Actually Java already manifests some of the features Tim would like to see. Java already has introspection, which is really the basis for the other features, and "parametric polymorphism", or genericity, was proposed quite a while ago via the Community Process (I think), and there is already a third-party implementation ("Pizza" compiler). I'm not sure what the state of the proposal was, but I think Sun is seriously considering it.
Yes Java runs in a VM and because of that it is slow. But remember - Java is just a language spec. I think Java is a wonderful language. There is no reason somebody can't make a native compiler for Java and have immediately portable Java code (the Java language spec is platform-agnostic). If Transmeta has a Java version of their code-morphing software, I think that's great.
He argues faster machines are not required for anything but/games/. Which is why he says that game coders are the ones who have the unique opportunity to define the next generation of languages.
It is obvious we are now approaching a point in which performance is not the bottleneck. Up until now, everything has been designed for performance...now that Moore's law pretty much guarantees decent performance no matter what, it is no longer a bottleneck. The bottlenecks now are programming time, maintanence, portability, mobility, compatibility, etc. The history of languages has been one of tradeoffs. The next trade-off will perhaps be a sacrifice in performance, which will allow us an entirely new dimension with which to program to achieve the above goals. However, the performance bottleneck has always assumed that humans were the best optimizers, so tried to allow humans to get as close to the code as possible. This is not necessarily true any more. Who really explicitly specifies parallelism in thier programs today? Another layer of abstraction might actually/afford/ us better performance, because we, as humans, no longer have the responsibility of dictating the optimizations...the optimizations can be made where they are apparent, under those layers.
Look at it this way: nobody uses DOS and Windows 2.0 on a blazing Athlon. New speed allows us new opportunities to do powerful stuff. That DOS or Windows 2.0 is blazing fast on new hardware doesn't mean a thing, because it now has no use, things with overwhelmingly more power have been developed. I think we will need another generation of languages to exploit Moore's law to deliver a whole new generation of powerful software. As he suggests, there are dimensions we haven't really explored yet.
Exactly...people are beating up Tim for no reason. He/explicitly/ stated he was making a distinction between what is/possible/ and what is/practical/. While OO might be/possible/ in C, it is only really/practical/ in C++. Same with assembly.
"Sapir-Worff is indeed wrong, *but* there can be no dispute that choice of natural language makes it easier or harder to communicate certain things. The same is true of formal languages, no?"
Right...the previous poster and others, keep saying that language "doesn't determine what or how you think". They pick adults and then run some tests on them, and find that, lo and behold, they/can/ actually think about concepts without the words. Another poster says that it is merely/culture/ influencing/language/. If one knew anything about child development or anthropology, they'd know that culture and language are intimately intertwined. Culture affects language, which in turn affects culture. The amalgam of those can influence how you think, or at least with what/frame of reference/ you view the world.
"Your mistake is in thinking that just because these right-wing bozos call themselves conservative, they are."
Perhaps...I've learned not to dislike conservatism per se, because it has a lot of valid theory I think, but the zealots who warp theory into a clarion call to push their own stupid agendas.
I have to say, while I find most of the Republican party downright repugnant, I have a lot of respect of Alan Keyes, more than anybody else associated with that party. He is sharp, clear, cogent, an astute constitutional scholar - he makes/sense/! However his tragic flaw is that he has a gigantic mental wall he smashes against, when he states that all his arguments are founded on the notion of our nation as a construction of, and under, "God". When he surrenders all his arguments exclusively to religion, he really sorely loses credibility at that point. I think he has many valid points, but their basis should be that it is a nation/by/ and/for/ the people...not because it is a nation/under God/. It is really unfortunate.
Yes...they give away little cards and pamphlets that tell you exactly what you can and should do if arrested, etc. One of the things it lists is not to say one word without a lawyer. I'm not suggesting the ACLU should mess with Norway.
"yet you can clearly understand the difference between 'free as in speech' vs. 'free as in free beer.'"
That's because we have the concept of freedom as in liberty...we overload the word 'free' with this other meaning. If we did not have 'liberty'/'freedom', then we'd be SOL.
I do believe language shapes perception. Take some African tribes - they don't have any words to describe ownership...because all property is communal. I'd like to see you walk up to their village and attempt to describe ownership to them. My guess is that it will be very difficult because their perception since they were born has been influenced by their language.
