There are an increasing number of books on design patterns being published...each taking more liberties on what a design pattern is.
Don't forget that design patterns started in architecture. I'd grant that most of the books you refer to are chasing buzzwords, but some of them may be trying to create new pattern languages that apply to a different arena of concerns.
I suspect that anything requiring non-trivial design skills could have a pattern language built around it. Whether that would generally be a good thing for each respective field or not is a little less clear to me; from a programming standpoint they seem to be an "ok" but not "fantastic" method for learning new techniques.
Um, aren't these concepts something we learned in college?u
Error handling wasn't taught well at my college. Yeah, you might fail one of Greenlee's assignments if you if you didn't check the return status of a system call, but that's not the same thing as knowing how to handle an error when you get one.
It wouldn't be difficult to add an error-handling module to an intermediate-level programming class. There are only a few basic response to any error situation: ignore it, propagate it, retry it, ask the user about it, log it to disk/email/syslog/database/whatever, log it to the GUI, and/or bail-and-quit. Talk about when and how to use each approach; throw in material about retry strategies, explicit vs. implicit error signaling, fail-fast behavior, ask-forgiveness, pitfalls of catching all exceptions, the needs of production systems, etc., and followup with an examination of a few platform-specific error-handling facilities.
If you're college taught all this, then great!!! Mine did not. Maybe I should email some of my old profs...
You catch more flies with honey than vinegar... instead of issuing nastygrams to the press, the red cross could brainstorm some alternative iconography (maybe the pharamaceutical snake and staff?), maybe even hire a graphic artist to create a few public domain PNG's, and contact game developers individually with a softly worded approach. Get two or three of them to sign a public statement supporting the cause. Then maybe follow with a few press releases and "reluctantly" throw in something near the end about trademark, etc.
I'm not trying to comment on the article or poo-poo the Red Cross; I was just struck that there's a lot to learn here... as a general rule, you can be more effective in communicating with others if you choose positive approaches in preference to negative ones. Of course, it's often more costly to find those positive approaches... it can take creativity, patience, and self-denial.
I believe in using the best car for the job. When I'm going to the beach, I take the SUV. When I'm driving to the other side of town on surface streets, I take my civic; if it's raining, I'll swap out the touring tires for all-season ones and give the windshield a quick RainX treatment. When oil prices spike, I'll whip out my OBD-II and tweak my fuel ignition timings; I usually remove all the passengers seat too, though one time a coil popped loose and tore a hole in some new jeans. If I've got a date, I'm going to pick her up in the Porche, unless she's the earthy type who would rather make out in a Jeep... or, actually, I'd prefer to use a HumVee, but I had to sell mine so I could rent a 18-wheeler to help my friend move out of his apartment. It was a hefty expenditure given that I had to hire a commercial driver and pay insurance, but we were able to get it all in one trip! With an ordinary vehicle, we would have to ferry stuff back and forth, which would have taken, like, ages.
Moral: 'The best tool for the job' is not the same thing as 'the best set of tools for all of our jobs'. I suspect most businesses will do best picking one or two languages (static+dynamic works well, like Java/Jython) and sticking to them except in well-justified exception cases (like needing to write a device driver). DBA's and sysadmins will probably have their own collection of scripting languages dictated by their DBMS or OS platform.
The opposite of 'best tool for the job' (often subscribed to by programmers) is the 'one size fits all' advice (often subscribed to by management). It has problems too. If your bias is towards 'best tool', think about (1) overcoming any reluctance you have to learning a new or "rival" platform (2) long-term cost and risk of having an extra platform [it's higher than you think]. If your bias is towards 'fits all', learn more about when language choice it matters and be receptive to dialog on new or alternative tools.
(2) avoiding pointless diversity which will cause headaches for future maintainers down the road.
No kidding... the NASA article is interesting, but the smugness is unwarranted and irritating. 260 staff, 20+ years, 420k lines of code??? That's some costly code. Good luck trying that in the real world... an OSS clone of your competitor's product will be in Debian Stable before you make it to the store shelves.
