True, and I suppose I could use that if I was just writing a standard-format paper for school or some such; but as far as I can tell, TextEdit still lacks margin control, which is one of the features an earlier poster required for a "full-featured text editor" (which was not a page layout program). Still, good point about TextEdit. It's pretty damn full features for a text editor.
I'm not a programmer by any means, but I've always wondered since the NeXT acquisition happened, with the Services feature in OS X, would it really be that difficult to implement something like OpenDoc? You'd need a central app to run the document windows for the whole thing and present you with your palettess of parts and containers and tools, and then smaller invisible apps that do nothing but offer up services, that the central app uses to display and edit parts and containers.
That's why to this day I still use AppleWorks' word processor, as obscure as it is these days, whenever I'm working on papers and such by myself, and not exchanging data with anyone. That's basically all it does - rich text, formatted into pages, with margins and all of that stuff. (As opposed to amorphous rich text like in TextEdit/NotePad/etc). It's technically able to embed other types of data inline with the text (or floating over it on a draw layer), but if you're just doing text, it just does text.
Word, on the other hand, is always nagging me and trying to do shit for me to "spruce up" my document, "Hey it looks like you're making a list, let me format that for you." It suffers the quintessential Microsoft flaw of the program getting in your way, trying to do things for you whether you like it or not, instead of getting OUT of your way and facilitating you to do exactly what you want. And then people go and try to use it for fancy newsletters and flyers and want me to collaborate with them and I just can't stand to work in the broken word processor paradigm when what we're really trying to do is page layout.
Or what if only 25% thought it was a stupid law and 50% didn't care because they don't pick their nose anyway?
It's not necessarily a quantitative matter of strict percentages. It's just a qualitative matter of "if I do this, and someone tries to stop it, will there be any significant power on my side of the issue?" There's a quote I don't quite remember about laws which criminalize everybody being unenforcable - the police become the extreme minority and all the other "criminals" can simply overwhelm them.
This of course relies on the premise that the average person is going to stand up for his or her self if they think they've got any real chance of winning, which is really the point I'm making - if I think I'll get in serious trouble for doing something, either I'll stop doing it or make sure I don't get caught (keep it secret). If I think I'll "get in trouble" but that I've got enough people/power on my side to win out of that trouble, then "screw you if you want to know if I pick my nose or not. I do. What are you going to do about it?"
The fact that at least a large minority, if not a majority, of the population think smoking pot is no big thing, has not done much to curb the ridiculous laws and sentencing guidelines like 3-strikes, etc.
That's an example of the power balance above. People should be able to get away with doing things like that - the government shouldn't have the power to stop them. That power is given to them by the legitimacy that we the people as a whole grant them and the laws that they enforce. Enough people support those laws and the power of the government to enforce them that most pot smokers/growers/dealers don't have much of a chance of winning if it comes to a conflict, and yet they don't believe they should have to stop, and so they keep it secret. That's a good interim solution, but the real solution is to remove such power from the government.
Your dream of an open, secretless utopia is just that - a utopia. There will always be political power structures of one nature or another and privacy is one of the strongest defenses against the abuse those power structures inevitably enable.
True, it is a dream, and I doubt I will see it come to pass in my lifetime, probably not even my childrens' lifetimes. But I think that it is possible to arrive at a simple and consistent set of canons (in the sense of "canonical law", i.e. axomatic law, not in the religious sense) that everyone would freely consent to in principle, things like the right to freedom of expression (or non-expression), and the right to consent (or not) to decisions about yourself as you will - and of course the corresponding responsibilities to respect those rights in others. Those two are just my basic 'canons' that I base all my "moral" or "ethical" judgements on, and while I think they're pretty damn universal, I'm open to the possibility that they could be refined further.
Once you've got a simple, consistent, canonical law laid down, it's just a matter of making sure it's enforced properly, and keeping those enforcing it from gaining too much arbitrary power. Making sure the general populace is in charge of the enforcement of truly universal laws is a sure way to guarantee "majority rule, minority rights".
The whole concept of fixed, canonical law is where constitutional government comes from. No longer are the rulers arbitrarily making up whatever rules they feel like at the time, but they've got a fixed set of guidelines that they are charged with enforcing. (At least, that's how it's SUPPOSED to work). And making sure that the rulers themselves are approved by the general public is the whole concept of democracy.
We haven't always had these things: rulers used to descend genetically or seize power by force and often claimed a divine right to rule, and then went about making arbitrary decrees and edicts as they pleased. We've come a long way since then. I think we've still got room to improve from here, too. That's all I'm pushing for.
If I had to choose either Notepad or Quark any time I wanted to create a text document, I'd be an unhappy camper.
That's why I'm saying Pages is so brilliant. It's not Quark, but it's the same class of program, scaled down to the Word level of functionality.
The way I see it, the text editor paradigm works up to the feature level of text-only documents with varied font faces and sizes, alignments and justifications, line spacings, even margins and pages sizes.... so long as it's all just text.
Once you want to start adding tables and graphics and working with master pages and the like, it's time to change paradigms and act like you're doing what you real are doing: basic page layout. You're not just editing text anymore, and trying to make a fancy text editor do things other than edit text is a bad idea.
Yes, exactly! And Pages made me realize why I have always disliked things like Word and other "word processors"...
They're really a bastard category of products. They're text editors pretending to be page layout programs... or page layout programs pretending to be text editors. The whole concept has always seemed somehow *wrong* to me. Kludgy and awkward.
Pages fixes that. It fills in the same category as things like Word, but goes about things in a sane way. Apple has a text editor already - TextEdit. It's pervasive across the OS X system, and technically I'm using it right now in this Safari text box. Pages is a page layout program that calls on TextEdit (I presume) to do its text functions, QuickTime to handle its graphics functions, and so on. The components are handled by system functions that handle those components well; Pages just puts them all together in a pretty, integrated package.
It's a lot like XHTML+CSS versus the old content-and-layout-in-one kludge that was earlier HTML standards, actually.
