You don't seem to understand the problem at all. The problem isn't that the chicken pox vaccine causes a small amount of side effects. The problem is that the vaccine DELAYS infections of chicken pox. With polio, even if the vaccine only delays the desease, you are better off being paralized as an adult is better than as a child. Every day you don't have the desease is a win. Chicken pox on the other hand is a major childhood illness, but if delayed into adulthood becomes seriously life threatening. Your comment that children who get chicken pox would "presumably died anyway" is exactly the kind of belief in bad science that you are complaining about. Catching chicken pox as an otherwise healthy child is less dangerous than playing high school football. On the other hand, if people do not regularly get their vaccine, they massivly increase the risk getting the disease as an adult, which is truely life threatening. The problem isn't that there is contaminated chicken pox vaccines. The problem is that the specific vaccine is a trade of short term profits and saving a week of hassle for a very serious threat to life as an adult.
So, given your post, you are clearly a victim of bad science.
I'm starting to think that if you want good science, we will need to start getting schools to start offering sport coaching positions that do not require the coach to be a teacher. At every post elementary school I went to, the history, science and civics classes were taught by the coaches. It was also pretty clear that they were not chosen for their coaching ability, not for their teaching capabilities. I already know that our public will not stand for placing education over sports, so the best we can hope for is for the public will be willing to stop screwing science by giving even more to the sports programs.
The problem is that it goes both ways. If you look at the data on the chicken pox vaccine, it is clear that it was pushed through for profit reasons and not because of good science. So, should we mock the people that did or did not get their kid the chicken pox vaccine that lead to their death, or at the very least didn't prevent it. Now, I'm not saying that all vaccines are bad, but if a more suspicious individual than me took a look at the chicken pox vaccine, I can certainly understand why they would start getting nervous about other vaccines.
I agree with you. I cringe every time I hear someone make a statement of fact that is simply incorrect, and then try to support it by saying "That's my opinion! And I have the right to have my opinion!" It is amazing how many people do not understand the difference between a statement of fact and an opinion.
"3. Move the program to another system by just copying it."
I have always assumed that this was the reason for making it critical. When it first became the standard place to store configurations and I noticed that you could no longer run programs that have not been "installed", it came across to me as a poor man's copy protection.
No, I am not in the 19-22 age group. I am in my late 30's Although I can tell you that you are wrong about your list. Every one of them is commonly done by people well over that age. You might see it a little less because as people start being held accountable for their actions, they are less likely to do things that will cause themselves trouble. The problem with the criminalization of youth is in the basic premise that people of a particular age group do bad things. History shows us that this is not the case. The reason you see these problems more commonly in youth is that people take a little while to change their habits. A person that is allowed to spit down hallways and punch holes in walls for 18 years, is not going to clean up their act on a magical 18th birthday. It might take a couple of years before they start getting shunned or prosecuted for bad behavior. At 17 they have not paid to replace the sheetrock on a wall. At 23 they might have.
Of course making the age of majority 18 doesn't reduce those problems. It increases them. By the same example of the sheetrock, a person that is considered an adult at 13 would have already reached the point of not busting things up for the fun of it by the age of 15. It isn't a matter of age. It is a matter of how long the person has been held accountable for their actions as an adult.
The same kind of argument you put out there could have been used to explain why women should not have had equal rights to men. There was a time that since women did not generally work outside the home, and generally were not placed into situations where they needed to be great thinkers, most of them did not think great thoughts. They were not mens equals. Was this because of some genetic inferiority? Clearly not. It was because like young adults, they were human. They did not become experienced in things that they had no contact. Were there exceptions? Sure. But, there are exceptions to the oppressed young adults of today as well. The problems we see with young adults are not caused by youth. They are caused by telling adults that they are children and removing all rights and responsibilities from them. Think about the 30 and 40 year olds you know. Would you trust most of them in public if they did not have to take responsibility for any of their actions? I know I wouldn't.
Now, wait a minute. You are complaining because I called your comment "childish" after you made the following comment to the original poster?
"I'm sorry, but that's really a childish thing to say."
That leads to a new insult backed by evidence. You are a hypocrite.
Please figure out what is wrong with your thought process that causes you to think that you can tell me when you have insulted me.
Trying to take the high ground because someone calls you on your temper tantrum just doesn't carry any weight. The student was right, and you are self import hypocrite who has poor reading skills. If you don't even recognize the arguments that have already been made to justify these opinions, you are even dimmer than I thought.
