I work for a small software company, we do not provide software to dictators, and we do not undertake any business that could even remotely be called immoral - and as a company we are heavily affected by piracy in China (where we have never sold a single license, and we receive continual support requests).
Not only could your practices be remotely called immoral, they frequently actually are called immoral. The morality of withholding source code and using copyright to constrain your users is certainly questioned. I'm not going to say that those practices are immoral, but to say that there isn't even the most remote question is simply misrepresenting reality.
However, over time any encryption technology can be cracked with better and faster computers
This is a common misconception. Modern encryption algorithms are strong enough that "better and faster computers" won't help break them; a classical computer powerful enough to brute force 256-bit AES is physically impossible. Even quantum computers will just mean that some specific techniques need larger keys to be secure.
Encryption algorithms do occasionally get broken through mathematical trickery, but from a user perspective the most likely security issue related to encryption is some sort of design oversight in the practical system that you use. Examples include the fact that your password is on a sticky note on your monitor, or the fact that DRAM doesn't clear immediately when a computer is powered off.
Re:I am afraid, there is lack of direction for Rub
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Ruby 1.9.1 Released
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· Score: 1
I was strictly comparing languages based upon benchmarks of the languages and NOT the frameworks.
That's even less useful, because then you're just comparing a well integrated Apache module to basically nothing. There are well defined deployment solutions for Rails, not so much for Ruby without a framework.
Having working for Amazon as a startup, we doubled our business every month for the first two years from 95-97!!! Ruby would never have been able to accomplish that and we would have had to constantly be replacing and buying hardware.
For any business that isn't planning on going from nothing to the Dow Jones in less than a decade, the business numbers for performance come out quite a bit different. Even if you're only going to get as much traffic as Slashdot, servers are still cheaper than developers. Assuming that you're going to be the next Amazon or Google and wasting money preparing for that early is simply a bad business decision.
And the only argument people provide for using it is 'you can develop faster'; well you can in ANY language given a good framework, proper training, knowledge of patterns, etc etc.
Do you have any argument or reference to support your claim that language choice doesn't matter to development time, or are you just going to keep asserting it?
Re:I am afraid, there is lack of direction for Rub
on
Ruby 1.9.1 Released
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· Score: 1
For example, as PHP determines a need for more processes, it scales up to handle more concurrent requests. Ruby can't and will top out and just queue them up.
That's just a deployment issue. It's definitely easier to get a single-server PHP deployment right - give or take secure permissions - but that doesn't mean that a properly set up RoR install can't take full advantage of a server's resources; mod_rails even does dynamic process allocation if that's what you really want (for Rails applications where "scaling" matters, you may not actually want that).
Honestly, I don't like the deployment story for either Rails or PHP, but again - that shouldn't be a major criteria for selecting a language. Developer productivity is much more important.
Re:I am afraid, there is lack of direction for Rub
on
Ruby 1.9.1 Released
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· Score: 1
You're emphasizing the wrong things.
For example: scaling isn't a language issue. A system can scale if it can keep working once it grows beyond what some constant set of hardware can support. Whether a system can do that is entirely a question of architecture; choice of framework will have some impact, but language won't at all. Micro-benchmarks of page generation times have nothing to do with scaling at all, except maybe at the absolute upper end. Even reasonably slow page generation times shouldn't be your bottleneck in a non-trivial system.
The important thing that you're missing is the force multiplier of using a more powerful language. The single largest expense in most software development projects is developers. Anything that lets less developers get more done sooner is hugely valuable - and skilled developers with a powerful language will, in practice, get more done faster than skilled developers with a less powerful language.
Re:I am afraid, there is lack of direction for Rub
on
Ruby 1.9.1 Released
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· Score: 1
Did you read the article I linked to?
Re:I am afraid, there is lack of direction for Rub
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Ruby 1.9.1 Released
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· Score: 5, Insightful
On a side note, I will use PHP on my servers before touching Ruby since I see no advantages for using it over PHP.
Choice of programming language actually matters, and dismissing languages you haven't used much is foolhardy. If this isn't obvious to you, this article may prove enlightening.
I shouldn't feed the troll, but for anyone else following this thread...
