Of course Slashdot prints half-truths and fearmongering 26 times a day, but it is fascinating to watch the mainstream press get this story wrong so many times. This argument is about the contents of a *text file*, one which the USA does not even currently control. ICANN publishes the root DNS information, and the root operators, who are dozens of independent, international parties, can choose to accept or decline. If the UN, the EU, or the National Hockey League wants to publish their own root information, they are perfectly free to do so. Why don't they put their zone out and see if anyone adopts it?
So let's say that China and the EU decide to get together and do that? What will happen is that Americans will start to get different resolutions for domains than people in other countries will. This could cause massive disruption of e-commerce and Internet usage in general. Do you really think it would be better to cause the disruption and "see what happens" rather than try to negotiate a settlement? According to TFA, the EU wants other countries to have some kind of formalized "influence" over the process. It doesn't seem so unreasonable to me.
"We have no intention to regulate the internet," said Commissioner Reding, reassuring the US that the EU was not proposing setting up a new global body.
In an absolute sense, sure, C/C++ will always be faster. But does the end user notice this in a webapp? NO!
That's the wrong criterion. In a webapp there is not one "end user". There are end users plural. And the question is how many can be served on a single server. That's the appropriate performance measurement for a webapp.
Does that mean I would use C/C++ for a webapp? Not typically. But I would at least make the decision based upon the right measurement!
Sentiments aside, they look to be a small player that priced themselves out of the overall market, hoping to score support contracts for an Open Source project that was to showcase their abilities and hoping to sell at least a handful of this other stuff at an unrealistic $9-10k per instance. The closest thing that competes in price is only $4k and there's other solutions that ARE cheaper.
Maybe they are so expensive because they have a cost center (open source software development) that their competitors do not.
I'm not saying the post-singularity will be utopian. I have no idea. I'm saying that just as a world in which you can manufacture tools is very different than one in which you cannot, a world in which you can manufacture conscious beings will be very different. Our economy will not survive in a recognizable form. Most likely, neither will our society. We're not talking about an incremental improvement like cell phones. We're talking about the ability to manufacture thinking beings who can manufacture other thinking beings and so on and so forth.
There is a truism in regards to technology: when something is made easier to do, more of it is expected to be done.
And what happens when it is affordable to just manufacture robots and AIs to do the work? And manufacture robots and AIs to manufacture and design robots and AI? We could get to a point where it is vastly more efficient to manufacture "workers" than to train humans to do the work.
I don't know what happens then. But it certainly isn't just "more of the same". An observer could not have predicted human society based on what the world was like before intelligence arose. Similarly, we cannot predict the future "society" (whatever they call it) that will arise from the hive mind of intelligences replicating.
I have no idea when or if we'll get there. But I think it is intellectually lazy (and, in fact, indefensible) to say that the future is guaranteed to be like the past just because it "usually is". "Usually" human beings don't even have civilization. It's an unpredictable recent development since the last ice age. I expect more unpredictable developments in our future.
The naming system works the same way universally precisely because control is centralized. Can you point to a distributed naming system that works as well as the Domain name system? Do you remember bang paths?
There is nothing trivial about a function that maps names to numbers. That function lives at the intersection of human wants and thoughts and the computer's functional requirements. That's why there is a brouhahaha over the ".sex" TLD. That's why certain domains are worth millions of dollars.
In Massachusetts, is it considered criminal to mislead the government or the administration in such a fashion?
Why would it be? We don't live in an authoritarian dictatorship. Aside from its judicial branch (i.e. court rooms), the government should be treated as any other organization. Do you really want it to be against the law for an opposition party worker to hide their affiliation from a powerful politician? Or for a leaker to deny that they leaked information to the press? Imagine if it were legal for politicians to lie to us but illegal for us to lie to them!
Re:Why did you quit visiting Yahoo?
on
YahooTV
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· Score: 2, Informative
A yahoo [reference.com] "is a crude or brutish person".
Most people know the word "yahoo" as an exclamation of happiness. "I won the lottery!" "Yahooooo!"
Lesson: Don't trust programmers to name a company.
The programmers did not name the company. They named their web site listing while they were still students, just as the Google guys named their prototype search engine. In both cases, the sites became incredibly popular under those names long before they became companies. At the time Google and Yahoo were named, programmers were the only people involved.
Programmers will invent a name that sounds to them like a great intelligent joke, but causes problems later. How many people who aren't computer professionals know that the joke is "Yet Another Hierarchically Ordered Oracle"?
Who cares? How many people know what Google (googol) or Microsoft (microcomputer software) mean? How has this hurt those companies?
