So you would never vote for someone you like, even when you agree with his ideas, because of his political party.
Doesn't that just make you an idiot?
I don't think I am the idiot here - I like one of his ideas, and I like the way he appears in interviews. But you can have friends - even friends that you admire - that you disagree wholeheartedly with on many issues. I think the conservative party in UK is riddled with spoilt bullies that were brought up with the feeling of entitlement to privilege. I most definitely don't think they are good for the people of UK, and I would never vote for them, at least not until that changed.
Just listen to the weasel words of the likes of Cameron and Osbourne: 'Big Society' and 'We are for Working People' - it sounds almost socialist, except what they mean is "Big Society" = "let charities take care of the poor; we won't", and "Working People" = "those who are already in a secure job - if you are unemployed, we'll force you to accept any job, however demeaning, 'cause you'll get nothing from us". Is this the right way to create a more just society? I'm not convinced.
The obvious first market for ebooks has been anything you read sequentially, like novels. Ebook adoption climbs a hill for works you need to jump around in. That grease-thumbed reference book you keep beside your workbench will be the physical book's last stand.
Possibly - but I think the reason why ebooks haven't taken over the world by now is more complex. One problem is that ebook readers only last for a short while, compared to a printed book. I have had a Kindle for about 18 months, and it is now broken: the dreaded screen failure that many have had already. By comparison, I can still read books that are 150 years old. Printed books are altogether more rugged - you can still use them even after having dropped then in your bath etc.
The other nuisance for me has been the fact that an ebook is really hard to make notes on. That pretty much rules out using it for anything other than entertainment. Then there's the tie-in: it ought to be simple and easy to move your book over to your PC, change the format, print parts of it etc, but in order to do any of that, you have to commit a crime. All of which means that it is unworkable to use ebooks for any serious purpose.
And then, of course, they all try to use the format to push all sorts of rubbish on you - like advertising, or turning your ebook reader into an entertainment gadget, as if the smartphone wasn't already filling that space. So they waste their time on that instead of trying to make an ebook reader that could really replace the printed book and even surpass its utility.
Boris Johnson is an odd one - on one hand a typical, Eton Tory bully, on the other hand clever and original; a highly unusual combination. I would never vote Conservative, but I rather like him. And his ideas for cycling are spot on.
Ahem,... Dare one raise one's voice in disagreement here? I think you are getting carried away by conspiracy theoretical silliness. There is no need to invoke fantasies, when reality will do.
First of all, the government doesn't have the power to do as they please - we have seen this time and again - but you seem to think that they can 'just go out and shut down this and that'. If it was that easy, why haven't they long ago wiped the world clean of political dissent? Why do they allow the press to keep embarrassing them over and over? I think the simple explanation is that they actually believe in the ideals of democratic government, however twisted their ideologies might otherwise be. By comparison, we have seen what a totalitarian government is capable of - Europe and America are both quite far from that.
No, I think this is just the old struggle between the two forms of prudishness: the ones that believe pornography is evil, and the ones that pornography has anything to do with real sex. You see, pornography expresses a very prudish view on sexuality - a kind "Berührungsangst" as the Germans call it. That is why pornography always seems so unrealistic - there are no emotions, the participants are usually waxed to look as asexual as possible etc. (And yes, I have actually watched porn - even the supposedly more rauchy kind; I'm sorry to say, I found it boring).
The Tories in UK know that a large part of their constituency long back to the good old days of Queen Victoria and the Empire, when the Colonies knew their place and decent people were rich and wore ten layers of wool, and only procreated because it was your duty to Queen and Country. So they pander to their voters, as all politicians do, and they have a reasonably well-founded suspicion that a lot of people in UK of all classes are rather worried about the complete lack of control with everything happening on the internet. These people would welcome a lot of the proposed measures to exert control over things, even if they don't really work, simply because it feels like somebody is doing something.
I'm more concerned with pesticides/herbacides/whateveracides than GMOs.
We started engineering our food when we started farming 10,000 years ago.
It isn't the GMO side of it that is a problem, it is the patenting of genes and the fact that you can't produce viable seeds from these crops, thus making you fully dependent on the producer: Monsanto.