Unless or until Apple has an Office killer. The second MS gets wind of an Apple plan to compete with them directly using the same vendors Microsoft Office for Mac is as dead as a doornail.
Pages? (Opens Word docs AND works in a much more elegant fashion).
Keynote? (Opens PowerPoint docs and... ditto).
Throw in an Excel-alike and you've got your Office competition right there.
That is a similar matter, and your post makes me realize I should clarify my position.
It's a similar matter because the reason such victims might want to keep secrets is because they fear they will be judged against by the public, as you said. In my earlier post, I made the point that the only reason I might want to keep secrets from the government is because the general public tends to side with the government (they are, after all, it's power base). If there was some law against, say, picking your nose, but 99% of the population thought that was a stupid law and openly flaunted it, I wouldn't feel the need to keep the fact that I pick my nose secret from the govt, even though it's illegal, because if they tried to do anything about it, everybody would side with me.
Same think with your rape/etc victims example: if people would support them instead of judging them harshly, they would have no need to keep secrets. The problem is not that they can't keep a secret, the problem is that for some reason they need to. (A social reason in this case, instead of legal, though they're not much of a difference when it comes down to it).
That said, we come to my point of clarification. I don't think it should be at all illegal to keep things secret. Nobody should be compelled or coerced into revealing anything. But nobody should need to be afraid to reveal anything either. While we may never be able to fix human nature and society to alleviate the desire for secrecy about rape and abuse, we should be able to fix the law so that nobody needs to worry about keeping secrets from the government.
What aggravates me more than the mere existence and enforcement of such a law is that when I was talking about it with my coworkers they pretty much all said "Good -- I have nothing to fear/hide..."
There is some truth in that statement.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a very private person, and I hate to be tracked by authority figures of any kind. But more than that, deeper than that - I hate *having* to hate being tracked.
I'm a very open and honest person. I normally cannot stand to keep secrets; it feels dishonest and wrong to me. So what bothers me about authoritative violations of privacy is not that they are finding out something about me, but that there is any reason for me to not want them to know something about me.
I don't read 2600 Magazine (honestly, I probably wouldn't grok most of it), but people keep using it as an example here so I will too. Say I read 2600. I don't mind that everybody else in the book store can see that I'm buying it. I've got no reason to hide that from them. If one of them got all uppity about "you're one of those evil hacker-types! You must die!!!" and tried to do something to me for buying a magazine (and the subsequent inferences therefrom), everybody would side with *me* because it's according to our social contract - the real and living one as everybody understands it, even if not as written on paper - one citizen cannot stop another citizen from buying whatever damn magazine they please, and if someone tries to, *they* are in the wrong. I will have the support of the general populace, which is the real power base in any civilization.
But if "the government" (whichever) decides to track my magazine purchases, and for some reason doesn't trust people who buy 2600, and then comes down on me as a "terrorist hacker" because of it, the public will go "Oh - the government says he's evil, it's their job to protect us from evil people, so they must be right." And now I have little to no real recourse.
The point I guess I'm trying to make here is that being concerned with our privacy isn't getting to the root of the problem. Having privacy is a stopgap measure to keep the government from wielding against you powers that it shouldn't have in the first place. But to get to the real problem, we shouldn't be focusing on the privacy, although that is a good interim measure - we need to focus on WHY do we need this privacy in the first place? If the system worked properly, if we had a true, concrete and axiomatic system of law, such that people could be assured that they know very clearly and simply what is and is not allowed (of both them and the government), and that such a balance was reasonable to both parties... nobody would need to keep secrets, and probably nobody would *want* to keep secrets unless they were in violation of the law.
That's where that attitude of "I have nothing to hide" comes from. These are people who trust that the system is flawless and thus only criminals have things to hide - which is how it SHOULD be, but not how it IS. The person saying that, in your example, could be entirely unaware that he is, in the eyes of the law, a criminal by some technicality, and that if caught they would do horrible nasty things to him and all the other people like him would nod and say "The government says he's a criminal, it must be true."
The attitude is correct, that only criminals need to keep secrets from the law. The problem is not that we can't keep secrets - the problem is that we NEED to, because too many things that should not be called crimes, are, and that the general populace is complacent in that.
A friend of mine expressed a similar notion about gun control. He, like me, really isn't all that much into guns. Would rather never have to have one. But that the government doesn't *want* him to have guns is scary - "why shouldn't they want me to have guns? do they want to do something bad to me that they can't do if I keep my guns?" - and in that case, he just might consider keeping some, even though he'd rather not have to.
Replace "guns" with "secrets" and see how that paragraph parses.
All I can say to that person, who imo is a very sad individual that hasn't read the constitution, is read the first 10 amendments to the constitution if you want to know what rights you have.
This is something that keeps coming up, and I have to keep emphasizing the wrongness of it because it is the root of all of the problems with our government today.
"You", a citizen, have the right to do anything not expressly prohibited to you. "They", the government, have no rights, only certain powers expressly granted to them.
The Bill of Rights is a list of SPECIALLY PROTECTED rights, which the government expressly may not create laws infringing upon, if they somehow (*cough*Article 8, Section 18*cough*) find a way to go about expanding their own powers at will. But the Bill of Rights is NOT a list of your total rights, and many of the founding fathers were opposed to its inclusion (hence why it was added afterward), because they feared that people would think that, since some rights were enumerated, that was an encompassing list of all rights. The compromise was the 10th Amendment, which is the clearest bit of language in the constitution that hammers home my point:
"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
In other words, if the federal constitution doesn't say No, and your state constitution doesn't say No, then you can do it. It's your right unless otherwise stated.
The (Federal) government, on the other hand, is supposed to have a very select set of powers, explicitly enumerated in Article 8 of the Constitution. The catch there is, the last clause of Article 8 grants Congress the power...
"To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof."
