Really? I'm pretty sure most Americans could ride a horse. We all managed quite well 200 years ago. I grew up riding horses; it's not hard. It's more about communication -- learning what signals the horse is giving you, and how to properly give signals to the horse.
I have to take exception to this "Americans are dumb" sentiment. Americans are vastly undereducated on the whole -- both in an institutional context and a cultural/parental one -- but they are no more or less intelligent than any other country's inhabitants. They are never inspired to push themselves, to be challenged, to learn. In fact, American culture has come to think of intelligence as "uncool" -- a frightening development. That's why what's going on in our country is such a tragedy. But saying the average American is not intelligent enough to ride a horse -- that's just elitism.
It's a good point to bring up. I too have used Ghostery for a long time and put some amount of blind trust in what they're doing. But looking Evidon's site, I see that the main thrust of their revenue seems to be in selling compliance products to governments and corps. This app which manages browser trackers for compliance is likely based on the Ghostery codebase and likely why they scooped it up.
And I see on Ghostery's blog that they blacked out their site during the SOPA Blackout day. So it's always good to question who's pulling the strings behind the curtain, but in this case I think both the company and the users of Ghostery win.
That was never generosity, that was fulfilling a basic social contract.
I wouldn't call it a "social contract" as much as I would patriotism. Most of today's multinational corporation juggernauts started out as family-owned businesses. Not only did the family have their their reputation to protect, since their name was in the company title and all, but these guys were truly patriotic and thankful for the possibilities that America gave them, and wanted to make sure America benefited from their prosperity. Modern publicly-traded multinationals couldn't give a damn about America, as evidenced in the Apple exec quote, "It's not our job to fix America's problems." The fact that these corporations' executives don't see themselves as part of America gets to the root of the problem.
I believe in unions, but I do think they need to be regulated in a different way in the USA so that they are democratic institutions that aren't co-opted by a small power elite at the top.
But I guess I could say this about the United States government as well.
The docks in Los Angeles (San Pedro) are the same. It's all "in the family". I know a guy who lived next to one of the big cheeses of the Dockworkers union. They would greet each other and make smalltalk across the hedges, but this guy's smalltalk was things like, "Yeah...so you know Jim? Yeah, well Jim wasn't happy with our deal, so we had to talk to sense into him.With a couple baseball bats. After our conversation, I put him in the car and said to give my best to his wife. I think we're on the same page now."
I believe in unions, but I do think they need to be regulated in a different way in the USA so that they are democratic institutions that aren't co-opted by a small power elite at the top.
Our purpose here isn't to make it completely impossible for people to read Wikipedia, and it's okay for you to circumvent the blackout. We just want to make sure you see our message.
The problem is that most people who love Javascript seem to love it for the bad parts -- the "everything goes" language parts. There's no classes, just anonymous functions. Some people seem to love this half-assed prototype-based OOP and label it with words like "expressive" and "powerful". It's not so powerful when you're building complex RIAs. In that case, it's really dreadful compared to class-based OOP languages. As people start developing more advanced HTML5 apps, this will become apparent. There's no strong typing. People love this. I get it...people loved Actionscript 2 with its fast-and-loose coding style. Hey, I'm not necessarily against weak typing; I like Ruby. And weak typing is fine for building quick prototypes. But it makes projects a bitch to debug. And let's be honest -- most people love it because it seems quicker to throw together a bunch of shit code really fast and get your small-sized project done.
But there was a good reason Adobe moved on to AS3 after Microsoft killed ECMAScript 4 in the committee -- anything beyond small projects was a huge pain in the ass to develop. [Adobe also made the switch for performance reasons, but that was more because their compiler was unoptimized, which we saw bit them in the ass later] When I code in AS3 and then code something in JS, it's like stepping back 10 years in time. Which it really is, because there's been no major revision to Javascript in 10 years thanks to MS.
