"As for PHP vs. Ruby, both technologies suck: except for minor differences in syntax and object model, they are naively designed and implemented. After decades of research in dynamic languages and OOP, it is a testament to widespread ignorance that people would produce and use something like that."
So if we have all this research on programming languages - how come it never seems to jump the gap to applied language design, let alone implementation, and why is it that for all the professional, tenured academics supposedly doing this research, it usually tends to be amateurs without any of this knowledge who take the radical step of actually sitting down and producing something usable?
Suggests that our academic system is seriously broken, doesn't it, if the people who supposedly know best how to build languages can't be bothered actually doing it?
in the sense that Mussolini used it, does not mean what you think it means. The word "corporation" did not mean "commercial enterprise" to him as it does to 21st century Americans, it was used in the much older sense to mean "body or grouping of interests".
Mussolini's "corporatism" meant a sort of negotiating council comprising representatives of government, organised labour and industrial capital, which is a fascist/Third Way kind of idea for overcoming the at that time hugely destabilising tension between capital and labour (verging on literal civil war). On the face of it, not actually that bad, except that in practice it was unelected and unresponsive to democracy, the governmental elements tended to end up calling all the shots, and labour particularly suffered. And mixed with the ultranationalist and militarist elements of the weird soup that was Fascism in reality as opposed to in its initial conception, it turned out to be really really bad. But it's arguable that the bad parts of Fascism didn't all derive from that initial idea.
I'm as aware as the next person that commercial corporations are antidemocratic in internal structure, but the scary thing is that many people arguing loudest that "corporatism is fascism" tend to be unaware that the kind of political system they *would* prefer in its place is closer to the initial forms of actual historical Fascism.
If you want to be technical. Switches are Layer 2 Ethernet devices, routers are Layer 3 IP devices. Ethernet is a single-segment link-local nonroutable protocol and cares nothing about TCP/IP.
And if you want to be even more technical about it, it is becoming increasingly difficult to find non-switched (old-school CSMA/CD) Ethernet nowadays in the pervasive 1 Gigabit world. Even cheap four-port home Ethernet 100Mbps 'hubs' are in fact switched. So it's not your granddad's Ethernet anymore, and many of the efficiency arguments about CSMA/CD don't apply.
"Enough," the old woman muttered. "Kull wahad! No woman-child ever withstood that much. I must've wanted you to fail." She leaned back, withdrawing the gom jabbar from the side of his neck. "Take your hand from the box, young human, and look at it."
He fought down an aching shiver, stared at the lightless void where his hand seemed to remain of its own volition. Memory of pain inhibited every movement. Reason told him he would withdraw a blackened stump from that box.
"Do it!" she snapped.
He jerked his hand from the box, stared at it astonished. Not a mark. No sign of agony on the flesh. He held up the hand, turned it, flexed the fingers.
"Pain by nerve induction," she said. "Can't go around maiming potential humans. There're those who'd give a pretty for the secret of this box, though." She slipped it into the folds of her gown.
I guess it never crossed my mind that by clicking on a banner ad I'd be causing economic harm. I thought the ad economy these days was all based on impressions, not clickthroughs.
Makes me want to protect the little guy by filtering out all ads before they display in my browser, just to be on the safe side. Don't want to hurt anyone by accidentally clicking...:)
It seems to me that the current technical design architecture of graphical user interfaces - with hard-coded, black-box dialogs written in massively complex, baroque languages like C/C++/Java/.NET and with all sorts of weird cabling under the hood - are fundamentally going about things the wrong way. We make our interfaces non-user-modifiable, then complain that the users aren't contributing anything to the development of open software 'because they're not programmers'.
OF COURSE if we build our 'user interfaces' like this, our 'end users' aren't going to be able to edit them. We lock the end-user out of the feedback loop by design. So we need a specialist caste of GUI programmers to write them, and these programmers are likely to not really understand how the interface is going to be used (because they'd rather be writing the nuts and bolts algorithms underneath), so they do a cheap and slapdash job and move on, or else they force fundamental UI design decisions by some 'look and feel committee' which not everyone in a project agrees with. But once the interface is there, we can't change it easily, so people learn to live with it, work around the flaws, and let them become interface cliches.