Likewise some Native American languages interchange parts of nature for their attributes. 'Grass' and 'green' are the same word, as are 'blue' and 'sky'. Yes, I'm sure Native Americans internally realize the difference between a color and a physical object, but their perception of the world, or frame of reference, is slightly different. Instead of 'chief' you have 'one-who-does-good' - think about how different that is from the perception of government as a hierarchy.
Yeehaw! Let's start a geek militia and kick those Brits with their damn "government" bs, out of here. We're Americans...we don't need no steenkin' gover-ment!
Yeehaw! Let's start a geek militia and kick those Brits with their damn "government" bs, out of here. We're Americans...we don't need no steenkin' gover-ment!
So apparently we have slashdotting reporters in our ranks;)
Anyway, when I follow/their/ link back to the article, as an Anonymous Coward, the posts are all in flat mode at threshold 0. Consequently, of course the first posts I see are Anonymous Cowards posting people's email addresses and web sites and proclaiming that we should all "e-mail bomb" these people. I think that is the last thing we want to present to the public at large. Perhaps you could change the default Anonymous Coward threshhold to something like 2, to avoid presenting ourselves as wackos to the casual reader/public?
I agree...I've been slacking too much...I'm joining the ACLU and EFF today...@$80 is a small price to pay to ensure our (and _everyone's_) liberties aren't trampled on.
I suggest everybody else who agrees strongly with the parent post to do the same - and get some/real/ karma for a change...
"In almost 8 hours has Jon Johansen been in interrogation. He had to leave his mobile phone, all passwords on his computer, and a number of CD-reckords. But he isn't frightened by the serious charges."
In the US I believe a suspect is not required to say ONE word without a lawyer present. Is this also true in Norway? I think it is an outrage that the government can conduct a raid, ransack your house, and take a 16 year old minor for "questioning" for 8 HOURS on behest of some faceless multi-billion dollar corporation. He shouldn't have had to say ONE word without a lawyer. Everybody pull out and read your ACLU cards...
Isn't a college education supposed to _expand_ your mind? Isn't the reason you get treated like cattle (among other reasons), so that you can _interact_ with your _peers_ (of any, and all, races and sexes)? College, besides stuffing information into your brain, is there to _expose_ you to the _real_world_, not to teach you to close your eyes and stick your head in the ground singing the smurf theme song when anything slightly controversial is introduced to you.
I don't see how cutting off access to peers and anything deemed "offensive" by the moral supremecy conducive to education. Um, shouldn't we be _exposed_ to and learn to _analyse_ "offensive" or controversial things?
The only thing a stupid bill like this would do is raise a generation of closed-minded ignorant bigotted people. Hmm...maybe that is why it was proposed...
who the hell is congress to say what private institutions can and can't do? If I want to make "Orgy U" I should be free to. Now, it may very well be that government funds these institutions...but depriving colleges' funding because of some groups moral agenda is just plain _wrong_. If nothing illegal is being done then the government should be blind to the specifics.
[rant]
You know, I've come to the realization that there is a fundamental paradox in the conservative movement. Conservatives, in my experience are usually also libertarians. Government is a necessary evil. They want less of it, and none of it in their business. They want complete freedom to pursue their own happines, without government sticking their noses in their business. YET, it is these same people, enjoying their right to picket abortion clinics, bear arms and form militias, who want to ram their special-interest moral-supremecist agenda through government onto YOU. Government shouldn't tell US what to do...unless of course it is restricting YOU from same-sex marriages, abortion, pre-marital sex, "perverting our youth", viewing pornography, saying dirty words, taking the lord's name in vain, being rude to elders, biting your nails, or any other form of being "un-American". Freedom works the same for/everybody/. You can't have it both ways.
[/rant]
Ok, i've checked "No Score +1 Bonus" and put on my asbestos jacket...
"So the SETI servers don't send them blocks, process their blocks, or record their stats. Problem solved - if you want to be a part of the project, you have to use a compatible client."