Ignoring the inconvenient fact that it takes considerable skill and experience to make such modifications without crashing or corruption. Skill and experience tech-illiterate children in a country scrambling to make a living don't have and are extremely unlikely to obtain.
This is utter nonsense. Any random kid who has a computer for a year or two can make useful modifications to a simple python program, as long as they happened to be interested enough to try.
Forget about the energy gained from waste. If this process can get rid of the amount of radioactive material we have to get rid of, then it doesn't matter if it didn't have a net output of energy.
Throwing out valuable resources just because they can't be easily used right now is stupid. Should all the waste-gasoline from petroleum distilleries in the early 1900's have dumped in rivers and burned off (as it was, back then) indefinitely rather than using it in internal combustion engines?
I'd agree that overpopulation in North America and Europe is a myth, but your claim is going to need a bit more support.
There are enough resources to go around, we just need to convince the first world to share them.
Are you claiming that populations can breed their way into resource entitlement? That may be the outcome of some set of politically correct ideals, but it certainly doesn't work in the real world.
Quite a tragic situation, given that most of the resources that the first world consumes come from those countries in the first place.
What resources? Diamonds? Some metal ores, probably in small volumes?
Especially in (the relevant parts of) Africa, things are so poor, violent, and corrupt that it's difficult to run significant businesses there and exploit the local resources effectively.
Which is in itself telling - that you placed your religious (OS/software) beliefs over your desire to support the goals of the project. (Which was primarily educational, and only secondarily political.)
The educational goals of the project were explicitly based on shipping a device built entirely on Free Software. There was going to be a view source button (that would show the easily-readable Python source of the current app), and there were discussions about how to allow the users to modify all the software on the device without bothering tech-illiterate adults when they ran into trouble.
The apparent potential of such a plan was huge. Every potential programmer in that population would certainly learn how to program as they grew up with this device. And every non-programmer would think of computer programs as something you could get your friends to write or modify.
That was a good chunk of the educational promise of the OLPC project. A generic laptop - even one running normal desktop Linux - doesn't offer the same potential; one running Windows certainly doesn't. That promise was the reason that the OLPC project was worthy of charitable donations. Without it, donors might as well donate money to Asus to subsidize the Eee PC.
It's not an unfair playing field. Somebody is WILLING to work for less pay than you. You are the one who has to adapt. That's how a free market is supposed to work.
The labor market in most countries isn't free due to immigration restrictions. Those immigration restrictions create a regulated but fair-to-the-locals labor market. H1B visas then warp that fair market in favor of hirers.
If you are seriously proposing a free market in labor, that's an interesting proposition. But H1B visas have nothing to do with such a proposal or market freedom at all.
Unfortunately, you can't do either of the things you want to do. Relativity says you can't have synchronized clocks and quantum mechanics doesn't give you any way to know when/if the wave was collapsed.
It can be accessed by law enforcement or rescue people.
From a strict security perspective, this is basically the same as "it can be accessed by the general public". Law enforcement and rescue people are just arbitrary people who haven't been screened. This is true if we're talking about the president (where there's some clear idea on what "screened" means) and it's also true if we're talking about any arbitrary person.
I'm just waiting for cellphone location data to be used in a high profile robbery...
"Bill Gates is still in New York, Melinda has been at the hairdresser for 6 minutes, and the kids are all at daycare. That means we still have at least 20 minutes to find the valuables in their house. Wait, no, Melinda has left the hairdresser and is coming this way. We have six minutes to get out, but we can try again tomorrow."
I wonder if Chomsky would agree that his thesis applies, too, when his cause celebre is the power structure.
I saw a video where he answered a similar question, and his general response was that being vilified by the US media doesn't automatically mean that they're "the good guys". In the case the media coverage of the Sandanistas made a good example for his point about media coverage. If the book had been written today, it might have mentioned Saddam Hussein or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad; both of them certainly first-class douchebags, and both certainly subject to biased coverage by the media in the US.
Noam Chomsky has proposed many interesting hypotheses in his career, but he hasn't proven anything in his career ever.
Dunno about that. Some of his linguistics results look a lot like math - it seems entirely likely that there could be a mathematical proof in one of his papers.
But that's irrelevant to the issue at hand. We're talking about politics, and there aren't proofs in politics.
