I don't know about science, but Deep Impact was much more interesting from a sociological point of view. It really wasn't about blowing up the meteor with as many special effects as possible, like Armageddon. It was about telling the world "In a few months, you're all going to be dead" and then watching how people react. And it was very well done.
And what about the self-healing capabilities of the human body? Fall over and graze that mechanical leg, and you have to go in for repairs. Minor damage will accumulate in ways that it doesn't on the human leg. Or the degree of tactile sensation you can get from human fingertips? You'll have to hook it up to the receivers in the brain, and develop very sophisticated sensors to emulate that. Then there's the fact that this prosthetic leg is likely to be heavier than your natural leg, and not have the same physical properties - walking on one might be find, but try running and you're balance will be thrown off by the weight difference. And don't even think about going swimming - it's not bouyed to the same degree as the rest of your body, you're headed straight to the bottom. And glucose is unlikely to as efficient in powering a mechanical arm than a biological one, and there's no guarantee that the body will deliver the amount of glucose it needs to this foreign body; if you consume enough glucose to power your arm, your body may well store too much of it, inhibit insulin production and make you obese. In that case, your stuck with inserting the insulin directly into the arm, which really isn't much better than a really inefficient battery. What about the latency in translating signals from the brain into a form understood by your mechanical arm - are you going to have lag whenever you try and move it? Heat generation, is it going to produce more or less than your normal arm? Will you be able to keep yourself warm by wrapping it around you, or will it generate more heat and be uncomfortably warm in the height of summer?
The human body is a very, very complex system, with a whole bunch of intertwined mechanisms, few of which we understand completely, and some of which are total mysteries. Suggesting that lopping off a limb and slapping on a mechanical replacement (that is not only functionally equivelant, but will not throw off any of the body's other systems, including the ones we don't understand) is relatively easy is ludicrous.
Building on what you said: the whole basis of a patent is that of a trade. The public gives the inventory a time-limited monopoly, the inventor tells the public how his invention works. The reason this is a good deal for the public is the non-obvious clause. Patents are designed to protect things that nobody else can figure out how to do. If someone can look at your invention and think "Eh, I know how to do that", then your invention is not worthy of patent - the public would be getting a bad deal, because they're trading a monopoly for something they already know. Patents are designed so that when someone invents something really cool, he doesn't keep it as a trade secret. If he does, and he dies, then the world loses knowledge. If he patents it, then everyone knows how to do it (even if they can't use it for another ten years) and knowledge is retained. That is how patents can (and should) act towards the good. The problem now is that the USPTO is betraying their purpose by making crappy deals on behalf of the public. They're giving away monopolies like candy, and reaping the kickbacks (errr, I mean processing fees).
Linus' leadership had nothing to do with making the GNU tools "happen". They happened all by themselves, and had happened before Linux was developed. What Linux did is actually give them a platform to be used on; before Linux they were really just open-source versions of stuff that other OSes often already had. Without Linux, the GNU tools were superfluous. Without the GNU tools, Linux was just a barebones kernel; you need tools to actually do anything useful with it.
That said, I think the constant attempt to change an already-entrenched name is futile. I can understand why someone would get irritated when people in ignorance assign all the hardwork they did to someone else.
I'm not sure exactly why steps 2 and 3 need to be in there. I mean, all your terminals are doing is producing the ballot paper, they're not doing any of the counting themselves (correct me if I'm wrong). So if they try and rig the election, it's going to be bloody obvious to anyone using the terminals: "Hey, I voted for Joe Blogs, but the computer ticked Jane Doe". I'd say that sort of paranoia should be more appropriately levelled at the machines doing the counting, where it's also feasible, as there would be fewer of those machines doing the counting, and they wouldn't have to be publically accessible. Just my thoughts.
The problem is that the banks aren't taking appropriate steps to identify the customer before handing over the customer's money.
You really think so?
When the customer takes reasonable steps to protect their information and follows the banks security procedures they are not responsible for loss.
