Sounds like you live in central Illinois. Maybe Springfield (just a guess... I could probably pin it down by looking at Amtrak's website)? Maybe there's a bus line to St. Louis -- really, that's about the best you can hope for at that distance in a region that's so spread-out. The thing is, unless there are a lot of people making a common trip a train isn't any more efficient than a bunch of cars -- and if the train runs very infrequently so that it can be filled many would-be riders will just drive so they can depart and arrive at a more convenient time. Bus service can carry the same number of passengers with smaller granularity and less infrastructure (thus greater flexibility).
The point isn't to get people not to drive. The point is to make transportation efficient and convenient. There might incidentally be a direct Springfield-St. Louis link, but the reason the line would be built would be to serve very common trips between large cities that are too short for air travel to be efficient and too long for the current surface-level options to be convenient. In the midwest Chicago is an obvious choice for such a hub -- it has several large, regionally important cities at these distances (St. Louis, Minneapolis, Indianapolis, Detroit; Milwaukee is close enough that Amtrak already works pretty well, and the ridership reflects this). But if the system grew out you might also build a line between Indy and St. Louis (assuming there's a lot of business travel between them... I don't really know that), and more spoking out from these cities.
So the guy that says yes gets modded insightful and parent not only can't get any, but he gets the useless "Funny" mod and no karma bump. Truly there is no justice!
I wouldn't bother responding, but you're modded insightful, so...
I'm assuming you're saying this because the roads near you aren't safe to bike on. If you live on a road where you're not safe on a bike you're not going to be safe on one of these either. Probably less safe. It can go faster than a bike, but it's wider and less nimble.
If you don't have the cardiovascular endurance to make it any farther than the end of your driveway you have problems beyond transportation.
Sure, but if you do it during setup what happens if you replace the floppy drive in your computer? Or move the hard drive to a different computer entirely. Some of that could be detected, but it would be a lot of work for, as the MS dude said, something with a pretty small potential benefit.
Anyway, autorun sucks. So does media detection generally. We all know this. Especially all of us that run HAL on Linux but use programs that aren't aware of it. I thought my CD drive was broken for months before I figured out that HAL was just polling it while it was trying to play/burn CDs. When my girlfriend plugs her iPhone into her MacBook to charge it (I guess she doesn't have another charger) iPhoto opens right over the top of whatever else she's doing. How lame is that?
It wasn't ending a sentence in a preposition, it was "look like sloppy". You didn't end the sentence in a preposition, "do" is a verb.
In fact, none of your examples are ending sentences in prepositions either. While "on" and "out" can be prepositions in these cases you're using them as adverbs or adjectives (simply modifying "print", "point", and "radio"). Ending a sentence in a preposition might look like:
This is the table the radio was on. ("on" connects to "the radio" to "the table". A crude re-ordering is "This is the table on which the radio was", which sounds dumb. Rather, we'd say something like "The radio was on this table", although that would be a somewhat unnatural answer to certain questions.) What are you talking about? ("about" connects "talking" to "what". You might write, "You're talking about what?")
The rule isn't just about prepositions ending sentences, either, it's that a preposition should precede the rest of the prepositional phrase; the rule that it can't end a sentence is just a side effect of this. I've read, however, that the rule was really devised by American teachers with an unhealthy Latin obsession, and that people have been moving prepositions all over the place for centuries. I'm not really an expert on that, however... just a lowly computer programmer.
Murder is already more than killing someone illegally. It requires premeditation, which has to do with what the accused was thinking. You even referred to motive. Motive is really only important in crimes like murder that require intent and premeditation. If the charge is more like manslaughter motive is not so important; it's just a matter of the fact of who killed whom.
My previous paragraph is an oversimplification, is probably wrong in many places outside the US, and IANAL or anything... the point stands that the US legal system and most others do indeed distinguish between crimes on the basis of the mental state of the accused. You can come up with many reasons that it's right or wrong, but in the end it's a big part of our legal tradition, from homicide to copyright infringement to fouls in sports.
I generally agree that speed limits aren't evil and that people ought to follow them more. Just want to point out the amusing fact that on the road I used to drive home from work in Santa Clara, CA, the lights were timed so that if I drove the speed limit I hit the front end of several consecutive red lights on the way home. If I drove 5 over (average speed on the road was about 5 over) I usually got through them all.