So basically, every law Congress has passed, aside from Constitutional amendments, is supposed to trace back in some way shape or form to the enforcement of one of these powers explicitly granted to Congress, or to help the other branches to exercise their (also explicitly enumerated and limited) powers.
And the lawmakers have really stretched things. The one you see abused most often is the "interstate commerce" clause. Drug control laws, for example, derive entirely from that - nevermind that the same laws are applied if someone produces a drug like pot entirely in their back yard and uses it it all by themselves, never involving other states or even other people in the process. The lawbooks are full of stretches like that - some law links back to the supposed enforcement of an apparently unrelated power of Congress, and then applies equally well in situations unrelated to the exercise of that specific power, effectively growing the powers of the Federal government.
And since such Article 8 abuses supersede the 10th Amendment protections of your universal human rights (because such abuses 'legitimately' grant Congress further powers, as far as the 10th Amendment is concerned), it seems they can get away with it.
The system is broken.
(Not to mention, even if it weren't broken in just this way... the Constitution still allows individual states to wield whatever powers they please except these, and a few others added in later amendments. Even if the feds weren't able to be draconian... chances are the states still would).
It's not going to get windows users to come over, because those users are unlikely to buy all new computers and software just for OS X.
This just made me think of something interesting.
One of the big costs of "switching" is having to buy all new hardware, software, etc for the new platform. Standardizing on USB/FireWire/etc has has alleviated the hardware problem for the most part, but the software has still posed a big problem.
Now, if Microsoft goes and gets Windows running on Intel Macs, as they seem very likely to do (hey, they sell more software), then Wintel users can go ahead and buy Apple next time they upgrade, getting a machine that will run Windows and all its software AND Mac OS X and the new software they want to try out. This will be nothing but a boon for Apple's hardware sales.
However, I worry, as other posters have mentioned, that if "Mac" users can just run Windows versions of major software packages, that that will be less reason for software developers to produce Mac versions of their products. That, in the long run, will undermine the strength of OS X as a platform, which in turn negates the big drawing point of Apple hardware in the first place. Which makes Apple an overpriced commodity hardware vendor with pretty cases == dead Apple, unless they can turn into a *really* good hardware vendor. And there's always the chance that if OS X *didn't* whither, and began to chip away at the MS monopoly, MS could then fix Windows to not run on MacIntel, reducing the value of an Apple box to the average consumer.
Though now that I think about it, Apple does sell other software besides just OS X itself, and the iApps and their professional big brothers (Final Cut Studio et al) are a major draw to OS X. It could be possible for Apple to to keep OSX around as a meta-platform, existing only in userspace as an API set and a pretty interface running on top of any kernel (Windows, Linux, Darwin/BSD), designed to support Apple's "killer apps", which would be the real draw for most users who don't particularly care about APIs or nice standard interfaces. Then again, NeXT did almost exactly that with OpenStep, and look how well that turned out.
So it seems to me, Apple's got three choices. Either it keeps Windows off the Mac, in which case the status quo is almost unchanged (except now we've got TCPM on the Mac and other such arbitrary [non-technical] barriers to the unhindered use of *my* computer, which I object to philosophically). Or, if Windows does run on the Mac, and it reduces the value of the OS X platform, Apple faces the choice of either becoming a commodity software with a nifty API and interface, or a commodity hardware vendor with pretty cases. Neither of which seem like the Apple we know, and both of which ruin their existing business model which, despite low platform marketshare, is doing them damn well financially.
I predict that Apple will probably allow Windows on MacIntel until such point that it begins to hurt the OS X platform (and probably try to find some way to prevent that), and if at some point that does become the case, will then bar Windows from their hardware with TCPM and return things to the status quo... except now we've got Trusted Computing DRM crap on our Macs. Which is really all that bugs me about this move in the first place.
Ugh, I need to learn to use preview....laws regarding religions establishment...
I meant to say, "laws regarding religious establishments", as in, churches and such. Normally I wouldn't bother to make a correction like this, but it befuddles my meaning to have it written as such.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;...
Where in there does it say that the government can't talk about religion? It doesn't even seem to prohibit the states from establishing state religions. Maybe it should, but that's not what it says.
I just want to note that in the above quote from the constitution, "establishment" is used as a verb, not a noun; i.e. it isn't saying Congress can't make laws regarding religions establishment (churches are bound to laws like everybody else), but that Congress can't make laws establishing a religion (or prohibiting people from exercising their own religions).
In other words, the government must be religion-neutral, neither endorsing nor prohibiting any religion. (Well, technically, by that language, only Federal legislation is thus restricted, but this whole "Congress shall" business is often interpreted nowadays as "government" as a some conglomerate whole).
What, you can't hear people's punctuation when they speak? I say things in parentheses all the time... hear them pretty often too... then again, I also think that mint tastes very green...
Are you suggesting that Microsoft should note hire an otherwise qualified woman if she came from a culture where that was done to her?
I'm in no way endorsing circumcision (of any sort), but to discriminate against someone who came from a culture where that was done to them in order for them to be considered "decent", and then consider that person "indecent", is... well, needlessly discriminatory.
The same exact standard applies to piercings (which I'm not too fond of myself, but hey, if people want to do things to themselves...). If someone came from a culture where, in order to be a "decent" adult, they had to have had a bone run through their nose and huge discs in their ears, and then they came to America and wanted to work for MS as a programmer, would you say they should not be hired because they look like that? Now, what if an American decided that he LIKED that look and did it to himself? How is that any different?
How many times have you seen a corporation that was actually democratic? To create such a beast requires a conscious effort to bend the rules. Generally, a corporation is a paragon of dictatorships. The people at the top give the orders, and the people below them follow those orders -- or else. Where's the inherent democracy and freedom in that?
Precisely. This is why I advocate that corporations, government bodies and all other types of organization should treated as the same class of entity, and held to the exact same standards. Governments and corporations as they exist today are both held to too lenient standards, but in different ways: government bodies are absolved of financial responsibility because they can take their funding at gunpoint if it comes down to it, and corporations are absolved of behavior responsibility because they are inherantly dictatoral/hierarchical in command, yet no individuals are held directly accountable for the actions of the corporation.
