those cars have not disappeared. i see them every day.
So... every day you see proof that the government isn't interested in banning old cars that do not meet the current standards for new cars? And yet you reject the evidence of your own eyes in favour of your ideological belief that the government is "out of control"?
No wonder American politics is so messed up, if this is representative of the thought processes of the average voter.
Over the years, the government has made many safety features mandatory on new cars. How many of those have they subsequently extended backwards without passing new, separate legislation?
How does the governement decide whether a computer is infected or not?
I'm guessing all those nice capitalist non-government-affiliated antivirus companies might just have an idea or two about that.
Does running a P2P program counts as "infected"?
What? Why on earth would it? We're talking about detecting malware, not enforcing copyright law.
I understand that to decide whether a computer is infected or not, one would have to store and analyze the network traffic with DPI.
DPI would not necessarily be required. And even if it was, it does not involve storing traffic, just looking inside it as it goes past.
Do you also want the government to close their eyes when they see which websites you browse, and the content of your emails? (which is usually not encrypted)
Who said anything about the government seeing this? This is about ISPs doing filtering, not the government. And it would be machines doing the inspection, not humans. Most people are happy with machines seeing the contents of their email, given as how it's impossible to send an email without machines seeing its contents.
Finally, does "infected computers" include computers from political oponents, like in China?
Um, what? How the hell did we get from "ISPs monitoring for signs of malware infection" to "Big Brother grinding the faces of political opponents in the dust"?
The "slippery slope" argument is a logical fallacy, Mr Coward.
I have to admit now that sometimes people on/. make me sick, not because they are bad inside, more because they don't really see anything wrong with totalitarism.
Ditto, except replace "don't really see anything wrong with" with "appear to be completely incapable of distinguishing between reasonable government activity and".
If a drug dealer, pimp, or other assorted crook was breaking into my house and using my telephone to run their business, I would be very pleased if the telephone company told me about it.
No, it's total rubbish. The car manufacturer does not have any way of knowing whether the person who owns the car is a good driver or not; there is no way they could take responsibility for it even if they wanted to. ISPs, on the other hand, do have complete visibility of all traffic to and from their customers' computers, and could easily identify certain types of infection if they had the necessary permission to inspect that traffic.
Er, what? The theory of evolution describes the process by which life changes over time, and that is settled science, disputed only by cranks, religious fundamentalists, and the uneducated.
How life arose in the first place is a different question that is surrounded by uncertainty and constant debate, both scientific and otherwise. Anyone you have heard claiming that this other question is settled was merely trying to prove their pet theory by assertion.
Don't be silly. All real scientists know that it is possible to extract water from rock, because it says so in the Bible. You aren't calling Moses a liar, are you?
Most people who use the word "creation" have a pretty geocentric view, in my experience.
Unless you are one of the handful of true believers who realises that the universe was created billions of years ago by Xgarg, the space-lobster god of Fralxi, for the sole benefit of the sentient inhabitants of a planet in another galaxy whose name cannot be represented in our pathetic human alphabet.
What the companies and politicians know, and piracy apologists are repeatedly failing to grasp, is that it doesn't matter how the websites function.
If the end result of visiting a certain URL is that the visitor is assisted in acquiring copyrighted content without the permission of the copyright holder, and the site at said URL has been designed with that goal in mind, then it really doesn't matter how many iframes and trackerless torrents and mere links and so forth there are.
The end result is the same. The intent is the same. The courts have declared again and again that the person who set up the URL with that intent has broken the law. And the law-abiding majority of people look at the judgement and say "yeah, that's fair, they even called it The Pirate Bay, do they think we're stupid or something?"
For example, the Patriots didn't win America's freedom by going up against the Redcoats in the field, they won it by temporarily occupying remote British farmhouses of zero strategic value.
And Martin Luther King Jr certainly did nothing for the cause of civil rights by standing up in public and speaking out -- the real heroes of that movement are the ones who anonymously blocked the entrances to Whites Only restrooms, often for whole minutes at a time, while said restrooms were closed anyway for renovation.
Geeze, it's like kids these days don't even get taught history at all.
the 'peaceful resolution' you speak of, has no effect
That is not entirely true. Educating the public, and persuading the common people that overly restrictive copyright laws hurt them personally, would probably have a very positive effect.
