If it cross-pollinates, you get a hybrid that produces sterile seeds, same as many other hybrids--just make sure the can't-make-seeds gene is dominant and put it in both strands. End of problem.
The more I think about it, the more Terminator seeds seem like a bad thing economically, but from an environmental standpoint, aren't they a good thing? I mean, if you're concerned about GM plants contaminating the "real" environment, then GM plants that don't reproduce would take care of that problem by never accidentally propagating. I mean, I like corn, but if some GM corn gets loose and becomes the only edible plant on Earth, I'm gonna get mighty sick of corn.
Here's a hypothetical question that makes the Libertarian in me cringe: what if a country's purchases a site-license and takes care of seed distribution itself?
If this system should be up all the time, be sure that whatever you use can (like Oracle) take online backups, but get a fast taperobot. This could easily cost as much as the system.
Or you could do what we did: buy a couple of extra drives and do hot backups to compressed files on said drives, and keep compressed log archives there too. Backups to disk go very very fast, and you can tar them off to tape at your leisure without significant disruption to the production DB. Plus, if a real data drive fails, recovering its datafiles is a lot faster: drive failure is by far the most common event requiring restore-from-backup; if you're doing it from another disk, your downtime is dramatically reduced. Tapes will help you recover from more extreme disasters like fires or total system failure.
As has been pointed out elsewhere, file size doesn't limit Oracle table sizes. I have a 103GB Oracle database on HP-UX, which has the same 2GB limit as ext2fs; my largest single table is 12GB.
Oracle organizes its data in tablespaces, which can contain multiple tables, indexes, clusters, rollback segments, and such. A single tablespace can be composed of a large number of data files. To create a ten GB tablespace, you can create a tablespace with 5 2GB files, which will give you 10GB storage (less about 8kb (or whatever your blocksize is) overhead per file). So long as you remember to allocate in multiple 2gb-8kb chunks instead of single >2gb chunks, you'll do fine.
Perversely enough, I find the 2gb limitation to be something of an advantage, as it encourages me to spread my data across multiple spindles. I've never used raw partitions; in fact, I've used spindle-distribution and backup/recovery concerns as an excuse not to.
More speed means more stupid and/or naive programmers thinking they understand data structures because their bubble sort works, and they have access to an API that features a sort() function.
Free GC means more people bogosorting UnSortedArray[] into SortedArray[], effectively doubling memory requirements until the GC realizes nothing's referring to UnsortedArray[] anymore. The bozo programmer won't notice this happening because he'll test it with a list thirty items long, and since it doesn't seem that slow he'll re-sort the list every time the pop-up box that drives the entire application pops up, and he won't see the problem because he only calls that screen once per session anyway. But when the user's hard drive light goes on and stays on all day because he has a hundred thousand items in his list, and the entire OS seizes because it's thrashing so hard it accidently swaps out VideoRetraceHandler() during the wrong 75th of a second, Bozo will tell the user to buy a bigger computer with more memory, because his code sure isn't the problem.
Either the sort will get fixed eventually, or the software will stop being used.
On the whole, the propagation of high level tools on high-power machines makes for stupid code, but since it's all being used to do stupid stuff, it doesn't matter. There's always going to be stupid stuff that needs writing; banks and insurance companies are always going to need code grinders. The good programmers will be drawn into the realms where good programming matters. Nobody gives a hoot if your dialogue box pull-down lists are alphabetized via bubble-sort, but if you're trying to queue disk access requests inside a RAID-5 driver, you're going to need a better skill set. So let the sort of programmers who love their bubble sorter write dialogue boxes while the rest of us move on to more interesting things.
There was a similar case in England earlier this year. Some bloke incorporated himself in the U.S. and through said corporation built a U.S-located Web site, filled it with pr0nz, and sold the pr0nz back to English customers. He thought he had a loophole, being that the pics served from the U.S. and being sold by an American corporation. They busted him anyway.
This could raise some interjurisdictional issues, similar to the American arrogance of arresting foreign heads of state in their own countries because they allegedly violated an American law. Personally, I don't want a bunch of deranged Sudanese cutting off my hand in the middle of the night because I said "Sudan sucks" on-line somewhere.
PS--Sudan doesn't suck. Not as bad as Libya anyway.
Also, there is a privacy issue. You cannot possibly belive that the workers use all the time *working*. They surf the web, they write personal letters, and so on. Furthermore -- they don't want this to be stored on a central server. They want it to be stored on "their" computer.
Actually, all your web surfing and e-mail go through the company servers anyway; thus privacy still exists only to the extent the company chooses for it to exist. In other words, your privacy is often protected by policy, not technology.
With a well-configured server (e.g. Samba or the likes and a umask of 077 (or 037 with well-chosen groups)), though, employees can still have a great deal of privacy (and protection) from one other, and now you can have backup and recovery strategies that make sense (among all the other advantages of NCs or other thin clients). Don't want the company reading your files? Encrypt them.
Diamond Age disappointed me because I thought it was a tad too serious.
