Language design unquestionably makes certain programming errors more difficult or even impossible. This is not mere tilting at windmills: many of the classes of errors that are removed are extremely important and damaging ones. Other language features can force programmers to think through their designs more and/or make their code more clear and expressive. Some language designs can even limit and constrain the possible logic errors that a program can commit.
Obviously, naturally, a better programmer will write more secure programs, in any language. But that's not a very interesting question. The interesting question is whether two equally skilled, equally disciplined programmers will write equally secure programs when one of them is allowed by the language to do anything, and the other has many guardrails in place to prevent errors.
In fact, in my experience, the majority is wrong quite a lot.
Fortunately, this is not a popularity contest. The question is whether the government can compel a company to rewrite its products to make it easy for the government to snoop on its customers. If they can, it's only a small jump to forcing companies to include a backdoor in their products in the first place.
Actually, ignoring the unique hardware key associated with the Secure Enclave (because it can't be read by anything except the Secure Enclave), each iPhone does have several other unique identifiers that can be used to lock OS firmware to the device, such as the serial number, the cellular radio IMEI, and the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth MAC. As already pointed out, Apple could hard-encode those values in the firmware update and sign that. The resulting binary could not be used with any device where those identifiers did not match. Bad actors could not just change the numbers to match a random victim's phone, because the Apple signature would not match the binary. This is discussed at http://arstechnica.com/apple/2....
It is true that even having the source code for firmware creates a risk, but that risk cannot be turned into an exploit without Apple's secret key. And of course if someone gets Apple's secret key, all iOS devices are in trouble.
I think the real issue we should be talking about is whether the government can force companies to redesign their products to help the government spy on their customers. If it can do this, then why can't the government similarly require that circumvention mechanisms be built into devices in the first place to make snooping easy?
I think we're back to the "it can do X" argument (JavaScript can do OO, it can do functional, etc). The problem with this argument is that any language can do X if you try hard enough. Unfortunately, to do OO in JavaScript, you do have to try, because JavaScript is not an OO language, but rather a prototype-based language. Compatibility layers such as CoffeeScript that offer clean OO have to produce somewhat wordy JavaScript to provide that support, precisely because even though you can emulate OO in JavaScript, it's not concise, easy, elegant or fun, unless you are using something like Coffee, which is a different language than JavaScript.
Certainly Ruby and Python have beautiful OO models, much more attractive and natural than JavaScript's. And like JavaScript, both Python and Ruby can be programmed in a functional manner if you choose to do that; indeed, their libraries support functional behavior out of the box much better than JavaScript's. And, as with the OO example above, if you really want to do functional-style programming, you might be better off using a language designed with that in mind, for example with default currying and pattern-matching built in.
But I don't think OP cares about any of that. I think OP just wants to whip some scripts together fast. JavaScript was designed with a browser in mind. It was not architechted with single standalone scripts in mind, and it continues to be a poor tool for that purpose.
I'd much rather code in Scala or Clojure than Java. And these languages have good, and increasing, user bases who can provide support for those languages. An increasing number of companies are adopting these languages for production tasks, too -- apparently they feel they can find people who can support them.
I'm not saying Groovy per se is a good choice (or not a good choice), just rejecting the general argument that we should stick to the core language of a system for support reasons. If that argument were valid, then we should use assembler instead of C, we should dump CoffeeScript and the like in favor of JavaScript, and of course we shouldn't use any of the great new JVM languages, presumably sticking with Java 6 or something so we can make the lives of lowest-common-denominator programmers maximally easy.
Python is a good language, but it can be a little tedious to do simple one-off text-parsing tasks. Regexes aren't first-class elements of the language. You have to know what libraries to import. And Python as a language has an ongoing, controversial split between Python 2 and Python 3 that makes myself and others a little uncomfortable. Having said that, there's a lot of good stuff going on in Python. It's a worthy language.
JavaScript, to me, is less worthy as a language. Yes, you "can do" pretty much anything in JavaScript (as you can with any Turing-complete language, meaning all of them), and yes, it has some desirable language features. But, it's typically hard to do simple things, at least if you want compatibility with older platforms. JavaScript has a substantial number of warts and language design problems. If JavaScript were a newly-introduced language, I think it would pretty much go nowhere. It's compelling because all the browsers use it, and because we now have some nice frameworks, like Node, that use it, and because of the browsers, some great debuggers and related tooling. Still, for quick programming of one-off tasks, I would not pick JavaScript.
I would give Ruby strong consideration. Although you can write complex, large programs in Ruby, including web apps using frameworks like Rails, the language is very well-suited to small text-processing tasks as well. Check out Practical System Administration Using Ruby.
