In general, Dan Suglaski got it right in a talk on Parrot, where he said (paraphrase), "I don't think that, as a language designer, I should have an ego so large as to suggest that I can choose which character set best encodes your language. Parrot will use Unicode as a Lingua Franca, but will support fully the use of your native character sets where needed."
It's not that Unicode can't "try" to support your needs, it's that Unicode should not be assumed to have succeded (lest it act as an instrument of stagnation rather than unification). Local character sets like ASCII, Big5, etc. have their own value in terms of efficiency and applicability to local domain problems. They should have core support for that reason, period.
All of the other names that you cite (other than "Microserf", which is more appropriately, "Microserfs", and was the title of a book about Microsoft's corporate culture, equating it to a feudal monarchy... again an ironic name), are the same sort of infantile name-calling as "open sores". I don't equate any of them to "M$". Had he used any of those as his example, I would have agreed with him.
In fact, my point revolved around the idea that his logic was flawed on the specific point of "M$" vs. "open sores", not that name-calling was ever justified. Microsoft DOES trade software quality for revenue, which is why I bite my tongue when I want to poke fun at them for holding up Longhorn. If they're truly trying to reverse that corporate policy of release-date-over-quality, then bravo!
You do see the difference between irony and simple "you stupid fart-face" name-calling, right?
Yep, I have a Canon E300 (AKA Digital Rebel, AKA Kiss), which, at 6MP and with my good macro lens (since I don't need any depth of field for taking a picture of a sheet of paper) can literally tell you how good your paper selection is, and that's the "prosumer" grade camera. Grab yourself one of the "professional" digital cameras (like the E20), and you're going to be able to determine the components of the ink, based on the way the paper separates it through capillary action.
These test sheets are fine for low-end cameras, but once you start dealing with professional lenses and high resolution CCDs you really need something printed by a professional printer, not some cheesy home unit (even if the home unit has the same resolution as the camera, it may not be capable of reproducing the image on paper with enough fidelity to test the camera.
And the "spyware" tag? Love it. FUD works both ways, doesn't it?
Please define "both ways". I wasn't aware of Google spreading FUD about someone else.
"M$"? That's hilarious. "Open sores" is funny, too. Oh, it isn't?
No one ever said (that I've read) that "M$" was funny (yes, I know it's your sig, not part of your post, but it has the same tit-for-tat flawed premise, so I thought I should address it as the same time). It's simply appropriate because Microsoft has traditionally been focused on making money to the exclusion of any technical merits of their software. Trading "$" for "S"oftware... it's meant to be ironic, not funny.
"Open sores" on the other hand is neither ironic nor particularly funny. It's one of those things that 5th graders would come up with by permuting a kid's last name into the closest word for a bodily function they can think of.
The fact that a huge number of people (not particularly open source proponents) have taken to using "M$" to refer to Microsoft isn't really much of a justification for arbitrary name-calling.
Outsource to a company in your country that offshores for you. Pros: someone responsible is in a timezone close to you and (probably) grew up speaking your langauge Cons: Another layer of removal from the technical folks. Possible distance issues.
Open a division in the target country and hire locals. Pros: Same hiring and training as your US staff, plus you get to quality-control the hires. Cons: Possible distance issues.
Outsource to a company in another part of the world. Pros: Local management which can interact with local HR, recruiting and day-to-day management issues more effectively (in theory). Cons: You can't be sure you aren't sharing resources, and the company might have "more important customers".
I think that I would prefer the second option, and most of the distance issues are related to either language or time-zone, so you can minimize those problems by selecting a country that has a fairly high percentage of english (or your country's) speakers and is in your hemisphere (in the US, for example, Mexico can be an excellent choice). Almost all workers in Mexico who have the education to work with US tech companies can speak english and they are in US timezones. Plus, a flight from the US to Mexico or visa versa takes far, far less time, money and physical stamina than a flight to Asia. For European countries, I suggest looking at the more stable African nations and at Eastern Europe.
If you do it right, you're simply becoming an international company, not "outsourcing". This can benefit your local employees a great deal. In the long run, this can be far more beneficial than just reducing your overhead costs, as you have a foothold in a nation whose economy is expanding, and you can sell your product or service in both nations. Lather, rinse, repeat.
To workers in G8 nations who are concerned about losing their jobs... stop and think about the new realities of outsourcing for a minute and you will see that there are new needs for you to fill. For example, do you think the demand will be high or low for software architects in the US who can speak Indian? Do you think the demand will be high or low for tech writers who can read and write Indian or various eastern European or Asian languages? If you're a manager, look around. I'm sure there are classes you can take in Asian culture. What a win it would be to know more about those you'll have to manage, eh?
I remember that too. I remember thinking the 1.37 kernel was HUGE.
I also remember that it didn't have most of the features that I rely on today (multi-processor support (there were patches); USB; PCMCIA; large memory; 2-year uptime; kernel threading was primative; modules; firewalling; etc.)
You could argue that many of those things should have been in user-land (and some did at the time), but I think that the final result speaks for itself. Call it bloated if you wish (I know you were not Greyfox), but I like to think of it as my swiss-army-kernel, and I keep it with me everywhere I go.