Another reason programmers don't name things well is they think it is cool to be self-deprecating. That seems to the reason for "Yet Another".
I have never known a business person who would allow confidential letters to be typed in such a manner that they travel outside the company while being prepared. The same applies to all company data.
So the 308,000 customers of SalesForce.com are not business people???
What is the "argument" that you think that this article is making? It points out that computers as a tool have some potentially unexpected side effects that we should consider when desiging systems and regulations. Just as policemen and bodyguards must take the existence of guns into account when designing (for example) security systems for public buildings, courts should consider the impact of computers when deciding how they will allocate cases.
Choosing which hospital has the best success rate for my operation is in the same ball court.
No, it is not. If you choose the hospital with the best success rate then you increase the liklihood of your survival: this is a social good. In the patent case cited, the goal is to determine the social good. That's the court's job. Gaming the system degrades its efficiency.
How about choosing which school has the best results for certain subjects.
Also not analogous.
If the number of applicants is the same for these examples then society doesn't benefit whichever I choose [discounting the relative merits of my self / children to society], so by his argument I shouldn't need that information.
That doesn't make sense. If the information helps a person needing a heart transplant to find the hospital that does heart transplants best and a person needing brain surgery to find the hospital that does brain surgery best then overall society benefits by allocating the right patients to the right hospitals. Ditto for schools.
Finding the lowest price for a product could be considered detrimental to society [less sales tax / corporaqtion tax paid or some such].
Now you're totally out to lunch. The capitalist system is based upon the competition that ensues when consumers select products based on price and perceived value. If society produces products more cheaply then people buy more products. They don't just stuff their money in their mattress after they've bought the basics as cheaply as possible.
Choosing to buy one's fuel based on price is bad for the exchequer too, it is the highest taxed item in my country.
The exchequer primarily benefits from the overall health of the economy. High energy prices reduce economic performance by making it expensive to manufacture and transport goods. If the government wants more money from gas prices it is much more logical for them to raise the gas tax 1% and increase their SHARE rather than encouraging citizens to buy more expensive gas thereby enriching the gas companies much more than themselves.
I don't really see that it matters a lot whether Vista "sells". Microsoft has to continue to upgrade their operating system platform so that it is seen as sufficiently modern. That's enough to deter defectors ("switchers"). When they unbundle something like WinFS, the.NET Runtime and Avalon, that still deters switchers, because those features are still only available on Windows. It's not important what is in the box: it's what is available for the platform.
Of course, from a short-term profits point of view, it would be great if people paid for Vista upgrades instead of waiting until they revved their next computer. If you can get them to upgrade now AND buy a copy with the next computer then you are of course laughing all the way to the bank. But if all they can do is sell the OEM versions with the computers, and cross-sell Office and the server stuff they'll still be making money left, right and center.
While you are allowed to have brash, bold, ad campaings, the general rule in corporate "stuff" advertising is NEVER ADVERTISE YOUR COMPETITION. If you do, the target of the campaign might get the idea that you are tyring a Jedi Mind Trick on him, and figure out that maybe he/she should take a closer look at the company your ad is telling him to ignore.
In the market for low-end servers, Dell is the incumbent. Sun is the new-comer. Therefore it is a given that the customer is looking at Dell. Sun is trying to get them to also notice Sun. This is no different than the Apple "switcher" situation of a few years ago which was mostly well-received.
This is not nearly as difficult as you make it seem: implement the parser in a standardized language. The formal specification of the standardized language can then be included with the source of the parser.
That's just weird. Now you have to interpret the document format that the language specification is written in, write a compiler for the language, run the compiler for the language on the documents and then interpret the output of the parser. Alternately you could document the document format that the content is in and let later consumers write parsers in whatever programming language they feel is best.
I'm not against providing implementations of parsers as documentation for the document format. They might still have a C or Python compiler around and it could be handy. But it doesn't make sense to focus on documenting the parser implementation language rather than the content format language.
Land of the free? " With a record-setting 2 million people locked up in American jails and prisons, the United States has overtaken Russia and has a higher percentage of its citizens behind bars than any other country."...
"On a per capita basis, according to the best available figures, the United States has three times more prisoners than Iran, four times more than Poland, five times more than Tanzania and seven times more than Germany. Maryland has more citizens in prison and jail (an estimated 35,200) than all of Canada (31,600), though Canada's population is six times greater."...
"A major cause of the increase is the war on drugs. In 1980, says Marc Mauer, assistant director of the Sentencing Project in Washington, about 40,000 Americans were locked up solely for drug offenses. Now the number is 450,000, three-fourths of them black or Hispanic, although drug use is no higher in those groups than among whites."
