Neither. The average human is selfish, and self-interested. "Good" people are often ones who have been trained to achieve satisfaction and gratification by being less selfish, and "Bad" ones are often people who do nothing but indulge in their selfishness -- but I don't think that there's a direct correlation. If you get your jollies by helping old ladies across the street, and you spend all of your time indulging this fetish, then I'd be reluctant to classify you as evil. Wierdo.
Excellent advice. I'd like to add that this one bit of advice is the most powerful thing you can do. Every time you talk to customer service, the very first thing you do is get the name of the person you're talking to. The whole name, first and last. Make sure you understand it. If they mumble, ask them to repeat it until you understand it. It doesn't hurt to ask them to confirm the spelling if you have any doubt about it. I usually write it down while I'm talking, if it is convenient.
Then, and only then, start discussing the reason that you called. It also helps to use their name while you're talking to them, to remind them that you really did keep track of the name.
I find that this makes more difference in how good the customer service is than any other tactic you can try. Yes, a rep can give you a bogus name, but I haven't had a single one give me attitude or hang up on me since I started doing this. I also try to not be too much of an asshole; I tend to say things like "I know that it isn't your fault that I'm having this problem, but it is really pissing me off, and I want it fixed."
As per the original post, I've found T-Mobile to give superb customer service, but I've been with them since forever, so they probably like me.
Reports about someone earning "X" per month are meaningless out of context.
How about "working 15 hours a day"? You can come to a pretty decent conclusion about that independent of any context.
No one has to work at a Foxconn plant making iPods.
No, that's true. And you don't have to pay taxes, or obey the law. And if I hold a gun to your head and demand your wallet, you don't have to give it to me. And folks being tortured don't have to give confessions.
Justifying something by raising the point that there is something that sucks even more than being abused is really weak, ethically and intellectually, especially when when the abuser (in the form of Apple's executives and investors) are getting fucking rich off the poor bastards working in their sweat-shops.
How, precisely and specifically, has Apple "staked its image" on "progressive politics"?
Oh, come on. The 1984 commercial was aimed at Microsoft, but Apple identified themselves in that with the counter-culture movement, pitted against a totalitarian, conservative regime. They've always targeted the intellectual, liberal elite market. True, being Apple, they don't -- as a company -- actually act like progressives, but they've always branded themselves as the progressive company.
rather than thinking about ways that corporations that legally do business in China may be further targeted.
I can't change China's politics. I have no influence on China's politics. And I disagree with the idea that attacking companies who's business practices are unethical is ineffective or ill-advised.
We are (in the US), above all, a capitalist society, and live in a country in which corporations have at least as much control over our government as we -- as voters -- do. It is our responsibility to hold companies and corporations to account for their business practices. Without this pressure, there is no motivation for companies to act ethically, and this is proved time and again by their actions and by the fact that Google is so notable for being an exception.
A friend of mine, a bit of a tinfoil hat person (but not a geek) maintains that this is already the case and that most US presidents of the past 100 years or so are all in some way related to each other. Is there any truth to this, or is it as far fetched as it sounds?
I have no idea, but I wouldn't be surprised. Let me know if you ever find out the answer.
If the disk subsystem crashes, how exactly do you get at the on disk program to start it with?
Oh, heck... that's easy. The code's already in memory, so all the kernel has to do is clear out the module's stack and heap space and restart it.
While it may not be possible to totally isolate every subsystem, with a microkernel subsystems should be more robust than in monolithic kernels.
The different between theory and reality is that, in theory, there is no difference.
Uh, OK. What's that got to do with this discussion? Every reliability-based OS on the market today is a micro-kernel. Because they're more reliable. That's not theory, that's practice.
Micro kernels are more robust. They aren't perfectly robust, but they're significantly, demonstrably more robust than monolithic kernels.
Likewise, you could say that OS X implements a microkernel poorly (or is it a poor microkernel?).
Yes, you could, although it is a bastard microkernel, rather than a microkernel impostor. Linux's microkernel adaptions provide nothing in the way of improved stability. OS-X is fundamentally stable, but has been altered in a way that reduces its stability. There's a difference.
is there another example of a microkernel based system that is much better? Wasn't NT4 microkernel based? Did that help it?