Compare this state of affairs with how easy it is for an end-user to 'program' or modify a spreadsheet or an Access database query or a Word macro. In those 'office' type platforms, there's a smooth curve from being an 'end user' to a 'power user' to a 'developer'. Why don't we make the whole OS/GUI platform similarly open? Why isn't Linux shooting for an environment more like Smalltalk or even more so, where the end user is encouraged to remix, repurpose, rebuild, sculpt their own visual environment, tweak any dialogs they find cramped, publish new interfaces for products just like they'd publish skins for Firefox?
Radically remixable UIs. Everything exposed, all UI-to-application data channels scriptable and documented, safely open to tweaking. That's where I want to go.
You can't redistribute patent licences, so at that point users of Ubuntu who live in a jurisdiction that believes in software patents are left in exactly the same position they were before - either with MP3 codecs they're not allowed to run, or with a commercial Linux distribution whose disks they are not allowed to copy.
If all you want is not a free *nix, but just a pretty commercial *nix that works with stuff but which you're not allowed to give away to your friends, buy Linspire or SUSE Enterprise Desktop or one of the many other half-free ones. The concept's been around a while.
There is a whole emerging literature documenting anomalous mental-physical interactions, up to and including religious/mystical experiences. Irreducible Mind is a textbook-quality tome which is expensive, but a good place to start.
The evidence of the honestly miraculous is out there, if you choose to look. A word of warning, though, if you do decide to investigate this stuff, it will get inside your head.
"There are no "Neo-Cons". There is, and has always been only one kind of Conservative."
You're not that familiar with the conservative movement if you claim this. Try reading Lew Rockwell. "Neo-Conservative" is a term describing a very specific grouping of current US conservative movement figures who were Trotskyist activists in the 1960s, but jumped fences around the mid-1970s. Hence why the 'neo'. It is arguable that they have carried through a rather distinctly Trotskyist (ie, revolutionary in the Leninist mould, theoretically guided, hardball politics, determined to bring freedom to the world by force) attitude to organising and political action into the conservative arena, with Adam Smith or Ayn Rand substituted for Marxism. Not all of the Bush 43 administration are neocons by any means, but they are an influential bloc. Compared to the older school of 'paleo-conservatives' who had no leftist involvement.
(Ayn Rand, though much older than the neoconservatives, prefigures some of the traits of the group, as she was exposed to Bolshevism and invented Objectivism as its polar opposite, unfortunately preserving some of the underlying flawed assumptions of Marxist dialectical materialism in the process. The lesson I draw is to be very careful what you choose to hate, because you can borrow more than you realise from your enemies.)
"The Gulf War was shut down by the UN,"
And George HW was smarter than to override the world's foremost democratic institution while preaching internationalism and democracy, yes. Also because getting stuck in an urban civil war in Baghdad and radicalising moderate Muslims towards insurgency did not seem like a fun thing to do, as in fact it has turned out not to be.
"Yes, Oil was a big part of the war. But face it: without oil, we'd all live on farms."
No argument here. I just wish the administration had come clean about its real reasons.
"Oil profits was not what the war was about"
Also agree. "Oil profits" is a cheap shorthand for a much more subtle and interesting dynamic. The significance of the Middle East, as anyone who's read Dune knows, is not *profits* but *control* of a strategic commoditity with highly inelastic demand. Think long-term geopolitical strategy, not first-quarter returns. The twin payoffs of oil-producer control are to 1) prevent the US from being in a position where opponents can deny supplies of oil, and 2) retain the option to deny supplies of oil to opponents. It's a sensible, if ruthless, policy.
The difficulty comes in equating 'opponents of the US' with 'enemies of freedom and love and all good things'.
"We didn't just go to war; our men sat in tanks that were 130 degrees out in the sun for EIGHT MONTHS getting 'permission' to go to war."
Yes, because moderates in W's admin tried to convince him that he really did need at least the pretence of being covered by the UN. But when that permission was not granted, despite lying point-blank to the Security Council, W overruled them and started his war, on his terms, and that was the beginning of the downfall of the USA's non-military influence in the world, because you can't lead the world with rhetoric of moral high ground while undermining the very institutions you champion. By crying wolf and resorting to war with no need, W has squandered the USA's political capital for a generation.
"No, not an inside job."
Agreed. The 9/11 'controlled demolition' hypothesis fails for me exactly as you describe. How could anyone covertly plant charges in a working office block? There's no precedent that I know of.