Stephenson's writing style tends to be very contextually adaptive, and creates mood very well. Witness the way Snow Crash's writing style changes depending on whether we're on the Raft, or in the Library, or just chatting with Uncle Enzo. Much of The Diamond Age is set in a neo-Victorian society, and the writing is very Gothic, ornate and literate when about the neo-Victorians, but quite straightforward when about the rest of the world. The writing sets the Victorian mood very well, but it can be challenging, especially if you're looking for the exuberance of Snow Crash. The only writer whose vocabulary challenges me so much is Nabokov.
Whoever called this flamebait is completely missing the point, even if it was a first post(tm). The whole concept of posting anonymously ties in with the discussion here; what's under discussion is people being so afraid of having what they say held against them in the wrong context that it never gets said at all.
Nobody knows what's appropriate anymore. Somebody, somewhere, will be offended by something you say; if they live in a jurisdiction where they could sue you, you'll get sued, or disciplined, or fired. It happens all the damned time. Remember the niggardly incident? A white mayor's aide in Washington, D.C., was discussing how broke the city was and how they needed to make every budget dollar count. Unfortunately, instead of saying "parsimonious" he said "niggardly", and some vocabulary-challenged bozos started screaming "racism" so loudly the aide eventually offered his resignation, which the mayor accepted. So you see, it doesn't even matter what you're trying to say; all that matters is that somebody's perfectly willing to take it the wrong way.
And the potent combination of political correctness and literary deconstructionism can be used to turn you into something you're not, too. If this flap were raised at a university rather than a mayor's office, the poor schub would never, ever, get tenure, on account of being a crypto-racist.
Words have a way of coming back to haunt you, even when they're far too old to matter. Who here remembers the letter a twenty-one year old Bill Clinton wrote his college ROTC advisor a letter opting out of the program? It included the phrase "I loathe the military way of life." In 1992 Rush Limbaugh recorded an uncanny Clinton sound-alike saying "I loathe the military", and that sentence has been used against Clinton for over seven years now. A twenty-one year-old intellectual saying he didn't want to be in the Army while there was an unjust war going on? Who'd've thunk? When you're fifty yourself, do you really want people judging you by the dumbfuck things you said when you were twenty-one? Eighteen? Fifteen?
You can do it to yourself, too: Say you write, "I'm disgusted by Microsoft's acquisition tactics" on a mailing list somewhere, and five years later, while MS is getting ready to offer you three hundred million dollars for your innovative little software package, they decide to do a quick Yahoo search on you. They find an archived copy of the mailing list, and suddenly the deal is off. You're out one third of the company's sale price, all because you voiced an opinion about MS's attempt to buy the company that makes your favorite game.
This is the fear that Rutt's given in to. This is the fear we should all give in to, to limit our exposure to liability. This is the duct tape over all our mouths: that no matter what you say on-line, anyone, anywhere, can try to use it against you, and for reasons that don't make sense to anyone but a room full of lawyers, they just might succeed.
NTFS is a journaling file system. Has been for quite some time. The poor OS needs journaling--can you imagine having to run chkdsk that often? OTOH I've had to fsck my ext2fs partitions twice: once after a power failure outlasted my UPSs (silly optimistic me didn't have a monitoring cable in place), and once after I moved to a new house--my Samba server had been running for four hundred and thirty days prior, which exceeds the default ext2fs time-between-forced-fsck counter.
'Sides, now we have two or three fairly serious contenders in the JFS arena, don't we?
If you thought all the coffee puns were bad when Java came out; if you thought you'd go postal if you read one more article with a title like "Getting Wired with Java", just wait and see what the next generation of metal synonyms will be like. I just love marketeers. We ask for a processor; they give us a bad pun.
Is it studleyCapped as iTanium? Can we have a uTanium? A weTanium for SMP systems? Will aPple sue them for putting the letter "i" in front of nonsense?
I guess if DS9 can c/Platinum/Latinum/, Intel can do the same to it's own products. What the hell was wrong with "Merced", anyway?
I, as a parent of school-age children want to retain the choice to do this myself, or send my kids to a church where the ethics and sense of right and wrong are close enought to my standards.
Commendable. Unfortunately, though, out of respect for the desire of many parents to be responsible for the morals and ethics of their own children, ethics are not being taught in schools at all. From an idealistic perspective, and certainly from the perspective of parents who are actively involved in their children's lives, this is probably a good thing. Unfortunately, a minority of parents are so involved, so an unintended consequence is that lots and lots of children are being raised without any exposure to ethicals at all. Hell, they aren't even being exposed to civics.
You're right to be worried over the "who gets to chose what's right" debate. That's big, important stuff. I have very little doubt that no sooner than ethics are a required subject will some legislator will attempt to tack "abortion is wrong" onto the ethics list, and tie it to a spending bill. Twenty years later the rights of women are curtailed in this country because of some social engineering done on some grade-schoolers.
I wish there were a least common denominator. "Don't hurt somebody" does not suffice--there are infinite nuances to what constitutes hurt, and lord knows a three-year-old's idea of what hurts him is often the very thing an adult knows is absolutely necessary. So what we're left with is that the least common denominator is nothing at all.
