well.. saruman doesn't matter from the perspective of the war anymore at that point.
Not true. He has one more BIG thing to do that got cut. He drops the Palantir to the group during that parley at Orthanc. Without that scene, the good guys never pick up the Palantir, which means Sauron never sees a hobbit's face in it, which means one of the major distractions that tricked him into looking for the ring in the wrong place never happened. That is relevant to the war effort (which, the entire thing, is a diversion to keep Sauron from looking right under his nose at Mordor where the ring is really going.)
The Scouring of the Shire is perfectly in place, you are right there - but that doesn't mean Tolkein always made that decision correctly. Tom Bombadil was totally out of place plotwise and should not have been part of the story. Also, It was a Very Bad Idea for Tolkein to insert all those long song lyrics when in book form you don't get them with any accompanying music so they just look like tedious poetry - especially since they referred to events and people the reader had no clue about. Much of what happened in LOTR seemed like randomness because the reasons it's happening are embedded in a history of the world that the reader wasn't privy to.
The Scouring of the Shire is in place as the climax because LoTR is not a story about battles and armies. It's a story about the ending of the age of magic and the starting of the age of "normalcy" - and the "de-magicking" of the hobbits' home is the part he focused on. The transition as they were going to become more human-like and less "hobbity" was visible to the reader in that part, both as the show of how much the 4 main hobbits had changed, and the final trailing off as the ones touched by the ring all feel like they aren't part of this less magic, more mundane world anymore and they have to leave just like the elves did.
All in all, it makes sense to end the second movie where it did.
Agreed - but it makes no sense to leave off any sort of "end" for such a main character as Sarumon. The scouring of the Shire would not be necessary for Sarumon to have some kind of ending. Just showing the scene where he parleys with the group and tosses down the Palantir would have been enough. There are many cases where it makes sense why the movies had to do things differently than the books - especially in pacing and timing (in the books battles that last days are described tersely in a few pages. In movie form they have to take up more screen time or they don't feel to the audience like they are big battles.) But, this is NOT such a case. In BOTH movie and book form, you shouldn't introduce a character, give him a lot of development time, and then never wrap-up his part in the story in any way.
No, no, no. It just has endless appendices (sp?) that no one reads.
No. The entire 6-book series ends with an appendix that refers to the whole seres. That it ended up bound in the third volume is a decision that came AFTER the text was written and fully edited. It was a publishing decision to divide the story into three volumes. So *YES* the third volume is in fact shorter (book 5 and book 6). The appendix is not part of the the Return of the King - it's part of the entire series, physically stuck into the last volume because that's where there was room for it while keeping a similar page count for all three volumes.
The greatest of the Elvish powers are destroyed with the one ring, and with that they loose their havens of Lothlorien and rivendell.
In all fairness to Peter Jackson, even TOLKEIN didn't really do a good job of fitting all that in to LoTR. Most of that you get as backstory in the APPENDIX, and in subsequently released "history texts" like the Silmarillion. In the mainline text of the 3 novels, Tolkein showed that the elves are going to have to leave middle earth and head over the sea, but the reader has no real clue why. When I first read it as a 12-year old kid, that really annoyed me. It angered me that the author decided I, the reader, wasn't allowed to have a happy ending and so he had to throw in this exodus of elves for (what appeared at the time to be) no apparent reason. That the ring's destruction is the cause of this (and that thusly the elves are making a *BIG* sacrifice in allowing it to be destroyed) is not known to the reader from just reading the main text straight through. Had Tolkien covered that angle better, then it would have transformed that aspect of the story from a pointless moment of angst into the moment of quiet heroism and sacrifice it was supposed to be.
It's like the encounter with Tom Bombadil. I'm *glad* Jackson cut that part. It was an ugly wart on the side of the story who's only purpose was to make it take longer to get to Bree. It was Frodo who saved the group from the Barrow-downs by fighting (an aspect they should NOT have cut, because without it Frodo looks like more of a wuss who never stands up and fights) All Bombadil really did was just guide them direction-wise when they were a little lost and couldn't find the road.
