GP: "It was obvious they meant that in general most Americans would claim the US is a Christian nation. I see very little evidence to go against that assertion."
You: "America was founded by Deists ([...]). Anybody who thinks that's the same thing as your modern-day fundamentalist Bible thumper is sufficiently divorced from history to render their opinion moot."
Isn't the faith of the founders of our nation kind of irrelevant to the point at hand regarding our nation today.
Refute this: The United States of America could be considered a Christian nation because 43 or our presidents have been self-described Christians.
(This argument could be used for lots of other fun thought experiments: The US is a white nation, the US is a patriarchal nation, the US is a heterosexual nation, etc. Any of those statements, regardless of their lack of political expediency, could be considered true. I couch my words, because generalizations often tread close to the edge of fallacy.)
Of course, ad hominem is always more fun: "Anybody who thinks [differently from me] is sufficiently divorced from history to render their opinion moot." Why challenge (or refute, or correct) a statement when you can just disregard it! Doesn't this kind of thinking only reinforce the schism of debate found all over our great nation?
Sadly, a Saipan wage of around 22 cents an hour may not even pay for the gasoline required to drive to that job in the U.S. given the cost of our cars and insurance and gasoline. Even funnier -- 22 cents is even less than bus fare in most american cities... so you might spend half your day just earning enough to ride the bus to and from work each day! 22 cents an hour would never approach the cost of a weeks worth of health insurance. The supplemental cost for me to be on my wife's healthcare is almost $90 a week (after my job was off-shored I was unemployed for over a year, and have just now started part time work, hence no health coverage of my own). Two [long] days worth of our current minimum wage labor would just cover the supplemental rate; At the rate of an Indian call center operator of $2 dollars an hour it would take you more than a week to earn a week's insurance. That's a real winning system you've got planned there (and that's not even unskilled labor).
Good thought experiment though, not having a minimum wage would totally fuel the labor movement in America. Our politics would be vastly different. Lets all imagine this for a while.
I'd love to hear your quips belittling these serious issues. I can't wait to hear why unskilled laborers shouldn't be able to afford health care! The whole point of a living wage is to provide food, shelter and clothing; that would be awfully hard to accomplish on less than $5 a day in America -- well not without some huge public or private welfare apparatus.
Atheism leaves a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation; all of which may be guides to an outward moral virtue, even if religion vanished; but religious superstition dismounts all these and erects an absolute monarchy in the minds of men.
"You should let the best people get the job. Whether or not the people elected are the right ones or not is up for debate, but it is far better to select people than a random person. You don't grab anyone to fix any problem you have. You go to a plumber, electrician, doctor, dentist, etc. for specific problems."
Let the best people get the job. Interesting. Who decides who's best and who forces them to rule? Maybe what you're saying is that we should have "Politician schools" and the peons/masses should only get to choose from graduates of this school -- or we just draft all of the top 10% from this school directly into government.
It's hard to say if that's better than letting anyone with an issue run for office and let the public decide if they are qualified enough. What I mean is, our system doesn't tap the best qualified people now, so how do you change it to get the "best people"?
The problem with your find/replace argument is that "government by the people for the people" is quite different from "health care by specialists for customers".
I'll grant you, it's still pretty amusing, I guess. However, government by specialists for customers is called something else. You'd need a word like Meritocracy (for the specialization) or Plutocracy (for the clout to command the public) that also accounts for the "voting with your wallet" that the word customers implies.
It might be an interesting experiment to just pay for credentialed representation monthly, and when your representation stopped working for you -- you could just go off and get a second opinion, or sign up with someone else. The reason it might be a worthwhile experiment is that politicians would have to use their greed-reflex to please the public and not just wealthy special interests. Soft-money bans and financial transparency would be a requisite. Representatives weight in the senate would be tied directly to the per-person number of their subscriber base.
Funny you should mention that... next year when I turn 30 I'm going to have a combined Logan's Run birthday party (a close friend and I are one day apart). Woot.
