Free antivirus software from Microsoft would put several billion dollar companies out of business - there's significant overhead costs in running an antivirus company, and with no revenue model, there's no way to stay afloat. The result - Microsoft Antivirus with no competitors. That's bad for the market as a whole.
Why does everyone always think in such binary terms - Blogging is never going to replace traditional media and journalism, but that doesn't mean one has to disappear. Personally, I think blogs are a fantastic supplement to journalism, so long as people remember which is which.
I don't think blogging is going to fade in the slightest - today's bloggers aren't paid to do what they do, and very few are trying to change the world. They exist because opinionated people and depressed 16 year old girls like talking.
I think they could use some price changes, but they need to be careful - Dropping the price of G5 workstations will just prompt a change in price in x64 workstations and an increase in XP marketing.
Where I think Apple needs to drop prices is in its Powerbook line (I'm not just saying that because I want one) - maybe between 5 and 10%. One of the more subtle things the iPod has done is to give Apple the perception of being the master of the mobile lifestyle and that's a place they can beat out Dell and HP.
If I were in a position of power at Apple, I would merge the iBook and the Powerbook lines - keep the iBook as-is for the most part, but give it the brushed metal exterior that is universally loved and offer a 64mb graphics card version. Apple's lower cost laptops should be able to ride on the Powerbook's name and stop being thought of as some ignored bastard child.
Break into the PVR market, not by releasing your own PVR which is probably a loss game, but rather by finding a partner like Tivo and forcing them to treat Apple's as first class citizens.
Run a marketing campaign "A powerbook in every bag". Consumers like laptops better than desktops, and most studies show that the Powerbook is the best perceived value in the laptop market.
Steal Microsoft's tablet pc idea - Tablet PC is honestly a fantastic system and MS should be given credit for its implementation. Steal the idea. BillG can't force it down people's throats, but Steve Jobs can sell a tablet powerbook and by reviving the old Newton trademark, probably convince people that Apple was the real innovator in this space.
Find a way to integrate with either the Nintendo Revolution or the PS3 - The Xbox2 will beat both of them to market, but both of them will probably beat Longhorn to market. If you can get onboard with streaming music from iTunes on your pc to your console you can in a single move reverse years of (accurate) perceptions about Apple's relationships with gaming. I know you don't like playing games personally, Steve, but games grossed more than box office did last year - stop ignoring them.
Lastly, stop suing people. Seriously. There's no need to be a fraction as paranoid as you guys are. You're like North Korea with better haircuts.
Your argument is based on the theory that the cost of Windows stays the same.
Repeat after me - APPLE CAN NEVER WIN THE MARKET SHARE WAR. Its impossible. Microsoft can literally operate for 10 years without bringing in a single dollar of revenue at current operating costs based on their cash in reserve - granted, they never would because the shareholders want their money, but the point is if Apple ever started beating desktop Window sales in price, the cost of Windows will drop substantially. XP paid for itself years ago, and right now every sale is a somewhat marginal cost of support and overhead and almost pure profit. If Apple drops to a zero profit sale point, Microsoft can technically pay users to use Windows - if MS subsidized the cost of PC sales by 100 dollars and threw in Windows for free (exactly what they did to break into the Smartphone market) they could run Apple under the table and then raise prices in several years after Apple's reserves are depleted. I'm not sure of Microsoft's exact financials, but I suspect even if they did subsidize the cost of PCs, they could still be profitable overall based on server and office sales. In fact, the surest sign that Microsoft is unafraid of the current positioning of Tiger and OpenOffice is the fact that the price of Windows and Office hasn't dipped yet.
BMW will never steal Hyundai's market by underselling them - BMW beats Hyundai by making BMWs.
Gotos can be used in complex string parsing that involves groups to seperate your logic out by group and provide an implementation that doesn't switch a stack context all the time. For instance, regex engine's are often implemented with gotos.
You can replace "string" with any other form of buffered deterministic input parsing.
I think it depends on when you start calling unions of men and women "marriage" - obviously men and women were procreating before the advent of language and society altogether. My definition of marriage doesn't start at that time.
If you consider marriage as the binding of a woman to a single man, the appearances of that were secular but in theocratic states, and in those cases, the reasoning behind the fact women should be bound to a man was at least rationalized in the faith at the time.