The propaganda model proposed by Herman and Chomsky provides a good explanation for observable phenomena and makes accurate predictions about the future. In a field that isn't hard science, that's really pretty amazing; it's certainly a higher standard for "truth" than you'd expect to see.
... preserve the dysfunctional status quo.
... keep bombing innocent brown people.
... keep increasing the gap between rich and poor.
... continue to ignore the constitution.
... make the economy even worse than it already is.
Are you claiming the "clearly shown" liberal commie bias that conservatives have "proven"(just look at Dan Rather and Keith Olbermann) or the "clearly shown" fascist bias that liberals have "proven" (just look at the Fox Noise channel)?
The latter, but your phrasing is set up to dismiss me without considering the facts. And no, it's not about Fox News.
Read this Wikipedia article and then carefully consider the issue of sourcing. What would happen to a news firm if they got on the Pentagon's bad side and couldn't go to Pentagon press conferences?
No, don't respond to my question now. Actually go and read the link.
George W. Bush was never stupid, and his support team even less so.
Assume that he had specific goals and accomplished them. Now go look at what happened during his presidency. What were his goals? Does he still look stupid now?
Be happy. be hopeful. Or shut up and let the rest of us be happy and hopeful.
Absolutely not. Not even for a moment. I refuse to leave you to your dangerous delusions.
Obama will likely be somewhat better than Bush, since his is the "good cop" role, but US bombs will keep killing innocent people in Afghanistan and Iraq. The United States will continue supporting Israel's massive violations of international law and basic human rights in Palestine. The US treasury and federal reserve will keep raising the national debt to give handouts to large companies.
Obama has the power to enact real change. He's the commander in chief - he could order the troops back from everywhere tomorrow. He could get our UN rep to stop vetoing every UN resolution that might help the Palestinians. He could reverse all of Bush's police state executive orders. But he won't do any of those things.
Faith in Obama is just a dangerous delusion. It means that either you've been seduced by his silver tongue into thinking that he'll do something that matters, or you've been confused as to what the important issues in the United States really are.
We The People have pretty much the size of Government We The People want doing pretty much the tasks We The People believe to be Constitutional else We The People would have chosen other leaders.
This is pure bullshit.
The mechanisms of the US federal government *do not* result in outcomes representing the "will of the people". First, we're a republic; if the "will of the people" changes between elections that doesn't change who's in office. But elections don't represent the will of the people either. This can be easily show mathematically just by considering the difference in outcome between the first-past-the-post voting system we use and a Condorcet method.
And that's not even getting into the fact that the "will of the people" is disrupted and confused by a centrally owned media that has been clearly shown to be biased towards certain perspectives.
And even if you were right, that would still be missing the point of the constitution. It's intended to prevent certain things from happening without the completion of a difficult amendment process first - especially if the current leaders or even the current the majority wants it immediately.
This article is the sort of crap that results in people talking about "market fundamentalists" and dismissing the very real benifits of decentralized decision making produced by healthy markets. The authors of this article missed three key points:
Not all markets are healthy. Oligopoly and misregulation commonly screw things up.
Getting the best results from a market require that all participants have perfect information (which implies they've spent the time to do a full analysis of all their options). This never happens.
Network effects really can result in entrenching technically inferior solutions. The barrier to entry can be so high that the market can't overcome it in a reasonable amount of time.
Healthy markets really are a good way to solve resource allocation problems and to make locally effective choices. They're probably even the best way. But saying that all markets always have optimal outcomes is absurd and results in people making the opposing absurd claim ("all markets are broken and need either heavy regulation or to be replaced with central planning") sound more reasonable.
How about something like a quick jolt to the pleasure centers of the brain?
There's absolutely no need for invasive surgery and addiction for something reasonably straightforward like this. The sound is just to let them know they're doing it right. For a reasonably mature subject, that's all that's necessary for this kind of scheme. If it's a little kid, give them a cookie when they succeed.
Slashdot Mirror
Not only could your practices be remotely called immoral, they frequently actually are called immoral. The morality of withholding source code and using copyright to constrain your users is certainly questioned. I'm not going to say that those practices are immoral, but to say that there isn't even the most remote question is simply misrepresenting reality.
No. Not in any useful sense of the word "possible". No one will ever luck into guessing a randomly generated 256 bit key on the first try.