That would be because your post indicated you either are a minor, or were recently a minor. While most people don't want to admit it, there is a class war going on against youth. It ranges from civil liberties violations to incarceration. I am not talking about children. I am talking about adults. People between the ages of 13 and 18. I know that many will trot out the crap about "we can show that their brains are still growing" so we have to treat them as second class citizens, but until your brain is in decay, it is growing. Then you look at the fact that the 'evidence' that is used, and it is basically phrenology.
The current state of oppression amongst 13 to 18 (spreading to 21 and 25) year olds is almost as bad as what blacks in America faced prior to the 60's, and a little worse than what women faced before suffrage. The one thing that this group has in it's favor is that the oppression only lasts for a limited amount of time per person.
No. I am saying that making a post to slashdot from the back of a classroom while someone is talking in the front is not a personal insult, and to take it as such is childish. You quoted the poster as saying he was 'commenting' from the back of the classroom. Perhaps you didn't notice that the the page you typed your ill thought out response in has a big green bar across it that says "Post Comment". Now, you may need to sound out everything you type out load due to very poor verbal skills, but it is certainly childish to think that the OP has as poor of writing skills as you. It is only fair to assume that he can type a comment into slashdot without talking at all.
Of course, there are all sorts of problems with your statement besides not understanding what you are commenting on. From the assertion that the student would be 'talking over' the teacher as opposed to interjecting, to assuming that the teacher is asking, or for that matter being respectful.
It's funny. When I first heard a home school advocate telling me how the public school system was really just a front to push through social programs, and it really wasn't about real education, I assumed that she was a loon. Since then, every single person I have heard argue against homeschooling has fallen back to the same argument that the home shooling "loon" game. Public school is a social program.
Your collage statement is made entirely out of ignorance. Home schooled kids can easily get into college. A frequent path is to start taking courses in a Jr. College when their public school counterparts would still in high school. By the time you have 2 years of junior college under your belt, you can start applying at regular colleges, as they will be more interested in you college career than where you went to high school.
Of course saying that you have a college degree doesn't necessarily mean much anymore, as I regularly meet people who have degrees, yet are surprisingly ignorant in what they studied. For the most part, until they get a masters, their degree doesn't say much more about them than a High School diploma.
As for the 'grow and develop with guidance' comment... I have yet to meet a parent that actually knows what is going on in their children's classroom. There is not 'guidance' there. What happens in the public schools is that parents surrender custody of their children to a state run orphanage. Many kids, (I don't have numbers, but I would guess that it is greater than 70%) are in the care of 'the system' for more waking hours than they are in the care of their actual parents. So, you have to consider who's guidance they are being given.
No. Having someone insult you to your face in front of 30 other people that you are forced to interact with by FORCE OF LAW, and that group in turn is contained in a rather small community that also is required to exist under FORCE OF LAW, is far worse than any number of people that you are not required to interact with under force of law. Throughout history, shunning by a community has been used as a very effective form of punishment. This was particularly common in communities that were isolated, as it became a very big problem for someone when they are being shunned, and there is no where else to go. In this day and age, most people don't understand this because we live in a mobile society with access to so many people that an organized shunning is virtually impossible. Heck, even in relatively small towns, it is not uncommon for there to be people you don't even know if your town isn't isolated by large distances from other population centers. Schools are one of the few places that shunning still carries force. Unfortunately most people don't understand it, because they don't consider students to be real people, and they don't consider school to be the real world.
Can you imagine living in a town of 5000 people, having someone of clout out to destroy your reputation, and to top it off, having an armed force of unstoppable magnitude waiting in the wings to use force to prevent you from leaving the town? That is what students deal with when face to face insults are thrown in a school. Under those circumstance, you wouldn't give a crap about a million people outside of your town hearing the insults. It is only your militarily forced community that will matter.
I followed your link, and it really does say that reporting a real bomb on the school grounds is a punishable offense. No hyperbole, no exaggeration, no twisting to mean something that it doesn't. The fact that they specifically distinguish between a false report, and real reports means that this isn't can't be chalked up to bad wording.
