It also raises the possibility that hideously wealthy would find something more worthy to put their money towards than influencing government
As long as it is profitable to try to influence government, individuals and corporations will continue to do so. You cannot stop people from spending money to support the candidate of their choice. Ban direct contributions, and they'll donate to the parties. Ban that, and they'll donate to advocacy groups. Ban that and not only will they find another way, but you've seriously maimed the First Amendment. The only way to stop this problem is to restrict government to its constitutionally granted powers, so that it is unable to reward contributors with favorable legislation that screws over everyone else.
Anyone should be allowed to create new technologies - complain about their leveraging of them when it happens, not because it has the potential of happening.
Do you apply this logic to Carnivore and Echelon as well? "Sure, go ahead and monitor all my emails and phone calls. I won't complain unless I find out that you misused them."
When you think about it, all your arguments are paranoid fears of what might happen and not what IS happening.
Based on their history, it is hardly paranoid to expect Microsoft to abuse and subvert standards for their benefit at the expense of their customers.
Look at some screenshots and get clued up on how smart tags work.
I know how they work. I also know, as does Microsoft, that the majority of nontechnical users will not be able to tell the difference between an actual hyperlink and a smart tag. Furthermore, Microsoft also knows that most users rarely install additional software, and will thus be left with the default MS-created set of smart tags. Maybe the initial set of tags are fairly innocent, but it is not unreasonable to believe that that could change.
Decide whether you really are bigoted enough to say Microsoft shouldn't be allowed to create technology because they might misuse it.
As you know perfectly well, nobody is attempting to get smart tags declared illegal. Several people have simply said that they think it's a bad idea. Are you such a bigot that you can't tolerate differing opinions?
I however am not happy with your desire to steal my code
This "stealing" rhetoric is wrong when used by the RIAA, and is equally inaccurate in this context. At worst, you're talking about copyright infringement.
There are a huge amount of PowerPC Macs out there, and they are going to be "obsolete". That means a lot of people are going to be pissed, most likely.
True, however a large number of Mac fans are already pissed at Apple and Motorola for the extremely poor rate of PowerPC improvements.
I dunno if the Carbonated apps can simply be recompiled for something for x86. Probably not.
Carbon is essentially a complete rewrite of the classic Mac OS API to run on BSD and Mach. Considering they've gone to some trouble to make Darwin x86-compatible, I would think they also had portability in mind when writing Carbon and Quartz. There may not be x86 machines running Mac OS X in secret Apple labs today, but I suspect they could do it in not very much time if they had to.
I very much hope he rules that they *do*, because to rule that the French have no right to deal with Nazi memorabilia in the way they feel they should really would be to claim that the US knows best
Huh? From what I heard Yahoo already removed all Nazi material from their French sites, but that wasn't good enough for the French censors who are now demanding control over their American sites. I will absolutely claim that the US knows better than France what should be legal within US borders.
I thought it couldn't play encrypted DVDs, which apparently need features in Darwin that aren't available yet. I'm really hoping they can make it work; even if Apple does release an "official" player it will almost certainly be crippled to appease the MPAA.
The central premise is that your data lives in a central location that you can access from anywhere.
And I want that central location to be my residence, which is easily achievable today without special NC boxes. The problem with NCs is that they are strictly inferior(*) to full-featured PCs, and PCs are so cheap that cost isn't much of an issue.
(*)from the consumer's perspective, of course. I'm sure Microsoft and the RIAA are huge fans of the limitations of NCs.
others can turn around and just add a few proprietary lines of code and sell binaries and I would have no rights to say "hey- wait a minute! You just ripped me off".
Well, you could say it, you just wouldn't be able to take action against them (which presumably you considered before you released under the BSDL). And there's nothing stopping you from widely publicizing the fact that your original code does 99.9% of what the derived work does and is free.
If the speed limits were consistently enforced they rapidly become completely unpopular and go away and the law makers know this.
That would be true if the *current* speed limits were consistently enforced. Of course, the current speed limits have very little to do with safety and much more to do with revenue generation. I would rather see speed limits increased to a level such that you are clearly driving dangerously by exceeding them (maybe 80-85 on interstates, 50-60 on main roads, 35-40 on residential). You would still have people violating the law so the revenue source wouldn't dry up, but it would actually be dangerous drivers paying the fines, as opposed to the negative lottery we have today.
There is of couse the issue of credit itself. Some people (like me) have real problems living on borrowed money.
Unless credit card policies are very different in Canada, there's no interest if you pay your balance in full every month. Just use it like a check card and you'll be fine. Like lotteries, credit card interest is a tax on people who are bad at math.
