Gnome/GTK+ is available for Win32, although not as neatly packaged as for X11. Dropline has some Win32 packages that are easy to install. Tor Lillqvist has created some packages that a useful in conjunction with the MingGW environment. I believe that there is a Cygwin Project as well (see here but I can't testify as to its status. If you need an IDE, the Bloodshed IDE, Dev-C++, can download GTK+ packages for use within the IDE, and can help you automate integrating GTK+ in your apps. See here for information on the IDE.
Gnome/GTK+ is GPL'd and truly "free software". wxWindows is another option, but someone has already posted regarding that, so I'll leave it to you to investigate your options and decide which you like best.
With Perl, you can make the script/program/module as beautiful as you want, or as ugly as you want. Just to contrast with Java, Java forces you to be verbose -- very verbose. People claim that it makes them productive and it leads to maintainable code, but too much verbose code can be very confusing. With Perl, you have a choice of coding style, but there is no choice with respect to verbosity in Java.
Other than your suggestion that Java code's "verboseness" makes it confusing, what you describe is exactly how things should be.
Java is highly maintainable precisely because it doesn't employ a "there's more than one right way to do it" approach. That is why it is so suitable to distributed projects, multi-programmer projects, and in fact, why it is used in a lot of large open-source projects.
Perl is a glue language designed to be used for short programs that perform useful tasks for an individual programmer. For such purposes, archaic structures and code conventions are perfectly acceptable. Can it be used for other things? Sure it can. COBOL can. PASCAL was. Doesn't mean that it is the best tool for the job, by the way.
Maintainable code isn't produced by a desire for self-expression. It is produced by following conventions. Java platform code has been described as "self-documenting" precisely because it lacks shortcuts that create obscurity. Of course, no code is REALLY self-documenting, but Java code comes darn close.
Please note that I am not knocking Perl. I use it myself and it is very useful for the things it does well. You should not, however, compare peas and apples. Perl is not comparable to Java. The languages are designed for different purposes and their structures and means of writing source for those languages reflect those differences. Perl was designed to be a super-shell language. Java was designed to be a net-ready systems and application programming language. Different purposes make for different languages and platforms.
Please enlighten me as to why this is news? This happens every day! It's called lobbying. Is it because it's the mother of all evil megacorps that's doing the lobbying?
Actually, no. Lobbying as an activity implies personal contact by representatives seeking legal or economic favors from a governmental body. Lobbying implies legality--we allow groups, companies and even individuals to lobby the government in accordance with rules designed to reduce abuses.
Offering financial benefits in return for those favors isn't lobbying, it is bribery which is an entirely different matter. Since 1977, the U.S. has had a Foreign Corrupt Practices Act which prohibits corrupt payments to obtain, direct, or retain business, and the language of the statute is sufficiently broad to encompass the kind of activity described in the article. The FCPA even provides for a private cause of action. The U.S. is also a signatory of the CONVENTION ON COMBATING BRIBERY OF FOREIGN PUBLIC OFFICIALS IN INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS TRANSACTIONS which is certainly broad enough for this, and is administered by the OECD, and there is of course the EU's Criminal Law Convention on Corruption which probably has some application as well.
I acknowledge that you probably meant your comment sarcastically, or perhaps cynically, but this activity is not lobbying, which is an aspect of free speech. It is corruption, and it is a crime. You have the right, and indeed the duty, to demand that Microsoft be investigated and, should it appear that Microsoft's actions were motivated by a corrupt purpose within the meaning of the laws and conventions to which the U.S. is a signatory, that they be prosecuted. Bear in mind that these laws penetrate the corporate identity and go after the individuals directly involved, so the potential bite of these laws is quite serious.
Which really makes me wish that GNUCash was in that group.
Go to here. Problem solved. And if you want it to look like your other Gnome/GTK apps, just pass it the GTKLookAndFeel when starting it up. With j2se1.5 coming out soon, it will even have a skinnable look and feel for Gnome. Just add jre!
To the contrary, you clearly have a recourse. It is called the 5th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which plainly prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures.
You have the right to hire a lawyer, go to court, and force them to either demonstrate that they have good cause to retain the machines or else to turn them over. You have a claim for damages should it turn out that they didn't have a good basis for retaining the machines.
You have a recourse. Most people won't exercise it however, because they have to pay a lawyer for assistance, although if you are in fact entitled to recover for the malfeasance of officialdom, you can recover your attorney's fees.
God forbid should anyone you love be killed during a crime involving a gun. Will your paranoia save the life of someone you love?
Of course, someone trots this one out. When all else fails, wave your tear-sodden hankie.
God forbid anyone I love ( or you love ) should be killed during a crime, PERIOD. I don't have much use for All in the Family, but your melodramatic little remark brings a line by Archie Bunker to mind. When Gloria (Archie's flower-child daughter for those too young to know who I'm talking about) complains to Archie about his attitude towards guns, pointing out how many people are killed using guns, Archie says, "Would it make you feel any better little girl if they was pushed outta winders?"
