Heh, no kidding. Up in the North-East there's I-84 that runs from central Massachusetts into Pennsylvania. There's a stretch in Connecticut that is supposed to be 50mph, and that continues for an absolutely ridiculous amount of miles. It starts justified, as it goes through the middle of a city, but then it's still 50/55mph on a straight highway with nothing around.
The bit that goes through that city is a little intimidating. Traffic goes 75-85mph with heavy volume and not so good visibility. You never see a cop out on that road through there. I've been told that the patrol officers aren't willing to risk their lives to give out speeding tickets on that road.
Hell, at one point I was going through there, made it out of the city alive, and was cruising along happily at 70mph after it went up to 65 again. Some tractor trailer decided to pass me in the middle lane, cut me off, and lock his brakes. Mind you, it is illegal for rigs to be in the left lane there, and there was maybe five vehicles in sight on those four lanes. That car never worked again. I try not to drive in Connecticut.;-)
State police have no problems issuing lots of tickets in their wonderful 40 miles of undeveloped land, where they refuse to raise the limit from 55mph. Average speed there is around 75mph, and there is excellent visibility. I see at least three cars pulled over every time I drive that stretch.
The excuse for these things is to keep the speed down, but the reason is to tax the people as much as possible. Speed limits in most anywhere have only a passing correlation to safe speeds. People ignore the speed limits because they are arbitrarily low. We aren't driving the impossible to corner and shakes at over 60mph cars of decades ago. We aren't driving with solid rubber tires, steel on steel locking brakes, or no suspensions (in most cases). Those in power would simply rather tax by issuing unneccessary traffic violations than raise the speed limits.
One of the reasons for having an officer issue tickets was that they examined the situation and decided whether they felt a violation was in order. Then you had officers running around playing ticket-tron throwing violations to every third car. Now people lock their brakes and stop paying attention when they see a police car. The same thing has happend with these ridiculous cameras, except now people are never paying full attention to the road, lest they may drift 1 mph over the limit.
Operating a car is most certainly not a privilege; operating one on a public roadway is a licensed privilege. If you built your own private road, you could drive however you wanted.
Oh, and don't get on so much with the cars kill people bit. Everything kills people. People fall down stairs every day, so we put cameras into every house to make sure the kids didn't leave toys on the steps? How about we put them in every kitchen just in case someone decides to stab another with a kitchen knife, and in every bathroom because people are drowned in the bath.
If the cameras are there, the assumption is that you're already guilty of something and they're just waiting to catch you. That's a real problem. Then again, that's one of those many reasons for why I won't live in England.
I'd agree with you that the free market might have done it, but that it would have taken a long time. You'd have private charities start up for humanitarian causes, etc, that sprouted from various countries as their respective standard of living rose. Again, this would take a long time. Since the UN did not use force to accomplish those various goals, it is acceptable. Nations volunteer aid as money, product, or personnel.
You did mention a few reasons why the UN shouldn't be involved in this, though. First, they aren't a representative government, so there is no way to directly influence their decisions. Second, they don't actually run any other infrastructure, and have no real authority to do so. As you mentioned, they are mostly a diplomatic body for discussion, not a ruling or lawmaking body.
In the case of the Internet, it really is a market driven medium, market supported, and market paid medium and not a public resource. We get the benefit of the network as is made available by the companies that keep it running. We have very successful international working groups that ratify standards and discuss problems and fixes. The market has already taken care of broad international groups separate from governments for most of the Internet.
The only things that are still tied to any particular government are DNS and IP addressing. IP addressing is broken apart into different geographic regions, so it's largely outside of government control. The only one that they are really discussing is DNS.
It would definitely be better to get it out from under US control, but giving it to another set of governments isn't going to make it any better. We should be striving for cooperative control of the root zone by independent private groups rather than any government control at all.
He won't do it, but what about some business whose owner takes a personal hatred towards you? What of a millionaire or similar?
Any private speech should be protected, but public speech is not private, obviously. You can't just up and allow people to spread outright lies publically, nor can you let someone just put up information that would likely endanger your welfare, and certainly negatively impact your business and social life.
There is a difference between public venue and private property. In my house, I should be able to say whatever I want; in public, I should have to mind my manners. If I am publically lying about a person in public, then that should be actionable.
I agree with the GP that you should be able to do/say pretty much anything you want to on and with your own property. You should be able to hire whomever you please without fear of a discrimination suit, and you should be able to fire people the same way. You should be able to refuse to serve Austrians in your restaurant, require everyone to where a green shirt, etc.
I don't go so far as to say that the same rules hold true on public property or using a public resource. The government must treat everyone exactly the same, regardless or race or station, or you have a breakdown in the system. A person using public property can't be allowed to abuse it to put forth mistruths; they have their own property for that.
In the US, having our freedoms restored from the poor wording of the Civil Rights Act would do a great deal to rid ourselves of discrimination. Instead of it being illegal to do all those things I mentioned, make it illegal for the government to do them. That is as it should be. That would rid us of horrible things like affirmative action, the so called "equal opportunity" laws, race based college financial aid, etc.
It certainly wouldn't create an "underclass" by allowing people to freely associate and freely express themselves. The discriminatory laws that require such things as what I mentioned in the last paragraph *do* create underclasses and priviledged groups. People don't seem to understand or care that in the US, we are required by law to discriminate.
