Thanks, raven. That is pretty much what I had in mind, but it's good to hear from someone who really knows what they are talking about.:-) So, would you agree that, with modern cards, OpenGL compliance is really a matter of software, not so much of the card itself?
I wonder how much of the OpenGL stuff is actually in the hardware, and how much is in the software. With my limited knowledge and understanding, it seems to me that modern graphics cards are mostly execution engines for instructions that perform simple, primitive operations, and that most of the OpenGL support is actually in Mesa, with the driver mostly being there for allowing communication from Mesa to the hardware, and some non-Mesa things which I imagine would mostly be non-OpenGL.
Within Mesa, there is, or at least used to be, an implementation of OpenGL that runs on the CPU. This could be used to provide OpenGL compliance, without any support from the graphics hardware, but it would be extremely slow. Support for 3D on specific chipsets consists mostly of implementing whatever OpenGL specifies in a way that makes it fast on that chipset. If the chipset has a dedicated function for a feature, you can use that. If the chipset has primitives that you can use to implement the feature, you can use those. If all else fails, you can use the code that runs on the CPU as a fallback.
Assuming all the above is correct (and I would like someone who actually knows these things to weigh in on that), the answer to your question would be that the open-source support for OpenGL can be as correct w.r.t. the specifications as people care to make it; AMD isn't much of a factor in this.
``How are these drivers with 3D stuff like in games? Are they fast as NVIDIA's closed binary drivers?''
Without actually having tested the new R800 driver (I don't have an R800-based card), I feel confident to say: no.
If, like the story claims, they are about on par with the R600/R700 driver, that means you get working 2D, and 3D working with some glitches and with very low performance. I have an R730-based card, and it gets about 10 fps in Flightgear. I am sure the hardware can do better than that.:-)
``Kudos to them for finally taking this step. I have no doubt that with at least this start point, these drivers should achieve feature parity with the closed source Nvidia drivers before too long.''
I wouldn't hold my breath. R600 and R700 documentation has been out for quite a while now, and the open-source driver has been under development for years, but it's definitely not on par with the Nvidia closed-source driver. The R300 driver is, as far as I know, one of the best open-source drivers ever developed for ATI graphics cards, and is the only driver still maintained (ATI stopped supporting the R300 series of chips), but even that doesn't realize the hardware's full potential. I'm also told the R300 driver has suffered major performance regressions.
Now the developers working on the open-source drivers are hard at work getting R800 and R900 working, but I fear that this means R300 through R700 will never get done. I wouldn't mind buying an R800 card now to encourage AMD to work more closely with the open source community, but I already bought a R700-based card after the specifications for those were released. If I bought an R800-based card, would I get fully working and performant 2D and 3D and encourage AMD to help the open source community, or would I get another half-done driver before the next series came out, and encourage AMD to provide second-rate support to the open source world?
Don't get me wrong. I think the release of driver code by AMD is a great move, and I applaud them for making it. It also shows that they are at least more committed to free software than some of their competitors. On the other hand, what matters to me is not if they are more committed than another company, but if the support is good enough to justify the price. Just to take one data point: using my Club3D HD4650 and the driver that shipped with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, I am currently getting about 10 frames per second in Flightgear. That makes the program _almost_ usable. It's certainly better now than when I bought the card. We're getting there, thanks in no small part to AMD. But we're not there yet... and that's also in large part because of AMD.
``Those mission-critical-designed-for OSes are, unfortunately, likely to be secure by obscurity.''
I wouldn't be so sure. Security or lack thereof is mostly the result of culture and process. Mission-critical systems operate under vastly different dynamics than popular desktop systems like Windows.
If you think about what sells Windows systems, part of that is wowing would-be buyers with eye candy and gimmicky features. Support for lots of hardware is important. Support for and performance of the latest games is important. It gets sold even though it is widely known and expected to contain security holes and does not offer real-time guarantees. It's a large system with plenty of faults in it. Systems deployed in safety-critical and/or realtime settings are pretty much the exact opposite of that: they're usually small systems, built to perform a specific task on specific hardware. No eye candy, no gimmicks, no support for the webcam you bought from the guy on the corner of the street, no game APIs, etc. etc. This alone eliminates many of the holes. Add to that developers who know and care about safety, security, and real-time, and rigorous testing and even formal verification, and you will end up with a vastly different product.
