Are you saying that children are protected by being taught that sex and sexual organs are morally wrong?
Who is teaching that sex and sexual organs are morally wrong? If anything, what is being said is that a game which depicts sex and sexual organs is morally wrong.
No, no matter what I do, the person following me must be driving in such a way that they do not rear end me.
It seems to me you're arguing that two wrongs make a right. The person following you might very well be breaking the law, but that doesn't give you the right to assault and/or kill him.
No matter how stupid I am, if you rear end me it is 100% your fault.
I can think of a lot of situations where that isn't true (what if the person blew a stop sign and pulled out in front of you while you were going 50 mph?). But that's really irrelevant. If two people both engage in negligent behavior which causes an accident, then both people are at fault. If you want to say that both are 100% at fault, fine.
Anyway, as I've said, in another way, one person's negligence doesn't excuse another person's recklessness.
My understanding is that your right not to testify against yourself in a criminal proceeding against you does not give you the right to prevent the police from collecting evidence. Since your blood alcohol content is evidence, they may collect.
If the police collect force you to give incriminating evidence against your will, that is generally excluded from a criminal case against you. I think the argument is that a breathalyzer is like a DNS test, it's direct evidence and not testimony.
Indeed in some states, the police are permitted by law to physically restrain you and obtain a blood sample by force to be used as evidence against you.
I thought that was true in all states, at least, once you are arrested.
As a practical matter, after you layer on technicality after technicality, we are left with a system that presumes your guilt and it is left up to you to prove your innocence.
I really don't see how that's the case. A breathalizer isn't a conviction, it's a search and seizure, and the standard of proof is probable cause, not proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
In most jurisdictions, a police accusation is sufficient evidence to convict, anyhow.
A jury might decide that a police accusation is proof beyond a reasonable doubt, but that's not the same as saying that you don't have a right to proof beyond a reasonable doubt in a criminal trial. Unless you're talking about civil infractions or jurisdictions outside the United States, I'm not sure what you're talking about.
Actually, for some interesting reading, you should google for just how wildly inaccurate brethalyzer machines are when used outside of a laboratory environment on people who are not of average size and build. It's amazing we let breath tests administered on the side of some highway on people of all sizes pass as evidence of BAC.
They might not be perfect, but a breathalyzer test is evidence of BAC. Google around and you'll also find that there have been many people who have failed a breathalyzer test but still been found not guilty of DUI.
The GFDL isn't suited to software (and, frankly, I think it makes a lousy documentation license, too).
Yeah, meant the GPL. Too much Wikipedia:).
If you mean the GPL, I see where you're coming from, but without distribution there isn't anyone to license it to.
The requirement is to license it to "all third parties".
A translation of a derivative work is still derivative
Generally, because a translation of a derivative work contains the original work. It may not contain the same words, but it contains the same structure.
what a C compiler emits when fed source with #included GPLed headers is a derivative of the GPLed work
I disagree. Do you have a court ruling saying this is the case?
However, it's less clear whether the headers can be copyrighted in the first place. It's generally assumed that they can, but some argue that they're ineligible for being purely descriptive--whatever creative effort goes into the writing of the functions themselves doesn't extend to purely factual documentation.
I guess this is another way to say the same thing as I'm saying. After all, if the header file can't be copyrighted at all, then nothing can be a derivative work of it.
However, I believe a header file can be copyrighted, as a header file. That copyright would cover the creative aspects of the header file, such as the order, the whitespace, pretty much all the non-functional parts. None of these non-functional parts are included in the alleged derivative work though, so it is not in fact a derivative work.
What if the headers have inline functions?
Depends how significant and creative those inline functions are. If the functions are more than trivially significant and creative, it's probably a derivative work, but depending on how significant and creative perhaps that use might be considered fair use.
What if we're using a language that doesn't have any notion of #including headers?
Then presumably you'd have to distribute the header file itself, in which case your defense would have to rely on calling the work an aggregation rather than a derivative. It'd be a much different argument, and since the distinction is one invented by the GPL it's a total guess as to what a court would say about things.
Congress intended there to be a standard, but the technical details that lead to a certain conclusion for C code don't apply to, say, Java.
The standard has become quite clear through court precedents though. A derivative work must be in fixed form and must contain a copy of the original work.
