This can be true even if you never plan to switch compilers, OSes, or architectures in production - I've seen errors which will silently corrupt your memory on one platform but segfault (and thus give you a nice stack trace to work from) on another.
But really, how much of your code is so ephemeral that it'll be thrown away before the next compiler, OS, or architecture you want to run it on comes around? I've seen programmers scream that "This new compiler version breaks my program!", then waste time wading through their standards-incompliant code that could have been correct if it had been tested on multiple compilers from day one. I've seen "optimizations" that were written based on profiling on only one system and become hard-to-refactor "pessimizations" on newer systems. I've seen programs stuck on slow and expensive hardware because nobody wanted to worry about endianness issues until competing fast and cheap hardware made those worries necessary.
For someone writing popular open source code, portability is even more important for testing. The number of people who want to use your code will almost certainly be greater than the number of people who want to use your code and your operating system. It's nice to get bug reports and patches from the whole former set rather than just the latter.
The GPL is a license. If you don't agree to that license, you aren't committing any crime.
Now, if you redistribute copyrighted software without a license to do so, that would be committing a crime... but how many hardware developers redistribute the Linux kernel? Put the ".h" files corresponding to this new ABI in the public domain, and those will be the only code that driver authors need to redistribute derived works of. Give them a restricted license, and it just means that driver authors will have to rewrite them. (no, SCO apologists, you can't copyright an interface)
Binary Linux drivers don't have to be in user land to be legal - there's a reason why kernel developers have added a "tainted" flag to help them sort out bug reports, rather than just sueing Nvidia.
Finally: The slippery slope started long ago, with ABIs for applications that allow binary compatibility and closed source software. Other than bad bug reports, every one of your arguments applies to applications running on Linux as much as to drivers running on Linux, and that experience might be instructive. Would Netscape have gone open source immediately just to get their apps running on Linux? Or do we have an open source Mozilla/Firefox application today because of those developers' experience writing closed source apps for open source platforms a decade ago? Closed source software on my Linux drives at work and home right now includes Flash, Acrobat Reader, Doom 3, Neverwinter Nights, GMV, SimCity 3000, Enemy Territory, Matlab, Cubit, Intel's compilers, Tecplot, and of course Nvidia's video drivers. Other than Doom 3 (several years from now), how many of these programs would have a Linux version at all if they were required to be open source first?
In fact, I suspect we have *more* open source software today because of the decision to allow closed source software: giving people the ability to use more software gives us "control over our computers" in a practical sense, a sense that attracts more users. I don't know of any closed source software whose authors would rather release source code than stop supporting Linux, but I do know of open source developers who would be Windows developers if they were forced to stop using closed source software on Linux, and I know of Windows users who would be Linux users if they were able to use all their hardware on Linux.
basically the user doesn't have to know the difference between, for instance, Carbon apps and Cocoa apps.
Just to check, I started up a Gnome app while running KDE. No problem. The other way works fine too. The only things developers and users are forced to choose are what toolkits or what user interfaces they prefer.
It always seems to be pundits like you who complain in the users' names about choice - users either don't know there is a choice (because they're using whatever was default on their distribution) or don't care there is a choice (because the existance of one compatible choice usually doesn't make the other any worse). Do you know any real users who don't like having choices? Tell them I ordered them to use Gnome. There, no choice anymore, it's all better.
Different packaging systems are a much better example of problems caused by choice, because there you can have some incompatibility - I can't double-click-install every SuSE package or Mandrake package on my Fedora system, and I can't install *any* Debian package without digging into "Alien" howtos. That means more work or less compatibility for software developers, and that's a bad choice... but, of course, it's the same bad choice that developers are forced to make when they choose to write OS X applications or Windows applications. It's not even that bad, since Linux developers can statically link all libraries and make a self-installing install.sh script to be compatible with every distribution (or can distribute source code to be compatible with a dozen other Unices), but OS X or Windows developers who want to be compatible with OSes from multiple companies need to use crossplatform API wrappers from day one.
"unless... a keylogger is installed compromising it won't do much"
"Unless they take out money, breaking into the cash safe won't do much". Sure, it's technically true, but who cares? Is there a subclass of criminals who, when making up their rootkit boot media, refuse to install keyloggers for ethical reasons?
No, it's like fining somebody for leaving their door unlocked and _not_ getting burglarized.
No, it's like fining somebody for not having a fence around their property and not getting burglarized.
A locked door isn't like a firewall, it's like a secure password-protected service. Firewalls easily let you limit access to "all or nothing" - but hell, if that's as "fine-grained" as you need your security to be, you can get the same effect on a good OS just by turning off the services you want inaccessible. You can use a firewall to limit access by IP, but you could do that without a separate firewall by having clients do IP (or better, asymmetric encryption key) checks themselves. What you can't do is use a firewall to forward outside connections to an inside service and expect that service to become any more secure.
Does this have something to do with the push behind SP2? I can't imagine Microsoft wanting to widely advertise, "You need to upgrade for security reasons because pre-SP2 versions of our programs are swiss cheese!" but they did need to get the "You need to upgrade for security reasons" message out there - perhaps what got across to consumers and lawmakers was "You need to upgrade for security reasons because SP2 has the all-important magic of Firewall!"