Now I live in Chicago and bike much more than I drive. I hit the front end of red lights consistently everywhere. When I do drive in the city I feel like I have to brake less when I accelerate calmly and drive the limit, so maybe here the lights are timed right.
I agree somewhat -- there's a difference between committing a crime maliciously and committing one carelessly. But some things we do must be done with care, or else the danger to others is unacceptable. And people do die and are injured when care is not taken. Driving is like that. If you drive drunk or while talking on a cell phone (hands-free or not, as studies show it doesn't make much of a difference) or while fucking downloading a ringtone (as this one idiot did in central Illinois, ran onto the shoulder, killed a cyclist, and managed to only get community service) you are neglecting your responsibility in a very dangerous way. It's still a serious crime.
And, sure, the causes and solutions are different. But we're not talking about that, we're talking about severity. Drunk driving is severely irresponsible and I think it's perfectly acceptable to group people with such disregard to their responsibility with those who commit crimes deliberately.
The main argument for the use of DeCSS is that people have a right (regardless of what the government says) to decode the media they own. I think most people claiming that right claim it regardless of how hard it is, and regardless of disapproval for other actions of media companies in general.
On the other hand, the hackers involved controlled a botnet and ordered a DOS attack. They justified it only as retaliation for other actions by Estonia, and in the way you describe, which is indeed a very weak argument.
I'm not saying that arguers on/. never use arguments like the one you mention, but what you say is hardly the principle justification for use of DeCSS.
I haven't read what Neil Young has to say about this, but I think Apple would be a major culprit regardless of lossy data compression. That's because the explosion of portable music forces producers to mix for shitty earbuds and noisy environments, which means crazy EQ and insane dynamic compression. I'm more worried about that that I am about lossy compression, especially with VBR.
I agree on Unicode. Inline TeX support would be tough. TeX is a full programming language, and it's usually not considered a good idea to open up the servers to arbitrary code entered by posters. Even if the TeX code is executed such that it can't harm the system or any data, malicious users would have a new avenue to ramp up the server's CPU and RAM usage. Instead of inline TeX you'd need to choose a safe subset of TeX to implement and write a new, safe parser for it; probably one without programming capabilities.
At that point you might just be better off allowing MathML, although given the rather poor state of current browser rendering you might want to render it server-side by... well, maybe translating it to TeX, after imposing your size/complexity limits.
I'll grant that it would be cool and useful to be able to plop mathematical expressions into comments.
So because it's your car you could, say, drive on my lawn? On the sidewalks? Hint: it may be your car, but they aren't your roads. You might call them "your" roads, because your tax/toll money went toward them, but they're not your private property like your car is. They're a common good. So it's perfectly legitimate for the public to appoint a government that limits behavior on them. There's a more abstract common good, however, than just the physical road surface: it's the ability for people to get where they want quickly and safely. When you drive you make use of that good, just like I do (even though I usually do it on a bike or on foot), and similarly to what I do when I ride the trains and buses in my city. When people drive distracted, go much faster or slower than the average speed of traffic, cut too close when making maneuvers, and engage in many other behaviors that we usually deem illegal, they raise the rate of accidents on the road, increase their severity were they to occur, worsen surrounding traffic conditions, or some combination of these. And that is harm, whether simplistic libertarians can figure it out or not.
Which is not to say that all traffic laws (or laws in general) are good. Some of them might be unfair to certain groups of people, some of them might suck for everyone. All laws should be subject to discussion and scrutiny. But this idea that government has no right to restrict how you drive your car because it's your car is completely bogus.
One of the advantages of requiring a pre-sale signature to agree to a usage license is its inconvenience. Here's why. The big issue here is that most people that buy products with usage licenses have agreed to things that they don't understand, and of which they may not even be aware. The smaller issue is that these terms are usually onerous and some of them are unenforceable. Now, simply making people unambiguously aware of usage-license terms solves the first problem. And if people are aware that may put some pressure on companies to make the licenses something that people are likely to understand and consciously agree to. If it's also necessarily inconvenient to agree to onerous terms, there will be significantly more pressure on software makers, from consumers and retailers, to make the terms simpler and more consumer-friendly.