I consider the roots of modern marriage to appear when a sense of rights and position for both the male and female partners entered society. In the west, I believe that the earliest indications of this were in Judaism, which held that each time a man took a wife, the union was blessed under God. Marriage in Greek and Persian societies, which gave exclusive rights to the female partners of most (but not all) relationships, was also rooted in religious rituals around the same time. Moving forward in time, I believe it was also Judaism in the west which first introduced monogamy around 1000AD. Catholicism was spread across a large number of unique cultures, and the rights of marriage appear to not have been solidified in my Church until about 1400AD.
I didn't get much chance to read last night, but from what I did read, it sounds like there were civil agreements of marriage in China pretty early on. I need to do alot more reading on that, though.
On a secular level, the United States has already decided what the difference between accepted religions and cults are - just ask the IRS and the FBI respectively. If two people want to enjoy the benefits of a civil union / marriage / Foo who fall outside that definition, they're certainly welcome to if they meet the requirements set by the government. At that point since marriage would be completely seperated from religion, who cares if the FBI calls their faith a cult - they can be married by its religious laws anyway. They would just need to meet the governments rules for the tax stuff.
If you look at morality like a numbers game, the obscene number of divorces is the graver threat to marriage (for the record, the Church fought the divorce laws back in their day as well, they just lost). Issues of morality and faith aren't about numbers, though - things that are wrong are wrong, whether committed by ten people or ten million.
In the Catholic version of moral law, divorce is forbidden - I for one will never get divorced, and should it be civilly thrown upon me, I won't ever remarry. That's the choice I make when I give my vowes to my future wife (I'm unmarried now, but I am engaged). Although that is the choice Catholics choose to live by (and the choice, I believe, is the right one), there are other major religions that don't have the same restrictions on remarrying. Just as I want the freedom to practice my faith as I believe, I don't want anyone's definition of anything to overwrite everyone else's (particularly since Catholic's aren't the majority).
Marriage is a horrible intersection of the several different religious and one secular worlds - its a ruined idea from the start, because no one is going to agree on what it is and what its responsibilities should be, and most of the parties have centuries (or in the case of Judaism, millenia) old definitions that they believe are right. I believe that a substantial reason why divorce is at such an ungodly rate (pun intended) is because the secular definition of marriage has overwritten the religious definition in many supposively faithful people. Its certainly not the government's job to make it easier for a religion to propogate its teachings, but to poach and rewrite a core doctrine that, although varied, is present in dozens of ancient religions is an attempt to rewrite our beliefs and culture with a secular version. No one would accept if the fed renamed high school graduation "Mitzvah", borrowed most of the ceremony and imagery, but then dropped the important spiritual parts.
That is why I would prefer that we split the idea into two - a religious marriage, and a secular "Foo". Let the Congress of the United States decide what Foo should require and entail, what genders and how many people should be allowed - For me, my Lord and Saviour decided what marriage is. If an individual religion's definition of marriage mostly overlaps with Foo, fine, if it doesn't, who cares. If I'm mormon and want three wives, fine, I can take three wives but only one FemFoo. I don't want to force my beliefs down your throat, and I won't, because although I believe that's the path to salvation that type of evangelism doesn't work and you have freedoms that no one in my faith disagrees with. At the same time, I'd prefer if governments didn't try to overwrite my doctrines and redefine my words.
There will always be people at that point who try to use their own religious rules to change the definition of Foo, but then its much easier for society to say "No, this is our invention, stay out of it and in return we'll stay out of your churches."
As for the birth control question - Honestly, back in college, whatever was available. I lost my faith in my teens and slowly have restored it, but not before committing quite a list of sins. The Catholic Church in America does a very poor job of keeping its members Catholic, and teaching them what it means to truly be Catholic, and its only been in the past couple of years that I restored enough of my faith to learn and slowly (and painfully) change myself. I'm no Saint and certainly not one qualified to try and debate moral law, but I suspect those who are qualified to represent the Church don't spend much time on slashdot.
Civil contracts in societies where the leadership IS the religion is just as much a religious contract as it is civil. Before that (in the west at least, I don't know much about how marriage evolved in the east), marriage was an issue of the exchange of property which I don't think counts as a starting point.
I specifically stated that it was the act, not the people, that was wrong. All people are created in the image of the Lord, and all of us are sinners in his eyes. Intolerance of people is a sin, because you're not accepting something the Lord himself clearly loves.
But are you really tolerant of all actions? What about murder? Child rape? Tolerance of all actions implies that there is no such thing as evil, or good for that matter. There are some acts universally agreed to be evil - and many, many that society does not agree on. I believe that homosexual acts are an affront to God, just like thousands of things I've done that are equally offensive to him. We're all sinners, and we can all be forgiven for our transgressions, but that doesn't mean the things we did to lose our state of grace in the first place still aren't wrong.
