Software patents that were reviewed by qualified examiners and only granted if they were truly novel and non-obvious would promote science and the useful arts. I think far fewer people would have trouble with the concept if that were the reality -- in that case the intended bargain (the patent makes public the details of an idea that nobody else would have thought of on their own) would apply.
But the "grant first, ask questions later" approach of today's patent office, where one can patent an implementation that any programmer of above-average skill might come up with when presented with the same problem, means that we'd be better off with no software patents at all.
I'd be happy with either fixing the examination process or dumping software patents.
An example of a software patent that would reasonably be granted under a good examination regime, even though it did irk a bunch of people back before it expired, would be the RSA patent. That was not obvious to 99% of the skilled practitioners of the art until it was published. (And even now I expect most programmers have at most a high-level understanding of why it works, me included.)
Don't be naive. Here are two workarounds off the top of my head, either of which would be solid enough to be repeated ad nauseum to the nodding masses on talk shows: 1) It's not unreasonable to search and seize whatever we have to, if it means keeping the public safe from another 9/11. 2) We have probable cause to believe that terror cells are operating somewhere in the US, and the Internet is the place it's holding its meetings.
The Constitution has never been much of an obstacle to people in power. Hell, if the past is any indication, they'll probably find some way to twist the commerce clause to allow it; that seems to be the "feds get to do whatever the hell they want" section of the Constitution.
I would much rather have the show end with a buildup to a killer conclusion than gradually fade out as it's renewed and renewed and renewed and the writers slowly run out of ideas. Ron Moore has said he thinks the story is now in its third act (out of three) so my guess is that, as in the case of "Lost," this is actually something put forth by the producers as much as by the network. I doubt they have any more interest than the viewers do in watching their show end with a whimper after overstaying its welcome.
It's like the difference between "Harry Potter" and "The Wheel of Time" -- the former can build to a climax and introduce big changes to the characters and the world with the knowledge that there will be exactly seven books. (Obviously it remains to be seen if the conclusion will be satisfying, but at least there is a conclusion.) The latter just drags on and on and on for God only knows how long, the story grinding to a slow crawl as it's stretched out to more and more books.
Ha ha. That "don't add child directories' disk usage to the parents'" option in the Solaris "du"? Yeah. Um, I wrote that when I worked at Sun. Along with a bunch of other things, e.g. the first CD player app (WorkMan) that could pull track listings over the network. That existed on Solaris years before anyone ported it to Linux. I think I've earned my opinion on Solaris, thank you very much.
Although you're right that one can install the companion disc (and then go to sunfreeware.com to pick up the stuff that's missing or out of date) it still remains the case that, e.g., if I log in as root on one of the random Solaris systems at work (where I have superuser privileges but not unilateral control over what root's environment looks like) I get a nasty old Bourne shell with no history, no completion, etc. If I were to change root's shell to bash or zsh, I'd run the risk of breaking system admin scripts that assume I'm using the default shell.
If in your book it makes me a Linux fanboy to want Solaris to improve in the areas where it's currently behind Linux, then so be it, I don't really care what name you put to that. My interest is in seeing Solaris improve because I think it's fundamentally a pretty good piece of software.
I've liked many aspects of Solaris for a long time, but the #1 thing that turns me off it is the userland tools.
Yes, I know they ship a DVD with lots of GNU tools, but the fact that the built-in make, vi, grep, etc. are still basically unmodified from the early 1990s (if not longer) is not, to me, a feature. Those hoary old versions should be the ones on a supplementary DVD for those who need perfect backward compatibility with 15-year-old shell scripts and so forth.
It sounds like that's a focus of this project, so I say fabulous. If I can get ZFS and DTrace plus a modern toolset out of the box, Solaris will start to look much more attractive.
I'm all for abolishing the electoral college too, but it's not going to happen any other way than this. Getting rid of it completely would take a constitutional amendment, and passing one of those would take the votes of the legislatures of too many small states whose citizens get a disproportionate amount of power in presidential elections under the current system. Any small state that votes to get rid of the electoral college is in essence voting to reduce its own national influence. Maybe one or two might do it on principle, but most wouldn't.