Making your mobile platform incompatible with anything already out there is a choice, and not a choice I agree with.
Do you make phones? If not your opinion is worthless as you are not a Google customer for Android.''
Thanks for pointing that out. Wow, and here I was thinking that throwing my opinion out here in a Slashdot post would actually get Google to do what I wanted!
On the other hand, my opinion matters somewhat. I have an Android phone (LG GW620), and lots of people come to me to ask about my experience. And my experience is that it was a bad choice. There has been a lot of buzz about Android being based on Linux and being open, but if that made you think it is developer friendly, you have been misled. The fact that it's based on Linux matters little, given that you get, at best, second-rate access to the Linux part. It's not any more open than any other phone I've owned. Maemo would have been a much better choice of platform for me and for most people who ask me. As for the actual user experience... this is the least reliable phone I've ever owned. It's full of glitches, and it's already crashed twice. It was cheap, but I'm not convinced it was even worth what I paid for it.
``Google have to do what the likes of HTC, Samsung, Motorola and whoever else want.''
Actually, I don't see why they would have to. They can make their software however they want to make it. If none of the hardware manufacturers want to ship phones with Google's software, Google can do it themselves. If none of the carriers want phones with Google's software, Google can set up their own network. They have the money for that kind of thing. The immensity of a project has never stopped Google, as far as I know.
``Now if only Pidgin could provide solid video chat functionality in their client...''
I honestly think the Pidgin team isn't that interested in such features. Video chat was coded for it years ago (back when it was still called Gaim), but that code was never adopted. I guess it just isn't a very big deal, or else I expect people would have switched to software that does do video chat, like the gaim-vv fork, Kopete, or AMSN. I don't see that happening, though. And Skype got by without video support for years, too. The world at large doesn't really seem to care about video chat.
``And when it comes to BTRFS, I think the Linux community needs to pull it out and reject it. After this, who wants Oracle copyright'd source code in their tree? Anyone? How do you know Oracle won't pull some nasty stunt further down the road when you've built an appliance based on BTRFS?''
Like MeeGo, the other Linux-based-mobile-platform-pushed-by-a-large-vendor besides Android. Based on BTRFS.
But really, I don't think Oracle is out to kill Linux. I think they're out to get money from Google, and using this lawsuit to grant them more leverage in their negotiations.
``Time to learn another fucking language and 10 more over-engineered libraries!''
Not if Google does the Right Thing and just goes with an already existing language and existing libraries. It's not like that wouldn't work on today's mobile devices. They already have Linux running on them; now give us a libc and a widget library and we're off to a great start.
Making your mobile platform incompatible with anything already out there is a choice, and not a choice I agree with.
``"New-Sun" is, perhaps, trying to do what "Sun" did before -- successfully take down a giant a step or two. After all, what were the end results of Sun v. Microsoft?''
Instead of Microsoft making an incompatible Java-like platform and calling it Java, we got Microsoft making an incompatible Java-done-better platform and calling it.NET. I regard this as a Good Thing: first of all, because it prevented Microsoft from taking over Java and kept the competition from Sun alive, and, secondly, because I feel that.NET has brought a lot of good things to many people, including forcing Java to improve.
Now we get Oracle suing Google for... I don't really know what. Maybe this will cause Google to stop pushing Java as the sole language for development for Android, and focus more on native code and whatever other language people want to bring to it. If so, I would very much like that.
What I want to know is not which of two competing lock-in traps is nicer to work with or delivers more impressive results. What I want to know is: where is the open-standards based answer? We've had Flash for about 14 years now. Java applets have come and gone. Microsoft is trying to take Adobe's cake with Silverlight, but isn't meeting with a lot of success. Meanwhile, Flash continues to be widely used, while others are hard at work trying to make interactive applacations using HTML and JavaScript. Technologically, this is a disaster. How come there isn't an open, open-standards and open-source technology that does vector graphics and animation and scripting and user interaction? There's obviously demand for it. It's also not that hard to create. Where is it?
``I wish politicians didn't care about looking "soft on crime" in dealing with the drug war''
I think the key thing here is education and reporting. If people knew what was really going on and what the real effects of specific policies were, I think it would be a lot easier to get people to agree on good decisions. As it stands, it is too easy to spin things so that it looks like your opponent is trying to mess things up, even when people who have done their homework agree that the same opponent actually advocates a policy that is likely to work out better.
