On the other hand, an enourmous amount of development happens exactly because of the GPL, because individuals agree with the ethical statement implied by the GPL. A lot of business people really dislike any talk of ethics or morality or correct action and prefer all relationships to be defined soley by a line item on an accounting sheet. And they call us nerds anti-social!
I don't think takeup would neccesarily be better with a BSD license, either - as evidenced by the fact that BSD takeup lags far behind Linux.
There is no hoopla about AJAX. First off, the ability to do it has been around for years, well before it got an acronym and in fact well before the XmlHttpRequest object. Amusingly, dynamic reloading was way more interesting back then, when everyone was on modems and dispensing with 5k of overhead in a page load really sped your page up.
The browser is a crappy application platform. All the remote access methods (MS DHTML download behavior, hidden frames, XmlHttpRequest) are severly limited in functionality, especially error recovery and detection. Raise your hand if you've ever had sending an email in gmail screw up? The UI design decisions a browser makes to optimize the browsing of hypertext are totally different than the ones you make when you're create an application, especially an office suite. Web applications have a couple notable benefits, combined with some signifigant flaws. The major advantages are remote access and ease of installation/support. Disadvantages include, but are not limited to, more difficult cross platform development (yes, really: it's harder to get complicated DHTML behaviors working in multiple browsers than a regular application, and it's complicated by being hard to reliably detect your platform), lack of local file access, limited UI customization possible (have to roll your own drag & drop, limited context menu support), no integration into the desktop (standard menu shortcuts hit the browser, not the application), and a limited widget set to work from.
Theres a good reason why people moved away from thin clients. People are slowly moving back, for a variety of reasons, and there *are* good reasons to do it, but until someone (Microsoft in Vista?) develops a standard and widely deployed remote application host, which is *not* a web browser, AJAX and web applications are going to remain underdeveloped and overhyped. Look to Java Web Start for inspiration (if only Java apps weren't so crappy...)
I'm confused as to why you think I'm using flawed logic, because I (explicitly) avoided producing my own conclusions. It doesn't take a genius or training in formal logic to see the problem with the original argument, but many people approach the Bible from a position of faith rather than logic, which is why such logically unsound arguments survive and are perpetuated.
Well, as a programmer, I'd say that it's in part because business people aren't very accepting of iterative development (it requires a commitment on the part of the user that they tend to resent - they want a week to write a spec, and a week to test it 6 months later, not continuous involvement), and it's in part because if you're going to iteratevely develop a spec you could be iteratevely developing an application instead. Because the spec will still be wrong and incomplete until theres a concrete implementation to work from.
You're doing the same sort of self-referential redefinition the OP did. Anything that you approve of is "Christian", anything you don't isn't. This is a classic version of the old "No True Scotsman" fallacy and as such is dismissed by anyone who's interested in intelligent discussion.
The NX flag is basically opt-in, you can request pages that aren't marked with it. In an OS that flags everthing as NX by default, you'd need to rebuild your application (although XP allows you do disable NX on a process by process basis). The point of NX isn't to prevent stuff like Scheme working, it's to prevent exploits or accidents.
If you'd paid attention in Sunday School instead of trying to look up little girls skirts, you'd understand that the fact that Abraham was *willing* to sacrific his son was the entire point. The fact that God didn't make him go through with it (at the *very* last second, by turning the knife away) is pretty incidental. And if the whole sequence of events sound incredibly contrived, well, then, you might be reading critically instead of religously. Again.
Lots of teens have sex, and lots of teens are the victims of violence. If you don't think school bullying hasn't been the cause of plenty of depression, you've had your eyes shut. The fact is, a great deal of this "depression" over sex is not because they've had sex, but because they're guilty and confused about it, which is directly attributable to the way sex is repressed and hidden. A classic example of the emotional issues surrounding teen sex for women is "should I have let him...". And that fact that it's even an issue betrays the fundamental problem with the way we as a society accept sex.