"It starts off with assuming anarchy, and then replaces any occurence of 'violence' with 'money'."
I've always wondered how that works. In a pure-libertarian system, who actually enforces the use of money to solve disputes rather than violence? Do both parties somehow 'just magically' come to a fully voluntary and satisfactory agreement on their own, even though there may be huge power and ownership differentials between them? What's the incentive for either the larger or the smaller partner to *not* use violence or its threat, if using it would be cheaper than negotiating and would get them trade concessions they otherwise wouldn't? Does some kind of unspoken shared social objection to violence on principle kick in to prevent this? But why? If people don't care about their neighbour as a person, and don't mind screwing them over in every way short of actual physical harm (even if it means taking all their savings and knowing they will die from starvation) - whyever would they avoid taking that next final, rational step? If it makes me money to shoot you, rationally I would be leaving money on the table not to. It's not like your life's worth as much as mine - self-evidently I'm smarter, or you would have outwitted me. Ergo, I really have no other ethical choice for maximising my utility.
I just don't understand how at even a first approximation Rand could have somehow associated money as being *a shield against* violence rather than a willing partner. Was she so traumatised by Communist violence that she never studied any history of American organised crime? How did she miss the obvious inference that violence and self-interested capitalism go just as well together as violence and revolutionary politics do?
Who wants to change tapes in the middle of a film - or be locked out of recording shows off the air - no matter how high the 'quality'? Especially when you're playing it back on a low-res TV?
"I have a family of four, and when each of us want to experience the rich content we were promised (like VOIP, online productivity applications, video-on-demand, and streaming music), you're going to call us bandwidth hogs?"
? Is this a trick question or something?
Yes, you're bandwidth hogs. The cable doesn't care what kind of content you're downloading, just how big it is. Deal with reality, and pay for how much you use, and this won't be a problem.
Do you expect your car to take you places without paying for petrol? Why expect that Internet bits should be magically free? Unregulated, yes definitely, but there's a cost to move those bits and that's what you should be charged for.
Asking for infinite data transfer on finite capacity media is like getting a car 'with free lifetime supply of petrol' built in for a fixed monthly rental and wondering why it comes with a restrictive contract that specifies that you can't drive it interstate.
I don't understand this whole fracas over oversold bandwidth because this is exactly how Telstra in NZ works. You pay a monthly fee for a bandwidth + transfer package. If you transfer more than your monthly limit (1GB, 5G, 10GB) you get billed another.
Simple, convenient, puts the responsibility for not flooding the pipes onto the user, no content filtering. What part of this is hard?
"There are many supposedly intelligent and well-educated individuals who literally and fervently believe that the Bush administration is the single greatest threat to the American people that has existed in the history of the nation, and any other current or historical external threat is either manufactured or pales in comparison to the present "internal" threat."
Yes, that would be something I literally believe. Or at least part of that construct.
a) I am not sure that the Bush 43 administration is the single greatest threat to the American people in the American Republic's history, there's been a long sordid trail of bad policy - Lincoln presided over a bloody civil war, McKinley did the Spanish-American War setting the US on the path to empire, FDR centralised massive power in the Executive branch, Johnson and Nixon architected Vietnam, Carter initiated funding to jihadis, Reagan massively accelerated it, Clinton ramped up domestic prison incarcerations and security privatisation - and that's not even looking at some of the scarier earlier Presidents - but I do think that the Bush 43 gang will be seen by history as the guys who pushed the bus the last inch over the edge of the cliff.
Certainly as a non-USian, it is Bush 43 who finally made me lose faith in American foreign policy as the centerpiece of a safe, free world. I didn't wise up to how bad things were getting under Reagan or Bush I. Clinton's handling of Yugoslavia made me start to worry, but even as late as early 2001 I still didn't really see the USA as the outright threat I do now. Seeing Colin Powell outright lie to the UN was what really did it.
b) It's always the internal rather than external threats that are the bigger worry to any organisation. Particularly when the external threats are (or were before the disastrous policies of the last six years) a tiny group with no weapons to speak of. Sorry, a couple thousand people dead in a skyscraper is nothing compared to, say, the road death toll or the shadow of the Cold War. The USA is a big place and it's got huge natural defenses. There are no credible existential threats from terrorism. The only human entities capable of really hurting the USA at this point are its own military and 'security' forces (both governmental and private), and the manufacture of radicalism caused from the projection of that force across that globe. But far worse are the dangers posed by natural and economic forces which will leave terrorists and counter-terrorists alike exposed.