Q: Might you add anti-virus/spyware protection in Windows? Gates: It's not a thing you build in. You have to offer a service.
Why is that Mr. Gates? I would have thought that you would offer a secure environment as part of your product out of the box?
Well, no. You have to offer a service by definition, because the needs of security change rapidly. Road conditions don't alter in order to specifically thwart your airbag, but security on the Internet modifies itself in an arms-race against your security measures.
Microsoft is in a very tough spot. ANYTHING they do automatically becomes the de facto milestone for anti-security efforts. This means that they have to build a service which is capable, not just of altering what it looks for, but fundamentally how it behaves. If you find a way to subvert their security protocol (for fetching updates) imagine the havoc that you could cause.
I'm unhappy with the state of MS security, but I'm dead-set convinced that as long as they are a monopoly they are going to have to take things like security precations slowly and carefully.
Just as an example, and not to flag-wave, the open source OS camp has a very different set of issues because very few installations are "vanilla". This means that attackers must contend with a richer set of security measures by default and while they might be able to compromise some subset of machines, it will always be a much smaller subset than they can compromise in a truly homogenous world like Windows (where you only have to contend with a relatively linear set of service packs and revisions).
That doesn't make OSS OSes more secure, it just makes the landscape of OSS OS deployment rougher terrain for attackers. It gives us one more tool (along with the many-eyes approach; security tools; network analysis; static host analysis; dynamic host analysis; good user management; good systems management; etc.)
The topic has wandered a bit in this thread. Let's return to the one you're closest to:
Should I be allowed to buy a domain name based on a candidate's name and use it for purposes of promoting his opponennt, or attacking him (or her, of course)? My answer is a firm no. I don't think that putting up a label marking it as misinformation makes it anything other than misinformation. I also don't think you should be able to take out an ad on TV that starts off saying that this is an add for a candidate, then attack the candidate and then end with "this message is not approved of by the candidate."
The reason it's wrong is that it is designed with one and only one intent: to capture the attention of people who would not pay attention if you did not initially claim to be representing the candidate you are attacking. There is no other reason to make that claim (or to use that domain name) in the first place. You could start off the ad with, "Here are the reasons Joe Blow is the wrong choice," or you could by the doamin, "joeblowwrongchoice.org".
If all the humans left earth tomorrow the exchange of this type of information would drop sharply, and then gradually taper off as automated systems failed, until it stopped altogether.
Not at all. Humans instigate a great deal of information transfer, which is not surprising. Human history has been one of the more exothermic events in earth's biosphere (not the planet as a whole, of course), and information so far appears to be a by-product of thermodynamics.
However, information transfer continues regardless. What you're trying to get at is that the information transfer that remained would not, on the whole, be terribly interesting to humans (e.g. bugs eating the paper of a book and being eaten by birds who then excrete the waste in a pattern which decreases over the distance from the book, propagating that information (in a new form) in a simple wave-front)With that I will agree, but I won't agree that it's a terribly interesting point.
While we ARE here spewing out CDs, books, tapes, papers, keystrokes, body language and all sorts of other information, we are shaping the infosphere. Our mistake is in thinking that by shaping it, we are able to gain control over it.
Just as in Felton's example with watermarking, the laws of math and physics ultimately work against you, presenting points of diminishing returns in every such endevor. If you think that the distribution of a video game over the Internet isn't governed at all levels by the laws of math and physics, you are quite mistaken.
That's the problem I have with this. I happen to have creative control on several websites, two of which get a substantial amount of traffic. According to your reasoning, it's perfectly OK for me to put a George Kerry bumpersticker on my car, but it should be a federal offense for me to put a John Bush ad on my website?
On your personal site, an ad isn't worth much, and to counter the impact of your personal ad, a candidate would have to spend next to nothing.
On one of the large sites that you run, I presume you accept money for ads. If "the other guy" wanted to buy that same ad it would cost him money, and by putting up the ad for your candidate you are turning down money that you could have charged for that space. This places a value on your contribution, just as if you had handed cash to the candidate.
All that these rules do is say that you cannot contribute money to a campaign via advertising without the same restrictions that you would face if you wanted to contriubte cash. I don't see how this is unreasonable unless you also feel that restrictions on cash donations are unreasonable.
You have a very valuable pulpit. If you want to host the political literature of all of the major candidates in a fair and even way, that's one thing (and I would defend that as protected speech), but if you want to donate it to a candidate, then it's just a donation like any other.
Another poster has covered the technical ground far better than I could have, so I'll skip answering your question directly. However, it is useful to note that while Parrot does not place Unicode in the role of sole character set (as, for example, the JVM does), it does use Unicode as the primary interchange format. If two character sets do not have any defined conversions between then, Unicode is used as a fallback (possibly resulting in an exception).
The oft-misread quote, "information wants to be free," is interpreted as meaning that information has some kind of sense of its own needs. It's strange (or perhaps, in my pessimistic moments, not) that the foolishness of this notion prompts so many to ridicule it instead of thinking further and realizing that there is a second interpretation.
Information "wants" to be free in the same sense that liquids "want" to seek a neutral level in a resevior-and-tube construct. Information "wants" to obey its natural laws. Without human interference, information propagates in ways which modern physics is just now (as in over the last 50 years or so) coming to terms with. The laws of information are fundamentally tied to the laws of physics in term of all of the means of propagation; from simple kinetic interaction to quantum entagnlement.
