In the short term, your stance makes sense, but I like to look at technology issues in a long-term view. To my way of thinking, the killing off of ideas is just as tragic as the killing off of people. Killing ideas eventually *leads to* killing people anyway, indirectly, so in a way it's actually more tragic (for example, knowing how to make and use penecillin has saved countless lives since that idea came to be. Had that idea been killed as it was budding, that would have indirectly killed a lot people down the road.)
This might sound like a non-sequitor side topic, but it's not. The notion that individuals no longer have the right to tinker and experiment in a lot of fields is very tragic because it is killing off new ideas before they have their chance to bud. Keep it up long enough and the next generations will become more and more ignorant.
Trying to safeguard a technology by hiding it behind closed doors so only a select few know how it works is only a short-term benefit to a company. In the long term (after a generation has passed), it actually retards the technology and might even stifle it to death.
Ideas die if they are not allowed to spread. That is why allowing hobbiests access to information is of vital importance, and that is why it is vital that common people have the freedom to understand and use new technology as it appears. And, no I don't mean people just using technology as a consumer, but also as inventors and a scientists.
If you like technology, you should hate stifling information behind closed doors.
The fonts were not as uniformly rendered then as they are today.
1. Even with the same exact font (blocks of type) being used, one letter 'A' and the next letter 'A' could look different enough to confuse an OCR program, due to blotchy ink or blotchy paper, like so:
XX XX
X X XX X
XXXXXX XXX XX
X X X X
X X X XX
2. Also, the spacing between letters was not as uniform, which would con fuse an OCR pro gram into B reaking words at in con vein ientplaces.
3. And, as the other pofter mentioned, theref the ditterent ftyle ot fymbolf they ufed to ufe.
Why would it be any different just because it's online?
In the online world, it is completely impossible to show somebody something without similtaneously giving them a copy of that same something. If the library shows you a html version of the copyrighted work, then it had to do so by sending you the contents of that work as a second digital copy, independant of the copy that's on their hard drive. If the library shows you a GIF image of the copyrighted work, then it hd to do so by sending you the contents of that work. No matter what scheme is used, no matter what technique for encryption is used, the fact of the matter is that at some point, even if just temporarily, your computer has to have its own copy in one way or another.
On the other hand, if I show you a physical book, this doesn't cause two seperate copies of the book to appear.
Unless the online library is willing to delete their copy (even from backups and from the hard drive) while you have your copy (and then trust you to send it back to them when you are done or pay them for it if you lose it), then there cannot be a working analogy between online and physical libraries as far as copyright law goes. Even someone not intending to make use of their copy is still technically breaking copyright law every time they look at a copyrighted work. Your browser's cache is filled with copyright violations if you've ever visited any website with any copyrighted content recently (which is most people who surf the web, probably).
The problem is that the original law was not written with this technology in mind, and the attempts to update it are written by people who just don't understand what they're doing, don't understand how the technology works, and aren't listening to those who do, and instead are listening to those with a vested interest in lying to them about the issue. Hence we get laws that if interpreted literally would outlaw the entire world wide web, but then get enforced selectively. (ALWAYS a bad situation to be in, where it is nearly impossible to avoid violating a law - then the law becomes a means to randomly smack-down on people for whatever you wish to discriminate against them for.)
Idiot. (I am referring to your adovocating that site you linked to).
So, racism got worse because of teaching evolution, huh? So, shipping slaves from africa to the new world was somehow less racist than what came afterward??? Suuurrrrre.....
The problem I see with this isn't so much the loss of fun associated with driving, but the loss of freedom. I would ONLY favor an automated driving system if it did not do any of the following things:
1 - Require a centralized control or regularly downloaded from some centralized source in order to work properly (i.e. map data from a city's traffic management server, or something like that).
2 - Allow the government to effectively disable the car by remote (which would be easy if #1 was true - just mandate that only authorized vehicles could access the server).
3 - Become mandatory (or effectively mandatory by raising insurance rates to punitive levels for those who don't use it).
4 - Become a means of legistlated vendor lock-in for the previously established auto makers. (In much the same way that the DMCA is a legistlated vendor lock-in for previously established movie and music companies.) If cars that don't have these features are not allowed on main roads anymore, and to get the features approved requires a lot of red tape and is tied to some Intellectual Property of some sort, that effectively prevents any small competitor from trying to get started in the auto-industry, or any hobbiest trying to customize a car.