As for assigning electoral votes proportionally, doing that would be politically foolish unless the whole country did it at the same time. Right now any state that isn't totally on one candidate's side gets attention paid to it by all the candidates, because if you can get just one more vote than your opponent, you get a bunch of extra electoral votes. Any state that switches to a proportional system would in effect be saying that in a close election, a candidate would stand to gain at most one or two electoral votes by paying attention to the state. Rational candidates would thus focus their attention on the remaining winner-take-all states. So again, voting for proportional electoral votes would be voting to reduce one's own influence on national politics.
That's the beauty of this proposal: it doesn't require the participation of as many states (thus making the small states' ability to block a constitutional amendment irrelevant) and it doesn't do anything until it has passed in enough states to make it the de facto national system (thus eliminating the downside of being the first in line to vote for it.) And it is completely constitutional, since each state gets to determine its own system for choosing electors; there is nothing in the constitution saying they can't take other states' election results into account.
I'm hoping this catches on. It's the only way we're going to get rid of the stupid electoral college system and reach the ideal of one man, one vote in presidential elections.
By the way, expect social conservatives to fight this idea tooth and nail if it looks like it's gaining momentum. A significant part of their power base is in rural areas whose electoral influence would decrease as a result of this system taking effect. Without the electoral college system boosting the value of rural-state votes, a social conservative presidential candidate will find it harder to get elected.
(On preview: Who the heck moderated the parent down? It's a perfectly reasonable point and pertinent to the discussion.)
If they pull out of California because of that, they may as well just quit the election systems game altogether. It's the largest market, and more importantly, when California does significant things, other states very often follow its lead, for better or worse.
Not, mind you, that I'm saying it's a bad thing for Diebold to get out of the market. (Which it's been reported they're considering doing anyway.) Don't let the door hit your ass on the way out, I say to them.
Though you could say that thanks to the innovative spirit that capitalistic systems produce, the poorest are still better off. They have access to basic medical care, and inexpensive warm clothing. For us peasants, the running clean water is pretty nice too.
Basic medical care paid for by government assistance programs, and running water from a usually city-run utility, clean because of health codes and government regulations. Those are not the best two examples of how the poor benefit from capitalism. Inexpensive warm clothing, though, I'll grant you.
Despite what you might think from the above reply, I am not a big-government advocate. I'd like a much smaller government too (I've been a registered member of the Libertarian Party for almost all of my adult life) and I think the Supreme Court's broad interpretation of the commerce clause over the years borders on treason. But it seems to me that once you allow that a government-funded safety net is a necessary evil to prevent people from starving and dying on the disease-ridden streets, it is a Herculean task to somehow prevent people from abusing that system. Human nature is to take advantage of opportunities, and free medical care is an opportunity. The tragedy of the commons is not just about grazing.
IMO the only two systems that are intellectually defensible are a pay-or-go-away system where poor people rely on charities or friends/family to pay for medical care (the ideal libertarian system, a la China) or a completely government-funded system where reasonable care is equally available to everyone regardless of income (a la Canada or the UK). I suspect that even if you don't agree with that, you would agree that the health care system we have in the US right now is an unsustainable mess that needs to be replaced with something better. And although I realize it's not at all a fair comparison for a whole host of reasons, I think you can look at the laissez-faire "anything goes, no regulations to speak of, so who knows what's actually in that bottle labeled 'amoxycilin' you just bought over the counter" health care system of China and conclude that, with all its inefficiencies, the Canadian system is probably a better one to be living under.
So you're suggesting that once the fad is over, we will go back to plain HTML forms with submit buttons, twiddling our thumbs waiting for the whole page to reload to update one piece of data?
Please take heart. Not all of us adults are such utter fucking morons.
Not that you'd know it from the comments on the article, where a depressing number of people say they hope he has learned from his "mistake."
I bet he has. He's learned to keep his activities secret from the authorities if he values his freedom. He's learned a little bit about what it's like to live in an increasingly paranoid, authoritarian society, where innocuous activities that harm nobody can get one declared an enemy of the people. He's learned that politicians have no compunctions about advancing their own careers by ruining the lives of the people they supposedly serve.
