Then they can correlate it, work out when you are unlikely to be at home, and use that time to burgle your house (or sell the information to gangs who will do it).
Also I think the point was javascript is seen as a less powerful language
It's Turing-complete. You can implement any language in it. That's not what people mean when they say it's less powerful, they mean some combination of:
Implementing the same algorithm in JavaScript and another language requires a more complex JavaScript compiler to reach the same speed.
It lacks access to operating system features via standard APIs (e.g. no threads)
It doesn't allow unsafe operations that are required for low-level programming.
The fact that you can run a slow JVM written in JavaScript doesn't address any of these.
What is this, 1998 appreciation day? They were working on JIT compilers for the first release of Java! Modern JVMs all use JIT compilation extensively. The only ones that don't are ones designed to run on very small embedded systems, which use Jazelle, which is basically a Java bytecode decoder on the front of an ARM chip that executes most bytecodes directly and traps on the difficult ones.
Most compilers work like that. The Java compiler is written in Java (as you discover when it crashes and you get a Java stack trace). Smalltalk was written in Smalltalk and even modern Smalltalk implementations like Pharo are written in Smalltalk. The typical trick is to write a small compiler for a subset of the language in another language and then use it to compile the rest of the compiler. For example, the core of the Squeak VM is written in a subset of Smalltalk that is fairly easy to translate to C. This is then translated to C and compiled with the target system's C compiler. You then have enough of the VM running for it to load the rest. Early Pascal compilers did the same. In the '70s, having the compiler written in the language was considered a test of whether something was a 'real' language (since then we've learned that languages that are good for writing compilers are not necessarily good for other things. Well, some of us have...)
This is apparently almost true today. When I last looked, about four years ago, there were three almost completely independent 802.11 stacks and the one you used depended on the driver you used.
2. Licensing issues will most likely prevent you from copying "BSD" parts into Linux, unless the original author allowed for dual GPL / BSD licensing (and I doubt it)
Absolutely untrue. Lots of code in Linux is BSD or MIT licensed, some is even public domain. Only the aggregate work is GPL'd. Dual licensing GPL/BSDL is a completely pointless thing to do, legally speaking, because there is no legal impediment to incorporating BSDL code into a GPL project.
Apple ships some BSD licensed code that I've written. I use about two orders of magnitude more code that they've contributed back to the community. Seems to me like I'm winning...
Here's a simple challenge for you: try writing a functional network card driver for Linux over a weekend. Now try the same in FreeBSD.
You realise that a large number of WiFi drivers were written for FreeBSD or OpenBSD and then ported to Linux, right? and that the porting to Linux part typically involves copying things that are in the generic part of the 802.11 stack on *BSD into the driver?
Copyright does not protect copying in exchange for distribution
Yes it does. That is why copyright starts at the date of publication. It was intended to allow works to be widely distributed immediately and then to eventually fall into the public domain, rather than enjoying very limited distribution until someone shared a copy publicly.
Copyright is an absolute right that prevents any copying to permitted by the copyright holder with only fuzzy exceptions for fair use
That's not even English.
Whoever modded the parent up should do a little reading.
The iMac was released without a floppy drive in 1998. iTools, which became.Mac in 2002, was released in 2000. The iMac shipped with a 56Kb/s modem, which was far slower than a floppy drive.
The first Steve Jobs machine to miss out the floppy drive came with a 120MB magneto-optical drive, which actually was a sensible replacement (if you ignored the fact that the disks were a lot more expensive).
Only if your laptop is your only computer. Rip your CDs/DVDs on another machine, transfer them to a NAS or external hard drive, and copy them to the laptop as needed.
Sounds about right. I've had this laptop for about four months now, and the only times that I've used the optical drive were for playing DVD movies, and that was only because my DVD player broke. Software all comes via the Internet these days - even games from gog.com. Creating a bootable USB image is less effort than a bootable CD. I put a BluRay burner in my NAS when I built it for backups, but I don't have much need for the optical drive in my laptop and an external one would probably be more convenient (i.e. not get as hot!) when I did want one.
I'd even allow more. Movies do have a tendency to be hideously expensive and some companies might feel that seven years is a bit too little to invest a truckload of money into
Really? Movies make the majority of their profits in the first week after release, with another small bump the week after the DVD release. When deciding whether to fund a film, people ask whether it will make back the investment in the opening weekend. Anything after that is expected to be pure profit. The dribble from DVD sales and rental is just a bonus.