10000 years ago, we didn't have patents or predatory, global corporations. GMO could be of huge benefit to the world, but the producers, like Monsanto, are doing everything they can to hinder it. What should happen is that governments should fund the development of GMO crops with real benefits, untainted by greedy corporations' interests.
Advertising is necessary, to be sure - up to a point. As a business, you have to attract customers, no doubt, and to do that, you have to advertise. But there a huge difference between putting a small, factual advert in a few, strategic places, and spurting out a deluge of mindless shite over everybody. That sort of advertising is simply immoral in so many ways - and I use the word 'immoral' very deliberately, because I think it is also a moral issue.
The enormous amounts of adverts tend to drown out any coherent message there might be, not to mention the actual content of many websites. Most adverts are at best irrelevant noise, at worst blatant lies and in any case unproductive, and therefore worthless to the companies paying for them.
This is also a moral issue, IMO, for many reasons; one thing is the large part of advertising that is shamelessly fraudulent, but there are also issues like encouraging (or even bullying) people into wasting their money and sometimes health on unnecessary comsumption, as well as luring businesses into wasting their money on worthless advertising. Advertising agencies are for a very large part nothing more than parasites, and the sooner we get rid of them, the better.
And just to have it said - I do know the arguments about 'nobody forces people to...'; not true, simply. It is very easy to see the direct connection from massive advertising campaigns that encourage drinking amoungst young people, to the increasing trend towards young people binge drinking every weekend. Producers of things like alcohol and sugary or fatty consumables, and companies like loan sharks and betting shops, deliberately target the most vulnerable, contributing to a culture of mindless consumption and indirectly to peer-pressure; after all, who wants to be seen as un-cool - a lentil eating outsider?
Because time is a real cost. Sometimes more than throwing out something old & buying something new.
And time can encompass a lot of issues - build, install, security, speed, opportunity cost.
True - but into this yo uhave to factor the time spent on having to replace applications that are no longer available on newer versions. I know of several places that hold on to HW from the 80es, simply because there is no strong reason for replacing it. Some of these systems have uptimes running into years, even 10 - 15 years. My personal record so far has been an old Solaris box, which had run for 7 years - it was rebooted because we need to rewire the server room.
Of course, if you're talking smartphones, perhaps you have to upgrade - but that is only because there are so few options for upgrading the hardware; by design.
1) Make sure users, especially Windows users, are well educated enough to not run things or accept things that pop up in the browser or is sent in an email.
2) Make sure that all users have Adblockers, No-Script etc installed by default. It is more trouble initially, but it gives you a chance to stop and think, and after a while you will have trained yourself and your browser to allow you to do your work with a minimum of pain.
3) Always run Windows in a VM under Linux - and make regular, dated backups of the Windows disk images (the VM disk images!). If shit happens, you can quickly go back to a version that works.
Of those three, the first point is far the most important.
"sell goods and services without the knowledge of their governments".
Legal, financial transactions of any kind are known to the government of all countries with a certain level of technology; this is mostly for purposes of taxation. This has been the case, at least in principle, for something like a century, give or take, so it is hardly an argument against the 'Evil, Communist' government of Cuba. In fact, I would say that most people in most civilised countries would see tax-evaders as being on the wrong side of the fence, since most people can see the sense in contributing to resources we all benefit from.
Oracle is an expensive product and annual bills like that are not terribly unusual really. They may or may not be able to find a suitable cheaper option assuming that they don't just need to do better license accounting.
Yeah, it is expensive when you compare to cheaper products, although if I remember correctly, the OP said '$2M for 2M licenses" - ie. $1 per license, which isn't a lot of money. $2M isn't a lot either, if you compare to how much you would pay for developing and maintain your own SW. This isn't only for RDBMS - Oracle has an extensive suite of 'enterprise applications', whatever that means, all of which would have to be replaced as well, if one were to go for alternative products - which would then be less integrated. I suspect, if you compare Oracle to other enterprise systems, they don't stand out as being particularly expensive, but I haven't checked.
Another thing to bear in mind is that when we look at large systems in general, we have traditionally talked about mainframes - where the hardware is hugely expensive, and all applications comes with eye-watering pricetags; I seem to recall numbers like $20K per seat being typical. In that context, what Oracle demands may seem modest.