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0601-01.ht m
I'm sorry: a free country would not lock up half a million people for engaging in recreational pharmaceutical use or business activities related to it.
Not that it really matters for making the point, but modern Windows navigation conventions really date back to Windows 95. Windows 95 and Gnome have more in common than Windows 95 and Windows 3.1 did. Do you remember the "program manager" and the "file manager"?
You keep describing this as a process of wealth redistribution to the 3rd world, when the reality is that the wealth is being distributed to the rich. The way markets have worked, and the way that they have always worked, is that the poor get poorer and the rich get richer.
This seems to be the key sentence in your post. According to this view, market-driven countries like America, Britain and the rest of Western Europe have seen their poor grow poorer over the last 300 years of capitalism. And yet, by any measure you care to mention, this is not true. Nutrition is better than the pre-capitalist period and better than that in communist countries. Education is better. Working days are shorter. Health is better.
Furthermore, this is true not just in "rich" countries but also in most poor countries that have adopted global capitalism. With the exception of war-torn and AIDs-ravagead sub-saharan africa (which is hardly a key part of the globalized economy), people's health and and other development indicators have been trending steadily and rapidly higher. In other words, the facts are starkly at odd with your "opinion" that the world's poor are getting poorer. These findings are summarized in an easily digestible form at the UN site.
http://www.undp.org/hdr2003/flash.html
Among other things you can see there, the average Chinese life expectency has increased from around 43 to around 70 over the last 50 years. GDP is about 10 times what it was in 1950. Even the poorest regions of China are better off today than they were 20 years ago.
The poorest countries of the world are not those that have embraced globalism most warmly (your poor get poorer theory) but rather those that have been fighting wars that prevent their economies from participating meaningfully in the global economy.
My question for you is: do you hate the rich so much that you would ignore the the demonwtrated benefits of globalization for the poor?. Or are you willing to look the facts in the face?
http://www.undp.org/hdr2003/flash.html
I'm all for capitalism, but while my employer has a global work force to choose from, I do not have a global pool of employers to choose from.
Why not? Do you think that there are no employees of Japanese companies in America? IIRC, Honda just opened a big plant in my old home town. And I know people in America who work for German software companies (e.g. SAP).
Slashdot Mirror
Of course Slashdot prints half-truths and fearmongering 26 times a day, but it is fascinating to watch the mainstream press get this story wrong so many times. This argument is about the contents of a *text file*, one which the USA does not even currently control. ICANN publishes the root DNS information, and the root operators, who are dozens of independent, international parties, can choose to accept or decline. If the UN, the EU, or the National Hockey League wants to publish their own root information, they are perfectly free to do so. Why don't they put their zone out and see if anyone adopts it?
So let's say that China and the EU decide to get together and do that? What will happen is that Americans will start to get different resolutions for domains than people in other countries will. This could cause massive disruption of e-commerce and Internet usage in general. Do you really think it would be better to cause the disruption and "see what happens" rather than try to negotiate a settlement? According to TFA, the EU wants other countries to have some kind of formalized "influence" over the process. It doesn't seem so unreasonable to me.
"We have no intention to regulate the internet," said Commissioner Reding, reassuring the US that the EU was not proposing setting up a new global body.
Insightful.
In an absolute sense, sure, C/C++ will always be faster. But does the end user notice this in a webapp? NO!
That's the wrong criterion. In a webapp there is not one "end user". There are end users plural. And the question is how many can be served on a single server. That's the appropriate performance measurement for a webapp.
Does that mean I would use C/C++ for a webapp? Not typically. But I would at least make the decision based upon the right measurement!
Maybe they are so expensive because they have a cost center (open source software development) that their competitors do not.
I'm not saying the post-singularity will be utopian. I have no idea. I'm saying that just as a world in which you can manufacture tools is very different than one in which you cannot, a world in which you can manufacture conscious beings will be very different. Our economy will not survive in a recognizable form. Most likely, neither will our society. We're not talking about an incremental improvement like cell phones. We're talking about the ability to manufacture thinking beings who can manufacture other thinking beings and so on and so forth.
There is a truism in regards to technology: when something is made easier to do, more of it is expected to be done.
And what happens when it is affordable to just manufacture robots and AIs to do the work? And manufacture robots and AIs to manufacture and design robots and AI? We could get to a point where it is vastly more efficient to manufacture "workers" than to train humans to do the work.
I don't know what happens then. But it certainly isn't just "more of the same". An observer could not have predicted human society based on what the world was like before intelligence arose. Similarly, we cannot predict the future "society" (whatever they call it) that will arise from the hive mind of intelligences replicating.
