On the other hand even though I know what the software is for I have NO idea what the icon apparently depicting several colored cubes in a coffee cup is going to do (to cite an example I noticed yesterday).
That one makes JELL-O for you and puts it in your coffee cup. Make sure your cup is empty first, or it can splash all over your desk! That happened to me last week, but I just clicked on the "broom next to a diagonal line with a circle on it" button to clean it up.
First of all, I must admit that I can't tell if your post was flamebait or if you're just completely misguided. But let me address your three main points.
Your first point, sarcastically put as it was, is that secretaries have a far more complicated set of tasks than simply typing into typewriters. I agree with that to some extent, which is why I said explicitly in my original post "Start there and then add whatever else you need. Don't start with a general purpose computing platform and complain that it's too hard to use.". Nobody is claiming that typewriters are the perfect tool, but being able to draft letters and memos is infinitely more relevant than being able to minimize, restore, and drag a Solitaire or FreeCell window around a virtual desktop.
Which takes me to the second point. Does "she" have any use for email or the web? Maybe, but she has no inherent right to those things as you seem to imply, especially for personal use. How is web browsing any more acceptable during business hours than watching television or playing Quake? Do your WORK. Is that such a hard concept to understand? And if said work involves accessing the web or exchanging emails, then that can be incorporated into the appliance I described quite easily, with proper filters, proxies, client software, etc.
The rest of this post now deals with your sickeningly misguided dismay at the use of the term "Sally Secretary". For those of you who have no interest in gender issues, logic, and truth, feel free to stop reading now. Otherwise...
"Sally Secretary" (which I quoted, btw, and did not initiate) is a nickname for a generic person, like "Terrible Tommy" for a misbehaving kid or "Timmy Tricketer" for a sneaky little kid. Do these nicknames or their use imply that all men are misbheaving sneaks or that people who cause problems are generally male? No, they are generic nicknames for the purpose of conversation. And as soon as Jenny Q. Oxford invents an English gender-neutral third-person pronoun suitable for people, we can start using that. Hey did you notice that I called her "Jenny"? That must be because all women have better vocabularies than all men.
But more importantly in this case is that most secretaries are female. Sorry to break the news to you. Feel free to do some actual research, for example see the fine report by the 9 to 5 National Association of Working Women. Or maybe just read an article that references that report which says: "More than one in four women in this country have clerical or administrative jobs, according to 9 to 5 National Association of Working Women, the Atlanta-based nonprofit organization whose mission is to strengthen women's ability to work for economic justice."
Maybe it troubles you that there are so many women secretaries. Go fight that battle then. But try to make a separation between what you're fighting for. It's ignorant knee-jerk PC comments like yours that distract from real social issues (such as why so many women go into such professions) rather than actually addressing them. Your hush-hush "Equity Through Obscurity" approach to social politics is out-dated, conterproductive, and off-topic.
I don't think I could recommend it to Sally Secretary quite yet. Its still got a bit more polishing to do.
It may come as a surprise, but 20 years ago Sally Secretary rarely had a computer, and 50 years ago, she was lucky to get a typewriter. Keep going back, and she was lucky to be doing something other than sewing or breast-feeding.
And yet throughout this history, we've somehow managed to organize large nation states and watch empires nearly conquer entire hemispheres without spending millions of dollars on bloated software.
There is an important lesson here. Despite the clamor on this discussion board, it is not "Linux r0x0rs!". It is that people often come up with good tools for specific tasks to control the environment -- this (and language of course) is our defining characteristic. Most secretaries use windows PCs so they can run MS-Word. That's a whole lot of licensing fees to pay to MSFT for what is essentially a glorified typewriter.
So to get to my point... Before you bash unices as being too hard for Sally Secretary to use, consider this. Create a distro that emulates a typewriter exactly. No command prompt, no shell, no KDE, no Mozilla, no translucent alpha blended windowing system. Just a typewriter. And it's free, and you can run it easily on a $200 computer.
Start there and then add whatever else you need. Don't start with a general purpose computing platform and complain that it's too hard to use. Of course it's too hard. This whole mentality of using a "desktop environment" is one of the worst crutches the computing industry has been hobbled with. Somehow the concepts of "BIOS" and "DOS" evolved from a set of useful low-level I/O routines into a horribly bloated general purpose machine with so many points of failure, that we're often spending more money now on IT and training than on the machines and the people who actually use them!