When a journalist pull this type stunt, I think we should turn it around. For instance, let's hypothesize that there's a top-notch research paper on particle physics out there which took a team of grad students and PhD's a few years to create. The data for this paper was gathered and collated meticulously; evidence was assembled with great care along cautious lines of reasoning; pre-existing work from others in the field was carefully dug up, reviewed, applied to the problem under study, and referenced appropriately; assumptions, simplifications, and biases were clearly disclosed; the conclusions of the paper were carefully crafted to say only what was defensible; potential weaknesses were carefully pointed out and mitigated; avenues for additional research and open questions were pointed out; the results said something profound and helped others. What an achievement! Surely this is the future of journalism! That old tired image of the lone sloppy magazine writer hastily struggling to meet his deadline will be just a bad memory! Economic naivete, misuse of statistics, and one-size-fits-all mentalities will never make their way into print again! Yay!!
The fact that gangs of humans are applying a vast store of partially-learned rules to a purely imagined set of requirements through a skein of lossy transmission lines with any number of distractions means that noise is inevitable, and in something as literal as code for Von Neumann machines, any noise means error.
That juicy description just earned you a place on my friends list. Thanks!
I expect that local government could slash energy consumption by enforcing some kind of "out of hours" energy tax aimed at lights, computers etc. being left on over night.
How do you enforce that?
They can enforce "not watering your lawn" during periods of drought by having cops patrol neighborhoods. Sure there are a lot of watering situations this method couldn't catch, but it's sufficent to pressure most people into compliance.
They could probably do a similar thing with wasted electricity. Drive through retail areas and notice places where the lights are being left on unnecessarily. There would be a lot of things you couldn't catch this way, and there would be a lot of special cases to worry about, but it could be done wisely if implemented at the local level.
Economic incentives might provide better ways to do this though... e.g., maybe a high tarriff on off-peak usage with exemptions for business who turn off lights and relax their thermostat settings. I don't know if anyone has explored the topic thoroughly.
Wikipedia isn't an organization, it's a website. The people who caught the plagiarism weren't employees of Wikipedia, or acting on behalf of the Wikipedia Foundation.
Wikipedia is a community. The people who caught the cheating were acting on behalf of the community and identify strongly with same. Wikipedia Foundation is a non-profit corporation setup to conduct legal business on behalf of the community.
why should Wikipedia be given credit?
The people who did the work are part of the community, drew on the resources of the community, and want the community to get credit. I don't see a problem with this.
This is just another instance of Wikipedia supporters having a chip on their shoulder against the established media.
Agreed... the tone of the story submission did sound unprofessionally indignant.
I've despised Parisians since I was 7. When my family visited the city, attempted to speak French and treated rudely for not speaking French perfectly.
FYI... I visited Paris in summer 2001 w/o knowing a lick of French. I found Parisians very nice, not at all what the sterotypes led me to expect. This was true across multiple hostels, museums, stores, and sidewalks.
I don't doubt that you had negative experiences, but you can choose for how hard and how long to hold your grudges... I, for instance, don't look back so fondly on Venetians, but I'm not going to get myopically belligerent towards them over future foreign policy tiffs.
I feel like there is a hidden assumption in this analysis.
I can't bring myself to RTFA. But suppose the government of a third world country decided to sanction* and enable piracy on a wide scale. Government firms could acquire first-world software, crack it, and release it to individuals and organizations. Wouldn't that help create wealth too? Even if the BSA's assumption about copyrights fueling innovation is true [and it probably is true for dull-to-write business software], there still a massive benefit to be obtained by deploying the software that's already been created. My basis for thinking this is due to the unique economics of the third world: they have a choice between implementing copyright (and letting 10% of their business pay through the nose for GlitzOMatic Pro 2006) or they can reject copyright and hook up 90% of their businesses with GlitzOMatic Pro 1997 (which was the only copy they could get their hands on, but it still has all the important features).
Maybe even better would be to reject foreign copyright and respect internal copyright. Or choose a very short term for copyright duration (5 years?). Of course, that's not very likely to make you friends internationally.
Probably the best option would be to embrace copyright (but keep it in check with the courts) and also embrace OSS.
*It's a legitimate option for a sovereign state to reject copyright if it has no pre-existing internal or external agreements to the contrary. Governments should be responsible to their PEOPLE, not to the cultures, expectations, and power-wielders of other states.
Seriously, why does ICANN keep coming up with proposals for TLD's like.travel and.asia? This is not a useful ontological breakdown for organizing the world's organizations. It's like going into your local library and finding that the books are divided into three sections: Anvils, Horseys, and Everything Else.