I do like the idea of "truth in advertising" laws to reveal the origins of political speech financing. That's got its own problems, of course. By prohibiting significant anonymous support, you make it easy for a winning candidate to retaliate against his opponents supporters after an election, and you thus discourage any challenges to candidates who are particularly vindictive or who are in well-entrenched seats. But at least it's a reform measure that comes from the right philosophy: the cure for questionable political discourse is more discourse, not less.
if you limit the amount each person/group is able to contribute, then it levels the playing field for speech.
No, it doesn't. People and groups with enough money don't need to "contribute" it to anyone - they can buy their own advertisements and commericals. It's only us poor schlubs who have to give money to other groups before we can pool enough in one place to buy an ad. Limiting political contributions just tilts the playing field even more.
It's the equivalent to saying that the guy who can buy a 100 foot tall speaker is just exercising his free speech by drowning everybody else out.
So we'll ban 100 foot tall speakers... or will we? People are going to hear about candidates and issues somehow, and until the collective IQ rises a few dozen points my bet is that "somehow" will still be "biased mass media" - your 100 foot tall speakers. You can't ban biased political media; you can just try to restrict who gets to produce it - and all the proposed restrictions I've seen are likely to backfire. They hit the poor first (by limiting political contributions and thus restricting political speech to non-collective entities) and the non-connected rich next (by restricting political speech to "the news" rather than the commercials). Here are the untouched 100 foot tall speakers that will still be able to drown everybody else out; the best we can hope for after "campaign finance reform" is that the individual oligarch's biases will cancel each other out.
I could make it take 500 Watts and just dissipate 300 Watts as heat.
No, it couldn't. If it takes 200 watts, it must dissipate 200 watts as heat. There's just not that much juice going out over the audio/video cables.;-)
Games are the only thing I reboot for, but for most people it's not just games. Go to any computer store, you'll see photo manipulation wizards, home and landscaping design programs, genealogy databases, trip planners, video editors... it'll be decades before there are good open source equivalents to all the most popular commercial software, and until that happens the only thing that will make Linux usable for many people will be a Win32 subsystem that runs all that existing software out of the box.
Yeah, yeah, I know, "Emulation killed OS/2 somehow!" "All of the hordes of commercial software companies making Linux programs will stop, and I won't want to run Win32 or Winelib builds of their programs for some theoretical reason!"
People don't buy computers to run operating systems. They buy them to run programs, and if enough of the programs they want to run require Windows, then they'll choose Windows. I've been running Linux on the desktop since 1997, I'm posting from Fedora Core 4 right now, and I had a moment of false excitement when I got Starcraft working in a properly tweaked Wine install in 1998, but here we are in 2005 and I *still* have to reboot to play a years-old game like Baldur's Gate 2 without bugs. I'm not trying to complain about the Wine developers - the fact that they've been successful at all (Deus Ex now runs better than on Windows XP, hooray!) is amazing. But it needs to go further (and it needs to do so before everybody moves to Yet Another.NOT Invented Here API and moves the goal posts again) to make Linux a mainstream OS.
A class where all their old creationist canards are systematically brought up and dismantled, where all the "missing transitional forms!!1!11" from flying dinosaurs to walking whales to homo habilis are trotted out, where every child walks out knowing how to find the real age of rocks and stars, where their children are led to question, "If Adam and Eve lived 6,000 years ago, how come we find artifacts and bones from civilizations thousands of years older and expanding hunter-gatherer tribes tens of thousands of years older?"
If so, sign me up. But first point me to the "Intelligent Design" advocate who's pushing for that class, because I've never met them.
There are lots of "wrong" scientific theories out there no matter how you define "wrong". Peak oil, pyramids, bigfoot, what makes the stock market move, the composition of the earth's core. Take your pick but I don't see the same level of emotions.
Which of these theories are children in danger of hearing in their "science" class rooms? If ID backers would get back in the closet with the alien pyramid builder theorists, nobody else would care.
This is just more trash talk from Dan Lyons, Forbes own resident pro-SCO, anti-"Linux crunchies" troll. He's apparantly realized that his only hope of keeping his job indefinitely is to convince his bosses that having one's arguments meticulously dissected by flaw-finding weblogs is a meaningless annoyance that happens to everybody, and to dissuade his bosses from ever paying close attention to the flaws found in Dan's own work.
Don't even click the link and give them an ad impression. Unless the man has just lost his mind, the whole reason for writing these shrill rants is to draw more "Slashdot effect" hits. It's quite possible that Forbes is thrilled to see all the attention in their web server logs, not yet realizing they're getting it by driving away the "Wall Street Journal" audience in favor of the more populous "National Enquirer" crowd.
Of the editors you've listed, let me use the one I've used before as an example:
LyX is not a TeX editor. LyX is a.lyx editor which renders its output by exporting to.tex and which has a limited (of three files I'm currently working on, it completely failed to load two, and failed to load the images of the third) ability to import.tex files. Why is this ability limited? Not because TeX "isn't powerful enough" - ASCII isn't powerful, and I'm sure LyX imports.txt files just fine. It's not limited because LyX writers are lazy or don't care, surely - they obviously think that feature is important enough to include, and if it worked with any.tex file they wouldn't have needed to invent their own.lyx file format in the first place.
