I'm guessing that the RIAA lawyers realized they have some kind of problem with their paperwork, and thought this a clever way of short-circuiting it. Instead, of course, they have merely red-flagged it for Ms. Thomas-Rasset's new legal team.
I don't think so - just because they are mindless jerks with no integrity doesn't mean they are unintelligent. There could be a number of other explanations - like, they may simply try to spend her money on unnecessary digging through documents, or stalling for time or whatever. Or they are trying to create a diversion from the real problem.
What the matter with these people? On one hand they want to be able to patent "Computer Implemented Inventions" (ie SW) - where the traditional, or at least the popular view is that patents are for significant, real-world inventions like machines or tools; something tangible. So they seem to argue that software, such as cmoputer games, are tangible enough to be patented. But on the other hand they want money for each time it is being sold, copied or even looked at - because now it is suddenly "intellectual property" on par with works of art, like music, paintings and novels.
Either way, I don't see the merit in their arguments - if you sell tangible goods, you pass on the ownership, and if it turns out that the thing you sold for $100 can be sold on for $100000, shame on you for not seeing that opportunity. The same goes for works of art, as far as I can see; isn't that almost the way it goes - a painter sells his work for pennies, and later it goes on Sotheby's in London and sells for £10000000?
It is this kind of behaviour that time and again show us all that those in the self-proclaimed "upper class" are in fact not rich because they have worked hard and been extremely clever and intelligent, but because they are greedy low-life who lack a few basic building blocks in their moral and social instincts. Is it any wonder that socialism seems like a good idea sometimes?
That's a cool gadget to have in your living room; described by Terry Pratchett in "Making money" as the Glooper.
"Igor?" said Moist, "You have an Igor?" "Oh, yes", said Hubert. "That's how I get this wonderful light. They know the secret of storing lightning in jars! But don't let that worry you, Mr Lipspick. Just because I'm employing an Igor and working in a cellar doesn't mean I'm some sort of madman, ha ha ha!" "Ha ha," agreed Moist. "Ha hah hah!," said Hubert, "Hahahahahaha!! Ahahahahahahhhhh!!!!!-" Bent slapped him on the back. Hubert coughed. "Sorry about that, it's the air down here", he mumbled.
How much do you want to bet the RIAA will push exactly that claim?
I wouldn't bet a penny on that, I think. I must admit I haven't been able overcome my nausea enough to study what the RIAA actually do in detail, but as far as I can see they earn money on bullying alleged "pirates", right? As tax is something that is paid to the state, RIAA wouldn't make money from it, and I doubt they are actually all that keen on stopping their source of income.
From the article it appears that the discussion only allows for two postures: either straight, vertical or straight, horizontal, both of which present some significant obstacles. The vertical model would require a huge heart, but the horizontal model would require some way of holding up a string of vertebrae against gravity, which would require either huge muscles or other things that would need to be supported by some skeletal structures that are missing, AFAIK. The model they suggest, I think, is something more like a swan's neck, which wouldn't be as tall (thus not requiring so high a blood pressure) and wouldn't require the extremely massive muscles, while still being as flexible as they seem to have been.
Censure is a bad thing, and stupid too - but I think one has to try to be a little bit more nuanced than simply condemning them for being Chinese and Communists.
Looking back at the last few decades, I think it is clear that the Chinese government are working towards an ever more open society; but it would be madness just letting go and changing everything overnight. There is a significant part of the population that are against that openness, and whether we or the Chinese government like it or not, it takes a long time to change society. After all, it took us several generations in Europe to go from feudal monarchy to modern democracy, and clever as the Chinese may be, they are not going to be able to make that change overnight. And seeing how they have gone from a closed society to what they are now in about 30 years (~a generation), it should probably take at least 10 years more.
Just look at what happened in Iraq: Saddam Hussein was a fairly standard dictator and as foul as they come, but society worked. Then the Americans came and ripped out the bad bits, but couldn't replace them with anything - and we all know the horrors and the chaos that followed. Democracy and freedom is something you have to learn; any society has to learn to handle it responsibly, because freedom without responsibility is just chaos.
I think the problem here is that you need to learn to say stop - this is possible to do in a kind, but firm manner. You won't loose friends over it, if they are worth having as friends they will respect your terms without complaining; as far as I can tell, they are just spongeing on you. And as long as you allow that to happen, you are less likely to get real friends. This is about respect - as long as you don't respect yourself enough to say stop and stand on your right, you won't teach others to respect you.
- or rather, about those who always seem to have a lot of lofty words about freedom, democracy and what people in other countries want.
First of all what do you actually know about what people in other cultures want or need? This is not just about China; one of the things that always strike is how little Americans and Europeans understand each other, despite the fact that American culture historically is mostly a concoction of elements of European culture. When Americans and Europeans can't even agree on basic terms like the word "freedom" and what it means, how can you be so smug about what people living in even less familiar cultures think and want? To the Chinese the concept of freedom is not as important as it is for Americans - hell, even the Europenas don't make such a fuss about it - and even when the Chinese talk about freedom as a concept, it is clear that it isn't identical to the American concept of freedom.
Secondly, what do you know about Tiananmen? I'll tell you: you know only what you have been told by mostly American media - so you only know the Western side of the story. You haven't heard the Chinese side of it, and even if you had, you wouldn't have listened, let alone looked for clues that might tell you whether what they have to say rings true. I don't claim to know the whole truth about what happened; from my Chinese friends I hear things that seem to indicate that there were persons - foreign agents - that did their best to stir up discontent and who distributed weapons, among other things. These are only rumours, AFAIK, not something from the official news; but even the possibility of something like is unpleasant to contemplate, in my view. And it is unfortunately all too easy to imagine CIA involved in this kind of thing.