I can understand that if you leave out the scouring of the shire, then you also cut out Saruman's part entirely from Return of the King, and that there wasn't time to cover that part. What bothers me about this more is that you never really see that Saruman is defeated in the TT movie (although I haven't seen the extended release of TT yet, so maybe it was in there) After Isengard is flooded and Ent'ed to smithereens, there's still the part where the group parleys with Saruman (and the audience learns of his smoothtalking skills, and, more importantly plot wise, the palantir is dropped and Sauron sees "a hobbit" in it, and is thusly decieved about the ring's whereabouts. It's the cutting of THIS instance of Sauruman that I am most annoyed at. It shows that he is truly defeated, even if they do leave him stuck locked up in the tower and can't get to him - and it would have been a chance to hear Christopher Lee play the smooth-talking "reasonable" evil guy, which would have really rocked.
At the end if TT, I just assumed that the reason we hadn't seen that part yet was the same reason we didn't see Shelob - it was pushed forward into the third movie. Now that I see it won't be, I'm a bit confused by Peter Jackson's decision (as confused as I was by his addition of Faramir taking a long time to change his mind and let Frodo go, dragging him all the way to Osgiloth in the process - That didn't add anything to the story and there's no reason to ADD material to the story when it's already impossible to fit everything in and stuff is being cut all over the place. Those were valuable minutes of footage to fit under the 3 hour cap - minutes that could have been spent on something plot related, like the cut Saruman scenes.
Okay, that fixed it. From your fixed URL, your post said:
First, ars provides this ability, but I have yet to see the catastrophic consequences that everyone keeps claiming- it reminds me of Chicken Little.
Second, it's not that difficult to devise a scheme that will allow for editing, but deal with the karma whores. For example: allow the editing of a post for only the first 10 minutes after posting. Second, any changes to the post result in a forfeiture of any moderation received up to that point, unless the moderation is negative.
Interestingly, comments rarely get rated within the first 10 minutes anyway (few, if any, of mine have), so this is almost a non-issue- just the same, I've proposed a safeguard that will prevent the kind abuse you're talking about.
Either I'm missing something here, or it really isn't rocket science after all.
What you're missing is that moderation has absolutely nothing to do with the problem that I (and the person in that post you were replying to in that article 7429261) raised. It's not about moderation. It's about rewriting the record of what someone posted. If you say Foo, and I reply Bar (in the next 10 minutes), then you change your original post Foo to AntiFoo, then you have just effectively inverted what MY response means, putting words in my mouth.
Putting a limit of 10 minutes on it is insufficient. The only fair method would be to prevent it from appearing until after you state that you are done with all edits (like it doesn't show up in anyone else's view of the thread until after those 10 minutes have passed, so other people cannot comment on it until it is finalized.) But what this "fix" does is essentially transform your posting into an atomic action as far as the rest of the viewers can tell. During the 'critical section' of those 10 minutes, nobody should be able to reply. The problem I have with that potential solution is that, while it would work, it isn't any different conceptually from just holding your browser open to the post editing form, hitting preview/edit/preview/edit, and then waiting 10 minutes and hitting submit.
The only way to make the abilty to retroactively edit a post a relevant feature is to make it an unfair one. Any solution which keeps it fair also keeps it irrelevant since it's then an atomic operation no different than just waiting a while and hitting "submit".
how is software in this case any different from, say, a written novel.
If the written novel YOU wrote is in English, and the one you think might have copied parts of it is also in English, it's easy. If it's in some weird language that nobody you know can speak, but there exists a translator program that can 'babelfish' it into German, then babelfish that into French, then babelfish that into Japaneese, then babelfish that into English, and then apply a replacement code that remaps all the vocabulary words to code words according to a mapping file, and THEN you still think it would easy and practical to read that to discover if it's the same text, then we are at an impasse because I would think you are quite deluded.
Decompiling to discover copyright violations will only work if you ALREADY KNOW exactly where to start looking in the binary. And what's the difference between reading an entire novel to check for matches against an original source and reading an entire decompiled program to check for matches against an original source? One is a task you might be able to actually finish in your lifetime.
True geeks will remain unaffected as their favorite homegrown distro will still have the same level of commercial applications it does now--virtually none compared to Windows.
In a parliamentary system, the people don't vote for the person who ends up being PM. They party with the majority members gets their reps together and they "form the government" (which means selecting a PM and cabinet posts from among their members) without further input from the voters. That is not voting for the person. That's voting for the party and hoping you like whom they pick.
