Actually, I'm increasingly convinced that what we're seeing now is a split in the party. I think we're witnessing a coup against the neocons who had taken control.
I think you are right. At last night's caucus, we sent 6 of our 9 local delegates in for Obama, and *every single one of them* had never caucused before and was committed to learning how the Democratic Party in Texas operates in order to keep the Obama "hope campaign" going forward, regardless of who wins the overall nomination. By contrast, the 3 pro-Hillary delegates were all already experienced in politics and 1 had gone to the state-level caucus before.
Dean's "50-state strategy" re-opened Democratic offices all over the nation. Now Obama's message of hope is energizing people of all ages and incomes. The message last night was "I'm getting involved instead of just complaining". The party of FDR and LBJ is coming back from the ground up. Democracy is finally returning to the Democratic Party.
Black suits are the current standard for students doing college recruiting job interviews. Gray, brown, and blue suits are worn more by the interviewers.
I suspect black made a comeback partly because it provides several good alternative outfits for women: black skirt + top, black pants + top, and black pantsuit, and the last two can be worn with either heels or flats. Purchasing one black skirt and one black pantsuit thus goes a long way.
There's a street near my house where I grew up that is complete on every online map I've ever seen, but the truth is it's actually two dead ends that don't meet up.
Same here. The problem is that the bad mapping is on the real official map straight from the city courthouse -- I looked last time I was in there. The only way Google/MapQuest/etc. would even know about it would be to drive the streets and make their own unofficial correction.
The stock market isn't legalized gambling FFS. god damn it. why do people keep modding this insightful.
It keeps getting modded that way because gambling is the next closest thing that behaves like the stock market:
1) The regular media (the big 4, not CNBC) makes daily announcements of stock price movement but don't talk about business plans, much like they talk about winning horse races but avoid discussing the training regimen.
2) It uses the terms "winners" and "losers" a lot.
3) People can "get rich" by "betting on" a particular mix of stocks just as they can get rich by betting on particular horses/dogs/sports teams/etc.
4) There have been multiple spectacular meltdowns of the stock market and people are still alive to remember the most famous one of the Depression.
5) MOST IMPORTANTLY, individual stock market earnings are deemed personal achievements rather than victories of the communal economy.
If you really want people to stop talking about stocks/investing like gambling, then YOU need to change the language you use to talk about it. Say things like "the biotech sector has done great with making useful products and we're all now benefitting from that success" rather than "I put my money in biotech firms X Y and Z because I knew they had good stuff coming out". The former makes stock profits an extension of a generally solid economy, the latter is a bet you made that paid off.
As long as you continue to say that stock profits happen because of the work you put in in picking them, everyone else will say that Wall Street is your gambling venue.
IPv6 barely supports firewalling or QoS. Open corporate networks for all.
What extra support does firewalling need from the IP layer?
IPv6 has no IP level encryption. Its in the standard, but no software or hardware implements it yet.
This looks like a configuration guide to enable IPSec over IPv6 on Cisco routers. And over here it says that Linux does IPSec over IPv6 since 2.4.28 and 2.6.9.
Change ISPs? Guess what. You have to re-IP your whole inside network because your IP range is solely defendant on a subset of your main provider.
That's definitely true for IPv4, but I thought the whole point of site local addresses was to avoid this issue in IPv6.
Then, there is the fact that IPv6 is not battle tested, so you will be experiencing the joys of the late 90s all over again, with similar attacks like pings of death, to teardrop and land attacks. Expect one (if not more) of the major operating systems out there to have a bug in the IP stack allowing anyone to send some currently unknown packet and get kernel level access from anywhere on the Internet.
True, but then again there are far more people involved in the Net today than in 1994 to 1998-ish when IPv4 stacks were getting pounded.
AFAIK NAT is not visible at the IP layer, e.g. you can't look at a packet and say "that packet has gone through a NAT box somewhere". So I don't see why NAT requires "support" in IPv6 to work.