(BTW don't take this as a MSFT bash. I feel as strongly about Apple's overly general approach to computing, though at least their momentum seems to be toward a more controlled environment. And all the people working on Linux window managers and trying to make their Linux machines have a "START" button and "My Computer"... Jesus, it makes me sick...)
Who says 'self-aware networks' are even possible? I've seen no evidence to show that they are.
A network that knows its own configuration, is able to introspect on the status of its nodes, and has the power to make changes to its routing and component members is "self aware" and "self mutable". It is also well within our technological capacity to build one. The abilities to introspect and self-modify are the core of intelligence. Read Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid.
An intelligent machine is most likely impossible using a digital computer.
If anything requires evidence to prove, it's that silly statement right there. It's not even clear what you mean by an "intelligent machine". But even taking it to a deep level of complexity (human-level intelligence), it's likely that we'll be there soon as the ability to simulate the right number of neurons is made possible by faster processors. Read The Age of Spiritual Machines.
I just think its funny people still worry about this when the smartest machine we've ever built is a robot vacuum.
Apparently The Sharper Image catalog and your local Brookstone dictate your knowledge of technology and human achievement. That being the case, I must inform you that some of the newest meat thermometers are quite sophistaced and even have an "ultra-sensitive 'fish' option".
Every biological system on the planet works on the same principal, yes, the system will be attacked, keep functioniong, and attempt to regain controll.
I don't know about you, but my neck hairs bristle at the shift of computer systems into the biological (model) realm. I am well aware that biological systems function well in the face of a variety of offenses.
But they (biological systems) also autonomously evolve, compete strongly, and often get wiped out. And when they do too well, they have the tendency to consume all resources, pollute, and then die out or reinvent themselves.
We (humans) are a biological animal. Let's be careful building something that will compete with us. The potential dangers of this scenario have been played out in Terminator and countless other sci-fi epics. Self-aware entities fight for their survival and the survival of their species/genes.
You might say "but we control the technology", but in fact the next generation of computers will control us. Digital Rights Management (DRM) is in effect our surrendering of our rights to machines. As more of our survival becomes dependent on machines (as has been increasing at an exponential rate recently), this means our rights of survival are out of our hands. Think of DRM as the Declaration of Independence, but in reverse -- well, we had a nice run there for a couple hundred years! But I'd rather be a heavily-taxed under-represented colonist of a foreign empire than a farm animal to machine masters any day.
I don't mean to rant tinfoil hat conspiracy nonsense, and it's important to secure our systems from collapse, but let's not be so quick to push ourselves toward slavery just yet. I think this (self-aware networks) is an area that is as important as nano/biotech to watch out for, and it's far more likely that we become totally enslaved to technology than that we all get turned into gray goo.
Re:I don't think the User-Agent header cuts it
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Well I think we're arguing different points to some extent. I'm not claiming that switching on User-Agent solves all of the problems of the world, but my point was that the general approach of switching on client request parameters to generate appropriate content (for example via XML/XSLT) is a better solution than assuming CSS on a single document will handle everything for you. This is still an open problem, and I hope somebody comes up with a great solution for it. We were working on it for a while, but realized there wasn't a huge market for it yet (since 99%+ of users were sitting in front of a computer, and for those who weren't, usually a custom application for whatever other platform was more appropriate).
With respect to table layout (vs. CSS layout), I never said it is better. In fact, I said specifically in my previous post "It's two alternate ways to accomplish the same thing. Neither is right or wrong." Some old browsers support tables and NOT CSS, so in those cases table layout would be better. There's no simple answer for "which is better".
And yes, I do use the <font> tag sometimes when I'm dashing off a quick/temporary hand-coded HTML fragment, especially with relative size like size="+1" which is not easily indicated with CSS. Thanks for bringing it up; I will mention it in confession this weekend!
I define a "web browser" as a program that can download pages via HTTP and render HTML into something human-perceivable. Not all web browsers are visual web browsers. Or am I degrading this discussion into a question of semantics?
You are, but I was not clear, and when I said that I meant "standard desktop web browsers".
CSS supports @media selectors...