None of these languages have a lot of the cool new language features that are coming out (it seems like) on a weekly basis lately. By this standard, they all seem a little backward. But these newer languages are almost always immature in important ways -- either the language is evolving too much, the docs are weak, there's not much community yet, they have no module system (gem/egg/CPAN) or a weak one, they're only good at a small subset of tasks, etc. In a few years, these languages might displace Python or Ruby, just as Python and Ruby largely displaced Perl. But the newcomers are not yet strong enough for that. In the meantime, Ruby or Python would make better here-and-now answers.
The central problem with DRM is that it stops only honest people. Anything that is located entirely on the user's computer in obfuscated form and plays from there can be cracked, and crackers will crack it, whereupon the cracked goods will quickly find themselves on BitTorrent and other sharing networks.
The thing is, competing with free isn't that hard. If you offer high-quality goods for a reasonable price, using an open format, at a convenient location, customers will buy from you. How did Tower Records thrive for so many years when recording tape-to-tape or record-to-tape was so easy? Or, for a modern example, look at Tor books, which has un-DRMed its books. They say the sky isn't falling. This transition has already largely completed in the realm of technical books at companies like O'Reilly, Manning, Apress, and others.
DRM is an endless and futile game for content creators, and an annoyance to customers. I doubt in the end that any DRM standard we settle upon will be sufficient for most publishers for many reasons, ranging from capabilities to safety, and in the end those publishers who are really serious about DRM will go with proprietary plugins anyway (and will find that those don't work very well either).
Either this is incredibly dry humor, or this guy is an idiot. I'm going to go with the dry humor. Not an elitist? But got to run off to catch a Bergman or Truffaut film at the university. This is too funny, but I have to turn off the Interwebs and catch up on my Proust, see you guys later!
A sane layoff program targets the X percent of employees who are actually worth the least. Trying to piss everyone off with a dumb policy and then watch them stream out the door indiscriminately is one of the worst strategies. You'd probably be better off randomly firing X percent of your company. You'd keep a lot of the good people and they wouldn't feel alienated.
I think some folks have somehow gotten the idea that we have a right to be free of the consequences of our speech. This is not the case and has never been the case, regardless of one's level of fame. Most of us would be fired if we endorsed a sufficiently controversial view too loudly, and famous people have to deal with financial consequences as well, perhaps even more so than average.
Orson Scott Card has made no secret of his own controversial views. Let him deal with the consequences. I feel no pity for him.
So don't buy them if you think it's a scam. In the meantime, I can make use of a nice currency that is not under the control of any country, both as a consumer and a merchant. It's fairly anonymous / not easily trackable. It sets a stoploss, like cash -- if you cheat me in a Bitcoin transaction, you get at most the Bitcoins I sent you and no method to get more of my money. We don't need a bank to use Bitcoins -- they can be sent over the Internet with no third party intermediary, and there are Bitcoin escrow services to verify I received the product before I release the payment to you.
Political systems routinely use currency as a way to control people. If people do not need the currency of a political system, that particular weapon becomes impotent. That's why the establishment opposes Bitcoin. I personally think Bitcoin is a great currency that helps me right now, so I'll continue to use it, "gullible rube" or not.
If the IP works, then routing to the Google servers obviously works. It sounds like an intermittent nameserver problem. China's DNS servers are having difficulty resolving names in a reasonable time. There could be any number of reasons for this, it's not necessarily that China is blocking Google.
You're saying they charge 10 cents per listen. That's not what they say on the site. The wording there is pretty clear that you add the song for 10 cents and listen to it an unlimited number of times. Do you have a source or citation to support your interpretation of their policy?
To me, a site that sells un-DRMed, high-quality MP3s at a reasonable price is not all bad. I would be willing to give them a try.
You say obesity is a choice. I say choice plays a role, but it is a minor role. The average person cannot just choose their way out of obesity. Another way of looking at it is to simply observe that saying "just choose to eat right and exercise more" is not a very helpful treatment, whereas eating more vegetables, associating with people who eat healthy, finding workout buddies as a means of exerting social pressure to work out -- these strategies can be helpful.
What is needed is not making good choices per se, because while it looks good on paper it's very hard to do in a vacuum. What is needed is focus on the meta level -- make it easy to make good choices. In the end it should be as easy as possible to do the right thing. That is why focusing on willpower and personal blame has been so fruitless for so many people for so long.
The right approach is different for every individual because everyone is motivated differently. I have a personal trainer and that really helps me make it to the gym, because I am the kind of person that hates to miss an appointment or be late. I have arranged my life in a way that makes doing the right thing almost automatic. But take away my gym buddies, take away my personal trainer, and I would go a lot less. It's not because I lack willpower or motivation. It's because my life would then be arranged in a way that made doing the right thing much harder for me.