I guess that you would be comfortable if your loved one was killed by a car driven by a drunk driver? No? How about being gutted by some crack-addict with a broken glass bottle? No? Didn't think so. Learn to distinguish the actor from the object. Guns aren't evil. People can be. And laws don't stop the lawless, only those of us who respect law and order. Do you think the gangbangers and drug dealers have LICENSED machineguns? Please.
There are a lot of irresponsible idiots out there.
If guns are freely available, there will be a lot of irresponsible idiots out there with guns.
If speech is free, irresponsible idiots will exercise it. The Chinese firmly believe that this threat to social harmony is unwarranted, so they restrict speech. Certainly there are a lot of people who believe that Rush Limbaugh engages in "hate speech" that leads to violence, suffering, and death. There are many people about whom the same thing may be said.
The real problem, of course, is your assumptions, which have nothing to do with rational arguments. By "rational" you apparently mean "If I compare apples to oranges you should accept that I'm right."
For your information, we have lots of "idiots" driving 18-wheelers. The purpose of licensing drivers is to assure that they know how to make the vehicle work, not to regulate their ownership, possession, or use of the vehicle
Licensing doesn't make people responsible. At best, it assures that they know how something functions well enough to use it.
People who advocate licensing guns aren't supporters of publicly funded gun-training programs like publicly funded driver training programs in our schools. They aren't interested in whether people know how to use guns properly. The sole basis of every gun registration regime that has ever been suggested in this country and in every other I'm aware of is to make it easier to restrict ownership and to seize the weapons when a full prohibition is passed.
To suggest that the gun-registration schemes proposed by the anti-2nd Amendment crowd are equivalent to licensing motor vehicle operators is specious and dishonest, because the goals are entirely different. The purpose of licensing a motor vehicle operator is to assure a minimum level of competence in motor vehicle operation. The purpose of licensing guns is as a first step to confiscation.
Oh, and if you don't want name-calling, don't engage in it. Ending your post with a line that suggests that people who disagree with you don't have rational arguments is pompous and assinine
Without commenting specifically on whether or not this is appropriate, consider that we don't go to this sort of length in response to a murder conviction.
You are entirely correct. Curious, isn't it? We don't publish a registry of convicted murderers. We don't publish registries of convicted rapists, or convicted bank robbers. These are all categories of criminals much more dangerous to the general public than pedophiles, yet it is pedophiles who find their names, photos, and personal information posted on the internet.
Of course, this will only work for so long as laws requiring convicted pedophiles -- even those who have served their time and theoretically owe no burden to the State -- to provide their names and contact information to local authorities are ruthlessly enforced.
Any such system will inevitably see mission creep. Why NOT list people convicted of other serious crimes? Makes sense, doesn't it? After all, that information is public record anyway, right?
While we are at it, it makes sense that we should post information about people suspected but not convicted of crimes. After all, there's no criminal penalty here. It is just information. No worse than the rumor-mill, right? And it advances the public safety. We will limit it to those suspected of serious crimes and, yes, terrorism. Besides, in the United States, we let judges use crimes of which a defendant has been accused but not convicted in considering what punishment is appropriate when a criminal defendant has reached the sentencing stage. Why should the judges be the only ones who know?
It is just information right? And we should let information be free.
Such as information about the political groups and associations of ordinary citizens. Are you a member of a political group with radical ideas? We know now that groups like that are potentially dangerous. They produce people like Timothy McVeigh. Nobody says you can't be a member of the group; we are just saying you can't keep it a secret. Hey, we have hood laws across the South already. We have laws against secret political societies. So this is just a logical next step. Post that information. No harm, no foul, right?
Palestinians and Muslims are risky too. No harm in posting information about them. Honest people have nothing to fear when their privacy is compromised, right?
Samuel Johnson once said that patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels. The protection of children has become the last refuge of fascisti. It has been the "wedge issue" used to justify sweeping restrictions on internet access in public libraries (gotta stop that child porn), an oppressive IV-D child support collection apparatus (gotta get them deadbeat dads), and any number of "public safety" statutes, which have used the safety and protection of children as a tool to build a system of social and legal controls that could easily be used for any other purpose, and which create a mindset of submission that would welcome additional restrictions for "good" purposes.
I take literally the idea that in order to protect all of us, we must protect the most unworthy among us. A convicted child molester who has served his (or more rarely her) time and whom the state has chosen to release has that most ancient of rights recognized in Anglo-American law -- the right to be left alone. That means that using public funds to create public registries containing their personal information, thus giving them a pariah status that directly contradicts the clear language and intent of the 8th Amendment's prohibition on cruel and unusual punishments, not to mention common sense, is wrong.
I fully expect someone to respond to this message with some screed about how precious children are, and how their cousin was molested, and how would you like it if someone molested YOUR kid. Know what? That's all completely beside the point. The issue is freedom and liberty, not crime. Restraints on freedom and invasions of privacy in the name
You may be right, but it still doesn't change anything. I think this guy should have told Microsoft first, waited, if they don't respond within 48 hours, report it.