And, yes, NT4 was so much more stable than any other, monolithic kernel Windows, I'm surprised that you brought that up. Companies used, and still use, NT far beyond its "life cycle" because of how fucking stable it was. It was so much more stable, that Microsoft integrated huge chunks of NT into its later OSes... and they got more stable because of it.
What makes you think that a microkernel would necessarily fair much better in this case? In my experience, SCSI problems are as much hardware as software.
Ok, let's say that SCSI problems are hardware related, for the sake of the argument. Let's say that the hardware is just flaky; the code on the SCSI chip is buggy, or something.
In a monolithic kernel, a SCSI hardware problem will cause the SCSI module to crap out, which will screw up all sorts of other things in the kernel. One drive dies, and all of a sudden -- because the SCSI module is borked -- you can't get to any of your SCSI devices. Your 'ls' hangs the terminal, and can't even be killed with a SIGHUP. In the worst case -- often the common case, in Linux -- your entire computer is dead in the water. In Linux, you reboot.
Let's assume the micro-kernel SCSI module is equally unable to gracefully handle bad situations like hardware failures. In a micro-kernel OS, if the kernel notices that the module is borked it just restarts the module, because it hasn't been corrupted by whatever screwed up the SCSI module. Or, if it doesn't, for some reason, you can tell it to.
The question remains, what is the value in running a system with one of its basic subsystems (disk I/O in the above example) crashed?
There is no value in running a system with a crashed subsystem, which is why, with a micro-kernel, you simply restart the subsystem and continue. Because mono-kernels don't segregate subsystems, if a subsystem crashes, you never know what else has been affected, and you reboot.
If you do a little research, you'll notice that monolithic kernel advocates never argue that monolithic kernels are as stable as or more stable than micro kernels. The argument is always that monolithic kernels are faster, not more stable. And that's true. It is equally true that microkernels are more robust than monolithic kernels. What Microkernel advocates argue is that the speed difference isn't as b
2) Join the NRA and learn how to protect yourself and your family _AND_ buy at least 20-30,000 rounds of ammo.
Y'know, I admire the sentiment. However, I have strong doubts that any weapons you could muster would provide any sort of defense against the firepower the government can come up with. Personally, I think it's a form of mental masturbation for people to buy guns thinking that, somehow, they're going to be able to mount an effective insurrection against the government. It didn't work for the South, it didn't work for the folks at Waco, and it didn't work at Ruby Ridge.
I'm all for gun ownership. I think the statistic is that members of households with guns are three times more likely to be the victim of a homicide than non-gun households, so, by all means... stock up.
But then you'd have issues with performance and such.
Tanenbaum's argument is that the performance difference is barely noticeable on modern hardware. There's some truth to that, unless you are doing high performance computing or are a ricer, in which case micro vs. mono kernel is only one of many factors you have to consider. In any case, it boils down to a speed vs. performance, and -- although I'm not the best person to defend microkernels in an argument of this sort -- it would be very easy to argue that the performance difference has shrunk considerably while the stability gap is still largely the same or may even be growing.
Caveat: I do not use microkernels, and have only the vaguest knowledge of the theoretics of such systems.
Aren't you going to want to reboot it anyway or is the theory that you can restart a component without rebooting?
Yeah, I think that's the point.
The goal is to have a system such that you maximize the segregation of the parts. If the SCSI subsystem crashes -- for example -- you flush it and restart it. While it may not be possible to totally isolate every subsystem, with a microkernel subsystems should be more robust than in monolithic kernels.
For all of Linus' scorn of microkernels, Linux borrows heavily from the concept, if not from the theory. One could almost say that Linux implements a microkernel poorly through the kernel module interface. It fails to be a true microkernel in a number of ways, though, not least of which is the low degree to which it isolates modules.
In any case, your nervousness about a system where a "fundamental" subsystem craps out is understandable in someone who's main experience is with monolithic kernels, because the corruption of one subsystem often infects other systems. For example, IME when the Linux SCSI module starts barfing (which happens with distressing regularity), if you're lucky, you can unload and reload the SCSI modules, but eventually, you're going to have to reboot, because it never quite works well after a reload. In a microkernel, subsystems are just services that other subsystems may use, but aren't intimate with. A corruption in one subsystem shouldn't lead to corruptions in any other subsystem.