The parent is very much oversimplifying a complex issue. It's like saying addictions are simply about willpower. The fact is, choice and willpower are only one rather small factor. Other factors include biology, the food supply, and the social context. Willpower and choice are probably the least important factor in this list.
We live in a short span of time, biologically speaking, in which too much food is more of a problem than too little. Our bodies know, from millions of years of evolution, that a famine could come any time and we'd better be ready. Storage of fat reserves is a winning strategy historically speaking. We are therefore programmed to do this, and everything about our food system is designed to make this the default. Try willing yourself to be shorter and see how far that gets you. It's much the same.
Perhaps "disease" is the wrong term for obesity, but "syndrome" is probably right. There's a combination of factors that taken together create a chronic condition that most people do not have the "will" to fight effectively. By changing the food supply and the social context you give yourself a much better chance, but even then, and even with a strong will, it's a tough battle. Hence, biology is probably the dominant reason for obesity. To say it's "your fault" is just as ignorant as saying being gay, or being black, is your fault.
Yeah, I dub this phenomenon the "Matrix Syndrome." It's a deadly illness that sometimes infects sci-fi shows. The Matrix movies and the Star Wars movies are classic examples. In a related vein, Deep Space 9 and ST:Enterprise are whole series that were sorely challenged by the Matrix Syndrome.
A show or series is said to have the Matrix Syndrome if there was a great predecessor, such as ST:TOS, the original Star Wars trilogy or the first Matrix movie, followed by a substantial decline in creative quality of the stories. It's not about special effects, quality of acting, filmwork, etc; it's about how interesting, relevant, creative and compelling the stories are.
I agree with the parent that current BSG episodes are still good, mostly. But they are a long way from the greatness of their predecessors in the first season. Note that the BSG writers are still very daring, but being daring is different from being compelling. So I suggest that BSG has a mild case of Matrix Syndrome -- although still enough to be disappointing.
So use PyObjC http://pyobjc.sourceforge.net/ or RubyCocoa http://rubycocoa.sourceforge.net/. I've programmed in both and like them both a lot. Cocoa is very easy to use. I mainly use XCode only for building and running projects, and I use IB for creating NIBs (form templates). I like it a hell of a lot better than Visual Basic and an it's an order of magnitude nicer than using C, C++ or Java. It's also a lot better than Objective C, where you still don't have garbage collection.
Many of the following points have been mentioned elsewhere in this thread, but certainly putting "porn" into a red-light district has several problems.
The "rights-based" objection is that this is simple discrimination based on content of legal speech. It's like saying if you want to talk about Democratic politics, you can do so anywhere, but if you want to talk about Republican politics, you have to do it over here in this little building on the edge of town. Time-and-place restrictions are valid, but they can't be applied based on the content of speech. You can say _everyone_ has to get a permit to march, but you can't say only KKK members need to get a permit; everyone else can march any time.
Another objection here is that you get the same protection with blocking software, but without censoring everyone else. It's hard to find a compelling interest for the government to do this when equally effective software measures are widely available for your use. (Not that either.xxx or filtering software are that effective; see below.)
Defining hard-core porn itself is a serious problem. Any distinction you make, you will regret. If it's harder to get to.xxx material, people will dance just shy of that mark....technically not porn, but undeniably pornographic in every other way. What have you solved?
But preventing access to porn through technical means is much harder than stopping spam. No one wants spam, but those kids do want porn, which is why they look for it. What are the technical problems with porn-filtering?
Well, first, you can't control international traffic. This is a killer to the.xxx idea.
Next, you can't control the peer-to-peer world. (And what are you going to do when we get peer-to-peer chat systems going?)
Third, how are you going to prevent porn-by-email or porn-by-usenet?
Fourth, you have weird technical problems with IPs themselves. I guess any IP that hosts any porn has to reverse-lookup to a.xxx name? If not, kids can get there using the IP.
In short, the.xxx idea has two killer problems. One, it's unconstitutional censorship of legal speech. Two, it solves nothing but poses as a solution; hence it makes the problem worse by indulging you in a false sense of security. Together, these reasons make a pretty tough argument against the.xxx idea.
I don't have a better solution, either; like I said, it's a tougher problem than spam. It's going to be very-difficult-to-impossible, no matter which way you cut it. If you really want a solution, then as a parent poster in this thread mentioned, don't let your kids on the Internet without supervision. If you're a real control freak, try a keystroke logger. But the first time your kid gets caught with that trick, they're going to the library or Internet cafe to do their illicit chatting. Really.....you can't win. You might as well try to act as an advisor to help your children sort out the issues, rather than a dictator with a long list of rules about what they can't see. The list of rules itself may be the problem; it tells kids exactly what to go research.
Your call, but if you go the dicator route, you're going to have a long, hard road ahead. Good luck; you'll need it.
