However if your beautiful/good/awesome God didn't have to be created by something why does my beautiful/good/awesome 'verse have to be?
That's my point: an atheist chooses to say that the universe (or something like it) always has been here, on some level, and the theist chooses to believe God (or something like Him) always has been around.
Whichever way you go, you come squarely up against "always has been". That's a hard thing to grasp, especially since the next question is: Why? Eternity past and why we are here are tough to figure out.
While you are to be acknowledged for your beliefs, you are also to be castigated for them! Do you really think that one human life is worth all the other organisms of a species on all the other planets?
I didn't say "all", I said a hundred, and I was talking about priorities. People are more important than animals and trees, as much as I like animals and trees. Would I (hypothetically) sacrifice one human to save the plants and animals on a hundred planets? Nope. Would I do so for all other planets, assuming there are more than 100? I don't know - is one of them Earth? Yeah, I'm pretty zealous about my home planet and my own race (the human one).
Don't get the idea that I would look down on someone else for wanting to sacrifice themselves to save a planet full of animals or a box of yeast. I might even sacrifice my own life for such, depending on the circumstances. I just wouldn't sacrifice someone else. As I said, priorities.
But I think I have found your difficulty:
[...] realize that rational people will fight the darkness of religion every step of the way.
You dismiss people who have religious beliefs as irrational. That's an error. The thing that separates religious people from atheists are the core sets of belief from which each extrapolates their world view.
I was raised an atheist. I came to a point in my 20's where I had to acknowledge that the universe was made, created. From there, being the rational guy I am, it was impossible to avoid the God of the Bible. My belief in God springs directly from rationality, not from inheritance of familial tradition. I wasn't born this way, except for the rationality, I guess. Or perhaps that's what you meant?
There are few more insidious vices than the luxury of labeling others. It blinds us to our own intolerance, and we can't overcome what we can't acknowledge.
You miss the big picture. It's not about winning at all costs over Microsoft. That's their game. Our game is about "free"-dom: freedom of choice of OS, free beer, and freedom of choice in implementation.
I don't care if 1%, 10%, 51%, or 100% of people choose Linux for their desktop. Sure, I'd rather have a sizeable market share, since that makes life easier in terms of support and finding documentation. But "winning" is not the goal. Improving the product is the goal.
Improving the product requires putting out several forks and seeing what works. I suspect that no single desktop will please everyone. No single package management system will please everyone. Case in point: I don't like rpms or debs. I like the Encap system. Why should I have to put up with something I don't like just because everyone else likes it?
Don't be fooled into playing someone else's game just because they think of you as their opponent in it. Play your own game, and if they want to play that, then beat the crap out of them at it. But don't play theirs.
It's been reported that IBM's contract with SCO stated that they weren't allowed to put technologies from their Unix into any other OS. This is not exclusive to those that weren't put there by IBM. That means that IBM could not use their "IP" in any other OS without consent from SCO. Many think that, if this stipulation were in IBM's contracts with SCO that SCO had a decent case against IBM.
Those reports are incorrect. IBM, like every other UNIX licensee, always had the right to use their own code however they saw fit. It was only the AT&T code that they were not allowed to use. SCO's interpretation of the contracts flies in the face of the history of the UNIX source code licenses, of the side agreement (PDF here) between IBM and AT&T, and common sense.
2. Regarding Section 2.01, we agree that modifications and derivative works prepared by or for you are owned by you. However, ownership of any portion or portions of SOFTWARE PRODUCTS included in any such modification or derivative work remains with us.
Who would enter into a development license saying that any work they developed became the sole, secret property of the other party? That would be the Anti-GPL, and the answer is that no one ever did.
Like IBM, and maybe soon Microsoft, the conditions which allowed the phone monopoly to exist no longer are present. A single company can't dominate the computer industry the way IBM did, nor the communications industry the way AT&T did.
How long before Microsoft lose its monopoly on desktop computing software?