And how, pray tell, do you enforce a compatible client. If the client is trusted, there is no way to ensure it is valid. You cannot trust a liar to tell you he is a liar. This whole discussion has been had before on the QuakeForge list, where the security architecture of an open source quake was discussed. So if we cannot enforce a compatible client, then the few people at the project have to waste all their time chasing down and removing accounts of bad people, who will just make more accounts. Sure, the closed-source version is not a great solution, but I don't expect these guys to make more headaches for themselves for the heck of it.
"False negatives can be easily caught by issuing the same blocks to other clients."
Even if you only send out one duplicate, that already doubles the workload. I guess you could randomly sample, but then your trade-off is that you will miss some.
"False positive results are even easier to catch."
Being able to catch false positives won't be of much use if your whole network is down because it was flooded with false positives.
Open sourcing opens a big can of worms. It/forces/ you to create/correct/ and clever solutions. That is a benefit of open source. It is also a detriment, because these guys are scientists and want to work on the project, not hire a whole programming squad to make clever solutions to new problems they have generated, which are being handled, while not/correctly/, at least "good enough" already by the closed-source client.
Open sourcing would be a good thing...but it has to be handled very slowly and rationally and carefully.
How is this DeCSS different from any number of prior/LEGAL/ reverse engineering attempts?
Well, for one they are giving away the product of their reverse engineering...Reverse engineering has a precedent...but giving the results away might not
"The problem is that the correspondance between the voter's electronic identities and their real identities has to be broken in some gauranteeable and visible way, or unscrupulous persons can use the same information thats needed for security to trace people's voting records."
Why? What "unscrupulous persons" besides the government even has access to that info? It's not like the government is selling voting info. But yes, I agree that it is probably best that even the government/not/ know who voted for what.
Actually my girlfriend and I were talking about this after the last slashdot article about the gender divide. We basically agreed that because companies only make "what sells", we see few girl-oriented games, and the ones that/are/ "girl-oriented" are stupid stereotypical bullshit games like "Barbie: Pretty Fantasy Sparkle Love Pony Party Makeover". This crud is selling because girls are growing up pushed towards this stuff. It is a symptom of a much larger problem. How many commercials a day do you see promoting pre-teen girls to use cell-phones, go to parties, use make-up, bake cakes, or try to attract boys? Whole generations of women have been growing up under this brainwashing. No/wonder/ we have so few women in science and technology.
I think we basically decided toys today have gone to shit (as with pop culture). Where the hell are Legos nowadays (well, yeah they are having a comeback with Mindstorms, but those really aren't for "kids"). I am sick of the stupid Radioactive-Space-Cowboy-Time-Traveller themes they have now. Now all you see is Steve-Austin Bash-Em Action figures, and Pokemon.
Same with games. I don't think there is anything inherently anti-girl about computer games. It's not as if their poor girly minds can't understand computers. It's just that nobody is making games for girls with any brains. Remember the Sierra line of role-playing games? Those were the coolest. I have copies of almost every one. They don't make those games any more. I'm sure girls would like games other than action games if they were just presented. But I don't really see anything like that out there. It's just bone-crushing and flaming-death in 3D or real-time strategy. Not too appealing. Myst had somewhat of a success, but that was banal at best.
So girls...what DO you like? It can't be "Barbie: Pretty Fantasy Sparkle Love Pony Party Makeover"... if so I think I've lost all hope for the human race...
Who's to say they won't give out a meta-compiler for generating new ISA mappings, then take output from that compiler, produced by all those altruistic open-source people, and actually use it? They don't/need/ to open-source the CMS to gain a benefit of open-source development. All they have to do is provide a way that open-source developers can give them input that they can use to plug in an ISA. My impression is that the CMS is actually a layer/into which/ an ISA translation can be plugged. The CMS should not be dictating the mapping...some pluggable part of it should. An ISA mapping could be compiled/generated then handed to Transmeta who could then say "thanks a lot, we'll now/plug/ this into our CMS", or "great, here is a util which will allow you to add this ISA to your CMS". They don't need to open their CMS, just like Intel doesn't need to open it's CPU...it just needs to make sure the developer has the tools he/she needs (in the Intel case - a native compiler).
I took a whole of 5 seconds to skim through this article (the hokey blurb forewarned me), so take this with a grain of salt.
