyone else does, I just want to get some paperwork standardized so that companies don't get spooked every time I hand back their IP agreements with loads of red-marker.
If you want to call the organization that produces that document a union, fine, but I have no interest in standardized pay scales; time off; benefits; etc, because I'm in a position trade on my skillset for what I want. I'd have to step down in all of those areas in order to get standardization across the industry. Clearly not a win.
We really need someone who knows the law to draw up a document. I'm thinking of a non-disclosure/non-compete that we can all offer to prospective employers. Here's what I think needs to go into it:
1. Information and inventions that you are exposed to at work are property of the company, and will not be disclosed without permission.
2. External projects will be performed only off-site unless you are instructed otherwise. No company resources will be used.
3. Off-hours work and inventions are your own.
4. If you're asked to deploy your own off-hours software for business, changes made will be contributed back to the project under the terms of that project's license.
5. In terms of non-competition, software that is used by a competitor, but which does not directly engage in the business of your company will not be considered to be a violation.
Having this, we could then present this to prospective businesses in order to take the pressure off of them to come up with a way to cover their asses. They get a document which the industry has had a chance to review an comment on so that they know what to expect.
PGP only goes so far. If you only use encryption for sensitive material, you flag it as such.
To solve for this, I'm writing a specification for transparent encryption of email using standard MUAs. Please feel free to check out the PPS homepage, which will be moving to SourceForge sometime RSN (basically, I'm just waiting to get over the learning curve at my new company). The nice things about PSS are that it does not require that a user know their email is being encrypted and that it does not require a specific encryption back-end (it's design assumes something PGP-like, but you could easily adapt any public-key system).
Let me know what you think, and send me email if you have any questions at all. Thanks!
Ok, so someone was using work computers to send personal email.... If there were rules about not sending personal email, you give the person a warning and move on. What was the big deal?
punish the people who are infringing them. What's so hard about that?
Right on, brother! In this case, that happens to be the people with the Web site that published names and suggested that these are people to harm. That's clearly conspiracy to commit a crime, and under our law that's a crime.
I can only guess that the judge felt there was sufficient disclaimer on the page to nullify the threats and suggestions that they made elsewhere. I would not buy it, and I hope that another court overturns it.
If this were any other industry, this case would never win. Imagine if I build software that replicates itself (a "worm") and let it loose (without your permission) in your company. If you turn around and include it in your distribution I cannot see that I would have any right to go after you. It's my look-out for having put the damn thing there in the first place. You should not be required to inspect your software for my intrusions.
I had such respect for Canada, but it's slipping. They're beginning to start looking like a mini-United States with health care.
Free speech shouldn't be limited if you want bubble-gum
No, nor should it be limited because you want anything. It should be, and is, limited to protect the freedom of others. This is why you cannot lie in a way that damages others. This why you cannot write up a plan for the assassination of the president and distribute it (but you *can* write up a list of reasons why he should die).
In this case, I contend that the particular speach involved (regardless of the hot-button topic of abortion) constituted a threat and plan for serious harm to individuals, published to a wide and willing audience. This is, as far as I can tell, like pointing a gun at someone's head and then saying that you're not responsible for murder because you're not the one who pulled the trigger.
This is exactly the kind of speach that we're not supposed to let people get away with, beucause it damages the freedom of others to, as the Declaration of Independance put it, "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." The person seeking an abortion is only harmed indirectly. We should be concerned about this, but not so much as to infringe on free speach.
We should be very concerned that idiots who hide behind a rhetoric of saving life advocate and promote murder. I won't tell you if I'm pro-life/choice, but I will tell you that I feel ashamed of the actions of these people as a human being.
The only "monolithic" supercomputer I ever had any respect for (as opposed to networks of individual machines like beowulf clusters or DECNets) was the KSR/1, and it only existed for about a year before the company's financial woes killed it.
They had some increadibly cool features like the fact that the system ran a UNIX variant (OSF/1), not on a front-end like the Crays, but right on the box itself.