If you are still hung up on the number, say I'm off by a factor of ten. Is that unrealistic?
No, no. You're right; unless you have big bucks to contribute to a campaign, your only chance of making a difference is in letter-writing. However, I think you over-estimate the impact of a letter.
If a politician has enough money, it doesn't much matter how many angry constituents s/he has. They can always do a media blast which, in the US, usually works.
I'm not trying to dissuade people from writing letters to their congresscritters; I just don't think letters have the impact that they may once have had; I think money talks louder. It probably always has.
Just because the war fails doesn't mean that tons of people who've never hurt anyone won't have their lives destroyed by it.
I believe that the these wars are accomplishing exactly what the people who've instigated them wanted them to. As has been pointed out elswhere in responses to this story, these "wars" exist so that the powerful can prosecute and imprison people they don't like.
If you're a coke-snorting son of a family of senators, you do some community service, go AWOL, get arrested for drunk driving, and eventually get your governor-brother to rig election results so that you can become president, and stab your own CIA operatives in the back.
Cut the oppressed masses bullshit. I bet you aren't even trying. You want an insight? You are a defeatist baby.
Do you know what? There isn't a bill like this that has ever been passed that couldn't have been defeated by each member of congress getting maybe a hundred hand written letters. Not form letters or emails, fricken hand written notes a page and a half a page long. Thats it. Maybe less. People don't know, don't show it or don't care. That's why bills like this get passed.
I call Bullshit.
I can see it now:
Aid: "Senator, regarding that digital piracy bill you're supposed to be voting on? We have one-hundred-and-one hand-written letters from your constituents opposing it. Oh, and that $300,000 campaign contribution from the RIAA 409 front came through."
Senator: "By golly, send that check back! My people have spoken!"
My version is assume they are all out to kill you.
Curse you for beating me to this post!
Actually, a friend of mine -- an inveterate bike-rider -- used to say this same thing. "Assume that everybody can see you, and they're all out to get you."
Basically, I pretty much agree with you on all fronts.:-)
My choice of word emphasis was misleading. I wasn't implying that you though Ruby was fast; I was emphasizing that Ruby isn't fast. It looked, in my post, like I was contradicting you, when I wasn't. Sorry.:-)
It's a good language, but it certainly has its weaknesses, not the least of which are performance or the lack of a good UI toolkit.
I like the Qt bindings. They're pretty easy to use, and it provides a look-and-feel that integrates well with my desktop.
I'm not convinced that the lack of a good UI toolkit is a Ruby problem, per-se, as much as it is the lack of a good cross-platform toolkit. Creating a good cross-platform UI may be an unsolvable problem. Certainly, a lot of really smart, good programmers have been working on the problem for years, and there are a lot of really decent cross-platform libraries that fail to deliver what users really want: good integration with their desktops.
Application developers often make, what I believe, is a fundamental false assumption: they believe that users want the application to look the same on whatever platform they're running it on. I believe that people want an application to look and behave like every other application they're used to, and they want it to share data with other applications that they're using.
We don't need a UI that looks consistent no matter which platform you run it on; we need a really good, cross-platform, well-integrated data transfer mechanism, that adopts the style of whatever platform you're running it on. I'm not sure that this is achievable, but I hope it is, and any such solution would accomplish two main goals:
It would be high level and not attached to any specific toolkit. It would therefore have back-ends for/on each platform on which it ran.
It would allow developers to easily define different UIs for each platform. Windows paradigms do not translate well to OSX -- you pretty much have to re-design the UI.
It would use native key bindings for common actions. Cut/copy/paste must be bound to whatever is most common for the target platform.
It would adopt whatever application data transfer mechanism is used by the underlying system
It may be that the second point would be sufficient to avoid the troubles that plagued AWT, but maybe not. I don't know -- as I said, smarter people than I have worked on this problem, and have yet to succeed. However, I am fairly convinced that the problem isn't particular to Ruby. I've yet to see any language that has a satisfactory cross-platform GUI, so the next best thing is to really enforce MVC separation and write a different UI for each platform. For myself, I write apps for myself, so I use Ruby's Qt bindings. It is about as good as I can get.