The problem is not that The Onion is speaking, or writing, things that are satirical and anti-administration. The problem is that they are using the signarture of the President to do it. They don't get a pass just because they're funny.
This is not flag burning. They can burn the seal if they want, or make a knock-off. They just aren't allowed to use the seal in the way they're doing. Maybe there's no possible confusion that The Onion doesn't represent the U.S. Government - but how do you know? Stranger things have happened than some West Asian pot-stirrer finding an Onion article and using it to start a riot, a war, or a really nasty food fight.
The whole thing could be resolved in 10 minutes with a photo editor. Instead, The Onion will use it to gain attention, which is what they (and their advertisers) want anyway.
> I've resisted specialization for most of my career
That's really best, IMO. The field changes so fast that today's specialization is tomorrow's dead end.
The older I get, though, the harder it is to delve into new topics. It's not hard mentally, just emotionally. I'm tired of the latest new thing, and want my favorite old things to keep being cutting edge, which they may never again be.
On the plus side, there is so much convergence and so much confusion about it that old skills often suddenly look new again.
It's usually poor management that forces the product to be out the door 6 months before it's ready.
There are those who think that it's possible to write bug-free programs. I'm not one of them, or at least I've never seen, much less written, a bug-free program. But I can be more specific than that: I have never seen a program that I'm willing to call bug-free, even if there are many programs whose source code I can read and which I use regularly without finding incorrect behavior.
The general principle is that writing software, like scientific theory, is a process. You think over the problem, design and propose a solution, and let people whack at it. Wait for a flaw, and repeat until something better comes along. Programs are not bug-free any more than scientific knowledge is "fact".
One reason we say that "Every non-trivial program has at least one bug" is that if a program is non-trivial, there is room to interpret its mission. One person may like the way it behaves, while another may expect something else. The conditions under which the program was specified, documented, and written are also always different from the ones in which it is used, if only by the passage of time.
Holding developers personally accountable for bugs is like punishing a process engineer when someone thinks of a better way to do something. "Why didn't you think of this before! Twenty lashes!"
Software development is a creative process. If you punish failure, you stifle creativity. The software may work, but it will suffer poor performance and lack desired features. Those who would have chosen software writing as a career will find other work, or they'll keep their best work to themselves. In a team environment, they'll hide their mistakes and cover up their failures, rather than allowing anyone to learn from them.
Governments always seem to load up their shotgun and miss the wrong target. They stumble on a solution to a problem, and don't ever question whether that's a problem they really should be solving or if the solution will actually work.
For the anti-terror ops, knowing who talks to whom is important, and can lead to fairly detailed knowledge of the workings of an organization. The contents of the conversations are in many ways less important, since it takes a real idiot to spill details over the phone. They are also labor-intensive, since you have to wait a long time between calls and then work hard to decipher exactly what's said.
A wiretap could reveal that two guys are "ready to go for the big trip this weekend", leading jackbooted thugs to sweep in and prevent the crime. Later the perps claim those rifles, hip waders and fishing rods in the trunk are there because they were going camping.
Wiretaps are for old people.
There are some bigger holes in the protection of the Canadian people:
Canada has gillions of miles of uncontrolled coastline.
Canada has thousands of miles of open border with the US. And we're armed!
There is this little fad called the Internet (and encrypted communications) that reached Canada a few years back. Like in 1975.
Software patents are in the very fabric of Microsoft. They will no more oppose them than they would oppose advertising, exclusive OEM contracts, or no-compete clauses.
The culture is built around selling software based on its features, and denying others the ability to have the features (whether developed internally or acquired). In order to sell the software they either have to copy the features of someone else, buy/coopt the inventor, or come up with the feature internally. They can't rely on trade secrets, contracts, or copyright to protect them from other people using the features Microsoft uses. They have to rely on patents for that.
Being denied access to a software feature by a particular patent, Microsoft will attempt to cross-license it, buy the patent owner, convince the marketplace that the feature is useless or harmful, or ruin the patent owner.
