As read in the article, Apples support of Open Source appears to be a 1-way street
That's because the article is wildly off target, and basing your opinion of Apple on it is unwise. The article took two instances of Apple not releasing their own code and from that extrapolated to "Apple is a parasite on open source development", ignoring the many contributions that Apple has made. There is tons of Apple-developed code in Darwin, and they didn't have to release any of it. By the end of this year, millions of ordinary users will be running an open source Unix kernel thanks to Apple, but all some people can do is bitch because Apple hasn't released every single line of code they've written.
Pure FUD./etc/passwd is ignored if NetInfo is running, which is pretty much always. I just checked two Macs, one running the retail OS X and one running the public beta, and neither has any passwords in/etc/passwd. Finally, in the retail OS X the root account is disabled by default; you have to either enable it or use sudo to become root.
I agree with most of your comments, except for this:
Take your right wing views about the Big Bad Liberal Media "America Should Eat Itself" Conspiracy and put it somewhere painful.
Censorship is hardly limited to the right wing. In the last US election the loudest calls for censorship came from Joe Lieberman, and let's not forget Tipper's crusade against naughty words in music.
I stand corrected. I should have known better than to make a claim of the form "task X cannot be done in language Y in fewer than Z lines" on Slashdot...
But, I do have one quibble, the same quibble I've had with Python from the outset. Using whitespace blocking to mandate code structure forces the programmer to the language, and not the other way around. I like my code to fit my style.
I agree completely. Guido says "Don't you hate code that's not properly indented?", and I do. I also don't like reading code that is poorly documented, doesn't use descriptive identifier names, or uses 300 line methods that should be broken up. However I would be very annoyed if a compiler were to refuse to compile code without comments, or forbid variable names of less than 6 characters, or limit methods to 50 lines. Maybe this is a result of my libertarian views; I don't want a nanny state, and I don't want a nanny compiler.
And more importantly, there's no way (that I know of) to put an RSA Python script in a 4-line sig block...
Pay phones are just one detail in the broad category of infrastructure which IMO really should be maintained by taxes and subsidies, because without some social engineering they just won't exist even though they are beneficial.
As long as there's any significant demand it will be filled. It may be more expensive than you'd like, but I don't see why that's a problem. Why shouldn't the cost of maintaining a pay phone be paid by the people who use it? It's like the "universal service fund" that subsidizes lines to rural areas that would otherwise be more expensive; again, why should the extra costs of providing service to outlying areas be hidden? If the response is that some people are too poor to afford the true costs, then I would think it would be more efficient to provide assistance to the poor people than to distort market prices for everyone.
72% of the people who voted for Bush believe that Lieberman's religion made him a bad choice for V.P.
This is wildly off-topic, but the poll says no such thing. The poll says that 8% of voters think that Lieberman's religion made him a worse candidate, and of those 8%, 72% voted for Bush.
am i the only one who finds it...oh, i don't know, COMPLETELY FUCKED UP that the police can harass you on the grounds that you were obeying the law.
Not at all. You can be stopped for speeding because it's illegal, but because everyone speeds you can also be stopped for not speeding because that's clearly suspicious behavior. It's almost as if they planned it that way...
i wonder how history will judge a government that let it's nation be reduced to ash because they refused to say 'sorry.'
You realize that only makes sense if you're talking about China, right? Bush expressed regret for the (self-inflicted) death of the Chinese pilot, but correctly did not accept responsibility for the crash, because it was not the fault of the US. In addition to causing the accident, China illegally held the Americans for nearly two weeks in an attempt to extort a confession from the US. China is the country that should be apologizing, but somehow I don't see that happening.
McCain/Feingold will outloaw the use of soft money during elections. It has no bearing whatsoever on inter-election money usage. Yes, it could impact AT&T's ability to sway the next election, but that's the whole point, right?