The fact that there's nothing to "suspect violation" with in the first place without decompiling the code. It works to prove it if you already have good enough suspicion to devote hours of work to checking it. It doesn't work as a means of discovering that there's a reason to devote that effort in the first place. (If you can see the source, you can automate the search for possible suspicious sections, and someone familiar with the code can come across a suspiciously similar bit of code somewhere else purely by accident when he was trying to do something else. That sort of accidental, or automated discovery won't work with a compiled binary. You have to have some OTHER reason first to susped a similarity, and then know just what part of the binary it's in. (Remembering that with a decompiled binary, you won't be able to just search for some relevant strings to get you to the right section of the file where the code is. Unless it was compiled with symbol table data (for debugging purposes, for example), none of the identifiers will be the same. You have to FIRST know just where to look, and then begin the painstaking process of walking that section of code by hand and seeing if it's suspiciously simliar to the code you are checking it against.
Even then it's not enough. As my example of a word macro. Even if you know it's an allegedly passive type of document (like a word.doc) that STILL doesn't mean it's safe.
You misunderstand me. Yes, there's a popup that asks if you want to view the attachment in another program. But that popup doesn't know the difference between "view this Word document" and "run this macro inside this Word document". The 'without user intervention' refers to the fact that the user cannot tell if the attachment is really a "passive" one or not - he doesn't know if he's "viewing" or "running" it.
True, so do you expect people to start decompiling all the commercial binaries out there and then analizing their patterns to see if they do the same thing as your (hypothetical) open source project? Even with decompilers, the binary code is well hidden enough to avoid discovery unless you know precisely where to start looking for a suspected violation first. And keep in mind that totally different source code can result in the same binary, since, for example, the following two might end up mapping to the same machine language:
for( foo; bar; baz ) {
x = x + 1;
y = 2*x; }
foo; while(bar) {
y = ++x*2;
baz; }
You can't extract the exact source code out of a compiled binary, not even to the point of having the same grammer patterns with different identifiers.
That's a valid point to make, but it was deceptive to label the UN as representative. It's representative of the governments that exist in the world, but not of the population of the world. I still have a big problem with the notion that any country, no matter how small it's population, gets the same vote. (I have the same problem with the US electoral college, which is like it is for almost exactly the same reason - it was devised at a time when the member states were more autonomous than today.)
Did your government tell you who was going to be picked for UN representative when you were voting? Didn't think so. (Actually this is a problem I have with the parliamentary system in general. You don't vote for *a person*. You vote for a *party* and hope that the people who claim to adhere to the ideals of that party really mean it, and hope that whoever ends up being Prime Minister is in-line with what you were thinking of when you picked a party to vote on.
But even ignoring that for a moment, do all countries pick their ambassador in a fashion which is influenced by the population? No. There exist monarchies (not fake ceremonial leftover monarchies like in Britain, but real, actual monarchies where the kings and queens run things), and dictatorships. It's not a democracy when ambassadors are picked by a multitude of governments, some of which are beholden to their populations, and some of which are not.
Well, they get voted for as directly as the US President.
On paper, yes. In practice, no. When you vote for an "elector" to pick the president, those electors are technically not required to vote the way the state's population asked them to, but if they ever tried staged a "coup" by picking someone completely different, it would never stick. When the ambassador to the UN is picked by the government, the public wasn't involved at all, and had no clue who it was even going to be until it's announced.
Sure. How about the very first one - that somehow the needs of the geek won't be affected at all by this since it would be done to woo businesses. Bull. If there's one standard distro only, that affects everyone, not just the business user, as development effort will start to ignore the other distros given enough time.
The ability to edit posts is a very bad idea in a forum where people can reply do what you posted.
Don't give people the ability to falsify the record of the debate. Picture this:
"I think Hitler was a bad guy."
"I agree"
"I wholeheartedly agree"
"Yeah, me too."
Now you go change the original post, so it now looks like:
"I think Hitler was great."
"I agree"
"I wholeheartedly agree"
"Yeah, me too."
(I don't even like the fact that the signature isn't embedded into the text of the post. It lets you say something in what looks like the last line of the post, and then remove it from record later, rendering anyone's response rather silly looking if they replied to it.)
Microsoft's coders as anything but sloppy or lazy. That "Microsoft doesn't care about security" is a casualism that many outside Microsoft have come to accept because of the confluence of Windows security flaws, simple repetition of the allegation, and (as I see it) envy.