Here's the thing: there are lots of people in big cities. And most of them are really "little" people. But the specific needs of urban people are hardly mentioned in Presidential campaigns, and rural America is touted as "real" America. Why? Well, what are our 10 biggest urban areas? NYC, in a safe Democratic state. LA, in a safe Democratic state (at the moment... it was Republican not long ago). Chicago, in Illinois, once a battleground that recently has been solidly for the Dems (some suburbs in WI and IN, which tend to be closer to the middle, but not many). Dallas-Ft. Worth, in solidly Republican Texas. Philly, in battleground Pennsylvania (minus some of its suburbs). Houston, back in Texas. Miami, in wacky battleground Florida. D.C., solid blue but with many suburbs in Virginia, which was pretty much median this last cycle but usually more Republican. Atlanta, in Georgia, which was fairly close last election but far more Republican than the national average. Boston, which hardly needs discussion.
So two-and-a-half out of our ten biggest urban areas count in national politics. None out of the top four. The only reason you'd visit any big city in America save Philly, Miami, and D.C.'s Virginia suburbs is for fund-raising, and then you're only talking to the big-wigs of those cities. So the issues the politicians take on are skewed, not towards what's best for most people, but towards what's popular in a few states that tend towards the "political median". While those things generally pull politicians to the middle on major issues, it means they pander like crazy on things that will get them votes in these places (plus Iowa because of its early primary). What we need is policy that takes into account all the little people in our big cities. What we get is corn ethanol. I'll take a popular vote, please.
First, neither Javascript nor Flash has a security record to brag about. If you're just dealing with HTML security is simple: watch your buffers and encrypt any communication that you want secret. Define a few ways that the browser can access your filesystem, and a way for websites to store persistant data in a limited way if they have to. Securing a code execution environment, especially if you want to have fast graphics, is harder. The types of cross-site scripting attacks that have been devised make my head spin. I think the position of not running any Javascript or Flash is more reasonable than just letting both run on whatever shady-ass site you happen to get linked to.
Furthermore, Flash (this used to be a problem with Java) is increasingly used to build site navigation buttons and contain the text of a page. This makes it hard to search text and hard to know where you're being linked. It means you can't use the basic functionality of some websites with essentially textual content unless you're on an Adobe-sanctioned platform. The more pages unnecessarily rely on Flash the more we become beholden to Adobe. You know, the company responsible for the fact that in 2009 we can't have 64-bit browsers. If the web is only cross-platform only to the extent that Adobe is willing and able to deliver a build, it's not really very cross-platform at all, is it? People that understand this are in the minority and I think it's the responsible thing for us to remind web developers of the real promises and demands of their medium.
For what it's worth I haven't disabled Javascript and have the Flash plugin installed. I do use the Flashblock plugin. Some websites (CNN, for one) detect Flashblock and won't let me view any of their Flash content. The feedback page is the last request I'll make to their servers. It's true, JS and Flash can be used for good and bad. I am a Google Maps addict... and, honestly, Flash isn't a terrible video platform (except for the CPU usage I guess). But I don't just let everyone do bad stuff to me with them just because others do good stuff. This is Slashdot, so a bad analogy is in order: the statement, "Force has legitimate uses," is not an invitition to hit me; if you try, I'll certainly try to evade.
When I was in college a couple years ago there were a few programs used by classes that had DRM (they had to contact a licensing server before starting). Apparently every year when the license renewal came up there was some kind of dispute with the company, the contract didn't get signed in time, and everyone was locked out of the software for a few days. Several classes were slightly held up by it. The people responsible for choosing the software and negotiating contracts surely understood the consequences of the DRM, but they kept on buying the licenses year after year.
If people that suffer from the effects of DRM, understand its fundamental nature, are aware before time of installation when it is present, and are likely to value control over their computers continue to buy software with DRM, I don't see why people that generally only meet one of those conditions, the suffering, would stop buying it. Surely the amount of competition has something to do with what people will put up with. There probably aren't very many competitors for the software my college was buying, but the products would be basically interchangeable (the time to re-train people and revise some course material would be an issue, but as we're always dealing with new combinations of software and hardware in the lab classes I don't think it would be that big of an issue). On the other hand, there are tons of games, but only one Gears of War. So in both of these cases the amount of competition is pretty limited. On the other hand, in music, Amazon can offer the exact same product as Apple, which is significant competition.
