In reading the article, it would seem that the culpable party was the surgeon, not the machine.
Really? Point out where the article draws that conclusion.
As I just said elsewhere, it's unclear how the accident happened, obviously, but with something like this I consider both the underlying technique as well as the user interface potential risk factors. Of course, it could just have been human error, but that's the whole point of risk factor analysis; the line between "human error" and a false expectation or a design problem does not actually exist.
We don't know anything about the trial - so let's not guess about rates. I'm just saying it's very bad when such an accident (occurring just a few weeks ago) is not worthy of mention in a long news article or TV program covering the device. Especially when it clearly appears to be the result of procedural error - this isn't someone's hand slipping. It should (rightly) draw new attention to the doctor, the device, and the underlying techniques, so it's very spooky when the news covers the device without ever mentioning it's just been involved in a patient death under questionable circumstances.
It's unclear how the accident happened, obviously, but with something like this I consider both the underlying technique as well as the user interface potential risk factors. Of course, it could just have been human error, but that's the whole point of risk factor analysis; the line between "human error" and a false expectation or a design problem does not actually exist.
Isn't this the same robot that was just involved in a patient death?
I mention it because I caught the news about a robot being involved in a surgery accident on the newswire a couple days ago, and then yesterday I caught a puff piece on the DaVinci system on the TV news (ABC, I think?) - no mention of that recent fatality.
No mention of the fatality in the CNN article, either. And for that matter, no mention of it here. I find this very strange. Slashdot editors missing it, I can understand. But wouldn't even the most brain-dead journalist make this connection? Let alone the big-leaguers?
Where does it stop? AT&T (back when it was ma bell) used to forbid people from using answering machines not made and installed by AT&T at enormous expense. If you broke the rules, you could be sued, but worse, they could permanently refuse to sell you phone service as "punishment."
How dare we tamper with ma bell's own lines? How dare we?
Dont change the subject. Mod chips have many legitimate uses, and many legitimate users. Microsoft disagrees - what stunning moral logic of you to assume Microsoft is acting honestly in doing so.
I expect them to suck it up and take it like a multi-billion dollar monopoly.
I stand behind everything I said. Rather, your high-handed attitude and refusal to answer the points is the very paradigm of condescension - not to mention that it makes it clear you have nowhere to go with your argument.
I made the point that other platforms are not immune to the "too many ways of doing things" disease.
And what bad faith of you to do so, since your implication is that X is on a par with Win/Mac for standardization, and thus ease of use - or are you merely quibbling.
The (limited) scope of X11 is why X11 still exists.
No, inertia is why X still exists. Please, if you like, starting with your "100s", list the free and open (or even close) alternatives to X that withered on the vine out of anything other than the "good enough" momentum of people who were already using X.
many of the "bare to the metal" GUIs couldn't evolve fast enough.
I actually laughed when I read this. You live in a strange fantasy world, where the GUI has evolved at anything other than a snail's pace in the last 20 years. "Couldn't evolve fast enough." I think my garden slugs are evolving faster.
Truthfully, there is a tremendous advantage to a well-integrated, well-packaged and concise system that does GUI end-to-end. It saves a lot of work for end-developers and if well made requires the same or (I think) less work to "evolve" than X+frontend of the moment. It means programmers can do a lot more because things are simpler. You see, these "assumptions" aren't just good for users, they're good for developers too.
Nothing about X's choice not to meet all these needs was wise. It was merely expedient.
X11 IS NOT A GUI.
You seem to be willfully missing the point. We clearly know this already. And as has been said over and over again, this is why we need to reconsider it.
No problems will be solved by throwing away X11 and hoping that everybody standardises on your favored project (ie, PicoGUI).
Quite wrong. Unless you don't consider the failure of unix outside of the server-and-geek world a problem. Maybe you don't. Consider the monumental efforts of KDE and GNOME - and spend 10 minutes with a non-computer-user attempting to work with them. X and its legacy is fundamentally what's in the way - it's a big mess, even as a protocol, and the design decisions inside it percolate up to the very highest of the high-level interfaces built on top of it, usually wounding and crippling them. Unfortunately, there's a lot of elitism and snobbery in the unix and development worlds that keeps people from looking past it and imagining what could be better. But some of us remember the same kinds of folks arguing that the GUI itself was a fad, and a waste of time, next to the "good enough" CLI.