I suspect TeX import is limited for the same reason that other programs' abilities to converse with the user are limited: because despite attempts like LyX and Clippy, dealing perfectly with input as widely variable as a complex.tex file or colloquial human speech would practically be artificial intelligence. I'm not saying the OpenDocument or MS Office file formats are simple, of course, but at least their Turing-complete syntax is limited to separate macros rather than being scatterable throughout the document.
Well they're hardly using it to promote a commercial venture,
If that's true, they should drop the banner ads, and they should definitely stop intercepting hits to their home page to display interstitial commercials. Today the Onion is trying to get me to buy shoes, watch TV shows, eat fast food, report software pirates, wear jeans, buy belts, buy The Onion books, and go to the theater. I certainly hope they're getting paid for all that.
and if you can find someone who reads one of these Onion pieces and believes it suggests presidential support,
This is the page that made me think they may have a case. I too thought that this was just another attempt by the Whitehouse to bitchslap dissent, because I thought that they were just talking about the presidential seal graphics that might be in photos used in obvious parody articles about the President.
But look at this page. There's no info about the Onion (you'd have to have started from an Onion page to find out the connection), all the links go to official whitehouse.gov pages, the style is that of the official whitehouse.gov page, the server uses local copies of their potentially copyrighted graphics, and they've got a nearly identical (it says "Resident of the United States" now) copy of the Presidential Seal in the upper left corner: large enough to recognize, but small enough that the modification (even assuming it's always been modified) isn't obvious.
Could someone listen to one of these addresses and not realize they were listening to a parody? I doubt it, but then again I knew they were an Onion parody before I ever went to the site, and I've only listened to one address so far. Since the Onion's humor is sometimes of the prescient "it's funnycause it's true" variety, I could definitely imagine there being addresses in there capable of fooling people.
could you point them in my direction, as i've got this bridge i'd like to sell them.
One of which is memory protection, yes, but that's not the only one, and it's not tied to the cooperative multitasking problem. For example, if Mozilla/Firefox were to run plugins in separate threads rather than separate processes it wouldn't add any memory protection, but it would add (or rather it would start using the kernel's) preemptive multitasking.
I do understand that the kernel can context switch between processes and kernel-level threads without any application support for that capability, but that doesn't matter if two separate codes are effectively running as two user-level threads in one kernel thread. Netscape API plugins work that way: they're not executables that get run, they're dynamically linked libraries that get loaded and called. Because of this, if the plugin code goes into an infinite wait or infinite loop, the browser process which invoked it can be frozen as well. Back on topic, if the plugin code can't be linked to the browser code because of different binary types, then the plugin can't be loaded by the browser, even if the OS can run both types of code.
This is the same difficulty that's kept Mozilla bug 156493, "Browser should tolerate plug-in (plugin) malfunctions, like with a separate (own) process", unfixed for the past three years. I'm reminded of this in particular, because starting plugins as separate processes (which was requested to prevent buggy plugins from crashing the entire Firefox/Mozilla process) would simultaneously have made it much easier for 64-bit browsers to support 32-bit plugins.
So it is true that Macromedia is lagging behind the leading edge of technology... but do you have to sound so self-righteous about it? If our browsers used interprocess communication instead of cooperative multitasking (a concept far more outdated than 32 bit binaries) then this wouldn't be a practical problem.
If aliens would like to see webpage of WHOLE earth's goverment, where would they go?
Nowhere, and hopefully it will stay that way.
If aliens came here and found a single government that ruled every human on Earth without the possibility of independence or emigration, they'll either think that's a bad thing or a good thing. If they think it's a bad thing then we'll have ruined first contact. If they think it's a good thing then we'll eventually *wish* we'd prevented first contact...
You're ignorant. "Nazi" is not a banned word. Discussion of Nazism is not illegal. Glorification of the Third Reich is illegal. Goose stepping is illegal.
And Wolfenstein 3D, In which the character escapes from a Nazi prison, was illegal - not because shooting make-believe Nazis is "glorifying the Third Reich", but because you saw some swastikas while doing so.
As an American I don't really agree with these policies, either, but perhaps the Germans themselves are in a better position to judge the necessity of such laws.
Perhaps it's exactly the opposite. The Germans may be in a better position to appreciate the obvious necessity of avoiding totalitarian governments, but when it comes to the less obvious questions of *how* to avoid them, I'd trust the answers from a culture that has so far succeeded more than from one that has failed. There is very little risk of a new resurgence of Nazi power, and that risk is *increased* by giving neo-Nazis a sense of persecution to rally around. There is a greater risk of a resurgence of totalitarianism, and that risk is also increased by training the public to accept and even defend government restrictions on political speech.
Do you really want Iran, North Korea and China having a say in how DNS is administered?
Yes, for the same reason I want criminals to be able to vote. Every nation should be represented in a fair and democratic Internet administration, not just the people we like.