SI might be wrong for computer science, but SI prefixes have standard meanings. If we want prefixes that work better for computing (which we may well), then making new ones, just to be clear, is a good idea. Then if SI is wrong you don't have to use it, and you don't confuse everyone by using its terminology to mean something slightly different (which is much worse than using it to mean something very different).
Anyway, the power-of-two units make some calculations easier and many harder. Just because an N-bit MUX has 2^N inputs doesn't mean they'll all be connected to something. You have 4 384-byte memory modules, quick, how many kB? Um, what's 384/1024? 3/8 maybe? Having to mess with mutliplying/dividing by 1024 in the middle of back-of-the-napkin calculations where not every number is a simple power of 2 (even if many of them have lots of 0s at the end in binary, like 384 does) actually does suck unless you just give in and learn your multiplication tables in hex (if I was still doing driver programming I probably would have done just that).
I think GP may have been going for sarcasm or humor. At least I laughed my ass off.
I (a liberal Illinoisan) have to say though, that the Democratic Governor, the Dem-controlled state legislature, the Democrat appointed to the seat, and the Democratic U.S. Senate Majority Leader each deserve all the problems this scandal has given them, because they've all behaved pretty badly through the mess. And whatever political popularity Jesse White picks up from refusing to certify the appointment, well, he doesn't deserve it.
Clearly, then, the people that wrote the wipe manpage aren't working on an OS trying to establish its market credibility.
Free Unix (all the software: Linux, the BSDs, GNU, KDE, Perl, etc) isn't trying to do anything. It's just code. People that write code and contribute it have their own reasons and motivations. People working for Red Hat and Novell are trying to establish the market credibility of Free Unix (or at least their brands of it). But there's no reason that just because those companies use some geeks' code that those geeks share the marketing goals of the companies. If Red Hat wants their manpages to sound professional, they should review and rewrite as necessary. It's (usually) allowed by the license. Same thing for Ubuntu if they want user-friendly manpages. If either group can't get changes adopted upstream, they can either fork or maintain a patch set. Neither is as much work as writing the software from scratch, so they've still managed to benefit from the work of the paranoid geeks. Just as those same geeks likely benefit from their work.
And that's the problem with just taking the vision of one guy. My 9-year old Ford is better than the Bugatti in most ways that matter to most people.
But let's put the fact that this "visionary" had a pretty damn useless vision aside. Bugatti may have made a really fast car, but that's hardly visionary. They might have developed some great technology with industry-wide implications to hit those marks (or maybe they didn't, I don't know), but that doesn't mean there's anything noteworthy about the goal of, "Go faster -- how much faster? A little faster than the last guy!"
Humanities classes are definitely useful, whether they're designed to give you specific skills you need or not. Having some knowledge of techniques, theories, and discoveries from fields other than your own, and a basic knowledge of the art and literature of your culture (or even other ones) can give you different perspectives on your work and help you understand what's going on in the world. Similarly, math and logical reasoning skills are important for writers and musicians, and colleges usually make them take classes in those subjects. The classes most engineers take in the humanities are usually at about the same level as the ones most musicians take in math, just scratching the surface of the subject in question. Sadly, neither group tends to take these classes very seriously, and misses out on opportunities to think in different ways.
Sorry, my last post wasn't really complete. Here's why I'm skeptical: in order for an advertiser to win that sort of case, there would have to be a policy that the advertiser has a right to the viewer's attention. I don't think such a policy exists. I think a broadcaster would have a better chance if the device wasn't acting on behalf of the user (like trojan-installed adware or a Tivo firmware update that replaced existing ads with ones paying the interfering company), because then it would be interfering with the broadcast. But a device that just blocks ads is just helping the user use the broadcast on his own terms. Even if copyright law is invoked that's fair use.
The device you're talking about appears to copy a user's recordings to its server to share with other users. That's almost certainly a violation of copyright law as it stands, and that seems to be the substantive argument. The stuff about ads just looks like moralizing.