I can't think of any reason people would choose C or Java over Ruby.
I can.
Mind you, I'm do a lot of Ruby coding, and I love the language. However:
It is not fast. The speed difference shows up in non-trivial applications, or when processing large amounts of data.
It has no support for compile-time type checking. It doesn't have to be strongly typed, but for non-trivial applications, type checking is a big help.
It is interpreted, and so has a loose binding to runtime dependencies. This is a huge problem if you're writing applications that you want to distribute, or expect to have running for long periods of time. I can write an app in C and statically compile it, and odds are good that it'll still run four, five years from now. Odds are equally good that something in Ruby is going to change within the two or three years that will break existing applications. Proof of this are the running problems with YAML in Ruby. Heck, I've caused similar regressions in the Ruby standard XML parser on occasion.
Again, I love Ruby. I'd rather code in Ruby than Java or C. I'm more productive in Ruby; it is a better language than C or Java. However, I'm really nervous about using it for any large (code-base) project.
It seems like there are a lot of things that PDA's should do but they don't. I have a Palm Tungsten E, and I keep thinking it should be more useful. For instance, the other day I needed some information I had on my USB flash drive, but I had nothing handy it could interface with; shouldn't this be the job of my PDA? Doesn't anyone who designs these things have this kind of inspiration?
Buy one of these, and you will have access to your USB flash drive from your Tungsten. $62 bucks for a gig... not bad.
Incidentally, I have an uninformative story about this product. A friend of mine had one in his Treo, which he dropped in the parking lot. The SD card popped out and shot off somewhere under a car; he didn't notice it until he got home. The next day, he spent a half-hour looking for it in the lot, and just as he was about to give up, he found it (quite a ways away -- apparently, the Treo can function as a small cannon). It had gotten wet from the rain during the night, but he dried it off, put it back in the Treo, and it worked. Ah, the wonders of solid-state technology!
Incidentally, the first place I encountered point defense systems was in the Sci-Fi "Bolo" series by Keith Laumer. The story I remember in particular was about a Bolo sitting on a (the?) moon, shooting down tactical nukes as they came over the horizon. Eventually, the radiation from the nukes -- even at distance -- started heating up the Bolo, and its reaction times slowed so that the nukes got closer, and closer... I don't remember the name of the story, or when it first appeared, but it must have been a couple of decades ago, because I think I first read it in the mid-80's. Mr. Laumer's first Bolo book was published in 1976.
Like it or not, bottom feeding scum is subjective.
When they are in court making you money, they are geniuses...
When they are in court taking your money, they are scum...
Sort of like how defense attorneys are thought of scum sometimes, yet if you were charged with something, you would want the bottomest feeding scumiest one you could find...
Ok, I think all of these comments expressing admiration and respect for lawyers who are capable of dragging out a litigation is missing the point.
If you're employing lawyers in a groundless attempt to extort money from people and the lawyers are helping you do it, it doesn't make them any less bottom-feeding scum... it only underscores that you're bottom-feeding scum, too... they're just accomplices.
On top of that, you don't have to be particularly brilliant to drag out a court case. You don't even have to be especially competent to win, but that's beside the point. I never have, and never will, buy the line that lawyers and CEOs are "just doing a job," and aren't ethically responsible for their actions, any more than I buy it for soldiers committing war atrocities. There must be more important considerations to what we do than whoring ourselves for cash.
That sounds pretty much like the same insults that were slung in my face umpteen years ago when I was trying to argue for using standardized formats for data in several projects.
Not only that, he's calling the kettle black, and I doubt he's a programmer himself. A real programmer has experience outside of OO, and is aware that there's a valid argument that there are other models than OO. One doesn't have to agree with the arguments, but no one calling themself a "programmer" should be ignorant of the fact that there are many smart people, who are indisputably "programmers", who disagree with the OO philosophy. Functional programming, while not as popular, is a serious domain with concrete advantages over OO -- the only debate is to whether FP is over better than OO for general purpose programming. There are a lot of people who think that it is, and that the data ownership that you describe in your original post is, in fact, a bad idea.