Given that threats of litigation may be less expensive than fixing the endless supply of security holes in proprietary software, and the litigious character of American business practices, I'm not convinced.
A researcher who contacts the vendor and then releases information on the security holes later may be accused of extortion, as has happened to at least one Italian security expert. It isn't worth it.
From the point of view of making these exploits known so that they can be fixed, while also protecting one's self from charges of extortion, simply releasing the exploits on public forums -- and thus forcing the vendor to do a quick fix -- may be the lesser of two evils, if not the optimal solution.
I will say that I think this is probably an appropriate approach only when dealing with commercial entities, particularly known "bad actors" like Microsoft whose responses might be driven by marketing rather than by a desire for technical excellence. For open-source or community projects where volunteerism of any kind is encouraged, letting the maintainers know about the problem first is the better choice, if only because the risk of any litigation is pretty minimal.
Democracy is a scary thing and our founders knew that -- the tyranny of the majority and all.
I do not find your comments insightful in the least
What the Founding Fathers of the American Republic "knew" was that direct democracy was a threat to the largely inherited wealth and power of the American aristocracy that existed at that time, a largely landed aristocracy in both North and South.
That threat was somewhat realized with the advent of the Jackson presidency. Jacksonian Democracy, the first truly populist political movement of the new American polity, was such a threat to entrenched interests that the Congress wouldn't even let President Jackson select his own cabinet. No problem. He met with his "kitchen cabinet" and let the people with the job titles have fancy offices -- and no responsibilities.
The reason why America has so-called "representative democracy", the electoral college, and many other restraints on popular rule is that those with wealth and power in late 18th-century American intended to keep it. At a time when the franchise was under local control and largely limited to white male property owners, when voting was carried out under circumstances that allowed wealthy local patrons to control the votes of their poorer and dependent neighbors, and those who voted were largely of the same view as though who had designed the system, the American Constitution was framed as a tool for unifying the American polity and controlling popular dissent for the greater commercial benefit of a few wealthy people
No, i'm not going to review the conflicts of the first quarter-century of the American Republic. No, I'm not some neo-Marxist left-wing revisionist trying to write a "people's history". I am in fact a political conservative who knows his history and has no illusions about how we got from A to B in this country.
Understand this. To argue using the term "tyranny of the majority" misunderstands the history of political power. It is merely a variation on the argument that the body of the people are incompentent because among the voting population are incompetent people. This is an argument against democracy of any kind. It is also an argument against the jury system, transparency in government, and open processes. It rests on the false assumption that there is a minority among us that is more competent that the rest of us to determine what is or is not, what will be or will not be, and to tell the rest of us the result.
It also rests on the false belief that liberty is best protected by a conscientious political elite rather than by the body of the people. This is, for a nation supposedly dedicated to the "Rule of Law" a rather shocking idea, for it is nothing more than the same idea that motivated the "mother/father" officials of Imperial China, who operated on the assumption that the law was less important than those who enforced it. It is the Rule of Men returning to us in new clothes, or if you prefer, the Rule of Man over Men.
The American Bill of Rights was demanded by the people, not by the Framers. It was the price of the new Constitution that the political elites were determined to impose in lieu of the supposedly broken Articles of Confederation.
Don't depend on the Congress, our institution of "representative democracy" to defend our liberties. They have shown no interest in doing so. Neither has the President. And the unelected Supreme Court, aside from asserting a power of review not stated in the Constitution at all, has shown itself to be at best an unready and qualified defender of American liberties.
Ironically, the defense of liberty ultimately falls to the people, the "incompetent, untrustworthy, tyrannous" majority of Americans. Like elsewhere, if there is no dedication to liberty among the people, there will be none anywhere. I fear the "tyranny of money" that has grown since the Constitution was adopted in this country, far far more than I fear any "tyranny of the majori
Yes, I had a Ti 99/4a, and I had the Parsec ROM as well. In fact, I still have my Ti 99/4a in the box somewhere. I used to have the cassette recorder that was used to save programs, but I'm not sure what happened to it now.
In retrospect, my parents should have gotten me the Commodore 64, I guess -- but hey, $300 was a lot of money in those days!
How would it be if you wanted to IM or VOIP your doctor and you are a Yahoo user and the doc is a AIM user??
Well, in a free market, VoiP companies that didn't settle on a standard that permitted people to call whom they needed to call would soon lose out to companies that did, or the technology itself would lose out to another, more open, technology.
Regulation isn't needed to promote standards. Standards tend to arise from market forces. If the FCC is getting into this, it is about control and tax revenue, not promoting uniform standards. Governments suck at uniform standards.
In any case, why can we trust the U.S. government to take a hands-off role towards the Internet any more than we can trust the UN?
Because the US has taken a generally hands-off role towards the Internet. Because the U.S. courts have struck down laws trying to restict speech on the Internet not once but twice. Because the U.S., where DARPANET was born, has generally been protective of its intellectual child.