It's not in the nature of Microsoft simply to make their product and see who likes it. The company was built on having some useable product and _marketing_it_ with exquisite skill, timing, and ruthlessness. They have always used any tactic they could to lock in OEMs, consumers, and ISVs, while locking out competitors. It's their way.
It would take a complete culture shift for them ever to oppose software patents. Instead, they will attempt to use the patents they have as leverage in whatever way they can, whether it's cross-licensing other patents, FUD, or to lock in whomsoever needs locking.
Perhaps, but it's not that simple. In various pockets of England and America, speakers in the 18th through 20th centuries contracted "have not", "are not" and "am not" into "ain't" also.
And it really misses the point of a colloquialism to insist that it be grammatically correct. A colloquialism by definition is outside the official rules of the language. "Ain't", however, is so thorougly established and understood that only the most small-minded grammarians (such as those often found teaching public school) reject it.
It happens that my use of it *was* ungrammatical, in the small-minded sense. That was because the line "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" is itself a well-known expression. "Broke", being the past participle of "to break", should have been conjugated as "broken". Colloquial speakers in that context consider it needlessly polysyllabic, hence the expression.
You miss the principle of Charity. Rather than call his logic invalid because he started with "EU/UN" and then dropped it in favor of just "UN", you should charitably add the "EU/" yourself and see if his argument holds up. Otherwise, you're just nitpicking at spelling errors at best or launching a veiled ad hominem "UN-hating gingoistic bigot!" attack at worst. As always win you ignore Charity, you may win points with the audience, but logic isn't a popularity contest.
That said, you completely failed to address his major arguments, which were:
If it ain't broke, don't fix it
ICANN is a private company
The UN is not the right body for this
That the UN, an American creation, should now try to bully the US into giving up control of the Internet, another American creation, seems to us the height of arrogance.
There are obvious counterpoints to all of these, and I only consider #3 to be worthwhile. But you didn't make those counterpoints at all.
What is about to happen is that the Silver Age of the Internet is about to end. The Golden Age was before the web; the Silver age has lasted since '91 or so. Now we'll see fragmentation and provincialism. Whether that is good or bad is an open question, but it will surely be different.
What's really at stake in this struggle is who will have the power to block network access to and from a given country. Some countries are afraid of the US having that power, which they would "never" use, while the US is afraid of the UN having that power, which they also would "never" use.
In the case you mention that you invent someting first but someone else files first (both arrived at the same invention independently), your invention would make their invention INVALID as it would be perfectly valid prior art against their invention.
But you have to prove your invention was prior art by showing that you publicised it. "Prior art", under first-to-invent, means anything that existed before your invention. Under first-to-file, though, it's only what the patentee could have known about.
I see a huge conflict between trade secret law and patent law under first-to-file. The proposed changes will only benefit the patent lawyers and other system parasites.
... would load a Commodore 64 binary file named SIG from device 8, the first 1541 drive.
Completely non-portable, you insensitive clod. Still, those of us reading Slashdot from a C64 might be tempted to load and run your binary SIG, thus potentially spreading a virus.
At least you could do: 10 DOPEN#1,"SIG" 20 INPUT#1,S$ 30 DCLOSE#1 40 PRINT S$
Just as non-portable, but would actually work and not cause a security nightmare from running untrusted binaries. We 64 users have enough trouble with CSS not to have security issues on top of everything else.
"FRAUD ALERT! Internet scams have been popping up on the Internet to exploit people's generous nature in the wake of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. CLICK HERE FOR MORE"
How can a scam be an Internet scam if it doesn't pop up on the Internet?
No, and it's not just semantics. "10 times safer" and "1/10th as hazardous" are not the same thing.
If you have 3 in 100 safe flights (97 disasters) and you make a change to have 30 safe flights in 100, that's 10 times safer.
The point is that once you are that the level of safety that NASA is with the Shuttle, you can't get 10 times safer. There isn't that much safer to get. You can reduce the risk by an order of magnitude, but you can't increase the level safety by that much.