That's a nice sentiment, but the analogy doesn't hold. If you want criminals to be able to vote, you count their votes. If you want North Korea to have a say in how the internet is administered, it's impossible. You can give Dear Leader a say in Internet administration, but you can't make him share that authority with the rest of the country. Letting totalitarian governments "represent" the populations they control would make international representation less democratic, not more.
The only way to address this is to stip all parties of all funding, and then allocate money for campaigning from tax revenue.
Do we really give the same amount to every party (wasting my tax dollars on everybody from the Socialists to the Reform party) or do we give more money to the more popular parties (thus writing the current Republicrat party oligarchy into law)? It sounds like you're in favor of the former - what prevents me from starting my own "Ilikemoneycrat" party tomorrow? It would be great to rant on TV commercials instead of Slashdot comments.
Do we prevent people from publishing their own political statements with non-tax-dollars (thus infringing everyone's freedom of speech) or do we only prevent people from giving money to others to have political messages published (thus infringing everyone but the rich's freedom of speech)? I can't afford to buy a TV commercial right now, but I can find a hundred people willing to combine our contributions to buy one. If you limit our ability to pool that money together, all you'll do is limit political advertisements to the people rich enough not to need anyone else's money.
When you equalize "media access", how are you going to determine what gets counted as access? Does a documentary about the unibomber have to be balanced with one about abortion clinic bombings, so we don't unfairly show too low a ratio of right-wing to left-wing nutjobs? If a news show's guest economist says that the President's Social Security plan is horrible, does that count as "access" for all his challengers? If so, then the big media conglomerates can game the system by burning up airtime on weak support for candidates they dislike. If not, then the big media conglomerates can own the system by being the only corporations with unlimited influence on mainstream political discussion.
But for that matter, how do you define "media"? Do Daily Kos and Little Green Footballs balance each other out, or do each have to give "equal access" to opposing viewpoints? Could you or Slashdot be in trouble if your own globally published comments are too partisan? If so, what does that do to your freedom of speech? If not, wouldn't that be a great loophole for paid hordes of astroturfers to slip through?
Everybody's got their own pet solution for half of the world's problems (I'm no exception - in the political arena my hobby horse is Condorcet voting), and nobody can foresee every one of the unintended consequences which their proposed reforms would bring, but please at least try! You'll quickly see just how hard a problem campaign finance reform is. It's not as easy as calling all the money "bribery", because it isn't being spent on fabulous mansions for Congressmen. It's being spent on political speech, and any restrictions on political speech can only exacerbate the problem or replace it with something worse.
It was basically a stupid little feature thrown in to meet a stupid little government requirement thrown in by some UNIX zealots to try and keep UNIX around.
No, it was a necessary feature thrown in to allow the government to avoid having to throw away all their software once the operating systems they originally developed on were no longer optimal. Games of "catch the moving API" can be fun and profitable for operating system vendors, but they're not so great for third party developers and users. The idea behind having a portable interface was to allow customers to choose different operating systems based on price, features, and performance. Obviously that's not the kind of market that a vendor can siphon tens of billions of dollars of profit from, however - I'm sure Microsoft much prefers the current situation where customers can choose different operating systems based on price, features, performance, and having to rewrite or replace all their unique applications.
We have companies like [The] SCO group, Forgent Networks and NTP who do not really have any products
The SCO Group has several products, and they haven't officially canceled all of them yet. They're not immune to a patent-based counterattack because they don't have any products, they're immune because they don't have enough customers or money. You can't squeeze blood from a turnip, especially not after the turnip farmers have already juiced it while laughing at you.
We've got lots of really cool stuff now, but much of our economy is still based on scarcity.
Our economy will always be based on scarcity. Even if technology increases our wealth a billion-fold, and even if 99% of the population decides that they want to reproduce at replacement rates instead of having six kids every generation, then we will still see the remaining 1% (who can at first afford all their kids thanks to our new-found wealth) expanding to fill available resources in less than a millenium.
That's assuming a roughly equitable redistribution of wealth, too, which may not be the case. In the past, every new baby was born into intrinsic economic wealth, if only because a couple decades later they would grow up into road-pavers and could survive on that income. If technology is making it possible to replace more and more labor with capital, that means that the amount of capital for which unskilled laborers can sell their work will keep going down. Perhaps this discrepancy will be met with voluntary charity at first; as soon as that is not the case then the only alternatives are all scarcity of one form or another.
But possibly running on incomplete data. While crime in the US has been decreasing for decades, the incarceration rate has quadrupledsince 1980. A lot of the increase is due to violent crime, too: even after taking victimless crimes out of the equation, it looks like the "criminality rate" has been skyrocketing. And for a discussion of changing American culture, I think the percentage of criminals is more important than the rate at which they're successful. How many of our people can we lock up? How many should we?
Of course, getting back the current discussion, trying to blame this on video games is ridiculous. The rise in criminality predates Pong, and the current era of ultra-realistic games doesn't see to have affected the trends at all.
Slashdot Mirror
This can be true even if you never plan to switch compilers, OSes, or architectures in production - I've seen errors which will silently corrupt your memory on one platform but segfault (and thus give you a nice stack trace to work from) on another.