If you think the allegations of bad security of Microsoft are all about sloppy coding, then you haven't been paying attention. You can have the best checking for coding flaws, check the bounds of all input buffers and all that, and still have horrible security. The bad security of Microsoft products comes from decisions that are out of the coders' hands. The basic design decisions are where the flaws start - like choosing to make the running of attachments the default setting in an e-mail client - which is mainly a problem because the macro languages of content viewers like Word and Excel allow people to do things a macro language for an office tool should never be able to do - like open and write files to the disk in a manner outside the document's normal File/Save method. The decision not to sandbox the office tool macros is not a coder's fault. It's a very high level design decision, and one that's fed by marketting - it makes the tool more powerful at the expense of security.
The ugly truth about computer security is that it's a pain in the ass. It gets in the way of making programs be easy and intuitive. Microsoft consistently chooses to place the glitter and showoff factor at a higher priority than security. If something is insecure, but it makes the system seem nifty, they'll put it in.
My question was posed in the generic sense. Jboss and apache both use CVS, but {generic OSS project} and {generic other project} don't necessarily do so. It's something I've wondered about ever since I first read the GPL. If one group makes their code public, and the other does not (sound like anyone we sco? er, I mean "know'?) Then the one that has the hidden code can copy the open code, and nobody would ever know aobut it. How do you protect against that?
Only fools and crackpot leftists take representative democracy seriously.
What does that have to do with the UN? Here's two ways off the top of my head I can say the UN is not a representative democracy:
1 - Did you vote for your ambassador to the UN? were you offered the chance to? Didn't think so.
2- Even if people got to vote for their UN representative, remember the bitching about how it was unfar for Bush to win the 2000 election on Florida's results when the popular vote nationwide was agaisnt him? That's a case of taking the state's vote as being all-or-nothing and making disproportionate representation that gives people in less populous states more say in the election. (as the system was designed to do). The very same thing, but on an even larger scale, happens in the UN. In the general assembly each person in the US is represented by one 280 millionth of a vote, while each person in Syria gets one 16 millionth of a vote, and each person in Finland gets one 5 millionth of a vote.
more fully participated in International Democracy (embodied by the UN)?
It's an interesting alternate universe in which you live, where the UN embodies international democracy. So, tell me - who'd you vote for for UN representative from your country? Oh, wait - you didn't get to vote on that position? Really? Okay, then how is the UN an international democracy?
Slashdot Mirror
Hobbocentric crap everyone's getting so upset about.
According to the book ITSELF, it's primarily concerned with hobbits.
well.. saruman doesn't matter from the perspective of the war anymore at that point.
Not true. He has one more BIG thing to do that got cut. He drops the Palantir to the group during that parley at Orthanc. Without that scene, the good guys never pick up the Palantir, which means Sauron never sees a hobbit's face in it, which means one of the major distractions that tricked him into looking for the ring in the wrong place never happened. That is relevant to the war effort (which, the entire thing, is a diversion to keep Sauron from looking right under his nose at Mordor where the ring is really going.)
The Scouring of the Shire is perfectly in place, you are right there - but that doesn't mean Tolkein always made that decision correctly. Tom Bombadil was totally out of place plotwise and should not have been part of the story. Also, It was a Very Bad Idea for Tolkein to insert all those long song lyrics when in book form you don't get them with any accompanying music so they just look like tedious poetry - especially since they referred to events and people the reader had no clue about. Much of what happened in LOTR seemed like randomness because the reasons it's happening are embedded in a history of the world that the reader wasn't privy to.
The Scouring of the Shire is in place as the climax because LoTR is not a story about battles and armies. It's a story about the ending of the age of magic and the starting of the age of "normalcy" - and the "de-magicking" of the hobbits' home is the part he focused on. The transition as they were going to become more human-like and less "hobbity" was visible to the reader in that part, both as the show of how much the 4 main hobbits had changed, and the final trailing off as the ones touched by the ring all feel like they aren't part of this less magic, more mundane world anymore and they have to leave just like the elves did.
All in all, it makes sense to end the second movie where it did.