There is always some amount of risk. Knowing what you are willing to risk, and at what peril you are placing it, allows you to know where to put your effort. More importantly, you know where to stop putting resources to protecting things you don't care about losing, or where your effort pass the point of diminishing returns.
That said, you are correct that viewing security as a process is essential to avoiding that sinking feeling when you realize that you're vulnerable, or worse, that you've been owned. Correct the problem and go on, knowing that you aren't any more "secure" than before (except that you are more humble, which is half the battle anyway).
NASA says the new system is designed to be 10 times safer than the space shuttle
Whether it's seat belts in cars, kids wearing helmets on bikes, or the severe risk-intolerance that afflicts our space program, we've become a society of cowards, insisting on safety above all.
If that trend continues, and I expect it will, soon we won't ever venture into space, underwater, or outside our own fenced in back yard.
Besides, calling something "10 times safer" sets off my B.S. detector. 1/10 as much likelihood of disaster isn't 10 times safer. If (to pick a number) 2 of every 10 shuttle launches ends in a crew loss, then you're already 80% safe. If you determine that you'll have only 2 in 100 flights end in calamity, then you've gone from 80% safe to 98% safe, on 1/10th the risk.
"10 times safer" is meaningless unless your safety record is in the single digit percentage range. "One tenth the risk" would be a lot more accurate, if that's even what they're claiming.
There is a huge chunk of the online population in the U.S., perhaps most of it, for whom computers are a tool, like a hammer or a radio. They never bother to investigate what else you can do with a hammer besides tack up a picture, nor ever realize that there is more to a radio than "FM 104.3 - your home for today's Country and all time favorites".
For those folks, the Internet is either the little blue "e" or it's AOL. They don't have broadband, but they want it because the marketing geniuses at AOL have been telling them that AOL for broadband is better.
There is another set of users, mostly teenagers, who use either AIM or MSN Messenger to send messages back and forth to their friends' cell phones all day long. It's like passing notes in class, but they do it before breakfast, during breakfast, in the car, between or in classes, and so on. They do homework over it.
The teenagers don't know or care, for the most part, that there are dozens of IM clients and that they all pretty much work. They have MSN or AIM and that's all they need.
A portion of both groups discover eventually that the world is bigger than their little corner of it, but, like programmers using vi to edit CSS, they stick with their original chat and web clients even knowing that there are better alternatives.
I suspect that Microsoft and AOL has some synergy in that environment.
Slashdot Mirror
That's my point: an atheist chooses to say that the universe (or something like it) always has been here, on some level, and the theist chooses to believe God (or something like Him) always has been around.
Whichever way you go, you come squarely up against "always has been". That's a hard thing to grasp, especially since the next question is: Why? Eternity past and why we are here are tough to figure out.
I didn't say "all", I said a hundred, and I was talking about priorities. People are more important than animals and trees, as much as I like animals and trees. Would I (hypothetically) sacrifice one human to save the plants and animals on a hundred planets? Nope. Would I do so for all other planets, assuming there are more than 100? I don't know - is one of them Earth? Yeah, I'm pretty zealous about my home planet and my own race (the human one).
Don't get the idea that I would look down on someone else for wanting to sacrifice themselves to save a planet full of animals or a box of yeast. I might even sacrifice my own life for such, depending on the circumstances. I just wouldn't sacrifice someone else. As I said, priorities.
But I think I have found your difficulty:
[...] realize that rational people will fight the darkness of religion every step of the way.
You dismiss people who have religious beliefs as irrational. That's an error. The thing that separates religious people from atheists are the core sets of belief from which each extrapolates their world view.I was raised an atheist. I came to a point in my 20's where I had to acknowledge that the universe was made, created. From there, being the rational guy I am, it was impossible to avoid the God of the Bible. My belief in God springs directly from rationality, not from inheritance of familial tradition. I wasn't born this way, except for the rationality, I guess. Or perhaps that's what you meant?
There are few more insidious vices than the luxury of labeling others. It blinds us to our own intolerance, and we can't overcome what we can't acknowledge.