The examples of derivative works provided by the Act all physically incorporate the underlying work or works. The Act's legislative history similarly indicates that "the infringing work must incorporate a portion of the copyrighted work in some form." 1976 U.S. Code Cong. & Admin. News 5659, 5675. See also Mirage Editions, Inc. v. Albuquerque A.R.T. Co., 856 F.2d 1341, 1343-44, 8 U.S.P.Q.2D (BNA) 1171 (9th Cir. 1988) (discussing same), cert. denied, 489 U.S. 1018, 103 L. Ed. 2d 196, 109 S. Ct. 1135 (1989).
Galoob v Nintendo
The GPL, like any other license, has to fit the contours of copyright law, and some of those contours don't get defined until someone tries to break them. That's the nature of the legal system.
However, the law as well as the legal system are clear that copyright covers the preparation of derivative works, not merely the distribution of derivative works. In fact, the distribution of derivative works is only covered by the fact that distribution of a derivative necessarily involves distribution of the original.
Yes, the GPL needs to fit the contours of copyright law if it is going to be effective, however, it doesn't do a very good job of that.
Yeah, it's pretty much the same in New Jersey I believe. But this is how they get around the presumption of guilt. As for how they get around the self-incrimination issues, I don't know. According to the supreme court, breathalyzer tests don't fall under the fifth amendment at all.
I guess putting someone in jail for a year for refusing to take a breathalyzer is a miscarriage of justice.
Regarding presumption of guilt, try looking at DUI laws some time. For instance, if you are accused of DUI, you have the right not to submit to a brethalyzer. If you exercise this right, you are automatically guilty. There is no defense at that point.
Guilty of what? In New Jersey, if you refuse to submit to a breathalyzer, you're guilty of refusing to submit to a breathalyzer. Of course, the punishment for refusing to submit to a breathalyzer is loss of your license, but it's not exactly the same as being guilty of DUI.
...if something really bad happens, you might just find yourself charged with murder.
That seems unlikely assuming you *don't* run, and stick to your story... but of course causing an accident is a very risky thing.
Depends on how good your story is, whether or not it fits the physical evidence, whether or not there were witnesses who saw otherwise, etc.
Besides, even if you did manage to get away with murder, you'll probably still feel pretty damn guilty. Yeah, you shouldn't have been tailgated, but recklessly assaulting someone just because you're being tailgated is not the proper response.
What does that have to do with anything? Don't you think most people who wind up at these pages and click on the links want to go to the page which is advertising?
Rear end is not your fault (particularly because you can say you thought you say an animal, which would be reason to slam on the breaks)
Lying about what happened doesn't change who is actually at fault. It just might change whether or not you are found guilty of the crime.
Slamming on your brakes with the intention of having someone run into you means it's absolutely your fault if the person then actually runs into you. There may be civil laws which say that compensation should be distributed otherwise, but that doesn't change the reality of the situation.
This should be modded up (sorry, no points left) because that is exactly what would happen if there weren't any registration fee.
Yeah, and it would be the point. You say it as though it's a bad thing.
Hell we're not far from that now with the companies who register tens of thousands of domains and park them for no reason other than to sell it to someone.
We're basically already there. In fact, even when the cost of domains were high it was still mainly a fee for administration, not for the domain itself.
Anyway, it's not like the registration fee goes to the public. What's it matter if it goes to a domain squatter or a registry?
Finally he was angry enough that he just slammed on his brakes, and of course it was an instant rear-end, the front of the BMW was crushed, and the driver leaped out of his car shouting, etc.. The reply? "I thought I saw an animal." The BMW driver was totally at fault, and his car was toast (whereas my friend could drive away after the cops wrote it up... one bonus of those massive old American cars).
Yeah, someone did that here in Florida a few months ago. The result, the person in back lost control of the vehicle, smashed the car, and died. The person in front ran and is wanted for vehicular manslaughter.
Not a very good idea. You might not be guilty of a traffic violation, but you are guilty of assault with a deadly weapon, and if something really bad happens, you might just find yourself charged with murder.
The problem with small fines like traffic tickets are that you need to prove that you are innocent of the crime vs. having to prove that you are guilty.
Wow, where is this? This isn't the case anywhere I've lived.
911 is just shorthand for another number or set of numbers, so in theory you could dial that number, but it usually isn't published. That said, I can't imagine an area not having some sort of emergency phone number which could handle your call.
First, from all indications, the switch for software developers (with the exception of anything that touches the hardware) is absurdly easy.
In theory, though a switch in hardware is almost sure to bring out some bugs that are already there in the software. And what about the change in endianness? Won't this mean that anything using the network which isn't using (the equivalent of) htonl() et. al. will need to be fixed?