Seriously, what is that? Some kind of Victorian theory like phrenology assigning intelligence to Correct Breathing Technique?
And have you ever tried breathing without using your mouth at all? It can be done, but it's pretty tough, even more so if you're exerting yourself. The mouth and nose are a system, they work together.
I think the growing need for virtualisation as a safety/management measure reveals major flaws in the fundamental design philosophy of both operating systems and languages. Specifically, it is becoming abundantly clear now that our existing methods of breaking software into modular components simply don't work. If they worked, we wouldn't need to draw boxes around things at the physical or virtual server level in order to guarantee containment.
I think basically the problem is that our languages still think largely in terms of a single executable process, leaving interactions with hardware, files and other processes up to the operating system, while our operating systems are still mostly geared toward the old timesharing model: how to multiplex access to CPU and random access storage between multiple users. They're too low-level, too close to the hardware. Process tree, file tree, libraries, even component framework, all of these are angles of attack at the problem but not general enough to prevent nasty interactions between themselves - you can't, for example, safely create any kind of 'sub-system' or 'chroot jail' equivalent inside all of the filesystem, hardware, IP address, library/components, and process tree at once. But that's the minimum you need to be able to guarantee that you have a single, isolatable system that can deliver a service. A modern graphical desktop, for example, requires all of: libraries, executables, system config files, user config files, user data, an X server, a time service, a software patch/update service, network access (with ports non-firewalled), many little utility services like D-BUS, clipboard, etc. There's no way you can draw a box around all of those inside an OS with the tools we have now.
So, you boot up a virtual server and do a whole OS install, because you know that works. If you've got the time and a *very* specialised application, like webhosting, you *might* be able to get away with something less than full virtualisation - just virtualising the filesystem, for instance. But it's risky.
What we want is a much more general kind of computing metaphor that takes *a system of components* as a fundamental primitive and allows easy reuse and sandboxing of these as a matter of course. Something like a Plan 9 approach where 'everything is a file' at a radical level, including processes. There would need to be an integrated language that is based around parallel clusters of communicating file-like components rather than serial threads of execution. And make 'duplicate this system, but inside this functional requirements sandbox' be a very, very basic primitive (if not the lowest-level one of them all).
"And we do not see people fighting to get this or that car (beer, TV set) brand to dominate the market because of an eventual technical superiority, better taste, features, etc... The only difference from that to computer Operational Systems is that the collaborative culture brought by the microcomputer "revolution" make people expect a level of interoperability and interchangeability between these different branded machine that they don't expect in other ones, like cars, for instance."
I disagree. With standards wars, such as Beta vs VHS, HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray, that's exactly what we've seen. If the two sides appear equally balanced, the consumers however wisely steer clear of the entire market until a winner appears.
There is a basic level of interoperability that people expect in *all* products. You expect a car to be able to take petrol, tyres and run on roads provided by third parties. You expect a media system to be able to play any media you buy. You expect your mobile phone to work with multiple providers in multiple places (this is why GSM rules the world outside the USA). And when that interoperability isn't there, choice becomes a negative and not a positive, because you run the risk of being on the losing side of history and wasting your investment.
Slashdot Mirror
"At the end of the day you can sight all kinds of flaws in Microsoft and closed source software. "
Close, but not quite.
Sight (v): to acknowledge that you have seen or received a document, as in, 'inwards goods has sighted the receipt'
Cite (v): to quote as a reference or source in an argument, as in, 'I can cite 5,124 open bugs in Microsoft Office to support my case'
"As for PHP vs. Ruby, both technologies suck: except for minor differences in syntax and object model, they are naively designed and implemented. After decades of research in dynamic languages and OOP, it is a testament to widespread ignorance that people would produce and use something like that."
So if we have all this research on programming languages - how come it never seems to jump the gap to applied language design, let alone implementation, and why is it that for all the professional, tenured academics supposedly doing this research, it usually tends to be amateurs without any of this knowledge who take the radical step of actually sitting down and producing something usable?
Suggests that our academic system is seriously broken, doesn't it, if the people who supposedly know best how to build languages can't be bothered actually doing it?