Considering the obscene price of a usable XBOX 360, why not just go and throw in the some of the old hardware? How much would a mid-range p3 and interconnects add to that $400? Or they could've talked to a company like HP about the hardware emulation they did for IA32 instructions for the Itanium.
The problem here is that Microsoft half-assed their console line, picked the wrong hardware, and then decided to toss it all out the window and make something new and incompatible. They screwed up with their design, and now they have to do software emulation of their old processors to get to a point where old games *might* work. This is exactly what is expected of MS. They don't think through their designs with the future in mind, and then they have to scrap it and start over again, usually twice.
And so much for the HAL built into Windows... the only things they should have to be worrying about is a partial port of Windows to Power, and an emulation library to do ISA conversion from IA-32 to Power's ISA. I suspect that they would get better performance doing this than the original system had. Not that it's an easy task to write a reliable emulation library, but spread across all their sales, it probably wouldn't have added more than 20$ to the price. And hey, if people are ready to buy a stripped down, less useful piece of hardware than the equivalent priced computer, why wouldn't they spend another 20$ for backwards compatibility?
Article 1 Section 9 is an enumerated list of thing the Federal is prohibited from doing. The only change is Section 9 Clause 4, which was Amendment 16 - the income tax.
Article 4 Section 2 Clause 3 doesn't legalize slavery, it prohibits someone under a service or labor arrangement from fleeing to another state to escape the laws in the original state that held them to that service or labor.
While it is good that the latter is gone, it isn't quite what you imply, either. What is the reference in Article 1 that you're referring to?
I suppose you could be referring to Clause 1, however that doesn't allow slavery, either. It allows a tax to be levied for a person entering the country.
While I agree with many of your general statements, I disagree that the UN being slow and inefficient is an advantage in this case. You need DNS to simply work. You don't want change by committee, or random TLDs, or root servers run by some random country. Right now, it's kept securely operational, well distributed, and clean. Giving it to the UN would be a huge unknown quantity.
While change is usually a good thing, you tend to want to know what you'd be changing into before you're committed to doing so.
Also, who has DNS isn't really going to make a lick of difference for P2P. Corporations might do something really stupid, like what Verisign did with site finder, but at least the backlash meant something. If it was the UN, you'd never get it fixed.
Of course, you're right about the US not being some kind of perfection. It's a good system that has been twisted around. It barely resembles the original framework, at this point.
The problem you get with the way that the UN or the EU is talking about doing it, is that you would have an even *bigger* beauracracy in charge of it. You *would* have countries like China or Iran or Cuba that took up as chair of the DNS committee. You'd have a technical resource directly controlled by a "government" with no actual authority. It's one thing to set standards on an international level, but quite another to have things like this controlled by something like the UN.
The US shouldn't be running DNS, nor should the EU or the UN. Right now, the US doesn't really run it, but they have influence. If it was in the UN, then lots of people accountable to none of us would have influence, and quite a few of them are nearly diametrically opposed to free speech, or even freedom in general.
That is not exactly the case. Europe is talking about taking control of DNS, which is currently run by America. The US isn't will to cede control, so various countries are talking about trying to use a form of force to remove US control. While it is certainly possible for them to do this without using actual force, it undermines the current system to do so.
You can't accurately say that this is the US trying for world domination. The US already has it, and doesn't want to give it up. Objectively, it looks more like the UN is trying for world domination.;-)
DNS is a cooperative system. Everyone chose to use the server that the US administers, and everyone could choose to not continue doing so. However, that puts something that is critical in the hands of a group with an unknown track record for running DNS, with an infrastructure of unknown reliability, and with unknown (as of yet) policies. You may or may not continue to have the domains you currently do.
The UN, et al, is making this a huge deal over something they didn't have a reason to be involved in. They're right be on the receiving end of a big fight; if a change to DNS happens, it should be to entirely remove government influences, not to create a much large influence.
DNS *is* only a small part of what the Internet is, however it is one of the most important services that exists on it. Most everything is located and connections established by resolving a DNS name to an IP. Email depends upon DNS almost completely, for example. Without DNS, we're thrown back to the days where you had to maintain and copy around massive tables for everything, so that you know what the IP of the mail exchange is, what the web server IP is, etc.
Even things like Microsoft's Active Directory require a DNS infrastructure to work, though it doesn't need the global DNS that we're talking about.
In this case, you can pretty much consider it to be "the internet", since, while IP and associated routing will still work fine, most services will not.
Huh, yeah, will you look at that, I hadn't realized it (obviously;-). You'd have to know where to look manually, for now. Or convince the spyware/virus scanner developers to add signatures for something they can't normally detect.
BartPE plus RootkitRevealer, AdAware, Spybot, AVG, etc. You can customize the preinstalled environment, and most of that software will work off network shares, etc. I don't know of anything yet developed under Linux for doing spyware scans, unfortunately.
Yes, MS has a PE (preinstalled environment), and there is also the free Bart's PE. They create a bootable Windows LiveCD, basically. I've used BartPE, and it works great.