I hate to pose a question without making some attempt at an answer, but I am deeply concerned about the latchkey kids, the inner-city kids, the ones who never see their parents, or who have narcissistic sociopaths where their parents should be, or who were raised by televisions that tell them to kickbox and buy Pokemons until they're happy. Even if you're raising your kids right, these kids aren't being raised at all. Far too many of those latter children will become the kind of adults our society does not need. They will be your children's peers, co-workers, bosses, associates.
So, just to play devil's advocate: what's wrong with asking your child what went on in civics/ethics class today, and telling them which parts of it you think are bullshit? Or better yet, using it as a springboard into some real issues? It sounds like you're already encouraging them to be independent thinkers; this could be less of an impediment to what you're trying to accomplish than you might think.
I think it will be to our great advantage that the source is published, even if none of us ever uses Solaris again: Solaris is, despite some dim moments in its history, a capable, robust, efficient Unix implementation. I'm willing to bet there are at least a few innovative ideas and techniques which can be rathered from the source and reimplemented elsewhere.
I think that even if Sun's business offices are demanding that Solaris be "protected" by a restrictive license, many of the good things in Solaris can become good things in other OSs which also run on their hardware. If everybody plays this bridge hand the right way, other OSs could even develop library/binary compatibility with Solaris, so that Solaris applications can run unmodified in those environments. Besides simple application compatibility, this move could improve the hardware compatibility found in alternative operating systems.
Sun could win big by never having to update their OS again; they can make this happen simply by helping Solaris propagate all its good features elsewhere.
Pornography is imagery and other materials designed for the soul purpose of sexual titillation.
You said "tit." This titillated me. Therefore you are a ____________.
Spare me your lawyers jargon.
If I can get thrown in jail for disagreeing with you on what is or is not pornography, I'll damned well have a lawyer spewing all the jargon I can afford.
You know very well the difference between porn and legitimate art.
The lighting?
God intended sex to be a way in which two people, a man and a woman, could experience a profound and joyous union.
And all I want want to do is share in the experience vicariously by videotaping it.
The problem is that porn is for the purpose of titillation:
You said it again!
[T]his image that you are defending takes what is intended to be a joyous union of bodies and (yes) souls, and turns it into an excuse to masturbate.
Boy does it ever!
The people pictured are not even known as people, they are nothing but objects -- so many pounds of protoplasm in a pleasing shape.
I hereby declare "pounding the protoplasm" the be the best sexual euphemism of the year.
Pornography is imagery and other materials designed for the soul purpose of sexual titillation.
You said "tit." This titillated me. Therefore you are a pornographer.
Spare me your lawyers jargon.
If I can get thrown in jail for disagreeing with you on what is or is not pornography, I'll damned well have a lawyer spewing all the jargon I can afford.
You know very well the difference between porn and legitimate art.
The lighting?
I may as well dive off the deep end and speak truth (and don't waste time trying to tell me this is just my opinion).
I guess mentioning that we descended from monkeys is out of the question...
God intended sex to be a way in which two people, a man and a woman, could experience a profound and joyous union.
And all I want want to do is share in the experience vicariously by videotaping it.
The problem is that porn is for the purpose of titillation:
You said it again!
[T]his image that you are defending takes what is intended to be a joyous union of bodies and (yes) souls, and turns it into an excuse to masturbate.
Boy does it ever!
The people pictured are not even known as people, they are nothing but objects -- so many pounds of protoplasm in a pleasing shape.
I hereby declare "pounding the protoplasm" the be the best sexual euphemism of the year.
This is exactly why I don't like reading obituary threads--asinine jackass ACs who decide to run roughshod over anyone else's memories of the positive contributions the deceased has made to their lives or to society in general. Remember that jerk who was slagging on Stevens?
Lots of writers use Macs--sometimes it's nice to file your nails with an eme ry board instead of a belt sander.
It's probably pointless to ask these bozos to have respect, or to just lurk, or to say "if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all," so I'm just going to keep the discourse at a level you can relate to and say "go to hell."
Software as service isn't that bad an idea for MS. Somebody told me once that MS's number one competitor was old versions of its own products, which implies to me that in a sense we're already leasing MS software for $200/year, renewable at every other year.
I think that an NC-style architecture would be a fantastic thing for MS for one other reason as well: bug fixes. As their apps and OSs increase exponentially in size, so do the number of bugs that are introduced. If they go and ship a million CDs with a genuine show-stopper bug on it, they're out God knows how much in money and reputation. With bigger and more complex products, the chances of those bugs remaining hidden throughout testing increase dramatically. Perhaps their Win2K beta testing is starting to bear this out.
One might argue that in order to fix a CD-shipped product, all MS has to do is announce there's an "update" available via download at http://about-to-crash.microsoft.com, and make sure the fix appears on all new CDs. But when a bug in a highly modularized client-server application is found, the bug fix magically appears the next time the client loads that module. The absolute best part of this paradigm is that there is no need to publicize the bug at all. The NC e-mails the core dump (and keystroke history) back to MS support automagically; MS reads it, builds the patch and installs it on the server with nobody the wiser. Potentially, this could do more for MS's corporate image than releasing bug-free software in the first place. Not only do they not have to do spin anymore, they can start talking about how they're "proactive" and "responsive". Then the people love Microsoft, and they're no longer a monopoly, they're just popular.