The whole "soft on X" vs. "tough on X" is a prime example of this. Nobody wants to look "soft on X" where X is something that is considered bad. The reason for this is that the electorate largely believes that being soft on X will increase problems. Put that way, it should be obvious that this isn't _necessarily_ the case. So what we need to do is we need to perform research that advises us about the best policy decision to take, and we need to educate the country to be able to understand research and be able to tell proper method from pretty much meaningless words. And in cases where the research has already been done ad nauseam, we can take the shortcut of just educating people about the results.
And then we need reporting on the effects of various policies. We need to evaluate the effects of policies, and we need to tell people about the results. Then people can see what the laws that are on the books are actually doing, and they can take an informed decision about whether or not that is something they actually want.
The reason we're in this mess is that we've been taking decisions based on gut feeling and things that sound good, with blatant disregard for actual facts and research. I mean, it's not like the effect of various drugs and drug policies haven't been researched a thousand times already (although I am told that, in the USA, drug research is restricted... I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions about the wisdom of that). Add violence, tough law enforcement, and large scale imprisonment to the mix, and it's no surprise that it turned out a total disaster.
``Mexico legalizing won't do a damn thing if that is what you mean. The narco traffickers profit from the US' prohibition.''
Exactly. And policymakers in the USA can, for now at least, pretend it's not a US problem. In fact, they can even say: Drugs are bad, we need to be tough on them! Just look at what they did to Mexico!
``there is something of a zero sum game in effect; easier access to hard drugs mean more will do it and we'll have to put up with more tweakers, cokeheads, and smackheads wrecking their lives and making everyone around them miserable.''
I am not so sure about that.
First of all, it is really hard for me to believe that it would be a zero sum game, given that you now are fighting drug producers, traffickers and users both locally and internationally. The current drug policy costs a lot of money, involves a fair bit of violence, and puts a lot of people in prison. Meanwhile, it makes the drug trade more profitable for those who can pull it off, so they become more organized and violent as necessary to beat you. By now, that has pretty much reached the point of full-blown war. I really think you can do better than that, in terms of cost to society.
Secondly, it's not just about hard drugs. In the Netherlands, we have different policies for hard drugs and soft drugs, where the idea is to let people have their pleasure/escape from reality/whatever they're doing drugs for, while steering them away from the really bad stuff. We encourage that by basically saying: listen, drugs are bad, but if you must use them, use this or this and not that or that. It looks a lot like people just want to get their occasional high or experiment a bit when they're teens or tweens, and will happily give up their drugs after they're done with that - unless the drug manages to get them addicted or ruins their lives before they quit. By throwing different drugs like marihuana, crack and heroin all on the same heap, you apparently increase the chance of people getting on the more addictive or harmful stuff.
Thirdly, look at alcohol. Look at tobacco. Look at coffee. How addictive and harmful are those? How much trouble are they causing? How does that compare to illegal drugs, for example, marihuana, cocaine, ecstasy, LSD, heroin, and amphetamines? What about prescription drugs throughout the times (some that used to be legal have later become "legal if you have a prescription" and are now pretty much only used illegally anymore)? I think you will find that, all factors considered, the legal status of a drug has a measurable impact on the drug's impact on society. I can almost picture a statistician coming out and saying "making a drug illegal increases its harm to society by X at p = 0.01".
Fourthly, some drug problems are always going to develop, regardless of whether the substance is legal or illegal. I don't know what the best way to deal with this is. In the Netherlands, we give people treatment, put them in clinics and keep them there until they are no longer dependent on the drug, give them substitute drugs as part of a programme to get off the dependency, or even, in some cases, give them the actual substance they are addicted to. This obviously costs society money, and doesn't really solve the problem. There is a lot of relapse, as well. On the other hand, it might be cheaper than not doing it. As far as I know, there is very little drug-related violence in the Netherlands, and these programmes might well be a large factor in there. However, I don't know how this system performs compared to the many alternatives; for example, locking people up as per normal (that is, we would do the same if it weren't drug-related) when they have shown to be a risk to society, where drug addiction is simply considered a factor that increases the risk.