From what I've seen the point of McCain/Feingold is to ensure that incumbents never have to fight well-funded opponents or deal with negative publicity. With regards to this topic, McCain/Feingold would in fact prevent AT&T from running announcements close to an election saying "we support candidate Foo because he opposes this treaty which Senator Bar is in favor of". What's worse is that it would prevent nonprofit groups from doing the same thing. McCain/Feingold is a blatant assault on the 1st Amendment, which is not surprising since its sponsors are authoritarians on the right and left respectively.
I just hit the back button after I got to the "no cookie" page, and it took me back to the article.
Of course this means I just circumvented an access control device in violation of the DMCA, and am now compounding my crime by describing how I did it...
we need government legislation that makes software a product just like anything else that we buy in a store.
No, we don't. What we need is to get rid of existing legislation that grants extraordinary powers to "owners" of intellectual property. It should be common sense that click-wrap restrictions and EULAs are not legal contracts and thus are unenforceable, but government has seen fit to screw the consumers with bought-and-payed-for legislation such as UTICA and the DMCA. As with many problems, we would be in a much better situation if the government had just stayed out of it.
Crap, that's a good reason. And I just love that Intel's euphonism for destroying fair use rights is "Keeping Honest People Honest" (http://developer.intel.com/technology/1394/). Unfortunately given the current state of affairs if USB 2.0 were to take Firewire's place, I'm sure the MPAA thugs would insist on similar access controls, which would result in much inferior technology with the same consumer-hostile "features".
That's interesting that you say "poor showing in the debates", because the Media was painting it as if Bush had won the debates clearly.
Well, the media had spent weeks portraying Gore as a master statesman and Bush as a buffoon, so when Bush failed to screw up too badly they were naturally surprised. By my scoring the debates were roughly a draw (maybe a slight edge to Bush because of how obnoxious Gore came off), but Bush benefitted a lot from the low expectations.
As far as Corruption in the Clinton administration. This is difficult to say. The majority of all charges that had been thrown up against Clinton failed to stick because they were untrue.
Or they failed to stick because evidence mysteriously vanished, or witnesses refused to testify, or because Congress saw fit to spend time on vital issues like exactly how often he boinked interns rather than irrelevant actions like accepting campaign funds from the Chinese military.
Apparently, China demanded an apology - nothing more - and Bush refused!
Well, duh. Let me make this as simple as possible: It...Was...Not...Our...Fault. No government is in the habit of apologizing for acts it did not commit. The Chinese military, whether through incompetence or malice, are responsible for this incident. In fact recent reports suggest that the Navy plane may have been fired upon, which would be an act of war by the government you seem determined to kneel before.
I am far from a flag-waving nationalist; I have strongly criticized the US government on many occasions. But this time, the US is right, China is wrong, and it is that simple.
You are just a prospective employee, and there are plenty of them around that won't tell them they have to sign this document...
This may be changing given the recent economic situation, but last I heard there were still more tech jobs open than qualified people to fill them. As a prospective employee, you do have leverage; just as the company can tell you to go away, you can seek employment at another company with more reasonable policies. Adopting the attitude that you have no negotiating power is likely to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Shame it only runs on machines out of the reach of the average consumer and can't even burn CDs yet.
You can get a new iMac for $899. To run OS X you'll need a memory upgrade (why Apple is still shipping 64 meg machines when OS X's minimum requirements are 128 is a mystery to me), but you're still under $1000, which is hardly out of reach for the average consumer. Yes, I know you can buy a motherboard+case+power supply+graphics card+CPU in the Wintel world for half the price, but that's not something normal people have the ability or inclination to do.
There's a quite enlightened synopsis of the state of the OS wars here
That article is incorrect in a number of areas, especially this line: "The market for Mac OS X is simply a subset of the overall Mac market because not all Mac users will upgrade." Many Unix and Windows users who would never have considered Macs before are very interested in Mac OS X. Just count the number of Slashdot articles on OS X in the past month.
Here's a perfect example of someone willing to throw freedom out the window because of the evil-bogeyman-of-the-day, in this case child pornography.
How do you prove beyond reasonable doubt that it isn't? You can't, in all honesty.