And now we have compounded problems because of this. We have all these competing dev groups trying to make up for this 10-year deficit with ridiculously hacky libraries like jQuery and Coffeescript. [They are not ridiculous for what they've done within the limitations of JS; kudos to those people for squeezing every last HP out of that '82 Honda. They are ridiculous because they're ultimately ingenious-but-giant hacks on top of an outdated language.] And then we have web app frameworks like Ruby on Rails fighting amongst themselves about which JS library to bundle by default. This is the kind of crap that happens when we have standards that were made for the web of the late '90s. I'm not holding out a lot of hope for drastic changes with ECMAScript 5, or Harmony or whatever they're calling the next punt down the field.
I understand the thrust of your opinion here, but wanted to clarify regarding your dismissive statement, "And if junior has a sister, she's going to be rooting for the Netflix too" -- a 2004 survey by the Entertainment Software Assoc. had females comprising 25% of console gamers and 39% of PC gamers.
People who are actually good drivers (or flyers) know that there are some situations in which you are FUBAR. Like getting t-boned by someone running a red light, or like PSA Flight 182 -- a 727 which collided with a Cessna 172 above San Diego, CA. Captain James McFeron's last words to the tower as the 727 descended in an uncontrolled plunge were, "This is it, baby", and that sums it up. Sometimes no matter how good you are, how much you prepare, you end up at the mercy of the universe's alternate plans for you.
Regarding the article, there's enough that can go wrong without having a plane come apart because some bean counter deemed it an acceptable risk.
At a high level, this is irrelevant. The high-tech toys are the tail wagging the dog -- the military industrial complex is about profit, not results. Yes, there are guys in the military who are "straight shooters", but most of the up-top guys are mired in political mud. And sure, there's a contingent in the military who are in a decades-running penis-waving contest and have to "better" than all the theoretical threats out there, because guys up top are from a generation that was trained to fight World War 3 with the Soviets.
The potential for abuse is a greater evil than the potential for goodwill is a blessing. I understand your perspective, but we are at a philosophical divide. The law is no place for interpretation and subjectivity. If a law is ill-formed, then it should be modified or struck down. The one exception to this tenet is Constitutional law, for laws in this case must be crafted with paternalistic broad strokes; the genus to a specific law's species. But even then, a Constitution which is worded with vague intentions can cause no end to interpretative problems.
Considering Javascript still doesn't even have support for classes, I'd pick Actionscript in a second. And having written libraries in both languages, yes I'd definitely pick AS3 in a second. Javascript is a plague upon the web -- loose typing, no classes, dodgy debugging, different browser implementations of things like call stacks and getter/setters, just to name a few. It was painful years ago, and it's even more painful in the age of AJAX and HTML5.
Imagine if police officers also took this kind of subjective stance with the law they are sworn to uphold. Hell, they already are -- we're seeing them violate the rights of individuals in the US en masse. When someone in a position to uphold the law disregards it, it ceases to be something the populace can depend on. If a potential juror has a problem with the law, he or she can refuse to participate, but to swear to uphold the law and then sabotage the trial because he or she doesn't like the law is breaking the social contract. If a juror can refuse to act on a law that's bad, then another juror can also refuse to act on a law that's good. And that's trial by mob, not by jury.
The proper way to change laws is through the legislature. At least in the US system, the law can only be struck down if it violates a state or federal Constitution. So no, the appeals process is generally not a way to change a law you don't like. Yes, unfortunately changing the law often takes time in a democratic system. But if a government is consistently producing bad law, the problem is that the public is failing to elect good representatives. In the US, the two-party system has been completely corrupted while Americans were asleep, and no one woke them up. A thriving democracy cannot exist without an educated public and a strong press. In the US, both of those things are ceasing to exist. Those things must be fixed or the democracy has no future. This jury vigilantism you suggest does nothing to tackle that problem. The legal system is flawed, but it's one of the last parts of US government that generally works. What you suggest is to make a mockery of it by trivializing the oath as a citizen to uphold the law as a juror, and at the end of the day still have a broken government.