Option Four does sound like it has the funnier final scene, though.
in the sense that Mussolini used it, does not mean what you think it means. The word "corporation" did not mean "commercial enterprise" to him as it does to 21st century Americans, it was used in the much older sense to mean "body or grouping of interests".
See the Wiki
Mussolini's "corporatism" meant a sort of negotiating council comprising representatives of government, organised labour and industrial capital, which is a fascist/Third Way kind of idea for overcoming the at that time hugely destabilising tension between capital and labour (verging on literal civil war). On the face of it, not actually that bad, except that in practice it was unelected and unresponsive to democracy, the governmental elements tended to end up calling all the shots, and labour particularly suffered. And mixed with the ultranationalist and militarist elements of the weird soup that was Fascism in reality as opposed to in its initial conception, it turned out to be really really bad. But it's arguable that the bad parts of Fascism didn't all derive from that initial idea.
I'm as aware as the next person that commercial corporations are antidemocratic in internal structure, but the scary thing is that many people arguing loudest that "corporatism is fascism" tend to be unaware that the kind of political system they *would* prefer in its place is closer to the initial forms of actual historical Fascism.
If you want to be technical. Switches are Layer 2 Ethernet devices, routers are Layer 3 IP devices. Ethernet is a single-segment link-local nonroutable protocol and cares nothing about TCP/IP.
And if you want to be even more technical about it, it is becoming increasingly difficult to find non-switched (old-school CSMA/CD) Ethernet nowadays in the pervasive 1 Gigabit world. Even cheap four-port home Ethernet 100Mbps 'hubs' are in fact switched. So it's not your granddad's Ethernet anymore, and many of the efficiency arguments about CSMA/CD don't apply.
Dune Chapter 1
"Enough," the old woman muttered. "Kull wahad! No woman-child ever withstood that much. I must've wanted you to fail." She leaned back, withdrawing the gom jabbar from the side of his neck. "Take your hand from the box, young human, and look at it."
He fought down an aching shiver, stared at the lightless void where his hand seemed to remain of its own volition. Memory of pain inhibited every movement. Reason told him he would withdraw a blackened stump from that box.
"Do it!" she snapped.
He jerked his hand from the box, stared at it astonished. Not a mark. No sign of agony on the flesh. He held up the hand, turned it, flexed the fingers.
"Pain by nerve induction," she said. "Can't go around maiming potential humans. There're those who'd give a pretty for the secret of this box, though." She slipped it into the folds of her gown.
I guess it never crossed my mind that by clicking on a banner ad I'd be causing economic harm. I thought the ad economy these days was all based on impressions, not clickthroughs.
:)
Makes me want to protect the little guy by filtering out all ads before they display in my browser, just to be on the safe side. Don't want to hurt anyone by accidentally clicking...
Moonpod's "Starscape", saw in a /. banner ad, downloaded the demo, liked it, registered the full version, and I was very happy with it.
Also my current web host I found from a Google sponsored link. Sponsored links are useful when you're shopping, a bit like classified ads.
I've *clicked* on a fair few banner ads, mostly to find out what they are. But my clicks don't generally translate into intent to purchase.
It seems to me that the current technical design architecture of graphical user interfaces - with hard-coded, black-box dialogs written in massively complex, baroque languages like C/C++/Java/.NET and with all sorts of weird cabling under the hood - are fundamentally going about things the wrong way. We make our interfaces non-user-modifiable, then complain that the users aren't contributing anything to the development of open software 'because they're not programmers'.
OF COURSE if we build our 'user interfaces' like this, our 'end users' aren't going to be able to edit them. We lock the end-user out of the feedback loop by design. So we need a specialist caste of GUI programmers to write them, and these programmers are likely to not really understand how the interface is going to be used (because they'd rather be writing the nuts and bolts algorithms underneath), so they do a cheap and slapdash job and move on, or else they force fundamental UI design decisions by some 'look and feel committee' which not everyone in a project agrees with. But once the interface is there, we can't change it easily, so people learn to live with it, work around the flaws, and let them become interface cliches.