How about actually finding the abused child? If the picture is real, then the cops have photographs of the victim while the crime was being committed, which is more than they have to go on for most other crimes. Yeah, it means they may have to do a bit more work, but convenience for law enforcement is not an excuse to suppress freedom. It's that kind of thinking that gave us Carnivore and you guys the RIP bill.
Re:"Wings" in politics
on
Republic.Com
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· Score: 3
This is probably off-topic, but I can't let this leftist rhetoric go unchallenged.
Liberals seem to look to the future and change things, trying to improve them, whereas conservatives look into the past, and try to roll things back to a point that they felt was comfortable for them.
Not even close. To take just one example, conservatives are trying to reform Social Security to make it self-sufficient and not in danger of bankruptcy in 30 years, and liberals are howling in protest. The defining issue between liberals and conservatives is not the future or the past, it is how much power government should have.
In the US, the democratic party has tried to fight for the people, the little guy, the worker.
"Little guys" like trial lawyers, Hollywood actors, and union bosses? How exactly were Clinton and Gore fighting for the people when they approved the Clipper Chip, the CDA, and the DMCA? How are Democratic politicians helping inner-city families by denying them a choice in education, while they send their own children to expensive private schools?
The republicans support the business executives, big money, and therefore corporations as well as conservative religious organizations.
Take a look at campaign contributions. Democrats get just as much from businesses as Republicans. Corporations will happily buy legislation from either or both parties. I'm not going to defend the Republican party too strongly because they do a number of stupid things (generally due to the religious right contingent), but to say that the Democrats are for the people and Republicans are for the corporations is pure demagoguery.
With the return of the Bush regime to power in the United States, the prime goal that we've seen so far is to reduce environmental standards, by increasing the limits of acceptible arsenic pollution in our water
It is absolutely false that Bush wants to raise arsenic limits. He ordered a _review_ of Clinton's last-minute regulations lowering acceptable levels by 80% to see if there is a scientific basis for them. Compliance will cost a significant amount, and there is little evidence that current arsenic levels are a problem. In fact, if current arsenic levels are so dangerous, why did Clinton wait eight years to do anything? It couldn't possibly have been a political maneuver so that leftist partisans could subsequently accuse Bush of wanting to poison children....
Classic crashes way too much for me to trust it when I'm trying to get my work done. I don't have any choice but to use Classic apps, since there's basically zip out there as far as carbonized/cocoa apps
Then you shouldn't be using it yet. Getting OS X and running mostly Classic apps is like using Linux and only running WINE. Apple has always said that you should switch to OS X when the apps you normally use have Carbon or Cocoa versions available. For most users, that time is not now, which is why the OS X rollout was relatively low-key. This summer an updated OS X will start shipping preinstalled on all Macs, and at that point there will be many more native apps.
The bottom line is this: If you are doing something that undermines the system, and your only way of continuing to do it is the expectation that the vast majority will "play by the rules" then this is crossing the line into thievery.
I disagree. We are under no obligation to conform to the business plan of corporations. I don't have a Tivo or Replay, but I hardly ever watch commercials; either I've taped the show and fast-forward through them, or I just flip to another channel. Is that thievery? Here's another one: unlike most people, I pay my credit card balance in full every month, thus depriving Mastercard of interest they expected me to pay. If everyone did that, Mastercard would be in serious trouble. Does that mean it's wrong for me to avoid 18% interest rates? I don't think so.
Also, how do these kids get guns in the first place? It is strange how we have laws to protect our right to own a gun, but shooting someone is illegal. I see a big contradiction there! So what is the purpose of owning a gun in the first place, for anybody? Self protection?
Law-abiding citizens use (not necessarily fire) guns millions of times each year to protect themselves from criminals. (As someone correctly pointed out above, the police can usually only respond after the crime.) States with concealed-carry laws tend to have lower crime rates, since a criminal has to consider the possibility that the little old lady he's thinking of mugging may be armed.
If there were no guns in the first place, we wouldn't have to own a gun to protect ourselves from other guns.
If there were no such thing as guns, the world might be a better place. But we can't choose to live in that world. Like it or not, the bad guys are going to have guns. In response, we can either unilaterally disarm, or ensure that we are able to defend ourselves.