And then there's iPhoto. With the help of the excellent iPhoto Keyword Assistant I have been diligently adding metadata to all of my digital photos. While KA fixes one of iPhoto's big shortcomings (an awful interface to the keywords, especially if you have a lot); using the keywords was still clunky. You have to start iPhoto, open up a special sub-window and then click on the keywords you want. This interface is barely acceptable when you only have a dozen keywords; when you have five dozen it is quickly painful.
iPhoto 5 has a much less 'sucky' keyword interface. After a tiny bit of getting used to it's really quite handy. It's a little less useful when you have you scroll the double column keyword pane, but still tons better than iPhoto 4 and older. I haven't used keyword assistant, so I can't compare it. You can also build boolean filters with just the keyword pane, so that's a nice addition. Finally, the search capabilities in iPhoto 5 are also way beyond 4.x. So that's just my two cents. iLife '05 is worth it just for the updates to iPhoto. If you use any of the other apps, then it's just gravy.
Oh wait - here you are saying what I was saying in my other reply to you. Haha. Arguing on Slashdot is such a waste of time.:-)
Sorry for the trouble. Well anyway, since we agree that atheism is not a religion, consider my previous reply to be merely about "baldness as the null set of hairstyles" compared to "atheism as the null set of religion". I think you you might agree with me there as well (with that clarification), that 'color' is not the null set of hairstyles, and thus not apt to describe atheism's relationship to other religious belief.
BlueFashoo said: Bald can be a hairstyle. I believe the word you're looking for is "color."
I hate to get prescriptive on you, but bald cannot be a hairstyle:
hairstyle noun a particular way in which a person's hair is cut or arranged.
By definition there must be hair there -- hair to style. That's like saying that not having a beard is a beard-style or being dead is a lifestyle.
If you are trying to make the point that atheism:religion::color:hairstyle, you probably could have said it in a better way.
Can you agree atheism:theism::bald:hair (the most basic meanings, obviously antonyms)? If you take religion (at Oxford's word) to be
the belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, esp. a personal God or gods
then it would be fair to substitute theism for religion in the above analogy, at which point, your whole argument fails. And the parent poster is correct -- that is "Calling Atheism a religion is like calling bald a hairstyle."
To be fair: your supposition is that atheism is some kind of religion, but look at it in terms of what atheism means, "the theory of belief that God does not exist." Isn't that directly antithetical to the definition of religion? I know where your argument is though, don't get me wrong. If one cannot prove the existence or non-existence then one must take it on faith that there is no God and (fallaciously) faith must equal religion. But really that's just it -- atheist's faith doesn't imply religion (or religiosity) at all.
(full disclosure, I am an agnostic secular humanist with Buddhist leanings)
4. Sense-enhanced searches.
Sense-enhanced searches rely on one or more technologies to detect that
which ordinarily could not be detected with un-aided human senses. These
searches differ from surveillance in public places because, with a few excep-
tions such as airport body searches, sense enhanced searches are not yet rou-
tine, perhaps because of the rarity or expense of the necessary equipment.
Instead, the typical sense-enhanced search is targeted at someone or some-
thing specific, or carried out at specific and usually temporary locations.
Unlike home or office monitoring, which usually requires equipment inside
the location of interest, many sense-enhanced searches allow someone on the
outside to see what is happening inside a building, a package, or even cloth-
ing. Because there is no "entry" as the term is commonly defined, nor a
physical intrusion, and because many of the technologies rely on emanations
that are not coerced by the observer, these technologies may be permissible
under both the Fourth Amendment and private law trespass law. Sense-
enhanced search technology is changing rapidly, raising doubts as to what
constitutes a reasonable expectation of privacy in a world where we are all
increasingly naked and living in transparent homes. (page 1496; 36 in the pdf)
You can tell all these nay-sayers haven't worked in tech support. Every solution to a majority of common problems is easier to guide a caller through on a Mac compared to a Wintel (even on old systems, OS 7.x, Win 3.11, etc).
Does Windows allow you to make network locations yet? That would probably make your job easier, wouldn't it? Being able to make a fresh location with fresh IP settings.
Here's a fun example: "Hi, my start button is on the top right, how do I fix it?" It's so obvious for all us geeks how to fix that. I had any number of callers who'd had their taskbars in places they didn't like them for months because they couldn't figure out how to move it back (or they'd accidentally resized it to be one pixel high). These are just boneheaded things in Windows; how hard would it be to put taskbar placement in the control panel (or a context menu for the grannies who've figured out when and where to use the right button)?
Ah tech support -- I don't miss you.:-) My job was off-shored.
Perhaps. They jail political dissidents. We jail pot smokers. Thus, the US has the highest imprisonment rate in the world. (Or very close- we don't know North Korea's) Cuba's not even in the top ten.