There are plenty of people who fight for recreation, too. And it runs the gamut from trained martial artists to drunks who get tossed out of bars, just like teen sex ranges from emotionally mature people engaging in recreation, to commited long term relationships, to the cheerleader who's so fucked up by her parents and churches attitude toward sex that she anesthizes herself with alcohol and ends up pregnant after a drunken grope in the closet.
All of the bad things in the world are attributed to sin.
This is a circular definition which is a classic example of poor reasoning. There are many things that I would consider bad in the Bible which are not attributed to sin, they're performed by "godly" people and in many cases directly by God himself. Its only if you define anything approved by God as good and anything he disapproves of as sinful that "all the bad things" are attributed to sin. Of course, since this is exactly what you do when you adopt a Christian moral code, a Christian studying the Bible will naturally take away a completely different lesson than a non-believer. For example, when God descends from Heaven in person to fight alongside the armies of Israel, slaughtering "everything that breathes" in the various towns that committed the horrible offense of not being Jewish, the Christian will take away the lesson that killing the enemies of the faith is an honorable act of devotion, while the unbeliever may well take away the lesson that Christians worship and bloodthirsty death god and want nothing to do with it.
The Bible does not teach that God helps out honest and good people, at least not on Earth. In fact, God likes to test and challenge his strongest believers, so he does stuff like have them sacrifice their children, or he kills their family (if you're wondering how this is different from how he treats unbelievers, you may have been reading the Bible from a critical rather than a religious perspective. Congratulations!), in an attempt to test the limits of the faith and love they have for Him. Unquestioning submission to divine authority is the primary lesson of the Bible!
Except that this is totally wrong, because the foundation of CS, which is not software design and CS majors make shitty programmers, is a theory of calculation and what can and cannot be calculated. And because of stuff like the halting problem, we know that there are fundamental theoretical limits on what we can calculate and predict.
POSIX is exactly the same boat. I agree totally with Linus here - there has never been a spec that wasn't flawed, incomplete, or otherwise broken.
In the business world, it generally goes something like this: Customer provides a spec (normally a word document written up by the one person who actually knows how they do business there, and then distorted beyond recognition by 2 months of committee meetings). You read the spec, mutter to yourself about what the hell they're thinking, and begin to write code to match the spec. When you deliver the first iteration, your customer suddenly identifies a need which they didn't spec and which totally breaks your design.
This is so common that an entire design methodology was built around it happening, and lowering the amount of up front information presented because its always wrong and incomplete.
I find that people who say this not only tend to have absolutely abysmal softare development skills, but they also tend to have incredibly inflated views of the "perfection" of engineering. You can start telling me about "real engineering" and about all your theoretical base and your guild rings when the door to my house stops sticking when it rains.
It's not clear from the article precisely who is complaining and kicking up the trademark fuss, but it sounds like the MTA proper, which is 100% a state agency. The MTA is an umbrella agency which covers all the various transit authorities (rail, bridges & tunnels, subway, busses), which operate pretty much independently under the MTAs overall direction. Within the various authorites there are numerous instances of those famous "public-private partnerships", with all the pork and graft they are known for.
Actually, Ford got bitchslapped for doing that *because they knew it wasn't safe*, and they made it that way anyhow. Pretty much all major liability cases end up this way, and companies who make those decisions should be bitchslapped, including software companies. Companies who can show a good faith effort to prevent problems are generally in the clear, especially when they *also* show a good faith effort to fix those problems when they appear. Thats what product recalls are all about, for example. Major liability occurs when you knew or should have known it wasn't safe, and you sold/marketed/distributed it anyway.
Yes, and because safes are safe, theres never any bank theft or fraud, right? Most identify theft and financially harmful fraud comes from the exploitation of human problems, not software flaws. I can't think of a single high profile hack that involed exploiting previously unknown flaws - in all cases, the flaw was either outside of the system (social engineering), or the flaw was known but the target failed to apply due dilligence, like patching or following best practices.