Good posts, by the way. I'm glad the mods exhibited the rare wisdom to mark your posts "insightful".
Oregon has a law stating that the left lane is to be used only for passing, but I'm not sure that it is enforced much.
You missed the geriatrics (in Bend, OR, mostly) who pull out from side-streets RIGHT in front of people. But, otherwise, I think you covered the worst offenders. It baffles me why cops are willing to pull people for speeding, but they entirely ignore this other class of hazardous driving.
Space is far too hostile and Homo Sapiens is far too frail and squishy for any large scale space travel.
Meh. You wouldn't last too long at the South Pole without technology, either, but we've got people living down there for a year at a time. You'd probably die no more slowly unprotected at 900 feet below sea level than you would in a vacuum, but people regularly tool around down there in submarines.
I suspect that we're more capable of fashioning a livable, reasonably safe habitate than we are of engineering humans for the environment. At least, historically, we've proven better at modifying our environment than ourselves. We just haven't applied ourselves as rigorously to the task as we have for other environments.
Screw 'em both. Symbian on Nokia seems impressive to me.
Oh, no. No, no, no.
I'm with T-Mobile, and I've been very happy and haven't wanted to switch just to get a Treo. Palm's retarded pricing scheme -- raising the price of unlocked Treo's just to keep Cingular happy -- kept me from buying a Treo, so I purchased a SymbianOS Ericsson i900.
Worst. Mistake. Ever.
Symbian is, by far, the worst PDA OS that I've ever encountered. Admittedly, I've never tried WinCE (or its derivatives), but I have a hard time that any MS OS could be any worse than SymbianOS.
It runs out of memory. I mean, by running applications. You open too many, and suddenly you can't make phone calls without closing apps. That was the singlemost frustrating, retarded thing about SymbianOS. The UI was mostly worthless, although I admit that's a matter of preference. There is almost no public domain or free/shareware software for it (everything costs money). And it crashed a lot. Add to this the fact that it can't be synched with Linux, and that puts it squarely in the "avoid like a case of venereal disease" box, for me.
I could go on about how bad it is. I could talk about the almost unusable handwriting recognition, the awful application chooser (which can't sort applications alphabetically), or that it has to be constantly re-paired with bluetooth devices if you look at it funny. Suffice it to say that the day Palm dropped the price of the Treo by $100, I bought one. The design isn't as elegant as, say, the Tungsten was, and that wasn't as perfect as the Palm V was... but it is orders of magnitude better than SymbianOS.
To be fair, there is one thing that SymbianOS UIQ does better than PalmOS... telephone numbers in every application are recognized, and can be dialed by tapping on them. And the i900's jog dial is pretty handy. But I strongly recommend that you stay away from SymbianOS, because it sucks big, green, putrid donkey dicks, and I'm sorry that they ever got any of my money... it is that bad.
Oh, a little afterward... I gave the i900 to my wife to replace her 8 year old cell phone -- which, admittedly, she was happy with -- thinking that the i900 couldn't be worse than a decrepit, obsolete phone. Wrong! She likes that it is easier to text message, but so far, she's considering going back to her old phone. Of course, I've never been able to get her interested in PDAs, but SymbianOS makes a bad phone OS, and a really shitty PDA OS.
Caveat: I'm voicing neither support nor criticism of the Supreme Court's decision -- I'm don't know enough about it to have an opinion, yet.
I agree wholeheartedly that government, and society, really should stay out of people's private lives when there is no direct victim. I apply this to drug use, pornography, sexual preference, religion... just about anything. However, I think I hear you contradicting yourself in your post. You say: "What disgusts me should have no effect on what you like -- true freedom means allowing (if not accepting) others to do what they want as long as they don't harm your body or your property." as well as The community and the state (and the people!) are given the power to define all of the following:. If the community defines pornography and stops you from obtaining it and consuming it in the privacy of your own home, then isn't that, in your view, both right (the community defines...) and wrong (true freedom means allowing...) at the same time?
Finally, I'll leave you with this thought: one function of the courts is to protect individuals from the communities in which they live:
Slashdot Mirror
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Then, and only then, start discussing the reason that you called. It also helps to use their name while you're talking to them, to remind them that you really did keep track of the name.