I think the MySQL project has been dead pretty much since Sun bought it. Pity, just as MySQL was growing up to become a real database. On the other hand, we have the code and the rights... life goes on without the original project.
As for Java, it's already to entrenched to just let die. I am not sure about the licenses older versions of the JDK and JRE used to be distributed under (in particular, if Oracle could, if they wanted to, stop them from being used as they have been), but I am pretty sure that recent versions of the JRE and JDK are completely or almost completely under free software licenses, which means people can keep using them the way they have been doing.
Personally, I don't think either MySQL or Java are best-of-breed technologies, so I wouldn't be sad if Oracle's actions set people off on a search for better options, but there is no denying that both technologies are very widely used, and so the way this story unfolds is of interest to very many parties.
``It does seem odd to me that Microsoft would limit this functionality - whilst they obviously want a reason for people to pay for the full versions of Visual Studio, crippling 64 bit is surely going to harm adoption of 64 bit Windows, which can't be good for Microsoft.''
Actually, I've heard many complaints about 64-bit Windows. Perhaps less adoption of 64-bit Windows _is_ good for Microsoft... or at least was when they released VS 2008.
Also, not telling whether they got the username correct or wrong is security 101.
This is yet another case of Facebook having done the wrong thing for their users' privacy, and correcting things only to lessen the negative publicity. It's not an accident.
``Frankly, if nothing else it will help America have some idea as to what is happening, and that there is a war going on.''
Exactly. Most I hear about the wars these days is how much money they are costing. As if that is the important thing. A video like that of the helicopter gunning down some civilians shows the tragedy of what's really happening there. To me, the real news is that people were actually upset about that. That sort of thing happens in wars. In fact, I would go so far as to say that, tragic as it was, it's not even nearly the worst you can expect. If only more people understood that, maybe there wouldn't be so many of these tragedies.
That's a good point. On the other hand, I'm very grateful to Wikileaks for publishing things they feel we ought to know but that aren't being published by anyone else. Perhaps if the government had offered more transparency in their dealings, nobody would have cared enough about the documents to publish them. Personally, I feel that if you can shock the world by publishing what the government does, the government is doing something wrong.
``A) This stuff should never have been secret, and anyone who would hide it is un-American
or
B) These secrets are property of the government, and anyone who would divulge them is un-American''
Personally, I think that if you think that "un-American" is a bad thing, you've already lost. I don't care if something or someone is American or not. What I care about is whether or not it's good for the world!
``While I'd agree that the implementation of "free speech zones" can be a bit ridiculous, and probably not always compliant with the notion of "free speech,", it is important to recognize that "freedom of speech" does not give you unlimited rights to say whatever you want, wherever you want, in whatever manner you want, whenever you want.''
I absolutely agree. There have been many discussions about free speech in the Netherlands where people were arguing about whether or not people should have the right to say hurtful things. Personally, I feel that the reason you want people to be allowed to speak their minds is that they might contribute something valuable and thus improve things for everyone, or at least on aggregate. Simply insulting people, setting people up against each other, or misleading people by saying things you know to be untrue, in my eyes, actually only makes things worse, so I see why you would want to limit those things. Leave the insults and hate speech at home, and bring us your brilliant insights and suggestions for improvement.
On the subject of free speech zones, though, the way I've heard about them being used doesn't suggest to me a benevolent desire to get valuable insights heard or to curb aggression, violence, or even drowning out other voices. If you're forcing dissenting voices to be where the rest of the population can't hear them, that's not keeping things civil, that's censorship. Doing that and calling such areas "free speech zones" is a farce. It's doublespeak at its finest.
Your points about it often being hard to figure out what people are actually campaigning for is well taken. I've wondered this with many protests, and also with more repulsive acts like wars and terrorist attacks. Sometimes I can't help but think that, if only people were clearer about what they wanted, we would all be happier. That actually works in many relationships, too.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks, raven. That is pretty much what I had in mind, but it's good to hear from someone who really knows what they are talking about. :-) So, would you agree that, with modern cards, OpenGL compliance is really a matter of software, not so much of the card itself?