And finally, what do you know about the Chinese government's motives? Not a single thing, I bet. All you guys know, as far as I can see from comments here, is how to repeat what the American media tell you; which amounts to no more than smug ignorance. They sure as hell don't care about the truth about this, they just want to sell minced woodland to you. Step back a little bit an ask yourself what a govenment can reasonably be expected to want? The Chinese aren't idiots and their govenment officials aren't GWBs - they know that what people want more than anything else is stability and predictability, and that the best way of holding on to power is by providing what the people craves. The Chinese is not interested in oppressing people or freedom - they know very well that democracy and freedom of speech are more or less illusory and can be easily manipulated; they can see clearly how their American colleagues do it. But the Chinese people don't want American style "freedom", they don't want lack of regulations and they don't want to be flooded with odious, American "McJesus" Christianity.
As I said, I don't know what happened, I just know that there are many more sides to the story than we hear about, especially on/. But if I should hazard guess, I would say that the situation was a whole lot more serious than what we have heard; that there was some foreign involvement in stirring up the sentiments, and that the government felt the situation was desperate and required immediate and decisive action. Maybe they panicked, and perhaps, looking back, they wish they hadn't. The only thing I feel entirely certain about is that they didn't just lean back and say "Freedom? Hah! We'll give freedom - let's massacre the lot".
It seems to me that America is always trying to solve all problems with technology rather than simply learning to avoid the problems in the first place. The problem with technology is that it will always be too easy to circumvent - it is never going to be entirely watertight.
Of course that is not always a problem, if what you are trying to achieve is simply to reduce the size of a problem; but since we are talking Homeland Security, ie trying to stop terrorism, how likely is that to be entirely successful? To paraphrase Terry Pratchett - the terrorists only need to lucky once, but America needs to be lucky every time.
What makes it seem even more futile is that there is a much cheaper and more effective alternative: why not try to be more of a friend to those in need? The biggest help terrorists have is that they can point their finger at America and say "The Big Satan".
Scientology is currently everyone's favorite whipping boy. Followers of larger and more powerful religions don't want to get into a debate about whose beliefs are nuttier, because they're all about equally nutty when you get right down to it.
Let me just point out that this is not a question of which religion is stupider; to me as a convinced atheist they are all equally meaningless, but there are some that are far more harmful than others. Scientology is way out there, not because of what they believe in, according to their books, but because they behave to all intents and purposes as a dangerous and unscrupulous criminal organisation. The first thing they do to new members is make them deeply indebted to the organization by pushing them through meaningless "courses" that get exponentially more expensive. And they suppress any criticism with extremely vicious attacks on those who are critical - as well as their familes.
Calling Scientlogy merely a cult is way too generous. They are a criminal organisation.
Nope. Not ever. Now, I wasn't really out to put down IDEs or their users; we are all different, some may like using this sort of tools, I just don't.
Perhaps it is down to the things I have worked with in my career - I worked on Windows when it was still version 2.0, and there was no way one could have used a debugger in that environment (real-mode x86); the only way to track down why a program failed was by inserting print statements. Since then I always write my code with print statements embedded, controlled by a suitable debug flag. And I can tell you it works a hell of a lot better than any debugger - I have successfully debugged multithreaded programs on Windows NT, written by somebody who either didn't know that the desktop interface isn't reentrant (or didn't know what that means) and who hadn't a clue about semaphores and event-driven programming. Now, how many simultaneous threads can you realistically follow in a source level debugger without loosing the thread, ahaha? Whereas printed output can be analysed over and over, you can even put it into an SQL database and try to cross-analyse it if you care.
I generally find the problem faster than my colleagues, I might mention.
I believe pavements are mentioned too, but one reason for favouring buildings is airconditioning. If you can keep the heat from entering, you won't have to spend electricity on pupming it out again.
It somehow brings a smile to my face, reading this article and the reactions to it.
People tend to imagine that ideas mustremain static in order to remain "true", somehow; I wonder why that is? You can see it with religion - it's always about what Jesus REALLY said, or trying to figure out what the first Christians believed and practiced; but reality is not like that, it changes all the time and we acquire new knowledge every day - or if we don't, there is something wrong with us. So why should ideas remain static? Shouldn't our faith, hah, evolve?
And the same goes for political ideologies and philosophies. Just because Karl Marx's definition became popular, that doesn't have to be the final word about that matter. Whatever else he wanted, I'm pretty sure his ambition was to push towards a better and more fair society - if he had lived today, I doubt he would have come up with exactly the same thing, although the general drift would have been the same.
Capitalism and Communism as ideologies are just formalisations of two fundamental - let's call them instincts - that humans have: the instinct for individual survival, the egotism or "capitalism", and the instinct to care for others, our offspring and in the form of cooperation. Both give huge evolutionary advantages and both are almost as old as life itself. Everybody can understand that individual survival is necessary in order to produce offspring, but cooperation is fundamental to life in a more subtle way - indeed, it happens even down to the molecular level in every living cell, and it would be hard to imagine life at all without it. Plus, it has been "reinvented" over and over, when the first cells arose as a cooperation of molecules, when multicellular life forms arose, and when social animals have arisen several times over time.
The struggle between Capitalism and Communism is no more than yet another manifestation of the same; but we can't do without either, so instead of squabbling and stupidly calling "the others" evil or worse, we should get on with finding a sensible and sustainable balance. And on the way to achieving that, one of the things we have to learn is that there is nothing inherently wrong with either Communism or Capitalism, both are valuable contributors to a good society.
So yes, open source and the internet are indeed expressions of communism; a good form of communism that doesn't insist on enslaving, but strives to liberate.
The things you mentions as advantages are more or less the very ones I would mention as reasons why I don't use an IDE. Syntax highlighting and code completion drive me absolutely insane and I don't use debuggers; I REALLY can't stand it when a program tries to outsmart me - it is the same with idiotic gimmicks like incremental search.
Maybe I am just old fashioned, but to me the clearest way of indicating syntax is indentation, which I believe people use even if they use syntax higlighting. It has the advantage that you aren't crippled when you have to work away from your usual machine. I use standard vi for the same reason - there isn't a vim on all platforms, and most of the improvements in vim are actually nothing more than gimmicks anyway, IMHO.
