> Furthermore, the ability to store and write a program, as I said above, has been fundamental to how computers have developed (i.e. the development of compilers).
And as logn as you can punch holes in a strip of film, you can have your compiler and have it write a program.
It might be a real good idea however to realize that for a 64 word computer, you will be assembling the program by hand, possibly punching the holes by hand.
On a 1kbyte computer, it is still a lot more practical to go that way, compilers start becomming importsant a lot later, and while I agree they were an important step, they are definitely not a DEFINING step for what makes a computer.
I bet that honor goes to X Windows, or maybe to something even more archaic.. (OpenLook?)
Virtual desktops as a concept were also not unheard of on platforms like the Amiga and OS/2.. and I believe there were actually drivers for win 3.1 that allowed it there as well (not from MS tho, S3 and Diamond come to mind, but my recollection of that is a bit hazy).
At any rate, X has virtual desktop support and has had it for a long time. It doesn't need any special graphics drivers or vedor specific extentions or such either. All it needs is you specifying a desktop larger then your screen.
Modern window managers added nice things to it, but the concept has been around for a logn long time.
> At least with Linux they would potentially have a little more control over the situation.
Or with any other open source OS for that matter.. I happen to have one of those WinTV cards myself, and plugged it into my FreeBSD workstation..
It took 2 commands as root to get it to work and have a workign TV application..
Then I started wanting to record video.. too bad, the sound recording of the tv application was wrong (insisted on saving in 8bit format and then trying to read it as 16bit data to compress it.. gives a nice amount of noise, but not the sound you were recording)
At any rate, fixing that was a matter of a few hours, and indeed having the knowlede to read and change C sources, and udnerstandign enough of the matter to see what was wrong in the first place...
The real advantage of OSS is that while few may have to skills to fix a specific problem, as logn as there are a few around who are involved, the problem will get fixed for everyone.
The likelyhood of that is a lot better then of a big company fixing a bug that isn't bothering them in a very direct way.
Makign security patches for Apache, or extending it by means of modules.. those are not the problem, and idneed with a few weeks or months of time, a decent programmer can easily get to know the Apache sources well enough to do both and make small functional improvements.
Taking the much larger steps needed to keep Apache at its number 1 position? That will not be as easy by far.
Besides being a webserver, Apache is also a framework, and while not the most beautiful framework around, it is a very usable oen for writing web applications. The way it is now in 2.x is a huge improvement over what it used to be in the 1.x versions, but such steps will be needed in the future as well, and they require a lot more them almost anyone can master in a few weeks or months, unless there happen to eb some good teachers around.
Replacign part of the team and gettign new peopel upto speed is a lot easier then replacign all of the team and having noone to talk to from the old team.
Mozilla, Netscape, IE.. they are all archaic browsers, all of which can trace their history back tot he early days of the web. khtml (Safari, Konqueror) and Opera are the only browsers that are both somewhat mainstream and are not archaic in origin.. Given that all of them render quircky old html versions and broken html, they are all archaic in the end.
Given all that, we have lots of such content around, and I doubt that is gonna get fixed really, so we have to live with it;P
Firefox is doign a good job here, and while I can easily live with the standard themes, its nice to see some work on that as well.
CAPS Lock isn't dead, its stuck.. in the 'off' position for most people, and in the 'on' position for Nigerian spammers and script kiddies who think it equals screaming..
And then there is the possibility to send text messages from a computer in a variety of ways, including connecting your mobile to it.. A computer can also generate and send messages and a quite incredible rate..
First of all to make using it a lot more practical. You may never have had to deal with the current source code license from SUN, but as it is now, it effectively hinders any attempts at porting JAVA to any platforms SUN didn't bother to build it for themselves, and when dealing with Linux and FreeBSD and similar platforms, that turns out to be quite relevant.
So, its not about them accepting your patches, but about JAVA being usable beyond what SUN can support itself directly.
Will they accept patches? I bet they will if you transfer the copyright to them, and no, that indeed means no GPLed code entering it. They cannot hope to sell a proprietary version at thre same time if they don't own the copyright to EVERY little part of it.
And thank you for your rebutal with regards to SPannish law, which seems well informed. The world factbook is at www.cia.gov btw, if you want to check regardign crimerate.