The reason things like ReactOS and Wine haven't gone very far is because most people recognize what a dead end it is to always be playing catch-up with MS. You can't win. It is futile.
I think of ReactOS as "Windows done right" with the potential to have features that users had demanded for years that Microsoft had refused to implement. Real virtual desktops (supported at the graphics layer, not a broken hack like MSVDM), a decent shell, good network interoperability (ssh/nfs servers), safe ActiveX support, a repository-based update manager, etc. Running a virtualized ReactOS that knew how to play nice with the host system would give people something like Parallel's "coherence" interface on the Mac. It would be really nice to have that one vertical-market application that will never leave Windows available for Linux/BSD/Mac users. Or even Microsoft apps -- Excel is still the high bar for charting in spreadsheets.
That said, you are right about one thing: there will likely be a dearth of OSS developers for ReactOS simply because knowing the Win32 API well enough to duplicate it is pretty distasteful when they could use that time to know GTK/Qt/POSIX/etc. instead.
Funnily enough, there is still an active community of WordPerfect for DOS 5.x/6.x users that use dosemu under Linux to run it because it runs better than under Vista.
The reason people want to live here now? The Feds will pay for your health care, education and Social Security.
That's only an incentive for people from countries with no social safety nets of their own AND who intend to indefinitely be dirt poor once they get here.
-OEM copies come with all the drivers slipstreamed
The HP Vista machine I got earlier this year had all the drivers, but several of the drivers demanded updates as soon as it was connected to the Net (nVidia's was especially annoying).
Now you're getting into semantics. If everything you mentioned previously is simulated, then a chemist can come and say "where are the individual molecular interactions?"
Except that it will be the systems biologist who asks "where are the model connections between the other signals and outputs" before the chemist comes in. The individual cell responds in very non-trivial ways to thousands of different inputs, only some of which have well-understood physical meaning, and cells interact all over the body in ways that are barely understood now but nonetheless have huge ramifications: take out a signal from the liver and the brain can shut down. How will any particular neuron approach the complexity of a real neuron without including all of the *other* stuff that occupies most of the living time of cells? If the simulation gets very large (brain-size), then how will the simulated brain lacking an equivalent to needing energy get tired, bored, or desire to do something faster a.k.a. prioritize?
I can't comment much on the blue brain project, they may indeed have some very interesting results by now, but I do agree with the GP: there is an awful lot required before a system gets close to biological realism.
Granted, birds still surpass airplanes in a few important ways (they forage for energy, procreate, and are self-healing... far beyond what we can fabricate in those respects) but airplanes sure are useful anyways.
I think you've found a fantastic analogy for the opposite point: computers today are much more like airplanes than they are like birds, i.e. once a computer is set up for a long calculation ("get from here to there") it can do it far better than anything else in the world, but it will not ever be able to independently set up many novel calculations (rapid maneuvers) in order to solve a larger yet less well-defined problem ("find food"). We can get vastly powerful idiot savant type AI pretty much now, which is honestly a lot more useful than true hard AI anyway. But I think that hard AI requires a real understanding of how ape-like intelligence works.
When I was in IT, I used to think that hard AI would spring relatively quickly once there were enough transistors available on one silicon wafer to correspond to the number of neurons/synapses. Now that I'm in chemical engineering, I doubt that hard AI will arrive in my lifetime because I know that the real human body is loosely governed by *millions* of non-linear ordinary differential equations, each requiring parameters that must be measured experimentally, and all of them together requiring far more hardware to simulate than we've got today. Just simulating a relatively few biological pathways in liver cells takes modern-day supercomputers between days and weeks. The ODEs can be often simplified, but only after understanding what they mean physically and making appropriate approximations, and it's that step (understanding) that is the bottleneck in understanding why animal intelligence works physically.
Finally, I think in the end we are far more likely to get artificial bodies for humans before we get to artificial minds for computers.