Not only are you wrong on the merits (since X's limitations - which don't bother you - are the death of a thousand cuts to innovation among developers as well as adoption among users), but you are wrong on the principle. Do something for the art of it. For the love of it. Don't refuse to do something new because what's old is "good enough."
Because it was a red herring. Didn't seem very "smart" to bring it up. Discussing libel (or "slander") in this thread is sort of like asking whether it would be ethical for vendors to sell hotdogs at a state execution. But actually, asking what I would think about "terrorist websites" was what put you over the top.
I real all about the high school teachers. Personally, I'm not too happy with that kind of law, but it doesn't enter into this discussion, as it's a civil matter. The government doesn't care who you slander. BTW, slander cases in the U.S. are also very rare - they're hard to win. Not to mention that, in print, it's called "libel."
BTW again, what do you think of a journalist who covers these issues but doesn't cite any of the materials? Pretty yellow, eh?
Did you read far enough in my post to get the answer to your own question? A website used to plan a terrorist attack *non-specifically* would be immediately noticed, and would present "probable cause" for a criminal investigation that would probably include surveillance of the perpetrators. I really hope terrorsists are that stupid. But I doubt it. A website that *specifically* incited terrorists acts would in itself potentially be a crime, but that would most likely lead to the same result - a real investigation, hopefully finding evidence for a fair trial.
I wonder if our notoriously yellow media has led you to believe that you need to arbitrarily censor everyone to prevent terrorism?
What's ironic about all this is that when you do that, it becomes both harder to catch terrorists, and harder for terrorists themselves to find any justification. Just shout out your cause in the market square. Everyone might boo you, and you'd go home feeling like an idiot, instead of possibly mistaking enforced silence as evidence, for instance, that the world really wants to be a fascist Muslim theocracy.
You say "the web site in particular was very clear about advocating violence"; I didn't see that website cited anywhere. Do you have a URL?
Our concern is angry but peaceful political speech being intentionally mislabeled as an "incitement to violence" in order to silence it. I suspect this is the case literally, but regardless, the reasoning stands:
We are talking about people in the act of doing violence against an army of police. We don't need to split hairs over "dangerous" speech. You're already holding a big umbrella to protect yourself from the storm; don't try to arrest the wind for blowing it in your direction. Why? a) Stifling political speech is about as hard as arresting the wind - you still get the protest, b) The censorship powers are uniformly abused, c) the end result is the same, except with censorship your "democracy" loses its legitimacy.
Just as we say it is better to let a hundred criminals go free than one innocent be punished, we say it is a better society that looks bravely into the face of dangerous speech than one that cowers, like the Chinese, behind a firewall, against the perils of democratic ideals. This is not some idealistic caprice - these are hard-won and time-tested ideas.
If this is actually a case where there is a group openly and specifically organizing violent criminal acts against the police on the web, it's the exception that proves the rule. If that were the case, however, I'd expect (and hope, actually) to see real arrests and real trials, not administrative decisions and arbitrary censorship.
Shoddily and over-specifically summarizing centuries of legal tradition, America has the extremely circumspect definition that only speech which "directly incites" other parties to "violence" is not "protected speech" under the 1st Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
So in theory, in America, a website might be considered illegal if it were instructing protesters to take violent actions. But even in this, U.S. courts have at various times (though certainly not always) proved extremely conservative about what an "instruction" is - as a general rule, "let's teach the bastards a lesson" doens't qualify; not even "bring your baseball bats" would. The former could be considered rhetorical or non-specific, and the latter doesn't tell anyone what to do with the bats (could be self-defense, for instance). Only speech which names names, places, or specific acts in a totally clear and unambiguous way, such as "John, attack any police who come into your sector with rocks" has tended to qualify the speaker as a party to a conspiracy to commit a criminal act.
Despite this unprecedently liberal view of free speech, America has not degenerated into anarchy, much to the chagrin of a number of European political philosophers.
In the case of the websites being shut down, there are no examples of what qualifies, only a vague reference to anti-WTO organizations. Though anti-WTO protests have a repuation for violence, the organizations behind them are uniformly peaceful in nature and advocate nothing other than non-violent demonstration and, only at the most absolute extreme, vandalism or traffic violations. The most polite thing we can say is that it's often "unclear" whether or not the police or the protesters are the source of the violence in a given incident. Being more impolite, it seems that law enforcement is sent out in anti-protest activities with instructions that virtually guarantee violence ("There's a gang of young drugged-out commie agitators out there frightening citizens and stopping traffic. Here's all the clubs, pepper spray, and tear gass you need. We stand behind whatever actions you need to take 100%.") Telling it like it is, quite often the peaceful protestors get the shit gassed and jackbooted out of them without provocation, and when they post bail and go home, they see on the news that they were "violent" and thus, deserved it. Congratulations freshman, you've just passed Authoritarian Propaganda 101.