I wonder how much of the OpenGL stuff is actually in the hardware, and how much is in the software. With my limited knowledge and understanding, it seems to me that modern graphics cards are mostly execution engines for instructions that perform simple, primitive operations, and that most of the OpenGL support is actually in Mesa, with the driver mostly being there for allowing communication from Mesa to the hardware, and some non-Mesa things which I imagine would mostly be non-OpenGL.
Within Mesa, there is, or at least used to be, an implementation of OpenGL that runs on the CPU. This could be used to provide OpenGL compliance, without any support from the graphics hardware, but it would be extremely slow. Support for 3D on specific chipsets consists mostly of implementing whatever OpenGL specifies in a way that makes it fast on that chipset. If the chipset has a dedicated function for a feature, you can use that. If the chipset has primitives that you can use to implement the feature, you can use those. If all else fails, you can use the code that runs on the CPU as a fallback.
Assuming all the above is correct (and I would like someone who actually knows these things to weigh in on that), the answer to your question would be that the open-source support for OpenGL can be as correct w.r.t. the specifications as people care to make it; AMD isn't much of a factor in this.
``How are these drivers with 3D stuff like in games? Are they fast as NVIDIA's closed binary drivers?''
Without actually having tested the new R800 driver (I don't have an R800-based card), I feel confident to say: no.
If, like the story claims, they are about on par with the R600/R700 driver, that means you get working 2D, and 3D working with some glitches and with very low performance. I have an R730-based card, and it gets about 10 fps in Flightgear. I am sure the hardware can do better than that. :-)
``Kudos to them for finally taking this step. I have no doubt that with at least this start point, these drivers should achieve feature parity with the closed source Nvidia drivers before too long.''
I wouldn't hold my breath. R600 and R700 documentation has been out for quite a while now, and the open-source driver has been under development for years, but it's definitely not on par with the Nvidia closed-source driver. The R300 driver is, as far as I know, one of the best open-source drivers ever developed for ATI graphics cards, and is the only driver still maintained (ATI stopped supporting the R300 series of chips), but even that doesn't realize the hardware's full potential. I'm also told the R300 driver has suffered major performance regressions.
Now the developers working on the open-source drivers are hard at work getting R800 and R900 working, but I fear that this means R300 through R700 will never get done. I wouldn't mind buying an R800 card now to encourage AMD to work more closely with the open source community, but I already bought a R700-based card after the specifications for those were released. If I bought an R800-based card, would I get fully working and performant 2D and 3D and encourage AMD to help the open source community, or would I get another half-done driver before the next series came out, and encourage AMD to provide second-rate support to the open source world?
Don't get me wrong. I think the release of driver code by AMD is a great move, and I applaud them for making it. It also shows that they are at least more committed to free software than some of their competitors. On the other hand, what matters to me is not if they are more committed than another company, but if the support is good enough to justify the price. Just to take one data point: using my Club3D HD4650 and the driver that shipped with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, I am currently getting about 10 frames per second in Flightgear. That makes the program _almost_ usable. It's certainly better now than when I bought the card. We're getting there, thanks in no small part to AMD. But we're not there yet ... and that's also in large part because of AMD.
Somehow, I don't think there will be a lot of security holes in a Flash player written in Java, compared to a Flash player written in C or C++.
It's just another case of existing technologies being re-implemented for Java. Nothing to see here, move along.
``Those mission-critical-designed-for OSes are, unfortunately, likely to be secure by obscurity.''
I wouldn't be so sure. Security or lack thereof is mostly the result of culture and process. Mission-critical systems operate under vastly different dynamics than popular desktop systems like Windows.
If you think about what sells Windows systems, part of that is wowing would-be buyers with eye candy and gimmicky features. Support for lots of hardware is important. Support for and performance of the latest games is important. It gets sold even though it is widely known and expected to contain security holes and does not offer real-time guarantees. It's a large system with plenty of faults in it. Systems deployed in safety-critical and/or realtime settings are pretty much the exact opposite of that: they're usually small systems, built to perform a specific task on specific hardware. No eye candy, no gimmicks, no support for the webcam you bought from the guy on the corner of the street, no game APIs, etc. etc. This alone eliminates many of the holes. Add to that developers who know and care about safety, security, and real-time, and rigorous testing and even formal verification, and you will end up with a vastly different product.
``
Do you make phones? If not your opinion is worthless as you are not a Google customer for Android.''