Capitalism does not embrace democracy. It simply tolerates it in the context of western societies.
I have to disagree with you here, but only semantically. CORPORATISM (a.k.a. fascism) does not embrace democracy, at least not the form of corporatism practiced in most capitalist economies today. The financially irresponsible government protects (though legal acknowledgement and force of law) the existance and of behaviorally irresponsible corporations, who in turn provide further financial support to the government.
But capitalism, in the sense of a free and competitive marketplace, is very compatible with true democracy. Democracy is, in a sense, a capitalist marketplace of wills. The parallels are clearly evident: in a democratic system, if you don't like what a candidate is offering don't give them your vote. In a capitalist system, if you don't like what a seller if offering you don't give them your money. And vice versa for both, of course, if you do like what they're offering.
If all government bodies, corporations, and other organizations were held to both democratic and capitalist (free-market) ideals, you would see a lot more financial responsibility in the various departments of government (when they don't have a get-out-of-debt-free card due to taxes), and a lot more behavioral responsibility in the corporations (when they don't have a get-out-of-jail free card due to broken legal constructs).
I'm a bit confused here, Doc. How exactly is the grandparent bigoted? Taken at his word, he is encouraging the mixing of cultures and races. He says China needs to be more democratic to allow more multiculturalism and thus miscegenation (I had to look that one up - means breeding between different races). That's a statement in SUPPORT of such things.
Now granted, such an opinion is a little weird and uncommon, but I don't see how you can call it bigoted... quite the opposite in fact. Do you think he was being sarcastic?
Seriously, what is it with all the Goggles comments on Slashdot? Seems every day there's a new story that's got something to do with Goggles. Could we at least put them into their own goggles.slashdot.org section?
I mean, I know everybody is fond of Goggles, what with their "Do Nothing" motto and all, but really... this article is nothing more than a Goggles Slashvertisement. Can't you people see that?
The villain in the movie, as best as I can tell from the trailers, is a fifth guy who was on the station and apparently now has electrical powers... and is a mean and nasty villain. I'm not too familiar with the original FF so I've no idea how accurate that is...
Yes, but they still lack some of the features and usefulness of the original editors. Particularly, there is still no OSX-native map editor with proper visual-mode texture alignment. I haven't actually looked at the shape editors much, I should check them out.
There are perfectly valid and useful apps for OS9 that simply are no longer updated or maintained (and often can't be because they are closed-source the the company who made them no longer cares), yet these programs are still needed by people working with more modern, up-to-date software just because no replacement has yet been coded.
My case in point: Aleph One is an open-source FPS engine based on Bungie's classic Marathon series. While the original Marathon series was pretty much Mac (Classic) only, the latest version of the engine runs on OSX, Windows, Linux... there's even some outdated versions for Be. The whole thing now runs in OpenGL, all platforms are being standardized on the SDL media layer, and so on. The engine itself, while still by no means a "modern" 3D engine (that's not the point), is very up-to-date and in keeping with current technologies and formats. There are still mod projects being made for this engine.
HOWEVER, all the TOOLS used to make CONTENT for the engine are not open-source (and can't be, the source code has been lost by the original developers). So for all of us working on such mod projects, we NEED to be able to run older Classic applications.
I guess my point is, modern mainstream apps from MS and Adobe, and minor system utilities or helper apps that get obsoleted with every OS or big-app update, are not the only things people use computers for. There are all sorts of niche applications that don't get updated because *they don't need to be*, so forcing them to update or not run when their users upgrade is not right. Hell, games themselves are often in this category. Every now and then I go back into my older games, like Caesar III for a current example, and start playing again because, despite being old, they're still fun.
You're right that writing NEW code for OS9 is stupid. But there's a lot of OLD code that doesn't otherwise NEED to be updated, which plenty of users probably still want to run. Forcing them to stop if they want to upgrade their system (or to keep an old machine around to run it), just isn't right.
I've had my current email address for the past 13 or 14 years.
(In fact the ISP it's hosted with currently hosts ONLY that email address and a tiny hunk of web space for me; I get my actual connection and everything from Cox).
My address has been plastered all over the Internet from since before there was a spam problem. Even if I were to take it off of all the sites I've made, or ask it to be taken down from all the other sites, there's still hundreds of UseNet posts from before there was need to spam-proof my address, all cached on the various web-based UseNet caches.
At one point a few years back I was getting many hundred spam messages a day. Now, I get about two. And I've not had any problems with false positives that I'm aware of, at least not for quite a while.
I don't run my own mail server and I don't know how West.net (my mail provider) runs theirs, but I do know they run a nice spam filtering service called Postini, which catches a large majority of the spam. When it gets to my end, I've got extensive whitelists for all the discussion lists I'm on, as well as everyone in my address book (everyone I've sent mail to, basically). A lot of spam I'd get has my own address forged onto it, so any mail from me that doesn't contain my passphrase in the subject is blacklisted. I've also got a blacklist for serious repeat spammers (same exact spam every day). Past that, Mail's Bayesian filtering quarantines most of the remaining messages, and all the ends up in my In box are legit messages from people I don't know, and maybe one or two spam messages.
I think the common thread between the article's successful spam filtering and my successful spam filtering is using multiple layers of whitelists, blacklists, and greylists. Keep the people you know on whitelists so you never need to worry about them not getting through; people doing evil things get blacklisted, preferably temporarily as he's done it; and everyone else takes the risk of being filtered (either because their mail server is dysfunctional, as some of his filters would risk, or because the message "looks like spam" as a Bayesian filter would risk). Implement this type of scheme on both the mail server (his way) and the client program (my way) for extra protection.
I think that's about as successful as anyone can hope for a spam filter.
Slashdot Mirror
True, and I suppose I could use that if I was just writing a standard-format paper for school or some such; but as far as I can tell, TextEdit still lacks margin control, which is one of the features an earlier poster required for a "full-featured text editor" (which was not a page layout program). Still, good point about TextEdit. It's pretty damn full features for a text editor.