The functionality you get in an IDE may be great when you are on Windows, where you neither have a proper shell nor command line window. I use either a tabbable xterm (in KDE) or screen (on a terminal) - normally with 4 or 5 command lines open at the same time. The first one for vi, the next for make and so on. OK, so I have to type ":w" to save my file, jump to next terminal session and type "make" then jump to next session and run the program; I can't say it is a huge effort, but maybe I've just got a stronger constitution than most.
And of course, since I do it this way, I always have the full power of a proper shell right at my fingertips, which you don't have in an IDE, not even one that run on UNIX.
Oh, just one more reason for not using an IDE: it hides what actually goes on from the programmer. Take the build process - in an IDE you push a button and it sort of happens, but you are not really sure how, certainly not in any detail. When you use make, you have actually written a makefile yourself which means that you have had to sit down and understand it as well as understanding the compiler- and link flags. This is actually useful knowledge, believe it or not.
- but much as I would like to see it not exist at all, the fact is that it does, and there are people who genuinely like it. It is never a good idea to try to will something like that away by passing a law; we simply have to learn to live with it in a sensible way, which fortunately is possible.
But living sensibly with things like drugs, gambling and other things society doesn't feel comfortable with means educating people about these things, preferably from an early age. Criminalising a common activity creates the worst possible situation; it excludes people from talking openly about it, sharing experiences etc, and it takes away any real authority when you want to teach your children how to handle it.
I personally never gamble - to me it is dull as well as a stupid way of wasting money - but I do smoke cannabis occasionally, which makes me a dangerous criminal; however, it also makes me able to teach my children why they shouldn't smoke themselves silly because of the way it interferes with your ability to achieve your ambitions. And you know what? I hold down a responsible job and have for decades, and my children are doing very well for themselves too. I imagine the same is true for people who enjoy gambling.
You probably already know what you need to document on your network - it will be whatever it takes to get things back up and running, and it depends not only on your operating system, but also on the hardware. I manage a R&D network of mostly UNIXes, and due to the R&D part of it, I have learned how to get by on minimal hardware and how to rescue systems wen they have been driven over the edge - again. There is no such thing as too much documentation, is what I've found, but it has to be well structured, easily accessible and easy to update.
There are some things you should obviously have written down: the physical and logical configuration of your network, the physical position of all hardware (which should always be clearly labeled), and administrator passwords should be written down somewhere safe, unless you have a password strategy that is easy for you to remember, but hard to guess for others (I'll elaborate a bit below).
Maybe it is just me, but I have found it absolutely necessary to put clearly visible labels on all machinery and make a list of them as well; when you have more than 40 servers plus all the little gadgets that form the understorey of a wild server habitat to keep check on, you just can't remember. And the idea that a serverroom should or could be a well-ordered place is naive, in my experience. I have a small label even on each network cable just in case.
The thing about passwords - some say that we should use passwords that are basically digitised, white noise, and that they should be changed every week or so; but who can remember that kind of things? So you end up with little lists and notes that are always out of date and are too easily forgotten in places where others might see them. I have done away with that - instead I use words I find easy to remeber, but which I have reasons to believe others won't. Some time last year it was words like the perhaps too well know "1337H4X0R", but recently I have found that there is a wealth of insanely obscure words to be found in older dictionaries for little know languages - it's a bit of a hobby I have; did you know that there are several hundred largely unrelated languages in Papua New Guinea alone? Not to mention Inuit dialects, Native American languages, etc etc. I haven't tried myself, but how fast could one guess a pasword like "umiarssualivinnguaq" ("small harbour" in Greenlandish)? It's probably not the first one most people would think of. The advantage is that these words have been used by real people; this means that 1) they have a real meaning, and 2) they are pronouncable (well, in principle), two things that make them easy to remember.
But I think the most important thing is not WHAT, but HOW you document. I have over the years evaluated a few documentation-/monitoring strategies, and the one I have settled on is in many ways the simplest: I use a Wiki and store all the home-made documentation there. It is simple to maintain and easy to access. Forget about MS doc formats and PDF or any other complicated format - a good Wiki is what you need, especially if it allows you to read it even from a text-only browser, because sometimes that may be all you have access to.
Another aspect of learning a trade as opposed to higher education is the money. In many countries, if you go to university you have to live on loans as well as having a low-paid job in the morning or evening - I got up at 3:30 every morning to work as a cleaner while I studied. So when you are ready for your first real job, you are already deeply in debt and then you find that your salary isn't sky-high, your work-conditions are lousy, you have to work 60 hours a week, but no overtime-payment.
On the other hand, if you had chosen learn a manual skill, you would probably have been an apprentice - which would have meant that you got paid while you learned - and you would have had a contract that you had the right to overtime-payment; and that's before you even get a real job. So when you've finished your studies, you probably don't have a huge debt and your salary is not actually that much lower than an academic's. I don't know if you can spot the difference here?
I have to say, I find it hard to justify to my children that they should go to college and study hard. It seemed obvious when I was young; well-educated people were admired and they had what seemed a brilliant career. I'm not sure what has happened in the meantime - part of it is probably to do with the celebrity culture. I mean, everybody has heard about Einstein, Niels Bohr and the others, but nowadays scientists are just nerds - ie. completely un-cool - and being well-educated is fairly low-status if not outright suspicious.
Another part is that young people have been lured away from protecting their own interests - you are almost certainly an un-savoury individual if you are in a trade union and your character is considered flawed if you are not willing to give away your overtime for free. It makes you wonder why intelligent people have let this happen, but it not hard to see who benefits from it.
I don't find what is euphemistically called "graphical content" exciting or scary - it just annoys me. To me the entertaiment value is in the actual content of the game, movie or whatever, not in whether there is a lot of internal organs draped over items in the vicinity; I realised how much it actually irritates me when I watched the "Watchmen" movie. The story line is not too bad for a superhero movie, but why do we need to spend that much time on Hefty Smurf splatting people's guts around?