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Sounds like you live in central Illinois. Maybe Springfield (just a guess... I could probably pin it down by looking at Amtrak's website)? Maybe there's a bus line to St. Louis -- really, that's about the best you can hope for at that distance in a region that's so spread-out. The thing is, unless there are a lot of people making a common trip a train isn't any more efficient than a bunch of cars -- and if the train runs very infrequently so that it can be filled many would-be riders will just drive so they can depart and arrive at a more convenient time. Bus service can carry the same number of passengers with smaller granularity and less infrastructure (thus greater flexibility).
The point isn't to get people not to drive. The point is to make transportation efficient and convenient. There might incidentally be a direct Springfield-St. Louis link, but the reason the line would be built would be to serve very common trips between large cities that are too short for air travel to be efficient and too long for the current surface-level options to be convenient. In the midwest Chicago is an obvious choice for such a hub -- it has several large, regionally important cities at these distances (St. Louis, Minneapolis, Indianapolis, Detroit; Milwaukee is close enough that Amtrak already works pretty well, and the ridership reflects this). But if the system grew out you might also build a line between Indy and St. Louis (assuming there's a lot of business travel between them... I don't really know that), and more spoking out from these cities.
So the guy that says yes gets modded insightful and parent not only can't get any, but he gets the useless "Funny" mod and no karma bump. Truly there is no justice!
I wouldn't bother responding, but you're modded insightful, so...
I'm assuming you're saying this because the roads near you aren't safe to bike on. If you live on a road where you're not safe on a bike you're not going to be safe on one of these either. Probably less safe. It can go faster than a bike, but it's wider and less nimble.
If you don't have the cardiovascular endurance to make it any farther than the end of your driveway you have problems beyond transportation.
And everyone shall follow it!
Sure, but if you do it during setup what happens if you replace the floppy drive in your computer? Or move the hard drive to a different computer entirely. Some of that could be detected, but it would be a lot of work for, as the MS dude said, something with a pretty small potential benefit.
Anyway, autorun sucks. So does media detection generally. We all know this. Especially all of us that run HAL on Linux but use programs that aren't aware of it. I thought my CD drive was broken for months before I figured out that HAL was just polling it while it was trying to play/burn CDs. When my girlfriend plugs her iPhone into her MacBook to charge it (I guess she doesn't have another charger) iPhoto opens right over the top of whatever else she's doing. How lame is that?
It wasn't ending a sentence in a preposition, it was "look like sloppy". You didn't end the sentence in a preposition, "do" is a verb.
In fact, none of your examples are ending sentences in prepositions either. While "on" and "out" can be prepositions in these cases you're using them as adverbs or adjectives (simply modifying "print", "point", and "radio"). Ending a sentence in a preposition might look like:
This is the table the radio was on. ("on" connects to "the radio" to "the table". A crude re-ordering is "This is the table on which the radio was", which sounds dumb. Rather, we'd say something like "The radio was on this table", although that would be a somewhat unnatural answer to certain questions.)
What are you talking about? ("about" connects "talking" to "what". You might write, "You're talking about what?")
The rule isn't just about prepositions ending sentences, either, it's that a preposition should precede the rest of the prepositional phrase; the rule that it can't end a sentence is just a side effect of this. I've read, however, that the rule was really devised by American teachers with an unhealthy Latin obsession, and that people have been moving prepositions all over the place for centuries. I'm not really an expert on that, however... just a lowly computer programmer.
Murder is already more than killing someone illegally. It requires premeditation, which has to do with what the accused was thinking. You even referred to motive. Motive is really only important in crimes like murder that require intent and premeditation. If the charge is more like manslaughter motive is not so important; it's just a matter of the fact of who killed whom.
My previous paragraph is an oversimplification, is probably wrong in many places outside the US, and IANAL or anything... the point stands that the US legal system and most others do indeed distinguish between crimes on the basis of the mental state of the accused. You can come up with many reasons that it's right or wrong, but in the end it's a big part of our legal tradition, from homicide to copyright infringement to fouls in sports.
I generally agree that speed limits aren't evil and that people ought to follow them more. Just want to point out the amusing fact that on the road I used to drive home from work in Santa Clara, CA, the lights were timed so that if I drove the speed limit I hit the front end of several consecutive red lights on the way home. If I drove 5 over (average speed on the road was about 5 over) I usually got through them all.
