---- The Open Source Record Label : : LOCARECORDS.COM
I cannot visit this Open Source site, because it's only visible using a Closed Source technology. Perhaps you could ask your friends there to consider creating a non-Flash version for the rest of us? Thanks.
From the article: The optimum time to shut down Mono will be after much Linux development has committed to it. By then, Mono technology will have infected many projects.
"Infected" many projects? This sounds like a sentence lifted straight from a Ballmer speech about GPL "cancer". Perhaps the author means "spread" to many projects?
ISTM you're thinking in terms of individual political action. I'm talking about collective action.
When the corporation bribes the senator to further its interests, which happen to oppose yours, chances are excellent that they also oppose that of the majority of people like you.
The problem is not *your* individual action or inaction alone, it's the inaction (and/or apathy) of your fellow electors. Single-issue campaigns are a good example of how many individual voters can together persuade a Senator that he should forego the bribe in order hold onto his job. Buying a Senator out 100%, with a bribe so huge that he's willing to fall on his career-sword, is a very expensive business. It does happen, but it's rare.
This brings us back to the original thread: low participation makes bad democracy. More people voting, more frequent elections and referendums, extension of power downwards through decentralization of govt, better-educated electorates, more pluralistic and decentralized media, etc. etc., all these things are needed to make democracy work.
Here are a few measures which could help in the US:
- Make voting a civic duty, like jury service, for which you must apply to be allowed to opt out - Adopt the Swiss system of frequent referendums on major issues - Pass strict controls on media ownership and cross-ownership: a small number of corporations run most of the media in the west (especially in the US), and they must be forced to divest.
But until these difficulties are fixed, electors will need to work very hard to make politicians accountable. That means reading more widely, getting active politically, and casting informed votes every chance we get.
That's a funny aphorism, but it only describes a minority of situations where democracy is being built, developed or considered.
Look at what's happening in Chiapas: radical democracy, empowering lives for the first time in generations. In many other places, democracy is a tremendous blessing, and is being implemented to great benefit by an enthusiastic electorate. But here in the jaded industrialised west, we make jokes about how only "wolves" benefit from democracy, because most "hens" can't be bothered to get off their fat arses and participate.
Women were forbidden to vote for as long as they were precisely because of representative democracy.
On what grounds do you assert that women's suffrage would never have been granted had it been voted on by all men and women? Do you have any numbers to back that up?
You go on to state that direct voting by the whole electorate is "mob rule", without offering any argument to defend the assertion. Please explain: how is direct democracy "mob rule"?
I don't like e-voting any more than you do, as most of the e-voting that's around today is dangerously badly implemented, and ultimately anti-democratic. However, you argue instead that we need representative democracy because...
1. Because mob-rule (pure democracy) is a bad idea. Mob rule is a bad idea, agreed, but please explain how is mob rule "pure democracy"? Do mobs hold votes on which person to lynch or which building to burn? Mob rule is pure feudalism, not pure democracy.
2. Because most people don't even give a shit about who's PRESIDENT, let alone every minor issue our representatives get paid (well) to address.
Most people in Zimbabwe, Iraq, Palestine, Venezuela etc. care very deeply about who's president. You must be talking about "most people in the USA", right? The evidence certainly supports you there, but there is the matter of the other 6 billion people on the planet.
> How do you figure? You have no idea what my personal political leanings are.
No, he doesn't. But "right-wing" and "left-wing" are relative terms. For example, Sen. Lieberman considers Gov. Dean to be a purveyor of "dangerously extremist politics", yet Dean would likely be seen by most here in Britain as quite moderate, and probably would fit comfortably into the British Conservative Party.
As an example, many US Dems and Republicans consider the very idea of a national health system to be "left-wing", yet in the rest of the world it's not seen that way: all the G8 countries apart from the US have state-run national health systems of some sort. The typical USian criteria for classifying "left" and "right" are different to other countries.
So I'd guess that the previous AC was asking if you're right-wing, because it seems to us here outside the US, looking at what seems to may of us an incredibly right-wing US press, that anyone who considers it to be "left-wing" must be fairly "right-wing" by our measure.
That's not a personal attack, it's merely an observation that the terms are defined differently by different people.
> This seems to be the response whenever I discuss this topic.
Hmm. Then maybe whenever you discuss the topic, you express a viewpoint to the right of those readers? Nothing wrong with that, surely?
The other poster is right-- you're advocating socialism-- the system that killed 100 million people between 1900 and 2000.