Compare this state of affairs with how easy it is for an end-user to 'program' or modify a spreadsheet or an Access database query or a Word macro. In those 'office' type platforms, there's a smooth curve from being an 'end user' to a 'power user' to a 'developer'. Why don't we make the whole OS/GUI platform similarly open? Why isn't Linux shooting for an environment more like Smalltalk or even more so, where the end user is encouraged to remix, repurpose, rebuild, sculpt their own visual environment, tweak any dialogs they find cramped, publish new interfaces for products just like they'd publish skins for Firefox?
Radically remixable UIs. Everything exposed, all UI-to-application data channels scriptable and documented, safely open to tweaking. That's where I want to go.
You can't redistribute patent licences, so at that point users of Ubuntu who live in a jurisdiction that believes in software patents are left in exactly the same position they were before - either with MP3 codecs they're not allowed to run, or with a commercial Linux distribution whose disks they are not allowed to copy.
If all you want is not a free *nix, but just a pretty commercial *nix that works with stuff but which you're not allowed to give away to your friends, buy Linspire or SUSE Enterprise Desktop or one of the many other half-free ones. The concept's been around a while.
John C Wright
There is a whole emerging literature documenting anomalous mental-physical interactions, up to and including religious/mystical experiences. Irreducible Mind is a textbook-quality tome which is expensive, but a good place to start.
The evidence of the honestly miraculous is out there, if you choose to look. A word of warning, though, if you do decide to investigate this stuff, it will get inside your head.
Shouldn't the comparison be between the USA as a whole, versus the EU as a whole, or between individual US states versus individual EU countries?
"There are no "Neo-Cons". There is, and has always been only one kind of Conservative."
You're not that familiar with the conservative movement if you claim this. Try reading Lew Rockwell. "Neo-Conservative" is a term describing a very specific grouping of current US conservative movement figures who were Trotskyist activists in the 1960s, but jumped fences around the mid-1970s. Hence why the 'neo'. It is arguable that they have carried through a rather distinctly Trotskyist (ie, revolutionary in the Leninist mould, theoretically guided, hardball politics, determined to bring freedom to the world by force) attitude to organising and political action into the conservative arena, with Adam Smith or Ayn Rand substituted for Marxism. Not all of the Bush 43 administration are neocons by any means, but they are an influential bloc. Compared to the older school of 'paleo-conservatives' who had no leftist involvement.
(Ayn Rand, though much older than the neoconservatives, prefigures some of the traits of the group, as she was exposed to Bolshevism and invented Objectivism as its polar opposite, unfortunately preserving some of the underlying flawed assumptions of Marxist dialectical materialism in the process. The lesson I draw is to be very careful what you choose to hate, because you can borrow more than you realise from your enemies.)
"The Gulf War was shut down by the UN,"
And George HW was smarter than to override the world's foremost democratic institution while preaching internationalism and democracy, yes. Also because getting stuck in an urban civil war in Baghdad and radicalising moderate Muslims towards insurgency did not seem like a fun thing to do, as in fact it has turned out not to be.
"Yes, Oil was a big part of the war. But face it: without oil, we'd all live on farms."
No argument here. I just wish the administration had come clean about its real reasons.
"Oil profits was not what the war was about"
Also agree. "Oil profits" is a cheap shorthand for a much more subtle and interesting dynamic. The significance of the Middle East, as anyone who's read Dune knows, is not *profits* but *control* of a strategic commoditity with highly inelastic demand. Think long-term geopolitical strategy, not first-quarter returns. The twin payoffs of oil-producer control are to 1) prevent the US from being in a position where opponents can deny supplies of oil, and 2) retain the option to deny supplies of oil to opponents. It's a sensible, if ruthless, policy.
The difficulty comes in equating 'opponents of the US' with 'enemies of freedom and love and all good things'.
"We didn't just go to war; our men sat in tanks that were 130 degrees out in the sun for EIGHT MONTHS getting 'permission' to go to war."
Yes, because moderates in W's admin tried to convince him that he really did need at least the pretence of being covered by the UN. But when that permission was not granted, despite lying point-blank to the Security Council, W overruled them and started his war, on his terms, and that was the beginning of the downfall of the USA's non-military influence in the world, because you can't lead the world with rhetoric of moral high ground while undermining the very institutions you champion. By crying wolf and resorting to war with no need, W has squandered the USA's political capital for a generation.
"No, not an inside job."
Agreed. The 9/11 'controlled demolition' hypothesis fails for me exactly as you describe. How could anyone covertly plant charges in a working office block? There's no precedent that I know of.
