No, you can't take your shoes off (at least in stores with cafe's, but probably others as well). Sleeping in the store is frowned on, but if you just dozed off while reading it's ok. A manager would probably only say something if you were asleep for a long time, or slept there frequently.
I was not talking about store policy, which are not generally visible to customers, but the expectation that a customer should have. The person I was responding to expected that the existence of the chair means something, I expect it to mean another. It doesn't really matter to me whose expectations match those of the store, because the store has a different set of values than either of us.
As you mentioned, despite official policy, you really shouldn't stay "as long as you wanted to", just as free refills at the soda fountain doesn't mean you and fifty friends can just buy one cup. At some (usually low) point businesses expect people to just be decent, but beyond that they do have to take action.
I also have a lot of experience as a customer of bookstore's of various sizes, and I've never seen one that discouraged people from just sitting and reading.
I respect your expertise. However, consider the soda fountain. In the suburbs, you generally get to fill your own cup and get a refill if you like. This is rarely the case once you enter the city. The point is, businesses do what they have to to adapt to the environment, and can't just be expected to swallow whatever their customers "need".
It is illegal, for example, to sell products below cost to drive competition out of business and then make up the losses by jacking up prices sky high.
"Not all agreements or arrangements that may have some restraint on trade are flatly prohibited. In fact, some agreements, such as arrangements with distributors for exclusive territories, agreements preventing former employees from competing or stealing business from their former employers,
loss leader pricing and other practices are usually reasonable and acceptable."
The problem you're looking for, in this case, is:
Product tying - Here, a seller with a popular product, or one of limited supply, refuses to sell it unless the buyer also buys another product that the buyer otherwise wouldn't purchase. Forcing a buyer to purchase the weak product is usually illegal.
Thus, the question is whether the iTMS sells something that nobody else can suitably replace. That may not be an easy thing to prove, given the existence of several other on-line stores, not to mention CDs. Unlike Microsoft, whose Windows OS is all but necessary in many cases for interoperability, the iTMS is much less so. If you don't want to buy an iPod, then there's really very little reason to want to (and no reason to have to) use the iTMS.
Now, in the profit plan that you cited, it's generally legal to gain market share by selling below cost. However, at some point of your competitors' weakening you would've established a monopoly position in the market. It is at that point where you must stop doing that.
Note that state laws may differ:
California's competition statutes go far beyond the limited competition
strictures of the Sherman and Clayton Acts, proscribing (for example)
the use of loss leaders and locality discrimination in ways that federal
antitrust laws do not address.
I don't have the numbers (as to how many of the "internal use" developers are free software contributors versus "for sale" developers) with which to argue, so I won't, and I simply acknowledge your excellent point.
However, copyright is the legal basis of the GPL, without which some software would not have been written. I'm not assuming that all authors of GPL software would not have just released into the public domain, but I can imagine a number of them enjoy retaining ownership of the code. Read a good technical book lately? Without copyright there would be a lot less of those.
Now add to that the developers who directly and indirectly (including "internal use" developers working for a printing press or record label) make a living under copyright protection, and we should have a sizable chunk to talk about.
Why can't any company come in, clean up with good products at cheap prices and STAY THAT WAY?
The answer lies in the eventual need to compete in the stock market for capital. To be competitive, you have to offer your immoral investors better returns than other companies. The reason I call them immoral is because, by and large, the stock market investors do not consider any other metric except money.
Thus, once you begin to need capital - which is inevitable if you want to grow - you have to play the game of maximizing profit. This is the insatiable greed you are talking about. In many industries, there's basically no way of getting the kind of money you need to compete without going public.
I don't have an answer to rudeness or selfish behavior. If I did, then this discussion wouldn't have to come up at all.
The point is, when a business provides extra service such as a nice couch or a power socket, each customer must develop an understanding of what sort of usage is fair to the provider. Because there are people who readily abuse every comfort and convenience, something will be done. Either is service is taken away for all, or some other device (think parking meter) is used to prevent abuse. I interpreted your "just fucking cope" comment to include none of these "countermeasures", which is why I suggested that abusers make it difficult or impossible to just cope.