I don't have working knowledge of US military hardware internals, and if I did I certainly couldn't comment about it, but I imagine to some extent you're correct. Though there's still a big difference of knowledge and skill between base parts and a final design. For instance, getting photos and material samples from a downed US stealth fighter or helicopter doesn't mean the Chinese can go right out and build one of their own, or automatically absorb the theory and science behind it. But they are improving much more rapidly than the US military thought possible; case in point, the Chinese sub which surfaced within torpedo range of a US carrier without being detected.
But yes, the US has certainly been sold down the river by politicians and corporations who were willing to put personal desires for wealth and power above the good of the country. The lack of a large high-tech manufacturing base in America is certainly, as you point out, as much a national security issue as it is an economic one.
Well, it's LITERALLY dated now that we've already passed 2010.
But the US still has a Cold War -- it's just with China now. [a more complicated Cold War, certainly, but despite the economic relationship the militaries of the two nations see each other as a primary threat] And once they get their space program in full swing and the US program continues to deteriorate, I could see a tense joint mission between the two.
The precise reason the jury is allowed to do this is to make sure the law stands up to the scrutiny of the common people
The law is made by the legislative branch of government. If you don't like the laws, get new people in there to change them, appeal to a higher court which can strike down the laws, or start a revolution I guess. The purpose of the jury is to make sure a single judge doesn't bring bias into the case against the defendant or accuser. If the law as written can't be respected, then the fragile social contract which John Locke argued for is broken and gives way to anarchism.
1) Plug-ins are a part of the HTML5 standard. The committee understands the two can co-exist and thrive. 2) The web has been thriving for many years now with plug-ins. I think it'll do just fine. 3) It was Flash that kept the progress of the web moving forward, when standards committee progress turned glacial. Go read about the history of Javascript. It's a sad tale, and that language is still 10 years behind Actionscript even though they are both based on the root ECMAScript language. Eventually Adobe had to go their own way with Actionscript because nothing was getting done.
Eventually most people will primarily browse the web on a tablet device. Meaning, most people will no longer have the ability to block ads through their tablet-supplied mobile web browsers or content-specific portals like the Facebook app. So I think this is a short-term problem for these companies, and a long-term problem for users who are moving to embrace locked-down versions of the web. [Most people will not hack their device]
You're missing a bit there. "Organized crime" IS the KGB. When the KGB was disbanded, those guys no longer had jobs. Some now work for the Russian security forces, but most seem to have gone into the underworld in those chaotic post-USSR years. And let's not forget that Putin is ex-KGB. There's not much difference between the Russian mafia and the Russian government. Similar to America's corporatocracy, but more brutal.
[3] Incidentally, the same is true of the early Earth. Creationists like to point out the unlikelihood of life arising because of the low odds of the right chemical conditions arising - but with thousands of lighting strikes (to take one proposed cause) occurring daily in a wide variety of locations
Actually, according to the NOAA Severe Storms Lab, lightning strikes the ground of the Earth about eight MILLION times a day. So, a lot more chances than you suggested!
Marathon was also the first FPS to offer secondary-fire modes on weapons, and the first to offer multiplayer game modes. I can't remember if they shipped a level editor or weapons customization editor, or if that was 3rd party.
Useful for whom? HyperCard was probably the most friendly, accessible, yet powerful way to introduce people to programming the industry has ever seen. I created a full RPG on my Mac Plus using HyperCard when I was in my teens. Sure, I'd read through a C book and could do command-line programs, but rich GUI experiences? That was way beyond what I had a handle on. But, enter HyperCard, and I had a full development environment which let me easily program multimedia experiences. My RPG had animated graphics, a combat system, a branching dialogue system, contextual mouse icons and interactions, and an inventory system. [The main problem back then was distribution -- all we had were dialup modems and BBSes.] So I don't know, I have fond memories of HyperCard because it gave me the tools to easily create what I wanted. It empowered me and my ideas. I think the "fondness" people have for Minecraft is there for similar reasons. It seems you have a different metric for "useful". I think getting kids excited about programming and creation is one of the most useful things a piece of software can do.