I don't know about you, but I would consider "check the URL" and "look for SSL encryption" before handing over the keys to your account fairly rudimentary parts of any banks security procedures. A meatspace equivelant of this would be handing over your credit card to some random stranger, and giving him the PIN. The bank shouldn't cough up for that either, because the root cause of your loss is you being a freaking idiot. It all comes down to what your definition of "reasonable controls" are, and I'd argue that pretty much any controls placed on web-access can be circumvented by phishers. It's like trying to invent an encryption method that remains secure even if someone else knows the encryption keys.
Agreed, I live in Melbourne and my blood ran cold this morning when I spotted a white station wagon with "Diebold" written down the side in big blue letters.
Probably servicing ATMs - quite a number of big Aussie banks use Diebold machines.
Please tell me you guys are NOT using diebold machines.
Still hand-counting. At least, we were last election. I did hear that there was some work going on on a system like which I mentioned above (open-source, generates a paper-trail) here at some stage, but I heard that here on Slashdot, so take it with a grain of salt.
I'm from Australia; we do. In fact, I'm one of the polling officials who does the counting. However, with our recent elections, there have been heaps of candidates and the ballot papers have been huge (like say 2xA3 sheets joined together). There are also a tonne of informal ballots, both deliberate ones, and ones where people just haven't understood the voting procedure, and have failed to make their preference clear. Computer voting could reduce this. Because the generated ticket wouldn't have to have all the options, just the candidate(s) that were voted for, that would shrink the currently-cumbersome ballot paper considerably. Because the computer screen could offer online help, and would not accept informal votes, that problem would be reduced too. A computer system is pretty flexible as well, and you could offer multiple interfaces (text-to-speech, for example) for those with disabilities, and present ballot papers and instructions in multiple languages. There are a lot of reasons to use a good computer system for voting, with the emphasis on the "good".
The sort of system that most people here promote is source-philosophy agnostic. A voting machine that generates a slip that is both human-readable, and compuer-readable is the obvious solution. Even if someone hacks the software, anyone glancing at the slip can tell that the computer has marked the wrong square - open or closed source, bugs and exploits would be easy to detect in that system. Running a computer re-count would be easy. Running a human re-count would be easy. There is total transparency throughout the process.
Open Source may not be the answer, but maintaining an Open Process is. And Diebold doesn't do it.
A kid playing soccer might eventually become as skilled as Beckham, or at least come close. There is room in the game of soccer for individual skill. 20 years ago, a programmer could write a state-of-the-art game solo, and you probably couldn't tell it from commercial offerings (as they were probably developed in the same fashion). There was room in the industry for an individual to shine.
Nowadays, however, the state of the art has progressed, and commercial games are developed using teams of 30+ people of various skills, from graphic artist to musician to programmer, and budgets of millions of dollars. An individual just can't compete against that. A kid playing soccer might one day play like Beckham; a kid tapping away on his computer will never be able to recreate Doom 3. It's just not possible. There is no room in the modern game industry for the individual at that level. Game designers might be celebrated, but not game programmers. Programmers are just one cog in the machine, and an easily replaced one at that. Kids want to dream of being a hero, not a cog.
If you are capable of learning on your own, then why attend college in the first place?
Because knowledge at a college/university is often more accessible (knowledgable professors, extensive libraries, etc) and because you want to get your knowledge certified (the degree).
I spent 5 years at university doing two degrees. For the most part, the computer subjects were useful getting over the initial "hump" when learning about a subject. I actually learnt more from tinkering on my own, but the formal learning at university helped me get the basics down pat quicker. As I neared the end of the course, there were a number of lectures that I just didn't attend; the hour-long lecture that would have taken 3 hours in travel to get to and from, for example, or the one done by an asian lady with a sound grasp of her topic, but not of English. In those cases I bought the textbook, read the notes, tinkered on my machine at home, and passed the course.
After my first three years, I could probably have learnt a lot of the remainder of the course from home. It would have been slower, and required more willpower on my part, but I probably could have. But if I'd rocked up to a prospective employer and said "I don't actually have a degree, but I know all the same stuff", my chances of employment compared to graduate would be nil. Teaching is only a part of a university's role and, sadly, in many cases it seems the least important. Most people I know went to university to improve their job prospects through a degree, rather than because they were interested in learning about a given subject. The goal was the degree, the education was just a side-effect.