I have no idea when or if we'll get there. But I think it is intellectually lazy (and, in fact, indefensible) to say that the future is guaranteed to be like the past just because it "usually is". "Usually" human beings don't even have civilization. It's an unpredictable recent development since the last ice age. I expect more unpredictable developments in our future.
What makes you think he is a socialist? And even if he is, what's weird about the fact that he is a libertarian and a socialist? So is Noam Chomsky.
The naming system works the same way universally precisely because control is centralized. Can you point to a distributed naming system that works as well as the Domain name system? Do you remember bang paths?
There is nothing trivial about a function that maps names to numbers. That function lives at the intersection of human wants and thoughts and the computer's functional requirements. That's why there is a brouhahaha over the ".sex" TLD. That's why certain domains are worth millions of dollars.
In Massachusetts, is it considered criminal to mislead the government or the administration in such a fashion?
Why would it be? We don't live in an authoritarian dictatorship. Aside from its judicial branch (i.e. court rooms), the government should be treated as any other organization. Do you really want it to be against the law for an opposition party worker to hide their affiliation from a powerful politician? Or for a leaker to deny that they leaked information to the press? Imagine if it were legal for politicians to lie to us but illegal for us to lie to them!
A yahoo [reference.com] "is a crude or brutish person".
Most people know the word "yahoo" as an exclamation of happiness. "I won the lottery!" "Yahooooo!"
Lesson: Don't trust programmers to name a company.
The programmers did not name the company. They named their web site listing while they were still students, just as the Google guys named their prototype search engine. In both cases, the sites became incredibly popular under those names long before they became companies. At the time Google and Yahoo were named, programmers were the only people involved.
Programmers will invent a name that sounds to them like a great intelligent joke, but causes problems later. How many people who aren't computer professionals know that the joke is "Yet Another Hierarchically Ordered Oracle"?
Who cares? How many people know what Google (googol) or Microsoft (microcomputer software) mean? How has this hurt those companies?
Another reason programmers don't name things well is they think it is cool to be self-deprecating. That seems to the reason for "Yet Another".
Let me ask again: who cares?
Yeah we learned we need it more than ever before. Just imagine the SCO history without the GPL.
I'm imagining it. I don't see any big differences in the outcome.
I have never known a business person who would allow confidential letters to be typed in such a manner that they travel outside the company while being prepared. The same applies to all company data.
So the 308,000 customers of SalesForce.com are not business people???Easy access to large amounts of information has benefits to society that vastly outweigh the detriments.
Right. And that's exactly what the article says.
Computer and communications technology is making more and better information available ever more quickly. This is a good thing -- usually.
You paraphrased the first line of the article and acted as if it were a rebuttal to the article. Then you got modded up to insightful!
What is the "argument" that you think that this article is making? It points out that computers as a tool have some potentially unexpected side effects that we should consider when desiging systems and regulations. Just as policemen and bodyguards must take the existence of guns into account when designing (for example) security systems for public buildings, courts should consider the impact of computers when deciding how they will allocate cases.
Moderation: overrated! Your analogies are poor.
Choosing which hospital has the best success rate for my operation is in the same ball court.
No, it is not. If you choose the hospital with the best success rate then you increase the liklihood of your survival: this is a social good. In the patent case cited, the goal is to determine the social good. That's the court's job. Gaming the system degrades its efficiency.
How about choosing which school has the best results for certain subjects.
Also not analogous.
If the number of applicants is the same for these examples then society doesn't benefit whichever I choose [discounting the relative merits of my self / children to society], so by his argument I shouldn't need that information.
That doesn't make sense. If the information helps a person needing a heart transplant to find the hospital that does heart transplants best and a person needing brain surgery to find the hospital that does brain surgery best then overall society benefits by allocating the right patients to the right hospitals. Ditto for schools.
Finding the lowest price for a product could be considered detrimental to society [less sales tax / corporaqtion tax paid or some such].
Now you're totally out to lunch. The capitalist system is based upon the competition that ensues when consumers select products based on price and perceived value. If society produces products more cheaply then people buy more products. They don't just stuff their money in their mattress after they've bought the basics as cheaply as possible.
Choosing to buy one's fuel based on price is bad for the exchequer too, it is the highest taxed item in my country.
The exchequer primarily benefits from the overall health of the economy. High energy prices reduce economic performance by making it expensive to manufacture and transport goods. If the government wants more money from gas prices it is much more logical for them to raise the gas tax 1% and increase their SHARE rather than encouraging citizens to buy more expensive gas thereby enriching the gas companies much more than themselves.