Taking a larger look, what HyperCard did for people with little-to-no programming experience, Jobs did on the NeXT for professional developers. NeXTSTEP's dev tools were highly lauded as revolutionary for introducing GUI abstractions to coding (the basis of what XCode is today); so much so that companies like Microsoft and Lotus were developing their software for other platforms on NeXTs. So the idea that Steve killed HyperCard because he hated creation tools rings a bit false to me.
Slashdot Mirror
Because a corporation IS a person, obviously! :/
Really? I'm pretty sure most Americans could ride a horse. We all managed quite well 200 years ago. I grew up riding horses; it's not hard. It's more about communication -- learning what signals the horse is giving you, and how to properly give signals to the horse.
I have to take exception to this "Americans are dumb" sentiment. Americans are vastly undereducated on the whole -- both in an institutional context and a cultural/parental one -- but they are no more or less intelligent than any other country's inhabitants. They are never inspired to push themselves, to be challenged, to learn. In fact, American culture has come to think of intelligence as "uncool" -- a frightening development. That's why what's going on in our country is such a tragedy. But saying the average American is not intelligent enough to ride a horse -- that's just elitism.
It's a good point to bring up. I too have used Ghostery for a long time and put some amount of blind trust in what they're doing. But looking Evidon's site, I see that the main thrust of their revenue seems to be in selling compliance products to governments and corps. This app which manages browser trackers for compliance is likely based on the Ghostery codebase and likely why they scooped it up.
And I see on Ghostery's blog that they blacked out their site during the SOPA Blackout day. So it's always good to question who's pulling the strings behind the curtain, but in this case I think both the company and the users of Ghostery win.
Or your average software engineer.
The more pressing question is, where does that sky crane fly off to? Perhaps a secret mission to bomb the Martians' base?
I wouldn't call it a "social contract" as much as I would patriotism. Most of today's multinational corporation juggernauts started out as family-owned businesses. Not only did the family have their their reputation to protect, since their name was in the company title and all, but these guys were truly patriotic and thankful for the possibilities that America gave them, and wanted to make sure America benefited from their prosperity. Modern publicly-traded multinationals couldn't give a damn about America, as evidenced in the Apple exec quote, "It's not our job to fix America's problems." The fact that these corporations' executives don't see themselves as part of America gets to the root of the problem.
But I guess I could say this about the United States government as well.
The docks in Los Angeles (San Pedro) are the same. It's all "in the family". I know a guy who lived next to one of the big cheeses of the Dockworkers union. They would greet each other and make smalltalk across the hedges, but this guy's smalltalk was things like, "Yeah...so you know Jim? Yeah, well Jim wasn't happy with our deal, so we had to talk to sense into him.With a couple baseball bats. After our conversation, I put him in the car and said to give my best to his wife. I think we're on the same page now."
I believe in unions, but I do think they need to be regulated in a different way in the USA so that they are democratic institutions that aren't co-opted by a small power elite at the top.
Wikipedia: the United Nations of SOPA sanctions.
The problem is that most people who love Javascript seem to love it for the bad parts -- the "everything goes" language parts. There's no classes, just anonymous functions. Some people seem to love this half-assed prototype-based OOP and label it with words like "expressive" and "powerful". It's not so powerful when you're building complex RIAs. In that case, it's really dreadful compared to class-based OOP languages. As people start developing more advanced HTML5 apps, this will become apparent. There's no strong typing. People love this. I get it...people loved Actionscript 2 with its fast-and-loose coding style. Hey, I'm not necessarily against weak typing; I like Ruby. And weak typing is fine for building quick prototypes. But it makes projects a bitch to debug. And let's be honest -- most people love it because it seems quicker to throw together a bunch of shit code really fast and get your small-sized project done.
But there was a good reason Adobe moved on to AS3 after Microsoft killed ECMAScript 4 in the committee -- anything beyond small projects was a huge pain in the ass to develop. [Adobe also made the switch for performance reasons, but that was more because their compiler was unoptimized, which we saw bit them in the ass later] When I code in AS3 and then code something in JS, it's like stepping back 10 years in time. Which it really is, because there's been no major revision to Javascript in 10 years thanks to MS.