It might have happened, and the potential is certainly there, but it's not the gaping hole people like to pretend.
I know lots of cops too and they're mostly nice enough people. They tend to be a bit rednecky.
Thats not generally a flaw in most people, but the prejudices involved do affect they way they do thier job.
However, the real question is, do you know or have known lots of cops *in a professional capacity"? Because let me tell you, the way cops act when they're "on the job" is totally different from what they'll do hanging out at a bar. Especially when they think you're a criminal. Cops tend to trust thier gut feeling about this sort of thing, which is notoriously unreliable, and since oversight of police is pretty much non existant except in major cases, people just let stuff like illegal or unfounded stops or searches go. Insisting on your rights to a cop who stops you, by the way, is a great way to spend a night in jail. I don't think cops are neccesarily bad people, but they are human, and the circumstances of the job lend themselves to that sort of petty powermongering, just like DMV clerks. Which is why we need extensive oversight, more money and support, including therapy, for officers, and systemic work to try to break up the club atmosphere that forms that "blue wall". The military has exactly the same problem, but it doesn't affect citizens as much because the military isn't used as a policing force very often. Of course, if current trends continue, that may change. And can I take an aside to point out how ridiculous that someone calling themselves a conservative is even *thinking* about having the military take a larger roll in civilian affairs?
And a me too from me. I had the same board, no end of trouble, most of which were related to the shitty 4-1 drivers. Never getting another VIA chipset, but I've had other Asus boards that were fine.
I read books all the time without paying a dime for them. The full copies and everything. Hundreds of books, over and over, and many authors have lost many sales of books because of it. I'm also not in the least ashamed of it. Am I a crook?
Firefox itself uses no APIs that can do this. It's possible it's an obscure bug in some video or mouse driver that happens to be triggered by an odd sequence of events, but it's more likely that it's a bug in a media player or other plugin that does use some of the low level access APIs where it's more possible and likely to lock up the machine.
Even then, there really aren't that many ways to lock up a modern OS in the way you describe. That means that bugs causing it are either very trivial to find, or almost impossible because they're actually caused bugs within the OS itself, and are only expressed by obscure and often apparently totally unrelated things.
In short: a bug that does this is the OSes fault, and while it's possible theres something that Firefox or a plugin developer can do to work around it, it won't happen unless you can provide information, like a reliable test case.
The bullshit that comes out of these peoples mouths is increcdible. The entire article focuses on the fact that since Microsoft won't supported OpenDocument, it makes interoperability much harder for everyone - MA won't be able to use Office anymore, businesses and citizens will have to get new products to interoperate with the government, etc. Okay, fine. All that is to an extent quite true. But how the hell can they claim that it somehow subverts competition in the free market when *one* company refusing to support this standard blocks *all* interoperability?
People keep focussing on the problems with OO.o vrs Office, including a totally irrelevent dig at Calc (that doesn't match my experience - at my last job I downloaded and used Calc to data munge some Excel spreadsheets because Excel would lock up for 5 seconds every time I opened or closed the "find" dialog. Nice)
There's plenty thats just plain wrong, too. PDF *is* an open, documented standard with, as far as I know, no patent issues preventing outside implementations. Notably, non-Adobe PDF implementations don't have to rely on difficult and time consuming reverse engineering to interoperate.
And he claims that, up till now, bidding on technologies has been open and merit based.... but he thinks that they should mandate Office. Right. Thats right from the mothership - "Cross platform means NT *AND* 98!". You can implement any "merit based" technology you want, as long as it Microsoft based.
Spying isn't a search and siezure, not even by extreme stretching of the words. There is, in fact, no explicit constitutional barrier to spying or monitoring communications of citizens at all. The right to privacy is *implied* by the fourth amendment, and that interpertation is still controversal. Supreme Court Justice Scalia doesn't believe in it, for example.