When we try to impose our notions that "this information is useful" or "this information has value", we're imposing an artificial label, which other than the interesting fact that that label itself is information, is only a construct of our own making.
When we try to hide information, fundamentally we are trying to block is propagation. To acknowledge that information wants to be free is to acknowledge that that information will naturally propagate, and any attempt to constrain it requires the application of work.
Like damming a river, blocking information propagation is almost (perhaps entirely) impossible to do in absolute terms. There is a point of diminishing returns, and forces will naturally act against the restriction.
When applied to the macroscopic level, the situation changes, just as Newton's and Dirac's physics are very different. When we look at the propagation of information on a large scale (let's say the ROM image of this game), we must take into account the macroscopic forces acting on it, while accounting for the abstract realities of information propagation. When we do that, we see that a balance of force (e.g. crackers and warez distributors wanting to distribute the information and IP owners wanting to restrict it), the reality that "information wants to be free" acts to tip the balance in favor of the force acting to restrict it least. In other words, the reality that Feldman showed us in watermaking (that theory shows us that perfect watermarking is impossible) appears to be a universal phenomenon: placing restrictions on information is a fundamentally losing game.
There's still profit to be made from building a good dam, just as long as you accept that you can never completely stop water from evaporating, running under-ground or blowing over the dam as spray and that when you try, you will end up spending increasingly large amounts of energy for increasingly small returns.
Support for very high level language inter-operation (e.g. you can sub-class a Python object in Perl and call a method on the Perl class that gets invoked fromt he Python class).
Deep support for multiple character sets, not just ASCII and Unicode.
Perl 6
The last item might seem odd, but Perl 6 is definitely a language which needed some serious support. It's very ambitious, and a VM that didn't support its needs as completely as Parrot does would have exponentially complicated writing a compiler for it.
That said, the combination of the two promises to be one of the most powerful development platforms released to date.
As if Linux wasn't one of the bloated kernels already.
People throw around bloat with great abandon, and usually without any real rationale behind the term. In this case, you have the creator and current maintainer of one of the world's most complex pieces of software which handles millions of different configurations across hundreds of devices and architectures saying, in effect, "this patch would make the kernel too complex." That speaks to me of a level of complexity which I cannot even reasonably grasp (and I can grasp a hell of a lot of complexity).
Personally, I'd love to see RT linux for real (as opposed to semi-real-time features like low-latency and preemptability), but not at the cost of the stability of the OS. Let it mature the way PCMCIA did. Linus didn't accept that right off the bat either, and we were better off for it in the long run, as I think the PCMCIA subsystem had to work hard to maitain itself coherently while not shipping with the OS, and/or not being updated regularly.
As for bloat... I've yet to see anything that is not modularly removable from the kernel which was not essential to a modern OS. There are many cases where I'd love to drop old hardware, but that's not usually realistic. There are many modules which I have no use for, but I can always turn those off. There are many features for hardware I don't use, but removing them would be unfair to people on those platforms.
A threat is more than spoken word, gesture, or other form of communication, it is any act that is perceived to indicate deliberate and imminant harm.
This is not unique, and in fact many free speech cases revolve around non-speech. See more below...
By both of us now using that statement as example, we've demonstrated that the SPEECH is not illegal, it is the intent that is illegal.
Not as I understand the concept of free vs. protected speech (were you speeking because you know that to be the case or because it seems intuitively obvious to you?)
It is the intent which is used as (one of) the benchmark(s) for infringing speech, but it is the speech which is illegal because of the context in which it is performed. There are illegal forms of speech. Often, we try to limit the situations in which such speech can be deemed illegal, but if I tell someone from Iran our launch codes, that's treason regardless of the fact that I was excersising my right to free speech.
Free speech is not, and (to my knowledge) never has been an absolute. Protected speech is, but protected speech has in turn always hinged on what it is that we protect.
Now, consider, with political speech: the government fines you within an administrative court, the fine is for speaking about something in some way - whether or not it is true. This is an entirely different class of "wrongdoing" than the others.
I was with you up to there.
I know of no such restriction. I do know of restrictions on political speech which limit candidates to the point (at least this is the intent) where they cannot un-hinge the democratic process by spending more money than their opponent. This does not work because we do not fully enforce, fund and augment such laws where needed. However, the idea is the same as assault: you cannot use speech to restrict the freedoms of others (including other candidates who have as much of a right to the voters' attention as you).
This is why I'm against excluding anyone who COULD win an election from appearing in a debate (in a presidential race this means including anyone who is on enough ballots to get a majority of electoral votes).
This is also why I'm for limiting how much money you and your supporters can spend in EVERY medium to support your campaign. That means that I can put up a pro-Joe-Blow site as long as I don't exceed individual campaign dontaions in terms of the resources expended (which, on a $20/month hosted site is easy to avoid). I can then say anything I want.
But, by the same token, Google could not put a giant Joe Blow ad on their homepage (because the value of that one ad would exceed the individual contribution allowed).
This is nothing new, and applying to the Internet is an expected consequence of the Internet's popularity as a medium. What will be interesting is enforcement, given the Inernet's nature as a truly international medium... we shall see.