ICANN needs a Theory. The original TLD's (com/org/net/gov/mil/edu/int) had a pretty good theory that met the needs of the net at that time. Today those distinctions are less useful since.gov/.mil are U.S.-centric,.com has become the defacto standard that people expect, and there are many organizations which don't seem to fit the classification at all (e.g., personal-use domains might be one example). The ccTLD's (us/uk/jp, etc.) let individual countries have more autonomy, but it also semantically diluted the namespace (especially with opportunist looking for TLD's like.tv/.to).
I can't say what a good theory would be. Maybe the original TLD's could be cleaned up and administered better. Maybe the ccTLD's could be integrated with trademark law so that, e.g., foobar.jp means that Japan recognizes the owner of foobar's trademark. At any rate, the theory should have a few characterstics: it should be complete [cover all reasonable use cases]; it should be predictable [if I know of an organization or entity with a website, I should be able to predict the exact 1 TLD they exist in]; and it shouldn't require that most organizations feel obligated purchase multiple names to protect their trademark.
Hmm... it looks like you can use numeric HTML entity … to insert a literal ellipse. In Konqueror, it looks likes this gets replaced with three adjacent dots (because you can select each dot individually).
Example, the following HTML:
Entity=…<BR/>
3 Dots=...
Renders as:
Entity=...
3 Dots=...
I wonder if other browsers treat the ellipse entity as a single character and render it more compactly?
Show a biologist new evidence, and if the prevailing theory doesn't fit, it changes.
In practice, this can take awhile because the biologist is human too. Sometimes it can even take a generation of researchers to displace an outmoded theory. However, your point is well taken: science has a good track record of error-correcting itself. Unlike most religious and political philosophies, science actively seeks to tests its ideas and guard itself against human cognitive error.
For millennia, religion has promised to heal the sick, fertilize the land (or womb), and bring down destruction on the enemy. In the past 400 years a lot of those promises have come to fruition, but somehow it seems that the credit belongs to those who have conducted, funded, and leveraged scientific research. The ability of science to critique itself, to backtrack, to admit error and accommodate new information probably has something to do with its relative success in these areas.
Kids AREN'T going around shooting and killing each other, at least not in the US. The FBI reports that crime overall has gone down steadily since 1994.
Overall crime rate is very tenuously linked to the homicide rate of a specific age group. A better metric would be to list, for each age group, the number of homicides offenses per 10,000 people of that same age group. The DOJ gets us part way there, but their stats don't address the shifting age of the population (e.g., are youth being less violent or are there simply less youth per overall population?). You could probably cross-reference it with page 12 of census data and get a good idea.
I suggest that the field and the general user experience would be greatly enhanced by limiting access to compilers/assemblers.
I disagree. One, you are proposing that we limit people's ability to use the computer as a tool to help them think for themselves. Computation is an intrinsic right of all humanity, not something to be confined to a particular group who have undergone a particular indoctrination.
Two, the general thrust of computing technology has been to push down more power to end users. Generations of researchers have tried to figure out how to make computers easier to program and use by ever-wider audiences. This has greatly magnified all of the original benefits of computers and computer networks: cooperation, innovation, and productivity. So of course it's magnified the bad stuff as well. You can't remove tools from the malicious without also removing them from others who have used them to create significant cultural and economic wealth.
The goose has grown. The golden eggs are bigger and so are the turds. If you're upset about the turds, the solution is to get a bigger shovel, not starve the goose. In the end, design, architecture, tools, techniques, and education will go much further than "lock up the compilers".
I haven't seen anyone concerned about privacy yet. I guess that since we're talking about Google, all anyone can do is "Oooh" and "Aaah" over this.
That's the power of trust, my friend. Google has a good track record of conducting its business in a way that protects or promotes Slashdot's political zeitgeist. I don't think it's inconsistent to take that into consideration when determining how much criticism and suspicion to level at a new corporate endeavor.
Is it possible to be too trusting? Absolutely. I take your point that we do compromise our objectivity when we consider the messenger. This story may be a bad example of it though... many people have pointed out the prank call and telemarketing vulnerabilities. Others are professing admiration for the business concept ("a new add revenue stream w/o making the ads more obnoxious"), but they aren't signalling a desire to actually use it.
What you posted could be restated as follows, losing none of the relevant information...