Just to be absolutely 100% clear, there are many, many, many people in many, many, many developing areas who could really use the education and social infrastructure these guys are working on but aren't really in immediate danger of starving. In fact, *most* people aren't in immediate danger of starving. Which isn't to say that they all live with the sort of luxury and immediate access to food that we have in the US or other first world countries. I would say abosultely, yes, in many cases getting them a laptop is at least as important as getting them food. Because not everyone who lives in the third world is a bloated fly-eaten starvation victim.
In fairness, this has pretty much been the goal and intent of law enforcement pretty much forever. In fact, the idea that laws (and the enforcement thereof) are in any way for the benefit of the citizenry is a pretty recent concept, historically speaking.
Wait, isn't it illegal for the fed to spy on it's citizens?
No.
Won't they need to get a court order to wire tap even with VoIP?
Yes and no. Mostly no, these days. They need a warrant, but they can get them after the fact, and from secret courts.
And how would that work in a chat room where lots of good citizens are talking?
If it's like interception of email, they're supposed to just ignore what anyone says unless they're talking to the person being tapped. I leave it up to your imagination just how tightly agents stick to that rule.
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I don't think takeup would neccesarily be better with a BSD license, either - as evidenced by the fact that BSD takeup lags far behind Linux.
The browser is a crappy application platform. All the remote access methods (MS DHTML download behavior, hidden frames, XmlHttpRequest) are severly limited in functionality, especially error recovery and detection. Raise your hand if you've ever had sending an email in gmail screw up? The UI design decisions a browser makes to optimize the browsing of hypertext are totally different than the ones you make when you're create an application, especially an office suite. Web applications have a couple notable benefits, combined with some signifigant flaws. The major advantages are remote access and ease of installation/support. Disadvantages include, but are not limited to, more difficult cross platform development (yes, really: it's harder to get complicated DHTML behaviors working in multiple browsers than a regular application, and it's complicated by being hard to reliably detect your platform), lack of local file access, limited UI customization possible (have to roll your own drag & drop, limited context menu support), no integration into the desktop (standard menu shortcuts hit the browser, not the application), and a limited widget set to work from.
Theres a good reason why people moved away from thin clients. People are slowly moving back, for a variety of reasons, and there *are* good reasons to do it, but until someone (Microsoft in Vista?) develops a standard and widely deployed remote application host, which is *not* a web browser, AJAX and web applications are going to remain underdeveloped and overhyped. Look to Java Web Start for inspiration (if only Java apps weren't so crappy...)
I'm confused as to why you think I'm using flawed logic, because I (explicitly) avoided producing my own conclusions. It doesn't take a genius or training in formal logic to see the problem with the original argument, but many people approach the Bible from a position of faith rather than logic, which is why such logically unsound arguments survive and are perpetuated.
Well, as a programmer, I'd say that it's in part because business people aren't very accepting of iterative development (it requires a commitment on the part of the user that they tend to resent - they want a week to write a spec, and a week to test it 6 months later, not continuous involvement), and it's in part because if you're going to iteratevely develop a spec you could be iteratevely developing an application instead. Because the spec will still be wrong and incomplete until theres a concrete implementation to work from.
You're doing the same sort of self-referential redefinition the OP did. Anything that you approve of is "Christian", anything you don't isn't. This is a classic version of the old "No True Scotsman" fallacy and as such is dismissed by anyone who's interested in intelligent discussion.
The NX flag is basically opt-in, you can request pages that aren't marked with it. In an OS that flags everthing as NX by default, you'd need to rebuild your application (although XP allows you do disable NX on a process by process basis). The point of NX isn't to prevent stuff like Scheme working, it's to prevent exploits or accidents.
If you'd paid attention in Sunday School instead of trying to look up little girls skirts, you'd understand that the fact that Abraham was *willing* to sacrific his son was the entire point. The fact that God didn't make him go through with it (at the *very* last second, by turning the knife away) is pretty incidental. And if the whole sequence of events sound incredibly contrived, well, then, you might be reading critically instead of religously. Again.