So what does my intolerance of their actions mean? Am I going to support laws that mean busting down doors and arresting of people the government suspects are gay? Absolutely not, that's an abomination of freedom, and the freedom to do what we want, even if it is offensive to God, is a gift from God. I won't do anything, save say that the act is wrong and be there to talk to my friends if they ever want to learn the Truth. What would you do if you saw a friend doing things you fundamentally believed was wrong - stay silent and do nothing? How is that moral?
What's the best solution? Get the government out of the marriage business, period. Leave the status of "married" up to the church. Each church has the right to decide whether or not marriages from another church are valid. Governments should only deal with "unions", as far as rights and privileges go; a union should be a legal status, and a marriage a private one.
I can't agree with you more. I believe that marriage is an institution of religion, and that the term marriage should be applied to couples who are wed by an accepted religion (no scientology or cults, please). The government should take whatever benefits they have historically given married couples and make up a new type of union with exactly those benefits, and allow them universally to all couples of either gender.
As a rational member of society, I believe that I do not have the right to dictate to you what is love. I don't have the right to infringe on you whatever I may believe. As a Catholic, though, I believe that homosexual relationships are wrong (when sex is involved). No one can shake my belief on this, because part of faith is the idea that there are some things whose correctness is established by God, and not subject to my review or approval. When my conscience interferes with my faith (as it does here), I believe that my conscience is malformed.
America allows me the right to passionately believe what I do, but it only works when the rights of all of its citizens are defended. When the government calls it marriage, I feel compelled to try and intervene somehow because I believe that the weakening of the instition of marriage is the cause of many of today's problems, and in my eyes this weakens it further by taking the word and dilluting it even further from what it was meant to be. If it was just called something else, I'd support it fully.
I can't describe in words why such a trivial thing like renaming the civil act means so much to me. Perhaps its because true faith in modern society is so dilluted already - sure there's a conservative political movement, but there are few things less Christian than a mass of people who declare a person who declare one form of sinner is less human than another form of sinner, who endlessly warmonger to solve some feeling of vengeance that seems to endlessly beat in their chest, and try to evangelize publically while ignoring the teachings of their own faith in their own homes. Regardless of motive, the worlds of religion and politics were never meant to be such close bedfellows and any time you try to secularize a thing such as marriage which has existed for thousands of years in various incarnations, but all of them religious, you're going to end up in trouble. Encourage people to set up families with tax benefits and everything else, but secularize it AWAY from marriage and stop trying to poach a sacrament that millions consider holy that predates my own religion - that solves a number of conflicts various religions have with the implementation of secular marriage and is the only solution that truly seperates church from state.
They're not going neutral - they are not dropping their extensive domestic partner benefits for employees. They're just not publically supporting a bill that tried to force other companies to have the same types of benefits plans that Microsoft already offers, and has no intention of backing off of.
They're legally obligated to - in today's political climate, if they ignored a potentially very effective anti-Microsoft campaign when they were trying to roll out the Xbox2 in the consumer market over something completely unrelated to their business, the shareholders could sue management and would most likely win. Its an astronomical business risk given Microsoft's current positioning with the Xbox2, iTunes and Tiger, and one that has no potential happy ending for MS shareholders. No one is going to drop their Apple because Microsoft stuck to its guns on this issue - its lose / lose.
That said, Microsoft's internal policies are amoung the most open I've ever seen - that's not changing. They're not changing tunes, they're just backing off a potentially very ugly PR campaign at a very bad time.
Point to an instance of Microsoft discriminating against gays - point to a change in their internal policies that says they're going to. Microsoft is one of the few companies I know that offers domestic partner benefits - are they changing that? NO!
The pastor informed Microsoft that he would organize a boycott of Microsoft's products in a country where there is such a rabid hatred of gays that such a boycott would actually work. Agree with it or not, public companies do not have the right to risk damage to their shareholders over value choices of their leadership. Wall Street would accept Microsoft fighting back in regards to its own internal moral choices, but corporate leadership has no right to risk fiscal damage sticking the companies neck out on an issue completely unrelated themselves (and it is unrelated because if the bill passed, Microsoft would keep doing business the way it always has been). I happen to think that the obvious opinion of Microsoft's leadership (that we should be treating ALL citizens as equal) is the morally right opinion, but there are very opinionated and very loud people who disagree with that. Would it be acceptable to you if the company you had money invested in lost revenue due to a boycott that happened because the CEO of the company supported school prayer?