Yes, Kleck's DGU numbers did in fact include someone yelling "I have a gun!" and the sort. Even if the 2.5 million figure is inflated by these, I still think they should count: when there are lots of guns, and the right to carry them and use them to defend yourself, the threat "I have a gun" actually has some teeth to it; if firearms were rare, the potential deterrent ability of a verbal statement holds no teeth.
I don't think my analogy of guns to whiskey falls flat, necessarily, because alcohol also has a sole purpose: to produce intoxication. Like guns, there is great doubt as to its benefit to sociey, the potential to clear harm to the individual if misused, and this doubt and this potential harm have in the past been used as an excuse to restrict individual freedom by legislative means. Also, I made no mention to target shooting or hunting, although I do both (confession: most of the time I'm deer hunting I'm far more interested in just watching wildlife go by at dusk than in actually shooting anything).
I believe that counting laws is more than a "straw man": In my home state, if you hold up a convenience store with a shotgun, you're committing not just armed robbery, but you are also in possession of a firearm during the commissioning of a felony--two crimes for the price of one, although you could certainly add criminal trespass, trespassing with criminal intent, brandishing a weapon, parking in a handicapped zone, and Lord knows what else if you really felt like it. I don't know whether all the extra laws have done anything to deter armed robbery--aside from by keeping potential repeat offenders in jail for longer.
On the other hand, you wouldn't believe the thicket of federal laws one must wander through for a parent to legally take his minor child to a target range to fire a pistol. Among these laws, it is illegal for him to do so unless he is carrying a properly written permission note that he wrote to himself! Pending federal legislation could imprison the father for five years if he doesn't have the note with him, and if it's improperly written, it's not a permission note. And heaven help you if you bring a revolver and a pistol; portions of those two law sets are mutually contradictory.
All these and other laws about where and when and loaded and unloaded and displayed or locked or unlocked keep me so nervous that I usually leave mine at home, leaving myself essentially defenseless against someone who is carrying a gun (or carrying a knife or who is just physically stronger than me (which includes just about everybody (I'm a geek (remember?)))) and just doesn't give a damn. I got nervous as hell when I recently moved to a house within one thousand feet of a school. I actually had to sit down and read the Code before I could figure out whether I was violating any laws by, for example, carrying a revolver between my house and my car, and whether this was any different than carrying a rifle. Back when I lived three thousand feet from a school, it was okay.
Now that I know where I stand with regards to that law, I can safely return to my habit of answering the door with a revolver on my belt--this keeps conversations with Jehovah's Witnessess and Girl Scouts wonderfully short!;-)
Yes, Kleck's DGU numbers did in fact include someone yelling "I have a gun!" and the sort. Even if the 2.5 million figure is inflated by these, I still think they should count: when there are lots of guns, and the right to carry them and use them to defend yourself, the threat "I have a gun" actually has some teeth to it; if firearms were rare, the potential deterrent ability of a verbal statement holds no teeth.
I don't think my analogy of guns to whiskey falls flat, necessarily, because alcohol also has a sole purpose: to produce intoxication. Like guns, there is great doubt as to its benefit to sociey, the potential to clear harm to the individual if misused, and this doubt and this potential harm have in the past been used as an excuse to restrict individual freedom by legislative means. Also, I made no mention to target shooting or hunting, although I do both (confession: most of the time I'm deer hunting I'm far more interested in just watching wildlife go by at dusk than in actually shooting anything).
I believe that counting laws is more than a "straw man": In my home state, if you hold up a convenience store with a shotgun, you're committing not just armed robbery, but you are also in possession of a firearm during the commissioning of a felony--two crimes for the price of one, although you could certainly add criminal trespass, trespassing with criminal intent, brandishing a weapon, parking in a handicapped zone, and Lord knows what else if you really felt like it. I don't know whether all the extra laws have done anything to deter armed robbery--aside from by keeping potential repeat offenders in jail for longer.
On the other hand, you wouldn't believe the thicket of federal laws one must wander through for a parent to legally take his minor child to a target range to fire a pistol. Among these laws, it is illegal for him to do so unless he is carrying a properly written permission note that he wrote to himself! Pending federal legislation could imprison the father for five years if he doesn't have the note with him, and if it's improperly written, it's not a permission note. And heaven help you if you bring a revolver and a pistol; portions of those two law sets are mutually contradictory.
All these and other laws about where and when and loaded and unloaded and displayed or locked or unlocked keep me so nervous that I usually leave mine at home, leaving myself essentially defenseless against someone who is carrying a gun (or carrying a knife or who is just physically stronger than me (which includes just about everybody (I'm a geek (remember?)))) and just doesn't give a damn. I got nervous as hell when I recently moved to a house within one thousand feet of a school. I actually had to sit down and read the Code before I could figure out whether I was violating any laws by, for example, carrying a revolver between my house and my car, and whether this was any different than carrying a rifle. Back when I lived three thousand feet from a school, it was okay.