Think it through a little more carefully: you're proposing that trusted (well, supposed to be trusted anyway) AV software include penetration code. How will vendor A's heuristic scanner know that vendor B's "anti-virus worm/virus" is benign, yet still be effective at detecting a destructive new variant of an existing worm/virus?
"Penetration + patch" looks identical to "penetration + destroy" at the high level. Both have malicious code in the penetration portion and both require access to disk/network to work. Also, there is zero economic incentive in vendor A giving vendor B's virus/worm a pass, especially since giving ANY virus/worm a pass opens a new hole for malware.
The idea was thought of before back in the DOS days. It didn't catch on then for good reasons.
There were already some pretty good ways of storing hydrogen for cars and the issue was just creating the hydrogen in the first place.
Not really. The Department of Energy has estimated that one would need at least a device capable of storing up to 0.6 kg of hydrogen per kg (e.g. a 100kg storage tank has 6kg of raw hydrogen in it) before hydrogen is just barely usable as a transportation fuel source. Ideally, 12% wt/wt storage is necessary to achieve the 300 miles per tank that most cars get today on gasoline. The best storage systems (circa 2004 when the report came out) topped out around 8% for liquified hydrogen tanks, but those are very difficult to use in practice because the hydrogen leaks out quickly. All other systems topped out around 4% and required either high temperature (metal hybrides) or very high pressures (700bar, approximately 10000 psi), again making them not yet ready for widespread use.
Hydrogen production is still an issue too though. Most of what we get now is a byproduct from natural gas processing, so it's still not carbon-neutral.
(Disclaimer: This topic is actually part of my master's thesis.)
Your embedded system is a 200MHz ARM that can be recharged on the wall every few days as necessary. Mine is a 100MHz Zf86 that depends exclusively on solar power, has no VGA card at all, has only a 115200 baud serial port and 11 megabit wireless for communication, and would use up a significant chunk of its 32MB RAM just loading the client-side X11 libraries. Hell,/usr/lib/libQtGui.so.4.2.1 (stripped) by itsef is 7 megabytes. Turbo Vision OTOH (which BTW I am NOT a developer for, I just use it sometimes) is under a megabyte and can be used over ssh and serial port.
How many people do you know who have the knowledge to build aircraft carriers less expensively? How many people do you know who have the knowledge to administer primary & secondary schools less expensively? See why your point is moot?
My point is simply that there are some things that the market cannot provide at lower cost even though the demand is there. I picked aircraft carriers because they are staggeringly expensive, I could just as easily have chosen cars, iPods, or yes even educations. Like all of the other "products", an educational insitution has a quality control organization policing its curriculum to ensure that a degree / diploma isn't entirely worthless paper. And given the constraints placed on educational institutions (even primary and secondary schools), I for one cannot say that offhand that a large pool of people are out there who could run them less expensively than they are run now. I think plenty of people could do better, but I don't know if they can do so a lower cost. And that is what the GP asserted: that no matter what, the market would come up with schools capable of meeting the constraints existing schools have to meet but able to do so cheaper.
We've yet to see the market produce cheaper electricity, cheaper water, cheaper wastewater, cheaper trash pickup, cheaper broadband, cheaper medical insurance, cheaper emergency services, or cheaper universities. Why should we expect it to produce cheaper elementary or high schools?
why would you then not consider Eclipse was based on VAJ lineage since it came before it?
Yeah, I wasn't very clear there. I meant that if Eclipse really was the future of VAJava I would have expected to see or hear something like "the next release of VAJava will be called Eclipse" or "Eclipse is the new product from the VAJava / VAC++ line". Instead Eclipse seemed to spring suddenly out of the blue after years of semi-secret development, only shortly after the last official VAJava release, and with a pretty different interface.
I'm pretty sure VAJava and Eclipse had radically different lineages, especially since I could get VAJava in 1999 but not Eclipse.