> There are four boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap box, ballot box, jury box and ammo box. Use in that order.
While true, you may want to take a look at countries like India and Russia and quite a few of the european states. It was not people bearing arms that tipped over manyan oppressive government, and as said before, your assault riffle is not gonna do much good against jetfighters and attack helies.
There are two things you shouldn't confuse. People have the inalienable right to take up arms against an oppressor. People have as much right on a life as free of violence as possible. You will have to balance those out, and your balancde is different then mine obviously.
> If other countries have a good method of providing for the protection of their citizens from criminals, foreign aggresors or the tyrrany of their own government, good for them. The 2nd Amendment has proven to be invaluable to US citizens in these matters, and we are reluctant to abandon the inalienable right that it recognizes.
It may do well in your culture, it may not do that well in others. The original story and question related to the UK, not to the USA.
> I believe it applies as much today as it did when it was written 227 years ago.
I am not saying it is unimportant when seen in the light of US culture. The asker of the original question however lives in the UK, not the USA. There it would be better to apply the local culture also;P
> hence the misperception that pot is "legal" in Holland
That is the rigth way of stating it indeed. The idea is to only enforce the law there where an actual problem exists, that concept is at times difficult to explain, but it works quite well in specific cases where you don't want to control something, only its excesses.
> They're missing the rather obvious point that criminals don't obey gun laws and it isn't possible to make guns disappear by legislation. Even if it was possible, criminals would simply use other weapons.
Robbery happens, but in a society where you can reasonably expect a person to carry a weapon, there are 2 options from the point of view of the robber: - victim doesn't seem to defend themselves.. easier pray. - victim may carry a weapon and looks like soemoen who might use it.. worse pray, and when going for it anyway, better make sure I'm first to kill.
In a society that generally doesn't allow weapons, criminals still have them, but are a lot less likely to use them because it all of a sudden turns robbery into something that will get a lot more fanatical response and heavier punnishment.
You are reasoning from a different culture where weapons and esp. guns have been a part of the culture for as logn as the country exists, and have served a good purpose in many different toles. There are way more guns out there, and the likelyhood of someone having one is a lot higher. That creates a different set of conditions and if you start controlling guns in such an environment, you are very likely goign to see criminals still having and using them, while law abiding citizens wont have them.. and it will take quite a while before havign managed to also make it difficult enough for criminals to use them (as opposed to possessing them).
For what I can see, you are making the point that cities with strict gun controlls have generally a higher crimerate in the USA. Lets just assume this is true (I do not know, but it sounds likely), the questions remain, are the two actually related directly, and if so, what is cause and what is effect here.
> Why do you want to leave out the 2nd world war though? I mean, damn, Germany was a fine neighbour for most of the 20th century - in fact, they were practically benevolent if you don't count the 1st and 2nd wars.
Because I regard being at war as an exceptional situation which does justify forms of violence that should normally not be tollerated?
I am not forgetting that bit of history, but see it as a time during which special conditions were in place?
Doing otherwise would kinda be lookign at US history and judging the chance you have on dying to a bullet from the civil war in part (longer ago, but very relecant for the history of the country)
> I was merely using Pim's assassination to illustrate that terribly violent murders happen regardless of culture and legislation, which is what you seem to be arguing.
No, I was arguing they happen less often in a society that tends to not tollerate weapons on the streets.
I completely agree with your point that it happens everywhere. I take that as a given, and now want to have it happen as little as possible.
> You guys would do well to take care of your own house before pointing out the flaws of others,
Hmm, we seem to have a better working solution for some things, others have better working solutions for other things. It helps telling eachother about those, saves lots of re-inventing the wheel and such.
As much as there may be some open neo-nazism in parts of scandinavia, it also seems society has a lot more effective way of rendering it powerless then quite a few other parts of Europe. Its something we should definitely be interested in for example.
> Would you care to substantiate this claim?
That claim is according to the CIA world factbook, that doesn't make it true of course. That said, SPain has an alltogether more violent history when looking at modern times.
Oh, thanks for the reply, I appreciate actual discussion.
They are taught how to shoot to kill, yes. They are also taught to shoot to stop a person before shooting to kill a person, and have a lot of extra explaining to do if they don't manage. So no, drawing a gun and shooting is in many cases not done to kill but to incapacitate a person.