But I digress. It appears that by U.S. standards the interdictions being considered in Australia would be in gross violation of the 1st Amendment. Obviously territorial sovereignty means this should give an Australian politician little pause. But there is also relevant international law and widely-recognized (or so we all claim at Christmas) international declarations of human rights, which muddy the waters somewhat. Unfortunately, this doesn't give politicians much pause either - in the 1st world or the 3rd.
Ultimately, the American interpretation of the right of free speech is so strict because of constant and blatant experience with the abuse of police power to intimidate and silence political dissent - a totally undemocratic and illegal practice in almost every 1st world country... but politicians and police tend not to have themselves arrested and tried for it.
The bottom line is that (at least up until now - I don't want to speculate about the future) we've pretty much backed off silencing political speech in the U.S., no matter how inflamatory. The infamous example is the Nuremberg Files website, a hideous screed containing a list of abortion practitioners, where names are crossed off when one is murdered. Again - no specific instructions to murder any of them, so, despite a rough ride through the courts (this one is about as close as you can shave it), it is still running.
Americans do it this way because history has unambiguously taught them that what little reduction in "dangerous" activity you might get from trying to silence "dangerous" speech (and believe me, you don't get much) is far outweighed by the immense damage these things do to a functioning democracy.
Incidentally - when democracy breaks down, that's when you really get violence.
I think you're a poster child for propaganda. The moral of this story, as old as government itself, is that those in power will call any protest action "violent" or "illegal" in order to simultaneously suppress it and discredit it. Often, police agent provocateurs are even sent into a demonstration with instructions to commit violence themselves and urge others to as well, as "insurance" against particularly well organized protest groups. And that's happened in America. A loss of rights? Shutting the anti-WTO websites down because they "incite violence" is a classic case.
All bluster and no bite, sielwolf. Can't even spell "Ideology," and yet you think you're going to score points for your punch-drunk radical fundamentalism. You don't want justice to be applied flexibly, and yet you're demanding justice not be applied at all. How do you think this country ever got that reputation? And how do you think it will get it back again?
You're just mad someone called you on not understanding the issues.;)
"Sacrifice" and "consistency" are out of context here. Loving this case is not in any way inconsistent. Rather, it's a watershed. I'm against software patents (actually, they're prima facie insane). I also dislike Microsoft's monopolistic practices (among them maintaining a large software patent portfolio), and the high prices, dearth of innovation, and bad engineering they engender.
Generally we have to devote energy to combating both. Now, the two will combat each other. It's beautiful, really; all we have to do is sit back, and one, or the other, or both, will come out of this fray the worse for wear. If only this sort of "hypocrisy" could happen more often.
I would say overall MS has learned exactly the opposite.
Antitrust-wise they seem to be in zero trouble, without making any material change in their business practices. So one PR strategy against Linux failed. There will be dozens of others. I still don't find it obvious that Microsoft's products will be eclipsed by open source in the long term.
I think the moral of that story is, do whatever you want to your customers; if you're a big enough monopolist, you will almost certainly get away with it.
Of course I've "*used*" it. I've spent quality time with people who are programming against it, and I've read much of the developer literature. I see a lot of ambivalence about OSX. I don't think the OS9 cruft is eliminated; I believe that it's all still there, both in the Classic emulation layer and in the APIs which (in earlier drafts I read were simple, beautiful, and well-organized, very Java-like) Adobe forced Apple to cruft up to make native ports of their software easier... and then took their sweet time with those native ports to boot.
You said: "without a lot of the cruft that other Unix systems have accumulated," but I have no idea what you mean. What unix cruft is gone? Are you talking about X11 being replaced by Aqua? From my point of view, all the bad things about Unix are still there, and worse, new unix-esque crap has been piled on top of it, often conflicting, and badly, to add to the confusion that Unix already is.