Seven years is long enough that most people who want to see it will pay, rather than say 'well, it will enter the public domain in seven years - I'll wait.'
So you don't see them. I am against copyright (as it exists now) but at least I am aware that it isn't a human right to see them.
Copyright grants the author the exclusive distribution right to their work in exchange for publication. If they are not publishing their work, then they should lose the exclusive distribution right.
What do you mean? Internet backbones? Not much is routed through America that doesn't either originate or terminate there. I think Canada is connected to Europe via Iceland. South America and Mexico might depend on the USA for access? DNS? Nope, the root servers are geographically distributed, and would keep functioning if the USA dropped off the net.
Macs have macports, which is a port of the FreeBSD ports system to Darwin. It usually does source builds though, and will try to grab the source from its upstream location, so these will still count towards the stats.
People started saying climate change instead of global warming because idiots focussed on the warming bit, not the global bit. Global temperatures went up, but if the local temperature went down so people said things like this.
If all porn was forced to be on *.xxx domains by law
If we all had magic machines that granted our wishes, we wouldn't have to work. All porn? By which country's definition? Iran? Sweden? Forced there by law of which country? The USA? That won't take porn off any ccTLDs.
This kind of argument is called ex falso quodlibet - from a false axiom you can prove anything. If you start with a premise that is invalid, then you can convincingly argue anything.
You seem to be under the impression that women don't watch porn. I'm not sure about overall statistics, but the only people I know who have bought porn films on DVD have been female, so I wouldn't be surprised if a significant proportion of the industry's funding comes from women...
Probably because the other companies asked their lawyers, who looked at how my MS could spend in court and said 'it's cheaper to settle', while B&N asked their developers who looked at the patents and said 'haha! These patents are ridiculous!' I doubt many companies employ lawyers who have the ability to judge the merits of the patents, which is part of the reason why patent trolling is so lucrative: the people making the decision to pay are lawyers and CxOs who will assume that a granted patent means a valid patent.
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Then they can correlate it, work out when you are unlikely to be at home, and use that time to burgle your house (or sell the information to gangs who will do it).
Even sandboxed in a VM, I'd be inherently wary about executing server-compiled byte-code
Why is this any different from executing server-supplied source code?
Also I think the point was javascript is seen as a less powerful language
It's Turing-complete. You can implement any language in it. That's not what people mean when they say it's less powerful, they mean some combination of:
The fact that you can run a slow JVM written in JavaScript doesn't address any of these.
What is this, 1998 appreciation day? They were working on JIT compilers for the first release of Java! Modern JVMs all use JIT compilation extensively. The only ones that don't are ones designed to run on very small embedded systems, which use Jazelle, which is basically a Java bytecode decoder on the front of an ARM chip that executes most bytecodes directly and traps on the difficult ones.
Most compilers work like that. The Java compiler is written in Java (as you discover when it crashes and you get a Java stack trace). Smalltalk was written in Smalltalk and even modern Smalltalk implementations like Pharo are written in Smalltalk. The typical trick is to write a small compiler for a subset of the language in another language and then use it to compile the rest of the compiler. For example, the core of the Squeak VM is written in a subset of Smalltalk that is fairly easy to translate to C. This is then translated to C and compiled with the target system's C compiler. You then have enough of the VM running for it to load the rest. Early Pascal compilers did the same. In the '70s, having the compiler written in the language was considered a test of whether something was a 'real' language (since then we've learned that languages that are good for writing compilers are not necessarily good for other things. Well, some of us have...)
1. Linux has a *full* "generic" 802.11 stack.
This is apparently almost true today. When I last looked, about four years ago, there were three almost completely independent 802.11 stacks and the one you used depended on the driver you used.
2. Licensing issues will most likely prevent you from copying "BSD" parts into Linux, unless the original author allowed for dual GPL / BSD licensing (and I doubt it)
Absolutely untrue. Lots of code in Linux is BSD or MIT licensed, some is even public domain. Only the aggregate work is GPL'd. Dual licensing GPL/BSDL is a completely pointless thing to do, legally speaking, because there is no legal impediment to incorporating BSDL code into a GPL project.
Apple ships some BSD licensed code that I've written. I use about two orders of magnitude more code that they've contributed back to the community. Seems to me like I'm winning...
Here's a simple challenge for you: try writing a functional network card driver for Linux over a weekend. Now try the same in FreeBSD.