Lets get our terms straight here: you're talking about Stalinism, not socialism. Socialist governments aren't murdering their own citizens in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Belgium, France etc., where democratic socialism has been around and running pretty well for a long time, and all of them a damn sight more democratic than the US has ever been.
Killed them for their own good, and the good of society, you say.
Let's also not forget that it was Capitalist armies that also murdered millions around the world for their own good, in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Lebanon, Iraq, Palestine, Yugoslavia, Somalia, Mozambique, Angola, Haiti, Chile, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, the Dominican Republic, Panama, Indonesia, etc.
In the UK dental care ceased to be available on a strict "free at the point of delivery" basis around a decade ago and in that time many poor families have stopped visiting the dentist completely. Most poorer people would FAR rather spend money on cigarettes, lottery scratchcards and alcohol for themselves than on dental care for their children.
Actually, dental care in the UK is still free if you:
have a valid NHS HC2 Certificate (NHS low-income scheme)
are receiving income support, family credit, or jobseekers allowance
are pregnant or have had a baby in the last 12 months
are a student under 19 years old
are a child under 18 years old
And I can find no data on poorer people preferring to spend on cigarettes etc. than on health care for their children. Do you have any data to back up your assertion?
Clear function names are also a good idea. But one person's clear is another persons slightly-ambiguous: having the extra type is another string to your bow. Code can never be made too readable, IMHO.
For simple flags, yes, "1" is quicker to type than "True". But Booleans can make other kinds of code clearer:
"For example, if you're reading a function and encounter the statement return 1, you might wonder whether the 1 represents a Boolean truth value, an index, or a coefficient that multiplies some other quantity. If the statement is return True, however, the meaning of the return value is quite clear."
...the Bevo Bucks vending machine at the Univ of Texas, with the swipe card system made by Diebold. Get yer free Snickers bars, then head off to the polling station to contemplate which switch is the best way to vote Republican. All courtesy of Diebold.
We use Zope a lot where I work, so we have ALL the books. The Zope Bible (mentioned by GeorgeH above) is my favorite. However, most printed books make heavy use of the semi-deprecated DTML tags, rather than the more "strategic" ZPT tags, an approach which made sense back when they were written, but not now.
And there is still no introductory documentation on Zope CMF: not even on a web page, anywhere, no, not even on the Zope CMF site. They do have some nice outlines of what needs to be written, along with some vain pleas in the comments for it to actually get done sometime. When will it actually BE written? What is CMF? What do you use it for? What do all its components do, in a nutshell, and why and when should you use them? Zip. To understand that, you'll need to delve into the source and fsck around with it 'til it makes sense. Zope was intended to be a Web CMS for web developers, not for Python hackers. We're a little afraid for its future now, especially now that Guido is moving on.
Jesterzog is right: its doesn't matter how good Zope is, if mere mortals can't use it.
I'd really like to write some CMF documentation myself, now that I finally understand it. But I'm doing 2.5 jobs at the moment, and every day wears me out. Maybe when my team's current project finishes I can persuade my boss' boss to let me have a little time to do this, to protect our heavy time investment in Zope and CMF.
For example, the hideous crimes of "unlawful labeling of a sound recording", "cheating", "possession of a gray machine", or "computer crime", will now get you between a minimum of 25 years and life in a "forest or work camp".
And the state only has to come up with two "witnesses".
It's funny that none of the innocents that the Taliban or Saddam slaughtered are mentioned. Just the evil capitalist/democratic govenments that go to war.
Well you're right, it's hardly a comprehensive catolog of the innocent civilians slaughtered by the US: that would have to include the millions slaughtered by the US in Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia, the Philippines, etc. etc. And to be really comprehensive, it would have to include all those slaughtered by evil client regimes of the US, with CIA and Pentagon help.
You're also correct that the Taliban and Saddam's regime would certainly have to be on a page like that: both were US "allies" when the serious slaughtering was going on.
If he were to write and release a Builder's Mortage Banking software (fully complete version 1) under the GPL, it would not grow substantially because there would be little interest in it.
Do you mean the software, or the mortgage he subsequently took out at the bank?:-)
Slashdot Mirror
---- The Open Source Record Label : : LOCARECORDS.COM
I cannot visit this Open Source site, because it's only visible using a Closed Source technology. Perhaps you could ask your friends there to consider creating a non-Flash version for the rest of us? Thanks.
From the article:
The optimum time to shut down Mono will be after much Linux development has committed to it. By then, Mono technology will have infected many projects.
"Infected" many projects? This sounds like a sentence lifted straight from a Ballmer speech about GPL "cancer". Perhaps the author means "spread" to many projects?