Now I live in Chicago and bike much more than I drive. I hit the front end of red lights consistently everywhere. When I do drive in the city I feel like I have to brake less when I accelerate calmly and drive the limit, so maybe here the lights are timed right.
Does that really qualify as "accidentally"? You're going to a sketch P2P/tracker/whatever site that has porn ads on it, and you know this.
I agree somewhat -- there's a difference between committing a crime maliciously and committing one carelessly. But some things we do must be done with care, or else the danger to others is unacceptable. And people do die and are injured when care is not taken. Driving is like that. If you drive drunk or while talking on a cell phone (hands-free or not, as studies show it doesn't make much of a difference) or while fucking downloading a ringtone (as this one idiot did in central Illinois, ran onto the shoulder, killed a cyclist, and managed to only get community service) you are neglecting your responsibility in a very dangerous way. It's still a serious crime.
And, sure, the causes and solutions are different. But we're not talking about that, we're talking about severity. Drunk driving is severely irresponsible and I think it's perfectly acceptable to group people with such disregard to their responsibility with those who commit crimes deliberately.
The main argument for the use of DeCSS is that people have a right (regardless of what the government says) to decode the media they own. I think most people claiming that right claim it regardless of how hard it is, and regardless of disapproval for other actions of media companies in general.
On the other hand, the hackers involved controlled a botnet and ordered a DOS attack. They justified it only as retaliation for other actions by Estonia, and in the way you describe, which is indeed a very weak argument.
I'm not saying that arguers on /. never use arguments like the one you mention, but what you say is hardly the principle justification for use of DeCSS.
I haven't read what Neil Young has to say about this, but I think Apple would be a major culprit regardless of lossy data compression. That's because the explosion of portable music forces producers to mix for shitty earbuds and noisy environments, which means crazy EQ and insane dynamic compression. I'm more worried about that that I am about lossy compression, especially with VBR.
I agree on Unicode. Inline TeX support would be tough. TeX is a full programming language, and it's usually not considered a good idea to open up the servers to arbitrary code entered by posters. Even if the TeX code is executed such that it can't harm the system or any data, malicious users would have a new avenue to ramp up the server's CPU and RAM usage. Instead of inline TeX you'd need to choose a safe subset of TeX to implement and write a new, safe parser for it; probably one without programming capabilities.
At that point you might just be better off allowing MathML, although given the rather poor state of current browser rendering you might want to render it server-side by... well, maybe translating it to TeX, after imposing your size/complexity limits.
I'll grant that it would be cool and useful to be able to plop mathematical expressions into comments.
So because it's your car you could, say, drive on my lawn? On the sidewalks? Hint: it may be your car, but they aren't your roads. You might call them "your" roads, because your tax/toll money went toward them, but they're not your private property like your car is. They're a common good. So it's perfectly legitimate for the public to appoint a government that limits behavior on them. There's a more abstract common good, however, than just the physical road surface: it's the ability for people to get where they want quickly and safely. When you drive you make use of that good, just like I do (even though I usually do it on a bike or on foot), and similarly to what I do when I ride the trains and buses in my city. When people drive distracted, go much faster or slower than the average speed of traffic, cut too close when making maneuvers, and engage in many other behaviors that we usually deem illegal, they raise the rate of accidents on the road, increase their severity were they to occur, worsen surrounding traffic conditions, or some combination of these. And that is harm, whether simplistic libertarians can figure it out or not.
Which is not to say that all traffic laws (or laws in general) are good. Some of them might be unfair to certain groups of people, some of them might suck for everyone. All laws should be subject to discussion and scrutiny. But this idea that government has no right to restrict how you drive your car because it's your car is completely bogus.
One of the advantages of requiring a pre-sale signature to agree to a usage license is its inconvenience. Here's why. The big issue here is that most people that buy products with usage licenses have agreed to things that they don't understand, and of which they may not even be aware. The smaller issue is that these terms are usually onerous and some of them are unenforceable. Now, simply making people unambiguously aware of usage-license terms solves the first problem. And if people are aware that may put some pressure on companies to make the licenses something that people are likely to understand and consciously agree to. If it's also necessarily inconvenient to agree to onerous terms, there will be significantly more pressure on software makers, from consumers and retailers, to make the terms simpler and more consumer-friendly.