To be fair, Java was not originally created for applets; the idea behind it was for embedded applications. It just so happened that nobody really wanted it for embedded applications, and the web just started to boom at the right time for applets to catch on. Sun didn't intentionally create it for applet authors, they're just the first people who picked it up.
for Open Source and community driven projects Java should never be considered.
Open Source folks will generally write in a language they're familiar with. For a lot of people, that's Java. I agree with you that the JVM is unnecessary complication in most situations, but the language itself is nice, with a large, cohesive, well-documented class library. Purely on a language basis, I prefer Java to C/C++. A lot of the time when I'm developing something for myself, I'm doing it more for the chance to muck around than to get a lean, mean, performing machine. But the Azureus folks probably wanted to fool around and see what they could to with the bittorrent protocol, and because they knew java, that's what they used. In that scenarior, efficiency and performance were never goals, so they were never factored in to the choice of language.
Let alone that if Sun goes bust (or decides to kill the platform) your project is esentially doomed. Both are very unlikely scenarios, but not impossible.
Nah. Even if development on Java was totally halted, existing Java programs would run fine. Even if distribution of Sun's JVM was halted, it's installed on many computers already (and I believe it's licence allows it to be redistributed with your program?). Even if Sun goes belly-up, there's no reason for Java to die.
I will dispute their statement about pigeons though. I recall watching or reading something where the scientists put trackers on homing pigeons to discover how they found their way around. Turns out they follow landmarks. The pigeons often took indirect routes, because they were following a road. The scientists didn't figure this out even after they realized the paths were very odd... it didn't click until someone looked at a road map.
One doesn't disprove the other. Just because they navigate using landmarks doesn't mean they don't also have a magnetic sense - it could be that navigating using landmarks is easier than "following their nose", or it could be it's not strong enough to be reliable, but good enough as a last ditch thing.
I haven't known of anyone having to take a loan to get their children married in the "good ol' days". But today, getting children married requires taking a loan.
I think you're confusing "getting married" with "putting on a wedding". Unless your daughter is butt-ugly and you're forking out big dollars to buy her a hubby or something.
The problem is vague headlines, a carryover from newspapers where there was limited room for a headline; they tend to drop words that don't carry lots of meaning. In this case, the full headline should be "Conflicting Goals Create Tension in an OSS Community". You have interpreted it to mean "Conflicting Goals Create Tension in the OSS Community"; the headline leaves both interpretations open. They're designed as a draw to read the article, which prevents the real facts, not to actually prevent facts themselves. Incidentally, it's also a reason to avoid net speak. In a similar way to headlines, net speak simplifies the language to the point where the one sentance can easily lend itself to multiple interpretations, which could have been avoided by using the full language rather than a simplified sub-set.
see no reason to give websites slack thinking they could get away with blatantly not caring and being discriminatory if they are open to the public.
They are not being discrinatory. "Discrimintaion" means that you treat people differently based on a certain set of factors. These websites don't treat handicapped people different to anyone else - everyone gets served up with the same set of code. The only problem is that handicapped people can't use it. Which, with all respect to them, is their problem.
Some handicapped people can't drive a regular car either. But instead of suing auto manufacturers to force them to build handicapped-friendly car, they created a niche market that created/customized cars without foot controls. The people who benefit from those cars pay for them.
Years ago, public utilities made regular coal plants, bun coal, generate electricity with steam boilers and turbines, thick black smoke goesd off into the sky, shareholders make "profit", customers get electricity-but everyone got to breathe some rather toxic stuff.
Unlike a website, air is a shared resource, and the companies didn't have any right to pollute it. Whereas a corporate website is created, developed and supported by the company that creates it. It doesn't chew up any shared resources, and it doesn't cost the public anything at all, so the public really shouldn't have a say about what goes on it.