Microsoft is having a good year and their corporate solutions would be unaffected by a boycott, but they're obviously in defensive mode in the consumer market. They're trying vainly to fight off iTunes, they have to compete with Tiger and later this year, they need to have a strong release of the Xbox2. The last thing they need is biblebelt churches releasing fliers calling the Xbox2 the "Sinful Gay Box of Sodom and Gemorha" right before the Christmas season.
Re:Why isn't this already out?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I realize that, but there are places where memory is allocated inproc as nonshared - see this from GnomeLive about the total cost of buffers for X.
That said, isn't this similar to how Win32 drawing works? Granted the display driver interface is in the NT kernel, but its my understanding that each process is responsibile for its own windowing operations, abstracted through the Win32 interface. The NT kernel also handles the input, but even if you handled input in its own seperate process and messaged each process individually, messaging the location of your mouse at each instant requires a substantially smaller communication buffer per process than a buffer capable of messaging full bitmaps back and forth.
I'm just trying to get an understanding of how it works.
I wonder if an optional kernel module and builds of existing toolkits to optionally reference that wouldn't be a viable option for desktop users. Its my understand that this is exactly how Windows works, and although it hasn't been the bastions of reliability in the IT world, to be fair to MS, as a desktop Windows is reliable enough for the most part.
Mostly, I have problems grappling with the seemingly obscene memory usage that X takes up when used in a desktop scenario. Its my understanding that each process with a windowing component needs to allocate a substantially sized inproc memory buffer to use to communicate with X - Using Gnome as an example, since each Gnome applet runs as its own process, this memory adds up quick. Why does my clock take up 4 megs of RAM? How much of that is GTK and X related? On Ubuntu, why do I need to permanently allocate several megs of memory so that I can periodically use the Synaptic update notifier applet. If memory serves, I read on GnomeLive that a default Gnome installation runs approximately 20 processes to just sit there, with close to 17 megs allocated just for the message buffer!
I suppose you could solve the problem by moving applet architectures into single processes threaded out similar to NT Services, but that not only seems a threat to general desktop reliability, but also flies against the entire philosophy of *nix programming. I wish I knew a great deal more on the inner workings of this stuff, so I contribute some to help. Maybe in time.
I have no idea what Aero is really supposed to be - I can't imagine what they could possibly be planning that it requires minimum video card specs like that. The cynical side of me says that they're planning on implementing eye-candy on the OSX level and they're just bad at it. The optimist side of me... uh, can't envision what they're planning.
... the realization that any time the windowing system and its processes are running in separate processes, some form of communication will have to result ni order to allow the client to do such nifty things as detect mouse clicks or draw things to the screen.
I don't know much about the guts of X and windowing in general, but what exactly is the benefit of having windowing in an external process? It would seem to me that if applications dynamically loaded each process could handle its own windowing with background threads. I realize that this is a pie-in-the-sky theory since it would be very difficult for different drawing libraries to interoperate, and that library versioning would become very difficult to maintain, but are there other major technical reasons we have an X process? Are interoperability and backwards compatibility the principal reasons for X?
Personally, I don't care about the network transparency of X - I'd prefer the remote capabilities to be built on top of the existing drawing system as remote use seems to me to be more the exception than the rule, and in the remote access scenarios I use, session management and persistence is very important to me.
Jim Allchin commented on that a couple days ago - I'm too lazy to google for the original article referenced off Channel9, but you're welcome to.
All of the recommended system profiles you see floating around are for Longhorn with the Aero interface enabled - if you turn Aero off, the minimum system requirements are supposed to be the same as XP but with a bit more memory for WinFX.
I ran with Copernic for a while, and though it was good, I don't think it was completely accurate in its search results and I couldn't stand the interface. I've had X1 Pro on my box at work for years, and I don't know how I'd live without it.
Companies like X1 (recently bought by Yahoo) have been making desktop search systems for years that are vastly superior to the new arrivals in the desktop search wars. It just wasn't a popular topic until very recently.
IANAL, but its my understanding that the "jailed for refusal to sell your cookies to one individual at a bake sale" doctrine is rooted in the civil rights act, NOT the interstate commerce clause like many other issues in the 60s tended to be, and as a result applied only to consumers, not to companies. This is trying to remember a freshman law class in college ten years ago, so it may be wrong, but I think that something similar to this issue was brought up as an example in the class at one point, and this was the answer.