And now we have compounded problems because of this. We have all these competing dev groups trying to make up for this 10-year deficit with ridiculously hacky libraries like jQuery and Coffeescript. [They are not ridiculous for what they've done within the limitations of JS; kudos to those people for squeezing every last HP out of that '82 Honda. They are ridiculous because they're ultimately ingenious-but-giant hacks on top of an outdated language.] And then we have web app frameworks like Ruby on Rails fighting amongst themselves about which JS library to bundle by default. This is the kind of crap that happens when we have standards that were made for the web of the late '90s. I'm not holding out a lot of hope for drastic changes with ECMAScript 5, or Harmony or whatever they're calling the next punt down the field.
I understand the thrust of your opinion here, but wanted to clarify regarding your dismissive statement, "And if junior has a sister, she's going to be rooting for the Netflix too" -- a 2004 survey by the Entertainment Software Assoc. had females comprising 25% of console gamers and 39% of PC gamers.
People who are actually good drivers (or flyers) know that there are some situations in which you are FUBAR. Like getting t-boned by someone running a red light, or like PSA Flight 182 -- a 727 which collided with a Cessna 172 above San Diego, CA. Captain James McFeron's last words to the tower as the 727 descended in an uncontrolled plunge were, "This is it, baby", and that sums it up. Sometimes no matter how good you are, how much you prepare, you end up at the mercy of the universe's alternate plans for you.
Regarding the article, there's enough that can go wrong without having a plane come apart because some bean counter deemed it an acceptable risk.
At a high level, this is irrelevant. The high-tech toys are the tail wagging the dog -- the military industrial complex is about profit, not results. Yes, there are guys in the military who are "straight shooters", but most of the up-top guys are mired in political mud. And sure, there's a contingent in the military who are in a decades-running penis-waving contest and have to "better" than all the theoretical threats out there, because guys up top are from a generation that was trained to fight World War 3 with the Soviets.
The potential for abuse is a greater evil than the potential for goodwill is a blessing. I understand your perspective, but we are at a philosophical divide. The law is no place for interpretation and subjectivity. If a law is ill-formed, then it should be modified or struck down. The one exception to this tenet is Constitutional law, for laws in this case must be crafted with paternalistic broad strokes; the genus to a specific law's species. But even then, a Constitution which is worded with vague intentions can cause no end to interpretative problems.
Considering Javascript still doesn't even have support for classes, I'd pick Actionscript in a second. And having written libraries in both languages, yes I'd definitely pick AS3 in a second. Javascript is a plague upon the web -- loose typing, no classes, dodgy debugging, different browser implementations of things like call stacks and getter/setters, just to name a few. It was painful years ago, and it's even more painful in the age of AJAX and HTML5.
Imagine if police officers also took this kind of subjective stance with the law they are sworn to uphold. Hell, they already are -- we're seeing them violate the rights of individuals in the US en masse. When someone in a position to uphold the law disregards it, it ceases to be something the populace can depend on. If a potential juror has a problem with the law, he or she can refuse to participate, but to swear to uphold the law and then sabotage the trial because he or she doesn't like the law is breaking the social contract. If a juror can refuse to act on a law that's bad, then another juror can also refuse to act on a law that's good. And that's trial by mob, not by jury.
The proper way to change laws is through the legislature. At least in the US system, the law can only be struck down if it violates a state or federal Constitution. So no, the appeals process is generally not a way to change a law you don't like. Yes, unfortunately changing the law often takes time in a democratic system. But if a government is consistently producing bad law, the problem is that the public is failing to elect good representatives. In the US, the two-party system has been completely corrupted while Americans were asleep, and no one woke them up. A thriving democracy cannot exist without an educated public and a strong press. In the US, both of those things are ceasing to exist. Those things must be fixed or the democracy has no future. This jury vigilantism you suggest does nothing to tackle that problem. The legal system is flawed, but it's one of the last parts of US government that generally works. What you suggest is to make a mockery of it by trivializing the oath as a citizen to uphold the law as a juror, and at the end of the day still have a broken government.