Hey, I was joking; people often make ruder jokes about things they are fond of than about things they dislike. I like Javascript, but I'm not deeply convinced about the merits of compiling something to Javascript. Of course, this sort of idea isn't unknown in other languages, from C++ 'compiling' to C, or C to assembler, or diverse pre-processors like pro C/COBOL/FORTRAN etc - or for that matter IBM's HLASM. They have their place and offer some convenience, but they are not highly relevant to me.
And don't speak badly about Windows; I've spent many happy hours watching people struggle with Windows, while I buzz along on my Linux system. I would be very sad if there were no more Windows systems to laugh at.
When USENET, IRC, and other mediums that were hard to censor were the rule rather than the exception?
They were not hard to censor; in fact, it would probably have been much easier, since the volumes were much lower. It was just that few realised the potential of this new technology; I remember well how, for years, my workplaces only had a very thin internat connection - in one place there was 1 PC, placed in the reception, connected via a modem, for the whole company to use. It was regarded as a curiosity that probably would fizzle out after a while.
They may profess to follow Western ideals, they may even actually believe in them, but when push comes to shove they'll always do what's necessary to enrich the bottom line.
Welcome to Capitalism, where the only valid measure of anything is The Bottom Line. Freedom is only Freedom and truth is only Truth, if they increase profits.
...why the EU is hesitant to consider admitting Turkey?
Because, for all its rhetoric about freedom and equality, EU is about freedom and equality FOR BUSINESS first and foremost. They don't want Turkey because Turkey is not valuable enough in terms of business, and because for all the lofty ideals, Europeans are deeply bigotted against the idea that Muslims might be good citizens in a European country. It is no longer PC to call them 'swarthy' like we used to, so now it is about 'the clash of civilizations' and how 'Islam leads to terror' and of course the good ol' 'they breed like rats'. That is the ugly truth about why EU doesn't admit Turkey - if Turkey joined the EU, Turkish people would have the right to move and work everywhere.
Well, if we are to believe the Gospel, we all have the chance to seek redemption, I guess. It isn't exactly a new phenomenon that ultra-rich people end up growing the conscience they should have learned from their parents in childhood - the same happened for Rockefeller and Carnegie, just mention two, and for a number of those that grew rich on exploiting their workers or slaves during the industrial revolution in England.
I suppose a major factor is also that when you grow older, you discover how futile it is to amass enormous wealth. Objectively speaking, how much wealth can any one person or family sensibly utilise? At the lower end of the scale, you will wish to cover your immediate needs, then maybe a good house, some transport, etc, but at some level it becomes meaningless to add more. People don't really need a 100-room mansion in a 10000 acre garden for their own use, and even the most obscenely luxurious foods and wines become commonplace surprisingly soon. Thus, when you get older, you realise that all you really have is loads of inert gold lying around, figuratively speaking - and conscience is the only thing you don't have in abundance.
Isn't there something slightly perverse about this kind of vegetarianism? I mean, not just this, but the whole idea of taking vegetables and somehow try to make it taste almost like some sort of meat? Vegetables taste great as they are - you become vegetarian because of that, not because you think it is sad for the poor animals, I would have thought. Otherwise, you are just another 'holier-than-thou' fool.
I'm dying to know what sort of "long-term solution" would be acceptable to those who feel a need to ban or block others from watching pornography. Drug therapy? Morality police? Castration? Shotgun weddings?
Well, it is not always as simple as applying a thick layer of 'Freedom Rhetoric'; and it isn't as simple as equating 'porn' with 'sexual freedom'. Especially in a place like India - check out the kinds of imagery you can see on certain Indian temples, for example; they are somewhat friskier than any pornography you are likely to encounter on the web. So, I think it is quite likely that when they, whoever they are, talk about poor, moral influences, it is not so much about the plasticky sex, as it is about something else - perhaps the depiction of sex as something superficial and without consequences, who knows? If we want to make our opinions known, we should at least make the effort to understand what the issue is.
The other thing, of course, is that this may well be what the majority of the population wants: tougher regulations. India is a democracy, and democracies often decide to do stupid things - it is part of the price you pay for the luxury of having democracy. This problem is best solved by liberal application of education, especially in 'soft', humanist subjects, where you learn to think critically and respect your opposition. Liberalisation of pornography is not really a major part of the solution - it is at best irrelevant, and at worst it becomes a hindrance to the development of a realistic attitude to and understanding of sex.