Convergence devices are, in the words of (I believe) Peter Rojas, a single concentrated point of failure.
Yeah, but the same could be said of your computer. That fact isn't going to get you to go get one of those stand-alone word-processing machines, is it?
I think the key argument to bring out here is that if you are OK with dubbing songs on a tape and giving them to someone else, then _you are OK with stealing, sometimes_. Then the debate is not whether "stealing" is OK, but rather, when is it OK?
Those who oppose file-trading want to make it black-and-white: if you trade MP3s, you're stealing, and stealing is bad, mkay? But if tape-trading is OK, then stealing is not inherently bad -- at least not the kind of stealing where you give songs to your friends.
Once we go there, it's a very slippery slope. Most of the comforts of absolutism are gone.
The "lasts forever" argument doesn't hold water, because I think most people who concede that making a tape and giving it to mom is OK, would also feel that making a CD and giving it to mom is equally OK. But the contents of a CD are digital; they last "forever" in the sense used by the anti-digital argument.
Now, one could always be a real absolutist and argue that tape-trading is wicked as well. But that's a very extremist position; few people will agree with it. If that's the best they can do, then the pro-file-trading side has effectively positioned the other side as extremists, which makes further debate much easier.
I think every person who calls MP3 sharing "stealing" should be forced to commit to whether giving a mix CD to mom is OK or wicked; and if it's OK, then they have to acknowledge that so-called "stealing" is not always bad. With that on the table, there are other interesting moral dilemmas to explore, but the game is half-won right there.
College doesn't teach you how to make money, it teaches you how to conform, how to fit into the machine. To be a leader, you have to UNlearn a lot of what they teach in college, even the best colleges.
With a great college education, you can be a successful part of the machine. You will probably make middle-to-upper-middle wages if your degree is in the sciences or engineering; you will probably become a manager at some point, or if you are especially good, maybe an executive. Unless you learn leadership and independent thinking, you will never be really rich; you will always implement somone else's idea and ultimately you will always be, at most, a well-treated slave.
If you just flat refuse the promotion, that will look bad and will probably inhibit your career advancement, definitely at that company. It will make you seem like someone who doesn't want to be in management. Odds are you won't get another offer.
But you can examine the group you're being offered and look for the structural problems that make it a doomed opportunity. You can then say you'll take the position, provided you are given the tools and the management backing you need to be successful. Make sure that the political support you need is really there at the highest levels of management that could reasonably influence your organization -- preferably, you will hear these assurances in person from the necessary individuals themselves. Listen carefully and be sure they are actually saying what you need them to say, or are at least giving you an acceptable alternative.
You should NOT accept a position where you have been set-up for failure. But if you don't accept such a position, everyone in management with visibility into your rejection of the offer must understand that you turned down the offer because the position is structurally hopeless and you were not given the tools necessary to ensure success. Go see these people in person and explain, preferably before you formally turn down the offer.
Finally, you have issues with this assignment for more than one reason. If the bottom line is you just don't want to do this assignment, there's nothing wrong with telling your management chain exactly what you do want -- and I would encourage you do to so. Maybe they have some creative ideas. I've found that directly asking for what you really want is a powerful act -- maybe a quarter of the time you just get it outright, a quarter of the time you'll get it if you're patient, a quarter of the time you can get 70-90 percent of what you want, and the last quarter, at least you know to look for it somewhere else (like at a different company, in your case).
But just like capitalism and socialism are good ideas in theory, getting the majority of people to actually adhere to their tenets is nearly impossible.
You may be right, but I think we as a community ought to give up on that idea only after we have made an all-out effort at education. For example, we can have a "Download a Song, Pay the Artist" day, in which all P2P users are asked to download a song from their P2P service of choice, share a song with another P2P user, and pay the artist in any way they like (Musiclink, iTunes store, Amazon). The whole idea behind such a day would be paying the artist -- hence it would be ticklish indeed for the opposite side to say anything negative about it. And yet the very act asserts the right to download and share files via P2P.
I'd like to collect statistics about how much was purchased so that those numbers could be used to show the economic power of the tens of millions of worldwide P2P users.
I have little doubt the first year or two would return low numbers. But I think it could have a gradual impact on P2P culture, and would certainly make a great news item.
As for your actions regarding DRM, I'm not condemning those who use DRM files. If you're aware of the potential consequences to yourself (losing access to the files, not being able to do with them what you wish) and to others (use of DRM files encourages businesses to use them, which effects even those who don't choose to support DRM), and you consciously choose to do it anyway, then that is your choice and I respect that. I will certainly grant that there are benefits to the iTunes buying approach (it's damn easy) that are compelling.