That is a very childish way to look at things. Throwing a temper tantrum because someone isn't listening to you is what a very small child does. When I was in school, it was virtually always the teacher that disrupted the class by throwing a temper tantrum if someone didn't pay attention to them. Of course in the few classes that had quality teachers (and the students do know who is a good teacher and who is a bad one) a student not paying attention in the back of the class was ignored as long as they were not actively causing a problem. And, no, not actively paying attention to someone who is going to throw a temper tantrum if you don't, isn't a problem.
In fact, you statement shows that you consider students to be less people, and is an example of one of the things broken in our school system.
Re:Shorting AMD stock: NASDAQ figures
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Is AMD Dead Yet?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I used to agree with you 100%. Now I only agree 50%. You are right that there are things that just can't be done with the processor speeds we have today. The thing is, that all the things that can be done at all either run fast enough for most people, or are batch process stuff like video encoding. These are things that are nice to have run faster, but are not important enough to warrant a new machine.
I know my computer isn't fast enough because I cannot run a 3D environment in a high enough resolution that I cannot identify individual pixels on a 6 screen 8'x8'x8' system while calculating all of my motions via video capture, and processing all of my voice input, all in real-time.
That being said, my system upgrade cycle has moved from 6-12 months to 3-4 years. When I buy a new system, I am not getting new functionality because the old system did everything the new system does, just faster. I would say that we are in a lull where we have to rely on the server market, and the few that buy systems just because they enjoy the bragging rights of a fast system to push manufacturers to improve. It looks like we need MUCH faster processors to get to the next hump where users need to upgrade to get something really new.
Actually we don't have a gun culture. We have an anti-gun culture. When combined with our "bad boy" culture, you get problems with guns. Our population is bombarded day an night with how bad guns are, and how they are the root of all of our crime. Children are taught in school that guns are evil, and that they should report it if they see one. Heck, just walking down the street with an unloaded shotgun is likely to get you arrested.
Of course, at the same time, we are bombarded with the idea that it's cool to be bad. That criminals and assholes get all the sex. That power comes from crime. This leads to two things. 1) When someone wants to show just how "bad" they are, they use a gun. Not because the gun IS bad, but because they have been convinced that it is bad. And 2) Taking away the guns won't help in the slightest, as there are not "bad guys" because of guns, and the people wanting to show how bad they are will simply use something else.
Is this really how you want all laws enforced? Do you really want laws from one location to apply to another just because it went through the internet? That attitude isn't a slippery slope. It is cliff diving without water.
You are correct that the poster above you is lacking a fundamental understanding of a basic concept, but he is close. Java byte code IS machine code. It is the machine code for the Java emulator. Sun was pretty clear on what their original plan for Java was. They were going to make Java emulators for every popular platform so that people would write code for their new processor. Then when there was enough code to generate demand, they would release the actual Java processor which they called the 'JavaOne'. The plan for the actual hardware was abandoned when they found that they could not make the JavaOne run as fast as an x86 could emulate it. The JavaOne processor was also not helped by the fact that the Java Emulator was a piece of crap. It was buggy and inconsistent. This meant that code written to run on the emulator would not always run unaltered on the actual hardware.
JIT is not an indication that code compiled to the JVM is not machine code, as JIT for Java came after JIT was proven to work in many game console emulators. Java was kind of a Johnny come lately to the JIT emulation scene.
I still think that Java would not have taken so long to be usable, and that it would have had a wider range of relevance if Sun had actually built Java hardware before releasing the emulator, and had actually tested the JVM against real live reference hardware.
I always liken Java to the x86 platform. It was a poorly designed system that had a big name trusted by business behind it. Eventually after enough companies dumped enough money into trying to fix it, we finally ended up with something that works pretty good. A lot of time has been wasted, but that is in the past, and we now have a usable system to move forward from.
Off-Line web apps is something that IBM should be pushing right now. They have had a working system for off-line web apps out in the wild since 2002 with the release Domino 6.0. DOLS (Domino Off Line Services) not only allows for off line web apps. It also already has security worked out as well as many tools for integrating it with other systems.
Gee, they are predicting that a technology that was released in 2002 on Lotus Domino 6.0 will be brand new this year. Hurray!!!
Of course when Adobe releases it, we can listen to the Notes trolls complain that Lotus didn't make their 6 year old technology conform to a 'standard' that was created in 2008.