I love the way you put this.:) Either Cubans are better at following their laws, or their laws are easier to follow. Neither of those possibilities is glowing praise for America.
Like you and many others in this thread have mentioned: Black pots living in glass houses may not cast the first stone;) If we looked at human suffering on the whole, Cuba is a speck compared to, let's say: civilian casualties of war, Pope sanctioned AIDS deaths in Africa, and preventable world hunger. I wonder how we can sleep at night on our high horses. Oh I know - we aren't doing much about curbing the three I mentioned, so the Cuban embargo (and its resultant suffering, small by comparison) must not even be on Washington's radar.
I'm not saying it's acceptable. I think the embargo is a stupid vestige of the Cold War that is protected by a vocal (and selfish) minority.
For example, there's no reason to distinguish "running an embedded Cocoa component" and "making a system() call" because both of these grant you full local-user control.
Well there's no reason for 'average folks'. You and I can both tell the difference between a 'do shell script' and running a plugin and is this: It's trivial to open up the bundle and looking at the script for system calls (plain text and all) vs. trying to determine what a widget or web plugin does before running it (arguments of decompiling, etc aside).
Anyhow, we are both saying the same thing: The sandbox is weak. The granularity of the sec is currently wasted. Widget installation should require the same checks as screen savers and apps (as they can all run arbitrary code in userspace or worse).
Only Dashboard or another front end that adds the same capabilities to its instance of WebCore can give you those rights. And THAT restriction is the important one, from the point of view of real security. Does that fit with what you know?
Yes, I think we agree. I think the one addition to point out is that Dashboard will only honor requests in the code for certain methods of the widget object based on the security level specified in the plist. The document I referenced explains this as: if you try to widget var s = widget.createScript ("~/Desktop/malicious.wdgt/evil-binary", null, null); without declaring AllowSystem in the widget's plist it will just ignore that command. As it's been mentioned elsewhere this is really moot at the current time (and hence the biggest problem with Dashboard's security). There is no preference, or application for controlling whether widgets are granted this power. As it stands right now you just have to 'trust' the widget developer that when she puts AllowSystem in her widget that she isn't going to erase your filevault. Without some level of granularity on the widget 'sandbox' this security model is essentially useless [untapped].
Anyway, you are correct that WebCore alone will not honor any calls through the widget object. The widget object is the only facility that allows for capability beyond what is available with today's webpages (ecmascript, flash players, java applets) and the widget object is only available when a widget's script is evaluated by Dashboard.
Everything else I would say has already been said by others. Yes it's a problem if Safari copies widgets to ~/Library/Widgets.
In my opinion installation of Widgets should be handled in very much the same way as installation of screen savers. You double click it where-ever it is and are prompted 'install for you or for everybody', it asks you to authenticate depending on your answer and then copies to/Library or ~/Library depending. At which point you are free to execute the widget with all that entails.
Thanks for the reply. I agree with your sentiment -- yes it is difficult to parse large amounts of code with your head. Yes, it is even harder to parse out diffs of 60 megs of code, in your head. By that I mean, you're right, no one could just look at the output from a diff on a source tree and know what was changed and why and how that affects the tree. It is feasible though for you or I to look at a single diff against something we wrote and see what was changed. We may even be able to tell without any further input why it was changed ("Oh, I see why that's a better approach..."). However, neither of these are really addressed by the GPL, which is what I was talking about. Specifically, for this case, I don't think WebCore is "written in a messy way." We're two different people though, so ymmv. I think it's just simply a lot of work to cross/back-port any of that new code (if it's even desirable). If it's true that one of a programmer's virtues is laziness then it's obvious why some parties aren't very excited about the daunting task of merging Apple's work.
So anyway, my argument in a nutshell: The GPL doesn't say anything about code usability in any strict sense, just code availability.
"Do you sugges that the KDE folks blindly apply the patches with out knowing why the change was made in the first place?"
I made no such claims. In fact, I said (and I'll quote it to just to be absolutely, undeniably clear), 'Preferred Form doesn't mean "braces where I want them with comments I can use" it means "not printed on paper."'
I'm not on anyone's jock, as you put it. I'm saying that the GPL is very clear on what one's obligations are. There is no clause in the GPL that says "when you release your changes to the public [under the same terms you were granted permission to redistribute this code] you have to include revision control information and commentary meeting or exceeding some unspecified standard."