They also had a wild memory architecture where there was no main memory. Instead, each processor had a 32MB cache, and the system virtualized the caches into a giant virtual memory space (giant for the time, now 2GB main memory is average to low for serious computing).
Process migration and the scheduler were a thing of beauty. When a process needed to be moved to a new processor, only the stack pointer and registers needed to be moved. When the process was ready to run again, a simple (seeming) page-fault would take care of everything else, moving it's stack and any other memory pages that it needed locally.
They even solved the performance problems of a ring-based bus, and got better performance than most flat busses. One of these suckers with 1024 nodes was a marvel to behold, and alas, there will never be another.:-(
You are, of course, correct. However, AOL is treading a thin line here. They have been ORDERED by the FCC to allow alternate access to their Internet messaging, and have not done so. It was one of the conditions of the Time/Warner/AOL/DC Comics/CNN/TNT/Life merger. Since they have failed to do so, they may face legal action from the FCC. Now, they *could* offer a for-pay route, but they've also failed to do _that_....
You ask a lot of questions, so they must be taken in turn:
"There is a large contingent of people who think that what the people on this list are doing is completely and totaly abhorent and wrong. These people don't have the right to speak out against the people on this list?"
Of course they have that right. As well they should. Let's make no mistake, no one who defends the bill of rights can reasonably turn around and say that speaking out against someone for their deeds is wrong.
"They don't have the right to seek them out and try to convince them that what they're doing is wrong?"
Again, of course they do. You have every right to publish a list of abortion doctors and suggest that people write them letters, call them or send them email. Personally, I think this is rude, but clearly defended.
"They don't have the right to call them murderers?"
I'm not sure. Clearly the law has determined that abortion is not (always) murder, so to call someone who practices abortion a murderer may be slander. I am not a lawyer, but I wouldn't take the chance if I were you. I would go for, "Dr A. is an abortion doctor, and I think abortion is murder." It makes your take on abortion clearly your take and you clearly accuse Dr A. of nothing other than abortion.
However, none of what you ask goes to the core question: can you post a list of people with their addresses and say that someone should kill them? If that is, indeed what was done, then I cannot see why it should be protected speech. You are inciting to murder. Would you be happy if I put up a list of pregnant mothers with their addresses and said that these children should be terminated with or without their mother's consent?
Your argument is classically known as a strawman. You state "I want X. I'm going to get X. I'm ENTITLED to X. If your Y needs get in the way, you'd better watch out."
First off, this statement cannot be mapped to the post to which you reply. Especially "I'm going to get X" and "you'd better watch out."
You procede to demonstrate that your statement is one that is used to limit rights. Yes, clearly. Too bad no one said it.
The post to which you replied was discussing the harm that would come to those who engaged in a legal activity which some do not agree with.
Let me quote: "A bunch of kids' rights to go to school without being harrassed, threatened or hurt because of what their parents do for a living just got trashed."
Here we have the pivotal argument: is it legal to publish information which is intended to cause harm to come to specific persons. We're not talking about posting anti-abortion literature (which I defend your right to do all day long). We're talking about saying that someone should die and then posting their name and address.
As far as I'm concerned, this is loading the gun and aiming the gun. Even if the gun goes off on its own, I don't buy that you are innocent of the murder.
Both left leaning liberals and right wing conservatives want it both ways all the time.
Well, since we're making sweeping generalizations, here's one: Libertarians want to re-write the constitution for their own agenda, but seek to do so by weakening key points of interpretation.
Case in point:
Now if we can only educate people as to why free speech should be defended even when they don't like the content.
I dislike Nazi ideology. I will actively seek to discredit (truthfully) the arguments of Nazi proponents and stop others from falling for the party line. However, I will defend people's right to speech the same way Noam Chomsky did. If a Nazi wants to write a book, in which he questions World War II history, I say let him have his press. If an anarchist wants to say "down with the government", more power to him (or her). If an anti-abortion advocate wants to say that doctors should be confronted with the horror that they instill in others, I don't agree, but go you forth and speak!
