I don't think we're close to the end of coding from scratch, at least not in the sense that coding from scratch will be replaced by grabbing existing F/OSS parts and combining them. And the reason is exactly because
More often than not, these constituent parts are Open Source software systems and typically not designed to be used as components.
Trying to glue things together that weren't meant to be used that way can sometimes be done, but it's rare that it works well and it's usually a major kludge. Until people start building "pieces" that *are* meant to be used as components of a bigger system, then no.
That said, the recent trend towards using coarse grained services / SOA, is a step in that direction. When people start writing apps that are designed to interoperate as part of an SOA, then I think we'll see a lot more reuse. But right now that's just not the case with the major open-source apps.
If someone wants to try an experiment, try taking, ah, let's say SugarCRM and SQLLedger; and combine them into a cohesive system. Unless you're masochistic you'll probably decide it would be easier to write an integrated system from scratch. This is assuming that you start with a policy of NOT modifying the base code of either system (after all, who wants to be on the hook for maintaining a private fork of something like that, for basically forever?)
There's no provision in the Constitution or bill of rights expressly guaranteeing the right to travel.
Arguably the 10th Amendment covers that, but for the sake of argument let's allow that the 9th and 10th Amendments are so widely ignored that they might as well not be there.
The thing is, there doesn't need to be such a provision anyway. The Constitution really is "just a piece of paper" in that it can't *actually* guarantee anything. It can't stand up, pick up a gun and forcibly defend anyone's rights, it can't attend a protest, it can't vote, etc.
Ultimately We The People *HAVE* to realize that our inalienable rights ARE inalienable AND that the only "guarantee" that those rights won't be infringed is OUR willingess and ability to defend those rights. We simply have to stand up to these politicians and say "Enough" and quit respecting their so called authority and their bullshit laws.
Interesting, I didn't know "gov't should have nothing to do with marriage" was an official position of the Libertarians.
I don't know if it's official in the sense of being part of the published party platform; but almost every Libertarian I know takes that position. It's not the government's role to decide who is or isn't married, or who can or cannot get married. Seems pretty self-obvious to me, but somehow it became accepted that the govt. could control this. <shrug>
Or he could read A Beautiful Math and see that there has been a lot of progress in finding a mathematical / scientific basis for "social" sciences; specifically in terms of game theory.
No, it doesn't claim that sociology can be treated like, say physics, at least not yet. But some interesting patterns have started to emerge relating game theory and many other fields, including sociology.
Yeah, and it doesn't matter if North Korea makes all the nukes in the world, harm is only done when they use them, right?
Right. And it's one thing for us - as a country - to say "we don't *want* North Korea to have nukes, and to use diplomacy, sanctions, economic leverage, etc. to try and dissuade them from having nukes; as opposed to us simply showing up to arrest North Korea. But ultimately, we have no actual authority to intervene in the affairs of North Korea by force, simply because we don't like what they're doing. And by the same token, the US government has no authority to intervene in the lives of US citizens just because it doesn't like something they are doing.
but got news for you: the law is full of examples of preemptive regulation and laws.
Most or all of which are total bullshit. Just because something is common doesn't mean it's right or just.
You can get arrested for yelling "fire" in a crowded theatre, even if no one gets hurt or even gets out of their seats.
Which, again, is bullshit. If no one was harmed, no crime has been committed.
It's called "reckless endangerment", which is what this guy basically did.
Yes, and if I'm on the jury I will either hang the jury by refusing to convict, or convince my fellow jurors to invoke Jury Nullification and acquit regardless of what the law says; assuming no one was actually harmed.
He didn't have to publicly supply a way to bypass security.
He didn't.
That is endangering everyone unnecessarily.
No, it's not. As plenty of others have already pointed out, it doesn't matter if Osama f'in Bin Laden is sitting in the seat beside you on your flight... As long as he doesn't have a bomb, or any other means of creating problems on the flight, the fact that it's Osama is irrelevant. So these fake boarding passes *might* help somebody get on a plane who isn't allowed... big deal, they will still be searched, run through a metal detector, bomb-sniffing crap, etc. This is completely insignificant from a security standout.
And even if it were a security flaw, people have to realize that with freedom comes danger. It's probably a little bit more dangerous to live in a very free country, than one with a strict totalitarian regime who controls every movement everybody makes... but most people will take that tradeoff. I know I sure will. "Give me Liberty or give me Death" is not just a cute sound bite to me.
In related news in the future, one will hear that the war on terrorism has created the need for the President to secretely sign a law to postpone elections until the war is won.
Yep. How much you want to be that happens in our lifetimes?
Is anyone on/. familiar with Godwin's Law? People try to compare Bush to Hitler way too much here. Seems like Godwin's Law has been forgotten.
First of all, Godwin's "Law" says nothing more than:
As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one
Big deal.