Some people have day jobs... mine happens to be in government. Some other people apparently do not interact with the public, or with users - for example: you. You're quite misinformed about most of your points, and outright wrong about others. I'd be wrong to say you know nothing about it, but you definitely fit the category of "knows enough to be dangerous".
1) Wordpad cannot do the formatting or scripting of any MS Word document. It also cannot open OpenDocument or WordXML. Also, MS Office docs are large because they are OLE memory dumps. It has nothing, at all, to do with compatibilty. It lets the programmers be lazy, and has the side benefit of fast loading documents.
2) The CIO, and ITD, do not report to the people as their function is not to provide service to the people. Their responsibility is internal to the government. However, since their policy effects how the public interacts with the government, it is even more important than a typical IT department. Also, if I was so inclined to care who appointed the CIO, I could've looked up the public record.
3) The CIO made the best decision concerning the data that it was generally possible to make. The CIO and ITD do not gain by getting rid of the MS format documents. They have no stake in what format gets used any more than anyone else. Moving to DOS across the board would be pretty stupid, but it might also be the best decision for some circumstances. They aren't really that similar of cases, anyway.
4) If the State standardised that new electronic documents are to be in a certain format, then it effects everyone that works in, and with, the State. BTW - there is more to the Registry than clerks and a few officers, too, and they don't do nearly everything through their custom system.
5) NT4 is still commonly used on State machines, and likely will be until those computers stop working. Also, many municipalities still have NT4 machines, and they need to communicate with the State, too. If the State starts sending documents in OpenDocument, the cities and towns need to be able to read and write them. That's the only reason that a number of municipalities keep Office around. You have a bad habit of assuming that the State does regular hardware upgrades and such; they don't do that across the board. Also, hardware specs for Office 2003 are irrelevant, you need to worry about Office Vista. *Those* hardware and software requirements are substantially higher.
7) People are familiar with clicking the link that says "click here to download the program to view this file". PDF is also an open format, so anyone can implement it. That's why you can do things like click the "Print to PDF" button in OpenOffice, or any number of other applications. The MS format is heavily obfuscated and encumbered by copyright and patent. OfficeXML is *less* so, but still is not open. Besides, people do download and run any little stupid crap thing... that's what keeps all the repair shops in business, and also one of the largest driving factors in new PC sales. They'll certainly download the thing from the link next to the OpenDocument files.
You really don't know any of the important facts on this. You don't know how average people act, you don't know about the formats, and you don't know how the State operates. You obviously don't work for or with the State, and likely have little interaction with government, at all. You want to give reasons why choosing a new format is bad, then give real reasons.
You're spouting absolutely incorrect information all over this post. I'm going out on a limb here and I'm going to say that I know more than you on this topic. I happen to be a government official in MA, so I feel very comfortable saying that I know more than you about this. Just because a couple Senators say it, doesn't make it correct; it isn't their job to know everything about everything.
1) The State distributes public documents in PDF, not in Word docs. They occasionally will send Word and Excel files around to other government institutions, if they require a lot of data input, formulas, or validation. This *already* causes severe compatibility problems due to issues between versions of MS software.
2) Appointed positions have to be voted upon by elected representatives. There is your accountability.
3) The State has a CIO, and ITD, and various others to make these decisions and recommendations. If they ignore these people/departments, they are basically making them unnecessary, and should justify why they're spending the money for nothing.
4) The State does have several tens of thousands of desktops. Every municipal government has several State machines to do voter registration, police queries, and other functions. You have things like the Registry, with their many thousands of machines, you have courts, DOR, DLS, DET, etc. So yes, there are a very lot of desktops out there under State control.
5) The State tends to run with old computers until they do a full replacement, or they die (it seems whichever is longer;-). Many current machines are running NT4, and, as they pointed out, there are still Win98 machines out there, too. XP won't run on those computers, and neither will Office 12. Using OpenOffice would give them more life from existing equipment, if they desire.
6) You forgot support agreements on all that hardware/software. Not that all of it will be purchased with those agreements. It depends on whether they're doing RFP, going with the bid list under existing contract, etc.
7) People aren't going to be worried about those things, at all. They had to install something to read all those PDFs on nearly every State and Federal website. If they're downloading tax forms, those are PDF, for example. People certainly don't get all worried about installing some random software, either.
The elected officials are talking about squashing this likely because some MS agent bent their ear on it. If you read some of the things that people said against using OpenDocument, and requiring Word, you see how unfounded many of those comments really are. All the talk about disability and accessibility was quite interested. Software had to be specially written for Office because of it's non-standard nature, for example.
If this initiative gets shot down, I think you'll find that it had everything to do with MS influence, and nothing to do with worrying about the People.
Actually, OpenOffice includes a mass document converter. I'm sure that there will be various other tools developed in short order once this becomes more common, too. If MA actually follows through on this, there'll probably be other software developed just for doing this.
PDF is only good for fixed content. Anything that you're going to be working with the data in you can't put into a format like that! If it's headed for an archive, then PDF is a fine way to do it. If it's a MS Word.doc now, then it's probably best to convert it to an editable format, so OpenDocument.
Realistically, if your project to convert things is happening now, what else would you convert to? OpenDocument already has good support, is a very clearly defined format, and is unencumbered. It's also easy to work with to generate documents from other data.