Your analogy might work okay for grandma (who would presumably need to understand the purpose of this technique), but the slashdot target audience is generally a technically-oriented crowd. We're interested in a brief overview of how it works, and we remember a thing or two from those mandatory physics classes we took along the way to computer science, engineering, math, or whatever pure/applied science we got into. As such, we're more interested in the mechanism of the technique, in which case your post is misleading and the parent post is a little bit more informative.
I applaud the nod towards thoughtful communication though...
The point is not that we should encourage lots of lawsuits against software companies, or have unlimited liability for software.... But the complete lack of any liability is an anomaly that should be removed.
The problem I have with Bill's statement is that he implicitly argues that contract law should be modified to do some sort of blanket-invalidation of these license clauses. However, this would just exacerbate the real problem: because of Microsoft's monopolistic presence, consumer don't get to choose their preferred tradeoff b/t quality and functionality. Fix the marketplace and people will take this into account. (Some consumers already do.) If you blindly implement liability, however, you'll just cut small businesses and altrusitic programmers out of the game. Consumers will be stuck with whatever the big companies offer.
The people who advocate software liability never seem to suggest a viable way of implementing it. The average software product (commercial or open source) ships with THOUSANDS of (detected) bugs. You can cut down on this by reducing features and using very strict change control, but you'll end up paying a whole lot more for a whole lot less. This makes sense for life-critical situations (space shuttle, etc.), but it's a poor decision for most purposes. Many software methodologies (had this journalist bothered to investigate) offer a range of such tradeoffs, so it might make sense for companies to advertise their methodology and be judged liable only if they failed to follow that methodology.
I think journalist like Bill would find it instructive to learn a programming language and work a small 100-line college assignment. If he can do that with less than 5 bugs, let's give him a 10,000-line assignment. Then make him interoperate with a few buggy vendor components. Then give him a deadline, ill-defined requirements, incompetent teammates, and some poorly thought-out (but strict) change management procedures to follow. Sorry Bill, call me back when IE or FireFox kills people on a daily basis like the automobiles you praise as the model of liability legislation.
I'm systems administrator in my household and I spent over five hours last week upgrading the firewalls, anti-virus and anti-spyware programs on our three laptops and two desktop computers.
This statement is just asinine. He's blaming the manufacturer for fixing and enhancing their own software. This is like Toyota voluntarily showing up one Saturday and installing stronger seat belts, fixing a minor problem with the mirrors, and smoothing out glitches that have emerged in production.
And there is just one of the fscking hypocracies of the whole movement. What happened? Did Nuclear get less evil? or did the alternative get more evil?
Perhaps they just got more practical and realized that humanity isn't going to live in a shoestring of energy. The risks of nuclear power that GreenPeace has identified are valid, but the nuclear industry has demonstrated that these risks can be managed [okay, the russians not so much, but definitely France, U.S.A, Canada, etc.]. I fail to see how it is "hypocritical" to modify your stance in response to earned experience.
I wish more political groups would find opportunities to check their stance against the real world and seek out cooperative approaches or compromises in lieu of the repeated head-bashing you get with direct political conflict.
(Disclosure: I work in the nuclear industry. My views are not necessarily those of my employeer.)
Oddly, only the monotheism you take a whack at has truly embraced free will and self-determination. If anything about it rankles, it is that it also embraced the concept that it comes at the price of conscience and responsibility.
I don't follow... social prerogatives are compiled in at the psychological level and exist in pretty much all cultures and humans, despite whether they believe in 0, 1, or multiple gods. Honesty, loyalty, sexual restraint, self sacrifice, and other such values pretty much exist everywhere. Some theists see this as an argument for God from universal morality (the "knowledge of good and evil" humankind gained when some certain somebodies ate some certain forbidden fruit). Personally, I see this a result of socialization and evolutionary psychology... there are plausible reasons from game theory why unilaterally "doing wrong" is a bad strategy.
I'll grant that different cultures seem to have different amounts of free will and self-determination, and that religious belief can make a large difference. It could be argued, for instance, that America owes a great deal of its wealth to the Protestant work ethic. Right now though, it seems that the Christian church has relinquished any driving force it might have had as champion of the individual... after 9/11, it's all about conformity and control (and acting victimized). We need some modern Martin Luther's to break up the spiritual hegemony.
(I have no clue what that last paragraph is saying, but it sounded good.:-)
Where the hell did you get the idea that we can arrest people for being impolite?
Boobytrapping and hurting a child is NOT morally equivalent to redirecting a hotlink. The first one is physically harming a person. The second may fiscally hurt some shareholders, but only as a secondary effect of providing information to others which they then choose to act on or not.