Looking around, it seems that most people take 'tough' to mean 'spectacular'; I disagree with that. I think some of the most difficult bugs are the subtle ones that don't give many symptoms, or which masquerade as something else.
Probably the hardest one to solve - or the one that required most insight - was in an application is worked with on Windows NT. The architecture was messy, to say the least, with anonymous pipes everywhere, but the real trouble came from the toolset, which tempted developers into doing stupid things. I think it was written using a an IDE for C++ from Borland (I forget the name), and they had got this 'brilliant' idea of making a number of objects that you could drag onto your design surface to create a Windowed application with automatically generated code behind. One class of objects were for things like FTP, etc, which was used in a central place. The problem, as it turned out, after I had thought deeply about it, was that network communication is asynchronous by its very nature, whereas the graphical toolset in Windows is non-reentrant, meaning that it is not a good idea to call functions that update the desktop before they have returned from a previous call. See what I mean: When a network packet arrives, you update your progress bar or whatever, which looks cool - but if the next packet arrives too soon, it tends to kill not just the application, but the whole desktop. The solution was to not use the network objects at all and instead rely on POSIX network calls running in a separate thread and communicating to the main loop via a pipe. Not quite synchronous, but much more robust.
Nobody counts the emissions to produce any other vehicles, so why would we hold electric cars to a different standard?
Because it would be more accurate/honest? If we want to consider the effect on the environment, we have to take into account the sum of effects, for all types of cars, not just focus on a single aspect. Electric cars probably come out on top still, but the problem is, we don't know, unless we consider all facts without bias. The objective truth, as far as possible, should be what matters, especially to environmentally conscious people - we want to achieve a better environment, after all.
... theory here is that if more stringent fuel mileage standards are maintained, it will force traditional automakers...
I'm no fan of cars in general, although I would probably go for an electric vehicle next time I need to change. It looks to me like they (Tesla) are pushing for a standard that only or predominantly looks at the emissions from the vehicle, whereas the obviously right thing would be to count in all the emissions required to produce and maintain vehicles.
Look, you are talking about the leader of the Conservative Party, a party that claims to be 'for working people', which either demonstrates that to them 'work' means 'the sort of things they do in Wall Street or London City', or they are just full of weasel words; you tell me. My guess is, they don't know and they don't care how this is supposed to work, he is just posturing.
However, I think there is a more realistic side to this - as it is now, there aren't really any rules, or if there are, these sites are getting away with simply ignoring them and hiding behind 'free speech'. The police or other authorities can't do anything against them, because they have to follow the law - so if you see this as a problem and want to tackle it, you have to change the law so police are allowed to take action. As I see it, it is about putting pressure on porn sites to start taking things seriously, because they haven't bothered until now.
I have to say, my experiences since the release of Windows 10 have been thoroughly positive. Everything just works, applications load fast, all the tools are there from the start, or freely available for easy download. Admittedly, I do run Debian, and this may have influenced my experience somewhat. Windows, you say? I wouldn't touch it with a bargepole. A sledgehammer, yes, and with some emphasis, but not a bargepole.
Sorry to change the subject here, but I see a trend recently, where posts - like the one I am replying to - get modded down unreasonably. Modding down simply because you are annoyed that somebody makes a joke about your pet fetish, is petty and immature.
I know there is a feature in/. called 'meta-moderation', but it is too long-wided to use, or it was when I looked last time, so could we have a button beside all posts that have been moderated (up or down), that would allow logged-in users to agree or disagree with the moderation? And then you could use the stats on how people's mods were agreed or disagreed with to affect the standing or karma of modders.
Good to hear from somebody in a position to know, which I am not, unfortunately. Still, I got my impression from a discussion in a book written by professor Nick Lane: "The Vital Question"; maybe I didn't understand his words. Have you read his book?
Slashdot Mirror
...this guy with the beard and dedication will fix all ...
Karl Marx?
So you would never vote for someone you like, even when you agree with his ideas, because of his political party.
Doesn't that just make you an idiot?