Thanks for pointing that out. Wow, and here I was thinking that throwing my opinion out here in a Slashdot post would actually get Google to do what I wanted!
On the other hand, my opinion matters somewhat. I have an Android phone (LG GW620), and lots of people come to me to ask about my experience. And my experience is that it was a bad choice. There has been a lot of buzz about Android being based on Linux and being open, but if that made you think it is developer friendly, you have been misled. The fact that it's based on Linux matters little, given that you get, at best, second-rate access to the Linux part. It's not any more open than any other phone I've owned. Maemo would have been a much better choice of platform for me and for most people who ask me. As for the actual user experience ... this is the least reliable phone I've ever owned. It's full of glitches, and it's already crashed twice. It was cheap, but I'm not convinced it was even worth what I paid for it.
``Google have to do what the likes of HTC, Samsung, Motorola and whoever else want.''
Actually, I don't see why they would have to. They can make their software however they want to make it. If none of the hardware manufacturers want to ship phones with Google's software, Google can do it themselves. If none of the carriers want phones with Google's software, Google can set up their own network. They have the money for that kind of thing. The immensity of a project has never stopped Google, as far as I know.
``Now if only Pidgin could provide solid video chat functionality in their client...''
I honestly think the Pidgin team isn't that interested in such features. Video chat was coded for it years ago (back when it was still called Gaim), but that code was never adopted. I guess it just isn't a very big deal, or else I expect people would have switched to software that does do video chat, like the gaim-vv fork, Kopete, or AMSN. I don't see that happening, though. And Skype got by without video support for years, too. The world at large doesn't really seem to care about video chat.
``And when it comes to BTRFS, I think the Linux community needs to pull it out and reject it. After this, who wants Oracle copyright'd source code in their tree? Anyone? How do you know Oracle won't pull some nasty stunt further down the road when you've built an appliance based on BTRFS?''
Like MeeGo, the other Linux-based-mobile-platform-pushed-by-a-large-vendor besides Android. Based on BTRFS.
But really, I don't think Oracle is out to kill Linux. I think they're out to get money from Google, and using this lawsuit to grant them more leverage in their negotiations.
``Time to learn another fucking language and 10 more over-engineered libraries!''
Not if Google does the Right Thing and just goes with an already existing language and existing libraries. It's not like that wouldn't work on today's mobile devices. They already have Linux running on them; now give us a libc and a widget library and we're off to a great start.
Making your mobile platform incompatible with anything already out there is a choice, and not a choice I agree with.
``"New-Sun" is, perhaps, trying to do what "Sun" did before -- successfully take down a giant a step or two. After all, what were the end results of Sun v. Microsoft?''
Instead of Microsoft making an incompatible Java-like platform and calling it Java, we got Microsoft making an incompatible Java-done-better platform and calling it .NET. I regard this as a Good Thing: first of all, because it prevented Microsoft from taking over Java and kept the competition from Sun alive, and, secondly, because I feel that .NET has brought a lot of good things to many people, including forcing Java to improve.
Now we get Oracle suing Google for ... I don't really know what. Maybe this will cause Google to stop pushing Java as the sole language for development for Android, and focus more on native code and whatever other language people want to bring to it. If so, I would very much like that.
What I want to know is not which of two competing lock-in traps is nicer to work with or delivers more impressive results. What I want to know is: where is the open-standards based answer? We've had Flash for about 14 years now. Java applets have come and gone. Microsoft is trying to take Adobe's cake with Silverlight, but isn't meeting with a lot of success. Meanwhile, Flash continues to be widely used, while others are hard at work trying to make interactive applacations using HTML and JavaScript. Technologically, this is a disaster. How come there isn't an open, open-standards and open-source technology that does vector graphics and animation and scripting and user interaction? There's obviously demand for it. It's also not that hard to create. Where is it?
Hey man. Would you be willing to contribute an article to that effect to The Freedom Blog?
Peace!
``I wish politicians didn't care about looking "soft on crime" in dealing with the drug war''
I think the key thing here is education and reporting. If people knew what was really going on and what the real effects of specific policies were, I think it would be a lot easier to get people to agree on good decisions. As it stands, it is too easy to spin things so that it looks like your opponent is trying to mess things up, even when people who have done their homework agree that the same opponent actually advocates a policy that is likely to work out better.
