If you implement a "stable" binary module API, the binary driver people will want that API frozen for all of eternity. You won't be able to come up with a better solution in three months or a year. Whereas if you have the source, even if you don't understand the finest details of every last line in it, you can usually understand it well enough to track API changes. Anybody can; if someone comes up with a better internal interface to timers, or memory allocators, it's not that hard to change code they have never seen before.
It's one thing to have a stable system call interface between the kernel and userland. But an internal API needs to be flexible.
One of Linux's great strengths is the flexibility of changing to meet new needs and not being hobbled by rigid backwards compatibility. This can only be done if all source is open and anyone can update drivers to meet new needs. When someone comes up with a patch to streamline a certain minor part of the kernel, it frequently has repercussions elsewhere in kernel land. It is these small changes which have made linux better and better with breathtaking speed. A "stable" binary API removes the possibility of keeping everything up to date and would dramatically show down the adoption of new features and general improvements.
Continual refactoring is worth far more than some supposed binary API which prevents changes. Get rid of binary drivers! If companies are so paranoid that they want binary drivers, then the hell with them. Linux can advance better without that baggage.
I looked him up in the wikipedia, and don't understand what you mean. The US has fooled around in countless elections and domestic affairs around the world, but I don't know what you mean in this case. Care to elaborate?
I saw the idiot's reply to my parent post, daring me to name any legitimate government the US overthrew, knew that would happen, and dreaded having to respond to anyone that ignorant because I'd want to go get dates and references and everything...
And you guys came thru for me! Hot damn that is good:-)
[the USSR's] murderous, oppressive grip on Eastern Europe and attempts at foisting their cheerful utopia on South America and Africa
As opposed to the US's murderous, oppressive grip on third world countries generally and attempts at foisting their cheerful utopia on the rest of the world.
It's fair to say the US's grip wasn't as thorough, but it sure was oppressive, and it encompassed more of the world than the USSR for more years. How many legitimate governments did the US overthrow because they didn't like them?
Terrorism is terrorism. Justifying the largest non-nuclear explosion in the name of fighting terrorism belongs in George Orwell's literature.
TFA is by Mr Cryptology and he doesn't make that kind of stupid mistakes. He quite clearly says they FIXED that and one other problem, but left in a third problem because the people in charge are technically ignorant.
Copyright and patent and trademark, ie Intellectual Property (sorry, RMS) is so screwed up now that I hope that take it to the extreme and paralyze the bloodsuckers by making them sue each other for infringement. Think of it... from whom will they profit more, mere consumers who are only good for $5K per shakedown, with all the overhead that entails, or each other, good for several hundred million and the chance to run them into the ground? They are, after all, your competition.
Yes, pass this sucker. Make copyrights last forever. Make story plots patentable. Go ahead. See how much control you have over popular culture, you morons. Watch popular culture pass right on by, out of your control, beyond your puny stilted imagination. Paint yourselves into corners of your own making, spend all your energy fighting each other and hoarding and enhancing your little corner of the past, while the future bypasses you utterly and forever. While you think of a zillion ways to regurgitate your patented storyline, which is all you can do because your competitors have their own patented storylines which they are busy regurgitating, people will develop their own tools which they will share freely, and other people will swap these and improve these and make their own unpatented stories and their own uncopyrighted and locked down culture.
You morons will be left holding ancient patented and copyrighted dreck which has been projectile vomited to a fare-thee-well because you have a 300 year patent on it, or a 500 year copyright on it, and heaven knows Disney has to protect Micky from all those hordes who have only one goal in mind: how to appropriate Mickey for their own perverted uses. Yes, that's right, the truth is out now, I have seen the transcripts of the meetings. Sony wants nothing more than to lock up Mickey for themselves, they have wet drems at board meetings when they salivate at the prospect of hijacking Mickey if you don't keep thsoe patents and copyrights in force. They have entire teams of lawyers searching for loopholes to grab Mickey form your slippery paws because you slipped up and saved a few megabucks by not hiring that one brilliant lawyer before Sony did.