I can't remember the name of the organization that did Eclipse anymore, but it started with O, like "Orion" or something. I remember the dev talking about how they weren't "really" IBM: they had funding and access to everyone else's code, but they didn't allowed anyone else to see theirs. They were apparently the brain child of a DE or two (Distinguished Engineers). The dev thought that their re-engineering of SWT was stupid when they had Swing already available and that it delayed the release by at least two full years.
I do remember hearing or seeing some kind of presentation about it. People were asking what was going to replace VAJava for WebSphere development and some bigwig said that this project was going to do it with its "plug in architecture" and would replace the IDE for C and C++ along with Java. It was supposed to be better than SlickEdit, better than "anything else out there". AND it was supposed to be sold to make money. Somewhere along the line it got split into the F/OSS version and WSAD which is sold for money.
However I have to ask the inconvenient question. People obviously do want powerful governing power over themselves, and people do want that power to solve all of their problems.
I am just about as cynical about human nature as Dr House, but even I don't believe that most people want the government to "solve all of their problems". That's a pretty wide brush to tar everyone-who-isn't-you with.
Spot on. Also note that the Libertarian Party has been actively involved in promoting its politics through literature that appeals to geeky types for a long time (see the Prometheus Award given to sci-fi authors), so many slashdotters have actually been exposed to Libertarian ideas for years without being aware of it.
If a class of people can't afford existing schools, less-expensive schools will appear to supply the demand.
I can't afford an aircraft carrier and I know plenty of people besides myself that would love to buy one so the demand for a cheap aircraft carrier is definitely there. When should we expect a less-expensive aircraft carrier to be available for purchase?
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Actually, I'm increasingly convinced that what we're seeing now is a split in the party. I think we're witnessing a coup against the neocons who had taken control.
I think you are right. At last night's caucus, we sent 6 of our 9 local delegates in for Obama, and *every single one of them* had never caucused before and was committed to learning how the Democratic Party in Texas operates in order to keep the Obama "hope campaign" going forward, regardless of who wins the overall nomination. By contrast, the 3 pro-Hillary delegates were all already experienced in politics and 1 had gone to the state-level caucus before.
Dean's "50-state strategy" re-opened Democratic offices all over the nation. Now Obama's message of hope is energizing people of all ages and incomes. The message last night was "I'm getting involved instead of just complaining". The party of FDR and LBJ is coming back from the ground up. Democracy is finally returning to the Democratic Party.
Agreed, that's why Oracle takes presedence. DB2, Postgress are later in line.
Do you have enough experience in both DB2 and Oracle to give good reasons for DB2 being "later in line" than Oracle?
Black suits are the current standard for students doing college recruiting job interviews. Gray, brown, and blue suits are worn more by the interviewers.
I suspect black made a comeback partly because it provides several good alternative outfits for women: black skirt + top, black pants + top, and black pantsuit, and the last two can be worn with either heels or flats. Purchasing one black skirt and one black pantsuit thus goes a long way.
There's a street near my house where I grew up that is complete on every online map I've ever seen, but the truth is it's actually two dead ends that don't meet up.
Same here. The problem is that the bad mapping is on the real official map straight from the city courthouse -- I looked last time I was in there. The only way Google/MapQuest/etc. would even know about it would be to drive the streets and make their own unofficial correction.
The stock market isn't legalized gambling FFS. god damn it. why do people keep modding this insightful.
It keeps getting modded that way because gambling is the next closest thing that behaves like the stock market:
1) The regular media (the big 4, not CNBC) makes daily announcements of stock price movement but don't talk about business plans, much like they talk about winning horse races but avoid discussing the training regimen.
2) It uses the terms "winners" and "losers" a lot.
3) People can "get rich" by "betting on" a particular mix of stocks just as they can get rich by betting on particular horses/dogs/sports teams/etc.
4) There have been multiple spectacular meltdowns of the stock market and people are still alive to remember the most famous one of the Depression.