I like the technology, but given the government's unwillingness to consider the needs of the little guy, or the importance of a level playing field in business (and hobbies, dammit!), I say there is an extremely high likelyhood that this would be implemented in a way that will stifle freedom more than is minimally neccessary (I do understand that some small stifling of freedom is a natural unavoidable consequence of a denser population, but this will be implemented in such a way that it stifles it a lot more than it has to, I can guarantee it.)
The first Republican president in US history took a lot of pro-big-government actions. Ever heard of him? He was a guy called Lincoln. I have no idea where this urban myth that Republicans have an origin of being in favor of small government came from. Just like the Democrats, they've flipped back and forth on that issue. Their current shift back toward favoring big government is just the tail-end of a cycling phenomenon. There's nothing "neo" about "neo-cons". It's more like retro-cons from the 1800's.
If you can't figure out how the EULAs that have become ubiquitous recently differ from actual real contracts, then you are either in your teens or 20's, or stupid.
Then it would be impossible to ever buy products that require a service to be up and running for them to work, like cable-ready TV's, or satellite radios, or an online RPG game, or a cable modem. All the services that those products are used with come with a disclaimer saying the provider reserves the right to change the terms of service at a later date without asking first, and that little clause is ALL that is legally required to make changes like the kind TIVO is making. In other words, there is no such thing as a service provider that you can be guaranteed will continue to provide the same service tomorrow they are providing today. You are acting like there is an alternative to switch to. There isn't. The only alternative is to never use any new technology and remain stuck in the 1980's.
What makes commercials so annoying isn't that you are being advertised to, but that you are being advertised to INSTEAD of doing what you want, and you have to sit there and wait and wait and wait to get back to the activity you were trying to do. If you hold in the fast forward button for 20 seconds, then a 20 second banner ad during that wouldn't be that annoying. But if the system slows down your fast forwarding so you have time to watch, say, a 1 minute commercial instead of spending just 20 seconds fast-forwarding, THEN customers will get pissed and leave in droves. If it doesn't change the rate of fast forwarding, AND it doesn't ruin functionality by obscuring too much of the screen, then I don't think there will be much customer backlash. (It would be annoying if you saw the ad INSTEAD of being able to see your place in the material you are fast-forwarding through. I'm assuming this will be a banner across the bottom or something like that, not something that obscures teh whole screen.)
Presumably you mean the fastest man-made object in relation to the solar system's frame of referece. (otherwise it is a harder question to answer because any object going in the same direction as the sun was drifting when it was launched will be going a heck of a lot faster than an object going in the opposite direction of which way the sun was drifting.) I don't know, for example, if the Voyager craft are headed in the same direction as the sun (in essence, blazing a trail in front of it), or if they are trailing behind it, or if they are flinging out perpendicular to it.
Actually, no. Disney was responsible for funding Pixar's efforts on Toy Story when it was a bold new idea to do 100% computer animation, and for that they deserver credit. But beyond funding and doing a lot of the Producer legwork business, they weren't writing the story. They were casting the talent. They were publicising. But the story was written by Pixar. (They do know how to make good stories - see some of their shorts from the old animation festivals for proof of this.)
The Republican's ideal is not small government. The Democrat's ideal is not large government. They both keep flip-flopping on this issue depending entirely on who happens to be in power at the time. When one party has the control of the presidency and congress, that party will start enacting federalized big-government laws, regardless of which of the big two parties it is at the time. When one party does not have that control, then it will advocate leaving more decisions to a local level, because that is where they still can have power.
Remember that Lincoln was the first Republican president. I think it's safe to say he definately followed a policy of bigger government, at least relative to what his opponents were pushing for.
I'm of the opinion that the big/small government issue is always a smokescreen for what issue the politicians are really after. (In the example of Lincoln, he had a social agenda already, and I think he was using the big government, federalism issue as a mask for it, to get the country to follow along with it (people who say the civil war had nothing to do with slavery are convieniently ignoring what the mindset of the president who ordered the war was - he talked a lot about how it was only about the union, and only about federalism, but a peek at his writings from before he was elected makes it quite clear that he was an abolitionist to the very core, and I have to think this was a major influence on his decisions. A lot of the terrible deeds he authorized were probably cases of becoming fanatical enough about the cause that he started to think the ends justified the means no matter what.) )
But, in any case, regardless of whether you agree with my assesment of Lincoln's motives or not, the point is that, NO, it is not true to claim that smaller government is a Republican ideal.