Of course I also took exception to McDutchie's absurd claim that "[...] the free-software concept is meaningless if the provided source code is not realistically usable without having access to essential information about what it does." I mean isn't that obviously wrong on its face? How could I or anyone else reuse code if it was just some kind of black box that was unknowable without reams of documentation ("essential information about what it does"). Is it just me? Do you honestly agree with that? Isn't that exactly what makes open source different from relying on proprietary code with documented APIs (i.e., I can only write against Win32 with documentation; I can't just look)?
In any case, it's ethically wrong because the free-software concept is meaningless if the provided source code is not realistically usable without having access to essential information about what it does.
This is completely wrong. Source code, by its very nature, is self documenting (that is, source code provides "essential information about what it does" by it's mere existence; maybe you don't write code?). Preferred Form doesn't mean "braces where I want them with comments I can use" it means "not printed on paper".
It's weird the rest of your comment is so elitist when you display such glaring ignorance on the subject.
He could have started composing that apology a month ago, in light of this:
PJ also claimed SCO has yet to pierce her veil. "I have heard," she wrote, "SCO has been telling journalists a lot of peculiar stories about who they think I might be. One guess was that I was Eric Raymond, with his lawyer wife whispering in his ear. Another guess was that I am a composite of IBM lawyers. Another was...I forget. It's too silly. They didn't get it right yet, that I've heard."
Sounds like a serial killer taunting the cops to catch him.
About Maureen O'Gara Maureen O'Gara is editor-in-chief of Maureen O'Gara's LinuxGram(TM) - published weekly by G2 Computer Intelligence Inc. and distributed by Linux Business News (www.LinuxBusinessNews.com).
Emphasis my own. It looks like the tip of the slippery slope is calling your opponents murderers. Pardon my mixed metaphor/cliché.;-) I guess Sys-con isn't going to remove all of MOG's tripe from their site.
If you were using the tablet for art -- drawing, texture painting -- you wouldn't want the display to re-orient itself as you turned the device (well at least not automatically). I (and everyone else that draws/sketches) moves the page while working. Anyhow, if it had the same sensor the powerbooks have for hard-drive protection there's no reason that software like this couldn't be implemented. I just chimed in because I can think of no reason why your suggestion should be the default behavior.
AC: Slashdot? Ethically challenged?* Say it isn't so. *Wonder if he's an athiest?
With the sibling's quibbling about spelling aside, there is no correlation between being atheist and ethically challenged. A statement like that is just as bigoted and egregious as "Ethically challenged? *Wonder if he's a Jew [...African...Female...etc]?"
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps learning how to spell will liven up your debating skills.
Thank you.
GP: "It was obvious they meant that in general most Americans would claim the US is a Christian nation. I see very little evidence to go against that assertion."
You: "America was founded by Deists ([...]). Anybody who thinks that's the same thing as your modern-day fundamentalist Bible thumper is sufficiently divorced from history to render their opinion moot."
Isn't the faith of the founders of our nation kind of irrelevant to the point at hand regarding our nation today.
Refute this: The United States of America could be considered a Christian nation because 43 or our presidents have been self-described Christians.
(This argument could be used for lots of other fun thought experiments: The US is a white nation, the US is a patriarchal nation, the US is a heterosexual nation, etc. Any of those statements, regardless of their lack of political expediency, could be considered true. I couch my words, because generalizations often tread close to the edge of fallacy.)
Of course, ad hominem is always more fun: "Anybody who thinks [differently from me] is sufficiently divorced from history to render their opinion moot." Why challenge (or refute, or correct) a statement when you can just disregard it! Doesn't this kind of thinking only reinforce the schism of debate found all over our great nation?
Anyhow, nothing personal. Cheers.
Sadly, a Saipan wage of around 22 cents an hour may not even pay for the gasoline required to drive to that job in the U.S. given the cost of our cars and insurance and gasoline. Even funnier -- 22 cents is even less than bus fare in most american cities... so you might spend half your day just earning enough to ride the bus to and from work each day! 22 cents an hour would never approach the cost of a weeks worth of health insurance. The supplemental cost for me to be on my wife's healthcare is almost $90 a week (after my job was off-shored I was unemployed for over a year, and have just now started part time work, hence no health coverage of my own). Two [long] days worth of our current minimum wage labor would just cover the supplemental rate; At the rate of an Indian call center operator of $2 dollars an hour it would take you more than a week to earn a week's insurance. That's a real winning system you've got planned there (and that's not even unskilled labor).