I'm not a programmer by any means, but I've always wondered since the NeXT acquisition happened, with the Services feature in OS X, would it really be that difficult to implement something like OpenDoc? You'd need a central app to run the document windows for the whole thing and present you with your palettess of parts and containers and tools, and then smaller invisible apps that do nothing but offer up services, that the central app uses to display and edit parts and containers.
That's why to this day I still use AppleWorks' word processor, as obscure as it is these days, whenever I'm working on papers and such by myself, and not exchanging data with anyone. That's basically all it does - rich text, formatted into pages, with margins and all of that stuff. (As opposed to amorphous rich text like in TextEdit/NotePad/etc). It's technically able to embed other types of data inline with the text (or floating over it on a draw layer), but if you're just doing text, it just does text.
Word, on the other hand, is always nagging me and trying to do shit for me to "spruce up" my document, "Hey it looks like you're making a list, let me format that for you." It suffers the quintessential Microsoft flaw of the program getting in your way, trying to do things for you whether you like it or not, instead of getting OUT of your way and facilitating you to do exactly what you want. And then people go and try to use it for fancy newsletters and flyers and want me to collaborate with them and I just can't stand to work in the broken word processor paradigm when what we're really trying to do is page layout.
What if only 75% thought it was a stupid law?
Or what if only 25% thought it was a stupid law and 50% didn't care because they don't pick their nose anyway?
It's not necessarily a quantitative matter of strict percentages. It's just a qualitative matter of "if I do this, and someone tries to stop it, will there be any significant power on my side of the issue?" There's a quote I don't quite remember about laws which criminalize everybody being unenforcable - the police become the extreme minority and all the other "criminals" can simply overwhelm them.
This of course relies on the premise that the average person is going to stand up for his or her self if they think they've got any real chance of winning, which is really the point I'm making - if I think I'll get in serious trouble for doing something, either I'll stop doing it or make sure I don't get caught (keep it secret). If I think I'll "get in trouble" but that I've got enough people/power on my side to win out of that trouble, then "screw you if you want to know if I pick my nose or not. I do. What are you going to do about it?"
The fact that at least a large minority, if not a majority, of the population think smoking pot is no big thing, has not done much to curb the ridiculous laws and sentencing guidelines like 3-strikes, etc.
That's an example of the power balance above. People should be able to get away with doing things like that - the government shouldn't have the power to stop them. That power is given to them by the legitimacy that we the people as a whole grant them and the laws that they enforce. Enough people support those laws and the power of the government to enforce them that most pot smokers/growers/dealers don't have much of a chance of winning if it comes to a conflict, and yet they don't believe they should have to stop, and so they keep it secret. That's a good interim solution, but the real solution is to remove such power from the government.
Your dream of an open, secretless utopia is just that - a utopia. There will always be political power structures of one nature or another and privacy is one of the strongest defenses against the abuse those power structures inevitably enable.
True, it is a dream, and I doubt I will see it come to pass in my lifetime, probably not even my childrens' lifetimes. But I think that it is possible to arrive at a simple and consistent set of canons (in the sense of "canonical law", i.e. axomatic law, not in the religious sense) that everyone would freely consent to in principle, things like the right to freedom of expression (or non-expression), and the right to consent (or not) to decisions about yourself as you will - and of course the corresponding responsibilities to respect those rights in others. Those two are just my basic 'canons' that I base all my "moral" or "ethical" judgements on, and while I think they're pretty damn universal, I'm open to the possibility that they could be refined further.
Once you've got a simple, consistent, canonical law laid down, it's just a matter of making sure it's enforced properly, and keeping those enforcing it from gaining too much arbitrary power. Making sure the general populace is in charge of the enforcement of truly universal laws is a sure way to guarantee "majority rule, minority rights".
The whole concept of fixed, canonical law is where constitutional government comes from. No longer are the rulers arbitrarily making up whatever rules they feel like at the time, but they've got a fixed set of guidelines that they are charged with enforcing. (At least, that's how it's SUPPOSED to work). And making sure that the rulers themselves are approved by the general public is the whole concept of democracy.
We haven't always had these things: rulers used to descend genetically or seize power by force and often claimed a divine right to rule, and then went about making arbitrary decrees and edicts as they pleased. We've come a long way since then. I think we've still got room to improve from here, too. That's all I'm pushing for.
If I had to choose either Notepad or Quark any time I wanted to create a text document, I'd be an unhappy camper.
That's why I'm saying Pages is so brilliant. It's not Quark, but it's the same class of program, scaled down to the Word level of functionality.
The way I see it, the text editor paradigm works up to the feature level of text-only documents with varied font faces and sizes, alignments and justifications, line spacings, even margins and pages sizes.... so long as it's all just text.
Once you want to start adding tables and graphics and working with master pages and the like, it's time to change paradigms and act like you're doing what you real are doing: basic page layout. You're not just editing text anymore, and trying to make a fancy text editor do things other than edit text is a bad idea.
They've already got "Pages". Seems like Apple is taking the MS generic-product-name game and running with it.
Yes, exactly! And Pages made me realize why I have always disliked things like Word and other "word processors"...
They're really a bastard category of products. They're text editors pretending to be page layout programs... or page layout programs pretending to be text editors. The whole concept has always seemed somehow *wrong* to me. Kludgy and awkward.
Pages fixes that. It fills in the same category as things like Word, but goes about things in a sane way. Apple has a text editor already - TextEdit. It's pervasive across the OS X system, and technically I'm using it right now in this Safari text box. Pages is a page layout program that calls on TextEdit (I presume) to do its text functions, QuickTime to handle its graphics functions, and so on. The components are handled by system functions that handle those components well; Pages just puts them all together in a pretty, integrated package.
It's a lot like XHTML+CSS versus the old content-and-layout-in-one kludge that was earlier HTML standards, actually.