Re:How much difference between Java and C++?
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It's an issue of the Java XML classes, not so much Java being slow in general. The need to do constant DOM traversal and such makes it sluggish.
While debugging and things may be easier in Java, they're certainly doable in C++. My point was simply that writing a project in a mixed pile of languages is not the best way. Java might be easier to debug, but 30 linked Java programs, a bunch of C++ programs, a few different APIs, and various differnt platforms to worry about is never easy to debug. Having the mix of languages just adds to the difficulty. Plus, you have to deal with even more IPC, and you have to deal with a software requirement that you can't distribute.
If it was all Java, then it wouldn't be as much a problem. You load the VM when you start it up, and everything is fine after that.
How many copies of the JRE do you have in memory? How many copies of the C library, or C++ library? What's that? Oh, one JRE for each Java program, but only one copy of the C/C++ libraries. Hmm, that looks like a very bad thing for normal applications being written in Java.
Azureus is a good program, but not because it is Java. The developer was good at writing the program. It could easily be written in C/C++, and *it would perform better*. It would require less memory and it would have a faster startup time. Considering that the type of code doesn't lend well to runtime optimization, it also runs slower, in general, than an optimised native app. I run Azureus for lack of choice in good native Linux bittorrent clients. The program bugs me, though... the UI isn't very well done and isn't responsive. It also uses more memory than I would like, considering what it does.
Eclipse *IS NOT* the most actively used IDE... Microsoft Visual Studio is.
While I would say that Java isn't restricted to a learning tool and db interface, it is not used in a majority of desktop apps. When you consider how many desktop apps are *not* Java, it would be accurate to see that Java is hardly ever used there. Its most high profile use in a desktop app is also the focus of the current "slow and bloated" discussion, too.
Java does have its drawbacks, and I agree, they aren't as severe as a lot of people make them out to be. This doesn't make the problems inconsequential, though. I really isn't currently suited for desktop app development. There are problems that need to be addressed first.
Looking at my own system, if I instanced a JRE for each app I'm running, I would have used over 280MB RAM just for the JRE. (Est. 20MB per app.) That needs to be fixed in a big way before it is viable.
Re:How much difference between Java and C++?
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Actually, just in casual use I have found two non-script places. The first is the well known database engine in Base. The second is the MS-XML filter.
I have the oddest suspicion that if they wrote the whole thing in the most appropriate single language, it would be faster. I *know* that MS-XML filter would be faster had they written it in C++ instead of Java.
People just need to get out of this habit of picking their favorite language or toolkit or Perl module instead of picking the most appropriate. Having to load a JRE for a few random things when you have a largely C++ project is a waste of resources. It was immature to do what they did, and the problem is too common. They didn't *finish* the product before they claimed it was release quality. They made it feature complete, they fixed many of the bugs, but they didn't keep going to the end. It's the same problem that Firefox and Thunderbird have, for example. You can't put together a product that does the same things as everyone else, but does them all slower, and expect people to not complain.
I still plan on replacing Office with OOo, but I would've liked for users to have seen an obvious improvment. Instead of noticing so many of the nicer features and methods, what they're going to see is that it takes a lot longer to start, longer to load files, longer to print, etc. The way that OOo has been handled bothers me quite a bit, as you can tell; enough that the two reasons left for moving to it are cost and the OpenDocument format.
Disabling Java does make OpenOffice start up and run much better. Unforunately, too many things in OOo are written in Java, and some of them are things that one wouldn't expect. The one that I just discovered was the MS XML import filter.
Perhaps if the income tax were levied by the local or State government, then I would go with it. I definitely disagree with the Federal collecting income tax *at all*. I don't like the idea of the government taking your money in the way that they do. I don't even really like the idea of a property tax because it mean, in effect, that you're only renting your land. I'm just not sure what a better way would be.
First, I want to say that I agree that corporations should never be considered a citizen, in any respect. The government is for the pepole, not for the corporations. A corp. is suffered by the people and government because it is an important structure, much like patents or copyrights. To exist, a corp. must be granted a charter by the State, and that charter can be revoked. This never happens, though, and it is a shame in many ways.
Second, I disagree with you over the election of senators. The reason for having a two part Congress was so that the people had representation in the Federal at the same time as the States having representation. Without the Senate being appointed by the States, you have no representation to argue for the States' rights. This directly causes a movement of power away from the States and into the Federal. While I agree that it seems like having more representatives of the people is better, you have to remember that it wasn't the point of the Senate to provide that.
The Senate gave all States an equal voice, just as the House gave the people an equal voice. That is why every State has the same number of senators, but representatives in the House are based on population. There is no sense in having Congress divided into two chambers if they are both elected by the same body.
I wasn't saying that the people having the vote was the corruption, but rather that having the entirety of Congress elected by the people allowed the corruption to occur.
Naysayers on this be damned, but you are right. If you're going to have property tax, then it needs to be an equal property tax. Everyone needs to pay in, and that definitely includes church related stuff. The upshot of doing it would be a huge increase in the amount of revenue in local governments. That would be extraordinary, since they might not have to keep begging from the State and Federal, as they do now.
Besides, if you want the government to be hands-off from the church, how can you have to government give them special cases and exemptions? That's would be the *opposite* of hands-off!