This one is more like 4 feet, unless Reed Christiansen is a very short.
For example, if my domain name was 'somecompany.com,' and somebody typed 'soemcompany.com' by mistake, they would get VeriSign's advertising."
No, actually you get something even more interesting.
Life imitates art.
ISTM you're thinking in terms of individual political action. I'm talking about collective action.
When the corporation bribes the senator to further its interests, which happen to oppose yours, chances are excellent that they also oppose that of the majority of people like you.
The problem is not *your* individual action or inaction alone, it's the inaction (and/or apathy) of your fellow electors. Single-issue campaigns are a good example of how many individual voters can together persuade a Senator that he should forego the bribe in order hold onto his job. Buying a Senator out 100%, with a bribe so huge that he's willing to fall on his career-sword, is a very expensive business. It does happen, but it's rare.
This brings us back to the original thread: low participation makes bad democracy. More people voting, more frequent elections and referendums, extension of power downwards through decentralization of govt, better-educated electorates, more pluralistic and decentralized media, etc. etc., all these things are needed to make democracy work.
Here are a few measures which could help in the US:
- Make voting a civic duty, like jury service, for which you must apply to be allowed to opt out
- Adopt the Swiss system of frequent referendums on major issues
- Pass strict controls on media ownership and cross-ownership: a small number of corporations run most of the media in the west (especially in the US), and they must be forced to divest.
But until these difficulties are fixed, electors will need to work very hard to make politicians accountable. That means reading more widely, getting active politically, and casting informed votes every chance we get.
That's a funny aphorism, but it only describes a minority of situations where democracy is being built, developed or considered.
Look at what's happening in Chiapas: radical democracy, empowering lives for the first time in generations. In many other places, democracy is a tremendous blessing, and is being implemented to great benefit by an enthusiastic electorate. But here in the jaded industrialised west, we make jokes about how only "wolves" benefit from democracy, because most "hens" can't be bothered to get off their fat arses and participate.
Women were forbidden to vote for as long as they were precisely because of representative democracy.
On what grounds do you assert that women's suffrage would never have been granted had it been voted on by all men and women? Do you have any numbers to back that up?
You go on to state that direct voting by the whole electorate is "mob rule", without offering any argument to defend the assertion. Please explain: how is direct democracy "mob rule"?
I don't like e-voting any more than you do, as most of the e-voting that's around today is dangerously badly implemented, and ultimately anti-democratic. However, you argue instead that we need representative democracy because...
1. Because mob-rule (pure democracy) is a bad idea.
Mob rule is a bad idea, agreed, but please explain how is mob rule "pure democracy"? Do mobs hold votes on which person to lynch or which building to burn? Mob rule is pure feudalism, not pure democracy.
2. Because most people don't even give a shit about who's PRESIDENT, let alone every minor issue our representatives get paid (well) to address.
Most people in Zimbabwe, Iraq, Palestine, Venezuela etc. care very deeply about who's president. You must be talking about "most people in the USA", right? The evidence certainly supports you there, but there is the matter of the other 6 billion people on the planet.
> How do you figure? You have no idea what my personal political leanings are.
No, he doesn't. But "right-wing" and "left-wing" are relative terms. For example, Sen. Lieberman considers Gov. Dean to be a purveyor of "dangerously extremist politics", yet Dean would likely be seen by most here in Britain as quite moderate, and probably would fit comfortably into the British Conservative Party.
As an example, many US Dems and Republicans consider the very idea of a national health system to be "left-wing", yet in the rest of the world it's not seen that way: all the G8 countries apart from the US have state-run national health systems of some sort. The typical USian criteria for classifying "left" and "right" are different to other countries.
So I'd guess that the previous AC was asking if you're right-wing, because it seems to us here outside the US, looking at what seems to may of us an incredibly right-wing US press, that anyone who considers it to be "left-wing" must be fairly "right-wing" by our measure.
That's not a personal attack, it's merely an observation that the terms are defined differently by different people.
> This seems to be the response whenever I discuss this topic.
Hmm. Then maybe whenever you discuss the topic, you express a viewpoint to the right of those readers? Nothing wrong with that, surely?