So, I'm sorry: your analogies are not analogous.
How about that one?
It wasn't intended to give rise to unique insights. It was intended to simplify the teaching and calculation of geometry.
Of course, from a short-term profits point of view, it would be great if people paid for Vista upgrades instead of waiting until they revved their next computer. If you can get them to upgrade now AND buy a copy with the next computer then you are of course laughing all the way to the bank. But if all they can do is sell the OEM versions with the computers, and cross-sell Office and the server stuff they'll still be making money left, right and center.
While you are allowed to have brash, bold, ad campaings, the general rule in corporate "stuff" advertising is NEVER ADVERTISE YOUR COMPETITION. If you do, the target of the campaign might get the idea that you are tyring a Jedi Mind Trick on him, and figure out that maybe he/she should take a closer look at the company your ad is telling him to ignore.
In the market for low-end servers, Dell is the incumbent. Sun is the new-comer. Therefore it is a given that the customer is looking at Dell. Sun is trying to get them to also notice Sun. This is no different than the Apple "switcher" situation of a few years ago which was mostly well-received.
This is not nearly as difficult as you make it seem: implement the parser in a standardized language. The formal specification of the standardized language can then be included with the source of the parser.
That's just weird. Now you have to interpret the document format that the language specification is written in, write a compiler for the language, run the compiler for the language on the documents and then interpret the output of the parser. Alternately you could document the document format that the content is in and let later consumers write parsers in whatever programming language they feel is best.
I'm not against providing implementations of parsers as documentation for the document format. They might still have a C or Python compiler around and it could be handy. But it doesn't make sense to focus on documenting the parser implementation language rather than the content format language.
Land of the free? " With a record-setting 2 million people locked up in American jails and prisons, the United States has overtaken Russia and has a higher percentage of its citizens behind bars than any other country." ...
"On a per capita basis, according to the best available figures, the United States has three times more prisoners than Iran, four times more than Poland, five times more than Tanzania and seven times more than Germany. Maryland has more citizens in prison and jail (an estimated 35,200) than all of Canada (31,600), though Canada's population is six times greater." ...
"A major cause of the increase is the war on drugs. In 1980, says Marc Mauer, assistant director of the Sentencing Project in Washington, about 40,000 Americans were locked up solely for drug offenses. Now the number is 450,000, three-fourths of them black or Hispanic, although drug use is no higher in those groups than among whites."
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0601-01.ht m
I'm sorry: a free country would not lock up half a million people for engaging in recreational pharmaceutical use or business activities related to it.
Not that it really matters for making the point, but modern Windows navigation conventions really date back to Windows 95. Windows 95 and Gnome have more in common than Windows 95 and Windows 3.1 did. Do you remember the "program manager" and the "file manager"?
You keep describing this as a process of wealth redistribution to the 3rd world, when the reality is that the wealth is being distributed to the rich. The way markets have worked, and the way that they have always worked, is that the poor get poorer and the rich get richer.
This seems to be the key sentence in your post. According to this view, market-driven countries like America, Britain and the rest of Western Europe have seen their poor grow poorer over the last 300 years of capitalism. And yet, by any measure you care to mention, this is not true. Nutrition is better than the pre-capitalist period and better than that in communist countries. Education is better. Working days are shorter. Health is better.
Furthermore, this is true not just in "rich" countries but also in most poor countries that have adopted global capitalism. With the exception of war-torn and AIDs-ravagead sub-saharan africa (which is hardly a key part of the globalized economy), people's health and and other development indicators have been trending steadily and rapidly higher. In other words, the facts are starkly at odd with your "opinion" that the world's poor are getting poorer. These findings are summarized in an easily digestible form at the UN site. http://www.undp.org/hdr2003/flash.html
Among other things you can see there, the average Chinese life expectency has increased from around 43 to around 70 over the last 50 years. GDP is about 10 times what it was in 1950. Even the poorest regions of China are better off today than they were 20 years ago.
The poorest countries of the world are not those that have embraced globalism most warmly (your poor get poorer theory) but rather those that have been fighting wars that prevent their economies from participating meaningfully in the global economy.
My question for you is: do you hate the rich so much that you would ignore the the demonwtrated benefits of globalization for the poor?. Or are you willing to look the facts in the face? http://www.undp.org/hdr2003/flash.html
I'm all for capitalism, but while my employer has a global work force to choose from, I do not have a global pool of employers to choose from.
Why not? Do you think that there are no employees of Japanese companies in America? IIRC, Honda just opened a big plant in my old home town. And I know people in America who work for German software companies (e.g. SAP).
You know that RSS 3.0 is a joke, right?