When a person posts the name and address of another person in with literature advocating harm to that person, I don't care if the target is Steve Balmer, Richard Stallman, the undersecretary of defence or the very person to whom I am responding; it's just wrong. On what basis? When you incite people to kill, you create a weapon. When you point that weapon and it goes off, you cannot claim "I knew it was loaded, but it's the gun's falt for firing."
If you were talking to ONE person, and discussed this, I would say that you have put it in that person's hands to make a decision, but when you're dealing with a mob of unknowns through a publishing mechanism (say, the Web), you know that someone out there is going to be unbalanced enough to do the deed.
Let me put this another way: if I walk into an asylum full of violently insane people, unlock the doors, tell them that the president is evil and must die and then I tell them exactly where he will be later today... would you say that I have just conspired to kill the president? In what way is it different if I say the same thing on a Web site? If I lay out the plan to kill someone, and suggest that it should be done, I am at the very least conspiring to commit 1st degree murder, am I not?
I have 2 disclaimers: 1) I never got the chance to read the original threats. If they were of the form, "here are the people that you should talk to," then I can't see a case. If they were of the form, "here are the people that need to pay for these crimes, and don't deserve to live," then I absolutely feel that the first amendment has nothing at all to do with this. 2) I am not a lawyer. Do your own research. These are just opinions.
Why would math not describe the natural world? In fact, I think the worst cul de sac's of mathematics have been the pure-math-because-I-can-do-the-proof sort of things where there is no real-world application (e.g. complex math which just forces a certain polynomial rigor, which you don't need i for in the first place).
Did you think that I was trying to bad-mouth math at any point in my post?
In case, you're one of many like me who collected magic cards, but doesn't play much anymore; someone just forwarded me this link to a Cheapass Game that can be played with Magic Cards. If you're not familliar with Cheapass Games, they produce very low-cost games with simple rules. Their best known include: "Before I Kill You, Mr. Bond", "Give Me the Brain", "Kill Dr. Lucky" and many, many others.
My personal favorite and recommendation is "Kill Dr. Lucky" for it's deceptively simple strategy, including the infamous "lucky train".
Landyland and it's sister game Mana Burn are only a buck each, which is the low-end of Cheapass games. The high end is around $8-10, but I usually expect to pay around $2-5 for a Cheapass game.
The other great thing about Cheapass is the art. Many of the games are drawn by such artists as Phil Phoglio and John Kovalic. It may be on paper cut-outs, but it's very nicely done.
NOTE: I'm advocating Cheapass games, but have no vested interest in their financial future. I'd love to see more people play them, but that's just for my gaming fun.
Not to mention that the setup menus include an opt-out option as well (though, I'm not clear on what happens to the data they've already collected if you use this method).
The thing is you don't want to opt out. There's no junk mail you get because of it (though the junk mail your neighborhood gets might change slightly); you never get calls because of it and best of all, no one can tell you watch smut-o-vision;-)
The benefits on the other hand: better selection of "recommended shows" based on what you thumbs-up and down; accurate ratings data goes to the networks; and your cable company can tell what new stations are worth keeping (where before, they only had wide regional statistics to go on, TiVo can tell them how many of their subscribers watch the channel).
All science is computer science is true in as far as it goes. The more accurate assertion would be to say that computer science is a new way of looking at information theory (which pre-dates even Babbage).
For example, high energy physics is the process of deducing, without knowing the underlying properties of the Universe, what behavior we will see when we "crank up the heat" of the universe. If we knew the underlying properties, however, math could tell us the rest. This math, it seems, is more complex than the pre-Dirac world had thought. It does, in fact, seem to involve some rudimetary logic. Hence, the study of the universe is the study of an information system with logic, math and vast "memory", which is not unlike Turing's paper tape.
