Look how much of the aid to Israel is in military aid - $2.2 billion just for military spending.
While the world does give a lot of money to the Paelestinian authority, even the military aid given by the US dwarfs the total aid that the Palestinians receive.
I agree that someone announcing Apple is about to fail does not prove that Apple is failing, but neither do previous false predictions disprove the current one.
Previous false predictions do not disprove the current one, but they should certainly be borne in mind when deciding whether or not to panic because someone has made a new prediction.
The fact that is important to me here is not that previous false predictions have been made, but that previous false predictions have been made that seemed, at the time, to be as well reasoned as the current one. It wasn't that all of the predictions of Apple's demise were obviously illogical. Clearly there is something about the way Apple works as a business that allows them to evolve, escaping even seemlingly-certain doom.
All those previous predictions that ended up being prooved wrong have shown me that that the demise of Apple cannot be predicted by logic, evidence and indicators. That makes me treat new predictions that are based on these approaches with a healthy pinch of salt.
What's so subversive about putting an AP in your backpack?
Well, in the short term (and potentially maliciously), you could use it to trick people into thinking its a legit access point. You'd be able to serve whatever web pages you wanted to in repsonse to requests from nearby wi-fi users. This would be better done with an uplink, though, allowing man in the middle attacks aplenty.
The longer term implication of something like this is that networks could become a lot more decentralised. At the moment, the freedom of the internet relies on the good nature of the people who own the backbone. If they decide to move towards more limitations then the rest of us just have to go along with it. If we all carried the infrastructure around with us then it would be completely decentralised. (The stuff talked about in the article is a long, long way from that being possible, though)
Alright, I am no fan of Microsoft. That said, accusing them of having stolen all their money is slander. They aren't thieves; they just practice unfair business practices. They are worlds away from a common thief, so don't compare them.
So a broke father who steals some food for his kids is a worse person than a company exec who uses illegal practices to make more profit and thus increase the value of their shares?
Crime is crime no matter how much money the criminal has.
Were I Bill Gates, my response to this fine would be obvious: Don't pay it, and refuse to make any of the changes they are demanding.
You know, I think the European Commission could quite easily get its hands on the money by confiscating the assets of all of the European MS subsidiaries.
Microsoft could choose not to sell into Europe any more, but I can't see MS wanting to run the risk of leaving the European market. Imagine if the EU decided to put its newly aquired $600million into getting Linux to the stage where businesses and governments across Europe could replace Windows with it. No, I don't think MS will want to go down that route.
Basically, what you are advocating is that corporations that are rich enough and who make products that are sufficiently well used should just ignore the rule of law. That doesn't sound like a very nice world to be heading towards to me.
Microsoft broke the law. Microsoft is now being punished for it. That's how the law works in Europe.
Microsoft broke the law. Microsoft is getting punished.
People are cheering because, for once, a big corporation is being held to the same standard as anyone else. You break the law, you take the consequences.
Are you really trying to compare the upholding of the law with terrorists killing thousands of people? Using the WTC attack as a debating tool is both tasteless and pointless.
The EU's budget in 2003 was 97.5 billion euros. That's over 120 billion dollars. You're suggesting that the EU is pursuing MS in order to increase its budget by a tiny percentage?
Take for example the EU's impending actions against Microsoft. This is a situation where European burocrats are going to enact terrible economic policy in order to prop up European companies who are unable to legitimately compete with Microsoft.
Please name the European companies that will be better able to compete with Microsoft following the EU ruling.
I can name several big American companies that stand to benefit from the punishment handed to MS, but no big European ones.
Microsoft broke the rules, were caught out and are now being punished. The same would have happend in America if the laws had actually been enforced.
If you think the EU is in any way anti-American in the way it makes these rulings then I suggest you take a look at the facts. Almost all such rulings are against European companies.
The EU has all sorts of faults - it is a long, long way from perfect, but I really think you are sniffing after a red herring here.
Okay, so all the hackers that plan to send their results to the company in question or the press stop hacking.
What are we left with then - just the hackers who are in it for the money. The ones who won't reveal what they have done and so probably won't ever get found out.