Good thought experiment though, not having a minimum wage would totally fuel the labor movement in America. Our politics would be vastly different. Lets all imagine this for a while.
I'd love to hear your quips belittling these serious issues. I can't wait to hear why unskilled laborers shouldn't be able to afford health care! The whole point of a living wage is to provide food, shelter and clothing; that would be awfully hard to accomplish on less than $5 a day in America -- well not without some huge public or private welfare apparatus.
I want to offer my many thanks for using the words begs the question correctly for all the readers to see.
You are a shining beacon among the rabble.
I hope everyone that follows will use your post as the definitive example of a thoughtful followup.
(I figured since you were already modded all the way up, I may as well just thank you personally.)
Here's my favorite from that page...
Francis Bacon:
Atheism leaves a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation; all of which may be guides to an outward moral virtue, even if religion vanished; but religious superstition dismounts all these and erects an absolute monarchy in the minds of men.
Haha, I wasn't even aware it was a quotation. :-D Thanks for the pointer though. But yeah, I acknowledge I was just on a semantic argument.
Thanks for the link, too.
"You should let the best people get the job. Whether or not the people elected are the right ones or not is up for debate, but it is far better to select people than a random person. You don't grab anyone to fix any problem you have. You go to a plumber, electrician, doctor, dentist, etc. for specific problems."
Let the best people get the job. Interesting. Who decides who's best and who forces them to rule? Maybe what you're saying is that we should have "Politician schools" and the peons/masses should only get to choose from graduates of this school -- or we just draft all of the top 10% from this school directly into government.
It's hard to say if that's better than letting anyone with an issue run for office and let the public decide if they are qualified enough. What I mean is, our system doesn't tap the best qualified people now, so how do you change it to get the "best people"?
The problem with your find/replace argument is that "government by the people for the people" is quite different from "health care by specialists for customers".
I'll grant you, it's still pretty amusing, I guess. However, government by specialists for customers is called something else. You'd need a word like Meritocracy (for the specialization) or Plutocracy (for the clout to command the public) that also accounts for the "voting with your wallet" that the word customers implies.
It might be an interesting experiment to just pay for credentialed representation monthly, and when your representation stopped working for you -- you could just go off and get a second opinion, or sign up with someone else. The reason it might be a worthwhile experiment is that politicians would have to use their greed-reflex to please the public and not just wealthy special interests. Soft-money bans and financial transparency would be a requisite. Representatives weight in the senate would be tied directly to the per-person number of their subscriber base.
Funny you should mention that... next year when I turn 30 I'm going to have a combined Logan's Run birthday party (a close friend and I are one day apart). Woot.
And then there's iPhoto. With the help of the excellent iPhoto Keyword Assistant I have been diligently adding metadata to all of my digital photos. While KA fixes one of iPhoto's big shortcomings (an awful interface to the keywords, especially if you have a lot); using the keywords was still clunky. You have to start iPhoto, open up a special sub-window and then click on the keywords you want. This interface is barely acceptable when you only have a dozen keywords; when you have five dozen it is quickly painful.
iPhoto 5 has a much less 'sucky' keyword interface. After a tiny bit of getting used to it's really quite handy. It's a little less useful when you have you scroll the double column keyword pane, but still tons better than iPhoto 4 and older. I haven't used keyword assistant, so I can't compare it. You can also build boolean filters with just the keyword pane, so that's a nice addition. Finally, the search capabilities in iPhoto 5 are also way beyond 4.x. So that's just my two cents. iLife '05 is worth it just for the updates to iPhoto. If you use any of the other apps, then it's just gravy.
Oh wait - here you are saying what I was saying in my other reply to you. Haha. Arguing on Slashdot is such a waste of time. :-)
Sorry for the trouble. Well anyway, since we agree that atheism is not a religion, consider my previous reply to be merely about "baldness as the null set of hairstyles" compared to "atheism as the null set of religion". I think you you might agree with me there as well (with that clarification), that 'color' is not the null set of hairstyles, and thus not apt to describe atheism's relationship to other religious belief.
Again, sorry to waste your (our) time.
I hate to get prescriptive on you, but bald cannot be a hairstyle:By definition there must be hair there -- hair to style. That's like saying that not having a beard is a beard-style or being dead is a lifestyle.
If you are trying to make the point that atheism:religion::color:hairstyle, you probably could have said it in a better way.