I find that this makes more difference in how good the customer service is than any other tactic you can try. Yes, a rep can give you a bogus name, but I haven't had a single one give me attitude or hang up on me since I started doing this. I also try to not be too much of an asshole; I tend to say things like "I know that it isn't your fault that I'm having this problem, but it is really pissing me off, and I want it fixed."
As per the original post, I've found T-Mobile to give superb customer service, but I've been with them since forever, so they probably like me.
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Justifying something by raising the point that there is something that sucks even more than being abused is really weak, ethically and intellectually, especially when when the abuser (in the form of Apple's executives and investors) are getting fucking rich off the poor bastards working in their sweat-shops.
Oh, come on. The 1984 commercial was aimed at Microsoft, but Apple identified themselves in that with the counter-culture movement, pitted against a totalitarian, conservative regime. They've always targeted the intellectual, liberal elite market. True, being Apple, they don't -- as a company -- actually act like progressives, but they've always branded themselves as the progressive company. I can't change China's politics. I have no influence on China's politics. And I disagree with the idea that attacking companies who's business practices are unethical is ineffective or ill-advised.We are (in the US), above all, a capitalist society, and live in a country in which corporations have at least as much control over our government as we -- as voters -- do. It is our responsibility to hold companies and corporations to account for their business practices. Without this pressure, there is no motivation for companies to act ethically, and this is proved time and again by their actions and by the fact that Google is so notable for being an exception.
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Oh, heck... that's easy. The code's already in memory, so all the kernel has to do is clear out the module's stack and heap space and restart it.
Uh, OK. What's that got to do with this discussion? Every reliability-based OS on the market today is a micro-kernel. Because they're more reliable. That's not theory, that's practice.
Micro kernels are more robust. They aren't perfectly robust, but they're significantly, demonstrably more robust than monolithic kernels.
Yes, you could, although it is a bastard microkernel, rather than a microkernel impostor. Linux's microkernel adaptions provide nothing in the way of improved stability. OS-X is fundamentally stable, but has been altered in a way that reduces its stability. There's a difference.
QNX.
And, yes, NT4 was so much more stable than any other, monolithic kernel Windows, I'm surprised that you brought that up. Companies used, and still use, NT far beyond its "life cycle" because of how fucking stable it was. It was so much more stable, that Microsoft integrated huge chunks of NT into its later OSes... and they got more stable because of it.
Ok, let's say that SCSI problems are hardware related, for the sake of the argument. Let's say that the hardware is just flaky; the code on the SCSI chip is buggy, or something.
In a monolithic kernel, a SCSI hardware problem will cause the SCSI module to crap out, which will screw up all sorts of other things in the kernel. One drive dies, and all of a sudden -- because the SCSI module is borked -- you can't get to any of your SCSI devices. Your 'ls' hangs the terminal, and can't even be killed with a SIGHUP. In the worst case -- often the common case, in Linux -- your entire computer is dead in the water. In Linux, you reboot.
Let's assume the micro-kernel SCSI module is equally unable to gracefully handle bad situations like hardware failures. In a micro-kernel OS, if the kernel notices that the module is borked it just restarts the module, because it hasn't been corrupted by whatever screwed up the SCSI module. Or, if it doesn't, for some reason, you can tell it to.
There is no value in running a system with a crashed subsystem, which is why, with a micro-kernel, you simply restart the subsystem and continue. Because mono-kernels don't segregate subsystems, if a subsystem crashes, you never know what else has been affected, and you reboot.
If you do a little research, you'll notice that monolithic kernel advocates never argue that monolithic kernels are as stable as or more stable than micro kernels. The argument is always that monolithic kernels are faster, not more stable. And that's true. It is equally true that microkernels are more robust than monolithic kernels. What Microkernel advocates argue is that the speed difference isn't as b
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I'm all for gun ownership. I think the statistic is that members of households with guns are three times more likely to be the victim of a homicide than non-gun households, so, by all means... stock up.
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Caveat: I do not use microkernels, and have only the vaguest knowledge of the theoretics of such systems.