But really, how much of your code is so ephemeral that it'll be thrown away before the next compiler, OS, or architecture you want to run it on comes around? I've seen programmers scream that "This new compiler version breaks my program!", then waste time wading through their standards-incompliant code that could have been correct if it had been tested on multiple compilers from day one. I've seen "optimizations" that were written based on profiling on only one system and become hard-to-refactor "pessimizations" on newer systems. I've seen programs stuck on slow and expensive hardware because nobody wanted to worry about endianness issues until competing fast and cheap hardware made those worries necessary.
For someone writing popular open source code, portability is even more important for testing. The number of people who want to use your code will almost certainly be greater than the number of people who want to use your code and your operating system. It's nice to get bug reports and patches from the whole former set rather than just the latter.
The GPL is a license. If you don't agree to that license, you aren't committing any crime.
Now, if you redistribute copyrighted software without a license to do so, that would be committing a crime... but how many hardware developers redistribute the Linux kernel? Put the ".h" files corresponding to this new ABI in the public domain, and those will be the only code that driver authors need to redistribute derived works of. Give them a restricted license, and it just means that driver authors will have to rewrite them. (no, SCO apologists, you can't copyright an interface)
Binary Linux drivers don't have to be in user land to be legal - there's a reason why kernel developers have added a "tainted" flag to help them sort out bug reports, rather than just sueing Nvidia.
Finally: The slippery slope started long ago, with ABIs for applications that allow binary compatibility and closed source software. Other than bad bug reports, every one of your arguments applies to applications running on Linux as much as to drivers running on Linux, and that experience might be instructive. Would Netscape have gone open source immediately just to get their apps running on Linux? Or do we have an open source Mozilla/Firefox application today because of those developers' experience writing closed source apps for open source platforms a decade ago? Closed source software on my Linux drives at work and home right now includes Flash, Acrobat Reader, Doom 3, Neverwinter Nights, GMV, SimCity 3000, Enemy Territory, Matlab, Cubit, Intel's compilers, Tecplot, and of course Nvidia's video drivers. Other than Doom 3 (several years from now), how many of these programs would have a Linux version at all if they were required to be open source first?
In fact, I suspect we have *more* open source software today because of the decision to allow closed source software: giving people the ability to use more software gives us "control over our computers" in a practical sense, a sense that attracts more users. I don't know of any closed source software whose authors would rather release source code than stop supporting Linux, but I do know of open source developers who would be Windows developers if they were forced to stop using closed source software on Linux, and I know of Windows users who would be Linux users if they were able to use all their hardware on Linux.
basically the user doesn't have to know the difference between, for instance, Carbon apps and Cocoa apps.
Just to check, I started up a Gnome app while running KDE. No problem. The other way works fine too. The only things developers and users are forced to choose are what toolkits or what user interfaces they prefer.
It always seems to be pundits like you who complain in the users' names about choice - users either don't know there is a choice (because they're using whatever was default on their distribution) or don't care there is a choice (because the existance of one compatible choice usually doesn't make the other any worse). Do you know any real users who don't like having choices? Tell them I ordered them to use Gnome. There, no choice anymore, it's all better.
Different packaging systems are a much better example of problems caused by choice, because there you can have some incompatibility - I can't double-click-install every SuSE package or Mandrake package on my Fedora system, and I can't install *any* Debian package without digging into "Alien" howtos. That means more work or less compatibility for software developers, and that's a bad choice... but, of course, it's the same bad choice that developers are forced to make when they choose to write OS X applications or Windows applications. It's not even that bad, since Linux developers can statically link all libraries and make a self-installing install.sh script to be compatible with every distribution (or can distribute source code to be compatible with a dozen other Unices), but OS X or Windows developers who want to be compatible with OSes from multiple companies need to use crossplatform API wrappers from day one.
"unless ... a keylogger is installed compromising it won't do much"
"Unless they take out money, breaking into the cash safe won't do much". Sure, it's technically true, but who cares? Is there a subclass of criminals who, when making up their rootkit boot media, refuse to install keyloggers for ethical reasons?
No, it's like fining somebody for leaving their door unlocked and _not_ getting burglarized.
No, it's like fining somebody for not having a fence around their property and not getting burglarized.
A locked door isn't like a firewall, it's like a secure password-protected service. Firewalls easily let you limit access to "all or nothing" - but hell, if that's as "fine-grained" as you need your security to be, you can get the same effect on a good OS just by turning off the services you want inaccessible. You can use a firewall to limit access by IP, but you could do that without a separate firewall by having clients do IP (or better, asymmetric encryption key) checks themselves. What you can't do is use a firewall to forward outside connections to an inside service and expect that service to become any more secure.
Does this have something to do with the push behind SP2? I can't imagine Microsoft wanting to widely advertise, "You need to upgrade for security reasons because pre-SP2 versions of our programs are swiss cheese!" but they did need to get the "You need to upgrade for security reasons" message out there - perhaps what got across to consumers and lawmakers was "You need to upgrade for security reasons because SP2 has the all-important magic of Firewall!"