Theory makes no provision for unrestrained people forming monopolies and cartels and gangs and other non-individual groupings. Soon as you have those, you no longer have a free market. Duh!
Yeh I love these idealists. So practical. Now you know why that original poster said he hates libertarians.
Sometimes you gotta choose. You can have 0% of an ideal or some percentage >0 of less than ideal. Libertarians haven't got a lick of common sense when they talk about throwing out government altogether and think that a completely free society will result. Not an ounce of brains among the whole lot.
Works as in mostly functions most of the time for for most people. No governemnt of 300M people can make everyone happy. It certainly doesn't make me happy. If all you can do is find individual cases that don't work, whoopee. Big Deal. If you can make up a practical working government which works for more people more of the time, go for it, and I will find individual cases which don't work.
The government may be like a car which has seen better days, maybe it has a notchy shifter, tires need replacement, trunk doesn't always latch close without a big slam, creaks and rattles, a window makes too much noise... but it still works better for most people than a race car in perfect condition.
Libertarians would throw out the clunker and start from scratch. That only works in silly novels. Realists would fix the car up piece by piece.
I usually vote for the libertarians on a ballot if there are any. I haven't voted for a mainstream politician since I don't know when. But there's a huge difference between someone actually getting down in the dirt and running for office, and the quibblers who constitute most of the libertarians. I think most of the rank and file only choose libertarian because the arguments are more fun and don't require a reality check.
I can't think right now of any recent discussions with libertarians, but I can give you the flavor of what I meant. There was an interesting group a few years back, maybe still in existance, the Artemus Society I think. Their motto was "We're going back to the moon, and this time we mean to stay" or something similar. They discussed all sorts of things, and I thought them pretty interesting. Some were actually practical, such as what the regolith would provide, best way to build simple fast shelters from local materials and energy, etc. But they also argued incessantly over some of the most nitpicky nonsense. It was the equivalent of covered wagon pioneers fighting over how to lay out city streets, whether sidewalks should be 3 feet wide or 4 feet wide, should there be a grassy strip between the street and sidewalk or should the sidewalk be an extension of the curb, etc etc ad nauseum.
Tons and tons of stuff that wouldn't apply for a hundred years, would be inapplicable then anyway, and was a complete distraction from actually getting to the moon.
That's been my experience with libertarians. I'd love it if government were 1% its current size, if laws couldn't be enforced at all if they were only enforced spottily and rarely, if they applied to everybody at all times. But the reality is different. Arguing about throwing out the tax code in favor of simply paying for services, for instance, is mental masturbation. It is never going to happen. We have a bureaucratic government, it works more or less, that is what we have, and arguing about the details of its idealistic replacement is a sheer waste of time.
Suppose he lived in NYC but worked out of state 75% of the time, a travelling salesman or hot shot fixer upper of some sort? Should he deduct that 75% then?
I had a job in one state while living in the other. Commuted across state lines. Should I only have paid income taxes on that portion of the day where I was actually in the state?
Suppose I take a paid vacation and use paid holidays to travel out of state. Should they stop taxing me for those periods? Maybe the states I travel thru should tax me for that portion of the time I am in their state. After all, I am paid for that vacation and holiday time.
Sure he owns a house elsewhere. He pays smaller property taxes, I bet. He pays less for food too, I bet. But he works in NYC 25% of the time. How many people do such a thing? Are they supposed to make a special law just for those few?
Parent question: Just what is it that you oppose about libertarians?
Parent sig: There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it does him good
Maybe it's because your definition of "worst tyranny" is pretty weak. Most libertarians I've met focus on petty technicalities which are only important if you ignore the big picture of murder, mayhem, and general starvation and deprivation. Their worries generally fall into the category of counting angels on pin heads.
A lock tumbler is either positioned correctly or it isn't. "Correctly" means with a certain distance, and that does not make it analog. If a tumber could be half open, or 3/4 open, or.2464 open, then it would be analog.
Mechanical does not imply analog.
There are physical digital computers, made from fluids, gears, many things. Physical does not imply analog either, or physical circuits would make all computers analog.