Further:
Godwin's Law does not dispute whether, in a particular instance, a reference or comparison to Hitler or the Nazis might be apt. It is precisely because such a reference or comparison may sometimes be appropriate, Godwin argues in his book, Cyber Rights: Defending Free Speech in the Digital Age, that overuse of the Hitler/Nazi comparison should be avoided, as it robs the valid comparisons of their impact.
If you believe, as many of us do, that comparisons between Bush and Hitler *are* valid, then Godwin's Law is totally irrelevant in this context.
For one, that means that it's difficult to process HTML pages with semantic tools. One of my favourite recent reads has been Visualising the Semantic Web [amazon.com] ed. Geroimenko and Chen (Springer Verlag, 2005), which shows the rich possibilities of extracting information and transforming it, such as into a graphical display, or reorganizing it. This is all a cinch with any valid XHTML Strict page, but as long as we're stuck in HTML 4.01, these abilities will never be widely available to us.
"We" need xhtml, "we" pull web pages into XML parse trees all the time as part of our jobs.
Exactly. It makes life simpler when HTML is actually XHTML as we can use common, standard APIs and parsers and get predictable, deterministic results. Accepting kludgey, broken, badly formed HTML and trying to parse it is a much worse proposition than getting well formed XML.
The theory you seem to be proposing here might be worth a shot if you were a defense attorney defending a case. It is not a good idea to rely on such theories if you want to stay out of prison. Much better to consider the theories that a prosecutor might use and steer clear of possibly illegal activity.
Steer clear of illegal activity???? HELL no! That's the dumbest idea I've ever heard. As good citizens we have a responsibility to ignore and break bad laws...
I suspect very strongly that in the case of money, simply having the means to create counterfeit bills will probably land you in a whole heap of trouble.
This is why every American should immediately go visit FIJA and learn the truth about serving on a jury. Hint: you can judge the law as well as the facts, and juries ARE the "last line of defense" against oppressive government / bad laws. See Jury Nullification and/or Peter Zenger for more.
If I'm ever serving on a jury, I can guarantee you that I won't be voting to convict in any "victimless crime" situation, or anything where somebody is being charged with violating some bullshit law. Hung jury or acquittal, here we come.
Now whoever came up with the term Web 2.0 in the first place?
I've heard people credit the term to Tim O'Reilly but I'm not sure how accurate that is.
It is really a phrase with no specific meaning in the first place.
Yes.
I never even noticed there was a switch-over or a release of HTTP protocol v. 2. So it is really anyones own make up of a defintion for Web 2.0 (when is 2.1 getting released? can't wait)
Just wait until you see what we announce at the Gopher 3.1 Expo.
was include a code that would let you register to qualify for a special presale of concert tickets. That alone might not be enough to keep me buying music CDs, but that's the kind of thinking that they need to go for.
I have two beefs with this. First, I don't see how "free as in speech" applies in any meaningful way against proprietary software. The owners of the code chose what to do with that code. If they chose to hide code, then that seems compatible with the "free as in speech" paradigm. Ie, I can chose to speak or not to speak. That is part of the actual freedom of speech.
Ok, maybe "free as in speech" isn't the best possible analogy. It's the one that's commonly used though, and people who read/. typically understand what that means in context. At any rate, the point is just to make a distinction between free as in "you don't have to pay anything for it" (aka, "gratis") and free as in "you are free to use this for any purpose, make changes to it, redistribute it, etc."
Maybe Libre really is a better word to use for this, but how many people understand exactly what that means either?
Second, there seems to be a number of people over the years who claim that Stallman hates charging money for software.
Ok, I'll admit that my Stallman History isn't a strong as it could be. Maybe he has said things to that effect. But - for whatever reason - he and the FSF chose not to codify a "no $$$ for software" rule into the GPL. That is what I was basing my statement on. Maybe Stallman does have a problem with it on some level, but technically the GPL doesn't rule it out.
This will be settled when Amazon agrees to ditch all their Sun servers and put in an IBM zSeries server or 10, move all their middleware to WebSphere, move to Rational development tools, install DB/2, implement a full-suite of Tivoli products and deploy Lotus collaboration tools.
It would have been cheaper for Amazon to just license the patents.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, look at it this way. At that pay rate, you can buy your own car wash.
Or your own cheerleaders!
I don't think we're close to the end of coding from scratch, at least not in the sense that coding from
scratch will be replaced by grabbing existing F/OSS parts and combining them. And the reason is
exactly because
More often than not, these constituent parts are Open Source software systems and typically not designed to be used as components.
Trying to glue things together that weren't meant to be used that way can sometimes be done, but it's rare that it works well and it's usually a major kludge. Until people start building "pieces" that *are* meant to be used as components of a bigger system, then no.