The low cost of DSL is in part because of economies of scale, and part because there never was a reason to charge the outrageous rates that the telecoms wanted to charge in the 80s/90s. Way back when, if you told the phone company that you were going to hook a modem up to the phone lines, they wanted to charge you some outrageous price for it. Why? Because they thought they could. Luckily, people quickly figured out that you just don't tell them that you will have a modem hooked up to the phone line, you go a reasonable price, and eventually they gave up on trying to charge more for a "data" line.
There is absolutely no indication that we have as much as we can afford. You can be sure that if nobody put pictures on their web pages, we wouldn't have as fast of service as we do have. The monopoly providers have increased their infrastructure only enough to keep the smaller players out of the competition. Now we have P2P and video over IP. It is the early adopters that will push for faster speeds, and bring new applications to the internet. If we had it your way, there would be no commercial internet because you wouldn't want the data phone lines subsidized for those people that were using it for 'unapproved' uses. Thus, the internet would have never taken off as a commercial system. After all, the phone network being used for voice was as much as we could afford, and you don't want to pay more for phone access than because a few people wanted to use it for data, right?
The same could be said about all those jerks that want graphics sent across their internet connections. Really what needs to be done is to get us back to only sending green screen updates. All that wasteful html traffic has just caused needless upgrades. If you need to consume more than a what a 1200 baud modem can offer, perhaps what you need is a dedicated line. Not a consumer internet connection.
Look, it was no secret as to what Comcast was jumping into when they decided to get into the internet business. In fact it seems pretty obvious that they were quite clear on the fact that bandwidth would keep increasing to the point that people would just get their video directly from the source, instead of paying them to be a gatekeeper middleman. What they were hoping for was that they could use their monopoly power to stifle the internet so that their monopoly would not crumble in face of actual competition. So far they have been successful. Now that people are starting to cry foul, they are trying to pretend that they are the victims.
It always amazes me how many people will defend someone who is clearly trying to screw them.
Watch out for the free express version. When it was first announced, I checked the license, and it expressly forbids releasing any software written for it as open source. That means you can't legally even put code examples up on a website. Now, I'm sure that this limitation won't affect much of the software that is written with it, but people should be aware that the express license has an anti open source clause.
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You don't seem to understand the problem at all. The problem isn't that the chicken pox vaccine causes a small amount of side effects. The problem is that the vaccine DELAYS infections of chicken pox. With polio, even if the vaccine only delays the desease, you are better off being paralized as an adult is better than as a child. Every day you don't have the desease is a win. Chicken pox on the other hand is a major childhood illness, but if delayed into adulthood becomes seriously life threatening. Your comment that children who get chicken pox would "presumably died anyway" is exactly the kind of belief in bad science that you are complaining about. Catching chicken pox as an otherwise healthy child is less dangerous than playing high school football. On the other hand, if people do not regularly get their vaccine, they massivly increase the risk getting the disease as an adult, which is truely life threatening. The problem isn't that there is contaminated chicken pox vaccines. The problem is that the specific vaccine is a trade of short term profits and saving a week of hassle for a very serious threat to life as an adult.
So, given your post, you are clearly a victim of bad science.
I'm starting to think that if you want good science, we will need to start getting schools to start offering sport coaching positions that do not require the coach to be a teacher. At every post elementary school I went to, the history, science and civics classes were taught by the coaches. It was also pretty clear that they were not chosen for their coaching ability, not for their teaching capabilities. I already know that our public will not stand for placing education over sports, so the best we can hope for is for the public will be willing to stop screwing science by giving even more to the sports programs.
The problem is that it goes both ways. If you look at the data on the chicken pox vaccine, it is clear that it was pushed through for profit reasons and not because of good science. So, should we mock the people that did or did not get their kid the chicken pox vaccine that lead to their death, or at the very least didn't prevent it. Now, I'm not saying that all vaccines are bad, but if a more suspicious individual than me took a look at the chicken pox vaccine, I can certainly understand why they would start getting nervous about other vaccines.
I agree with you. I cringe every time I hear someone make a statement of fact that is simply incorrect, and then try to support it by saying "That's my opinion! And I have the right to have my opinion!" It is amazing how many people do not understand the difference between a statement of fact and an opinion.
"3. Move the program to another system by just copying it."
I have always assumed that this was the reason for making it critical. When it first became the standard place to store configurations and I noticed that you could no longer run programs that have not been "installed", it came across to me as a poor man's copy protection.
