What I don't get is why Sun have such a hissy fit over supposed Java incompatibilites introduced through forking of free licensed code. What's to stop them preventing people from calling derivitive versions 'Java'? Sun could implement strict compliance testing, a-la UNIX, to ensure that derivitives are compatible, and can license the 'Java' trademark for use by those compatible versions. Problem solved.
Java has two big things going for it: productivity, due to lessons learned from years of fighting with C++'s syntax, and general platform neutrality. Sun's biggest fear is that the first will be separated from the second.
The big push behind a lot of the toolkits, et al, that have been released in the last couple of years is "make Microsoft irrelevant." That's what Google is doing now, with its push towards web services. It's what Netscape tried to do with its platform. And it's what Sun tried, and to an extent is still trying, with Java.
For ages, Microsoft has owned "the" platform, so if you wanted to develop an application, you pretty much had to play by their rules, and, via the power of positive feedback, if you wanted to use an application, you pretty much has to be on Microsoft's platform. Platform neutral environments change the game, and that is why Google, Sun, etc are so interested in them, and why Microsoft is so afraid of them.
Now, let's say Sun releases Java as an open source package. Microsoft then makes a bunch of extremely useful enhancements to the language, but somehow manages to tie them to the Windows API. They're still technically open source, but useless unless you're running Vista. It calls this enhanced language "Lava" and tosses it at the developers.
Will being tied to Windows prevent people from using this language? Yes, some of them. But some of them will say "hey, I'm still reaching 90% of the world, so who cares?" and happily adopt Lava. That's a true fork in the language, and a realization of Sun's biggest fear: someone, particularly a competitor, benefiting from all of Sun's hard work, but not contributing to the community in any real way, and holding up their own incompatible language as the "real" future of Java. Er, Lava.
Actually having Java classes that represent HTML objects and using them to create dynamic webpages makes so much sense, I'm suprised no one, especially Sun, have tried it earlier.
It's been done a number of times before. Heck, I've written my own frameworks for my own projects. They just sucked. This is Google.
Creating adversarial relationships, especially ones where Microsoft as much as accuses a customer of piracy (are we sure Microsoft hasn't purchased RIAA yet?) cultivates resentment and long term rot.
Unless you're a monopoly. Most businesses ask themselves "how can we get everyone in the world to use our product?" Microsoft is a monopoly, and they have to ask a different question: "everyone in the world uses our product; how can we get them to pay [more] for it [again]?"
Re:It is a way to get another bubble
on
Web 3.0
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Yet at the time it was claimed that the Information Superhighway (remember that one?) was going to totally change the way we lived.
It did totaly change the way we live. It just did it in a subltle manner.
I used to spend hours a month writing and mailing checks. I used to have to drive to the bank to transfer money between my checking and savings accounts. Now I do it all on-line.
I used to have to buy a paper to find out what time a movie was playing. Now I go to the cinema's website. If I want, I can even buy my ticket on-line, and print it out at home. No more standing in line.
If I wanted to order a book, I'd have to go to this thing called a library, and use this thing called a card catelog, and look through a bunch of tiny pieces of paper (think punch cards without the holes). Then I could either fill out the request form, or hope that my local bookstore had it in stock. Now, I can hit Amazon or B&N, and if I don't want to order on-line, I can grab the ISBN and have my local bookseller get me a copy.
When I wanted to talk to people, I had to actually talk to them. Completely synchronos. Now I email them whenever I get the chance, and the get back to me when they have the chance. I can send the same message to a dozen people, and there's no "telephone game" involved.
If I didn't know something about a topic, it was another trip to the bookstore, or hope for a good PBS special. Now it's a quick trip to Google or Wikipedia. Information is just there, waiting for me to be curious.
Our lives have changed. Not in a Back to the Future 2, wow, that skateboard is flying way, but in a thousand subtle, essential ways, so much so that it is honestly hard to imagine life without the net.
Heck, I just used Yahoo Maps to look up a zip code, and Google to find out a bookstore's hours.
Think about it: the government prints money, distributes it via the Federal Reserve, then takes it back via the IRS. On top of that, the government is billions and billions of dollars in debt; every dollar the Government spends decreass the overall value of the US Dollar.