I like MySQL - but Oracle is my favourite database by a mile. I do system work daily with all of the major ones: Oracle, DB2, Informix, Adabas, Sybase, Teradata. I'm no longer an expert in any of them (used to do a lot of Oracle), but I do know that Oracle is still the standard the others are trying to reach up to, SQL-wise and with respect to scripting.
MySQL is not even in that game IMO, but it has a very simple API, so it is hugely useful for smaller applications.
Just to clarify - what we are talking about here is not spatial dimensions in the popular sense but "degrees of freedom": they have a procedure that takes five independent parameters. Sometimes it would be nice to not see a headline that tries to make a senstational headline out of a simple, down-to-earth matter. I mean, this is a bit like saying "I made a ten-dimensional cake" because it happens to contain ten ingredients; just get real, man.
Can't we all agree that the science indicates aspartame is either harmless or barely measurably harmful, and certainly less harmful than the obesity one gets from consuming large amounts of sugar?
Maybe. Unless you suffer from phylketonuria, of course. And all we know, of course, is that we haven't found out what harm it causes yet, strictly speaking; except for this:
When we eat sweet tasting food, the body starts up certain processes as preparation to digesting carbohydrates; but, being a very clever machine, it also learns from experience, so when we eat artificial sweetener, we can end up unlearning the natural connection between sweet taste and calories. The consequence of this is that when we eat something that really does contain sugar, we don't feel full as quickly, and thus end up eat far more. So, in effect using artificial sweeteners may help set you up for obesity. The same presumably goes for fat substitutes and things like that new pill, Alli.
There is no doubt in my mind that when a private company is offering a service, that company has sovereignty over what and how they do it, even if they are ISPs - that is one of the basic tenets of Capitalism, isn't it? So when people complain about net neutrality in the name of freedom, while at the same time defending Capitalism in the name of freedom, we have reached a point where a decision has to be made: what freedom do you actually want?
In my view all important infrastructure should be publically owned - roads, electricity grid, water supply, information networks - paid for through the taxes, and possibly through usage fees as well. "The Public" belongs to all of us and therefore has a clear duty to be neutral in all political, religious etc respects, but I don't think we can reasonably demand that private companies are, unless it makes business sense - which it all too often doesn't.
First of all I think it is excessively pompous to talk about a "Technology Bill of Rights" - it isn't as if we have been living through an era of extreme oppression after which we have finally reached the Enlightenment. Actually, one could argue that the opposite is the case: that the internet up until now has been a lawless wilderness, where criminals of all sorts thrive and where it is far too easy to get hurt; in short, we need to tame and civilize the internet.
Article 1. Any individual shall be able to choose anonymity when posting to Internet sites
I disagree. The need for whistleblowing would be better served by making special arrangements for protecting the identity of people in certain specific circumstances. Granting anonymity "whenever, wherever" is far too wide-reaching; it is not just poor, oppressed, but honest people who wish to hide their faces. There are already ways of protecting the identity of legitimate whistle-blowers; the company I work for have hired an independent company to which employees can direct their criticism and complaints. It actually works - employees feel comfortable with speaking out, and the employer is able to keep themselves informed about the criticisms without knowing who said what, thus avoiding any unproductive ill feelings.
Article 3. No individual shall be held liable for effects of malware or malicious code unknowingly run on a personal computer
Why not? It isn't difficult to avoid - apart from the lazy option of using a virus-scanner, simply thinking before clicking on anything sent in your mail should do the trick for the most part. Contrary to common belief, most malware atatcks are not the result of somebody breaking into your computer, they happen because you behave stupidly. You need to educate yourself a bit before operating a computer, just like a car - because if you don't, you will end up hurting other people. Perhaps it should be mandatory to pass an internet test before being allowed out.
To be quite honest, I suspect in many ways Americans are the least well-equipped to form a meaningful opinion about what freedoms are essential. American media and culture have for many decades been too much of a hot-bed of word-twisting, to the extent that even many basic concepts have an entirely different meaning to an American as compared to non-Americans. And if people all over the world are to agree on anything big and important enough to be called " Bill of Rights", it will have to be thought through and turned over a very large number of times. Just throwing together a list of your personal gripes doesn't quite cut it, I feel.
"Human" is a term applicable to all members of the genus "Homo", just like "Chimpanzee" is the word for all members of "Pan" - the biological genus, that is, not the club (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_Club_Copenhagen). As a note of interest, some biologists even argue that chimpanzees are biologically so close to us that they should be included in the same genus.
I suspect the idea that humans are somehow special and "more" than animals stems from the kind of religion we have traditionally practised here in the West, which is in many ways still a "famer- and shepherd religion". To most hunter/gatherers this distinction is unknown - the animals you hunt are seen as persons you have to respect; when we became farmers, animals became mere items that the Creator had made for our convenience.
And of, it isn't hard to see this traditional prejudice reflected in the constantly repeated "Humans vs Neanderthal" nonsense - something that continues despite the ever growing body of evidence that shows the Neanderthal Human to be a sophisticated creature with culture on par with our own at the time - there is evidence that they took care of their elderly and sick, such as the remains of a person who was clearly disabled, yet lived to adulthood, as well as eg. the "Divje Babe" flute (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal_flute) which may be evidence that they practised music. They were clearly very clever hunters, possibly more so than Homo sapiens - a recent study suggests they hunted large prey actively rather than simply scavenging.
You may indeed suggest anything you like - "Freedom of Speech", you see. Your words as well as the epithet you have chosen to write under ("Amercan Terrorist") would appear to imply that you consider people idiots when they don't accept your point of view; so in this case I must be an idiot, because I disagree.
Americans are more or less like all other people in the world; the vast majority are just ordinary people, not exceptionally good or evil, just like myself. And I trust and respect myself - I know that I am mostly decent, honest and helpful, and I know that it is possibly to disagree with others and still treat them with decency and honesty. I have every reason to believe that most people share my sentiments.
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I'm guessing that the RIAA lawyers realized they have some kind of problem with their paperwork, and thought this a clever way of short-circuiting it. Instead, of course, they have merely red-flagged it for Ms. Thomas-Rasset's new legal team.