Ah, The joy of Ogle. Get your DVD software from some east european country. Buy your console player from some other country. Since, except in a few rare cases, trying to contact your senator as a concerned citizen doesn't do anything, I think the only way to fight this stuff is to pit company versus company, and let them fight and lobby. While the MPAA might like restrictive playback devices, I'm sure that hardware companies that are losing sales of their consoles because of this crap would be opposed to these rules.
That's really the only "voting" power the public has - vote with your wallet. But make sure to TELL these companies every time you chose a different product, exactly why you did so. "I would have bought your player, but since I wanted one that isn't deliberately crippled, I had to buy one that was made to be sold outside the stupid laws your industry has pushed through the US government. Rest assured that the DMCA is fully responsible for the fact that you lost my sale today."
Personally, I can't wait until all these repressive measures are put in place and the United States can finally implode and leave the rest of the world in peace.
The problem is, that through the magic of selective enforcement, the government is perfectly capable of keeping the country running even with laws on the books that would cause implosions if actually enforced uniformly. If enforced everywhere, this law would make the entire entertainment industry implode. But rest assured, it will only be enforced when and where the industry wants it to be.
There is already a divergence from the way things used to work, even in how it has gone so far. You didn't used to have to wait for a judge's ruling to decide whether or not it it was okay to be told what investigation it is that has taken hold of your property. It's one thing to say "Your property is being held because of the such-and-such versus so-and-so investigation, and that's all I can say", but what they did here was to say, "It's being held because of an investigation. No really, honestly. Trust us. There's an investigation of some sort involving terrorism in some way, and no, we won't tell you which one it allegedly is."
the notion that C pointers are some direct representation of actual hardware pointers is a bit of a myth, since they abstract away from segmentation/paging and so on.
The C lanaguage does NOT do that. The OS does. If your program runs on top of an OS that does segmentation/paging and so on, then *ANY* such program, written in *ANY* language, is still going to be one level removed from the hardware due to segmentation/paging. It *must* be that way or else the OS has no memory protection. (Any OS that does segmentation or paging has to do so in a manner that will work on ANY generic program, written in ANY language, from shell scripts all the way down to machine-language.)
But, if you're writing the OS kernel itself, then that's not true anymore - you *can* (and must) get down to pointers on raw hardware. It is entirely possible in C to have pointers to raw hardware addresses, if you are writing a program that is not running on top of a protected memory OS. (for example, a vending-machine embedded program, or the linux kernel itself).
There is actually very little that has to be done in direct assembly code in the kernel. If you tried writing it in a higher level language that doesn't let you use pointers, there would have to be MORE assembly code.
And that is the irony is that if you do what you suggest. Write the kernel in a high-level language and you end up with MORE dangerous code, not less, because despite how dangerous C can be with this stuff, assembly is much worse, and not using a middle-level language like C means even more stuff has to be done in a low-level language like assembly than is done that way now.
Well, you keep telling me what your argument isn't but I (honestly) can't work out what it is.
C is unsafe, yes. But that's becuase it manipulates memory exactly how you ask it to, and lets you shoot yourself in the foot. But that is not a sufficient reason to stop using it, because some tasks need to be approached that way, like writing a kernel, or passing byte buffers around as is often done in network programming.
C is a middle-ground between assembly code and a high-level langauge. Until such middle-ground tasks for which it is optimal dissapear, there is still a need to have it around.
not to be part of the Kyoto treaty despite being only 4% of the population yet producing 25% of the worlds pollution.
Pollution is caused by industry just as much, if not more, than it is to population. That's what's wrong with the Kyoto treaty. It doesn't take that into account. The USA produces a disproportionately large amount of pollution because it produces a disproprotionately large amount of commerce. Anyone buying any US product in any foreign country is contributing to US pollution indirectly, just as much as someone living here is. Don't get me wrong, the US does need to be more careful with production methods, and implement better pollution controls, but the Kyoto treaty's methods would only work if the US became a less efficient producer, and produce less commerce per capita. Why, in American politics, do I have to pick between people with no heart who don't care about environmental issues, or people with no brain who care about the environment but don't have a clue about basic science or economics? (For example, an intelligent environmentalist should *favor* nuclear power.)