In the end I think the redisign will be minimal, especially since many (most?) Mac applications were built for Intel machines first anyway. And in that sense it might actually be a boon, bringing down the porting costs.
As for the Intel chips, news is leaking out from under the door about the new development boxes, based on the P4, being faster than dual-G5 machines in a lot of respects, and equally as fast in many others.
Well yeah, that's basically the whole point of the switch. But it's still not guaranteed that it'll actually happen that way.
And lastly, piracy. Windows got as popular as it was because of piracy - people pirated it, it became ubiquitous, and developers had more of a market for it.
Well...Windows is where it is today because it figured out how to stop the piracy - by bundling the software with the hardware, and forcing the majority of hardware makers to refuse to sell machines without an OS. Apple wants to do this, but it's going to be a lot harder for them, because they don't have the stranglehold over the hardware providers that Microsoft does.
I think this one could go either way. The only thing Apple really has going for it here is that installing an operating system isn't very easy. But that might be enough, for a while.
It all comes down to whether people will buy the machines - or does it? Where does Apple's money come from? The iPod.
iPods account for 31% of Apple's revenue. It's a significant portion, but not everything, not even half.
If they lose margin on their machines, will it hurt? Hard to say. It will bring more people into the Mac 'fold', which will help everyone that isn't Apple, such as hardware developers, software developers, etc.
If they really believe this, then they should just open source the OS (and spin off the majority of its development). For now, at least, Apple is hedging its bets against this.
This switch will be a good thing, and piracy, believe it or not, will be a good thing. I look forward to it.
I agree with you there, at least with respect to myself and society. But I'm not sure it'll be a good thing for Apple.
Well, let me clarify. Apple was put in a situation where the switch was the only choice they really had. So the switch will be better than not switching. But whether or not Apple is going to gain paying customers as a result I think is very much to be determined.
I think you hit on it, and this is the main reason I don't use IE. Because the IE HTML control can be used by any program, without even necessarily letting you know that you're using it, I've been forced to go into the IE preferences and turn off everything.
I've turned off a lot of things in Firefox too. Ask every time for cookies, no java (I turn it on those few times I need it), and I've unchecked "allow web sites to install software" and removed everything from the whitelist (it's just too easy to fake DNS). I have installed a couple of extensions, but to install them I turned on installation, added the site to the whitelist, installed it, then turned installation back off and removed the site from the whitelist. Overly paranoid, perhaps, but I try to go on the assumption that lots of security features are broken and therefore I try to maximize my layers of security.
Well, yes and no. Most spyware gets on IE through social engineering, but some of it manages to get through even though the user never explicitly installed anything, through bugs in IE which are present even with the default settings and no plugins installed.
I'd guess that IE is less secure than Firefox. It's only a guess, since the worst vulnerabilities are the ones that we don't know about. But at the same time, a lot of the "security holes" in IE that some people complain about would fall under what I'd call user error, not a bug.
Anyway, if you don't like this explanation, turn extension installation off completely.
You should be able to set the permissions or at least the 'run-as' of the toolbar separately from the permissions of Firefox.
I think this would be a waste of programmers' time. The way I see it, extensions are a proving grounds for ideas until they make it into Firefox and/or the HTML spec. If you're going to take the time to define and enforce permissions, why bother making the person download and install an extension?
No, the whole point of an operating system is to provide a stable programming target and perform resource management.
That's what resource management is. If programmers cooperate with each other to share resources, then resource management is done automatically. But with any modern operating system this isn't necessary. Each program is separated from the other programs so that it can behave as though it is alone in the computing ether, as though it owns all the memory, all the processor, all the hard drive, etc.
I suppose saying that it protects individual programmers from the actions of each other was a little bit overboard. Really it is designed to protect individual programs from the actions of each other. As for protecting the individual programmers, in a project with multiple programmers, that's really the job of the programming language and development tools.
They lost me back in '95 or '96 the last time they made the switch. I was lucky enough to be the owner of one of those Performas with all the networking and other hardware problems. About this same time I started getting interested in Linux, and the thing wouldn't even run on the Performa due to all the buggy hardware. I already was thinking about making the switch because of software compatibility and price issues, but that buggy system sealed the deal.
A few years later they came out with OSX. If I had been able to hold on for that long OSX would have kept me hooked for a while. If the switch to Intel goes anything like the switch to PowerPC, there are going to be a whole lot of lost customers.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you saying that children are protected by being taught that sex and sexual organs are morally wrong?