I don't think so - just because they are mindless jerks with no integrity doesn't mean they are unintelligent. There could be a number of other explanations - like, they may simply try to spend her money on unnecessary digging through documents, or stalling for time or whatever. Or they are trying to create a diversion from the real problem.
What the matter with these people? On one hand they want to be able to patent "Computer Implemented Inventions" (ie SW) - where the traditional, or at least the popular view is that patents are for significant, real-world inventions like machines or tools; something tangible. So they seem to argue that software, such as cmoputer games, are tangible enough to be patented. But on the other hand they want money for each time it is being sold, copied or even looked at - because now it is suddenly "intellectual property" on par with works of art, like music, paintings and novels.
Either way, I don't see the merit in their arguments - if you sell tangible goods, you pass on the ownership, and if it turns out that the thing you sold for $100 can be sold on for $100000, shame on you for not seeing that opportunity. The same goes for works of art, as far as I can see; isn't that almost the way it goes - a painter sells his work for pennies, and later it goes on Sotheby's in London and sells for £10000000?
It is this kind of behaviour that time and again show us all that those in the self-proclaimed "upper class" are in fact not rich because they have worked hard and been extremely clever and intelligent, but because they are greedy low-life who lack a few basic building blocks in their moral and social instincts. Is it any wonder that socialism seems like a good idea sometimes?
That's a cool gadget to have in your living room; described by Terry Pratchett in "Making money" as the Glooper.
"Igor?" said Moist, "You have an Igor?"
"Oh, yes", said Hubert. "That's how I get this wonderful light. They know the secret of storing lightning in jars! But don't let that worry you, Mr Lipspick. Just because I'm employing an Igor and working in a cellar doesn't mean I'm some sort of madman, ha ha ha!"
"Ha ha," agreed Moist.
"Ha hah hah!," said Hubert, "Hahahahahaha!! Ahahahahahahhhhh!!!!!-"
Bent slapped him on the back. Hubert coughed. "Sorry about that, it's the air down here", he mumbled.
How much do you want to bet the RIAA will push exactly that claim?
I wouldn't bet a penny on that, I think. I must admit I haven't been able overcome my nausea enough to study what the RIAA actually do in detail, but as far as I can see they earn money on bullying alleged "pirates", right? As tax is something that is paid to the state, RIAA wouldn't make money from it, and I doubt they are actually all that keen on stopping their source of income.
From the article it appears that the discussion only allows for two postures: either straight, vertical or straight, horizontal, both of which present some significant obstacles. The vertical model would require a huge heart, but the horizontal model would require some way of holding up a string of vertebrae against gravity, which would require either huge muscles or other things that would need to be supported by some skeletal structures that are missing, AFAIK. The model they suggest, I think, is something more like a swan's neck, which wouldn't be as tall (thus not requiring so high a blood pressure) and wouldn't require the extremely massive muscles, while still being as flexible as they seem to have been.
Censure is a bad thing, and stupid too - but I think one has to try to be a little bit more nuanced than simply condemning them for being Chinese and Communists.
Looking back at the last few decades, I think it is clear that the Chinese government are working towards an ever more open society; but it would be madness just letting go and changing everything overnight. There is a significant part of the population that are against that openness, and whether we or the Chinese government like it or not, it takes a long time to change society. After all, it took us several generations in Europe to go from feudal monarchy to modern democracy, and clever as the Chinese may be, they are not going to be able to make that change overnight. And seeing how they have gone from a closed society to what they are now in about 30 years (~a generation), it should probably take at least 10 years more.
Just look at what happened in Iraq: Saddam Hussein was a fairly standard dictator and as foul as they come, but society worked. Then the Americans came and ripped out the bad bits, but couldn't replace them with anything - and we all know the horrors and the chaos that followed. Democracy and freedom is something you have to learn; any society has to learn to handle it responsibly, because freedom without responsibility is just chaos.
I think the problem here is that you need to learn to say stop - this is possible to do in a kind, but firm manner. You won't loose friends over it, if they are worth having as friends they will respect your terms without complaining; as far as I can tell, they are just spongeing on you. And as long as you allow that to happen, you are less likely to get real friends. This is about respect - as long as you don't respect yourself enough to say stop and stand on your right, you won't teach others to respect you.
- or rather, about those who always seem to have a lot of lofty words about freedom, democracy and what people in other countries want.
First of all what do you actually know about what people in other cultures want or need? This is not just about China; one of the things that always strike is how little Americans and Europeans understand each other, despite the fact that American culture historically is mostly a concoction of elements of European culture. When Americans and Europeans can't even agree on basic terms like the word "freedom" and what it means, how can you be so smug about what people living in even less familiar cultures think and want? To the Chinese the concept of freedom is not as important as it is for Americans - hell, even the Europenas don't make such a fuss about it - and even when the Chinese talk about freedom as a concept, it is clear that it isn't identical to the American concept of freedom.
Secondly, what do you know about Tiananmen? I'll tell you: you know only what you have been told by mostly American media - so you only know the Western side of the story. You haven't heard the Chinese side of it, and even if you had, you wouldn't have listened, let alone looked for clues that might tell you whether what they have to say rings true. I don't claim to know the whole truth about what happened; from my Chinese friends I hear things that seem to indicate that there were persons - foreign agents - that did their best to stir up discontent and who distributed weapons, among other things. These are only rumours, AFAIK, not something from the official news; but even the possibility of something like is unpleasant to contemplate, in my view. And it is unfortunately all too easy to imagine CIA involved in this kind of thing.
And finally, what do you know about the Chinese government's motives? Not a single thing, I bet. All you guys know, as far as I can see from comments here, is how to repeat what the American media tell you; which amounts to no more than smug ignorance. They sure as hell don't care about the truth about this, they just want to sell minced woodland to you. Step back a little bit an ask yourself what a govenment can reasonably be expected to want? The Chinese aren't idiots and their govenment officials aren't GWBs - they know that what people want more than anything else is stability and predictability, and that the best way of holding on to power is by providing what the people craves. The Chinese is not interested in oppressing people or freedom - they know very well that democracy and freedom of speech are more or less illusory and can be easily manipulated; they can see clearly how their American colleagues do it. But the Chinese people don't want American style "freedom", they don't want lack of regulations and they don't want to be flooded with odious, American "McJesus" Christianity.