The U.N. is a useless body. In its entire history, it has never accomplished anything without the substantial agreement and cooperation of the Great Powers. Where they have disagreed, it has been powerless. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a perfect example of the kind of claptrap they come up with. Vague, contradictory, and ultimately useless because it is never enforced.
The truth is that anarchy serves the Internet better. What would it be like if the US could enforce its draconian and restrictive view of intellectual property on 'Net locations overseas? What if the Chinese could compel compliance with their censorship regime beyond their own borders?
Historically, the inevitable result of unification of political and social power in one organization or entity has been stagnation. A certain amount of ambiguity, of room for true dissent, a refuge from one authority in the shelter of another, is necessary to human advancement. There are some who will abuse that liberty. But it is not for their benefit that we seek to preserve the ambiguous boundaries of the 'Net. It is for ourselves.
Being that Redhat is discontinuing their "free" versions of Redhat, how does this make Linux a contender in a cheaper solution? RedHat linux is expensive. I can't believe how much redhat charges for something that is supposed to be 'free'. Can anyone justify Redhat charging for something they're not able to legally charge for?
Precisely why has the forgoing comment been modded insightful? This has been discussed and explained to death on Slashdot already.
ryanw, Redhat is free to charge for the support service they provide. That's what they can charge for. That's what you are paying for when you get a Redhat Enterprise Linux package. Their support. You misunderstand what Free Software is. Free Software is software libre, not merely freeware.
RHL hasn't gone away. It has, in fact, become "freer" by becoming Fedora Linux, a more community-based distro. That distro will continue to serve as the basis for the officially trademarked Redhat Enterprise Linux.
Go to http://fedora.redhat.com and educate yourself. Don't start a troll. We don't need anymore trolls on Redhat's decision to limit their official support to the stuff that actually makes them money. I would think that the reasons would be obvious, but you can certainly get a real answer to your questions if that is what you really want. If you question was merely rhetorical, then all I can say is "let's stay on topic" and avoid beating the same dead horse again.
It essentially means that the lawyer fronts the money during the trial and collects a percentage at the end.
This isn't quite correct.
Generally speaking, a contingent fee cannot be a vehicle for an attorney or law firm to "bankroll" litigation. While it isn't considered unethical to advance costs in most cases, it would be unethical for a firm to make a "gift" of costs to the client.
Moreover, the ethical rules governing the legal profession prohibit charging an excessive fee. Whether a fee is excessive or not is generally viewed in hindsight.
I don't think we have enough information to determine whether the fee arrangement is ethical or not. Tying compensation to the sale of the client seems rather odd, but I don't know that it is necessarily unethical.
There is a movement to ban contingent fees altogether, the argument being that they promote barratry and don't really serve the interests of the disadvantaged as much as the trial bar would suggest.
I think his post is still valid. RedHat's installer is under the GPL, which means it can be freely distributed, and that's why you have an anaconda + debian project and so many companies selling CDs of Redhat Linux. The only limitation is that resellers can't use the Redhat trademark.
On the other hand, the fact that YaST isn't GPL and isn't truly free means that there is no way for Cheapbytes and the like to sell CDs of SuSE as they do for Redhat and several other major distros. They don't provide ISOs so you can't burn them yourself, you can only do an FTP install which significantly limits distribution.
If that isn't a problem for you, great. But SuSE is less free, and that's a fact. Redhat is NOT the GNU/Linux world's "evil empire". They are just the folks on top here in the U.S., which gives some people their poor excuse to snipe at them.
This gets modded "Insightful", while a post that shows links to an actual prior news story with considerably more useful information than the CNN report is "Flamebait".
The only "idiots" are those who assume that if they can put someone or something in a box and label it, they've said all that needs to be said, and may turn their brains off. Shame on those who wasted mod points on you. You said nothing useful, and it is evident that you didn't actually read the stories on Fox.
Re:That was a great quote to leave unchallenged:
on
CNN Reports on Diebold
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· Score: 4, Insightful
This is the point where a bad reporter starts typing up the story, and a good reporter starts asking about smartcards reporting -16,000 votes. At least the AP is looking at the right story now, so hopefully eventually the right person will be looking at it.
One major media outlet HAS noticed the problem -- Fox News Network.
Here's a quote:
"JOHN GIBSON, HOST: Talk about fishy. Just wait until the next election. A lot of folks will be holding their noses around the new electronic voting machines (search). There's already a stench of suspicion surrounding some of last year's elections which used touch-screen machines made by Diebold (search). They may have been tampered with after they were certified.
David Allen is co-author of Black Box Voting: Ballot Tampering in the 21st Century. Mr. Allen, that is today's big question. Were electronic voting machines suspect in the Georgia elections?"
That's a transcript of an October 14 show, and they had an earlier story on October 6 talking about fears of tampering.