Computer science is math, and math is the Universe. As computer science expands and more generically encompases all of mathematics, the lines get grayer. If it is fair to say that all science is math (and I think it is), it is getting increasingly more accurate to say that all science is computer science.
You know, I started out getting upset about your response, but I have to admit that this is exactly the kind of feedback we need. Linux in the classroom is a reality. Mexico is converting wholesale, and much of the rest of the world will follow. In countries like ours, where we can afford to buy software, we assume that we should.
Your comments are fair, though skewed by a lot of advertising. I think your kids are smarter than you give them credit for (check out this article about a 16-year-old who's heavily involved in one of the most revolutionary movements in UNIX history). We can't move to using Linux in the classroom all at once, but certainly your computer courses deserve more than Microsoft Visual Studio. Linux offers 20 or so languages out-of-the-box, development tools for just about anything and the environment that businesses use.
Also, if you're going to plunk a system into the library to be nothing but a Web browser, why run anything but Linux on it? The school's fileserver can be Linux. Educational software delivered by Web browser is just as easily accessed on a Linux box as Windows or MacOS.
I think using Macs for younger kids is great. Using Windows PCs to show people how to use office makes sense. I just don't think Linux should be excluded from the educational experience, it's too important.
Having worked for a high school-focused company, I can appreciate how much this will help. A lot of schools need help in getting the latest technology to their students.
Linux (and open source in general) is poised to do this. Schools are in need of large systems that students of all degrees of expertise can disect. What's more, a lot of students need to be given positive feedback on their work. What better feedback than having IBM ship the modification that you made to Apache or having Red Hat ship the documentation that updated for the GNOME login?
Now, even better: which platform is more likely to support the privacy rights of these kids?
You can go on and on. The only reasons schools use anything but open source software is marketing.
I disagree. I like Red Hat as a company, and respect their need to make money. However, I am suspicious of the "hey, we have to make money somehow" justification. I did not accept this article at its face and assume that RH were being bastards. Instead, I thought good and hard about it.
Here's what I came up with:
1. Yes, they should charge for this service.
2. They should also make a VERY public show of giving free access to anyone credited with developing any part of their software. This is good policy AND good press.
Just wondering why all the doom and gloom. It's a great time to be a Linux-head!
Or, were you refering to the fact that Linux companies which were riding the tech wave without real business plans are getting hit just like everyone else? Companies who were relying on the stock market to make them profitable are going by the wayside, but I think the Linux industry is here to stay. Companies like IBM and Motorola will continue to see huge returns from their Linux investments. Countries like Mexico will continue to use it. But, most of all, the companies that did have business plans and did plan on becoming profitable will have a fighting chance just like any startup businesses.
Disclaimer: I'm a VA/Linux stockholder, so I may be biased on some of this.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm guessing you don't program. C++ lends itself to incoherent parameter-passing, inscrutable overloading, downright insane side-effects of innocuous looking declarations and the kind of debugability that one has come to expect of biological systems.
I have a great deal of respect for what C++ tried to do with C, but let's face it: good design principles are not what C++ lends itself to. What C++ has going for it is that it's the first language that a lot of people learned OO concepts in. Certainly, all of those concepts can be applied in other languages (e.g. Gtk+ in C), and OO has been done better elsewhere (e.g. Java, Smalltalk, Python, etc), but that's not why people use C++. They use C++ because they feel they need speed and a language that the average joe will know how to "do OO stuff" in.
I'll trade
Ignore the startup time. How much slower will your desktop be overall? Will people with last month's machine be able to run it cleanly? How embeddable is it?
- rich Every feature that I know of in Qt is supported in other widget sets
- clean Large widget sets are cleanly coded (e.g. Gtk+) or they die (e.g. Motif). It's very hard to maintain a poorly coded widget set.
- well-designed What widget set do you feel is poorly designed and has traded memory requirements for it other than Motif, which is a poorly designed pig, I'll grant.