I don't think I am the idiot here - I like one of his ideas, and I like the way he appears in interviews. But you can have friends - even friends that you admire - that you disagree wholeheartedly with on many issues. I think the conservative party in UK is riddled with spoilt bullies that were brought up with the feeling of entitlement to privilege. I most definitely don't think they are good for the people of UK, and I would never vote for them, at least not until that changed.
Just listen to the weasel words of the likes of Cameron and Osbourne: 'Big Society' and 'We are for Working People' - it sounds almost socialist, except what they mean is "Big Society" = "let charities take care of the poor; we won't", and "Working People" = "those who are already in a secure job - if you are unemployed, we'll force you to accept any job, however demeaning, 'cause you'll get nothing from us". Is this the right way to create a more just society? I'm not convinced.
The obvious first market for ebooks has been anything you read sequentially, like novels. Ebook adoption climbs a hill for works you need to jump around in. That grease-thumbed reference book you keep beside your workbench will be the physical book's last stand.
Possibly - but I think the reason why ebooks haven't taken over the world by now is more complex. One problem is that ebook readers only last for a short while, compared to a printed book. I have had a Kindle for about 18 months, and it is now broken: the dreaded screen failure that many have had already. By comparison, I can still read books that are 150 years old. Printed books are altogether more rugged - you can still use them even after having dropped then in your bath etc.
The other nuisance for me has been the fact that an ebook is really hard to make notes on. That pretty much rules out using it for anything other than entertainment. Then there's the tie-in: it ought to be simple and easy to move your book over to your PC, change the format, print parts of it etc, but in order to do any of that, you have to commit a crime. All of which means that it is unworkable to use ebooks for any serious purpose.
And then, of course, they all try to use the format to push all sorts of rubbish on you - like advertising, or turning your ebook reader into an entertainment gadget, as if the smartphone wasn't already filling that space. So they waste their time on that instead of trying to make an ebook reader that could really replace the printed book and even surpass its utility.
Boris Johnson is an odd one - on one hand a typical, Eton Tory bully, on the other hand clever and original; a highly unusual combination. I would never vote Conservative, but I rather like him. And his ideas for cycling are spot on.
Ahem,... Dare one raise one's voice in disagreement here? I think you are getting carried away by conspiracy theoretical silliness. There is no need to invoke fantasies, when reality will do.
First of all, the government doesn't have the power to do as they please - we have seen this time and again - but you seem to think that they can 'just go out and shut down this and that'. If it was that easy, why haven't they long ago wiped the world clean of political dissent? Why do they allow the press to keep embarrassing them over and over? I think the simple explanation is that they actually believe in the ideals of democratic government, however twisted their ideologies might otherwise be. By comparison, we have seen what a totalitarian government is capable of - Europe and America are both quite far from that.
No, I think this is just the old struggle between the two forms of prudishness: the ones that believe pornography is evil, and the ones that pornography has anything to do with real sex. You see, pornography expresses a very prudish view on sexuality - a kind "Berührungsangst" as the Germans call it. That is why pornography always seems so unrealistic - there are no emotions, the participants are usually waxed to look as asexual as possible etc. (And yes, I have actually watched porn - even the supposedly more rauchy kind; I'm sorry to say, I found it boring).
The Tories in UK know that a large part of their constituency long back to the good old days of Queen Victoria and the Empire, when the Colonies knew their place and decent people were rich and wore ten layers of wool, and only procreated because it was your duty to Queen and Country. So they pander to their voters, as all politicians do, and they have a reasonably well-founded suspicion that a lot of people in UK of all classes are rather worried about the complete lack of control with everything happening on the internet. These people would welcome a lot of the proposed measures to exert control over things, even if they don't really work, simply because it feels like somebody is doing something.
Literally no-one on this thread will be who they claim to be. Not even me.
What, you're not Oxygen99, but H2S?
I'm more concerned with pesticides/herbacides/whateveracides than GMOs.
We started engineering our food when we started farming 10,000 years ago.
It isn't the GMO side of it that is a problem, it is the patenting of genes and the fact that you can't produce viable seeds from these crops, thus making you fully dependent on the producer: Monsanto.