Oh, as to the boycotts and whatnot-you don't understand. Not only boycotts being made illegal for a time, they were just a *reflection* of the ingrained institutionalised racism and "apartness" that lead to private violence
Exactly. At that time, racism was insitutionalised - i.e Government-endorsed. When the government passes racist laws, that encourages racist behaviour in general. I'm not saying the government should do anything of the sort. Government services should be accessible to all; government officials should treat all citizens the same, regardless of race. But I don't think the government has any authority to compel you to do business with someone you don't want to do business with. If you choose not to do business with a certain race, that's your choice; a stupid one, because you're cutting out a large section of your market arbitrarily, but it's still your choice.
The point of these laws is to ensure that accessibility is the financial problem of the only people who can do anything about it
The problem is two-fold:
It makes it the problem of people who reap no benefit from it.
The way it's been introduced - by way of a tangential interpretation of an old law - means that people who built sites in good faith are suddenly liable.
If they introduced legislation saying that all commercial sites produced in the future needed to have a certain level of accessibility (defined by a set standard) then that would be one thing. But the way it is now, if this decision is upheld, then any existing corporate site that isn't accessible is liable - even though it was not illegal to have non-accessible sites when they were built.
You mean a boycott? I remember when advocating an economic boycott because a business wouldn't cater to blacks was illegal, and those people got arrested. I mean I personally remember it as an old civil rights worker would remember it. I remember seeing a sign at a city boundary, welcome to xxxxville, with the signs -> kiwanis, moose, elks, no niggers allowed. Yes. for real,. saw that. That's what happens once you go that "who cares it's my business" way.
Which is absolutely irrelevant to the point at hand; I wasn't advocating discrimination by the government (arresting people who suggest boycotts, forbidding blacks from the town limits). That's not an outgrowth of "who cares it's my business", that's an outgrowth of government-endorsed racism, which is pretty much gone now (government-endorsed racism, not racism in general).
In your private life, if all you want to do is hang out with left handed lutheran latvians-go ahead. If you operate a public business-be prepared to be open to the public-to people, any old people.
So once you open a storefront, your property should become public property? You shouldn't have the right not to serve anyone in particular, simply because you don't like the look of them? I know over here, petrol station attendants are particularly told not to serve anyone they think looks suspicious after about 10 at night because of the risk of robbery. Do you think that should be disallowed, because it discriminates against people with squinty eyes and a sour mouth? Or even because it discriminates against black people, in that the attendant is more likely to think of a black person as suspicious?
When I go to some store, and go to park the car, I can see special handicapped parking places near the door. Am I pissed about it? That I can't park there, that I have to walk further than that, that maybe what I pay for something inside is some tiny bit more expensive because they had to make a few special parking spaces?
Really, it's nothing to do with you as a non-disabled customer. It's between the business owner, and the disabled customer. This is (AFAIK) an unregulated area that has been addressed by the market. Businesses want the custom of the disabled and elderly, so they make special provisions for them. A more apt question would be, do you think all businesses should be forced to have a certain proportion of their car spaces reserved for disabled people? I'm all for businesses being disabled-friendly. I'm not for all businesses being compelled to be disabled-friendly, especially when that entails a financial burden on the business owner.
This is a similar deal with the websites-it's just a human and humane and civilly cool thing to do.
I agree. It is civil and humane. But not doing it shouldn't be illegal, especially when people have already invested thousands of dollars developing something which, at the time, was not known to be illegal. The judge's interpretation of this law, even if valid, is far from obvious. Because of that, it means that businesses that created websites they believed to be fully legal, are now suddenly liable unless they invest thousands of dollars to correct the problem. The judge's interpretation of the law (intended for physical premesis) has essentially created a new law for websites (because nobody else interpreted the law that way, and it wasn't made clear in the text of the law). However, unlike a new law, which would only be valid against offences committed after it has passed, a re-interpretation of an old law means that people who created inaccessible sites before it was known to be illegal are now liable. It's like waiting for someone to spit on the street, then creating a law imposing a $10,000 fine for spitting on the street and charging them with it.
Just wait till you're sued by a Parkinson's victim because your buttons are too small. Your never going to be able to create a website that caters for every variety of disability in the world - and now you can be sued because of it.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know about science, but Deep Impact was much more interesting from a sociological point of view. It really wasn't about blowing up the meteor with as many special effects as possible, like Armageddon. It was about telling the world "In a few months, you're all going to be dead" and then watching how people react. And it was very well done.
