he has a link to an article which shows that profiling airline passengers is "provably less secure" than random searches at the gates
Not quite:
the authors of this paper show that, given a reasonably diverse population of terrorists, this system is provably less secure than random searching.
The terrorists we are currently dealing with are not from a diverse population. With very few exceptions, they are male Muslim extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40. The paper assumes that Osama and his buddies can recruit a 25 year old Saudi and a 75 year old grandmother from Nebraska with equal ease, which is certainly not the case. It's an interesting theoretical piece, but certainly doesn't "prove" that profiling is a bad idea.
If government-developed software is released to the public domain, then you can end up paying for it twice: Once when you are taxed to fund the development, and again when you pay a license fee to the software vendor that incorporated the public domain code.
But I have the choice as to whether or not to buy software from that vendor. Whereas if the government-developed software is GPLed, then the vendor would be unlikely to develop for-profit software based on it, so I would lose that choice. In either case, open source developers can freely use it.
Starting next week I will be looking for "Napsterized" copies of Enterprise because we lost UPN in our area. Now if the networks offered programming on demand through cable and satellite where I could just go to UPN, CBS, FOX, etc and select the show I want to watch when I want to watch it I would pay for that service. It beats waiting for hours to get a full copy (that works) off Kazaa or IRC.
EXACTLY. I had the same experience trying to locate 3 episodes of last season's Buffy that I missed. It was a PITA to find a server, download the episodes in 10 meg pieces (with several retries), and assemble and convert them into something vlc could handle. I would have gladly paid $5 per episode to avoid that hassle, but I didn't have that option. It appears that the entertainment industry will once again have to be dragged kicking and screaming to a market where they can make billions, just as they were with VCRs.
"Ah-hah!" say the rabid free marketeers. "Disney spent that money on the expectation that you would watch the commercial.
No advocate of free markets would argue that a company's business model should be enforced by government guns. The MPAA and RIAA are rent-seeking corporate welfare recipients, and enemies of capitalism.
And nobody is compelled to enforce in the current administration.
Not that I'm entirely disagreeing with you, but note that there was even less enforcement in the previous administration, when most of these crimes actually occurred. At least now some of the crooks are going to jail.
That reminds me, Mac OS X had a vaguely similar local exploit last year. If you ran a UI program that was suid root (such as NetInfo Manager), when in that program you could use the Apple menu to launch recent items as root. So launch Terminal as unprivileged user, quit, launch NetInfo Manager, select Terminal from Apple menu, and you get a root shell.
Apple released a fix within 48 hours of discovery, and as far as I know Mac OS X doesn't allow user processes to arbitrarily twiddle UI elements of other apps.
There's no way for that to overflow the allotted 120 chars. No way at all.
Sure about that? What if it runs on a system where an int is 128 bits? If your answer is "that will never happen", consider that that same logic led to billions of dollars spent fixing Y2K bugs.
yet you want to have me replace it with an ugly mess of seperate calls
I've never seen it do good, and have seen many friends crash when getting into smoking and all, so I say good that it's illegal.
And thousands of people die every year from alcohol, but history has taught us that trying to ban it created more problems than it solved.
I think the artists and others have a right to protect their work from being stolen / whatever you want to call it on napster like systems, which is what a DMCA type law should handle.
Except that piracy was already illegal before the DMCA. The DMCA isn't about preventing piracy, it's about controlling use. It allows publishers to eliminate fair use by slapping any technological access controls on their products, which you are then forbidden to circumvent even if your intent is not to violate copyright.
I have no problems with drugs being illegal or terrorism being illegal.
I have a problem with laws against the private use of relatively harmless substances such as marijuana, especially when enforcement of such laws reduces civil liberties and privacy for all citizens. (No, I don't use pot myself.) And I hope you can agree that the DMCA and Disney Copyright Extension Act are blatant abuses of government power.
as for your 80% stat--do you have any way of backing that up?
If you break the law, you're going to get in trouble, I have no problem with this.
Regardless of whether the law is just? Besides, you don't have to break any laws to suffer. 80% of citizens whose property is confiscated via asset forfeiture are never even charged with crimes.