So why not just skip the middle men and print money? The government needs one billion dollars for social security? Print it. Another trillion for the war? Start the presses. It would, in effect, be like a flat tax; everyone's net worth would fall the same percent, the same percent as the overal Dollar value. We aren't based on the Gold Standard anymore, so I don't see how this would really change anything, except simplifying things greatly, and being an honest representation of what's actually happening.
In Rising Sun, the Michael Crichton novel/movie, there is a quote that goes something like: "In America, you worry about who made a mistake. In Japan, they worry about why a mistake was made. Their way is better." I always loved that idea.
There is a lot of culture behind this attitude, though. One is a very high level of personal responsibility and honor. The second is that the corporation is seen almost as a family: "employment for life" is, or at least was, almost taken for granted. Because you could rightfully assume that the person who made a mistake was doing their absolute best for the company, it wasn't so hard to help them learn from their mistakes and become a better employee, and since you weren't worried about getting fired, it was a lot easier to own up to your mistakes. In America, it's all about CYA.
And of course the Rabinical movement didn't emerge untill after the destruction of the temple in 79 AD. Before that Judaism had a priesthood (plus the Pharisees, precursors of the Rabbis). But I'll stop now before your eyes glaze over.
The Rabinnical system was actually developed during the Babylonian exile. Jesus was refered to as "Rabbi" a number of times. Phariseeism did, though, evolve into what is refered to as Rabbinic Judaism after the destruction of the temple.
Nothing will explode a la Hindenburg unless it's painted with rocket fuel a la Hindenburg. Pure hydrogen doesn't explode very well (just like gasoline) because you have to get enough oxygen to it fast enough. Hindenburg had the benefit of being painted with a nice solid rocket oxidizer that releases oxygen when it gets hot.
A gallon of gasoline has roughly the same explosive potential as a stick of dynamite. The primary difference is that the gasoline needs to be spread out, whereas the dynamite if concentrated. this is why they tell you an empty barrel of gasoline is more dangerous than a full one; the empty barrel is full of fumes, with a ready supply of oxygen, and just waiting to go off.
A Modest Proposal For Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public: a satirical phamphlet written by Johnathan Swift in which the author (a persona, not Swift) advocates solving poverty by eating babies of poor people.
I'll leave it to you to figure out the grandparent's analogy (although I'm not sure it's quite what the grandparent really intended).
You're right, this is a poor analogy. Eating babies is bad.
Microsoft has put most its eggs in the.NET platform and has abandoned tens of thousands of VB developers by pulling support and further development on VB6. There is an opportunity for the open source community to create a VB compatible IDE that could compile applications for both to Windows and Linux. Such an IDE in conjunction with WINE could bring not only applications but also developers to the Linux platform.
Look at your "desktop" on you computer (Linux,Windows,Mac... whatever).
Mac.
How many apps running are written in C/C++ ?
Almost none. Objective C is the rule on a Mac.
How many are written in Java ?
Almost all the rest. All my custom tools and apps are Java. My text editor, my checkbook, my Bible software... all Java.
How many are written in PHP ?
Only the stuff I used for my website. I can do some nifty document handling with it, so I use PHP and the built-in webserver to keep track of my articles.
No, I agree. PHP is just a scripting language. Would you use C/C++ on a website? I wouldn't
I have. PHP lacked the database support, CORBA support, socket support, threading support... etc. that we needed.
Now, if I'd have had my way, we would have used Java, and we would have been more productive, but requierments are requierments, and the client was a java-phobe. C'est la vie.
Try to find a cheap, reliable tomcat hosting service. Then throw a dart at a google search for "web hosting." You'll find that outside of enterprise, PHP is the lingua franca.
I can get a linux-based server with PHP and Tomcat for about $10 a month. I use PHP for most stuff; some very simple page generation, things where Server Side Includes don't quite cut it, and the like. When I need to do some heavy lifting, though, I drop a WAR file on the server.
So if you're a poor student or struggling entrepreneur looking to make an experiment or prototype, you will naturally gravitate toward PHP (same argument works for mySQL/postgre v the world). And guess who will populate the next gen of enterprise?
Tomcat and JBoss can both be dowloaded for free, just like PHP. Drop them on your linux box at home, grab some caffine, and go at it.
Again, I use PHP and MySQL for the "quick and dirty." I threw a surprise birthday party for a friend a month or so ago, and had people sign up on my web site. It was a quick 20 minute PHP-MySQL app. It was also throw-away code; no modularization, no resure planned or needed.