- well-documented None of the widget sets that I know of trade memory for documentation. I think this one's a bit of a straw-man.
- object-oriented I've never seen a non-OO widget set for X or Widnows. Which ones were you thinking of?
- portable This is the one that gets me. Qt is written in C++, and thus suffers from C++'s portability problems (which is exactly why Sun was unable to choose Qt for Solaris) from the onset. It can never be as portable as something written in C (e.g. Gtk+).
All things considered, I don't think any of your points are sufficient to warrent the extra memory requirements....Awe damn, now look what I've done. I've responded to a toolkit troll with a language troll!
If you intended this as a troll, I guess you succeded, but you certainly did not succeed in laying out a case for Qt or C++. Both are deeply flawed, and those flaws are not sufficiently offset by either's merits.
What that sounds like to me is you need a Union.
Unions have a whole lot of baggage that I don't think this industry needs. A stripped-down sort of union might be nice. The problem is, I don't want to be constrained to do business the way everyone else does, I just want to get some paperwork standardized so that companies don't get spooked every time I hand back their IP agreements with loads of red-marker.
If you want to call the organization that produces that document a union, fine, but I have no interest in standardized pay scales; time off; benefits; etc, because I'm in a position trade on my skillset for what I want. I'd have to step down in all of those areas in order to get standardization across the industry. Clearly not a win.
We really need someone who knows the law to draw up a document. I'm thinking of a non-disclosure/non-compete that we can all offer to prospective employers. Here's what I think needs to go into it:
1. Information and inventions that you are exposed to at work are property of the company, and will not be disclosed without permission.
2. External projects will be performed only off-site unless you are instructed otherwise. No company resources will be used.
3. Off-hours work and inventions are your own.
4. If you're asked to deploy your own off-hours software for business, changes made will be contributed back to the project under the terms of that project's license.
5. In terms of non-competition, software that is used by a competitor, but which does not directly engage in the business of your company will not be considered to be a violation.
Having this, we could then present this to prospective businesses in order to take the pressure off of them to come up with a way to cover their asses. They get a document which the industry has had a chance to review an comment on so that they know what to expect.
Thoughts?
END {perl}; no strict interpretation; wait for 6.0;
@O'Reilly::Larry_Wall{Hacks};
PGP only goes so far. If you only use encryption for sensitive material, you flag it as such.
To solve for this, I'm writing a specification for transparent encryption of email using standard MUAs. Please feel free to check out the PPS homepage, which will be moving to SourceForge sometime RSN (basically, I'm just waiting to get over the learning curve at my new company). The nice things about PSS are that it does not require that a user know their email is being encrypted and that it does not require a specific encryption back-end (it's design assumes something PGP-like, but you could easily adapt any public-key system).
Let me know what you think, and send me email if you have any questions at all. Thanks!
Now, you just restart your named and try pinging name.space!
Ok, so someone was using work computers to send personal email.... If there were rules about not sending personal email, you give the person a warning and move on. What was the big deal?
In the US treatment is guaranteed at the risk of serious debt.
If I have a non-terminal illness for which a simple emergency room visit will not suffice, I am not guaranteed treatment in the US.
punish the people who are infringing them. What's so hard about that?
Right on, brother! In this case, that happens to be the people with the Web site that published names and suggested that these are people to harm. That's clearly conspiracy to commit a crime, and under our law that's a crime.
I can only guess that the judge felt there was sufficient disclaimer on the page to nullify the threats and suggestions that they made elsewhere. I would not buy it, and I hope that another court overturns it.
If this were any other industry, this case would never win. Imagine if I build software that replicates itself (a "worm") and let it loose (without your permission) in your company. If you turn around and include it in your distribution I cannot see that I would have any right to go after you. It's my look-out for having put the damn thing there in the first place. You should not be required to inspect your software for my intrusions.
I had such respect for Canada, but it's slipping. They're beginning to start looking like a mini-United States with health care.