Here's the thing: there are lots of people in big cities. And most of them are really "little" people. But the specific needs of urban people are hardly mentioned in Presidential campaigns, and rural America is touted as "real" America. Why? Well, what are our 10 biggest urban areas? NYC, in a safe Democratic state. LA, in a safe Democratic state (at the moment... it was Republican not long ago). Chicago, in Illinois, once a battleground that recently has been solidly for the Dems (some suburbs in WI and IN, which tend to be closer to the middle, but not many). Dallas-Ft. Worth, in solidly Republican Texas. Philly, in battleground Pennsylvania (minus some of its suburbs). Houston, back in Texas. Miami, in wacky battleground Florida. D.C., solid blue but with many suburbs in Virginia, which was pretty much median this last cycle but usually more Republican. Atlanta, in Georgia, which was fairly close last election but far more Republican than the national average. Boston, which hardly needs discussion.
So two-and-a-half out of our ten biggest urban areas count in national politics. None out of the top four. The only reason you'd visit any big city in America save Philly, Miami, and D.C.'s Virginia suburbs is for fund-raising, and then you're only talking to the big-wigs of those cities. So the issues the politicians take on are skewed, not towards what's best for most people, but towards what's popular in a few states that tend towards the "political median". While those things generally pull politicians to the middle on major issues, it means they pander like crazy on things that will get them votes in these places (plus Iowa because of its early primary). What we need is policy that takes into account all the little people in our big cities. What we get is corn ethanol. I'll take a popular vote, please.
First, neither Javascript nor Flash has a security record to brag about. If you're just dealing with HTML security is simple: watch your buffers and encrypt any communication that you want secret. Define a few ways that the browser can access your filesystem, and a way for websites to store persistant data in a limited way if they have to. Securing a code execution environment, especially if you want to have fast graphics, is harder. The types of cross-site scripting attacks that have been devised make my head spin. I think the position of not running any Javascript or Flash is more reasonable than just letting both run on whatever shady-ass site you happen to get linked to.
Furthermore, Flash (this used to be a problem with Java) is increasingly used to build site navigation buttons and contain the text of a page. This makes it hard to search text and hard to know where you're being linked. It means you can't use the basic functionality of some websites with essentially textual content unless you're on an Adobe-sanctioned platform. The more pages unnecessarily rely on Flash the more we become beholden to Adobe. You know, the company responsible for the fact that in 2009 we can't have 64-bit browsers. If the web is only cross-platform only to the extent that Adobe is willing and able to deliver a build, it's not really very cross-platform at all, is it? People that understand this are in the minority and I think it's the responsible thing for us to remind web developers of the real promises and demands of their medium.
For what it's worth I haven't disabled Javascript and have the Flash plugin installed. I do use the Flashblock plugin. Some websites (CNN, for one) detect Flashblock and won't let me view any of their Flash content. The feedback page is the last request I'll make to their servers. It's true, JS and Flash can be used for good and bad. I am a Google Maps addict... and, honestly, Flash isn't a terrible video platform (except for the CPU usage I guess). But I don't just let everyone do bad stuff to me with them just because others do good stuff. This is Slashdot, so a bad analogy is in order: the statement, "Force has legitimate uses," is not an invitition to hit me; if you try, I'll certainly try to evade.
When I was in college a couple years ago there were a few programs used by classes that had DRM (they had to contact a licensing server before starting). Apparently every year when the license renewal came up there was some kind of dispute with the company, the contract didn't get signed in time, and everyone was locked out of the software for a few days. Several classes were slightly held up by it. The people responsible for choosing the software and negotiating contracts surely understood the consequences of the DRM, but they kept on buying the licenses year after year.
If people that suffer from the effects of DRM, understand its fundamental nature, are aware before time of installation when it is present, and are likely to value control over their computers continue to buy software with DRM, I don't see why people that generally only meet one of those conditions, the suffering, would stop buying it. Surely the amount of competition has something to do with what people will put up with. There probably aren't very many competitors for the software my college was buying, but the products would be basically interchangeable (the time to re-train people and revise some course material would be an issue, but as we're always dealing with new combinations of software and hardware in the lab classes I don't think it would be that big of an issue). On the other hand, there are tons of games, but only one Gears of War. So in both of these cases the amount of competition is pretty limited. On the other hand, in music, Amazon can offer the exact same product as Apple, which is significant competition.