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Heh, no kidding. Up in the North-East there's I-84 that runs from central Massachusetts into Pennsylvania. There's a stretch in Connecticut that is supposed to be 50mph, and that continues for an absolutely ridiculous amount of miles. It starts justified, as it goes through the middle of a city, but then it's still 50/55mph on a straight highway with nothing around.
;-)
The bit that goes through that city is a little intimidating. Traffic goes 75-85mph with heavy volume and not so good visibility. You never see a cop out on that road through there. I've been told that the patrol officers aren't willing to risk their lives to give out speeding tickets on that road.
Hell, at one point I was going through there, made it out of the city alive, and was cruising along happily at 70mph after it went up to 65 again. Some tractor trailer decided to pass me in the middle lane, cut me off, and lock his brakes. Mind you, it is illegal for rigs to be in the left lane there, and there was maybe five vehicles in sight on those four lanes. That car never worked again. I try not to drive in Connecticut.
State police have no problems issuing lots of tickets in their wonderful 40 miles of undeveloped land, where they refuse to raise the limit from 55mph. Average speed there is around 75mph, and there is excellent visibility. I see at least three cars pulled over every time I drive that stretch.
The excuse for these things is to keep the speed down, but the reason is to tax the people as much as possible. Speed limits in most anywhere have only a passing correlation to safe speeds. People ignore the speed limits because they are arbitrarily low. We aren't driving the impossible to corner and shakes at over 60mph cars of decades ago. We aren't driving with solid rubber tires, steel on steel locking brakes, or no suspensions (in most cases). Those in power would simply rather tax by issuing unneccessary traffic violations than raise the speed limits.
One of the reasons for having an officer issue tickets was that they examined the situation and decided whether they felt a violation was in order. Then you had officers running around playing ticket-tron throwing violations to every third car. Now people lock their brakes and stop paying attention when they see a police car. The same thing has happend with these ridiculous cameras, except now people are never paying full attention to the road, lest they may drift 1 mph over the limit.
Operating a car is most certainly not a privilege; operating one on a public roadway is a licensed privilege. If you built your own private road, you could drive however you wanted.
Oh, and don't get on so much with the cars kill people bit. Everything kills people. People fall down stairs every day, so we put cameras into every house to make sure the kids didn't leave toys on the steps? How about we put them in every kitchen just in case someone decides to stab another with a kitchen knife, and in every bathroom because people are drowned in the bath.
If the cameras are there, the assumption is that you're already guilty of something and they're just waiting to catch you. That's a real problem. Then again, that's one of those many reasons for why I won't live in England.
I'd agree with you that the free market might have done it, but that it would have taken a long time. You'd have private charities start up for humanitarian causes, etc, that sprouted from various countries as their respective standard of living rose. Again, this would take a long time. Since the UN did not use force to accomplish those various goals, it is acceptable. Nations volunteer aid as money, product, or personnel.
You did mention a few reasons why the UN shouldn't be involved in this, though. First, they aren't a representative government, so there is no way to directly influence their decisions. Second, they don't actually run any other infrastructure, and have no real authority to do so. As you mentioned, they are mostly a diplomatic body for discussion, not a ruling or lawmaking body.
In the case of the Internet, it really is a market driven medium, market supported, and market paid medium and not a public resource. We get the benefit of the network as is made available by the companies that keep it running. We have very successful international working groups that ratify standards and discuss problems and fixes. The market has already taken care of broad international groups separate from governments for most of the Internet.
The only things that are still tied to any particular government are DNS and IP addressing. IP addressing is broken apart into different geographic regions, so it's largely outside of government control. The only one that they are really discussing is DNS.
It would definitely be better to get it out from under US control, but giving it to another set of governments isn't going to make it any better. We should be striving for cooperative control of the root zone by independent private groups rather than any government control at all.
He won't do it, but what about some business whose owner takes a personal hatred towards you? What of a millionaire or similar?
Any private speech should be protected, but public speech is not private, obviously. You can't just up and allow people to spread outright lies publically, nor can you let someone just put up information that would likely endanger your welfare, and certainly negatively impact your business and social life.
There is a difference between public venue and private property. In my house, I should be able to say whatever I want; in public, I should have to mind my manners. If I am publically lying about a person in public, then that should be actionable.
I agree with the GP that you should be able to do/say pretty much anything you want to on and with your own property. You should be able to hire whomever you please without fear of a discrimination suit, and you should be able to fire people the same way. You should be able to refuse to serve Austrians in your restaurant, require everyone to where a green shirt, etc.
I don't go so far as to say that the same rules hold true on public property or using a public resource. The government must treat everyone exactly the same, regardless or race or station, or you have a breakdown in the system. A person using public property can't be allowed to abuse it to put forth mistruths; they have their own property for that.
In the US, having our freedoms restored from the poor wording of the Civil Rights Act would do a great deal to rid ourselves of discrimination. Instead of it being illegal to do all those things I mentioned, make it illegal for the government to do them. That is as it should be. That would rid us of horrible things like affirmative action, the so called "equal opportunity" laws, race based college financial aid, etc.