The CSS approach is inherently flawed in that it adds markup to a fixed flow, when in reality I want different flow on different devices. Sometimes shorter, sometimes longer, sometimes repeating a header every paragraph, sometimes not, sometimes with links, sometimes not... It's a fine abstract solution that probably has some good specific applications, but it doesn't properly address the problem of vastly different device types and the fact that information/content is presented in vastly different ways on them.
You sing the praises of table layout, but most web browsers that support XSLT also support CSS. Would you really want to generate a table layout using client-side XSLT?
Sure, why not? If I'm rendering HTML for a standard desktop web browser, what's the difference? It's two alternate ways to accomplish the same thing. Neither is right or wrong.
And how through HTTP would your server know which server-side XSLT script to use?
A simple answer is to switch on information in the User-Agent HTTP header. You can certainly get more clever than that, but it's usually not necessary.
By the way, don't get me wrong. I think the CSS approach to multi-platform rendering is cool, and is often easy to implement to get initial support going for multiple platforms. But for long-term production quality cross-platform presentation, it's not sufficient.
Does table-based visual formatting work with non-visual display methods such as a voice interface? Does it work well on a handheld device with a 240x160 pixel screen?
No, it doesn't work well with either of those. So? I've spent several years working on cross-device content presentation (WAP, voice, web, mini-web, etc.), and one thing I can say for certain is that web pages work on web browsers.
If you want content on other devices, you need to re-render it as something else specific for that target, just like people use JavaScript now to render for IE/Netscape separately. There's no magic solution that will look/sound great on every device and platform. If you try it, you will be reduced to ugly, user-unfriendly, lowest common denominator presentation and stuck with HUGE bloated code anyway.
A good solution is to represent data in XML and use XSLT or similar technology to render specifically for your target platform. Note that many browsers even have this functionality (XSLT) built in.
he'll soon understand that in Soviet American Corps, sucees is not a matter of technical excellency but rather a matter of negociation skills and of litigation
I think that was the original poster's point, though not elaborated on: that a strong correlation does not necessarilly imply a causal link (in either direction). Your "shoe" example further proves this. This type of statistical abuse is rampant in the media, and most people don't think twice when they hear quotes like this.
Re:Link renders bad on Mozilla?
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Whoever wrote that page is an idiot, first off the use tables for formatting (ugh), then they set the left and right columns to 720 pixels each absolute values rather than %ages.
Since the parent/parent was already modded Offtopic, I figure it's safe to chime in here without getting further demoted...
I agree that if both left and right columns were set to 720 pixels, then the author messed up. But using tables for formatting is perfectly acceptable, as it consistently and clearly works, has always worked, and does not create verbose or complex HTML.
Your distaste for table-based formatting reminds me of assholes on inline skates (aka roller blades) who mock people who still ride the old school 4-wheeled roller skates, like they haven't caught up with what's cool and proper. Get over it, it works.
Let me take your analogy in another direction, to discuss not the "primary reason" for these things, but the "primary reason for the legality" of these things.
The reason handguns are legal is because our founding fathers recognized LONG AGO that governments have the tendency to infringe on the rights of the public over time. Always.
The second amendment:
"A well-regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State,
the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed."
So the primary purpose of the LEGALITY of guns is to secure the freedom and rights of individuals, though often they are USED for revenge/murder/intimidation/hunting etc.
The primary purpose of the LEGALITY of P2P networks can be framed similarly: to support the free sharing of information to facilitate freedom of ideas and preservation of a democratic republic. But, like guns, the P2P networks are often used for other more harmful purposes (such as copyright infringement).
In conclusion, I would say that in order to maintain the security of a free State, maintaining the ability for a people to communicate among itself is almost as significant as the people's right to defend itself. I hereby propose an amendment to the constitution declaring as much (details to be worked out).
OK, I'll bite. You said: Aesthetically, the games played on computers are pretty pitiful compared to the classics of literature.
How about this:
Aesthetically, the fruit you can buy in the grocery store is pretty pitiful compared to the classic dishes made in my favorite French restaurant downtown.
It's a meaningless statement, as was yours. There is a time and place for both things, and your concept of aesthetics is either flawed or so superior to the rest of us, that it needs no explanation or support whatsoever. And I'm leaning pretty strongly toward the former.
What Microsoft should really do is host a T-Shirt design contest, where the winner gets three copies of the shirt they designed and a $10 billion credit at ThinkGeek.
I want an office where I can use whatever software I want for each function, not what others decide to be in a suite.