There is no such word as "copywrite", though it's a nice eggcorn.
It amazes me how many computer programmers can't spell. However do you get your code to compile?
"It starts off with assuming anarchy, and then replaces any occurence of 'violence' with 'money'."
I've always wondered how that works. In a pure-libertarian system, who actually enforces the use of money to solve disputes rather than violence? Do both parties somehow 'just magically' come to a fully voluntary and satisfactory agreement on their own, even though there may be huge power and ownership differentials between them? What's the incentive for either the larger or the smaller partner to *not* use violence or its threat, if using it would be cheaper than negotiating and would get them trade concessions they otherwise wouldn't? Does some kind of unspoken shared social objection to violence on principle kick in to prevent this? But why? If people don't care about their neighbour as a person, and don't mind screwing them over in every way short of actual physical harm (even if it means taking all their savings and knowing they will die from starvation) - whyever would they avoid taking that next final, rational step? If it makes me money to shoot you, rationally I would be leaving money on the table not to. It's not like your life's worth as much as mine - self-evidently I'm smarter, or you would have outwitted me. Ergo, I really have no other ethical choice for maximising my utility.
I just don't understand how at even a first approximation Rand could have somehow associated money as being *a shield against* violence rather than a willing partner. Was she so traumatised by Communist violence that she never studied any history of American organised crime? How did she miss the obvious inference that violence and self-interested capitalism go just as well together as violence and revolutionary politics do?
"If you want to assist a foreign government with genocide or running prison labor camps for dissidents don't expect to do it from U.S. soil."
Unless you were IBM, but that was a while ago. They're on our side now.
"I'd take an invisible high bandwidth cap over something as low as 100 GB. I can rarely download less than 150 GB per month."
As *low* as 100 GB???
Yeah, not much sympathy here. Come to New Zealand and get a 10 GB monthly cap as your maximum. And learn to like it.
What the heck are you downloading, every DVD made ever?
"If that's the case, and consumers choose what's best, then why did VHS beat out Betamax, which had better video and audio quality across the board?"
For one thing, because Betamax could only record one hour compared to VHS's two.
Who wants to change tapes in the middle of a film - or be locked out of recording shows off the air - no matter how high the 'quality'? Especially when you're playing it back on a low-res TV?
Consumers aren't always dumb.
"I have a family of four, and when each of us want to experience the rich content we were promised (like VOIP, online productivity applications, video-on-demand, and streaming music), you're going to call us bandwidth hogs?"
? Is this a trick question or something?
Yes, you're bandwidth hogs. The cable doesn't care what kind of content you're downloading, just how big it is. Deal with reality, and pay for how much you use, and this won't be a problem.
Do you expect your car to take you places without paying for petrol? Why expect that Internet bits should be magically free? Unregulated, yes definitely, but there's a cost to move those bits and that's what you should be charged for.
Asking for infinite data transfer on finite capacity media is like getting a car 'with free lifetime supply of petrol' built in for a fixed monthly rental and wondering why it comes with a restrictive contract that specifies that you can't drive it interstate.
I don't understand this whole fracas over oversold bandwidth because this is exactly how Telstra in NZ works. You pay a monthly fee for a bandwidth + transfer package. If you transfer more than your monthly limit (1GB, 5G, 10GB) you get billed another.
Simple, convenient, puts the responsibility for not flooding the pipes onto the user, no content filtering. What part of this is hard?
"There are many supposedly intelligent and well-educated individuals who literally and fervently believe that the Bush administration is the single greatest threat to the American people that has existed in the history of the nation, and any other current or historical external threat is either manufactured or pales in comparison to the present "internal" threat."
Yes, that would be something I literally believe. Or at least part of that construct.
a) I am not sure that the Bush 43 administration is the single greatest threat to the American people in the American Republic's history, there's been a long sordid trail of bad policy - Lincoln presided over a bloody civil war, McKinley did the Spanish-American War setting the US on the path to empire, FDR centralised massive power in the Executive branch, Johnson and Nixon architected Vietnam, Carter initiated funding to jihadis, Reagan massively accelerated it, Clinton ramped up domestic prison incarcerations and security privatisation - and that's not even looking at some of the scarier earlier Presidents - but I do think that the Bush 43 gang will be seen by history as the guys who pushed the bus the last inch over the edge of the cliff.