You must notice that the closer you are to a City, the harder it is to find a bathroom you can borrow. Same deal. We can't just ask them to cope with the increased abuse.
It's funny how often people say this, in spite of the fact that people will and do create stuff for enjoyment without the incentive of money. What do you think Open Source is? There may or may not be more created with copyright - I'm not convinced that copyright is working in that regard.
The "creation of stuff for enjoyment without the incentive of money" is a luxury, often afforded by a comfortable day job writing commercial software protected by copyright. How many free software authors have to work two or three jobs to make ends meet?
Huh? MS was convicted as a monopoly for actions they did _before_ they were a monopoly. The special rules apply once you are a monopoly. The action of MS with some of their products before they were found guilty of being a monopoly are no different then the current actions of Apple now surrounding their iPod/iTMS.
Your understanding of related laws is poor. Nobody can be convicted of being a monopoly. It is entirely legal to be a monopoly, and a company usually becomes one before a lawsuit formally declares them as such.
In Microsoft's case, they were a monopoly (as the court later determined) while dealing with Netscape. As such, they were not allowed to do certain things, such as bundle products to leverage that monopoly (operating systems) in a different market (web browsers).
In this case, Apple can be found to have a monopoly in on-line music sales, and then found guilty to have abused that monopoly. But they cannot be punished for entirely anti-competitive practices (such as selling MacOS X only for Macintosh computers) where they don't have a monopoly, or before they got one. I repeat: anti-competitive practices (a favorite one is to sell a product below cost, called a "loss leader") are common and legal as long as you're not a monopoly at the time.
Put another way, a company must evaluate its own monopoly status (as a court might later find) and adjust its own behavior at any time, if it wants to stay clear in court.
It is very simple. Ask them nicely and politely to move along to allow another customer a seat. It works 99% of time without any complaint whatsoever.
It's not that simple. A lost sale may be as little as somebody walking by outside, taking a glance in, and seeing that there's no place to sit down, moving right on. It's weird to ask a customer to leave when this is all that is happening, and it's also something that service personnel don't necessarily like to do. The 1% may be rude to them, which is something nobody needs.
I must assume that the chain bookstores that put out comfy armchairs and sofas expect people to occupy them for a considerable time if they so desire.
I don't agree with your assumption at all. A bookstore makes its living through selling books, not letting you read the whole thing in the store. The chairs, I would assume, are there so you can sit down for a bit, not so you can take off your shoes and read through the entire novel without paying.
You mentioned the "NYC way", and so you may need to understand that the suburban areas have a slightly different culture. People don't like to be "rude", and would rather not ask customers to leave. This in turn works well if customers rein in their own behavior. It is in this world that abusers can take over a coffee shop or a bookstore.
Anti-competitive practices are not only legal, but common, as long as you're not a monopoly for whom special rules apply. Companies regularly sell products below cost, for example. That's illegal only if you're a monopoly.
So the first question must be, is Apple a monopoly in the particular market? Before that, as somebody else pointed out, we must answer if on-line music is a distinct market from the music market at large. Only when both answers are "yes" does the question of anti-competitive behavior even begin to matter.
The problem is one of abuse. A restaurant (or more likely, a coffee shop) has a limited number of seats and tables, and from that seating capacity it needs to make enough money to survive. Now, if "normal" customers buy a $3 coffee and stay 20 minutse, while a laptop-using customer buys the same coffee and stays 2 hours, they have a problem.
In fact, this is plainly obvious from any visiting any chain bookstore in my area. The tables are almost always taken up by people who are working or studying, some of them with books that are not even purchased. These customers are also generally oblivious to the fact that people are standing up waiting for a table. This prevents the shop from making money, because not having a place to sit down means another customer may not go in at all.
It doesn't take many abusive customers to consume all the seating you have, nevermind the electricity they consume. Recently I'm beginning to see not-so-friendly signs that say how long you can stay per drink. How do you propose they "fucking cope" with this? Institute cover charges like some bars?
They were captured in Afghanistan, at an Al Qaeda run training camp. These are members of a group that have sworn to destroy us, and they have fired on US Military and CIA. They are not innocent.