On the other hand, I'm currently writing some software that will let an organization manage conferences: multi-week registrations, multiple options to choose from, varying price structures, seating charts, etc, etc. I'm writing this one in Java, and using the Derby embedded database. Why? Well, quite honestly, it's largly because I think in Java, and the "correct" solution comes more naturally to me.
There are other benifits, though. For instance, I am developing "desktop" and "web" versions simultaniously; I could get the database code working correctly, without wondering if the errors I was seeing were from bugs in my code, problems with sever configuration, etc. Now that I'm putting a front-end onto it, I can concentrate only on the HTTP stuff, and, later, on the Swing stuff.
This kind of modularization is possible with PHP, but you need to do a lot more planning to make it happen. With Java, at least in my experience, this kind of design is just more natural.
Well yah know, I like the idea of the rating system telling what the rating is for. Things like does the game have violence, sex, drugs use, and profanity. Wouldn't it be nice if those things are printed right on the box?
Oh yeah they are already doing that, Right next to the one letter ESRB rating. Here let me give you a few examples:
[snip]
This stoplight rating system seems like it would be a step in the wrong direction. It would end up giving you less information.
Similar things are now included on movie ratings. Before, there was just an [R] label on the box; now, they say [R] (for graphic milk consumption).
The problem is that there isn't really a standard for choosing those labels, which is why you'll see posters and trailers that say "Rated [PG-13] for intense motorcycle awesomeness" and the like, and the studios get to choose what the label says. I don't know if the story is the same for video games, but I imagine it is.
Stoplights are probably a bit vague, but standardized descriptors would be very nice, along with an indication of how much a particular element is found in a game. There could be a big "hey, don't let you kids play this / let your kids go nuts, they'll be fine" thing at the top, and something more like a nutrition label under that.
That would actually be kind of fun... "contains 100% of your daily recommended dose of mutilation and whoring.";-)
I've been advocating - well, spouting off on message boards - about this for years. It amazes me how arbitrary ratings can be. This is more of a problem in the movie industry, though. If a director has clout and money, he can get whatever rating he wants slapped on a film.
This would put power into the hands of parents. Instead of saying "we watched this movie / played this game, and we think it's just fine for your kids," they would be saying "we watched this movie / played this game, here's what's in it, you decide if it's right for your family."
And therein lies the problem. If other nations do set up their own root servers, the Internet will be fractured and cease to be the useful network it is today. The whole point of the Internet is that it's run by rough consensus. You can't deny other nations a voice and still expect them to participate on your terms, it's an international resource that only has the value it has because it is singular.
Actually, this fracutring of the internet is the best possible solution, because it erases the single-point-of-failure problem.
The rest of the world is worried about the US being a central point of failure; many aspects of goventment, economy, etc, rely upon the internet. If the internet breaks, so does the government, so does the economy, et al. If the US decides to be evil, they can unilaterally decide that no traffic that is supposed to be going to, say, Afganistan's government TLD gets there.
The US's view is basically "screw you, we're doing quite qwll without your help, thank you very much." Also, we don't like the idea of giving countries like China or Iran control over who gets to see what on the internet.
What I see happening is the US maintianing its DNS servers, and these servers remaining the standard by which all others are judged. If a foreign server does not match up with the US servers, they will be considered "broken," and thier citizens, if capable, will protest against this, because they will suddenly not be able to communicate with the rest of the 'net. This will be bad, but it will be relativly localized: the rest of the net will carry on.
But, if the US does decide to be evil, and blocks traffic to some country that it is angry with, the rest of the net will, independently, but generally as a whole, recognize that it is now the US servers that are broken, and maintain their own listings. Bad for those of us stateside, but irrelevant to the rest of the world.
The only real problem that I see the the fees that will innevitably be imposed by someone, somewhere. I just know that some government or corporation is going to try to charge money to make our sites visible outside the US. It will likely be unsuccessful, but it will still be a pain.
In most other realms, competition is viewed as a good thing. It seems that with Microsoft (or any other large software company) that they want to completely squash the opposition.
To be fair, competition is only seen as a good thing by the people being competed over. Almost any business owner with any sense wants to be the best, and only, at what he or she does.
Not because individuals always make the right choice, but because people generally try to make the best choice, and having a lot of people making decisions, and thus many points of failure, is better than having one person or group making the decisions, and thus a single point of failure.
If you're alluding to government intervention in our personal lives, I disagree with the above argument.