10000 years ago, we didn't have patents or predatory, global corporations. GMO could be of huge benefit to the world, but the producers, like Monsanto, are doing everything they can to hinder it. What should happen is that governments should fund the development of GMO crops with real benefits, untainted by greedy corporations' interests.
Advertising is necessary, to be sure - up to a point. As a business, you have to attract customers, no doubt, and to do that, you have to advertise. But there a huge difference between putting a small, factual advert in a few, strategic places, and spurting out a deluge of mindless shite over everybody. That sort of advertising is simply immoral in so many ways - and I use the word 'immoral' very deliberately, because I think it is also a moral issue.
The enormous amounts of adverts tend to drown out any coherent message there might be, not to mention the actual content of many websites. Most adverts are at best irrelevant noise, at worst blatant lies and in any case unproductive, and therefore worthless to the companies paying for them.
This is also a moral issue, IMO, for many reasons; one thing is the large part of advertising that is shamelessly fraudulent, but there are also issues like encouraging (or even bullying) people into wasting their money and sometimes health on unnecessary comsumption, as well as luring businesses into wasting their money on worthless advertising. Advertising agencies are for a very large part nothing more than parasites, and the sooner we get rid of them, the better.
And just to have it said - I do know the arguments about 'nobody forces people to ...'; not true, simply. It is very easy to see the direct connection from massive advertising campaigns that encourage drinking amoungst young people, to the increasing trend towards young people binge drinking every weekend. Producers of things like alcohol and sugary or fatty consumables, and companies like loan sharks and betting shops, deliberately target the most vulnerable, contributing to a culture of mindless consumption and indirectly to peer-pressure; after all, who wants to be seen as un-cool - a lentil eating outsider?
Because time is a real cost. Sometimes more than throwing out something old & buying something new.
And time can encompass a lot of issues - build, install, security, speed, opportunity cost.
True - but into this yo uhave to factor the time spent on having to replace applications that are no longer available on newer versions. I know of several places that hold on to HW from the 80es, simply because there is no strong reason for replacing it. Some of these systems have uptimes running into years, even 10 - 15 years. My personal record so far has been an old Solaris box, which had run for 7 years - it was rebooted because we need to rewire the server room.
Of course, if you're talking smartphones, perhaps you have to upgrade - but that is only because there are so few options for upgrading the hardware; by design.
1) Make sure users, especially Windows users, are well educated enough to not run things or accept things that pop up in the browser or is sent in an email.
2) Make sure that all users have Adblockers, No-Script etc installed by default. It is more trouble initially, but it gives you a chance to stop and think, and after a while you will have trained yourself and your browser to allow you to do your work with a minimum of pain.
3) Always run Windows in a VM under Linux - and make regular, dated backups of the Windows disk images (the VM disk images!). If shit happens, you can quickly go back to a version that works.
Of those three, the first point is far the most important.
"sell goods and services without the knowledge of their governments".
Legal, financial transactions of any kind are known to the government of all countries with a certain level of technology; this is mostly for purposes of taxation. This has been the case, at least in principle, for something like a century, give or take, so it is hardly an argument against the 'Evil, Communist' government of Cuba. In fact, I would say that most people in most civilised countries would see tax-evaders as being on the wrong side of the fence, since most people can see the sense in contributing to resources we all benefit from.
Oracle is an expensive product and annual bills like that are not terribly unusual really. They may or may not be able to find a suitable cheaper option assuming that they don't just need to do better license accounting.
Yeah, it is expensive when you compare to cheaper products, although if I remember correctly, the OP said '$2M for 2M licenses" - ie. $1 per license, which isn't a lot of money. $2M isn't a lot either, if you compare to how much you would pay for developing and maintain your own SW. This isn't only for RDBMS - Oracle has an extensive suite of 'enterprise applications', whatever that means, all of which would have to be replaced as well, if one were to go for alternative products - which would then be less integrated. I suspect, if you compare Oracle to other enterprise systems, they don't stand out as being particularly expensive, but I haven't checked.
Another thing to bear in mind is that when we look at large systems in general, we have traditionally talked about mainframes - where the hardware is hugely expensive, and all applications comes with eye-watering pricetags; I seem to recall numbers like $20K per seat being typical. In that context, what Oracle demands may seem modest.