Slashdot Mirror
Language design unquestionably makes certain programming errors more difficult or even impossible. This is not mere tilting at windmills: many of the classes of errors that are removed are extremely important and damaging ones. Other language features can force programmers to think through their designs more and/or make their code more clear and expressive. Some language designs can even limit and constrain the possible logic errors that a program can commit.
Obviously, naturally, a better programmer will write more secure programs, in any language. But that's not a very interesting question. The interesting question is whether two equally skilled, equally disciplined programmers will write equally secure programs when one of them is allowed by the language to do anything, and the other has many guardrails in place to prevent errors.
In fact, in my experience, the majority is wrong quite a lot.
Fortunately, this is not a popularity contest. The question is whether the government can compel a company to rewrite its products to make it easy for the government to snoop on its customers. If they can, it's only a small jump to forcing companies to include a backdoor in their products in the first place.
Actually, ignoring the unique hardware key associated with the Secure Enclave (because it can't be read by anything except the Secure Enclave), each iPhone does have several other unique identifiers that can be used to lock OS firmware to the device, such as the serial number, the cellular radio IMEI, and the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth MAC. As already pointed out, Apple could hard-encode those values in the firmware update and sign that. The resulting binary could not be used with any device where those identifiers did not match. Bad actors could not just change the numbers to match a random victim's phone, because the Apple signature would not match the binary. This is discussed at http://arstechnica.com/apple/2....
It is true that even having the source code for firmware creates a risk, but that risk cannot be turned into an exploit without Apple's secret key. And of course if someone gets Apple's secret key, all iOS devices are in trouble.
I think the real issue we should be talking about is whether the government can force companies to redesign their products to help the government spy on their customers. If it can do this, then why can't the government similarly require that circumvention mechanisms be built into devices in the first place to make snooping easy?
I've been running iOS8 since pre-beta on multiple devices, including phones and iPads. I've had no problem, nothing at all like you describe.
If you're so inclined, I'd try a fresh install and see if that makes things run better. You can always restore from backup later.
I assume there was nothing strange about your iOS7 install, like being jailbroken, right?
I think we're back to the "it can do X" argument (JavaScript can do OO, it can do functional, etc). The problem with this argument is that any language can do X if you try hard enough. Unfortunately, to do OO in JavaScript, you do have to try, because JavaScript is not an OO language, but rather a prototype-based language. Compatibility layers such as CoffeeScript that offer clean OO have to produce somewhat wordy JavaScript to provide that support, precisely because even though you can emulate OO in JavaScript, it's not concise, easy, elegant or fun, unless you are using something like Coffee, which is a different language than JavaScript.
Certainly Ruby and Python have beautiful OO models, much more attractive and natural than JavaScript's. And like JavaScript, both Python and Ruby can be programmed in a functional manner if you choose to do that; indeed, their libraries support functional behavior out of the box much better than JavaScript's. And, as with the OO example above, if you really want to do functional-style programming, you might be better off using a language designed with that in mind, for example with default currying and pattern-matching built in.
But I don't think OP cares about any of that. I think OP just wants to whip some scripts together fast. JavaScript was designed with a browser in mind. It was not architechted with single standalone scripts in mind, and it continues to be a poor tool for that purpose.
I'd much rather code in Scala or Clojure than Java. And these languages have good, and increasing, user bases who can provide support for those languages. An increasing number of companies are adopting these languages for production tasks, too -- apparently they feel they can find people who can support them.
I'm not saying Groovy per se is a good choice (or not a good choice), just rejecting the general argument that we should stick to the core language of a system for support reasons. If that argument were valid, then we should use assembler instead of C, we should dump CoffeeScript and the like in favor of JavaScript, and of course we shouldn't use any of the great new JVM languages, presumably sticking with Java 6 or something so we can make the lives of lowest-common-denominator programmers maximally easy.
Python is a good language, but it can be a little tedious to do simple one-off text-parsing tasks. Regexes aren't first-class elements of the language. You have to know what libraries to import. And Python as a language has an ongoing, controversial split between Python 2 and Python 3 that makes myself and others a little uncomfortable. Having said that, there's a lot of good stuff going on in Python. It's a worthy language.
JavaScript, to me, is less worthy as a language. Yes, you "can do" pretty much anything in JavaScript (as you can with any Turing-complete language, meaning all of them), and yes, it has some desirable language features. But, it's typically hard to do simple things, at least if you want compatibility with older platforms. JavaScript has a substantial number of warts and language design problems. If JavaScript were a newly-introduced language, I think it would pretty much go nowhere. It's compelling because all the browsers use it, and because we now have some nice frameworks, like Node, that use it, and because of the browsers, some great debuggers and related tooling. Still, for quick programming of one-off tasks, I would not pick JavaScript.
I would give Ruby strong consideration. Although you can write complex, large programs in Ruby, including web apps using frameworks like Rails, the language is very well-suited to small text-processing tasks as well. Check out Practical System Administration Using Ruby.