I get really sick of this kind of thinking. Whether I run as root or not, an exploit in a desktop application can affect anything in my user's space - it can delete all my files (or worse, slightly modify them all so I won't notice for a while). It can read and sniff all my email. It can install and run sniffer applications, so long as they run in my context. Given that most people do 99% of their work in their user context, it has the capacity to affect 99% of their work.
Personally, between having my box turned into a zombie machine spamming the rest of the free world, and having someone intelligently attack my mailbox and web history and potentially discovering one or more of my accounts someplace, I'd take the zombie machine - that's alot easier to fix than someone cracking open my bank account.
That's not to say that running as root is a good idea - its horrible. You can screw around with someone alot more with admin privledges on a box than you can without. All of the attacks capable running as a lesser user are still available (and easier most of the time) running as root plus a couple thousand more, and its much harder for normal users to determine that they have been penetrated when the attack is at an admin level. But an exploit at ANY level is dangerous, and pretending that's not the case is not helpful.
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Free antivirus software from Microsoft would put several billion dollar companies out of business - there's significant overhead costs in running an antivirus company, and with no revenue model, there's no way to stay afloat. The result - Microsoft Antivirus with no competitors. That's bad for the market as a whole.
I don't think blogging is going to fade in the slightest - today's bloggers aren't paid to do what they do, and very few are trying to change the world. They exist because opinionated people and depressed 16 year old girls like talking.
Where I think Apple needs to drop prices is in its Powerbook line (I'm not just saying that because I want one) - maybe between 5 and 10%. One of the more subtle things the iPod has done is to give Apple the perception of being the master of the mobile lifestyle and that's a place they can beat out Dell and HP.
If I were in a position of power at Apple, I would merge the iBook and the Powerbook lines - keep the iBook as-is for the most part, but give it the brushed metal exterior that is universally loved and offer a 64mb graphics card version. Apple's lower cost laptops should be able to ride on the Powerbook's name and stop being thought of as some ignored bastard child.
Break into the PVR market, not by releasing your own PVR which is probably a loss game, but rather by finding a partner like Tivo and forcing them to treat Apple's as first class citizens.
Run a marketing campaign "A powerbook in every bag". Consumers like laptops better than desktops, and most studies show that the Powerbook is the best perceived value in the laptop market.
Steal Microsoft's tablet pc idea - Tablet PC is honestly a fantastic system and MS should be given credit for its implementation. Steal the idea. BillG can't force it down people's throats, but Steve Jobs can sell a tablet powerbook and by reviving the old Newton trademark, probably convince people that Apple was the real innovator in this space.
Find a way to integrate with either the Nintendo Revolution or the PS3 - The Xbox2 will beat both of them to market, but both of them will probably beat Longhorn to market. If you can get onboard with streaming music from iTunes on your pc to your console you can in a single move reverse years of (accurate) perceptions about Apple's relationships with gaming. I know you don't like playing games personally, Steve, but games grossed more than box office did last year - stop ignoring them.
Lastly, stop suing people. Seriously. There's no need to be a fraction as paranoid as you guys are. You're like North Korea with better haircuts.
Repeat after me - APPLE CAN NEVER WIN THE MARKET SHARE WAR. Its impossible. Microsoft can literally operate for 10 years without bringing in a single dollar of revenue at current operating costs based on their cash in reserve - granted, they never would because the shareholders want their money, but the point is if Apple ever started beating desktop Window sales in price, the cost of Windows will drop substantially. XP paid for itself years ago, and right now every sale is a somewhat marginal cost of support and overhead and almost pure profit. If Apple drops to a zero profit sale point, Microsoft can technically pay users to use Windows - if MS subsidized the cost of PC sales by 100 dollars and threw in Windows for free (exactly what they did to break into the Smartphone market) they could run Apple under the table and then raise prices in several years after Apple's reserves are depleted. I'm not sure of Microsoft's exact financials, but I suspect even if they did subsidize the cost of PCs, they could still be profitable overall based on server and office sales. In fact, the surest sign that Microsoft is unafraid of the current positioning of Tiger and OpenOffice is the fact that the price of Windows and Office hasn't dipped yet.
BMW will never steal Hyundai's market by underselling them - BMW beats Hyundai by making BMWs.
Sun wants it called Java 5 instead of 1.5 to compete with .NET 2.0 - pure marketing-speak.
You can replace "string" with any other form of buffered deterministic input parsing.