What effect do you think this direct action is going to have? Because I don't see it as likely to have any effect at all -- at least, not a positive one. Taking a website that nobody visited anyway offline for a few hours is hardly going to make the entire recording industry turn round and say "Oh God, what have we done? The real pirates were us all along!". At best it will be ignored. At worst it will be used to justify new censorship laws.
That's the scary thing. It could have been literally anyone! The conspiracy runs so deep that there barely are any ordinary Americans left. We are all government agents now.
You are one of the tiny handful who are not yet part of the conspiracy. There can't be more than a few hundred of you left, and we are brainwashing you at a rate of about three a month. I wonder if you will manage to uncover the true secret of our ancient mysteries before we discover your identity?
That sounds like a great user interface. I'm sure nobody would have any problem figuring out how to type on a device that didn't display a keyboard until they started typing.
Yes, Star Trek had an awesome user interface. It's called "plot". You push whatever you feel like, and the computer automatically does whatever the script says should happen next. Sadly I don't think even Apple has quite that level of control over its users' lives yet.;)
Near as I can tell, the entire reason that they release this stuff is to give a gigantic middle finger to the US government.
Yep, that's what it looks like. Assange is drunk on power. He set up this website with a noble goal in mind, suddenly someone hands him all this stuff and he literally has the world's most powerful nation on its knees pleading with him!
I mean, wow. Talk about an adrenaline rush!
It will be interesting to see who assassinates him first -- the CIA for hurting America, or the FSB for putting them out of a job.
Be that as it may, the brutal reality is that Wikileaks' actions are not going to make the government change the behaviors you don't like. They are merely going to make it tighten up more, and introduce more draconian punishments for anyone caught leaking information.
Oh, and this will be powerful ammunition for those who would like to see the government given the power to censor the Internet.
Is that really what you want? You are cheering on Wikileaks even when its actions are going to do no good at all, and might even lead to you personally being hurt?
This latest release is a case it point. It's going to embarass governments by showing them lying, trying to outdo each other etc.
It's going to embarrass democratic governments. The oppressive nations of the world, meanwhile, are breaking out the popcorn and sitting back to enjoy the fun.
Perhaps if Mr Assange wants to further his goal of preventing things being covered up, he might like to start with those nations that are actively and openly censoring their citizens' right to free speech and free access to information? Hint: America is not very high up that list.
A disc? How quaint. On the PC we have this cool thing called an "internet" that lets us buy a new game at the click of a mouse button, and play it shortly afterwards without even having to stand up. I haven't needed to visit a bricks-and-mortar game store in years. That's one thing to be thankful for today.
As for difficulty running them, I haven't had any compatibility problems since like 1998, and -- thanks in part to the crippling effect of obsolete console technology that we are supposed to be discussing -- the cost of a system that's capable of running all the latest games is no greater than the combined cost of the basic computer you need anyway plus a console.
But, hey, don't let cold facts get in the way of your fanboyism.
Also blocky models, blurry textures, and horrible terrain pop-in. Yes, it could be done on the PS2, and it's an absolutely amazing bit of work considering the hardware limitations.
But that doesn't mean it couldn't have been even better with PS3 technology, and even better than that with today's PC technology.
You don't need flashy graphics to make a good game, but if you acknowledge that the quality of the visuals are one of the things that allowed SotC to become a work of art, how would it not have been improved by the ability to render those visuals exactly as its creators envisaged them, instead of having them limited by technology that was lagging well behind the state of the art?
the last two attacks (shoe bomber and underpants bomber) only tried to destroy the plane.
And both failed.
People who for some reason support the TSA often trot out the line "which would you prefer, being seen naked or having a bomb on the plane with you?"
Well, there have been bombs on, oh, four or five aircraft recently, none of which has done any damage -- while there have been several non-bomb-related plane crashes that have killed a lot of people.
If I was an insurance company, I would be offering lower travel insurance premiums to people with bombs on their planes!
I gather the next thing is that if you travel by air, they're going to billet troops in your home while you're away. It'll save billions on military housing, and it could save lives too if the troops find your secret terrorist lab!
He also observes that reified generics would probably make Java itself a better language, and would be useful for Scala too. Which between them account for practically everyone using the JVM in the real world. Is it really worth hurting the vast majority of people (and driving some of them to competing platforms), in order to benefit a handful of tiny niche products?
Closures and objects are identical in terms of the things that they can express.
Any minute now someone is going to bring up Turing completeness and point out that in theory you could write any program in Brainfuck. And someone else is going to point out that closures in languages like C# are objects, just hidden behind some syntactic sugar. No, wait, I just did both myself.