What is the mechanism by which a child species loses the ability to breed with its parent species?
"Species" is an abstraction. Abstractions leak. Consider the sexual crossing of genes, the non-uniform application of environmental pressures across a population, the importation of new DNA via cross-breeding/microevolution, the occasional mutation... with the various forces of differentiation at work, it's hard to imagine how a species could keep itself together unchanged for the long haul. The miracle of life is not that species split apart but that their individuals members are--for a time--able to spawn new members despite everybody having different DNA.
If you have difficulty relating to this, look at human languages. They work in mostly the same way... if, for instance, you were to geographically isolate two groups of English speakers for several centuries, you would likely get two child languages that were mutually unintelligible.
You may find this post to be more applicable to your original question. Also, I am not a geneticist, but I believe that you are overestimating the role of mutations in driving change.
Whatever we spend 6.5M pounds on (more lifeguards, overpriced military hardware, whatever), it doesn't disappear. It still doesn't disappear but gets spent on ice-creams, bigger mortgages etc.
I think both the poster and you would agree that the 6.5M pounds, if not used for one thing, gets *reallocated* for another. We get bigger houses if we let some little kids drown. Nobody consciously makes that decision, but these two desires get balanced out in the market.
Of course, in this case, your ad hoc analysis makes a pretty good argument that society will recoup its investment in this system. Still (and I think this was another point the poster was trying to glue in), there might be more cost effective way of achieving the same ends [e.g., such as spending the money on mandatory swim lessons for at-risk populations or even doing something tangential such as reinforcing a weak levy that guards a major metropolis].
Of course, judging from your analysis, you probably perceive all of this already.... I just feel like typing to put off going to bed.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Don't forget that design patterns started in architecture. I'd grant that most of the books you refer to are chasing buzzwords, but some of them may be trying to create new pattern languages that apply to a different arena of concerns.
I suspect that anything requiring non-trivial design skills could have a pattern language built around it. Whether that would generally be a good thing for each respective field or not is a little less clear to me; from a programming standpoint they seem to be an "ok" but not "fantastic" method for learning new techniques.
Error handling wasn't taught well at my college. Yeah, you might fail one of Greenlee's assignments if you if you didn't check the return status of a system call, but that's not the same thing as knowing how to handle an error when you get one.
It wouldn't be difficult to add an error-handling module to an intermediate-level programming class. There are only a few basic response to any error situation: ignore it, propagate it, retry it, ask the user about it, log it to disk/email/syslog/database/whatever, log it to the GUI, and/or bail-and-quit. Talk about when and how to use each approach; throw in material about retry strategies, explicit vs. implicit error signaling, fail-fast behavior, ask-forgiveness, pitfalls of catching all exceptions, the needs of production systems, etc., and followup with an examination of a few platform-specific error-handling facilities.
If you're college taught all this, then great!!! Mine did not. Maybe I should email some of my old profs...
I'm not trying to comment on the article or poo-poo the Red Cross; I was just struck that there's a lot to learn here... as a general rule, you can be more effective in communicating with others if you choose positive approaches in preference to negative ones. Of course, it's often more costly to find those positive approaches... it can take creativity, patience, and self-denial.
Moral: 'The best tool for the job' is not the same thing as 'the best set of tools for all of our jobs'. I suspect most businesses will do best picking one or two languages (static+dynamic works well, like Java/Jython) and sticking to them except in well-justified exception cases (like needing to write a device driver). DBA's and sysadmins will probably have their own collection of scripting languages dictated by their DBMS or OS platform.
The opposite of 'best tool for the job' (often subscribed to by programmers) is the 'one size fits all' advice (often subscribed to by management). It has problems too. If your bias is towards 'best tool', think about (1) overcoming any reluctance you have to learning a new or "rival" platform (2) long-term cost and risk of having an extra platform [it's higher than you think]. If your bias is towards 'fits all', learn more about when language choice it matters and be receptive to dialog on new or alternative tools. (2) avoiding pointless diversity which will cause headaches for future maintainers down the road.
No kidding... the NASA article is interesting, but the smugness is unwarranted and irritating. 260 staff, 20+ years, 420k lines of code??? That's some costly code. Good luck trying that in the real world... an OSS clone of your competitor's product will be in Debian Stable before you make it to the store shelves.