Now that I know where I stand with regards to that law, I can safely return to my habit of answering the door with a revolver on my belt--this keeps conversations with Jehovah's Witnessess and Girl Scouts wonderfully short!;-)
Even if you excluded gun-murders from US homicide statistics, we would still have a higher murder rate than England, Canada, Japan, or much of the rest of the world. More people are kicked to death in the U.S. each year than are murdered at all in Japan.
Actually, England and Wales already had lower crime rates than the U.S. before so much gun control legislation was enacted here. Recently, however, mugging rates there are 1.4 times U.S. rates, and they have twice as many burglaries as we do. All this after they enacted even harsher GC laws than they already had. (Source: "Most Crime Worse in England Than US, Study Says" Reuters, 11 October 1998) Their murder rate, while climbing, still hasn't attained ours.
Why are some people so desperate to justify allowing murder to happen more often?
Murder rates in the U.S. were lower back when there were almost no laws regarding who could own and carry firearms, so I might ask you exactly the same thing.
Call me naive, but IMHO a device that makes you 2.7 times more likely to be killed by a friend or family member isn't something I would like to consider as 'useful for self defense'.
The 1993 study...published in the New England Journal of Medicine, never actually inquired as to whose gun was used in the killing. Instead, if a household owned a gun and if a person in that household or someone he knew was shot to death while in the home, the gun in the household was blamed. In fact, virtually all the killings in the study were committed with guns brought in by an intruder. No more than 4% of the gun deaths in the study can be attributed to the homeowner's gun.
At your invitation, I'm going to call you naive, partly for giving so much credence to an article that was published not in a creditable criminology journal but in a peer-reviewed medical journal, but mostly because you used the words "friend or family member" in this context. In your defense, the original study used this term, but it also considered any acquaintance as a friend. By the definition they used, these included nearly anyone known to the victim:
With the broad definition of "acquaintances" used in the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports, most victims are indeed classified as knowing their killer. But what's not made clear is that acquaintance murder primarily includes drug buyers killing pushers, cabdrivers killed by first-time customers, gang members killing other gang members, prostitutes killed by their clients, and so on. Only one U.S. city, Chicago, reports a precise breakdown on the nature of acquaintance killings, and the statistic gives a very different impression: between 1990 and 1995, just 17% of murder victims were either family members, friends, neighbors or roommates of their killers.
[same article].
All the article's authors had to do was include a single instance of family-member murder in their statistical group to speciously change "acquaintances" to "friends or family" to suit their purposes.
It is fallacious to assume that these acquaintance-murderers or their victims are law-abiding citizens. Read this sentence in the study: "[C]ase households more commonly contained an illicit-drug user, a person with prior arrests, or someone who had been hit or hurt in a fight in the home." They claim to have "controlled" for these factors but also acknowledge excluded several dozen other cases for "various reasons". The study also fails to take into account that sixty-one percent of all murder victims have prior criminal records, and that "about 90% of adult murderers already have an adult criminal record. Murderers are overwhelmingly young males with low IQs who have long histories of difficulty getting along with others" [same article]..
Incidentally, the editor of the NEJM recently resigned amidst allegations about his objectivity in publishing this and other articles, most notably the "study" done during the impeachment hearings where the Journal asked a bunch of college students whether blowjobs counted as sex.
One final note: I am boggled by the degree of bias the moderators on this thread have shown for anti-gun opinions and against gun rights pieces. In this respect at least, I suppose SlashDot can finally join the mainstream American press.
One more quick note, which more directly answers whats-his-face's question: In 1979, the Carter Justice Department found that of more than 32,000 attempted rapes, 32% were actually committed. But when a woman was armed with a gun or knife, only 3% of the attempted rapes were actually successful. Source: U.S. Department of Justice, Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, Rape Victimization in 26 American Cities, 1979, p. 31.
Slashdot Mirror
The more I think about it, the more Terminator seeds seem like a bad thing economically, but from an environmental standpoint, aren't they a good thing? I mean, if you're concerned about GM plants contaminating the "real" environment, then GM plants that don't reproduce would take care of that problem by never accidentally propagating. I mean, I like corn, but if some GM corn gets loose and becomes the only edible plant on Earth, I'm gonna get mighty sick of corn.
Here's a hypothetical question that makes the Libertarian in me cringe: what if a country's purchases a site-license and takes care of seed distribution itself?
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Oracle organizes its data in tablespaces, which can contain multiple tables, indexes, clusters, rollback segments, and such. A single tablespace can be composed of a large number of data files. To create a ten GB tablespace, you can create a tablespace with 5 2GB files, which will give you 10GB storage (less about 8kb (or whatever your blocksize is) overhead per file). So long as you remember to allocate in multiple 2gb-8kb chunks instead of single >2gb chunks, you'll do fine.
Perversely enough, I find the 2gb limitation to be something of an advantage, as it encourages me to spread my data across multiple spindles. I've never used raw partitions; in fact, I've used spindle-distribution and backup/recovery concerns as an excuse not to.