You realise that a large number of WiFi drivers were written for FreeBSD or OpenBSD and then ported to Linux, right? and that the porting to Linux part typically involves copying things that are in the generic part of the 802.11 stack on *BSD into the driver?
In my own case, Linux was simply the first Unix that supported the hardware I had at the time.
And the BSD lawsuit delaying the distribution of the i386 versions of BSD by a few years had nothing to do with that...
Copyright does not protect copying in exchange for distribution
Yes it does. That is why copyright starts at the date of publication. It was intended to allow works to be widely distributed immediately and then to eventually fall into the public domain, rather than enjoying very limited distribution until someone shared a copy publicly.
Copyright is an absolute right that prevents any copying to permitted by the copyright holder with only fuzzy exceptions for fair use
That's not even English.
Whoever modded the parent up should do a little reading.
The 'preview' button would be a good start...
The iMac was released without a floppy drive in 1998. iTools, which became .Mac in 2002, was released in 2000. The iMac shipped with a 56Kb/s modem, which was far slower than a floppy drive.
The first Steve Jobs machine to miss out the floppy drive came with a 120MB magneto-optical drive, which actually was a sensible replacement (if you ignored the fact that the disks were a lot more expensive).
Only if your laptop is your only computer. Rip your CDs/DVDs on another machine, transfer them to a NAS or external hard drive, and copy them to the laptop as needed.
Sounds about right. I've had this laptop for about four months now, and the only times that I've used the optical drive were for playing DVD movies, and that was only because my DVD player broke. Software all comes via the Internet these days - even games from gog.com. Creating a bootable USB image is less effort than a bootable CD. I put a BluRay burner in my NAS when I built it for backups, but I don't have much need for the optical drive in my laptop and an external one would probably be more convenient (i.e. not get as hot!) when I did want one.
I'd even allow more. Movies do have a tendency to be hideously expensive and some companies might feel that seven years is a bit too little to invest a truckload of money into
Really? Movies make the majority of their profits in the first week after release, with another small bump the week after the DVD release. When deciding whether to fund a film, people ask whether it will make back the investment in the opening weekend. Anything after that is expected to be pure profit. The dribble from DVD sales and rental is just a bonus.
Seven years is long enough that most people who want to see it will pay, rather than say 'well, it will enter the public domain in seven years - I'll wait.'
So you don't see them. I am against copyright (as it exists now) but at least I am aware that it isn't a human right to see them.
Copyright grants the author the exclusive distribution right to their work in exchange for publication. If they are not publishing their work, then they should lose the exclusive distribution right.
What do you mean? Internet backbones? Not much is routed through America that doesn't either originate or terminate there. I think Canada is connected to Europe via Iceland. South America and Mexico might depend on the USA for access? DNS? Nope, the root servers are geographically distributed, and would keep functioning if the USA dropped off the net.
Macs have macports, which is a port of the FreeBSD ports system to Darwin. It usually does source builds though, and will try to grab the source from its upstream location, so these will still count towards the stats.
YOUR government has *no* problem defining porn precisely enough to apply laws to it.
And my government's definition is very different to the Swedish or Iranian definition, so which do you propose we use for the Internet?
People started saying climate change instead of global warming because idiots focussed on the warming bit, not the global bit. Global temperatures went up, but if the local temperature went down so people said things like this.
If wiping out religion were that easy, we'd have done it long ago...
If all porn was forced to be on *.xxx domains by law
If we all had magic machines that granted our wishes, we wouldn't have to work. All porn? By which country's definition? Iran? Sweden? Forced there by law of which country? The USA? That won't take porn off any ccTLDs.
This kind of argument is called ex falso quodlibet - from a false axiom you can prove anything. If you start with a premise that is invalid, then you can convincingly argue anything.
No. .gov.ru filters you in Soviet (and post-Soviet) Russia.
Um, the government has *no* problem defining porn precisely enough to apply laws to it
The government? We have a world government now? Why wasn't I informed?
You seem to be under the impression that women don't watch porn. I'm not sure about overall statistics, but the only people I know who have bought porn films on DVD have been female, so I wouldn't be surprised if a significant proportion of the industry's funding comes from women...
Probably because the other companies asked their lawyers, who looked at how my MS could spend in court and said 'it's cheaper to settle', while B&N asked their developers who looked at the patents and said 'haha! These patents are ridiculous!' I doubt many companies employ lawyers who have the ability to judge the merits of the patents, which is part of the reason why patent trolling is so lucrative: the people making the decision to pay are lawyers and CxOs who will assume that a granted patent means a valid patent.