In fact, treating all hackers as malicious criminals, even if they 'do the right thing' after the event, is likely to dissuade them from coming forward with information about how they get into system. The black hats will have a field day.
Society needs people to test its security without malicious intent. It needs journalists to try to sneak weapons onto planes to expose poor airport security, it needs hackers who don't just siphon off the cash, it needs protesters trying to get into government buildings to hang banners. Without all of these people, the systems would be up against malicious attacks only and many security holes would stay open for long enough for real damage to be done.
>How does this attempt to retain solidarity with the OSS community?
I read the post as having a sarcastic tone in that sentence. I don't think the posting really thinks that dedicating a building to the MS founders mothers is retaining solidarity with the open source movement.
Replace "America does nothing" in those points with "America continues its one-sided involvement withe Arab-Israeli conflict" or "America continues to do secret deals with totalitarian rulers of Middle Eastern countries in order to ensure supply of oil" or "America continues to use it's super power status to move world econmies in a way that will benefit Americans ahead of anyone else"
It's not that America didn't respond to the attacks, it's that it didn't do anything to address the reasons why it was so easy for the terrorist leaders to convince people to fight for them.
For years, Americans wanted my government to solve the Northern Ireland issue by talking to the IRA. Things are not sorted yet, but they are certainly much better than they were. Why can the same approach not be taken by America?
Treat the terrorists as criminals - don't justify them by fighting a war on them and making them military leaders.
Investigate, find the criminals responsible and deal with them.
At the same time, look into what made people turn to crime in the first place. Do something about it.
A combination of approaches will bring a solution. Neither pure force or pure placation will get results.
We didn't start this war, but we are going to finish it.
Where did this war start anyway? Only the most ignorant of people would argue that America never did anything to inflame the situation that has been developing since the end of the second world war.
Surely your quote from Starship Troopers could be very easily taken as a justification for terrorism - if force is the best way to 'settle things' then the bomb is an attractive option...
Do not confuse our preference for ending this war in the more profitable and fun way with our capability of ending this war in a more direct manner.
I think you are underestimating the difficulty of winning a 'war on terror' You can't fight a successful war against an abstract noun.
A war against al-queida might be winnable, but the actions involved in hunting down and killing every last member will simply result in the formation of new networks.
The only way to defeat terrorism is to defeat its organisers (who are psychopaths who do not care about the people they claim to fight for) in the minds of those who might support them. Once the support is removed, the terrorists become lone nutters - dangerous on a small scale but no real threat to society.
In order to win the arguments and pull people away from the terrorists, we have to have the moral highground - not just in our own minds but in the eyes of the world. That means that we have to stop bending the rules of justice for all, we have to stop turning a blind eye to certain atrocities while condemning others, we have to stop the blatant profiteering that is going on in Iraq right now, we have to be absolutely assiduous in ensuring that our actions are transparently for the good of the world rather than to fill our own pockets.
Unfortunatley, I can see why the many good things that American/European culture has done for the world are lost amongst the bad things that some members of our culture do to benefit themselves.
No true businessperson would feel that way. It's a dumb, nationalistic sentiment that results in lower economic efficiency.
It is not neccessarily business people that are being referred to here. I read this point as referring to consumers.
Many Americans support 'Buy American' campaigns, in order to avoid sending money overseas or buying from countries they disagree politically with (e.g. the boycott of French good following their refusal to fall into line). That's dumn nationalism too, but is affects the sales of some goods.
It's probably one of the reasons why many of those countries are struggling economically in the first place.
I assume you are not claiming to have any credentials that would make me give that theory any credence at all.
There are all sorts of reasons why countries around the world are struggling while rich countries prosper. A lot of them have to do with raw materials being exported from poor contries with little money going to the people of the country themselves (as the mines/farms/oil fields/forests) are owned by multinationals.
Another reason is that most of the struggling econmies have been involved in one or more wars in the last few decades. Nothing messes an economy up more than the mass destruction of infrastructure, businesses and production facilities.
America did a great thing for Europe after the second world war. Without American support, Europe would have been in big,big trouble. The fact that the European economies have got themselves back on track shows that recovery from war can happen. Unfortunately, both America and Europe seen to have forgotten that to reconstruct after a war requires huge investment along with a willingness to do allow the people of the country to run their own affairs.