First of all, the Dutch have their own set of problems, so does everyone for that matter. Also I didn't say that violent crime doesn't happen here. For the rest, I've been in Norway quite a few times, and racism is no stranger there, nor is it overhere for that matter.
The fact that the killing of Pim Fortyn made the news in the way it did is partially because it was the first political asssassination (unless you take the nazi occupation during the 2nd world war into account) in a few centuries here. Bad thing? definitely, highly exceptional? also quite definitely. Oh and if you want to refer to his death, at least get your facts straight, he was killed in a small city called Hilversum (actually considered a village by many), not in Amsterdam. Assassinations do happen in Amsterdam however, and way too often. They happen between criminals, and while I'd rather do without them alltogether, it kinda does solve a problem if they take care of themselves;P
What mr Fortuyn did, and what you seem to be echoing, is an old trick used by many a 'popular' dictator also, "let people feel so they don't think". You call on fears without providing any facts for them. mr. Fortuyn may have done so to call attention for real problems, and he managed in that, but its not something to play with, it stirs up forces that few have been able to control judging from past evidence.
If you'd have read my posts a little better (but since you can't bother to logon or such, I wonder if you can bother to read the discussion a bit better before replying) you might have found that I simply object to the reasoning that getting yourself armed is gonna solve the problem of robbery, it generally just makes the thing more likely to turn violent, and if you don't agree with the example I use, fine, but come up with something better then some name calling.
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> Considering the utterly pointless uses that computers are put to in modern life, I think I'd have to agree with Aiken.
And the worst part of it is tha a substantial part of computer activity today is triggered by computer activity.. they keep themselves busy kinda..
> Furthermore, the ability to store and write a program, as I said above, has been fundamental to how computers have developed (i.e. the development of compilers).
And as logn as you can punch holes in a strip of film, you can have your compiler and have it write a program.
It might be a real good idea however to realize that for a 64 word computer, you will be assembling the program by hand, possibly punching the holes by hand.
On a 1kbyte computer, it is still a lot more practical to go that way, compilers start becomming importsant a lot later, and while I agree they were an important step, they are definitely not a DEFINING step for what makes a computer.
Hmmm.. I thought she was RUssian actually.
I bet that honor goes to X Windows, or maybe to something even more archaic.. (OpenLook?)
Virtual desktops as a concept were also not unheard of on platforms like the Amiga and OS/2.. and I believe there were actually drivers for win 3.1 that allowed it there as well (not from MS tho, S3 and Diamond come to mind, but my recollection of that is a bit hazy).
At any rate, X has virtual desktop support and has had it for a long time. It doesn't need any special graphics drivers or vedor specific extentions or such either. All it needs is you specifying a desktop larger then your screen.
Modern window managers added nice things to it, but the concept has been around for a logn long time.
First time I saw it was with the lotus taskbar for OS/2.. IBM added it to OS/2 a bit later..
XOrg has some peopel who have been involved in XFree for a long time also. The people to 'teach' about it are still there.
And I didn't say it was impossible, just that it takes a considerabel efford to pickup a project like Apache with a completely new team.
> At least with Linux they would potentially have a little more control over the situation.
Or with any other open source OS for that matter..
I happen to have one of those WinTV cards myself, and plugged it into my FreeBSD workstation..
It took 2 commands as root to get it to work and have a workign TV application..
Then I started wanting to record video.. too bad, the sound recording of the tv application was wrong (insisted on saving in 8bit format and then trying to read it as 16bit data to compress it.. gives a nice amount of noise, but not the sound you were recording)
At any rate, fixing that was a matter of a few hours, and indeed having the knowlede to read and change C sources, and udnerstandign enough of the matter to see what was wrong in the first place...
The real advantage of OSS is that while few may have to skills to fix a specific problem, as logn as there are a few around who are involved, the problem will get fixed for everyone.
The likelyhood of that is a lot better then of a big company fixing a bug that isn't bothering them in a very direct way.
Makign security patches for Apache, or extending it by means of modules.. those are not the problem, and idneed with a few weeks or months of time, a decent programmer can easily get to know the Apache sources well enough to do both and make small functional improvements.