Unless or until Apple has an Office killer. The second MS gets wind of an Apple plan to compete with them directly using the same vendors Microsoft Office for Mac is as dead as a doornail.
Pages? (Opens Word docs AND works in a much more elegant fashion).
Keynote? (Opens PowerPoint docs and... ditto).
Throw in an Excel-alike and you've got your Office competition right there.
That is a similar matter, and your post makes me realize I should clarify my position.
It's a similar matter because the reason such victims might want to keep secrets is because they fear they will be judged against by the public, as you said. In my earlier post, I made the point that the only reason I might want to keep secrets from the government is because the general public tends to side with the government (they are, after all, it's power base). If there was some law against, say, picking your nose, but 99% of the population thought that was a stupid law and openly flaunted it, I wouldn't feel the need to keep the fact that I pick my nose secret from the govt, even though it's illegal, because if they tried to do anything about it, everybody would side with me.
Same think with your rape/etc victims example: if people would support them instead of judging them harshly, they would have no need to keep secrets. The problem is not that they can't keep a secret, the problem is that for some reason they need to. (A social reason in this case, instead of legal, though they're not much of a difference when it comes down to it).
That said, we come to my point of clarification. I don't think it should be at all illegal to keep things secret. Nobody should be compelled or coerced into revealing anything. But nobody should need to be afraid to reveal anything either. While we may never be able to fix human nature and society to alleviate the desire for secrecy about rape and abuse, we should be able to fix the law so that nobody needs to worry about keeping secrets from the government.
What aggravates me more than the mere existence and enforcement of such a law is that when I was talking about it with my coworkers they pretty much all said "Good -- I have nothing to fear/hide..."
There is some truth in that statement.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a very private person, and I hate to be tracked by authority figures of any kind. But more than that, deeper than that - I hate *having* to hate being tracked.
I'm a very open and honest person. I normally cannot stand to keep secrets; it feels dishonest and wrong to me. So what bothers me about authoritative violations of privacy is not that they are finding out something about me, but that there is any reason for me to not want them to know something about me.
I don't read 2600 Magazine (honestly, I probably wouldn't grok most of it), but people keep using it as an example here so I will too. Say I read 2600. I don't mind that everybody else in the book store can see that I'm buying it. I've got no reason to hide that from them. If one of them got all uppity about "you're one of those evil hacker-types! You must die!!!" and tried to do something to me for buying a magazine (and the subsequent inferences therefrom), everybody would side with *me* because it's according to our social contract - the real and living one as everybody understands it, even if not as written on paper - one citizen cannot stop another citizen from buying whatever damn magazine they please, and if someone tries to, *they* are in the wrong. I will have the support of the general populace, which is the real power base in any civilization.
But if "the government" (whichever) decides to track my magazine purchases, and for some reason doesn't trust people who buy 2600, and then comes down on me as a "terrorist hacker" because of it, the public will go "Oh - the government says he's evil, it's their job to protect us from evil people, so they must be right." And now I have little to no real recourse.
The point I guess I'm trying to make here is that being concerned with our privacy isn't getting to the root of the problem. Having privacy is a stopgap measure to keep the government from wielding against you powers that it shouldn't have in the first place. But to get to the real problem, we shouldn't be focusing on the privacy, although that is a good interim measure - we need to focus on WHY do we need this privacy in the first place? If the system worked properly, if we had a true, concrete and axiomatic system of law, such that people could be assured that they know very clearly and simply what is and is not allowed (of both them and the government), and that such a balance was reasonable to both parties... nobody would need to keep secrets, and probably nobody would *want* to keep secrets unless they were in violation of the law.
That's where that attitude of "I have nothing to hide" comes from. These are people who trust that the system is flawless and thus only criminals have things to hide - which is how it SHOULD be, but not how it IS. The person saying that, in your example, could be entirely unaware that he is, in the eyes of the law, a criminal by some technicality, and that if caught they would do horrible nasty things to him and all the other people like him would nod and say "The government says he's a criminal, it must be true."
The attitude is correct, that only criminals need to keep secrets from the law. The problem is not that we can't keep secrets - the problem is that we NEED to, because too many things that should not be called crimes, are, and that the general populace is complacent in that.
A friend of mine expressed a similar notion about gun control. He, like me, really isn't all that much into guns. Would rather never have to have one. But that the government doesn't *want* him to have guns is scary - "why shouldn't they want me to have guns? do they want to do something bad to me that they can't do if I keep my guns?" - and in that case, he just might consider keeping some, even though he'd rather not have to.
Replace "guns" with "secrets" and see how that paragraph parses.
All I can say to that person, who imo is a very sad individual that hasn't read the constitution, is read the first 10 amendments to the constitution if you want to know what rights you have.
This is something that keeps coming up, and I have to keep emphasizing the wrongness of it because it is the root of all of the problems with our government today.
"You", a citizen, have the right to do anything not expressly prohibited to you. "They", the government, have no rights, only certain powers expressly granted to them.
The Bill of Rights is a list of SPECIALLY PROTECTED rights, which the government expressly may not create laws infringing upon, if they somehow (*cough*Article 8, Section 18*cough*) find a way to go about expanding their own powers at will. But the Bill of Rights is NOT a list of your total rights, and many of the founding fathers were opposed to its inclusion (hence why it was added afterward), because they feared that people would think that, since some rights were enumerated, that was an encompassing list of all rights. The compromise was the 10th Amendment, which is the clearest bit of language in the constitution that hammers home my point:
"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
In other words, if the federal constitution doesn't say No, and your state constitution doesn't say No, then you can do it. It's your right unless otherwise stated.
The (Federal) government, on the other hand, is supposed to have a very select set of powers, explicitly enumerated in Article 8 of the Constitution. The catch there is, the last clause of Article 8 grants Congress the power...
"To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof."
So basically, every law Congress has passed, aside from Constitutional amendments, is supposed to trace back in some way shape or form to the enforcement of one of these powers explicitly granted to Congress, or to help the other branches to exercise their (also explicitly enumerated and limited) powers.