Just the opposite, really. I am essentially only for Government intervention when one's actions directly harm another person. This has to be done, or things would quickly degrade into "might makes right." After that, though, the more power you allow the government, the more likely it is that the single point of failure will, in fact, fail.
It's kind of a social Darwinism. If every family has the chance to conduct its own affairs, some of them will do well, and others will fail, but, at least in theory, the successes will outweigh the failures. If the government is seen as the primary responsible entity, though, you have a much higher chance of a single, catestrophic failure.
Or, more to the point, I don't trust Mommy because she is inherantly right, but I trust a nation of Mommies to be right more often than the Government.
When does "playing pretend" go to far? When Mom says so, not when Uncle Sam says so. It's called individual liberty, and individual responsibility. It's called Enlightement liberalism.
Yes and no. Sometimes, mommy is an idiot, or a flake, and Uncle Sam would be a better judge of what's right for little Johhny. The problem, of course, is that most of the time, Uncle Sam is also an alcoholic with a penchant for violent outbursts.
Sometimes, the line should be drawn well before Mom says so. In this instance, I would argue that any parent that allowed a child to play this game was failing in their duty as a parent.
Of course, that's my opinion. I might be wrong. The government might be wrong. Mom might be wrong. And we all have a fairly equal chance of being wrong.
That's why individual responsibility is so important. Not because individuals always make the right choice, but because people generally try to make the best choice, and having a lot of people making decisions, and thus many points of failure, is better than having one person or group making the decisions, and thus a single point of failure.
If Jane is an idiot, Johhny is screwed, but Sam and Max will be all right. If the Govenrment is given control, though, and drops the ball, everyone suffers.
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What I don't get is why Sun have such a hissy fit over supposed Java incompatibilites introduced through forking of free licensed code. What's to stop them preventing people from calling derivitive versions 'Java'? Sun could implement strict compliance testing, a-la UNIX, to ensure that derivitives are compatible, and can license the 'Java' trademark for use by those compatible versions. Problem solved.
Java has two big things going for it: productivity, due to lessons learned from years of fighting with C++'s syntax, and general platform neutrality. Sun's biggest fear is that the first will be separated from the second.
The big push behind a lot of the toolkits, et al, that have been released in the last couple of years is "make Microsoft irrelevant." That's what Google is doing now, with its push towards web services. It's what Netscape tried to do with its platform. And it's what Sun tried, and to an extent is still trying, with Java.
For ages, Microsoft has owned "the" platform, so if you wanted to develop an application, you pretty much had to play by their rules, and, via the power of positive feedback, if you wanted to use an application, you pretty much has to be on Microsoft's platform. Platform neutral environments change the game, and that is why Google, Sun, etc are so interested in them, and why Microsoft is so afraid of them.
Now, let's say Sun releases Java as an open source package. Microsoft then makes a bunch of extremely useful enhancements to the language, but somehow manages to tie them to the Windows API. They're still technically open source, but useless unless you're running Vista. It calls this enhanced language "Lava" and tosses it at the developers.
Will being tied to Windows prevent people from using this language? Yes, some of them. But some of them will say "hey, I'm still reaching 90% of the world, so who cares?" and happily adopt Lava. That's a true fork in the language, and a realization of Sun's biggest fear: someone, particularly a competitor, benefiting from all of Sun's hard work, but not contributing to the community in any real way, and holding up their own incompatible language as the "real" future of Java. Er, Lava.
Actually having Java classes that represent HTML objects and using them to create dynamic webpages makes so much sense, I'm suprised no one, especially Sun, have tried it earlier.
It's been done a number of times before. Heck, I've written my own frameworks for my own projects. They just sucked. This is Google.
Creating adversarial relationships, especially ones where Microsoft as much as accuses a customer of piracy (are we sure Microsoft hasn't purchased RIAA yet?) cultivates resentment and long term rot.
Unless you're a monopoly. Most businesses ask themselves "how can we get everyone in the world to use our product?" Microsoft is a monopoly, and they have to ask a different question: "everyone in the world uses our product; how can we get them to pay [more] for it [again]?"
Yet at the time it was claimed that the Information Superhighway (remember that one?) was going to totally change the way we lived.
It did totaly change the way we live. It just did it in a subltle manner.
I used to spend hours a month writing and mailing checks. I used to have to drive to the bank to transfer money between my checking and savings accounts. Now I do it all on-line.