His mistake wasn't making the map. If FPSes had been around when I was in high school I would have loved to play on a map of the school; unlike a bunch of adults, it seems, I understood and understand the difference between video games and reality. His mistake was not being sufficiently clandestine when he shared it with his friends. Hopefully he will take this as a valuable lesson about the value of covering his tracks thoroughly in his daily life.
Non-DRM-encumbered AAC files will play on any player that supports AAC, e.g. the Zune or most (all?) of the Archos players. And it's a pretty safe bet that other hardware vendors will be adding AAC support pretty quickly once Apple starts actually selling its non-DRMed music. I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here; exactly what else could Apple do to open iTunes to third-party players?
A little refresher on evolution: As far as natural selection is concerned, health after age 50-60 is essentially unimportant.
Sounds like someone else needs a little refresher on evolution too. The presence of people who have a few decades of extra life experience to impart and who can take care of the grandchildren while mom and dad are out hunting is not exactly insignificant to the survival of a tribe.
All digital music, with the exception of purely synthesized stuff, has to pass through an analog-to-digital conversion process that throws away information (quantizing). So "uncompressed music" is still actually compressed -- and lossy-compressed at that -- if it's in digital form. The question has never been compressed vs. uncompressed, but rather what type and level of information loss you find acceptable.
I'm happy with a compression format that is not encumbered with lots of onerous license terms (i.e., that I could write and distribute an open-source player for if I felt like it) and that produces quality slightly better than the point at which I can hear the difference on a good stereo system. The "slightly better" simply so that if I get an even better stereo system later on, I still won't hear the difference. As long as that baseline is met, I want the format to take as few bytes per song as possible.
Now maybe Europeans will start making music and movies and writing books. Until now nobody there had any reason to produce art -- it would just have been pirated, so what would have been the point?
I'd much rather see FFXII fleshed out first. Maybe it's just me, but I felt like they cut out a huge chunk of story toward the end. It's like they got halfway through the plot they'd originally worked out, realized they were running way behind schedule, and just jumped ahead to the last couple chapters after coming up with a tiny amount of connecting material to lessen the severity of the sudden jolt in the story.
It's sad, too -- up until the sudden skip to the ending, FFXII's storyline was shaping up as a good contender for my favorite of the series.
Without spoiling any specifics, I'll say by way of example that it felt like there was a lot more backstory to cover regarding the main villain and his non-human associate. And there was a major part of the world heavily referred to but never seen.
That'd be Mr. Hu, if you're talking about the current president of China. His given name is Jintao. Chinese, like other languages, puts the family name before the given name.
I don't disagree with your general point, but one of your examples is no good:
Let's iterate over the characters in a string (a typical beginner task, right?). How do you do that in Java? Why, like this:
CharacterIterator it = new StringCharacterIterator("abcd");// Iterate over the characters in the forward direction
for (char ch=it.first(); ch != CharacterIterator.DONE; ch=it.next()) {// Use ch...
}
This is how you do it in modern Java:
for (char ch : "abcd".toCharArray()) {... }
That is still not blindingly self-documenting, but for the last couple major revisions of Java you have not had to deal with iterators nearly as often as you used to. (They sometimes still get used under the covers, but you don't have to manage them explicitly in the common use cases.)
But like I said, I don't disagree in general. I'm teaching my girlfriend some elementary programming and I'm using Python. That's a more reasonable first language in my opinion.
Do you think you'd feel any different at all if you or someone you care about had been sitting next to the guy that was caught actually trying to set off real shoe bombs on an actual airplane? Are you of the "well, we lucked out on that one, caught him, and since they know we know that trick now, they would never try it again, and we can stop looking for it now" camp? How does your brain work on topics like that?
You mean Richard Reid, the guy who tried to set off plastic explosives with a match (hint: you don't ignite plastic explosives with a match; if you set C4 on fire it will just burn, not explode) and who was beaten unconscious by the other passengers before he could even fail to set off his nonfunctional bomb?