When a journalist pull this type stunt, I think we should turn it around. For instance, let's hypothesize that there's a top-notch research paper on particle physics out there which took a team of grad students and PhD's a few years to create. The data for this paper was gathered and collated meticulously; evidence was assembled with great care along cautious lines of reasoning; pre-existing work from others in the field was carefully dug up, reviewed, applied to the problem under study, and referenced appropriately; assumptions, simplifications, and biases were clearly disclosed; the conclusions of the paper were carefully crafted to say only what was defensible; potential weaknesses were carefully pointed out and mitigated; avenues for additional research and open questions were pointed out; the results said something profound and helped others. What an achievement! Surely this is the future of journalism! That old tired image of the lone sloppy magazine writer hastily struggling to meet his deadline will be just a bad memory! Economic naivete, misuse of statistics, and one-size-fits-all mentalities will never make their way into print again! Yay!!
That juicy description just earned you a place on my friends list. Thanks!
How do you enforce that?
They can enforce "not watering your lawn" during periods of drought by having cops patrol neighborhoods. Sure there are a lot of watering situations this method couldn't catch, but it's sufficent to pressure most people into compliance.
They could probably do a similar thing with wasted electricity. Drive through retail areas and notice places where the lights are being left on unnecessarily. There would be a lot of things you couldn't catch this way, and there would be a lot of special cases to worry about, but it could be done wisely if implemented at the local level.
Economic incentives might provide better ways to do this though... e.g., maybe a high tarriff on off-peak usage with exemptions for business who turn off lights and relax their thermostat settings. I don't know if anyone has explored the topic thoroughly.
Wikipedia is a community. The people who caught the cheating were acting on behalf of the community and identify strongly with same. Wikipedia Foundation is a non-profit corporation setup to conduct legal business on behalf of the community.
why should Wikipedia be given credit?
The people who did the work are part of the community, drew on the resources of the community, and want the community to get credit. I don't see a problem with this.
This is just another instance of Wikipedia supporters having a chip on their shoulder against the established media.
Agreed... the tone of the story submission did sound unprofessionally indignant.
FYI... I visited Paris in summer 2001 w/o knowing a lick of French. I found Parisians very nice, not at all what the sterotypes led me to expect. This was true across multiple hostels, museums, stores, and sidewalks.
I don't doubt that you had negative experiences, but you can choose for how hard and how long to hold your grudges... I, for instance, don't look back so fondly on Venetians, but I'm not going to get myopically belligerent towards them over future foreign policy tiffs.
That'll teach'em not to put the OK/Save button on the right-hand side of the dialog box!
I can't bring myself to RTFA. But suppose the government of a third world country decided to sanction* and enable piracy on a wide scale. Government firms could acquire first-world software, crack it, and release it to individuals and organizations. Wouldn't that help create wealth too? Even if the BSA's assumption about copyrights fueling innovation is true [and it probably is true for dull-to-write business software], there still a massive benefit to be obtained by deploying the software that's already been created. My basis for thinking this is due to the unique economics of the third world: they have a choice between implementing copyright (and letting 10% of their business pay through the nose for GlitzOMatic Pro 2006) or they can reject copyright and hook up 90% of their businesses with GlitzOMatic Pro 1997 (which was the only copy they could get their hands on, but it still has all the important features).
Maybe even better would be to reject foreign copyright and respect internal copyright. Or choose a very short term for copyright duration (5 years?). Of course, that's not very likely to make you friends internationally.
Probably the best option would be to embrace copyright (but keep it in check with the courts) and also embrace OSS.
*It's a legitimate option for a sovereign state to reject copyright if it has no pre-existing internal or external agreements to the contrary. Governments should be responsible to their PEOPLE, not to the cultures, expectations, and power-wielders of other states.
ICANN needs a Theory. The original TLD's (com/org/net/gov/mil/edu/int) had a pretty good theory that met the needs of the net at that time. Today those distinctions are less useful since .gov/.mil are U.S.-centric, .com has become the defacto standard that people expect, and there are many organizations which don't seem to fit the classification at all (e.g., personal-use domains might be one example). The ccTLD's (us/uk/jp, etc.) let individual countries have more autonomy, but it also semantically diluted the namespace (especially with opportunist looking for TLD's like .tv/.to).