SI might be wrong for computer science, but SI prefixes have standard meanings. If we want prefixes that work better for computing (which we may well), then making new ones, just to be clear, is a good idea. Then if SI is wrong you don't have to use it, and you don't confuse everyone by using its terminology to mean something slightly different (which is much worse than using it to mean something very different).
Anyway, the power-of-two units make some calculations easier and many harder. Just because an N-bit MUX has 2^N inputs doesn't mean they'll all be connected to something. You have 4 384-byte memory modules, quick, how many kB? Um, what's 384/1024? 3/8 maybe? Having to mess with mutliplying/dividing by 1024 in the middle of back-of-the-napkin calculations where not every number is a simple power of 2 (even if many of them have lots of 0s at the end in binary, like 384 does) actually does suck unless you just give in and learn your multiplication tables in hex (if I was still doing driver programming I probably would have done just that).
I think GP may have been going for sarcasm or humor. At least I laughed my ass off.
I (a liberal Illinoisan) have to say though, that the Democratic Governor, the Dem-controlled state legislature, the Democrat appointed to the seat, and the Democratic U.S. Senate Majority Leader each deserve all the problems this scandal has given them, because they've all behaved pretty badly through the mess. And whatever political popularity Jesse White picks up from refusing to certify the appointment, well, he doesn't deserve it.
Clearly, then, the people that wrote the wipe manpage aren't working on an OS trying to establish its market credibility.
Free Unix (all the software: Linux, the BSDs, GNU, KDE, Perl, etc) isn't trying to do anything. It's just code. People that write code and contribute it have their own reasons and motivations. People working for Red Hat and Novell are trying to establish the market credibility of Free Unix (or at least their brands of it). But there's no reason that just because those companies use some geeks' code that those geeks share the marketing goals of the companies. If Red Hat wants their manpages to sound professional, they should review and rewrite as necessary. It's (usually) allowed by the license. Same thing for Ubuntu if they want user-friendly manpages. If either group can't get changes adopted upstream, they can either fork or maintain a patch set. Neither is as much work as writing the software from scratch, so they've still managed to benefit from the work of the paranoid geeks. Just as those same geeks likely benefit from their work.
And that's the problem with just taking the vision of one guy. My 9-year old Ford is better than the Bugatti in most ways that matter to most people.
But let's put the fact that this "visionary" had a pretty damn useless vision aside. Bugatti may have made a really fast car, but that's hardly visionary. They might have developed some great technology with industry-wide implications to hit those marks (or maybe they didn't, I don't know), but that doesn't mean there's anything noteworthy about the goal of, "Go faster -- how much faster? A little faster than the last guy!"
I don't have a roof antenna, but my parents do. They didn't touch the thing for the DTV switch and had no problems.
Humanities classes are definitely useful, whether they're designed to give you specific skills you need or not. Having some knowledge of techniques, theories, and discoveries from fields other than your own, and a basic knowledge of the art and literature of your culture (or even other ones) can give you different perspectives on your work and help you understand what's going on in the world. Similarly, math and logical reasoning skills are important for writers and musicians, and colleges usually make them take classes in those subjects. The classes most engineers take in the humanities are usually at about the same level as the ones most musicians take in math, just scratching the surface of the subject in question. Sadly, neither group tends to take these classes very seriously, and misses out on opportunities to think in different ways.
Sorry, my last post wasn't really complete. Here's why I'm skeptical: in order for an advertiser to win that sort of case, there would have to be a policy that the advertiser has a right to the viewer's attention. I don't think such a policy exists. I think a broadcaster would have a better chance if the device wasn't acting on behalf of the user (like trojan-installed adware or a Tivo firmware update that replaced existing ads with ones paying the interfering company), because then it would be interfering with the broadcast. But a device that just blocks ads is just helping the user use the broadcast on his own terms. Even if copyright law is invoked that's fair use.
The device you're talking about appears to copy a user's recordings to its server to share with other users. That's almost certainly a violation of copyright law as it stands, and that seems to be the substantive argument. The stuff about ads just looks like moralizing.