No, I don't think I'd feel that different.
In fact, it's a good demonstration of, as you say, how my brain works: I try to think through the subject based on what actually happened. Observable history, one might call it.
The only reason two of the three 9/11 hijackings succeeded was because the passengers, having never heard of a passenger jet being used as a weapon before, assumed they would be flown to Cuba or somesuch, just like all the other passengers on hijacked jets in living memory. That is no longer the case, as evidenced by the fact that the third hijacked plane failed to reach its target. The simple fact that everyone knows there are people out there who want to blow up passenger jets will, without an extra dime spent on security or any extra disrobing at the gate, make it a lot harder to pull off any stunt that requires a terrorist passenger to initiate.
And those plans that don't require a passenger to initiate, e.g. smuggling a bomb into the cargo hold, hitting a plane with a surface-to-air missile after takeoff, etc., won't be affected at all by the senseless security theater everyone is subjected to.
Why is terrorism "the worst" now? I'm much more afraid of a high-magnitude earthquake hitting the west coast of the US, or a major hurricane veering further north than usual on the east coast, than I am of some random bomb going off somewhere.
Just in the last year we've seen how a single earthquake in Taiwan can bring connectivity between Asia and the rest of the world nearly to a halt. Natural disasters like that are a sure thing and it makes much more sense to me to worry about that than about the latest episode of "24" coming true.
Which isn't to say that we should dismiss any possible threat entirely, of course -- but we should also prioritize our efforts. It's not possible to fully prepare for every possible problem.
Ironically, TFA actually claims that we are pretty well prepared.
(Almost.) If a system like this were put in place and rigorously enforced, and after a year the Australian music industry still saw declining sales, it would put a pretty big nail in the coffin of the "our industry is dying because of you filthy pirates" argument. The industry goons will not stop bleating that until it becomes such a ridiculous claim that any reasonable person reacts to it with derisive laughter instead of seriously considering it.
If, on the other hand -- unlikely though I think it is -- their sales shot up all of a sudden, then people like me would be forced to admit we were wrong. Which honestly I'll be happy to do if there are convincing hard numbers that contradict my point of view.
On the other hand, it's not worth causing so much trouble to so many people just to test a theory, which is why I'm only "almost" in favor of this.
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Software patents that were reviewed by qualified examiners and only granted if they were truly novel and non-obvious would promote science and the useful arts. I think far fewer people would have trouble with the concept if that were the reality -- in that case the intended bargain (the patent makes public the details of an idea that nobody else would have thought of on their own) would apply.
But the "grant first, ask questions later" approach of today's patent office, where one can patent an implementation that any programmer of above-average skill might come up with when presented with the same problem, means that we'd be better off with no software patents at all.
I'd be happy with either fixing the examination process or dumping software patents.
An example of a software patent that would reasonably be granted under a good examination regime, even though it did irk a bunch of people back before it expired, would be the RSA patent. That was not obvious to 99% of the skilled practitioners of the art until it was published. (And even now I expect most programmers have at most a high-level understanding of why it works, me included.)
Don't be naive. Here are two workarounds off the top of my head, either of which would be solid enough to be repeated ad nauseum to the nodding masses on talk shows: 1) It's not unreasonable to search and seize whatever we have to, if it means keeping the public safe from another 9/11. 2) We have probable cause to believe that terror cells are operating somewhere in the US, and the Internet is the place it's holding its meetings.
The Constitution has never been much of an obstacle to people in power. Hell, if the past is any indication, they'll probably find some way to twist the commerce clause to allow it; that seems to be the "feds get to do whatever the hell they want" section of the Constitution.
I would much rather have the show end with a buildup to a killer conclusion than gradually fade out as it's renewed and renewed and renewed and the writers slowly run out of ideas. Ron Moore has said he thinks the story is now in its third act (out of three) so my guess is that, as in the case of "Lost," this is actually something put forth by the producers as much as by the network. I doubt they have any more interest than the viewers do in watching their show end with a whimper after overstaying its welcome.