If you consider marriage as the binding of a woman to a single man, the appearances of that were secular but in theocratic states, and in those cases, the reasoning behind the fact women should be bound to a man was at least rationalized in the faith at the time.
I consider the roots of modern marriage to appear when a sense of rights and position for both the male and female partners entered society. In the west, I believe that the earliest indications of this were in Judaism, which held that each time a man took a wife, the union was blessed under God. Marriage in Greek and Persian societies, which gave exclusive rights to the female partners of most (but not all) relationships, was also rooted in religious rituals around the same time. Moving forward in time, I believe it was also Judaism in the west which first introduced monogamy around 1000AD. Catholicism was spread across a large number of unique cultures, and the rights of marriage appear to not have been solidified in my Church until about 1400AD.
I didn't get much chance to read last night, but from what I did read, it sounds like there were civil agreements of marriage in China pretty early on. I need to do alot more reading on that, though.
On a secular level, the United States has already decided what the difference between accepted religions and cults are - just ask the IRS and the FBI respectively. If two people want to enjoy the benefits of a civil union / marriage / Foo who fall outside that definition, they're certainly welcome to if they meet the requirements set by the government. At that point since marriage would be completely seperated from religion, who cares if the FBI calls their faith a cult - they can be married by its religious laws anyway. They would just need to meet the governments rules for the tax stuff.
If you look at morality like a numbers game, the obscene number of divorces is the graver threat to marriage (for the record, the Church fought the divorce laws back in their day as well, they just lost). Issues of morality and faith aren't about numbers, though - things that are wrong are wrong, whether committed by ten people or ten million.
In the Catholic version of moral law, divorce is forbidden - I for one will never get divorced, and should it be civilly thrown upon me, I won't ever remarry. That's the choice I make when I give my vowes to my future wife (I'm unmarried now, but I am engaged). Although that is the choice Catholics choose to live by (and the choice, I believe, is the right one), there are other major religions that don't have the same restrictions on remarrying. Just as I want the freedom to practice my faith as I believe, I don't want anyone's definition of anything to overwrite everyone else's (particularly since Catholic's aren't the majority).
Marriage is a horrible intersection of the several different religious and one secular worlds - its a ruined idea from the start, because no one is going to agree on what it is and what its responsibilities should be, and most of the parties have centuries (or in the case of Judaism, millenia) old definitions that they believe are right. I believe that a substantial reason why divorce is at such an ungodly rate (pun intended) is because the secular definition of marriage has overwritten the religious definition in many supposively faithful people. Its certainly not the government's job to make it easier for a religion to propogate its teachings, but to poach and rewrite a core doctrine that, although varied, is present in dozens of ancient religions is an attempt to rewrite our beliefs and culture with a secular version. No one would accept if the fed renamed high school graduation "Mitzvah", borrowed most of the ceremony and imagery, but then dropped the important spiritual parts.
That is why I would prefer that we split the idea into two - a religious marriage, and a secular "Foo". Let the Congress of the United States decide what Foo should require and entail, what genders and how many people should be allowed - For me, my Lord and Saviour decided what marriage is. If an individual religion's definition of marriage mostly overlaps with Foo, fine, if it doesn't, who cares. If I'm mormon and want three wives, fine, I can take three wives but only one FemFoo. I don't want to force my beliefs down your throat, and I won't, because although I believe that's the path to salvation that type of evangelism doesn't work and you have freedoms that no one in my faith disagrees with. At the same time, I'd prefer if governments didn't try to overwrite my doctrines and redefine my words.
There will always be people at that point who try to use their own religious rules to change the definition of Foo, but then its much easier for society to say "No, this is our invention, stay out of it and in return we'll stay out of your churches."
As for the birth control question - Honestly, back in college, whatever was available. I lost my faith in my teens and slowly have restored it, but not before committing quite a list of sins. The Catholic Church in America does a very poor job of keeping its members Catholic, and teaching them what it means to truly be Catholic, and its only been in the past couple of years that I restored enough of my faith to learn and slowly (and painfully) change myself. I'm no Saint and certainly not one qualified to try and debate moral law, but I suspect those who are qualified to represent the Church don't spend much time on slashdot.
Civil contracts in societies where the leadership IS the religion is just as much a religious contract as it is civil. Before that (in the west at least, I don't know much about how marriage evolved in the east), marriage was an issue of the exchange of property which I don't think counts as a starting point.