"I'm going to kill you at 5PM tomorrow" is a DEATH THREAT. Assault is when I beat you up
You're thinking of assult and battery. Assault is the threat and/or attempt, not the act of doing harm:
Law.
1. An unlawful threat or attempt to do bodily injury to another.
2. The act or an instance of unlawfully threatening or attempting to injure another.
This highlights my point about the law surrounding free speech. The on-the-street defintion of assault and of free speech are both wide misinterpretations of the laws under which our country has operated for over two centuries.
The problem comes about where you are an individual using your own property for a sign, not a company painting the candidate's banner on the face of their headquarters.
Regulating what an individual can put up on their home page on the net would be, IMH(IANAL)O, unreasonable, as long as the "value" of the resources you put behind such an effort fell within the unregulated end of campaign contributions.
What's quite reasonable is saying that a candidate or corporations and lobby groups supporting the candidate can't spend any more money on the Internet for advertising than they could on TV or in print. It's just another medium.
I do think that because of the interactivity of it, there should be some exceptions. Just for example, an unmoderated forum about a candidate should not be considered advertising.
What part of "Congress shall make no law" don't you understand?
You're taking the naive approach to freedom of speech. There is a concept that has been around for a very long time, and which the courts have hammered out quite clearly as the standard interpretation of the first ammendment called "protected speech".
If, for example, protected speech included everything you say or communicate in any way, then assault WOULD NOT BE ILLEGAL. Assault is clearly a case of laws being passed which restrict speech. Why should I not be allowed to say, "I'm going to kill you at 5PM tomorrow"? Why? because it's not protected speech.
Political speech is, for the most part, studiously protected, but there are strong exceptions when it comes to the funding that speech and consuming massive amounts of advertising "real eastate". These are reasonable measures taken to prevent one canidate from "buying" and election (and, in fact, I feel they're not strong enough as they do not prevent a small handfull of candidates from locking in an election among them).
If free speech were an absolute, a large fraction of the laws in this country at the federal and state levels would have been shot down by the Supreme Court over a century ago.
The bottom line is, since the developers have always been paid nothing for their work
Why do we keep saying this when it is so patently untrue?
Were the SGI engineers payed nothing for their work on the Linux kernel? The DEC engineers who made 2.0 possible? The IBM engineers who ported massive amounts of IBM code into Linux (the topic of a lawsuit, I'll remind you) and wrote a good amount of their own code? What about the Red Hat engineers who have contributed hugely? Alan Cox isn't paid? I think he'd be upset to hear it. Last I checked Linus was being paid specifically for his work on Linux by OSDL.
These are just the high-profile cases. Dozens of people around the world are paid to work on specific niches of the Linux kernel all the time.
Same thing goes for the rest of the OS tools, utilities, and subsystems.
The fact that some, even a majority (and I'm not conviced on that point) of the work might be gratis does not mean "the developers have always been paid nothing."
The cost is not in learning. People learn new languages every day. The problem is in compatibility.
Let's say that tomorrow MySQL adopts Tutorial D. Ok, so you are going to write code that talks to MySQL and you think about Tutorial D.... well, MySQL still talks SQL, and it turns out that so does everything else. Someday you may want to switch databases because suddenly DB2 is all the rage. If you use Tutorial D, you can't switch.
Any move away from SQL would have to be a broad industry move or would have to come from an effort that is so divorced from the current uses of databases that compatibility simply is not an issue.
The problem is that there are two specific problems created by registering, let's say, Kerry2004.org and putting up anti-Kerry information:
1. You've made an implication that "even pro-Kerry people have given up on him." This is not a strong argument, but a valid one.
2. The more important problem is that you deprive the candidate (Kerry, in my example) of the ability to speak to this voter, who, had they gotten an error loading Kerry2004.org would almost certainly have tried another likely domain name for the Kerry campaign. That person is now far less likely to procede on (they don't know if Kerry lost the domain or if this is some kind of hacked version of the site or what). Some (probably large) fraction of visitors to Kerry2004.org would have been exposed to pro-Kerry information which they were seeking out, and instead are exposed to anti-Kerry information and stop there.
This is an abuse of speech, and is not done any disservice by requring a bit of truth in advertising.
But my point is, they should be allowed to make the choice and see for themselves
You have a valid point, and yes that is a conservative point of view. It's funny how many conservative positions I take, given that I'm a liberal at heart.;-)
However, laws regulating what someone can say and when they can say it in a political campaign are one of the worst possible infringements on freedom of speech.
No, it's not. Free speech is not and never has been an absolute right in the US. We have a concept called "protected speech", and I don't think that you can make the case that putting up your anti-X opinions on a site called X.{com,gov,org,etc} during a political campaign should be protected where and if that site would reasonably be expected to be run only by X's proponents, and specifically where the general public might go to find pro-X information (e.g. most proper nouns). You can distribute pamphlets saying, "X is bad," you can start a X-sucks.com site and say anything you want (within the confines of protected speech, slander laws, etc.), but to mislead the voters is simply unacceptable, and borders on the kind of election abuse that should get one removed from the race.