And the lawmakers have really stretched things. The one you see abused most often is the "interstate commerce" clause. Drug control laws, for example, derive entirely from that - nevermind that the same laws are applied if someone produces a drug like pot entirely in their back yard and uses it it all by themselves, never involving other states or even other people in the process. The lawbooks are full of stretches like that - some law links back to the supposed enforcement of an apparently unrelated power of Congress, and then applies equally well in situations unrelated to the exercise of that specific power, effectively growing the powers of the Federal government.
And since such Article 8 abuses supersede the 10th Amendment protections of your universal human rights (because such abuses 'legitimately' grant Congress further powers, as far as the 10th Amendment is concerned), it seems they can get away with it.
The system is broken.
(Not to mention, even if it weren't broken in just this way... the Constitution still allows individual states to wield whatever powers they please except these, and a few others added in later amendments. Even if the feds weren't able to be draconian... chances are the states still would).
It's not going to get windows users to come over, because those users are unlikely to buy all new computers and software just for OS X.
This just made me think of something interesting.
One of the big costs of "switching" is having to buy all new hardware, software, etc for the new platform. Standardizing on USB/FireWire/etc has has alleviated the hardware problem for the most part, but the software has still posed a big problem.
Now, if Microsoft goes and gets Windows running on Intel Macs, as they seem very likely to do (hey, they sell more software), then Wintel users can go ahead and buy Apple next time they upgrade, getting a machine that will run Windows and all its software AND Mac OS X and the new software they want to try out. This will be nothing but a boon for Apple's hardware sales.
However, I worry, as other posters have mentioned, that if "Mac" users can just run Windows versions of major software packages, that that will be less reason for software developers to produce Mac versions of their products. That, in the long run, will undermine the strength of OS X as a platform, which in turn negates the big drawing point of Apple hardware in the first place. Which makes Apple an overpriced commodity hardware vendor with pretty cases == dead Apple, unless they can turn into a *really* good hardware vendor. And there's always the chance that if OS X *didn't* whither, and began to chip away at the MS monopoly, MS could then fix Windows to not run on MacIntel, reducing the value of an Apple box to the average consumer.
Though now that I think about it, Apple does sell other software besides just OS X itself, and the iApps and their professional big brothers (Final Cut Studio et al) are a major draw to OS X. It could be possible for Apple to to keep OSX around as a meta-platform, existing only in userspace as an API set and a pretty interface running on top of any kernel (Windows, Linux, Darwin/BSD), designed to support Apple's "killer apps", which would be the real draw for most users who don't particularly care about APIs or nice standard interfaces. Then again, NeXT did almost exactly that with OpenStep, and look how well that turned out.
So it seems to me, Apple's got three choices. Either it keeps Windows off the Mac, in which case the status quo is almost unchanged (except now we've got TCPM on the Mac and other such arbitrary [non-technical] barriers to the unhindered use of *my* computer, which I object to philosophically). Or, if Windows does run on the Mac, and it reduces the value of the OS X platform, Apple faces the choice of either becoming a commodity software with a nifty API and interface, or a commodity hardware vendor with pretty cases. Neither of which seem like the Apple we know, and both of which ruin their existing business model which, despite low platform marketshare, is doing them damn well financially.
I predict that Apple will probably allow Windows on MacIntel until such point that it begins to hurt the OS X platform (and probably try to find some way to prevent that), and if at some point that does become the case, will then bar Windows from their hardware with TCPM and return things to the status quo... except now we've got Trusted Computing DRM crap on our Macs. Which is really all that bugs me about this move in the first place.
Ugh, I need to learn to use preview. ...laws regarding religions establishment...
I meant to say, "laws regarding religious establishments", as in, churches and such. Normally I wouldn't bother to make a correction like this, but it befuddles my meaning to have it written as such.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; ...
Where in there does it say that the government can't talk about religion? It doesn't even seem to prohibit the states from establishing state religions. Maybe it should, but that's not what it says.
I just want to note that in the above quote from the constitution, "establishment" is used as a verb, not a noun; i.e. it isn't saying Congress can't make laws regarding religions establishment (churches are bound to laws like everybody else), but that Congress can't make laws establishing a religion (or prohibiting people from exercising their own religions).
In other words, the government must be religion-neutral, neither endorsing nor prohibiting any religion. (Well, technically, by that language, only Federal legislation is thus restricted, but this whole "Congress shall" business is often interpreted nowadays as "government" as a some conglomerate whole).
What, you can't hear people's punctuation when they speak? I say things in parentheses all the time... hear them pretty often too... then again, I also think that mint tastes very green...
Are you suggesting that Microsoft should note hire an otherwise qualified woman if she came from a culture where that was done to her?
I'm in no way endorsing circumcision (of any sort), but to discriminate against someone who came from a culture where that was done to them in order for them to be considered "decent", and then consider that person "indecent", is... well, needlessly discriminatory.
The same exact standard applies to piercings (which I'm not too fond of myself, but hey, if people want to do things to themselves...). If someone came from a culture where, in order to be a "decent" adult, they had to have had a bone run through their nose and huge discs in their ears, and then they came to America and wanted to work for MS as a programmer, would you say they should not be hired because they look like that? Now, what if an American decided that he LIKED that look and did it to himself? How is that any different?
How many times have you seen a corporation that was actually democratic? To create such a beast requires a conscious effort to bend the rules. Generally, a corporation is a paragon of dictatorships. The people at the top give the orders, and the people below them follow those orders -- or else. Where's the inherent democracy and freedom in that?
Precisely. This is why I advocate that corporations, government bodies and all other types of organization should treated as the same class of entity, and held to the exact same standards. Governments and corporations as they exist today are both held to too lenient standards, but in different ways: government bodies are absolved of financial responsibility because they can take their funding at gunpoint if it comes down to it, and corporations are absolved of behavior responsibility because they are inherantly dictatoral/hierarchical in command, yet no individuals are held directly accountable for the actions of the corporation.