No, I am not in the 19-22 age group. I am in my late 30's Although I can tell you that you are wrong about your list. Every one of them is commonly done by people well over that age. You might see it a little less because as people start being held accountable for their actions, they are less likely to do things that will cause themselves trouble. The problem with the criminalization of youth is in the basic premise that people of a particular age group do bad things. History shows us that this is not the case. The reason you see these problems more commonly in youth is that people take a little while to change their habits. A person that is allowed to spit down hallways and punch holes in walls for 18 years, is not going to clean up their act on a magical 18th birthday. It might take a couple of years before they start getting shunned or prosecuted for bad behavior. At 17 they have not paid to replace the sheetrock on a wall. At 23 they might have.
Of course making the age of majority 18 doesn't reduce those problems. It increases them. By the same example of the sheetrock, a person that is considered an adult at 13 would have already reached the point of not busting things up for the fun of it by the age of 15. It isn't a matter of age. It is a matter of how long the person has been held accountable for their actions as an adult.
The same kind of argument you put out there could have been used to explain why women should not have had equal rights to men. There was a time that since women did not generally work outside the home, and generally were not placed into situations where they needed to be great thinkers, most of them did not think great thoughts. They were not mens equals. Was this because of some genetic inferiority? Clearly not. It was because like young adults, they were human. They did not become experienced in things that they had no contact. Were there exceptions? Sure. But, there are exceptions to the oppressed young adults of today as well. The problems we see with young adults are not caused by youth. They are caused by telling adults that they are children and removing all rights and responsibilities from them. Think about the 30 and 40 year olds you know. Would you trust most of them in public if they did not have to take responsibility for any of their actions? I know I wouldn't.
Now, wait a minute. You are complaining because I called your comment "childish" after you made the following comment to the original poster?
"I'm sorry, but that's really a childish thing to say."
That leads to a new insult backed by evidence. You are a hypocrite.
Please figure out what is wrong with your thought process that causes you to think that you can tell me when you have insulted me.
Trying to take the high ground because someone calls you on your temper tantrum just doesn't carry any weight. The student was right, and you are self import hypocrite who has poor reading skills. If you don't even recognize the arguments that have already been made to justify these opinions, you are even dimmer than I thought.
That would be because your post indicated you either are a minor, or were recently a minor. While most people don't want to admit it, there is a class war going on against youth. It ranges from civil liberties violations to incarceration. I am not talking about children. I am talking about adults. People between the ages of 13 and 18. I know that many will trot out the crap about "we can show that their brains are still growing" so we have to treat them as second class citizens, but until your brain is in decay, it is growing. Then you look at the fact that the 'evidence' that is used, and it is basically phrenology.
The current state of oppression amongst 13 to 18 (spreading to 21 and 25) year olds is almost as bad as what blacks in America faced prior to the 60's, and a little worse than what women faced before suffrage. The one thing that this group has in it's favor is that the oppression only lasts for a limited amount of time per person.
No. I am saying that making a post to slashdot from the back of a classroom while someone is talking in the front is not a personal insult, and to take it as such is childish. You quoted the poster as saying he was 'commenting' from the back of the classroom. Perhaps you didn't notice that the the page you typed your ill thought out response in has a big green bar across it that says "Post Comment". Now, you may need to sound out everything you type out load due to very poor verbal skills, but it is certainly childish to think that the OP has as poor of writing skills as you. It is only fair to assume that he can type a comment into slashdot without talking at all.
Of course, there are all sorts of problems with your statement besides not understanding what you are commenting on. From the assertion that the student would be 'talking over' the teacher as opposed to interjecting, to assuming that the teacher is asking, or for that matter being respectful.
It's funny. When I first heard a home school advocate telling me how the public school system was really just a front to push through social programs, and it really wasn't about real education, I assumed that she was a loon. Since then, every single person I have heard argue against homeschooling has fallen back to the same argument that the home shooling "loon" game. Public school is a social program.
Your collage statement is made entirely out of ignorance. Home schooled kids can easily get into college. A frequent path is to start taking courses in a Jr. College when their public school counterparts would still in high school. By the time you have 2 years of junior college under your belt, you can start applying at regular colleges, as they will be more interested in you college career than where you went to high school.
Of course saying that you have a college degree doesn't necessarily mean much anymore, as I regularly meet people who have degrees, yet are surprisingly ignorant in what they studied. For the most part, until they get a masters, their degree doesn't say much more about them than a High School diploma.