5) MOST IMPORTANTLY, individual stock market earnings are deemed personal achievements rather than victories of the communal economy.
If you really want people to stop talking about stocks/investing like gambling, then YOU need to change the language you use to talk about it. Say things like "the biotech sector has done great with making useful products and we're all now benefitting from that success" rather than "I put my money in biotech firms X Y and Z because I knew they had good stuff coming out". The former makes stock profits an extension of a generally solid economy, the latter is a bet you made that paid off.
As long as you continue to say that stock profits happen because of the work you put in in picking them, everyone else will say that Wall Street is your gambling venue.
IPv6 barely supports firewalling or QoS. Open corporate networks for all.
What extra support does firewalling need from the IP layer?
IPv6 has no IP level encryption. Its in the standard, but no software or hardware implements it yet.
This looks like a configuration guide to enable IPSec over IPv6 on Cisco routers. And over here it says that Linux does IPSec over IPv6 since 2.4.28 and 2.6.9.
Change ISPs? Guess what. You have to re-IP your whole inside network because your IP range is solely defendant on a subset of your main provider.
That's definitely true for IPv4, but I thought the whole point of site local addresses was to avoid this issue in IPv6.
Then, there is the fact that IPv6 is not battle tested, so you will be experiencing the joys of the late 90s all over again, with similar attacks like pings of death, to teardrop and land attacks. Expect one (if not more) of the major operating systems out there to have a bug in the IP stack allowing anyone to send some currently unknown packet and get kernel level access from anywhere on the Internet.
True, but then again there are far more people involved in the Net today than in 1994 to 1998-ish when IPv4 stacks were getting pounded.
AFAIK NAT is not visible at the IP layer, e.g. you can't look at a packet and say "that packet has gone through a NAT box somewhere". So I don't see why NAT requires "support" in IPv6 to work.
The reason things like ReactOS and Wine haven't gone very far is because most people recognize what a dead end it is to always be playing catch-up with MS. You can't win. It is futile.
I think of ReactOS as "Windows done right" with the potential to have features that users had demanded for years that Microsoft had refused to implement. Real virtual desktops (supported at the graphics layer, not a broken hack like MSVDM), a decent shell, good network interoperability (ssh/nfs servers), safe ActiveX support, a repository-based update manager, etc. Running a virtualized ReactOS that knew how to play nice with the host system would give people something like Parallel's "coherence" interface on the Mac. It would be really nice to have that one vertical-market application that will never leave Windows available for Linux/BSD/Mac users. Or even Microsoft apps -- Excel is still the high bar for charting in spreadsheets.
That said, you are right about one thing: there will likely be a dearth of OSS developers for ReactOS simply because knowing the Win32 API well enough to duplicate it is pretty distasteful when they could use that time to know GTK/Qt/POSIX/etc. instead.
Funnily enough, there is still an active community of WordPerfect for DOS 5.x/6.x users that use dosemu under Linux to run it because it runs better than under Vista.
The reason people want to live here now? The Feds will pay for your health care, education and Social Security.
That's only an incentive for people from countries with no social safety nets of their own AND who intend to indefinitely be dirt poor once they get here.
Plenty of people come here for other reasons.
-OEM copies come with all the drivers slipstreamed
The HP Vista machine I got earlier this year had all the drivers, but several of the drivers demanded updates as soon as it was connected to the Net (nVidia's was especially annoying).
Now you're getting into semantics. If everything you mentioned previously is simulated, then a chemist can come and say "where are the individual molecular interactions?"
Except that it will be the systems biologist who asks "where are the model connections between the other signals and outputs" before the chemist comes in. The individual cell responds in very non-trivial ways to thousands of different inputs, only some of which have well-understood physical meaning, and cells interact all over the body in ways that are barely understood now but nonetheless have huge ramifications: take out a signal from the liver and the brain can shut down. How will any particular neuron approach the complexity of a real neuron without including all of the *other* stuff that occupies most of the living time of cells? If the simulation gets very large (brain-size), then how will the simulated brain lacking an equivalent to needing energy get tired, bored, or desire to do something faster a.k.a. prioritize?