To think that free speech is an absolute is one of the most common errors in interpreting US law. It simply is not. If it were, assault COULD NOT BE A CRIME. If it were, slander could not be an offense.
Those crimes are not free speech. They simply aren't.
Slashdot Mirror
In general, Dan Suglaski got it right in a talk on Parrot, where he said (paraphrase), "I don't think that, as a language designer, I should have an ego so large as to suggest that I can choose which character set best encodes your language. Parrot will use Unicode as a Lingua Franca, but will support fully the use of your native character sets where needed."
It's not that Unicode can't "try" to support your needs, it's that Unicode should not be assumed to have succeded (lest it act as an instrument of stagnation rather than unification). Local character sets like ASCII, Big5, etc. have their own value in terms of efficiency and applicability to local domain problems. They should have core support for that reason, period.
All of the other names that you cite (other than "Microserf", which is more appropriately, "Microserfs", and was the title of a book about Microsoft's corporate culture, equating it to a feudal monarchy... again an ironic name), are the same sort of infantile name-calling as "open sores". I don't equate any of them to "M$". Had he used any of those as his example, I would have agreed with him.
In fact, my point revolved around the idea that his logic was flawed on the specific point of "M$" vs. "open sores", not that name-calling was ever justified. Microsoft DOES trade software quality for revenue, which is why I bite my tongue when I want to poke fun at them for holding up Longhorn. If they're truly trying to reverse that corporate policy of release-date-over-quality, then bravo!
You do see the difference between irony and simple "you stupid fart-face" name-calling, right?
Good point. I keep using the prefix "E"... I have no idea why. Just a mental glitch.
Yep, I have a Canon E300 (AKA Digital Rebel, AKA Kiss), which, at 6MP and with my good macro lens (since I don't need any depth of field for taking a picture of a sheet of paper) can literally tell you how good your paper selection is, and that's the "prosumer" grade camera. Grab yourself one of the "professional" digital cameras (like the E20), and you're going to be able to determine the components of the ink, based on the way the paper separates it through capillary action.
These test sheets are fine for low-end cameras, but once you start dealing with professional lenses and high resolution CCDs you really need something printed by a professional printer, not some cheesy home unit (even if the home unit has the same resolution as the camera, it may not be capable of reproducing the image on paper with enough fidelity to test the camera.
And the "spyware" tag? Love it. FUD works both ways, doesn't it?
Please define "both ways". I wasn't aware of Google spreading FUD about someone else.
"M$"? That's hilarious. "Open sores" is funny, too. Oh, it isn't?
No one ever said (that I've read) that "M$" was funny (yes, I know it's your sig, not part of your post, but it has the same tit-for-tat flawed premise, so I thought I should address it as the same time). It's simply appropriate because Microsoft has traditionally been focused on making money to the exclusion of any technical merits of their software. Trading "$" for "S"oftware... it's meant to be ironic, not funny.
"Open sores" on the other hand is neither ironic nor particularly funny. It's one of those things that 5th graders would come up with by permuting a kid's last name into the closest word for a bodily function they can think of.
The fact that a huge number of people (not particularly open source proponents) have taken to using "M$" to refer to Microsoft isn't really much of a justification for arbitrary name-calling.
There are several ways of offshoring:
- Outsource to a company in your country that offshores for you. Pros: someone responsible is in a timezone close to you and (probably) grew up speaking your langauge Cons: Another layer of removal from the technical folks. Possible distance issues.
- Open a division in the target country and hire locals. Pros: Same hiring and training as your US staff, plus you get to quality-control the hires. Cons: Possible distance issues.
- Outsource to a company in another part of the world. Pros: Local management which can interact with local HR, recruiting and day-to-day management issues more effectively (in theory). Cons: You can't be sure you aren't sharing resources, and the company might have "more important customers".
I think that I would prefer the second option, and most of the distance issues are related to either language or time-zone, so you can minimize those problems by selecting a country that has a fairly high percentage of english (or your country's) speakers and is in your hemisphere (in the US, for example, Mexico can be an excellent choice). Almost all workers in Mexico who have the education to work with US tech companies can speak english and they are in US timezones. Plus, a flight from the US to Mexico or visa versa takes far, far less time, money and physical stamina than a flight to Asia. For European countries, I suggest looking at the more stable African nations and at Eastern Europe.If you do it right, you're simply becoming an international company, not "outsourcing". This can benefit your local employees a great deal. In the long run, this can be far more beneficial than just reducing your overhead costs, as you have a foothold in a nation whose economy is expanding, and you can sell your product or service in both nations. Lather, rinse, repeat.
To workers in G8 nations who are concerned about losing their jobs... stop and think about the new realities of outsourcing for a minute and you will see that there are new needs for you to fill. For example, do you think the demand will be high or low for software architects in the US who can speak Indian? Do you think the demand will be high or low for tech writers who can read and write Indian or various eastern European or Asian languages? If you're a manager, look around. I'm sure there are classes you can take in Asian culture. What a win it would be to know more about those you'll have to manage, eh?
I remember that too. I remember thinking the 1.37 kernel was HUGE.
I also remember that it didn't have most of the features that I rely on today (multi-processor support (there were patches); USB; PCMCIA; large memory; 2-year uptime; kernel threading was primative; modules; firewalling; etc.)