According to the hotmail migration article, not only did switch over to Win2k servers seamlessly, they also increased the number of users they could support on hotmail without buying additional hardware.
I wouldn't expect them to say anything else. Considering that they have no reservations about lying to their customers, the press, and federal judges, the fact that Microsoft says X gives very little support for the hypothesis that X is true.
Of course that's not true, but "good people" will have a much easier time finding another job than somebody who just memorized the MSCE test books.
"I saw the dot-com bust coming long before anyone else and the dotcommers are getting what they deserve"
I'll have sympathy for somebody making $30k working customer support who got laid off. I have none for engineers who were making $100k. When you're making that much there is no excuse to not have a substantial amount saved up for when you hit a rough patch.
"Layed off workers living in San Jose should work at McDonald's to make ends meet"
I agree, that isn't terribly realistic. The first step should be to move somewhere that has a sane cost of living.
Re:/. crew's pro-democrat/left wing bias
on
Carnivore To Die?
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· Score: 2
Not to mention the unilateral cancellation of the Kyoto and ABM treaties
Exactly one country has ratified Kyoto, Romania. If it's so vital to the future of the planet, why are you waiting around for the U.S.? Just because the Senate unanimously rejected it doesn't mean other countries can't approve it.
The ABM treaty was made with the Soviet Union. Consulting a current map, I see no such entity. I actually don't support Bush's missile defense program, because it will almost certainly turn into pork barrel programs with little or no results, but the ABM treaty is a non-issue.
There are NOT that many people who will use Java, in their professional lives. Applets are a pain in the ass, because every browser / version on the planet behaves differently.
Yes, there are. You're absolutely right that applets and client-side Java in general have failed, but it's very heavily used in enterprise and back-end products that you don't see on the shelves at CompUSA.
Passing by reference. In order to pass values by reference in Java, you have to make another class to do it?
Why are you passing values by reference? Very often there's a cleaner way to do it. Personally, I like that in Java and C when I write "foo(a,b)" I can be sure that a and b will be the same afterwards, as compared to C++ where they might be passed by reference and I have to look at the declaration of foo to tell.
Garbage Collection is a clever trick, but if you get used to that net being under you, and you've never used another language, programming in C will be a rude shock.
Professional developers should understand memory management and be familiar with C. But an introductory class would be much better served by discussing loops, methods, and basic algorithms rather than the details of malloc/free/new/delete.
My point is that it takes more effort to go from Java to C++, than it takes to go from C++ to Java.
Of course it does, because C++ is much more complex and difficult. I'm experienced in both, and have found Java to almost always be a better choice.
(Try wrighting an applet that actually does anything useful, and then try to run it under Netscape on a Macintosh.
Again, that's client side. Sun completely screwed up by putting the burden of supporting Java applets on browser developers, thereby insuring spectacular incompatibilities. These issues go away on the server side. Our complex web applications run equally well on Solaris, NT, and Mac OS X, with 0 lines of code changed.
Java is nowhere near as bad as you think it is. I understand where you're coming from most of your exposure to it has been buggy applets, but it is a real language capable of doing real work, in many cases much more quickly and reliably than would be possible in C++.
Our experience with C and C++, however unpleasant those languages are to learn with, really helped people get jobs. Java is much less useful in this way.
First, I find it difficult to believe that there aren't a sufficient number of Java development jobs. Second, the point of a CS education should not be to learn the most popular language, but to learn the concepts of programming so that you can easily pick up new languages as required. I find Java much better suited to that task than C++ with its mountains of complex features and wacky syntax.
if you're looking for a high-performance language you can't rely on a system with garbage collection and run-time linking.
This is not necessarily the case; recent Hotspot JVMs have been producing impressive results. Yes, you'll probably always be able to beat it with optimized C, like you'll always be able to beat C with optimized assembly, but for the vast majority of tasks it is more than fast enough.
Not to mention that truly understanding what's going on with memory and pointers, while posing a steeper learning curve, really helps you understand how the machine deals with your programs.
Here I agree. Nobody should be able to get a CS degree without knowing C and being able to do pointer tricks. But for introductory classes, which probably have lots of non-CS students, that's going to be overkill.
Excellent ad hominem, but you seem to have left out the part where you actually refuted his claims.
Here is an article stating that the Eskimos who actually live in the area support drilling, and based on past dealings with oil companies do not believe it would not harm the environment. But I'm sure you know more than they do.
The drilling of ANWR will not involve just a single, tiny well in a secluded location. It will involve scores of them scattered throughout the region.
Sources, please. The Greenpeace flyer doesn't count.
and it doesn't involve blaming environmentalists for a California problem that was caused by a right-wing deregulation fiasco of unimaginable proportions.