There are plenty of people who fight for recreation, too. And it runs the gamut from trained martial artists to drunks who get tossed out of bars, just like teen sex ranges from emotionally mature people engaging in recreation, to commited long term relationships, to the cheerleader who's so fucked up by her parents and churches attitude toward sex that she anesthizes herself with alcohol and ends up pregnant after a drunken grope in the closet.
This is a circular definition which is a classic example of poor reasoning. There are many things that I would consider bad in the Bible which are not attributed to sin, they're performed by "godly" people and in many cases directly by God himself. Its only if you define anything approved by God as good and anything he disapproves of as sinful that "all the bad things" are attributed to sin. Of course, since this is exactly what you do when you adopt a Christian moral code, a Christian studying the Bible will naturally take away a completely different lesson than a non-believer. For example, when God descends from Heaven in person to fight alongside the armies of Israel, slaughtering "everything that breathes" in the various towns that committed the horrible offense of not being Jewish, the Christian will take away the lesson that killing the enemies of the faith is an honorable act of devotion, while the unbeliever may well take away the lesson that Christians worship and bloodthirsty death god and want nothing to do with it.
The Bible does not teach that God helps out honest and good people, at least not on Earth. In fact, God likes to test and challenge his strongest believers, so he does stuff like have them sacrifice their children, or he kills their family (if you're wondering how this is different from how he treats unbelievers, you may have been reading the Bible from a critical rather than a religious perspective. Congratulations!), in an attempt to test the limits of the faith and love they have for Him. Unquestioning submission to divine authority is the primary lesson of the Bible!
Except that this is totally wrong, because the foundation of CS, which is not software design and CS majors make shitty programmers, is a theory of calculation and what can and cannot be calculated. And because of stuff like the halting problem, we know that there are fundamental theoretical limits on what we can calculate and predict.
In the business world, it generally goes something like this: Customer provides a spec (normally a word document written up by the one person who actually knows how they do business there, and then distorted beyond recognition by 2 months of committee meetings). You read the spec, mutter to yourself about what the hell they're thinking, and begin to write code to match the spec. When you deliver the first iteration, your customer suddenly identifies a need which they didn't spec and which totally breaks your design.
This is so common that an entire design methodology was built around it happening, and lowering the amount of up front information presented because its always wrong and incomplete.
I find that people who say this not only tend to have absolutely abysmal softare development skills, but they also tend to have incredibly inflated views of the "perfection" of engineering. You can start telling me about "real engineering" and about all your theoretical base and your guild rings when the door to my house stops sticking when it rains.
It's not clear from the article precisely who is complaining and kicking up the trademark fuss, but it sounds like the MTA proper, which is 100% a state agency. The MTA is an umbrella agency which covers all the various transit authorities (rail, bridges & tunnels, subway, busses), which operate pretty much independently under the MTAs overall direction. Within the various authorites there are numerous instances of those famous "public-private partnerships", with all the pork and graft they are known for.
Disclaimer: I am a former MTA employee. I've seen similiar stupid crap with relation to train schedules.
Actually, Ford got bitchslapped for doing that *because they knew it wasn't safe*, and they made it that way anyhow. Pretty much all major liability cases end up this way, and companies who make those decisions should be bitchslapped, including software companies. Companies who can show a good faith effort to prevent problems are generally in the clear, especially when they *also* show a good faith effort to fix those problems when they appear. Thats what product recalls are all about, for example. Major liability occurs when you knew or should have known it wasn't safe, and you sold/marketed/distributed it anyway.
It might have happened, and the potential is certainly there, but it's not the gaping hole people like to pretend.
Thats not generally a flaw in most people, but the prejudices involved do affect they way they do thier job.