As I said, I don't know what happened, I just know that there are many more sides to the story than we hear about, especially on /. But if I should hazard guess, I would say that the situation was a whole lot more serious than what we have heard; that there was some foreign involvement in stirring up the sentiments, and that the government felt the situation was desperate and required immediate and decisive action. Maybe they panicked, and perhaps, looking back, they wish they hadn't. The only thing I feel entirely certain about is that they didn't just lean back and say "Freedom? Hah! We'll give freedom - let's massacre the lot".
It seems to me that America is always trying to solve all problems with technology rather than simply learning to avoid the problems in the first place. The problem with technology is that it will always be too easy to circumvent - it is never going to be entirely watertight.
Of course that is not always a problem, if what you are trying to achieve is simply to reduce the size of a problem; but since we are talking Homeland Security, ie trying to stop terrorism, how likely is that to be entirely successful? To paraphrase Terry Pratchett - the terrorists only need to lucky once, but America needs to be lucky every time.
What makes it seem even more futile is that there is a much cheaper and more effective alternative: why not try to be more of a friend to those in need? The biggest help terrorists have is that they can point their finger at America and say "The Big Satan".
Scientology is currently everyone's favorite whipping boy. Followers of larger and more powerful religions don't want to get into a debate about whose beliefs are nuttier, because they're all about equally nutty when you get right down to it.
Let me just point out that this is not a question of which religion is stupider; to me as a convinced atheist they are all equally meaningless, but there are some that are far more harmful than others. Scientology is way out there, not because of what they believe in, according to their books, but because they behave to all intents and purposes as a dangerous and unscrupulous criminal organisation. The first thing they do to new members is make them deeply indebted to the organization by pushing them through meaningless "courses" that get exponentially more expensive. And they suppress any criticism with extremely vicious attacks on those who are critical - as well as their familes.
Calling Scientlogy merely a cult is way too generous. They are a criminal organisation.
You don't use debuggers? Ever?
Nope. Not ever. Now, I wasn't really out to put down IDEs or their users; we are all different, some may like using this sort of tools, I just don't.
Perhaps it is down to the things I have worked with in my career - I worked on Windows when it was still version 2.0, and there was no way one could have used a debugger in that environment (real-mode x86); the only way to track down why a program failed was by inserting print statements. Since then I always write my code with print statements embedded, controlled by a suitable debug flag. And I can tell you it works a hell of a lot better than any debugger - I have successfully debugged multithreaded programs on Windows NT, written by somebody who either didn't know that the desktop interface isn't reentrant (or didn't know what that means) and who hadn't a clue about semaphores and event-driven programming. Now, how many simultaneous threads can you realistically follow in a source level debugger without loosing the thread, ahaha? Whereas printed output can be analysed over and over, you can even put it into an SQL database and try to cross-analyse it if you care.
I generally find the problem faster than my colleagues, I might mention.
Makes me wonder why roofs and not pavement
I believe pavements are mentioned too, but one reason for favouring buildings is airconditioning. If you can keep the heat from entering, you won't have to spend electricity on pupming it out again.
It somehow brings a smile to my face, reading this article and the reactions to it.
People tend to imagine that ideas mustremain static in order to remain "true", somehow; I wonder why that is? You can see it with religion - it's always about what Jesus REALLY said, or trying to figure out what the first Christians believed and practiced; but reality is not like that, it changes all the time and we acquire new knowledge every day - or if we don't, there is something wrong with us. So why should ideas remain static? Shouldn't our faith, hah, evolve?
And the same goes for political ideologies and philosophies. Just because Karl Marx's definition became popular, that doesn't have to be the final word about that matter. Whatever else he wanted, I'm pretty sure his ambition was to push towards a better and more fair society - if he had lived today, I doubt he would have come up with exactly the same thing, although the general drift would have been the same.
Capitalism and Communism as ideologies are just formalisations of two fundamental - let's call them instincts - that humans have: the instinct for individual survival, the egotism or "capitalism", and the instinct to care for others, our offspring and in the form of cooperation. Both give huge evolutionary advantages and both are almost as old as life itself. Everybody can understand that individual survival is necessary in order to produce offspring, but cooperation is fundamental to life in a more subtle way - indeed, it happens even down to the molecular level in every living cell, and it would be hard to imagine life at all without it. Plus, it has been "reinvented" over and over, when the first cells arose as a cooperation of molecules, when multicellular life forms arose, and when social animals have arisen several times over time.
The struggle between Capitalism and Communism is no more than yet another manifestation of the same; but we can't do without either, so instead of squabbling and stupidly calling "the others" evil or worse, we should get on with finding a sensible and sustainable balance. And on the way to achieving that, one of the things we have to learn is that there is nothing inherently wrong with either Communism or Capitalism, both are valuable contributors to a good society.
So yes, open source and the internet are indeed expressions of communism; a good form of communism that doesn't insist on enslaving, but strives to liberate.
The things you mentions as advantages are more or less the very ones I would mention as reasons why I don't use an IDE. Syntax highlighting and code completion drive me absolutely insane and I don't use debuggers; I REALLY can't stand it when a program tries to outsmart me - it is the same with idiotic gimmicks like incremental search.
Maybe I am just old fashioned, but to me the clearest way of indicating syntax is indentation, which I believe people use even if they use syntax higlighting. It has the advantage that you aren't crippled when you have to work away from your usual machine. I use standard vi for the same reason - there isn't a vim on all platforms, and most of the improvements in vim are actually nothing more than gimmicks anyway, IMHO.
The functionality you get in an IDE may be great when you are on Windows, where you neither have a proper shell nor command line window. I use either a tabbable xterm (in KDE) or screen (on a terminal) - normally with 4 or 5 command lines open at the same time. The first one for vi, the next for make and so on. OK, so I have to type ":w" to save my file, jump to next terminal session and type "make" then jump to next session and run the program; I can't say it is a huge effort, but maybe I've just got a stronger constitution than most.