Taking the much larger steps needed to keep Apache at its number 1 position? That will not be as easy by far.
Besides being a webserver, Apache is also a framework, and while not the most beautiful framework around, it is a very usable oen for writing web applications. The way it is now in 2.x is a huge improvement over what it used to be in the 1.x versions, but such steps will be needed in the future as well, and they require a lot more them almost anyone can master in a few weeks or months, unless there happen to eb some good teachers around.
Replacign part of the team and gettign new peopel upto speed is a lot easier then replacign all of the team and having noone to talk to from the old team.
Mozilla, Netscape, IE.. they are all archaic browsers, all of which can trace their history back tot he early days of the web.
;P
khtml (Safari, Konqueror) and Opera are the only browsers that are both somewhat mainstream and are not archaic in origin.. Given that all of them render quircky old html versions and broken html, they are all archaic in the end.
Given all that, we have lots of such content around, and I doubt that is gonna get fixed really, so we have to live with it
Firefox is doign a good job here, and while I can easily live with the standard themes, its nice to see some work on that as well.
> The important things like fixing the preferences, the weird, fatal bugs can wait! We want fun eye candy!!!
MS found out decades ago that that is the way to success indeed...
CAPS Lock isn't dead, its stuck.. in the 'off' position for most people, and in the 'on' position for Nigerian spammers and script kiddies who think it equals screaming..
And then there is the possibility to send text messages from a computer in a variety of ways, including connecting your mobile to it.. A computer can also generate and send messages and a quite incredible rate..
Why opensource JAVA?
First of all to make using it a lot more practical. You may never have had to deal with the current source code license from SUN, but as it is now, it effectively hinders any attempts at porting JAVA to any platforms SUN didn't bother to build it for themselves, and when dealing with Linux and FreeBSD and similar platforms, that turns out to be quite relevant.
So, its not about them accepting your patches, but about JAVA being usable beyond what SUN can support itself directly.
Will they accept patches? I bet they will if you transfer the copyright to them, and no, that indeed means no GPLed code entering it. They cannot hope to sell a proprietary version at thre same time if they don't own the copyright to EVERY little part of it.
And thank you for your rebutal with regards to SPannish law, which seems well informed. The world factbook is at www.cia.gov btw, if you want to check regardign crimerate.
Who knows :) thanks for the link.
> There are four boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap box, ballot box, jury box and ammo box. Use in that order.
While true, you may want to take a look at countries like India and Russia and quite a few of the european states. It was not people bearing arms that tipped over manyan oppressive government, and as said before, your assault riffle is not gonna do much good against jetfighters and attack helies.
There are two things you shouldn't confuse. People have the inalienable right to take up arms against an oppressor. People have as much right on a life as free of violence as possible. You will have to balance those out, and your balancde is different then mine obviously.
> If other countries have a good method of providing for the protection of their citizens from criminals, foreign aggresors or the tyrrany of their own government, good for them. The 2nd Amendment has proven to be invaluable to US citizens in these matters, and we are reluctant to abandon the inalienable right that it recognizes.
It may do well in your culture, it may not do that well in others. The original story and question related to the UK, not to the USA.
> I believe it applies as much today as it did when it was written 227 years ago.
;P
I am not saying it is unimportant when seen in the light of US culture. The asker of the original question however lives in the UK, not the USA. There it would be better to apply the local culture also
> hence the misperception that pot is "legal" in Holland
That is the rigth way of stating it indeed.
The idea is to only enforce the law there where an actual problem exists, that concept is at times difficult to explain, but it works quite well in specific cases where you don't want to control something, only its excesses.
> They're missing the rather obvious point that criminals don't obey gun laws and it isn't possible to make guns disappear by legislation. Even if it was possible, criminals would simply use other weapons.
Robbery happens, but in a society where you can reasonably expect a person to carry a weapon, there are 2 options from the point of view of the robber:
- victim doesn't seem to defend themselves.. easier pray.
- victim may carry a weapon and looks like soemoen who might use it.. worse pray, and when going for it anyway, better make sure I'm first to kill.
In a society that generally doesn't allow weapons, criminals still have them, but are a lot less likely to use them because it all of a sudden turns robbery into something that will get a lot more fanatical response and heavier punnishment.