Oh?
"The US military admitted for the first time yesterday that one of the prisoners whom the Bush administration has held without charges for more than two years at Guantanamo Bay was never an Al Qaeda or Taliban fighter and should be immediately released from the interrogation camp"
- The Boston Globe
As of May 6, 2004, according to CNN, about 100 suspects had been released, with 600 still detained. In other words, the US military has an error margin of at least 1 in 7, assuming all 600 of the remaining ones are guilty. That's a terrible batting record when you're talking about indefinite imprisonment with no appeals.
Yes, it's unfortunate, but it's a reality that war is a terrible thing. And, while these terrorists are locked away at Gitmo, they aren't in Afghanistan training to hijack planes or shooting at the US Military.
I think you're missing the point, which is that if the only difference that we can think of between American pilots of WWII and terrorists today is the clothes that they happen to be wearing, we have a very big problem.
Except for the fact that he's an American citizen, while the savages locked away at Gitmo are not.
In your hatred, you have forgotten one crucial principle behind the US legal system: innocent until proven guilty. Yes, the people locked away in Cuba might be "savages" who deserve it, but that determination is made through due process. When it is not, then what you have may not be but is indistinguishable from locking away people arbitrarily.
The prison system at Gitmo holds people whose guilt are determined with no formal proceedings by the US military. They are held indefinitely and (before much protests) without any possibility of appeal. The administration of the prison is basically not examined by any third party or even another US government branch. For a country that rightly prides itself in a system of checks and balances, Gitmo is an embarrassment and a danger to US reputation. The US governmental system is designed to not trust any single person or agency, and that has worked very well.
The US Constitution applies to US Citizens ONLY. Foreign nationals are granted NO constitutional protections, unless they become US Citizens.
You are plainly wrong. Foreign nationals generally enjoy the same legal protections as US citizens when on US soil. That's why the so-called illegal combatants had to be sent to Cuba to skirt this. If you were right, then you can sue any foreigner in the US and win by default, and the cops could lock up foreigners for any reason for any length of time.
If the terrorists want to be treated as POW's under Geneva, then fine - just as soon as they start identifying themselves with some form of uniform or mark
Terrorism as a strategy evolves from the inability to fight a superior power head-on, so people who resort to terrorism are unlikely to revert to "civilized" nation-to-nation warfare that is common to recorded history.
During WWII American pilots dropped incendiary bombs on various cities, and caused deaths of enemy civilians in the hundreds of thousands at a time. They did so in uniform. I'm not calling them war criminals at all, but I want to point out that we do want to be very careful what we designate as "civilized" war and otherwise. Judged by today's standards (which includes much better technology to possibly win a war without killing so many), those actions might be considered war crimes. It is therefore folly to think that the definition of civilized behavior is immobile, and in part that definition has usually considered the actual ability of a party at war.
The main problem is, terrorism isn't going away, and as even Bush had admitted, the war on "terror" as a concept may never be won. It is better to find a real way to deal with captured terrorists, rather than hide in the legal limbo between US law and the Geneva Convention.
Are you saying that the US government can tax everybody?
The US government taxes everybody who lives in the US, whether or not they are citizens (even illegal aliens pay sales tax). Since the legal basis of anything the US government is permitted to do is derived from the US Constitution, then this part of the US Constitution does certainly apply to certain non-citizens. Similarly, even non-citizens in the US generally enjoy the protection of the Bill of Rights.
Needless to say, there are bits that apply only to citizens.
I am pretty anal about where I put my files, yet over the years those habits and preferences do change. Thus, I might've used 'personal' in 1995 and 'prj' in 2000 to refer to personal projects. Whenever I switch machines, I don't always have the patience to restore everything (particularly stuff like archived email) from the old machine in the right places, especially if it's something as major as a Windows to Linux switch. Instead, the old stuff live in a tgz file somewhere.
Would I ever need to search old email? Probably. Do I want to remember where every single email program I've ever used stores its mailbox files? Hell, no. If done right, these search tools can be really handy.
Most often a simple flow chart is quicker to make and more useful for this purpose.