I don't have working knowledge of US military hardware internals, and if I did I certainly couldn't comment about it, but I imagine to some extent you're correct. Though there's still a big difference of knowledge and skill between base parts and a final design. For instance, getting photos and material samples from a downed US stealth fighter or helicopter doesn't mean the Chinese can go right out and build one of their own, or automatically absorb the theory and science behind it. But they are improving much more rapidly than the US military thought possible; case in point, the Chinese sub which surfaced within torpedo range of a US carrier without being detected.
But yes, the US has certainly been sold down the river by politicians and corporations who were willing to put personal desires for wealth and power above the good of the country. The lack of a large high-tech manufacturing base in America is certainly, as you point out, as much a national security issue as it is an economic one.
Well, it's LITERALLY dated now that we've already passed 2010.
But the US still has a Cold War -- it's just with China now. [a more complicated Cold War, certainly, but despite the economic relationship the militaries of the two nations see each other as a primary threat] And once they get their space program in full swing and the US program continues to deteriorate, I could see a tense joint mission between the two.
The law is made by the legislative branch of government. If you don't like the laws, get new people in there to change them, appeal to a higher court which can strike down the laws, or start a revolution I guess. The purpose of the jury is to make sure a single judge doesn't bring bias into the case against the defendant or accuser. If the law as written can't be respected, then the fragile social contract which John Locke argued for is broken and gives way to anarchism.
1) Plug-ins are a part of the HTML5 standard. The committee understands the two can co-exist and thrive.
2) The web has been thriving for many years now with plug-ins. I think it'll do just fine.
3) It was Flash that kept the progress of the web moving forward, when standards committee progress turned glacial. Go read about the history of Javascript. It's a sad tale, and that language is still 10 years behind Actionscript even though they are both based on the root ECMAScript language. Eventually Adobe had to go their own way with Actionscript because nothing was getting done.
Eventually most people will primarily browse the web on a tablet device. Meaning, most people will no longer have the ability to block ads through their tablet-supplied mobile web browsers or content-specific portals like the Facebook app. So I think this is a short-term problem for these companies, and a long-term problem for users who are moving to embrace locked-down versions of the web. [Most people will not hack their device]
You're missing a bit there. "Organized crime" IS the KGB. When the KGB was disbanded, those guys no longer had jobs. Some now work for the Russian security forces, but most seem to have gone into the underworld in those chaotic post-USSR years. And let's not forget that Putin is ex-KGB. There's not much difference between the Russian mafia and the Russian government. Similar to America's corporatocracy, but more brutal.
Actually, according to the NOAA Severe Storms Lab, lightning strikes the ground of the Earth about eight MILLION times a day. So, a lot more chances than you suggested!
Marathon was also the first FPS to offer secondary-fire modes on weapons, and the first to offer multiplayer game modes. I can't remember if they shipped a level editor or weapons customization editor, or if that was 3rd party.
Useful for whom? HyperCard was probably the most friendly, accessible, yet powerful way to introduce people to programming the industry has ever seen.
I created a full RPG on my Mac Plus using HyperCard when I was in my teens. Sure, I'd read through a C book and could do command-line programs, but rich GUI experiences? That was way beyond what I had a handle on. But, enter HyperCard, and I had a full development environment which let me easily program multimedia experiences. My RPG had animated graphics, a combat system, a branching dialogue system, contextual mouse icons and interactions, and an inventory system. [The main problem back then was distribution -- all we had were dialup modems and BBSes.] So I don't know, I have fond memories of HyperCard because it gave me the tools to easily create what I wanted. It empowered me and my ideas. I think the "fondness" people have for Minecraft is there for similar reasons. It seems you have a different metric for "useful". I think getting kids excited about programming and creation is one of the most useful things a piece of software can do.
Taking a larger look, what HyperCard did for people with little-to-no programming experience, Jobs did on the NeXT for professional developers. NeXTSTEP's dev tools were highly lauded as revolutionary for introducing GUI abstractions to coding (the basis of what XCode is today); so much so that companies like Microsoft and Lotus were developing their software for other platforms on NeXTs. So the idea that Steve killed HyperCard because he hated creation tools rings a bit false to me.