You could argue that many of those things should have been in user-land (and some did at the time), but I think that the final result speaks for itself. Call it bloated if you wish (I know you were not Greyfox), but I like to think of it as my swiss-army-kernel, and I keep it with me everywhere I go.
Microsoft is in a very tough spot. ANYTHING they do automatically becomes the de facto milestone for anti-security efforts. This means that they have to build a service which is capable, not just of altering what it looks for, but fundamentally how it behaves. If you find a way to subvert their security protocol (for fetching updates) imagine the havoc that you could cause.
I'm unhappy with the state of MS security, but I'm dead-set convinced that as long as they are a monopoly they are going to have to take things like security precations slowly and carefully.
Just as an example, and not to flag-wave, the open source OS camp has a very different set of issues because very few installations are "vanilla". This means that attackers must contend with a richer set of security measures by default and while they might be able to compromise some subset of machines, it will always be a much smaller subset than they can compromise in a truly homogenous world like Windows (where you only have to contend with a relatively linear set of service packs and revisions).
That doesn't make OSS OSes more secure, it just makes the landscape of OSS OS deployment rougher terrain for attackers. It gives us one more tool (along with the many-eyes approach; security tools; network analysis; static host analysis; dynamic host analysis; good user management; good systems management; etc.)
The topic has wandered a bit in this thread. Let's return to the one you're closest to:
Should I be allowed to buy a domain name based on a candidate's name and use it for purposes of promoting his opponennt, or attacking him (or her, of course)? My answer is a firm no. I don't think that putting up a label marking it as misinformation makes it anything other than misinformation. I also don't think you should be able to take out an ad on TV that starts off saying that this is an add for a candidate, then attack the candidate and then end with "this message is not approved of by the candidate."
The reason it's wrong is that it is designed with one and only one intent: to capture the attention of people who would not pay attention if you did not initially claim to be representing the candidate you are attacking. There is no other reason to make that claim (or to use that domain name) in the first place. You could start off the ad with, "Here are the reasons Joe Blow is the wrong choice," or you could by the doamin, "joeblowwrongchoice.org".
If all the humans left earth tomorrow the exchange of this type of information would drop sharply, and then gradually taper off as automated systems failed, until it stopped altogether.
Not at all. Humans instigate a great deal of information transfer, which is not surprising. Human history has been one of the more exothermic events in earth's biosphere (not the planet as a whole, of course), and information so far appears to be a by-product of thermodynamics.
However, information transfer continues regardless. What you're trying to get at is that the information transfer that remained would not, on the whole, be terribly interesting to humans (e.g. bugs eating the paper of a book and being eaten by birds who then excrete the waste in a pattern which decreases over the distance from the book, propagating that information (in a new form) in a simple wave-front)With that I will agree, but I won't agree that it's a terribly interesting point.
While we ARE here spewing out CDs, books, tapes, papers, keystrokes, body language and all sorts of other information, we are shaping the infosphere. Our mistake is in thinking that by shaping it, we are able to gain control over it.
Just as in Felton's example with watermarking, the laws of math and physics ultimately work against you, presenting points of diminishing returns in every such endevor. If you think that the distribution of a video game over the Internet isn't governed at all levels by the laws of math and physics, you are quite mistaken.
That's the problem I have with this. I happen to have creative control on several websites, two of which get a substantial amount of traffic. According to your reasoning, it's perfectly OK for me to put a George Kerry bumpersticker on my car, but it should be a federal offense for me to put a John Bush ad on my website?
On your personal site, an ad isn't worth much, and to counter the impact of your personal ad, a candidate would have to spend next to nothing.
On one of the large sites that you run, I presume you accept money for ads. If "the other guy" wanted to buy that same ad it would cost him money, and by putting up the ad for your candidate you are turning down money that you could have charged for that space. This places a value on your contribution, just as if you had handed cash to the candidate.
All that these rules do is say that you cannot contribute money to a campaign via advertising without the same restrictions that you would face if you wanted to contriubte cash. I don't see how this is unreasonable unless you also feel that restrictions on cash donations are unreasonable.
You have a very valuable pulpit. If you want to host the political literature of all of the major candidates in a fair and even way, that's one thing (and I would defend that as protected speech), but if you want to donate it to a candidate, then it's just a donation like any other.
Another poster has covered the technical ground far better than I could have, so I'll skip answering your question directly. However, it is useful to note that while Parrot does not place Unicode in the role of sole character set (as, for example, the JVM does), it does use Unicode as the primary interchange format. If two character sets do not have any defined conversions between then, Unicode is used as a fallback (possibly resulting in an exception).
The oft-misread quote, "information wants to be free," is interpreted as meaning that information has some kind of sense of its own needs. It's strange (or perhaps, in my pessimistic moments, not) that the foolishness of this notion prompts so many to ridicule it instead of thinking further and realizing that there is a second interpretation.
Information "wants" to be free in the same sense that liquids "want" to seek a neutral level in a resevior-and-tube construct. Information "wants" to obey its natural laws. Without human interference, information propagates in ways which modern physics is just now (as in over the last 50 years or so) coming to terms with. The laws of information are fundamentally tied to the laws of physics in term of all of the means of propagation; from simple kinetic interaction to quantum entagnlement.