Nowerdays, whether it is in Africa, the Middle East or elsewhere, contributions from rich countries always come with huge strings attached for the benefit of Western corporations. That is a shortsighted view in my opinion. It will prevent economies from truly developing (for capitalism to work well, markets have to be free, not owned by a handful of corporations and people have to have the ability to create and run their own markets without the deck being stacked in the favour of the few)
It's easy to put the problems in so many of the worlds economies down to particular attitudes of the people of those countries but that just distracts from the real reasons. It takes a little more effort to look at the facts and see that, for all the good things European/American culture has done in the last few hundred years, it has also prevented the development of other economies. It takes some more effort still to see that this policy, far from being a rational self interest, is actually irrational - the development of the American and European Economies are ultimately linked to those of the rest of the world - the best thing for everyone, including US and European citizens, would to create sutainable, autonomous, helthy, economies everywhere.
'Apparently' is the important word there. There are a lot of 'apparently's when it comes to Hoagland.
If some of those 'apparently's become 'definitely's then I might be interested. Until then, all you have to go on is Hoaglands word. Given that so much of what he says is proovably (and proven) false, I'm not inclined to take anything he says at face value.
Were the paleontologists willing to come out in public and stake their reputations on it? Did Hoagland even check their credentials himself to ensure they weren't random crackpots posing as paleontologists? I doubt it.
That photo doesn't even have anything to give a sense of scale - how the hell could a paleontologists identify a specimen with no scale?
Pretty much all of the good points about using C# are about the common language runtime and JIT compiling rather than the language per se.
Things I like about C# as a language:
* Attributes - being able to add proper meta data to code is really nice if the team designs with it in mind.
* Proper structured error handling
errr...
Other than that, everything that has made me think 'that's nice' has been a feature of the runtime rather than the language.
In fact, the two I listed are really runtime features exposed through the language;)
Really, though, the language is nothing - if you know c and c++ then c# or Java would take you less than a day to learn (in terms of the language itself) The time is in learning the runtimes and the APIs.
I use C# because of ASP.NET - it is genuinely a great web development API for certain kinds of web application. It actually gets away from 'I'm outputting a stream of HTML' and allows you think at a higher level about what you want your application to do (although it does allow access to the raw stream if you want it) That's what these new languages and runtimes are all about, in my opinion - abstracting away and allowing us to think about what the application does rather than reinventing plumbing code. Not suitable for every task, but great for getting useful applications built.
Errr... You clearly are basing your views on the Spanish on some crap that you got from a second rate news service.
Sure, both the American media and the terrorists behind the Madrid bombing are painting the election result as a direct result of the Madrid attack, but it's a bit more complex than that.
The main reason that the ruling party lost themselves the election is that they continued to claim that the evidence pointed to ETA, even once it became clear that AlQueda-related terrorists were behind the attack.
The Spanish people really didn't like the fact that their government was using the deaths of 200 people to gain an electoral advantage and vote accordingly.
I truly think that, had the Spanish government dealt with the aftermath differently, they would still be in power.
Now the question is, will the people of America get as annoyed that their leader is trying to use the deaths of thousands of people to gain an electoral advantage?
The Socialist Party, now in power in Spain, consistently campaigned against the Iraq war while it was in opposition. It seems right that, if you campaign against something in opposition then, when you get into power, you should remain consistent with what you've been saying.
The other question is, if the Democrats get into power in America, will they remain true to what they've been saying while in opposition?
It is becoming increasingly apparent that insecure machines on the internet are not just a problem for the owner. With Spam, DDOS, Worms and email viruses as very real issues, infected computers can affect everyone.
Could it be possible for the owner of an infected machine to be held liable for the damage caused by their failure to secure it? Could an ISP be legally forced to disconnect such machines until they are clean?
Isn't copyright law intended give the author of a work the right to withhold publication and the right to decide how the work is published as well as the right to benefit from publication?
Yep, I was shocked when I first played with MySql, having heard such good things about it, and discovered how many features it lacked that I consider essential to a serious database.