I do like the idea of "truth in advertising" laws to reveal the origins of political speech financing. That's got its own problems, of course. By prohibiting significant anonymous support, you make it easy for a winning candidate to retaliate against his opponents supporters after an election, and you thus discourage any challenges to candidates who are particularly vindictive or who are in well-entrenched seats. But at least it's a reform measure that comes from the right philosophy: the cure for questionable political discourse is more discourse, not less.
if you limit the amount each person/group is able to contribute, then it levels the playing field for speech.
No, it doesn't. People and groups with enough money don't need to "contribute" it to anyone - they can buy their own advertisements and commericals. It's only us poor schlubs who have to give money to other groups before we can pool enough in one place to buy an ad. Limiting political contributions just tilts the playing field even more.
It's the equivalent to saying that the guy who can buy a 100 foot tall speaker is just exercising his free speech by drowning everybody else out.
So we'll ban 100 foot tall speakers... or will we? People are going to hear about candidates and issues somehow, and until the collective IQ rises a few dozen points my bet is that "somehow" will still be "biased mass media" - your 100 foot tall speakers. You can't ban biased political media; you can just try to restrict who gets to produce it - and all the proposed restrictions I've seen are likely to backfire. They hit the poor first (by limiting political contributions and thus restricting political speech to non-collective entities) and the non-connected rich next (by restricting political speech to "the news" rather than the commercials). Here are the untouched 100 foot tall speakers that will still be able to drown everybody else out; the best we can hope for after "campaign finance reform" is that the individual oligarch's biases will cancel each other out.
I could make it take 500 Watts and just dissipate 300 Watts as heat.
;-)
No, it couldn't. If it takes 200 watts, it must dissipate 200 watts as heat. There's just not that much juice going out over the audio/video cables.
Games are the only thing I reboot for, but for most people it's not just games. Go to any computer store, you'll see photo manipulation wizards, home and landscaping design programs, genealogy databases, trip planners, video editors... it'll be decades before there are good open source equivalents to all the most popular commercial software, and until that happens the only thing that will make Linux usable for many people will be a Win32 subsystem that runs all that existing software out of the box.
.NOT Invented Here API and moves the goal posts again) to make Linux a mainstream OS.
Yeah, yeah, I know, "Emulation killed OS/2 somehow!" "All of the hordes of commercial software companies making Linux programs will stop, and I won't want to run Win32 or Winelib builds of their programs for some theoretical reason!"
People don't buy computers to run operating systems. They buy them to run programs, and if enough of the programs they want to run require Windows, then they'll choose Windows. I've been running Linux on the desktop since 1997, I'm posting from Fedora Core 4 right now, and I had a moment of false excitement when I got Starcraft working in a properly tweaked Wine install in 1998, but here we are in 2005 and I *still* have to reboot to play a years-old game like Baldur's Gate 2 without bugs. I'm not trying to complain about the Wine developers - the fact that they've been successful at all (Deus Ex now runs better than on Windows XP, hooray!) is amazing. But it needs to go further (and it needs to do so before everybody moves to Yet Another
A class where all their old creationist canards are systematically brought up and dismantled, where all the "missing transitional forms!!1!11" from flying dinosaurs to walking whales to homo habilis are trotted out, where every child walks out knowing how to find the real age of rocks and stars, where their children are led to question, "If Adam and Eve lived 6,000 years ago, how come we find artifacts and bones from civilizations thousands of years older and expanding hunter-gatherer tribes tens of thousands of years older?"
If so, sign me up. But first point me to the "Intelligent Design" advocate who's pushing for that class, because I've never met them.
There are lots of "wrong" scientific theories out there no matter how you define "wrong". Peak oil, pyramids, bigfoot, what makes the stock market move, the composition of the earth's core. Take your pick but I don't see the same level of emotions.
Which of these theories are children in danger of hearing in their "science" class rooms? If ID backers would get back in the closet with the alien pyramid builder theorists, nobody else would care.
This is just more trash talk from Dan Lyons, Forbes own resident pro-SCO, anti-"Linux crunchies" troll. He's apparantly realized that his only hope of keeping his job indefinitely is to convince his bosses that having one's arguments meticulously dissected by flaw-finding weblogs is a meaningless annoyance that happens to everybody, and to dissuade his bosses from ever paying close attention to the flaws found in Dan's own work.
Don't even click the link and give them an ad impression. Unless the man has just lost his mind, the whole reason for writing these shrill rants is to draw more "Slashdot effect" hits. It's quite possible that Forbes is thrilled to see all the attention in their web server logs, not yet realizing they're getting it by driving away the "Wall Street Journal" audience in favor of the more populous "National Enquirer" crowd.
Of the editors you've listed, let me use the one I've used before as an example:
.lyx editor which renders its output by exporting to .tex and which has a limited (of three files I'm currently working on, it completely failed to load two, and failed to load the images of the third) ability to import .tex files. Why is this ability limited? Not because TeX "isn't powerful enough" - ASCII isn't powerful, and I'm sure LyX imports .txt files just fine. It's not limited because LyX writers are lazy or don't care, surely - they obviously think that feature is important enough to include, and if it worked with any .tex file they wouldn't have needed to invent their own .lyx file format in the first place.