We're talking about JavaScript, not Windows. :P
Hey, I was joking; people often make ruder jokes about things they are fond of than about things they dislike. I like Javascript, but I'm not deeply convinced about the merits of compiling something to Javascript. Of course, this sort of idea isn't unknown in other languages, from C++ 'compiling' to C, or C to assembler, or diverse pre-processors like pro C/COBOL/FORTRAN etc - or for that matter IBM's HLASM. They have their place and offer some convenience, but they are not highly relevant to me.
And don't speak badly about Windows; I've spent many happy hours watching people struggle with Windows, while I buzz along on my Linux system. I would be very sad if there were no more Windows systems to laugh at.
Compiling to JS is like having a shit for dinner, you're doing it wrong.
What are you talking about? 50 million flies can't be wrong.
When USENET, IRC, and other mediums that were hard to censor were the rule rather than the exception?
They were not hard to censor; in fact, it would probably have been much easier, since the volumes were much lower. It was just that few realised the potential of this new technology; I remember well how, for years, my workplaces only had a very thin internat connection - in one place there was 1 PC, placed in the reception, connected via a modem, for the whole company to use. It was regarded as a curiosity that probably would fizzle out after a while.
They may profess to follow Western ideals, they may even actually believe in them, but when push comes to shove they'll always do what's necessary to enrich the bottom line.
Welcome to Capitalism, where the only valid measure of anything is The Bottom Line. Freedom is only Freedom and truth is only Truth, if they increase profits.
...why the EU is hesitant to consider admitting Turkey?
Because, for all its rhetoric about freedom and equality, EU is about freedom and equality FOR BUSINESS first and foremost. They don't want Turkey because Turkey is not valuable enough in terms of business, and because for all the lofty ideals, Europeans are deeply bigotted against the idea that Muslims might be good citizens in a European country. It is no longer PC to call them 'swarthy' like we used to, so now it is about 'the clash of civilizations' and how 'Islam leads to terror' and of course the good ol' 'they breed like rats'. That is the ugly truth about why EU doesn't admit Turkey - if Turkey joined the EU, Turkish people would have the right to move and work everywhere.
Does anyone remember when Bill Gates was evil?
Well, if we are to believe the Gospel, we all have the chance to seek redemption, I guess. It isn't exactly a new phenomenon that ultra-rich people end up growing the conscience they should have learned from their parents in childhood - the same happened for Rockefeller and Carnegie, just mention two, and for a number of those that grew rich on exploiting their workers or slaves during the industrial revolution in England.
I suppose a major factor is also that when you grow older, you discover how futile it is to amass enormous wealth. Objectively speaking, how much wealth can any one person or family sensibly utilise? At the lower end of the scale, you will wish to cover your immediate needs, then maybe a good house, some transport, etc, but at some level it becomes meaningless to add more. People don't really need a 100-room mansion in a 10000 acre garden for their own use, and even the most obscenely luxurious foods and wines become commonplace surprisingly soon. Thus, when you get older, you realise that all you really have is loads of inert gold lying around, figuratively speaking - and conscience is the only thing you don't have in abundance.
Isn't there something slightly perverse about this kind of vegetarianism? I mean, not just this, but the whole idea of taking vegetables and somehow try to make it taste almost like some sort of meat? Vegetables taste great as they are - you become vegetarian because of that, not because you think it is sad for the poor animals, I would have thought. Otherwise, you are just another 'holier-than-thou' fool.
I'm dying to know what sort of "long-term solution" would be acceptable to those who feel a need to ban or block others from watching pornography. Drug therapy? Morality police? Castration? Shotgun weddings?
Well, it is not always as simple as applying a thick layer of 'Freedom Rhetoric'; and it isn't as simple as equating 'porn' with 'sexual freedom'. Especially in a place like India - check out the kinds of imagery you can see on certain Indian temples, for example; they are somewhat friskier than any pornography you are likely to encounter on the web. So, I think it is quite likely that when they, whoever they are, talk about poor, moral influences, it is not so much about the plasticky sex, as it is about something else - perhaps the depiction of sex as something superficial and without consequences, who knows? If we want to make our opinions known, we should at least make the effort to understand what the issue is.