I have since got over my shock and realised that MySql is really good for what it is, but is really a different kind of beast to Oracle, MSSql etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Total aid to Palestinian Authority: $1.2 billion per year
(source: http://www.washtimes.com/commentary/20031212-0750
This aid comes with heavy limitations on how it can be spent (although widespread corruption means most of it is not spent how it should be)
USA aid to Israel: $2.6 billion - $4 billion per year
(source: http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/US-Israel/U.S._A
Look how much of the aid to Israel is in military aid - $2.2 billion just for military spending.
While the world does give a lot of money to the Paelestinian authority, even the military aid given by the US dwarfs the total aid that the Palestinians receive.
Dan.
I agree that someone announcing Apple is about to fail does not prove that Apple is failing, but neither do previous false predictions disprove the current one.
Previous false predictions do not disprove the current one, but they should certainly be borne in mind when deciding whether or not to panic because someone has made a new prediction.
The fact that is important to me here is not that previous false predictions have been made, but that previous false predictions have been made that seemed, at the time, to be as well reasoned as the current one. It wasn't that all of the predictions of Apple's demise were obviously illogical. Clearly there is something about the way Apple works as a business that allows them to evolve, escaping even seemlingly-certain doom.
All those previous predictions that ended up being prooved wrong have shown me that that the demise of Apple cannot be predicted by logic, evidence and indicators. That makes me treat new predictions that are based on these approaches with a healthy pinch of salt.
Dan.
What's so subversive about putting an AP in your backpack?
Well, in the short term (and potentially maliciously), you could use it to trick people into thinking its a legit access point. You'd be able to serve whatever web pages you wanted to in repsonse to requests from nearby wi-fi users. This would be better done with an uplink, though, allowing man in the middle attacks aplenty.
The longer term implication of something like this is that networks could become a lot more decentralised. At the moment, the freedom of the internet relies on the good nature of the people who own the backbone. If they decide to move towards more limitations then the rest of us just have to go along with it. If we all carried the infrastructure around with us then it would be completely decentralised. (The stuff talked about in the article is a long, long way from that being possible, though)
Dan.
Alright, I am no fan of Microsoft. That said, accusing them of having stolen all their money is slander. They aren't thieves; they just practice unfair business practices. They are worlds away from a common thief, so don't compare them.
So a broke father who steals some food for his kids is a worse person than a company exec who uses illegal practices to make more profit and thus increase the value of their shares?
Crime is crime no matter how much money the criminal has.
Dan.
Were I Bill Gates, my response to this fine would be obvious: Don't pay it, and refuse to make any of the changes they are demanding.
You know, I think the European Commission could quite easily get its hands on the money by confiscating the assets of all of the European MS subsidiaries.
Microsoft could choose not to sell into Europe any more, but I can't see MS wanting to run the risk of leaving the European market. Imagine if the EU decided to put its newly aquired $600million into getting Linux to the stage where businesses and governments across Europe could replace Windows with it. No, I don't think MS will want to go down that route.
Basically, what you are advocating is that corporations that are rich enough and who make products that are sufficiently well used should just ignore the rule of law. That doesn't sound like a very nice world to be heading towards to me.
Microsoft broke the law. Microsoft is now being punished for it. That's how the law works in Europe.
Microsoft broke the law. Microsoft is getting punished.
People are cheering because, for once, a big corporation is being held to the same standard as anyone else. You break the law, you take the consequences.
Are you really trying to compare the upholding of the law with terrorists killing thousands of people? Using the WTC attack as a debating tool is both tasteless and pointless.
The EU's budget in 2003 was 97.5 billion euros. That's over 120 billion dollars. You're suggesting that the EU is pursuing MS in order to increase its budget by a tiny percentage?
Dan.
Please name the European companies that will be better able to compete with Microsoft following the EU ruling.
I can name several big American companies that stand to benefit from the punishment handed to MS, but no big European ones.
Microsoft broke the rules, were caught out and are now being punished. The same would have happend in America if the laws had actually been enforced.