The whole "soft on X" vs. "tough on X" is a prime example of this. Nobody wants to look "soft on X" where X is something that is considered bad. The reason for this is that the electorate largely believes that being soft on X will increase problems. Put that way, it should be obvious that this isn't _necessarily_ the case. So what we need to do is we need to perform research that advises us about the best policy decision to take, and we need to educate the country to be able to understand research and be able to tell proper method from pretty much meaningless words. And in cases where the research has already been done ad nauseam, we can take the shortcut of just educating people about the results.
And then we need reporting on the effects of various policies. We need to evaluate the effects of policies, and we need to tell people about the results. Then people can see what the laws that are on the books are actually doing, and they can take an informed decision about whether or not that is something they actually want.
The reason we're in this mess is that we've been taking decisions based on gut feeling and things that sound good, with blatant disregard for actual facts and research. I mean, it's not like the effect of various drugs and drug policies haven't been researched a thousand times already (although I am told that, in the USA, drug research is restricted ... I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions about the wisdom of that). Add violence, tough law enforcement, and large scale imprisonment to the mix, and it's no surprise that it turned out a total disaster.
``Mexico legalizing won't do a damn thing if that is what you mean. The narco traffickers profit from the US' prohibition.''
Exactly. And policymakers in the USA can, for now at least, pretend it's not a US problem. In fact, they can even say: Drugs are bad, we need to be tough on them! Just look at what they did to Mexico!
``there is something of a zero sum game in effect; easier access to hard drugs mean more will do it and we'll have to put up with more tweakers, cokeheads, and smackheads wrecking their lives and making everyone around them miserable.''
I am not so sure about that.
First of all, it is really hard for me to believe that it would be a zero sum game, given that you now are fighting drug producers, traffickers and users both locally and internationally. The current drug policy costs a lot of money, involves a fair bit of violence, and puts a lot of people in prison. Meanwhile, it makes the drug trade more profitable for those who can pull it off, so they become more organized and violent as necessary to beat you. By now, that has pretty much reached the point of full-blown war. I really think you can do better than that, in terms of cost to society.
Secondly, it's not just about hard drugs. In the Netherlands, we have different policies for hard drugs and soft drugs, where the idea is to let people have their pleasure/escape from reality/whatever they're doing drugs for, while steering them away from the really bad stuff. We encourage that by basically saying: listen, drugs are bad, but if you must use them, use this or this and not that or that. It looks a lot like people just want to get their occasional high or experiment a bit when they're teens or tweens, and will happily give up their drugs after they're done with that - unless the drug manages to get them addicted or ruins their lives before they quit. By throwing different drugs like marihuana, crack and heroin all on the same heap, you apparently increase the chance of people getting on the more addictive or harmful stuff.
Thirdly, look at alcohol. Look at tobacco. Look at coffee. How addictive and harmful are those? How much trouble are they causing? How does that compare to illegal drugs, for example, marihuana, cocaine, ecstasy, LSD, heroin, and amphetamines? What about prescription drugs throughout the times (some that used to be legal have later become "legal if you have a prescription" and are now pretty much only used illegally anymore)? I think you will find that, all factors considered, the legal status of a drug has a measurable impact on the drug's impact on society. I can almost picture a statistician coming out and saying "making a drug illegal increases its harm to society by X at p = 0.01".
Fourthly, some drug problems are always going to develop, regardless of whether the substance is legal or illegal. I don't know what the best way to deal with this is. In the Netherlands, we give people treatment, put them in clinics and keep them there until they are no longer dependent on the drug, give them substitute drugs as part of a programme to get off the dependency, or even, in some cases, give them the actual substance they are addicted to. This obviously costs society money, and doesn't really solve the problem. There is a lot of relapse, as well. On the other hand, it might be cheaper than not doing it. As far as I know, there is very little drug-related violence in the Netherlands, and these programmes might well be a large factor in there. However, I don't know how this system performs compared to the many alternatives; for example, locking people up as per normal (that is, we would do the same if it weren't drug-related) when they have shown to be a risk to society, where drug addiction is simply considered a factor that increases the risk.
Just my 0.02, with regards from Amsterdam.