"Deregulation" never happened in California. Price controls and massive bureaucratic obstacles to producing and selling power happened.
Now that you've established that you are a morally superior individual to those of use who want to rape the earth and kick puppies, what exactly do you propose to do about the problem that our civilization requires large amounts of energy? Conservation is fine and well, but as CA demonstrates that by itself is not sufficient. And I'm guessing you're not a huge fan of nuclear power either, so what's the answer?
I can highlight any word or phrase, switch to another virtual console, type in either "webster" (for a dictionary lookup) or "google" (for a google lookup), then paste in the term I'm interested in.
This reminds me, Mac OS X has a very similar feature called Services, which allow applications to export functionality that can be accessed from anywhere. For example, I can select a URL in a text editor (or terminal window, or any other app), select "Open URL" from the Services menu, and the URL opens in OmniWeb. It would be easy to write a service that would perform dictionary or Google lookups on the selected text, in fact I may do that because it's a good idea.
This technology is more flexible than a static list of words to link, and it keeps the user in control, as opposed to Microsoft's view that they know where you want to go today.
With smarttags at least it is the user of the data that is altering it (although MS has the control over the changes made). Having a third party (proxy) alter the data enroute will upset both the content providers and the end users.
Not really; the proxy wouldn't be altering the data, only preventing the original data from being altered by IE. In fact, the proxy could look for a meta tag that would specifically enable smart tags (which is how MS would have done it if they had any interest in benefitting their customers) and if present not insert the smart tag blocker. I would consider this a public service along the same lines as cancelling spam on Usenet.
There will be no proof of this assertion because it is entirely false. It is possible that Republicans opposed a Clinton-nominated judge who was black, and for liberals the only possible explanation of this is that all Republicans are racists. Oddly, this reasoning doesn't seem to apply to Democrats who opposed Clarence Thomas.
If what you were saying were true, you'd be able to take screenshots of sites and then sell them on your own site as yours. You can't do that; those screenshots will be copyrighted by the web site owner.
But this isn't about redistribution, it's about locally altering the appearance of a web page, as I might do by changing the default fonts, disabling Javascript, or running Junkbuster.
What if I release my web site under a "non-free" license's that does not premit modifation by any party for any reason?
It would be no more binding than are the phony EULAs found in most commercial software.
There's no question that Microsoft is adding this "feature" to benefit themselves rather than their customers. Still, it's conceptually the same as me looking at your website through a Junkbuster proxy, or changing the text and background colors to some weird combination. Even if you are the copyright holder on a work, you do not get to exert absolute control over how it is viewed or used. Isn't this why we're opposed to the DMCA, because it unreasonably limits what users can do with their own machines?
Get a lawyer first. No question. Only they can really work out all the details.
+5. This is likely to be the best advice on this thread. Clearly there are many details we don't know about, and any legal comments made here will probably have only an accidental relationship to reality.
Get a lawyer, and do whatever you have to to graduate.
Which reminds me, both the government and the Mafia have programmes whereby they offer "protection" you didn't ask for in exchange for "protection money" you have to pay. Both have the power to see that Bad Things Happen to you if you don't pay up. What's the difference, really?
Actually, there are several differences. The Mafia doesn't insist on knowing every detail of my finances, as long as they get paid. The Mafia doesn't care what chemicals I may choose to ingest in private. And I don't think even the Mafia could pull off as huge a pyramid scheme as Social Security.
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As long as it is profitable to try to influence government, individuals and corporations will continue to do so. You cannot stop people from spending money to support the candidate of their choice. Ban direct contributions, and they'll donate to the parties. Ban that, and they'll donate to advocacy groups. Ban that and not only will they find another way, but you've seriously maimed the First Amendment. The only way to stop this problem is to restrict government to its constitutionally granted powers, so that it is unable to reward contributors with favorable legislation that screws over everyone else.
Do you apply this logic to Carnivore and Echelon as well? "Sure, go ahead and monitor all my emails and phone calls. I won't complain unless I find out that you misused them."
When you think about it, all your arguments are paranoid fears of what might happen and not what IS happening.
Based on their history, it is hardly paranoid to expect Microsoft to abuse and subvert standards for their benefit at the expense of their customers.
Look at some screenshots and get clued up on how smart tags work.
I know how they work. I also know, as does Microsoft, that the majority of nontechnical users will not be able to tell the difference between an actual hyperlink and a smart tag. Furthermore, Microsoft also knows that most users rarely install additional software, and will thus be left with the default MS-created set of smart tags. Maybe the initial set of tags are fairly innocent, but it is not unreasonable to believe that that could change.