Why do countries maintain military forces? Generally not because they intend to conquer their neighbors, but to defend themselves from potential attackers. The principle is exactly the same.
Next time that someone calls me PC, I'll just ahve to say "Why thank you, no, I don't advocate sick twisted fucks advocating and celebrating the murder of healthcare providers..."
Perhaps you don't realize that nobody here is defending the content of these people's speech. There is a large difference in saying that you disapprove of what someone is saying and demanding that the authorities punish them. It is the latter approach that "political correctness" is associated with.
That would be very interesting, but I don't think it would happen. Despite the often vast disagreements between/. posters on issues like taxes, abortion, capitalism vs socialism, etc, we almost universally agree that the DMCA is a huge steaming pile of poo. I have yet to see any coherent defense of it written by a technically clueful person. What that says to me is that the DMCA proponents have no interest in even attempting to convince the technically adept that it is anything other than a blatant power grab and an elimination of fair use and first sale rights. Instead, they realize that they will have much more success by writing checks to Congressmen and demonizing their opponents as thieves to the general public.
Slashdot Mirror
That's because the article is wildly off target, and basing your opinion of Apple on it is unwise. The article took two instances of Apple not releasing their own code and from that extrapolated to "Apple is a parasite on open source development", ignoring the many contributions that Apple has made. There is tons of Apple-developed code in Darwin, and they didn't have to release any of it. By the end of this year, millions of ordinary users will be running an open source Unix kernel thanks to Apple, but all some people can do is bitch because Apple hasn't released every single line of code they've written.
Pure FUD. /etc/passwd is ignored if NetInfo is running, which is pretty much always. I just checked two Macs, one running the retail OS X and one running the public beta, and neither has any passwords in /etc/passwd. Finally, in the retail OS X the root account is disabled by default; you have to either enable it or use sudo to become root.
Take your right wing views about the Big Bad Liberal Media "America Should Eat Itself" Conspiracy and put it somewhere painful.
Censorship is hardly limited to the right wing. In the last US election the loudest calls for censorship came from Joe Lieberman, and let's not forget Tipper's crusade against naughty words in music.
I stand corrected. I should have known better than to make a claim of the form "task X cannot be done in language Y in fewer than Z lines" on Slashdot...
I agree completely. Guido says "Don't you hate code that's not properly indented?", and I do. I also don't like reading code that is poorly documented, doesn't use descriptive identifier names, or uses 300 line methods that should be broken up. However I would be very annoyed if a compiler were to refuse to compile code without comments, or forbid variable names of less than 6 characters, or limit methods to 50 lines. Maybe this is a result of my libertarian views; I don't want a nanny state, and I don't want a nanny compiler.
And more importantly, there's no way (that I know of) to put an RSA Python script in a 4-line sig block...
As long as there's any significant demand it will be filled. It may be more expensive than you'd like, but I don't see why that's a problem. Why shouldn't the cost of maintaining a pay phone be paid by the people who use it? It's like the "universal service fund" that subsidizes lines to rural areas that would otherwise be more expensive; again, why should the extra costs of providing service to outlying areas be hidden? If the response is that some people are too poor to afford the true costs, then I would think it would be more efficient to provide assistance to the poor people than to distort market prices for everyone.
This is wildly off-topic, but the poll says no such thing. The poll says that 8% of voters think that Lieberman's religion made him a worse candidate, and of those 8%, 72% voted for Bush.
Not at all. You can be stopped for speeding because it's illegal, but because everyone speeds you can also be stopped for not speeding because that's clearly suspicious behavior. It's almost as if they planned it that way...
i wonder how history will judge a government that let it's nation be reduced to ash because they refused to say 'sorry.'
You realize that only makes sense if you're talking about China, right? Bush expressed regret for the (self-inflicted) death of the Chinese pilot, but correctly did not accept responsibility for the crash, because it was not the fault of the US. In addition to causing the accident, China illegally held the Americans for nearly two weeks in an attempt to extort a confession from the US. China is the country that should be apologizing, but somehow I don't see that happening.