I do too, but often I can't afford to spend precious hours compiling and configuring just to get components to work together. Sometimes I'll take a hit in functionality just to be able to have things work out of the box. This is the appeal of "office suites".
If I hollow out the case and use it as a planter, is that an illegal modification? Can Microsoft sue me because they're not making their royalty money on the plants I'm growing in my XBOX?
Dude... What kind of plants are you growing in there?
Oh come on, this complete mad ramblings gets a +5 insightful?
Historically homo-sapiens always had the need to carry around something.
According to whom? Is that based on your extensive travels in your time machine or is it from your unpublished but detailed studies of bone abrasions on the underside of the right hand of human skeletons over the last 40 thousand years?
Please, homo-sapiens don't have a need to carry around anything, especially "a rock, a spear, sword, etc; later became smoking." The first three (rock, spear, sword) were carried around for functional purposes, for hunting, or defense at times when animals or foreigners were always a possible threat (most of our history). As soon as people got into a comfortable and more secure environment, they put down these "necessities" and danced, told stories, slept, etc.
As for smoking, there's a lot of deep psychological reasons why people smoke. Social lubricant? OK, sure. Addictive stimulant? Of course. Something repetetive to do with your hands/mouth and synchronize your brain state so you don't become anxious? Yes, to some extent. But "needing to carry around something" is far from the top of the list.
Your point that bottled water and cigarettes both share the traits of being held in your hand and taken into the body through the mouth is valid. And perhaps for some people, holding and drinking water might even help them stop smoking, as it does give them a replacement for some of the similar cravings. But to suggest that this is as simple as homo-sapiens needing to carry something around is overly-reductive, and even if true, would have little to do with the cost of bottled water, even less to do with the cost of gas, and not a damn thing to do with champagne or ink.
Spectrum is hard to make. I mean, look how long it took to perfect 2.4Ghz spectrum and produce enough to support WiFi. All those R&D costs have to be paid by someone! I'm not even counting the investment needed to build a spectrum manufacturing plant.
This is exactly why we need to stop worrying so much about the environment and start spectrum-drilling in Alaska. Otherwise we will become too dependent on foreign spectrum.
You frame the issue in a really interesting manner and raise some good points, but I feel you've only shot down the previous poster (AC who claimed that regulations == nanny state baby-sitting you) without offering a solution.
I agree that the gap between physical man-persons and corporate "artificial persons" as you call them is significant. I also understand where the previous poster is coming from, in that I don't want all my interactions fully managed by the state.
A good compromise here, I feel, is comparable to the mandatory food labels in the US which list serving size, calories, fat grams, carbs, and ingredients list in quantity-order. This doesn't force consumers to eat healthy, but at least it makes it easy to know what they're getting without having to go out of their way to call the manufacturer to request information (or read dense, confusing, hard-to-find, and ever-changing privacy policies). The analogue here would be a simplified privacy-summary table of a pre-specified format (both human-readable and machine parseable formats), with minimal legislation regarding who needs to show the table, and punishments for violating terms.
I think this food packaging regulation is one of the best things that's come from our government in a long time in terms of finding the balance between over-regulation and idealistic laissez-faire libertarianism. I wish it could be a model for many other things.
BTW, if anybody has information on when/how/by whom this was legislated (the food labels), I'd love to read more about it.
Disclaimer: I am the author of the book being reviewed.
I bet you would sell more copies of your book if it indicated on the cover "by smack.addict" instead of the more innocent and questionable "George Reese". And instead of that fat hairy cat (wtf is that thing anyway?), you should have had a pic of a spoon with a lighter under it.
What platforms do you use for development?
Linux and win32 servers (doesn't matter), win32 dev machines, cmdline build tools (ant, javac, etc.), personal editors of choice.
What Dbs do you use?
MySQL 4. It is free, fast, small footprint, and now supports transactions.
What web server?
Tomcat. Free, simple.
Why?
Building a SOAP-based server with persistence. App runs on Axis on Tomcat on MySQL, with custom direct persistence. Minimize number of components to simplify system and possibility of failure/bugs. For more performance, load balance onto extra servers (cost of cheapo hardware only, since all sw OS/db/middleware is free) and/or beef up DB machine depending on bottleneck.