I think the ditto issue is emblematic of the entire conflict between unix and OS9; they've met, and they've been joined by a confusing and unfortunate kludge which everyone who uses the system is guaranteed to run afoul of. Copying files is about the most basic and fundamental activity you get into in an OS - that's not a little detail you overlook. Why not just modify cp to copy metadata if it exists, or make cp a link to ditto? Or the passwd file being superceded (at least in "some cases," I'm sure) by another database... My rule on this stuff is that if you're going to fsck with the password file, you'll break a lot of old code, but once you do replace it, you take the old piece out... the only thing worse than broken old code is broken old code that thinks its working.
There are more complaints I didn't even get into. The incredible performance hit of scattering metadata of various kinds in what seems like dozens of flat files, so that the UI chains up thousands of seeks all over the disk, parsing XML and doing lots of complicated crap just to show you the contents of a folder or the properties of an application... And then apparently tying everything up in the layout loop... Have you tried resizing windows? It's tragic. And then there's the fact that Apple seems to have abandoned the superior use of metadata it once had; I see gnr9ng.xyz files scattered everywhere, not legacy stuff but new stuff created by Apple, as if it's a DOS box... IOW, turning their back on one of the earliest and best ideas in the Mac: type and creator information, instead of goofy abbreviations and naming conventions that are super-easy for the user to run afoul of.
My big complaint with them is rather than boxing up traditional unix organization and features (which have no place on a desktop Mac, IMO), they made MacOS into a Unix clone, and an annoying one, because there's a bunch of important differences and gotchas and thus hassles actually porting and running unix software, since they did change quite a bit, even if they didn't fix it... meanwhile hiding/usr at the application level means that the user is guaranteed to see it at some point and be confused... I don't understand why they didn't approach unix more like they approached classic. With some containment. Seems like that would have been simpler, more much compatible, easier to use...
Slashdot Mirror
Quite true. I'm far more concerned with the journalists covering the device than with the surgeons.
In reading the article, it would seem that the culpable party was the surgeon, not the machine.
Really? Point out where the article draws that conclusion.
As I just said elsewhere, it's unclear how the accident happened, obviously, but with something like this I consider both the underlying technique as well as the user interface potential risk factors. Of course, it could just have been human error, but that's the whole point of risk factor analysis; the line between "human error" and a false expectation or a design problem does not actually exist.
We don't know anything about the trial - so let's not guess about rates. I'm just saying it's very bad when such an accident (occurring just a few weeks ago) is not worthy of mention in a long news article or TV program covering the device. Especially when it clearly appears to be the result of procedural error - this isn't someone's hand slipping. It should (rightly) draw new attention to the doctor, the device, and the underlying techniques, so it's very spooky when the news covers the device without ever mentioning it's just been involved in a patient death under questionable circumstances.
It's unclear how the accident happened, obviously, but with something like this I consider both the underlying technique as well as the user interface potential risk factors. Of course, it could just have been human error, but that's the whole point of risk factor analysis; the line between "human error" and a false expectation or a design problem does not actually exist.
Isn't this the same robot that was just involved in a patient death?
I mention it because I caught the news about a robot being involved in a surgery accident on the newswire a couple days ago, and then yesterday I caught a puff piece on the DaVinci system on the TV news (ABC, I think?) - no mention of that recent fatality.
No mention of the fatality in the CNN article, either. And for that matter, no mention of it here. I find this very strange. Slashdot editors missing it, I can understand. But wouldn't even the most brain-dead journalist make this connection? Let alone the big-leaguers?
Where does it stop? AT&T (back when it was ma bell) used to forbid people from using answering machines not made and installed by AT&T at enormous expense. If you broke the rules, you could be sued, but worse, they could permanently refuse to sell you phone service as "punishment."
How dare we tamper with ma bell's own lines? How dare we?
Dont change the subject. Mod chips have many legitimate uses, and many legitimate users. Microsoft disagrees - what stunning moral logic of you to assume Microsoft is acting honestly in doing so.
I expect them to suck it up and take it like a multi-billion dollar monopoly.
Well said. Although permanent banning is probably a bit over the top.
Count me in. In fact, count in the entire XBox/Linux group. A $200 Linux box is a very important thing to many people...
Go back and re-read it. As someone clever once said, the truth is insulting to a fallacy. Unless, that is, you don't know how to respond?
I stand behind everything I said. Rather, your high-handed attitude and refusal to answer the points is the very paradigm of condescension - not to mention that it makes it clear you have nowhere to go with your argument.