-autorelase means "add this object to the current autorelease pool's list of objects". When the autorelease pool is deallocated, all of the objects it has collected are sent -release messages (at which point they will be deallocated if their refcount becomes 0). In order for -autorelease to work, there has to be an NSAutoreleasePool in place. In normal Cocoa/GNUstep/OpenStep apps, an NSAutoreleasePool is created as the first step in handling an event, and freed as the last step, so any event handling code that you write can assume its existence. There are cases where you have to create your own pools, such as if you're writing a command line tool or if you create extra threads.
With the lack of any TRUE infringments on freedom (see Revolutionary War)
Actually, it's instructive to compare the tax rates that angered the colonists with our tremendously higher taxes today. And look at the War on (some) Drugs and the Eternal War on Terror for many examples of infringements on freedom.
Primitive types are nice to have around because they optimize sweetly
Adding object semantics to primitive types doesn't have to slow things down, C# seems to do it fine. Having separate int/Integer types is a hack that produces ugly and inelegant code, and should be removed.
Ditching the AWT means ditching all browser support.
Why? I've run Swing applets in browsers, they worked just as well as AWT applets (which is not very, but still). I actually prefer native widgets to the one-size-fits-all Swing widgets, but Sun disagrees and I don't think they need to expend resources supporting two completely (well, mostly) separate UI libraries.
I like my tiny, efficient serialized objects; easily compressed and not very human readable.
And not interoperable with anything else, and prone to breakage with new versions. If you're concerned about size, gzip your XML data and you'll get close to a 90% reduction.
He knows damn well why it can't be InternetAddress...that's used in javax.mail.internet for a totally different task!
Classes in different packages can have the same name, e.g. java.util.Date and java.sql.Date (although I'd argue that's also poor naming).
Suggesting that we get rid of primatives severly hurts your credability.
(Must...resist...spelling...comment.) Why? Using primitives with objects (especially colllections) is ugly, inconvenient, and inefficient. If properly done, speed won't suffer and you'll continue to use operators on int and float "objects". Much as it pains me to say it, C# does this right.
BigInteger is part of java.math and is a perfedt counterpart to Integer, but can be as big as you want.
Right, and if primitives and objects were merged it would be much easier to use BigInteger and BigDecimal, since you could use standard operators instead of clunky methods, i.e. "bignum += 2" vs bignum = bignum.add(new BigInteger("2")).
I can see where this guy is comming from, but most of his points are whining or ignorace of the system.
XML is great, but to continue to add LARGER API's with memory hungry requirements to the system is a death sentance.
Huh? He's talking about using XML as the serialization format instead of the current binary format. It doesn't change the API at all, nor add bloat. Text formats are almost always better than binary, and as the author points out, it may actually improve performance.
I can see where this guy is comming from, but most of his points are whining or ignorace of the system.
I guarantee that "this guy" knows far more about Java than you.
Please give an example of something that the Cocoa APIs can do that the Carbon APIs cannot.
Probably nothing, but that's not the point; you can do anything computable with any Turing-complete language, but nobody's advocating writing all software in assembly. In terms of developer productivity, Cocoa is *much* better than Carbon, as well as every other API I've seen.
That article is written by the CEO of RealBasic, a Carbon-based RAD tool, so he naturally sees Cocoa as a threat and is hardly going to be an impartial source of information.
The "license" is actually a unilateral contract in that it takes away your rights instead of granting them.
And thus should be laughed out of court on grounds of lack of consideration. I've never heard a counterargument to this other than the false claim that you have no right to run the software except by agreeing to the EULA.
By default (in the US) you have no rights to do anything with the software, even run it.
IANAL, but I'm pretty sure this is wrong. See 17 USC 117. If you are the legitimate owner of a piece of software, you can make copies if doing so is an "essential step" in running it, such as copying to a hard drive or RAM.
If this is the case I'm thinking of, the defendant never "agreed" to a click-wrap license. He bought a bundled package of Adobe apps, and resold them individually (without opening or installing them), which Adobe claimed a mythical contract prohibited. The ruling was that since the defendant acquired the software via a standard purchase, he had first sale rights to resell them. It doesn't invalidate clickwraps, but it's still a good precedent since it establishes that just because a publisher asserts something doesn't make it legally binding.
Does that mean I can expect lower quality from Open Source? When a software shop doesn't offer liability or warrenty on software, it makes me wonder if even they themselves question its reliability.
Umm, this might make sense if closed source publishers actually did warrant the quality of their software and accept legal responsibility for damages caused by defects. But they don't.
So putting the BSD license, which effectively waives your copyright, and distributing the source may be sufficient to indicate an intent on your part to waive your copyright.