Decide whether you really are bigoted enough to say Microsoft shouldn't be allowed to create technology because they might misuse it.
As you know perfectly well, nobody is attempting to get smart tags declared illegal. Several people have simply said that they think it's a bad idea. Are you such a bigot that you can't tolerate differing opinions?
This "stealing" rhetoric is wrong when used by the RIAA, and is equally inaccurate in this context. At worst, you're talking about copyright infringement.
True, however a large number of Mac fans are already pissed at Apple and Motorola for the extremely poor rate of PowerPC improvements.
I dunno if the Carbonated apps can simply be recompiled for something for x86. Probably not.
Carbon is essentially a complete rewrite of the classic Mac OS API to run on BSD and Mach. Considering they've gone to some trouble to make Darwin x86-compatible, I would think they also had portability in mind when writing Carbon and Quartz. There may not be x86 machines running Mac OS X in secret Apple labs today, but I suspect they could do it in not very much time if they had to.
Huh? From what I heard Yahoo already removed all Nazi material from their French sites, but that wasn't good enough for the French censors who are now demanding control over their American sites. I will absolutely claim that the US knows better than France what should be legal within US borders.
I thought it couldn't play encrypted DVDs, which apparently need features in Darwin that aren't available yet. I'm really hoping they can make it work; even if Apple does release an "official" player it will almost certainly be crippled to appease the MPAA.
And I want that central location to be my residence, which is easily achievable today without special NC boxes. The problem with NCs is that they are strictly inferior(*) to full-featured PCs, and PCs are so cheap that cost isn't much of an issue.
(*)from the consumer's perspective, of course. I'm sure Microsoft and the RIAA are huge fans of the limitations of NCs.
Well, you could say it, you just wouldn't be able to take action against them (which presumably you considered before you released under the BSDL). And there's nothing stopping you from widely publicizing the fact that your original code does 99.9% of what the derived work does and is free.
That would be true if the *current* speed limits were consistently enforced. Of course, the current speed limits have very little to do with safety and much more to do with revenue generation. I would rather see speed limits increased to a level such that you are clearly driving dangerously by exceeding them (maybe 80-85 on interstates, 50-60 on main roads, 35-40 on residential). You would still have people violating the law so the revenue source wouldn't dry up, but it would actually be dangerous drivers paying the fines, as opposed to the negative lottery we have today.
Unless credit card policies are very different in Canada, there's no interest if you pay your balance in full every month. Just use it like a check card and you'll be fine. Like lotteries, credit card interest is a tax on people who are bad at math.
I wouldn't expect them to say anything else. Considering that they have no reservations about lying to their customers, the press, and federal judges, the fact that Microsoft says X gives very little support for the hypothesis that X is true.
Of course that's not true, but "good people" will have a much easier time finding another job than somebody who just memorized the MSCE test books.
"I saw the dot-com bust coming long before anyone else and the dotcommers are getting what they deserve"
I'll have sympathy for somebody making $30k working customer support who got laid off. I have none for engineers who were making $100k. When you're making that much there is no excuse to not have a substantial amount saved up for when you hit a rough patch.
"Layed off workers living in San Jose should work at McDonald's to make ends meet"
I agree, that isn't terribly realistic. The first step should be to move somewhere that has a sane cost of living.
Exactly one country has ratified Kyoto, Romania. If it's so vital to the future of the planet, why are you waiting around for the U.S.? Just because the Senate unanimously rejected it doesn't mean other countries can't approve it.
The ABM treaty was made with the Soviet Union. Consulting a current map, I see no such entity. I actually don't support Bush's missile defense program, because it will almost certainly turn into pork barrel programs with little or no results, but the ABM treaty is a non-issue.
Yes, there are. You're absolutely right that applets and client-side Java in general have failed, but it's very heavily used in enterprise and back-end products that you don't see on the shelves at CompUSA.
Passing by reference. In order to pass values by reference in Java, you have to make another class to do it?
Why are you passing values by reference? Very often there's a cleaner way to do it. Personally, I like that in Java and C when I write "foo(a,b)" I can be sure that a and b will be the same afterwards, as compared to C++ where they might be passed by reference and I have to look at the declaration of foo to tell.
Garbage Collection is a clever trick, but if you get used to that net being under you, and you've never used another language, programming in C will be a rude shock.
Professional developers should understand memory management and be familiar with C. But an introductory class would be much better served by discussing loops, methods, and basic algorithms rather than the details of malloc/free/new/delete.
My point is that it takes more effort to go from Java to C++, than it takes to go from C++ to Java.