None of these languages have a lot of the cool new language features that are coming out (it seems like) on a weekly basis lately. By this standard, they all seem a little backward. But these newer languages are almost always immature in important ways -- either the language is evolving too much, the docs are weak, there's not much community yet, they have no module system (gem/egg/CPAN) or a weak one, they're only good at a small subset of tasks, etc. In a few years, these languages might displace Python or Ruby, just as Python and Ruby largely displaced Perl. But the newcomers are not yet strong enough for that. In the meantime, Ruby or Python would make better here-and-now answers.
The central problem with DRM is that it stops only honest people. Anything that is located entirely on the user's computer in obfuscated form and plays from there can be cracked, and crackers will crack it, whereupon the cracked goods will quickly find themselves on BitTorrent and other sharing networks.
The thing is, competing with free isn't that hard. If you offer high-quality goods for a reasonable price, using an open format, at a convenient location, customers will buy from you. How did Tower Records thrive for so many years when recording tape-to-tape or record-to-tape was so easy? Or, for a modern example, look at Tor books, which has un-DRMed its books. They say the sky isn't falling. This transition has already largely completed in the realm of technical books at companies like O'Reilly, Manning, Apress, and others.
DRM is an endless and futile game for content creators, and an annoyance to customers. I doubt in the end that any DRM standard we settle upon will be sufficient for most publishers for many reasons, ranging from capabilities to safety, and in the end those publishers who are really serious about DRM will go with proprietary plugins anyway (and will find that those don't work very well either).
Either this is incredibly dry humor, or this guy is an idiot. I'm going to go with the dry humor. Not an elitist? But got to run off to catch a Bergman or Truffaut film at the university. This is too funny, but I have to turn off the Interwebs and catch up on my Proust, see you guys later!
You, sir, have elucidated my thoughts eloquently.
A sane layoff program targets the X percent of employees who are actually worth the least. Trying to piss everyone off with a dumb policy and then watch them stream out the door indiscriminately is one of the worst strategies. You'd probably be better off randomly firing X percent of your company. You'd keep a lot of the good people and they wouldn't feel alienated.
I think some folks have somehow gotten the idea that we have a right to be free of the consequences of our speech. This is not the case and has never been the case, regardless of one's level of fame. Most of us would be fired if we endorsed a sufficiently controversial view too loudly, and famous people have to deal with financial consequences as well, perhaps even more so than average.
Orson Scott Card has made no secret of his own controversial views. Let him deal with the consequences. I feel no pity for him.
So don't buy them if you think it's a scam. In the meantime, I can make use of a nice currency that is not under the control of any country, both as a consumer and a merchant. It's fairly anonymous / not easily trackable. It sets a stoploss, like cash -- if you cheat me in a Bitcoin transaction, you get at most the Bitcoins I sent you and no method to get more of my money. We don't need a bank to use Bitcoins -- they can be sent over the Internet with no third party intermediary, and there are Bitcoin escrow services to verify I received the product before I release the payment to you. Political systems routinely use currency as a way to control people. If people do not need the currency of a political system, that particular weapon becomes impotent. That's why the establishment opposes Bitcoin. I personally think Bitcoin is a great currency that helps me right now, so I'll continue to use it, "gullible rube" or not.
If the IP works, then routing to the Google servers obviously works. It sounds like an intermittent nameserver problem. China's DNS servers are having difficulty resolving names in a reasonable time. There could be any number of reasons for this, it's not necessarily that China is blocking Google.
You're saying they charge 10 cents per listen. That's not what they say on the site. The wording there is pretty clear that you add the song for 10 cents and listen to it an unlimited number of times. Do you have a source or citation to support your interpretation of their policy?
To me, a site that sells un-DRMed, high-quality MP3s at a reasonable price is not all bad. I would be willing to give them a try.
You say obesity is a choice. I say choice plays a role, but it is a minor role. The average person cannot just choose their way out of obesity. Another way of looking at it is to simply observe that saying "just choose to eat right and exercise more" is not a very helpful treatment, whereas eating more vegetables, associating with people who eat healthy, finding workout buddies as a means of exerting social pressure to work out -- these strategies can be helpful.
What is needed is not making good choices per se, because while it looks good on paper it's very hard to do in a vacuum. What is needed is focus on the meta level -- make it easy to make good choices. In the end it should be as easy as possible to do the right thing. That is why focusing on willpower and personal blame has been so fruitless for so many people for so long.
The right approach is different for every individual because everyone is motivated differently. I have a personal trainer and that really helps me make it to the gym, because I am the kind of person that hates to miss an appointment or be late. I have arranged my life in a way that makes doing the right thing almost automatic. But take away my gym buddies, take away my personal trainer, and I would go a lot less. It's not because I lack willpower or motivation. It's because my life would then be arranged in a way that made doing the right thing much harder for me.