Can you agree atheism:theism::bald:hair (the most basic meanings, obviously antonyms)? If you take religion (at Oxford's word) to be then it would be fair to substitute theism for religion in the above analogy, at which point, your whole argument fails. And the parent poster is correct -- that is "Calling Atheism a religion is like calling bald a hairstyle."
To be fair: your supposition is that atheism is some kind of religion, but look at it in terms of what atheism means, "the theory of belief that God does not exist." Isn't that directly antithetical to the definition of religion? I know where your argument is though, don't get me wrong. If one cannot prove the existence or non-existence then one must take it on faith that there is no God and (fallaciously) faith must equal religion. But really that's just it -- atheist's faith doesn't imply religion (or religiosity) at all.
(full disclosure, I am an agnostic secular humanist with Buddhist leanings)
The PDF link works fine for me.
Here's the money quote, emphasis my own:
Sigh. I guess that speaks for itself, huh?
You can tell all these nay-sayers haven't worked in tech support. Every solution to a majority of common problems is easier to guide a caller through on a Mac compared to a Wintel (even on old systems, OS 7.x, Win 3.11, etc).
:-) My job was off-shored.
Does Windows allow you to make network locations yet? That would probably make your job easier, wouldn't it? Being able to make a fresh location with fresh IP settings.
Here's a fun example: "Hi, my start button is on the top right, how do I fix it?" It's so obvious for all us geeks how to fix that. I had any number of callers who'd had their taskbars in places they didn't like them for months because they couldn't figure out how to move it back (or they'd accidentally resized it to be one pixel high). These are just boneheaded things in Windows; how hard would it be to put taskbar placement in the control panel (or a context menu for the grannies who've figured out when and where to use the right button)?
Ah tech support -- I don't miss you.
http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2005/01/24/ind ex.html
Here's a cool picture of the Opportunity rover as imaged from orbit.
Like many geeks, I love this space exploration stuff!
Perhaps. They jail political dissidents. We jail pot smokers. Thus, the US has the highest imprisonment rate in the world. (Or very close- we don't know North Korea's) Cuba's not even in the top ten.
:) Either Cubans are better at following their laws, or their laws are easier to follow. Neither of those possibilities is glowing praise for America.
;) If we looked at human suffering on the whole, Cuba is a speck compared to, let's say: civilian casualties of war, Pope sanctioned AIDS deaths in Africa, and preventable world hunger. I wonder how we can sleep at night on our high horses. Oh I know - we aren't doing much about curbing the three I mentioned, so the Cuban embargo (and its resultant suffering, small by comparison) must not even be on Washington's radar.
I love the way you put this.
Like you and many others in this thread have mentioned: Black pots living in glass houses may not cast the first stone
I'm not saying it's acceptable. I think the embargo is a stupid vestige of the Cold War that is protected by a vocal (and selfish) minority.
(Mixing clichés is fun! Try it)
So again, we're on the same page.
For example, there's no reason to distinguish "running an embedded Cocoa component" and "making a system() call" because both of these grant you full local-user control.
Well there's no reason for 'average folks'. You and I can both tell the difference between a 'do shell script' and running a plugin and is this: It's trivial to open up the bundle and looking at the script for system calls (plain text and all) vs. trying to determine what a widget or web plugin does before running it (arguments of decompiling, etc aside).
Anyhow, we are both saying the same thing: The sandbox is weak. The granularity of the sec is currently wasted. Widget installation should require the same checks as screen savers and apps (as they can all run arbitrary code in userspace or worse).
Only Dashboard or another front end that adds the same capabilities to its instance of WebCore can give you those rights. And THAT restriction is the important one, from the point of view of real security. Does that fit with what you know?
Yes, I think we agree. I think the one addition to point out is that Dashboard will only honor requests in the code for certain methods of the widget object based on the security level specified in the plist. The document I referenced explains this as: if you try to widget var s = widget.createScript ("~/Desktop/malicious.wdgt/evil-binary", null, null); without declaring AllowSystem in the widget's plist it will just ignore that command. As it's been mentioned elsewhere this is really moot at the current time (and hence the biggest problem with Dashboard's security). There is no preference, or application for controlling whether widgets are granted this power. As it stands right now you just have to 'trust' the widget developer that when she puts AllowSystem in her widget that she isn't going to erase your filevault. Without some level of granularity on the widget 'sandbox' this security model is essentially useless [untapped].