Who is teaching that sex and sexual organs are morally wrong? If anything, what is being said is that a game which depicts sex and sexual organs is morally wrong.
He thought the killer was a victim because he played GTA and then killed officers? Or were the officers sued postehumously?
No, he's talking about suing the killers, not the officers.
To the first person who creates a mod which displays nude models on this lawyer's website.
No, no matter what I do, the person following me must be driving in such a way that they do not rear end me.
It seems to me you're arguing that two wrongs make a right. The person following you might very well be breaking the law, but that doesn't give you the right to assault and/or kill him.
No matter how stupid I am, if you rear end me it is 100% your fault.
I can think of a lot of situations where that isn't true (what if the person blew a stop sign and pulled out in front of you while you were going 50 mph?). But that's really irrelevant. If two people both engage in negligent behavior which causes an accident, then both people are at fault. If you want to say that both are 100% at fault, fine.
Anyway, as I've said, in another way, one person's negligence doesn't excuse another person's recklessness.
My understanding is that your right not to testify against yourself in a criminal proceeding against you does not give you the right to prevent the police from collecting evidence. Since your blood alcohol content is evidence, they may collect.
If the police collect force you to give incriminating evidence against your will, that is generally excluded from a criminal case against you. I think the argument is that a breathalyzer is like a DNS test, it's direct evidence and not testimony.
Indeed in some states, the police are permitted by law to physically restrain you and obtain a blood sample by force to be used as evidence against you.
I thought that was true in all states, at least, once you are arrested.
As a practical matter, after you layer on technicality after technicality, we are left with a system that presumes your guilt and it is left up to you to prove your innocence.
I really don't see how that's the case. A breathalizer isn't a conviction, it's a search and seizure, and the standard of proof is probable cause, not proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
In most jurisdictions, a police accusation is sufficient evidence to convict, anyhow.
A jury might decide that a police accusation is proof beyond a reasonable doubt, but that's not the same as saying that you don't have a right to proof beyond a reasonable doubt in a criminal trial. Unless you're talking about civil infractions or jurisdictions outside the United States, I'm not sure what you're talking about.
Actually, for some interesting reading, you should google for just how wildly inaccurate brethalyzer machines are when used outside of a laboratory environment on people who are not of average size and build. It's amazing we let breath tests administered on the side of some highway on people of all sizes pass as evidence of BAC.
They might not be perfect, but a breathalyzer test is evidence of BAC. Google around and you'll also find that there have been many people who have failed a breathalyzer test but still been found not guilty of DUI.
The GFDL isn't suited to software (and, frankly, I think it makes a lousy documentation license, too).
Yeah, meant the GPL. Too much Wikipedia :).
If you mean the GPL, I see where you're coming from, but without distribution there isn't anyone to license it to.
The requirement is to license it to "all third parties".
A translation of a derivative work is still derivative
Generally, because a translation of a derivative work contains the original work. It may not contain the same words, but it contains the same structure.
what a C compiler emits when fed source with #included GPLed headers is a derivative of the GPLed work
I disagree. Do you have a court ruling saying this is the case?
However, it's less clear whether the headers can be copyrighted in the first place. It's generally assumed that they can, but some argue that they're ineligible for being purely descriptive--whatever creative effort goes into the writing of the functions themselves doesn't extend to purely factual documentation.
I guess this is another way to say the same thing as I'm saying. After all, if the header file can't be copyrighted at all, then nothing can be a derivative work of it.
However, I believe a header file can be copyrighted, as a header file. That copyright would cover the creative aspects of the header file, such as the order, the whitespace, pretty much all the non-functional parts. None of these non-functional parts are included in the alleged derivative work though, so it is not in fact a derivative work.
What if the headers have inline functions?
Depends how significant and creative those inline functions are. If the functions are more than trivially significant and creative, it's probably a derivative work, but depending on how significant and creative perhaps that use might be considered fair use.
What if we're using a language that doesn't have any notion of #including headers?
Then presumably you'd have to distribute the header file itself, in which case your defense would have to rely on calling the work an aggregation rather than a derivative. It'd be a much different argument, and since the distinction is one invented by the GPL it's a total guess as to what a court would say about things.
Congress intended there to be a standard, but the technical details that lead to a certain conclusion for C code don't apply to, say, Java.
The standard has become quite clear through court precedents though. A derivative work must be in fixed form and must contain a copy of the original work.