You are reasoning from a different culture where weapons and esp. guns have been a part of the culture for as logn as the country exists, and have served a good purpose in many different toles. There are way more guns out there, and the likelyhood of someone having one is a lot higher. That creates a different set of conditions and if you start controlling guns in such an environment, you are very likely goign to see criminals still having and using them, while law abiding citizens wont have them.. and it will take quite a while before havign managed to also make it difficult enough for criminals to use them (as opposed to possessing them).
For what I can see, you are making the point that cities with strict gun controlls have generally a higher crimerate in the USA. Lets just assume this is true (I do not know, but it sounds likely), the questions remain, are the two actually related directly, and if so, what is cause and what is effect here.
> Switzerland?
Hmm, good point. Exception to prove the rule? Obviously they have a decent way of dealing with it (and some help of conditions)
> Why do you want to leave out the 2nd world war though? I mean, damn, Germany was a fine neighbour for most of the 20th century - in fact, they were practically benevolent if you don't count the 1st and 2nd wars.
Because I regard being at war as an exceptional situation which does justify forms of violence that should normally not be tollerated?
I am not forgetting that bit of history, but see it as a time during which special conditions were in place?
Doing otherwise would kinda be lookign at US history and judging the chance you have on dying to a bullet from the civil war in part (longer ago, but very relecant for the history of the country)
> I was merely using Pim's assassination to illustrate that terribly violent murders happen regardless of culture and legislation, which is what you seem to be arguing.
No, I was arguing they happen less often in a society that tends to not tollerate weapons on the streets.
I completely agree with your point that it happens everywhere. I take that as a given, and now want to have it happen as little as possible.
> You guys would do well to take care of your own house before pointing out the flaws of others,
Hmm, we seem to have a better working solution for some things, others have better working solutions for other things. It helps telling eachother about those, saves lots of re-inventing the wheel and such.
As much as there may be some open neo-nazism in parts of scandinavia, it also seems society has a lot more effective way of rendering it powerless then quite a few other parts of Europe. Its something we should definitely be interested in for example.
> Would you care to substantiate this claim?
That claim is according to the CIA world factbook, that doesn't make it true of course. That said, SPain has an alltogether more violent history when looking at modern times.
Oh, thanks for the reply, I appreciate actual discussion.
They are taught how to shoot to kill, yes. They are also taught to shoot to stop a person before shooting to kill a person, and have a lot of extra explaining to do if they don't manage. So no, drawing a gun and shooting is in many cases not done to kill but to incapacitate a person.
Uhm no, it's not. THat there is a problem proving it in many cases doesn't make it legal.
*lol*
;P
First of all, the Dutch have their own set of problems, so does everyone for that matter. Also I didn't say that violent crime doesn't happen here. For the rest, I've been in Norway quite a few times, and racism is no stranger there, nor is it overhere for that matter.
The fact that the killing of Pim Fortyn made the news in the way it did is partially because it was the first political asssassination (unless you take the nazi occupation during the 2nd world war into account) in a few centuries here. Bad thing? definitely, highly exceptional? also quite definitely. Oh and if you want to refer to his death, at least get your facts straight, he was killed in a small city called Hilversum (actually considered a village by many), not in Amsterdam. Assassinations do happen in Amsterdam however, and way too often. They happen between criminals, and while I'd rather do without them alltogether, it kinda does solve a problem if they take care of themselves
What mr Fortuyn did, and what you seem to be echoing, is an old trick used by many a 'popular' dictator also, "let people feel so they don't think". You call on fears without providing any facts for them. mr. Fortuyn may have done so to call attention for real problems, and he managed in that, but its not something to play with, it stirs up forces that few have been able to control judging from past evidence.
If you'd have read my posts a little better (but since you can't bother to logon or such, I wonder if you can bother to read the discussion a bit better before replying) you might have found that I simply object to the reasoning that getting yourself armed is gonna solve the problem of robbery, it generally just makes the thing more likely to turn violent, and if you don't agree with the example I use, fine, but come up with something better then some name calling.
> Don't you guys allow the smoking of pot too?
We indeed don't think its generally illegal to do to your own body what you feel like doing.. provided you are over 18.
Theres some limits to that, but the general idea is quite there in practise also.