Capitalism does not embrace democracy. It simply tolerates it in the context of western societies.
I have to disagree with you here, but only semantically. CORPORATISM (a.k.a. fascism) does not embrace democracy, at least not the form of corporatism practiced in most capitalist economies today. The financially irresponsible government protects (though legal acknowledgement and force of law) the existance and of behaviorally irresponsible corporations, who in turn provide further financial support to the government.
But capitalism, in the sense of a free and competitive marketplace, is very compatible with true democracy. Democracy is, in a sense, a capitalist marketplace of wills. The parallels are clearly evident: in a democratic system, if you don't like what a candidate is offering don't give them your vote. In a capitalist system, if you don't like what a seller if offering you don't give them your money. And vice versa for both, of course, if you do like what they're offering.
If all government bodies, corporations, and other organizations were held to both democratic and capitalist (free-market) ideals, you would see a lot more financial responsibility in the various departments of government (when they don't have a get-out-of-debt-free card due to taxes), and a lot more behavioral responsibility in the corporations (when they don't have a get-out-of-jail free card due to broken legal constructs).
I'm a bit confused here, Doc. How exactly is the grandparent bigoted? Taken at his word, he is encouraging the mixing of cultures and races. He says China needs to be more democratic to allow more multiculturalism and thus miscegenation (I had to look that one up - means breeding between different races). That's a statement in SUPPORT of such things.
Now granted, such an opinion is a little weird and uncommon, but I don't see how you can call it bigoted... quite the opposite in fact. Do you think he was being sarcastic?
Seriously, what is it with all the Goggles comments on Slashdot? Seems every day there's a new story that's got something to do with Goggles. Could we at least put them into their own goggles.slashdot.org section?
I mean, I know everybody is fond of Goggles, what with their "Do Nothing" motto and all, but really... this article is nothing more than a Goggles Slashvertisement. Can't you people see that?
The villain in the movie, as best as I can tell from the trailers, is a fifth guy who was on the station and apparently now has electrical powers... and is a mean and nasty villain. I'm not too familiar with the original FF so I've no idea how accurate that is...
Yes, but they still lack some of the features and usefulness of the original editors. Particularly, there is still no OSX-native map editor with proper visual-mode texture alignment. I haven't actually looked at the shape editors much, I should check them out.
There are perfectly valid and useful apps for OS9 that simply are no longer updated or maintained (and often can't be because they are closed-source the the company who made them no longer cares), yet these programs are still needed by people working with more modern, up-to-date software just because no replacement has yet been coded.
My case in point: Aleph One is an open-source FPS engine based on Bungie's classic Marathon series. While the original Marathon series was pretty much Mac (Classic) only, the latest version of the engine runs on OSX, Windows, Linux... there's even some outdated versions for Be. The whole thing now runs in OpenGL, all platforms are being standardized on the SDL media layer, and so on. The engine itself, while still by no means a "modern" 3D engine (that's not the point), is very up-to-date and in keeping with current technologies and formats. There are still mod projects being made for this engine.
HOWEVER, all the TOOLS used to make CONTENT for the engine are not open-source (and can't be, the source code has been lost by the original developers). So for all of us working on such mod projects, we NEED to be able to run older Classic applications.
I guess my point is, modern mainstream apps from MS and Adobe, and minor system utilities or helper apps that get obsoleted with every OS or big-app update, are not the only things people use computers for. There are all sorts of niche applications that don't get updated because *they don't need to be*, so forcing them to update or not run when their users upgrade is not right. Hell, games themselves are often in this category. Every now and then I go back into my older games, like Caesar III for a current example, and start playing again because, despite being old, they're still fun.
You're right that writing NEW code for OS9 is stupid. But there's a lot of OLD code that doesn't otherwise NEED to be updated, which plenty of users probably still want to run. Forcing them to stop if they want to upgrade their system (or to keep an old machine around to run it), just isn't right.
How the hell does goatse get modded Insightful?
(Yes, I clicked it. Yes, it's goatse. No, I don't care. I've seen worse).
I've had my current email address for the past 13 or 14 years.
(In fact the ISP it's hosted with currently hosts ONLY that email address and a tiny hunk of web space for me; I get my actual connection and everything from Cox).
My address has been plastered all over the Internet from since before there was a spam problem. Even if I were to take it off of all the sites I've made, or ask it to be taken down from all the other sites, there's still hundreds of UseNet posts from before there was need to spam-proof my address, all cached on the various web-based UseNet caches.
At one point a few years back I was getting many hundred spam messages a day. Now, I get about two. And I've not had any problems with false positives that I'm aware of, at least not for quite a while.
I don't run my own mail server and I don't know how West.net (my mail provider) runs theirs, but I do know they run a nice spam filtering service called Postini, which catches a large majority of the spam. When it gets to my end, I've got extensive whitelists for all the discussion lists I'm on, as well as everyone in my address book (everyone I've sent mail to, basically). A lot of spam I'd get has my own address forged onto it, so any mail from me that doesn't contain my passphrase in the subject is blacklisted. I've also got a blacklist for serious repeat spammers (same exact spam every day). Past that, Mail's Bayesian filtering quarantines most of the remaining messages, and all the ends up in my In box are legit messages from people I don't know, and maybe one or two spam messages.
I think the common thread between the article's successful spam filtering and my successful spam filtering is using multiple layers of whitelists, blacklists, and greylists. Keep the people you know on whitelists so you never need to worry about them not getting through; people doing evil things get blacklisted, preferably temporarily as he's done it; and everyone else takes the risk of being filtered (either because their mail server is dysfunctional, as some of his filters would risk, or because the message "looks like spam" as a Bayesian filter would risk). Implement this type of scheme on both the mail server (his way) and the client program (my way) for extra protection.
I think that's about as successful as anyone can hope for a spam filter.
Must... resist... Your Mom... jokes...