In general, if you have small tight components, you understand very well how they work and what they are doing, and you design your models well, then your app has the chance of running efficiently without needing mega servers and a huge development crew.
Slashdot Mirror
First of all, I must admit that I can't tell if your post was flamebait or if you're just completely misguided. But let me address your three main points.
Your first point, sarcastically put as it was, is that secretaries have a far more complicated set of tasks than simply typing into typewriters. I agree with that to some extent, which is why I said explicitly in my original post "Start there and then add whatever else you need. Don't start with a general purpose computing platform and complain that it's too hard to use.". Nobody is claiming that typewriters are the perfect tool, but being able to draft letters and memos is infinitely more relevant than being able to minimize, restore, and drag a Solitaire or FreeCell window around a virtual desktop.
Which takes me to the second point. Does "she" have any use for email or the web? Maybe, but she has no inherent right to those things as you seem to imply, especially for personal use. How is web browsing any more acceptable during business hours than watching television or playing Quake? Do your WORK. Is that such a hard concept to understand? And if said work involves accessing the web or exchanging emails, then that can be incorporated into the appliance I described quite easily, with proper filters, proxies, client software, etc.
The rest of this post now deals with your sickeningly misguided dismay at the use of the term "Sally Secretary". For those of you who have no interest in gender issues, logic, and truth, feel free to stop reading now. Otherwise...
"Sally Secretary" (which I quoted, btw, and did not initiate) is a nickname for a generic person, like "Terrible Tommy" for a misbehaving kid or "Timmy Tricketer" for a sneaky little kid. Do these nicknames or their use imply that all men are misbheaving sneaks or that people who cause problems are generally male? No, they are generic nicknames for the purpose of conversation. And as soon as Jenny Q. Oxford invents an English gender-neutral third-person pronoun suitable for people, we can start using that. Hey did you notice that I called her "Jenny"? That must be because all women have better vocabularies than all men.
But more importantly in this case is that most secretaries are female. Sorry to break the news to you. Feel free to do some actual research, for example see the fine report by the 9 to 5 National Association of Working Women. Or maybe just read an article that references that report which says: "More than one in four women in this country have clerical or administrative jobs, according to 9 to 5 National Association of Working Women, the Atlanta-based nonprofit organization whose mission is to strengthen women's ability to work for economic justice."
Maybe it troubles you that there are so many women secretaries. Go fight that battle then. But try to make a separation between what you're fighting for. It's ignorant knee-jerk PC comments like yours that distract from real social issues (such as why so many women go into such professions) rather than actually addressing them. Your hush-hush "Equity Through Obscurity" approach to social politics is out-dated, conterproductive, and off-topic.
And yet throughout this history, we've somehow managed to organize large nation states and watch empires nearly conquer entire hemispheres without spending millions of dollars on bloated software.
There is an important lesson here. Despite the clamor on this discussion board, it is not "Linux r0x0rs!". It is that people often come up with good tools for specific tasks to control the environment -- this (and language of course) is our defining characteristic. Most secretaries use windows PCs so they can run MS-Word. That's a whole lot of licensing fees to pay to MSFT for what is essentially a glorified typewriter.
So to get to my point... Before you bash unices as being too hard for Sally Secretary to use, consider this. Create a distro that emulates a typewriter exactly. No command prompt, no shell, no KDE, no Mozilla, no translucent alpha blended windowing system. Just a typewriter. And it's free, and you can run it easily on a $200 computer.
Start there and then add whatever else you need. Don't start with a general purpose computing platform and complain that it's too hard to use. Of course it's too hard. This whole mentality of using a "desktop environment" is one of the worst crutches the computing industry has been hobbled with. Somehow the concepts of "BIOS" and "DOS" evolved from a set of useful low-level I/O routines into a horribly bloated general purpose machine with so many points of failure, that we're often spending more money now on IT and training than on the machines and the people who actually use them!
(BTW don't take this as a MSFT bash. I feel as strongly about Apple's overly general approach to computing, though at least their momentum seems to be toward a more controlled environment. And all the people working on Linux window managers and trying to make their Linux machines have a "START" button and "My Computer"... Jesus, it makes me sick...)
This is actually good news for Cisco, because security holes like this appear to be a prerequisite for getting a large Department of Homeland Security contract.
But they (biological systems) also autonomously evolve, compete strongly, and often get wiped out. And when they do too well, they have the tendency to consume all resources, pollute, and then die out or reinvent themselves.