But are you really tolerant of all actions? What about murder? Child rape? Tolerance of all actions implies that there is no such thing as evil, or good for that matter. There are some acts universally agreed to be evil - and many, many that society does not agree on. I believe that homosexual acts are an affront to God, just like thousands of things I've done that are equally offensive to him. We're all sinners, and we can all be forgiven for our transgressions, but that doesn't mean the things we did to lose our state of grace in the first place still aren't wrong.
So what does my intolerance of their actions mean? Am I going to support laws that mean busting down doors and arresting of people the government suspects are gay? Absolutely not, that's an abomination of freedom, and the freedom to do what we want, even if it is offensive to God, is a gift from God. I won't do anything, save say that the act is wrong and be there to talk to my friends if they ever want to learn the Truth. What would you do if you saw a friend doing things you fundamentally believed was wrong - stay silent and do nothing? How is that moral?
I can't agree with you more. I believe that marriage is an institution of religion, and that the term marriage should be applied to couples who are wed by an accepted religion (no scientology or cults, please). The government should take whatever benefits they have historically given married couples and make up a new type of union with exactly those benefits, and allow them universally to all couples of either gender.
As a rational member of society, I believe that I do not have the right to dictate to you what is love. I don't have the right to infringe on you whatever I may believe. As a Catholic, though, I believe that homosexual relationships are wrong (when sex is involved). No one can shake my belief on this, because part of faith is the idea that there are some things whose correctness is established by God, and not subject to my review or approval. When my conscience interferes with my faith (as it does here), I believe that my conscience is malformed.
America allows me the right to passionately believe what I do, but it only works when the rights of all of its citizens are defended. When the government calls it marriage, I feel compelled to try and intervene somehow because I believe that the weakening of the instition of marriage is the cause of many of today's problems, and in my eyes this weakens it further by taking the word and dilluting it even further from what it was meant to be. If it was just called something else, I'd support it fully.
I can't describe in words why such a trivial thing like renaming the civil act means so much to me. Perhaps its because true faith in modern society is so dilluted already - sure there's a conservative political movement, but there are few things less Christian than a mass of people who declare a person who declare one form of sinner is less human than another form of sinner, who endlessly warmonger to solve some feeling of vengeance that seems to endlessly beat in their chest, and try to evangelize publically while ignoring the teachings of their own faith in their own homes. Regardless of motive, the worlds of religion and politics were never meant to be such close bedfellows and any time you try to secularize a thing such as marriage which has existed for thousands of years in various incarnations, but all of them religious, you're going to end up in trouble. Encourage people to set up families with tax benefits and everything else, but secularize it AWAY from marriage and stop trying to poach a sacrament that millions consider holy that predates my own religion - that solves a number of conflicts various religions have with the implementation of secular marriage and is the only solution that truly seperates church from state.
They're not going neutral - they are not dropping their extensive domestic partner benefits for employees. They're just not publically supporting a bill that tried to force other companies to have the same types of benefits plans that Microsoft already offers, and has no intention of backing off of.
That said, Microsoft's internal policies are amoung the most open I've ever seen - that's not changing. They're not changing tunes, they're just backing off a potentially very ugly PR campaign at a very bad time.
The pastor informed Microsoft that he would organize a boycott of Microsoft's products in a country where there is such a rabid hatred of gays that such a boycott would actually work. Agree with it or not, public companies do not have the right to risk damage to their shareholders over value choices of their leadership. Wall Street would accept Microsoft fighting back in regards to its own internal moral choices, but corporate leadership has no right to risk fiscal damage sticking the companies neck out on an issue completely unrelated themselves (and it is unrelated because if the bill passed, Microsoft would keep doing business the way it always has been). I happen to think that the obvious opinion of Microsoft's leadership (that we should be treating ALL citizens as equal) is the morally right opinion, but there are very opinionated and very loud people who disagree with that. Would it be acceptable to you if the company you had money invested in lost revenue due to a boycott that happened because the CEO of the company supported school prayer?
Microsoft is having a good year and their corporate solutions would be unaffected by a boycott, but they're obviously in defensive mode in the consumer market. They're trying vainly to fight off iTunes, they have to compete with Tiger and later this year, they need to have a strong release of the Xbox2. The last thing they need is biblebelt churches releasing fliers calling the Xbox2 the "Sinful Gay Box of Sodom and Gemorha" right before the Christmas season.
I realize that, but there are places where memory is allocated inproc as nonshared - see this from GnomeLive about the total cost of buffers for X.