The other thing, of course, is that this may well be what the majority of the population wants: tougher regulations. India is a democracy, and democracies often decide to do stupid things - it is part of the price you pay for the luxury of having democracy. This problem is best solved by liberal application of education, especially in 'soft', humanist subjects, where you learn to think critically and respect your opposition. Liberalisation of pornography is not really a major part of the solution - it is at best irrelevant, and at worst it becomes a hindrance to the development of a realistic attitude to and understanding of sex.
Looking around, it seems that most people take 'tough' to mean 'spectacular'; I disagree with that. I think some of the most difficult bugs are the subtle ones that don't give many symptoms, or which masquerade as something else.
Probably the hardest one to solve - or the one that required most insight - was in an application is worked with on Windows NT. The architecture was messy, to say the least, with anonymous pipes everywhere, but the real trouble came from the toolset, which tempted developers into doing stupid things. I think it was written using a an IDE for C++ from Borland (I forget the name), and they had got this 'brilliant' idea of making a number of objects that you could drag onto your design surface to create a Windowed application with automatically generated code behind. One class of objects were for things like FTP, etc, which was used in a central place. The problem, as it turned out, after I had thought deeply about it, was that network communication is asynchronous by its very nature, whereas the graphical toolset in Windows is non-reentrant, meaning that it is not a good idea to call functions that update the desktop before they have returned from a previous call. See what I mean: When a network packet arrives, you update your progress bar or whatever, which looks cool - but if the next packet arrives too soon, it tends to kill not just the application, but the whole desktop. The solution was to not use the network objects at all and instead rely on POSIX network calls running in a separate thread and communicating to the main loop via a pipe. Not quite synchronous, but much more robust.
Nobody counts the emissions to produce any other vehicles, so why would we hold electric cars to a different standard?
Because it would be more accurate/honest? If we want to consider the effect on the environment, we have to take into account the sum of effects, for all types of cars, not just focus on a single aspect. Electric cars probably come out on top still, but the problem is, we don't know, unless we consider all facts without bias. The objective truth, as far as possible, should be what matters, especially to environmentally conscious people - we want to achieve a better environment, after all.
... theory here is that if more stringent fuel mileage standards are maintained, it will force traditional automakers...
I'm no fan of cars in general, although I would probably go for an electric vehicle next time I need to change. It looks to me like they (Tesla) are pushing for a standard that only or predominantly looks at the emissions from the vehicle, whereas the obviously right thing would be to count in all the emissions required to produce and maintain vehicles.
Look, you are talking about the leader of the Conservative Party, a party that claims to be 'for working people', which either demonstrates that to them 'work' means 'the sort of things they do in Wall Street or London City', or they are just full of weasel words; you tell me. My guess is, they don't know and they don't care how this is supposed to work, he is just posturing.
However, I think there is a more realistic side to this - as it is now, there aren't really any rules, or if there are, these sites are getting away with simply ignoring them and hiding behind 'free speech'. The police or other authorities can't do anything against them, because they have to follow the law - so if you see this as a problem and want to tackle it, you have to change the law so police are allowed to take action. As I see it, it is about putting pressure on porn sites to start taking things seriously, because they haven't bothered until now.
I have to say, my experiences since the release of Windows 10 have been thoroughly positive. Everything just works, applications load fast, all the tools are there from the start, or freely available for easy download. Admittedly, I do run Debian, and this may have influenced my experience somewhat. Windows, you say? I wouldn't touch it with a bargepole. A sledgehammer, yes, and with some emphasis, but not a bargepole.
Sorry to change the subject here, but I see a trend recently, where posts - like the one I am replying to - get modded down unreasonably. Modding down simply because you are annoyed that somebody makes a joke about your pet fetish, is petty and immature.
I know there is a feature in /. called 'meta-moderation', but it is too long-wided to use, or it was when I looked last time, so could we have a button beside all posts that have been moderated (up or down), that would allow logged-in users to agree or disagree with the moderation? And then you could use the stats on how people's mods were agreed or disagreed with to affect the standing or karma of modders.
Good to hear from somebody in a position to know, which I am not, unfortunately. Still, I got my impression from a discussion in a book written by professor Nick Lane: "The Vital Question"; maybe I didn't understand his words. Have you read his book?