The GPL, like any other license, has to fit the contours of copyright law, and some of those contours don't get defined until someone tries to break them. That's the nature of the legal system.
However, the law as well as the legal system are clear that copyright covers the preparation of derivative works, not merely the distribution of derivative works. In fact, the distribution of derivative works is only covered by the fact that distribution of a derivative necessarily involves distribution of the original.
Yes, the GPL needs to fit the contours of copyright law if it is going to be effective, however, it doesn't do a very good job of that.
Yeah, it's pretty much the same in New Jersey I believe. But this is how they get around the presumption of guilt. As for how they get around the self-incrimination issues, I don't know. According to the supreme court, breathalyzer tests don't fall under the fifth amendment at all.
I guess putting someone in jail for a year for refusing to take a breathalyzer is a miscarriage of justice.
Regarding presumption of guilt, try looking at DUI laws some time. For instance, if you are accused of DUI, you have the right not to submit to a brethalyzer. If you exercise this right, you are automatically guilty. There is no defense at that point.
Guilty of what? In New Jersey, if you refuse to submit to a breathalyzer, you're guilty of refusing to submit to a breathalyzer. Of course, the punishment for refusing to submit to a breathalyzer is loss of your license, but it's not exactly the same as being guilty of DUI.
...if something really bad happens, you might just find yourself charged with murder.
That seems unlikely assuming you *don't* run, and stick to your story... but of course causing an accident is a very risky thing.
Depends on how good your story is, whether or not it fits the physical evidence, whether or not there were witnesses who saw otherwise, etc.
Besides, even if you did manage to get away with murder, you'll probably still feel pretty damn guilty. Yeah, you shouldn't have been tailgated, but recklessly assaulting someone just because you're being tailgated is not the proper response.
What does that have to do with anything? Don't you think most people who wind up at these pages and click on the links want to go to the page which is advertising?
Rear end is not your fault (particularly because you can say you thought you say an animal, which would be reason to slam on the breaks)
Lying about what happened doesn't change who is actually at fault. It just might change whether or not you are found guilty of the crime.
Slamming on your brakes with the intention of having someone run into you means it's absolutely your fault if the person then actually runs into you. There may be civil laws which say that compensation should be distributed otherwise, but that doesn't change the reality of the situation.
This should be modded up (sorry, no points left) because that is exactly what would happen if there weren't any registration fee.
Yeah, and it would be the point. You say it as though it's a bad thing.
Hell we're not far from that now with the companies who register tens of thousands of domains and park them for no reason other than to sell it to someone.
We're basically already there. In fact, even when the cost of domains were high it was still mainly a fee for administration, not for the domain itself.
Anyway, it's not like the registration fee goes to the public. What's it matter if it goes to a domain squatter or a registry?
If someone goes to the site and then clicks on the link, how is this not legitimate?
Sure, google should eliminate these sites from its search engine, but I don't see the point of not giving them the ad revenue they earned.
Why should we limit web sites to people who are serious? If anything we should be lowering or eliminating the registration fee.
Finally he was angry enough that he just slammed on his brakes, and of course it was an instant rear-end, the front of the BMW was crushed, and the driver leaped out of his car shouting, etc.. The reply? "I thought I saw an animal." The BMW driver was totally at fault, and his car was toast (whereas my friend could drive away after the cops wrote it up... one bonus of those massive old American cars).
Yeah, someone did that here in Florida a few months ago. The result, the person in back lost control of the vehicle, smashed the car, and died. The person in front ran and is wanted for vehicular manslaughter.
Not a very good idea. You might not be guilty of a traffic violation, but you are guilty of assault with a deadly weapon, and if something really bad happens, you might just find yourself charged with murder.
The problem with small fines like traffic tickets are that you need to prove that you are innocent of the crime vs. having to prove that you are guilty.
Wow, where is this? This isn't the case anywhere I've lived.
911 is just shorthand for another number or set of numbers, so in theory you could dial that number, but it usually isn't published. That said, I can't imagine an area not having some sort of emergency phone number which could handle your call.
Why not buy Vonage and a TTY machine? Then if you're choking you can use the TTY.
Can't vonage be used without hooking it up to a phone?
First, from all indications, the switch for software developers (with the exception of anything that touches the hardware) is absurdly easy.
In theory, though a switch in hardware is almost sure to bring out some bugs that are already there in the software. And what about the change in endianness? Won't this mean that anything using the network which isn't using (the equivalent of) htonl() et. al. will need to be fixed?