It certainly wouldn't create an "underclass" by allowing people to freely associate and freely express themselves. The discriminatory laws that require such things as what I mentioned in the last paragraph *do* create underclasses and priviledged groups. People don't seem to understand or care that in the US, we are required by law to discriminate.
Considering the obscene price of a usable XBOX 360, why not just go and throw in the some of the old hardware? How much would a mid-range p3 and interconnects add to that $400? Or they could've talked to a company like HP about the hardware emulation they did for IA32 instructions for the Itanium.
The problem here is that Microsoft half-assed their console line, picked the wrong hardware, and then decided to toss it all out the window and make something new and incompatible. They screwed up with their design, and now they have to do software emulation of their old processors to get to a point where old games *might* work. This is exactly what is expected of MS. They don't think through their designs with the future in mind, and then they have to scrap it and start over again, usually twice.
And so much for the HAL built into Windows... the only things they should have to be worrying about is a partial port of Windows to Power, and an emulation library to do ISA conversion from IA-32 to Power's ISA. I suspect that they would get better performance doing this than the original system had. Not that it's an easy task to write a reliable emulation library, but spread across all their sales, it probably wouldn't have added more than 20$ to the price. And hey, if people are ready to buy a stripped down, less useful piece of hardware than the equivalent priced computer, why wouldn't they spend another 20$ for backwards compatibility?
Article 1 Section 9 is an enumerated list of thing the Federal is prohibited from doing. The only change is Section 9 Clause 4, which was Amendment 16 - the income tax.
Article 4 Section 2 Clause 3 doesn't legalize slavery, it prohibits someone under a service or labor arrangement from fleeing to another state to escape the laws in the original state that held them to that service or labor.
While it is good that the latter is gone, it isn't quite what you imply, either. What is the reference in Article 1 that you're referring to?
I suppose you could be referring to Clause 1, however that doesn't allow slavery, either. It allows a tax to be levied for a person entering the country.
While I agree with many of your general statements, I disagree that the UN being slow and inefficient is an advantage in this case. You need DNS to simply work. You don't want change by committee, or random TLDs, or root servers run by some random country. Right now, it's kept securely operational, well distributed, and clean. Giving it to the UN would be a huge unknown quantity.
While change is usually a good thing, you tend to want to know what you'd be changing into before you're committed to doing so.
Also, who has DNS isn't really going to make a lick of difference for P2P. Corporations might do something really stupid, like what Verisign did with site finder, but at least the backlash meant something. If it was the UN, you'd never get it fixed.
Of course, you're right about the US not being some kind of perfection. It's a good system that has been twisted around. It barely resembles the original framework, at this point.
The problem you get with the way that the UN or the EU is talking about doing it, is that you would have an even *bigger* beauracracy in charge of it. You *would* have countries like China or Iran or Cuba that took up as chair of the DNS committee. You'd have a technical resource directly controlled by a "government" with no actual authority. It's one thing to set standards on an international level, but quite another to have things like this controlled by something like the UN.
The US shouldn't be running DNS, nor should the EU or the UN. Right now, the US doesn't really run it, but they have influence. If it was in the UN, then lots of people accountable to none of us would have influence, and quite a few of them are nearly diametrically opposed to free speech, or even freedom in general.
That is not exactly the case. Europe is talking about taking control of DNS, which is currently run by America. The US isn't will to cede control, so various countries are talking about trying to use a form of force to remove US control. While it is certainly possible for them to do this without using actual force, it undermines the current system to do so.
;-)
You can't accurately say that this is the US trying for world domination. The US already has it, and doesn't want to give it up. Objectively, it looks more like the UN is trying for world domination.
DNS is a cooperative system. Everyone chose to use the server that the US administers, and everyone could choose to not continue doing so. However, that puts something that is critical in the hands of a group with an unknown track record for running DNS, with an infrastructure of unknown reliability, and with unknown (as of yet) policies. You may or may not continue to have the domains you currently do.
The UN, et al, is making this a huge deal over something they didn't have a reason to be involved in. They're right be on the receiving end of a big fight; if a change to DNS happens, it should be to entirely remove government influences, not to create a much large influence.
DNS *is* only a small part of what the Internet is, however it is one of the most important services that exists on it. Most everything is located and connections established by resolving a DNS name to an IP. Email depends upon DNS almost completely, for example. Without DNS, we're thrown back to the days where you had to maintain and copy around massive tables for everything, so that you know what the IP of the mail exchange is, what the web server IP is, etc.
Even things like Microsoft's Active Directory require a DNS infrastructure to work, though it doesn't need the global DNS that we're talking about.
In this case, you can pretty much consider it to be "the internet", since, while IP and associated routing will still work fine, most services will not.
Huh, yeah, will you look at that, I hadn't realized it (obviously ;-). You'd have to know where to look manually, for now. Or convince the spyware/virus scanner developers to add signatures for something they can't normally detect.
BartPE plus RootkitRevealer, AdAware, Spybot, AVG, etc. You can customize the preinstalled environment, and most of that software will work off network shares, etc. I don't know of anything yet developed under Linux for doing spyware scans, unfortunately.
Yes, MS has a PE (preinstalled environment), and there is also the free Bart's PE. They create a bootable Windows LiveCD, basically. I've used BartPE, and it works great.