Agreed - but it makes no sense to leave off any sort of "end" for such a main character as Sarumon. The scouring of the Shire would not be necessary for Sarumon to have some kind of ending. Just showing the scene where he parleys with the group and tosses down the Palantir would have been enough. There are many cases where it makes sense why the movies had to do things differently than the books - especially in pacing and timing (in the books battles that last days are described tersely in a few pages. In movie form they have to take up more screen time or they don't feel to the audience like they are big battles.) But, this is NOT such a case. In BOTH movie and book form, you shouldn't introduce a character, give him a lot of development time, and then never wrap-up his part in the story in any way.
No, no, no. It just has endless appendices (sp?) that no one reads.
No. The entire 6-book series ends with an appendix that refers to the whole seres. That it ended up bound in the third volume is a decision that came AFTER the text was written and fully edited. It was a publishing decision to divide the story into three volumes. So *YES* the third volume is in fact shorter (book 5 and book 6). The appendix is not part of the the Return of the King - it's part of the entire series, physically stuck into the last volume because that's where there was room for it while keeping a similar page count for all three volumes.
The greatest of the Elvish powers are destroyed with the one ring, and with that they loose their havens of Lothlorien and rivendell.
In all fairness to Peter Jackson, even TOLKEIN didn't really do a good job of fitting all that in to LoTR. Most of that you get as backstory in the APPENDIX, and in subsequently released "history texts" like the Silmarillion. In the mainline text of the 3 novels, Tolkein showed that the elves are going to have to leave middle earth and head over the sea, but the reader has no real clue why. When I first read it as a 12-year old kid, that really annoyed me. It angered me that the author decided I, the reader, wasn't allowed to have a happy ending and so he had to throw in this exodus of elves for (what appeared at the time to be) no apparent reason. That the ring's destruction is the cause of this (and that thusly the elves are making a *BIG* sacrifice in allowing it to be destroyed) is not known to the reader from just reading the main text straight through.
Had Tolkien covered that angle better, then it would have transformed that aspect of the story from a pointless moment of angst into the moment of quiet heroism and sacrifice it was supposed to be.
It's like the encounter with Tom Bombadil. I'm *glad* Jackson cut that part. It was an ugly wart on the side of the story who's only purpose was to make it take longer to get to Bree. It was Frodo who saved the group from the Barrow-downs by fighting (an aspect they should NOT have cut, because without it Frodo looks like more of a wuss who never stands up and fights) All Bombadil really did was just guide them direction-wise when they were a little lost and couldn't find the road.
I can understand that if you leave out the scouring of the shire, then you also cut out Saruman's part entirely from Return of the King, and that there wasn't time to cover that part. What bothers me about this more is that you never really see that Saruman is defeated in the TT movie (although I haven't seen the extended release of TT yet, so maybe it was in there) After Isengard is flooded and Ent'ed to smithereens, there's still the part where the group parleys with Saruman (and the audience learns of his smoothtalking skills, and, more importantly plot wise, the palantir is dropped and Sauron sees "a hobbit" in it, and is thusly decieved about the ring's whereabouts. It's the cutting of THIS instance of Sauruman that I am most annoyed at. It shows that he is truly defeated, even if they do leave him stuck locked up in the tower and can't get to him - and it would have been a chance to hear Christopher Lee play the smooth-talking "reasonable" evil guy, which would have really rocked.
At the end if TT, I just assumed that the reason we hadn't seen that part yet was the same reason we didn't see Shelob - it was pushed forward into the third movie. Now that I see it won't be, I'm a bit confused by Peter Jackson's decision (as confused as I was by his addition of Faramir taking a long time to change his mind and let Frodo go, dragging him all the way to Osgiloth in the process - That didn't add anything to the story and there's no reason to ADD material to the story when it's already impossible to fit everything in and stuff is being cut all over the place. Those were valuable minutes of footage to fit under the 3 hour cap - minutes that could have been spent on something plot related, like the cut Saruman scenes.
What you're missing is that moderation has absolutely nothing to do with the problem that I (and the person in that post you were replying to in that article 7429261) raised. It's not about moderation. It's about rewriting the record of what someone posted. If you say Foo, and I reply Bar (in the next 10 minutes), then you change your original post Foo to AntiFoo, then you have just effectively inverted what MY response means, putting words in my mouth.