I used to have to buy a paper to find out what time a movie was playing. Now I go to the cinema's website. If I want, I can even buy my ticket on-line, and print it out at home. No more standing in line.
If I wanted to order a book, I'd have to go to this thing called a library, and use this thing called a card catelog, and look through a bunch of tiny pieces of paper (think punch cards without the holes). Then I could either fill out the request form, or hope that my local bookstore had it in stock. Now, I can hit Amazon or B&N, and if I don't want to order on-line, I can grab the ISBN and have my local bookseller get me a copy.
When I wanted to talk to people, I had to actually talk to them. Completely synchronos. Now I email them whenever I get the chance, and the get back to me when they have the chance. I can send the same message to a dozen people, and there's no "telephone game" involved.
If I didn't know something about a topic, it was another trip to the bookstore, or hope for a good PBS special. Now it's a quick trip to Google or Wikipedia. Information is just there, waiting for me to be curious.
Our lives have changed. Not in a Back to the Future 2, wow, that skateboard is flying way, but in a thousand subtle, essential ways, so much so that it is honestly hard to imagine life without the net.
Heck, I just used Yahoo Maps to look up a zip code, and Google to find out a bookstore's hours.
Microsoft can't afford to release something that's "better than nothing".
/rimshot
So how do you explain Windows?
Thank you, thank you, I'll be here all week.
I've got a question: why tax at all?
Think about it: the government prints money, distributes it via the Federal Reserve, then takes it back via the IRS. On top of that, the government is billions and billions of dollars in debt; every dollar the Government spends decreass the overall value of the US Dollar.
So why not just skip the middle men and print money? The government needs one billion dollars for social security? Print it. Another trillion for the war? Start the presses. It would, in effect, be like a flat tax; everyone's net worth would fall the same percent, the same percent as the overal Dollar value. We aren't based on the Gold Standard anymore, so I don't see how this would really change anything, except simplifying things greatly, and being an honest representation of what's actually happening.
If we can only trust Wikipedia on topics where key people happen to be interested, what good is it?
So your position is that we can only trust Wikipedia when ignorant people are interested?
If the SSL ceritifcate does not match the IP address of the host you are connecting to, it should raise big red flags in your head.
The fact that you needed to point this out means that, for the vast majority of users, it will not raise a big red flag.
In Rising Sun, the Michael Crichton novel/movie, there is a quote that goes something like: "In America, you worry about who made a mistake. In Japan, they worry about why a mistake was made. Their way is better." I always loved that idea.
There is a lot of culture behind this attitude, though. One is a very high level of personal responsibility and honor. The second is that the corporation is seen almost as a family: "employment for life" is, or at least was, almost taken for granted. Because you could rightfully assume that the person who made a mistake was doing their absolute best for the company, it wasn't so hard to help them learn from their mistakes and become a better employee, and since you weren't worried about getting fired, it was a lot easier to own up to your mistakes. In America, it's all about CYA.
Plus, they have way cooler swords.
And of course the Rabinical movement didn't emerge untill after the destruction of the temple in 79 AD. Before that Judaism had a priesthood (plus the Pharisees, precursors of the Rabbis). But I'll stop now before your eyes glaze over.
The Rabinnical system was actually developed during the Babylonian exile. Jesus was refered to as "Rabbi" a number of times. Phariseeism did, though, evolve into what is refered to as Rabbinic Judaism after the destruction of the temple.
Nothing will explode a la Hindenburg unless it's painted with rocket fuel a la Hindenburg. Pure hydrogen doesn't explode very well (just like gasoline) because you have to get enough oxygen to it fast enough. Hindenburg had the benefit of being painted with a nice solid rocket oxidizer that releases oxygen when it gets hot.
A gallon of gasoline has roughly the same explosive potential as a stick of dynamite. The primary difference is that the gasoline needs to be spread out, whereas the dynamite if concentrated. this is why they tell you an empty barrel of gasoline is more dangerous than a full one; the empty barrel is full of fumes, with a ready supply of oxygen, and just waiting to go off.
A Modest Proposal For Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public: a satirical phamphlet written by Johnathan Swift in which the author (a persona, not Swift) advocates solving poverty by eating babies of poor people.
I'll leave it to you to figure out the grandparent's analogy (although I'm not sure it's quite what the grandparent really intended).
You're right, this is a poor analogy. Eating babies is bad.