We (humans) are a biological animal. Let's be careful building something that will compete with us. The potential dangers of this scenario have been played out in Terminator and countless other sci-fi epics. Self-aware entities fight for their survival and the survival of their species/genes.
You might say "but we control the technology", but in fact the next generation of computers will control us. Digital Rights Management (DRM) is in effect our surrendering of our rights to machines. As more of our survival becomes dependent on machines (as has been increasing at an exponential rate recently), this means our rights of survival are out of our hands. Think of DRM as the Declaration of Independence, but in reverse -- well, we had a nice run there for a couple hundred years! But I'd rather be a heavily-taxed under-represented colonist of a foreign empire than a farm animal to machine masters any day.
I don't mean to rant tinfoil hat conspiracy nonsense, and it's important to secure our systems from collapse, but let's not be so quick to push ourselves toward slavery just yet. I think this (self-aware networks) is an area that is as important as nano/biotech to watch out for, and it's far more likely that we become totally enslaved to technology than that we all get turned into gray goo.
Well I think we're arguing different points to some extent. I'm not claiming that switching on User-Agent solves all of the problems of the world, but my point was that the general approach of switching on client request parameters to generate appropriate content (for example via XML/XSLT) is a better solution than assuming CSS on a single document will handle everything for you. This is still an open problem, and I hope somebody comes up with a great solution for it. We were working on it for a while, but realized there wasn't a huge market for it yet (since 99%+ of users were sitting in front of a computer, and for those who weren't, usually a custom application for whatever other platform was more appropriate).
With respect to table layout (vs. CSS layout), I never said it is better. In fact, I said specifically in my previous post "It's two alternate ways to accomplish the same thing. Neither is right or wrong." Some old browsers support tables and NOT CSS, so in those cases table layout would be better. There's no simple answer for "which is better".
And yes, I do use the <font> tag sometimes when I'm dashing off a quick/temporary hand-coded HTML fragment, especially with relative size like size="+1" which is not easily indicated with CSS. Thanks for bringing it up; I will mention it in confession this weekend!
Sure, why not? If I'm rendering HTML for a standard desktop web browser, what's the difference? It's two alternate ways to accomplish the same thing. Neither is right or wrong. A simple answer is to switch on information in the User-Agent HTTP header. You can certainly get more clever than that, but it's usually not necessary.
By the way, don't get me wrong. I think the CSS approach to multi-platform rendering is cool, and is often easy to implement to get initial support going for multiple platforms. But for long-term production quality cross-platform presentation, it's not sufficient.
If you want content on other devices, you need to re-render it as something else specific for that target, just like people use JavaScript now to render for IE/Netscape separately. There's no magic solution that will look/sound great on every device and platform. If you try it, you will be reduced to ugly, user-unfriendly, lowest common denominator presentation and stuck with HUGE bloated code anyway.
A good solution is to represent data in XML and use XSLT or similar technology to render specifically for your target platform. Note that many browsers even have this functionality (XSLT) built in.
he'll soon understand that in Soviet American Corps, sucees is not a matter of technical excellency but rather a matter of negociation skills and of litigation
In Soviet American Corps, sucees negociate YOU!
I think that was the original poster's point, though not elaborated on: that a strong correlation does not necessarilly imply a causal link (in either direction). Your "shoe" example further proves this. This type of statistical abuse is rampant in the media, and most people don't think twice when they hear quotes like this.
I agree that if both left and right columns were set to 720 pixels, then the author messed up. But using tables for formatting is perfectly acceptable, as it consistently and clearly works, has always worked, and does not create verbose or complex HTML.
Your distaste for table-based formatting reminds me of assholes on inline skates (aka roller blades) who mock people who still ride the old school 4-wheeled roller skates, like they haven't caught up with what's cool and proper. Get over it, it works.
PS I ride hover-skates, so fuck you all.
The reason handguns are legal is because our founding fathers recognized LONG AGO that governments have the tendency to infringe on the rights of the public over time. Always. The second amendment: So the primary purpose of the LEGALITY of guns is to secure the freedom and rights of individuals, though often they are USED for revenge/murder/intimidation/hunting etc.