And of course, since I do it this way, I always have the full power of a proper shell right at my fingertips, which you don't have in an IDE, not even one that run on UNIX.
Oh, just one more reason for not using an IDE: it hides what actually goes on from the programmer. Take the build process - in an IDE you push a button and it sort of happens, but you are not really sure how, certainly not in any detail. When you use make, you have actually written a makefile yourself which means that you have had to sit down and understand it as well as understanding the compiler- and link flags. This is actually useful knowledge, believe it or not.
- but much as I would like to see it not exist at all, the fact is that it does, and there are people who genuinely like it. It is never a good idea to try to will something like that away by passing a law; we simply have to learn to live with it in a sensible way, which fortunately is possible.
But living sensibly with things like drugs, gambling and other things society doesn't feel comfortable with means educating people about these things, preferably from an early age. Criminalising a common activity creates the worst possible situation; it excludes people from talking openly about it, sharing experiences etc, and it takes away any real authority when you want to teach your children how to handle it.
I personally never gamble - to me it is dull as well as a stupid way of wasting money - but I do smoke cannabis occasionally, which makes me a dangerous criminal; however, it also makes me able to teach my children why they shouldn't smoke themselves silly because of the way it interferes with your ability to achieve your ambitions. And you know what? I hold down a responsible job and have for decades, and my children are doing very well for themselves too. I imagine the same is true for people who enjoy gambling.
You probably already know what you need to document on your network - it will be whatever it takes to get things back up and running, and it depends not only on your operating system, but also on the hardware. I manage a R&D network of mostly UNIXes, and due to the R&D part of it, I have learned how to get by on minimal hardware and how to rescue systems wen they have been driven over the edge - again. There is no such thing as too much documentation, is what I've found, but it has to be well structured, easily accessible and easy to update.
There are some things you should obviously have written down: the physical and logical configuration of your network, the physical position of all hardware (which should always be clearly labeled), and administrator passwords should be written down somewhere safe, unless you have a password strategy that is easy for you to remember, but hard to guess for others (I'll elaborate a bit below).
Maybe it is just me, but I have found it absolutely necessary to put clearly visible labels on all machinery and make a list of them as well; when you have more than 40 servers plus all the little gadgets that form the understorey of a wild server habitat to keep check on, you just can't remember. And the idea that a serverroom should or could be a well-ordered place is naive, in my experience. I have a small label even on each network cable just in case.
The thing about passwords - some say that we should use passwords that are basically digitised, white noise, and that they should be changed every week or so; but who can remember that kind of things? So you end up with little lists and notes that are always out of date and are too easily forgotten in places where others might see them. I have done away with that - instead I use words I find easy to remeber, but which I have reasons to believe others won't. Some time last year it was words like the perhaps too well know "1337H4X0R", but recently I have found that there is a wealth of insanely obscure words to be found in older dictionaries for little know languages - it's a bit of a hobby I have; did you know that there are several hundred largely unrelated languages in Papua New Guinea alone? Not to mention Inuit dialects, Native American languages, etc etc. I haven't tried myself, but how fast could one guess a pasword like "umiarssualivinnguaq" ("small harbour" in Greenlandish)? It's probably not the first one most people would think of. The advantage is that these words have been used by real people; this means that 1) they have a real meaning, and 2) they are pronouncable (well, in principle), two things that make them easy to remember.
But I think the most important thing is not WHAT, but HOW you document. I have over the years evaluated a few documentation-/monitoring strategies, and the one I have settled on is in many ways the simplest: I use a Wiki and store all the home-made documentation there. It is simple to maintain and easy to access. Forget about MS doc formats and PDF or any other complicated format - a good Wiki is what you need, especially if it allows you to read it even from a text-only browser, because sometimes that may be all you have access to.
Another aspect of learning a trade as opposed to higher education is the money. In many countries, if you go to university you have to live on loans as well as having a low-paid job in the morning or evening - I got up at 3:30 every morning to work as a cleaner while I studied. So when you are ready for your first real job, you are already deeply in debt and then you find that your salary isn't sky-high, your work-conditions are lousy, you have to work 60 hours a week, but no overtime-payment.
On the other hand, if you had chosen learn a manual skill, you would probably have been an apprentice - which would have meant that you got paid while you learned - and you would have had a contract that you had the right to overtime-payment; and that's before you even get a real job. So when you've finished your studies, you probably don't have a huge debt and your salary is not actually that much lower than an academic's. I don't know if you can spot the difference here?
I have to say, I find it hard to justify to my children that they should go to college and study hard. It seemed obvious when I was young; well-educated people were admired and they had what seemed a brilliant career. I'm not sure what has happened in the meantime - part of it is probably to do with the celebrity culture. I mean, everybody has heard about Einstein, Niels Bohr and the others, but nowadays scientists are just nerds - ie. completely un-cool - and being well-educated is fairly low-status if not outright suspicious.
Another part is that young people have been lured away from protecting their own interests - you are almost certainly an un-savoury individual if you are in a trade union and your character is considered flawed if you are not willing to give away your overtime for free. It makes you wonder why intelligent people have let this happen, but it not hard to see who benefits from it.
I don't find what is euphemistically called "graphical content" exciting or scary - it just annoys me. To me the entertaiment value is in the actual content of the game, movie or whatever, not in whether there is a lot of internal organs draped over items in the vicinity; I realised how much it actually irritates me when I watched the "Watchmen" movie. The story line is not too bad for a superhero movie, but why do we need to spend that much time on Hefty Smurf splatting people's guts around?
... Oracle will have to regain the the trust and support of the MySQL community -- in other words, 'stop acting like Oracle.
If you go to http://www.oracle.com/technology/index.html you may notice that they give away their base products (ie RDBMS and JDeveloper among others) to developers for free, and if you go to their forum: http://forums.oracle.com/forums/main.jspa?categoryID=84 you should find that they have a large and thriving community for that very reason.