As for the 'grow and develop with guidance' comment... I have yet to meet a parent that actually knows what is going on in their children's classroom. There is not 'guidance' there. What happens in the public schools is that parents surrender custody of their children to a state run orphanage. Many kids, (I don't have numbers, but I would guess that it is greater than 70%) are in the care of 'the system' for more waking hours than they are in the care of their actual parents. So, you have to consider who's guidance they are being given.
No. Having someone insult you to your face in front of 30 other people that you are forced to interact with by FORCE OF LAW, and that group in turn is contained in a rather small community that also is required to exist under FORCE OF LAW, is far worse than any number of people that you are not required to interact with under force of law. Throughout history, shunning by a community has been used as a very effective form of punishment. This was particularly common in communities that were isolated, as it became a very big problem for someone when they are being shunned, and there is no where else to go. In this day and age, most people don't understand this because we live in a mobile society with access to so many people that an organized shunning is virtually impossible. Heck, even in relatively small towns, it is not uncommon for there to be people you don't even know if your town isn't isolated by large distances from other population centers. Schools are one of the few places that shunning still carries force. Unfortunately most people don't understand it, because they don't consider students to be real people, and they don't consider school to be the real world.
Can you imagine living in a town of 5000 people, having someone of clout out to destroy your reputation, and to top it off, having an armed force of unstoppable magnitude waiting in the wings to use force to prevent you from leaving the town? That is what students deal with when face to face insults are thrown in a school. Under those circumstance, you wouldn't give a crap about a million people outside of your town hearing the insults. It is only your militarily forced community that will matter.
I followed your link, and it really does say that reporting a real bomb on the school grounds is a punishable offense. No hyperbole, no exaggeration, no twisting to mean something that it doesn't. The fact that they specifically distinguish between a false report, and real reports means that this isn't can't be chalked up to bad wording.
That is a very childish way to look at things. Throwing a temper tantrum because someone isn't listening to you is what a very small child does. When I was in school, it was virtually always the teacher that disrupted the class by throwing a temper tantrum if someone didn't pay attention to them. Of course in the few classes that had quality teachers (and the students do know who is a good teacher and who is a bad one) a student not paying attention in the back of the class was ignored as long as they were not actively causing a problem. And, no, not actively paying attention to someone who is going to throw a temper tantrum if you don't, isn't a problem.
In fact, you statement shows that you consider students to be less people, and is an example of one of the things broken in our school system.
I used to agree with you 100%. Now I only agree 50%. You are right that there are things that just can't be done with the processor speeds we have today. The thing is, that all the things that can be done at all either run fast enough for most people, or are batch process stuff like video encoding. These are things that are nice to have run faster, but are not important enough to warrant a new machine.
I know my computer isn't fast enough because I cannot run a 3D environment in a high enough resolution that I cannot identify individual pixels on a 6 screen 8'x8'x8' system while calculating all of my motions via video capture, and processing all of my voice input, all in real-time.
That being said, my system upgrade cycle has moved from 6-12 months to 3-4 years. When I buy a new system, I am not getting new functionality because the old system did everything the new system does, just faster. I would say that we are in a lull where we have to rely on the server market, and the few that buy systems just because they enjoy the bragging rights of a fast system to push manufacturers to improve. It looks like we need MUCH faster processors to get to the next hump where users need to upgrade to get something really new.
Maybe it they would stop trying to force people to carry an ATM card that does not require a password, this wouldn't be such a problem.
Actually we don't have a gun culture. We have an anti-gun culture. When combined with our "bad boy" culture, you get problems with guns. Our population is bombarded day an night with how bad guns are, and how they are the root of all of our crime. Children are taught in school that guns are evil, and that they should report it if they see one. Heck, just walking down the street with an unloaded shotgun is likely to get you arrested.
Of course, at the same time, we are bombarded with the idea that it's cool to be bad. That criminals and assholes get all the sex. That power comes from crime. This leads to two things. 1) When someone wants to show just how "bad" they are, they use a gun. Not because the gun IS bad, but because they have been convinced that it is bad. And 2) Taking away the guns won't help in the slightest, as there are not "bad guys" because of guns, and the people wanting to show how bad they are will simply use something else.
Is this really how you want all laws enforced? Do you really want laws from one location to apply to another just because it went through the internet? That attitude isn't a slippery slope. It is cliff diving without water.