And what about the self-healing capabilities of the human body? Fall over and graze that mechanical leg, and you have to go in for repairs. Minor damage will accumulate in ways that it doesn't on the human leg. Or the degree of tactile sensation you can get from human fingertips? You'll have to hook it up to the receivers in the brain, and develop very sophisticated sensors to emulate that. Then there's the fact that this prosthetic leg is likely to be heavier than your natural leg, and not have the same physical properties - walking on one might be find, but try running and you're balance will be thrown off by the weight difference. And don't even think about going swimming - it's not bouyed to the same degree as the rest of your body, you're headed straight to the bottom. And glucose is unlikely to as efficient in powering a mechanical arm than a biological one, and there's no guarantee that the body will deliver the amount of glucose it needs to this foreign body; if you consume enough glucose to power your arm, your body may well store too much of it, inhibit insulin production and make you obese. In that case, your stuck with inserting the insulin directly into the arm, which really isn't much better than a really inefficient battery. What about the latency in translating signals from the brain into a form understood by your mechanical arm - are you going to have lag whenever you try and move it? Heat generation, is it going to produce more or less than your normal arm? Will you be able to keep yourself warm by wrapping it around you, or will it generate more heat and be uncomfortably warm in the height of summer?
The human body is a very, very complex system, with a whole bunch of intertwined mechanisms, few of which we understand completely, and some of which are total mysteries. Suggesting that lopping off a limb and slapping on a mechanical replacement (that is not only functionally equivelant, but will not throw off any of the body's other systems, including the ones we don't understand) is relatively easy is ludicrous.
Only the ones that have a long and prosperous future ahead of them.
inventor, not inventory. I knew there was a reason for the preview button.
Building on what you said: the whole basis of a patent is that of a trade. The public gives the inventory a time-limited monopoly, the inventor tells the public how his invention works. The reason this is a good deal for the public is the non-obvious clause. Patents are designed to protect things that nobody else can figure out how to do. If someone can look at your invention and think "Eh, I know how to do that", then your invention is not worthy of patent - the public would be getting a bad deal, because they're trading a monopoly for something they already know. Patents are designed so that when someone invents something really cool, he doesn't keep it as a trade secret. If he does, and he dies, then the world loses knowledge. If he patents it, then everyone knows how to do it (even if they can't use it for another ten years) and knowledge is retained. That is how patents can (and should) act towards the good. The problem now is that the USPTO is betraying their purpose by making crappy deals on behalf of the public. They're giving away monopolies like candy, and reaping the kickbacks (errr, I mean processing fees).
Linus' leadership had nothing to do with making the GNU tools "happen". They happened all by themselves, and had happened before Linux was developed. What Linux did is actually give them a platform to be used on; before Linux they were really just open-source versions of stuff that other OSes often already had. Without Linux, the GNU tools were superfluous. Without the GNU tools, Linux was just a barebones kernel; you need tools to actually do anything useful with it.
That said, I think the constant attempt to change an already-entrenched name is futile. I can understand why someone would get irritated when people in ignorance assign all the hardwork they did to someone else.
I'm not sure exactly why steps 2 and 3 need to be in there. I mean, all your terminals are doing is producing the ballot paper, they're not doing any of the counting themselves (correct me if I'm wrong). So if they try and rig the election, it's going to be bloody obvious to anyone using the terminals: "Hey, I voted for Joe Blogs, but the computer ticked Jane Doe". I'd say that sort of paranoia should be more appropriately levelled at the machines doing the counting, where it's also feasible, as there would be fewer of those machines doing the counting, and they wouldn't have to be publically accessible. Just my thoughts.
The problem is that the banks aren't taking appropriate steps to identify the customer before handing over the customer's money.
You really think so?
When the customer takes reasonable steps to protect their information and follows the banks security procedures they are not responsible for loss.