The parent is very much oversimplifying a complex issue. It's like saying addictions are simply about willpower. The fact is, choice and willpower are only one rather small factor. Other factors include biology, the food supply, and the social context. Willpower and choice are probably the least important factor in this list.
We live in a short span of time, biologically speaking, in which too much food is more of a problem than too little. Our bodies know, from millions of years of evolution, that a famine could come any time and we'd better be ready. Storage of fat reserves is a winning strategy historically speaking. We are therefore programmed to do this, and everything about our food system is designed to make this the default. Try willing yourself to be shorter and see how far that gets you. It's much the same.
Perhaps "disease" is the wrong term for obesity, but "syndrome" is probably right. There's a combination of factors that taken together create a chronic condition that most people do not have the "will" to fight effectively. By changing the food supply and the social context you give yourself a much better chance, but even then, and even with a strong will, it's a tough battle. Hence, biology is probably the dominant reason for obesity. To say it's "your fault" is just as ignorant as saying being gay, or being black, is your fault.
Yeah, I dub this phenomenon the "Matrix Syndrome." It's a deadly illness that sometimes infects sci-fi shows. The Matrix movies and the Star Wars movies are classic examples. In a related vein, Deep Space 9 and ST:Enterprise are whole series that were sorely challenged by the Matrix Syndrome. A show or series is said to have the Matrix Syndrome if there was a great predecessor, such as ST:TOS, the original Star Wars trilogy or the first Matrix movie, followed by a substantial decline in creative quality of the stories. It's not about special effects, quality of acting, filmwork, etc; it's about how interesting, relevant, creative and compelling the stories are. I agree with the parent that current BSG episodes are still good, mostly. But they are a long way from the greatness of their predecessors in the first season. Note that the BSG writers are still very daring, but being daring is different from being compelling. So I suggest that BSG has a mild case of Matrix Syndrome -- although still enough to be disappointing.
I don't mind 50 percent of the people giving up their rights. What pisses me off is when they try to give up my rights.
So use PyObjC http://pyobjc.sourceforge.net/ or RubyCocoa http://rubycocoa.sourceforge.net/. I've programmed in both and like them both a lot. Cocoa is very easy to use. I mainly use XCode only for building and running projects, and I use IB for creating NIBs (form templates). I like it a hell of a lot better than Visual Basic and an it's an order of magnitude nicer than using C, C++ or Java. It's also a lot better than Objective C, where you still don't have garbage collection.
Many of the following points have been mentioned elsewhere in this thread, but certainly putting "porn" into a red-light district has several problems.
.xxx or filtering software are that effective; see below.)
.xxx material, people will dance just shy of that mark....technically not porn, but undeniably pornographic in every other way. What have you solved?
.xxx idea.
.xxx name? If not, kids can get there using the IP.
.xxx idea has two killer problems. One, it's unconstitutional censorship of legal speech. Two, it solves nothing but poses as a solution; hence it makes the problem worse by indulging you in a false sense of security. Together, these reasons make a pretty tough argument against the .xxx idea.
The "rights-based" objection is that this is simple discrimination based on content of legal speech. It's like saying if you want to talk about Democratic politics, you can do so anywhere, but if you want to talk about Republican politics, you have to do it over here in this little building on the edge of town. Time-and-place restrictions are valid, but they can't be applied based on the content of speech. You can say _everyone_ has to get a permit to march, but you can't say only KKK members need to get a permit; everyone else can march any time.
Another objection here is that you get the same protection with blocking software, but without censoring everyone else. It's hard to find a compelling interest for the government to do this when equally effective software measures are widely available for your use. (Not that either
Defining hard-core porn itself is a serious problem. Any distinction you make, you will regret. If it's harder to get to
But preventing access to porn through technical means is much harder than stopping spam. No one wants spam, but those kids do want porn, which is why they look for it. What are the technical problems with porn-filtering?
Well, first, you can't control international traffic. This is a killer to the
Next, you can't control the peer-to-peer world. (And what are you going to do when we get peer-to-peer chat systems going?)
Third, how are you going to prevent porn-by-email or porn-by-usenet?
Fourth, you have weird technical problems with IPs themselves. I guess any IP that hosts any porn has to reverse-lookup to a
In short, the
I don't have a better solution, either; like I said, it's a tougher problem than spam. It's going to be very-difficult-to-impossible, no matter which way you cut it. If you really want a solution, then as a parent poster in this thread mentioned, don't let your kids on the Internet without supervision. If you're a real control freak, try a keystroke logger. But the first time your kid gets caught with that trick, they're going to the library or Internet cafe to do their illicit chatting. Really.....you can't win. You might as well try to act as an advisor to help your children sort out the issues, rather than a dictator with a long list of rules about what they can't see. The list of rules itself may be the problem; it tells kids exactly what to go research.