It's like the difference between "Harry Potter" and "The Wheel of Time" -- the former can build to a climax and introduce big changes to the characters and the world with the knowledge that there will be exactly seven books. (Obviously it remains to be seen if the conclusion will be satisfying, but at least there is a conclusion.) The latter just drags on and on and on for God only knows how long, the story grinding to a slow crawl as it's stretched out to more and more books.
Ha ha. That "don't add child directories' disk usage to the parents'" option in the Solaris "du"? Yeah. Um, I wrote that when I worked at Sun. Along with a bunch of other things, e.g. the first CD player app (WorkMan) that could pull track listings over the network. That existed on Solaris years before anyone ported it to Linux. I think I've earned my opinion on Solaris, thank you very much.
Although you're right that one can install the companion disc (and then go to sunfreeware.com to pick up the stuff that's missing or out of date) it still remains the case that, e.g., if I log in as root on one of the random Solaris systems at work (where I have superuser privileges but not unilateral control over what root's environment looks like) I get a nasty old Bourne shell with no history, no completion, etc. If I were to change root's shell to bash or zsh, I'd run the risk of breaking system admin scripts that assume I'm using the default shell.
If in your book it makes me a Linux fanboy to want Solaris to improve in the areas where it's currently behind Linux, then so be it, I don't really care what name you put to that. My interest is in seeing Solaris improve because I think it's fundamentally a pretty good piece of software.
ZFS? DTrace? Zones?
I've liked many aspects of Solaris for a long time, but the #1 thing that turns me off it is the userland tools.
Yes, I know they ship a DVD with lots of GNU tools, but the fact that the built-in make, vi, grep, etc. are still basically unmodified from the early 1990s (if not longer) is not, to me, a feature. Those hoary old versions should be the ones on a supplementary DVD for those who need perfect backward compatibility with 15-year-old shell scripts and so forth.
It sounds like that's a focus of this project, so I say fabulous. If I can get ZFS and DTrace plus a modern toolset out of the box, Solaris will start to look much more attractive.
I'm all for abolishing the electoral college too, but it's not going to happen any other way than this. Getting rid of it completely would take a constitutional amendment, and passing one of those would take the votes of the legislatures of too many small states whose citizens get a disproportionate amount of power in presidential elections under the current system. Any small state that votes to get rid of the electoral college is in essence voting to reduce its own national influence. Maybe one or two might do it on principle, but most wouldn't.
As for assigning electoral votes proportionally, doing that would be politically foolish unless the whole country did it at the same time. Right now any state that isn't totally on one candidate's side gets attention paid to it by all the candidates, because if you can get just one more vote than your opponent, you get a bunch of extra electoral votes. Any state that switches to a proportional system would in effect be saying that in a close election, a candidate would stand to gain at most one or two electoral votes by paying attention to the state. Rational candidates would thus focus their attention on the remaining winner-take-all states. So again, voting for proportional electoral votes would be voting to reduce one's own influence on national politics.
That's the beauty of this proposal: it doesn't require the participation of as many states (thus making the small states' ability to block a constitutional amendment irrelevant) and it doesn't do anything until it has passed in enough states to make it the de facto national system (thus eliminating the downside of being the first in line to vote for it.) And it is completely constitutional, since each state gets to determine its own system for choosing electors; there is nothing in the constitution saying they can't take other states' election results into account.
I'm hoping this catches on. It's the only way we're going to get rid of the stupid electoral college system and reach the ideal of one man, one vote in presidential elections.
By the way, expect social conservatives to fight this idea tooth and nail if it looks like it's gaining momentum. A significant part of their power base is in rural areas whose electoral influence would decrease as a result of this system taking effect. Without the electoral college system boosting the value of rural-state votes, a social conservative presidential candidate will find it harder to get elected.
(On preview: Who the heck moderated the parent down? It's a perfectly reasonable point and pertinent to the discussion.)
If they pull out of California because of that, they may as well just quit the election systems game altogether. It's the largest market, and more importantly, when California does significant things, other states very often follow its lead, for better or worse.
Not, mind you, that I'm saying it's a bad thing for Diebold to get out of the market. (Which it's been reported they're considering doing anyway.) Don't let the door hit your ass on the way out, I say to them.