Then, all respect due, your projects are too simple. Flowcharts cannot represent state, communication between objects, threads, or a number of other entirely necessary concepts. A flowchart has trouble representing anything much more complex than a Unix-style command-line application.
Also, if you find that a particular diagram or description style survives requirement changes better than another, it's likely because it was vague to begin with. Design, just like code, is supposed to be specific enough to not survive requirement changes unscathed. Good designs allow you to fulfill the new requirements with fewer or more localized changes, but one that doesn't need to change was not a good design at all. Think about it: you could've implemented either version and still satisfied the design!
This is exactly the trap most UML users fall into, which is why I avoid UML like the plague. Design and document as you code.
Just because design cannot fully predict every detail and requirement change doesn't mean that the opposite extreme is better. The problem with your suggestion is that when working in a team, there are design changes that you simply cannot make without breaking somebody else's code and assumptions. So clearly, design cannot be entirely static after some "begin coding" day, nor can it be entirely fluid until the "burn master CD-ROM" day. The answer must be somewhere in the middle, depending on how fluid your requirements are expected to be, and other factors. Custom software with requirements in contract form and change penalties are less likely to change, for example, and may benefit from more up-front design.
Even if you don't subscribe to the formal methods that UML often comes with, there's still value in adopting UML the language. Too often, documentation are built with custom symbols, terminology, and styles that are neither comprehensive nor easily understood. What UML brings are standard classes of diagrams (so that you know what kinds of documentation you might be missing) as well as standard symbols for describing them. At worst, using UML symbols will be no worse than inventing your own.
The holy grail of these methods is to merge design and documentation into a single entity, from which code can be automatically generated. This guarantees that the documentation matches the design and the code. There is no assumption that the design must be static, so I don't know where you get that impression.
I'm no fan of Microsoft, and I know you're joking, but Word under Windows 95 was running significantly faster than just X (no apps yet) on top of Linux. This was around 1996, on a 486/66 with 8 MB of RAM. I haven't used OpenOffice in a long while, but over the seven or eight years that I dual-booted, every version I used was much slower and less stable (nevermind compatibility) compared to Word on the same dual-booting machine. On my sub-GHz laptop today, Word 2000 runs just fine.
You could hate Microsoft for many of its practices, but you underestimate their technical prowess at your own peril. Windows 2000 and XP are very stable operating systems, and Word really is a pretty competent app. Can they do better? Absolutely. Is it bloated with unnecessary features? Probably. Is it slow? No, it's quite usable, and it's always been quite usable.
If she wins that battle, and then starts arguing for further changes, who is going to trust her ? After all, she has just demonstrated that whatever compromises and deals people might do with her, she simply uses as springboard for further conquests.
This isn't about one side giving in to the other. The free software community and the public at large are not at war or even in competition. This is about using the right words to communicate, so that it's easier to find common ground.
Coming back to the feminist-patriarch analogy, this isn't about the patriarch giving way, but about the two finding common ground even while still harboring fundamental differences. One side might think women exist to serve men, the other might think women must be equal, but they can in fact agree to send the girl to school anyway. Neither side has given way; they have merely found within their own beliefs a course of action that both can agree on.
Extremists are neccessary, since they define the extreme opposites of the field, allowing the common people know where the middle ground is.
Nobody said they should cease to exist. Just that we don't have to use the terminology they insist on.
Just plain "Open sourced software" could even refer to WinNT, now that it's code has been leaked...
Pick a better example. WinNT is open source the same way a stolen stereo is free.
The point being that it might be nigh impossible to dumb down a complex issue in a way that both keeps the message intact and explains why this issue is so important.
Sure, but why does the issue have to be explained in full right now, when people have zero understanding of it? Why can't they be educated on the benefits of open source first, then on the benefits of free software next? It's not as if the two are mutually exclusive.
Since you brought up Christianity, imagine if a missionary steps into a totally foreign village and begins to explain some of the obscure Church rulings. People listen only to what they care about, so at every point in time the advocate must understand what people care about, and speak to that need while leading towards the point of the advocacy.