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The goal is to have a system such that you maximize the segregation of the parts. If the SCSI subsystem crashes -- for example -- you flush it and restart it. While it may not be possible to totally isolate every subsystem, with a microkernel subsystems should be more robust than in monolithic kernels.
For all of Linus' scorn of microkernels, Linux borrows heavily from the concept, if not from the theory. One could almost say that Linux implements a microkernel poorly through the kernel module interface. It fails to be a true microkernel in a number of ways, though, not least of which is the low degree to which it isolates modules.
In any case, your nervousness about a system where a "fundamental" subsystem craps out is understandable in someone who's main experience is with monolithic kernels, because the corruption of one subsystem often infects other systems. For example, IME when the Linux SCSI module starts barfing (which happens with distressing regularity), if you're lucky, you can unload and reload the SCSI modules, but eventually, you're going to have to reboot, because it never quite works well after a reload. In a microkernel, subsystems are just services that other subsystems may use, but aren't intimate with. A corruption in one subsystem shouldn't lead to corruptions in any other subsystem.
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If a politician has enough money, it doesn't much matter how many angry constituents s/he has. They can always do a media blast which, in the US, usually works.
I'm not trying to dissuade people from writing letters to their congresscritters; I just don't think letters have the impact that they may once have had; I think money talks louder. It probably always has.
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I believe that the these wars are accomplishing exactly what the people who've instigated them wanted them to. As has been pointed out elswhere in responses to this story, these "wars" exist so that the powerful can prosecute and imprison people they don't like.
If you're a liberal pot smoker, you go to jail.
If you're a right-wing political pundit popping OxyContin, then boo-hoo, you have a drug addiction, and, well, you keep doing whatever you were doing before.
If you're a coke-snorting son of a family of senators, you do some community service, go AWOL, get arrested for drunk driving, and eventually get your governor-brother to rig election results so that you can become president, and stab your own CIA operatives in the back.
No, these wars and laws are a complete success.
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I can see it now:
Excuse me while I scoff.
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Actually, a friend of mine -- an inveterate bike-rider -- used to say this same thing. "Assume that everybody can see you, and they're all out to get you."
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I'm not convinced that the lack of a good UI toolkit is a Ruby problem, per-se, as much as it is the lack of a good cross-platform toolkit. Creating a good cross-platform UI may be an unsolvable problem. Certainly, a lot of really smart, good programmers have been working on the problem for years, and there are a lot of really decent cross-platform libraries that fail to deliver what users really want: good integration with their desktops.
Application developers often make, what I believe, is a fundamental false assumption: they believe that users want the application to look the same on whatever platform they're running it on. I believe that people want an application to look and behave like every other application they're used to, and they want it to share data with other applications that they're using.
We don't need a UI that looks consistent no matter which platform you run it on; we need a really good, cross-platform, well-integrated data transfer mechanism, that adopts the style of whatever platform you're running it on. I'm not sure that this is achievable, but I hope it is, and any such solution would accomplish two main goals:
It may be that the second point would be sufficient to avoid the troubles that plagued AWT, but maybe not. I don't know -- as I said, smarter people than I have worked on this problem, and have yet to succeed. However, I am fairly convinced that the problem isn't particular to Ruby. I've yet to see any language that has a satisfactory cross-platform GUI, so the next best thing is to really enforce MVC separation and write a different UI for each platform. For myself, I write apps for myself, so I use Ruby's Qt bindings. It is about as good as I can get.
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Mind you, I'm do a lot of Ruby coding, and I love the language. However:
Again, I love Ruby. I'd rather code in Ruby than Java or C. I'm more productive in Ruby; it is a better language than C or Java. However, I'm really nervous about using it for any large (code-base) project.
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Incidentally, I have an uninformative story about this product. A friend of mine had one in his Treo, which he dropped in the parking lot. The SD card popped out and shot off somewhere under a car; he didn't notice it until he got home. The next day, he spent a half-hour looking for it in the lot, and just as he was about to give up, he found it (quite a ways away -- apparently, the Treo can function as a small cannon). It had gotten wet from the rain during the night, but he dried it off, put it back in the Treo, and it worked. Ah, the wonders of solid-state technology!