Law enforcement can't just come and take a computer randomly from a company or person. They have to get a warrant from a judge to do so.
Not true anymore. Welcome to life under the PATRIOT Act. Now they merely have to *claim* it has something to do with terrorism (like they are doing here) and all those pesky little problems for the law enforcers go away. They don't even have to prove it has something to do with terrorism, just claim it.
It is the government's position that intellectual property is in fact actual property, at least when deciding it favor of copyright and patent holders under even the most tenuous links. If that attitude is to be consistent, then that means the data stored on the hard drive is a seperate piece of property from the hard drive itself.
So, if Uncle Sam wants to take something of yours all he has to do is claim it's part of an ongoing investigation and you aren't allowed to say anything more about it? What if you aren't convinced it actually is part of an investigation? Nope. Nothing to see - just move along and pretend nothing bad is happening like a good little citizen.
As far as closeness to the hardware is concerned, basically all that distinguishes O'Caml and C is that O'Caml is GC'd.
Then I'll have to check it out. It sounds useful (I like GC, but hate a lot of other features of high level languages, and I do recognize that despite the bad rep it has, that GC is not the cause of the slowness of high level languages - that's a bad rep dating back to lisp machines that had really slow GC implementations). But, I still have to wonder about this: You claim O'Caml is just as close to the hardware as C except for having GC, but then went on to say that it doesn't have the pointer issues of C. Those are incompatable statements. You need pointers to be close to the hardware. Imagine trying to write a kernel in a language that doesn't let you move chunks of memory around as you wish. (I'm not denying that it sounds like a good language. I'm denying that it could ever be a drop-in replacement for C, used for the same tasks.) You're correct that since most popular OSs are written in C, it's pratically impossible to write safe string manipulation code (and lots of other kinds of code, natch), in any language unless you trust the kernel code very strongly. This is just one more black mark against C, so far as I can see.
This is a non-problem, because if you don't trust the kernel code that strongly, you've got much, much bigger problems than this to deal with, such that arguments over string libraries in languages become piddly and irrelevant if you can't even trust that the kernel is managing your program's memory correctly, for example. This has nothing to do with C. Even if the kernel was written in something else it would still have to be a language that allows for memory twiddling because that's what the kernel DOES. It's very goal is inherently dangerous memory twiddling type of activity - scheduling traps for the CPU to interrupt itself and let the scheduler move programs about in memory, that sort of thing. In other words, the language chosen is not the cause of the fact that you have to trust the kernel developers to be good at memory twiddling. The task they are trying to do is the cause of that. C was chosen becaues it happens to be designed to be good at that task.
It's not that "Choosing C causes the kernel to do dangerous memory twiddling." It's "Having to do dangerous memory twiddling causes the kernel to be written in C."
And eventually everything becomes machine language, and that is where the unsafe untrustworthiness is at. So if you write an OS in a high-level language, you aren't removing the "have to trust something you didn't write" problem - you're just moving it to the language compiler's author instead of the kernel writer's author.
If you do in fact believe that any coder, however good, is capable of writing buggy string manipulation code, then the argument that C is safe if you know how to use it properly doesn't go through,
It's good that this isn't my argument, then. I don't have to believe that C is perfectly safe in order to deny your claim that C is unsafe so you should use something else. There *IS* a middle-ground between the two.
there is such a thing as fast enough for many, many applications which currently tend to be written in C/C++.
I invite you to re-read what I already wrote. I did say already that I favor a stratification of code such that the high-level code is in a high-level language and only the OS-interaction is in C. It's just that even things like web browsers still have to have OS interaction code in them.
Something like a web browser should probably have only about 10-20% of the code being in C. You're advocating for 0%, and all that does is push the problem down to another layer (a library). That doesn't get rid of it. You spend all this energy bitching about having to trust the kernel code, yet are perfectly willing to trust the library code that goes along with your high-level languages, which has the same sort of problem potential. This is not a consistent attitude.
2) I wasn't dictating anything.
Except for that whole insisting that programmers should stop using C thing you were doing, yes.