Basic medical care paid for by government assistance programs, and running water from a usually city-run utility, clean because of health codes and government regulations. Those are not the best two examples of how the poor benefit from capitalism. Inexpensive warm clothing, though, I'll grant you.
Despite what you might think from the above reply, I am not a big-government advocate. I'd like a much smaller government too (I've been a registered member of the Libertarian Party for almost all of my adult life) and I think the Supreme Court's broad interpretation of the commerce clause over the years borders on treason. But it seems to me that once you allow that a government-funded safety net is a necessary evil to prevent people from starving and dying on the disease-ridden streets, it is a Herculean task to somehow prevent people from abusing that system. Human nature is to take advantage of opportunities, and free medical care is an opportunity. The tragedy of the commons is not just about grazing.
IMO the only two systems that are intellectually defensible are a pay-or-go-away system where poor people rely on charities or friends/family to pay for medical care (the ideal libertarian system, a la China) or a completely government-funded system where reasonable care is equally available to everyone regardless of income (a la Canada or the UK). I suspect that even if you don't agree with that, you would agree that the health care system we have in the US right now is an unsustainable mess that needs to be replaced with something better. And although I realize it's not at all a fair comparison for a whole host of reasons, I think you can look at the laissez-faire "anything goes, no regulations to speak of, so who knows what's actually in that bottle labeled 'amoxycilin' you just bought over the counter" health care system of China and conclude that, with all its inefficiencies, the Canadian system is probably a better one to be living under.
So you're suggesting that once the fad is over, we will go back to plain HTML forms with submit buttons, twiddling our thumbs waiting for the whole page to reload to update one piece of data?
I'll take the fad!
Why were there poor people in the US before the New Deal, then? That seems like a pretty glaring argument against that position.
Please take heart. Not all of us adults are such utter fucking morons.
Not that you'd know it from the comments on the article, where a depressing number of people say they hope he has learned from his "mistake."
I bet he has. He's learned to keep his activities secret from the authorities if he values his freedom. He's learned a little bit about what it's like to live in an increasingly paranoid, authoritarian society, where innocuous activities that harm nobody can get one declared an enemy of the people. He's learned that politicians have no compunctions about advancing their own careers by ruining the lives of the people they supposedly serve.
His mistake wasn't making the map. If FPSes had been around when I was in high school I would have loved to play on a map of the school; unlike a bunch of adults, it seems, I understood and understand the difference between video games and reality. His mistake was not being sufficiently clandestine when he shared it with his friends. Hopefully he will take this as a valuable lesson about the value of covering his tracks thoroughly in his daily life.
Non-DRM-encumbered AAC files will play on any player that supports AAC, e.g. the Zune or most (all?) of the Archos players. And it's a pretty safe bet that other hardware vendors will be adding AAC support pretty quickly once Apple starts actually selling its non-DRMed music. I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here; exactly what else could Apple do to open iTunes to third-party players?
Sounds like someone else needs a little refresher on evolution too. The presence of people who have a few decades of extra life experience to impart and who can take care of the grandchildren while mom and dad are out hunting is not exactly insignificant to the survival of a tribe.
AAC as used by Apple is part of the MPEG-4 standard. Apple didn't invent it and doesn't own it.
All digital music, with the exception of purely synthesized stuff, has to pass through an analog-to-digital conversion process that throws away information (quantizing). So "uncompressed music" is still actually compressed -- and lossy-compressed at that -- if it's in digital form. The question has never been compressed vs. uncompressed, but rather what type and level of information loss you find acceptable.
I'm happy with a compression format that is not encumbered with lots of onerous license terms (i.e., that I could write and distribute an open-source player for if I felt like it) and that produces quality slightly better than the point at which I can hear the difference on a good stereo system. The "slightly better" simply so that if I get an even better stereo system later on, I still won't hear the difference. As long as that baseline is met, I want the format to take as few bytes per song as possible.
Does that make me not "people?"
Weak. If you're going to compare someone to a banana, at least do it with some style.