The point is that for certain common patterns, such as event callbacks, a closure-like syntax is significantly more readable than a conventional object type syntax. Computational equivalence is an academic question. In the real world, the question is how efficiently code can be written and how reliably it can be maintained, and in that regard there is often a real benefit to reducing boilerplate code.
Slashdot Mirror
ldd /usr/bin/dolphin | grep kde
HTH
So ... every day you see proof that the government isn't interested in banning old cars that do not meet the current standards for new cars? And yet you reject the evidence of your own eyes in favour of your ideological belief that the government is "out of control"?
No wonder American politics is so messed up, if this is representative of the thought processes of the average voter.
Over the years, the government has made many safety features mandatory on new cars. How many of those have they subsequently extended backwards without passing new, separate legislation?
I'm guessing all those nice capitalist non-government-affiliated antivirus companies might just have an idea or two about that.
What? Why on earth would it? We're talking about detecting malware, not enforcing copyright law.
DPI would not necessarily be required. And even if it was, it does not involve storing traffic, just looking inside it as it goes past.
Who said anything about the government seeing this? This is about ISPs doing filtering, not the government. And it would be machines doing the inspection, not humans. Most people are happy with machines seeing the contents of their email, given as how it's impossible to send an email without machines seeing its contents.
Um, what? How the hell did we get from "ISPs monitoring for signs of malware infection" to "Big Brother grinding the faces of political opponents in the dust"?
The "slippery slope" argument is a logical fallacy, Mr Coward.
Ditto, except replace "don't really see anything wrong with" with "appear to be completely incapable of distinguishing between reasonable government activity and".
If a drug dealer, pimp, or other assorted crook was breaking into my house and using my telephone to run their business, I would be very pleased if the telephone company told me about it.
No, it's total rubbish. The car manufacturer does not have any way of knowing whether the person who owns the car is a good driver or not; there is no way they could take responsibility for it even if they wanted to. ISPs, on the other hand, do have complete visibility of all traffic to and from their customers' computers, and could easily identify certain types of infection if they had the necessary permission to inspect that traffic.
Er, what? The theory of evolution describes the process by which life changes over time, and that is settled science, disputed only by cranks, religious fundamentalists, and the uneducated.
How life arose in the first place is a different question that is surrounded by uncertainty and constant debate, both scientific and otherwise. Anyone you have heard claiming that this other question is settled was merely trying to prove their pet theory by assertion.
Don't be silly. All real scientists know that it is possible to extract water from rock, because it says so in the Bible. You aren't calling Moses a liar, are you?
Most people who use the word "creation" have a pretty geocentric view, in my experience.
Unless you are one of the handful of true believers who realises that the universe was created billions of years ago by Xgarg, the space-lobster god of Fralxi, for the sole benefit of the sentient inhabitants of a planet in another galaxy whose name cannot be represented in our pathetic human alphabet.
What the companies and politicians know, and piracy apologists are repeatedly failing to grasp, is that it doesn't matter how the websites function.
If the end result of visiting a certain URL is that the visitor is assisted in acquiring copyrighted content without the permission of the copyright holder, and the site at said URL has been designed with that goal in mind, then it really doesn't matter how many iframes and trackerless torrents and mere links and so forth there are.
The end result is the same. The intent is the same. The courts have declared again and again that the person who set up the URL with that intent has broken the law. And the law-abiding majority of people look at the judgement and say "yeah, that's fair, they even called it The Pirate Bay, do they think we're stupid or something?"
Well, it's like any freedom fighters.
For example, the Patriots didn't win America's freedom by going up against the Redcoats in the field, they won it by temporarily occupying remote British farmhouses of zero strategic value.
And Martin Luther King Jr certainly did nothing for the cause of civil rights by standing up in public and speaking out -- the real heroes of that movement are the ones who anonymously blocked the entrances to Whites Only restrooms, often for whole minutes at a time, while said restrooms were closed anyway for renovation.
Geeze, it's like kids these days don't even get taught history at all.
That is not entirely true. Educating the public, and persuading the common people that overly restrictive copyright laws hurt them personally, would probably have a very positive effect.
What effect do you think this direct action is going to have? Because I don't see it as likely to have any effect at all -- at least, not a positive one. Taking a website that nobody visited anyway offline for a few hours is hardly going to make the entire recording industry turn round and say "Oh God, what have we done? The real pirates were us all along!". At best it will be ignored. At worst it will be used to justify new censorship laws.