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In the short term, your stance makes sense, but I like to look at technology issues in a long-term view. To my way of thinking, the killing off of ideas is just as tragic as the killing off of people. Killing ideas eventually *leads to* killing people anyway, indirectly, so in a way it's actually more tragic (for example, knowing how to make and use penecillin has saved countless lives since that idea came to be. Had that idea been killed as it was budding, that would have indirectly killed a lot people down the road.)
This might sound like a non-sequitor side topic, but it's not. The notion that individuals no longer have the right to tinker and experiment in a lot of fields is very tragic because it is killing off new ideas before they have their chance to bud. Keep it up long enough and the next generations will become more and more ignorant.
Trying to safeguard a technology by hiding it behind closed doors so only a select few know how it works is only a short-term benefit to a company. In the long term (after a generation has passed), it actually retards the technology and might even stifle it to death.
Ideas die if they are not allowed to spread. That is why allowing hobbiests access to information is of vital importance, and that is why it is vital that common people have the freedom to understand and use new technology as it appears. And, no I don't mean people just using technology as a consumer, but also as inventors and a scientists.
If you like technology, you should hate stifling information behind closed doors.
1. Even with the same exact font (blocks of type) being used, one letter 'A' and the next letter 'A' could look different enough to confuse an OCR program, due to blotchy ink or blotchy paper, like so:2. Also, the spacing between letters was not as uniform, which would con fuse an OCR pro gram into B reaking words at in con vein ientplaces.
3. And, as the other pofter mentioned, theref the ditterent ftyle ot fymbolf they ufed to ufe.
Why would it be any different just because it's online?
In the online world, it is completely impossible to show somebody something without similtaneously giving them a copy of that same something. If the library shows you a html version of the copyrighted work, then it had to do so by sending you the contents of that work as a second digital copy, independant of the copy that's on their hard drive. If the library shows you a GIF image of the copyrighted work, then it hd to do so by sending you the contents of that work. No matter what scheme is used, no matter what technique for encryption is used, the fact of the matter is that at some point, even if just temporarily, your computer has to have its own copy in one way or another.
On the other hand, if I show you a physical book, this doesn't cause two seperate copies of the book to appear.
Unless the online library is willing to delete their copy (even from backups and from the hard drive) while you have your copy (and then trust you to send it back to them when you are done or pay them for it if you lose it), then there cannot be a working analogy between online and physical libraries as far as copyright law goes. Even someone not intending to make use of their copy is still technically breaking copyright law every time they look at a copyrighted work. Your browser's cache is filled with copyright violations if you've ever visited any website with any copyrighted content recently (which is most people who surf the web, probably).
The problem is that the original law was not written with this technology in mind, and the attempts to update it are written by people who just don't understand what they're doing, don't understand how the technology works, and aren't listening to those who do, and instead are listening to those with a vested interest in lying to them about the issue. Hence we get laws that if interpreted literally would outlaw the entire world wide web, but then get enforced selectively. (ALWAYS a bad situation to be in, where it is nearly impossible to avoid violating a law - then the law becomes a means to randomly smack-down on people for whatever you wish to discriminate against them for.)
Idiot. (I am referring to your adovocating that site you linked to).
So, racism got worse because of teaching evolution, huh? So, shipping slaves from africa to the new world was somehow less racist than what came afterward??? Suuurrrrre.....
The problem I see with this isn't so much the loss of fun associated with driving, but the loss of freedom. I would ONLY favor an automated driving system if it did not do any of the following things:
1 - Require a centralized control or regularly downloaded from some centralized source in order to work properly (i.e. map data from a city's traffic management server, or something like that).
2 - Allow the government to effectively disable the car by remote (which would be easy if #1 was true - just mandate that only authorized vehicles could access the server).
3 - Become mandatory (or effectively mandatory by raising insurance rates to punitive levels for those who don't use it).
4 - Become a means of legistlated vendor lock-in for the previously established auto makers. (In much the same way that the DMCA is a legistlated vendor lock-in for previously established movie and music companies.) If cars that don't have these features are not allowed on main roads anymore, and to get the features approved requires a lot of red tape and is tied to some Intellectual Property of some sort, that effectively prevents any small competitor from trying to get started in the auto-industry, or any hobbiest trying to customize a car.
I like the technology, but given the government's unwillingness to consider the needs of the little guy, or the importance of a level playing field in business (and hobbies, dammit!), I say there is an extremely high likelyhood that this would be implemented in a way that will stifle freedom more than is minimally neccessary (I do understand that some small stifling of freedom is a natural unavoidable consequence of a denser population, but this will be implemented in such a way that it stifles it a lot more than it has to, I can guarantee it.)