Looks like CNN is behind the ball on this one -- again. As for the AP -- look, you are more likely to get action based on the FNN stories than anything the AP prints. FNN has a lot more viewership, and frankly, a lot more viewer trust with ordinary Americans.
What we need isn't more news stories, we need more letters from concerned voters to their election boards and local representatives. This is a problem that will be fixed on the state or local level. Let's write those letters folks.
Slashdot Mirror
The only truely viable cross platform (X11, Windows, MacOS) toolkits are:
You are excluding Java/Swing of course, which is both viable and truly cross-platform.
Is anyone aware of OSS products similar to this?
Gnome/GTK+ is available for Win32, although not as neatly packaged as for X11. Dropline has some Win32 packages that are easy to install. Tor Lillqvist has created some packages that a useful in conjunction with the MingGW environment. I believe that there is a Cygwin Project as well (see here but I can't testify as to its status. If you need an IDE, the Bloodshed IDE, Dev-C++, can download GTK+ packages for use within the IDE, and can help you automate integrating GTK+ in your apps. See here for information on the IDE.
Gnome/GTK+ is GPL'd and truly "free software". wxWindows is another option, but someone has already posted regarding that, so I'll leave it to you to investigate your options and decide which you like best.
With Perl, you can make the script/program/module as beautiful as you want, or as ugly as you want. Just to contrast with Java, Java forces you to be verbose -- very verbose. People claim that it makes them productive and it leads to maintainable code, but too much verbose code can be very confusing. With Perl, you have a choice of coding style, but there is no choice with respect to verbosity in Java.
Other than your suggestion that Java code's "verboseness" makes it confusing, what you describe is exactly how things should be.
Java is highly maintainable precisely because it doesn't employ a "there's more than one right way to do it" approach. That is why it is so suitable to distributed projects, multi-programmer projects, and in fact, why it is used in a lot of large open-source projects.
Perl is a glue language designed to be used for short programs that perform useful tasks for an individual programmer. For such purposes, archaic structures and code conventions are perfectly acceptable. Can it be used for other things? Sure it can. COBOL can. PASCAL was. Doesn't mean that it is the best tool for the job, by the way.
Maintainable code isn't produced by a desire for self-expression. It is produced by following conventions. Java platform code has been described as "self-documenting" precisely because it lacks shortcuts that create obscurity. Of course, no code is REALLY self-documenting, but Java code comes darn close.
Please note that I am not knocking Perl. I use it myself and it is very useful for the things it does well. You should not, however, compare peas and apples. Perl is not comparable to Java. The languages are designed for different purposes and their structures and means of writing source for those languages reflect those differences. Perl was designed to be a super-shell language. Java was designed to be a net-ready systems and application programming language. Different purposes make for different languages and platforms.
Please enlighten me as to why this is news? This happens every day! It's called lobbying. Is it because it's the mother of all evil megacorps that's doing the lobbying?
Actually, no. Lobbying as an activity implies personal contact by representatives seeking legal or economic favors from a governmental body. Lobbying implies legality--we allow groups, companies and even individuals to lobby the government in accordance with rules designed to reduce abuses.
Offering financial benefits in return for those favors isn't lobbying, it is bribery which is an entirely different matter. Since 1977, the U.S. has had a Foreign Corrupt Practices Act which prohibits corrupt payments to obtain, direct, or retain business, and the language of the statute is sufficiently broad to encompass the kind of activity described in the article. The FCPA even provides for a private cause of action. The U.S. is also a signatory of the CONVENTION ON COMBATING BRIBERY OF FOREIGN PUBLIC OFFICIALS IN INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS TRANSACTIONS which is certainly broad enough for this, and is administered by the OECD, and there is of course the EU's Criminal Law Convention on Corruption which probably has some application as well.
I acknowledge that you probably meant your comment sarcastically, or perhaps cynically, but this activity is not lobbying, which is an aspect of free speech. It is corruption, and it is a crime. You have the right, and indeed the duty, to demand that Microsoft be investigated and, should it appear that Microsoft's actions were motivated by a corrupt purpose within the meaning of the laws and conventions to which the U.S. is a signatory, that they be prosecuted. Bear in mind that these laws penetrate the corporate identity and go after the individuals directly involved, so the potential bite of these laws is quite serious.
Which really makes me wish that GNUCash was in that group.
Go to here. Problem solved. And if you want it to look like your other Gnome/GTK apps, just pass it the GTKLookAndFeel when starting it up. With j2se1.5 coming out soon, it will even have a skinnable look and feel for Gnome. Just add jre!
After a few lackluster attempts at installing Gnome on my OSX box I have to say that a nice easy step by step instruction would be most helpful.
Sure. Dump OSX, install Yellow Dog Linux, and install GNOME using RPMS. Done.
To the contrary, you clearly have a recourse. It is called the 5th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which plainly prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures. You have the right to hire a lawyer, go to court, and force them to either demonstrate that they have good cause to retain the machines or else to turn them over. You have a claim for damages should it turn out that they didn't have a good basis for retaining the machines. You have a recourse. Most people won't exercise it however, because they have to pay a lawyer for assistance, although if you are in fact entitled to recover for the malfeasance of officialdom, you can recover your attorney's fees.