Certainly as a non-USian, it is Bush 43 who finally made me lose faith in American foreign policy as the centerpiece of a safe, free world. I didn't wise up to how bad things were getting under Reagan or Bush I. Clinton's handling of Yugoslavia made me start to worry, but even as late as early 2001 I still didn't really see the USA as the outright threat I do now. Seeing Colin Powell outright lie to the UN was what really did it.
b) It's always the internal rather than external threats that are the bigger worry to any organisation. Particularly when the external threats are (or were before the disastrous policies of the last six years) a tiny group with no weapons to speak of. Sorry, a couple thousand people dead in a skyscraper is nothing compared to, say, the road death toll or the shadow of the Cold War. The USA is a big place and it's got huge natural defenses. There are no credible existential threats from terrorism. The only human entities capable of really hurting the USA at this point are its own military and 'security' forces (both governmental and private), and the manufacture of radicalism caused from the projection of that force across that globe. But far worse are the dangers posed by natural and economic forces which will leave terrorists and counter-terrorists alike exposed.
Seriously, what is that? Some kind of Victorian theory like phrenology assigning intelligence to Correct Breathing Technique?
And have you ever tried breathing without using your mouth at all? It can be done, but it's pretty tough, even more so if you're exerting yourself. The mouth and nose are a system, they work together.
for you are less stringy than dinosaurs and just as tasty.
I think the growing need for virtualisation as a safety/management measure reveals major flaws in the fundamental design philosophy of both operating systems and languages. Specifically, it is becoming abundantly clear now that our existing methods of breaking software into modular components simply don't work. If they worked, we wouldn't need to draw boxes around things at the physical or virtual server level in order to guarantee containment.
I think basically the problem is that our languages still think largely in terms of a single executable process, leaving interactions with hardware, files and other processes up to the operating system, while our operating systems are still mostly geared toward the old timesharing model: how to multiplex access to CPU and random access storage between multiple users. They're too low-level, too close to the hardware. Process tree, file tree, libraries, even component framework, all of these are angles of attack at the problem but not general enough to prevent nasty interactions between themselves - you can't, for example, safely create any kind of 'sub-system' or 'chroot jail' equivalent inside all of the filesystem, hardware, IP address, library/components, and process tree at once. But that's the minimum you need to be able to guarantee that you have a single, isolatable system that can deliver a service. A modern graphical desktop, for example, requires all of: libraries, executables, system config files, user config files, user data, an X server, a time service, a software patch/update service, network access (with ports non-firewalled), many little utility services like D-BUS, clipboard, etc. There's no way you can draw a box around all of those inside an OS with the tools we have now.
So, you boot up a virtual server and do a whole OS install, because you know that works. If you've got the time and a *very* specialised application, like webhosting, you *might* be able to get away with something less than full virtualisation - just virtualising the filesystem, for instance. But it's risky.
What we want is a much more general kind of computing metaphor that takes *a system of components* as a fundamental primitive and allows easy reuse and sandboxing of these as a matter of course. Something like a Plan 9 approach where 'everything is a file' at a radical level, including processes. There would need to be an integrated language that is based around parallel clusters of communicating file-like components rather than serial threads of execution. And make 'duplicate this system, but inside this functional requirements sandbox' be a very, very basic primitive (if not the lowest-level one of them all).
"And we do not see people fighting to get this or that car (beer, TV set) brand to dominate the market because of an eventual technical superiority, better taste, features, etc... The only difference from that to computer Operational Systems is that the collaborative culture brought by the microcomputer "revolution" make people expect a level of interoperability and interchangeability between these different branded machine that they don't expect in other ones, like cars, for instance."
I disagree. With standards wars, such as Beta vs VHS, HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray, that's exactly what we've seen. If the two sides appear equally balanced, the consumers however wisely steer clear of the entire market until a winner appears.
There is a basic level of interoperability that people expect in *all* products. You expect a car to be able to take petrol, tyres and run on roads provided by third parties. You expect a media system to be able to play any media you buy. You expect your mobile phone to work with multiple providers in multiple places (this is why GSM rules the world outside the USA). And when that interoperability isn't there, choice becomes a negative and not a positive, because you run the risk of being on the losing side of history and wasting your investment.