If you think the EU is in any way anti-American in the way it makes these rulings then I suggest you take a look at the facts. Almost all such rulings are against European companies.
The EU has all sorts of faults - it is a long, long way from perfect, but I really think you are sniffing after a red herring here.
Dan.
Okay, so all the hackers that plan to send their results to the company in question or the press stop hacking.
What are we left with then - just the hackers who are in it for the money. The ones who won't reveal what they have done and so probably won't ever get found out.
In fact, treating all hackers as malicious criminals, even if they 'do the right thing' after the event, is likely to dissuade them from coming forward with information about how they get into system. The black hats will have a field day.
Society needs people to test its security without malicious intent. It needs journalists to try to sneak weapons onto planes to expose poor airport security, it needs hackers who don't just siphon off the cash, it needs protesters trying to get into government buildings to hang banners. Without all of these people, the systems would be up against malicious attacks only and many security holes would stay open for long enough for real damage to be done.
>How does this attempt to retain solidarity with the OSS community?
I read the post as having a sarcastic tone in that sentence. I don't think the posting really thinks that dedicating a building to the MS founders mothers is retaining solidarity with the open source movement.
Dan.
Or how about a 70 word version?
"Internet - powered by open source."
"Internet - carrier for open source."
"open source - developed through Internet."
"more secure than proprietary software."
"anti-Americanists like open source."
"open sourcers gain respect of peers."
"Open sourcers stand on shoulders of giants."
"Servers - expensive and proprietary, but Linux runs on Intel."
"Embedded devices - increasing use of open source."
"Increasing number of non-software companies developing software"
"More companies supporting Linux."
"Free."
How about 95 words then?
(Edited the points to remove some extraneous words)
"The Internet is powered by open source."
"The Internet is the carrier for open source."
"The Internet the platform through which open source is developed."
"It is more secure than proprietary software."
"Open source benefits from anti-American sentiments."
"Incentives around open source include the respect of one's peers."
"Open source means standing on the shoulders of giants."
"Servers have always been expensive and proprietary, but Linux runs on Intel."
"Embedded devices are making greater use of open source."
"There are an increasing number of non-software companies developing software"
"Companies are increasingly supporting Linux."
"It's free."
Replace "America does nothing" in those points with "America continues its one-sided involvement withe Arab-Israeli conflict" or "America continues to do secret deals with totalitarian rulers of Middle Eastern countries in order to ensure supply of oil" or "America continues to use it's super power status to move world econmies in a way that will benefit Americans ahead of anyone else"
It's not that America didn't respond to the attacks, it's that it didn't do anything to address the reasons why it was so easy for the terrorist leaders to convince people to fight for them.
For years, Americans wanted my government to solve the Northern Ireland issue by talking to the IRA. Things are not sorted yet, but they are certainly much better than they were. Why can the same approach not be taken by America?
Treat the terrorists as criminals - don't justify them by fighting a war on them and making them military leaders.
Investigate, find the criminals responsible and deal with them.
At the same time, look into what made people turn to crime in the first place. Do something about it.
A combination of approaches will bring a solution. Neither pure force or pure placation will get results.
Dan.
Where did this war start anyway? Only the most ignorant of people would argue that America never did anything to inflame the situation that has been developing since the end of the second world war.
Surely your quote from Starship Troopers could be very easily taken as a justification for terrorism - if force is the best way to 'settle things' then the bomb is an attractive option...
I think you are underestimating the difficulty of winning a 'war on terror' You can't fight a successful war against an abstract noun.
A war against al-queida might be winnable, but the actions involved in hunting down and killing every last member will simply result in the formation of new networks.
The only way to defeat terrorism is to defeat its organisers (who are psychopaths who do not care about the people they claim to fight for) in the minds of those who might support them. Once the support is removed, the terrorists become lone nutters - dangerous on a small scale but no real threat to society.
In order to win the arguments and pull people away from the terrorists, we have to have the moral highground - not just in our own minds but in the eyes of the world. That means that we have to stop bending the rules of justice for all, we have to stop turning a blind eye to certain atrocities while condemning others, we have to stop the blatant profiteering that is going on in Iraq right now, we have to be absolutely assiduous in ensuring that our actions are transparently for the good of the world rather than to fill our own pockets.