Your call, but if you go the dicator route, you're going to have a long, hard road ahead. Good luck; you'll need it.
Yeah, but the same could be said of your computer. That fact isn't going to get you to go get one of those stand-alone word-processing machines, is it?
I think the key argument to bring out here is that if you are OK with dubbing songs on a tape and giving them to someone else, then _you are OK with stealing, sometimes_. Then the debate is not whether "stealing" is OK, but rather, when is it OK?
Those who oppose file-trading want to make it black-and-white: if you trade MP3s, you're stealing, and stealing is bad, mkay? But if tape-trading is OK, then stealing is not inherently bad -- at least not the kind of stealing where you give songs to your friends.
Once we go there, it's a very slippery slope. Most of the comforts of absolutism are gone.
The "lasts forever" argument doesn't hold water, because I think most people who concede that making a tape and giving it to mom is OK, would also feel that making a CD and giving it to mom is equally OK. But the contents of a CD are digital; they last "forever" in the sense used by the anti-digital argument.
Now, one could always be a real absolutist and argue that tape-trading is wicked as well. But that's a very extremist position; few people will agree with it. If that's the best they can do, then the pro-file-trading side has effectively positioned the other side as extremists, which makes further debate much easier.
I think every person who calls MP3 sharing "stealing" should be forced to commit to whether giving a mix CD to mom is OK or wicked; and if it's OK, then they have to acknowledge that so-called "stealing" is not always bad. With that on the table, there are other interesting moral dilemmas to explore, but the game is half-won right there.
College doesn't teach you how to make money, it teaches you how to conform, how to fit into the machine. To be a leader, you have to UNlearn a lot of what they teach in college, even the best colleges. With a great college education, you can be a successful part of the machine. You will probably make middle-to-upper-middle wages if your degree is in the sciences or engineering; you will probably become a manager at some point, or if you are especially good, maybe an executive. Unless you learn leadership and independent thinking, you will never be really rich; you will always implement somone else's idea and ultimately you will always be, at most, a well-treated slave.
If you just flat refuse the promotion, that will look bad and will probably inhibit your career advancement, definitely at that company. It will make you seem like someone who doesn't want to be in management. Odds are you won't get another offer.
But you can examine the group you're being offered and look for the structural problems that make it a doomed opportunity. You can then say you'll take the position, provided you are given the tools and the management backing you need to be successful. Make sure that the political support you need is really there at the highest levels of management that could reasonably influence your organization -- preferably, you will hear these assurances in person from the necessary individuals themselves. Listen carefully and be sure they are actually saying what you need them to say, or are at least giving you an acceptable alternative.
You should NOT accept a position where you have been set-up for failure. But if you don't accept such a position, everyone in management with visibility into your rejection of the offer must understand that you turned down the offer because the position is structurally hopeless and you were not given the tools necessary to ensure success. Go see these people in person and explain, preferably before you formally turn down the offer.
Finally, you have issues with this assignment for more than one reason. If the bottom line is you just don't want to do this assignment, there's nothing wrong with telling your management chain exactly what you do want -- and I would encourage you do to so. Maybe they have some creative ideas. I've found that directly asking for what you really want is a powerful act -- maybe a quarter of the time you just get it outright, a quarter of the time you'll get it if you're patient, a quarter of the time you can get 70-90 percent of what you want, and the last quarter, at least you know to look for it somewhere else (like at a different company, in your case).
You may be right, but I think we as a community ought to give up on that idea only after we have made an all-out effort at education. For example, we can have a "Download a Song, Pay the Artist" day, in which all P2P users are asked to download a song from their P2P service of choice, share a song with another P2P user, and pay the artist in any way they like (Musiclink, iTunes store, Amazon). The whole idea behind such a day would be paying the artist -- hence it would be ticklish indeed for the opposite side to say anything negative about it. And yet the very act asserts the right to download and share files via P2P.
I'd like to collect statistics about how much was purchased so that those numbers could be used to show the economic power of the tens of millions of worldwide P2P users.
I have little doubt the first year or two would return low numbers. But I think it could have a gradual impact on P2P culture, and would certainly make a great news item.
As for your actions regarding DRM, I'm not condemning those who use DRM files. If you're aware of the potential consequences to yourself (losing access to the files, not being able to do with them what you wish) and to others (use of DRM files encourages businesses to use them, which effects even those who don't choose to support DRM), and you consciously choose to do it anyway, then that is your choice and I respect that. I will certainly grant that there are benefits to the iTunes buying approach (it's damn easy) that are compelling.
I appreciate your comments!
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