God forbid should anyone you love be killed during a crime involving a gun. Will your paranoia save the life of someone you love?
Of course, someone trots this one out. When all else fails, wave your tear-sodden hankie.
God forbid anyone I love ( or you love ) should be killed during a crime, PERIOD. I don't have much use for All in the Family, but your melodramatic little remark brings a line by Archie Bunker to mind. When Gloria (Archie's flower-child daughter for those too young to know who I'm talking about) complains to Archie about his attitude towards guns, pointing out how many people are killed using guns, Archie says, "Would it make you feel any better little girl if they was pushed outta winders?"
I guess that you would be comfortable if your loved one was killed by a car driven by a drunk driver? No? How about being gutted by some crack-addict with a broken glass bottle? No? Didn't think so. Learn to distinguish the actor from the object. Guns aren't evil. People can be. And laws don't stop the lawless, only those of us who respect law and order. Do you think the gangbangers and drug dealers have LICENSED machineguns? Please.
There are a lot of irresponsible idiots out there.
If guns are freely available, there will be a lot of irresponsible idiots out there with guns.
If speech is free, irresponsible idiots will exercise it. The Chinese firmly believe that this threat to social harmony is unwarranted, so they restrict speech. Certainly there are a lot of people who believe that Rush Limbaugh engages in "hate speech" that leads to violence, suffering, and death. There are many people about whom the same thing may be said.
The real problem, of course, is your assumptions, which have nothing to do with rational arguments. By "rational" you apparently mean "If I compare apples to oranges you should accept that I'm right."
For your information, we have lots of "idiots" driving 18-wheelers. The purpose of licensing drivers is to assure that they know how to make the vehicle work, not to regulate their ownership, possession, or use of the vehicle
Licensing doesn't make people responsible. At best, it assures that they know how something functions well enough to use it.
People who advocate licensing guns aren't supporters of publicly funded gun-training programs like publicly funded driver training programs in our schools. They aren't interested in whether people know how to use guns properly. The sole basis of every gun registration regime that has ever been suggested in this country and in every other I'm aware of is to make it easier to restrict ownership and to seize the weapons when a full prohibition is passed.
To suggest that the gun-registration schemes proposed by the anti-2nd Amendment crowd are equivalent to licensing motor vehicle operators is specious and dishonest, because the goals are entirely different. The purpose of licensing a motor vehicle operator is to assure a minimum level of competence in motor vehicle operation. The purpose of licensing guns is as a first step to confiscation.
Oh, and if you don't want name-calling, don't engage in it. Ending your post with a line that suggests that people who disagree with you don't have rational arguments is pompous and assinine
Without commenting specifically on whether or not this is appropriate, consider that we don't go to this sort of length in response to a murder conviction.
You are entirely correct. Curious, isn't it? We don't publish a registry of convicted murderers. We don't publish registries of convicted rapists, or convicted bank robbers. These are all categories of criminals much more dangerous to the general public than pedophiles, yet it is pedophiles who find their names, photos, and personal information posted on the internet.
Of course, this will only work for so long as laws requiring convicted pedophiles -- even those who have served their time and theoretically owe no burden to the State -- to provide their names and contact information to local authorities are ruthlessly enforced.
Any such system will inevitably see mission creep. Why NOT list people convicted of other serious crimes? Makes sense, doesn't it? After all, that information is public record anyway, right?
While we are at it, it makes sense that we should post information about people suspected but not convicted of crimes. After all, there's no criminal penalty here. It is just information. No worse than the rumor-mill, right? And it advances the public safety. We will limit it to those suspected of serious crimes and, yes, terrorism. Besides, in the United States, we let judges use crimes of which a defendant has been accused but not convicted in considering what punishment is appropriate when a criminal defendant has reached the sentencing stage. Why should the judges be the only ones who know?
It is just information right? And we should let information be free.
Such as information about the political groups and associations of ordinary citizens. Are you a member of a political group with radical ideas? We know now that groups like that are potentially dangerous. They produce people like Timothy McVeigh. Nobody says you can't be a member of the group; we are just saying you can't keep it a secret. Hey, we have hood laws across the South already. We have laws against secret political societies. So this is just a logical next step. Post that information. No harm, no foul, right?
Palestinians and Muslims are risky too. No harm in posting information about them. Honest people have nothing to fear when their privacy is compromised, right?
Samuel Johnson once said that patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels. The protection of children has become the last refuge of fascisti. It has been the "wedge issue" used to justify sweeping restrictions on internet access in public libraries (gotta stop that child porn), an oppressive IV-D child support collection apparatus (gotta get them deadbeat dads), and any number of "public safety" statutes, which have used the safety and protection of children as a tool to build a system of social and legal controls that could easily be used for any other purpose, and which create a mindset of submission that would welcome additional restrictions for "good" purposes.