Free speech shouldn't be limited if you want bubble-gum
No, nor should it be limited because you want anything. It should be, and is, limited to protect the freedom of others. This is why you cannot lie in a way that damages others. This why you cannot write up a plan for the assassination of the president and distribute it (but you *can* write up a list of reasons why he should die).
In this case, I contend that the particular speach involved (regardless of the hot-button topic of abortion) constituted a threat and plan for serious harm to individuals, published to a wide and willing audience. This is, as far as I can tell, like pointing a gun at someone's head and then saying that you're not responsible for murder because you're not the one who pulled the trigger.
This is exactly the kind of speach that we're not supposed to let people get away with, beucause it damages the freedom of others to, as the Declaration of Independance put it, "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." The person seeking an abortion is only harmed indirectly. We should be concerned about this, but not so much as to infringe on free speach.
We should be very concerned that idiots who hide behind a rhetoric of saving life advocate and promote murder. I won't tell you if I'm pro-life/choice, but I will tell you that I feel ashamed of the actions of these people as a human being.
The only "monolithic" supercomputer I ever had any respect for (as opposed to networks of individual machines like beowulf clusters or DECNets) was the KSR/1, and it only existed for about a year before the company's financial woes killed it.
:-(
They had some increadibly cool features like the fact that the system ran a UNIX variant (OSF/1), not on a front-end like the Crays, but right on the box itself.
They also had a wild memory architecture where there was no main memory. Instead, each processor had a 32MB cache, and the system virtualized the caches into a giant virtual memory space (giant for the time, now 2GB main memory is average to low for serious computing).
Process migration and the scheduler were a thing of beauty. When a process needed to be moved to a new processor, only the stack pointer and registers needed to be moved. When the process was ready to run again, a simple (seeming) page-fault would take care of everything else, moving it's stack and any other memory pages that it needed locally.
They even solved the performance problems of a ring-based bus, and got better performance than most flat busses. One of these suckers with 1024 nodes was a marvel to behold, and alas, there will never be another.
You are, of course, correct. However, AOL is treading a thin line here. They have been ORDERED by the FCC to allow alternate access to their Internet messaging, and have not done so. It was one of the conditions of the Time/Warner/AOL/DC Comics/CNN/TNT/Life merger. Since they have failed to do so, they may face legal action from the FCC. Now, they *could* offer a for-pay route, but they've also failed to do _that_....
Of course they have that right. As well they should. Let's make no mistake, no one who defends the bill of rights can reasonably turn around and say that speaking out against someone for their deeds is wrong.
Again, of course they do. You have every right to publish a list of abortion doctors and suggest that people write them letters, call them or send them email. Personally, I think this is rude, but clearly defended.
I'm not sure. Clearly the law has determined that abortion is not (always) murder, so to call someone who practices abortion a murderer may be slander. I am not a lawyer, but I wouldn't take the chance if I were you. I would go for, "Dr A. is an abortion doctor, and I think abortion is murder." It makes your take on abortion clearly your take and you clearly accuse Dr A. of nothing other than abortion.
However, none of what you ask goes to the core question: can you post a list of people with their addresses and say that someone should kill them? If that is, indeed what was done, then I cannot see why it should be protected speech. You are inciting to murder. Would you be happy if I put up a list of pregnant mothers with their addresses and said that these children should be terminated with or without their mother's consent?
Your argument is classically known as a strawman. You state "I want X. I'm going to get X. I'm ENTITLED to X. If your Y needs get in the way, you'd better watch out."
First off, this statement cannot be mapped to the post to which you reply. Especially "I'm going to get X" and "you'd better watch out."
You procede to demonstrate that your statement is one that is used to limit rights. Yes, clearly. Too bad no one said it.
The post to which you replied was discussing the harm that would come to those who engaged in a legal activity which some do not agree with.
Let me quote: "A bunch of kids' rights to go to school without being harrassed, threatened or hurt because of what their parents do for a living just got trashed."