I think the MySQL project has been dead pretty much since Sun bought it. Pity, just as MySQL was growing up to become a real database. On the other hand, we have the code and the rights ... life goes on without the original project.
As for Java, it's already to entrenched to just let die. I am not sure about the licenses older versions of the JDK and JRE used to be distributed under (in particular, if Oracle could, if they wanted to, stop them from being used as they have been), but I am pretty sure that recent versions of the JRE and JDK are completely or almost completely under free software licenses, which means people can keep using them the way they have been doing.
Personally, I don't think either MySQL or Java are best-of-breed technologies, so I wouldn't be sad if Oracle's actions set people off on a search for better options, but there is no denying that both technologies are very widely used, and so the way this story unfolds is of interest to very many parties.
``Linux users Don't go to LAN parties, they're too busy compiling their favourite kernel.''
Oh come on, that's so old. I'm already halfway through figuring out how to compile glibc without it taking up hundreds of megabytes!
``It does seem odd to me that Microsoft would limit this functionality - whilst they obviously want a reason for people to pay for the full versions of Visual Studio, crippling 64 bit is surely going to harm adoption of 64 bit Windows, which can't be good for Microsoft.''
Actually, I've heard many complaints about 64-bit Windows. Perhaps less adoption of 64-bit Windows _is_ good for Microsoft ... or at least was when they released VS 2008.
``But it was a design decision, not a bug.''
Also, not telling whether they got the username correct or wrong is security 101.
This is yet another case of Facebook having done the wrong thing for their users' privacy, and correcting things only to lessen the negative publicity. It's not an accident.
``Frankly, if nothing else it will help America have some idea as to what is happening, and that there is a war going on.''
Exactly. Most I hear about the wars these days is how much money they are costing. As if that is the important thing. A video like that of the helicopter gunning down some civilians shows the tragedy of what's really happening there. To me, the real news is that people were actually upset about that. That sort of thing happens in wars. In fact, I would go so far as to say that, tragic as it was, it's not even nearly the worst you can expect. If only more people understood that, maybe there wouldn't be so many of these tragedies.
``people announce their intention to do something incredibly stupid.''
Hey, it would stink to try for a Darwin Award, only to have nobody recognize the attempt as such.
``Who watches the watchmen? Seriously.''
That's a good point. On the other hand, I'm very grateful to Wikileaks for publishing things they feel we ought to know but that aren't being published by anyone else. Perhaps if the government had offered more transparency in their dealings, nobody would have cared enough about the documents to publish them. Personally, I feel that if you can shock the world by publishing what the government does, the government is doing something wrong.
``A) This stuff should never have been secret, and anyone who would hide it is un-American
or
B) These secrets are property of the government, and anyone who would divulge them is un-American''
Personally, I think that if you think that "un-American" is a bad thing, you've already lost. I don't care if something or someone is American or not. What I care about is whether or not it's good for the world!
``While I'd agree that the implementation of "free speech zones" can be a bit ridiculous, and probably not always compliant with the notion of "free speech,", it is important to recognize that "freedom of speech" does not give you unlimited rights to say whatever you want, wherever you want, in whatever manner you want, whenever you want.''
I absolutely agree. There have been many discussions about free speech in the Netherlands where people were arguing about whether or not people should have the right to say hurtful things. Personally, I feel that the reason you want people to be allowed to speak their minds is that they might contribute something valuable and thus improve things for everyone, or at least on aggregate. Simply insulting people, setting people up against each other, or misleading people by saying things you know to be untrue, in my eyes, actually only makes things worse, so I see why you would want to limit those things. Leave the insults and hate speech at home, and bring us your brilliant insights and suggestions for improvement.
On the subject of free speech zones, though, the way I've heard about them being used doesn't suggest to me a benevolent desire to get valuable insights heard or to curb aggression, violence, or even drowning out other voices. If you're forcing dissenting voices to be where the rest of the population can't hear them, that's not keeping things civil, that's censorship. Doing that and calling such areas "free speech zones" is a farce. It's doublespeak at its finest.
Your points about it often being hard to figure out what people are actually campaigning for is well taken. I've wondered this with many protests, and also with more repulsive acts like wars and terrorist attacks. Sometimes I can't help but think that, if only people were clearer about what they wanted, we would all be happier. That actually works in many relationships, too.