I can't comment much on the blue brain project, they may indeed have some very interesting results by now, but I do agree with the GP: there is an awful lot required before a system gets close to biological realism.
Granted, birds still surpass airplanes in a few important ways (they forage for energy, procreate, and are self-healing... far beyond what we can fabricate in those respects) but airplanes sure are useful anyways.
I think you've found a fantastic analogy for the opposite point: computers today are much more like airplanes than they are like birds, i.e. once a computer is set up for a long calculation ("get from here to there") it can do it far better than anything else in the world, but it will not ever be able to independently set up many novel calculations (rapid maneuvers) in order to solve a larger yet less well-defined problem ("find food"). We can get vastly powerful idiot savant type AI pretty much now, which is honestly a lot more useful than true hard AI anyway. But I think that hard AI requires a real understanding of how ape-like intelligence works.
When I was in IT, I used to think that hard AI would spring relatively quickly once there were enough transistors available on one silicon wafer to correspond to the number of neurons/synapses. Now that I'm in chemical engineering, I doubt that hard AI will arrive in my lifetime because I know that the real human body is loosely governed by *millions* of non-linear ordinary differential equations, each requiring parameters that must be measured experimentally, and all of them together requiring far more hardware to simulate than we've got today. Just simulating a relatively few biological pathways in liver cells takes modern-day supercomputers between days and weeks. The ODEs can be often simplified, but only after understanding what they mean physically and making appropriate approximations, and it's that step (understanding) that is the bottleneck in understanding why animal intelligence works physically.
Finally, I think in the end we are far more likely to get artificial bodies for humans before we get to artificial minds for computers.
Think it through a little more carefully: you're proposing that trusted (well, supposed to be trusted anyway) AV software include penetration code. How will vendor A's heuristic scanner know that vendor B's "anti-virus worm/virus" is benign, yet still be effective at detecting a destructive new variant of an existing worm/virus?
"Penetration + patch" looks identical to "penetration + destroy" at the high level. Both have malicious code in the penetration portion and both require access to disk/network to work. Also, there is zero economic incentive in vendor A giving vendor B's virus/worm a pass, especially since giving ANY virus/worm a pass opens a new hole for malware.
The idea was thought of before back in the DOS days. It didn't catch on then for good reasons.
Sounds nice until a malware author manages to make their real virus look like an "anti-virus virus" and it walks right through the anti-virus defense.
1) Bush doesn't have those powers. He's just pretending he does.
If he successfully uses those powers, then he does in fact have them, regardless of what anyone else says to the contrary.
There were already some pretty good ways of storing hydrogen for cars and the issue was just creating the hydrogen in the first place.
Not really. The Department of Energy has estimated that one would need at least a device capable of storing up to 0.6 kg of hydrogen per kg (e.g. a 100kg storage tank has 6kg of raw hydrogen in it) before hydrogen is just barely usable as a transportation fuel source. Ideally, 12% wt/wt storage is necessary to achieve the 300 miles per tank that most cars get today on gasoline. The best storage systems (circa 2004 when the report came out) topped out around 8% for liquified hydrogen tanks, but those are very difficult to use in practice because the hydrogen leaks out quickly. All other systems topped out around 4% and required either high temperature (metal hybrides) or very high pressures (700bar, approximately 10000 psi), again making them not yet ready for widespread use.
Hydrogen production is still an issue too though. Most of what we get now is a byproduct from natural gas processing, so it's still not carbon-neutral.
(Disclaimer: This topic is actually part of my master's thesis.)