That seems unlikely, especially since nearly all BSD software I've seen (including mine) includes copyright notices.
Quicktime is particularly bad because it asks you if you want to upgrade EVERY SINGLE TIME you play a file or stream.
That is a pain. But there's a 30 second workaround: set your clock forward many years, launch the QuickTime player, click "Later", quit, and reset your clock. It won't bother you again as long as the time is earlier than what you set it to.
If I have an admin working for me that is so bad at admining that he / she needs a mac, they probally won't be working for me for very long
And what if a good admin can manage 3n Mac servers with the same effort as it takes to manage n Windows servers? This is another form of the argument "Macs are only for people who don't know anything about computers", which has always been ridiculous. Regardless of your skill, it's better to spend your time actually accomplishing tasks on computers than getting them to work right.
Except for the huge price tag. And the UI that drains resources. And the crappier hardware.
Slashdot Mirror
Not quite:
The terrorists we are currently dealing with are not from a diverse population. With very few exceptions, they are male Muslim extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40. The paper assumes that Osama and his buddies can recruit a 25 year old Saudi and a 75 year old grandmother from Nebraska with equal ease, which is certainly not the case. It's an interesting theoretical piece, but certainly doesn't "prove" that profiling is a bad idea.
But I have the choice as to whether or not to buy software from that vendor. Whereas if the government-developed software is GPLed, then the vendor would be unlikely to develop for-profit software based on it, so I would lose that choice. In either case, open source developers can freely use it.
On the other hand, the eMac has 40% more pixels (1280x960 vs 1024x768), which is very useful under OS X.
EXACTLY. I had the same experience trying to locate 3 episodes of last season's Buffy that I missed. It was a PITA to find a server, download the episodes in 10 meg pieces (with several retries), and assemble and convert them into something vlc could handle. I would have gladly paid $5 per episode to avoid that hassle, but I didn't have that option. It appears that the entertainment industry will once again have to be dragged kicking and screaming to a market where they can make billions, just as they were with VCRs.
Actually, only 53% of Microsoft's political donations went to Republicans. Guess where the other 47% went. They're an equal-opportunity rent-seeker.
No advocate of free markets would argue that a company's business model should be enforced by government guns. The MPAA and RIAA are rent-seeking corporate welfare recipients, and enemies of capitalism.
Not that I'm entirely disagreeing with you, but note that there was even less enforcement in the previous administration, when most of these crimes actually occurred. At least now some of the crooks are going to jail.
Apple released a fix within 48 hours of discovery, and as far as I know Mac OS X doesn't allow user processes to arbitrarily twiddle UI elements of other apps.
Sure about that? What if it runs on a system where an int is 128 bits? If your answer is "that will never happen", consider that that same logic led to billions of dollars spent fixing Y2K bugs.
yet you want to have me replace it with an ugly mess of seperate calls
snprintf(strVal, 120, "val is: %d (decimal), %x (hex), %o (octal)", val1, val1, val1 );
And thousands of people die every year from alcohol, but history has taught us that trying to ban it created more problems than it solved.
I think the artists and others have a right to protect their work from being stolen / whatever you want to call it on napster like systems, which is what a DMCA type law should handle.
Except that piracy was already illegal before the DMCA. The DMCA isn't about preventing piracy, it's about controlling use. It allows publishers to eliminate fair use by slapping any technological access controls on their products, which you are then forbidden to circumvent even if your intent is not to violate copyright.
I have a problem with laws against the private use of relatively harmless substances such as marijuana, especially when enforcement of such laws reduces civil liberties and privacy for all citizens. (No, I don't use pot myself.) And I hope you can agree that the DMCA and Disney Copyright Extension Act are blatant abuses of government power.
as for your 80% stat--do you have any way of backing that up?
A quick google search came up with this and this.
Regardless of whether the law is just? Besides, you don't have to break any laws to suffer. 80% of citizens whose property is confiscated via asset forfeiture are never even charged with crimes.
-autorelase means "add this object to the current autorelease pool's list of objects". When the autorelease pool is deallocated, all of the objects it has collected are sent -release messages (at which point they will be deallocated if their refcount becomes 0). In order for -autorelease to work, there has to be an NSAutoreleasePool in place. In normal Cocoa/GNUstep/OpenStep apps, an NSAutoreleasePool is created as the first step in handling an event, and freed as the last step, so any event handling code that you write can assume its existence. There are cases where you have to create your own pools, such as if you're writing a command line tool or if you create extra threads.