I don't know about you, but I would consider "check the URL" and "look for SSL encryption" before handing over the keys to your account fairly rudimentary parts of any banks security procedures. A meatspace equivelant of this would be handing over your credit card to some random stranger, and giving him the PIN. The bank shouldn't cough up for that either, because the root cause of your loss is you being a freaking idiot. It all comes down to what your definition of "reasonable controls" are, and I'd argue that pretty much any controls placed on web-access can be circumvented by phishers. It's like trying to invent an encryption method that remains secure even if someone else knows the encryption keys.
Agreed, I live in Melbourne and my blood ran cold this morning when I spotted a white station wagon with "Diebold" written down the side in big blue letters.
Probably servicing ATMs - quite a number of big Aussie banks use Diebold machines.
Please tell me you guys are NOT using diebold machines.
Still hand-counting. At least, we were last election. I did hear that there was some work going on on a system like which I mentioned above (open-source, generates a paper-trail) here at some stage, but I heard that here on Slashdot, so take it with a grain of salt.
I'm from Australia; we do. In fact, I'm one of the polling officials who does the counting. However, with our recent elections, there have been heaps of candidates and the ballot papers have been huge (like say 2xA3 sheets joined together). There are also a tonne of informal ballots, both deliberate ones, and ones where people just haven't understood the voting procedure, and have failed to make their preference clear. Computer voting could reduce this. Because the generated ticket wouldn't have to have all the options, just the candidate(s) that were voted for, that would shrink the currently-cumbersome ballot paper considerably. Because the computer screen could offer online help, and would not accept informal votes, that problem would be reduced too. A computer system is pretty flexible as well, and you could offer multiple interfaces (text-to-speech, for example) for those with disabilities, and present ballot papers and instructions in multiple languages. There are a lot of reasons to use a good computer system for voting, with the emphasis on the "good".
The sort of system that most people here promote is source-philosophy agnostic. A voting machine that generates a slip that is both human-readable, and compuer-readable is the obvious solution. Even if someone hacks the software, anyone glancing at the slip can tell that the computer has marked the wrong square - open or closed source, bugs and exploits would be easy to detect in that system. Running a computer re-count would be easy. Running a human re-count would be easy. There is total transparency throughout the process.
Open Source may not be the answer, but maintaining an Open Process is. And Diebold doesn't do it.
To build on what dhasenan said...
A kid playing soccer might eventually become as skilled as Beckham, or at least come close. There is room in the game of soccer for individual skill. 20 years ago, a programmer could write a state-of-the-art game solo, and you probably couldn't tell it from commercial offerings (as they were probably developed in the same fashion). There was room in the industry for an individual to shine.
Nowadays, however, the state of the art has progressed, and commercial games are developed using teams of 30+ people of various skills, from graphic artist to musician to programmer, and budgets of millions of dollars. An individual just can't compete against that. A kid playing soccer might one day play like Beckham; a kid tapping away on his computer will never be able to recreate Doom 3. It's just not possible. There is no room in the modern game industry for the individual at that level. Game designers might be celebrated, but not game programmers. Programmers are just one cog in the machine, and an easily replaced one at that. Kids want to dream of being a hero, not a cog.
If you are capable of learning on your own, then why attend college in the first place?
Because knowledge at a college/university is often more accessible (knowledgable professors, extensive libraries, etc) and because you want to get your knowledge certified (the degree).
I spent 5 years at university doing two degrees. For the most part, the computer subjects were useful getting over the initial "hump" when learning about a subject. I actually learnt more from tinkering on my own, but the formal learning at university helped me get the basics down pat quicker. As I neared the end of the course, there were a number of lectures that I just didn't attend; the hour-long lecture that would have taken 3 hours in travel to get to and from, for example, or the one done by an asian lady with a sound grasp of her topic, but not of English. In those cases I bought the textbook, read the notes, tinkered on my machine at home, and passed the course.
After my first three years, I could probably have learnt a lot of the remainder of the course from home. It would have been slower, and required more willpower on my part, but I probably could have. But if I'd rocked up to a prospective employer and said "I don't actually have a degree, but I know all the same stuff", my chances of employment compared to graduate would be nil. Teaching is only a part of a university's role and, sadly, in many cases it seems the least important. Most people I know went to university to improve their job prospects through a degree, rather than because they were interested in learning about a given subject. The goal was the degree, the education was just a side-effect.