Some people have day jobs... mine happens to be in government. Some other people apparently do not interact with the public, or with users - for example: you. You're quite misinformed about most of your points, and outright wrong about others. I'd be wrong to say you know nothing about it, but you definitely fit the category of "knows enough to be dangerous".
1) Wordpad cannot do the formatting or scripting of any MS Word document. It also cannot open OpenDocument or WordXML. Also, MS Office docs are large because they are OLE memory dumps. It has nothing, at all, to do with compatibilty. It lets the programmers be lazy, and has the side benefit of fast loading documents.
2) The CIO, and ITD, do not report to the people as their function is not to provide service to the people. Their responsibility is internal to the government. However, since their policy effects how the public interacts with the government, it is even more important than a typical IT department. Also, if I was so inclined to care who appointed the CIO, I could've looked up the public record.
3) The CIO made the best decision concerning the data that it was generally possible to make. The CIO and ITD do not gain by getting rid of the MS format documents. They have no stake in what format gets used any more than anyone else. Moving to DOS across the board would be pretty stupid, but it might also be the best decision for some circumstances. They aren't really that similar of cases, anyway.
4) If the State standardised that new electronic documents are to be in a certain format, then it effects everyone that works in, and with, the State. BTW - there is more to the Registry than clerks and a few officers, too, and they don't do nearly everything through their custom system.
5) NT4 is still commonly used on State machines, and likely will be until those computers stop working. Also, many municipalities still have NT4 machines, and they need to communicate with the State, too. If the State starts sending documents in OpenDocument, the cities and towns need to be able to read and write them. That's the only reason that a number of municipalities keep Office around. You have a bad habit of assuming that the State does regular hardware upgrades and such; they don't do that across the board. Also, hardware specs for Office 2003 are irrelevant, you need to worry about Office Vista. *Those* hardware and software requirements are substantially higher.
7) People are familiar with clicking the link that says "click here to download the program to view this file". PDF is also an open format, so anyone can implement it. That's why you can do things like click the "Print to PDF" button in OpenOffice, or any number of other applications. The MS format is heavily obfuscated and encumbered by copyright and patent. OfficeXML is *less* so, but still is not open. Besides, people do download and run any little stupid crap thing... that's what keeps all the repair shops in business, and also one of the largest driving factors in new PC sales. They'll certainly download the thing from the link next to the OpenDocument files.
You really don't know any of the important facts on this. You don't know how average people act, you don't know about the formats, and you don't know how the State operates. You obviously don't work for or with the State, and likely have little interaction with government, at all. You want to give reasons why choosing a new format is bad, then give real reasons.
You're spouting absolutely incorrect information all over this post. I'm going out on a limb here and I'm going to say that I know more than you on this topic. I happen to be a government official in MA, so I feel very comfortable saying that I know more than you about this. Just because a couple Senators say it, doesn't make it correct; it isn't their job to know everything about everything.
;-). Many current machines are running NT4, and, as they pointed out, there are still Win98 machines out there, too. XP won't run on those computers, and neither will Office 12. Using OpenOffice would give them more life from existing equipment, if they desire.
1) The State distributes public documents in PDF, not in Word docs. They occasionally will send Word and Excel files around to other government institutions, if they require a lot of data input, formulas, or validation. This *already* causes severe compatibility problems due to issues between versions of MS software.
2) Appointed positions have to be voted upon by elected representatives. There is your accountability.
3) The State has a CIO, and ITD, and various others to make these decisions and recommendations. If they ignore these people/departments, they are basically making them unnecessary, and should justify why they're spending the money for nothing.
4) The State does have several tens of thousands of desktops. Every municipal government has several State machines to do voter registration, police queries, and other functions. You have things like the Registry, with their many thousands of machines, you have courts, DOR, DLS, DET, etc. So yes, there are a very lot of desktops out there under State control.
5) The State tends to run with old computers until they do a full replacement, or they die (it seems whichever is longer
6) You forgot support agreements on all that hardware/software. Not that all of it will be purchased with those agreements. It depends on whether they're doing RFP, going with the bid list under existing contract, etc.
7) People aren't going to be worried about those things, at all. They had to install something to read all those PDFs on nearly every State and Federal website. If they're downloading tax forms, those are PDF, for example. People certainly don't get all worried about installing some random software, either.
The elected officials are talking about squashing this likely because some MS agent bent their ear on it. If you read some of the things that people said against using OpenDocument, and requiring Word, you see how unfounded many of those comments really are. All the talk about disability and accessibility was quite interested. Software had to be specially written for Office because of it's non-standard nature, for example.
If this initiative gets shot down, I think you'll find that it had everything to do with MS influence, and nothing to do with worrying about the People.
Actually, OpenOffice includes a mass document converter. I'm sure that there will be various other tools developed in short order once this becomes more common, too. If MA actually follows through on this, there'll probably be other software developed just for doing this.
PDF is only good for fixed content. Anything that you're going to be working with the data in you can't put into a format like that! If it's headed for an archive, then PDF is a fine way to do it. If it's a MS Word .doc now, then it's probably best to convert it to an editable format, so OpenDocument.
Realistically, if your project to convert things is happening now, what else would you convert to? OpenDocument already has good support, is a very clearly defined format, and is unencumbered. It's also easy to work with to generate documents from other data.