Re:Cool idea but may be dangerous
on
Bayesian Tail
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The far more important difference is that we cannot control the generation of incoming email, which is why we are reduced to filtering as intelligently as possible.
Server logs are not the same at all. The administrator has some control over the logs that get generated, and the programmer has full control. There isn't supposed to be the equivalent of email spam at all, because useless messages should just be filtered or redirected at the source. Leaving everything at "verbose" and relying on filtering just doesn't seem like the right approach to the problem.
It is a cute idea, though, and probably applicable to some specific cases (no source code, etc).
There's no excuse for throwing caution to the wind. What I'm saying is that there's no reason to move halfway across the world thinking that you'll avoid a natural disaster.
But there are different kinds of natural disasters, some with little or no warning time (earthquakes, etc), some with days worth of warning time (storms, etc). If a person has the mobility, then moving somewhere else is in fact a prudent decision.
Just like avoiding certain chemicals, or looking both ways before crossing the street. It's always a cost versus benefit decision, and people who can afford it care less about the cost.
But the problem is it only works once, so it is not good for terrorism per se.
Hijacking planes and crashing them into buildings is also unlikely to work over and over again. In fact, it seems that it already failed the fourth time they tried. I don't think they would consider this a "problem".
Just because you can't anticipate every catastrophe doesn't mean we shouldn't plan for the ones we can predict and avoid. In many cases, the preparations are the same: designated relief shelters, stockpiled medical and food supplies, evacuation procedures, etc. Our response to just about every natural disaster is to get out of the way, so the same plan may work just as well whether it's a tsunami or a meteor.
If for example, processor makers started guaging their performance in MIPS (or BIPS) or something, it would make more sense I guess.
It would make about as little sense. On many CPUs (particularly the CISC CPUs), instructions take wildly different amounts of time to complete. A NOP might complete in one clock cycle, while an obscure legacy instruction might take twenty.
Running only NOPs, the CPU would be 1 BIPS if driven at 1 GHz. Running the other instruction, it'd be 50 MIPS. Somewhere in the middle would be the truth.
The fact is, it is next to impossible to accurately digest CPU performance down to a single number that can be comparable across architectures and across the variety of actual usage. Even something as obvious as instruction cache size has a different real world effect depending on the sizes of your instructions!
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I was not talking about store policy, which are not generally visible to customers, but the expectation that a customer should have. The person I was responding to expected that the existence of the chair means something, I expect it to mean another. It doesn't really matter to me whose expectations match those of the store, because the store has a different set of values than either of us.
As you mentioned, despite official policy, you really shouldn't stay "as long as you wanted to", just as free refills at the soda fountain doesn't mean you and fifty friends can just buy one cup. At some (usually low) point businesses expect people to just be decent, but beyond that they do have to take action.
I also have a lot of experience as a customer of bookstore's of various sizes, and I've never seen one that discouraged people from just sitting and reading.
I respect your expertise. However, consider the soda fountain. In the suburbs, you generally get to fill your own cup and get a refill if you like. This is rarely the case once you enter the city. The point is, businesses do what they have to to adapt to the environment, and can't just be expected to swallow whatever their customers "need".
The problem you're looking for, in this case, is:
Thus, the question is whether the iTMS sells something that nobody else can suitably replace. That may not be an easy thing to prove, given the existence of several other on-line stores, not to mention CDs. Unlike Microsoft, whose Windows OS is all but necessary in many cases for interoperability, the iTMS is much less so. If you don't want to buy an iPod, then there's really very little reason to want to (and no reason to have to) use the iTMS.
Now, in the profit plan that you cited, it's generally legal to gain market share by selling below cost. However, at some point of your competitors' weakening you would've established a monopoly position in the market. It is at that point where you must stop doing that.
Note that state laws may differ:
Sources: lectlaw.com and smartagreements.com
However, copyright is the legal basis of the GPL, without which some software would not have been written. I'm not assuming that all authors of GPL software would not have just released into the public domain, but I can imagine a number of them enjoy retaining ownership of the code. Read a good technical book lately? Without copyright there would be a lot less of those.