Unfortunatley, I can see why the many good things that American/European culture has done for the world are lost amongst the bad things that some members of our culture do to benefit themselves.
Dan.
'Apparently' is the important word there. There are a lot of 'apparently's when it comes to Hoagland.
If some of those 'apparently's become 'definitely's then I might be interested. Until then, all you have to go on is Hoaglands word. Given that so much of what he says is proovably (and proven) false, I'm not inclined to take anything he says at face value.
Were the paleontologists willing to come out in public and stake their reputations on it? Did Hoagland even check their credentials himself to ensure they weren't random crackpots posing as paleontologists? I doubt it.
That photo doesn't even have anything to give a sense of scale - how the hell could a paleontologists identify a specimen with no scale?
Dan.
Pretty much all of the good points about using C# are about the common language runtime and JIT compiling rather than the language per se.
Things I like about C# as a language:
* Attributes - being able to add proper meta data to code is really nice if the team designs with it in mind.
* Proper structured error handling
errr...
Other than that, everything that has made me think 'that's nice' has been a feature of the runtime rather than the language.
In fact, the two I listed are really runtime features exposed through the language
Really, though, the language is nothing - if you know c and c++ then c# or Java would take you less than a day to learn (in terms of the language itself) The time is in learning the runtimes and the APIs.
I use C# because of ASP.NET - it is genuinely a great web development API for certain kinds of web application. It actually gets away from 'I'm outputting a stream of HTML' and allows you think at a higher level about what you want your application to do (although it does allow access to the raw stream if you want it) That's what these new languages and runtimes are all about, in my opinion - abstracting away and allowing us to think about what the application does rather than reinventing plumbing code. Not suitable for every task, but great for getting useful applications built.
Dan.
Indeed. Compassion prevents wars. It can also stop wars once they have started.
Dan.
Is there no such thing as an American terrorist?
Even if you forget about the cases where US citizens have turned to terror, don't you think it is possible that US citizens could become terrorists?
Dan.
Which countries are you at war with?
Dan.
Errr... You clearly are basing your views on the Spanish on some crap that you got from a second rate news service.
Sure, both the American media and the terrorists behind the Madrid bombing are painting the election result as a direct result of the Madrid attack, but it's a bit more complex than that.
The main reason that the ruling party lost themselves the election is that they continued to claim that the evidence pointed to ETA, even once it became clear that AlQueda-related terrorists were behind the attack.
The Spanish people really didn't like the fact that their government was using the deaths of 200 people to gain an electoral advantage and vote accordingly.
I truly think that, had the Spanish government dealt with the aftermath differently, they would still be in power.
Now the question is, will the people of America get as annoyed that their leader is trying to use the deaths of thousands of people to gain an electoral advantage?
The Socialist Party, now in power in Spain, consistently campaigned against the Iraq war while it was in opposition. It seems right that, if you campaign against something in opposition then, when you get into power, you should remain consistent with what you've been saying.
The other question is, if the Democrats get into power in America, will they remain true to what they've been saying while in opposition?
Dan.
It is becoming increasingly apparent that insecure machines on the internet are not just a problem for the owner. With Spam, DDOS, Worms and email viruses as very real issues, infected computers can affect everyone.
Could it be possible for the owner of an infected machine to be held liable for the damage caused by their failure to secure it? Could an ISP be legally forced to disconnect such machines until they are clean?
Isn't copyright law intended give the author of a work the right to withhold publication and the right to decide how the work is published as well as the right to benefit from publication?
Do you think that Godwins Law should be updated to include "Terrorists" as well as "Nazis" as a thread-terminating comparison?
Dan.
No, I haven't tried them yet - I only use MySql on one of our sites at the moment and that host hasn't upgraded.
I'll have a look and see what improvements have been made.
Thanks for the note.
Dan.
Yep, I was shocked when I first played with MySql, having heard such good things about it, and discovered how many features it lacked that I consider essential to a serious database.
I have since got over my shock and realised that MySql is really good for what it is, but is really a different kind of beast to Oracle, MSSql etc.
Dan.