Microsoft has put most its eggs in the .NET platform and has abandoned tens of thousands of VB developers by pulling support and further development on VB6. There is an opportunity for the open source community to create a VB compatible IDE that could compile applications for both to Windows and Linux. Such an IDE in conjunction with WINE could bring not only applications but also developers to the Linux platform.
Isn't this guy basically describing Delphi?
I could never get B&W 1 to run under Wine, even with Cadega. It would install, start and then explode in a shower of jerky graphics and fail.
So you're saying that Cedega emmulated the Windows experience perfectly?
Look at your "desktop" on you computer (Linux,Windows,Mac ... whatever).
Mac.
How many apps running are written in C/C++ ?
Almost none. Objective C is the rule on a Mac.
How many are written in Java ?
Almost all the rest. All my custom tools and apps are Java. My text editor, my checkbook, my Bible software... all Java.
How many are written in PHP ?
Only the stuff I used for my website. I can do some nifty document handling with it, so I use PHP and the built-in webserver to keep track of my articles.
No, I agree. PHP is just a scripting language. Would you use C/C++ on a website? I wouldn't
I have. PHP lacked the database support, CORBA support, socket support, threading support... etc. that we needed.
Now, if I'd have had my way, we would have used Java, and we would have been more productive, but requierments are requierments, and the client was a java-phobe. C'est la vie.
Try to find a cheap, reliable tomcat hosting service. Then throw a dart at a google search for "web hosting." You'll find that outside of enterprise, PHP is the lingua franca.
I can get a linux-based server with PHP and Tomcat for about $10 a month. I use PHP for most stuff; some very simple page generation, things where Server Side Includes don't quite cut it, and the like. When I need to do some heavy lifting, though, I drop a WAR file on the server.
So if you're a poor student or struggling entrepreneur looking to make an experiment or prototype, you will naturally gravitate toward PHP (same argument works for mySQL/postgre v the world). And guess who will populate the next gen of enterprise?
Tomcat and JBoss can both be dowloaded for free, just like PHP. Drop them on your linux box at home, grab some caffine, and go at it.
Again, I use PHP and MySQL for the "quick and dirty." I threw a surprise birthday party for a friend a month or so ago, and had people sign up on my web site. It was a quick 20 minute PHP-MySQL app. It was also throw-away code; no modularization, no resure planned or needed.
On the other hand, I'm currently writing some software that will let an organization manage conferences: multi-week registrations, multiple options to choose from, varying price structures, seating charts, etc, etc. I'm writing this one in Java, and using the Derby embedded database. Why? Well, quite honestly, it's largly because I think in Java, and the "correct" solution comes more naturally to me.
There are other benifits, though. For instance, I am developing "desktop" and "web" versions simultaniously; I could get the database code working correctly, without wondering if the errors I was seeing were from bugs in my code, problems with sever configuration, etc. Now that I'm putting a front-end onto it, I can concentrate only on the HTTP stuff, and, later, on the Swing stuff.
This kind of modularization is possible with PHP, but you need to do a lot more planning to make it happen. With Java, at least in my experience, this kind of design is just more natural.
Well yah know, I like the idea of the rating system telling what the rating is for. Things like does the game have violence, sex, drugs use, and profanity. Wouldn't it be nice if those things are printed right on the box?
;-)
Oh yeah they are already doing that, Right next to the one letter ESRB rating. Here let me give you a few examples:
[snip]
This stoplight rating system seems like it would be a step in the wrong direction. It would end up giving you less information.
Similar things are now included on movie ratings. Before, there was just an [R] label on the box; now, they say [R] (for graphic milk consumption).
The problem is that there isn't really a standard for choosing those labels, which is why you'll see posters and trailers that say "Rated [PG-13] for intense motorcycle awesomeness" and the like, and the studios get to choose what the label says. I don't know if the story is the same for video games, but I imagine it is.
Stoplights are probably a bit vague, but standardized descriptors would be very nice, along with an indication of how much a particular element is found in a game. There could be a big "hey, don't let you kids play this / let your kids go nuts, they'll be fine" thing at the top, and something more like a nutrition label under that.
That would actually be kind of fun... "contains 100% of your daily recommended dose of mutilation and whoring."
I've been advocating - well, spouting off on message boards - about this for years. It amazes me how arbitrary ratings can be. This is more of a problem in the movie industry, though. If a director has clout and money, he can get whatever rating he wants slapped on a film.