The primary purpose of the LEGALITY of P2P networks can be framed similarly: to support the free sharing of information to facilitate freedom of ideas and preservation of a democratic republic. But, like guns, the P2P networks are often used for other more harmful purposes (such as copyright infringement).
In conclusion, I would say that in order to maintain the security of a free State, maintaining the ability for a people to communicate among itself is almost as significant as the people's right to defend itself. I hereby propose an amendment to the constitution declaring as much (details to be worked out).
OK, I'll bite. You said: Aesthetically, the games played on computers are pretty pitiful compared to the classics of literature.
How about this:
Aesthetically, the fruit you can buy in the grocery store is pretty pitiful compared to the classic dishes made in my favorite French restaurant downtown.
It's a meaningless statement, as was yours. There is a time and place for both things, and your concept of aesthetics is either flawed or so superior to the rest of us, that it needs no explanation or support whatsoever. And I'm leaning pretty strongly toward the former.
"Ambient Wood Project" ??
Wasn't that the subtitle of "Bukake Bud's Adventure #12"?
What Microsoft should really do is host a T-Shirt design contest, where the winner gets three copies of the shirt they designed and a $10 billion credit at ThinkGeek.
Please, homo-sapiens don't have a need to carry around anything, especially "a rock, a spear, sword, etc; later became smoking." The first three (rock, spear, sword) were carried around for functional purposes, for hunting, or defense at times when animals or foreigners were always a possible threat (most of our history). As soon as people got into a comfortable and more secure environment, they put down these "necessities" and danced, told stories, slept, etc.
As for smoking, there's a lot of deep psychological reasons why people smoke. Social lubricant? OK, sure. Addictive stimulant? Of course. Something repetetive to do with your hands/mouth and synchronize your brain state so you don't become anxious? Yes, to some extent. But "needing to carry around something" is far from the top of the list.
Your point that bottled water and cigarettes both share the traits of being held in your hand and taken into the body through the mouth is valid. And perhaps for some people, holding and drinking water might even help them stop smoking, as it does give them a replacement for some of the similar cravings. But to suggest that this is as simple as homo-sapiens needing to carry something around is overly-reductive, and even if true, would have little to do with the cost of bottled water, even less to do with the cost of gas, and not a damn thing to do with champagne or ink.
When Microsoft extends something I don't remember it becoming 'open'.
Every time they extend their EULA, something else becomes open.
You frame the issue in a really interesting manner and raise some good points, but I feel you've only shot down the previous poster (AC who claimed that regulations == nanny state baby-sitting you) without offering a solution.
I agree that the gap between physical man-persons and corporate "artificial persons" as you call them is significant. I also understand where the previous poster is coming from, in that I don't want all my interactions fully managed by the state.
A good compromise here, I feel, is comparable to the mandatory food labels in the US which list serving size, calories, fat grams, carbs, and ingredients list in quantity-order. This doesn't force consumers to eat healthy, but at least it makes it easy to know what they're getting without having to go out of their way to call the manufacturer to request information (or read dense, confusing, hard-to-find, and ever-changing privacy policies). The analogue here would be a simplified privacy-summary table of a pre-specified format (both human-readable and machine parseable formats), with minimal legislation regarding who needs to show the table, and punishments for violating terms.
I think this food packaging regulation is one of the best things that's come from our government in a long time in terms of finding the balance between over-regulation and idealistic laissez-faire libertarianism. I wish it could be a model for many other things.
BTW, if anybody has information on when/how/by whom this was legislated (the food labels), I'd love to read more about it.
stat.prepareStatement("Yeah, so ?. Go George!");
stat.bind(1, "stf up");
What platforms do you use for development?
Linux and win32 servers (doesn't matter), win32 dev machines, cmdline build tools (ant, javac, etc.), personal editors of choice.
What Dbs do you use?
MySQL 4. It is free, fast, small footprint, and now supports transactions.
What web server?
Tomcat. Free, simple.
Why?
Building a SOAP-based server with persistence. App runs on Axis on Tomcat on MySQL, with custom direct persistence. Minimize number of components to simplify system and possibility of failure/bugs. For more performance, load balance onto extra servers (cost of cheapo hardware only, since all sw OS/db/middleware is free) and/or beef up DB machine depending on bottleneck.
In general, if you have small tight components, you understand very well how they work and what they are doing, and you design your models well, then your app has the chance of running efficiently without needing mega servers and a huge development crew.