I take literally the idea that in order to protect all of us, we must protect the most unworthy among us. A convicted child molester who has served his (or more rarely her) time and whom the state has chosen to release has that most ancient of rights recognized in Anglo-American law -- the right to be left alone. That means that using public funds to create public registries containing their personal information, thus giving them a pariah status that directly contradicts the clear language and intent of the 8th Amendment's prohibition on cruel and unusual punishments, not to mention common sense, is wrong.
I fully expect someone to respond to this message with some screed about how precious children are, and how their cousin was molested, and how would you like it if someone molested YOUR kid. Know what? That's all completely beside the point. The issue is freedom and liberty, not crime. Restraints on freedom and invasions of privacy in the name
You may be right, but it still doesn't change anything. I think this guy should have told Microsoft first, waited, if they don't respond within 48 hours, report it.
Given that threats of litigation may be less expensive than fixing the endless supply of security holes in proprietary software, and the litigious character of American business practices, I'm not convinced.
A researcher who contacts the vendor and then releases information on the security holes later may be accused of extortion, as has happened to at least one Italian security expert. It isn't worth it.
From the point of view of making these exploits known so that they can be fixed, while also protecting one's self from charges of extortion, simply releasing the exploits on public forums -- and thus forcing the vendor to do a quick fix -- may be the lesser of two evils, if not the optimal solution.
I will say that I think this is probably an appropriate approach only when dealing with commercial entities, particularly known "bad actors" like Microsoft whose responses might be driven by marketing rather than by a desire for technical excellence. For open-source or community projects where volunteerism of any kind is encouraged, letting the maintainers know about the problem first is the better choice, if only because the risk of any litigation is pretty minimal.
Democracy is a scary thing and our founders knew that -- the tyranny of the majority and all.
I do not find your comments insightful in the least
What the Founding Fathers of the American Republic "knew" was that direct democracy was a threat to the largely inherited wealth and power of the American aristocracy that existed at that time, a largely landed aristocracy in both North and South.
That threat was somewhat realized with the advent of the Jackson presidency. Jacksonian Democracy, the first truly populist political movement of the new American polity, was such a threat to entrenched interests that the Congress wouldn't even let President Jackson select his own cabinet. No problem. He met with his "kitchen cabinet" and let the people with the job titles have fancy offices -- and no responsibilities.
The reason why America has so-called "representative democracy", the electoral college, and many other restraints on popular rule is that those with wealth and power in late 18th-century American intended to keep it. At a time when the franchise was under local control and largely limited to white male property owners, when voting was carried out under circumstances that allowed wealthy local patrons to control the votes of their poorer and dependent neighbors, and those who voted were largely of the same view as though who had designed the system, the American Constitution was framed as a tool for unifying the American polity and controlling popular dissent for the greater commercial benefit of a few wealthy people
No, i'm not going to review the conflicts of the first quarter-century of the American Republic. No, I'm not some neo-Marxist left-wing revisionist trying to write a "people's history". I am in fact a political conservative who knows his history and has no illusions about how we got from A to B in this country.
Understand this. To argue using the term "tyranny of the majority" misunderstands the history of political power. It is merely a variation on the argument that the body of the people are incompentent because among the voting population are incompetent people. This is an argument against democracy of any kind. It is also an argument against the jury system, transparency in government, and open processes. It rests on the false assumption that there is a minority among us that is more competent that the rest of us to determine what is or is not, what will be or will not be, and to tell the rest of us the result.
It also rests on the false belief that liberty is best protected by a conscientious political elite rather than by the body of the people. This is, for a nation supposedly dedicated to the "Rule of Law" a rather shocking idea, for it is nothing more than the same idea that motivated the "mother/father" officials of Imperial China, who operated on the assumption that the law was less important than those who enforced it. It is the Rule of Men returning to us in new clothes, or if you prefer, the Rule of Man over Men.
The American Bill of Rights was demanded by the people, not by the Framers. It was the price of the new Constitution that the political elites were determined to impose in lieu of the supposedly broken Articles of Confederation.
Don't depend on the Congress, our institution of "representative democracy" to defend our liberties. They have shown no interest in doing so. Neither has the President. And the unelected Supreme Court, aside from asserting a power of review not stated in the Constitution at all, has shown itself to be at best an unready and qualified defender of American liberties.
Ironically, the defense of liberty ultimately falls to the people, the "incompetent, untrustworthy, tyrannous" majority of Americans. Like elsewhere, if there is no dedication to liberty among the people, there will be none anywhere. I fear the "tyranny of money" that has grown since the Constitution was adopted in this country, far far more than I fear any "tyranny of the majori
Not even a word on the TI 99/4A
Yes, I had a Ti 99/4a, and I had the Parsec ROM as well. In fact, I still have my Ti 99/4a in the box somewhere. I used to have the cassette recorder that was used to save programs, but I'm not sure what happened to it now.
In retrospect, my parents should have gotten me the Commodore 64, I guess -- but hey, $300 was a lot of money in those days!