When we try to impose our notions that "this information is useful" or "this information has value", we're imposing an artificial label, which other than the interesting fact that that label itself is information, is only a construct of our own making.
When we try to hide information, fundamentally we are trying to block is propagation. To acknowledge that information wants to be free is to acknowledge that that information will naturally propagate, and any attempt to constrain it requires the application of work.
Like damming a river, blocking information propagation is almost (perhaps entirely) impossible to do in absolute terms. There is a point of diminishing returns, and forces will naturally act against the restriction.
When applied to the macroscopic level, the situation changes, just as Newton's and Dirac's physics are very different. When we look at the propagation of information on a large scale (let's say the ROM image of this game), we must take into account the macroscopic forces acting on it, while accounting for the abstract realities of information propagation. When we do that, we see that a balance of force (e.g. crackers and warez distributors wanting to distribute the information and IP owners wanting to restrict it), the reality that "information wants to be free" acts to tip the balance in favor of the force acting to restrict it least. In other words, the reality that Feldman showed us in watermaking (that theory shows us that perfect watermarking is impossible) appears to be a universal phenomenon: placing restrictions on information is a fundamentally losing game.
There's still profit to be made from building a good dam, just as long as you accept that you can never completely stop water from evaporating, running under-ground or blowing over the dam as spray and that when you try, you will end up spending increasingly large amounts of energy for increasingly small returns.
- Language neutrality
- Support for very high level language inter-operation (e.g. you can sub-class a Python object in Perl and call a method on the Perl class that gets invoked fromt he Python class).
- Deep support for multiple character sets, not just ASCII and Unicode.
- Perl 6
The last item might seem odd, but Perl 6 is definitely a language which needed some serious support. It's very ambitious, and a VM that didn't support its needs as completely as Parrot does would have exponentially complicated writing a compiler for it.That said, the combination of the two promises to be one of the most powerful development platforms released to date.
As if Linux wasn't one of the bloated kernels already.
People throw around bloat with great abandon, and usually without any real rationale behind the term. In this case, you have the creator and current maintainer of one of the world's most complex pieces of software which handles millions of different configurations across hundreds of devices and architectures saying, in effect, "this patch would make the kernel too complex." That speaks to me of a level of complexity which I cannot even reasonably grasp (and I can grasp a hell of a lot of complexity).
Personally, I'd love to see RT linux for real (as opposed to semi-real-time features like low-latency and preemptability), but not at the cost of the stability of the OS. Let it mature the way PCMCIA did. Linus didn't accept that right off the bat either, and we were better off for it in the long run, as I think the PCMCIA subsystem had to work hard to maitain itself coherently while not shipping with the OS, and/or not being updated regularly.
As for bloat... I've yet to see anything that is not modularly removable from the kernel which was not essential to a modern OS. There are many cases where I'd love to drop old hardware, but that's not usually realistic. There are many modules which I have no use for, but I can always turn those off. There are many features for hardware I don't use, but removing them would be unfair to people on those platforms.
What bloat did you have in mind?
A threat is more than spoken word, gesture, or other form of communication, it is any act that is perceived to indicate deliberate and imminant harm.
This is not unique, and in fact many free speech cases revolve around non-speech. See more below...
By both of us now using that statement as example, we've demonstrated that the SPEECH is not illegal, it is the intent that is illegal.
Not as I understand the concept of free vs. protected speech (were you speeking because you know that to be the case or because it seems intuitively obvious to you?)
It is the intent which is used as (one of) the benchmark(s) for infringing speech, but it is the speech which is illegal because of the context in which it is performed. There are illegal forms of speech. Often, we try to limit the situations in which such speech can be deemed illegal, but if I tell someone from Iran our launch codes, that's treason regardless of the fact that I was excersising my right to free speech.
Free speech is not, and (to my knowledge) never has been an absolute. Protected speech is, but protected speech has in turn always hinged on what it is that we protect.
Now, consider, with political speech: the government fines you within an administrative court, the fine is for speaking about something in some way - whether or not it is true. This is an entirely different class of "wrongdoing" than the others.
I was with you up to there.
I know of no such restriction. I do know of restrictions on political speech which limit candidates to the point (at least this is the intent) where they cannot un-hinge the democratic process by spending more money than their opponent. This does not work because we do not fully enforce, fund and augment such laws where needed. However, the idea is the same as assault: you cannot use speech to restrict the freedoms of others (including other candidates who have as much of a right to the voters' attention as you).
This is why I'm against excluding anyone who COULD win an election from appearing in a debate (in a presidential race this means including anyone who is on enough ballots to get a majority of electoral votes).
This is also why I'm for limiting how much money you and your supporters can spend in EVERY medium to support your campaign. That means that I can put up a pro-Joe-Blow site as long as I don't exceed individual campaign dontaions in terms of the resources expended (which, on a $20/month hosted site is easy to avoid). I can then say anything I want.
But, by the same token, Google could not put a giant Joe Blow ad on their homepage (because the value of that one ad would exceed the individual contribution allowed).
This is nothing new, and applying to the Internet is an expected consequence of the Internet's popularity as a medium. What will be interesting is enforcement, given the Inernet's nature as a truly international medium... we shall see.