Now maybe Europeans will start making music and movies and writing books. Until now nobody there had any reason to produce art -- it would just have been pirated, so what would have been the point?
I'd much rather see FFXII fleshed out first. Maybe it's just me, but I felt like they cut out a huge chunk of story toward the end. It's like they got halfway through the plot they'd originally worked out, realized they were running way behind schedule, and just jumped ahead to the last couple chapters after coming up with a tiny amount of connecting material to lessen the severity of the sudden jolt in the story.
It's sad, too -- up until the sudden skip to the ending, FFXII's storyline was shaping up as a good contender for my favorite of the series.
Without spoiling any specifics, I'll say by way of example that it felt like there was a lot more backstory to cover regarding the main villain and his non-human associate. And there was a major part of the world heavily referred to but never seen.
Then how do you explain the rapid growth of the software industry before software patents became commonplace?
That'd be Mr. Hu, if you're talking about the current president of China. His given name is Jintao. Chinese, like other languages, puts the family name before the given name.
Please, nobody tell the autodynamics people about this -- they'll get really depressed.
I don't disagree with your general point, but one of your examples is no good:
This is how you do it in modern Java:
for (char ch : "abcd".toCharArray()) { ... }
That is still not blindingly self-documenting, but for the last couple major revisions of Java you have not had to deal with iterators nearly as often as you used to. (They sometimes still get used under the covers, but you don't have to manage them explicitly in the common use cases.)
But like I said, I don't disagree in general. I'm teaching my girlfriend some elementary programming and I'm using Python. That's a more reasonable first language in my opinion.
You mean Richard Reid, the guy who tried to set off plastic explosives with a match (hint: you don't ignite plastic explosives with a match; if you set C4 on fire it will just burn, not explode) and who was beaten unconscious by the other passengers before he could even fail to set off his nonfunctional bomb?
No, I don't think I'd feel that different.
In fact, it's a good demonstration of, as you say, how my brain works: I try to think through the subject based on what actually happened. Observable history, one might call it.
The only reason two of the three 9/11 hijackings succeeded was because the passengers, having never heard of a passenger jet being used as a weapon before, assumed they would be flown to Cuba or somesuch, just like all the other passengers on hijacked jets in living memory. That is no longer the case, as evidenced by the fact that the third hijacked plane failed to reach its target. The simple fact that everyone knows there are people out there who want to blow up passenger jets will, without an extra dime spent on security or any extra disrobing at the gate, make it a lot harder to pull off any stunt that requires a terrorist passenger to initiate.
And those plans that don't require a passenger to initiate, e.g. smuggling a bomb into the cargo hold, hitting a plane with a surface-to-air missile after takeoff, etc., won't be affected at all by the senseless security theater everyone is subjected to.
Why is terrorism "the worst" now? I'm much more afraid of a high-magnitude earthquake hitting the west coast of the US, or a major hurricane veering further north than usual on the east coast, than I am of some random bomb going off somewhere.
Just in the last year we've seen how a single earthquake in Taiwan can bring connectivity between Asia and the rest of the world nearly to a halt. Natural disasters like that are a sure thing and it makes much more sense to me to worry about that than about the latest episode of "24" coming true.
Which isn't to say that we should dismiss any possible threat entirely, of course -- but we should also prioritize our efforts. It's not possible to fully prepare for every possible problem.
Ironically, TFA actually claims that we are pretty well prepared.
(Almost.) If a system like this were put in place and rigorously enforced, and after a year the Australian music industry still saw declining sales, it would put a pretty big nail in the coffin of the "our industry is dying because of you filthy pirates" argument. The industry goons will not stop bleating that until it becomes such a ridiculous claim that any reasonable person reacts to it with derisive laughter instead of seriously considering it.
If, on the other hand -- unlikely though I think it is -- their sales shot up all of a sudden, then people like me would be forced to admit we were wrong. Which honestly I'll be happy to do if there are convincing hard numbers that contradict my point of view.
On the other hand, it's not worth causing so much trouble to so many people just to test a theory, which is why I'm only "almost" in favor of this.