Here we have the pivotal argument: is it legal to publish information which is intended to cause harm to come to specific persons. We're not talking about posting anti-abortion literature (which I defend your right to do all day long). We're talking about saying that someone should die and then posting their name and address.
As far as I'm concerned, this is loading the gun and aiming the gun. Even if the gun goes off on its own, I don't buy that you are innocent of the murder.
Case in point:I dislike Nazi ideology. I will actively seek to discredit (truthfully) the arguments of Nazi proponents and stop others from falling for the party line. However, I will defend people's right to speech the same way Noam Chomsky did. If a Nazi wants to write a book, in which he questions World War II history, I say let him have his press. If an anarchist wants to say "down with the government", more power to him (or her). If an anti-abortion advocate wants to say that doctors should be confronted with the horror that they instill in others, I don't agree, but go you forth and speak!
When a person posts the name and address of another person in with literature advocating harm to that person, I don't care if the target is Steve Balmer, Richard Stallman, the undersecretary of defence or the very person to whom I am responding; it's just wrong. On what basis? When you incite people to kill, you create a weapon. When you point that weapon and it goes off, you cannot claim "I knew it was loaded, but it's the gun's falt for firing."
If you were talking to ONE person, and discussed this, I would say that you have put it in that person's hands to make a decision, but when you're dealing with a mob of unknowns through a publishing mechanism (say, the Web), you know that someone out there is going to be unbalanced enough to do the deed.
Let me put this another way: if I walk into an asylum full of violently insane people, unlock the doors, tell them that the president is evil and must die and then I tell them exactly where he will be later today... would you say that I have just conspired to kill the president? In what way is it different if I say the same thing on a Web site? If I lay out the plan to kill someone, and suggest that it should be done, I am at the very least conspiring to commit 1st degree murder, am I not?
I have 2 disclaimers: 1) I never got the chance to read the original threats. If they were of the form, "here are the people that you should talk to," then I can't see a case. If they were of the form, "here are the people that need to pay for these crimes, and don't deserve to live," then I absolutely feel that the first amendment has nothing at all to do with this. 2) I am not a lawyer. Do your own research. These are just opinions.
Why would math not describe the natural world? In fact, I think the worst cul de sac's of mathematics have been the pure-math-because-I-can-do-the-proof sort of things where there is no real-world application (e.g. complex math which just forces a certain polynomial rigor, which you don't need i for in the first place).
Did you think that I was trying to bad-mouth math at any point in my post?
In case, you're one of many like me who collected magic cards, but doesn't play much anymore; someone just forwarded me this link to a Cheapass Game that can be played with Magic Cards. If you're not familliar with Cheapass Games, they produce very low-cost games with simple rules. Their best known include: "Before I Kill You, Mr. Bond", "Give Me the Brain", "Kill Dr. Lucky" and many, many others.
My personal favorite and recommendation is "Kill Dr. Lucky" for it's deceptively simple strategy, including the infamous "lucky train".
Landyland and it's sister game Mana Burn are only a buck each, which is the low-end of Cheapass games. The high end is around $8-10, but I usually expect to pay around $2-5 for a Cheapass game.
The other great thing about Cheapass is the art. Many of the games are drawn by such artists as Phil Phoglio and John Kovalic. It may be on paper cut-outs, but it's very nicely done.
NOTE: I'm advocating Cheapass games, but have no vested interest in their financial future. I'd love to see more people play them, but that's just for my gaming fun.
Not to mention that the setup menus include an opt-out option as well (though, I'm not clear on what happens to the data they've already collected if you use this method).
;-)
The thing is you don't want to opt out. There's no junk mail you get because of it (though the junk mail your neighborhood gets might change slightly); you never get calls because of it and best of all, no one can tell you watch smut-o-vision
The benefits on the other hand: better selection of "recommended shows" based on what you thumbs-up and down; accurate ratings data goes to the networks; and your cable company can tell what new stations are worth keeping (where before, they only had wide regional statistics to go on, TiVo can tell them how many of their subscribers watch the channel).