From what I've seen the point of McCain/Feingold is to ensure that incumbents never have to fight well-funded opponents or deal with negative publicity. With regards to this topic, McCain/Feingold would in fact prevent AT&T from running announcements close to an election saying "we support candidate Foo because he opposes this treaty which Senator Bar is in favor of". What's worse is that it would prevent nonprofit groups from doing the same thing. McCain/Feingold is a blatant assault on the 1st Amendment, which is not surprising since its sponsors are authoritarians on the right and left respectively.
Of course this means I just circumvented an access control device in violation of the DMCA, and am now compounding my crime by describing how I did it...
No, we don't. What we need is to get rid of existing legislation that grants extraordinary powers to "owners" of intellectual property. It should be common sense that click-wrap restrictions and EULAs are not legal contracts and thus are unenforceable, but government has seen fit to screw the consumers with bought-and-payed-for legislation such as UTICA and the DMCA. As with many problems, we would be in a much better situation if the government had just stayed out of it.
Crap, that's a good reason. And I just love that Intel's euphonism for destroying fair use rights is "Keeping Honest People Honest" (http://developer.intel.com/technology/1394/). Unfortunately given the current state of affairs if USB 2.0 were to take Firewire's place, I'm sure the MPAA thugs would insist on similar access controls, which would result in much inferior technology with the same consumer-hostile "features".
Well, the media had spent weeks portraying Gore as a master statesman and Bush as a buffoon, so when Bush failed to screw up too badly they were naturally surprised. By my scoring the debates were roughly a draw (maybe a slight edge to Bush because of how obnoxious Gore came off), but Bush benefitted a lot from the low expectations.
As far as Corruption in the Clinton administration. This is difficult to say. The majority of all charges that had been thrown up against Clinton failed to stick because they were untrue.
Or they failed to stick because evidence mysteriously vanished, or witnesses refused to testify, or because Congress saw fit to spend time on vital issues like exactly how often he boinked interns rather than irrelevant actions like accepting campaign funds from the Chinese military.
Well, duh. Let me make this as simple as possible: It...Was...Not...Our...Fault. No government is in the habit of apologizing for acts it did not commit. The Chinese military, whether through incompetence or malice, are responsible for this incident. In fact recent reports suggest that the Navy plane may have been fired upon, which would be an act of war by the government you seem determined to kneel before.
I am far from a flag-waving nationalist; I have strongly criticized the US government on many occasions. But this time, the US is right, China is wrong, and it is that simple.
This may be changing given the recent economic situation, but last I heard there were still more tech jobs open than qualified people to fill them. As a prospective employee, you do have leverage; just as the company can tell you to go away, you can seek employment at another company with more reasonable policies. Adopting the attitude that you have no negotiating power is likely to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Actually I believe perl 5.6 was in the Darwin distribution a few weeks after it was released.
You can get a new iMac for $899. To run OS X you'll need a memory upgrade (why Apple is still shipping 64 meg machines when OS X's minimum requirements are 128 is a mystery to me), but you're still under $1000, which is hardly out of reach for the average consumer. Yes, I know you can buy a motherboard+case+power supply+graphics card+CPU in the Wintel world for half the price, but that's not something normal people have the ability or inclination to do.
There's a quite enlightened synopsis of the state of the OS wars here
That article is incorrect in a number of areas, especially this line: "The market for Mac OS X is simply a subset of the overall Mac market because not all Mac users will upgrade." Many Unix and Windows users who would never have considered Macs before are very interested in Mac OS X. Just count the number of Slashdot articles on OS X in the past month.
Didn't that contribute significantly to the instability of NT 4? From what I recall NT 3.5 was very stable.
How do you prove beyond reasonable doubt that it isn't? You can't, in all honesty.
How about actually finding the abused child? If the picture is real, then the cops have photographs of the victim while the crime was being committed, which is more than they have to go on for most other crimes. Yeah, it means they may have to do a bit more work, but convenience for law enforcement is not an excuse to suppress freedom. It's that kind of thinking that gave us Carnivore and you guys the RIP bill.