Actually, it's instructive to compare the tax rates that angered the colonists with our tremendously higher taxes today. And look at the War on (some) Drugs and the Eternal War on Terror for many examples of infringements on freedom.
Adding object semantics to primitive types doesn't have to slow things down, C# seems to do it fine. Having separate int/Integer types is a hack that produces ugly and inelegant code, and should be removed.
Ditching the AWT means ditching all browser support.
Why? I've run Swing applets in browsers, they worked just as well as AWT applets (which is not very, but still). I actually prefer native widgets to the one-size-fits-all Swing widgets, but Sun disagrees and I don't think they need to expend resources supporting two completely (well, mostly) separate UI libraries.
I like my tiny, efficient serialized objects; easily compressed and not very human readable.
And not interoperable with anything else, and prone to breakage with new versions. If you're concerned about size, gzip your XML data and you'll get close to a 90% reduction.
He knows damn well why it can't be InternetAddress...that's used in javax.mail.internet for a totally different task!
Classes in different packages can have the same name, e.g. java.util.Date and java.sql.Date (although I'd argue that's also poor naming).
(Must...resist...spelling...comment.) Why? Using primitives with objects (especially colllections) is ugly, inconvenient, and inefficient. If properly done, speed won't suffer and you'll continue to use operators on int and float "objects". Much as it pains me to say it, C# does this right.
BigInteger is part of java.math and is a perfedt counterpart to Integer, but can be as big as you want.
Right, and if primitives and objects were merged it would be much easier to use BigInteger and BigDecimal, since you could use standard operators instead of clunky methods, i.e. "bignum += 2" vs bignum = bignum.add(new BigInteger("2")).
I can see where this guy is comming from, but most of his points are whining or ignorace of the system.
XML is great, but to continue to add LARGER API's with memory hungry requirements to the system is a death sentance.
Huh? He's talking about using XML as the serialization format instead of the current binary format. It doesn't change the API at all, nor add bloat. Text formats are almost always better than binary, and as the author points out, it may actually improve performance.
I can see where this guy is comming from, but most of his points are whining or ignorace of the system.
I guarantee that "this guy" knows far more about Java than you.
No, you should never call -dealloc directly. Use -release or -autorelease.
Probably nothing, but that's not the point; you can do anything computable with any Turing-complete language, but nobody's advocating writing all software in assembly. In terms of developer productivity, Cocoa is *much* better than Carbon, as well as every other API I've seen.
That article is written by the CEO of RealBasic, a Carbon-based RAD tool, so he naturally sees Cocoa as a threat and is hardly going to be an impartial source of information.
And thus should be laughed out of court on grounds of lack of consideration. I've never heard a counterargument to this other than the false claim that you have no right to run the software except by agreeing to the EULA.
IANAL, but I'm pretty sure this is wrong. See 17 USC 117. If you are the legitimate owner of a piece of software, you can make copies if doing so is an "essential step" in running it, such as copying to a hard drive or RAM.
If this is the case I'm thinking of, the defendant never "agreed" to a click-wrap license. He bought a bundled package of Adobe apps, and resold them individually (without opening or installing them), which Adobe claimed a mythical contract prohibited. The ruling was that since the defendant acquired the software via a standard purchase, he had first sale rights to resell them. It doesn't invalidate clickwraps, but it's still a good precedent since it establishes that just because a publisher asserts something doesn't make it legally binding.
Umm, this might make sense if closed source publishers actually did warrant the quality of their software and accept legal responsibility for damages caused by defects. But they don't.
That seems unlikely, especially since nearly all BSD software I've seen (including mine) includes copyright notices.
That is a pain. But there's a 30 second workaround: set your clock forward many years, launch the QuickTime player, click "Later", quit, and reset your clock. It won't bother you again as long as the time is earlier than what you set it to.
And what if a good admin can manage 3n Mac servers with the same effort as it takes to manage n Windows servers? This is another form of the argument "Macs are only for people who don't know anything about computers", which has always been ridiculous. Regardless of your skill, it's better to spend your time actually accomplishing tasks on computers than getting them to work right.
Except for the huge price tag. And the UI that drains resources. And the crappier hardware.
Read some XServe reviews. You're 0 out of 3.