His point is that everything compiles down to, or at least ultimately runs as, machine language. By definition, not only CAN everything be done in machine language (or asm), but everything IS done in asm.
So when that future Israeli prime minister blew up the hotel full of British officers and families, that was.... a freedom fighter? terrorist? patriot? rebel? guerrila? I am unclear on the categories. Please illuminate.
Also, when the Israelis or the US drops a bomb, which happens to kill someone related to a terrorist organiaztion, but innocent children or, say, a wedding party, also die, that is....?
And the guerrillas who wear civilian clothes while killing uniformed soldiers, they would be.... guerrillas? freedom fighters? terrorists? I am unclear how to revise the textbooks on the 1775 American insurgency. Also how to report their treatment of government officials who tried to maintain law and order, and civilians who supported the duly constituted government.
Then there are those historical episodes where outside interference replaced popular governments with unpopular dictatorships, viz the Shah in Iran in 1954 (?) and Allende in Chile, and the many many central American interventions by the warmongering USA, or the opium wars of China, where the dope peddling British, with international support, forced the Chinese to buy their evil wares at the point of a gun.
I am unclear on all these things. I await your enlightenment.
In the sense that seeking the truth is a religion, in the sense of asking questions and trying to prove the answers right or wrong, in the sense that mathematicians prove that the circle can't be squared.
Good god (pun intended)! To call science a religion is really missing the point. You, sir, are an imbecile.
What, is it too difficult to comprehend that such a game would be extremely popular on OSX?
Ooooh, is it too difficult to comprehend that they can only afford so many programmers working at any one time, and that ports have to be done by the same people who are working on the original platform?
Slashdot Mirror
If you implement a "stable" binary module API, the binary driver people will want that API frozen for all of eternity. You won't be able to come up with a better solution in three months or a year. Whereas if you have the source, even if you don't understand the finest details of every last line in it, you can usually understand it well enough to track API changes. Anybody can; if someone comes up with a better internal interface to timers, or memory allocators, it's not that hard to change code they have never seen before.
It's one thing to have a stable system call interface between the kernel and userland. But an internal API needs to be flexible.
One of Linux's great strengths is the flexibility of changing to meet new needs and not being hobbled by rigid backwards compatibility. This can only be done if all source is open and anyone can update drivers to meet new needs. When someone comes up with a patch to streamline a certain minor part of the kernel, it frequently has repercussions elsewhere in kernel land. It is these small changes which have made linux better and better with breathtaking speed. A "stable" binary API removes the possibility of keeping everything up to date and would dramatically show down the adoption of new features and general improvements.
Continual refactoring is worth far more than some supposed binary API which prevents changes. Get rid of binary drivers! If companies are so paranoid that they want binary drivers, then the hell with them. Linux can advance better without that baggage.
I looked him up in the wikipedia, and don't understand what you mean. The US has fooled around in countless elections and domestic affairs around the world, but I don't know what you mean in this case. Care to elaborate?
I saw the idiot's reply to my parent post, daring me to name any legitimate government the US overthrew, knew that would happen, and dreaded having to respond to anyone that ignorant because I'd want to go get dates and references and everything ...
:-)
And you guys came thru for me! Hot damn that is good
[the USSR's] murderous, oppressive grip on Eastern Europe and attempts at foisting their cheerful utopia on South America and Africa
As opposed to the US's murderous, oppressive grip on third world countries generally and attempts at foisting their cheerful utopia on the rest of the world.
It's fair to say the US's grip wasn't as thorough, but it sure was oppressive, and it encompassed more of the world than the USSR for more years. How many legitimate governments did the US overthrow because they didn't like them?
Terrorism is terrorism. Justifying the largest non-nuclear explosion in the name of fighting terrorism belongs in George Orwell's literature.
TFA is by Mr Cryptology and he doesn't make that kind of stupid mistakes. He quite clearly says they FIXED that and one other problem, but left in a third problem because the people in charge are technically ignorant.