You miss the big picture. It's not about winning at all costs over Microsoft. That's their game. Our game is about "free"-dom: freedom of choice of OS, free beer, and freedom of choice in implementation.
I don't care if 1%, 10%, 51%, or 100% of people choose Linux for their desktop. Sure, I'd rather have a sizeable market share, since that makes life easier in terms of support and finding documentation. But "winning" is not the goal. Improving the product is the goal.
Improving the product requires putting out several forks and seeing what works. I suspect that no single desktop will please everyone. No single package management system will please everyone. Case in point: I don't like rpms or debs. I like the Encap system. Why should I have to put up with something I don't like just because everyone else likes it?
Don't be fooled into playing someone else's game just because they think of you as their opponent in it. Play your own game, and if they want to play that, then beat the crap out of them at it. But don't play theirs.
Who would enter into a development license saying that any work they developed became the sole, secret property of the other party? That would be the Anti-GPL, and the answer is that no one ever did.
Like IBM, and maybe soon Microsoft, the conditions which allowed the phone monopoly to exist no longer are present. A single company can't dominate the computer industry the way IBM did, nor the communications industry the way AT&T did.
How long before Microsoft lose its monopoly on desktop computing software?
The problem is not that The Onion is speaking, or writing, things that are satirical and anti-administration. The problem is that they are using the signarture of the President to do it. They don't get a pass just because they're funny.
This is not flag burning. They can burn the seal if they want, or make a knock-off. They just aren't allowed to use the seal in the way they're doing. Maybe there's no possible confusion that The Onion doesn't represent the U.S. Government - but how do you know? Stranger things have happened than some West Asian pot-stirrer finding an Onion article and using it to start a riot, a war, or a really nasty food fight.
The whole thing could be resolved in 10 minutes with a photo editor. Instead, The Onion will use it to gain attention, which is what they (and their advertisers) want anyway.
> I've resisted specialization for most of my career
That's really best, IMO. The field changes so fast that today's specialization is tomorrow's dead end.
The older I get, though, the harder it is to delve into new topics. It's not hard mentally, just emotionally. I'm tired of the latest new thing, and want my favorite old things to keep being cutting edge, which they may never again be.
On the plus side, there is so much convergence and so much confusion about it that old skills often suddenly look new again.
" but we more than make up for it with intelligent desing"
But our spellin and grammars without pier.
If we don't see retractions, what story are you posting about?
I think Fox learned their lesson. They really do try to be fair, something amateur media critics often fail to accomplish.
There are those who think that it's possible to write bug-free programs. I'm not one of them, or at least I've never seen, much less written, a bug-free program. But I can be more specific than that: I have never seen a program that I'm willing to call bug-free, even if there are many programs whose source code I can read and which I use regularly without finding incorrect behavior.
The general principle is that writing software, like scientific theory, is a process. You think over the problem, design and propose a solution, and let people whack at it. Wait for a flaw, and repeat until something better comes along. Programs are not bug-free any more than scientific knowledge is "fact".
One reason we say that "Every non-trivial program has at least one bug" is that if a program is non-trivial, there is room to interpret its mission. One person may like the way it behaves, while another may expect something else. The conditions under which the program was specified, documented, and written are also always different from the ones in which it is used, if only by the passage of time.
Holding developers personally accountable for bugs is like punishing a process engineer when someone thinks of a better way to do something. "Why didn't you think of this before! Twenty lashes!"
Software development is a creative process. If you punish failure, you stifle creativity. The software may work, but it will suffer poor performance and lack desired features. Those who would have chosen software writing as a career will find other work, or they'll keep their best work to themselves. In a team environment, they'll hide their mistakes and cover up their failures, rather than allowing anyone to learn from them.
The bozo ought to be ignored. Sadly, he won't be.
Governments always seem to load up their shotgun and miss the wrong target. They stumble on a solution to a problem, and don't ever question whether that's a problem they really should be solving or if the solution will actually work.