I can't say what a good theory would be. Maybe the original TLD's could be cleaned up and administered better. Maybe the ccTLD's could be integrated with trademark law so that, e.g., foobar.jp means that Japan recognizes the owner of foobar's trademark. At any rate, the theory should have a few characterstics: it should be complete [cover all reasonable use cases]; it should be predictable [if I know of an organization or entity with a website, I should be able to predict the exact 1 TLD they exist in]; and it shouldn't require that most organizations feel obligated purchase multiple names to protect their trademark.
Example, the following HTML: />
Entity=…<BR
3 Dots=...
Renders as:
Entity=...
3 Dots=...
I wonder if other browsers treat the ellipse entity as a single character and render it more compactly?
In practice, this can take awhile because the biologist is human too. Sometimes it can even take a generation of researchers to displace an outmoded theory. However, your point is well taken: science has a good track record of error-correcting itself. Unlike most religious and political philosophies, science actively seeks to tests its ideas and guard itself against human cognitive error.
For millennia, religion has promised to heal the sick, fertilize the land (or womb), and bring down destruction on the enemy. In the past 400 years a lot of those promises have come to fruition, but somehow it seems that the credit belongs to those who have conducted, funded, and leveraged scientific research. The ability of science to critique itself, to backtrack, to admit error and accommodate new information probably has something to do with its relative success in these areas.
Overall crime rate is very tenuously linked to the homicide rate of a specific age group. A better metric would be to list, for each age group, the number of homicides offenses per 10,000 people of that same age group. The DOJ gets us part way there, but their stats don't address the shifting age of the population (e.g., are youth being less violent or are there simply less youth per overall population?). You could probably cross-reference it with page 12 of census data and get a good idea.
I disagree. One, you are proposing that we limit people's ability to use the computer as a tool to help them think for themselves. Computation is an intrinsic right of all humanity, not something to be confined to a particular group who have undergone a particular indoctrination.
Two, the general thrust of computing technology has been to push down more power to end users. Generations of researchers have tried to figure out how to make computers easier to program and use by ever-wider audiences. This has greatly magnified all of the original benefits of computers and computer networks: cooperation, innovation, and productivity. So of course it's magnified the bad stuff as well. You can't remove tools from the malicious without also removing them from others who have used them to create significant cultural and economic wealth.
The goose has grown. The golden eggs are bigger and so are the turds. If you're upset about the turds, the solution is to get a bigger shovel, not starve the goose. In the end, design, architecture, tools, techniques, and education will go much further than "lock up the compilers".
That's the power of trust, my friend. Google has a good track record of conducting its business in a way that protects or promotes Slashdot's political zeitgeist. I don't think it's inconsistent to take that into consideration when determining how much criticism and suspicion to level at a new corporate endeavor.
Is it possible to be too trusting? Absolutely. I take your point that we do compromise our objectivity when we consider the messenger. This story may be a bad example of it though... many people have pointed out the prank call and telemarketing vulnerabilities. Others are professing admiration for the business concept ("a new add revenue stream w/o making the ads more obnoxious"), but they aren't signalling a desire to actually use it.
The one I saw <1 year ago looked like GNOME, but I may be wrong... it was a really old version (c. 2000) from which the default graphics were bad.
Your analogy might work okay for grandma (who would presumably need to understand the purpose of this technique), but the slashdot target audience is generally a technically-oriented crowd. We're interested in a brief overview of how it works, and we remember a thing or two from those mandatory physics classes we took along the way to computer science, engineering, math, or whatever pure/applied science we got into. As such, we're more interested in the mechanism of the technique, in which case your post is misleading and the parent post is a little bit more informative.
I applaud the nod towards thoughtful communication though...
The problem I have with Bill's statement is that he implicitly argues that contract law should be modified to do some sort of blanket-invalidation of these license clauses. However, this would just exacerbate the real problem: because of Microsoft's monopolistic presence, consumer don't get to choose their preferred tradeoff b/t quality and functionality. Fix the marketplace and people will take this into account. (Some consumers already do.) If you blindly implement liability, however, you'll just cut small businesses and altrusitic programmers out of the game. Consumers will be stuck with whatever the big companies offer.
The people who advocate software liability never seem to suggest a viable way of implementing it. The average software product (commercial or open source) ships with THOUSANDS of (detected) bugs. You can cut down on this by reducing features and using very strict change control, but you'll end up paying a whole lot more for a whole lot less. This makes sense for life-critical situations (space shuttle, etc.), but it's a poor decision for most purposes. Many software methodologies (had this journalist bothered to investigate) offer a range of such tradeoffs, so it might make sense for companies to advertise their methodology and be judged liable only if they failed to follow that methodology.