I made the point that other platforms are not immune to the "too many ways of doing things" disease.
And what bad faith of you to do so, since your implication is that X is on a par with Win/Mac for standardization, and thus ease of use - or are you merely quibbling.
The (limited) scope of X11 is why X11 still exists.
No, inertia is why X still exists. Please, if you like, starting with your "100s", list the free and open (or even close) alternatives to X that withered on the vine out of anything other than the "good enough" momentum of people who were already using X.
many of the "bare to the metal" GUIs couldn't evolve fast enough.
I actually laughed when I read this. You live in a strange fantasy world, where the GUI has evolved at anything other than a snail's pace in the last 20 years. "Couldn't evolve fast enough." I think my garden slugs are evolving faster.
Truthfully, there is a tremendous advantage to a well-integrated, well-packaged and concise system that does GUI end-to-end. It saves a lot of work for end-developers and if well made requires the same or (I think) less work to "evolve" than X+frontend of the moment. It means programmers can do a lot more because things are simpler. You see, these "assumptions" aren't just good for users, they're good for developers too.
Nothing about X's choice not to meet all these needs was wise. It was merely expedient.
X11 IS NOT A GUI.
You seem to be willfully missing the point. We clearly know this already. And as has been said over and over again, this is why we need to reconsider it.
No problems will be solved by throwing away X11 and hoping that everybody standardises on your favored project (ie, PicoGUI).
Quite wrong. Unless you don't consider the failure of unix outside of the server-and-geek world a problem. Maybe you don't. Consider the monumental efforts of KDE and GNOME - and spend 10 minutes with a non-computer-user attempting to work with them. X and its legacy is fundamentally what's in the way - it's a big mess, even as a protocol, and the design decisions inside it percolate up to the very highest of the high-level interfaces built on top of it, usually wounding and crippling them. Unfortunately, there's a lot of elitism and snobbery in the unix and development worlds that keeps people from looking past it and imagining what could be better. But some of us remember the same kinds of folks arguing that the GUI itself was a fad, and a waste of time, next to the "good enough" CLI.
Not only are you wrong on the merits (since X's limitations - which don't bother you - are the death of a thousand cuts to innovation among developers as well as adoption among users), but you are wrong on the principle. Do something for the art of it. For the love of it. Don't refuse to do something new because what's old is "good enough."
Because it was a red herring. Didn't seem very "smart" to bring it up. Discussing libel (or "slander") in this thread is sort of like asking whether it would be ethical for vendors to sell hotdogs at a state execution. But actually, asking what I would think about "terrorist websites" was what put you over the top.
Where you read "it becomes both harder to catch terrorists," strike "both" and add "and when you don't, it becomes" afterwards.
(sigh no edit function)
I real all about the high school teachers. Personally, I'm not too happy with that kind of law, but it doesn't enter into this discussion, as it's a civil matter. The government doesn't care who you slander. BTW, slander cases in the U.S. are also very rare - they're hard to win. Not to mention that, in print, it's called "libel."
BTW again, what do you think of a journalist who covers these issues but doesn't cite any of the materials? Pretty yellow, eh?
Did you read far enough in my post to get the answer to your own question? A website used to plan a terrorist attack *non-specifically* would be immediately noticed, and would present "probable cause" for a criminal investigation that would probably include surveillance of the perpetrators. I really hope terrorsists are that stupid. But I doubt it. A website that *specifically* incited terrorists acts would in itself potentially be a crime, but that would most likely lead to the same result - a real investigation, hopefully finding evidence for a fair trial.
I wonder if our notoriously yellow media has led you to believe that you need to arbitrarily censor everyone to prevent terrorism?
What's ironic about all this is that when you do that, it becomes both harder to catch terrorists, and harder for terrorists themselves to find any justification. Just shout out your cause in the market square. Everyone might boo you, and you'd go home feeling like an idiot, instead of possibly mistaking enforced silence as evidence, for instance, that the world really wants to be a fascist Muslim theocracy.
If you really are just an innocent bystander, I apologize; I'm so used to seeing this childish behavior that perhaps I'm becoming inured...
I love you AC troll. Will you be my girlfriend? ;)
You say "the web site in particular was very clear about advocating violence"; I didn't see that website cited anywhere. Do you have a URL?