For the anti-terror ops, knowing who talks to whom is important, and can lead to fairly detailed knowledge of the workings of an organization. The contents of the conversations are in many ways less important, since it takes a real idiot to spill details over the phone. They are also labor-intensive, since you have to wait a long time between calls and then work hard to decipher exactly what's said.
A wiretap could reveal that two guys are "ready to go for the big trip this weekend", leading jackbooted thugs to sweep in and prevent the crime. Later the perps claim those rifles, hip waders and fishing rods in the trunk are there because they were going camping.
Wiretaps are for old people.
There are some bigger holes in the protection of the Canadian people:
Canada has gillions of miles of uncontrolled coastline.
Canada has thousands of miles of open border with the US. And we're armed!
There is this little fad called the Internet (and encrypted communications) that reached Canada a few years back. Like in 1975.
Software patents are in the very fabric of Microsoft. They will no more oppose them than they would oppose advertising, exclusive OEM contracts, or no-compete clauses.
The culture is built around selling software based on its features, and denying others the ability to have the features (whether developed internally or acquired). In order to sell the software they either have to copy the features of someone else, buy/coopt the inventor, or come up with the feature internally. They can't rely on trade secrets, contracts, or copyright to protect them from other people using the features Microsoft uses. They have to rely on patents for that.
Being denied access to a software feature by a particular patent, Microsoft will attempt to cross-license it, buy the patent owner, convince the marketplace that the feature is useless or harmful, or ruin the patent owner.
It's not in the nature of Microsoft simply to make their product and see who likes it. The company was built on having some useable product and _marketing_it_ with exquisite skill, timing, and ruthlessness. They have always used any tactic they could to lock in OEMs, consumers, and ISVs, while locking out competitors. It's their way.
It would take a complete culture shift for them ever to oppose software patents. Instead, they will attempt to use the patents they have as leverage in whatever way they can, whether it's cross-licensing other patents, FUD, or to lock in whomsoever needs locking.
["aye not"]
Perhaps, but it's not that simple. In various pockets of England and America, speakers in the 18th through 20th centuries contracted "have not", "are not" and "am not" into "ain't" also.
And it really misses the point of a colloquialism to insist that it be grammatically correct. A colloquialism by definition is outside the official rules of the language. "Ain't", however, is so thorougly established and understood that only the most small-minded grammarians (such as those often found teaching public school) reject it.
It happens that my use of it *was* ungrammatical, in the small-minded sense. That was because the line "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" is itself a well-known expression. "Broke", being the past participle of "to break", should have been conjugated as "broken". Colloquial speakers in that context consider it needlessly polysyllabic, hence the expression.
You miss the principle of Charity. Rather than call his logic invalid because he started with "EU/UN" and then dropped it in favor of just "UN", you should charitably add the "EU/" yourself and see if his argument holds up. Otherwise, you're just nitpicking at spelling errors at best or launching a veiled ad hominem "UN-hating gingoistic bigot!" attack at worst. As always win you ignore Charity, you may win points with the audience, but logic isn't a popularity contest.
That said, you completely failed to address his major arguments, which were:
There are obvious counterpoints to all of these, and I only consider #3 to be worthwhile. But you didn't make those counterpoints at all.
What is about to happen is that the Silver Age of the Internet is about to end. The Golden Age was before the web; the Silver age has lasted since '91 or so. Now we'll see fragmentation and provincialism. Whether that is good or bad is an open question, but it will surely be different.
What's really at stake in this struggle is who will have the power to block network access to and from a given country. Some countries are afraid of the US having that power, which they would "never" use, while the US is afraid of the UN having that power, which they also would "never" use.
It's neither more, nor less, than that.
But you have to prove your invention was prior art by showing that you publicised it. "Prior art", under first-to-invent, means anything that existed before your invention. Under first-to-file, though, it's only what the patentee could have known about.
I see a huge conflict between trade secret law and patent law under first-to-file. The proposed changes will only benefit the patent lawyers and other system parasites.
... would load a Commodore 64 binary file named SIG from device 8, the first 1541 drive.