There are a lot more SCO Group company sites running Linux than just sco.com:
1 internetworld.com 433 461 461 Linux Apache/1.3.11 (Unix) ApacheJServ/1.1.2 mod_perl/1.21 PHP/4.2.3
2 www.nft.com 427 462 461 Linux Apache/1.3.11 (Unix) ApacheJServ/1.1.2 mod_perl/1.21 PHP/4.2.3
3 www.canopy.com 422 462 461 Linux Apache/1.3.11 (Unix) ApacheJServ/1.1.2 mod_perl/1.21 PHP/4.2.3
4 www.in2m.com 408 453 453 Solaris 8 Apache/1.3.27 (Unix) mod_jk/1.2.0 mod_ssl/2.8.12 OpenSSL/0.9.6h PHP/4.2.2
5 www.caldera.com 235 490 283 Linux Apache
6 www.sco.de 235 490 283 Linux Apache
7 it.sco.com 234 283 283 Linux unknown
8 au.caldera.com 234 489 283 Linux Apache
9 www.sco.com 234 489 266 Linux Apache
10 sco.com 234 489 266 Linux Apache
11 www.caldera.de 233 489 283 Linux Apache
12 www.za.caldera.com 232 489 283 Linux Apache
13 caldera.com 231 490 283 Linux Apache
14 www.sco.at 231 283 283 Linux unknown
15 doc.sco.com 230 283 283 Linux unknown
16 uw7doc.sco.com 230 489 283 Linux Apache
17 osr5doc.sco.com 229 490 280 Linux Apache
18 uk.sco.com 227 279 280 Linux unknown
19 www.calderasystems.com 227 489 283 Linux Apache
20 www.emeia.sco.com 227 491 283 Linux Apache
21 www.sco.it 226 489 260 Linux Apache
22 au.sco.com 223 283 283 Linux unknown
23 www.smilereminder.com 178 180 180 Linux Apache-AdvancedExtranetServer/1.3.23 (Mandrake Linux/4mdk) mod_ssl/2.8.7 OpenSSL/0.9.6c
24 www.bushfam.com 89 129 129 Linux Apache/1.3.27 (Unix) (Red-Hat/Linux) mod_python/2.7.8 Python/1.5.2 mod_ssl/2.8.12 OpenSSL/0.9.6b DAV/1.0.2 PHP/4.1.2 mod_perl/1.26 mod_throttle/3.1.2
25 www.vultus.com 34 305 43 Linux Apache/1.3.26 (Unix) mod_jk/1.2.2 mod_gzip/1.3.19.1a mod_ssl/2.8.10 OpenSSL/0.9.6g
26 shop.sco.com 17 43 0 Linux unknown
27 canopy.com 15 287 1 Linux Apache-AdvancedExtranetServer/1.3.23 (Mandrake Linux/4.2mdk) mod_ssl/2.8.7 OpenSSL/0.9.6c PHP/4.1.2
28 www.centershift.com 4 27 12 Windows 2000 Microsoft-IIS/5.0
29 www.helius.com - 44 18 Linux Apache/1.3.27 (Unix)
30 www.homepipeline.com - 28 5 Windows 2000 Microsoft-IIS/5.0
31 wdb1.sco.com - 17 0 Linux Oracle9iAS/9.0.2 Oracle HTTP Server Oracle9iAS-Web-Cache/Oracl
32 wdb1.caldera.com - 17 0 Linux Oracle9iAS/9.0.2 Oracle HTTP Server Oracle9iAS-Web-Cache/Oracl
33 www.communitect.com - 174 174 Linux Apache-AdvancedExtranetServer/1.3.23 (Mandrake Linux/4.1mdk) mod_ssl/2.8.7 OpenSSL/0.9.6c
34 www.power-innovations.com - 133 134 Windows 2000 Microsoft-IIS/5.0
35 ruckus.clan-nua.com - 31 6 Windows 2000 Abyss/1.1.6 (Win32) AbyssLib/1.0.7
36 nft.com - 25 1 Linux Apache-AdvancedExtranetServer/1.3.23 (Mandrake Linux/4.2mdk) mod_ssl/2.8.7 OpenSSL/0.9.6c PHP/4.1.2
37 www2.skwire.net - 25 6 Windows 2000 Abyss/1.1.6 (Win32) AbyssLib/1.0.7
38 demo.vultus.com - 41 42 Linux Apache/1.3.26 (Unix) mod_jk/1.2.2 mod_gzip/1.3.19.1a mod_ssl/2.8.10 OpenSSL/0.9.6g
39 locutus3.calderasystems.com - 4 0 Linux Apache/1.3.14 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.7.1 OpenSSL/0.9.6 ApacheJServ/1.1 PHP/3.0.15
40 zeus.ut.sco.com - 17 0 Linux Oracle9iAS/9.0.2 Oracle HTTP Server Oracle9iAS-Web-Cache/Oracl
And yet they haven't made a robot that can walk up walls like a gecko.