The first Republican president in US history took a lot of pro-big-government actions. Ever heard of him? He was a guy called Lincoln. I have no idea where this urban myth that Republicans have an origin of being in favor of small government came from. Just like the Democrats, they've flipped back and forth on that issue. Their current shift back toward favoring big government is just the tail-end of a cycling phenomenon. There's nothing "neo" about "neo-cons". It's more like retro-cons from the 1800's.
A fine is a tax you pay for doing wrong and a tax is a fine you pay for doing all right.
And a state lottery is a tax you pay for being bad at math.
If you can't figure out how the EULAs that have become ubiquitous recently differ from actual real contracts, then you are either in your teens or 20's, or stupid.
Then it would be impossible to ever buy products that require a service to be up and running for them to work, like cable-ready TV's, or satellite radios, or an online RPG game, or a cable modem. All the services that those products are used with come with a disclaimer saying the provider reserves the right to change the terms of service at a later date without asking first, and that little clause is ALL that is legally required to make changes like the kind TIVO is making. In other words, there is no such thing as a service provider that you can be guaranteed will continue to provide the same service tomorrow they are providing today. You are acting like there is an alternative to switch to. There isn't. The only alternative is to never use any new technology and remain stuck in the 1980's.
What makes commercials so annoying isn't that you are being advertised to, but that you are being advertised to INSTEAD of doing what you want, and you have to sit there and wait and wait and wait to get back to the activity you were trying to do. If you hold in the fast forward button for 20 seconds, then a 20 second banner ad during that wouldn't be that annoying. But if the system slows down your fast forwarding so you have time to watch, say, a 1 minute commercial instead of spending just 20 seconds fast-forwarding, THEN customers will get pissed and leave in droves. If it doesn't change the rate of fast forwarding, AND it doesn't ruin functionality by obscuring too much of the screen, then I don't think there will be much customer backlash. (It would be annoying if you saw the ad INSTEAD of being able to see your place in the material you are fast-forwarding through. I'm assuming this will be a banner across the bottom or something like that, not something that obscures teh whole screen.)
Presumably you mean the fastest man-made object in relation to the solar system's frame of referece. (otherwise it is a harder question to answer because any object going in the same direction as the sun was drifting when it was launched will be going a heck of a lot faster than an object going in the opposite direction of which way the sun was drifting.) I don't know, for example, if the Voyager craft are headed in the same direction as the sun (in essence, blazing a trail in front of it), or if they are trailing behind it, or if they are flinging out perpendicular to it.
The republicans ideal is a small government.
Depends on what decade. Today? No. Ten years ago? Yes. Twenty years ago? Yes. 100 years ago? No.
Actually, no. Disney was responsible for funding Pixar's efforts on Toy Story when it was a bold new idea to do 100% computer animation, and for that they deserver credit. But beyond funding and doing a lot of the Producer legwork business, they weren't writing the story. They were casting the talent. They were publicising. But the story was written by Pixar. (They do know how to make good stories - see some of their shorts from the old animation festivals for proof of this.)
The Republican's ideal is not small government. The Democrat's ideal is not large government. They both keep flip-flopping on this issue depending entirely on who happens to be in power at the time. When one party has the control of the presidency and congress, that party will start enacting federalized big-government laws, regardless of which of the big two parties it is at the time. When one party does not have that control, then it will advocate leaving more decisions to a local level, because that is where they still can have power.
Remember that Lincoln was the first Republican president. I think it's safe to say he definately followed a policy of bigger government, at least relative to what his opponents were pushing for.
I'm of the opinion that the big/small government issue is always a smokescreen for what issue the politicians are really after. (In the example of Lincoln, he had a social agenda already, and I think he was using the big government, federalism issue as a mask for it, to get the country to follow along with it (people who say the civil war had nothing to do with slavery are convieniently ignoring what the mindset of the president who ordered the war was - he talked a lot about how it was only about the union, and only about federalism, but a peek at his writings from before he was elected makes it quite clear that he was an abolitionist to the very core, and I have to think this was a major influence on his decisions. A lot of the terrible deeds he authorized were probably cases of becoming fanatical enough about the cause that he started to think the ends justified the means no matter what.) )
But, in any case, regardless of whether you agree with my assesment of Lincoln's motives or not, the point is that, NO, it is not true to claim that smaller government is a Republican ideal.