Completely non-portable, you insensitive clod. Still, those of us reading Slashdot from a C64 might be tempted to load and run your binary SIG, thus potentially spreading a virus.
At least you could do:
10 DOPEN#1,"SIG"
20 INPUT#1,S$
30 DCLOSE#1
40 PRINT S$
Just as non-portable, but would actually work and not cause a security nightmare from running untrusted binaries. We 64 users have enough trouble with CSS not to have security issues on top of everything else.
"FRAUD ALERT! Internet scams have been popping up on the Internet to exploit people's generous nature in the wake of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. CLICK HERE FOR MORE"
How can a scam be an Internet scam if it doesn't pop up on the Internet?
Strike two.
at the last Eclipse meeting, you could have heard a pin drop.
Just kidding. Does Eclipse have meetings?
George Bush doesn't care about anonymous hurricanes.
> 1/100 versus 1/1000
No, and it's not just semantics. "10 times safer" and "1/10th as hazardous" are not the same thing.
If you have 3 in 100 safe flights (97 disasters) and you make a change to have 30 safe flights in 100, that's 10 times safer.
The point is that once you are that the level of safety that NASA is with the Shuttle, you can't get 10 times safer. There isn't that much safer to get. You can reduce the risk by an order of magnitude, but you can't increase the level safety by that much.
Security is how you feel, not an intrinsic value.
There is always some amount of risk. Knowing what you are willing to risk, and at what peril you are placing it, allows you to know where to put your effort. More importantly, you know where to stop putting resources to protecting things you don't care about losing, or where your effort pass the point of diminishing returns.
That said, you are correct that viewing security as a process is essential to avoiding that sinking feeling when you realize that you're vulnerable, or worse, that you've been owned. Correct the problem and go on, knowing that you aren't any more "secure" than before (except that you are more humble, which is half the battle anyway).
Whether it's seat belts in cars, kids wearing helmets on bikes, or the severe risk-intolerance that afflicts our space program, we've become a society of cowards, insisting on safety above all.
If that trend continues, and I expect it will, soon we won't ever venture into space, underwater, or outside our own fenced in back yard.
Besides, calling something "10 times safer" sets off my B.S. detector. 1/10 as much likelihood of disaster isn't 10 times safer. If (to pick a number) 2 of every 10 shuttle launches ends in a crew loss, then you're already 80% safe. If you determine that you'll have only 2 in 100 flights end in calamity, then you've gone from 80% safe to 98% safe, on 1/10th the risk.
"10 times safer" is meaningless unless your safety record is in the single digit percentage range. "One tenth the risk" would be a lot more accurate, if that's even what they're claiming.
>what the hell is wrong with using vi to edit CSS?
:-)
I don't know - I use sed and rcs.
There is a huge chunk of the online population in the U.S., perhaps most of it, for whom computers are a tool, like a hammer or a radio. They never bother to investigate what else you can do with a hammer besides tack up a picture, nor ever realize that there is more to a radio than "FM 104.3 - your home for today's Country and all time favorites".
For those folks, the Internet is either the little blue "e" or it's AOL. They don't have broadband, but they want it because the marketing geniuses at AOL have been telling them that AOL for broadband is better.
There is another set of users, mostly teenagers, who use either AIM or MSN Messenger to send messages back and forth to their friends' cell phones all day long. It's like passing notes in class, but they do it before breakfast, during breakfast, in the car, between or in classes, and so on. They do homework over it.
The teenagers don't know or care, for the most part, that there are dozens of IM clients and that they all pretty much work. They have MSN or AIM and that's all they need.
A portion of both groups discover eventually that the world is bigger than their little corner of it, but, like programmers using vi to edit CSS, they stick with their original chat and web clients even knowing that there are better alternatives.
I suspect that Microsoft and AOL has some synergy in that environment.
From the Greatest Film of All Time Evar, Men In Black:
K: They're beautiful, aren't they?
J: Huh?
K: The stars. We never just look at them any more.