Now add to that the developers who directly and indirectly (including "internal use" developers working for a printing press or record label) make a living under copyright protection, and we should have a sizable chunk to talk about.
The answer lies in the eventual need to compete in the stock market for capital. To be competitive, you have to offer your immoral investors better returns than other companies. The reason I call them immoral is because, by and large, the stock market investors do not consider any other metric except money.
Thus, once you begin to need capital - which is inevitable if you want to grow - you have to play the game of maximizing profit. This is the insatiable greed you are talking about. In many industries, there's basically no way of getting the kind of money you need to compete without going public.
The point is, when a business provides extra service such as a nice couch or a power socket, each customer must develop an understanding of what sort of usage is fair to the provider. Because there are people who readily abuse every comfort and convenience, something will be done. Either is service is taken away for all, or some other device (think parking meter) is used to prevent abuse. I interpreted your "just fucking cope" comment to include none of these "countermeasures", which is why I suggested that abusers make it difficult or impossible to just cope.
You must notice that the closer you are to a City, the harder it is to find a bathroom you can borrow. Same deal. We can't just ask them to cope with the increased abuse.
The "creation of stuff for enjoyment without the incentive of money" is a luxury, often afforded by a comfortable day job writing commercial software protected by copyright. How many free software authors have to work two or three jobs to make ends meet?
Your understanding of related laws is poor. Nobody can be convicted of being a monopoly. It is entirely legal to be a monopoly, and a company usually becomes one before a lawsuit formally declares them as such.
In Microsoft's case, they were a monopoly (as the court later determined) while dealing with Netscape. As such, they were not allowed to do certain things, such as bundle products to leverage that monopoly (operating systems) in a different market (web browsers).
In this case, Apple can be found to have a monopoly in on-line music sales, and then found guilty to have abused that monopoly. But they cannot be punished for entirely anti-competitive practices (such as selling MacOS X only for Macintosh computers) where they don't have a monopoly, or before they got one. I repeat: anti-competitive practices (a favorite one is to sell a product below cost, called a "loss leader") are common and legal as long as you're not a monopoly at the time.
Put another way, a company must evaluate its own monopoly status (as a court might later find) and adjust its own behavior at any time, if it wants to stay clear in court.
It's not that simple. A lost sale may be as little as somebody walking by outside, taking a glance in, and seeing that there's no place to sit down, moving right on. It's weird to ask a customer to leave when this is all that is happening, and it's also something that service personnel don't necessarily like to do. The 1% may be rude to them, which is something nobody needs.
I must assume that the chain bookstores that put out comfy armchairs and sofas expect people to occupy them for a considerable time if they so desire.
I don't agree with your assumption at all. A bookstore makes its living through selling books, not letting you read the whole thing in the store. The chairs, I would assume, are there so you can sit down for a bit, not so you can take off your shoes and read through the entire novel without paying.
You mentioned the "NYC way", and so you may need to understand that the suburban areas have a slightly different culture. People don't like to be "rude", and would rather not ask customers to leave. This in turn works well if customers rein in their own behavior. It is in this world that abusers can take over a coffee shop or a bookstore.
So the first question must be, is Apple a monopoly in the particular market? Before that, as somebody else pointed out, we must answer if on-line music is a distinct market from the music market at large. Only when both answers are "yes" does the question of anti-competitive behavior even begin to matter.
Now consider the lost business because people passing by outside see that you're full, and go some place else.
In fact, this is plainly obvious from any visiting any chain bookstore in my area. The tables are almost always taken up by people who are working or studying, some of them with books that are not even purchased. These customers are also generally oblivious to the fact that people are standing up waiting for a table. This prevents the shop from making money, because not having a place to sit down means another customer may not go in at all.
It doesn't take many abusive customers to consume all the seating you have, nevermind the electricity they consume. Recently I'm beginning to see not-so-friendly signs that say how long you can stay per drink. How do you propose they "fucking cope" with this? Institute cover charges like some bars?
Oh?