That's the scary thing. It could have been literally anyone! The conspiracy runs so deep that there barely are any ordinary Americans left. We are all government agents now.
You are one of the tiny handful who are not yet part of the conspiracy. There can't be more than a few hundred of you left, and we are brainwashing you at a rate of about three a month. I wonder if you will manage to uncover the true secret of our ancient mysteries before we discover your identity?
That sounds like a great user interface. I'm sure nobody would have any problem figuring out how to type on a device that didn't display a keyboard until they started typing.
Yes, Star Trek had an awesome user interface. It's called "plot". You push whatever you feel like, and the computer automatically does whatever the script says should happen next. Sadly I don't think even Apple has quite that level of control over its users' lives yet. ;)
Retire?
Yep, that's what it looks like. Assange is drunk on power. He set up this website with a noble goal in mind, suddenly someone hands him all this stuff and he literally has the world's most powerful nation on its knees pleading with him!
I mean, wow. Talk about an adrenaline rush!
It will be interesting to see who assassinates him first -- the CIA for hurting America, or the FSB for putting them out of a job.
Be that as it may, the brutal reality is that Wikileaks' actions are not going to make the government change the behaviors you don't like. They are merely going to make it tighten up more, and introduce more draconian punishments for anyone caught leaking information.
Oh, and this will be powerful ammunition for those who would like to see the government given the power to censor the Internet.
Is that really what you want? You are cheering on Wikileaks even when its actions are going to do no good at all, and might even lead to you personally being hurt?
It's going to embarrass democratic governments. The oppressive nations of the world, meanwhile, are breaking out the popcorn and sitting back to enjoy the fun.
Perhaps if Mr Assange wants to further his goal of preventing things being covered up, he might like to start with those nations that are actively and openly censoring their citizens' right to free speech and free access to information? Hint: America is not very high up that list.
A disc? How quaint. On the PC we have this cool thing called an "internet" that lets us buy a new game at the click of a mouse button, and play it shortly afterwards without even having to stand up. I haven't needed to visit a bricks-and-mortar game store in years. That's one thing to be thankful for today.
As for difficulty running them, I haven't had any compatibility problems since like 1998, and -- thanks in part to the crippling effect of obsolete console technology that we are supposed to be discussing -- the cost of a system that's capable of running all the latest games is no greater than the combined cost of the basic computer you need anyway plus a console.
But, hey, don't let cold facts get in the way of your fanboyism.
Also blocky models, blurry textures, and horrible terrain pop-in. Yes, it could be done on the PS2, and it's an absolutely amazing bit of work considering the hardware limitations.
But that doesn't mean it couldn't have been even better with PS3 technology, and even better than that with today's PC technology.
You don't need flashy graphics to make a good game, but if you acknowledge that the quality of the visuals are one of the things that allowed SotC to become a work of art, how would it not have been improved by the ability to render those visuals exactly as its creators envisaged them, instead of having them limited by technology that was lagging well behind the state of the art?
And both failed.
People who for some reason support the TSA often trot out the line "which would you prefer, being seen naked or having a bomb on the plane with you?"
Well, there have been bombs on, oh, four or five aircraft recently, none of which has done any damage -- while there have been several non-bomb-related plane crashes that have killed a lot of people.
If I was an insurance company, I would be offering lower travel insurance premiums to people with bombs on their planes!
I gather the next thing is that if you travel by air, they're going to billet troops in your home while you're away. It'll save billions on military housing, and it could save lives too if the troops find your secret terrorist lab!
He also observes that reified generics would probably make Java itself a better language, and would be useful for Scala too. Which between them account for practically everyone using the JVM in the real world. Is it really worth hurting the vast majority of people (and driving some of them to competing platforms), in order to benefit a handful of tiny niche products?
Any minute now someone is going to bring up Turing completeness and point out that in theory you could write any program in Brainfuck. And someone else is going to point out that closures in languages like C# are objects, just hidden behind some syntactic sugar. No, wait, I just did both myself.
The point is that for certain common patterns, such as event callbacks, a closure-like syntax is significantly more readable than a conventional object type syntax. Computational equivalence is an academic question. In the real world, the question is how efficiently code can be written and how reliably it can be maintained, and in that regard there is often a real benefit to reducing boilerplate code.