Look at it a different way. What if we are not really creating jerks, but actually enabling communications so transparently, effortlessly, and safely, that people feel/free/ so say what they mean. Perhaps it's this freedom that seems hostile. A freedom in which your thoughts, no matter how politically correct or mannered, are nevertheless naked and open to critique or dismissal. I think this is healthy. Perhaps people/should/ be forced to think it through before letting it out their mouth and into criticism.
The paradox of a truly "free" society is that it will not tolerate any form of captivity...the paradox being that by making that requirement it is in fact no longer truly "free" (you are not "free" to impinge on freedom - isn't this reminiscent of the GPL-BSD war?). So too with free speech and free minds. Perhaps what you consider "being jerks" is a symptom of a culture which forces you to have concrete support for your views. Baptism by fire. Perhaps it is a Zen thing...you can only succeed by not trying...you can only be accepted by not trying...
Huh? Why? You need to be the exact opposite of that. You need to be identifyable. Not so the government can print in the papers "Joe Schmoe voted for a 'looser'", but so people can be accountable.
Wouldn't PKI be the perfect solution in this case? With their voter id card, give em their key, with which they can use to vote exactly once.
Slashdot Mirror
"(except that Java sucks)"
Actually Java already manifests some of the features Tim would like to see. Java already has introspection, which is really the basis for the other features, and "parametric polymorphism", or genericity, was proposed quite a while ago via the Community Process (I think), and there is already a third-party implementation ("Pizza" compiler). I'm not sure what the state of the proposal was, but I think Sun is seriously considering it.
Yes Java runs in a VM and because of that it is slow. But remember - Java is just a language spec. I think Java is a wonderful language. There is no reason somebody can't make a native compiler for Java and have immediately portable Java code (the Java language spec is platform-agnostic). If Transmeta has a Java version of their code-morphing software, I think that's great.
Jazilla.org - the Java Mozilla
He argues faster machines are not required for anything but /games/. Which is why he says that game coders are the ones who have the unique opportunity to define the next generation of languages.
/afford/ us better performance, because we, as humans, no longer have the responsibility of dictating the optimizations...the optimizations can be made where they are apparent, under those layers.
It is obvious we are now approaching a point in which performance is not the bottleneck. Up until now, everything has been designed for performance...now that Moore's law pretty much guarantees decent performance no matter what, it is no longer a bottleneck. The bottlenecks now are programming time, maintanence, portability, mobility, compatibility, etc. The history of languages has been one of tradeoffs. The next trade-off will perhaps be a sacrifice in performance, which will allow us an entirely new dimension with which to program to achieve the above goals. However, the performance bottleneck has always assumed that humans were the best optimizers, so tried to allow humans to get as close to the code as possible. This is not necessarily true any more. Who really explicitly specifies parallelism in thier programs today? Another layer of abstraction might actually
Look at it this way: nobody uses DOS and Windows 2.0 on a blazing Athlon. New speed allows us new opportunities to do powerful stuff. That DOS or Windows 2.0 is blazing fast on new hardware doesn't mean a thing, because it now has no use, things with overwhelmingly more power have been developed. I think we will need another generation of languages to exploit Moore's law to deliver a whole new generation of powerful software. As he suggests, there are dimensions we haven't really explored yet.
Jazilla.org - the Java Mozilla
Exactly...people are beating up Tim for no reason. /explicitly/ stated he was making a distinction between what is /possible/ and what is /practical/. While OO might be /possible/ in C, it is only really /practical/ in C++. Same with assembly.
/can/ actually think about concepts without the words. Another poster says that it is merely /culture/ influencing /language/. If one knew anything about child development or anthropology, they'd know that culture and language are intimately intertwined. Culture affects language, which in turn affects culture. The amalgam of those can influence how you think, or at least with what /frame of reference/ you view the world.
He
"Sapir-Worff is indeed wrong, *but* there can be no dispute that choice of natural language makes it easier or harder to communicate certain things. The same is true of formal languages, no?"
Right...the previous poster and others, keep saying that language "doesn't determine what or how you think". They pick adults and then run some tests on them, and find that, lo and behold, they
Jazilla.org - the Java Mozilla
"Your mistake is in thinking that just because these right-wing bozos call themselves conservative, they are."
/sense/! However his tragic flaw is that he has a gigantic mental wall he smashes against, when he states that all his arguments are founded on the notion of our nation as a construction of, and under, "God". When he surrenders all his arguments exclusively to religion, he really sorely loses credibility at that point. I think he has many valid points, but their basis should be that it is a nation /by/ and /for/ the people...not because it is a nation /under God/. It is really unfortunate.