.tex file or colloquial human speech would practically be artificial intelligence. I'm not saying the OpenDocument or MS Office file formats are simple, of course, but at least their Turing-complete syntax is limited to separate macros rather than being scatterable throughout the document.
LyX is not a TeX editor. LyX is a
I suspect TeX import is limited for the same reason that other programs' abilities to converse with the user are limited: because despite attempts like LyX and Clippy, dealing perfectly with input as widely variable as a complex
The real CmdrTaco will never find out; it's been years since he last read Slashdot.
Well they're hardly using it to promote a commercial venture,
If that's true, they should drop the banner ads, and they should definitely stop intercepting hits to their home page to display interstitial commercials. Today the Onion is trying to get me to buy shoes, watch TV shows, eat fast food, report software pirates, wear jeans, buy belts, buy The Onion books, and go to the theater. I certainly hope they're getting paid for all that.
and if you can find someone who reads one of these Onion pieces and believes it suggests presidential support,
Okay, here you go:
http://www.weeklyradioaddress.com/
This is the page that made me think they may have a case. I too thought that this was just another attempt by the Whitehouse to bitchslap dissent, because I thought that they were just talking about the presidential seal graphics that might be in photos used in obvious parody articles about the President.
But look at this page. There's no info about the Onion (you'd have to have started from an Onion page to find out the connection), all the links go to official whitehouse.gov pages, the style is that of the official whitehouse.gov page, the server uses local copies of their potentially copyrighted graphics, and they've got a nearly identical (it says "Resident of the United States" now) copy of the Presidential Seal in the upper left corner: large enough to recognize, but small enough that the modification (even assuming it's always been modified) isn't obvious.
Could someone listen to one of these addresses and not realize they were listening to a parody? I doubt it, but then again I knew they were an Onion parody before I ever went to the site, and I've only listened to one address so far. Since the Onion's humor is sometimes of the prescient "it's funny cause it's true" variety, I could definitely imagine there being addresses in there capable of fooling people.
could you point them in my direction, as i've got this bridge i'd like to sell them.
Well, I'm not buying, but there's no story so ridiculous you won't find someone to buy it. Even the Onion's regular articles have fooled the Bejing Evening News, MSNBC, and some fundamentalist Christian groups in the past.
One of which is memory protection, yes, but that's not the only one, and it's not tied to the cooperative multitasking problem. For example, if Mozilla/Firefox were to run plugins in separate threads rather than separate processes it wouldn't add any memory protection, but it would add (or rather it would start using the kernel's) preemptive multitasking.
I do understand that the kernel can context switch between processes and kernel-level threads without any application support for that capability, but that doesn't matter if two separate codes are effectively running as two user-level threads in one kernel thread. Netscape API plugins work that way: they're not executables that get run, they're dynamically linked libraries that get loaded and called. Because of this, if the plugin code goes into an infinite wait or infinite loop, the browser process which invoked it can be frozen as well. Back on topic, if the plugin code can't be linked to the browser code because of different binary types, then the plugin can't be loaded by the browser, even if the OS can run both types of code.
Writing good code is hard and expensive.
This is the same difficulty that's kept Mozilla bug 156493, "Browser should tolerate plug-in (plugin) malfunctions, like with a separate (own) process", unfixed for the past three years. I'm reminded of this in particular, because starting plugins as separate processes (which was requested to prevent buggy plugins from crashing the entire Firefox/Mozilla process) would simultaneously have made it much easier for 64-bit browsers to support 32-bit plugins.
So it is true that Macromedia is lagging behind the leading edge of technology... but do you have to sound so self-righteous about it? If our browsers used interprocess communication instead of cooperative multitasking (a concept far more outdated than 32 bit binaries) then this wouldn't be a practical problem.
If aliens would like to see webpage of WHOLE earth's goverment, where would they go?
Nowhere, and hopefully it will stay that way.
If aliens came here and found a single government that ruled every human on Earth without the possibility of independence or emigration, they'll either think that's a bad thing or a good thing. If they think it's a bad thing then we'll have ruined first contact. If they think it's a good thing then we'll eventually *wish* we'd prevented first contact...
You're ignorant. "Nazi" is not a banned word. Discussion of Nazism is not illegal. Glorification of the Third Reich is illegal. Goose stepping is illegal.
And Wolfenstein 3D, In which the character escapes from a Nazi prison, was illegal - not because shooting make-believe Nazis is "glorifying the Third Reich", but because you saw some swastikas while doing so.
As an American I don't really agree with these policies, either, but perhaps the Germans themselves are in a better position to judge the necessity of such laws.
Perhaps it's exactly the opposite. The Germans may be in a better position to appreciate the obvious necessity of avoiding totalitarian governments, but when it comes to the less obvious questions of *how* to avoid them, I'd trust the answers from a culture that has so far succeeded more than from one that has failed. There is very little risk of a new resurgence of Nazi power, and that risk is *increased* by giving neo-Nazis a sense of persecution to rally around. There is a greater risk of a resurgence of totalitarianism, and that risk is also increased by training the public to accept and even defend government restrictions on political speech.