Ah, The joy of Ogle. Get your DVD software from some east european country. Buy your console player from some other country. Since, except in a few rare cases, trying to contact your senator as a concerned citizen doesn't do anything, I think the only way to fight this stuff is to pit company versus company, and let them fight and lobby. While the MPAA might like restrictive playback devices, I'm sure that hardware companies that are losing sales of their consoles because of this crap would be opposed to these rules.
That's really the only "voting" power the public has - vote with your wallet. But make sure to TELL these companies every time you chose a different product, exactly why you did so. "I would have bought your player, but since I wanted one that isn't deliberately crippled, I had to buy one that was made to be sold outside the stupid laws your industry has pushed through the US government. Rest assured that the DMCA is fully responsible for the fact that you lost my sale today."
Personally, I can't wait until all these repressive measures are put in place and the United States can finally implode and leave the rest of the world in peace.
The problem is, that through the magic of selective enforcement, the government is perfectly capable of keeping the country running even with laws on the books that would cause implosions if actually enforced uniformly. If enforced everywhere, this law would make the entire entertainment industry implode. But rest assured, it will only be enforced when and where the industry wants it to be.
There is already a divergence from the way things used to work, even in how it has gone so far. You didn't used to have to wait for a judge's ruling to decide whether or not it it was okay to be told what investigation it is that has taken hold of your property. It's one thing to say "Your property is being held because of the such-and-such versus so-and-so investigation, and that's all I can say", but what they did here was to say, "It's being held because of an investigation. No really, honestly. Trust us. There's an investigation of some sort involving terrorism in some way, and no, we won't tell you which one it allegedly is."
Can I live in your imaginary world? The scenario you describe is a lot nicer than the one that actually occured.
I said nothing about the validity of the claims made by the government,
The instant you tell people there is nothing to worry about (which you DID do), then you have spoken in favor of the validity of those claims.
the notion that C pointers are some direct representation of actual hardware pointers is a bit of a myth, since they abstract away from segmentation/paging and so on.
The C lanaguage does NOT do that. The OS does. If your program runs on top of an OS that does segmentation/paging and so on, then *ANY* such program, written in *ANY* language, is still going to be one level removed from the hardware due to segmentation/paging. It *must* be that way or else the OS has no memory protection. (Any OS that does segmentation or paging has to do so in a manner that will work on ANY generic program, written in ANY language, from shell scripts all the way down to machine-language.)
But, if you're writing the OS kernel itself, then that's not true anymore - you *can* (and must) get down to pointers on raw hardware. It is entirely possible in C to have pointers to raw hardware addresses, if you are writing a program that is not running on top of a protected memory OS. (for example, a vending-machine embedded program, or the linux kernel itself).
There is actually very little that has to be done in direct assembly code in the kernel. If you tried writing it in a higher level language that doesn't let you use pointers, there would have to be MORE assembly code.
And that is the irony is that if you do what you suggest. Write the kernel in a high-level language and you end up with MORE dangerous code, not less, because despite how dangerous C can be with this stuff, assembly is much worse, and not using a middle-level language like C means even more stuff has to be done in a low-level language like assembly than is done that way now.
Well, you keep telling me what your argument isn't but I (honestly) can't work out what it is.
C is unsafe, yes. But that's becuase it manipulates memory exactly how you ask it to, and lets you shoot yourself in the foot. But that is not a sufficient reason to stop using it, because some tasks need to be approached that way, like writing a kernel, or passing byte buffers around as is often done in network programming.
C is a middle-ground between assembly code and a high-level langauge. Until such middle-ground tasks for which it is optimal dissapear, there is still a need to have it around.
not to be part of the Kyoto treaty despite being only 4% of the population yet producing 25% of the worlds pollution.
Pollution is caused by industry just as much, if not more, than it is to population. That's what's wrong with the Kyoto treaty. It doesn't take that into account. The USA produces a disproportionately large amount of pollution because it produces a disproprotionately large amount of commerce. Anyone buying any US product in any foreign country is contributing to US pollution indirectly, just as much as someone living here is. Don't get me wrong, the US does need to be more careful with production methods, and implement better pollution controls, but the Kyoto treaty's methods would only work if the US became a less efficient producer, and produce less commerce per capita. Why, in American politics, do I have to pick between people with no heart who don't care about environmental issues, or people with no brain who care about the environment but don't have a clue about basic science or economics? (For example, an intelligent environmentalist should *favor* nuclear power.)