Perhaps...I've learned not to dislike conservatism per se, because it has a lot of valid theory I think, but the zealots who warp theory into a clarion call to push their own stupid agendas.
I have to say, while I find most of the Republican party downright repugnant, I have a lot of respect of Alan Keyes, more than anybody else associated with that party. He is sharp, clear, cogent, an astute constitutional scholar - he makes
Jazilla.org - the Java Mozilla
"Doesn't the A in ACLU stand for "American"?"
Yes...they give away little cards and pamphlets that tell you exactly what you can and should do if arrested, etc. One of the things it lists is not to say one word without a lawyer. I'm not suggesting the ACLU should mess with Norway.
Jazilla.org - the Java Mozilla
"yet you can clearly understand the difference between 'free as in speech' vs. 'free as in free beer.'"
That's because we have the concept of freedom as in liberty...we overload the word 'free' with this other meaning. If we did not have 'liberty'/'freedom', then we'd be SOL.
I do believe language shapes perception. Take some African tribes - they don't have any words to describe ownership...because all property is communal. I'd like to see you walk up to their village and attempt to describe ownership to them. My guess is that it will be very difficult because their perception since they were born has been influenced by their language.
Likewise some Native American languages interchange parts of nature for their attributes. 'Grass' and 'green' are the same word, as are 'blue' and 'sky'. Yes, I'm sure Native Americans internally realize the difference between a color and a physical object, but their perception of the world, or frame of reference, is slightly different. Instead of 'chief' you have 'one-who-does-good' - think about how different that is from the perception of government as a hierarchy.
Jazilla.org - the Java Mozilla
Yeehaw! Let's start a geek militia and kick those Brits with their damn "government" bs, out of here. We're Americans...we don't need no steenkin' gover-ment!
(bonk)
Jazilla.org - the Java Mozilla
Yeehaw! Let's start a geek militia and kick those Brits with their damn "government" bs, out of here. We're Americans...we don't need no steenkin' gover-ment!
(bonk)
Jazilla.org - the Java Mozilla
I just took a look at the Norweigan article...at the bottom is a link back to the slashdot article:
h tml
;)
/their/ link back to the article, as an Anonymous Coward, the posts are all in flat mode at threshold 0. Consequently, of course the first posts I see are Anonymous Cowards posting people's email addresses and web sites and proclaiming that we should all "e-mail bomb" these people. I think that is the last thing we want to present to the public at large. Perhaps you could change the default Anonymous Coward threshhold to something like 2, to avoid presenting ourselves as wackos to the casual reader/public?
http://slashdot.org/articles/00/01/24/2024233.s
So apparently we have slashdotting reporters in our ranks
Anyway, when I follow
Jazilla.org - the Java Mozilla
I agree...I've been slacking too much...I'm joining the ACLU and EFF today...@$80 is a small price to pay to ensure our (and _everyone's_) liberties aren't trampled on.
/real/ karma for a change...
I suggest everybody else who agrees strongly with the parent post to do the same - and get some
Jazilla.org - the Java Mozilla
"In almost 8 hours has Jon Johansen been in interrogation. He had to leave his mobile phone, all passwords on his computer, and a number of CD-reckords. But he isn't frightened by the serious charges."
In the US I believe a suspect is not required to say ONE word without a lawyer present. Is this also true in Norway? I think it is an outrage that the government can conduct a raid, ransack your house, and take a 16 year old minor for "questioning" for 8 HOURS on behest of some faceless multi-billion dollar corporation. He shouldn't have had to say ONE word without a lawyer. Everybody pull out and read your ACLU cards...
Jazilla.org - the Java Mozilla
or:
* MPAA files injuction (or whatever), including CSS source in the public record, making the source public domain, making their case immediately moot.
We all wipe our browse and heave a sigh as stupidity saves us from greed once again.
Jazilla.org - the Java Mozilla
Is that actually the CSS code?
Is there somewhere I can snag a PNG of it?
Jazilla.org - the Java Mozilla
This is actually an awesome idea!