That said, isn't this similar to how Win32 drawing works? Granted the display driver interface is in the NT kernel, but its my understanding that each process is responsibile for its own windowing operations, abstracted through the Win32 interface. The NT kernel also handles the input, but even if you handled input in its own seperate process and messaged each process individually, messaging the location of your mouse at each instant requires a substantially smaller communication buffer per process than a buffer capable of messaging full bitmaps back and forth.
I'm just trying to get an understanding of how it works.
I wonder if an optional kernel module and builds of existing toolkits to optionally reference that wouldn't be a viable option for desktop users. Its my understand that this is exactly how Windows works, and although it hasn't been the bastions of reliability in the IT world, to be fair to MS, as a desktop Windows is reliable enough for the most part.
Mostly, I have problems grappling with the seemingly obscene memory usage that X takes up when used in a desktop scenario. Its my understanding that each process with a windowing component needs to allocate a substantially sized inproc memory buffer to use to communicate with X - Using Gnome as an example, since each Gnome applet runs as its own process, this memory adds up quick. Why does my clock take up 4 megs of RAM? How much of that is GTK and X related? On Ubuntu, why do I need to permanently allocate several megs of memory so that I can periodically use the Synaptic update notifier applet. If memory serves, I read on GnomeLive that a default Gnome installation runs approximately 20 processes to just sit there, with close to 17 megs allocated just for the message buffer!
I suppose you could solve the problem by moving applet architectures into single processes threaded out similar to NT Services, but that not only seems a threat to general desktop reliability, but also flies against the entire philosophy of *nix programming. I wish I knew a great deal more on the inner workings of this stuff, so I contribute some to help. Maybe in time.
I have no idea what Aero is really supposed to be - I can't imagine what they could possibly be planning that it requires minimum video card specs like that. The cynical side of me says that they're planning on implementing eye-candy on the OSX level and they're just bad at it. The optimist side of me ... uh, can't envision what they're planning.
I don't know much about the guts of X and windowing in general, but what exactly is the benefit of having windowing in an external process? It would seem to me that if applications dynamically loaded each process could handle its own windowing with background threads. I realize that this is a pie-in-the-sky theory since it would be very difficult for different drawing libraries to interoperate, and that library versioning would become very difficult to maintain, but are there other major technical reasons we have an X process? Are interoperability and backwards compatibility the principal reasons for X?
Personally, I don't care about the network transparency of X - I'd prefer the remote capabilities to be built on top of the existing drawing system as remote use seems to me to be more the exception than the rule, and in the remote access scenarios I use, session management and persistence is very important to me.
All of the recommended system profiles you see floating around are for Longhorn with the Aero interface enabled - if you turn Aero off, the minimum system requirements are supposed to be the same as XP but with a bit more memory for WinFX.
I ran with Copernic for a while, and though it was good, I don't think it was completely accurate in its search results and I couldn't stand the interface. I've had X1 Pro on my box at work for years, and I don't know how I'd live without it.
Companies like X1 (recently bought by Yahoo) have been making desktop search systems for years that are vastly superior to the new arrivals in the desktop search wars. It just wasn't a popular topic until very recently.
IANAL, but its my understanding that the "jailed for refusal to sell your cookies to one individual at a bake sale" doctrine is rooted in the civil rights act, NOT the interstate commerce clause like many other issues in the 60s tended to be, and as a result applied only to consumers, not to companies. This is trying to remember a freshman law class in college ten years ago, so it may be wrong, but I think that something similar to this issue was brought up as an example in the class at one point, and this was the answer.
I get really sick of this kind of thinking. Whether I run as root or not, an exploit in a desktop application can affect anything in my user's space - it can delete all my files (or worse, slightly modify them all so I won't notice for a while). It can read and sniff all my email. It can install and run sniffer applications, so long as they run in my context. Given that most people do 99% of their work in their user context, it has the capacity to affect 99% of their work.
Personally, between having my box turned into a zombie machine spamming the rest of the free world, and having someone intelligently attack my mailbox and web history and potentially discovering one or more of my accounts someplace, I'd take the zombie machine - that's alot easier to fix than someone cracking open my bank account.
That's not to say that running as root is a good idea - its horrible. You can screw around with someone alot more with admin privledges on a box than you can without. All of the attacks capable running as a lesser user are still available (and easier most of the time) running as root plus a couple thousand more, and its much harder for normal users to determine that they have been penetrated when the attack is at an admin level. But an exploit at ANY level is dangerous, and pretending that's not the case is not helpful.