Our concern is angry but peaceful political speech being intentionally mislabeled as an "incitement to violence" in order to silence it. I suspect this is the case literally, but regardless, the reasoning stands:
We are talking about people in the act of doing violence against an army of police. We don't need to split hairs over "dangerous" speech. You're already holding a big umbrella to protect yourself from the storm; don't try to arrest the wind for blowing it in your direction. Why? a) Stifling political speech is about as hard as arresting the wind - you still get the protest, b) The censorship powers are uniformly abused, c) the end result is the same, except with censorship your "democracy" loses its legitimacy.
Just as we say it is better to let a hundred criminals go free than one innocent be punished, we say it is a better society that looks bravely into the face of dangerous speech than one that cowers, like the Chinese, behind a firewall, against the perils of democratic ideals. This is not some idealistic caprice - these are hard-won and time-tested ideas.
If this is actually a case where there is a group openly and specifically organizing violent criminal acts against the police on the web, it's the exception that proves the rule. If that were the case, however, I'd expect (and hope, actually) to see real arrests and real trials, not administrative decisions and arbitrary censorship.
Shoddily and over-specifically summarizing centuries of legal tradition, America has the extremely circumspect definition that only speech which "directly incites" other parties to "violence" is not "protected speech" under the 1st Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
So in theory, in America, a website might be considered illegal if it were instructing protesters to take violent actions. But even in this, U.S. courts have at various times (though certainly not always) proved extremely conservative about what an "instruction" is - as a general rule, "let's teach the bastards a lesson" doens't qualify; not even "bring your baseball bats" would. The former could be considered rhetorical or non-specific, and the latter doesn't tell anyone what to do with the bats (could be self-defense, for instance). Only speech which names names, places, or specific acts in a totally clear and unambiguous way, such as "John, attack any police who come into your sector with rocks" has tended to qualify the speaker as a party to a conspiracy to commit a criminal act.
Despite this unprecedently liberal view of free speech, America has not degenerated into anarchy, much to the chagrin of a number of European political philosophers.
In the case of the websites being shut down, there are no examples of what qualifies, only a vague reference to anti-WTO organizations. Though anti-WTO protests have a repuation for violence, the organizations behind them are uniformly peaceful in nature and advocate nothing other than non-violent demonstration and, only at the most absolute extreme, vandalism or traffic violations. The most polite thing we can say is that it's often "unclear" whether or not the police or the protesters are the source of the violence in a given incident. Being more impolite, it seems that law enforcement is sent out in anti-protest activities with instructions that virtually guarantee violence ("There's a gang of young drugged-out commie agitators out there frightening citizens and stopping traffic. Here's all the clubs, pepper spray, and tear gass you need. We stand behind whatever actions you need to take 100%.") Telling it like it is, quite often the peaceful protestors get the shit gassed and jackbooted out of them without provocation, and when they post bail and go home, they see on the news that they were "violent" and thus, deserved it. Congratulations freshman, you've just passed Authoritarian Propaganda 101.
But I digress. It appears that by U.S. standards the interdictions being considered in Australia would be in gross violation of the 1st Amendment. Obviously territorial sovereignty means this should give an Australian politician little pause. But there is also relevant international law and widely-recognized (or so we all claim at Christmas) international declarations of human rights, which muddy the waters somewhat. Unfortunately, this doesn't give politicians much pause either - in the 1st world or the 3rd.
Ultimately, the American interpretation of the right of free speech is so strict because of constant and blatant experience with the abuse of police power to intimidate and silence political dissent - a totally undemocratic and illegal practice in almost every 1st world country... but politicians and police tend not to have themselves arrested and tried for it.
The bottom line is that (at least up until now - I don't want to speculate about the future) we've pretty much backed off silencing political speech in the U.S., no matter how inflamatory. The infamous example is the Nuremberg Files website, a hideous screed containing a list of abortion practitioners, where names are crossed off when one is murdered. Again - no specific instructions to murder any of them, so, despite a rough ride through the courts (this one is about as close as you can shave it), it is still running.
Americans do it this way because history has unambiguously taught them that what little reduction in "dangerous" activity you might get from trying to silence "dangerous" speech (and believe me, you don't get much) is far outweighed by the immense damage these things do to a functioning democracy.
Incidentally - when democracy breaks down, that's when you really get violence.