I had quite a lot of fun spewing that out :-)
Copyright and patent and trademark, ie Intellectual Property (sorry, RMS) is so screwed up now that I hope that take it to the extreme and paralyze the bloodsuckers by making them sue each other for infringement. Think of it ... from whom will they profit more, mere consumers who are only good for $5K per shakedown, with all the overhead that entails, or each other, good for several hundred million and the chance to run them into the ground? They are, after all, your competition.
Yes, pass this sucker. Make copyrights last forever. Make story plots patentable. Go ahead. See how much control you have over popular culture, you morons. Watch popular culture pass right on by, out of your control, beyond your puny stilted imagination. Paint yourselves into corners of your own making, spend all your energy fighting each other and hoarding and enhancing your little corner of the past, while the future bypasses you utterly and forever. While you think of a zillion ways to regurgitate your patented storyline, which is all you can do because your competitors have their own patented storylines which they are busy regurgitating, people will develop their own tools which they will share freely, and other people will swap these and improve these and make their own unpatented stories and their own uncopyrighted and locked down culture.
You morons will be left holding ancient patented and copyrighted dreck which has been projectile vomited to a fare-thee-well because you have a 300 year patent on it, or a 500 year copyright on it, and heaven knows Disney has to protect Micky from all those hordes who have only one goal in mind: how to appropriate Mickey for their own perverted uses. Yes, that's right, the truth is out now, I have seen the transcripts of the meetings. Sony wants nothing more than to lock up Mickey for themselves, they have wet drems at board meetings when they salivate at the prospect of hijacking Mickey if you don't keep thsoe patents and copyrights in force. They have entire teams of lawyers searching for loopholes to grab Mickey form your slippery paws because you slipped up and saved a few megabucks by not hiring that one brilliant lawyer before Sony did.
Morons, I say, morons.
You say the "experts" debate it, then ask us? Who you calling expert anyway?
Hey! You! get offa my cloud!
Theory makes no provision for unrestrained people forming monopolies and cartels and gangs and other non-individual groupings. Soon as you have those, you no longer have a free market. Duh!
Yeh I love these idealists. So practical. Now you know why that original poster said he hates libertarians.
Sometimes you gotta choose. You can have 0% of an ideal or some percentage >0 of less than ideal. Libertarians haven't got a lick of common sense when they talk about throwing out government altogether and think that a completely free society will result. Not an ounce of brains among the whole lot.
I guess I did!
Thanks for the tip.
Works as in mostly functions most of the time for for most people. No governemnt of 300M people can make everyone happy. It certainly doesn't make me happy. If all you can do is find individual cases that don't work, whoopee. Big Deal. If you can make up a practical working government which works for more people more of the time, go for it, and I will find individual cases which don't work.
... but it still works better for most people than a race car in perfect condition.
The government may be like a car which has seen better days, maybe it has a notchy shifter, tires need replacement, trunk doesn't always latch close without a big slam, creaks and rattles, a window makes too much noise
Libertarians would throw out the clunker and start from scratch. That only works in silly novels. Realists would fix the car up piece by piece.
Silly editors. Don't they know that the more powerful a telescope, the farther back in time it sees?
I usually vote for the libertarians on a ballot if there are any. I haven't voted for a mainstream politician since I don't know when. But there's a huge difference between someone actually getting down in the dirt and running for office, and the quibblers who constitute most of the libertarians. I think most of the rank and file only choose libertarian because the arguments are more fun and don't require a reality check.
I can't think right now of any recent discussions with libertarians, but I can give you the flavor of what I meant. There was an interesting group a few years back, maybe still in existance, the Artemus Society I think. Their motto was "We're going back to the moon, and this time we mean to stay" or something similar. They discussed all sorts of things, and I thought them pretty interesting. Some were actually practical, such as what the regolith would provide, best way to build simple fast shelters from local materials and energy, etc. But they also argued incessantly over some of the most nitpicky nonsense. It was the equivalent of covered wagon pioneers fighting over how to lay out city streets, whether sidewalks should be 3 feet wide or 4 feet wide, should there be a grassy strip between the street and sidewalk or should the sidewalk be an extension of the curb, etc etc ad nauseum.