As of May 6, 2004, according to CNN, about 100 suspects had been released, with 600 still detained. In other words, the US military has an error margin of at least 1 in 7, assuming all 600 of the remaining ones are guilty. That's a terrible batting record when you're talking about indefinite imprisonment with no appeals.Yes, it's unfortunate, but it's a reality that war is a terrible thing. And, while these terrorists are locked away at Gitmo, they aren't in Afghanistan training to hijack planes or shooting at the US Military.
I think you're missing the point, which is that if the only difference that we can think of between American pilots of WWII and terrorists today is the clothes that they happen to be wearing, we have a very big problem.
In your hatred, you have forgotten one crucial principle behind the US legal system: innocent until proven guilty. Yes, the people locked away in Cuba might be "savages" who deserve it, but that determination is made through due process. When it is not, then what you have may not be but is indistinguishable from locking away people arbitrarily.
The prison system at Gitmo holds people whose guilt are determined with no formal proceedings by the US military. They are held indefinitely and (before much protests) without any possibility of appeal. The administration of the prison is basically not examined by any third party or even another US government branch. For a country that rightly prides itself in a system of checks and balances, Gitmo is an embarrassment and a danger to US reputation. The US governmental system is designed to not trust any single person or agency, and that has worked very well.
The US Constitution applies to US Citizens ONLY. Foreign nationals are granted NO constitutional protections, unless they become US Citizens.
You are plainly wrong. Foreign nationals generally enjoy the same legal protections as US citizens when on US soil. That's why the so-called illegal combatants had to be sent to Cuba to skirt this. If you were right, then you can sue any foreigner in the US and win by default, and the cops could lock up foreigners for any reason for any length of time.
If the terrorists want to be treated as POW's under Geneva, then fine - just as soon as they start identifying themselves with some form of uniform or mark
Terrorism as a strategy evolves from the inability to fight a superior power head-on, so people who resort to terrorism are unlikely to revert to "civilized" nation-to-nation warfare that is common to recorded history.
During WWII American pilots dropped incendiary bombs on various cities, and caused deaths of enemy civilians in the hundreds of thousands at a time. They did so in uniform. I'm not calling them war criminals at all, but I want to point out that we do want to be very careful what we designate as "civilized" war and otherwise. Judged by today's standards (which includes much better technology to possibly win a war without killing so many), those actions might be considered war crimes. It is therefore folly to think that the definition of civilized behavior is immobile, and in part that definition has usually considered the actual ability of a party at war.
The main problem is, terrorism isn't going away, and as even Bush had admitted, the war on "terror" as a concept may never be won. It is better to find a real way to deal with captured terrorists, rather than hide in the legal limbo between US law and the Geneva Convention.
The US government taxes everybody who lives in the US, whether or not they are citizens (even illegal aliens pay sales tax). Since the legal basis of anything the US government is permitted to do is derived from the US Constitution, then this part of the US Constitution does certainly apply to certain non-citizens. Similarly, even non-citizens in the US generally enjoy the protection of the Bill of Rights.
Needless to say, there are bits that apply only to citizens.
Would I ever need to search old email? Probably. Do I want to remember where every single email program I've ever used stores its mailbox files? Hell, no. If done right, these search tools can be really handy.
Then, all respect due, your projects are too simple. Flowcharts cannot represent state, communication between objects, threads, or a number of other entirely necessary concepts. A flowchart has trouble representing anything much more complex than a Unix-style command-line application.
Also, if you find that a particular diagram or description style survives requirement changes better than another, it's likely because it was vague to begin with. Design, just like code, is supposed to be specific enough to not survive requirement changes unscathed. Good designs allow you to fulfill the new requirements with fewer or more localized changes, but one that doesn't need to change was not a good design at all. Think about it: you could've implemented either version and still satisfied the design!
Just because design cannot fully predict every detail and requirement change doesn't mean that the opposite extreme is better. The problem with your suggestion is that when working in a team, there are design changes that you simply cannot make without breaking somebody else's code and assumptions. So clearly, design cannot be entirely static after some "begin coding" day, nor can it be entirely fluid until the "burn master CD-ROM" day. The answer must be somewhere in the middle, depending on how fluid your requirements are expected to be, and other factors. Custom software with requirements in contract form and change penalties are less likely to change, for example, and may benefit from more up-front design.