However, the real question is, do you know or have known lots of cops *in a professional capacity"? Because let me tell you, the way cops act when they're "on the job" is totally different from what they'll do hanging out at a bar. Especially when they think you're a criminal. Cops tend to trust thier gut feeling about this sort of thing, which is notoriously unreliable, and since oversight of police is pretty much non existant except in major cases, people just let stuff like illegal or unfounded stops or searches go. Insisting on your rights to a cop who stops you, by the way, is a great way to spend a night in jail. I don't think cops are neccesarily bad people, but they are human, and the circumstances of the job lend themselves to that sort of petty powermongering, just like DMV clerks. Which is why we need extensive oversight, more money and support, including therapy, for officers, and systemic work to try to break up the club atmosphere that forms that "blue wall". The military has exactly the same problem, but it doesn't affect citizens as much because the military isn't used as a policing force very often. Of course, if current trends continue, that may change. And can I take an aside to point out how ridiculous that someone calling themselves a conservative is even *thinking* about having the military take a larger roll in civilian affairs?
And a me too from me. I had the same board, no end of trouble, most of which were related to the shitty 4-1 drivers. Never getting another VIA chipset, but I've had other Asus boards that were fine.
I read books all the time without paying a dime for them. The full copies and everything. Hundreds of books, over and over, and many authors have lost many sales of books because of it. I'm also not in the least ashamed of it. Am I a crook?
Even then, there really aren't that many ways to lock up a modern OS in the way you describe. That means that bugs causing it are either very trivial to find, or almost impossible because they're actually caused bugs within the OS itself, and are only expressed by obscure and often apparently totally unrelated things.
In short: a bug that does this is the OSes fault, and while it's possible theres something that Firefox or a plugin developer can do to work around it, it won't happen unless you can provide information, like a reliable test case.
People keep focussing on the problems with OO.o vrs Office, including a totally irrelevent dig at Calc (that doesn't match my experience - at my last job I downloaded and used Calc to data munge some Excel spreadsheets because Excel would lock up for 5 seconds every time I opened or closed the "find" dialog. Nice)
There's plenty thats just plain wrong, too. PDF *is* an open, documented standard with, as far as I know, no patent issues preventing outside implementations. Notably, non-Adobe PDF implementations don't have to rely on difficult and time consuming reverse engineering to interoperate.
And he claims that, up till now, bidding on technologies has been open and merit based.... but he thinks that they should mandate Office. Right. Thats right from the mothership - "Cross platform means NT *AND* 98!". You can implement any "merit based" technology you want, as long as it Microsoft based.
God. So much lying.
Spying isn't a search and siezure, not even by extreme stretching of the words. There is, in fact, no explicit constitutional barrier to spying or monitoring communications of citizens at all. The right to privacy is *implied* by the fourth amendment, and that interpertation is still controversal. Supreme Court Justice Scalia doesn't believe in it, for example.
Just to be absolutely 100% clear, there are many, many, many people in many, many, many developing areas who could really use the education and social infrastructure these guys are working on but aren't really in immediate danger of starving. In fact, *most* people aren't in immediate danger of starving. Which isn't to say that they all live with the sort of luxury and immediate access to food that we have in the US or other first world countries. I would say abosultely, yes, in many cases getting them a laptop is at least as important as getting them food. Because not everyone who lives in the third world is a bloated fly-eaten starvation victim.
In fairness, this has pretty much been the goal and intent of law enforcement pretty much forever. In fact, the idea that laws (and the enforcement thereof) are in any way for the benefit of the citizenry is a pretty recent concept, historically speaking.
No.
Won't they need to get a court order to wire tap even with VoIP?
Yes and no. Mostly no, these days. They need a warrant, but they can get them after the fact, and from secret courts.
And how would that work in a chat room where lots of good citizens are talking?
If it's like interception of email, they're supposed to just ignore what anyone says unless they're talking to the person being tapped. I leave it up to your imagination just how tightly agents stick to that rule.