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If you're employing lawyers in a groundless attempt to extort money from people and the lawyers are helping you do it, it doesn't make them any less bottom-feeding scum... it only underscores that you're bottom-feeding scum, too... they're just accomplices.
On top of that, you don't have to be particularly brilliant to drag out a court case. You don't even have to be especially competent to win, but that's beside the point. I never have, and never will, buy the line that lawyers and CEOs are "just doing a job," and aren't ethically responsible for their actions, any more than I buy it for soldiers committing war atrocities. There must be more important considerations to what we do than whoring ourselves for cash.
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Good posts, by the way. I'm glad the mods exhibited the rare wisdom to mark your posts "insightful".
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Oregon has a law stating that the left lane is to be used only for passing, but I'm not sure that it is enforced much.
You missed the geriatrics (in Bend, OR, mostly) who pull out from side-streets RIGHT in front of people. But, otherwise, I think you covered the worst offenders. It baffles me why cops are willing to pull people for speeding, but they entirely ignore this other class of hazardous driving.
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I suspect that we're more capable of fashioning a livable, reasonably safe habitate than we are of engineering humans for the environment. At least, historically, we've proven better at modifying our environment than ourselves. We just haven't applied ourselves as rigorously to the task as we have for other environments.
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I'm with T-Mobile, and I've been very happy and haven't wanted to switch just to get a Treo. Palm's retarded pricing scheme -- raising the price of unlocked Treo's just to keep Cingular happy -- kept me from buying a Treo, so I purchased a SymbianOS Ericsson i900.
Worst. Mistake. Ever.
Symbian is, by far, the worst PDA OS that I've ever encountered. Admittedly, I've never tried WinCE (or its derivatives), but I have a hard time that any MS OS could be any worse than SymbianOS.
It runs out of memory. I mean, by running applications. You open too many, and suddenly you can't make phone calls without closing apps. That was the singlemost frustrating, retarded thing about SymbianOS. The UI was mostly worthless, although I admit that's a matter of preference. There is almost no public domain or free/shareware software for it (everything costs money). And it crashed a lot. Add to this the fact that it can't be synched with Linux, and that puts it squarely in the "avoid like a case of venereal disease" box, for me.
I could go on about how bad it is. I could talk about the almost unusable handwriting recognition, the awful application chooser (which can't sort applications alphabetically), or that it has to be constantly re-paired with bluetooth devices if you look at it funny. Suffice it to say that the day Palm dropped the price of the Treo by $100, I bought one. The design isn't as elegant as, say, the Tungsten was, and that wasn't as perfect as the Palm V was... but it is orders of magnitude better than SymbianOS.
To be fair, there is one thing that SymbianOS UIQ does better than PalmOS... telephone numbers in every application are recognized, and can be dialed by tapping on them. And the i900's jog dial is pretty handy. But I strongly recommend that you stay away from SymbianOS, because it sucks big, green, putrid donkey dicks, and I'm sorry that they ever got any of my money... it is that bad.
Oh, a little afterward... I gave the i900 to my wife to replace her 8 year old cell phone -- which, admittedly, she was happy with -- thinking that the i900 couldn't be worse than a decrepit, obsolete phone. Wrong! She likes that it is easier to text message, but so far, she's considering going back to her old phone. Of course, I've never been able to get her interested in PDAs, but SymbianOS makes a bad phone OS, and a really shitty PDA OS.
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I agree wholeheartedly that government, and society, really should stay out of people's private lives when there is no direct victim. I apply this to drug use, pornography, sexual preference, religion... just about anything. However, I think I hear you contradicting yourself in your post. You say: "What disgusts me should have no effect on what you like -- true freedom means allowing (if not accepting) others to do what they want as long as they don't harm your body or your property." as well as The community and the state (and the people!) are given the power to define all of the following:. If the community defines pornography and stops you from obtaining it and consuming it in the privacy of your own home, then isn't that, in your view, both right (the community defines...) and wrong (true freedom means allowing...) at the same time?
Finally, I'll leave you with this thought: one function of the courts is to protect individuals from the communities in which they live:
"Mob Rule Cannot Be Allowed to Override the Decisions of Our Courts": President Dwight D. Eisenhower's 1957 Address on Little Rock, Arkansas
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