You are correct that the poster above you is lacking a fundamental understanding of a basic concept, but he is close. Java byte code IS machine code. It is the machine code for the Java emulator. Sun was pretty clear on what their original plan for Java was. They were going to make Java emulators for every popular platform so that people would write code for their new processor. Then when there was enough code to generate demand, they would release the actual Java processor which they called the 'JavaOne'. The plan for the actual hardware was abandoned when they found that they could not make the JavaOne run as fast as an x86 could emulate it. The JavaOne processor was also not helped by the fact that the Java Emulator was a piece of crap. It was buggy and inconsistent. This meant that code written to run on the emulator would not always run unaltered on the actual hardware.
JIT is not an indication that code compiled to the JVM is not machine code, as JIT for Java came after JIT was proven to work in many game console emulators. Java was kind of a Johnny come lately to the JIT emulation scene.
To simplify it:
Java Virtual Machine = Java Emulator Byte Code = Machine Code
I still think that Java would not have taken so long to be usable, and that it would have had a wider range of relevance if Sun had actually built Java hardware before releasing the emulator, and had actually tested the JVM against real live reference hardware.
I always liken Java to the x86 platform. It was a poorly designed system that had a big name trusted by business behind it. Eventually after enough companies dumped enough money into trying to fix it, we finally ended up with something that works pretty good. A lot of time has been wasted, but that is in the past, and we now have a usable system to move forward from.
Off-Line web apps is something that IBM should be pushing right now. They have had a working system for off-line web apps out in the wild since 2002 with the release Domino 6.0. DOLS (Domino Off Line Services) not only allows for off line web apps. It also already has security worked out as well as many tools for integrating it with other systems.
Gee, they are predicting that a technology that was released in 2002 on Lotus Domino 6.0 will be brand new this year. Hurray!!!
Of course when Adobe releases it, we can listen to the Notes trolls complain that Lotus didn't make their 6 year old technology conform to a 'standard' that was created in 2008.
I'm still confused as to why some people think they are smarter because they have clear nasal passages.
The low cost of DSL is in part because of economies of scale, and part because there never was a reason to charge the outrageous rates that the telecoms wanted to charge in the 80s/90s. Way back when, if you told the phone company that you were going to hook a modem up to the phone lines, they wanted to charge you some outrageous price for it. Why? Because they thought they could. Luckily, people quickly figured out that you just don't tell them that you will have a modem hooked up to the phone line, you go a reasonable price, and eventually they gave up on trying to charge more for a "data" line.
There is absolutely no indication that we have as much as we can afford. You can be sure that if nobody put pictures on their web pages, we wouldn't have as fast of service as we do have. The monopoly providers have increased their infrastructure only enough to keep the smaller players out of the competition. Now we have P2P and video over IP. It is the early adopters that will push for faster speeds, and bring new applications to the internet. If we had it your way, there would be no commercial internet because you wouldn't want the data phone lines subsidized for those people that were using it for 'unapproved' uses. Thus, the internet would have never taken off as a commercial system. After all, the phone network being used for voice was as much as we could afford, and you don't want to pay more for phone access than because a few people wanted to use it for data, right?
The same could be said about all those jerks that want graphics sent across their internet connections. Really what needs to be done is to get us back to only sending green screen updates. All that wasteful html traffic has just caused needless upgrades. If you need to consume more than a what a 1200 baud modem can offer, perhaps what you need is a dedicated line. Not a consumer internet connection.
Look, it was no secret as to what Comcast was jumping into when they decided to get into the internet business. In fact it seems pretty obvious that they were quite clear on the fact that bandwidth would keep increasing to the point that people would just get their video directly from the source, instead of paying them to be a gatekeeper middleman. What they were hoping for was that they could use their monopoly power to stifle the internet so that their monopoly would not crumble in face of actual competition. So far they have been successful. Now that people are starting to cry foul, they are trying to pretend that they are the victims.
It always amazes me how many people will defend someone who is clearly trying to screw them.
Watch out for the free express version. When it was first announced, I checked the license, and it expressly forbids releasing any software written for it as open source. That means you can't legally even put code examples up on a website. Now, I'm sure that this limitation won't affect much of the software that is written with it, but people should be aware that the express license has an anti open source clause.
Because there isn't much left after we have bought our robot attack insurance from Old Glory.