Liberals seem to look to the future and change things, trying to improve them, whereas conservatives look into the past, and try to roll things back to a point that they felt was comfortable for them.
Not even close. To take just one example, conservatives are trying to reform Social Security to make it self-sufficient and not in danger of bankruptcy in 30 years, and liberals are howling in protest. The defining issue between liberals and conservatives is not the future or the past, it is how much power government should have.
In the US, the democratic party has tried to fight for the people, the little guy, the worker.
"Little guys" like trial lawyers, Hollywood actors, and union bosses? How exactly were Clinton and Gore fighting for the people when they approved the Clipper Chip, the CDA, and the DMCA? How are Democratic politicians helping inner-city families by denying them a choice in education, while they send their own children to expensive private schools?
The republicans support the business executives, big money, and therefore corporations as well as conservative religious organizations.
Take a look at campaign contributions. Democrats get just as much from businesses as Republicans. Corporations will happily buy legislation from either or both parties. I'm not going to defend the Republican party too strongly because they do a number of stupid things (generally due to the religious right contingent), but to say that the Democrats are for the people and Republicans are for the corporations is pure demagoguery.
With the return of the Bush regime to power in the United States, the prime goal that we've seen so far is to reduce environmental standards, by increasing the limits of acceptible arsenic pollution in our water
It is absolutely false that Bush wants to raise arsenic limits. He ordered a _review_ of Clinton's last-minute regulations lowering acceptable levels by 80% to see if there is a scientific basis for them. Compliance will cost a significant amount, and there is little evidence that current arsenic levels are a problem. In fact, if current arsenic levels are so dangerous, why did Clinton wait eight years to do anything? It couldn't possibly have been a political maneuver so that leftist partisans could subsequently accuse Bush of wanting to poison children....
Then you shouldn't be using it yet. Getting OS X and running mostly Classic apps is like using Linux and only running WINE. Apple has always said that you should switch to OS X when the apps you normally use have Carbon or Cocoa versions available. For most users, that time is not now, which is why the OS X rollout was relatively low-key. This summer an updated OS X will start shipping preinstalled on all Macs, and at that point there will be many more native apps.
I disagree. We are under no obligation to conform to the business plan of corporations. I don't have a Tivo or Replay, but I hardly ever watch commercials; either I've taped the show and fast-forward through them, or I just flip to another channel. Is that thievery? Here's another one: unlike most people, I pay my credit card balance in full every month, thus depriving Mastercard of interest they expected me to pay. If everyone did that, Mastercard would be in serious trouble. Does that mean it's wrong for me to avoid 18% interest rates? I don't think so.
Law-abiding citizens use (not necessarily fire) guns millions of times each year to protect themselves from criminals. (As someone correctly pointed out above, the police can usually only respond after the crime.) States with concealed-carry laws tend to have lower crime rates, since a criminal has to consider the possibility that the little old lady he's thinking of mugging may be armed.
If there were no guns in the first place, we wouldn't have to own a gun to protect ourselves from other guns.
If there were no such thing as guns, the world might be a better place. But we can't choose to live in that world. Like it or not, the bad guys are going to have guns. In response, we can either unilaterally disarm, or ensure that we are able to defend ourselves.
Why do countries maintain military forces? Generally not because they intend to conquer their neighbors, but to defend themselves from potential attackers. The principle is exactly the same.
Perhaps you don't realize that nobody here is defending the content of these people's speech. There is a large difference in saying that you disapprove of what someone is saying and demanding that the authorities punish them. It is the latter approach that "political correctness" is associated with.
That would be very interesting, but I don't think it would happen. Despite the often vast disagreements between /. posters on issues like taxes, abortion, capitalism vs socialism, etc, we almost universally agree that the DMCA is a huge steaming pile of poo. I have yet to see any coherent defense of it written by a technically clueful person. What that says to me is that the DMCA proponents have no interest in even attempting to convince the technically adept that it is anything other than a blatant power grab and an elimination of fair use and first sale rights. Instead, they realize that they will have much more success by writing checks to Congressmen and demonizing their opponents as thieves to the general public.