This would put power into the hands of parents. Instead of saying "we watched this movie / played this game, and we think it's just fine for your kids," they would be saying "we watched this movie / played this game, here's what's in it, you decide if it's right for your family."
Bravo.
And therein lies the problem. If other nations do set up their own root servers, the Internet will be fractured and cease to be the useful network it is today. The whole point of the Internet is that it's run by rough consensus. You can't deny other nations a voice and still expect them to participate on your terms, it's an international resource that only has the value it has because it is singular.
Actually, this fracutring of the internet is the best possible solution, because it erases the single-point-of-failure problem.
The rest of the world is worried about the US being a central point of failure; many aspects of goventment, economy, etc, rely upon the internet. If the internet breaks, so does the government, so does the economy, et al. If the US decides to be evil, they can unilaterally decide that no traffic that is supposed to be going to, say, Afganistan's government TLD gets there.
The US's view is basically "screw you, we're doing quite qwll without your help, thank you very much." Also, we don't like the idea of giving countries like China or Iran control over who gets to see what on the internet.
What I see happening is the US maintianing its DNS servers, and these servers remaining the standard by which all others are judged. If a foreign server does not match up with the US servers, they will be considered "broken," and thier citizens, if capable, will protest against this, because they will suddenly not be able to communicate with the rest of the 'net. This will be bad, but it will be relativly localized: the rest of the net will carry on.
But, if the US does decide to be evil, and blocks traffic to some country that it is angry with, the rest of the net will, independently, but generally as a whole, recognize that it is now the US servers that are broken, and maintain their own listings. Bad for those of us stateside, but irrelevant to the rest of the world.
The only real problem that I see the the fees that will innevitably be imposed by someone, somewhere. I just know that some government or corporation is going to try to charge money to make our sites visible outside the US. It will likely be unsuccessful, but it will still be a pain.
Same rhetoric as it was for the x86 chips. x86 was terrible until Apple adopted it, right?
:-p
Darn skippy. And, for your information, we have always been at war with Eurasia.
In most other realms, competition is viewed as a good thing. It seems that with Microsoft (or any other large software company) that they want to completely squash the opposition.
To be fair, competition is only seen as a good thing by the people being competed over. Almost any business owner with any sense wants to be the best, and only, at what he or she does.
Not because individuals always make the right choice, but because people generally try to make the best choice, and having a lot of people making decisions, and thus many points of failure, is better than having one person or group making the decisions, and thus a single point of failure.
If you're alluding to government intervention in our personal lives, I disagree with the above argument.
Just the opposite, really. I am essentially only for Government intervention when one's actions directly harm another person. This has to be done, or things would quickly degrade into "might makes right." After that, though, the more power you allow the government, the more likely it is that the single point of failure will, in fact, fail.
It's kind of a social Darwinism. If every family has the chance to conduct its own affairs, some of them will do well, and others will fail, but, at least in theory, the successes will outweigh the failures. If the government is seen as the primary responsible entity, though, you have a much higher chance of a single, catestrophic failure.
Or, more to the point, I don't trust Mommy because she is inherantly right, but I trust a nation of Mommies to be right more often than the Government.
When does "playing pretend" go to far? When Mom says so, not when Uncle Sam says so. It's called individual liberty, and individual responsibility. It's called Enlightement liberalism.
Yes and no. Sometimes, mommy is an idiot, or a flake, and Uncle Sam would be a better judge of what's right for little Johhny. The problem, of course, is that most of the time, Uncle Sam is also an alcoholic with a penchant for violent outbursts.
Sometimes, the line should be drawn well before Mom says so. In this instance, I would argue that any parent that allowed a child to play this game was failing in their duty as a parent.
Of course, that's my opinion. I might be wrong. The government might be wrong. Mom might be wrong. And we all have a fairly equal chance of being wrong.
That's why individual responsibility is so important. Not because individuals always make the right choice, but because people generally try to make the best choice, and having a lot of people making decisions, and thus many points of failure, is better than having one person or group making the decisions, and thus a single point of failure.
If Jane is an idiot, Johhny is screwed, but Sam and Max will be all right. If the Govenrment is given control, though, and drops the ball, everyone suffers.
[T]he Bill of Rights [the first 10 amendments to the Constitution].
This is why we're doomed. If the Bill of Rights needs a footnote, we're pretty much finished.