That said, the recent trend towards using coarse grained services / SOA, is a step in that direction. When people start writing apps
that are designed to interoperate as part of an SOA, then I think we'll see a lot more reuse. But right now that's just not
the case with the major open-source apps.
If someone wants to try an experiment, try taking, ah, let's say SugarCRM and SQLLedger; and combine them into a cohesive system. Unless
you're masochistic you'll probably decide it would be easier to write an integrated system from scratch. This is assuming that you start
with a policy of NOT modifying the base code of either system (after all, who wants to be on the hook for maintaining a private fork of something like that, for basically forever?)
There's no provision in the Constitution or bill of rights expressly guaranteeing the right to travel.
Arguably the 10th Amendment covers that, but for the sake of argument let's allow that the 9th and 10th
Amendments are so widely ignored that they might as well not be there.
The thing is, there doesn't need to be such a provision anyway. The Constitution really is "just a piece of paper" in that it can't *actually* guarantee anything. It can't stand up, pick up a gun and forcibly defend anyone's rights, it can't attend a protest, it can't vote, etc.
Ultimately We The People *HAVE* to realize that our inalienable rights ARE inalienable AND that the only "guarantee" that
those rights won't be infringed is OUR willingess and ability to defend those rights. We simply have to stand up to
these politicians and say "Enough" and quit respecting their so called authority and their bullshit laws.
Under these circumstances, the appropriate response to every question is:
"Fuck you, suck my fucking dick."
God, I hope this rubbish starts ending on Tuesday.
It won't. There aren't enough Libertarians on the ballots to
make that happen, even if they all won; which won't happen
either.
I just hope you aren't counting on either branch of the
Demopublican Party to end this madness... if you are, you're
going to be sadly disappointed.
Interesting, I didn't know "gov't should have nothing to do with marriage" was an official position of the Libertarians.
I don't know if it's official in the sense of being part of the published party platform; but almost
every Libertarian I know takes that position. It's not the government's role to decide who
is or isn't married, or who can or cannot get married. Seems pretty self-obvious to me,
but somehow it became accepted that the govt. could control this. <shrug>
Man, I'm politically interested in a Republican from Texas. That's scary.
Don't worry, he's really a libertarian. So much so that he was formerly
the Libertarian Party candidate for President.
Or he could read A Beautiful Math and see that there has been a lot of progress in finding
a mathematical / scientific basis for "social" sciences; specifically in terms of game theory.
No, it doesn't claim that sociology can be treated like, say physics, at least not yet. But some interesting patterns
have started to emerge relating game theory and many other fields, including sociology.
That's ok with me, as I happen to consider the FBI to be a bunch of phonies and crackpots themselves.
Yeah, and it doesn't matter if North Korea makes all the nukes in the world, harm is only done when they use them, right?
Right. And it's one thing for us - as a country - to say "we don't *want* North Korea to have nukes, and to use diplomacy, sanctions, economic leverage, etc. to try and dissuade them from having nukes; as opposed to us simply showing up to arrest North Korea. But ultimately, we have no actual authority to intervene in the affairs of North Korea by force, simply because we don't like what they're doing. And by the same token, the US government has no authority to intervene in the lives of US citizens just because it doesn't like something they are doing.
but got news for you: the law is full of examples of preemptive regulation and laws.
Most or all of which are total bullshit. Just because something is common doesn't mean it's right or just.
You can get arrested for yelling "fire" in a crowded theatre, even if no one gets hurt or even gets out of their seats.
Which, again, is bullshit. If no one was harmed, no crime has been committed.
It's called "reckless endangerment", which is what this guy basically did.
Yes, and if I'm on the jury I will either hang the jury by refusing to convict, or convince my fellow jurors to invoke
Jury Nullification and acquit regardless of what the law says; assuming no one was actually harmed.
On another point, the reason our airports were so lax before 9/11 is that we would not have put up with post-9/11 security back then.
And there's no good reason for us to put up with it now.
He didn't have to publicly supply a way to bypass security.
He didn't.
That is endangering everyone unnecessarily.
No, it's not. As plenty of others have already pointed out, it doesn't matter if Osama f'in Bin Laden is sitting
in the seat beside you on your flight... As long as he doesn't have a bomb, or any other means of creating problems
on the flight, the fact that it's Osama is irrelevant. So these fake boarding passes *might* help somebody
get on a plane who isn't allowed... big deal, they will still be searched, run through a metal detector, bomb-sniffing
crap, etc. This is completely insignificant from a security standout.
And even if it were a security flaw, people have to realize that with freedom comes danger. It's probably a little bit more
dangerous to live in a very free country, than one with a strict totalitarian regime who controls every movement everybody makes... but most
people will take that tradeoff. I know I sure will. "Give me Liberty or give me Death" is not just a cute sound bite to me.
In related news in the future, one will hear that the war on terrorism has created the need for the President to secretely sign a law to postpone elections until the war is won.