Of course it does, because C++ is much more complex and difficult. I'm experienced in both, and have found Java to almost always be a better choice.
(Try wrighting an applet that actually does anything useful, and then try to run it under Netscape on a Macintosh.
Again, that's client side. Sun completely screwed up by putting the burden of supporting Java applets on browser developers, thereby insuring spectacular incompatibilities. These issues go away on the server side. Our complex web applications run equally well on Solaris, NT, and Mac OS X, with 0 lines of code changed.
Java is nowhere near as bad as you think it is. I understand where you're coming from most of your exposure to it has been buggy applets, but it is a real language capable of doing real work, in many cases much more quickly and reliably than would be possible in C++.
First, I find it difficult to believe that there aren't a sufficient number of Java development jobs. Second, the point of a CS education should not be to learn the most popular language, but to learn the concepts of programming so that you can easily pick up new languages as required. I find Java much better suited to that task than C++ with its mountains of complex features and wacky syntax.
if you're looking for a high-performance language you can't rely on a system with garbage collection and run-time linking.
This is not necessarily the case; recent Hotspot JVMs have been producing impressive results. Yes, you'll probably always be able to beat it with optimized C, like you'll always be able to beat C with optimized assembly, but for the vast majority of tasks it is more than fast enough.
Not to mention that truly understanding what's going on with memory and pointers, while posing a steeper learning curve, really helps you understand how the machine deals with your programs.
Here I agree. Nobody should be able to get a CS degree without knowing C and being able to do pointer tricks. But for introductory classes, which probably have lots of non-CS students, that's going to be overkill.
Here is an article stating that the Eskimos who actually live in the area support drilling, and based on past dealings with oil companies do not believe it would not harm the environment. But I'm sure you know more than they do.
Sources, please. The Greenpeace flyer doesn't count.
and it doesn't involve blaming environmentalists for a California problem that was caused by a right-wing deregulation fiasco of unimaginable proportions.
"Deregulation" never happened in California. Price controls and massive bureaucratic obstacles to producing and selling power happened.
Now that you've established that you are a morally superior individual to those of use who want to rape the earth and kick puppies, what exactly do you propose to do about the problem that our civilization requires large amounts of energy? Conservation is fine and well, but as CA demonstrates that by itself is not sufficient. And I'm guessing you're not a huge fan of nuclear power either, so what's the answer?
This reminds me, Mac OS X has a very similar feature called Services, which allow applications to export functionality that can be accessed from anywhere. For example, I can select a URL in a text editor (or terminal window, or any other app), select "Open URL" from the Services menu, and the URL opens in OmniWeb. It would be easy to write a service that would perform dictionary or Google lookups on the selected text, in fact I may do that because it's a good idea.
This technology is more flexible than a static list of words to link, and it keeps the user in control, as opposed to Microsoft's view that they know where you want to go today.
Not really; the proxy wouldn't be altering the data, only preventing the original data from being altered by IE. In fact, the proxy could look for a meta tag that would specifically enable smart tags (which is how MS would have done it if they had any interest in benefitting their customers) and if present not insert the smart tag blocker. I would consider this a public service along the same lines as cancelling spam on Usenet.
There will be no proof of this assertion because it is entirely false. It is possible that Republicans opposed a Clinton-nominated judge who was black, and for liberals the only possible explanation of this is that all Republicans are racists. Oddly, this reasoning doesn't seem to apply to Democrats who opposed Clarence Thomas.
Guns are inanimate objects. They are neither good nor evil, but can be used for good and evil purposes. See World War II for examples of both.
Both guns and port scanning tools have entirely legitimate and beneficial uses, and neither should be banned.
But this isn't about redistribution, it's about locally altering the appearance of a web page, as I might do by changing the default fonts, disabling Javascript, or running Junkbuster.
It would be no more binding than are the phony EULAs found in most commercial software.
There's no question that Microsoft is adding this "feature" to benefit themselves rather than their customers. Still, it's conceptually the same as me looking at your website through a Junkbuster proxy, or changing the text and background colors to some weird combination. Even if you are the copyright holder on a work, you do not get to exert absolute control over how it is viewed or used. Isn't this why we're opposed to the DMCA, because it unreasonably limits what users can do with their own machines?
+5. This is likely to be the best advice on this thread. Clearly there are many details we don't know about, and any legal comments made here will probably have only an accidental relationship to reality.
Get a lawyer, and do whatever you have to to graduate.
Actually, there are several differences. The Mafia doesn't insist on knowing every detail of my finances, as long as they get paid. The Mafia doesn't care what chemicals I may choose to ingest in private. And I don't think even the Mafia could pull off as huge a pyramid scheme as Social Security.