Yes, for the same reason I want criminals to be able to vote. Every nation should be represented in a fair and democratic Internet administration, not just the people we like.
That's a nice sentiment, but the analogy doesn't hold. If you want criminals to be able to vote, you count their votes. If you want North Korea to have a say in how the internet is administered, it's impossible. You can give Dear Leader a say in Internet administration, but you can't make him share that authority with the rest of the country. Letting totalitarian governments "represent" the populations they control would make international representation less democratic, not more.
The only way to address this is to stip all parties of all funding, and then allocate money for campaigning from tax revenue.
Do we really give the same amount to every party (wasting my tax dollars on everybody from the Socialists to the Reform party) or do we give more money to the more popular parties (thus writing the current Republicrat party oligarchy into law)? It sounds like you're in favor of the former - what prevents me from starting my own "Ilikemoneycrat" party tomorrow? It would be great to rant on TV commercials instead of Slashdot comments.
Do we prevent people from publishing their own political statements with non-tax-dollars (thus infringing everyone's freedom of speech) or do we only prevent people from giving money to others to have political messages published (thus infringing everyone but the rich's freedom of speech)? I can't afford to buy a TV commercial right now, but I can find a hundred people willing to combine our contributions to buy one. If you limit our ability to pool that money together, all you'll do is limit political advertisements to the people rich enough not to need anyone else's money.
When you equalize "media access", how are you going to determine what gets counted as access? Does a documentary about the unibomber have to be balanced with one about abortion clinic bombings, so we don't unfairly show too low a ratio of right-wing to left-wing nutjobs? If a news show's guest economist says that the President's Social Security plan is horrible, does that count as "access" for all his challengers? If so, then the big media conglomerates can game the system by burning up airtime on weak support for candidates they dislike. If not, then the big media conglomerates can own the system by being the only corporations with unlimited influence on mainstream political discussion.
But for that matter, how do you define "media"? Do Daily Kos and Little Green Footballs balance each other out, or do each have to give "equal access" to opposing viewpoints? Could you or Slashdot be in trouble if your own globally published comments are too partisan? If so, what does that do to your freedom of speech? If not, wouldn't that be a great loophole for paid hordes of astroturfers to slip through?
Everybody's got their own pet solution for half of the world's problems (I'm no exception - in the political arena my hobby horse is Condorcet voting), and nobody can foresee every one of the unintended consequences which their proposed reforms would bring, but please at least try! You'll quickly see just how hard a problem campaign finance reform is. It's not as easy as calling all the money "bribery", because it isn't being spent on fabulous mansions for Congressmen. It's being spent on political speech, and any restrictions on political speech can only exacerbate the problem or replace it with something worse.
It was basically a stupid little feature thrown in to meet a stupid little government requirement thrown in by some UNIX zealots to try and keep UNIX around.
No, it was a necessary feature thrown in to allow the government to avoid having to throw away all their software once the operating systems they originally developed on were no longer optimal. Games of "catch the moving API" can be fun and profitable for operating system vendors, but they're not so great for third party developers and users. The idea behind having a portable interface was to allow customers to choose different operating systems based on price, features, and performance. Obviously that's not the kind of market that a vendor can siphon tens of billions of dollars of profit from, however - I'm sure Microsoft much prefers the current situation where customers can choose different operating systems based on price, features, performance, and having to rewrite or replace all their unique applications.
We have companies like [The] SCO group, Forgent Networks and NTP who do not really have any products
The SCO Group has several products, and they haven't officially canceled all of them yet. They're not immune to a patent-based counterattack because they don't have any products, they're immune because they don't have enough customers or money. You can't squeeze blood from a turnip, especially not after the turnip farmers have already juiced it while laughing at you.
We've got lots of really cool stuff now, but much of our economy is still based on scarcity.
Our economy will always be based on scarcity. Even if technology increases our wealth a billion-fold, and even if 99% of the population decides that they want to reproduce at replacement rates instead of having six kids every generation, then we will still see the remaining 1% (who can at first afford all their kids thanks to our new-found wealth) expanding to fill available resources in less than a millenium.
That's assuming a roughly equitable redistribution of wealth, too, which may not be the case. In the past, every new baby was born into intrinsic economic wealth, if only because a couple decades later they would grow up into road-pavers and could survive on that income. If technology is making it possible to replace more and more labor with capital, that means that the amount of capital for which unskilled laborers can sell their work will keep going down. Perhaps this discrepancy will be met with voluntary charity at first; as soon as that is not the case then the only alternatives are all scarcity of one form or another.
But possibly running on incomplete data. While crime in the US has been decreasing for decades, the incarceration rate has quadrupled since 1980. A lot of the increase is due to violent crime, too: even after taking victimless crimes out of the equation, it looks like the "criminality rate" has been skyrocketing. And for a discussion of changing American culture, I think the percentage of criminals is more important than the rate at which they're successful. How many of our people can we lock up? How many should we?
Of course, getting back the current discussion, trying to blame this on video games is ridiculous. The rise in criminality predates Pong, and the current era of ultra-realistic games doesn't see to have affected the trends at all.