I think you're a poster child for propaganda. The moral of this story, as old as government itself, is that those in power will call any protest action "violent" or "illegal" in order to simultaneously suppress it and discredit it. Often, police agent provocateurs are even sent into a demonstration with instructions to commit violence themselves and urge others to as well, as "insurance" against particularly well organized protest groups. And that's happened in America. A loss of rights? Shutting the anti-WTO websites down because they "incite violence" is a classic case.
"MIT's reputation as being pure... in its academic evaluation of things is very important."
Apparently not.
All bluster and no bite, sielwolf. Can't even spell "Ideology," and yet you think you're going to score points for your punch-drunk radical fundamentalism. You don't want justice to be applied flexibly, and yet you're demanding justice not be applied at all. How do you think this country ever got that reputation? And how do you think it will get it back again?
;)
You're just mad someone called you on not understanding the issues.
"Sacrifice" and "consistency" are out of context here. Loving this case is not in any way inconsistent. Rather, it's a watershed. I'm against software patents (actually, they're prima facie insane). I also dislike Microsoft's monopolistic practices (among them maintaining a large software patent portfolio), and the high prices, dearth of innovation, and bad engineering they engender.
Generally we have to devote energy to combating both. Now, the two will combat each other. It's beautiful, really; all we have to do is sit back, and one, or the other, or both, will come out of this fray the worse for wear. If only this sort of "hypocrisy" could happen more often.
I would say overall MS has learned exactly the opposite.
Antitrust-wise they seem to be in zero trouble, without making any material change in their business practices. So one PR strategy against Linux failed. There will be dozens of others. I still don't find it obvious that Microsoft's products will be eclipsed by open source in the long term.
I think the moral of that story is, do whatever you want to your customers; if you're a big enough monopolist, you will almost certainly get away with it.
If all it is is code for a price hike, yes, it will fail.
Of course I've "*used*" it. I've spent quality time with people who are programming against it, and I've read much of the developer literature. I see a lot of ambivalence about OSX. I don't think the OS9 cruft is eliminated; I believe that it's all still there, both in the Classic emulation layer and in the APIs which (in earlier drafts I read were simple, beautiful, and well-organized, very Java-like) Adobe forced Apple to cruft up to make native ports of their software easier... and then took their sweet time with those native ports to boot.
/usr at the application level means that the user is guaranteed to see it at some point and be confused... I don't understand why they didn't approach unix more like they approached classic. With some containment. Seems like that would have been simpler, more much compatible, easier to use...
You said: "without a lot of the cruft that other Unix systems have accumulated," but I have no idea what you mean. What unix cruft is gone? Are you talking about X11 being replaced by Aqua? From my point of view, all the bad things about Unix are still there, and worse, new unix-esque crap has been piled on top of it, often conflicting, and badly, to add to the confusion that Unix already is.
I think the ditto issue is emblematic of the entire conflict between unix and OS9; they've met, and they've been joined by a confusing and unfortunate kludge which everyone who uses the system is guaranteed to run afoul of. Copying files is about the most basic and fundamental activity you get into in an OS - that's not a little detail you overlook. Why not just modify cp to copy metadata if it exists, or make cp a link to ditto? Or the passwd file being superceded (at least in "some cases," I'm sure) by another database... My rule on this stuff is that if you're going to fsck with the password file, you'll break a lot of old code, but once you do replace it, you take the old piece out... the only thing worse than broken old code is broken old code that thinks its working.
There are more complaints I didn't even get into. The incredible performance hit of scattering metadata of various kinds in what seems like dozens of flat files, so that the UI chains up thousands of seeks all over the disk, parsing XML and doing lots of complicated crap just to show you the contents of a folder or the properties of an application... And then apparently tying everything up in the layout loop... Have you tried resizing windows? It's tragic. And then there's the fact that Apple seems to have abandoned the superior use of metadata it once had; I see gnr9ng.xyz files scattered everywhere, not legacy stuff but new stuff created by Apple, as if it's a DOS box... IOW, turning their back on one of the earliest and best ideas in the Mac: type and creator information, instead of goofy abbreviations and naming conventions that are super-easy for the user to run afoul of.
My big complaint with them is rather than boxing up traditional unix organization and features (which have no place on a desktop Mac, IMO), they made MacOS into a Unix clone, and an annoying one, because there's a bunch of important differences and gotchas and thus hassles actually porting and running unix software, since they did change quite a bit, even if they didn't fix it... meanwhile hiding