Even if you don't subscribe to the formal methods that UML often comes with, there's still value in adopting UML the language. Too often, documentation are built with custom symbols, terminology, and styles that are neither comprehensive nor easily understood. What UML brings are standard classes of diagrams (so that you know what kinds of documentation you might be missing) as well as standard symbols for describing them. At worst, using UML symbols will be no worse than inventing your own.
The holy grail of these methods is to merge design and documentation into a single entity, from which code can be automatically generated. This guarantees that the documentation matches the design and the code. There is no assumption that the design must be static, so I don't know where you get that impression.
You could hate Microsoft for many of its practices, but you underestimate their technical prowess at your own peril. Windows 2000 and XP are very stable operating systems, and Word really is a pretty competent app. Can they do better? Absolutely. Is it bloated with unnecessary features? Probably. Is it slow? No, it's quite usable, and it's always been quite usable.
This isn't about one side giving in to the other. The free software community and the public at large are not at war or even in competition. This is about using the right words to communicate, so that it's easier to find common ground.
Coming back to the feminist-patriarch analogy, this isn't about the patriarch giving way, but about the two finding common ground even while still harboring fundamental differences. One side might think women exist to serve men, the other might think women must be equal, but they can in fact agree to send the girl to school anyway. Neither side has given way; they have merely found within their own beliefs a course of action that both can agree on.
Extremists are neccessary, since they define the extreme opposites of the field, allowing the common people know where the middle ground is.
Nobody said they should cease to exist. Just that we don't have to use the terminology they insist on.
Just plain "Open sourced software" could even refer to WinNT, now that it's code has been leaked...
Pick a better example. WinNT is open source the same way a stolen stereo is free.
The point being that it might be nigh impossible to dumb down a complex issue in a way that both keeps the message intact and explains why this issue is so important.
Sure, but why does the issue have to be explained in full right now, when people have zero understanding of it? Why can't they be educated on the benefits of open source first, then on the benefits of free software next? It's not as if the two are mutually exclusive.
Since you brought up Christianity, imagine if a missionary steps into a totally foreign village and begins to explain some of the obscure Church rulings. People listen only to what they care about, so at every point in time the advocate must understand what people care about, and speak to that need while leading towards the point of the advocacy.
Server logs are not the same at all. The administrator has some control over the logs that get generated, and the programmer has full control. There isn't supposed to be the equivalent of email spam at all, because useless messages should just be filtered or redirected at the source. Leaving everything at "verbose" and relying on filtering just doesn't seem like the right approach to the problem.
It is a cute idea, though, and probably applicable to some specific cases (no source code, etc).
But there are different kinds of natural disasters, some with little or no warning time (earthquakes, etc), some with days worth of warning time (storms, etc). If a person has the mobility, then moving somewhere else is in fact a prudent decision.
Just like avoiding certain chemicals, or looking both ways before crossing the street. It's always a cost versus benefit decision, and people who can afford it care less about the cost.
Hijacking planes and crashing them into buildings is also unlikely to work over and over again. In fact, it seems that it already failed the fourth time they tried. I don't think they would consider this a "problem".
Perhaps, but I still look both ways before I cross the street. I presume you don't.
Just because you can't anticipate every catastrophe doesn't mean we shouldn't plan for the ones we can predict and avoid. In many cases, the preparations are the same: designated relief shelters, stockpiled medical and food supplies, evacuation procedures, etc. Our response to just about every natural disaster is to get out of the way, so the same plan may work just as well whether it's a tsunami or a meteor.
It would make about as little sense. On many CPUs (particularly the CISC CPUs), instructions take wildly different amounts of time to complete. A NOP might complete in one clock cycle, while an obscure legacy instruction might take twenty. Running only NOPs, the CPU would be 1 BIPS if driven at 1 GHz. Running the other instruction, it'd be 50 MIPS. Somewhere in the middle would be the truth.
The fact is, it is next to impossible to accurately digest CPU performance down to a single number that can be comparable across architectures and across the variety of actual usage. Even something as obvious as instruction cache size has a different real world effect depending on the sizes of your instructions!