To be fair, Java was not originally created for applets; the idea behind it was for embedded applications. It just so happened that nobody really wanted it for embedded applications, and the web just started to boom at the right time for applets to catch on. Sun didn't intentionally create it for applet authors, they're just the first people who picked it up.
for Open Source and community driven projects Java should never be considered.
Open Source folks will generally write in a language they're familiar with. For a lot of people, that's Java. I agree with you that the JVM is unnecessary complication in most situations, but the language itself is nice, with a large, cohesive, well-documented class library. Purely on a language basis, I prefer Java to C/C++. A lot of the time when I'm developing something for myself, I'm doing it more for the chance to muck around than to get a lean, mean, performing machine. But the Azureus folks probably wanted to fool around and see what they could to with the bittorrent protocol, and because they knew java, that's what they used. In that scenarior, efficiency and performance were never goals, so they were never factored in to the choice of language.
Let alone that if Sun goes bust (or decides to kill the platform) your project is esentially doomed. Both are very unlikely scenarios, but not impossible.
Nah. Even if development on Java was totally halted, existing Java programs would run fine. Even if distribution of Sun's JVM was halted, it's installed on many computers already (and I believe it's licence allows it to be redistributed with your program?). Even if Sun goes belly-up, there's no reason for Java to die.
I will dispute their statement about pigeons though. I recall watching or reading something where the scientists put trackers on homing pigeons to discover how they found their way around. Turns out they follow landmarks. The pigeons often took indirect routes, because they were following a road. The scientists didn't figure this out even after they realized the paths were very odd... it didn't click until someone looked at a road map.
One doesn't disprove the other. Just because they navigate using landmarks doesn't mean they don't also have a magnetic sense - it could be that navigating using landmarks is easier than "following their nose", or it could be it's not strong enough to be reliable, but good enough as a last ditch thing.
I haven't known of anyone having to take a loan to get their children married in the "good ol' days". But today, getting children married requires taking a loan.
I think you're confusing "getting married" with "putting on a wedding". Unless your daughter is butt-ugly and you're forking out big dollars to buy her a hubby or something.
Those "prevents" should be "presents", sorry.
The problem is vague headlines, a carryover from newspapers where there was limited room for a headline; they tend to drop words that don't carry lots of meaning. In this case, the full headline should be "Conflicting Goals Create Tension in an OSS Community". You have interpreted it to mean "Conflicting Goals Create Tension in the OSS Community"; the headline leaves both interpretations open. They're designed as a draw to read the article, which prevents the real facts, not to actually prevent facts themselves. Incidentally, it's also a reason to avoid net speak. In a similar way to headlines, net speak simplifies the language to the point where the one sentance can easily lend itself to multiple interpretations, which could have been avoided by using the full language rather than a simplified sub-set.
see no reason to give websites slack thinking they could get away with blatantly not caring and being discriminatory if they are open to the public.
They are not being discrinatory. "Discrimintaion" means that you treat people differently based on a certain set of factors. These websites don't treat handicapped people different to anyone else - everyone gets served up with the same set of code. The only problem is that handicapped people can't use it. Which, with all respect to them, is their problem.
Some handicapped people can't drive a regular car either. But instead of suing auto manufacturers to force them to build handicapped-friendly car, they created a niche market that created/customized cars without foot controls. The people who benefit from those cars pay for them.
Years ago, public utilities made regular coal plants, bun coal, generate electricity with steam boilers and turbines, thick black smoke goesd off into the sky, shareholders make "profit", customers get electricity-but everyone got to breathe some rather toxic stuff.
Unlike a website, air is a shared resource, and the companies didn't have any right to pollute it. Whereas a corporate website is created, developed and supported by the company that creates it. It doesn't chew up any shared resources, and it doesn't cost the public anything at all, so the public really shouldn't have a say about what goes on it.