All science is computer science is true in as far as it goes. The more accurate assertion would be to say that computer science is a new way of looking at information theory (which pre-dates even Babbage).
For example, high energy physics is the process of deducing, without knowing the underlying properties of the Universe, what behavior we will see when we "crank up the heat" of the universe. If we knew the underlying properties, however, math could tell us the rest. This math, it seems, is more complex than the pre-Dirac world had thought. It does, in fact, seem to involve some rudimetary logic. Hence, the study of the universe is the study of an information system with logic, math and vast "memory", which is not unlike Turing's paper tape.
Computer science is math, and math is the Universe. As computer science expands and more generically encompases all of mathematics, the lines get grayer. If it is fair to say that all science is math (and I think it is), it is getting increasingly more accurate to say that all science is computer science.
You know, I started out getting upset about your response, but I have to admit that this is exactly the kind of feedback we need. Linux in the classroom is a reality. Mexico is converting wholesale, and much of the rest of the world will follow. In countries like ours, where we can afford to buy software, we assume that we should.
Your comments are fair, though skewed by a lot of advertising. I think your kids are smarter than you give them credit for (check out this article about a 16-year-old who's heavily involved in one of the most revolutionary movements in UNIX history). We can't move to using Linux in the classroom all at once, but certainly your computer courses deserve more than Microsoft Visual Studio. Linux offers 20 or so languages out-of-the-box, development tools for just about anything and the environment that businesses use.
Also, if you're going to plunk a system into the library to be nothing but a Web browser, why run anything but Linux on it? The school's fileserver can be Linux. Educational software delivered by Web browser is just as easily accessed on a Linux box as Windows or MacOS.
I think using Macs for younger kids is great. Using Windows PCs to show people how to use office makes sense. I just don't think Linux should be excluded from the educational experience, it's too important.
Having worked for a high school-focused company, I can appreciate how much this will help. A lot of schools need help in getting the latest technology to their students.
Linux (and open source in general) is poised to do this. Schools are in need of large systems that students of all degrees of expertise can disect. What's more, a lot of students need to be given positive feedback on their work. What better feedback than having IBM ship the modification that you made to Apache or having Red Hat ship the documentation that updated for the GNOME login?
Now, even better: which platform is more likely to support the privacy rights of these kids?
You can go on and on. The only reasons schools use anything but open source software is marketing.
If he sent encrypted email, it would look like he had something to hide.
;-)
This is because we do not encrypt all email, and GWB should be concerned about this. This is why he should be using PPS.
Of course, until I and any volunteers write implementations of the spec, that'll be a little hard
I disagree. I like Red Hat as a company, and respect their need to make money. However, I am suspicious of the "hey, we have to make money somehow" justification. I did not accept this article at its face and assume that RH were being bastards. Instead, I thought good and hard about it.
Here's what I came up with:
1. Yes, they should charge for this service.
2. They should also make a VERY public show of giving free access to anyone credited with developing any part of their software. This is good policy AND good press.
- Microsoft to unveil
.NET software for non-Microsoft platforms
- Defense Department plans 512-processor Linux cluster
- A 'free' interview with Linus Torvalds by CNN
- Linux looms on the mainframe horizon
Just wondering why all the doom and gloom. It's a great time to be a Linux-head!Or, were you refering to the fact that Linux companies which were riding the tech wave without real business plans are getting hit just like everyone else? Companies who were relying on the stock market to make them profitable are going by the wayside, but I think the Linux industry is here to stay. Companies like IBM and Motorola will continue to see huge returns from their Linux investments. Countries like Mexico will continue to use it. But, most of all, the companies that did have business plans and did plan on becoming profitable will have a fighting chance just like any startup businesses.
Disclaimer: I'm a VA/Linux stockholder, so I may be biased on some of this.