Putting a limit of 10 minutes on it is insufficient. The only fair method would be to prevent it from appearing until after you state that you are done with all edits (like it doesn't show up in anyone else's view of the thread until after those 10 minutes have passed, so other people cannot comment on it until it is finalized.) But what this "fix" does is essentially transform your posting into an atomic action as far as the rest of the viewers can tell. During the 'critical section' of those 10 minutes, nobody should be able to reply. The problem I have with that potential solution is that, while it would work, it isn't any different conceptually from just holding your browser open to the post editing form, hitting preview/edit/preview/edit, and then waiting 10 minutes and hitting submit.
The only way to make the abilty to retroactively edit a post a relevant feature is to make it an unfair one. Any solution which keeps it fair also keeps it irrelevant since it's then an atomic operation no different than just waiting a while and hitting "submit".
how is software in this case any different from, say, a written novel.
If the written novel YOU wrote is in English, and the one you think might have copied parts of it is also in English, it's easy. If it's in some weird language that nobody you know can speak, but there exists a translator program that can 'babelfish' it into German, then babelfish that into French, then babelfish that into Japaneese, then babelfish that into English, and then apply a replacement code that remaps all the vocabulary words to code words according to a mapping file, and THEN you still think it would easy and practical to read that to discover if it's the same text, then we are at an impasse because I would think you are quite deluded.
Decompiling to discover copyright violations will only work if you ALREADY KNOW exactly where to start looking in the binary. And what's the difference between reading an entire novel to check for matches against an original source and reading an entire decompiled program to check for matches against an original source? One is a task you might be able to actually finish in your lifetime.
True geeks will remain unaffected as their favorite homegrown distro will still have the same level of commercial applications it does now--virtually none compared to Windows.
False. "Commerical applications" != "applications" != "enterprice applications"
In a parliamentary system, the people don't vote for the person who ends up being PM. They party with the majority members gets their reps together and they "form the government" (which means selecting a PM and cabinet posts from among their members) without further input from the voters. That is not voting for the person. That's voting for the party and hoping you like whom they pick.
Proportional representation == parliament.
I'm in awe of your arrogance.
What is so difficult here?
The fact that there's nothing to "suspect violation" with in the first place without decompiling the code. It works to prove it if you already have good enough suspicion to devote hours of work to checking it. It doesn't work as a means of discovering that there's a reason to devote that effort in the first place. (If you can see the source, you can automate the search for possible suspicious sections, and someone familiar with the code can come across a suspiciously similar bit of code somewhere else purely by accident when he was trying to do something else. That sort of accidental, or automated discovery won't work with a compiled binary. You have to have some OTHER reason first to susped a similarity, and then know just what part of the binary it's in. (Remembering that with a decompiled binary, you won't be able to just search for some relevant strings to get you to the right section of the file where the code is. Unless it was compiled with symbol table data (for debugging purposes, for example), none of the identifiers will be the same. You have to FIRST know just where to look, and then begin the painstaking process of walking that section of code by hand and seeing if it's suspiciously simliar to the code you are checking it against.
Even then it's not enough. As my example of a word macro. Even if you know it's an allegedly passive type of document (like a word .doc) that STILL doesn't mean it's safe.
You misunderstand me. Yes, there's a popup that asks if you want to view the attachment in another program. But that popup doesn't know the difference between "view this Word document" and "run this macro inside this Word document". The 'without user intervention' refers to the fact that the user cannot tell if the attachment is really a "passive" one or not - he doesn't know if he's "viewing" or "running" it.
True, so do you expect people to start decompiling all the commercial binaries out there and then analizing their patterns to see if they do the same thing as your (hypothetical) open source project? Even with decompilers, the binary code is well hidden enough to avoid discovery unless you know precisely where to start looking for a suspected violation first. And keep in mind that totally different source code can result in the same binary, since, for example, the following two might end up mapping to the same machine language:
for( foo; bar; baz )
{
x = x + 1;
y = 2*x;
}
foo;
while(bar)
{
y = ++x*2;
baz;
}
You can't extract the exact source code out of a compiled binary, not even to the point of having the same grammer patterns with different identifiers.
That's a valid point to make, but it was deceptive to label the UN as representative. It's representative of the governments that exist in the world, but not of the population of the world. I still have a big problem with the notion that any country, no matter how small it's population, gets the same vote. (I have the same problem with the US electoral college, which is like it is for almost exactly the same reason - it was devised at a time when the member states were more autonomous than today.)