It's an issue of the Java XML classes, not so much Java being slow in general. The need to do constant DOM traversal and such makes it sluggish.
While debugging and things may be easier in Java, they're certainly doable in C++. My point was simply that writing a project in a mixed pile of languages is not the best way. Java might be easier to debug, but 30 linked Java programs, a bunch of C++ programs, a few different APIs, and various differnt platforms to worry about is never easy to debug. Having the mix of languages just adds to the difficulty. Plus, you have to deal with even more IPC, and you have to deal with a software requirement that you can't distribute.
If it was all Java, then it wouldn't be as much a problem. You load the VM when you start it up, and everything is fine after that.
How many copies of the JRE do you have in memory? How many copies of the C library, or C++ library? What's that? Oh, one JRE for each Java program, but only one copy of the C/C++ libraries. Hmm, that looks like a very bad thing for normal applications being written in Java.
Azureus is a good program, but not because it is Java. The developer was good at writing the program. It could easily be written in C/C++, and *it would perform better*. It would require less memory and it would have a faster startup time. Considering that the type of code doesn't lend well to runtime optimization, it also runs slower, in general, than an optimised native app. I run Azureus for lack of choice in good native Linux bittorrent clients. The program bugs me, though... the UI isn't very well done and isn't responsive. It also uses more memory than I would like, considering what it does.
Eclipse *IS NOT* the most actively used IDE... Microsoft Visual Studio is.
While I would say that Java isn't restricted to a learning tool and db interface, it is not used in a majority of desktop apps. When you consider how many desktop apps are *not* Java, it would be accurate to see that Java is hardly ever used there. Its most high profile use in a desktop app is also the focus of the current "slow and bloated" discussion, too.
Java does have its drawbacks, and I agree, they aren't as severe as a lot of people make them out to be. This doesn't make the problems inconsequential, though. I really isn't currently suited for desktop app development. There are problems that need to be addressed first.
Looking at my own system, if I instanced a JRE for each app I'm running, I would have used over 280MB RAM just for the JRE. (Est. 20MB per app.) That needs to be fixed in a big way before it is viable.
Actually, just in casual use I have found two non-script places. The first is the well known database engine in Base. The second is the MS-XML filter.
I have the oddest suspicion that if they wrote the whole thing in the most appropriate single language, it would be faster. I *know* that MS-XML filter would be faster had they written it in C++ instead of Java.
People just need to get out of this habit of picking their favorite language or toolkit or Perl module instead of picking the most appropriate. Having to load a JRE for a few random things when you have a largely C++ project is a waste of resources. It was immature to do what they did, and the problem is too common. They didn't *finish* the product before they claimed it was release quality. They made it feature complete, they fixed many of the bugs, but they didn't keep going to the end. It's the same problem that Firefox and Thunderbird have, for example. You can't put together a product that does the same things as everyone else, but does them all slower, and expect people to not complain.
I still plan on replacing Office with OOo, but I would've liked for users to have seen an obvious improvment. Instead of noticing so many of the nicer features and methods, what they're going to see is that it takes a lot longer to start, longer to load files, longer to print, etc. The way that OOo has been handled bothers me quite a bit, as you can tell; enough that the two reasons left for moving to it are cost and the OpenDocument format.
Disabling Java does make OpenOffice start up and run much better. Unforunately, too many things in OOo are written in Java, and some of them are things that one wouldn't expect. The one that I just discovered was the MS XML import filter.
Perhaps if the income tax were levied by the local or State government, then I would go with it. I definitely disagree with the Federal collecting income tax *at all*. I don't like the idea of the government taking your money in the way that they do. I don't even really like the idea of a property tax because it mean, in effect, that you're only renting your land. I'm just not sure what a better way would be.
First, I want to say that I agree that corporations should never be considered a citizen, in any respect. The government is for the pepole, not for the corporations. A corp. is suffered by the people and government because it is an important structure, much like patents or copyrights. To exist, a corp. must be granted a charter by the State, and that charter can be revoked. This never happens, though, and it is a shame in many ways.
Second, I disagree with you over the election of senators. The reason for having a two part Congress was so that the people had representation in the Federal at the same time as the States having representation. Without the Senate being appointed by the States, you have no representation to argue for the States' rights. This directly causes a movement of power away from the States and into the Federal. While I agree that it seems like having more representatives of the people is better, you have to remember that it wasn't the point of the Senate to provide that.
The Senate gave all States an equal voice, just as the House gave the people an equal voice. That is why every State has the same number of senators, but representatives in the House are based on population. There is no sense in having Congress divided into two chambers if they are both elected by the same body.
I wasn't saying that the people having the vote was the corruption, but rather that having the entirety of Congress elected by the people allowed the corruption to occur.
Naysayers on this be damned, but you are right. If you're going to have property tax, then it needs to be an equal property tax. Everyone needs to pay in, and that definitely includes church related stuff. The upshot of doing it would be a huge increase in the amount of revenue in local governments. That would be extraordinary, since they might not have to keep begging from the State and Federal, as they do now.
Besides, if you want the government to be hands-off from the church, how can you have to government give them special cases and exemptions? That's would be the *opposite* of hands-off!