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Free GC means more people bogosorting UnSortedArray[] into SortedArray[], effectively doubling memory requirements until the GC realizes nothing's referring to UnsortedArray[] anymore. The bozo programmer won't notice this happening because he'll test it with a list thirty items long, and since it doesn't seem that slow he'll re-sort the list every time the pop-up box that drives the entire application pops up, and he won't see the problem because he only calls that screen once per session anyway. But when the user's hard drive light goes on and stays on all day because he has a hundred thousand items in his list, and the entire OS seizes because it's thrashing so hard it accidently swaps out VideoRetraceHandler() during the wrong 75th of a second, Bozo will tell the user to buy a bigger computer with more memory, because his code sure isn't the problem.
Either the sort will get fixed eventually, or the software will stop being used.
On the whole, the propagation of high level tools on high-power machines makes for stupid code, but since it's all being used to do stupid stuff, it doesn't matter. There's always going to be stupid stuff that needs writing; banks and insurance companies are always going to need code grinders. The good programmers will be drawn into the realms where good programming matters. Nobody gives a hoot if your dialogue box pull-down lists are alphabetized via bubble-sort, but if you're trying to queue disk access requests inside a RAID-5 driver, you're going to need a better skill set. So let the sort of programmers who love their bubble sorter write dialogue boxes while the rest of us move on to more interesting things.
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This could raise some interjurisdictional issues, similar to the American arrogance of arresting foreign heads of state in their own countries because they allegedly violated an American law. Personally, I don't want a bunch of deranged Sudanese cutting off my hand in the middle of the night because I said "Sudan sucks" on-line somewhere.
PS--Sudan doesn't suck. Not as bad as Libya anyway.
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Actually, all your web surfing and e-mail go through the company servers anyway; thus privacy still exists only to the extent the company chooses for it to exist. In other words, your privacy is often protected by policy, not technology.
With a well-configured server (e.g. Samba or the likes and a umask of 077 (or 037 with well-chosen groups)), though, employees can still have a great deal of privacy (and protection) from one other, and now you can have backup and recovery strategies that make sense (among all the other advantages of NCs or other thin clients). Don't want the company reading your files? Encrypt them.
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Stephenson's writing style tends to be very contextually adaptive, and creates mood very well. Witness the way Snow Crash's writing style changes depending on whether we're on the Raft, or in the Library, or just chatting with Uncle Enzo. Much of The Diamond Age is set in a neo-Victorian society, and the writing is very Gothic, ornate and literate when about the neo-Victorians, but quite straightforward when about the rest of the world. The writing sets the Victorian mood very well, but it can be challenging, especially if you're looking for the exuberance of Snow Crash. The only writer whose vocabulary challenges me so much is Nabokov.
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Nobody knows what's appropriate anymore. Somebody, somewhere, will be offended by something you say; if they live in a jurisdiction where they could sue you, you'll get sued, or disciplined, or fired. It happens all the damned time. Remember the niggardly incident? A white mayor's aide in Washington, D.C., was discussing how broke the city was and how they needed to make every budget dollar count. Unfortunately, instead of saying "parsimonious" he said "niggardly", and some vocabulary-challenged bozos started screaming "racism" so loudly the aide eventually offered his resignation, which the mayor accepted. So you see, it doesn't even matter what you're trying to say; all that matters is that somebody's perfectly willing to take it the wrong way.
And the potent combination of political correctness and literary deconstructionism can be used to turn you into something you're not, too. If this flap were raised at a university rather than a mayor's office, the poor schub would never, ever, get tenure, on account of being a crypto-racist.
Words have a way of coming back to haunt you, even when they're far too old to matter. Who here remembers the letter a twenty-one year old Bill Clinton wrote his college ROTC advisor a letter opting out of the program? It included the phrase "I loathe the military way of life." In 1992 Rush Limbaugh recorded an uncanny Clinton sound-alike saying "I loathe the military", and that sentence has been used against Clinton for over seven years now. A twenty-one year-old intellectual saying he didn't want to be in the Army while there was an unjust war going on? Who'd've thunk? When you're fifty yourself, do you really want people judging you by the dumbfuck things you said when you were twenty-one? Eighteen? Fifteen?
You can do it to yourself, too: Say you write, "I'm disgusted by Microsoft's acquisition tactics" on a mailing list somewhere, and five years later, while MS is getting ready to offer you three hundred million dollars for your innovative little software package, they decide to do a quick Yahoo search on you. They find an archived copy of the mailing list, and suddenly the deal is off. You're out one third of the company's sale price, all because you voiced an opinion about MS's attempt to buy the company that makes your favorite game.
This is the fear that Rutt's given in to. This is the fear we should all give in to, to limit our exposure to liability. This is the duct tape over all our mouths: that no matter what you say on-line, anyone, anywhere, can try to use it against you, and for reasons that don't make sense to anyone but a room full of lawyers, they just might succeed.
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NT does not stand for "New Technology." It stands for "Nice Try."
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'Sides, now we have two or three fairly serious contenders in the JFS arena, don't we?
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Is it studleyCapped as iTanium? Can we have a uTanium? A weTanium for SMP systems? Will aPple sue them for putting the letter "i" in front of nonsense?
I guess if DS9 can c/Platinum/Latinum/, Intel can do the same to it's own products. What the hell was wrong with "Merced", anyway?