Tons and tons of stuff that wouldn't apply for a hundred years, would be inapplicable then anyway, and was a complete distraction from actually getting to the moon.
That's been my experience with libertarians. I'd love it if government were 1% its current size, if laws couldn't be enforced at all if they were only enforced spottily and rarely, if they applied to everybody at all times. But the reality is different. Arguing about throwing out the tax code in favor of simply paying for services, for instance, is mental masturbation. It is never going to happen. We have a bureaucratic government, it works more or less, that is what we have, and arguing about the details of its idealistic replacement is a sheer waste of time.
Suppose he lived in NYC but worked out of state 75% of the time, a travelling salesman or hot shot fixer upper of some sort? Should he deduct that 75% then?
I had a job in one state while living in the other. Commuted across state lines. Should I only have paid income taxes on that portion of the day where I was actually in the state?
Suppose I take a paid vacation and use paid holidays to travel out of state. Should they stop taxing me for those periods? Maybe the states I travel thru should tax me for that portion of the time I am in their state. After all, I am paid for that vacation and holiday time.
Sure he owns a house elsewhere. He pays smaller property taxes, I bet. He pays less for food too, I bet. But he works in NYC 25% of the time. How many people do such a thing? Are they supposed to make a special law just for those few?
Grandparent sig: 100% Anti-libertarian
Parent question: Just what is it that you oppose about libertarians?
Parent sig: There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it does him good
Maybe it's because your definition of "worst tyranny" is pretty weak. Most libertarians I've met focus on petty technicalities which are only important if you ignore the big picture of murder, mayhem, and general starvation and deprivation. Their worries generally fall into the category of counting angels on pin heads.
A lock tumbler is either positioned correctly or it isn't. "Correctly" means with a certain distance, and that does not make it analog. If a tumber could be half open, or 3/4 open, or .2464 open, then it would be analog.
Mechanical does not imply analog.
There are physical digital computers, made from fluids, gears, many things. Physical does not imply analog either, or physical circuits would make all computers analog.
Are you next going to say pregnancy is analog?
Don't know what the voltages are now, but used to be anything below, say, 0.5 was off, anything above 4.5 was on, anything in between was a no-no.
Sure sounds like lock tumblers have a lot in common with transistors.
His point is that everything compiles down to, or at least ultimately runs as, machine language. By definition, not only CAN everything be done in machine language (or asm), but everything IS done in asm.
He's being sarcastic.
So when that future Israeli prime minister blew up the hotel full of British officers and families, that was .... a freedom fighter? terrorist? patriot? rebel? guerrila? I am unclear on the categories. Please illuminate.
....?
.... guerrillas? freedom fighters? terrorists? I am unclear how to revise the textbooks on the 1775 American insurgency. Also how to report their treatment of government officials who tried to maintain law and order, and civilians who supported the duly constituted government.
Also, when the Israelis or the US drops a bomb, which happens to kill someone related to a terrorist organiaztion, but innocent children or, say, a wedding party, also die, that is
And the guerrillas who wear civilian clothes while killing uniformed soldiers, they would be
Then there are those historical episodes where outside interference replaced popular governments with unpopular dictatorships, viz the Shah in Iran in 1954 (?) and Allende in Chile, and the many many central American interventions by the warmongering USA, or the opium wars of China, where the dope peddling British, with international support, forced the Chinese to buy their evil wares at the point of a gun.
I am unclear on all these things. I await your enlightenment.
In the sense that seeking the truth is a religion, in the sense of asking questions and trying to prove the answers right or wrong, in the sense that mathematicians prove that the circle can't be squared.
Good god (pun intended)! To call science a religion is really missing the point. You, sir, are an imbecile.
... the Victoria's Secret door-to-door saleswomen, that is!
But unusual? I kinda doubt it.
What, is it too difficult to comprehend that such a game would be extremely popular on OSX?
Ooooh, is it too difficult to comprehend that they can only afford so many programmers working at any one time, and that ports have to be done by the same people who are working on the original platform?