"We ask you to close your site and cease and desist distributing source code"
"Sorry, I don't know what you're talking about. I have no source code. I got a lot of purty backgrounds tho - see.
Jazilla.org - the Java Mozilla
Isn't a college education supposed to _expand_ your mind? Isn't the reason you get treated like cattle (among other reasons), so that you can _interact_ with your _peers_ (of any, and all, races and sexes)? College, besides stuffing information into your brain, is there to _expose_ you to the _real_world_, not to teach you to close your eyes and stick your head in the ground singing the smurf theme song when anything slightly controversial is introduced to you.
I don't see how cutting off access to peers and anything deemed "offensive" by the moral supremecy conducive to education. Um, shouldn't we be _exposed_ to and learn to _analyse_ "offensive" or controversial things?
The only thing a stupid bill like this would do is raise a generation of closed-minded ignorant bigotted people. Hmm...maybe that is why it was proposed...
Jazilla.org - the Java Mozilla
who the hell is congress to say what private institutions can and can't do? If I want to make "Orgy U" I should be free to. Now, it may very well be that government funds these institutions...but depriving colleges' funding because of some groups moral agenda is just plain _wrong_. If nothing illegal is being done then the government should be blind to the specifics.
/everybody/. You can't have it both ways.
[rant]
You know, I've come to the realization that there is a fundamental paradox in the conservative movement. Conservatives, in my experience are usually also libertarians. Government is a necessary evil. They want less of it, and none of it in their business. They want complete freedom to pursue their own happines, without government sticking their noses in their business. YET, it is these same people, enjoying their right to picket abortion clinics, bear arms and form militias, who want to ram their special-interest moral-supremecist agenda through government onto YOU. Government shouldn't tell US what to do...unless of course it is restricting YOU from same-sex marriages, abortion, pre-marital sex, "perverting our youth", viewing pornography, saying dirty words, taking the lord's name in vain, being rude to elders, biting your nails, or any other form of being "un-American". Freedom works the same for
[/rant]
Ok, i've checked "No Score +1 Bonus" and put on my asbestos jacket...
Jazilla.org - the Java Mozilla
"So the SETI servers don't send them blocks, process their blocks, or record their stats. Problem solved - if you want to be a part of the project, you have to use a compatible client."
/forces/ you to create /correct/ and clever solutions. That is a benefit of open source. It is also a detriment, because these guys are scientists and want to work on the project, not hire a whole programming squad to make clever solutions to new problems they have generated, which are being handled, while not /correctly/, at least "good enough" already by the closed-source client.
And how, pray tell, do you enforce a compatible client. If the client is trusted, there is no way to ensure it is valid. You cannot trust a liar to tell you he is a liar. This whole discussion has been had before on the QuakeForge list, where the security architecture of an open source quake was discussed. So if we cannot enforce a compatible client, then the few people at the project have to waste all their time chasing down and removing accounts of bad people, who will just make more accounts. Sure, the closed-source version is not a great solution, but I don't expect these guys to make more headaches for themselves for the heck of it.
"False negatives can be easily caught by issuing the same blocks to other clients."
Even if you only send out one duplicate, that already doubles the workload. I guess you could randomly sample, but then your trade-off is that you will miss some.
"False positive results are even easier to catch."
Being able to catch false positives won't be of much use if your whole network is down because it was flooded with false positives.
Open sourcing opens a big can of worms. It
Open sourcing would be a good thing...but it has to be handled very slowly and rationally and carefully.
Jazilla.org - the Java Mozilla
How is this DeCSS different from any number of prior /LEGAL/ reverse engineering attempts?
Well, for one they are giving away the product of their reverse engineering...Reverse engineering has a precedent...but giving the results away might not
should it matter?
Jazilla.org - the Java Mozilla
How is this DeCSS different from any number of prior /LEGAL/ reverse engineering attempts?
Well, for one they are giving away the product of their reverse engineering...Reverse engineering has a precedent...but giving it away doesn't
should it matter?
Jazilla.org - the Java Mozilla
"The problem is that the correspondance between the voter's electronic identities and their real
/not/ know who voted for what.
identities has to be broken in some gauranteeable and visible way, or unscrupulous persons can
use the same information thats needed for security to trace people's voting records."