In the end I think the redisign will be minimal, especially since many (most?) Mac applications were built for Intel machines first anyway. And in that sense it might actually be a boon, bringing down the porting costs.
As for the Intel chips, news is leaking out from under the door about the new development boxes, based on the P4, being faster than dual-G5 machines in a lot of respects, and equally as fast in many others.
Well yeah, that's basically the whole point of the switch. But it's still not guaranteed that it'll actually happen that way.
And lastly, piracy. Windows got as popular as it was because of piracy - people pirated it, it became ubiquitous, and developers had more of a market for it.
Well...Windows is where it is today because it figured out how to stop the piracy - by bundling the software with the hardware, and forcing the majority of hardware makers to refuse to sell machines without an OS. Apple wants to do this, but it's going to be a lot harder for them, because they don't have the stranglehold over the hardware providers that Microsoft does.
I think this one could go either way. The only thing Apple really has going for it here is that installing an operating system isn't very easy. But that might be enough, for a while.
It all comes down to whether people will buy the machines - or does it? Where does Apple's money come from? The iPod.
iPods account for 31% of Apple's revenue. It's a significant portion, but not everything, not even half.
If they lose margin on their machines, will it hurt? Hard to say. It will bring more people into the Mac 'fold', which will help everyone that isn't Apple, such as hardware developers, software developers, etc.
If they really believe this, then they should just open source the OS (and spin off the majority of its development). For now, at least, Apple is hedging its bets against this.
This switch will be a good thing, and piracy, believe it or not, will be a good thing. I look forward to it.
I agree with you there, at least with respect to myself and society. But I'm not sure it'll be a good thing for Apple.
Well, let me clarify. Apple was put in a situation where the switch was the only choice they really had. So the switch will be better than not switching. But whether or not Apple is going to gain paying customers as a result I think is very much to be determined.
I think you hit on it, and this is the main reason I don't use IE. Because the IE HTML control can be used by any program, without even necessarily letting you know that you're using it, I've been forced to go into the IE preferences and turn off everything.
I've turned off a lot of things in Firefox too. Ask every time for cookies, no java (I turn it on those few times I need it), and I've unchecked "allow web sites to install software" and removed everything from the whitelist (it's just too easy to fake DNS). I have installed a couple of extensions, but to install them I turned on installation, added the site to the whitelist, installed it, then turned installation back off and removed the site from the whitelist. Overly paranoid, perhaps, but I try to go on the assumption that lots of security features are broken and therefore I try to maximize my layers of security.
Well, yes and no. Most spyware gets on IE through social engineering, but some of it manages to get through even though the user never explicitly installed anything, through bugs in IE which are present even with the default settings and no plugins installed.
I'd guess that IE is less secure than Firefox. It's only a guess, since the worst vulnerabilities are the ones that we don't know about. But at the same time, a lot of the "security holes" in IE that some people complain about would fall under what I'd call user error, not a bug.
Anyway, if you don't like this explanation, turn extension installation off completely.
You should be able to set the permissions or at least the 'run-as' of the toolbar separately from the permissions of Firefox.
I think this would be a waste of programmers' time. The way I see it, extensions are a proving grounds for ideas until they make it into Firefox and/or the HTML spec. If you're going to take the time to define and enforce permissions, why bother making the person download and install an extension?
No, the whole point of an operating system is to provide a stable programming target and perform resource management.
That's what resource management is. If programmers cooperate with each other to share resources, then resource management is done automatically. But with any modern operating system this isn't necessary. Each program is separated from the other programs so that it can behave as though it is alone in the computing ether, as though it owns all the memory, all the processor, all the hard drive, etc.
I suppose saying that it protects individual programmers from the actions of each other was a little bit overboard. Really it is designed to protect individual programs from the actions of each other. As for protecting the individual programmers, in a project with multiple programmers, that's really the job of the programming language and development tools.
They lost me back in '95 or '96 the last time they made the switch. I was lucky enough to be the owner of one of those Performas with all the networking and other hardware problems. About this same time I started getting interested in Linux, and the thing wouldn't even run on the Performa due to all the buggy hardware. I already was thinking about making the switch because of software compatibility and price issues, but that buggy system sealed the deal.
A few years later they came out with OSX. If I had been able to hold on for that long OSX would have kept me hooked for a while. If the switch to Intel goes anything like the switch to PowerPC, there are going to be a whole lot of lost customers.