No, MIT haven't made a wall-walking gecko-robot yet, but Berkeley have, and so have DARPA.
The other poster is right-- you're advocating socialism-- the system that killed 100 million people between 1900 and 2000.
Lets get our terms straight here: you're talking about Stalinism, not socialism. Socialist governments aren't murdering their own citizens in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Belgium, France etc., where democratic socialism has been around and running pretty well for a long time, and all of them a damn sight more democratic than the US has ever been.
Killed them for their own good, and the good of society, you say.
Let's also not forget that it was Capitalist armies that also murdered millions around the world for their own good, in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Lebanon, Iraq, Palestine, Yugoslavia, Somalia, Mozambique, Angola, Haiti, Chile, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, the Dominican Republic, Panama, Indonesia, etc.
Death to tyrants!
You're righter than you know.
Actually, dental care in the UK is still free if you:
And I can find no data on poorer people preferring to spend on cigarettes etc. than on health care for their children. Do you have any data to back up your assertion?
Clear function names are also a good idea. But one person's clear is another persons slightly-ambiguous: having the extra type is another string to your bow.
Code can never be made too readable, IMHO.
For simple flags, yes, "1" is quicker to type than "True". But Booleans can make other kinds of code clearer:
"For example, if you're reading a function and encounter the statement return 1, you might wonder whether the 1 represents a Boolean truth value, an index, or a coefficient that multiplies some other quantity. If the statement is return True, however, the meaning of the return value is quite clear."
Booleans were added sometime in 2.2... 2.2.2 I believe. But yes, very handy. :)
2.2.1 added True and False constants, which were set to integer 1 and 0.
But 2.3 adds a true Boolean type.
Booleans in Python at last, hurrah. We should see Boolean support appear in Jython soon too then, and an end to fiddling with 0's and 1's.
...the Bevo Bucks vending machine at the Univ of Texas, with the swipe card system made by Diebold.
Get yer free Snickers bars, then head off to the polling station to contemplate which switch is the best way to vote Republican. All courtesy of Diebold.
We use Zope a lot where I work, so we have ALL the books. The Zope Bible (mentioned by GeorgeH above) is my favorite. However, most printed books make heavy use of the semi-deprecated DTML tags, rather than the more "strategic" ZPT tags, an approach which made sense back when they were written, but not now.
And there is still no introductory documentation on Zope CMF: not even on a web page, anywhere, no, not even on the Zope CMF site. They do have some nice outlines of what needs to be written, along with some vain pleas in the comments for it to actually get done sometime. When will it actually BE written? What is CMF? What do you use it for? What do all its components do, in a nutshell, and why and when should you use them? Zip. To understand that, you'll need to delve into the source and fsck around with it 'til it makes sense. Zope was intended to be a Web CMS for web developers, not for Python hackers. We're a little afraid for its future now, especially now that Guido is moving on.
Jesterzog is right: its doesn't matter how good Zope is, if mere mortals can't use it.
I'd really like to write some CMF documentation myself, now that I finally understand it. But I'm doing 2.5 jobs at the moment, and every day wears me out. Maybe when my team's current project finishes I can persuade my boss' boss to let me have a little time to do this, to protect our heavy time investment in Zope and CMF.
If I were a sysadmin in Oregon, I'd be too scared to use copyrighted software, since the Oregon Legislative Assembly recently redefined "terrorism" to include just about every crime you can think of.
For example, the hideous crimes of "unlawful labeling of a sound recording", "cheating", "possession of a gray machine", or "computer crime", will now get you between a minimum of 25 years and life in a "forest or work camp".
And the state only has to come up with two "witnesses".
Boy that's a really nice sig you have there.
Thank you.
It's funny that none of the innocents that the Taliban or Saddam slaughtered are mentioned. Just the evil capitalist/democratic govenments that go to war.
Well you're right, it's hardly a comprehensive catolog of the innocent civilians slaughtered by the US: that would have to include the millions slaughtered by the US in Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia, the Philippines, etc. etc. And to be really comprehensive, it would have to include all those slaughtered by evil client regimes of the US, with CIA and Pentagon help.
You're also correct that the Taliban and Saddam's regime would certainly have to be on a page like that: both were US "allies" when the serious slaughtering was going on.
Because I brought my DINOSAUR! Who EATS force field dogs!
"Piece of shit" = bad :-)
"Piece of piss" = good
If he were to write and release a Builder's Mortage Banking software (fully complete version 1) under the GPL, it would not grow substantially because there would be little interest in it.
:-)
Do you mean the software, or the mortgage he subsequently took out at the bank?