Nope.
"I'm going to kill you at 5PM tomorrow" is a DEATH THREAT. Assault is when I beat you up
You're thinking of assult and battery. Assault is the threat and/or attempt, not the act of doing harm:This highlights my point about the law surrounding free speech. The on-the-street defintion of assault and of free speech are both wide misinterpretations of the laws under which our country has operated for over two centuries.
The problem comes about where you are an individual using your own property for a sign, not a company painting the candidate's banner on the face of their headquarters.
Regulating what an individual can put up on their home page on the net would be, IMH(IANAL)O, unreasonable, as long as the "value" of the resources you put behind such an effort fell within the unregulated end of campaign contributions.
What's quite reasonable is saying that a candidate or corporations and lobby groups supporting the candidate can't spend any more money on the Internet for advertising than they could on TV or in print. It's just another medium.
I do think that because of the interactivity of it, there should be some exceptions. Just for example, an unmoderated forum about a candidate should not be considered advertising.
What part of "Congress shall make no law" don't you understand?
You're taking the naive approach to freedom of speech. There is a concept that has been around for a very long time, and which the courts have hammered out quite clearly as the standard interpretation of the first ammendment called "protected speech".
If, for example, protected speech included everything you say or communicate in any way, then assault WOULD NOT BE ILLEGAL. Assault is clearly a case of laws being passed which restrict speech. Why should I not be allowed to say, "I'm going to kill you at 5PM tomorrow"? Why? because it's not protected speech.
Political speech is, for the most part, studiously protected, but there are strong exceptions when it comes to the funding that speech and consuming massive amounts of advertising "real eastate". These are reasonable measures taken to prevent one canidate from "buying" and election (and, in fact, I feel they're not strong enough as they do not prevent a small handfull of candidates from locking in an election among them).
If free speech were an absolute, a large fraction of the laws in this country at the federal and state levels would have been shot down by the Supreme Court over a century ago.
The bottom line is, since the developers have always been paid nothing for their work
Why do we keep saying this when it is so patently untrue?
Were the SGI engineers payed nothing for their work on the Linux kernel? The DEC engineers who made 2.0 possible? The IBM engineers who ported massive amounts of IBM code into Linux (the topic of a lawsuit, I'll remind you) and wrote a good amount of their own code? What about the Red Hat engineers who have contributed hugely? Alan Cox isn't paid? I think he'd be upset to hear it. Last I checked Linus was being paid specifically for his work on Linux by OSDL.
These are just the high-profile cases. Dozens of people around the world are paid to work on specific niches of the Linux kernel all the time.
Same thing goes for the rest of the OS tools, utilities, and subsystems.
The fact that some, even a majority (and I'm not conviced on that point) of the work might be gratis does not mean "the developers have always been paid nothing."
The cost is not in learning. People learn new languages every day. The problem is in compatibility.
Let's say that tomorrow MySQL adopts Tutorial D. Ok, so you are going to write code that talks to MySQL and you think about Tutorial D.... well, MySQL still talks SQL, and it turns out that so does everything else. Someday you may want to switch databases because suddenly DB2 is all the rage. If you use Tutorial D, you can't switch.
Any move away from SQL would have to be a broad industry move or would have to come from an effort that is so divorced from the current uses of databases that compatibility simply is not an issue.
The problem is that there are two specific problems created by registering, let's say, Kerry2004.org and putting up anti-Kerry information:
1. You've made an implication that "even pro-Kerry people have given up on him." This is not a strong argument, but a valid one.
2. The more important problem is that you deprive the candidate (Kerry, in my example) of the ability to speak to this voter, who, had they gotten an error loading Kerry2004.org would almost certainly have tried another likely domain name for the Kerry campaign. That person is now far less likely to procede on (they don't know if Kerry lost the domain or if this is some kind of hacked version of the site or what). Some (probably large) fraction of visitors to Kerry2004.org would have been exposed to pro-Kerry information which they were seeking out, and instead are exposed to anti-Kerry information and stop there.
This is an abuse of speech, and is not done any disservice by requring a bit of truth in advertising.
But my point is, they should be allowed to make the choice and see for themselves
;-)
You have a valid point, and yes that is a conservative point of view. It's funny how many conservative positions I take, given that I'm a liberal at heart.
However, laws regulating what someone can say and when they can say it in a political campaign are one of the worst possible infringements on freedom of speech.
No, it's not. Free speech is not and never has been an absolute right in the US. We have a concept called "protected speech", and I don't think that you can make the case that putting up your anti-X opinions on a site called X.{com,gov,org,etc} during a political campaign should be protected where and if that site would reasonably be expected to be run only by X's proponents, and specifically where the general public might go to find pro-X information (e.g. most proper nouns). You can distribute pamphlets saying, "X is bad," you can start a X-sucks.com site and say anything you want (within the confines of protected speech, slander laws, etc.), but to mislead the voters is simply unacceptable, and borders on the kind of election abuse that should get one removed from the race.
To think that free speech is an absolute is one of the most common errors in interpreting US law. It simply is not. If it were, assault COULD NOT BE A CRIME. If it were, slander could not be an offense.
Those crimes are not free speech. They simply aren't.