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You're right to be worried over the "who gets to chose what's right" debate. That's big, important stuff. I have very little doubt that no sooner than ethics are a required subject will some legislator will attempt to tack "abortion is wrong" onto the ethics list, and tie it to a spending bill. Twenty years later the rights of women are curtailed in this country because of some social engineering done on some grade-schoolers.
I wish there were a least common denominator. "Don't hurt somebody" does not suffice--there are infinite nuances to what constitutes hurt, and lord knows a three-year-old's idea of what hurts him is often the very thing an adult knows is absolutely necessary. So what we're left with is that the least common denominator is nothing at all.
I hate to pose a question without making some attempt at an answer, but I am deeply concerned about the latchkey kids, the inner-city kids, the ones who never see their parents, or who have narcissistic sociopaths where their parents should be, or who were raised by televisions that tell them to kickbox and buy Pokemons until they're happy. Even if you're raising your kids right, these kids aren't being raised at all. Far too many of those latter children will become the kind of adults our society does not need. They will be your children's peers, co-workers, bosses, associates.
So, just to play devil's advocate: what's wrong with asking your child what went on in civics/ethics class today, and telling them which parts of it you think are bullshit? Or better yet, using it as a springboard into some real issues? It sounds like you're already encouraging them to be independent thinkers; this could be less of an impediment to what you're trying to accomplish than you might think.
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I think that even if Sun's business offices are demanding that Solaris be "protected" by a restrictive license, many of the good things in Solaris can become good things in other OSs which also run on their hardware. If everybody plays this bridge hand the right way, other OSs could even develop library/binary compatibility with Solaris, so that Solaris applications can run unmodified in those environments. Besides simple application compatibility, this move could improve the hardware compatibility found in alternative operating systems.
Sun could win big by never having to update their OS again; they can make this happen simply by helping Solaris propagate all its good features elsewhere.
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^&!%#^&^%*#^$@%^* firewall. Okay. That's twice now. Kill me. I deserve it.
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Lots of writers use Macs--sometimes it's nice to file your nails with an eme ry board instead of a belt sander.
It's probably pointless to ask these bozos to have respect, or to just lurk, or to say "if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all," so I'm just going to keep the discourse at a level you can relate to and say "go to hell."
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I think that an NC-style architecture would be a fantastic thing for MS for one other reason as well: bug fixes. As their apps and OSs increase exponentially in size, so do the number of bugs that are introduced. If they go and ship a million CDs with a genuine show-stopper bug on it, they're out God knows how much in money and reputation. With bigger and more complex products, the chances of those bugs remaining hidden throughout testing increase dramatically. Perhaps their Win2K beta testing is starting to bear this out.
One might argue that in order to fix a CD-shipped product, all MS has to do is announce there's an "update" available via download at http://about-to-crash.microsoft.com, and make sure the fix appears on all new CDs. But when a bug in a highly modularized client-server application is found, the bug fix magically appears the next time the client loads that module. The absolute best part of this paradigm is that there is no need to publicize the bug at all. The NC e-mails the core dump (and keystroke history) back to MS support automagically; MS reads it, builds the patch and installs it on the server with nobody the wiser. Potentially, this could do more for MS's corporate image than releasing bug-free software in the first place. Not only do they not have to do spin anymore, they can start talking about how they're "proactive" and "responsive". Then the people love Microsoft, and they're no longer a monopoly, they're just popular.
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Bugger! I hate it when Slashdot and my firewall won't play nice with each other!
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I don't think my analogy of guns to whiskey falls flat, necessarily, because alcohol also has a sole purpose: to produce intoxication. Like guns, there is great doubt as to its benefit to sociey, the potential to clear harm to the individual if misused, and this doubt and this potential harm have in the past been used as an excuse to restrict individual freedom by legislative means. Also, I made no mention to target shooting or hunting, although I do both (confession: most of the time I'm deer hunting I'm far more interested in just watching wildlife go by at dusk than in actually shooting anything).
I believe that counting laws is more than a "straw man": In my home state, if you hold up a convenience store with a shotgun, you're committing not just armed robbery, but you are also in possession of a firearm during the commissioning of a felony--two crimes for the price of one, although you could certainly add criminal trespass, trespassing with criminal intent, brandishing a weapon, parking in a handicapped zone, and Lord knows what else if you really felt like it. I don't know whether all the extra laws have done anything to deter armed robbery--aside from by keeping potential repeat offenders in jail for longer.
On the other hand, you wouldn't believe the thicket of federal laws one must wander through for a parent to legally take his minor child to a target range to fire a pistol. Among these laws, it is illegal for him to do so unless he is carrying a properly written permission note that he wrote to himself! Pending federal legislation could imprison the father for five years if he doesn't have the note with him, and if it's improperly written, it's not a permission note. And heaven help you if you bring a revolver and a pistol; portions of those two law sets are mutually contradictory.
All these and other laws about where and when and loaded and unloaded and displayed or locked or unlocked keep me so nervous that I usually leave mine at home, leaving myself essentially defenseless against someone who is carrying a gun (or carrying a knife or who is just physically stronger than me (which includes just about everybody (I'm a geek (remember?)))) and just doesn't give a damn. I got nervous as hell when I recently moved to a house within one thousand feet of a school. I actually had to sit down and read the Code before I could figure out whether I was violating any laws by, for example, carrying a revolver between my house and my car, and whether this was any different than carrying a rifle. Back when I lived three thousand feet from a school, it was okay.