Did your government tell you who was going to be picked for UN representative when you were voting? Didn't think so. (Actually this is a problem I have with the parliamentary system in general. You don't vote for *a person*. You vote for a *party* and hope that the people who claim to adhere to the ideals of that party really mean it, and hope that whoever ends up being Prime Minister is in-line with what you were thinking of when you picked a party to vote on.
But even ignoring that for a moment, do all countries pick their ambassador in a fashion which is influenced by the population? No. There exist monarchies (not fake ceremonial leftover monarchies like in Britain, but real, actual monarchies where the kings and queens run things), and dictatorships. It's not a democracy when ambassadors are picked by a multitude of governments, some of which are beholden to their populations, and some of which are not.
Well, they get voted for as directly as the US President.
On paper, yes. In practice, no. When you vote for an "elector" to pick the president, those electors are technically not required to vote the way the state's population asked them to, but if they ever tried staged a "coup" by picking someone completely different, it would never stick. When the ambassador to the UN is picked by the government, the public wasn't involved at all, and had no clue who it was even going to be until it's announced.
Feel free to tear my assertations apart.
Sure. How about the very first one - that somehow the needs of the geek won't be affected at all by this since it would be done to woo businesses. Bull. If there's one standard distro only, that affects everyone, not just the business user, as development effort will start to ignore the other distros given enough time.
(about your sig)
The ability to edit posts is a very bad idea in a forum where people can reply do what you posted.
Don't give people the ability to falsify the record of the debate. Picture this:
"I think Hitler was a bad guy."
"I agree"
"I wholeheartedly agree"
"Yeah, me too."
Now you go change the original post, so it now looks like:
"I think Hitler was great."
"I agree"
"I wholeheartedly agree"
"Yeah, me too."
(I don't even like the fact that the signature isn't embedded into the text of the post. It lets you say something in what looks like the last line of the post, and then remove it from record later, rendering anyone's response rather silly looking if they replied to it.)
If you think the allegations of bad security of Microsoft are all about sloppy coding, then you haven't been paying attention. You can have the best checking for coding flaws, check the bounds of all input buffers and all that, and still have horrible security. The bad security of Microsoft products comes from decisions that are out of the coders' hands. The basic design decisions are where the flaws start - like choosing to make the running of attachments the default setting in an e-mail client - which is mainly a problem because the macro languages of content viewers like Word and Excel allow people to do things a macro language for an office tool should never be able to do - like open and write files to the disk in a manner outside the document's normal File/Save method. The decision not to sandbox the office tool macros is not a coder's fault. It's a very high level design decision, and one that's fed by marketting - it makes the tool more powerful at the expense of security.
The ugly truth about computer security is that it's a pain in the ass. It gets in the way of making programs be easy and intuitive. Microsoft consistently chooses to place the glitter and showoff factor at a higher priority than security. If something is insecure, but it makes the system seem nifty, they'll put it in.
My question was posed in the generic sense. Jboss and apache both use CVS, but {generic OSS project} and {generic other project} don't necessarily do so. It's something I've wondered about ever since I first read the GPL. If one group makes their code public, and the other does not (sound like anyone we sco? er, I mean "know'?) Then the one that has the hidden code can copy the open code, and nobody would ever know aobut it. How do you protect against that?
Only fools and crackpot leftists take representative democracy seriously.
What does that have to do with the UN? Here's two ways off the top of my head I can say the UN is not a representative democracy:
1 - Did you vote for your ambassador to the UN? were you offered the chance to? Didn't think so.
2- Even if people got to vote for their UN representative, remember the bitching about how it was unfar for Bush to win the 2000 election on Florida's results when the popular vote nationwide was agaisnt him? That's a case of taking the state's vote as being all-or-nothing and making disproportionate representation that gives people in less populous states more say in the election. (as the system was designed to do). The very same thing, but on an even larger scale, happens in the UN. In the general assembly each person in the US is represented by one 280 millionth of a vote, while each person in Syria gets one 16 millionth of a vote, and each person in Finland gets one 5 millionth of a vote.
more fully participated in International Democracy (embodied by the UN)?
It's an interesting alternate universe in which you live, where the UN embodies international democracy. So, tell me - who'd you vote for for UN representative from your country? Oh, wait - you didn't get to vote on that position? Really? Okay, then how is the UN an international democracy?