I think journalist like Bill would find it instructive to learn a programming language and work a small 100-line college assignment. If he can do that with less than 5 bugs, let's give him a 10,000-line assignment. Then make him interoperate with a few buggy vendor components. Then give him a deadline, ill-defined requirements, incompetent teammates, and some poorly thought-out (but strict) change management procedures to follow. Sorry Bill, call me back when IE or FireFox kills people on a daily basis like the automobiles you praise as the model of liability legislation.
I'm systems administrator in my household and I spent over five hours last week upgrading the firewalls, anti-virus and anti-spyware programs on our three laptops and two desktop computers.
This statement is just asinine. He's blaming the manufacturer for fixing and enhancing their own software. This is like Toyota voluntarily showing up one Saturday and installing stronger seat belts, fixing a minor problem with the mirrors, and smoothing out glitches that have emerged in production.
Perhaps they just got more practical and realized that humanity isn't going to live in a shoestring of energy. The risks of nuclear power that GreenPeace has identified are valid, but the nuclear industry has demonstrated that these risks can be managed [okay, the russians not so much, but definitely France, U.S.A, Canada, etc.]. I fail to see how it is "hypocritical" to modify your stance in response to earned experience.
I wish more political groups would find opportunities to check their stance against the real world and seek out cooperative approaches or compromises in lieu of the repeated head-bashing you get with direct political conflict.
(Disclosure: I work in the nuclear industry. My views are not necessarily those of my employeer.)
I don't follow... social prerogatives are compiled in at the psychological level and exist in pretty much all cultures and humans, despite whether they believe in 0, 1, or multiple gods. Honesty, loyalty, sexual restraint, self sacrifice, and other such values pretty much exist everywhere. Some theists see this as an argument for God from universal morality (the "knowledge of good and evil" humankind gained when some certain somebodies ate some certain forbidden fruit). Personally, I see this a result of socialization and evolutionary psychology... there are plausible reasons from game theory why unilaterally "doing wrong" is a bad strategy.
I'll grant that different cultures seem to have different amounts of free will and self-determination, and that religious belief can make a large difference. It could be argued, for instance, that America owes a great deal of its wealth to the Protestant work ethic. Right now though, it seems that the Christian church has relinquished any driving force it might have had as champion of the individual... after 9/11, it's all about conformity and control (and acting victimized). We need some modern Martin Luther's to break up the spiritual hegemony.
(I have no clue what that last paragraph is saying, but it sounded good. :-)
Where the hell did you get the idea that we can arrest people for being impolite?
Boobytrapping and hurting a child is NOT morally equivalent to redirecting a hotlink. The first one is physically harming a person. The second may fiscally hurt some shareholders, but only as a secondary effect of providing information to others which they then choose to act on or not.
"Species" is an abstraction. Abstractions leak. Consider the sexual crossing of genes, the non-uniform application of environmental pressures across a population, the importation of new DNA via cross-breeding/microevolution, the occasional mutation... with the various forces of differentiation at work, it's hard to imagine how a species could keep itself together unchanged for the long haul. The miracle of life is not that species split apart but that their individuals members are--for a time--able to spawn new members despite everybody having different DNA.
If you have difficulty relating to this, look at human languages. They work in mostly the same way... if, for instance, you were to geographically isolate two groups of English speakers for several centuries, you would likely get two child languages that were mutually unintelligible.
You may find this post to be more applicable to your original question. Also, I am not a geneticist, but I believe that you are overestimating the role of mutations in driving change.
I think both the poster and you would agree that the 6.5M pounds, if not used for one thing, gets *reallocated* for another. We get bigger houses if we let some little kids drown. Nobody consciously makes that decision, but these two desires get balanced out in the market.
Of course, in this case, your ad hoc analysis makes a pretty good argument that society will recoup its investment in this system. Still (and I think this was another point the poster was trying to glue in), there might be more cost effective way of achieving the same ends [e.g., such as spending the money on mandatory swim lessons for at-risk populations or even doing something tangential such as reinforcing a weak levy that guards a major metropolis].
Of course, judging from your analysis, you probably perceive all of this already.... I just feel like typing to put off going to bed. :-)