How would it be if you wanted to IM or VOIP your doctor and you are a Yahoo user and the doc is a AIM user??
Well, in a free market, VoiP companies that didn't settle on a standard that permitted people to call whom they needed to call would soon lose out to companies that did, or the technology itself would lose out to another, more open, technology.
Regulation isn't needed to promote standards. Standards tend to arise from market forces. If the FCC is getting into this, it is about control and tax revenue, not promoting uniform standards. Governments suck at uniform standards.
In any case, why can we trust the U.S. government to take a hands-off role towards the Internet any more than we can trust the UN?
Because the US has taken a generally hands-off role towards the Internet. Because the U.S. courts have struck down laws trying to restict speech on the Internet not once but twice. Because the U.S., where DARPANET was born, has generally been protective of its intellectual child.
The U.N. is a useless body. In its entire history, it has never accomplished anything without the substantial agreement and cooperation of the Great Powers. Where they have disagreed, it has been powerless. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a perfect example of the kind of claptrap they come up with. Vague, contradictory, and ultimately useless because it is never enforced.
The truth is that anarchy serves the Internet better. What would it be like if the US could enforce its draconian and restrictive view of intellectual property on 'Net locations overseas? What if the Chinese could compel compliance with their censorship regime beyond their own borders?
Historically, the inevitable result of unification of political and social power in one organization or entity has been stagnation. A certain amount of ambiguity, of room for true dissent, a refuge from one authority in the shelter of another, is necessary to human advancement. There are some who will abuse that liberty. But it is not for their benefit that we seek to preserve the ambiguous boundaries of the 'Net. It is for ourselves.
Precisely why has the forgoing comment been modded insightful? This has been discussed and explained to death on Slashdot already.
ryanw, Redhat is free to charge for the support service they provide. That's what they can charge for. That's what you are paying for when you get a Redhat Enterprise Linux package. Their support. You misunderstand what Free Software is. Free Software is software libre, not merely freeware.
RHL hasn't gone away. It has, in fact, become "freer" by becoming Fedora Linux, a more community-based distro. That distro will continue to serve as the basis for the officially trademarked Redhat Enterprise Linux.
Go to http://fedora.redhat.com and educate yourself. Don't start a troll. We don't need anymore trolls on Redhat's decision to limit their official support to the stuff that actually makes them money. I would think that the reasons would be obvious, but you can certainly get a real answer to your questions if that is what you really want. If you question was merely rhetorical, then all I can say is "let's stay on topic" and avoid beating the same dead horse again.
It essentially means that the lawyer fronts the money during the trial and collects a percentage at the end.
This isn't quite correct.
Generally speaking, a contingent fee cannot be a vehicle for an attorney or law firm to "bankroll" litigation. While it isn't considered unethical to advance costs in most cases, it would be unethical for a firm to make a "gift" of costs to the client.
Moreover, the ethical rules governing the legal profession prohibit charging an excessive fee. Whether a fee is excessive or not is generally viewed in hindsight.
I don't think we have enough information to determine whether the fee arrangement is ethical or not. Tying compensation to the sale of the client seems rather odd, but I don't know that it is necessarily unethical.
There is a movement to ban contingent fees altogether, the argument being that they promote barratry and don't really serve the interests of the disadvantaged as much as the trial bar would suggest.
I think his post is still valid. RedHat's installer is under the GPL, which means it can be freely distributed, and that's why you have an anaconda + debian project and so many companies selling CDs of Redhat Linux. The only limitation is that resellers can't use the Redhat trademark. On the other hand, the fact that YaST isn't GPL and isn't truly free means that there is no way for Cheapbytes and the like to sell CDs of SuSE as they do for Redhat and several other major distros. They don't provide ISOs so you can't burn them yourself, you can only do an FTP install which significantly limits distribution. If that isn't a problem for you, great. But SuSE is less free, and that's a fact. Redhat is NOT the GNU/Linux world's "evil empire". They are just the folks on top here in the U.S., which gives some people their poor excuse to snipe at them.
Fox News is for idiots.
This gets modded "Insightful", while a post that shows links to an actual prior news story with considerably more useful information than the CNN report is "Flamebait".
The only "idiots" are those who assume that if they can put someone or something in a box and label it, they've said all that needs to be said, and may turn their brains off. Shame on those who wasted mod points on you. You said nothing useful, and it is evident that you didn't actually read the stories on Fox.
One major media outlet HAS noticed the problem -- Fox News Network.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,100152,00.html
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,99241,00.html
Looks like CNN is behind the ball on this one -- again. As for the AP -- look, you are more likely to get action based on the FNN stories than anything the AP prints. FNN has a lot more viewership, and frankly, a lot more viewer trust with ordinary Americans.
What we need isn't more news stories, we need more letters from concerned voters to their election boards and local representatives. This is a problem that will be fixed on the state or local level. Let's write those letters folks.
IAAL, and no, Magnuson-Moss isn't limited to cars. Hopes this helps.