Why? What "unscrupulous persons" besides the government even has access to that info? It's not like the government is selling voting info. But yes, I agree that it is probably best that even the government
Jazilla.org - the Java Mozilla
Actually my girlfriend and I were talking about this after the last slashdot article about the gender divide. We basically agreed that because companies only make "what sells", we see few girl-oriented games, and the ones that /are/ "girl-oriented" are stupid stereotypical bullshit games like "Barbie: Pretty Fantasy Sparkle Love Pony Party Makeover". This crud is selling because girls are growing up pushed towards this stuff. It is a symptom of a much larger problem. How many commercials a day do you see promoting pre-teen girls to use cell-phones, go to parties, use make-up, bake cakes, or try to attract boys? Whole generations of women have been growing up under this brainwashing. No /wonder/ we have so few women in science and technology.
I think we basically decided toys today have gone to shit (as with pop culture). Where the hell are Legos nowadays (well, yeah they are having a comeback with Mindstorms, but those really aren't for "kids"). I am sick of the stupid Radioactive-Space-Cowboy-Time-Traveller themes they have now. Now all you see is Steve-Austin Bash-Em Action figures, and Pokemon.
Same with games. I don't think there is anything inherently anti-girl about computer games. It's not as if their poor girly minds can't understand computers. It's just that nobody is making games for girls with any brains. Remember the Sierra line of role-playing games? Those were the coolest. I have copies of almost every one. They don't make those games any more. I'm sure girls would like games other than action games if they were just presented. But I don't really see anything like that out there. It's just bone-crushing and flaming-death in 3D or real-time strategy. Not too appealing. Myst had somewhat of a success, but that was banal at best.
So girls...what DO you like? It can't be "Barbie: Pretty Fantasy Sparkle Love Pony Party Makeover"... if so I think I've lost all hope for the human race...
Jazilla.org - the Java Mozilla
I wish these article series would Please Die.
I want news for nerds...not ramblings (3 articles no less!) about flamings on sites for news for nerds.
Jazilla.org - the Java Mozilla
Who's to say they won't give out a meta-compiler for generating new ISA mappings, then take output from that compiler, produced by all those altruistic open-source people, and actually use it? They don't /need/ to open-source the CMS to gain a benefit of open-source development. All they have to do is provide a way that open-source developers can give them input that they can use to plug in an ISA. My impression is that the CMS is actually a layer /into which/ an ISA translation can be plugged. The CMS should not be dictating the mapping...some pluggable part of it should. An ISA mapping could be compiled/generated then handed to Transmeta who could then say "thanks a lot, we'll now /plug/ this into our CMS", or "great, here is a util which will allow you to add this ISA to your CMS". They don't need to open their CMS, just like Intel doesn't need to open it's CPU...it just needs to make sure the developer has the tools he/she needs (in the Intel case - a native compiler).
Jazilla.org - the Java Mozilla
I took a whole of 5 seconds to skim through this article (the hokey blurb forewarned me), so take this with a grain of salt.
/free/ so say what they mean. Perhaps it's this freedom that seems hostile. A freedom in which your thoughts, no matter how politically correct or mannered, are nevertheless naked and open to critique or dismissal. I think this is healthy. Perhaps people /should/ be forced to think it through before letting it out their mouth and into criticism.
Look at it a different way. What if we are not really creating jerks, but actually enabling communications so transparently, effortlessly, and safely, that people feel
The paradox of a truly "free" society is that it will not tolerate any form of captivity...the paradox being that by making that requirement it is in fact no longer truly "free" (you are not "free" to impinge on freedom - isn't this reminiscent of the GPL-BSD war?). So too with free speech and free minds. Perhaps what you consider "being jerks" is a symptom of a culture which forces you to have concrete support for your views. Baptism by fire. Perhaps it is a Zen thing...you can only succeed by not trying...you can only be accepted by not trying...
Then again, I just pulled this out of thin air...
Jazilla.org - the Java Mozilla
"3. Ensure that those votes are truly anonymous."
Huh? Why? You need to be the exact opposite of that. You need to be identifyable. Not so the government can print in the papers "Joe Schmoe voted for a 'looser'", but so people can be accountable.
Wouldn't PKI be the perfect solution in this case? With their voter id card, give em their key, with which they can use to vote exactly once.
Jazilla.org - the Java Mozilla