Now that I know where I stand with regards to that law, I can safely return to my habit of answering the door with a revolver on my belt--this keeps conversations with Jehovah's Witnessess and Girl Scouts wonderfully short! ;-)
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I don't think my analogy of guns to whiskey falls flat, necessarily, because alcohol also has a sole purpose: to produce intoxication. Like guns, there is great doubt as to its benefit to sociey, the potential to clear harm to the individual if misused, and this doubt and this potential harm have in the past been used as an excuse to restrict individual freedom by legislative means. Also, I made no mention to target shooting or hunting, although I do both (confession: most of the time I'm deer hunting I'm far more interested in just watching wildlife go by at dusk than in actually shooting anything).
I believe that counting laws is more than a "straw man": In my home state, if you hold up a convenience store with a shotgun, you're committing not just armed robbery, but you are also in possession of a firearm during the commissioning of a felony--two crimes for the price of one, although you could certainly add criminal trespass, trespassing with criminal intent, brandishing a weapon, parking in a handicapped zone, and Lord knows what else if you really felt like it. I don't know whether all the extra laws have done anything to deter armed robbery--aside from by keeping potential repeat offenders in jail for longer.
On the other hand, you wouldn't believe the thicket of federal laws one must wander through for a parent to legally take his minor child to a target range to fire a pistol. Among these laws, it is illegal for him to do so unless he is carrying a properly written permission note that he wrote to himself! Pending federal legislation could imprison the father for five years if he doesn't have the note with him, and if it's improperly written, it's not a permission note. And heaven help you if you bring a revolver and a pistol; portions of those two law sets are mutually contradictory.
All these and other laws about where and when and loaded and unloaded and displayed or locked or unlocked keep me so nervous that I usually leave mine at home, leaving myself essentially defenseless against someone who is carrying a gun (or carrying a knife or who is just physically stronger than me (which includes just about everybody (I'm a geek (remember?)))) and just doesn't give a damn. I got nervous as hell when I recently moved to a house within one thousand feet of a school. I actually had to sit down and read the Code before I could figure out whether I was violating any laws by, for example, carrying a revolver between my house and my car, and whether this was any different than carrying a rifle. Back when I lived three thousand feet from a school, it was okay.
Now that I know where I stand with regards to that law, I can safely return to my habit of answering the door with a revolver on my belt--this keeps conversations with Jehovah's Witnessess and Girl Scouts wonderfully short! ;-)
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Even if you excluded gun-murders from US homicide statistics, we would still have a higher murder rate than England, Canada, Japan, or much of the rest of the world. More people are kicked to death in the U.S. each year than are murdered at all in Japan.
Actually, England and Wales already had lower crime rates than the U.S. before so much gun control legislation was enacted here. Recently, however, mugging rates there are 1.4 times U.S. rates, and they have twice as many burglaries as we do. All this after they enacted even harsher GC laws than they already had. (Source: "Most Crime Worse in England Than US, Study Says" Reuters, 11 October 1998) Their murder rate, while climbing, still hasn't attained ours.
Murder rates in the U.S. were lower back when there were almost no laws regarding who could own and carry firearms, so I might ask you exactly the same thing.--
Here's a quote regarding your study, from JunkScience.com:
At your invitation, I'm going to call you naive, partly for giving so much credence to an article that was published not in a creditable criminology journal but in a peer-reviewed medical journal, but mostly because you used the words "friend or family member" in this context. In your defense, the original study used this term, but it also considered any acquaintance as a friend. By the definition they used, these included nearly anyone known to the victim:
All the article's authors had to do was include a single instance of family-member murder in their statistical group to speciously change "acquaintances" to "friends or family" to suit their purposes.It is fallacious to assume that these acquaintance-murderers or their victims are law-abiding citizens. Read this sentence in the study: "[C]ase households more commonly contained an illicit-drug user, a person with prior arrests, or someone who had been hit or hurt in a fight in the home." They claim to have "controlled" for these factors but also acknowledge excluded several dozen other cases for "various reasons". The study also fails to take into account that sixty-one percent of all murder victims have prior criminal records, and that "about 90% of adult murderers already have an adult criminal record. Murderers are overwhelmingly young males with low IQs who have long histories of difficulty getting along with others" [same article]..
Incidentally, the editor of the NEJM recently resigned amidst allegations about his objectivity in publishing this and other articles, most notably the "study" done during the impeachment hearings where the Journal asked a bunch of college students whether blowjobs counted as sex.
One final note: I am boggled by the degree of bias the moderators on this thread have shown for anti-gun opinions and against gun rights pieces. In this respect at least, I suppose SlashDot can finally join the mainstream American press.
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One more quick note, which more directly answers whats-his-face's question: In 1979, the Carter Justice Department found that of more than 32,000 attempted rapes, 32% were actually committed. But when a woman was armed with a gun or knife, only 3% of the attempted rapes were actually successful. Source: U.S. Department of Justice, Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, Rape Victimization in 26 American Cities, 1979, p. 31.
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