This is a common misconception. Modern encryption algorithms are strong enough that "better and faster computers" won't help break them; a classical computer powerful enough to brute force 256-bit AES is physically impossible. Even quantum computers will just mean that some specific techniques need larger keys to be secure.
Encryption algorithms do occasionally get broken through mathematical trickery, but from a user perspective the most likely security issue related to encryption is some sort of design oversight in the practical system that you use. Examples include the fact that your password is on a sticky note on your monitor, or the fact that DRAM doesn't clear immediately when a computer is powered off.
That's even less useful, because then you're just comparing a well integrated Apache module to basically nothing. There are well defined deployment solutions for Rails, not so much for Ruby without a framework.
For any business that isn't planning on going from nothing to the Dow Jones in less than a decade, the business numbers for performance come out quite a bit different. Even if you're only going to get as much traffic as Slashdot, servers are still cheaper than developers. Assuming that you're going to be the next Amazon or Google and wasting money preparing for that early is simply a bad business decision.
Do you have any argument or reference to support your claim that language choice doesn't matter to development time, or are you just going to keep asserting it?
That's just a deployment issue. It's definitely easier to get a single-server PHP deployment right - give or take secure permissions - but that doesn't mean that a properly set up RoR install can't take full advantage of a server's resources; mod_rails even does dynamic process allocation if that's what you really want (for Rails applications where "scaling" matters, you may not actually want that).
Honestly, I don't like the deployment story for either Rails or PHP, but again - that shouldn't be a major criteria for selecting a language. Developer productivity is much more important.
You're emphasizing the wrong things.
For example: scaling isn't a language issue. A system can scale if it can keep working once it grows beyond what some constant set of hardware can support. Whether a system can do that is entirely a question of architecture; choice of framework will have some impact, but language won't at all. Micro-benchmarks of page generation times have nothing to do with scaling at all, except maybe at the absolute upper end. Even reasonably slow page generation times shouldn't be your bottleneck in a non-trivial system.
The important thing that you're missing is the force multiplier of using a more powerful language. The single largest expense in most software development projects is developers. Anything that lets less developers get more done sooner is hugely valuable - and skilled developers with a powerful language will, in practice, get more done faster than skilled developers with a less powerful language.
Did you read the article I linked to?
Choice of programming language actually matters, and dismissing languages you haven't used much is foolhardy. If this isn't obvious to you, this article may prove enlightening.
I shouldn't feed the troll, but for anyone else following this thread...
This is utter nonsense. Any random kid who has a computer for a year or two can make useful modifications to a simple python program, as long as they happened to be interested enough to try.
Throwing out valuable resources just because they can't be easily used right now is stupid. Should all the waste-gasoline from petroleum distilleries in the early 1900's have dumped in rivers and burned off (as it was, back then) indefinitely rather than using it in internal combustion engines?
I'd agree that overpopulation in North America and Europe is a myth, but your claim is going to need a bit more support.
Are you claiming that populations can breed their way into resource entitlement? That may be the outcome of some set of politically correct ideals, but it certainly doesn't work in the real world.
What resources? Diamonds? Some metal ores, probably in small volumes?
Especially in (the relevant parts of) Africa, things are so poor, violent, and corrupt that it's difficult to run significant businesses there and exploit the local resources effectively.
The educational goals of the project were explicitly based on shipping a device built entirely on Free Software. There was going to be a view source button (that would show the easily-readable Python source of the current app), and there were discussions about how to allow the users to modify all the software on the device without bothering tech-illiterate adults when they ran into trouble.
The apparent potential of such a plan was huge. Every potential programmer in that population would certainly learn how to program as they grew up with this device. And every non-programmer would think of computer programs as something you could get your friends to write or modify.
That was a good chunk of the educational promise of the OLPC project. A generic laptop - even one running normal desktop Linux - doesn't offer the same potential; one running Windows certainly doesn't. That promise was the reason that the OLPC project was worthy of charitable donations. Without it, donors might as well donate money to Asus to subsidize the Eee PC.
The labor market in most countries isn't free due to immigration restrictions. Those immigration restrictions create a regulated but fair-to-the-locals labor market. H1B visas then warp that fair market in favor of hirers.
If you are seriously proposing a free market in labor, that's an interesting proposition. But H1B visas have nothing to do with such a proposal or market freedom at all.