Law enforcement can't just come and take a computer randomly from a company or person. They have to get a warrant from a judge to do so.
Not true anymore. Welcome to life under the PATRIOT Act. Now they merely have to *claim* it has something to do with terrorism (like they are doing here) and all those pesky little problems for the law enforcers go away. They don't even have to prove it has something to do with terrorism, just claim it.
It is the government's position that intellectual property is in fact actual property, at least when deciding it favor of copyright and patent holders under even the most tenuous links. If that attitude is to be consistent, then that means the data stored on the hard drive is a seperate piece of property from the hard drive itself.
So, if Uncle Sam wants to take something of yours all he has to do is claim it's part of an ongoing investigation and you aren't allowed to say anything more about it? What if you aren't convinced it actually is part of an investigation? Nope. Nothing to see - just move along and pretend nothing bad is happening like a good little citizen.
As far as closeness to the hardware is concerned, basically all that distinguishes O'Caml and C is that O'Caml is GC'd.
Then I'll have to check it out. It sounds useful (I like GC, but hate a lot of other features of high level languages, and I do recognize that despite the bad rep it has, that GC is not the cause of the slowness of high level languages - that's a bad rep dating back to lisp machines that had really slow GC implementations). But, I still have to wonder about this: You claim O'Caml is just as close to the hardware as C except for having GC, but then went on to say that it doesn't have the pointer issues of C. Those are incompatable statements. You need pointers to be close to the hardware. Imagine trying to write a kernel in a language that doesn't let you move chunks of memory around as you wish. (I'm not denying that it sounds like a good language. I'm denying that it could ever be a drop-in replacement for C, used for the same tasks.)
You're correct that since most popular OSs are written in C, it's pratically impossible to write safe string manipulation code (and lots of other kinds of code, natch), in any language unless you trust the kernel code very strongly. This is just one more black mark against C, so far as I can see.
This is a non-problem, because if you don't trust the kernel code that strongly, you've got much, much bigger problems than this to deal with, such that arguments over string libraries in languages become piddly and irrelevant if you can't even trust that the kernel is managing your program's memory correctly, for example. This has nothing to do with C. Even if the kernel was written in something else it would still have to be a language that allows for memory twiddling because that's what the kernel DOES. It's very goal is inherently dangerous memory twiddling type of activity - scheduling traps for the CPU to interrupt itself and let the scheduler move programs about in memory, that sort of thing. In other words, the language chosen is not the cause of the fact that you have to trust the kernel developers to be good at memory twiddling. The task they are trying to do is the cause of that. C was chosen becaues it happens to be designed to be good at that task.
It's not that "Choosing C causes the kernel to do dangerous memory twiddling." It's "Having to do dangerous memory twiddling causes the kernel to be written in C."
And eventually everything becomes machine language, and that is where the unsafe untrustworthiness is at. So if you write an OS in a high-level language, you aren't removing the "have to trust something you didn't write" problem - you're just moving it to the language compiler's author instead of the kernel writer's author.
If you do in fact believe that any coder, however good, is capable of writing buggy string manipulation code, then the argument that C is safe if you know how to use it properly doesn't go through,
It's good that this isn't my argument, then. I don't have to believe that C is perfectly safe in order to deny your claim that C is unsafe so you should use something else. There *IS* a middle-ground between the two.
there is such a thing as fast enough for many, many applications which currently tend to be written in C/C++.
I invite you to re-read what I already wrote. I did say already that I favor a stratification of code such that the high-level code is in a high-level language and only the OS-interaction is in C. It's just that even things like web browsers still have to have OS interaction code in them.
Something like a web browser should probably have only about 10-20% of the code being in C. You're advocating for 0%, and all that does is push the problem down to another layer (a library). That doesn't get rid of it. You spend all this energy bitching about having to trust the kernel code, yet are perfectly willing to trust the library code that goes along with your high-level languages, which has the same sort of problem potential. This is not a consistent attitude.
2) I wasn't dictating anything.
Except for that whole insisting that programmers should stop using C thing you were doing, yes.