Oh, as to the boycotts and whatnot-you don't understand. Not only boycotts being made illegal for a time, they were just a *reflection* of the ingrained institutionalised racism and "apartness" that lead to private violence
Exactly. At that time, racism was insitutionalised - i.e Government-endorsed. When the government passes racist laws, that encourages racist behaviour in general. I'm not saying the government should do anything of the sort. Government services should be accessible to all; government officials should treat all citizens the same, regardless of race. But I don't think the government has any authority to compel you to do business with someone you don't want to do business with. If you choose not to do business with a certain race, that's your choice; a stupid one, because you're cutting out a large section of your market arbitrarily, but it's still your choice.
The problem is two-fold:
- It makes it the problem of people who reap no benefit from it.
- The way it's been introduced - by way of a tangential interpretation of an old law - means that people who built sites in good faith are suddenly liable.
If they introduced legislation saying that all commercial sites produced in the future needed to have a certain level of accessibility (defined by a set standard) then that would be one thing. But the way it is now, if this decision is upheld, then any existing corporate site that isn't accessible is liable - even though it was not illegal to have non-accessible sites when they were built.You mean a boycott? I remember when advocating an economic boycott because a business wouldn't cater to blacks was illegal, and those people got arrested. I mean I personally remember it as an old civil rights worker would remember it. I remember seeing a sign at a city boundary, welcome to xxxxville, with the signs -> kiwanis, moose, elks, no niggers allowed. Yes. for real,. saw that. That's what happens once you go that "who cares it's my business" way.
Which is absolutely irrelevant to the point at hand; I wasn't advocating discrimination by the government (arresting people who suggest boycotts, forbidding blacks from the town limits). That's not an outgrowth of "who cares it's my business", that's an outgrowth of government-endorsed racism, which is pretty much gone now (government-endorsed racism, not racism in general).
In your private life, if all you want to do is hang out with left handed lutheran latvians-go ahead. If you operate a public business-be prepared to be open to the public-to people, any old people.
So once you open a storefront, your property should become public property? You shouldn't have the right not to serve anyone in particular, simply because you don't like the look of them? I know over here, petrol station attendants are particularly told not to serve anyone they think looks suspicious after about 10 at night because of the risk of robbery. Do you think that should be disallowed, because it discriminates against people with squinty eyes and a sour mouth? Or even because it discriminates against black people, in that the attendant is more likely to think of a black person as suspicious?
When I go to some store, and go to park the car, I can see special handicapped parking places near the door. Am I pissed about it? That I can't park there, that I have to walk further than that, that maybe what I pay for something inside is some tiny bit more expensive because they had to make a few special parking spaces?
Really, it's nothing to do with you as a non-disabled customer. It's between the business owner, and the disabled customer. This is (AFAIK) an unregulated area that has been addressed by the market. Businesses want the custom of the disabled and elderly, so they make special provisions for them. A more apt question would be, do you think all businesses should be forced to have a certain proportion of their car spaces reserved for disabled people? I'm all for businesses being disabled-friendly. I'm not for all businesses being compelled to be disabled-friendly, especially when that entails a financial burden on the business owner.
This is a similar deal with the websites-it's just a human and humane and civilly cool thing to do.
I agree. It is civil and humane. But not doing it shouldn't be illegal, especially when people have already invested thousands of dollars developing something which, at the time, was not known to be illegal. The judge's interpretation of this law, even if valid, is far from obvious. Because of that, it means that businesses that created websites they believed to be fully legal, are now suddenly liable unless they invest thousands of dollars to correct the problem. The judge's interpretation of the law (intended for physical premesis) has essentially created a new law for websites (because nobody else interpreted the law that way, and it wasn't made clear in the text of the law). However, unlike a new law, which would only be valid against offences committed after it has passed, a re-interpretation of an old law means that people who created inaccessible sites before it was known to be illegal are now liable. It's like waiting for someone to spit on the street, then creating a law imposing a $10,000 fine for spitting on the street and charging them with it.
in this case, the website is actively hostile to them.
The website's not actively hostile to them - it just totally ignores them. That may not be any better, but the one is not the other.
In the UK, maybe, not under this law.
Just wait till you're sued by a Parkinson's victim because your buttons are too small. Your never going to be able to create a website that caters for every variety of disability in the world - and now you can be sued because of it.