Your embedded system is a 200MHz ARM that can be recharged on the wall every few days as necessary. Mine is a 100MHz Zf86 that depends exclusively on solar power, has no VGA card at all, has only a 115200 baud serial port and 11 megabit wireless for communication, and would use up a significant chunk of its 32MB RAM just loading the client-side X11 libraries. Hell, /usr/lib/libQtGui.so.4.2.1 (stripped) by itsef is 7 megabytes. Turbo Vision OTOH (which BTW I am NOT a developer for, I just use it sometimes) is under a megabyte and can be used over ssh and serial port.
Qt4? Supports X11, Windows and OS X quite nicely from what I've heard.
Qt4 is nice but seems overkill for a lot of embedded systems. I'd pick Turbo Vision instead. Runs on Linux console, X11, ncurses, Windows, and DOS.
How many people do you know who have the knowledge to build aircraft carriers less expensively? How many people do you know who have the knowledge to administer primary & secondary schools less expensively? See why your point is moot?
My point is simply that there are some things that the market cannot provide at lower cost even though the demand is there. I picked aircraft carriers because they are staggeringly expensive, I could just as easily have chosen cars, iPods, or yes even educations. Like all of the other "products", an educational insitution has a quality control organization policing its curriculum to ensure that a degree / diploma isn't entirely worthless paper. And given the constraints placed on educational institutions (even primary and secondary schools), I for one cannot say that offhand that a large pool of people are out there who could run them less expensively than they are run now. I think plenty of people could do better, but I don't know if they can do so a lower cost. And that is what the GP asserted: that no matter what, the market would come up with schools capable of meeting the constraints existing schools have to meet but able to do so cheaper.
We've yet to see the market produce cheaper electricity, cheaper water, cheaper wastewater, cheaper trash pickup, cheaper broadband, cheaper medical insurance, cheaper emergency services, or cheaper universities. Why should we expect it to produce cheaper elementary or high schools?
why would you then not consider Eclipse was based on VAJ lineage since it came before it?
Yeah, I wasn't very clear there. I meant that if Eclipse really was the future of VAJava I would have expected to see or hear something like "the next release of VAJava will be called Eclipse" or "Eclipse is the new product from the VAJava / VAC++ line". Instead Eclipse seemed to spring suddenly out of the blue after years of semi-secret development, only shortly after the last official VAJava release, and with a pretty different interface.
I'm pretty sure VAJava and Eclipse had radically different lineages, especially since I could get VAJava in 1999 but not Eclipse.
I can't remember the name of the organization that did Eclipse anymore, but it started with O, like "Orion" or something. I remember the dev talking about how they weren't "really" IBM: they had funding and access to everyone else's code, but they didn't allowed anyone else to see theirs. They were apparently the brain child of a DE or two (Distinguished Engineers). The dev thought that their re-engineering of SWT was stupid when they had Swing already available and that it delayed the release by at least two full years.
I do remember hearing or seeing some kind of presentation about it. People were asking what was going to replace VAJava for WebSphere development and some bigwig said that this project was going to do it with its "plug in architecture" and would replace the IDE for C and C++ along with Java. It was supposed to be better than SlickEdit, better than "anything else out there". AND it was supposed to be sold to make money. Somewhere along the line it got split into the F/OSS version and WSAD which is sold for money.
However I have to ask the inconvenient question. People obviously do want powerful governing power over themselves, and people do want that power to solve all of their problems.
I am just about as cynical about human nature as Dr House, but even I don't believe that most people want the government to "solve all of their problems". That's a pretty wide brush to tar everyone-who-isn't-you with.
Spot on. Also note that the Libertarian Party has been actively involved in promoting its politics through literature that appeals to geeky types for a long time (see the Prometheus Award given to sci-fi authors), so many slashdotters have actually been exposed to Libertarian ideas for years without being aware of it.
If a class of people can't afford existing schools, less-expensive schools will appear to supply the demand.
I can't afford an aircraft carrier and I know plenty of people besides myself that would love to buy one so the demand for a cheap aircraft carrier is definitely there. When should we expect a less-expensive aircraft carrier to be available for purchase?