Anyway, you are correct that WebCore alone will not honor any calls through the widget object. The widget object is the only facility that allows for capability beyond what is available with today's webpages (ecmascript, flash players, java applets) and the widget object is only available when a widget's script is evaluated by Dashboard.
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/AppleAppl ications/Conceptual/Dashboard_Tutorial/Security/ch apter_10_section_1.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP4000 1340-CH210
/Library or ~/Library depending. At which point you are free to execute the widget with all that entails.
Everything else I would say has already been said by others. Yes it's a problem if Safari copies widgets to ~/Library/Widgets.
In my opinion installation of Widgets should be handled in very much the same way as installation of screen savers. You double click it where-ever it is and are prompted 'install for you or for everybody', it asks you to authenticate depending on your answer and then copies to
Thanks for the reply. I agree with your sentiment -- yes it is difficult to parse large amounts of code with your head. Yes, it is even harder to parse out diffs of 60 megs of code, in your head. By that I mean, you're right, no one could just look at the output from a diff on a source tree and know what was changed and why and how that affects the tree. It is feasible though for you or I to look at a single diff against something we wrote and see what was changed. We may even be able to tell without any further input why it was changed ("Oh, I see why that's a better approach..."). However, neither of these are really addressed by the GPL, which is what I was talking about. Specifically, for this case, I don't think WebCore is "written in a messy way." We're two different people though, so ymmv. I think it's just simply a lot of work to cross/back-port any of that new code (if it's even desirable). If it's true that one of a programmer's virtues is laziness then it's obvious why some parties aren't very excited about the daunting task of merging Apple's work.
5 26835 if you are curious. (Pardon the tone of that post.)
So anyway, my argument in a nutshell: The GPL doesn't say anything about code usability in any strict sense, just code availability.
I kind of elucidated on it a little further after a snippy remark from an AC. That response is here http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=149369&cid=12
but:
"Do you sugges that the KDE folks blindly apply the patches with out knowing why the change was made in the first place?"
I made no such claims. In fact, I said (and I'll quote it to just to be absolutely, undeniably clear), 'Preferred Form doesn't mean "braces where I want them with comments I can use" it means "not printed on paper."'
I'm not on anyone's jock, as you put it. I'm saying that the GPL is very clear on what one's obligations are. There is no clause in the GPL that says "when you release your changes to the public [under the same terms you were granted permission to redistribute this code] you have to include revision control information and commentary meeting or exceeding some unspecified standard."
Of course I also took exception to McDutchie's absurd claim that "[...] the free-software concept is meaningless if the provided source code is not realistically usable without having access to essential information about what it does." I mean isn't that obviously wrong on its face? How could I or anyone else reuse code if it was just some kind of black box that was unknowable without reams of documentation ("essential information about what it does"). Is it just me? Do you honestly agree with that? Isn't that exactly what makes open source different from relying on proprietary code with documented APIs (i.e., I can only write against Win32 with documentation; I can't just look)?
In any case, it's ethically wrong because the free-software concept is meaningless if the provided source code is not realistically usable without having access to essential information about what it does.
This is completely wrong. Source code, by its very nature, is self documenting (that is, source code provides "essential information about what it does" by it's mere existence; maybe you don't write code?). Preferred Form doesn't mean "braces where I want them with comments I can use" it means "not printed on paper".
It's weird the rest of your comment is so elitist when you display such glaring ignorance on the subject.
Nothing personal, though.
Emphasis my own. It looks like the tip of the slippery slope is calling your opponents murderers. Pardon my mixed metaphor/cliché.
Also, along with mrchaotica's comments:
If you were using the tablet for art -- drawing, texture painting -- you wouldn't want the display to re-orient itself as you turned the device (well at least not automatically). I (and everyone else that draws/sketches) moves the page while working. Anyhow, if it had the same sensor the powerbooks have for hard-drive protection there's no reason that software like this couldn't be implemented. I just chimed in because I can think of no reason why your suggestion should be the default behavior.
AC: Slashdot? Ethically challenged?* Say it isn't so.
...Female ...etc]?"
*Wonder if he's an athiest?
With the sibling's quibbling about spelling aside, there is no correlation between being atheist and ethically challenged. A statement like that is just as bigoted and egregious as "Ethically challenged? *Wonder if he's a Jew [...African
For the retards: Atheists have Ethics, Too.