I like MySQL - but Oracle is my favourite database by a mile. I do system work daily with all of the major ones: Oracle, DB2, Informix, Adabas, Sybase, Teradata. I'm no longer an expert in any of them (used to do a lot of Oracle), but I do know that Oracle is still the standard the others are trying to reach up to, SQL-wise and with respect to scripting.
MySQL is not even in that game IMO, but it has a very simple API, so it is hugely useful for smaller applications.
Just to clarify - what we are talking about here is not spatial dimensions in the popular sense but "degrees of freedom": they have a procedure that takes five independent parameters. Sometimes it would be nice to not see a headline that tries to make a senstational headline out of a simple, down-to-earth matter. I mean, this is a bit like saying "I made a ten-dimensional cake" because it happens to contain ten ingredients; just get real, man.
Can't we all agree that the science indicates aspartame is either harmless or barely measurably harmful, and certainly less harmful than the obesity one gets from consuming large amounts of sugar?
Maybe. Unless you suffer from phylketonuria, of course. And all we know, of course, is that we haven't found out what harm it causes yet, strictly speaking; except for this:
When we eat sweet tasting food, the body starts up certain processes as preparation to digesting carbohydrates; but, being a very clever machine, it also learns from experience, so when we eat artificial sweetener, we can end up unlearning the natural connection between sweet taste and calories. The consequence of this is that when we eat something that really does contain sugar, we don't feel full as quickly, and thus end up eat far more. So, in effect using artificial sweeteners may help set you up for obesity. The same presumably goes for fat substitutes and things like that new pill, Alli.
There is no doubt in my mind that when a private company is offering a service, that company has sovereignty over what and how they do it, even if they are ISPs - that is one of the basic tenets of Capitalism, isn't it? So when people complain about net neutrality in the name of freedom, while at the same time defending Capitalism in the name of freedom, we have reached a point where a decision has to be made: what freedom do you actually want?
In my view all important infrastructure should be publically owned - roads, electricity grid, water supply, information networks - paid for through the taxes, and possibly through usage fees as well. "The Public" belongs to all of us and therefore has a clear duty to be neutral in all political, religious etc respects, but I don't think we can reasonably demand that private companies are, unless it makes business sense - which it all too often doesn't.
Let me be the Devils advocate a bit here.
First of all I think it is excessively pompous to talk about a "Technology Bill of Rights" - it isn't as if we have been living through an era of extreme oppression after which we have finally reached the Enlightenment. Actually, one could argue that the opposite is the case: that the internet up until now has been a lawless wilderness, where criminals of all sorts thrive and where it is far too easy to get hurt; in short, we need to tame and civilize the internet.
Article 1. Any individual shall be able to choose anonymity when posting to Internet sites
I disagree. The need for whistleblowing would be better served by making special arrangements for protecting the identity of people in certain specific circumstances. Granting anonymity "whenever, wherever" is far too wide-reaching; it is not just poor, oppressed, but honest people who wish to hide their faces. There are already ways of protecting the identity of legitimate whistle-blowers; the company I work for have hired an independent company to which employees can direct their criticism and complaints. It actually works - employees feel comfortable with speaking out, and the employer is able to keep themselves informed about the criticisms without knowing who said what, thus avoiding any unproductive ill feelings.
Article 3. No individual shall be held liable for effects of malware or malicious code unknowingly run on a personal computer
Why not? It isn't difficult to avoid - apart from the lazy option of using a virus-scanner, simply thinking before clicking on anything sent in your mail should do the trick for the most part. Contrary to common belief, most malware atatcks are not the result of somebody breaking into your computer, they happen because you behave stupidly. You need to educate yourself a bit before operating a computer, just like a car - because if you don't, you will end up hurting other people. Perhaps it should be mandatory to pass an internet test before being allowed out.
To be quite honest, I suspect in many ways Americans are the least well-equipped to form a meaningful opinion about what freedoms are essential. American media and culture have for many decades been too much of a hot-bed of word-twisting, to the extent that even many basic concepts have an entirely different meaning to an American as compared to non-Americans. And if people all over the world are to agree on anything big and important enough to be called " Bill of Rights", it will have to be thought through and turned over a very large number of times. Just throwing together a list of your personal gripes doesn't quite cut it, I feel.
"Human" is a term applicable to all members of the genus "Homo", just like "Chimpanzee" is the word for all members of "Pan" - the biological genus, that is, not the club (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_Club_Copenhagen). As a note of interest, some biologists even argue that chimpanzees are biologically so close to us that they should be included in the same genus.
I suspect the idea that humans are somehow special and "more" than animals stems from the kind of religion we have traditionally practised here in the West, which is in many ways still a "famer- and shepherd religion". To most hunter/gatherers this distinction is unknown - the animals you hunt are seen as persons you have to respect; when we became farmers, animals became mere items that the Creator had made for our convenience.
And of, it isn't hard to see this traditional prejudice reflected in the constantly repeated "Humans vs Neanderthal" nonsense - something that continues despite the ever growing body of evidence that shows the Neanderthal Human to be a sophisticated creature with culture on par with our own at the time - there is evidence that they took care of their elderly and sick, such as the remains of a person who was clearly disabled, yet lived to adulthood, as well as eg. the "Divje Babe" flute (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal_flute) which may be evidence that they practised music. They were clearly very clever hunters, possibly more so than Homo sapiens - a recent study suggests they hunted large prey actively rather than simply scavenging.
You may indeed suggest anything you like - "Freedom of Speech", you see. Your words as well as the epithet you have chosen to write under ("Amercan Terrorist") would appear to imply that you consider people idiots when they don't accept your point of view; so in this case I must be an idiot, because I disagree.
Americans are more or less like all other people in the world; the vast majority are just ordinary people, not exceptionally good or evil, just like myself. And I trust and respect myself - I know that I am mostly decent, honest and helpful, and I know that it is possibly to disagree with others and still treat them with decency and honesty. I have every reason to believe that most people share my sentiments.