Yep. How much you want to be that happens in our lifetimes?
Is anyone on /. familiar with Godwin's Law? People try to compare Bush to Hitler way too much here. Seems like Godwin's Law has been forgotten.
First of all, Godwin's "Law" says nothing more than:
As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one
Big deal.
Further:
Godwin's Law does not dispute whether, in a particular instance, a reference or comparison to Hitler or the Nazis might be apt. It is precisely because such a reference or comparison may sometimes be appropriate, Godwin argues in his book, Cyber Rights: Defending Free Speech in the Digital Age, that overuse of the Hitler/Nazi comparison should be avoided, as it robs the valid comparisons of their impact.
If you believe, as many of us do, that comparisons between Bush and Hitler *are* valid, then Godwin's Law is totally irrelevant in this context.
For one, that means that it's difficult to process HTML pages with semantic tools. One of my favourite recent reads has been Visualising the Semantic Web [amazon.com] ed. Geroimenko and Chen (Springer Verlag, 2005), which shows the rich possibilities of extracting information and transforming it, such as into a graphical display, or reorganizing it. This is all a cinch with any valid XHTML Strict page, but as long as we're stuck in HTML 4.01, these abilities will never be widely available to us.
Well said. This is exactly why we need XHTML.
"We" need xhtml, "we" pull web pages into XML parse trees all the time as part of our jobs.
Exactly. It makes life simpler when HTML is actually XHTML as we can use common, standard APIs and parsers and
get predictable, deterministic results. Accepting kludgey, broken, badly formed HTML and trying to parse it
is a much worse proposition than getting well formed XML.
The theory you seem to be proposing here might be worth a shot if you were a defense attorney defending a case. It is not a good idea to rely on such theories if you want to stay out of prison. Much better to consider the theories that a prosecutor might use and steer clear of possibly illegal activity.
Steer clear of illegal activity???? HELL no! That's the dumbest idea I've ever heard. As good citizens we have a responsibility to ignore and break bad laws...
I suspect very strongly that in the case of money, simply having the means to create counterfeit bills will probably land you in a whole heap of trouble.
This is why every American should immediately go visit FIJA and learn the truth about serving on a jury. Hint: you can judge the law as well as the facts, and juries ARE the "last line of defense" against oppressive government / bad laws. See Jury Nullification and/or Peter Zenger for more.
If I'm ever serving on a jury, I can guarantee you that I won't be voting to convict in any "victimless crime" situation, or anything where somebody is being charged with violating some bullshit law. Hung jury or acquittal, here we come.
I suggest that all concerned Slashdotters contact congressman Markey and let him know what you think.
Now whoever came up with the term Web 2.0 in the first place?
I've heard people credit the term to Tim O'Reilly but I'm not sure
how accurate that is.
It is really a phrase with no specific meaning in the first place.
Yes.
I never even noticed there was a switch-over or a release of HTTP protocol v. 2. So it is really anyones own make up of a defintion for Web 2.0 (when is 2.1 getting released? can't wait)
Just wait until you see what we announce at the Gopher 3.1 Expo.
Try not going to myspace, that works really well.
If that doesn't deserve a +5 Insightful mod, nothing does!
was include a code that would let you register to qualify for a special presale of concert tickets. That alone might not be enough to keep me buying music CDs, but that's the kind of thinking that they need to go for.
Get out of the house a little bit more and figure out how to talk to normal people, please.
It was a posting on Slashdot, why in the hell would I expect any "normal people" to ever see it?!?!!
Seriously, though, anybody who uses the word "grok" in a conversational setting is already beyond hope
Even when that setting is a blog / discussion forum for a community made up mostly of some of the nerdiest nerds
and geekiest geeks known to man??
I have two beefs with this. First, I don't see how "free as in speech" applies in any meaningful way against proprietary software. The owners of the code chose what to do with that code. If they chose to hide code, then that seems compatible with the "free as in speech" paradigm. Ie, I can chose to speak or not to speak. That is part of the actual freedom of speech.
/. typically understand what that means in context. At any rate, the point is just to make a distinction between free as in "you don't have to pay anything for it" (aka, "gratis") and free as in "you are free to use this for any purpose, make changes to it, redistribute it, etc."
Ok, maybe "free as in speech" isn't the best possible analogy. It's the one that's commonly used though, and people who read
Maybe Libre really is a better word to use for this, but how many people understand exactly what that means either?
Second, there seems to be a number of people over the years who claim that Stallman hates charging money for software.
Ok, I'll admit that my Stallman History isn't a strong as it could be. Maybe he has said things to that effect. But - for whatever reason - he
and the FSF chose not to codify a "no $$$ for software" rule into the GPL. That is what I was basing my statement on. Maybe Stallman does have
a problem with it on some level, but technically the GPL doesn't rule it out.
It would have been cheaper for Amazon to just license the patents.