Unfortunately, you can't do either of the things you want to do. Relativity says you can't have synchronized clocks and quantum mechanics doesn't give you any way to know when/if the wave was collapsed.
From a strict security perspective, this is basically the same as "it can be accessed by the general public". Law enforcement and rescue people are just arbitrary people who haven't been screened. This is true if we're talking about the president (where there's some clear idea on what "screened" means) and it's also true if we're talking about any arbitrary person.
I'm just waiting for cellphone location data to be used in a high profile robbery...
I saw a video where he answered a similar question, and his general response was that being vilified by the US media doesn't automatically mean that they're "the good guys". In the case the media coverage of the Sandanistas made a good example for his point about media coverage. If the book had been written today, it might have mentioned Saddam Hussein or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad; both of them certainly first-class douchebags, and both certainly subject to biased coverage by the media in the US.
Dunno about that. Some of his linguistics results look a lot like math - it seems entirely likely that there could be a mathematical proof in one of his papers.
But that's irrelevant to the issue at hand. We're talking about politics, and there aren't proofs in politics.
The propaganda model proposed by Herman and Chomsky provides a good explanation for observable phenomena and makes accurate predictions about the future. In a field that isn't hard science, that's really pretty amazing; it's certainly a higher standard for "truth" than you'd expect to see.
... preserve the dysfunctional status quo.
... keep bombing innocent brown people.
... keep increasing the gap between rich and poor.
... continue to ignore the constitution.
... make the economy even worse than it already is.
The latter, but your phrasing is set up to dismiss me without considering the facts. And no, it's not about Fox News.
Read this Wikipedia article and then carefully consider the issue of sourcing. What would happen to a news firm if they got on the Pentagon's bad side and couldn't go to Pentagon press conferences?
No, don't respond to my question now. Actually go and read the link.
George W. Bush was never stupid, and his support team even less so.
Assume that he had specific goals and accomplished them. Now go look at what happened during his presidency. What were his goals? Does he still look stupid now?
Absolutely not. Not even for a moment. I refuse to leave you to your dangerous delusions.
Obama will likely be somewhat better than Bush, since his is the "good cop" role, but US bombs will keep killing innocent people in Afghanistan and Iraq. The United States will continue supporting Israel's massive violations of international law and basic human rights in Palestine. The US treasury and federal reserve will keep raising the national debt to give handouts to large companies.
Obama has the power to enact real change. He's the commander in chief - he could order the troops back from everywhere tomorrow. He could get our UN rep to stop vetoing every UN resolution that might help the Palestinians. He could reverse all of Bush's police state executive orders. But he won't do any of those things.
Faith in Obama is just a dangerous delusion. It means that either you've been seduced by his silver tongue into thinking that he'll do something that matters, or you've been confused as to what the important issues in the United States really are.
This is pure bullshit.
The mechanisms of the US federal government *do not* result in outcomes representing the "will of the people". First, we're a republic; if the "will of the people" changes between elections that doesn't change who's in office. But elections don't represent the will of the people either. This can be easily show mathematically just by considering the difference in outcome between the first-past-the-post voting system we use and a Condorcet method.
And that's not even getting into the fact that the "will of the people" is disrupted and confused by a centrally owned media that has been clearly shown to be biased towards certain perspectives.
And even if you were right, that would still be missing the point of the constitution. It's intended to prevent certain things from happening without the completion of a difficult amendment process first - especially if the current leaders or even the current the majority wants it immediately.
This article is the sort of crap that results in people talking about "market fundamentalists" and dismissing the very real benifits of decentralized decision making produced by healthy markets. The authors of this article missed three key points:
Healthy markets really are a good way to solve resource allocation problems and to make locally effective choices. They're probably even the best way. But saying that all markets always have optimal outcomes is absurd and results in people making the opposing absurd claim ("all markets are broken and need either heavy regulation or to be replaced with central planning") sound more reasonable.
Be careful. In your haste to support socialism, you're getting fascism. That's not what you really want.
There's absolutely no need for invasive surgery and addiction for something reasonably straightforward like this. The sound is just to let them know they're doing it right. For a reasonably mature subject, that's all that's necessary for this kind of scheme. If it's a little kid, give them a cookie when they succeed.